Caesar with Palm Branch

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On Marx's Day, at the beginning of Mary's Month, the soft blue wisteria gushed from every wall in Rome, and the iris raised blue-cauled heads. But it was the lush red cineraria and the harsh Red Flag that really bloomed in Rome. By May Day, 1947, the worldwide Communist Party had much to celebrate. Its latest and in some ways its most remarkable victory was in Sicily's free and fair elections, where the Communists last week became the island's leading party, and thus consolidated their position as the strongest political force in Italy.

How, in the 99 years since the Communist Manifesto, had Marx's mush-mouthed dialectics, distilled from northern academic mists, come so far in a land where struggle had always been so real and urgent that it needed no theoretical encouragement? How did Communist influence manage to reach so deeply into the heart of the civilization it sought to destroy? Part of the answer lay in the results of 20 years of Fascism; part of it lay in the extraordinary political genius of Palmiro Togliatti, the most successful Communist outside Russia, perhaps the greatest Communist since Lenin. And part of it lay in Western civilization's failure--in & out of Italy--to live up to its faith in itself and its God. This sickness of a civilization, not necessarily fatal, had definite symptoms that could be observed and recorded. If the West did not observe, record and act upon the evidence, the West would be deader than Rienzi.

Decline & Fall. Italy, in the belated spring of 1947, looked deceptively like a country in happy convalescence. From the Po down to Palermo, fields were green and fertile, and the people were hard at work. In the northern cities, many factories were going full blast and foreign visitors marveled (as they had before) at the patched-up trains, running on time. Fruits, vegetables and meat choked city markets.

But the markets were black markets. The picture of brave prosperity was false, and its bright colors hid festering dirt and dangerous tensions. Inflation went unchecked. Unemployment was,nearing the two-and-a-half-million mark. In Rome, Foreign Minister Count Carlo Sforza was on his way to the Foreign Office when a crowd surrounded his car and mauled him. Cried Sforza: "I know you want bread! I work 16 hours a day so you'll get it." The bitter reply: "You work--but we can't." The Government, a paralytic coalition of Christian Democrats, Communists and Socialists, was bogged down in tripartite squabbles; too many of the people merely said: "The Government bores us."

In the cafes along Rome's Via Vittorio Veneto, tweedy men and chiffoned women of one of the oldest, handsomest and rottenest aristocracies in Europe munched Europe's creamiest cream puffs. At Ro-sati's, they sipped their Martinis under the blind eyes of an ominous, seven-foot statue of Augustus Caesar, Rome's first Emperor-tyrant. And only five miles away, in an almost perfect circle, stretched the filthy, swarming manheaps of the Roman slums. The worst of them was nicknamed "Shanghai"--which to Italians is a synonym for total degeneracy. Here 15,000 Romans lived in one-room shacks; watermarks on the walls, above bed level, told of rain and mud floods. Said one of "Shanghai's" citizens last week:

"This is Rome, the eternal, the beautiful. We are unique. We are migrants from Italy who never left Italy." He coughed. "Communists? Christian Democrats? Socialists? I don't know what we are. We'll follow whoever gets to us first and will get us out of here."

The Communists were getting to them first. In the entire Italian scene, the Communists seemed to be the only people who knew what they wanted and how to get it. And so, while the world barely noticed it, the incredible had happened: Communism had all but conquered Italy.

Eternity & Bread. The obstacles had seemed towering. There was the Vatican, raised in immovable majesty above men and nations, a neighbor to eternity. There was the ancient land which had seen the works of Roman reason and Christian faith. There was the echo--petrified and arrested in time--of the world's greatest spirits, which made even simple 20th Century peasants somehow contemporary and kin to Da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yet a band of conspirators, whose faith was a tenth as old as the simple stone cross in a village church, could capture these works and values--capture the very proofs that man, forever stained by blood and mud, could nevertheless be humble, free and great.

The West made it easy for Communism to forget all about principles and values, and talk to the people of bread.

That was what happened in traditionally conservative Sicily. In last year's referendum on the monarchy, 68% of the Sicilian peasants had voted for the King. In regional elections last week, 34.5% of the voters cast their ballots for the Left. The Christian Democrats were second with 20%, the Qualunquist-Monarchist bloc third with 14%; the rest of the votes went to minor parties. This foreshadowed a Communist-Socialist majority in the national elections next October.

Spaghetti & Tea. Part of the reason for the Communist success was furnished by Count Ernesto Perrier, leader of Sicily's badly shaken right-wing coalition. Acknowledging his side's insufficient concern with the people's urgent economic needs, he said grimly: "Our emblem should have been a plate of spaghetti with a crown."

An even more interesting (though dishonest) explanation was furnished by Communist Licausi:

"For the Communist Party, there is no question of world revolution, but of feeding and democratizing the people. We plan no Soviet here. We want the big feudal land holdings redistributed, but we respect all properties below 100 hectares [247 acres]. And that is a good-sized piece of property. We want industry. . . . We want to put the idle to work. Capital will find all the guarantee it needs."

That was the current Communist line, and that was the not-very-secret weapon of Italian Communism. It was not only Sicilian peasants who fell for it. Chirped a Milanese debutante last week: "Communism doesn't prevent you from listening to music, sipping tea or eating pastry."

This bird-brained little socialite, a fellow traveler like many other Italian bluebloods, would think just what Palmiro Togliatti, alias Ercole Ercoli, alias Mario Correnti, wanted her to think. He was out to conquer an essentially anti-Communist people through bloodless, "democratic" means. In just three years he had worked a political miracle.

Down the Red Flag. March 1944 is the beginning of Togliatti's experiment in "respectable" revolution. Mussolini's regime is dead, and the Italian people squirm to the light--dazed, vaguely jubilant, cheering the U.S. as liberator. This is a unique opportunity for the West to establish a healthy Italian democracy. But the Communists see an opportunity, too. Many of them want to start a revolution immediately. Under the heavy March rains, Italy's mud seems like the very clay of history.

Out of a grey sky, flying in from Algiers, after an 18-year exile, appears Palmiro Togliatti--and proceeds to mold, the clay. He announces that there must be no antiroyalist agitation. It might even be advisable to roll up the Red Flag for a while, in favor of the national green, white & red. Moscow recognizes Marshal Ba-doglio's royalist government and Palmiro Togliatti enters it as Minister without Portfolio. Less ductile Communists, who still want to rush to the barricades, are pushed out of the party, many by the "respectable" device of being refused support by the Communist machine in local elections. All the fighting, for the present, will be done on the barricades of bureaucracy. Slovenly, shambling Mauro Scocci-maro, noted for his long, unwashed hair, dirty shirts and doctrinaire stubbornness, holds office as Minister of Finance; but when Premier de Gasperi drops him, Party Boss Togliatti does not even put up a fight. This is no time for unwashed comrades. Togliatti himself sets the fashion of what the well-dressed Communist will wear: a neat, double-breasted blue business suit.

Up the N.A.M. The party's economic program sounds like something the U.S.'s National Association of Manufacturers might have mothered. It calls for monetary stabilization to allow industrial growth, elimination of useless wartime restrictions, lower production costs and increased labor productivity, to assure "the recovery of business."

The climax of this sweetness-&-light campaign conies when "Father Palmiro" and his Communist Curates vote for the reaffirmation of the Lateran Pact (TIME, April 7), thus depriving the Christian Democrats of their most effective antiCommunist weapon--the charge that the Communists fight Christianity. Says a Communist observer: "You might say that Togliatti decided for the moment to dispense with the crude sickle in favor of the more delicate rapier. And instead of the hammer, we find Terracini's parliamentary gavel more effective."

"In the Name of the Lord." One day 54 years ago, churches in Genoa (as everywhere in the world) were overflowing with holy joy in commemoration of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. The priests read the Gospel: "Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord." Then the congregation clutched palm branches. Meanwhile, in Genoa's drab Via Albergo dei Poveri

(Street of the Hostel of the Poor), a son was born to a poor Government bookkeeper. Because it was Palm Sunday, the child was named Palmiro.

Nowadays, Atheist Togliatti firmly clutches the palm branch. Recently, in the Italian Assembly, one of his Christian Democrat opponents ended a bombastic speech with an appeal to the Blessed Virgin; the next speaker windily invoked the Holy Ghost. Communist Togliatti did not reply with dialectical materialism; instead, his steady voice crackled out the First Commandment--"lo sono il Signore Dio tuo. . . ." His fellow legislators cheered.

Young Palmiro learned theological disputation at Turin University, where he won a law scholarship. Later he went into Socialist journalism. In 1921, he was among the men who led the left wing's secession from the Socialist Party and founded the separate Communist Party of Italy. Five years later, when Musso lini's police were beginning to make things hot, Togliatti fled to France.

In the Name of History. One who knew him intimately then says: "Till this moment, Togliatti would not have accepted too rigid dictation from Moscow. Now he began losing all such scruples." Later, the soul of Palmiro Togliatti plunged into a crisis that was to test, once & for all, its true nature. From Moscow came a simple order: Italian Socialists, though they risked their lives to fight Fascism, were "sabotaging" world revolution and must be liquidated; the Communists must deliver the secret roster of Socialist leaders to the Fascist police.

Togliatti and his Communist friend, Writer-Philosopher Ignazio Silone, spent days discussing what they should do. Silone refused, left the party, now leads, with Giuseppe Saragat, a decent, ineffectual anti-Communist group of dissident Socialists. But Togliatti bowed to Moscow and turned in the names. There is blood on that blue serge, doublebreasted suit.

Il Migliore. After this test, Togliatti rose rapidly in the international hierarchy. Between foreign assignments he lived and wrote in Moscow. Said one of his friends: "He is one of the few Western Communists who can truthfully boast of Stalin's personal trust and friendship."

In 1943, he was one of the 17 top Communists who signed the decree dissolving the Comintern, as the first step toward the postwar period's "respectable" Communism.* A year later, he was ready for his most important assignment: Andrei Vishinsky himself got the Allies to okay Togliatti's return to Italy.

Togliatti is no sawdust Caesar. His manner is easy. His face has a studious look behind horn-rimmed glasses, with only a faint ironic hint of the trouble he has seen or is causing. Like France's Maurice Thorez, he is one of the few Communists with a smile--a smile that is somewhat sarcastic around the edges.

Togliatti is married to Rita Montagnana, a former seamstress, who leads Italy's Communist women and is a loyal party workhorse. She is a big, handsome, white-haired, brown-eyed woman. The Togliattis live in the sumptuous residence of a former Fascist minister, but use only a few rooms.

Togliatti usually sleeps only five or six hours, appears at his desk at party head quarters by 7 a.m./- His recreations are bourgeois. He loves to read, frequently culling quotes for his speeches (favorite sources: Dante, Lincoln, the Bible). He loves soccer, and is rumored to write an occasional sports column under a pseudonym. Sometimes he strolls out to a simple pizzeria called La Carbonara, frequented chiefly by taxi drivers. Characteristically, he has broken with the darkling tradition of Communist revolutionaries, and does not play chess. Instead, he likes to bowl and play scopone (an Italian card game). His party comrades like him. They sincerely call him Il Migliore--The Best.

The Shadow State. On Capitol Hill, the Roman Senate tried for centuries to keep republican government alive; the Caesars ended it. Today, at the foot of that hill, in the Via delle Botteghe Oscure (Street of the Dark Shops), which runs almost exactly along Rome's ancient city limits, stands a smart red brick house; there'rules the affable Palm-Branch Caesar of Italian Communism. His Communist Party organization is (as in all countries) a state within a state; in Italy, that shadow state happens to be more substantial than the feeble real one.

The party has its own schools, its own courts, its own system of taxation which collects membership dues and transacts other business--from Saturday night dances to political blackmail. Il Migliore is assisted by a team of able department heads:

P: Umberto ("The Brain") Terracini is Togliatti's lean, charming second-in-command. He is the very model of double-breasted fastidiousness; when he succeeded Saragat as Assembly president and prepared to take over his official residence, a conversation took place which would have shocked less cultured Communists:

Terracini: "But where are the servants?"

Saragat: "My wife and daughter did all the housework." Terracini (indignant): "But you see, there are five of us--myself, my wife and our three Siamese cats."

P: Eugenic Reale. Italian Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, holds the party's foreign portfolio. He is a physician, a brilliant conversationalist and a bon vivant who has the puffy, pouting look of a constipated baby.

P: Luigi ("The Cock") Longo, who holds the party portfolio for war, is a more traditional type of Communist, a sullen man with deep sunken eyes and a tight, twisted mouth. He commanded Italy's Communist Partisans during World War II. Allied intelligence as well as Italian officials estimate his potential underground army (armed with weapons seized from the Germans) to be 150,000 strong, which is as large as the army allowed the Italian state under the peace treaty.

P: Pietro Secchia is in charge of organization and recruiting of new members. A broad-shouldered giant with a monkish, curiously luminous face under a mop of dark hair, his brilliant false teeth glittering as he speaks, he lacks his colleagues' intellectual sparkle; but he tops them in dogged organizing genius. Secchia has himself stated his objective: "A Communist section for every church tower in Italy."

The Battle of the Towers. Italy has countless church towers. Today it also has 8,635 carefully counted Communist Party sections, which break down into 34,540 cells that probe into every corner of the land (see box). The methods are simple. Said a Communist organizer in a village near Milan last week: "Communists freed this village. It wasn't the Socialists or the priests. I am a Communist." They rely on Good Works: last fortnight, a jammed train carried 200 children from starving Naples north to Emilia; there, on Communist farms, under special care of Rita Togliatti's women, they would get four months of sun and food at Communist Party expense.

The Communist organizers make their blunders, too. Recently the Brescia Communist daily La Verita devoted most of its space to a completely phony story about "Gary Cooper Addressing Communists of Philadelphia." Communist popular songs are often unintentionally funny. Sample: "Stalin is even better than bread for the people. Just to see his face is to want madly to kiss him."

But such occasional idiocies do not prevent the Communist message from reaching the minds of thousands like a messianic revelation. In the village of Arsoli, a white-haired, sturdy old peasant woman described how the message came to her: "I think perhaps one is born with a Communist spirit, just like some people are born poets. I remember the first Abyssinian war with our terrible defeat, and watching the first swallows come from Africa that year. I remember, too, worrying when I was young about people like the carpenters, who built fine furniture but slept on trestles. Communism will put an end to things like that."

Neither the church, nor democracy, nor capitalism, nor any other anti-Communist force, has yet allayed such deep and simple resentments.

The Battle of the Cities. One way to tell how the battle is going is to list the cities the Communists have taken over through their victories in municipal elections. Such cities as Sofia and Bucharest and Belgrade have always seemed to be on the other side of the moon. But the Red Flag flies also over cities that hold the West's most poignant memories: Virgil's Mantua, Ambrose's Milan, Ferrara. the city of Lucrezia Borgia-- a woman the Communists would have appreciated: learned and turbulent Bologna, Dante's soft symmetrical Florence; Dandolo's capitalist Venice. The Communists hold Leghorn, where Shelley spent some of his waning days, and Galileo's Pisa, and Parma, famous for violets and Toscanini.

The people of these places are not Communist-dominated in the Eastern sense; they are ruled by Communists because they voted for Communists.

The spectacle was too much for many antiCommunists. Constant defeat at the hands of an enemy whose might was plainly visible, and yet elusive as a shadow, put a crippling psychological strain on Communism's enemies. Not all were driven as far as Giuseppe Rapelli, Christian Democratic Labor leader who tried to break Communist Giuseppe di Vittorio's iron grip on the labor unions, and is now in the hospital with a nervous breakdown. But all seem paralyzed to ineffectually, a prey to fear and doubt.

The Battle of the Parties. Last June, the Christian Democratic Party, Communism's strongest enemy, polled over eight million votes. But it slowly dissipated this advantage by failing to carry out any of its promised social reforms, by letting the Communists steal its thunder on every major issue (such as the Lateran Pact), and by being just plain badly organized.

Italian Socialists were frustrated in another way. Demagogic Pietro Nenni, head of the Socialist Party, is caught in the Communist line, though he still claims to be independent. To a U.S. newsman he explained last week: "The Communists are here. I would be very happy if they weren't, or if we had a Communist Party the size of yours in the U.S. That just isn't the situation, so we have to work along with them." Nenni's own followers have taken to calling themselves "Nenni Communists."

The dissident, anti-Communist Social ists under Giuseppe Saragat have made no progress since their secession (TIME, Jan. 20). The one anti-Communist party which has done relatively well is Gian, nini's nee-Fascist Common Man movement, which appeals to many disillusioned Christian Democrats. It points up the obvious but disastrous desire (which helped Hitler and Mussolini to power) to fight Communism with typical totalitarian methods.

And what of the world's most powerful anti-Communist force--the U.S.? Its ineffectual support of Italy's right and center has been just strong enough to enable Communists (whose propaganda equates "fascist" and "bourgeois") to charge the U.S with bolstering Italian reaction. To date, the one substantial result of last winter's $100,000,000 rehabilitation credit from the U.S. has been a $5,000,000 tobacco deal. Italians who think, beyond bread, about such matters as the Truman Doctrine cannot understand the U.S.: on the one hand, Washington opposes high German reparations to Russia and strikes a bold attitude in the Middle East, while on the other hand it stands pat on the Italian peace treaty which makes the Adriatic virtually a Yugoslav lake and, on Russian insistence, further drains Italy's economy.

Against the False Teachers. Then is there no hope in Italy--except Communism? Many Italian democrats still refuse to believe it. The U.S. could help, they feel, by substantial loans, by softening the peace treaty terms, and by steering clear of Italian reactionaries. What is needed, beyond this, is the kind of moral effort a biographer put into the mouth of St. Dominic. Whether Dominic actually said it or not, the words are a call to men everywhere who face the Communist threat. When papal legates (the story goes) came in splendor to help him fight the Albigensian heretics of southern France, St. Dominic entreated them thus:

"It is not by the display of power and pomp, a cavalcade of retainers and richly housed palfreys, nor by gorgeous apparel, that the heretics win proselytes. It is by zealous preaching, by apostolic humility, by austerity. Zeal must be met by zeal, humility by humility, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching falsehood by preaching truth. Sow the good seed as the heretics sow the bad. Cast off those sumptuous robes. Send away those brightly caparisoned palfreys. Go barefoot, without purse or scrip, like the apostles.

"Outlabor, out-fast, out-discipline these false teachers!"

Is Dominic's austere fire burning in Rome? Last week, in the Fifty-Seven Restaurant on the Via Veneto, the waiters solicitously snipped the hard edges off the omelets they served. A motorcar salesman reported that he had sold 26 Alfa Romeos in one morning, for a total of $260,000.

*No group of comparable size--not even the Twelve Apostles--ever attained influence so rap idly in so many countries as did the men who made the grand, empty gesture of "dissolving" the Comintern. Their roster includes: Otto Kuusinen-- President of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic; Maurice Thorez--Vice Premier of France; Klement Gottwald--Premier of Czechoslovakia; Georgi Dimitrov-- Premier of Bulgaria; Ana Pauker --Rumanian Communist boss and generally considered the country's real ruler; Matyas Rakosi--Deputy Premier of Hungary; Wilhelm Pieck-- leader of German Communism. /-For news of another early riser in Rome, see RELIGION.

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