A Wise Unknowingness: On Violet Gibson

By Brenda Wineapple

Violet Gibson's mug shot ARCHIVIO CENTRALE DELLO STATO, ROME
Violet Gibson's mug shot

After defending such clients as Sacco and Vanzetti and Charles Ponzi (yes, that Ponzi), my paternal grandfather, a lawyer and Jewish Italophile, published in 1930 a slim book, Italy and Your Senses, which is not, as the title suggests, a poetic tribute to Italian art, topography or people but rather a valentine to Benito Mussolini, whom he considered the resurrection and the light.

I mention this to show that while my grandfather's infatuation with Mussolini was extreme, he was not alone. Italy's fascist prime minister was one of the country's great tourist attractions in the Roaring Twenties, for Mussolini was a charismatic showman--after all, he liked to pose, à la Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, without his shirt. No matter that his political philosophy was hollow at the core, as Frances Stonor Saunders points out in her superb new book, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, or that between 1922 and 1943 Il Duce sent at least a million people to an early grave. He remained, for a very long time, the darling statesman of the conservative press and the fashionable fascists of Europe, although they conceded that he might be a bit hasty and brutal. Still and all, according to the British ambassador to Italy, Mussolini was "like any other gentleman." The King of England decorated him with the Order of the Bath, and Austen Chamberlain, the British foreign secretary (whose half brother was Neville, future prime minister and champion of the Munich accord), considered Mussolini a sincere, charming patriot, and certainly preferable to any other "Italian." Sure he was a dictator, the foreign secretary admitted, but one simply could not "apply British standards to un-British conditions." As Saunders acidly comments, Chamberlain's remark "contained all the narrowness and smugness of an imperial conceit."

Read on...

Has anyone ever heard of Violet Gibson before reading this article? Have to confess I hadn't. Tom

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I never heard of her, but it is a great story.

Anonymous said...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3449/3823015911_33efea48f2.jpg