Word: duces
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Fascists and cheering farmers tramped into a freshly cut wheat field near Aprilia one day last week to hear Premier Benito Mussolini officially open Italy's harvest season. Bustling up to Aprilia, one of the towns built on land reclaimed from the Pontine Marshes, in his automobile, Il Duce stripped to the waist, clambered atop a threshing machine. There he proceeded to blast away at early-spring predictions by observers in the U. S., Britain and France that Italy's vital wheat crop would fall far below normal this year. Folding his brawny arms across a tanned torso...
Last year Il Duce won the first victory in his twelve-year "Battle of the Grain," the drive to make Italy independent of foreign wheat imports. Due to years of intensified cultivation and reclamation of some 6,600,000 acres of swampland, Italian farms last year produced about 300,000,000 bushels, 20,000,000 more than the nor mal national need which was Mussolini's goal. The coldest, wettest winter since the turn of the Century, followed by a prolonged spring drought led to anticipation that this year's crop would fall to 220,000,000 bushels...
...horseback-riding, fencing, airplane-piloting, swimming, skiing Leader Mussolini, the traditional politician's ample paunch is evidence of a decadence not to be tolerated in his Party. Il Duce's news-organ Il Popolo d'Italia laid the law down recently: "Excessively fat members are undesirable in the Party ranks. . . . Their hearts, minds, nerves and muscles are all Fascist, but their bellies, no!" To Rome last week were ordered 45 special secretaries and inspectors of the Fascist Party. In the Forum Mussolini, with Il Duce watching, with pantherlike Fascist Secretary Achille Starace leading, the testees swam, jumped...
...along a dusty road near the town of Faenza one day last week when it was overtaken by an official automobile. At the head of the column the car stopped. Out stepped Premier Mussolini, nattily decked in a snow-white uniform of the Fascist militia. The 54-year-old Duce took his place in front of the battalion, challenged the soldiers to a one-mile trot into town...
...Bersaglieri are famed for their ability to move for hours at a steady trot. However, no nimble-footed sharpshooter was brash enough to forge ahead and when the startled populace at Faenza rushed into the streets to welcome Il Duce, he was still in the lead. Congratulating the Bersaglieri on their condition, he gave their commander 3,000 lire ($157) to buy them special mess kits...