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PARTISAN REVIEW
uarius, the notorious old charlatan,
3
is still the patron saint of Naples–
the patron saint of all Cagliostros,-but his popularity is being vigorously
contested by the Redeemer of the Marshes. ·An exasperated Neapolitan no
longer swears at the saints; he swears at the government.
•
The specific character of crime in the South likewise offered no great
obstacle to the Fascists. (The Army and the Gangs, Piedmont and the
anti-Piedmont, were so much bluff.) The conquests of Fascism in the
South were all negative ones. The Liberal regimes had completed the cor·
ruption of the masses. Mussolini merely represents a government that
hu
abandoned all pretence of reforming them ("the Southern Question does
not exist"), and exploiting the exinanition of Southern society for all it
iJ
worth. "Crimes of violence rank relatively high among the Italians, also
for homicide their ratio is above that for the native [U.S.] born.
In
:egard to crimes against property, family offenses, forgery, drug laws,
drunkenness, the Italian rate is well below the average for the native
born."• A formula: high frequency rate of crimes of violence plus low
frequency rate of crimes against property and institutions: which neatly
fitted the requirements of the Fascists.
The institution of Wives has no real interest in abolishing the institu–
tion of Whores. And what would Gangsters do without the help of
the
Police? The liberal governments tolerated crime in the South from no
Voltairean motives. And Fascism only introduced a foreign element
into
the make-up of the Southern "criminal.'' Before that the Italian State
resembled the universe of Leihnitz, with its scientific division of labor
between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil; i.e., while the South·
erners sold the bodies of their daughters, Northerners sold their mothen'
souls.
But in America the Cagliostran, owing to his retarded spiritual devel·
opment, preserves his original character intact. (Generoso Pope's Fascism,
like Italian Fascism before 1938, does not yet include anti-Semitism
in
its
arsenal.) Between Charles Ponzi in 1920 and Filippo Musica in 1938,
both natives of Southern Italy, the Cagliostran character in this country
had not changed much. Let me only point out the contrasts in the
char·
acters of Musica
~nd
Richard Whitney, and in the backgrounds of the two
men. (A. P. Giannini has many things in common with Whitney,
b~i
hardly anything with Musica; it is my
gue~s
that he is of North ltalill
ancestry.) Ponzi and Musica did not come to Wall Street by way of
Bar·
vard Law School hut by way of Mulberry Street. (Mulberry Street's bank·
ing is to Wall's what Naples is to Lombardy.) Let us try to imagine whll
'"•.. the famous sacred blood of San Gennaro or Januarius; which is prese"edil
two phials in a silver tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies three times a year, to IR
great admiration of the people." (Dickens)
•The Italians of New York
(Federal Writers' Project)
