Ending Grand Alliance Politics in Western Europe: US Anti-communism in France and Italy,1944–7

In 1947, the young US Evangelist Billy Graham proclaimed that communism was ‘masterminded by Satan.’ Reflecting the emerging second Red Scare in the USA, Graham began to denounce the ‘Sin of Tolerance’ toward communism, a civilizational enemy that dug its roots deep into hell itself. The fight against the ‘anti-Christ’ had begun. Even the sober theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, at the time far more influential than Graham over US Cold War policies, while speaking of containment, rather than eradication of the Soviet evil, almost equally demonized the ‘insidious’ nature of Communist totalitarianism. The Communists, he argued, ignored, or pretended to ignore human egotism and will-to-power, and thus they embodied the worst of all evils, because, unlike the Nazis, they posed ‘as the liberators of every class or nation which they intend[ed] to enslave,’ becoming ‘consistently totalitarian in every political and historical environment.’ Their claims of omniscience ‘reveal[ed] the real pathos of the ideological problem. For the greater the pretension of purity and disinterestedness, the greater the impurity.’ ¹

The USA’s foremost religious representatives followed their own crusading impulses against the unmitigated evil of communism. Their main Western European political targets, the leaders of the French and Italian Communist Parties, were no less militant against the heinous ways of the leading nation of world capitalism. Right after their simultaneous expulsion (not instructed, but certainly encouraged by Washington) from their respective national unity postwar governments, in May 1947, they cast their own utter condemnations of their Cold War enemy: in the words of PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti, the USA was an ‘aggressive empire,’ carrying with it a ‘massive wave of plain idiocy.’ In the rhetoric of both parties, US domination over Western Europe, with its crass, hedonistic, arrogant, and naive expressions of culture and power presented a double threat: against national sovereignties and against cherished cultural traditions. ²

The rhetorical battle was extreme at the onset of the Cold War. In the USA, the foremost champions of Christian faith, while not representing entirely the government’s disposition toward the Cold War, offered the maximum articulation of the country’s innate opposition to communism, especially in its totalitarian manifestations. The spiritual tones of the Cold War had informed the US leadership. As Andrew Preston has recently noted, both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman invoked ‘religion as a source of democracy because it protected freedom of conscience, and thus the individual’s autonomy from the state.’ And Truman ‘hoped to rally the forces of world religion – not just Protestants, not even just Christians and Jews, but all people of faith.’ In Italy, of course, that meant connecting with the Head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, a determined anti-communist, who had a powerful protégé in the USA, Francis Cardinal Spellman. ³ That alliance would prove instrumental for the highly mobilized Christian Democrat campaign in the first postwar Italian national elections of 1948.

But was postwar American anti-communism in Western Europe so immediately invested in this crusading impulse? What were the US officials’ perceptions of the ‘totalitarian danger’ in countries, most notably France and Italy, where the Communist parties were still legitimate government forces, growing stronger with each passing month, subversive for sure, but not dominant or backed up by Soviet occupation? American anti-communism was innate, but the nation’s leaders, diplomats, and some trade union representatives, in the immediate postwar period, also displayed more nuance and vision than the country’s spiritual leaders, and adopted a degree of flexibility toward the European Left, including Marxist groups. Within the whole public-private network that constituted, in the early years of the Cold War, America’s ‘political warfare’ – an integrated application of diplomatic, economic, cultural, ideological, propaganda, and covert tools, enlisting a wide array of transnational actors – the positions ranged from compromise to frontal attack against communism in the USA’s own European sphere of influence. But in general, throughout the period of the Grand Alliance, even after the war, Washington’s response to a Communist presence in Western Europe remained guarded, while still dictated by diffidence and hostility. In part, this general moderation was a response to the moderate, sometimes even ambivalent tones of the Communists themselves. Particularly, the Parti communiste français (PCF) and the Partito comunista italiano (PCI), striving for legitimacy and for the preservation of the wartime Grand Alliance, were holding back their anti-American tones. The politics of the Grand Alliance justified their government participation since national unity coalitions had been formed in liberated France and Italy in 1944, Notable intellectual leaders in the PCI especially went as far as expressing hope for renewal at home thanks to and not in spite of the US presence.

Here I intend to show less the continuity of American anti-communism than its moment of rethinking and possible reformulation in the crucial postwar years. The conflict between the USA and its Communist adversaries in Western Europe was Manichean, rooted in ideological opposition, and reaching a crescendo in the early Cold War years, but it did not reflect immediately an exclusive antagonism. Like most strategies in their emerging phases, the US one against Communist forces in Western Europe was still tentative, qualified, and moderate, reflecting the just as cautious tactics of their targets.

Washington’s cautious approach to the broad coalitions in postwar Western Europe has been noted from the earliest archive-based accounts of the Cold War. The post-revisionist school of thought in Cold War history highlighted this moderation in contrast to earlier interpretations that depicted the conflict as immediately arising from either Soviet aggression (according to the orthodox, or traditionalist school) or US expansionism (as revisionist historians argued). And recent accounts have fine-tuned this argument by illustrating the numerous instances in which Washington’s initiatives, and even viewpoints were influenced by France’s or Italy’s indigenous elements, pushing toward greater or softened confrontation with the two countries’ Communists. ⁴ But each of these accounts focused on either the French or the Italian case separately. As I have shown in my previous work, a comparative approach to the study of countries, like France and Italy, with similar conditions but significant differences in outcomes, reveals aspects in US relations with either one of those countries that tend to remain hidden in those treatments of just one bilateral relation.

Likewise, the Communists’ side of this story, with their guarded attitude toward the United States in the immediate postwar period, either for tactical reasons or genuine adaptation of certain ideological tenets, has been noted. ⁵ But the comparison between the two parties, in this case too, can illuminate crucial aspects of the different trajectories the French and Italian Communists chose in their confrontation with Western, US-dominated modernization. The very nature of the evolution of American anti-communism in Western Europe cannot be fully understood without its counterpart, the transition of Western European communism from subtle, ambivalent critique of the USA to irreconcilable anti-Americanism.

This analysis further illustrates the complex nature of confronting an enemy identified by its subversive nature. Quite rapidly, in the years comprised between the end of the war and the onset of the Cold War, both sides of this struggle came to define their Cold War enemy as a subversive force, an ‘enemy within,’ undermining what, in their respective views constituted the most valuable aspects of Western European identity. Washington’s specific options in dealing with the Communists in France and Italy came to be framed in a broader context not only because of the looming Soviet threat, but also because Communist success in the West would test the resilience of US visions for Europe. For the USA, the threat posed by those ‘fifth columns’ of the Soviet Union to the Western traditions of modernization, ethical individualism, and religion seemed even more ominous than the external threat represented by a potential Soviet takeover. For this reason, the formative years of the USA’s containment policies in Western Europe should be given careful attention. In those years we can see how, by confronting Communist power or subversion in the West, the USA also started to examine itself, its staunch anti-communism, and even its own assumptions of what constituted the best solutions for Western European politics and class conflict.

This story can be seen as a double set of missed opportunities. For the PCF and PCI it would have been hard, if not impossible, to acquire legitimacy within the ideological framework of the Cold War, but at least, they could have mitigated their Cold War alignment with Moscow; for the USA, too, the lost chance was a concrete one: a democratic administration that was geared on securing bipartisanship on the issue of anti-communism missed the opportunity to advance a moderate, social democratic alternative to the Communist appeal in both countries.

The Cold War had an early start in France and Italy. Sure, the provisional governments in both countries, from 1944 to 1947, reflected the last contentious phase of Grand Alliance politics at the international level. But US fears of the rising power of communism in the West seemed justified. Prioritizing anti-fascism, and giving credit to the Soviet record in the last two years of the war, the provisional governments outside Soviet occupation helped restore the legitimacy of their own Communists. Communists in France and Italy immediately appeared influential, gaining prominent positions in the provisional coalition governments. While taming their criticism of US occupation and battlefront conduct, and also extending their hand to their countries’ Catholics, they naturally displayed a strong allegiance to Moscow. For Washington, this reality turned France and Italy into the first ground of a confrontation that, already by the end of World War II, contained elements of ‘political warfare,’ ⁶ with the use of all means short of war against the Cold War enemy, particularly in areas, like France and Italy, where its greatest manifestation was by means of subversion. In this confrontation, the USA began to muster, if somewhat haphazardly, all the instruments of hard power (military presence, economic measures) and soft power (which could be termed as a battle for hearts and minds) it would eventually utilize against the French and Italian Communists during the next decade, at the peak of the Cold War.

For sure, by the end of the war, the re-emergence of the French and Italian Communists was apparent in all its strength: the PCF, with one fourth of the electorate, became the strongest party of France’s Fourth Republic; the PCI also gathered the same amount of votes, and its united front with the Socialists seemed bound to reach an absolute electoral majority. The two Communist Parties’ popular appeal could not be explained away with the simple reasons of postwar economic distress. Their record in the Second World War Resistance gave them an aura of patriotism, which many thought could be reconciled with proletarian internationalism. Showing organizational power, both parties managed to seize key economic and political institutions, retaining positions in the mid-level bureaucracy of the state even after their expulsion from government in 1947. The PCI, following the precepts of founder Antonio Gramsci, aimed at cultural hegemony, too, successfully extending its reach at both the high and mass cultural levels. Its French counterpart, while preserving a stronger workerist identity, also summarized its cultural role as that of being the parti de l’intelligence, since the 1930s counting a great number of distinguished adherents and fellow-travelers. ⁷

Indeed it was in the intersection – or symbiosis – between Communist political leadership and its intellectual affiliates that the transitional phase from Grand Alliance politics to Cold War assumes the greatest significance. Certainly, Communist critique of the USA followed an ideological party line; its nature was encompassing like that of no other political force. But it was not until the onset of the Cold War by 1946–7 that it would become full-fledged anti-Americanism, meant as a systematic – often orchestrated – rejection of US politics, society, values and culture. Communist propaganda, or creed, or even mindset of its representative intellectuals conjured a dystopian view of the USA, compared to an idealized one of the Soviet model of modernization as the alternative serving instead of enslaving humanity. Max Paul Friedman, in his insightful re-evaluation of anti-Americanism, dismisses its communist manifestations from even the years predating the Cold War as dogmatic, ‘predictable, and self-explanatory.’ ⁸ But to do so is reductive and misleading. Ever since the end of the war, US diplomats and State Department analysts, for their part, were not so offhand about the reasons for those attacks and their seeming rhetorical connections with similar judgments the USA received from even its political allies in the two countries (namely French leader Charles de Gaulle, and the Christian Democratic parties of both nations). As anti-communism re-emerged as the main focus of US foreign policy, the handling of Communist anti-Americanism in Western Europe first had to be a careful and discerning one.

So, while Cold War US public diplomacy was still in its formative period, the PCI and PCF had already shaped their own propaganda tools, as they quickly became the most apt at utilizing the intersection between politics and culture to manifest their opposition to the USA and their alleged defense of national independence. But the main strength of this consistency was its high quality of intellectual debate; consistency did not always mean rigid, obtuse, and even irrational resistance.

Indeed, outside the peak years of the Cold War, Communist anti-Americanism, especially in the West, was quite discerning and adaptive. This was particularly the case for a party, like the PCI, seeking legitimacy after its first decades as an underground sectarian group, and finding, among its most prominent intellectuals, reasons for ambivalence toward the American cultural and social model. I underline America as ‘model,’ for the open-minded nature of this intellectual and political debate was genuine; it was not simply dictated by compromise, and did not strictly follow the Soviet script of Popular Frontism in an effort to preserve the politics of the Grand Alliance. Western Communists calibrated their allegiance to Moscow to national realities and to their own internal cultural and political debate. The PCF and PCI’s ambivalence toward the US model was set against and, to some extent, as an alternative to the limits of a declining or even repressive (Fascism and Vichy) Western Europe.

Ambivalence and selectivity thus characterized the reactions of the Marxist Left in France and Italy to US influence during the interwar and immediate postwar periods. It was not just about the Italian (much less French) fascination with the Fordist version of reform capitalism, best exemplified by the analyses of philosopher Antonio Gramsci. It was also about the attraction that Communists from both countries nurtured toward the USA’s elite and even mass culture. Intellectual and novelist Italo Calvino recalled that to many Western European Communists, until the late 1940s Hemingway was ‘a sort of God,’ and Jazz was a ‘banner of untamed cosmopolitanism.’ ⁹ Likewise, French Communist intellectuals found attraction in the ‘popular’ dimension of US literature, which best challenged the elitism and gentility of Europe’s literary traditions. ¹⁰ And French appropriations of American jazz in the interwar period affected the Left above all. Jazz was, according to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘among the best of importation from the United States.’ ¹¹

The PCI’s ambiguity toward the USA was best encapsulated in the assessment by writers Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini, who, in 1946, described the USA as ‘an immense theater where our common drama was played out with greater frankness than elsewhere,’ and lauded American culture for bearing ‘all the years of human experience within its youth’ and was ‘thus valid for the entire world.’ ¹² While never reaching the same level of fascination with the US model, many PCF leaders also expressed a dual judgment. Claude Roy, who, like other leftist intellectuals, traveled to the USA in 1946 under the auspices of the US Office of War Information (OWI), apparently fulfilled Washington’s expectation: he became captivated by the USA on the road, where ‘the individual himself becomes the road,’ and where ‘the road can become a drug, flavorless like marihuana[sic].’ The USA, he added, was a genuine ‘rebellion of the spirit,’ a land of ‘infinite possibilities.’ But those possibilities could go either way, for the USA’s ‘pride [was] sometimes tragic and menacing,’ and ‘sometimes attractive.’ ¹³

New Deal reform also appeared in a favorable light, so much that Togliatti, while serving as Minister of Justice in the national unity government, suggested to his party directorate to help devise a New Deal for Italy, modeled along the technocratic social project of Franklin Roosevelt. ¹⁴ But for both parties, it was the New Deal’s corollary that really mattered: the internally legitimizing strategy of the Grand Alliance: preserving the anti-fascist international bond of communism and capitalism signified extending the coalition of democratic forces at home; termination of the Grand Alliance would have only confirmed, in the ideological views best articulated by Georgi Dimitrov at the onset of the Popular Fronts in 1935, and, during Italy’s liberation, confirmed by Mauro Scoccimarro, a prominent PCI orthodox, the collusion of capitalism and fascism. ¹⁵ Praise for the New Deal also helped draw a sharp distinction between the political heirs of FDR – the ‘promising’ America – and the ‘brutal imperialists’ of the Democratic and Republican Right – the ‘threatening’ America. ¹⁶ To be sure, the PCF’s pro-Sovietism was more accentuated than that of the PCI. Also, the French Communists, during the interwar period, did not have the same political inducement as Italian leftist intellectuals to envision the USA as an antidote to fascist oppression. On the contrary, since the tradition of anti-Americanism was more eloquent in France than in Italy, their opposition to the USA became one of the main sources of their political strength.

In the transition years 1946–7, the myth of a democratic, path-breaking America finally gave way, not without considerable agony and divisions (and censoring of those who refused the new alignment), to a universal, unrelenting opposition to the new Cold War enemy. The Communists’ hopes in a democratic, subversive, experimental USA seemed to founder along with the understanding that its maximum subversion – a reconciliation with the Soviet Union under the auspices of the Grand Alliance – had also vanished. As has been noted, the French and Italian Communists’ ‘ideological turning point preceded the political one.’ ¹⁷ Starting from mid-1946, the leaders of both parties led a concerted effort against the most experimentalist of their intellectual groups, accusing them of toeing the line with the most abstract, elitist, individualistic, self-indulgent traits of what they had first seen as an US avant-garde. The USA now, according to the new party line, by regimenting and rendering formulaic, if not outright conservative, even its most progressive forms of cultural expression (from jazz to literature), betrayed itself, too: instead of helping to bring liberation to Europe, the Cold War USA imitated and allied itself with Europe’s most conservative, stifling political and cultural elements. Its worst sin, as Pavese noted, was that of having become ‘Europeanized,’ losing ‘a large part of the exotic and tragic directness that was [its] essence.’ ¹⁸

The shift in the Communists’ attitudes preceded their full regimentation under Cominform directives at the end of 1947. The two parties’ relative autonomy from Moscow was reflected in this early militant posturing as much as in the ambivalence that had preceded or coexisted with it. Their main internal enemies – the centrist coalition and the Gaullists in France, and the Christian Democrats in Italy – while still having disagreements with Washington, had already anticipated the external Cold War with an internal polarization aimed at ending any form of national unity with the Communists, and bound to forge a secure alliance with the USA.

American anti-communism was as prejudicial as the anti-American sentiments of the Western European Communists. With the exception of the Popular Front and Grand Alliance years, it was also less restrained by tactical reasons than the Western Communists’ position was. The term ‘totalitarianism’ originated in Italy, with Benito Mussolini. And yet, the fascist dictatorship was for more than a decade welcomed in the USA, for it was seen as the necessary alternative to a Communist-Socialist takeover in Italy. Fascism was not just a lesser evil but, for the most part, a stabilizing regime. The Italian-American community, drawn in large numbers to the nationalist appeal of Fascism, also played a role in mitigating the US response to the totalitarianism of the Right. Indeed, with the exception of some minor precedents in Latin America, the record does show that an ‘almost automatic pattern of behavior by American foreign policymakers in the name of anticommunism in the twentieth century was getting its start in Italy.’ ¹⁹

The Popular Front years in France certainly inspired a sense of shared transatlantic interest founded on the common ‘New Deal’ programs and on the perceived threat from Nazi Germany. But, for all of the Communists’ compromises, the Roosevelt administration, much like the French coalition led by Socialist Léon Blum, continued to view the PCF as slavishly committed to the policies of the Soviet Union. These concerns continued in the USA throughout the debate over neutrality in the Spanish civil war, which confirmed the US official point of view that Popular Frontism, in an escalating crisis, might portend a Bolshevik takeover. ²⁰ On the labor front, anticipating the Cold War, union leaders of the dominant American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its affiliates often outdid the government in their aggressive red-hunting within their ranks, an attitude that, by extension (and also for further internal legitimation), formed their case against Communist unionism abroad as well – a case that started from as early as 1942, before the Liberation of Italy. Forming a symbiotic relationship with the State Department and US intelligence services, US labor managed to contribute its relentless anti-communism to US international diplomacy. Even those who, like CIO’s Arthur J. Goldberg, as leader of the OSS’s Labor Section, conducted intelligence operations in contact with the resistance movements in Europe – generally dominated by Communist partisans – made it clear that they favored the moderate Socialist factions within those groups. ²¹ In sum, the Communists, whether an underground force as in Italy, or an organized mass party participating in government as in France, received no endorsement from Washington during the interwar period.

The return of Communist leaders Maurice Thorez and Palmiro Togliatti from their exile in the Soviet Union in 1944, and the inclusion of the PCF and PCI in the national unity provisional governments of France and Italy naturally alarmed Washington. The two parties’ credibility reached its height thanks to their record of Resistance against Fascism and Nazism, and was further buttressed by the two provisional governments’ successful pursuit of recognition by the Soviet Union that same year. Washington’s response was therefore cautious. The politics of the Grand Alliance imposed limits to US and British actions. The Allied Military Government in Italy in particular gave priority to the defeat of Fascism and Nazi Germany.

While welcoming the military contribution of the left-wing Resistance against Fascism, the Anglo–American authorities also feared its political challenge to the central authorities of the two provisional governments. To undermine the political ascendancy of the autonomous Committee of National Liberation for North Italy (CLNAI), the American Supreme Allied Command used a mix of inducements (the assistance badly needed by partisan forces), security controls (assisting the growth of the army’s internal security forces, or carabinieri), and propaganda (in favor of the Italian national army). ²² In France, the legitimacy of Charles de Gaulle was much stronger than that of Italy’s wartime provisional leaders; and it was the general himself who, by early 1945, managed to curtail the political impact of the Communists’ Resistance by integrating the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur into the regular army and by dissolving the PCF-dominated milices patriotiques. ²³ But the US occupation authorities did avoid openly attacking the Communists in both countries. Under the circumstances, such a position could have been construed as an attack on Italy’s and France’s national interests. ²⁴ Washington refrained from moving decisively against the PCI and PCF until the Soviets fully showed the limits of their diplomatic support. Only by the end of 1946 did it become clear to the governments in Rome and Paris that their attempts to play a sort of balance of power in the emerging Cold War, using their relationship with Moscow to obtain more concessions from the Anglo-Americans, had backfired: the Soviet Union was unsupportive of France’s demands on Germany and disappointed Italy’s expectations of a mild Peace Treaty; and Anglo-US concessions were based more on fears for the two countries’ political fragility – compounded by the two governments’ attempt to connect with Moscow, which could have further legitimized their Communist parties – than on their potential strength within a Western alliance. ²⁵

But the legitimacy acquired by the two Communist Parties, together with the war-devastated conditions of France and especially Italy, prompted Washington to underline the link for both countries between their economic needs and the urgency of their institutional stabilization. Emphasis on that correlation also exposed the USA’s propensity to nation-building, or social engineering. That approach stemmed from the USA’s own cultural identity, based more on political creed (with its traditions of constitutionalism and democracy) than on a national religion or sense of ethnicity. ²⁶ Nation-building, applied to the reconstruction of Europe, favored immediate attention to restoring government structures and administrative efficiency (the same way US and British military authorities had tried to guide and control the Resistance in both countries), with only a sporadic focus on the deep-rooted causes for popular discontent. ²⁷ This approach thus revealed the lack of a full US understanding of the European distinction between state and a national community that could be defined by shared history and culture, and that also informed the radical tendencies of French and Italian postwar settlement. While the Americans grasped some of the cultural realities that might make France and Italy alter the political and economic lessons from overseas, they also kept placing faith in the presumably inexorable appeal of US pragmatism. For Washington, the notion persisted that extraordinary circumstances had created an imbalance in those two countries – now perceived as the new ‘sick men of Europe.’ In this view, communism in Western Europe constituted a fifth column of an ex wartime ally, no longer trustworthy ideological foe. Staunch anti-communism of course set its own limits. As a consequence, the USA failed to understand all the elements and subtleties of political resentment, if not straight out anti-Americanism, Communist and non-Communist, in France and Italy.

Although the USA had adopted means of public diplomacy and cultural diffusion since the First World War, its confrontation with Communist cultural clout in Western Europe remained at best tentative, until the Communist peace offensive of the Stockholm Appeal of 1950 for the ban of nuclear weapons made the importance of intellectual mobilization in the West clear to Washington as well. Consistently with Washington’s focus on reconstruction and institutional stabilization of postwar Europe, American cultural diplomacy focused primarily on transmitting the message of its own model of democracy rather than foster its blossoming from Europe’s national realities. Most organizations of cultural cooperation, before the Fulbright program for the exchange of scholars set in by the late 1940s, also consistently with the nation-building approach, focused primarily on promoting recovery and US business and industrial methods. This was the case, in Italy, of the USIS’ Bollettini Tecnici, and the USIS-funded intercultural magazines Nuovo Mondo and Mondo D’Oggi; or of the association France-États-Unis, founded in October 1945, and led by French engineer Robert Geoffroy. This last organization for a while overshadowed the long-standing Comité France-Amerique, the activities of which, the French embassy noted, had been ‘limited to the highest strata’ whereas the new organization would have a national appeal to a ‘wide range’ of businesses. ²⁸

The State Department also encouraged a rather unilateral ‘be like us’ message by promoting Hollywood exports, through its cooperation with a new cartel, the Motion Picture Export Association. But it also soon realized the importance of reviving populistic themes of national revival in both countries in search of national reassertion. The results were not consistent. So while Billy Wilder, working in Berlin as advisor to the Division of Information Control, claimed that Hollywood delivered the USA’s best ‘propaganda through entertainment,’ the US ambassador to France, Jefferson Caffery soon reached a more mixed conclusion. After noting France’s reactions to the Blum-Byrnes agreement of 1946 dropping all unfavorable quotas against US film productions, he was forced to recognize the importance of reviving the French movie industry, since for the French ‘to defend [their] movie industry was the same as defending France’ – an observation that was then followed, two years later, by a return to national quotas in France’s film screenings. ²⁹ In Italy, during the occupation, the Anglo-American Psychological Warfare Branch helped direct US cultural activities, in radio broadcasts, film screenings and the press toward a rather unilateral transmission of American values, and strong anti-Communist themes. ³⁰ But the State Department, as it did in France, also emphasized the relevance of local film productions, and especially the importance of Italian neorealism in cinema and literature. According to a field report, a movie like Roberto Rossellini’s Open City inspired Italians and Italian Americans in search for messages of national cohesion. ³¹ The main problem with this kind of accommodation was that both populist trends – France’s battle against Hollywood dominance, and the Italian neorealist movement – were dominated by the Communists themselves.

Even with the popularity of US mass culture, Washington began to realize that the intellectual appeal of the Left in postwar France and Italy commanded some immediate countermeasures. But initiatives such as the much trumpeted Office of War Information’s invitation to notable French intellectuals of the Left – Jean-Paul Sartre, and, as noted, the PCF’s Claude Roy among them – to tour the USA in 1945–6, mostly backfired. For all the fascination those thinkers expressed for the affluent USA, their visits confirmed their own notions of US hedonism, materialism, and conformity – some of the main ammunition in the Communists’ anti-American propaganda arsenal. ³²

US union activists not only anticipated but also inspired some of the State Department’s most important decisions on Communist power in Western Europe for the first 10 years of the Cold War. Strongly anti-Communist, the AFL and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), taking an early interest in liberated Italy since 1942, detected the emerging institutional power of the PCI through the multi-party labor organization it increasingly dominated, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL). Indeed, as it has been amply proven, the AFL and its affiliate Italian American Labor Council (IALC) claimed, ‘well before the State Department policy-makers realized it, that in the contest for postwar supremacy in Italy, the battlefield would be the working class.’ ³³ This is not the place to revisit the events that led to the creation of the Free Trade Unions Committee (FTUC), in opposition to Soviet control of world trade union organizations, or the funding operations that the AFL especially orchestrated, from as early as 1942, to help the anti-Communist elements within each European trade union movement. What is relevant here is to note a trajectory of increasingly militant anti-communism that also reflected the internal divisions of the American Labor movement.

At first, much in tune with the viewpoint of the State Department representatives in Rome and Paris, America’s labor diplomats, influenced by progressives such as Arthur Goldberg and Serafino Romualdi, favored the moderate Socialist factions in both countries, in order to prevent a Communist monopoly of the trade union movement. The AFL’s main goals in France and Italy until 1947 did not contemplate breaking up the CGIL and the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), but rather shift their balance of power in favor of the anti-Communist forces within them. Even the strongly anti-Communist founder of the IALC, Luigi Antonini, at first refrained from supporting the staunchest Italian labor bastion against the PCI, the Church-affiliated Associazione Cattolica Lavoratori Italiani (ACLI). For John C. Adams, the first labor attaché at the Rome embassy, the USA’s flexibility should have gone further, fostering cooperation between Communists and Christian Democrats within the CGIL. In Adams’ view, this was essential for the ‘victory of tolerance, democracy, and mutual understanding’ and for the pre-emption of extremist forces ‘from the right or the left.’ ³⁴ But the anti-Communist fervor of union leaders such as Luigi Antonini, besides the deep divisions within French and especially Italian socialist groups, soon overshadowed any US attempt to recreate a New Deal approach to Italian and French labor unions. The AFL-ILGWU’s visceral anti-Stalinism was personified by its top officials Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone who, as leaders of the FTUC, coordinated the USA’s international labor policies. This line closely followed the anti-Communist precepts of AFL leaders Samuel Gompers, William Green, and George Meany. ³⁵

With regard to Italy, just as relevant were the specific advantages of ethnic ties, which soon, however, turned into liabilities. Italian American labor leaders, by origins or by connection through union networks, were presumably attuned to Italy’s nationalist sensitivity as a recumbent nation. This induced the State Department, until the onset of the Cold War in mid-1946, to credit the CGIL as the institution that best represented Italian unity against Fascism, and as a moderating force in times of unrest typical of a nation on its uncertain transition to democracy. ³⁶ But the paternalistic ways of the Italian leadership of the AFL and ILGWU soon became apparent. Those ways often smacked of American exceptionalism, with their ‘one-fits-all’ cure of ‘free’ unionism. The AFL-IALC was even subject to charges of collusion with the Italian immigrant ‘prominenti’ community of former fascist sympathizers, best exemplified by Antonini’s collaboration with its most notorious figure, the publisher Generoso Pope. ³⁷ By 1948, the State Department, organizing delegations of technicians and teachers to assist the labor attaché, decided to exclude Italian Americans, since the embassy ‘found that persons of recent Italian descent often inspire[d] resentment among Italians.’ ³⁸

Recognizing the flaws of a ‘one-fits-all’ remedy to Communist labor power in both France and Italy, the State Department also acknowledged that a frontal attack on the CGIL and CGT would have caused major unrest, ultimately backfiring. Intelligence reports from the two embassies concluded that, unlike in the USA, parties in both France and Italy were well ‘dug-in’ most of the social and economic strata of the nation; a strong ostracism of the labor affiliates of a major party – namely, the Communists – would have been ‘an invitation to active opposition and political-economic sabotage.’ ³⁹

In the final analysis, American labor’s goal, shared particularly with the new Social Democrats of Italy and the Socialists in France, was to create a reformist approach to labor in Europe. But paradoxically the call for ‘free’ trade unionism became in itself a highly political activity, based on the AFL’s anti-Communist priorities. And US labor’s political maneuvering to obtain apolitical unions, when inserted in highly politicized and highly polarized situations as in France and Italy – compounded by differences especially between the conservative AFL and the progressive CIO – was bound to create divisions, not shifts in political hegemony of the trade union movement. This was the ultimate result of the labor splits that the US encouraged in both countries in 1947, an outcome that, in France, was greeted by Ambassador Jefferson Caffery as ‘the most important event that ha[d] occurred… since the Liberation,’ ⁴⁰ but also a situation that ultimately caused only a relative weakening of the Communist CGIL and the CGT.

In assessing Washington’s early response to the Communist threat in France and Italy, we also have to consider the extent to which such intervention was solicited by French or Italian leaders themselves. It was in both countries that the Cold War fears of falling dominoes favoring the Communist foe were expressed for the first time: as early as 1944, Italy’s leaders in exile to the USA explained to Washington that if their country fell to Communist subversion, the same fate would strike the Balkans, Spain, and France, leading to the ‘Sovietization of Europe.’ Italy’s first postwar ambassador to Washington, Alberto Tarachiani, often reiterated that argument in the following years; and the Christian Democrat prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi, during his first visit to the USA in January 1947, increased his bargaining power for an interim emergency US loan, by reminding his US counterparts that, without such assistance, the PCI might succeed in ‘bring[ing] Italy within the orbit of Russian influence.’ ⁴¹ Even Charles de Gaulle, after signing the treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in December 1944, used the argument of France’s political fragility, not strength, and even its prospect of being ‘gobbled up’ by Moscow, to encourage restoring the country’s old alliance with the USA – as a peer though, never as a subordinated ally. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower drew his own conclusion a few months earlier, writing the US Joint Chiefs that if France fell into the Soviet orbit, the other countries of Western Europe would do the same. ⁴²

The USA at first actually contained the fervor of the most zealous anti-Communists in France and Italy. The US tone against communism was muted and the substance was moderate. This was done for tactical reasons – the need to mitigate conflicts within the Grand Alliance – and for reasons of image, as the Truman administration acknowledged that it needed to have ‘something positive and attractive to offer, and not just anti-Communism,’ assistance and pro-Italianism or pro-French policies rather. ⁴³ Catering to certain national and even nationalist demands from France and Italy helped refute Communist charges of the two governments’ subservience to US control. British General Harold Alexander best summed up the case for a milder treatment of Italy, stating in May 1945: ‘we cannot afford to keep the Italians down too much and thus leave them no alternative but to go Red.’ A similar argument on France was made by Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who also described an empowered, rejuvenated France as the potential leader of a postwar order in Europe, hiding the American hand in it. And thus Washington decided, in the words of a State Department document, ‘to treat France in all respects on the basis of her potential power and influence rather than on the basis of her present strength.’ Similarly, at the Potsdam conference, President Truman promised the Italians ‘the dignity of the Free’ and the ‘certainty that no condition essential to their development w[ould] be denied or impaired.’ ⁴⁴ But above all, moderation was a matter of belief: Washington thought that the best answer to Communist influence was to adopt a flexible and enlightened approach to the moderate Left in both countries. This flexibility in part explains, for example, how the USA, against British opinion, favored a non-punitive approach to vanquished Italy, as well as the country’s choice for Republican institutions, which were championed mostly by the Left, over the Monarchy in the June 1946 referendum. ⁴⁵ It also explains why the OWI tried to coopt the French existentialists and even some self-professed Marxists through the above mentioned travel program.

The ambassadors to France and Italy, too, rapidly understood the importance of propping the moderate Left in both countries. Jefferson Caffery, one of the most prominent US diplomats (and former assistant secretary of state), from Paris, urged Washington to depart from its familiar approach with traditional elites and conservatives in France. This opened an enduring US strategy aimed at splitting the Left in both Italy and France. In 1946, after de Gaulle’s provisional government resigned, Caffery welcomed the new center-left coalition led by the Christian Democrats of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), the Socialists of the SFIO, and still including the PCF. Without the antagonizing de Gaulle, the government seemed to curb Communist radicalism, while simultaneously elevating the moderate Socialists to an authoritative role. ⁴⁶ In Italy, Alexander Kirk first, then another influential postwar US ambassador, James C. Dunn, who was generally known for his conservative ideas, pursued a similar wedge strategy aimed at splitting the moderate Socialists from the radical ones who formed a political alliance with the PCI. As early as 1944, American officials contemplated support of Pietro Nenni’s Socialists, who had not yet confirmed a unity of action pact with the Communists. Late in 1946, after the main Socialist factions of the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI), had fully joined the PCI, the State Department still entertained the idea of ‘knocking off Nenni’s ideological blinders’ by inviting him, in his role as foreign minister, to Washington together with Prime Minister De Gasperi for talks on the first major US postwar loan to Italy. ⁴⁷ Supporting the Socialists above all seemed the best way to prevent a Communist monopoly of the trade union movement and, fundamentally, Communist control of many aspects of reconstruction and even of a resurgent nationalist pride – a control that the PCF and PCI tried to wrest within the union governments by waging their own ‘battles for production,’ and tactically limiting strikes through the liberation and immediate postwar period. ⁴⁸ During the first half of 1947, George Kennan, the founder of the containment strategy against Soviet communism, insisted that to combat Communist influence in Western Europe, it was best to support forces from the moderate Left; he further argued that Communists who were forced to cooperate in a government with the moderate Left might become more tractable than if they stayed in ‘unscrupulous opposition,’ and finally might even ‘repudiate the Kremlin’s authority.’ ⁴⁹ Both the State Department and the US labor forces never went as far as condoning Communist government participation; they actually encouraged their expulsion during that same time. But they continued favoring the moderate Left over the Christian groups or the rather ‘intractable’ de Gaulle.

Another question was that of French and Italian nationalism. The two countries were reeling from their respective humiliating experiences in the Second World War, and the leaders who most effectively could counter the Communists’ own nationalist appeal were those of the center-right, not the moderate Socialists. That was why Ambassador Caffery, as early as the summer of 1945, while already favoring the dialogue with the center-left, also reluctantly suggested dealing with Charles de Gaulle, the ‘sour puss’ of French leadership. Simply, the general’s nationalist appeal would be a counterpoint to Communist nationalism. But encouraging de Gaulle still implied Washington’s flexibility, and even accepting or absorbing the French leader’s denunciations of US policies. As the ambassador underlined, the French leader’s critique of the USA would help give France the confidence it needed to cope with its relative decline. Both elements – nationalism and relative distancing from US foreign policy – promised to take ammunition away from Communist propaganda. ⁵⁰ During his visit to Washington, in August of 1945, de Gaulle not only secured President Truman’s promise of economic assistance, but also obtained his recognition as representative of a world power and a ‘great ally, wounded but victorious, and, above all, needed.’ ⁵¹ To a lesser degree, US chief diplomats in Italy, most notably Ambassadors Alexander Kirk and James Dunn, also envisioned that a dependent, but hardly subservient Alcide De Gasperi, and Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza, who had held the same office in the pre-fascist years, together represented an old diplomatic tradition that mitigated the overwhelming reality of outside dominance. So both ambassadors, assisted by the Chief of the Allied Control Commission for Italy, Admiral Ellery W. Stone, advocated for a non-punitive, or mild approach to the peace treaty. And De Gasperi, not his foreign minister, the Socialist Nenni, received the much needed American fanfare and acclamation during his January 1947 visit, with a literal US profusion of pro-Italian sentiments, and an assistance package of $100 million. ⁵²

Differences between France and Italy were also important, and Washington was careful in calibrating its anti-Communist approach to the realities of each country. In vanquished, occupied, and politically highly polarized Italy (with the strong PCI-PSI united front), US interference could be more heavy-handed. At the same time, the options in Italy were more limited by that very polarization. France, while being a ‘liberated’ country, was still in the ranks of victors, still had a claim to world power status, and featured a moderate Socialist Party (SFIO) that had long broken its alliance with the PCF. Illustrating this difference was how the first postwar loans to France and Italy were set up and politically displayed. In the spring of 1946, Washington eagerly welcomed as the main French negotiator, the historic Socialist leader Léon Blum as the French delegate (in the non-governmental role as ‘Ambassador Extraordinary’), a former leader of the interwar Popular Front, but also known for being the first Socialist to break up the alliance with the PCF. Six months later, a similar political motivation favored an Italian delegation led by the far more conservative De Gasperi, by then seen as the sole reliable bulwark against communism in Italy. ⁵³

By 1947, the prospects for strong center-left coalitions turned out to be poor in Italy, and not much better in France. The moderate Socialists in France and especially in Italy – where in January 1947 a Social Democratic faction separated itself from the PSI – became too divided, as evidenced especially by the various splits giving birth to new but weak and factionalized trade union organizations as alternatives to the Communist-dominated labor movement. Even the USA’s own divided opinion on which groups to support aggravated the factionalism of the French and Italian Socialist or Social Democratic Lefts. Those divisions, together with the Cold War escalation, redirected the US State Department and main labor forces to the right, relying on the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) party in Italy, and on the MRP and other French centrist groups as main bastions against communism. ⁵⁴

And yet even the strong Catholic groups, during the immediate postwar period, had not proven to be all that reliable. At the onset of the Cold War, the Christian Democrats of both countries – grouped under the DC in Italy, and the MRP in France – had not made their pro-US alignment clear yet. French MRP leaders, US officials reported still in mid-1947, argued that US economic power forced them to choose between a ‘U.S. peace and a Soviet peace,’ whereas they upheld ‘Human peace.’ ‘We French people,’ those leaders explained, ‘will continue to be ourselves only if we persist in defending the value of the spiritual.’ ⁵⁵

Far more influenced by the Vatican, the Catholic forces in Italy, and particularly the left-wing of the DC, nurtured their own misgivings about US materialism, hedonism, and alleged militarism. At best, for both French and Italian Catholic party groups, ‘the value of the spiritual’ meant a gradual and selective acceptance of US leadership of the Western world, and avoidance of any risk of war. Some of the most influential DC leaders – Amintore Fanfani, Giorgio La Pira, Mariano Rumor – had been followers of Cronache Sociali, the party current founded by Giuseppe Dossetti, who combined Catholic devotion, commitment to social welfare (they were early proponents of Keynesianism in Italy), and severe qualms about US society. In 1948–9 the most loyal ‘dossettiani’ also questioned Italy’s adherence to NATO. Another DC group, led by Giovanni Gronchi (who became president of the republic in 1955), connected Catholic traditions with a sense of social justice, and winked at the Nenni Socialists as early as 1949, unwittingly playing, in Dunn’s opinion ‘the cat’s paw of the Communists.’ ⁵⁶

Both Italy’s Christian Democrats and France’s centrist parties, to be sure, never considered their choice of the West as the ‘lesser evil.’ Binding them to the USA was not only economic need, or the common security threat, and their consequent desire to secure US aid. Shared core values, as Karl Deutsch first noted in the 1950s, were also part of the emerging Atlantic alliance, which had its foundation in not just mutual benefits but also in a sense of ‘we-ness’ that stressed compatibility, mutual responsiveness, and a sense of Western community. ⁵⁷ This sense of ‘shared destiny’ may have already appeared relatively strong when the French cabinet of Paul Ramadier, and the Italian coalition led by De Gasperi decided (with encouragement but no pressure from Washington) ⁵⁸ to expel the two Communist Parties from their respective governments simultaneously in May 1947. The transatlantic coalescence around Western traditions against the ‘other,’ the Eastern forms of authoritarian rule and cultural challenge, however, became most evident during Italy’s national democratic elections in 1948. More than previous episodes exhibiting polarizing visions of Italy – or Europe – the event assumed a Manichean dimension, with both sides – the Communist-led Popular Front and the Christian Democrats – stressing the clash of ideologies as one of civilizations. ⁵⁹ The USA’s own establishment of a National Security apparatus began with addressing Italy as a problem broader than its strategic implications: it was also a matter of saving one of the cradles of Western Civilization. Summoning for the first time an integrated public-private network – including the CIA’s first covert operation in support of the DC campaign – in the coordinated fashion of ‘political warfare,’ the USA further underlined the cultural and political connection between the ‘cradle’ and the ‘torch-bearer’ of Western modernity. From France, the MRP Foreign Minister Georges Bidault pleaded that ‘the old and the new world… cooperate in strict solidarity for the protection of the only worthy civilization [sic].’ ⁶⁰

So, by 1948 anti-communism comprised shared needs and shared values that induced French Socialists, as well as left-wing Christian Democrats from both countries who had toyed with the idea of a truly neutral European third force between the two superpowers to compromise with most aspects of US politics and culture, and to advocate Atlanticism. Most of them, particularly in Italy, continued to reject the ‘acquisitive’ aspects of the American model, and remained prone to make their ‘yes’ to the USA more equivocal than in this time of emergency.

Equivocations or disagreements actually remained an asset for an alliance that found its strength in its negotiating nature. For Washington, demonstrating flexibility toward difficult allies, and even accepting some criticism – if not straight out anti-Americanism – from them ultimately meant preempting anti-American campaigns dominated by the extreme Left. This choice of favoring a managed and mild dissent in order to isolate the Communists would evolve into a deliberate strategy in the following decades. It was the strategy first devised by the Eisenhower administration in its second mandate; it informed the intellectual approach adopted by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom throughout the 1950s; and it defined the US response to Gaullist France and even encouragement of the center-left coalition in Italy during the 1960s.

But the Cold War at its peak delayed that evolution, while it crystallized socio-economic realities in France and Italy that overall hindered reform when it was most needed. The US collaboration with conservative allies in both countries limited the options on both sides of the Atlantic, much like Cominform regimentation confined the possibilities of legitimization for the PCF and PCI. The two Communist parties, while in opposition, did contribute to pressuring the ruling parties in both countries to adopt welfare reforms and cultural adaptations of US business models and way of life. But surely their alignment with Moscow until the years of Eurocommunism limited their leverage internally as much as internationally. By the late 1940s, the USA, rather than opting for a reformist but not secure center-left in both countries, concentrated its overt and covert support on the safest anti-Communist assets – in Italy for sure the Christian Democrats and their right-of-center allies, in France the most conservative leaders of the MRP – at the expense of the center-left parties. This choice did not bode well for US intentions of superseding Italy’s or France’s class conflict, with its bipolar mindset of anti-Sovietism and anti-Americanism. US intervention worsened the terms of the political debate in both countries, which, as the Italian 1948 elections demonstrated, already on its own had become heavily conditioned by ideology without much reference to actual programs. In the following years, the USA had to forsake a truly reformist option in France and Italy. In the early 1950s, Washington also blurred the distinctions it had previously detected between the French and Italian political realities. Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board and Eisenhower’s psychological warfare strategies led a parallel propaganda and covert crusade against the PCF and PCI, treating both parties as no more, no less than products of the Soviet monolith. Conceived as a grand strategy meant to make sense of complexity, the psy-war of the 1950s in fact simplified that complexity, frequently backfiring. ⁶¹

Only through the difficult phase of the 1960s – in transatlantic relations as well as internally for the USA – would US diplomacy revert to a more pluralist approach toward its European allies. A divided US society also signified a return to domestic pluralism, which revived the ambivalence of anti-American opposition by the French and especially the Italian Communists, who again saw the ‘contradictions’ of the West erupting ‘with greater frankness’ in America than elsewhere. For much of the rest of the Cold War, the two parties thus inadvertently validated the multifaceted nature of the USA and the West. It was not the kind of American pluralism and ‘contradictions’ many US top officials would have liked to display; but the most discerning US leaders and diplomats, even more acutely than those of the immediate post-war period, understood that their country’s own divisions, dissent, even chaotic debates sometimes, compared favorably to the impermeability to change in the East. As Arthur S. Schlesinger Jr., one of the postwar founders of the Americans for Democratic Action, with its reformist agenda and strong Cold War anti-communism, best expressed, the USA demonstrated that ‘conflict and contradiction [were] the truly creative aspects of a free society.’ And US society’s forces from below, from the 1960s, came to realize that it was possible to work within the system, while in the East, the forces of protest would discover that the only solutions lay outside the system. ⁶²