When Fascist Blackshirts marched through the streets of Rome at the end of October 1922, their leader, Benito Mussolini, had just been installed as prime minister.
While Mussolini's followers had already organised into militias and begun to terrorise the country, it was during the 1922 squadristi, historian Robert O Paxton writes, that they "escalated from sacking and burning local socialist headquarters, newspaper offices, labour exchanges, and socialist leaders' homes to the violent occupation of entire cities, all without hindrance from the government."
By this point, Mussolini and his Fascist Party had been normalised, because they had been brought into the centre-right government the previous year as an antidote to the left. But while Mussolini presided over fascism's first real taste of political power, his movement was not the first of its kind. For that, one must look instead to the US. As Paxton explains, "It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: The Ku Klux Klan … the first version of the Klan was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe."
