 The Columbia Broadcasting System presents One World Flight. We want work. We need work. We can't go on like this. They've got to give us work. You are listening to a street crowd in Rome, Italy, shouting into the microphone of Norman Corwin, a CBS playwright producer, during his visit to Italy in the course of his 37,000 mile global tour, as first winner of the One World Flight Award. These voices are among several authentic sounds and interviews recorded inside Italy to be heard on this seventh of a series of 13 broadcasts based on Mr. Corwin's trip. Not peace and work. If there is peace and work, there will be no war. Why does he think this condition exists? What does he hope to do? This is Norman Corwin. Not far from where these Romans crowded about us last summer, demanding work, crying for bread and peace. Not far from here, in another time of hunger and unemployment, Vanito Mussolini offered a way out. He stood on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia just up the street away and led them to believe that war was glorious, that democracy was a flop, that if they just handed over their liberties and kept their mouths shut, they would all be rich and well fed and happy. He led them to war for fascism, against Ethiopians and Spanish loyalists, against a collapsing France, and finally against us and our allies. Now, their duce, their empire, and a good many of their relatives and friends were dead. A lot of their country was smashed up, their jobs were thinned out, and their food was low. They had turned in desperation to fascism a generation ago, and now, after disaster heaped upon disaster, they were back in desperation. The scene of our sidewalk interview was a street in the heart of Rome's shopping district, hard by the cigarette black market. Around the corner from here, Italians were peddling American and English cigarettes and earning about 45 cents a day on good days. The following recording presents them at their trade. I was told that elsewhere in Rome, the black market was making the usual fat profit in essential commodities, especially food, but for cigarette salesman life was apparently hard. Here is a complaint about it. She says that they buy cigarettes to sell, and then the police and the MPs come along and take them away from them. There were many other complaints, complaints from a confused and bewildered people that Italy had been betrayed, that America, England and Russia had broken promises. In the recording which follows, you'll hear the phrase Paris Decisions, an allusion to the Paris Peace Conference, then current. He said that we made war with our soldiers and our partisans, and we threw off fascism, and now they are betraying us, preferring presumably to the Paris decision. Let's ask him to clear that up. Who is betraying? He said that all the countries are betraying Italy, that the English and the Russians and the Americans, he said we want triad. We want our borders before the war. America specifically was accused of breaking promises we had made over the shortwave radio. Before the war, we heard the American radio and the American promises. We want America to keep the promises she made before the war. We heard on the American radio the promise that Italy would not lose a single bit of her territory if she came over to the Allied side. Of course, just as Nazism did not end in Germany with the suicide of its bigwigs and the surrender of its armies, neither did 30 years of fascist education disappear in Italy when Mussolini was strung up by the heels. The impress of fascism is still on the minds of those who suffered under it, and this next recording demonstrates that fact. You will hear an Italian who, though his country was ravaged by war and left destitute in peace, could still blindly threaten a fascist remedy for the situation. Exactly how his threat would be carried out he didn't quite know, but he threatened anyway. If you don't treat us well today, we'll make the war tomorrow. Who will make the war on whom? Keep a look where a pot drop keeps. He says he doesn't know who will make it against whom. The depression, confusion and desperation reflected in this random group of Italians was a fair cross-section of what was going on all over Italy at that time. In the same week we recorded what you've just heard, these things happened. Amarbe attempted to lynch the prefect of Milan. There was a police strike in Como. Fist fights broke out in the newly elected constitutional assembly in Rome. The Treasury reported that the national deficit for the new fiscal year would total 150% of the national income. A deputy in the constituente charged that hundreds of fascists were coming out of jail under amnesty granted by the new government and were bragging openly that they had always been fascists and were proud of it. Amarbe and Garizia jaded allied offices in the street. The Italian General Confederation of Labor ordered a one-hour work stoppage as a symbol of Italy's attitude toward the Paris peace conference. Unemployment figures passed the two million mark. There was a national strike of hotel workers, another of petroleum workers and a threatened strike of street car workers. Right-wingers declared they were fearful that the country's troubles would turn her toward Russia. Left-wingers charged the government with attempting to turn the conventatorials accusing the allies of forgetting Italy's sacrifices to help defeat Germany. From Naples came reports of a new wave of highway banditry. Almost all of these incidents and disturbances were reflected in what these people said spontaneously into our microphone. For example, the last one. There are great many people who are without homes and roaming the streets and if the ports are not open to immigration there will be a wave of banditry in Italy. One man protested especially hard about the disposition of Trieste and proposed that Italy and Yugoslavia settle it between them. I asked what kind of settlement he had in mind and got this answer. So that's something for us to settle. Italy and Yugoslavia alone. The implication is that there'd be a fight about it. This belligerency was either an inheritance of fascism or a symptom of growing desperation or possibly both. In any case, there was ample evidence of the latter. The low people are dying. The senority, the gentleman, the aristocracy are living well. Italy is calling for work and they must give it. Again and again, Italians shouldered their way through the crowd to reach the microphone if only to speak a few words. My mother is an American and I am Italian. We are in Italy in very bad condition. There were so many trying to be heard pushing their way to the meager platform of the mic I held in my hand that I had trouble keeping them all from speaking at once and had to beg them several times to take turns. For about an hour we recorded and two things kept coming through insistently. First, that the people were poor and hungry and wanted work. Second, that in this situation they found themselves back where they were when they were led into fascism in 1920. One man explained, It says that we never did want fascism but we were forced into it by a minority that took advantage of our good faith. Members of the crowd kept referring to the early 1920s and pointing up the similarities. For us fascism is dead for a great amount of time but today we find the same situation as there was in Italy in the early 1920s. To them, issues were not complicated but stark in their simplicity. Not a matter of veto power or territorial mandate but a question of food and work. Again they pressed forward shouting and I had to ask them to speak one at a time. Tell them one at a time because it all comes out as a vote. He said no, they're not eating well and the man says there's little work, little bread, little to eat. As foreigners we had of course attracted this crowd with our microphone but otherwise the streets of Rome were fairly quiet at that time in spite of the latent turbulence of the people which only a few weeks later was to erupt in fatal rioting. It was still early in August, the sun was very hot. Romans who could afford to ride on the noisy little post-war buses really only motorcycles with a sort of trailer attachment headed for the beaches some 20 miles away. For most of the Allied occupation officers and the better off Italians, living wasn't bad at all. Good food, golf, swimming, the country club out toward the airport which Count Giano had built for his black shirt cronies, the parks, the museums, the fine music. Stores were full of wonderful goods from all over if you had the price. The city's classic remains, the shrines of tourism, the grandeur that was Rome were still untouched. Under a full moon in the warm Mediterranean night you could almost forget the recent events at Anzio and Casino beyond the hills to the south. At the open air opera set in the ruins of the baths of Caracalla you could almost forget listening to a magnificent performance of Aida that in the 70 years since Verdi's great opera was first produced Italy has had very little to sing about. What with a dozen major and minor depressions and seven wars, two of them world wars. One day I looked up the film writer Segio Amadei whose movie The Open City, a story of the resistance of Italian partisans, had won awards in a number of countries including the United States. Amadei is a pleasant, grain, good-looking man who speaks very carefully and earnestly. I had missed seeing The Open City in the States and he screened it for me in a projection room. Afterwards we had a long talk about the way the world looked from the standpoint of an anti-fascist Italian in whose work was already a symbol of his country's cultural rebirth. He was gloomy about the international situation. He believed that the United States as the most powerful nation in the world had therefore the greatest responsibility and he was afraid that the death of President Roosevelt had set us back dangerously. The interpreter by the way is John Meklin, CBS Rome correspondent. I felt within myself a disturbance, almost as a heart attack when I heard of the death of President Roosevelt because I felt that when Roosevelt died, there died a man who understood the problems of peoples and who understood these problems above the lesser problems of American politicians. I'm inclined to think that lacking this leadership and understanding there is a danger that Americans will forget their responsibilities in, if you will pardon the word, a drunkenness of victory. The people we talked to on the street were uneasy. Most of the intellectuals we met had qualms. I interviewed spokesmen for three parties, the action Christian Democrat and Communist. I requested but did not get to see a spokesman for the socialists. Hugo LaMalfa of the action party, a young, dark, intense man, received us in his apartment six flights up from a narrow street in the center of the city. His party, moderately right wing, had been badly beaten in recent elections. It now has only seven seats. LaMalfa was quick to acknowledge the seriousness of Italy's condition. There are millions of unemployed people in Italy today and it is very difficult, indeed, to imagine or to conceive a method by which these millions may be put to work. He said there was a peril of fascist resurgence in all of Europe if economic difficulties were not solved. The peril of a resurgimento of the fascist possibility in Europe depends always and the gain from the economic difficulties which Europe itself faces. Basic economic conditions, Mr. LaMalfa said, were the key not only to the survival of democracy in Europe but to the reconciling of East and West. However, he differed from most other Italians whom we interviewed in believing that the rebuilding of a strong Germany was essential to Europe's well-being and safety. There is a possibility of reconciling the system of the East with the system of the West. Naturally, this implies not alone the recovery within Italy itself but as well a recovery within Germany. I asked whether he meant by Germany's recovery a rebuilding of its full economic potential. Yes, I do mean also the development of this economic potential. We next interviewed the Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, in his office overlooking the busy Via Nationale. Mr. Togliatti, whose party polled two and a half million votes in the latest election, is a short, plain man, obviously at home with extemporaneous speech. He agreed that conditions were bad and said that in order to implement recovery, Italy, quote, might well take an example from the conduct of internal affairs in the United States under President Roosevelt, unquote. He said he did not mean a program of socialism but one in which the government, by aiding and working together with private initiative, could come toward the needs of the people. He then gave an example of what he meant. I would like to give an example which will illustrate this. In Italy, at the moment, there live hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who live without houses. In fact, who live in caverns. If you visit the beach of Austria, you will find bathing houses built there and made of cement. Now, it is noteworthy that in Italy itself the same cement is not used to build the houses for which these hundreds of thousands of people have such urgent need. The program of the Italian government, therefore, which in the first stages has procured the cement from America, should be to assure that this cement, which is brought from such a distance, is used for the benefit and the good of the common people rather than for the exclusive benefit of a privileged fuel. Mr. Togliatti then criticized another government policy concerning what he charged was the misuse of cotton imported from America and he went on to say, I have given two examples now of this policy. We, therefore, as members of the government, ask this, not that the Italian government should hinder or obstruct private initiative, but rather that it should stimulate it and control it in order that private initiative within Italy can be used for the betterment and the good of the common people. Our next interview was with the Italian Prime Minister, Alcide de Gasperi, leader of the middle of the road Christian Democratic Party, which has upwards of 200 seats in the government. We were received by Mr. de Gasperi in his large office in the Viminale Palace late one afternoon. Unlike the other party spokesman whom you've heard, he dealt in generalities, speaking of the common tragedy of fascism uniting all men of all creeds together. The Prime Minister charged that the press had too often become an instrument of misunderstanding by magnifying evils and failing to report what he called incidents of goodwill. In his only comment on the situation within Italy, he referred to dissatisfaction over the clauses of the Paris Treaty as a love delusion and hoped that friendship between the Allies and Italy would not for long be impaired. If public opinion in Italy today is somewhat embittered at the course of events, it is only because we are not able to link up this sense of friendship which we have so far seen in you with the clauses what is now happening in the Treaty of Greece. The Treaty of Greece and the diplomatic clauses of the Treaty. But in any case, it is, in any case, a question of, well, a love delusion. We can get over it and that in the end our friendship and your friendship with us. One day we climbed into a jeep and drove over the Appian Way up into the Albani Mountains to the shattered village of Lanuvio. The village had figured in the fighting. Its houses were blasted. The graceful old church with its picture book companyly had a dozen shell holes through it. The condition of the people was especially pitiful. Typical was a hungry family of ten living among casks, cobwebs, dust and vermin in an abandoned wine cellar with the stray garlands of onions hanging from the ceiling and a horse taking up most of the floor space. Ground space really for there was no floor. As in Rome, the people were not at all hesitant about speaking. All except little Mario, aged 15, he was shy and he stood well back in the group of villagers who crowded about our jeep. He was shy because he had only one foot, the stump of the other being exposed because he had no shoes. We finally got him to talk though. He said he'd lost his foot in the same shell explosion which killed six members of his family. He was 11 and six died. Who were the six? Chieri, 56. The Nomi? No, no, you know me. Chieri, Thaddele, Sarelli. My mother and father, three sisters and a brother. I asked a lean, bronzed, 20-year-old construction worker who was rebuilding his own home with the help of Anna what he got to eat every day and he told our interpreter. For breakfast you'll have bread and a tomato. For lunch you'll have a soup and for dinner he has bread and a tomato. Every day is the same. Every day it is pretty much the same. It was here that we met Camilla, the widow whose story is no sadder than that of millions of victims of war, DPs, Jews, Poles, Chinese all the way around the world, yet whose voice somehow illuminates and symbolizes the suffering that we find so hard to read into the cold statistics. And how big is her family? How big is her family? She had three children, two have died and she has one alive now. Two of them were killed in the bombardment. Now, what about her husband? Her husband was killed in the same bombardment. All of them died together. Two children and a husband. I see, so she has one child left. She lost her father and her husband as well as two children and about ten relatives, close relatives and all. I asked what she got to eat. She said she never ate any breakfast. For lunch she ate a thin soup and for dinner a piece of bread. Can she not afford to eat more or is there not enough food available? It's because she has no money and the situation is so bad that she sort of farms her little boy out to various relatives who can feed him a little better every now and then. And what are her hopes for an improvement in this condition? It's very difficult to say. She has no idea at all what hope to look for, what she can hope to look for. Listening to all this was the young mayor of the town, Hercules Fretzi. He had been working and he was in his shirt sleeves, unshaven, sweating from the heat of the day and covered with dust from the rubble of the streets. I asked him a few questions. Now, how old are you, Mr. Fretzi? One son, how old are you? Twenty-nine. Twenty-nine years old. And how long have you been mayor? Twenty-nine. Six months. What is your political affiliation? The crowd partida. Partido comunista. Communist party. How long have you been a communist? Quanto tempo se le comunista? Circa due anni. About two years. Why did he join that party? Perchia, se comunista. Comunista, perché so lavoratore? Because he is a worker. The young mayor, who won the election by a margin of nine votes, spoke at length about conditions in Linovio and in Italy and in the world and he made a statement to our interpreter which he translated as follows. He has asked the United Nations to get together to form a really lasting peace because the Italian people do not want war and he went on to explain at great length that he thinks the United Nations should do their utmost to control those nations who would like to have more and more wars. The Italian people definitely do not want them. Again, as in Rome, the people of Linovio asked mainly for work. They asked for it even above food. Almost invariably, I had to draw from them the fact that they were eating too little but they were always ready to volunteer their anxiety for work. Such a one was a neighbor of Camellias by the arresting name of Spartacus Peace. He told our interpreter to tell us... In Italy we still have dignity left. We asked the United Nations whether they'd be the Allies rather whether they'd be Americans or the English or wherever else there may be that instead of just sending us a charity or that they assist us to get work. And so it went in the big city and in the mountain village. The hunger, the weariness of war, the yearning for work and for the security and dignity that come off work. Spartacus Peace was not laughed at by his neighbors when he said solemnly we still have dignity left and they had idealism left too, some of them. They had completed an agonizing cycle from desperation to fascism to desperation but on the way some of them had learned that their plight like that of every troubled population anywhere was a world problem, not a local one that whether democracy survives or perishes in any corner of the world be it a port town in Indonesia or a shattered village in the Albany Mountains that was the concern of all of us. It was a hero of the Italian anti-Nazi resistance fighters Rodolfo Benvenuto Tonego who to me best represented what that understanding was in Italy. This man who rose to be chief of the partisans through his valor and skill had never heard of Wendell Wilkie or the phrase One World. Not much news or information got through to them in their mountain hideouts but the idea of One World got through on its own and in Rome one night Sonego told us about it. You'll hear the interpretation as it was pieced together. That's what we used to see when we were lost in the mountains in heavy snow and rain. Nobody to protect us but the stars. Every one of us said why isn't there One World, One Flag under which we can all march and be united. That is why we have been fighting and that is why we believe and we sincerely believe that all the world should be very simply unified under One Flag because we do not want to keep on fighting for separate flags for several separate colors but for one flag and one color throughout the world. Sonego was ready to admit that it might be some time before the world would be very simply unified but he was determined that he would work for that day. In the meanwhile, such idealism as his in Italy grows if it grows at all in the dark. Hungry and jobless men look upon these ideas as a luxury, a dream to be afforded and indulged only on a full stomach. All they know right now is that they are back where they started so badly twenty-seven years ago and they ask what the victorious democracies are going to do about it. You have been listening to Norman Corwin, first winner of the Wendell Wilkie One World Flight Award in the seventh of a series of broadcasts based on his recent 37,000 mile global tour. All recorded voices heard on this broadcast were transcribed in Italy. Next week at the same time, One World Flight visits Egypt. Tonight's musical score was composed and directed by Alexander Sandler. Guy Dela Choppo was associate director. This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System.