The situation in Italy after World War II looked like this; the Italian Monarch, under Victor Emmanuel III, was abolished in a popular referendum on June 12th, 1946. A new constitution, calling for a new Republic, was written and went into effect January 1st, 1948. Now for the first free elections under the new republic, the U.S., at the beginning of its process to mask its foreign policy under “Fighting Communism,” knew it had an excuse (communism) to put a favorable leader in office. The main parties for the 1946 elections were:
Italian Communist Party (PCI)
Italian Socialist Party (PSI)
Christian Democrats (DC)
The Christian Democrats won a majority of the votes, and thus the free elections. Now for the next free elections, 1948, the PCI and PSI joined together an in effort to take back power over the Christian Democrats. Actually, my mistake, this is the election (1948) that the U.S. intervened in, not the 1946 one which I may have led you to believe above.
Now that the PCI and PSI joined together, they became the Popular Democratic Front (FDP). Two months before the elections the FDP beat out the DC in municipal elections in the city Pescara. This was enough to put the fear of Marx in President Truman. In January 1947 Premier Alcide de Gasperi accepted Washington’s invitation, needing financial assistance for his country, for a sit-down with the President. Suffice to say, three days after returning to Italy, de Gasperi dissolved his cabinet where socialists and other members of the left held key points like the ministries of finance and foreign affairs. Under pressure from his citizens, de Gasperi found it near impossible to fill his cabinet with all center, center-right officials and many leftists returned to the cabinet, though having nowhere near the power they held before. Deputy to de Gasperi, Ivan Lombardo, went to Washington to secure aid for the struggling country, though promised loans were “frozen” for reasons not well known. Many, especially the left in Italy, believed the loans were held up pending the eradication of the “socialists” and “communists” still left in de Gasperi’s cabinet. Again, coincidentally, de Gasperi very soon dissolved his cabinet of all leftists, claiming the government would benefit without their presence. Aid flowed into Italy generously from the U.S. Italy’s $1 billion debt to the U.S. was cancelled.
Now just before the election occurred, the U.S., unabashedly and not under the guise of covertness, began a large scale propaganda operation. The propaganda operation included: (a lot of these facts I got from William Blum’s ‘Killing Hope.’ I paraphrased most of them, cause…well they are facts and can’t really be re-written).
A massive letter writing campaign from Americans of Italian extraction to their relatives and friends in Italy -at first written by individuals in their own words or guided by “sample letters” in newspapers, soon expanded to mass-produced, pre-written, postage-paid form letters, “educational circulars”, and posters, needing only an address and signature. And-from a group calling itself The Committee to Aid Democracy in Italy — half a million picture postcards illustrating the gruesome fate awaiting Italy if it voted for “dictatorship” or “foreign dictatorship.” In all, an estimated 10 million pieces of mail were written and distributed by newspapers, radio stations, churches, the American Legion, wealthy individuals, etc.; and business advertisements now included offers to send letters airmail to Italy even if you didn’t buy the product. All this with the publicly expressed approval of the Acting Secretary of State and the Post Office which inaugurated special “Freedom Flights” to give greater publicity to the dispatch of the mail to Italy.
The form letters contained messages like: “A communist victory would ruin Italy. The United States would withdraw aid and a world war would probably result.” … “We implore you not to throw our beautiful Italy into the arms of that cruel despot communism. America hasn’t anything against communism in Russia [sic], but why impose it on other people, other lands, in that way putting out the torch of liberty?” “If the forces of true democracy should lose in the Italian election, the American Government will not send any more money to Italy and we won’t send any more money to you, our relatives.” I think this may be the worst aspect.
These weren’t the least sophisticated of the messages. Other themes emphasized were Russian domination of Italy, loss of religion and the church, loss of family life, loss of home and land. Veteran newsman Howard K. Smith pointed out at the time that “For an Italian peasant a telegram from anywhere is a wondrous thing; and a cable from the terrestrial paradise of America is not lightly to be disregarded.” The letters threatening to cut off gifts may have been equally intimidating. “Such letters,” wrote a Christian Democrat official in an Italian newspaper, “struck home in southern Italian and Sicilian villages with the force of lightning.” A 1949 poll indicated that 16 percent of Italians claimed relatives in the United States with whom they were in touch; this, apparently, was in addition to friends there.
A daily series of direct short-wave broadcasts to Italy backed by the State Department and featuring prominent Americans. (The State Department estimated that there were 1.2 million short-wave receivers in Italy as of 1946). The Attorney General went on the air and assured the Italian people that the election was a “choice between democracy and communism, between God and godlessness, between order and chaos.” William Donovan, the wartime head of the OSS (that organization before the CIA) warned that “under a communist dictatorship in Italy,” many of the “nation’s industrial plants would be dismantled and shipped to Russia and millions of Italy’s workers would be deported to Russia for forced labor.” If this were not enough, a parade of unknown but passionate refugees from Eastern Europe went before the microphone to recount horror stories of life behind “The Iron Curtain.”
Several commercial radio stations broadcast to Italy special services held in American Catholic churches to pray for the Pope in “this, his most critical hour.” On one station, during an entire week, hundreds of Italian-Americans from all walks of life delivered one-minute messages to Italy which were relayed through the short-wave station. Station WOV in New York invited Italian war brides to transcribe a personal message to their families back home. The station then mailed the recordings to Italy.
Voice of America daily broadcasts into Italy were sharply increased, highlighting news of American assistance or gestures of friendship to Italy. A sky-full of show-biz stars, including Frank Sinatra and Gary Cooper, recorded a series of radio programs designed to win friends and influence the vote in Italy. Five broadcasts of Italian-American housewives were aired, and Italian-Americans with some leftist credentials were also enlisted for the cause. Labor leader Luigi Antonini called upon Italians to “smash the Muscovite fifth column” which “follows the orders of the ferocious Moscow tyranny,” or else Italy would become an “enemy totalitarian country.” To counter Communist charges in Italy that blacks in the United States were denied opportunities, the VOA broadcast the story of a black couple who had made a fortune in the junk business and built a hospital for their people in Oklahoma City.
Italian radio stations carried a one-hour show from Hollywood put on to raise money for the orphans of Italian pilots who had died in the war.
American officials in Italy widely distributed leaflets praising US economic aid and staged exhibitions among low-income groups. The US Information Service presented an exhibition on “The Worker in America” and made extensive use of documentary and feature films to sell the American way of life. It was estimated that in the period immediately preceding the election more than five million Italians each week saw American documentaries. The 1939 Hollywood film “Ninotchka,” which satirized life in Russia, was singled out as a particularly effective feature film. It was shown throughout working-class areas and the Communists made several determined efforts to prevent its presentation. After the election, a pro-Communist worker was reported as saying that “What licked us was `Ninotchka’.”
The Justice Department served notice that Italians who joined the Communist Party would be denied that dream of so many Italians, emigration to America. The State Department then ruled that any Italians known to have voted for the Communists would not be allowed to even enter the terrestrial paradise. (A Department telegram to a New York politico read: “Voting Communist appears to constitute affiliation with Communist Party within meaning of Immigration Law and therefore would require exclusion from United States.”) It was urged that this information be emphasized in letters to Italy.
President Truman accused the Soviet Union of plotting the subjugation of Western Europe and called for universal military training in the United States and a resumption of military conscription to forestall “threatened communist control and police-state rule”. During the campaign, American and British warships were frequently found anchored off Italian ports. Time, in an edition widely displayed and commented upon in Italy shortly before the election, gave its approval to the sentiment that “The U.S. should make it clear that it will use force, if necessary, to prevent Italy from going Communist.”
A “Friendship Train” toured the United States gathering gifts and then traveled around Italy distributing them. The train was painted red, white and blue, and bore large signs expressing the friendship of American citizens toward the people of Italy. I don’t see that even being feasible here in the states.
The US, Great Britain and France maneuvered the Soviet Union (I would like to know how this happened) into vetoing, for the third time, a motion that Italy be admitted to the United Nations. The first time, the Russians had expressed their opposition on the grounds that a peace treaty with Italy had not been signed. After the signing in 1947, they said they would accept the proposal if other World War II enemies, such as Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania were also made members.
The same three allied nations proposed to the Soviet Union that negotiations take place with a view to returning Trieste to Italy. Formerly the principal Italian port on the Adriatic coast, bordering Yugoslavia, Trieste had been made a “free city” under the terms of the peace treaty. The approval of the Soviet Union was necessary to alter the treaty, and the Western proposal was designed to put the Russians on the spot. The Italian people had an intense sentimental attachment to Trieste, and if the Russians rejected the proposal it could seriously embarrass the Italian Communists. A Soviet acceptance, however, would antagonize their Yugoslav allies. The US prodded the Russians for a response, but none was forthcoming. From the Soviet point of view, the most obvious and safest path to follow would have been to delay their answer until after the election. Yet they chose to announce their rejection of the proposal only five days before the vote, thus hammering another nail into the FDP coffin.
A “Manifesto of peace to freedom-loving Italians,” calling upon them to reject Communism, was sent to Premier de Gasperi. Its signatories included two former US Secretaries of State, a former Assistant Secretary of State, a former Attorney General, a former Supreme Court Justice, a former Governor of New York, the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and many other prominent personages. This message was, presumably, publicized throughout Italy, a task easy in the extreme inasmuch as an estimated 82 percent of Italian newspapers were in the hands of those unsympathetic to the leftist bloc.
More than 200 American labor leaders of Italian origin held a conference, out of which came a cable sent to 23 daily newspapers throughout Italy similarly urging thumbs down on the Reds. At the same time, the Italian-American Labor Council contributed $50,000 to anti-Communist labor organizations in Italy. The CIA was already secretly subsidizing such trade unions to counteract the influence of leftist unions, but this was standard Agency practice independent of electoral considerations. (According to a former CIA officer, when, in 1945, the Communists came very near to gaining control of labor unions, first in Sicily, then in all Italy and southern France, co-operation between the OSS and the Mafia successfully stopped the tide).
The CIA, by its own later admission, gave $1 million to Italian “center parties,” a king’s ransom in Italy 1948, although another report places the figure at $10 million. The Agency also forged documents and letters purported to come from the PCI which were designed to put the party in a bad light and discredit its leaders; anonymous books and magazine articles funded by the CIA told in vivid detail about supposed communist activities in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; pamphlets dealt with PCI candidates’ sex and personal lives as well as smearing them with the fascist and/or anti-church brush.
An American group featuring noted Italian-American musicians traveled to Rome to present a series of concerts. What I wanna know is how did they get these Italian-Americans, both famous and not, to do these concerts, radio talks, etc.
President Truman chose a month before the election as the time to transfer 29 merchant ships to the Italian government as a “gesture of friendship and confidence in a democratic Italy”. These were Italian vessels seized during the war and others to replace those seized and lost.
Four days later, the House Appropriations Committee acted swiftly to approve $18.7 million in additional “interim aid” funds for Italy.
Two weeks later, the United States gave Italy $4.3 million as the first payment on wages due to 60,000 former Italian war prisoners in the US who had worked “voluntarily” for the Allied cause. This was a revision of the peace treaty which stipulated that the Italian government was liable for such payments.
Six days before election day, the State Department made it public that Italy would soon receive $31 million in gold in return for gold looted by the Nazis. What’s funny is the fact that only a few years earlier Italy had been the “enemy” fighting alongside the Nazis was now but a dim memory.
Two days later, the US government authorized two further large shipments of food to Italy, one for $8 million worth of grains. A number of the aid ships, upon their arrival in Italy during the election campaign, had been unloaded amid ceremony and a speech by the American ambassador. A poster prominent in Italy read: “The bread that we eat-40 per cent Italian flour-60 per cent American flour sent free of charge.” The poster neglected to mention whether the savings were passed on to the consumer or served to line the pockets of major companies.
Four days before election day, the American Commission for the Restoration of Italian Monuments, Inc. announced an additional series of grants to the Italian Ministry of Fine Arts.
April 15 was designated “Free Italy Day” by the American Sympathizers for a Free Italy with nation-wide observances to be held.
The American ambassador, James Clement Dunn, traveled constantly throughout Italy pointing out to the population “on every possible occasion what American aid has meant to them and their country.” At the last unloading of food, Dunn declared that the American people were saving Italy from starvation, chaos and possible domination from outside. His speeches usually received wide coverage in the non-left press. By contrast, the Italian government prohibited several of its own ambassadors abroad from returning home to campaign for the FDP.
After all this, it should also be noted the Soviet Russia spent almost next to nothing on the election or on propaganda compared to the U.S. Receiving 48% of the vote, the Christian Democrats were the clear winners.
