As you can see here in this link , Lincoln Memorial FAQ, the chair the President Lincoln is sitting in is decorated with the fascist symbol of the bound together rods. All they are lacking is the axe head sticking out. The Memorial was completed in 1922, the same year Mussolini took power in Italy, but I would imagine that the design and construction would have had to happen well before his election as prime minister.
So my question is what would the designers have thought of this symbol, pre-fascism? Why did they think it was a good symbol for Lincoln? What did the Romans think of this symbol? Was this symbol known as the symbol of the Italian fascists when the design was made? What did the symbol mean to the Italian fascists at the beginning of fascism? How did the president most famous for freeing the slaves end up with a symbol used be white supremists on his memorial?
Fasces were a symbol of law giving and governmental authority going back to the Roman Republic, with evidence that they adopted the custom from the Etruscans. Roman magistrates had aides who carried these bundles representing official authority to punish - the rods and the ax, for Corporal and Capital punishment. Inside the City, the ax was removed to represent the liberty of Roman citizens from arbitrary punishment. Excepting a dictator granted imperium even within the Sacred City, whose lictors did not remove their axes.
Their use by Mussolini was part if his fetish for Roman symbolism.
The fasces in the US House of Representatives, the White House, and the Supreme Court building are a classical allusion, not a statement of support for Italian authoritarians. The mace of the House of Representatives consists of 13 rods around an eagle, a clear allusion. Fasces were on the obverse of US dimes for a time.
It was and is used on the seal of the French Republic, as well as their military police. Many United States military police units use the symbol as part of their unit insignia, and the United States Army Reserve Legal Command does as well.
National Coats of Arms incorporating fasces include: Ecuador Cameroon Cuba
The former flag of Gran Columbia has fasces on it.
Romanian, Swedish, and Norwegian Police use them, as does the Russian Penitentiary Setvice. The city of Vilnius. Lithuania has them on it's great coat of arms as well.
Prior to 1914, the word 'fascio' in Italian just meant 'bundle' and had a connotation of strength through unity, and in this sense was used by revolutionary movements during the Italian unification period. The reason the later Fascists liked the symbol is obvious. Keep in mind Fascism's roots in splinter groups of an anarchosyndicalist union. Strength through unity was the whole point.
By early XX Century, the "fasces" would have been known, chiefly, as a "republican" symbol, due to their association with both the US Independence and the French Revolution. At its simplest, the symbol was meant to convey strenght out of the unity of equals (the rods bound together). There were distinctions - beyond mere form - between the various uses: with or without the axe, with or without the Phrygian cap; but the basic understanding would have been that.
I have written a few posts that may be of some interest. One deals mostly with the historical roots of the term in Italian politics and on its first resurgence and new acquired meaning in 1919-20. And a more recent one that touches on its meaning in connection with Roman antiquity.
Of course, the item and the name are not the same thing, but this should at least help give you an idea of the general landscape in so far as the meaning of the "fasces".
Feel free to ask if you have any additional question, though.
Also, if you are looking specifically at the symbol's perception in the US during the early 1920s, that's quite out of my usual field of interest, but there must be a post - or more than one - by our distinguished u/Georgy_K_Zhukov that I have been unable to locate for some reason (I'll blame the search function, but it's probably just me).