Mussolini Asks about Roosevelt's New Deal: Just How Much “Fascism” Does the American President’s Program Contain?

There was hardly a commentator who failed to see elements of Italian corporatism in Roosevelt’s managed economy under the National Recovery Administration, the institution formed in 1933 to maintain mandatory production and price “codes” for American industry. The Italian press was quite taken with these similarities, and Mussolini laid the groundwork for such comparisons in a book review he wrote of Roosevelt’s Looking Forward. On the one hand, he identified a spiritual kinship:

The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.

In other passages, Mussolini was more reserved:

The question is often asked in America and in Europe just how much “Fascism” the American President’s program contains. We need to be careful about overgeneralizing. Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices, having recognized that the welfare of the economy is identical with the welfare of the people. Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism. More than that cannot be said at the moment.

Mussolini’s reserve reflected the customary etiquette among world leaders, who try to avoid appearing partisan: in July 1933, the month Mussolini’s review appeared, his press department was ordered not to describe the New Deal as Fascist because it might provide welcome ammunition to Roosevelt’s political enemies at home. A year later, Mussolini was sufficiently convinced of the strength of the president’s position to be rather less diplomatic in his choice of words. In his review of the Italian edition of New Frontiers, a book written by Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, Mussolini wrote:

The book as a whole is just as “corporativistic” as the individual solutions put forth in it. It is both a declaration of faith and an indictment of economic liberalism. . . . Wallace’s answer to the question of what America wants is as follows: anything but a return to the free-market, i.e., anarchistic economy. Where is America headed? This book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century.

--Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), e-book.