SOURCE: “Mussolini as American Hero,” in Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, Princeton University Press, 1972, pp. 58-73.

In the following essay, Diggins explores Mussolini's appeal to Americans as a signifier of heroic redemption.

The Images of Mussolini

To conclude a study of the Mussolini vogue [in Mussolini and Facism: The View from America] by maintaining that in America he was nothing more than a press-manufactured celebrity is only half the story. Dismissing him as the product of a news-hungry media and a public given to dramatic “pseudo-events” ignores two salient facts: that neither publicity nor propaganda can by itself create a popular “symbolic hero,” and that Mussolini enjoyed the acclaim of many prominent contemporaries who were uninfluenced by the press. It would be tedious to quote here the lavish accolades heaped upon him by such astute admirers as Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw. Perhaps it suffices...