Running head: STUDENT CENTERED LEARNING 1

STUDENT NAMES
Mussolini - MASTER PACKET

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with “Master Packet 2 -> YOUR DICTATOR’S NAME”.
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Group Directions:
3. If you are using multiple sources within each EV box, please make sure that YOU
CITE EACH AND EVERY SOURCE DIRECTLY AFTER YOU COPY THE QUOTES.
4. Make sure that you are copying WORD FOR WORD from packet 1.
5. For each question, make sure that EVs 1 & 2 are 2 different pieces of
information that answer the question.
6. See the handout in Research Project Folder in English 9 HOnors HOs folder
entitled “Master Packet #2 Dictator Groups Assignment Directions” for additional
information/directions.

Assertion 1 Idea: The Rise of Benito Mussolini

ASS 1, Q1: How did Mussolini rise to power?

Box 1 EV1: The impact of World War II accelerated the decomposition of liberal, middle-class politics
in Italy. The country was suffering as early as 1917 when it was gripped by widespread industrial
strikes over rising prices and food shortages, fear of a communist revolution thanks to events in Russia,
and a crushing military defeat for the Italian forces at Caporetto in October. Victory in World War I also
left most Italians bitter because the Allies subsequently refused to grant Italy territories promised to it to
bring the nation into the war. After 1918 the country was overwhelmed by a host of social and
economic problems: urban unemployment, high rents for tenant farmers in the north, land-hunger
among peasant farmers in the south, spiraling inflation, and increased violence. Neither Italy's
established liberal parties nor the structure of constitution could cope with the crisis. Mussolini
successfully exploited the sharp divisions that emerged, presenting his party as a force for peace by
breaking strikes and "disciplining" labor, and himself as a new kind of strong and efficient national
leader.
MORE--ABOUT THE ACTUAL HOW. HOW DID HE EXPLOIT THE DIVISIONS?

Source # Source 1
Citation: Edited by John Merriman and Jay Winter, Charles Scribner's Sons, Paragraph 1

Box 2 EV2: At the time of Mussolini's birth, most people in Italy were poor. The country had only
recently been joined together from many different independent states into one country ruled by a
king. A few rich people owned most of the land, and the poor people worked the fields for meager
wages and food. But this work didn't last all year, and people were suffering and unhappy with the
way their country was governed.” APPROVED
STUDENT CENTERED LEARNING 2

Source #: Source 2
Citation: Edited by: Barbara C. Bigelow PG #167

ASS 1, Q2: How did Mussolini gain support of the people?

Box 3 EV1:. One reason for this was that Mussolini had a great talent for composing catchy
headlines. His editorials, which appeared on the front page were thrilling. He wrote in a way that
was, to use his own terms, "electric" and "explosive." Mussolini's rhetoric often swept people off
their feet before they had a chance to think about what he was saying. He could be so "electric"
and "explosive" because he always adopted the most extreme, revolutionary position on any
question. Soon he was the leader of the left-wing socialists, and for a few years after 1912, he was
the de facto head of the entire Socialist Party. APPROVED

Source #: Source 4
Citation:Edited by Anne Commire, paragraph 6

Box 4 EV2: Mussolini spoke eloquently of his great love of Italy and his firm belief that Italy could
once again be great. He had an uncanny knowledge of what his audience wanted to hear, and he
gave them what they wanted--whether he actually believed what he was saying or not.
APPROVED
As a journalist, Mussolini used his own newspaper to inflame people with words and to mislead
them with half-truths about his own character and qualifications. He used the newspaper to build
up a picture of himself as a great man--and he himself came to believe that he was.

Source #: 6
Citation: People of the Holocaust, gale paragraph 11

ASS 1, Q3: How did Mussolini solidify power?

Box 5 EV1: This much-envied talent led Mussolini to desert the Socialist party in 1914 and to
cross over to the enemy camp, the Italian bourgeoisie. He rightly understood that World War I
would bury the old Europe. Upheaval would follow its wake. He determined to prepare for "the
unknown." In late 1914 he founded an independent newspaper, Popolo d'Italia, and backed it up
with his own independent movement (Autonomous Fascists). He drew close to the new forces in
Italian politics, the radicalized middle-class youth, and made himself their national spokesman.
Mussolini developed a new program, substituting nationalism for internationalism, militarism for
anti militarism, and the aggressive restoration of the bourgeois state instead of its revolutionary
destruction. He had thus completely reversed himself. The Italian working classes called him
"Judas" and "traitor." Drafted into the trenches in 1915, Mussolini was wounded during training
exercises in 1917, but he managed to return to active politics that same year.His newspaper,
which he now reinforced with a second political movement (Revolutionary Fascists), was his main
card; his talents and his reputation guaranteed him a hand in the game.
After the end of the war, Mussolini's career, so promising at the outset, slumped badly. He
organized his third movement (Constituent Fascists) in 1918, but it was stillborn. Mussolini ran for
office in the 1919 parliamentary elections but was defeated. Nonetheless, he persisted

Source #:Source 3
Citation: N\A , Paragraph 4-6

Box 6 EV2: “The following year, in October of 1922, Mussolini successfully "marched" on Rome.
But, in fact, the back door to power had been opened by key ruling groups..., whose support
STUDENT CENTERED LEARNING 3

Mussolini now enjoyed. These groups, economically desperate and politically threatened,
accepted Mussolini's solution to their crisis: mobilize middle-class youth, repress the workers
violently, and set up a tough central government to restore "law and order."

Source #: Source 1
Citation: N/A

Assertion 2 Idea: Mussolini Maintenance of Power

ASS 2, Q1: How did Mussolini improve/take steps to improve the economy?

Box 7 EV1: Following his successful resolution of the Matteotti crisis, Mussolini went from success
to success for the next dozen years. One of his greatest triumphs came in February 1929 when he
signed the Lateran Accords with the Catholic Church. Previously the Church's relationship with the
Italian government had been poor; indeed, Pope Pius IX had refused to recognize any Italian
government as legitimate after the latter took Rome away from him in 1870. Mussolini was an odd
person to bring about a reconciliation with Catholicism. He had never been a churchgoer, and in
his younger days had written heretical and atheistic pamphlets and even a novel about a
lecherous cardinal. Il Duce was shrewd enough, however, to realize the immense benefits his
regime would gain from an agreement with Pope Pius XI, and after long negotiations, a concordat
and treaty were signed. In return for one square mile of territory (Vatican City) and other
concessions, the pope recognized the official existence of the Italian state and proclaimed that
Mussolini was "the man whom God has sent us." After this settlement, Mussolini's prestige soared
both at home and abroad. As his popularity and confidence grew, so did his ambitions. He saw
himself as a new Caesar who would refound the Roman Empire. Indeed he proclaimed that the
acquisition of "empire" was central to the meaning of fascism and that Italy must expand or decay.
Choosing as his victim Ethiopia, one of the last independent countries in Africa, Mussolini invaded
in October 1935. Against Haile Selassie and the poorly armed Ethiopians, the duce authorized his
army to employ ruthless tactics, including a "policy of terror and extermination" and the use of
poison gas. The League of Nations, set up in 1919 and a forerunner of the United Nations,
condemned this unprovoked aggression and voted for economic sanctions against Italy. This only
led to a backlash of patriotic fervor among Italians who rallied around their embattled leader. In
May 1936, Mussolini's armies conquered Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

Source #:Source 4
Citation: Anne Commire, paragraph 18-20

Box 8 EV2:

Source #: INSERT SOURCE #

Citation: AUTHOR, PG #

ASS 2, Q2: How did Mussolini maintain control over the people/manipulate the people to
maintain control?

Box 9 EV1:Mussolini's authority, however, did not spring simply from the machinery of dictatorial
control. Besides skills at political maneuvering such as those that had brought him to power and
STUDENT CENTERED LEARNING 4

had seen him through the Matteotti crisis, he possessed substantial charisma due to his oratorical
abilities and the general force of his personality. When Mussolini spoke, he always gave the
impression of absolute sincerity, decisiveness, and toughness. This lent an extraordinary authority
to his words and made them sound irrefutable. His speeches were declamatory in style, consisting
mainly of short, staccato sentences; the official designation for this style was "lapidary," which
literally means "etched in stone." Mussolini used few gestures as he spoke, and if he did
gesticulate, he would immediately return to a pose of immobility. By adopting this style, Mussolini
deliberately set himself apart from the ordinary, highly animated Italian. The image Mussolini
wanted to project was one of rock-solid strength, someone in whom one could place total
confidence.

Source #:Source 4
Citation: N/A, Paragraph 15

Box 10 EV2:

Source #: INSERT SOURCE #

Citation: AUTHOR, PG #

Assertion 3: Mussolini Fall From Power

ASS 3, Q1: When did things begin to go terribly wrong for DICTATOR’S NAME?

Box 11 EV1:In 1940-1941 Mussolini's armies, badly supplied and impossibly led, strung their
defeats from Europe across the Mediterranean to the African continent. These defeats constituted
the full measure of Mussolini's bankruptcy. Italy lost its war in 1942; Mussolini collapsed 6 months
later. Restored as Hitler's puppet in northern Italy in 1943, he drove Italy deeper into the tragedy of
invasion, occupation, and civil war during 1944-1945. The end approached, but Mussolini
struggled vainly to survive, unwilling to pay the price for folly. The debt was discharged by a
partisan firing squad on April 28, 1945, at Dongo in Como province. In the end Mussolini failed
where he had believed himself most successful: he was not a modern statesman. His politics and
culture had been formed before World War I, and they had remained rooted there. After that war,
though land empire had become ossified and increasingly superfluous, Mussolini had embarked
on territorial expansion in the grand manner. In a moment when the European nation-state had
passed its apogee and entered decline (the economic depression had underscored it), Mussolini
had pursued ultranationalism abroad and an iron state within. He had never grasped the lines of
the new world already emerging. He had gone to war for more territory and greater influence when
he needed new markets and more capital. Tied to a decaying world about to disappear forever,
Mussolini was anachronistic, a man of the past, not the future. His Fascist slogan served as his
own epitaph: Non si torna indietro (There is no turning back). A 19th-century statesman could not
survive long in the 20th-century world, and history swept him brutally but rightly aside. In 2006
Guido Mussolini, one of the dictator's grandsons, demanded the exhumation of Mussolini's body.
Guido Mussolini, 69, asked for a judicial inquiry into his grandfather's death to find out the truth
about how he died. Other members of the family, most notably former model and then-politician
Alessandra Mussolini, argued against exhuming the body. Guido Mussolini, a worker in a cheese
factory, later denied requesting an exhumation, saying he had only called for a full investigation to
discover the name of his grandfather's killer.
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Source #: source 5
Citation: N/A, Paragraph 18-20

Box 12 EV2:

Source #: INSERT SOURCE #

Citation: AUTHOR, PG #

ASS 3, Q2: How does Mussolini die?

Box 13 EV1:

Source #: INSERT SOURCE #

Citation: AUTHOR, PG #

Box 14 EV2:

Source #: INSERT SOURCE #

Citation: AUTHOR, PG #