MUSSOLINI: THE WILD MAN OF EUROPE
CONTENTS:
(1) ODE TO THE LITTLE LIBRARY
(2) THE WILD MAN OF EUROPE
(3) FREEMASONS, KLANSMEN AND OTHERS
(4) JOHN BOND IN ROME
(5) THE MUSSOLINI MOMENT IN AMERICA
(6) WHO WAS JOHN BOND?
(1) ODE TO THE "LITTLE LIBRARY"
After decades abroad, one of the great joys of life back in the United States is the proliferation of Little Libraries —chockful of fun things to read, all for free and in English too!
I love having the fates guide my reading, tossing me into literary byways I barely knew existed.
Still, I live only a few blocks from Politics and Prose, in the raised-consciousness bubble of Ward 3 (Upper Northwest Washington DC).
So, my discoveries —while endlessly intriguing— often run through predictable local channels.
This is Washington after all, a strangely unquantifiable place.
It is perpetually at the center of the world's attention, superpower capital and all that.
Meanwhile, it remains an oddly shapeless town, craving a unique sense of place that might or might not exist.
God knows, they try!
I could easily fill my living room— floor-to ceiling— with eager Washingtoniana from Little Libraries within a one-mile radius of my home.
There are serious historical studies, for sure, and shrewdly observed novels —but far fewer of the latter than you might expect.
But above all, Little Libraries overflow with bright-eyed feel-think from the talking heads of yesteryear (often concocted on their way out the door).
Also "inside glimpse" picture books from every presidential administration, now looking more or less alike.
Then— perhaps most intriguing —we have a steady stream of "collectibles" with the shelf life of unrefrigerated crème fraîche.
You can't imagine how much DC whimsy I scoop out of Little Libraries and then —coming to my senses —quickly offload in others before returning home.
At times, however, I wish that I had held on to the Bill 'n Hillary Bobbleheads, the Road to the White House Board Game and and a few of those recurrring sets of DC Politicards.
(2) THE WILD MAN OF EUROPE
Washington's Little Libraries can be endearingly silly.
But sometimes—in their randomness —they crack open the past and make us rethink what we know.
Like it or not, this qualifies as Washingtoniana too.
The Fellowship Forum and the Independent Publishing Company were joined at the hip in the Nation's Capital and exerted massive influence in their day.
But first, let's take a look at Wild Man.
Bond was not a born wordsmith, piling up shapeless paragraphs where single sentences would do.
Meanwhile, he compensated— almost obsessively —with vehement headings from hither and yon.
Vanity and violence... Unpleasant Traits... The Old Ego Remains...
Bond— it would seem —had "Marvelous Mussolini" stuck in his craw, right out of the gate.
The Duce's anti-American media assault is clearly working.
But what motivates this "Superman"? The author sees three main "purposes".
"Hyphenism"? "Italian-American" would be a prime example, it seems.
"Alienism"? Apparently a word of his own devising— from "alien" meaning "foreign" —signalling less than total commitment to the American Way of Life.
"Weeds" and "hothouses"? The metaphors come thick and fast.
Bond reveals a devastating conspiracy —at home and abroad— masterminded by the Duce himself.
Subverting the "Italian Vote" is a chief goal. (He refuses to hyphenate down to "Italian-American".)
In the economic sphere, Mussolini commands the resources of his "Corporate State", channeling them wherever he pleases.
This allows him to manipulate American public opinion —in pursuit of his global ambitions.
What is Dictator Mussolini's endgame— according to John Bond?
Nothing less than a Clerical-Fascist Empire jointly ruled by the Duce and the Pope.
(3) FREEMASONS, KLANSMEN AND OTHERS
Who was John Bond writing for?
Based in Rome, he operated as the "European Correspondent of The Fellowship Forum".
This was "A National Weekly Devoted to the Fraternal Interpretation of the World's Current Events".
The Fellowship Forum was printed by The Independent Publishing Company, both headquartered in Washington DC.
The Independent also issued several of Bond's books, including Mussolini: The Wild Man of Europe.
The journal, the publisher and the author all shared a "Fraternal" point of view— meaning what exactly?
The New York Times went right to the point in the summer of 1927, while assessing The Forum's request for a radio broadcasting licence .
The Times set the stage in their very first sentence, "The Fellowship Forum, alleged Ku Klux Klan publication, devoted in large part to attacks on the Roman Catholic Church..."
James S. Vance, the paper's general manager, fired back when their plan for a "Patriotic Protestant America" broadcasting station stalled out.
Whether the charges against The Forum were "untruthful" as Vance claimed, he and his crew had moved beyond mere facts —by way of coded messaging.
In "100% American" circles (to use a favorite catchphrase of the time), "Protestant" meant "Non-Catholic" and usually "Anti-Catholic" as well.
"Fraternal" was another favored term of art, evoking friends and neighbors in thousands of predominantly White Protestant lodges across America (Odd Fellows, Elks, Moose, Knights of Pythias and whatever else).
The Forum reported on a wide swathe of these organizations while privileging Freemasonry and the Klan.
In fact, there was a frequent overlap between those two. When you hear "Militant Freemasonry", "Ku Klux Klan" is strongly implied.
(For the complex and often fraught relationship of Freemasonry, Militant Freemasonry and the Klan in those years, see Adam Kendall's essential and impressively sourced survey, "The Ku Klux Klan, Freemasonry and the American Fraternal Press", Ars Quatuor Corononatorum, vol. 134, 2021).
The Fellowship Forum was founded in 1921— conspicuously based in Washington DC.
By 1927, this "National Voice for Protestant Fraternal America" had attained a circulation of over a million.
Freemasonry has a long history in the Washington area with many powerful adherents, going back to George Washington himself.
This Fraternal Order developed a network of influential connections across Protestant America, (with some Jewish involvement as well).
The Masons did not need to exclude Catholics, since the Church got there first. As a "secret society", Freemasonry was incompatible with the Roman faith and membership triggered instant excommunication.
The Ku Klux Klan had been refounded in 1915, after its suppression in 1870— following a horrifying run of lynchings and other violence.
The organization was then rebranded and restyled with an eye to public acceptibility —which it amply achieved in the course of the 1920s.
On August 8 1925 and September 13 1926, tens of thousands of robed and hooded Klansmen paraded through the Nation's capital, staking their now mainstream claim to a particular kind of America.
The Fellowship Forum was at the very heart of this surge.
Vance, the publication's General Manager, combined America First boosterism with cash pay-outs to subscription agents.
"There is always work for loyal Americans to do because America’s enemies are at work every minute of the day. We must arouse the sleeping Protestants throughout the country and get them properly informed. Interview every Protestant in your territory and solicit his subscription. They will learn the truth by reading The Fellowship Forum....How about the BONUS?—do you want it? If so show some speed!"
When it came to relentless huckstering, Vance wasn't doing this alone.
The Fellowship Forum's startling expansion was managed by The Southern Publicity Association, the Atlanta-based advertising and fundraising agency that also programmed the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan.
On November 25 , 1915, William Joseph Simmons (a Protestant preacher) led 16 stalwart "Knights" to the summit of nearby Stone Mountain.
Robed, hooded and masked, they reconsecrated the Ku Klux Klan, amidst neo-chivalric antics that had not been seen for decades.
We don't know for a fact that Edward Young Clarke was on top of Stone Mountain with Simmons on that fateful night —but if not, he wasn't far off.
From 1915 to 1922, Clarke was at Imperial Wizard Simmons side —variously as Imperial Wizard Pro Tempore and Imperial Kleagle.
At the outset, Simmons featured his resurrected Klan's connection with the past ("We were here yesterday, We are here today, We will be here forever.")
America, however, was in the full flush of Fraternal Culture and entering the age of modern advertising.
"An Urgent Call to Real Men"? That was cutting out half the population... The WKKK (Women of the Ku Klu Klan) would be founded in 1923.
By 1920, Clarke and Tyler founded The Southern Publicity Association.
In June of that year, they stipulated a contract with Grand Wizard Simmons.
Clarke was already their inside man as Imperial Kleagle —the Klan's lead recruiter and general sales manager.
Their task was to restructure the Klan as a centralized membership organization. In return, Clarke and Tyler would pocket a share of the fees.
In June of 1921, the Fellowship Forum began publication— helping mainstream the Klan in the wider world of Protestant Fraternalism.
(Eventually, the Association's accounts would include the Anti-Saloon League, the Armenian Relief Fund and the American Red Cross, as well as the Klan and the Fellowship Forum.)
An intriguing image, shot in Washington DC on November 1 , 1921--two conspicuously liberated women by the standards of their day
But why are we looking at it here? It reprsents one of the earliest publicity stunts undertaken by the Fellowship Forum--some four months after the publication of the first issue on June 24, 1921
Then there was the soft approach, much favored in these years.
That could include feel-good publicity stunts— like sending two young Christian ladies from Washington DC to San Francisco on a cross-country bicycle trip, "accompanied by 'Buddie', a German police dog, given them when they were doing YWCA work overseas."
"The young ladies represent the Fellowship Forum, a national publication in the interest of Masonry, and were accorded every welcome and courtesy by Asheville Masons. They reported a good volume of business for their publication."
Although Florence Deering and Evelyn Morey were routed through the heart of Klan Country in the South, we hear only of "Masonry" and not even the "Militant" kind— although we have to wonder about their conversations on the ground.
They did well for themselves financially, pocketing 80% of every new klansman's initiation fee, all the while investing in businesses that manufactured Klan robes and paraphernalia.[1]
New members often paid a total of $23.30 to join when including the $10 initiation fee, a $6.50 robe, a $5 membership fee, and an "imperial tax" of $1.80.
1923
Lutheran
K of P (Knights of pythias) High School grad
By 1920, the diocese managed 42 parochial schools with over 11,000 students.
There is a Jaffa Temple Shriners in Altoona--so Masonic Connection
Also Lutheran churches and a Knights of Pythias lodge (many parallels with Freemasonsry but more exclusiviely aAmericaninfou
Also a 327 PineAve--see photo
Pine Avenue in Altoona, PA, largely developed alongside the city's railroad expansion, with significant residential growth occurring between 1890 and 1915,
Altoona Works: By 1945, this became the world's largest rail shop complex, employing 15,000 workers by the 1920s.
Clerk Pennsylvania Railroad Company
Pyramid scheme with kick-backs reminiscent ofthe FF approach--You bring in new members and get money, then they do the same.
Recommended by number 89
Two Washington girls
Publiciity stunt in the early dayds of FF
Then I dredged up his other Roman opus from a year earlier— and this is what I found.
(4) JOHN BOND IN ROME
Bond was not a born wordsmith— dithering out half thoughts and piling up limp paragraphs where single sentences would serve.
But as an American Nativist Protestant, he did have a point of view — and Rome was Ground Zero if you were hunting Catholics and exposing all that.
Bond signed off on his preface in December 1926:
There is more than one Chamber of Horrors in the Museum of History, but none like that of the Borgia. The central figure is that of Roderigo Borgia, who as Alexander VI sat on the papal throne for upward of eleven years; around him are grouped his mistresses; a brood of bastard children; a retinue of henchman and an endless procession of victims. It was the darkest period in the life of Christianity, just before the dawn of the Reformation. Rome had become a sink of unspeakable corruption where, in the words of Dante, "Christ was sold every day."
However alarming his language, Bond seeks to distance himself from anti-Catholicism of the more vulgar sort. His argument is not with that faith but its authoritarian abuses—especially in the political sphere.
They... recognize the distinction between Catholicism as a religious creed and Popery as a fraudulent and un-Christian institution. Our warfare is directed not against Catholics, whether they are of the Roman or the Greek or any other persuasion-it is directed solely and wholly against the Neo-Caesarism of the popes. Our quarrel is not with the profession of any religious faith but with a political system invented and kept alive to enslave the minds of mankind and to destroy the freedom of conscience.
Bond ends his preface on a rousing note:
The Borgias are dead and gone but they are still brewing poison in the Vatican.
In Mussolini: the Wild Man of Europe Bond, tells us exactly who and what he has in mind.
Not easy to get from the Borgias to the more than sporadically anti-clerical Benito Mussolini
The Catholic mind-set that has fueld Latin authoritariansim over the centuries
As we can deduce from various chapter titles (Vanity and violence, Unpleasant Traits, The Old Ego Remains), Bond had the Duce stuck in his craw, right out of the gate, concrete objections aside.
Bond did not know what to make of Mussolini (who seemed to be coming from all directions at once) except that he was a product of "all that" and thus a threat to the American Protestant Way.
Signed off his introduction in1928 and dated 1929 on thetitlepage--before the Conciliazione of date 1929 consolidated a strategic relationship
Like many others, probably had a shrewd guessof where things were headed
Patti Lateranensi dell'11 febbraio 1929, che risolsero la "Questione Romana" nata nel 1870.
First of Bond's priorities
Bond wasn't entirely wrong about the regime's
(3) THE MUSSOLINI MOMENT IN AMERICA
Where is Bond coming from?
Where is Bond not coming from?
In the old days, anti-Catholicism was directly overwhelmingly at the Irish--and Anti-IItalianism largely left Catholicism out of the argument
The bloodiest AntiItalianism came out of New Orleans -- with a dominantly Catholic history and culture.
Bond was more right than wrong when it came tio Mussollni's workings in America
This sort of anti-Italian demagoguery has a long history, going back to the 1890 Italian lynchings in New Orleans and beyond.
Bond's obsession with the Catholic menace might seem quaintly old-fashioned in the 1920s, harking back to the Know-Nothing furor before the Civil War— except the enemy then was distinctly Irish.
As for Bond's fellow travelers in the Ku Klux Klan, the author of Pillory and Wild Man has not a word to say about the African American problem.
William McKinley
fare le corna
The rise of Mussolini coincided with advent of the Star System in Hollywood (not to mention Cinecittà in Rome).
The Mussolini regime was brilliant when it came to harnessing star power...in fact, it began with the ultra charismatic Duce himself
Marconi
Balbo--the most compelling of the Duce's surrogates (so compelling that there wasn't room for both of them on the same stage in the same regime)
Not just top-notch celebrities but also everyday Italian Americans
Ray Tucker, Washington Correspondent for the New York Telegram, published three-part article that appeared in more than 50 papers in July 1927 including an italian translation in Il Nuovo Mondo (July 29, 30 and 31 1927)
Which is why the external captioning of the Engliosh-language cartoon is in Italian.
Il Nuovo Mondo was an Italian language anti-Fascist daily newspaper which was published in New York City and then, in Chicago between 1926 and 1931. The paper was the first anti-Fascist daily published abroad by the Italians.[1]
childlike figure delivering laundry
"This isn't our style"
"Il fascismo non è merce da esportazione" Mussolini
Liberal columnist & an Italian-American Socialist newspaper
In 1927, the Klan reference was far from idle.
'The Black and White Brotherhood' — American cartoon published in the New York Call (11 November 1922) showing an Italian Fascist gazing across the ocean to his 'brother' in the KKK. Artist: Ryan Walker.
Socialist paper Walker was intensely involved with racial issues--especially lynching and the KKK
Were the Fascists and the Klan on the same side?! Working on the assumption that all his enemies are necessarily friends
Playing up the Italian connection
Bringing it back to Washington
Alfred E Smith iss the big story
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