After the Merry-Go-Round?

In the rich Po Valley and on the sunlit Roman plains, a strike call went out last week to 400,000 braccianti (landless farmhands). They wanted a nationwide contract, with better pay and job security, between their unions and the landowners. Months of collective bargaining had ended in deadlock--and Italy's most disturbing disorders since the Red riots of early 1948.

In some areas Communist agitators armed with guns and clubs rode out of cities in trucks to patrol country roads, force the braccianti into the strike. At Molinella, northeast of Bologna, they ambushed farmhands going to the fields, tangled savagely with carabinieri who came to the rescue. In the melee, a Red woman worker was shot dead. Twenty-seven anti-Red workers went to the hospital. One moaned: "Will it never end? Can one never work in peace?"

Not Today but Tomorrow. Communism in Italy was fishing diligently in the troubled waters of economic discontent. But it had no present hope of the great catch which seemed within its grasp a little more than a year ago. Then it had threatened to sweep the national elections and engulf democracy. Now it was in retreat, fighting guerrilla actions, terrorizing farmhands, harassing production, sniping at the Christian Democratic government of Premier Alcide de Gasperi.

A measure of the Red retreat was the steady decline in Communist Party membership (from 2,500,000 to 2,000,000 within the past six months). The party's prestige and influence had faded notice ably in its stronghold, the trade unions. "Today there is not much chance for us," admitted a Communist central committeeman in Rome last week. Then he added: "All we are doing is preparing for tomorrow." And the best hope for a Red tomorrow still lay in the plight of Italy's ill-paid, ill-fed, ill-housed masses.

Not Fear but Firmness. Christian Democrat de Gasperi understood the Red game. He also understood that democracy's first job had been to curb communism as a brass-knuckled force beyond the law. Despite Red violence in the farmhands' strike, he had established his government's authority.

In the past twelvemonth the nation's psychological climate had changed significantly. A bustle of hopeful activity hummed up & down Petrarch', "fair land which Apennines cut in twain "' seas and Alps surround." After a worrisome winter drought, the cypress groves of Tuscany and the rocky pastures of the south were turning a promising green under welcome rains. Along the Via Appia, middle-class families spread picnic lunches of bread, salami and strong red wine. From Venice to Capri hotels and restaurants looked forward to a season of 2,000,000 tourists, bringing American dollars and British pounds. The springtime wave of foreigners already crowded the sidewalk cafes of Rome's gay Via Veneto.

Along these same Roman sidewalks, in 1948's spring, Red mobs had marched with clenched fists and Marxist hymns. Last week the proprietor of a jewelry shop on the Piazza Colonna could say: "When the Reds called their last general strike [in February], they came to me and said,, 'You better close down.' I told them,

'You better not be here when the celere [riot squads] start moving.' They went away and I stayed open."

Into the Vacuum. The celere were the government's answer to the roughhouse tactics of Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti and his chief bullyboy, Luigi Longo. The man who found the answer is De Gas-peri's Minister of Interior, swarthy, bald, little Mario Scelba. When Scelba took office, he was an unknown Sicilian lawyer. Today, after De Gasperi, he is probably the government's best-known figure. He has met Communist force with the only language it understands: a superior force.

From the Italian regular army (limited by the Allies to 185,000), Scelba shifted strong cadres of officers and men into the carabinieri (limited by the Allies to 65,000), a sort of National Guard with headquarters in every village and town. He also strengthened the police with a large cadre of carabinieri. The total of his security force is a state secret, but a good guess is 200,000. Carabinieri and police recently gave an instructive example of their technique when the Communists tried to organize riots against the Atlantic pact in Rome's Piazza di San Silvestro.

Red "agitprops" (agitation and propaganda specialists) were on the scene early in the morning, starting small arguments, berating the police, skillfully attracting curious bystanders to the square. By late afternoon, the tiny piazza buzzed with angry, gesticulating mobsters and merely curious people, milling around a dozen brown jeeps filled with police. At a given signal from the lead jeep, drivers let in their clutches. The crowds began to retreat. The jeeps plunged ahead, picking up speed in an ever-widening circle which Italians now call "Scelba's merry-goround." Screaming pedestrians jostled each other madly to escape as the jeeps ran along the sidewalks. Their expert drivers ran no one down. Within ten minutes the square was empty except for the jeep crews.

Out of the Vacuum. Economically, Italy is better off today than a year ago. The level of output for 1948 stood 7% above 1947. Steel led the climb, with a 23% increase over the previous year's 1,691,400 tons; auto production increased from 32,000 cars and trucks to 54,000. Rationing has been lifted from all products except bread and pasta (macaroni), but the overall price level has risen only 2%. Hard fiscal measures have slowed galloping inflation to a walk.

ECAid, supervised by peppery, plain-spoken EGA Chief James D. Zellerbach, has given the economy a $555 million shot-in-the-arm in its first year. Without American foodstuffs and raw materials, as Premier de Gasperi admits, his government might not have survived.

The death of Fascism has released an amazing outburst of creative energy. Italian sculptors, painters, writers, cinema-makers have given postwar Europe some of its finest artistic achievement. Explained Director (Shoeshine) Vittorio De Sica: "It's not just accident that we make good movies. Living under Fascism was like living in a vacuum. We have been released, our people are going ahead."

The release extends to practical living.

All over the country people are improvising and working out new patterns of living from the ashes of the past. Gaunt Libero Borrini, 62, a Milanese handyman who was bombed out of his home during the war, has created a notable housing project out of rubble. In 1946, on a.piece of stateowned wasteland outside Milan, Borrini built a small, one-story house for his nephew. He got a brick here and a tile there from the debris of Allied air raids. He fashioned a roof from broken glass panels, plastered the walls with a compound made mostly of earth.

Borrini then built a house for himself, but sold it to a homeless family. He built another & another, each for himself yet always sold to a poor family for $300 or less. Now Borrini's "village" has 600 residents in 106 houses; 43 more buildings are underway. There is no church yet, but Borrini hopes to put up a small Madonna. "Who," he asks, "will protect us if we have no Madonna?"

The Underprivileged. Borrini's village is a reminder to Milanese of the steep cliffs that lie ahead in democracy's path. Italy's economy has yet to find a place for 2,000,000 unemployed, opportunities for a population expanding at the rate of 1,300 daily, a better life for the underprivileged masses.

The most disturbing economic fact of De Gasperi's Italy is the almost hopeless poverty of such people as hunchbacked Lucia Ladanca, a Potenza housewife who lives with her tuberculous husband and eight-year-old son Bruno in a fetid tenement not far from the well-stocked stores of Milan's main avenues. "My husband used to be a street sweeper," she says, "but you can't go on for long when you cough up blood. If they would take Bruno at school, he'd at least get one good meal a day. But he can't go to school. He has no shoes. If I get him shoes, then he has no trousers. If I get him trousers, then he has no shoes. We are never able to get him both at once. So he's growing up ignorant. What's worse, he's hungry."

Hunger reaches everywhere. A Roman schoolteacher must support a family of seven on a wage of $1 a week. A university student hungers for a future; there are many who wonder if they will graduate to a clerk's or a laborer's job, because there is nothing else. Among the statali (civil servants) there is sullen complaint: "Eighty percent of us get less money than a garbage collector."

The poverty of the peasants poses the stiffest challenge of all. In the barren south, not far inland from Bari, landless laborers pass by on foot, bicycle and donkeyback; heads down, they look neither right nor left. An angry, red-cheeked young priest, Don Vittorio Sabatelli, says: "It tears one's heart to go into their hovels. They live like pigs. I tell you, there are people here, four or five of them, who own three to five thousand hectares and there are thousands of workers in pitiful conditions like this. We need reform."

The Unreformed. The cry for land reform is sharpened by the spectacle of latifondiari like pompous Cerardo Scafa-rella, an absentee owner of 10,000 hectares (24,710 acres) near Potenza. The rents paid by 700 peasants who till his estate permit him to live richly in one of the city's stone palaces.

His tenants have tiny, scabrous stone cottages, with squealing pigs on the first floor and families of six to ten in the single room above. Most suffer from malaria. Each tenant tills up to 15 hectares, pays roughly one-third of his income in rental. The average wheat crop is about four bushels per hectare (the U.S. average is 45 bushels). The soil is badly eroded. The tenants have never heard of insecticides; few know of any fertilizer other than manure, which they rarely use. They cannot afford plows; instead they hammer at the wretched soil with picks.

Scafarella shows no sympathy. "We aren't concerned with production," he says. "We collect rents. Anyway, the peasants are retrograde. If we built clean, good homes, they'd only dirty them."

The latifondiari (.08% of landholders own 22% of Italy's arable land) are an anachronistic obstacle in democracy's advance. But they are only one aspect of land reform. Two years ago the late idealistic Prince Gioacchino Ruffo of Naples sold plots from his estate, at nominal prices, to former tenants. Today, like Scafarella's peasants, they too break arid, gullied soil with picks. They have no cash for better tools, insecticides and fertilizers. Without these necessities they can reap only four bushels of wheat per hectare. The only hunger that has been satisfied has been their hunger for land.

The Communists have exploited the peasants' land hunger for political ends. De Gasperi has countered with the slogan, "We must have land reform, but first we must develop our land." Last summer ECAgriculturists revived the old Fascist program of land reclamation (as it was carried out in the Pontine Marshes) as a sensible way to more productivity and less agrarian discontent. With U.S. prodding and financial help, three districts are being reclaimed; eventually they will account for one-third of the nation's arable land, provide cheap plots for the landless.

Reclamation is not the answer as far as the moderate Socialists in De Gasperi's government are concerned. Led by highbrowed Giuseppe Saragat, this faction has pressured the Christian Democrats toward a new plan of land redistribution by progressive stages. Some 8,760 landholders would be affected. The state would buy up to 50% of the big holdings for resale, on easy terms, to small peasants. In the face of latifondiari resistance, the program will be hard to put over.

Firmer & Faster. For Premier de Gasperi nothing has been achieved without difficulty. He and his ministers have had to learn all the way. They came without experience from political obscurity in the Fascist era to posts of heavy responsibility. They have displayed shrewd political talent, but they still tend to approach economic problems as scholarly theorists rather than as practical politicians. They know that Italy's hope lies in improved farming methods and more industrialization, but they are not able to move fast enough toward their goals. Said one high-ranking American in Rome: "Unless we do more than we have in the past year, unless we move faster, we might as well walk out of here in 1953 [when EGA ends] and let the Communists take over."

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