Italy during and after WW II
https://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Italy.pdf
Great engaging tales of Italy coming from members of the US diplomatic corps stationed throughout Italy, but it’s about 1200 pages and I’m only up to page 550.
It begins during the Second World War when the Italian partisans were helping the US Army fight Hitler and Mussolini; this included the Mafia in Sicily and the Communists throughout Northern Italy. After the War, the US Marshall plan pumped huge amounts into rebuilding the shattered Italian economy, and Europe split between East and West as the Cold War began and the Iron Curtain descended. The Red Belt included Florence and most of the industrial areas of the North of Italy. The Communist Party and to a lesser the degree the Socialists ran all the city governments in this region, and they ran them very well with a lot less corruption and much greater efficiency than local governments in the other regions. The Communist Party was the second largest in Italy with about 1/3rd of the vote, and the US was terrified that they would win an electoral majority, form the government and take Italy out of NATO and open up Southern Europe to the USSR. The CIA and State Department did everything under the sun in the 1948 election to defeat the Communists, and they succeeded. They continued to support the Christian Democrats for decades thereafter with under the table funding that eventually was exposed, and the exposure destroyed the Christian Democratic party. Italy was a co-founder of the EU, a major player in NATO, and a key and reliable US ally in Europe with lots of US air and naval bases throughout the period of the interviews I have read so far.
In the 50’s, Congress passed a refugee resettlement bill, which allowed millions of southern Italy’s poor to migrate to the US. Then when northern Italy’s economy really took off in the early 60’s, southern Italians migrated north for jobs and new more prosperous lives in Northern Italy. One of the debates in the diplomatic corps was whether the US should support an opening to the left – i.e. the Christian Democrats were wooing the Socialists from their alliance with the Communist party to join the Christian Democrats in a coalition government. The suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and the revelations of the gulags in Soviet Russia were accelerants in the Socialists desires to distance themselves from the Italian Communist Party. Eventually, under President Kennedy, US support for political realignment happened, and the Socialists entered the Italian government. As the Italians economy boomed, and social benefits were vastly expanded, militant extremism grew on both the left (Red Brigades) and the right (remnants of the Mussolini fascists) during the 70’s. This culminated in the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro, who had been the architect of the opening to the left.
In the early interviews, it sounds like an alumni gathering of the people I went to boarding school and college with – the same WASP tone, Ivy League attitudes and Northeast postures and predilections. As the 50’s play out, there is a split between the hard-line anti-Communist diplomats and the younger US diplomats who want to reach out to the Socialists and begin to talk to the Communists – a real “no, no” for the older diplomats still living in the shadow and attitudes of McCarthyism and the realities of the Cold War conflicts. As the interviews progress, there is a far greater understanding and appreciation for European points of view and the evolving global challenges including the need to interact with the South (Africa and Latin America), the Middle East and Asia. While the interviewees for the most part deeply loved the Italian people, they don’t get into the domestic politics that allowed Italy to develop, rebuild and prosper; for the most part they dismiss the politicians and credit the industrialists for the great Italian economic growth. Yet, when I’ve been in Italy, it's the infrastructure of transportation, for example, that is so impressive and the restoration and resurrection of historic buildings that is so appealing. In the US, our ideas of urban renewal were to tear down the older, poorer and historic buildings, in Italy, they restored and modernized and kept the charm of Florence and Milan and the great old towns and village of Tuscany. In the early interviews it brought me back to the year when I lived in Paris discovering all the beauty and joy and immense differences of European living and perspectives – looking at life with new eyes and vision and different understanding.
I have been looking for references to the Italian members of our family, nothing yet. Uncle Billy and Aunt Eloise met while he was in Italy with the US Army and were living on Via Paroli in Rome – a street that is mentioned several times. After they divorced, she stayed in their home in Rome, and he moved up to Cortona near Arrezzo and married Aunt Evelyn, from a Norwegian diplomatic family. They lived in an old converted stone farmhouse. I have not read yet any mention of their region. There is no interview with a US diplomat whose family I briefly met when visiting Aunt Eloise in Rome.
Lucien Wulsin