From 1919 to 1922, when Mussolini led the March on Rome and became prime minister, his first objective was power and combat. Make no mistake: many Fascists were skull crackers, leg breakers, and all-purpose thugs, particularly among the OVRA, the secret police of the Fascist state modeled after Lenin's secret police, hence the nickname "Cheha." The casualties from the Fascist-initiated "civil war" hover around two thousand, with 35 percent of the dead confirmed leftists and 15 percent Fascists. This may sound like a lot or a little depending on your perspective, but it is worth keeping in mind that more Italians died during this period from traditional Italian Mafia wars. It's also worth noting that many Fascists were actually impressive, respectable men who earned not only the cooperation of the police but the sympathy of both judges and the common man. In a national contest between two broad factions, the Italian people — workers, peasants, small-business men, and professionals, as well as the well-to-do and wealthy — chose the Fascists over avowed international socialists and communists.
Mussolini's style was remarkably similar to Yasir Arafat's (though Arafat was undoubtedly far more murderous). He played the political game of claiming to seek peaceful accords and alliances while straining to contain the more violent elements within his movement. His hands were tied, he'd claim, when squads of Fascist Blackshirts broke the bones of his opponents. Again like Lenin — and Arafat — Mussolini practiced a philosophy of "the worse the better." He celebrated the violence committed by socialists because it gave him the opportunity to commit more violence in retribution. A brawler who'd been in countless fist and knife fights, Mussolini saw physical violence as a redemptive and natural corollary to intellectual combat (in this he was a lot like Teddy Roosevelt). There's no need to defend Mussolini against the charge that he was a practitioner of organized political violence, as some of his more friendly biographers have tried to do. It's easier to concede the points of both defenders and critics. Yes, the socialists and communists he was fighting were often just as bad as the Fascists. And on other occasions the Fascists were much worse. At the end of the day, however, the salient fact was that in a nation torn by economic and social chaos as well as political bitterness in the wake of the Versailles Treaty, Mussolini's message and tactics triumphed. Moreover, his success had less to do with ideology and violence than with populist emotional appeals. Mussolini promised to restore two things in short supply: pride and order.
The precipitating events in his rise are controversial for reasons not worth dwelling on. Suffice it to say that the March on Rome was not a spontaneous, revolutionary event but a staged bit of political theater designed to advance a Sorelian myth. The violence between Fascist and other left-wing parties reached a crescendo in the summer of 1922, when the communists and socialists called for a general strike to protest the government's refusal to clamp down on the Fascists. Mussolini declared that if the government didn't break the strike, his Fascists would do it themselves. He didn't wait for — or expect — a response. When the "Reds" launched their strike on July 31, Mussolini's squadristi — made up largely of skilled ex-military troops — broke it within a day. They drove the streetcars, kept the traffic moving, and, most famously, got the "trains running on time."
Mussolini's strikebreaking tactics had a profound effect on the Italian public. At a time when intellectuals all over the world were growing cynical about parliamentary democracy and liberal politics, Mussolini's military efficiency seemed to transcend partisan politics. Just as many today say we need to "get beyond labels" in order to get things done, Mussolini was seen as moving beyond the "tired categories of left and right." Similarly — like certain modern liberals — he promised what he called a "Third Way" that was neither left nor right. He just wanted to get things done. With the public largely behind him, he planned to break a different sort of strike — the parliamentary deadlock that had paralyzed the government and, hence, "progress." He threatened that he and his Blackshirts — so named because Italian special forces wore black turtlenecks, which quickly became a fashion among Fascists — would march on Rome and take the reins of state. Behind the scenes, King Vittorio Emanuele had already asked him to form a new government. But Il Duce marched anyway, reenacting Julius Caesar's march on Rome and giving the new Fascist government a useful "revolutionary myth" that he would artfully exploit in years to come. Mussolini became prime minister and Fascist Italy was born.
How did Mussolini govern? Like the old joke about the gorilla, however he wanted. Mussolini became a dictator, less brutal than most, more brutal than some. But he was also very popular. In 1924 he held reasonably fair elections, and the Fascists won by a landslide. Among his achievements in the 1920s were the passage of women's suffrage (which the New York Times hailed as a nod to the pressure of American feminists), a concordat with the Vatican, and the revitalization of the Italian economy. The settlement of the long-simmering schism between Italy and the pope was a monumental accomplishment in terms of Italy's domestic politics. Mussolini succeeded where so many others had failed.
We will deal with many of the ideological issues and policies swirling around Italian Fascism in subsequent chapters. But there are some points that are worth stating here. First, Mussolini successfully cast himself as the leader of the future. Indeed, he was brought to power in part by an artistic movement called Futurism. Throughout the 1920s, even if he implemented some policies that Western intellectuals disliked — anti-press laws, for example — his method of governing was regarded as quintessentially modern. At a time when many young intellectuals were rejecting the "dogma" of classical liberalism, Mussolini seemed a leader at the forefront of the movement to reject old ways of thinking. This was the dawn of the "fascist century," after all. It was no coincidence that Fascism was the first politically successful, self-styled modern youth movement, and was widely recognized as such. "Yesterday's Italy is not recognizable in today's Italy," Mussolini declared in 1926. "The whole nation is 20 years old and as such it has the courage, the spirit, the intrepidity."44 No leader in the world was more associated with the cult of technology, particularly aviation, than Mussolini in the 1920s. By the 1930s world leaders were trying to fit into Mussolini's mold as a "modern" statesman.
Part of Mussolini's reputation as a new kind of leader stemmed from his embrace of "modern" ideas, among them American Pragmatism. He claimed in many interviews that William James was one of the three or four most influential philosophers in his life. He surely said this to impress American audiences. But Mussolini really was an admirer of James (and the James-influenced Sorel), who believed that Pragmatism justified and explained his governing philosophy and governed in a pragmatic fashion. He was indeed the "Prophet of the Pragmatic Era in Politics," as a 1926 article in the Political Science Quarterly (and subsequent book) dubbed him.45