Lee Lawrie's statue of Atlas out there on Fifth Avenue looked enough like Mussolini to draw an angry mob in 1937. They picketed.

Unlike most angry mobs, they had a point.

Atlas does look like Mussolini: the imperial glowering pout and eyes bulging with macho, the inflated chest, and the projection of power. He looks like a damned bully. With the world on his shoulders he suggests a parallel, to me, to Chaplin's Great Dictator toying with his global balloon.

Daniel Okrent notes that the Rockefellers were 'pen-pals' with Mussolini during the construction and dedication of the Palazzo d'Italia, and runs a photo of Mussolini approving a scale model of Rockefeller Center in Rome. As late as 1934 the fascist Italian government could be looked on as not-entirely-bad by Fortune magazine, when they ran an entire issue on Mussolini's reforms and big-chested projection of power. Of course in the run-up to the outbreak of war, various American players placed speculative bets on various European players in a way that may seem shocking now.

 

The outbreak of World War II for the US brought fast changes to the Palazzo d'Italia. According to Okrent, it was December 12, 1941. Attilo Piccirilli had done two elaborate backlit green-glass-block murals for the building, one of which, "Youth Leading Industry," is still in place, and the other, "Advance Forever Eternal Youth" ("Sempre Avanti Eterna Giovinezza") was disassembled, vanished, and replaced.

But there's fascist imagery all over Rockefeller Center.

(more to come)