The “new” lower middle class has commonly been identified with the emergence of mass culture, as its leading consumer if not its actual creator. Through the thirties, at least, salaried workers generally had more spare time and disposable income than the vast majority of production workers; they were also inclined to participate more actively in the dominant culture as a means of reaffirming a middle class status. In Italy, however, in the years between the wars, the clerical labor force was still so small in number, so deeply divided by the different terms of employment in the private and public sectors, and so poorly paid that it could hardly keep up appearances, much less set standards of cultural consumption for an emerging mass public. Moreover, it was of such recent formation, beginning its rapid growth with the expansion of state intervention and industrial enterprises during the war years, that the definition of its social place – somewhere between free professionalism and traditional proletariat – was still a wide-open question. How this group would be situated – whether it would be treated as mere clerical labor, or elevated into a new middle class – was the major problem that the regime had to address when it sought to organize the more than three-quarters of a million clerks, small functionaries, and uniformed service workers in the state and private sectors.