Early in May 1921, eighteen months before the March on Rome, Mussolini had received a telegram from a group of Italians in New York, most of them members of a shooting club. 'The first Italian fascio in the United States', it said, 'today salutes the fasci of Italy!' The 1920s and early 1930s saw a flowering of pro-Mussolini associations and newspapers among the four and a half million Italians living in the US, eager to celebrate their italianita and to praise the man they held responsible for saving from the Bolsheviks a homeland they remember with sentimental nostalgia. Many were ultra-Catholic, hostile to newcomers, ignorant about what Italy had turned into since they emigrated, and delighted to abandon, as instructed, 'barbaric dialects, worthy of Harlem negroes or the slum dwellers of London'. Italian consulates across the country acted as cover for Bocchini's men, while Italo-American businessmen and banker, who had done well in their adopted country, willingly put money into training their young to march, sing 'Giovinezza' and raise their arms in the fascist salute. In New York 'well born' Italians ladies joined a women's fascio.Id. at 362-363.
John Roy Carlson, Under Cover: My Four Year in the Nazi Underworld of America--The Amazing Revelation of How Axis Agents and Our Enemies Within Are Now Potting to Destroy the United States (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943) (Yes, it can happen here? It almost did in the 1930s and 1940s.).
