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You are here: Home / Politics / Anatomy of a meme: Mussolini in 1938, threshing grain, and Trump at McDonald’s 86 years later

Anatomy of a meme: Mussolini in 1938, threshing grain, and Trump at McDonald’s 86 years later

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Mussolini, then and now

Although it’s not yet gone hugely viral, there’s a meme of Benito Mussolini harvesting grain in the 1930s as a historical example of Donald Trump’s modern “common man” (or should I say “woman”) propaganda at a closed McDonald’s. The Mussolini photo is often paired with one of Trump.

The act is historically accurate.

Today’s image of Mussolini is probably not real based on contemporaneous imagery. Note the differences in the sunglasses and cap above*. Bausch and Lomb did not sell aviator glasses to U.S. civilians until 1937.

However, unlike Trump’s performance in a closed McDonald’s, Mussolini was actually working and getting dirty as you can see in the clip below.

In a photo from the 1938 propaganda extravaganza, Associated Press writes:

Dictator Benito Mussolini took part in the inauguration of the wheat threshing season in the reclaimed Pontine Marshes. He made a speech to assembled peasants, told them prophecies of very poor harvest were ill-founded and exaggerated, then stripped to the waist, joined in the threshing of the wheat himself. Benito Mussolini, stripped to the waist, addressing an audience at Aprilia, in the Pontine Marshes, Agraromano, Italy, on July 6, 1938. (AP Photo)

AP footage follows:

A history lesson

We need to understand the context for Mussolini’s working in Italian swamps-turned-fields.

On 24 December 1928 Italy’s fascist regime launched “Mussolini’s Law”, a fourteen-yearnational land reclamation programme aimed at turning Italy’s ‘deathinducing’ swamps into fertile agricultural land (Desideri 1981). The Pontine Marhses,a marshland spreading across 75,000 hectares south of Rome was given top priority as an area that should be given over to agricultural production (Sottoriva 1977)…

[In the process] filmmaking became part and parcel of the process of socially constructing an ideal fascist nature… The fascist regime saw the creation of a new physical and social landscape in the Pontine Marshesas, a genuine modernising project… Once the first phase of land reclamation was over, newsreels glorified the perfect fertile landscapes that replaced the marshes…

Another newsreel, shot in the mid 1930s, documents Mussolini himself threshing wheat in the Pontine Marshes alongside local farmers.

Thus Mussolini was reinforcing the benefits of an expensive 10-year program of draining actual swamps. He was dressed for the event.

Trump, on the other hand, was playing out a personal vendetta against Democratic presidential candidate and current vice president Kamala Harris. From September:

Donald Trump just can’t stop talking about Kamala Harris working at McDonald’s…

Trump, whose first job as the son of a real estate mogul was investing in real estate, seemingly cannot tolerate this bullet point on Harris’s résumé, and has latched on to right-wing conspiracy theories that it was a lie. The former president has become so obsessed with trying to discredit Harris’s job experience that he told a crowd of his supporters he would try out working at McDonald’s for the day.

Trump didn’t “work” at McDonald’s for an hour, much less a day. He was improperly dressed. From McDonald’s corporate:

It’s our policy that hats should be worn by all food handlers. Hair must be kept under the hat and away from the face, and styled or tied back so that it is close to the head. Hairnets may be required for hairstyles that do not fit completely under the hat.

And he didn’t work with McDonald’s employees. Or serve real customers.

But he sure as heck generated favorable headlines, as mass media continue to fall for Trump’s propaganda and framing.

TV News headlines

Impromptu news conference? You’re kidding, AP, right?
 


NOTE: If your Google-foo is better than mine, and you find a source for the meme-worthy image of Mussolini, say so in the comments and I’ll edit the post!

* Large billed caps weren’t a thing in the 1930s.

Look back at old ballpark photos, and you’ll often see rows upon rows of fans in suits, with the only hats being fedoras, trilbies and pork pies.

That’s because in the 1930s, caps looked like this.

 
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