On August 19, 1941, Serafino Romualdi found himself in the newsroom of the Uruguayan daily El País, more than 5000 miles away from his home base of operations in New York City. As a spirited representative of the Mazzini Society, established in the United States just two years earlier by several fuorusciti (Italian exiles), Romualdi had arrived in Montevideo to deliver a talk titled “Italians in the Current War,” which was aimed to motivate Italian-Uruguayans to organize and join the international cause against fascism. The editors of El País hailed Romualdi as a “prestigious Italian journalist and vigorous anti-fascist warrior.”Footnote 1 Born in Perugia, Italy, Romualdi had immigrated to the United States in 1923 as a result of his opposition to fascism.Footnote 2 In the United States, he became actively involved in the labor movement. Initially settling in Chicago, Romualdi relocated in 1928 to New York, where he worked as an editor for various trade union publications and as a labor organizer. In the early 1930s, he joined the influential International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.
Romualdi's visit to Uruguay was part of his tour of the Southern Cone, which also included travel throughout Brazil and Argentina to deliver similar lectures and radio addresses, with the intent of stimulating local anti-fascist declarations and ceremonies. The trip to Uruguay as a member of the Mazzini Society and the fact that Romualdi was soon to be recruited to work for the US government highlight the initial intersection of several transnational historical processes that were in motion during World War II. Among these junctions were anti-fascist dialogues and movements developing within what had by then become well-established immigrant groups in the Americas, and conversely, US government officials’ growing alarm about these ethnic communities’ susceptibility to transatlantic fascist propaganda.
In Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil, Romualdi hoped to find support for his efforts among those nations’ large Italian communities, which already counted on established—although circumscribed—Free Italy movements.Footnote 3 In Latin America, the Free Italy (or Italia Libre) movements were composed of Italians and their descendants who called for the liberation of Italy from the grip of fascism. Though scattered throughout the Americas, these anti-fascist groups demonstrated a strong desire to connect with their counterparts beyond the nation-state after the outbreak of war in Europe.Footnote 4 As they came to understand that the war would inevitably affect the Western Hemisphere, various US government officials had become increasingly concerned about the masses of Italian and German immigrants in Latin America: they saw these immigrants as either not fully assimilated into local society or overly driven by “blood” connections, and thus vulnerable to fascist ideas emanating from their European homelands. Thus, to counteract Axis efforts in Latin America, US officials sought to better understand ethnic populations’ views on European fascism, as well as the nature of Latin American political leaders’ connections to Europe.
Established in 1940, the Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), headed by Nelson Rockefeller, would eventually tap Romualdi and his growing connections in South America to gather intelligence concerning Italian and German influence in the region.Footnote 5 In Rockefeller's vision, Romualdi and others involved in the Free Italy movements could serve as a countervailing force against Axis-sponsored propaganda in Latin America and thus help to strengthen US defense efforts in the hemisphere. As an experienced and connected labor organizer who was politically situated within the anticommunist left, Romualdi was an ideal non-state actor to help advance OCIAA's cultural diplomacy strategies, including the distribution of positive images of the United States through news, radio, advertising, and film.Footnote 6 The US government was in dire need of individuals like Romualdi to help US officials better understand the sociopolitical conditions in Latin America after the outbreak of World War II and thus enable them to effectively employ culture as an instrument in international relations. Romualdi's travels throughout South America were initially motivated by a desire to grow local anti-fascist groups into a transnational Free Italy movement that might exert some collective influence in postwar Italy. However, he later came to see the United States as his home country and one whose interests he could serve, particularly after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941.Footnote 7
Romualdi's prodigious career as a postwar international agent for the US government, which included his role as a “roving ambassador” promoting anticommunist unionism in Latin America for the American Federation of Labor (AFL), is well documented by scholars.Footnote 8 Yet far less understood by historians is Romualdi's first contact with the region and the significance of his anti-fascist work there with Italian communities. Even before serving the AFL, a position that emerged in part from his brief stint working in Italy for the US Office of Strategic Services in 1944, Romualdi was officially hired by the OCIAA to work in its labor division, in 1943. The reports Romualdi sent to his associates at the Mazzini Society about his findings during his first trip to South America caught the attention of the Bureau of Latin American Research (BLAR), a confidential project created in September 1941 under the OCIAA. The Washington-based BLAR outfit, headed by the Italian exile Bruno Foa, relied heavily on reports from its network of Italian anti-fascists and became an early source of intelligence for the US government.Footnote 9
As detailed in this investigation, Romualdi and his associates played a crucial function in helping the US government to construct the initial scaffolding necessary to gather intelligence and later orchestrate various strategies under the umbrella of OCIAA-sponsored cultural diplomacy. At their inception, these plans necessarily relied on non-government actors who were best fit to interpret, calibrate, and implement plans that could be carefully aligned with US continental defense strategies and Pan-Americanism. Romualdi, who kept his connections to the US government secret, played a brief but decisive role in the fledgling US intelligence-gathering system in Latin America, which greatly depended on the connections and resourcefulness of its early participants. This first experience in Latin America prepared Romualdi for a long career as a US government agent in the region.
Ultimately, the impact of Romualdi's anti-fascist work with Italian communities in South America proved to be limited, in large part because it came to be under US guidance. His efforts were most effective in Uruguay, where they helped to push mounting local anti-fascist attitudes into more public spaces. His unremitting labor in Uruguay and the region also temporarily gave the Free Italy efforts importance beyond the movement's central organization in New York City and the Mazzini Society. Most important, through Romualdi's work, the US government was able to gauge the effectiveness and limitations of cultural diplomacy strategies in Latin America, before their more advanced and protracted implementation during the postwar period.
Concerns about South American governments’ ties to European fascism in the early 1930s first revealed themselves as mere observations by the US diplomats stationed in the region. By the late 1930s, however, these general concerns had developed into specific fears, provoked by Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland and the subsequent takeover of small European countries, often with the assistance of fifth columns.Footnote 10 Numerous incidents related to fascism involving Uruguay's Italian community and prominent local political figures garnered the attention of US diplomats in Uruguay, but US officials often struggled to interpret the significance of these events or to respond to them appropriately. It was precisely Uruguay's deep ties with Italy and the substantial place Italian migration held in the country's history that explain Romualdi's presence in Montevideo in 1941 and, subsequently, the US government's interest in his work.
Italian-Uruguayan Historical Ties
During an era that saw the rise of European fascism, the Uruguayan government leadership often demonstrated close ties with Italy. Under President Gabriel Terra (1931-38), who had briefly served as envoy to Italy in the 1920s, Uruguay enjoyed friendly relations with both Italy and Germany.Footnote 11 Moreover, in spite of Franklin D. Roosevelt's tremendous popularity in Uruguay, the US government had little influence in shaping Uruguay's international politics through much of the 1930s. The inability of US officials to persuade the Uruguayan leadership to sever close links with Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany in those years cannot be fully understood without considering the fact that European immigration to Uruguay had been indispensable to the small nation's economic and cultural development.
Uruguay's connection with Italy dates back to the early decades following Uruguayan independence, when an exiled Giuseppe Garibaldi left an indelible imprint on Uruguayan history. During the Uruguayan Civil War (1839-51) between the country's two traditional political parties, the liberal Colorado party and the conservative National Party (also known as the Blancos), an Italian legion of volunteers fought on the side of the Colorados under the leadership of Garibaldi, who had arrived in Montevideo from Brazil in 1840 and quickly became embroiled in Uruguayan politics. Garibaldi's participation in the civil war, which also involved Uruguay's two large neighbors, the Argentine Confederation and the empire of Brazil, as well as British and French troops, secured his place in the social imaginary of the Uruguayan nation as a historical symbol of its liberty and independence. This image of Garibaldi would be invoked with much frequency in the political atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s.Footnote 12 Certainly, Garibaldi's widespread significance in the collective memory of Uruguay's sizable population of Italian descent proved to be a vehicle well suited to cultural diplomacy.
The historic flow of Italian migration was decisive in the creation of a modern Uruguayan state. Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay together received one-fifth of the 56 million Europeans who migrated overseas between 1820 and 1932.Footnote 13 Most of the European migration to eastern Argentina, southern Brazil, and Uruguay originated from Spain and Italy.Footnote 14 Between 1836 and 1932, Uruguay received some 713,000 immigrants, the vast majority of whom arrived from those two countries.Footnote 15 The Italian migration had a fundamental role in Uruguay's twentieth-century political history. European migration, credited by scholars with helping to create a middle class of landowners, merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, and a working class in the cities, was a key component in the success of progressive-era projects during the first three decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 16 Italians generally favored the liberal Colorado party, which was more closely allied with urban interests and was generally perceived as the party of immigrants.Footnote 17 As such, Italian-Uruguayans gained a greater presence in Uruguayan politics under the progressive Batllista governments. The successive liberal administrations led by President José Batlle y Ordóñez and his followers in the Colorado party transformed Uruguay into Latin America's first welfare state.Footnote 18 According to Uruguayan historian Juan Oddone, Italian immigrants and their descendants in Uruguay “formed a group of technicians, professionals, journalists and intellectuals who gathered with humble representatives of social groups that had been isolated from the highest levels of politics . . . [where] they could successfully intertwine their [Garibaldian] ideology with the new demands of the progressive country they had decisively helped build.”Footnote 19
In Uruguay, as in other countries that experienced significant waves of immigration, ethnic identity constituted an important part of social life. Particularly in Montevideo, Italians founded various organizations, including civic associations, philanthropic entities, cooperatives, and social clubs related to music, art, and sports.Footnote 20 These organizations often had specific regional origins; for example, the Círculo Napolitano was a mutual aid society founded in 1880. As an immigrant elite class emerged, Italians also established schools, newspapers, and banks. The Scuola Italiana di Montevideo opened in 1886 and the Banco Italiano del Uruguay was incorporated in 1887. The very prominent Uruguayan Italian language newspaper, L'Italiano, targeted to middle and upper classes, was founded in 1905, although the first Italian newspaper, incidentally under the same name, appeared in 1841 and was both free and devoted to workers. By the late 1930s, Italian ethnic identity and the associations that helped to forge it would gain new significance with the outbreak of World War II.
Uruguay-US Relations in the Context of Italian Fascism
Like several other well-known Latin American political figures, the Uruguayan president Gabriel Terra and many of his close political allies often demonstrated a strong appreciation for the fascist cause. Uruguayan historian Ana María Rodríguez Ayçaguer notes that sympathy for the Italian nation and Mussolini in 1930s Uruguay mingled with both the desire for progress promised by fascism and the fear of Communism, which had been heightened by the Russian revolution and the founding of the Communist Party in Uruguay in 1921.Footnote 21 Faced with a seemingly insurmountable Depression-era economic crisis, Terra, a long-standing member of the Colorado party, orchestrated a coup in March of 1933, bringing forth a dictatorship in the name of constitutional reform.
The dictatorship ushered in a conservative shift in the Uruguayan government and established a new division in the country's politics. Those who had supported the coup later came to be seen as fascists.Footnote 22 In 1935, the Uruguayan government, believing that the Soviet legation was sponsoring subversive activity in Uruguay, broke relations with the Soviet Union. That year Uruguay also severed relations with the Spanish republic and in 1936 recognized the government of Francisco Franco. At the same time, Terra's government established stronger links with Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, as conservatives pointed to the achievements of the fascist and Nazi projects in Europe. During this period, Italy and Germany provided Uruguay with significant financial and technical assistance critical to the continued development of the modern Uruguayan state.
The apparent admiration demonstrated in some Uruguayan circles for Italy and Mussolini, particularly Terra's fascist leanings, began to garner the attention of the US legation in Montevideo.Footnote 23 One report from Leon Dominian, the US chargé in Montevideo, noted that his colleagues at the US embassy in Rio had confirmed his initial impressions that Terra had an “unquestionable bias for Italy and everything Italian.”Footnote 24 Dominian explained to his superiors in Washington that during an official three-week visit to Brazil in 1934 Terra was much less “guarded” than at home, demonstrating in speeches and meetings “his outburst of affection and loyalty to the land of his ancestors.” In contrast to the way in which Terra spoke about other countries, the Uruguayan president displayed what Dominian characterized as an obvious tone of sincerity whenever he professed his admiration for Italy.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of fascist sympathies in Uruguay was the Terra administration's permissiveness when it came to the extensive fascist propaganda efforts of Serafino Mazzolini, the Italian minister in Uruguay from 1932 to 1937. Upon his arrival, Mazzolini attempted to strengthen ties with local fascist groups and sympathizers.Footnote 25 During this time, the Uruguayan Italian-language weekly L'Italiano, in addition to covering activities in Italian-Uruguayan social spheres, highlighted and praised Mazzolini's various undertakings in Uruguay. Although he acted without apparent restrictions, the behavior of the industrious Italian minister did not go unnoticed or unchallenged. In a follow-up report about Terra's relations with Mazzolini, Dominian again confirmed with “undoubted accuracy” Terra's Italian bias, adding that Mazzolini had found “ready soil in the person of President Terra, who seems always conscious of his Italian origin and who recollects with enthusiasm” his time as the Uruguayan envoy in Rome.Footnote 26 For much of the 1930s, the US legation was troubled by the fact that Mazzolini acted freely in Montevideo as “a missionary of fascism.” Another matter of grave concern to the US legation, aside from Terra's “sentimental ties” to Italy, was that the use of force by the president and his followers to come to power and to maintain control meant that they could therefore “look upon the fascist regime in Italy with an enthusiasm . . . born of necessity.” Moreover, Dominian believed that the fascist tendencies in Terra's immediate entourage were demonstrated in its “admiration for ‘big stick’ methods of government” and an inclination “directed toward speaking approvingly” of European fascism.Footnote 27
As Uruguayan newspapers in opposition to Terra warned of the threat of fascist infiltration in their country, US officials in Montevideo were correspondingly troubled by what appeared to be special treatment of the Italian minister Mazzolini, as demonstrated by his frequent invitations to official events such as officers’ banquets or gatherings of military chiefs, to which other members of the diplomatic corps were ordinarily not invited. From the viewpoint of US officials, Uruguay's government under dictatorship naturally made Mazzolini a “mentor” to the Terra administration, one whose influence was potentially responsible not only for the fascist tendencies manifested in the country, but also for prevailing anti-American sentiments. While at times US diplomats in Montevideo expressed some doubt about the efficacy of the Italian minister, they nonetheless showed concern that the political circumstances in which Terra and his supporters found themselves could lead them to seriously entertain the fascist Italian system of government.Footnote 28
Throughout Mazzolini's tenure as minister, the US legation in Montevideo continued to relay various concerns about his activities. One such report claimed that a prominent member of Terra's opposition had personally expressed to a US diplomat his fear that the country was becoming “an Italian colony” and that, as a result of Mazzolini's influence, a number of schools in Montevideo had been remodeled on the fascist plan adopted in Rome.Footnote 29 The US legation also kept a close eye on similar “cultural missions” from Spain's government that were aimed to strengthen relations between Uruguay and the Franco regime.Footnote 30 Throughout the 1930s, these cultural missions reflected the perception of both US diplomats and their European counterparts that Uruguayan society, with its cultural heritage tied to the Old World, could potentially serve as fertile ground for fascism.
As a result of these deep cultural bonds, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia on October 3, 1935, brought a challenging episode in Uruguayan diplomacy. It was especially difficult for Uruguay to adopt and apply the League of Nations’ economic sanctions against Italy and the Italian people.Footnote 31 Furthermore, the conflict with Ethiopia revealed that fascism resonated among various Italian circles in Uruguay. For example, in early October 1935, some 90 volunteers left Uruguay on board the ship Augustus to join the Italian army in its war effort against Ethiopia. The ship, which had arrived at Montevideo from Buenos Aires with some Argentine volunteers, would continue to Brazil to pick up more volunteers there. The pro-Terra Uruguayan newspaper La Mañana described the scene as “an avalanche of people” gathered to send off the Uruguayan volunteers who were leaving “to offer their services to the homeland.”Footnote 32 According to other newspaper accounts, various Italian-Uruguayan associations were present at the port, including the Reduci Italiani (war veterans), the Uruguayan Fascio (the major fascist organization in the country), the Dopolavoro (National Recreational Club), and children from the Scuola Italiana di Montevideo. Conversely, the Italian affair in Ethiopia stimulated a salient Garibaldian tradition of liberal and republican values in Uruguayan society and rendered much of Mazzolini's efforts to influence the Italian community in Uruguay ineffective.Footnote 33 In total, only 117 volunteers left Uruguay to join the Italian cause in Africa, despite energetic propaganda and recruitment efforts from the Italian legation. Likewise in Argentina's case, the Ethiopian conflict did not energize Italian immigrants’ patriotism or ethnic identity to the degree it had in Italy's previous involvement in colonial wars.Footnote 34
It is significant that the departure of the volunteers received relatively minimal attention from Uruguayan newspapers and was not seen as a controversial event.Footnote 35 Additionally, while pro-Terra newspapers delicately demonstrated their support for the Italian government during its war with Ethiopia by reminding their readers of Uruguay's deep connection to Italy, such displays in favor of fascism would eventually present irreconcilable complications for Italian ethnic societies and associations.Footnote 36 Certainly, Uruguayan public opinion concerning European political developments had shifted by the late 1930s, growing more acutely anti-fascist after the German invasion of Poland and the defeat of France in June 1940. By then, various activities organized by ethnic associations had become politicized in a polarizing manner, requiring government intervention. For example, in 1941, teachers at Montevideo's Scuola Italiana were forced to use Uruguayan textbooks and limit their hours of Italian language instruction. Moreover, public displays that were deemed to be pro-fascist gained new meanings and produced more hostile responses from the press and the public in general.
Reports from the US legation in Montevideo in 1938 began to clarify this situation for Washington. As concerns about anti-Americanism intensified, US State Department officials came to believe that the impending conflicts in the European theater would require in their own hemisphere a different kind of battle, one for Latin American minds. Soon after arriving in Montevideo in February 1938, the new US minister to Uruguay, William Dawson, presented his provisional impressions of Uruguayan attitudes toward the United States and the dominant European powers. In his briefing, Dawson noted Terra's friendly attitude and tendencies toward fascist Italy and Germany, but saw no evidence that fascism held any appeal for the Uruguayan masses, regardless of class. Having read previous legation reports, Dawson expressed his surprise to find such little local support for fascism. Despite European propaganda against the United States, Dawson surmised that “with negligible exceptions” most Uruguayans trusted the United States, since Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy had been endorsed with enthusiasm and inspired local confidence.Footnote 37 The minister added that whatever Uruguayan support existed for European fascist projects was evidence of local concerns about communism rather than a real appeal of fascism. Furthermore, sympathy for Italy from the Uruguayan people was mostly for “cultural and racial reasons.” Likewise, negative views about the United States in Uruguay were related to trade and commerce issues, in particular US failure to offer a market for Uruguayan wool. Given these conditions as described by Dawson, it is fitting that Romualdi's anti-fascist efforts found the most support in Uruguay, rather than in Brazil or Argentina, and that his work quickly caught the attention of US officials.
World War II and Serafino Romualdi's Quest
Despite the improved standing of the United States in the region, the outbreak of World War II intensified the state of alarm about widespread fascist networks in the Americas and in turn galvanized various international anti-fascist actors like Serafino Romualdi, who could count on transnational connections through the Free Italy movements. In Romualdi's view, the anti-fascist elements in Latin America's Italian communities could be invigorated by helping them to organize and coordinate their work with the Mazzini Society in the United States.Footnote 38 The Mazzini Society, originally founded in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1939, was headquartered in New York City and became the center of the Italian anti-fascist movement in 1940.Footnote 39 Guided by prominent fuorusciti such as Gaetano Salvemini and Max Ascoli, the society sought to recruit Italian-Americans in the fight against fascism, but the organization's influence was often constrained by internal political differences. Although made up of individuals on the Italian left, the society's leadership prevented the participation of Communists and Marxists, who might undercut its members’ resolute commitment to liberal democracy and a republican form of government.Footnote 40 This exclusion of the far left also confined the society's impact abroad. Still, its reach at home was arguably even more restricted by an elite-led vision that did not resonate with the masses of Italians and their descendants in the United States.Footnote 41
However limited, the efforts of the Mazzini Society expanded to interconnect anti-fascist movements in Latin America and beyond, through the Free Italy groups. Luigi Antonini, a key member of the society and a union leader in New York, had traveled to Montevideo in 1939 to attend the International Congress of American Democracies, as a delegate of the American Labor Party.Footnote 42 This meeting was organized by Uruguayan professor Hugo Fernández Artucio, an important international actor and leading figure in Uruguay's anti-fascist movement.Footnote 43 It included the participation of various civic, social, and labor organizations, most situated on the political left, but organizers purposely refrained from inviting Communist delegates.Footnote 44 At the congress, Antonini argued for what would later become Romualdi's transnational mission in Uruguay, declaring that “the resistance of the American Continents’ penetration of totalitarian ideologies . . . cannot be left exclusively to the initiative and coordination of the governments,” but rather “it must find an active echo among the masses.”Footnote 45 Following the spirit of Antonini's vision, Romualdi's 1941 tour of South America was intended to generate stronger responses against the threats of fascism from the region's Italian communities. Although it is difficult to measure his political and social impact, Romualdi created another platform from which to voice anti-fascist positions and move Uruguayans and their government toward a more aggressive anti-fascist stance. Romualdi's message upon his arrival in August of 1941 would resonate with a growing sector of the Uruguayan population that was troubled by fascism.
One of the most emblematic examples of the shifting tide in public opinion in Uruguay was spurred by a 1941 Italian Red Cross event, which might have gone unnoticed or been interpreted as insignificant had it taken place during Terra's rule in the 1930s.Footnote 46 On Sunday, June 29, 1941, a group of Uruguayans organized a benefit for the Italian Red Cross in the city of Durazno, located approximately 120 miles north of Montevideo. Various members of the Italian community attended this gathering, including the heads of the Uruguayan Fascio, the Scuola Italiana, the Reduci, and the Circolo Italiano, as well as representatives from several other Italian-Uruguayan organizations. Also attending the benefit dinner were the Italian vice-consul Andres Musciani, Italian Army captain Mario Longhini, and Italian commander Erasmo Scalesse. Newspaper reports informed locals of the event in advance, so that the caravan of nine cars, which planned to drive through the city's main strip before reaching the formal benefit, was intersected and blocked by a large crowd of civilians and students who led a protest chanting slogans such as “Long live democracy!” and “Down with fascism!”Footnote 47 This confrontation involved the exchange of insults and rock-throwing by the students and quickly escalated as shots were fired from at least one of the cars, leaving one dead and nine injured. The police responded by detaining 29 members of the caravan.Footnote 48
Later that night, and throughout the following day, mobs exceeding a thousand people stoned various storefronts and houses of suspected Axis sympathizers in Durazno, requiring cavalry and artillery troops to maintain the peace.Footnote 49 More significantly, the Italian Red Cross incident led to the widespread condemnation of fascist activity throughout Uruguay.Footnote 50 The newspaper El Plata justified the mob reaction as a response to “the cowardly attack” from the caravan that had left the people of Durazno so “indignant” that they “attempted to take justice into their own hands.”Footnote 51 Following suit, many other mainstream newspapers protested what they saw as nefarious foreign elements in the country who were plotting in the auspicious shadow of Uruguayan democracy. The Catholic newspaper El Buen Público warned that the nation faced a situation “brought forth by people emboldened” by the politics of fascism, “who feel more and more like they are at home . . . as though a totalitarian government had already been established in our land.”Footnote 52 The majority of the local press labeled the events at Durazno as unprecedented, and called for swift government action. Following the incident, the Uruguayan congress held an intense five-hour session regarding the episode.Footnote 53 By July, Uruguayan president Alfredo Baldomir (1938-43) had met with his government's ministers to discuss broadening the country's illicit association laws to suppress such anti-institutional activities. It was in August of 1941, in this atmosphere of intense social debate about Uruguay's place in the war, that Romualdi arrived in Montevideo to make his first significant connections in the region, marking the beginning of a long career in Latin America.
Plans for Romualdi's travel as a representative of the Mazzini Society included stays throughout Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, where he planned to conduct a series of meetings, interviews, and talks warning of the threats of fascism emanating from Europe. At the end of August, following various interviews with newspaper editors and small conferences, Romualdi delivered his main lecture, “Los italianos en la guerra actual,” at Montevideo's Ateneo, one of the country's primary intellectual and cultural institutions.Footnote 54 The speech was followed by a formal collective declaration and anti-fascist act to “repudiate the alliance, made against the will and interests of the Italian people, that the fascist government of Italy maintains with Nazism.”Footnote 55 Those in attendance also reaffirmed their faith in democracy and their commitment to contribute to the victory of a democratic Italy.
By all accounts, Romualdi's speech was delivered before an audience of several hundred people, including members of the Uruguayan Free Italy movement. The event also featured the participation of influential Uruguayan speakers of Italian descent, such as the internationally renowned feminist Paulina Luisi who in 1909 became the first woman in Uruguay to receive a degree in medicine. Aside from his call for Italians everywhere to unite with the Free Italy movement, Romualdi also condemned Italy's entry into the war on the side of Nazism, which he argued “bound Italian soldiers to . . . become the stranglers of freedom and independence of other peoples.”Footnote 56 Moreover, Romualdi criticized the fascist aggressions against Ethiopia, Spain, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, representing them as a negation of Italy's liberal tradition. He also denounced the 1936 Rome-Berlin alliance and the 1939 German-Italian military pact, which in just a few years had placed Italy in “a condition of absolute vassalage with respect to Germany.” Finally, after recalling Giuseppe Mazzini's political ideology and Garibaldi's military action, Romualdi reminded his audience of the Italian volunteers who had helped to defend Uruguay's independence and freedom in the 1840s.
Romualdi departed Montevideo to continue his work in Argentina. From Buenos Aires, he and Sigfrido Cicotti, the secretary of the Free Italy organization in Argentina, traveled to several other provinces in an effort to grow the movement by organizing various local committees. For example, in Rosario, Romualdi and Cicotti sought to create a junior section of Free Italy by inviting “young children and descendants of Italians” to a public act.Footnote 57 In addition to his public events and speeches, much of Romualdi's work appears to have entailed establishing personal connections. Throughout his time in Argentina, he met with politicians, business leaders, and other prominent members of the Italian community to recruit members for Free Italy groups. Romualdi also held many interviews with local newspapers in an effort to publicize his work. As in Uruguay, the various newspaper write-ups on Romualdi's trip in Argentina echoed the same talking points: how Latin American democracies had become the “trenches in the war against fascism,” and the need for Italians throughout the Americas to play a role in this effort. He also recalled the liberal traditions and legacies of Mazzini and Garibaldi.Footnote 58
After the Pearl Harbor attacks, and following six months of travel throughout Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, Romualdi decided to return to the United States. He sailed home from Rio in February 1942. His efforts in Latin America were partially motivated by his assessment that the Italian anti-fascist voice had remained a minority, even in countries with large Italian communities and with an ideological tradition opposed to totalitarianism, as was the case in Uruguay.Footnote 59 The work of the Uruguayan branch of the Free Italy movement, the Asociación Italia Libre del Uruguay, which Romualdi helped to organize, continued to remind Uruguayans of the Pan-American effort required to free Italy from the Nazi-fascist yoke.Footnote 60
BLAR's Education and Re-Orientation Campaign
The transnational nature of inter-American and cross-Atlantic German and Italian ethnic associations continued to worry US government officials after the United States entered the war.Footnote 61 More specifically, these officials believed that enemy propaganda might intensify negative perceptions of the United States in Latin America, for instance by amplifying local concerns regarding US imperialism, and thus undermining inter-American cooperation and hemisphere defense strategies. This concern manifested itself in robust efforts by the US government to shape Latin American public opinion through the use of cultural diplomacy, predominantly through the OCIAA.Footnote 62 However, cultural diplomacy required participation from non-state actors, such as Serafino Romualdi or the Mazzini Society, who were well connected and naturally positioned to influence organic Latin American anti-fascist movements and thus make them more favorable to the US war efforts.Footnote 63 On his tour of South America, Romualdi wrote a series of reports on local fascist activities, which he sent to Max Ascoli, then president of the Mazzini Society. During that time, Ascoli, who served as a consultant for the US government, shared these reports with officials at the OCIAA. The reports were well received by other government agencies, including BLAR, leading to the OCIAA's interest in Romualdi's work in South America. Upon his return, he was invited to Washington and employed by Rockefeller “to undertake organizing work and propaganda” in Latin America.Footnote 64 Consequently, local anti-fascist groups connected to Romualdi would now receive funding from the OCIAA—surreptitiously and unbeknown to the recipients—and thus be guided or oriented in line with US hemisphere defense strategies.
In early July 1942, Romualdi returned to South America, again representing the Mazzini Society; however, he was tasked this time by the OCIAA to organize a Pan-American Congress of Free Italians. As a result, the Free Italy movement held its first conference at Montevideo's Ateneo in mid August 1942. Hosting the Pan-American conference in Uruguay made the Free Italy movement appear less US-dominated. While Argentina had a much larger Italian population, the political conditions in Uruguay made Montevideo a more promising setting. Hundreds of delegates from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and the United States attended the meeting.Footnote 65 Congressman Emilio Frugoni, a principal figure in the anti-fascist movement and one of the Free Italy delegates from Uruguay, spoke at the conference's inaugural session.Footnote 66 The meeting also included a ceremony to pay homage to Garibaldi and an address by Paulina Luisi. The conference's guest of honor was Carlo Sforza, an exiled Italian diplomat and former foreign relations minister, who by then had become the most prominent anti-fascist leader associated with the Mazzini Society and the figurehead of the global Free Italy movement.
Sforza spoke at the conference's closing ceremony, stating that Montevideo was the “natural” location for the meeting because of Uruguay's “profound liberalism,” and that the city once again offered proof of the “existence of Garibaldi's immortal spirit.”Footnote 67 During his talk, Sforza invoked the cultural symbols of Garibaldi and Mazzini to attack Mussolini. The conference speeches were shared via radio broadcast to the Americas and Italy, a cultural diplomacy strategy orchestrated and funded by the OCIAA. Sforza also brought his message to top government officials in Uruguay, meeting with president Baldomir and foreign minister Alberto Guani, two key allies in US continental defense efforts. Days later, while fielding press questions about the conference, Guani emphasized the notion that the Uruguayan people “profess a profound sympathy for Italy and the Italian people” and recalled important contributions to Uruguayan society from Italian immigration.Footnote 68 The Uruguayan press also echoed the nation's deep connection to Italy, the accomplishments of the conference, and Uruguay's commitment to the Free Italy cause.
Shortly after the 1942 conference, Romualdi helped to establish the Comité Italo-Americano de Educación Democrática in Montevideo. This effort was part of a confidential project under OCIAA-guided cultural diplomacy, with the goal of presenting the US perspective of the war to the millions of Italians and their descendants in Latin America. This committee, managed by Italian-born Uruguayan Ricardo Rimini, appeared as a Uruguayan outfit, but functioned as a BLAR subsidiary to produce a handful of publications in support of the Allied efforts. Under titles such as Garibaldi, héroe de los dos mundos (Garibaldi, Hero of Both Worlds) and América e Italia, these 20- to 30-page booklets emphasized historical Italian ties in the Americas and the social and political legacies of Garibaldi and Mazzini in these communities. Other publications such as Habla Mussolini (Mussolini Talks) and Dominación económica Nazi more directly highlighted the crimes of Nazism for Uruguayan readers. The general content of these pamphlets was approved by and guided from Washington, while BLAR associates on the ground calculated their impact and assessed their effectiveness.
Another publication from the Comité Italo-Americano de Educación Democrática, titled Charla a los inmigrantes italianos de América Latina (Speech to the Italian Immigrants of Latin America), served as an extended version of the speeches Romualdi delivered during his tour. This pamphlet began with a discussion of the immigrants’ experience and the decision to leave Italy for the Americas, “a place where you can begin a new life, where everyone has the same rights, the same liberty and equality, where it does not matter where one was born.”Footnote 69 After underscoring this state of equality without regard to family name and background, as well as the important contributions by Italians to these democratic societies, the publication called for Pan-American solidarity to defend the Americas against the Axis threat that sought to reverse the idyllic historical situation presented in the pamphlet's narrative. Whether in print or on radio, a common tactic was to juxtapose an account of the ideals forwarded by the historical Italian migration to the region against the fascist menace poised to undermine the achievements of Italian immigrants throughout the Americas.
In addition to this written campaign, which was clearly aligned with US continental defense efforts and the promotion of Pan-Americanism, Romualdi and the committee were tasked with distributing press releases to the main media outlets in the region, coordinating the “planting” of articles in newspapers, organizing meetings and lectures, and broadcasting a daily radio news program called Il Giornale dell’ Aria (The Newspaper of the Air). According to Romualdi, a powerful radio station in Uruguay broadcast this program to southern Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru.Footnote 70 While radio broadcasts were conducted by local stations such as El Espectador (CX-14), the committee's radio work was also likely associated with the OCIAA's Precinradio, Inc., a covert government corporation created in July 1942, through which the United States funded and supplied equipment and programming for radio propaganda to combat Axis activities throughout Latin America.Footnote 71 These efforts, intended to unite the Italian communities in the region and shape their views of the conflicts in Europe to garner support for the Allied cause, continued throughout the war. For instance, Montevideo hosted another congress of Free Italy in April 1944.
The social and political conditions in Uruguay illustrate precisely how and why Italian communities throughout Latin America gained the attention of US government officials. In the view of these officials, the millions of Latin Americans of Italian descent were of considerable importance for Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policies. Of course, this view was largely informed by the likes of Romualdi and the intelligence collection system he helped to create.Footnote 72 As outlined by BLAR operation plans, Romualdi and his associates generated a list of useful local contacts, mostly by using the existing network of [ethnic] mutual aid societies.Footnote 73 For example, in Argentina and Brazil, Romualdi recruited several people, among them reporters and former diplomats, who collected and analyzed information about local fascist activities. The small band of Italian-American actors associated with Romualdi and the BLAR group quickly understood that with regard to cultural exchanges, this was “a field where almost immediate action could be taken.”Footnote 74 Additionally, BLAR was tasked with creating an index of Axis-sponsored Latin American newspapers, with details about their editors and advertisers.Footnote 75 In its first two months of operation, BLAR sent some 15 memos to Ascoli and the coordinator's office dealing with various subjects, including Axis broadcasts and fascist propaganda in Latin America, the region's Japanese population, and scholarship exchanges, as well as “suggestions in the cultural field” and “suggestions for publications.”Footnote 76 During his 1942 stay in South America, Romualdi acted as the main field coordinator for BLAR, responsible for executing the “suggestions” in previous BLAR memos. For example, in 1942 the OCIAA wired Romualdi the necessary funds for the implementation of the pamphlet and radio campaigns.
Moreover, according to Romualdi and his BLAR associates, their intelligence work would replace old-fashioned techniques for gathering information in foreign countries with a more systematic approach. For example, they relied on agents trained in techniques of social research to understand the dynamics of Latin American political, cultural, and social life. Once employed by the OCIAA, Romualdi called for an increase in scale of various measures to address the threat of fascism and articulated the need to generate specific information about and for Italian groups. He recommended a program of trained field correspondents to gather “feelings and trends of opinions among Italian groups,” information that would allow Washington to design an effective response to this intelligence. The response, Romualdi explained, would involve disseminating “special information” made up of selected news, feature stories, and other material intended to “enlighten Italian public opinion in Latin America, either to encourage a certain trend of thought . . . or offset unfavorable reactions.”Footnote 77 Thus, the function of the Montevideo Committee was to bring a “political education and re-orientation” of the Italian community in Latin America.Footnote 78 Romualdi believed that his program of action would strengthen the “Pan-Americanism of Italian immigrants, which might be a new and important factor in the solidarity and unity of the Western Hemisphere.”Footnote 79
The Limits of US Intelligence
From 1942 to 1943, at the direction of Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator, the covert responsibilities of BLAR continued to grow, as did its budget, staff, and salaries. In the summer of 1943, BLAR shifted its focus to the Allied military campaign in Italy. BLAR and its associates hoped to use anti-fascist groups in South America as “vehicles for the spreading of the Liberation theme and of such slogans” that would equate a US “victory” with Italy's freedom.Footnote 80 They again intended to utilize the press and other publications and radio to disseminate pro-US messages related to the war. However, during the second half of 1943, funding for BLAR activities appeared uncertain. By then, Romualdi had impressed officials in the US State Department and appeared to have gained a “reputation as a wizard” for his work in Latin America.Footnote 81 For instance, when Max Ascoli returned from his trip to South America, he explained that Free Italy groups were dissatisfied with the lack of “tangible results” from the Montevideo conference and that “if the resentment against the United States among the pro-democratic Italians of Argentina and Uruguay has not become more articulate, it is due to the tireless, single-handed efforts of Serafino Romualdi.”Footnote 82 Ascoli added that Romualdi's work through the Montevideo committee was “providing invaluable channels for the presentation of the American point of view.”
The importance of BLAR and OCIAA activities was outlined in June of 1943 by William Donovan, director of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Donovan, who was concerned about the termination of funding for BLAR, appealed for more funds to the US Bureau of the Budget. He argued that “in a global war no part of the world can be ignored in gathering data” and that “the information coming to Latin America—especially through the secret channels available to the alien minority groups and the free movements—is vital for the activities” of the OSS “in planning psychological warfare operations in Europe and Asia.”Footnote 83 Additionally, Donovan warned the director of the Bureau of the Budget, Harold Smith, that “at present no other government agency attempts to either gather or use these materials from Latin America,” and that if BLAR funding was discontinued it would therefore be Smith who would have to “assume the responsibility for making such work [of gathering data] impossible.”
Clearly, much of the US government's understanding of cultural factors in the region was informed by OCIAA and its agents. For example, comprehensive FBI reports on “totalitarian activity” in Latin American countries focused heavily on Italian and German ethnic populations, organizations, and leaders, likely reflecting the early intelligence gathered by BLAR and its associates in South America.Footnote 84 In Donovan's view, the work of BLAR was crucial—it was the only group engaged in and effectively prepared to gather intelligence in the region—but he lamented that this work was not sufficiently widespread. Romualdi's work was focused in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, Donovan noted, and did “not cover large parts of South America and the vital Caribbean area in which a number of free movements have their international centers.”Footnote 85
Early on, these international actors recognized the tremendous limitation that their efforts in Latin America would face if Romualdi became directly linked to the US government. Romualdi and Ascoli understood that it was necessary that Romualdi's work and the Free Italy groups he helped to organize be perceived as acting independently in order to continue to exercise some sort of overall “directing and moderating influence.”Footnote 86 In fact, during Ascoli's stay in Buenos Aires, he was invited by a prominent member of the Italia Libre movement to a private and informal gathering, so that he might meet other leaders of the Free Italy movement from Argentina and the neighboring countries. When Ascoli arrived at the meeting, he was informed, as per the insistence of one of the delegates from Uruguay, that he could not attend the private discussions of the movement's affairs because of his known connections to the US government. Surprisingly, the US government's connection with Romualdi or the Montevideo-based Italian-American Committee in general were “not locally known.”Footnote 87 As Ascoli explained, by having a South American front, BLAR could shape local movements via print and radio “in a quiet and roundabout way.”
To be sure, other anti-fascist groups not connected to Romualdi or the OCIAA had emerged in the Uruguayan Italian community, and thus were more likely to present a critical view of the United States. This fact is illustrated by the publication El Progreso, established in 1940 by the group Círculo Italo-Uruguayo. In addition to its articles condemning fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, El Progreso often published essays that directly attacked US imperialism and capitalism. The anti-fascist views expressed by this short-lived publication demonstrated a clear affinity with Marxism.Footnote 88El Progreso's orientation was therefore in contrast to the materials produced by Romualdi's local, but US-directed Italian-American Committee.
It is not clear that Romualdi by 1942 had demonstrated the ardent anti-Communism that came to define his work after the war. However, it is clear that, whether in accordance with the Mazzini Society's democratic values or with US government strategies, Romualdi had kept local Communists and Marxists at a distance from his projects in Latin America. Well before the end of the war, both Romualdi and Bruno Foa respectively identified Communists as a significant postwar challenge in the reconstruction of societies along democratic lines. While explaining to Ascoli the important role labor unions would play after the war, Romualdi expressed a concern for the potential “submission of labor unions” to the “electoral or parliamentary interests” of particular parties or groups. Evidently referring to Communists, Romualdi argued that relying “simply on the democratic procedure” could “lead to the victory of the best-organized minority (and you know who I have in mind).”Footnote 89 Similarly, Foa explained in a letter to Ascoli “that the real issue after the war, in Italy as elsewhere in Europe, won't be monarchy vs. republic, and conservative vs. liberal democracy, but between democracy and communism.”Footnote 90
Conclusion
World War II created a new set of opportunities for transnational actors such as Serafino Romualdi. Driven by his ideological campaign against Italian fascism, Romualdi, in his dual role as representative of the Mazzini Society and US government agent, was able to exert some influence over Italian-Uruguayan anti-fascist groups and have an even greater impact on US government policy to forward his goals. On the one hand, Romualdi's vision—to create an elevated Pan-Americanism among Italian immigrants—proved to be overly optimistic. The Mazzini Society's limited success in Latin America, as defined by incompleteness and a lack of permanence, was in part likely a result of its collaboration with the US government. Already complicated by disagreements within the Mazzini Society, Romualdi's work was compromised by a plan of action abroad that by 1942 appeared to be primarily directed by the US government and which had to be in line with US defense strategies. Indeed, the changing circumstances of the war after 1943 also disrupted and altered various strategies and movements that guided both state and non-state actors in the Americas. On the other hand, Romualdi's program undoubtedly influenced the OCIAA's cultural diplomacy strategies, helping to create a sophisticated framework for gathering, interpreting, and responding to information about potentials threats of fascism in Latin America.
As evidenced in this investigation, the robust OCIAA-led program intended to shape the image of the United States in Latin America to make better neighbors—neighbors who would join the continent-wide struggle against the forces of fascism—initially relied on non-state actors such as Serafino Romualdi. The OCIAA's involvement in the Free Italy movements sought to counter German and Italian propaganda by linking the anti-fascist and pro-US community of Italians in the United States with Italian communities in Latin America. Moreover, the Pan-American cooperation required to combat the threats of World War II elevated the significance of Italian communities in the Americas, partly as a result of the transnational nature of these movements. Romualdi's international connections allowed the US government to tap into grassroots anti-fascist activities that could be aligned with US continental defense objectives, but which were out of reach for the US State Department.
More perspicacious than a traditional US diplomat in such matters, Romualdi through his work in Uruguay made it possible for the OCIAA to test various cultural diplomacy strategies intended to influence local public opinion. Given his career's trajectory following World War II, it is evident that regardless of his limited success with Italian anti-fascist groups in Latin America, Romualdi's experience in the region during the early 1940s primed him to become an effective agent for the US government with a shrewd understanding of the value in shaping local labor movements. The desire to influence political movements and other types of organized activism abroad—far beyond the tried and tested activities in which Romualdi was involved—became a central focus of US foreign policy throughout the Cold War period.
