Monday, Dec. 22, 1947
Week of Experiment
Palmiro Togliatti's Italian Communists last week decided to test their muscles. For the experiment they chose Rome itself. The action consisted of a taut parade of 30,000 Communist partisans, followed by a general strike--all painstakingly stage-set as a pageant of Communist power. But the action drifted away from the script; toward the end there were touches of Mardi gras and, finally, Italian Communism's worst humiliation.
"The Ideal of Conspiracy." Quietly the Communists had mobilized buses and trucks all over Italy. Before the government of Christian Democrat Premier Alcide de Gasperi quite knew what was up, thousands of partisans (mostly Communist) had converged on the capital. People who could remember 1922 thought that it made Mussolini's march on Rome look like a clumsy straggle of Boy Scouts.
Ostensibly, the Communists were honoring the Congress of the National Italian Partisans Association and a distinguished guest, General Sidor Kovpak, vice president of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Six abreast in precise lines, the Reds swung along under their mingled banners: the green & white flag of Italy and the red hammer & sickle. "Viva Stalin. . . . Death to De Gasperi!" shouted the fur-capped Ligurian Brigade as it passed the garish white marble monument to the Unknown Soldier. Italian partisans cheered the words of their leader, Luigi Longo: "We do not consider ourselves museum pieces. ... In our hearts are intact the enthusiasm and ideals of conspiracy and of insurrection!"
This was no call to the barricades. It was merely Act I. Next day the partisan army vanished as slickly as it had appeared. The watchful government, which had shrewdly infiltrated the parade by supplying a Grenadier regiment and military band to lead it,* relaxed to wait.
Truncheons & Cold Water. Act II opened some 48 hours later, at midnight, when Rome's first serious general strike since 1922 began. Key demands of the Communist-dominated Chamber of Labor: 10 billion lire ($16,500,000) for public works and Christmas gratuities to aid Rome's 70,000 unemployed. Actually, Government plans already called for almost 10 1/2-billion lire for public works; the Reds professed not to believe this.
More than 200,000 Roman workers stayed away from their jobs the first morning. Communist demonstrators filled the squares, but the De Gasperi government--rather to the general surprise--had done some stage-setting, too. A battalion of regular army troops with full field equipment took up positions in the Piazza Colonna. Armored cars and fast police jeeps rolled through the streets. When a demonstration was expected at the Ministry of the Interior, firemen played a few jets of cold water through the air. There was no demonstration.
On the second day there was a rough moment in the Piazza Colonna when police jeeps roared through a demonstrating crowd, swinging rubber truncheons on Communists and curious alike, and sending pedestrians frantically climbing up pillars. But there were no shots, no dead, no seriously injured. That evening, with the strike falling away under them, the Chamber of Labor bowed to the inevitable, called it off.
Bicycles & Opera Bouffe. The Roman temperament had as much to do as the police with turning Act II of the Communist pageant into opera bouffe. From the suburbs each morning of the strike came a gala stream of bicycles. Cycling gallants stopped at the homes of working girls, happily wheeled them to work (as many as dared) or to the park (as all wanted). Fathers joined families in morning strolls behind baby carriages, through the Villa Borghese pines or along the slopes beside the Appian Way. All the cafes were supposed to be tight shut. Some were, but near by was always another with its steel shutters invitingly half open. A bunch of youthful Communists, chilled by the biting wind, entered a bar in the Piazza Cavour to warm themselves with scab-brewed coffee, then rushed at a smaller bar across the square to force its shutters down.
The strike's last day was a meatless Friday, but at a little trattoria off the Corso Umberto the following noontime exchange took place between customer and proprietor:
"Cosa c'e?"
"Anything you want--fish, chicken, turkey, veal and good steaks."
"Meat? Is today a festa?"
"No--strike," and he smiled festively.
The Insulted Audience. At week's end, everybody went back to work. What had the Communist gesture proved?
Everybody knew beforehand that the Communists were powerful. So. long as they did not call for a general strike, Italians assumed that the Reds could bring one off. Now they had made the gesture, and the "weak" De Gasperi government had been able to overcome it. Collapse of the strike, however, did not mean that Communist power in Italy was broken or even badly bent. Conservative Rome was not the Red stronghold. Yet the Rome fiasco cost the Communists face, and partially freed De Gasperi from the constant threat of veto action by Communist-led unions against government policies.
Why had the brilliantly led Italian Communist Party stumbled? Partly because they had picked a phony strike issue. But principally because the Roman people drew upon their centuries-mellowed store of humor. They refused to play an audience role before a show that insulted their intelligence. They clambered into the wings, pulled the switches, snipped the ropes and brought the curtain tumbling on the Communist week of experiment.
After the Communists had had their turn, it was the antiCommunists' move. In Washington, President Harry Truman announced that, although the last U.S. troops in Italy were embarking for home, the U.S. would consider "appropriate" measures if Italy's freedom were threatened "directly or indirectly." In Rome, Giuseppe Saragat, overcoming a deep reluctance, brought his right-wing Socialists into the government and became a vice-premier. De Gasperi would now have a comfortable Assembly majority for the first time. The Communists and the left-wing Nenni Socialists had been isolated.
*An old anti-Communist tactic, known in some quarters as the Turnipseed gambit. In their unemployment demonstrations in 1931, Baltimore Communists, looking for trouble, regularly refused to get parade permits. Baltimore police, not looking for trouble, developed the expedient of issuing a permit to an aged and cooperative Negro, George Alexander Turnipseed by name, who thereupon was rushed to the head of the parade, waving a red flag and protected on either side by Baltimore's finest, who found it better to lead a parade than to break it up.
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