September 30,—1935-Most of 'Grassrooters' Think Mussolini Is About Washed Up
Sculpture of the head of Benito Mussolini, 1935 near Adwa, Ethiopia. The sculpture was later demolished during the Second World War (1939-45).
The Washington Daily News—Monday—September 30,—1935
Most of 'Grassrooters' Think Mussolini Is About Washed Up
By ERNIE PYLE
PARKERSBURG, W. Va.—A friend of mine the other day, knowing I had been roaming around the country for a couple of months, asked me what people were thinking and saying about the Ethiopian trouble.
A year ago, as you well know, there probably wasn’t one person out of five in this country who could even tell you what continent Ethiopia was on. But now everybody knows, everybody is talking about it, and everybody is shaking just a little bit in his boots. People are reading everything they can find on the Ethiopian trouble.
The general feeling can be summed up in these two viewpoints—the individual American hopes above everything else that we can stay out of it, if it does develop into an international war; and the individual American thinks that at last Mussolini has got himself into a jam that he isn’t going to get out of, no matter how the war goes.
Some people were talking about it in a restaurant in Iowa, and one fellow said he and another fellow had it all figured out, and it was this way: Mussolini has been having Napoleonic delusions, and visions of taking the whole world, a little at a time, with Ethiopia as the start. But now he’s in a spot that he had never visioned before, because if he goes ahead with his war he’s liable to fight all of Europe all at once, and he’d undoubtedly be badly licked. On the other hand, if he backs down on his war threats, he loses so much face in Italy that he is beaten and on the road to oblivion. Poor Mussolini, this man said.
My uncle, a farmer in Indiana, has a new idea for our own status if they do get into a real war. Sure, he says, we should go ahead and sell munitions and supplies of all kinds to any country that wants to buy, but don’t do any delivering. Make them come and get it, he says.
That way, we would make a lot of money from the war boom, and we also wouldn’t have any American ships nosing around in war waters and getting sunk and thus eventually leading us into the war. It sounded to me like a pretty smart idea that, provided our national conscience wouldn’t hurt us for selling stuff to help kill people. But I can’t recall that our national conscience ever did suffer much along that line.
● ● ●
Another man in Ohio told me the League of Nations could stop the war a month after it started, if it wanted to. And that is by an honest-to-goodness 100 per cent boycott. Don’t sell a thing, not even one little sack of tobacco to any of the countries at war, he says, and before you know it they’re out of supplies and will have to quit fighting and go home.
Canadians are worrying too, although their thoughts are so taken up with the coming national elections that Ethiopia has to take a second place. But Canadians know it is serious and they see the very prominent part England is taking in the war muddle, and they know that if England gets into it, there goes Canada, too.
An acquaintance of mine out West, who knows everything, says history shows that dictators can’t back down. When they decide to do something, they’ve got to go ahead with it or get out. So he thinks Mussolini will have to go ahead with his war.
People aren’t saying much about the right or wrong of Mussolini’s designs on Ethiopia. Some people do think it hurt the Ethiopians for somebody to write them a little constitution and modernize them, but that kind of talk is always winding up in theorizing over whether we all wouldn’t be better off if we were still living the simple life.
But war or peace, whether it’s right or wrong, if there is war, most people in this country think Mussolini is all washed up.
💛 **Enjoyed this post?** Your support helps us continue to transcribe and promote Ernie’s work. Please click the link below to donate.