In a 2016 article for the Conversation, an online academic journal, historian John Broich best summed up how fascism and il Duce were viewed in the U.S.: “Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925–1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.” The Saturday Evening Post even serialized the fascist leader’s autobiography in 1928. Acknowledging that the new “Fascisti movement” was a bit “rough in its methods,” as the New York Tribune put it, papers ranging from the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far Left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-war surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than fascism. Ironically, while the media acknowledged that fascism was a new “experiment,” papers like the New York Times commonly credited it with returning turbulent Italy to what it called “normalcy.”
Some things never change. Though no word yet if the Gray Lady of the 1930s believed that Mussolini’s form of socialism would improve his nation’s collective sex life.