The Garden of Fascism

• Main Author: Hull, Katy
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Princeton University Press 2021
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691208107.003.0006

This chapter addresses how American fascist sympathizers used Italo Balbo's 1933 North Atlantic flight to insist on the peaceful intentions of Benito Mussolini's regime. While it had been easy for most Americans to agree with fascist sympathizers' characterizations of Italo Balbo in July of 1933, the claims that Italy represented beauty, transcendence, and peace felt more farfetched as the decade progressed. Balbo alighted in Chicago only a few months after Adolf Hitler assumed dictatorial powers in Germany. The Italian airmen's flight helped to distance Italy under Mussolini — seemingly so beautiful and benign — from Germany under Hitler — blatantly brutal and threatening. These distinctions between Nazism and fascism became increasingly important for fascist sympathizers over the course of the mid-1930s, under mounting evidence that the two regimes were drawing closer together, both in style and in fact. Metaphors of the garden, which seemed so natural for many Americans on the occasion of Balbo's flight in 1933, felt increasingly false, forced, and strained by 1937, given the realities of life in Italy and the foreign policy of the fascist state.