Katy Hull's book seeks to understand why, in the 1920s and 1930s, there was significant support in America for Benito Mussolini's Italian Fascism. Using as her source material four writers with a broad readership – Richard Washburn Child of the Saturday Evening Post, Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times, Generoso Pope of his very own Il Progresso Italo-Americano, and Herbert Wallace Schneider of Columbia University, who published books on Italian Fascism – Hull argues that this varied group collectively looked to Fascism as the model for America so it could embrace modernity without its pitfalls: “the anonymity of cities, [the] pointlessness of consumption, [and the] dulling effects of standardization” (3), in addition to the sense that machines had come to dominate the humans they were meant to help.

Before the Fascist seizure of power in 1922, these writers depicted Fascism, its paramilitary Blackshirts, and Mussolini himself as healthy responses to the Western disillusionment with the traditional ideals of honor, sacrifice, and national unity that had been dashed by the horrors of the Great War. Where Americans had turned to hyper-individualism – a consequence of modern mass consumption – Fascism was restoring traditional values to Italy. Additionally, Mussolini, the “soulful administrator,” was shown to have mastered the modern state, and “when men and women seemed driven by forces outside themselves – the pace of the assembly line, the tempo of jazz, and the speed of cars – Mussolini offered a hope that human beings, endowed with sufficient will, could still be in control” (43).

Fascist Italy also offered a cautionary tale to Americans about the perils of democracy and the multi-party system, which had led to political paralysis in liberal Italy. Democracy in America, specifically, had resulted in the election of unqualified people to Congress without the technical expertise needed to run a modern nation, who then became dependent on self-serving interest groups. The Italians, on the other hand, with their corporatist state, where a Grand Council of technocrats had replaced the democratically elected Chamber of Deputies, “had eliminated the lag between political institutions and economic and social realities, hauling Politics into the mechanical age” (74, original emphasis).

Once the Depression set in, which Fascist sympathizers interpreted as the result of the capitalist fetishization of the machine and mass production to the detriment of human labor and prosperity, they looked to Roosevelt as a leader, like Mussolini, who could recalibrate government back towards caring for the needs of the people. Mussolini was portrayed as a simple man from humble origins, who consequently developed policies that directly helped people, such as land reclamation, maternal and child welfare, and social insurance. Similarly, they highlighted the public works projects in Italy as examples for Roosevelt and his New Deal to emulate.

Throughout her work, Hull is careful to point out that there was a glaring discrepancy between the image of Fascism published by its American sympathizers and its reality. She notes how these writers downplayed the brutality of the Blackshirts, uncritically reproduced regime propaganda depicting the Duce without any flaws, overlooked the effectiveness of Italy's public works to ameliorate the effects of the Depression, ignored that the corporatist state benefited businessmen and landowners at the expense of workers and farmers, and failed to acknowledge the systematic intimidation and state-sponsored violence of the regime.

This whitewashing of the regime got harder in the 1930s as it became increasingly militaristic, and then grew closer to Nazi Germany. Fascist sympathizers downplayed the brutality of Italy's imperialism, depicting the invasion of Ethiopia as a civilizing mission, and urged the United States not to get involved in the conflict – just as regime propaganda urged. After the Italians and Germans signed the Axis agreement and signs of German anti-Semitism emerged in Italy, Pope and McCormick (Childs had died, and Schneider had distanced himself from Fascism at this point) argued that the Axis was not really an alliance, that the two countries simply did not have enough in common, and that surely Italy was not the racial state Germany was. Though eventually McCormick wrote of the severity of the 1938 Italian Racial Laws, earning the ire of the regime, she continued to defend Fascism, insisting that the Fascism that went to war with Nazism was a corruption of its original ideals by extremist elements in the regime. Pope only finally abandoned Mussolini in 1941 because he was under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a foreign agent.

Hull's work is a valuable contribution to the literature that surveys the American fascination with Mussolini's Fascism, which includes Giorgio Bertellini's The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America (2019), Mauro Canali's La scoperta dell'Italia: Il fascismo raccontato dai corrispondenti americani (2017), Gian Giacomo Migone's The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe (2015), and David Schmitz's The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922–1940 (1988), in addition to an older work by John Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1972). Hull's strength is that she provides a unifying theme to her subjects’ support for Fascism, adding to Diggins's survey of the multiple reasons why Americans supported it, and Migone's and Schmitz's singular focus on Fascism's appeal as a bulwark against communism and as a force for stability in post-World War I Europe. She rightly emphasizes the self-serving nature of her subjects’ portrayal of Fascism, which ingratiated them with the regime and allowed them access to valuable sources for their stories by the regime itself, paralleling the work of Canali. And, finally, like Bertellini, she recognizes that one needs to understand the American fascination with Fascism within the context of the onset of modernity. Hull's main point is that Fascism was the means for America to embrace modernity without losing its “soul,” while Bertellini argues that part of Mussolini's popularity was that he maximized the culture of celebrity that the new film medium was developing and propagating in the 1920s and 1930s.

Another strength of this book, and what further binds Hull to her contemporaries, specifically Bertellini, is that she speaks to the current political moment in America. Bertellini alludes to the perils of being seduced by a politician who manipulates a medium of communication to generate a celebrity cult following, and then peddles dangerous political ideas. Hull notes that “in times of economic stress, when humans feel overwhelmed by forces seemingly beyond their control, they admire leaders who reflect their anxieties and offer deceptively simple responses to their problems” (115). And, as such, just as her sources should have depicted Fascism for what it really was, so we today must be vigilant and expose all current dangers to American democracy.