FROM SICILY 1943, TO IRAQ 2003. Resisting the Enlisting of John Hersey’s "A Bell for Adano" as Propaganda for the American Empire
FROM SICILY 1943, TO IRAQ 2003. Resisting the Enlisting of John Hersey’s "A Bell for Adano" as Propaganda for the American Empire

Summary/Abstract: This essay began some years ago when, at a friend’s house, I absent-mindedly picked up from a large stack of newspapers and magazines an old, 2003 copy of "The Atlantic", a publication I normally never read. The issue featured an essay by Robert Kaplan lamenting the fact that—notwithstanding all the debates concerning the ‘American Empire’—the ‘practical ways of managing it’ had never been adequately discussed. Trying to fill up this troublesome gap in imperial management, Kaplan listed ten rules that represented ‘a distillation of my own experience and conversations with diplomats and military officers I have met in recent travels on four continents, and on military bases around the United States’ (Kaplan, 2003). Rule number one was quizzically entitled ‘Produce more Joppolos.’ The Italian name intrigued me, though I could hardly guess what the author was referring to, given that the only Joppolo I knew at the time was a small seaside town in Calabria. Now, since Joppolo is quite a pleasant vacation site with a splendid view of the Mediterranean and a nice beach, I thought maybe Kaplan was suggesting that American soldiers—today’s ‘imperial grunts,’ as he calls them in the title of one of his most recent books—should be provided with better R & R facilities, though I could hardly believe Joppolo had suddenly risen to international fame as a much-coveted holiday resort. It turned out, of course, that I was on a completely wrong track.The Joppolo in Kaplan’s article was the protagonist of a 1944 novel by John Hersey entitled "A Bell for Adano", dealing with the Allied invasion of Italy that began in early July, 1943. The reason why "The Atlantic" correspondent liked Major Victor Joppolo so much was that, as an intelligent American Civil Affairs officer of Italian descent, this US officer manages to win the hearts and minds of the population of the Sicilian town of which he becomes the de facto Mayor by paying little or no attention to abstract directives from bureaucrats, generals, and politicians, choosing, instead, to follow his own best instincts. Identified by Hersey as an essentially ‘good man,’ Joppolo is, as one critic has written, ‘[a] man of patience and integrity with a concern for honesty and justice … [who] feels that only simple good works reaching those at the bottom will reconstruct ravaged Italy’ (Diggins, 1966: 607). Before I say something more about Major Joppolo and Hersey’s novel, however, I would like to go back for a moment to Kaplan’s piece, by quoting the opening sentence of the ‘Produce More Joppolos’ section of his article. ‘When I asked Major Paul S. Warren, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the Army’s Special Operations Command, what serves as the model for a civil-affairs officer within the Special Operations forces, he said, “Read John Hersey’s "A Bell for Adano"—it’s all there”’ (Kaplan, 2003). If one is to believe what Kaplan writes, it would appear that a novel which, despite achieving fame at the time...

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