and a larger merchant marine, Mussolini and the Fasci gained new subsidies from business groups. They also declared themselves in support of Gabriele D'Annunzio's seizure of power in the city of Fiume, and asked for public donations to support D'Annunzio. This money never reached D'Annunzio and was appropriated by the Fasci for their own purposes. During the Biennio Rosso, in the summer of 1920, a wave of strikes and factory occupations by socialist workers further persuaded industrialists and landowners to provide financial support to the Fascist movement. The Fasci established new branches across the country and greatly expanded their paramilitary militia known as the blackshirts. Under the pretence of saving the country from communism, they launched a wave of violence in the winter of 1920-21. By the autumn of 1920, the Fasci had shifted focus to the countryside, where they presented themselves as the most determined opposition to the socialists and the only ones willing to engage in acts of violence. The Fascists recruited heavily from the countryside, and their membership grew tenfold during the last seven months of 1920. They increasingly made use of squads partially composed of military veterans and often led by former army officers to carry out "punitive expeditions" to sack socialist headquarters and break up trade unions. Mussolini himself had relatively little control over the Fascist armed squads at this time, but he used them to project an image of strength at the negotiating table with other political parties. For the elections of May 1921, the Fasci entered into a coalition with the government of Giovanni Giolitti, who believed that he could use them against the socialists and the newly founded Italian Communist Party. The coalition led by Giolitti was called the National Bloc, and Mussolini presented his Fasci as representing the "extreme right wing" of this group; this was the first time that he identified himself as being on the extreme right. He began to speak of Italians as being a superior race and said that "Fascist foreign policy was summed up in the words 'imperialism' and 'national expansion'". The elections took place in a climate of violence. Since the Fascists were now in a coalition with the government, they were allowed to break the law and intimidate their opponents with impunity. The police sometimes lent their trucks to Fascist squads, army units sometimes gave them weapons, and judges usually found them innocent of