THE ORGANISATION OF THE YOUNG, WELFARE AND FREE TIME

The regime’s efforts to control the formation of the nation’s children and young people became more intensive and focused from 1929, in part to mitigate or minimise the effects of the Concordat’s concessions to the church. Indeed, in his speech to parliament on the ratification of the Lateran agreements, Mussolini quite brutally emphasised the Fascist and ‘totalitarian’ nature of the state, and its exclusive right to mould the mind and character of the young through an ‘education for war’.² This crudely formative view of the educational process under Fascism was carried over into the Ministry of Public Instruction’s change of title to Ministry of National Education in September 1929.

The ONB became a branch of this Ministry, with Ricci as the Under-Secretary for youth and physical education.

The ONB provided pre-military physical training in the form of drilling, gym and callisthenic exercises, and crucially, sports activities. It intended its work to be integrated into the school curriculum and time-table. School teachers, especially physical education staff, were expected to become local ONB organisers and instructors. The fusion of school and ONB was actual and complete in the thousands of small rural schools run directly by the agency between 1928 and 1935. The ONB’s direct connection to the school system facilitated recruitment and access to equipment and premises, membership always being heaviest among children up to the age of twelve, the statutory school leaving age until it was theoretically extended to fourteen under the 1923 educa-tional law. It also accelerated the ‘fascistisation’ of the personnel and pedagogy of the elementary schools in particular. An oath of loyalty was required of elementary and secondary school teachers from February 1929. As public employees they were subject to the later decrees on

obligatory PNF membership to join the profession. The first Fascist textbooks for obligatory use in all schools, public and private, were ready for introduction in the 1930 scholastic year. They and their successors were designed to impart an education which was nationalistic and militaristic in tone and content.

The PNF itself only retained direct control of the university students associations (GUF) on the formation of the ONB in 1926. It always resented the ONB’s special status and argued in a long series of jurisdic-tional disputes with the ONB that only a party organ as opposed to a state body was suitable to inculcate the Fascist spirit and mentality in the young. Were Fascist youth to be left to a ‘lazy bourgeois bureaucracy, which after thirteen years of the regime, remained more or less what it was?’ complained Starace to Mussolini in 1935.³ Under the irascible ras of Lucca and party Vice-Secretary, Carlo Scorza, the PNF founded the Young Fascists’ organisation in October 1930. It was deliberately aimed at plugging a real gap in the joint ONB and PNF regimentation of young men. These were the eighteen to twenty-one year olds already at work or attending trade or vocational schools but who had not gone on to higher education, the same age range but a different social class to most university students. These young peasants and workers were to be a new source of PNF members and lower level cadres. Their premil-itary training came from the Militia and their political education in special courses of political preparation. Their often unruly behaviour and aggressive demeanour, vented to the full in the attacks on Catholic youth clubs in 1931, were the nearest the party got to recreating the bravado of the squads.

But it was clearly among university students that the regime expected the next generation of Fascist leaders to emerge. Here, it was grudgingly recognised that the formation and selection of the new Fascist élite required some attempt to engage them intellectually and politically. A certain latitude to debate and criticise without it was hoped, breaking the bounds of Fascist orthodoxy, was allowed in student circles if denied elsewhere in society. Held annually between 1934 and 1940, the Littoriali or student games were a good example of the atmosphere of repressive tolerance in which the regime raised its prospective ruling class. Attending something between a student conference and academic talent show, students competed for the title of ‘lictor’ in a wide range of examinations for the creative arts and discourses on various themes of Fascist doctrine and_-practice. Prize-winners and participants could expect to

be earmarked for jobs in the burgeoning bureaucracies of the party, syndicates and corporations.

The Young Fascists’ motto, ‘Believe, Obey, Fight’, gave a sense of the kind of ‘new Fascist man’ the regime hoped to forge in the controlled environment of the educational system and the youth organisations.

Essentially, the Fascists wanted to create an Italy made in their own image, a nation of ready-made warriors, physically fit, mentally agile, disciplined, courageous and obedient, committed believers and fighters in the cause of the nation. To achieve this, Fascist propaganda and indoctrination projected a series of images and models of the kind of conduct and behaviour for the ‘new’ Italian to emulate. To diffuse a cul-ture of warlike and patriotic endeavour, the regime could draw on and propagate the virtues of some of Fascism’s own heroic figures, the First World War combatant, the squadrist and, of course, Mussolini himself.

The slogan ‘Mussolini is always right’ was first coined and employed by the party under Turati. He used the idealisation of a single, undisputed and infallible leader to cover the imposition of a centralised order and discipline on the party itself in the late 1920s. Under Starace, the cult of the Duce, the charismatic, omnipotent figure shaping the nation’s destiny, assumed ludicrous proportions in the 1930s.

But increasingly the prevailing myth on which Fascist propaganda focused was that of ancient Rome, which identified Fascism as the recreation of a glorious and exalted past, and also justified imperialist expansion.

The setting of Fascist Italy to the image of imperial Rome allowed the regime to convey and legitimise its desire to make Italy great and powerful, through the foundation of a new empire and as the carrier of a new ‘civilisation’. It combined the will to found an empire with the

‘making of Italians’: the aim was to mould a nation of citizen-soldiers which would be fit to conquer and rule an empire. It was easy to get carried away with all this, and Fascist pretensions now appear hollow and unrealisable. But it is important to recognise that when Fascists talked of ‘revolution’, they usually meant a ‘spiritual’ revolution, not so much a transformation of socio-economic reality as its sublimation in a changed national consciousness. The idea was to reshape attitudes, mentality and perceptions, to change the way people thought and behaved. Even what would become during the Depression Fascism’s claim to universality, a new social and economic order in corporativism, was given an ethical as much as a ‘productivist’ dimension. The corpor-ations supposedly brought all kinds of producers together in a collabor-ative system of production. They were the practical training ground

where through the experience of organised co-operation, employers and workers would exchange a class and sectional outlook for a national awareness. This was why the PNF, as the guardian and apostle of national values and the national interest, was always represented on each corpor-ative council. Changing Italy then involved changing the character of Italians in a controlled educative process; hence the priority which the regime gave in the 1930s to propaganda and organisation.

One of the most important aspects of the ‘going . . . to the people’

campaign during the Depression was the party’s organisation of welfare. By late 1931 the party’s welfare agencies (EOAs) had added to their operation of summer health camps for young children, the running of a winter relief programme coinciding with the worst months of seasonal unemployment. This lasted until the dissolution of the EOAs in 1937, when responsibility for winter welfare passed back to the local authorities and the summer camps went to the PNF’s new unified youth organisation. There was, of course, nothing exceptional about a government providing emergency aid to alleviate the distress of those suffering most from the effects of a deep and prolonged economic crisis. For one thing, welfare was a way of trying to head off the likely repercussions for public order of widespread economic distress. But the party’s involvement gave a Fascist imprint to the provision of welfare, and a further impetus to ‘totalitarian’ organisation which lasted beyond the actual period of the Depression. Party-run welfare was regarded as an act of ‘civil mobilization’ and ‘a most effective means of propaganda and penetration of the people’.⁴ In the rhetoric if perhaps not the reality of Fascist welfare, it was a demonstration of class collaboration and national solidarity, because the party was collecting contributions from all who were able to give and distributing aid to all who were in need.

Such was the Fascist moral community in the making, the outcome of the growing connection between people and regime through the medium of the party. This certainly strained the moral significance of the way the party actually collected the funds for winter relief. Much EOA funding came from a kind of party levy on the syndical bodies of employers and workers and the Fascist associations of schoolteachers, railwaymen and other public employees, and similar subscriptions extracted by party pressure on local banks and credit institutions. So workers would find that their syndicates had agreed to them donating a certain proportion of their wage to the EOA. In the spirit of class emulation, employers in the same economic or professional category contributed at least the same amount.

Perhaps more important was the way welfare provision could be used to ‘penetrate’ areas of the country and parts of the population which might otherwise be untouched by the regime or anyway unre-sponsive to more overtly political contact. The provincial EOAs were umbrella organisations for various private and public bodies working in the welfare field, through which the party monopolised the collection and distribution of relief funds for the unemployed and their families.

The centralised collection of funds and pooling of resources was matched by the decentralisation of welfare distribution to the area groups into which the fasci of towns and cities were territorially subdivided. Welfare was synchronised with the spread of the party’s

‘capillary’ structure. From the early 1930s, the area groups were encouraged to establish ‘sectors’, in turn subdivided into ‘nuclei’, corres-ponding to groups of streets or individual streets. Each sector or nucleus was to have a party social-worker, who made home visits to assess and report on need in her patch.

Winter welfare became one of the regime’s largest organisations. The Padua Party, for instance, was providing regular welfare for about 19 000 families, affecting 80 000 people in city and province, the equivalent of about 1 in 20 of the total provincial population, in March 1935. Starace’s official global figures were that nearly 1 750 000 families or almost three million individuals received daily welfare in the 1934–35 winter.

The party organisation of welfare stimulated the development of the women’s fasci. Significantly again, the party’s drive to create a female section alongside each male fascio started with the onset of the

‘going . . . to the people’ campaign launched in 1931. The regime’s demographic concerns and policies relegated women to the role of child bearing and raising and home management. The involvement of women’s fasci in various forms of voluntary and welfare work was the natural organisational extension of this child-caring slot for middle-class women with time and energy to spare. From them came the neighbour-hood social workers, the women who prepared and distributed the clothing and cooked meals for winter relief, who helped out at the summer camps, the ‘fascist Epiphany’ and other ‘fascistised’ popular festivals. Welfare organisation during the Depression quite literally gave the party access to the backwaters of town and countryside. By providing the moral and material benefits of welfare, the party was extending the regime’s network of control and surveillance of the population.

Along with welfare, the regime’s efforts to provide for people’s free time through its national afterwork agency, the OND or Dopolavoro, was characteristic of the ‘mass’ organising of the Depression years. The OND matched welfare in the large numbers of people it reached and involved including groups hostile and indifferent to, or simply ignorant of Fascism, and in what followed from this, the apolitical nature and appeal of its activities. The OND was originally set up in May 1925 as a state agency responsible to the Ministry of National Economy, with the job of unifying and running the workers recreational clubs estab-lished by the Fascist syndicates and taken over from the Socialists. The OND became a party auxiliary in 1927. Thereafter its national pres-ident was the PNF Secretary, the provincial counterparts were the federali and its local administration was staffed by party cadres. Turati’s takeover of the OND was part of the PNF’s mobilisation for the ‘battle for the lira’, offering social welfare and rest and recreation facilities for blue- and white-collar workers in a difficult economic situation. Already the largest adult organisation by 1931, with 1.75 million members, it moved beyond the initial phase of affiliating and ‘fascistising’ existing Socialist and democratic working-men’s clubs to build up a new network of sections during the Depression. By 1939 the OND had about 3.8 million members. It retained the character and function of its PNF relaunching during the revaluation crisis, providing some com-pensation in the form of facilities and services for the low pay and living standards which prevented many workers from becoming serious consumers. The OND’s cumulative impact was probably to alleviate and divert some of the social distress and discontent arising during the Depression years.

The regime’s organising drive crossed with and reinforced employer paternalism and ‘scientific’ management practice which saw a healthy and rested worker as a more productive one. Industrial employers also encouraged the OND in order to isolate and marginalise the Fascist syndicates among their workforce, since however toothless, they remained class-based organisations defending workers’ interests. Most of the OND’s industrial workers’ membership and a good part of its white-collar members belonged to occupational sections organised around the factory, firm and branch of the state administration. The territorial sections at the level of the communes were meant to catch the families and the whole population of the area. The typical OND section had a library, a radio, a sports and recreation ground and a clubhouse in which to socialise. It organised sporting activities and local festivals of

a folklorist character, and arranged showings of films and performances of the OND-sponsored travelling theatres. It offered to its members rail and other consumer discounts, welfare and social insurance benefits and, probably the most patronised activity, subsidised trips and excur-sions, a kind of low-level, low-cost tourism. The OND was introducing and spreading forms of popular mass leisure and recreation, which in other countries were occurring more spontaneously as part of the stirrings of a ‘consumer society’, rather than under the auspices of a ‘totalitarian’ state.

The OND clearly also played a part in persuading the regime of the utility of modern means of mass communication: the cinema and, especially, radio. These were increasingly incorporated into a more refined propaganda apparatus as the 1930s went on. Organisationally, this was reflected in the constant upgrading of the government bodies made responsible for the control and manipulation of opinion. The Press Office of the Council of Ministers, primarily concerned with the meticulous daily control of journalists and newspapers, was enlarged in 1934 into a sub-ministry for Press and Propaganda. This assumed over-all control also of radio, cinema, theatre and tourism. On its elevation in 1935 into a full Ministry, there began a concerted attempt to shape pop-ular culture through the controlled use of mass communication media.

Cinema-going certainly increased, partly because it was facilitated by the regime’s own organisations like the OND. There were a few historical and contemporary film dramas conveying something of the Fascist message and style. But the fare was mainly diversionary entertainment provided by both American and Italian-made films. What official prop-aganda there was, came in the obligatory showing in all cinemas of the weekly documentary or newsreel produced by the government-controlled film agency, LUCE. Their output obviously dramatised the regime’s major achievements and policies, placing some emphasis on rural and imperial campaigns and themes.

Rural life was also the focus for radio transmission, which from the start was controlled by a government-run public agency. Radio was clearly a more flexible way than a relatively low circulation press to convey the regime’s presence and message to rural populations traditionally indifferent to government and its agencies and isolated by illiteracy and distance. Radio quite literally spanned these social and geographical distances, and was capable of delivering a single, uniform message to many different places simultaneously. The poverty of the Italian domestic market for consumer goods, accentuated by the

regime’s own economic policies compressing wages and purchasing power, constantly inhibited the diffusion of radio. This was to an extent offset by the government providing what the individual often could not.

A special rural radio agency (ERR) was set up in 1933, and significantly was presided by the PNF Secretary, Starace, from late 1934, reflecting the party’s drive to control all the channels of contact between regime and people. Besides operating as a programme network for specifically rural audiences, the ERR distributed sets to elementary schools and other outposts of the regime in the countryside, like the communal OND. These sets had to service the whole community: collective listening in public places and premises was another improvised response to the problems of access.