How a Socialist Gave Birth to Fascism -March 23, 1919

On March 23, 1919, a former socialist journalist named Benito Mussolini gathered a small, fractious crowd in a Milan piazza and gave birth to fascism, a movement so contradictory in its early program that nobody was quite sure what it stood for. Richard Backus traces the birth of one of history’s most consequential political movements, asking not just what happened, but who paid for it, who looked the other way, and what the men who thought they could control Mussolini actually built.