Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy: Culture, Diplomacy and War Propaganda
Diana Rossini (Antony Sugaar translator), Harvard, 2008, 263 + x pages, map, tables, index, notes, ISBN 978 0 674 02824 1, $49 cloth. The author is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Rome Tre.
Though principally concerned with the Italian war aims, the 1915 Treaty of London and Italo-American disagreement generated by that treaty, this is also an examination of wartime and post-war diplomacy (or lack there of) among allied powers. It also a primer on contemporary Italian and American society, diplomacy and politics, as well as the misperceptions generated by great ignorance on both sides of the Atlantic. While America was a stable democracy with a strong and growing economy, Italy was still entering the industrial age with all the political unrest and economic injustice that entailed. Moreover, Italy government – democratic only in form -- was based on an unstable alliance between northern industrialists and quasi-feudal southern landowners.
Misunderstandings and misconceptions between the two countries were rife at all levels. The author dwells at length on the American folk myth in Italy generated by a generation of mass migration of Italians westward to the United States and how this myth was embellished by a massive American propaganda and aid campaign peaking in 1918. Indeed a near religious mysticism about America and President Wilson blossomed for year in the wake of the catastrophic Italian defeat at Caporetto only to be destroyed by disputes over Italian rights of conquest in the Adriatic.
The author also illuminates a little-known aspect of American involvement in World War One Italy: massive propaganda and public assistance campaigns. These involved the American Red Cross, the American Field Service, the YMCA and George Creels’ Committee on Public Information (CPI). Though the US refused Italian pleas for troops, sending only a token infantry regiment, the Red Cross and YMCA took up the slack. They set up hundreds of hostels and canteens for soldiers throughout Italy and mounted parallel relief programs for civilian refugees, soldiers’ widows and orphans staffed by easily-identified uniformed Americans. The American Field Service provided volunteer ambulance drivers. The large CPI staff produced film shows, mountains pamphlets and other materials expounding Wilson’s world view and his aim to create a New World Order from the ashes of war.
Meanwhile, Italy’s position within the Entente, already weak, was further degraded by American entry into the war. England and France, and most of all President Wilson, became unwilling to abide by the promises exacted by grasping Italian politicians in the secret Treaty of London. Italian diplomacy, led by Baron Sidney Sonnino, held inflexibly to its demands for all of an expanded Italia Irredenta, particularly the port of Fiume and the Dalmatian coast also claimed by an emerging Yugoslavia. Wilson failed to comprehend the deep ferocity of Italian popular sentiment and hove to his principled position that national boundaries should follow ethnic lines. While Wilson was willing to compromise on many issues with Britain and France in order to gain his cherished League of Nations, he rebuffed Italian demands for Fiume. This, the author finds, was part of a pattern of Wilsonian conduct that denigrated traditional diplomacy, which he found distasteful and duplicitious. This mind set led Wilson -- who depended largely on force of character and the moral righteousness -- to neglect tackling the major differences between American and Entente was aims until after the Armistice when US leverage was obviously reduced. His was not so much as failure of diplomacy but a failure to undertake, in the words of the author, “cultural negotiations” – viz., diplomacy.
Though Italy achieved many of her war aims, in particular, the Brenner frontier, Trieste and parts of Istria, neither the political leadership nor the pubic was satisfied. Dalmatia. Albania, Crete and the Dodecanese Islands remained beyond her grasp. Bitterness over the “mutilated victory’ of Versailles led to the fall of the Orlando/Sonnino/Nitti government and the rapid rise of fascism. Though more secure within its new borders, Italy still thirsted for political and military dominance in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, as well as an enlarged empire in Africa. It was these goals that energized an aggressive successor regime headed by war veteran Benito Mussolini.
Reviewer: Len Shurtleff
