Overflight, 80
Neither was aid restricted to statist Bolsheviks and statist counter−Bolsheviks. John P. Diggins, in Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, has noted in regard to Thomas Lamont of Guaranty Trust that:
Of all American business leaders, the one who most vigorously patronized the cause of Fascism was Thomas W. Lamont. Head of the powerful J.P. Morgan banking network, Lamont served as something of a business consultant for the government of Fascist Italy.
Lamont secured a $100 million loan for Mussolini in 1926 at a particularly crucial time for the Italian dictator. We might remember too that the director of Guaranty Trust was the father of Corliss Lamont, a domestic Communist. This evenhanded approach to the twin totalitarian systems, communism and fascism, was not confined to the Lamont family. For example, Otto Kahn, director of American International Corporation and of Kuhn, Leob & Co., felt sure that «American capital invested in Italy will find safety, encouragement, opportunity and reward.» This is the same Otto Kahn who lectured the socialist League of Industrial Democracy in 1924 that its objectives were his objectives. They differed only — according to Otto Kahn — over the means of achieving these objectives.
Ivy Lee, Rockefeller's public relations man, made similar pronouncements, and was responsible for selling the Soviet regime to the gullible American public in the late 1920s. We also have observed that Basil Miles, in charge of the Russian desk at the State Department and a former associate of William Franklin Sands, was decidedly helpful to the businessmen promoting Bolshevik causes; but in 1923 the same Miles authored a profascist article, "Italy's Black Shirts and Business." «Success of the Fascists is an expression of Italy's youth,» wrote Miles while glorifying the fascist movement and applauding its esteem for American business.