The Swashbuckling Mussolini
Eight months after Benito Mussolini became dictator of Italy, New York Times Magazine cautioned that only time would tell what kind of leader he would turn out to be:
Is he a symptom of the disease of politics that infects civilization, or is he a remedy? Is he autocrat, liberator, or merely demagogue? How far is he going, and where? After eight months of practically unlimited authority, what has his government accomplished? Enough to prove one-man power to be less dangerous than the powerlessness of many men, to show that a general-manager form of control may be applied to a nation as well as to a town? Is he, in a word, as right as he is popular in proceeding on the assumption that people really desire government more than they desire a voice in government?
History would ultimately judge Mussolini as one of the 20th century's greatest tyrants, and those 1923 questions would all be answered soon enough.
The Swashbuckling Mussolini
Published: Sunday, July 22, 1923