Christopher Columbus is widely considered one of the greatest villains ever to set foot in the Americas. His crimes have been extensively documented by modern historians, and even his contemporaries were so disgusted by his behavior that he was returned to Spain to stand trial for his crimes as a governor in the so-called “New World.”

The myth of Columbus as a heroic explorer has been shattered, in Chicago as everywhere else. In July 2020, massive protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd led to the removal of the city’s public monuments to Columbus in Grant Park and Arrigo Park. The city announced earlier this year that these monuments will not be returned to public display.

The defense of Columbus represents a reactionary effort by a small minority of Chicagoans to launder the reputation of a murderer. This group seeks to use public land and funds to push a regressive, sanitized version of a history of unrelenting violence and oppression. The people of Chicago expressed their will that statues honoring Columbus be removed from the city’s parks, and the city’s elected officials have ratified that decision through peaceful, deliberative, and democratic action.

Unfortunately, another monument that advances that exact same mission of intimidation and historical whitewashing is still on display in Chicago to this day. It was gifted to the city by Benito Mussolini himself, and it lionizes a key architect of the original fascist movement in Italy: Italo Balbo.

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Italo Balbo started his political career after World War I as an organizer of the fascist Blackshirts in Ferrara, where he and his men spent years terrorizing and murdering agricultural workers for attempting to unionize. He trained fascist thugs as strikebreakers, and they used extreme violence to reassert control of the countryside on behalf of wealthy landowners. Balbo himself was accused of ordering the brutal murder of anti-fascist priest Giovanni Minzoni, though he was acquitted of the crime in an Italian court after Mussolini took power.

In 1922, Balbo helped orchestrate Mussolini’s March on Rome, in which the future Duce threatened to launch a civil war unless the king of Italy appointed him as Prime Minister. The king relented, and Mussolini proceeded to use the power of the police and military to terrorize his enemies and establish an authoritarian state. Balbo was rewarded for his loyalty with a position as a member of Mussolini’s inner circle (a quadrumvir on the so-called “Grand Council of Fascism”) and as the head of Italy’s Royal Air Force, where he developed the country’s military air power in preparation for the Second World War. In a leadership shakeup in 1933, Mussolini appointed Balbo as Governor-General of Libya. He served there until his death in 1940, when poorly trained Italian forces shot down his plane in the mistaken belief that it was a British bomber. Allegations that Mussolini orchestrated Balbo’s death are unsubstantiated and likely untrue.

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In 1933, Balbo personally flew across the Atlantic Ocean from Italy to Chicago, arriving with a fleet of twenty-four amphibious aircraft to visit the Chicago World’s Fair. The spectacle was well-received by the public, especially the Italian-American community of the city, and Mussolini saw it as an opportunity to propagandize in favor of fascism.

The following year, Mussolini shipped a Roman column to Chicago to commemorate the flight. On the base of the column, he wrote the following words in English and Italian (emphasis added): 

THIS COLUMN 
TWENTY CENTURIES OLD
ERECTED ON THE BEACH OF OSTIA 
PORT OF IMPERIAL ROME 
TO SAFEGUARD THE FORTUNES AND VICTORIES 
OF THE ROMAN TRIREMES
FASCIST ITALY BY COMMAND OF BENITO MUSSOLINI
PRESENTS TO CHICAGO 
EXALTATION SYMBOL MEMORIAL 
OF THE ATLANTIC SQUADRON LED BY BALBO
THAT WITH ROMAN DARING FLEW ACROSS THE OCEAN 
IN THE 11TH YEAR 
OF THE FASCIST ERA.

The text has since worn away from the base, but the monument has remained in Burnham Park for over ninety years. During Balbo’s visit to Chicago, the city chose to further honor Balbo by renaming Seventh Street as “Balbo Drive,” a fact that made Mussolini extremely jealous. Balbo’s flight drew explicit comparisons to Christopher Columbus at the time, and the statue of Columbus that formerly stood in Grant Park was dedicated in Balbo’s presence during the World’s Fair in 1933.

Balbo died before the United States entered the war in December 1941, so he never featured in anti-Axis propaganda as one of Mussolini’s vile toadies. This is likely what allowed the monument to slip through the cracks in the country’s united opposition to and hatred of European fascism.

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Some of the positive characteristics extolled by Balbo’s defenders are not complete fabrications. By all historical accounts, Balbo was personable, courageous, adventurous, and sincere. He criticized Mussolini’s turn toward anti-Semitism, and he believed Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany was a strategic mistake. He had a complicated relationship with Mussolini, and his political disagreements with the Duce became more pronounced in the final years of his life.

Fortunately for Balbo, his position in the regime afforded him the luxury of criticizing Mussolini in public. His victims in Ferrara and throughout Italy were not granted the same liberty. The crimes of the legions of jackboots he commanded are extensively documented, and Balbo is likely guilty of many acts of violence that don’t appear in the historical record. He also played a key role in amassing the fighters and bombers that later killed thousands of Allied servicemen as they liberated North Africa, Sicily, Naples, and Rome from fascist tyranny.

Balbo spent his term as a supposedly ‘moderate’ governor of Libya preoccupied with a project to ship tens of thousands of Italian settlers to the colony and eventually displace the colonized. He dreamt of an Italian empire stretching across the Mediterranean and East Africa, unconcerned with the ultimate fate of the non-citizen Arab, Berber, Black, and Jewish ‘subjects’ who were terrorized by the brutal colonial regime he helped oversee. Balbo was eager to criticize Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler only when he wasn’t rubbing elbows with the Führer himself on an official state visit to Nazi Germany.

Most importantly, Balbo orchestrated the destruction of democracy in Italy and was a senior minister in Mussolini’s fascist government. He never recanted his profoundly held belief in fascist ideology or his support for Mussolini. Nothing Balbo said or did during his lifetime can absolve him of the horrible crimes he committed.

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There have been numerous attempts to remove the monument and rename Balbo Drive over the years, most recently in 2017 and 2020. A tiny minority of right-wing Chicagoans consistently turns out to defend the monument when it is threatened, and all City Council measures to remove the monument or rename the street have failed.

In 2018, a measure was introduced to the Chicago City Council to rename Balbo Drive as Ida B. Wells Drive. At the last minute, the Council caved to pressure from right-wing groups and chose to rename Congress Parkway instead.

In 2022, the Chicago Monument Project published a report that recommended the removal of seventeen monuments and works of public art in the city, including the Balbo Column. In their rationale for the removal of the column, the Monument Project stated:

The Brandon Johnson Administration pledged to follow the recommendations of the report upon his election in 2023, but there has been no movement on the Balbo question since.

Today, a tiny minority of Chicagoans defend the monument out of a strong but profoundly ahistorical sense of pride in Balbo’s accomplishment divorced from its context as an expression of fascist state power. Balbo’s apologists have aligned themselves with a nasty flavor of right-wing Italian-American civic pride that attempts to excuse his numerous crimes and his lifelong disdain of democracy and basic human rights.

In one guest essay written for the Monument Report, a defender of Columbus and Balbo writes “These monuments are not, nor were they intended to be, political statements. It is senseless to try and make them into a political agenda.” Indeed, most of the attempts to sanitize Balbo’s legacy seek to bring him out of the political sphere and turn him into a benign cultural figure, an Italian hero who was, at worst, ‘a product of his time.’

This is an extreme distortion of Balbo’s legacy. Mussolini saw Balbo’s flight as an explicit exercise in fascist propaganda. He followed the progress of Balbo’s ‘expedition’ with great interest, and Balbo’s men took careful note of the presence of a small number of anti-fascist protesters in Chicago and New York. The flight was an explicit attempt to legitimize Mussolini’s totalitarianism in the eyes of the American public, and the continued presence of the monument is evidence of how thoroughly this effort succeeded.

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Balbo’s values and life’s work should be reprehensible to any person who believes in free expression, democracy, an independent civil society, and freedom from political coercion. Democratic rights are under dire threat in America, and our city’s official valorization of a proud fascist has never been more embarrassing.

Between the ongoing authoritarian takeover of the United States by the Trump Administration, the continuing death and destruction in Palestine, and a number of other emergencies at home and around the world, leftists in Chicago have had a lot of other things to focus on in recent years. But symbols matter a great deal, and our city’s continued veneration of an avowed enemy of everything we as socialists hold dear is an insult we must not abide.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to the present state of affairs. The city should give Balbo the same treatment it gave to Columbus in 2020: rename Balbo Drive and loan or donate the column to a private historical society.

Chicagoans have the right to honor whomever they like on their own property, no matter how vile their hero’s actions were in life. Earlier this year, the Columbus statue formerly standing in Arrigo Park was loaned by the city to the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans.

I, for one, think the Balbo column would look wonderful right next to it.

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Markus van Drenthe is a democratic socialist and anti-fascist living in Chicago. Much of the information on Balbo in this essay was sourced from the biography Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life by Claudio G. Segrè (University of California Press, 1987).