Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia, my name is Jody Avergan.

This day it is the summer of 1926 and the legendary journalist Ida Tarbell is visiting Italy and

reporting on the rise of Benito Mussolini for an American audience. And the articles she is publishing are not so great. They're a flattering portraits of Mussolini, sometimes comparing him to Napoleon lauding the social programs he's implementing,

downplaying, you know, the fascism that's sort of at the heart of it all.

And I should say this is the first time we've talked about Tarbell on this show and I feel a little bad that's in the

context of this kind of late career drift towards Mussolini because Tarbell was one of the pioneering

investigative journalists of the progressive era. She wrote incredibly critically throughout

the teens and 20s about big business in this country and she probably was

like directly responsible for legislation that broke up oil companies and other monopolies.

But folks the calendar is the calendar. Here we are in late summer. We were looking for stories and lo and behold in

1926 Ida is in Italy and kind of falling for

Mussolini in this very interesting way so here to discuss as always are

Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wesley.

Hello there.

Hello Jody.

Hey there.

We will do why was Ida Tyrell so influential

and what all the great muckraking she did in the 20s for sure I'll just say kind of like the larger

interesting theme here is this is that people's politics drift but also I think there's you know and but I also think that there's this very

interesting thing that I think is you know feels resonant to me now too where you know we find

progressives finding common cause or being wooed by autocrats and I think there's some interesting stuff that

that's we're noticing in the culture in our politics now and I think is we can see that in this story.

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