1944 Coscia Anti-American Fascist Propaganda, World War II

This is a large-format 1944 Dante Coscia Italian fascist, anti-American propaganda poster. Intended to instill fear of the U.S. and Allied occupation of Italy, the poster stokes anti-Black racism, a common theme in Italian fascist propaganda, especially as the regime's control of the Italian Peninsula was slipping.

A Closer Look

The poster features a seated African-American man in an Uncle Sam outfit whose feet are being scrubbed by an Italian man. Uncle Sam's menacing grimace and clawed fingers, one hand looming over Europe on an adjacent globe, reinforce the conspicuous message. The poster is designed to threaten Italian masculinity, as the Italian man is forced to clean Uncle Sam's shoes as his family watches in shame, and Uncle Sam appears to be eyeing his wife. The full caption beneath the illustration reads: 'Free America promises dollars and work to Italians; but if 12 million of its unemployed workers live on subsidies, what work can it give to the vanquished people if not servitude and dishonor?'

Dante Coscia and Italian Fascist Propaganda

Dante Coscia (1912 - 1986) was one of a group of prolific Italian propagandists of the World War II era whose dramatic, richly-colored chromolithographic prints lent power to the blunt messaging of the fascist regime. Coscia was similar in style and ideology to the better-known illustrator Gino Boccasile (1901 - 1952) and, like Boccasile, appears to have been a true believer in Mussolini, following the dictator until the end of the war. (Boccasile even joined the Nazi Italian Division of the Nazi S.S.) Both artists developed a penchant for anti-American propaganda that drew heavily on Italians' racial anxieties as well as widespread distaste for perceived American decadence, materialism, and usurious exploitation of Europe in the years after the First World War. Despite their wartime activities and Boccasile's brief arrest at the end of the war, after which he was 'blacklisted' and reduced to sketching pornography, both artists appear to have rebounded quickly and had successful postwar careers producing apolitical works, especially advertising.

Historical Context

Although the exact date (month and day) of this work's production is unknown, Italian fascism was already facing an existential crisis at the start of the year marked here, 1944. The Allies had already captured Sicily, bombed Rome, crossed the Straits of Messina, and were fighting their way up the Italian Peninsula. On July 24-25, 1943, plots involving King Vittorio Emanuele III and opponents of Mussolini in the Italian government were enacted, bringing down Mussolini as the country's Prime Minister and placing him under arrest. Now, with Pietro Badoglio heading the government, secret armistice negotiations with the Allies began and were formalized in early September. At this point, Italy formally stopped fighting the Allies, while the Germans vowed to continue fighting any Allied offensives on the peninsula.

Italian troops behind the frontlines were forcibly disarmed by the Germans, who also launched a daring airborne raid on the prison holding Mussolini to free him and undertook increasingly brutal anti-insurgency campaigns throughout the parts of Italy they occupied. Meanwhile, the Allies continued to fight a grinding and costly campaign against well-entrenched, mostly German defenders. By December, Mussolini headed a new rump fascist state dubbed the Italian Social Republic, better known as the Republic of Salò after its de facto capital. Surrounded by true believers and defended, as best possible, by the Germans, Mussolini clung to power over constantly diminishing territory until the last days of the war, when he was captured and executed by partisans on April 28, 1945.

As the situation of the fascists was increasingly desperate, their propaganda became increasingly shrill. The supposed dangers of Allied occupation were regularly emphasized, with the Black soldiers in Allied armies being a frequent target of racist fearmongering. Italians of the era were accustomed to this sort of imagery; Mussolini's followers were proudly racist and had particular ire for Black Africans, given the country's difficult and costly attempt to conquer Ethiopia in the mid-1930s. These animosities drew on much deeper anxieties about Italy's own racial heritage, being closely tied with North Africa and the rest of the Mediterranean world.

Coscia most likely was referring obliquely to the 92nd Infantry Division, also known as the 'Buffalo Soldiers,' a segregated unit that was the only African-American Army unit to see combat in Europe during the war. (For a brief period late in the war, the division included the reassigned 442nd 'Nissei' Infantry Regiment, a segregated unit of Japanese-Americans that remains the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.) The division's fighting in Italy was the subject of the 2008 Spike Lee film Miracle at St. Anna. Other 'colored' Allied units also participated in the Italian Campaign, including French colonial troops and the Brazilian Expeditionary Force.

Publication History and Census

This work was drawn by fascist propagandist Dante Coscia. It is dated simply 'XXII,' meaning the 22nd year of the fascist era, or 1944. It is only noted among the institutional holdings of the Boston Athenaeum, Princeton University, and the Wolfsonian Collection at Florida International University. However, it is possible that examples are also held in some Italian institutions.