Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Revolutionary Apprenticeship

Italian Socialism and Labor

The First Arrest

Union Leader and Editor

Helga

Meeting Mussolini

Chapter 2 - Il Proletario

Tresca, Il Proletario, and the FSI

The Camorra Coloniale

To the Mines and Mills

Revolutionary Syndicalism

Exit Il Proletario

Chapter 3 - Freelance of Revolution

La Signorina

The Republic of Priests

The Camorra Coloniale Strikes Back

Helga

L’Avvenire

The Westmoreland Strike

Anti-Clericalism Revived

Relations with the FSI

Chapter 4 - Lawrence

May Day in Lawrence

General Strike

The IWW’s Decline in Lawrence

The Trial of Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso

Lawrence and a New Era For Tresca

Chapter 5 - On to Paterson

Italians in Paterson

The Paterson Strike of 1913

The Italian Tribune

Chapter 6 - Tresca and Flynn

On Trial in Paterson

Unemployment and Agitation, 1914

Tresca and the Anarchists

The Ludlow Massacre

Battle for the Garibaldi Memorial

Lexington Avenue Bomb

Political Differences and Personal Life

Chapter 7 - From Union Square to Mesabi Range

Italy Goes To War

California Propaganda Tour

Mesabi Range Strike

Imprisonment in Duluth County Jail

Pro-Tresca Defense Campaign

Chapter 8 - Surviving Repression

In the Shadow of War

The Red Scare

Radical Critics

Disillusionment

Chapter 9 - Postwar Activities

Too Radical

Polemics

Death on the Lecture Circuit

Chapter 10 - Sacco and Vanzetti

Sacco and Vanzetti

Chapter 11 - New Enemies

The Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks

Mussolini and Fascism

Fascism in Little Italy

Blackshirts

Prominenti

The Catholic Church

The Consular Network

American Philo-Fascism

Chapter 12 - Early Anti-Fascist Activities

Towards a United Front

Chapter 13 - Frame-Up

The Opportunity Which Has Long Been Sought

Abbasso la Monarchia

The Art of Not Creating Children

Backlash

Atlanta Federal Penitentiary

A Visit to the White House

Chapter 14 - The Resistance Awakens

Repercussions in America

Locatelli

Battle for the Garibaldi Memorial (1925)

The Fascist League of North America

Garibaldi Memorial Celebration: 1926

Vittorio Vidali (a.k.a. Enea Sormenti)

Open-Air Propaganda

Harlem Bomb

Political Refugees

Fascist Raids

Chapter 15 - The Anti-Fascist Alliance

The Anti-Fascist Congress

Schism

Tresca’s Assessment

Chapter 16 - A Year of Violence and Death

Felonious Assault

Memorial Day Murders

The Greco-Carrillo Case

Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti

The Trial of Greco and Carrillo

Fascist Reactions

Chapter 17 - Troubled Times for Anti-Fascism

Fascism on the March

Tresca and the AFANA

L’Adunata on the Attack

Targeting More Dignitaries

The Easton, PA Bombing

Battle for the Garibaldi Memorial, 1932

The Terzani Case

Chapter 18 - The Depression and the New Deal

On the Labor Front

Strike of the Rockmen

The Depression Strikes Home

Roosevelt

San Francisco General Strike

America Leaning Toward Fascism

The CIO and Worker Militancy

Chapter 19 - Fascism on the March

Pope: Gangster and Fascist

Italo-Ethiopian War

Italian Americans and the Ethiopian War

The Spanish Civil War

Chapter 20 - Taking on the Stalinists

The Spanish Revolution

The May Days of Barcelona

The John Dewey Committee

Juliet Stuart Poyntz

L’Adunata Attacks

Chapter 21 - The Town Anarchist

The Tresca Family

The Martello Group

Tresca’s Women

Chapter 22 - Tresca and World War II

War Clouds on the Horizon

World War II

Early Commentary on the War

Mussolini’s Debacles

Operation Barbarossa

The War and the United States

Chapter 23 - The Last Years

The Tresca Jubilee

The Anarchist Conference of April 1-2, 1939

Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

Tresca and the Pearl Harbor Anti-Fascists

Tresca and the Mazzini Society

The Manhattan Club Incident

OWI and the Italian-American Victory Council

The Final Days

Chapter 24 - Murder in the Dimout

The Assassination

Recollections and Tributes

Carmine Galante

Chapter 25 - Theories and Investigations

Theories

Hogan and the Investigation

Investigating the Communists

Investigating Pope and Garofalo

The FBI and the Tresca Murder

The Tresca Memorial Committee and Ernst Group

Chapter 26 - Who Ordered Tresca’s Murder?

Part I: The Literature

Vidali and the Communists

Pope-Garofalo

Vito Genovese

Part II: Author’s Assessment

Addendum

Notes

Bibliographical Essay

Index

Support AK Press!

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments

A former colleague once remarked that my work on Carlo Tresca was an act of filial piety, that is, he believed I had elected to write about this remarkable rebel in order to please my father. Since pleasing my father was an impossible task, it would be more accurate to say that my interest in Tresca and Italian anarchism derived from the stories he related about the days when he directed and acted in an amateur theatrical group (what Italians call a filodrammatica) that performed plays to help raise funds for Tresca’s Il Martello and other Italian radical newspapers. My adolescent awe of Tresca assumed its first academic expression in a graduate seminar paper. Tresca has been part of my professional life ever since. From its inception to its present form—what is left of an original manuscript that exceeded 1,100 pages—my biography of Tresca is the product of a lengthy and arduous undertaking often interrupted for years on end by the vicissitudes of personal and professional life.

If this biography had been of more recent origin, I would never have had the opportunity to benefit from the rich recollections of Tresca related by family members and more than a score of comrades, friends, and acquaintances, the majority of them now deceased. Among the former, I owe a huge debt to Beatrice Tresca Rapport, Peter Martin, Burnham and Claire De Silver, Harrison De Silver, and Andrew Canzanelli, all of whom provided personal knowledge, correspondence, and other vital materials. Among Tresca’s many close comrades, political associates, and others who furnished valuable information through interviews and correspondence, I must thank Vincenzo Alvano, Max Ascoli, Roger Baldwin, Michele Cantarella, Egidio Clemente, Alberto Cupelli, Mario De Ciampis, Sam and Esther Dolgoff, Joseph Genco, Joseph Ienuso, Valerio Isca, James T. Farrell, Jack Frager, Eleazar Lipsky, Nancy MacDonald, Vincenzo Massari, Morris Milgram, Vanni Montana, Felix Morrow, Charles Poggi, Giuseppe Popolizio, Hugo Rolland, Raffaele Schiavina, Norman Thomas, and Luigi Quintiliano.

I owe special thanks for their invaluable encouragement, expertise, and sharing of materials to two dear friends and colleagues who are no longer with us: Paul Avrich and Philip V. Cannistraro. Similar thanks and appreciation go also to Spencer Di Scala, Robert Helms, Gary Mormino, Salvatore Salerno, Michael Miller Topp, Mary Anne Trasciatti, Alan Wald, and Dorothy Gallagher, who provided access to the research files she had compiled for her own previously published biography of Tresca. Although I had already accumulated the bulk of this material, I was greatly impressed by Dorothy’s willingness to assist my endeavor—rival historians are rarely so generous.

The research for this book could not have been undertaken without the resources made available to me by various archives, libraries, and repositories. I should like to express special thanks to the late Rudolf J. Vecoli, former director, and to Joel Wurl, former curator, of the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota; to William Le Fevre, Director of Reference Services at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University; to Julie Herrada, Curator of the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan; to Peter Filardo and Erika Gottfriend at the Tamiment Institute Library, New York University; to Peter Vellon, former acting director of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, New York; to the late Rudolf de Jong and the late Maria Hunink at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam; to Mario Missori and the staff of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome; and to the staffs of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence; the Istituto Antonio Gramsci in Rome; the Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan, especially its former librarian Elio Sellino; the Archivio di Stato dell’Aquila; the Boston Public Library; and the National Archives, Washington, D.C., and Suitland, Maryland. Special thanks must also go to Ombretta Missori, who found materials for me in L’Aquila and Sulmona that had escaped my search.

I am appreciative and proud of the fellowships and grants awarded to me in support of my work on Tresca by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Immigration History Research Center, the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, the Dunning Fund, and Drexel University.

I remain very grateful to Brenden O’Malley, a former editor at Palgrave/Macmillan, for contracting me to publish the original hardback edition of my biography of Carlo Tresca. More recently, my deep appreciation extends also to Zach Blue and AK Press for conceiving the idea to publish a paperback version of the book. Preparing for the paperback enabled me to correct the scores of embarrassing errors that had escaped me and Palgrave’s copy editor the first time around. Moreover, AK Press generously allowed me to re-organize a few sections and also to add a new chapter on Tresca and World War Two as well as a brief addendum concerning the controversial statements Tresca made about Sacco and Vanzetti in the early 1940s.

Finally, I cannot sufficiently thank my wife Christine Zervos, who provided love, moral support, and technical expertise throughout the long years I spent immersed in my work. Without her tutelage and periodic rescue missions, I would surely have written this book on a typewriter rather than a computer. And finally, I must acknowledge the warm companionship of the five members of my feline family, who invariably draped themselves on my documents or keyboard rather than less essential areas of my desk.

Introduction

O n the evening of January 11, 1943, Carlo Tresca left the office of Il Martello (The Hammer), the newspaper he had published in New York for twenty-five years, and started walking toward a nearby restaurant for a late supper. As Tresca crossed the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 15th Street, a Mafia hit-man emerged from the shadows of the wartime dimout and fired two shots that killed him instantly. In homage to his slain friend, the former Marxian intellectual Max Eastman wrote: For Poetry’s sake, for the sake of his name and memory, Carlo had to die a violent death. He had to die at the hand of a tyrant’s assassin. He had lived a violent life. He had loved danger. He had loved the fight. His last motion was to swing and confront the long-expected enemy. So let us say farewell to Carlo as we hear him say—as he surely would if the breath came back—‘Well, they got me at last!’¹

Carlo Tresca was the last of the line of ‘old school’ radicals or revolutionaries.² So wrote the renowned socialist Norman Thomas after his friend had been gunned down. Thomas’s accolade recognized Tresca’s place among the most famous subversives who had challenged America’s established order during the previous 125 years: Johann Most, Eugene V. Debs, Daniel De Leon, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Mother Jones, William Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, John Reed, and William Z. Foster. The passage of time has dimmed history’s memory of Tresca and so many other radicals and dissenters of his generation. At the pinnacle of his career, however, Tresca was a well-known and much-beloved figure, especially in New York, where he had achieved iconic status as the Town Anarchist. His murder was front page news in every New York daily and other newspapers elsewhere in America. The investigation of the crime was eagerly followed by the press for many months thereafter, with repeated calls for the intervention of the FBI and other federal agencies.

Media attention of this intensity and duration was not simply a function of the sensational manner of his demise; it reflected the grudging respect and admiration Tresca had acquired in his twilight years, even from former adversaries and critics. For several decades Tresca had been perceived by defenders of the status quo as a dangerous anarchist, an enemy of the state and bourgeois capitalism. And they were correct in this perception. No armchair revolutionary, Tresca meant business, fighting for several decades in the trenches of class warfare, to use one of his favorite images. The fear he inspired in his heyday was aptly described by the eminent labor historian David Montgomery: Tresca was one man who actually incarnated the conservatives’ fantasy of the agitator who could start an uprising with a speech.³ With his charismatic personality and powerful oratory, Tresca was capable indeed of sparking rebellion among striking workers and political demonstrators with a single speech, and did so numerous times throughout a tempestuous and transnational career spanning more than five decades in Italy and the United States.

Identifying Tresca as a revolutionary only begins to define his life and career. Those who knew him intimately—Norman Thomas, Max Eastman, Arturo Giovannitti, John Dos Passos, and a host of others—were unanimous in their portrayal of Tresca as a man who defied categorization, whose uniqueness in terms of his personality, life-style, and political career was such that the only label befitting him comfortably is sui generis—one of a kind. Certainly few, if any, 20th century radicals in the United States were as colorful and flamboyant in their persona and lifestyle as Tresca. In his prime, he cut a romantic and dashing figure, sporting a Van Dyke beard, broad-brimmed hat, black cravat, and long-stemmed pipe. His warmth, good nature, and charm were augmented by his inimitable manner of speaking English—Italian with English words, some said. Complementing his colorful physical appearance and larger-than-life personality was a voracious appetite for living, every component of which—spaghetti, wine, tobacco, parties, playing cards, practical jokes, and affairs with women—he indulged in prodigious quantities.

But cohabitating within this epicurean, fun-loving, and eternally-affectionate human being was a formidable adversary who devoted more than fifty years to the struggle against oppression, injustice, and exploitation. At various stages of his career, Tresca called himself a socialist, a revolutionary syndicalist, and an anarchist, but he never truly fit into the conventional categories of radical typology. Arturo Giovannitti, the radical poet who was Tresca’s close comrade for nearly forty years, wrote that he liked to call himself an Anarchist, and if that term connotes a man who is absolutely free, then he was an Anarchist; but from the point of view of pure doctrine he was all things to all men, and in his endless intellectual vagabondage he never really sought any definite anchorage or moorings.⁴ Unorthodox and free of dogma, Tresca was a rebel without uniform, according to his friend Max Nomad, a freelance of revolution for whom personal independence and freedom of action were indispensable.⁵ Action always outweighed ideology for Tresca. An instinctive revolutionary, with inexhaustible energy and indomitable courage, Tresca lived for action and the fight. Leading striking workers and mass demonstrations, challenging police, hired detectives, and company thugs, engaging Fascist Blackshirts in pitched battles in the streets of Italian-American communities—such activities suited the requirements of his soul.

Perhaps the most distinctive features of Tresca’s career as a revolutionary activist were its transnational focus and multi-dimensionality. After his revolutionary apprenticeship in southern Italy and his emigration to the United States in 1904, Tresca never lost his interest in the political and social developments of his native land, and during the 1920s and 1930s, his main objective was the subversion of Fascism in Italy and its defeat within the Italian American communities of the United States. Both before and during the Fascist era, however, Tresca was involved in multiple spheres of action, often simultaneously. He distinguished himself as an independent publisher of several radical newspapers, a tribune who led thousands of striking workers and protest demonstrators, an antimilitarist, an advocate for civil liberties, a benefactor of victims of political persecution, the leading Italian anti-Fascist of his era, a staunch anti-Communist, and ultimately a strong defender of democracy.

Born in 1879, Tresca was the enfant terrible of his hometown of Sulmona, in the Abruzzo region of Southern Italy, severing ties with the bourgeois class of his birth and conducting class war against local notables by means of his newspaper and leadership of peasant and artisan societies. His slash and burn style of mucking journalism resulted in several convictions for libel. He chose emigration over prison. En route to the United States, Tresca spent a few days in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he chanced to meet his future nemesis, Benito Mussolini, then an aspiring socialist leader in exile. The future Duce of Fascism considered Tresca insufficiently revolutionary; Tresca sized up Mussolini as an opportunist and a poseur.

Once settled in the United States, Tresca quickly emerged as a key figure in the world of Italian immigrant radicals, establishing the pattern to which he adhered for his entire career. Combining his talents as a journalist and direct actionist, Tresca became a one-man guerrilla movement, leading Italian strikers against their American capitalist exploiters and attacking with his muckraking skills the Camorra Coloniale—his term for the triumvirate of Italian Consular officials, rich and powerful notables (prominenti), and Catholic priests that dominated Italian immigrant communities in their own interests. Although he always remained grounded in the subculture of Italian immigrant radicals, Tresca, as a freelance leader for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1912, extended his activities from the insular world of Italian immigrant workers to the broader and more diverse universe of American radicalism, labor, and progressive causes. His critical role in the defense campaign to liberate the imprisoned leaders of the 1912 textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts; and his activities in the great Paterson silk workers strike of 1913 and the Mesabi Range iron miners strike of 1916, transformed Tresca from an obscure foreign-born radical into a nationally-recognized and feared revolutionary.

Tresca’s militant opposition to the First World War resulted inevitably in government suppression of his newspaper, legal proceedings that nearly sent him to prison, and efforts to deport him that continued for many years. Despite his own difficulties following the war, Tresca was able to utilize his connections with prominent Americans on the Left to aid Italian victims of political persecution. In this way, Tresca played an important role in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti during the initial phase of their tragic odyssey. The postwar atmosphere of fear and repression, however, restricted the scope of Tresca’s activities, especially in the labor movement. Henceforth, Tresca would be deemed too radical by union officials who feared his participation in a strike would automatically provoke police intervention.

But curtailment of his labor activities provided more time and opportunity to partake in the campaign that became the true hallmark of Tresca’s career—resistance to Mussolini and the spread of Fascism within Italian immigrant communities. Tresca in the 1920s had no peer among anti-Fascist leaders, a distinction recognized by Mussolini’s political police in Rome who dubbed him the "deus ex machina of antifascism," the man upon whom the movement depended more than any other. Fascist efforts to control Italian-American communities through Consular officials, the prominenti, and Italian parish priests—the same triumvirate that Tresca had fought before the war—were ignored and indirectly supported by American officialdom, which considered anti-Fascists like Tresca to be Reds and far more dangerous than Fascists. Washington and Rome not only saw eye to eye on this issue, they colluded in a scheme to frame Tresca on trumped up charges—sending a two-line advertisement in his newspaper for a book on birth control through the mails—and to deport him back to Italy into the waiting arms of Fascist jailors. But they failed to consider Tresca’s legion of American associates and friends, and the backlash to his frame-up resulted in a commutation of his prison sentence by President Coolidge and a wave of bad publicity for Mussolini’s regime. By the end of the 1920s, as Norman Thomas observed, more than any single man in New York or the United States, Carlo Tresca blocked the rise of blackshirted Fascists who terrorized the streets of Italian-American districts. This was a great and too-little appreciated service to American democracy.⁶ During the Great Depression, when Italian-American Fascism became more deeply entrenched, and popular support for Mussolini reached its height, Tresca never relented in his battle against Fascism’s menace to his fellow immigrants and his adopted country.

By then, Tresca’s crusade against the forces of totalitarianism had assumed a second dimension, as he committed himself to all-out resistance against Stalinism and its interventions abroad. Although for practical reasons he had collaborated with Communists during the anti-Fascist resistance campaigns of the 1920s, Tresca had always opposed the Soviet regime as a brutal tyranny, and after the counter-revolutionary campaign Stalinists conducted in Spain during the civil war, he became an implacable foe, combating Stalin’s minions in the United States as forcefully as he did the Fascists. Tresca threw down his gauntlet before the Stalinists in 1937, assisting the John Dewey Commission that investigated and rejected the charges leveled against Leon Trotsky during the Moscow purge trials. Thereafter, Tresca specialized in exposés of the crimes committed by the Soviet secret police (OGPU) in Europe, Mexico, and the United States. His most famous public joust with the Communists occurred in 1938, when he charged the OGPU with kidnapping and murdering Juliet Stuart Poyntz, formerly a major figure in the American Communist Party and now a reluctant OGPU operative.

By the early 1940s, in poor health and depressed over the death of his two brothers, Tresca entered the twilight of his career, but he never ceased fighting his enemies, striving above all to prevent Communists and former supporters of Mussolini from gaining admission to wartime anti-Fascist organizations, such as the Mazzini Society and the Italian-American Victory Council formed by the Office of War Information. Tresca waged this battle with his customary militancy and courage until his assassination.

Tresca today is remembered only by the precious few Americans and Italians who are knowledgeable about the history of radicalism, the labor movement, and the anti-totalitarian struggles of leftwing activists in the United States. Historical memory inevitably falls victim to the erosive power of time. Moreover, Tresca was not the kind of individual usually included in history books intended for general consumption. He was a social rebel, a non-conformist, a political subversive, an all-around trouble-maker in the eyes of those who ruled America. He advocated the overthrow of state and church, the abolition of capitalism, and the establishment of a libertarian society—not exactly the beliefs and values embraced by mainstream America today or in the past. What should be recognized, however, is that, in the course of pursuing revolutionary objectives that could never be fulfilled, Tresca excelled as a heroic warrior, battling against Fascism, Communism, and the worst aspects of capitalism. Thus the source of Tresca’s greatness and historical importance as a revolutionary lies not in the quest for a societal transformation that he ultimately realized could not be achieved, but in the ceaseless and uncompromising fight for liberty, social justice, and human dignity that became his true mission. The memory of Carlo Tresca is therefore worthy of resurrection and respect, and achieving that end is the purpose of this biography.

1

Revolutionary Apprenticeship

G ently spread across the Valle Peligna and commanded on two sides by Apennine massifs in the Abruzzo region of Italy is the town of Sulmona, birthplace of the Roman poet Ovid. At one end of the Corso Ovidio, Sulmona’s main artery, stands a bronze bust of another native son, Carlo Tresca. Sculpted by Minna Harkavy, this statuette bears the inscription, Carlo Tresca: Socialist Exile, Martyr of Liberty. Until recently, most Sulmonese knew little more about the young firebrand who challenged the town’s rich and powerful at the turn of the century and then emigrated to the United States.¹

Born on March 9, 1879, Carlo Tresca was the sixth of eight children raised by Filippo Tresca and Filomena Fasciani, offspring of very prominent Sulmona families.¹ The Fasciani were professionals and artists, well known for the music school that bore the family name. Don Filippo was one of Sulmona’s leading notables at the time of Carlo’s birth, having inherited considerable land holdings as well as a carting firm and stationery store. Uninterested in business, he deferred management of his estates to his mother and the stationery store to his wife. A heavy-set, cigar-smoking gentleman, Don Filippo enjoyed the physical pleasures of life, a trait he passed on to Carlo. His principal avocation was politics. Aligned with the Marchese Mazzara against the Barone Sardi De Letto, the heads of the factions that alternated control of Sulmona’s municipal government, Don Filippo was Mazzara’s political strategist. At home, he was the archetypal southern Italian paterfamilias, an autocrat who commanded obedience and respect, while yielding considerable authority to his wife in domestic matters. Austere and distant toward his children, Don Filippo rarely bestowed signs of affection like hugs and kisses, but behind the authoritarian facade was a good-hearted, loving man.

Donna Filomena, in contrast, was emotional and demonstrative, devoted to her children and the Church. Whereas her husband rarely set foot inside a church, Donna Filomena was a paradigm of Catholic conviction in its most superstitious and pagan form. Since religious devotion in southern Italian women was expected and encouraged, lest their minds and bodies seek forbidden outlets, Don Filippo and his sons left her faith unchallenged. Yet Donna Filomena’s religious devotion did not prevent her from functioning in the real world.

The Trescas resided in an old palazzo at the Via San Cosimo No. 9: three stories high, stone facade, large central courtyard, and cavernous wine cellar. Carlo’s fondest childhood memories were of harvest time, when peasants from his father’s estates gathered in the courtyard to make wine and olive oil, clean grain, sort fruit, and slaughter pigs. He loved to mingle with these peasants, who sang sentimental folk songs, played games with him, sat him on their laps, and told stories. Childhood intimacy with peasants contributed to his lifelong ability to interact comfortably with men and women of the working classes. ²

Carlo’s youth manifested many of the characteristics that defined him as a mature man and radical: rebelliousness against authority, the need to lead and attract attention, enjoyment of action and the fight, and the love of fun and good times. The root of Tresca’s rebelliousness, he explained, was the tyrannical patriarch, Don Filippo: He sowed the seed of revolt in my heart. As rebellion against Don Filippo was impossible, Carlo turned his unconscious feeling of revolt against anyone who exercised authority. Carlo was never motivated to apply his intelligence and study in school. He detested homework and resold the text books his parents were required to purchase. His greatest satisfaction derived from challenging the disciplinary powers of his teachers, disrupting the classroom with pranks, and leading other boys in bouts of collective mayhem. Punishment never dissuaded him.

Only by age fourteen or fifteen did Carlo awaken to the need for education, a prospect dimmed by the Tresca family’s precarious finances in the 1890s. During the tariff war between Italy and France, trade between the two countries was reduced by half, and Italian wine producers—the French imported great quantities of Italian wine, refining and selling it as their own product—were hard hit in the South. Before the tariff war ended in 1892, the decline of exports and falling prices (accelerated by the spread of phylloxera) ruined tens of thousands of Italy’s wine-producers.

Don Filippo was among the casualties. Difficulties resulting from Italy’s economic travails were compounded by his habit of co-signing loans for friends who were forced to borrow during the tariff war—loans never repaid. With economic decline now irreversible, Don Filippo accepted defeat and lapsed into depression and inactivity. His wife assumed direction of all business affairs, saving every spare lira for her son Ettore’s medical school education. Luisa, the oldest child, married a minor postal official. Her younger sister Anita assisted with household chores, but spent most of her time making shirts surreptitiously, lest neighbors discover the family’s true circumstances. The fourth child, Beatrice, a religious ascetic, devoted herself to prayer and fasting; she would die a few years later. Carlo’s younger brothers, Lelio and Arnaldo, were still boys when adversity befell. Brother Mario, nearly four years older than Carlo, was handicapped by severe myopia and worked in the stationery wrapping packages. Ettore received his degree in medical surgery from the University of Naples in 1892. Quiet, dignified, and beloved by all who knew him, Ettore was always the big brother to whom Carlo could and did turn in times of trouble, especially financial. Ettore became the municipal doctor of the town of Introdaqua, a few miles from Sulomona. The terrible health and wretchedness of the workers and peasants he treated in local hospitals prompted Ettore to join the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). His work for the movement included giving lectures, writing newspaper articles on science, and organizing a people’s school (scuola popolare) in Introdacqua, where he provided instruction on health and hygiene. Not considered dangerous by the authorities, Ettore was left unmolested to continue his activities. Ettore practiced for nearly a year at the renowned Paolucci clinic in Naples before migrating to the United States in November 1903. ³

Ettore’s meager income could not help finance a good education for Carlo. Donna Filomena, determined to bring respect and cash back into the house, decided that Carlo should become a priest. A more unlikely candidate could scarcely be imagined. Carlo already by age fifteen had developed a strong revulsion for religion and the Catholic Church, but he was reluctant to disappoint his mother. Enrolled in a seminary, Carlo quietly rebelled by never attending. This deception continued for a few months, until Donna Filomena learned from a local priest that her son had never been seen at the seminary. The only alternative was to enroll Carlo in an Istituto Tecnico, a school that trained the less fortunate sons of the bourgeois for jobs in the bureaucracy, a career prospect almost as dismal as the priesthood. Carlo attended the technical school as a matter of familial duty, eventually completing the required four years but never receiving a diploma.⁴

The bleakness of his predicament inevitably evoked anger, vengefulness, and feelings of revolt against all, against the world. But his desire for revolt and revenge was as yet unfocused: Revenge for what? Against whom? I did not know then. It was all subconscious.⁵ Lacking a cogent political philosophy, Carlo did not yet perceive his personal dilemma within the larger context of reckless state policies and the cyclical downswings of capitalism. Nevertheless, his undirected and inchoate feelings of revolt were vital ingredients in the process of transforming him into a revolutionary. So, too, was the lure of action and love of a good fight.

Carlo’s dreams of battle had been stimulated by Uncle Paolo (actually Don Filippo’s cousin), who had fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi. When Crete rebelled against Turkish rule in 1897, Carlo wanted to join the volunteer legion of Italians, led by Garibaldi’s son Ricciotti, that fought alongside the Greeks. Donna Filomena thwarted this scheme, much to Carlo’s frustration. His desire for action and leadership had to be satisfied for now by the rivalry between students of his Istituto Tecnico and the Catholic seminary he had ceased attending. Given the reactionary role the Church had played during the Risorgimento, and its continuing opposition to the Italian liberal state, it was hardly surprising that students of a state school were hostile to Catholic seminarians. Envisioning himself a champion of Free Thought battling the Power of Darkness, Tresca frequently organized skirmishes with the embryo priests.⁶

Carlo’s anticlericalism was a basic ingredient in the complex mix of emotional passion and political ideals embodied by all radicals on the Italian Left. Disagree as they might on countless issues, the Italian sovversivi were united in their rejection of religion and hatred for the Catholic Church. Having reached, with his anti-clericalism, a critical stage in the metamorphosis transforming adolescent rebel into young revolutionary, Carlo only required exposure to the ideas and role models of a modern revolutionary movement to complete the process.

Italian Socialism and Labor

Tresca’s conversion to socialism occurred during a whirlwind of social and economic change that saw workers and peasants agitating and organizing on an unprecedented scale. The 1890s had been a period of intense reaction, with successive governments ruling by authoritarian methods. Thousands of anarchists and socialists were arrested and consigned to domicilio coatto—imprisonment on the desolate islands off the southern Italian and Sicilian coasts. The anarchist Gaetano Bresci, a silk worker from Paterson, New Jersey, assassinated King Umberto on July 29, 1900, in revenge for the massacre of workers during the May Days of 1898 in Milan. With the ascendance of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti in the early-20th century, a new policy of relative toleration toward the upward movement of the popular classes was initiated.⁷

In reality, Giolitti hoped to forestall revolution by co-opting the socialist movement and taming its main constituency. The state, in theory, would remain neutral in struggles between workers and industrialists, peasants and landowners—so long as the aims of the masses were economic. Giolittian toleration would permit an unprecedented wave of strikes, the growth of the PSI founded in 1892, and the expansion of labor institutions characteristic of Italy: Chambers of Labor, peasant leagues of resistance, and union federations. The growth of PSI and the labor movement took place mainly in northern Italy. In southern Italy—the Mezzogiorno—the vast majority of peasants and workers remained outside the sphere of organized labor and the socialist elements that sought to lead them. The government was far less tolerant of protesting peasants in the South than the striking factory workers in the North, and encounters with troops occasionally resulted in what socialists called proletarian massacres. Not surprisingly, the great mass of disinherited southerners opted not for political organization or militant strike action but for a more promising and enduring alternative—emigration.⁸

Tresca’s native Abruzzo was a predominantly agricultural region of small to medium land owners and their tenants and share-croppers. Labor institutions had scarcely progressed beyond the artisan stage of mutual aid societies, and the PSI was poorly represented, with only 26 sections with 700 members in 1906, although in the Abruzzo as elsewhere, there were more socialists than party members. Lacking industrial workers and a militant peasantry, PSI sections in Abruzzo were composed mainly of intellectuals and professionals, men of the middle and lower middle classes who had become alienated from or ruined by the existing order.⁹

The PSI section in Sulmona differed significantly, however, in that it did possess a modern proletarian element—railroad workers. By the 1890s, Sulmona had become the most important railroad center in the Abruzzo, its location providing a natural hub for the Rome-Pescara (East-West) and L’Aquila-Naples (North-South) lines. But most of Sulmona’s railroad workers were not native to the city or even to the Abruzzo, having come from the Emilia, Tuscany, and other regions of north-central and northern Italy. Their presence had only partly to do with operating trains. Railroad men where among the best organized and most radicalized workers in Italy. Until railroad strikes were made illegal in 1905, the government had the option of militarizing the railroads and operating them under martial law, as happened in 1902. A strategy less draconian was to transfer socialist and union militants from urban centers in the North to agricultural regions in the South, thereby minimizing the likelihood of their disrupting service and converting other workers to their cause. In 1898, the PSI section in Sulmona included twenty-seven railroad workers and thirty-eight local and nearby residents, mainly artisans and a handful of professionals and students. Not a single peasant yet belonged.¹⁰ By 1902, the railroad workers in Sulmona had increased to more than 200, nearly all of them socialists and members of Federazione dei Sindacati e Sodalizi Ferrovieri (Federation of Railroad Workers Unions and Brotherhoods), the national federation formed in 1900.¹¹

The PSI section and the railroad workers league were regarded with intense suspicion by Sulmona’s indigenous oligarchy of conservative monarchists. They feared that socialism transmitted by northern railroad workers might rouse local peasants and workers from their traditional apathy and subservience. Sulmona’s monarchist organ, L’Araldo (The Herald), manifesting both regional and class antagonism, sounded the alarm when five railroad workers of the local PSI section began publishing their own newspaper, Il Germe (The Seed), in October 1901. Accusing the northerners of acting like superior beings on a civilizing mission, the monarchist prominenti of Sulmona demanded to know what interest can they have in the good of a city that is not theirs; these subversives come among us to drain their bile and implant class hatred among our workers?¹² That the editorial staff of Il Germe soon comprised mostly natives of Sulmona did nothing to assuage their fear of aliens from the North. For their part, the local editors of Il Germe were delighted that the railroad workers represented a subversive wind from the north that chilled the oligarchs of Sulmona to their very bones.¹³

Whatever influence brother Ettore might have had on the evolution of Carlo’s socialism, the kindly doctor could not have provided the role model craved by the young rebel seeking adventure and heroic deeds. The northern railroad workers, on the other hand, provided an irresistible attraction as veterans of the class struggle and a source of fear to Sulmona’s elite. Even before terminating his studies at the Istituto Tecnico, Tresca began attending the lectures given regularly at the PSI section. Association with the rough-hewed proletarians—all of them older than he—was a source of excitement and ego gratification. The railroad workers, in turn, eagerly welcomed Tresca into their group; it was not every day that a scion of the landed gentry expressed interest in socialism. Yet, from the outset, the appeal of socialism for Tresca was more visceral than intellectual. His concern with abstract theory and ideological orthodoxy would remain minimal throughout his career. Instead, it was the railroad workers’ talk about the class struggle and the coming revolution [that] awakened my combative spirit, he recalled.¹⁴ Socialism offered a glorious field of action that suited the requirements of my soul.¹⁵ In his eighteenth or nineteenth year, comrade Tresca joined the PSI, a decision that inevitably translated into conflict with the authorities. His first mention in police records was as a member of the Sulmona section, dissolved by decree in May 1898.¹⁶

Don Filippo vigorously opposed his son’s joining the PSI, fearing that it would prejudice the masters of the political parties of his own class against me.¹⁷ To avoid arousing his father’s antagonism, Tresca attended party meetings on the quiet. His emergence as the enfant terrible of Sulmona had to wait until working-class agitation swept Italy in 1901-1902. Although small-scale in comparison to the unrest in northern Italy or even nearby Puglia, the popular agitation and socialist activity taking place in the Sulmona district contrasted markedly with conditions that had prevailed in the late 1880s, when local Prefects routinely reported that the masses were passive and free from subversive influences.¹⁸ Now, in Sulmona and nearby towns, socialist circles, mutual aid societies, and cooperatives among local artisans and peasants were emerging in appreciable numbers. Most of these popular associations were gravitating into the socialist camp.¹⁹

The northern intellectuals who dominated the PSI, men like Filippo Turati, had little interest in the predominantly peasant and backward Mezzogiorno. Propagandizing among the southern peasants and artisans became the mission of a small number of southern-born socialists. Tresca’s earliest propaganda activity for which there is evidence occurred on April 7, 1902, in the town of Pratola, where he delivered a speech to some fifty artisans. That same month he helped organize a PSI section meeting for some 100 members of Sulmona’s Fratellanza Artigiana. Although artisans were generally more advanced politically, Tresca’s first priority that spring was to bring Sulmona’s peasants under the influence of the PSI.²⁰ Among the poorest in the Abruzzo, Sulmona’s peasants, like most in the Mezzogiorno, did not reside in the countryside, where they tilled the soil. They lived in town. Normal conditions of squalor had been exacerbated by the housing shortage that resulted when Sulmona became a burgeoning railroad center. By the spring of 1902, the desperate peasantry was evidencing receptivity to socialism, and a few had formed the Fratellanza Agricola di Sulmona. ²¹

But the socialist message was just one of several the peasants were hearing. The PSI in Sulmona and its environs competed with the Partito Repubblicano Italiano, the small, bourgeois party inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini that advocated abolition of the monarchy and universal suffrage. Declining strength in traditional strongholds like the Romagna had caused the PRI to look south for support. Its local chieftain was Filippo Corsi, a native Abruzzese from Capestrano, who published La Bandiera in his hometown and in Sulmona from 1900 to 1902. Corsi had already acquired influence among local artisans, the class from which the republicans traditionally drew support, but had failed to make significant headway among peasants. Tresca discovered that in the smaller towns near Sulmona, Corsi would wait for the peasants to come out of church on Sunday, mount a chair, and launch into a speech. Out of curiosity the peasants would gather around and listen to his message. The same method was ineffective in a larger town like Sulmona, and Corsi’s efforts to reach peasants through circulars and placards proved futile because most were illiterate.²²

Tresca devised a different strategy—seeking peasants at neighborhood taverns where they congregated during their few hours of leisure. Another socialist organizer approaching them in this manner might have encountered the wall of reticence and suspicion that peasants usually erected against outsiders of a different social class. However, as the son of Don Filippo, Tresca automatically commanded respect and attention. When he first entered their taverns, the peasants would stand up and address him deferentially as Don Carlo, no doubt mystified as to why a scion of the ruling class would want to help them organize against their masters. But the ease and familiarity with which he communicated and his obvious sincerity quickly won their confidence, so much so that they even invited him into their homes, where their dire poverty convinced Tresca that his cause was just. After several months of Tresca’s persistent efforts, Sulmona’s peasants overcame their inertia and joined the local Fratellanza Agricola in significant numbers.²³

Tresca planned to demonstrate the peasants’ strength and solidarity on May 1, 1902, the first May Day rally in Sulmona’s history. A thousand or more peasants and workers from the area filled the Largo Palizze, where Il Germe had its office. The socialist sections of Sulmona and Pratola were also present. So, too, was a contingent of carabinieri (Italy’s paramilitary police force) to intervene if the demonstration became aggressive. But this May Day would remain peaceful. After hearing speeches by the leaders of Sulmona’s Fratellanza Agricola and Arnaldo Lucci, a native son and professor of law at the University of Naples, the throng marched to the grassy sheep-track on the outskirts of the city, where they listened to more speeches. However, the honor of the last word at the country meeting was bestowed upon comrade Carlo Tresca, reported Il Germe. His speech was the climax of the day: a fast-flowing stream of humor, up-to-date and fitting, which sounded a most exhilarating note of cheerfulness and generated humor in the best of taste. Lively applause paid him with interest for his special effort . ²⁴ Tresca would always cherish the memory of his first speech:

I didn’t say much, and I didn’t speak with eloquence but I heard a thunder of applause and I saw a sea of hands waving at me in praise and consent. I felt then that the people of Sulmona, my people, were christening me: I was no more a buoyant, exuberant, impertinent boy. I was a man, a man of command, of action. What a day! I will never forget it.²⁵

Tresca’s May Day speech confirmed his transformation from a rebellious youth to a socialist tribune. However, it was his preparatory work among Sulmona’s peasants and artisans that contributed most to his development as a revolutionary. Socialism in the 19th and 20th centuries produced all too many leaders for whom the proletariat was an intellectual abstraction devoid of real flesh and blood, and the class struggle an ineluctable force of history to be invoked in theoretical treatises and official propaganda. Tresca was different. From these earliest days as a budding revolutionary, Tresca’s empathy with the poor and oppressed was genuine and visceral. Whatever the official ideology he professed during his career—socialism, syndicalism, or anarchism—Tresca fought for the workers more than the movement. He embraced the transcendent moral and redemptive purposes of several revolutionary ideologies, but his true place was always in the arena of daily struggle, leading and fighting as a capo-popolo, a freelance of revolution, an indomitable rebel who has a big heart, plenty of guts, and a humorous direct way of talking the plain direct language that the real people understand.²⁶

The First Arrest

Another characteristic of Sulmona’s young capo-popolo was the sheer relish and bravura with which he defied the authorities. This propensity resulted in more than thirty-six arrests during Tresca’s career. The first occurred on June 1, 1902, on the occasion of a patriotic celebration organized by local monarchists to counteract the impact of the May Day rally. Tresca and Filippo Corsi, now his friend and ally, conspired to spoil the day. When local officials, dignitaries, and the special guest, the Minister of Education, rose to their feet at the playing of the national anthem, the peasant and artisan followers of Tresca and Corsi remained seated. Following this gesture of protest, the defiant peasants and artisans marched to the outskirts of town with Tresca and Corsi to savor their victory. On the way home, Tresca and some comrades encountered a procession of peasants who belonged to a conservative association faithful to the landlords. Cries of "Viva il Socialismo!" were raised in challenge to the marchers. A captain of the carabinieri, who had accompanied the conservative peasants to protect them, seized Tresca and placed him under arrest for shouting the subversive outcry. Tresca denied he had done so, but obliged the angry captain by shouting it now in his face. For this offense he was sentenced on June 11, 1902 to serve thirty days in jail.²⁷

Tresca retaliated by targeting the captain in Il Germe, declaring that "Il Capitano Sbirro (a derogatory term for policemen) was a gambler and a drunk and had arrested him for the sole purpose of parading his imbecility and to please this city’s cancerous criminal clique."²⁸ Such an affront might have been settled in the past by a duel. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, it had become customary in Sulmona to sue your offender for libel. Predictably, Tresca’s trial before the pretore of Sulmona on October 4, 1902 ended with a guilty verdict and a sentence of seventy days imprisonment, which, after losing his appeal, he served from March 2 to May 12, 1903 .²⁹

Tresca’s first incarceration was not an entirely unpleasant experience save for the lice in his cell. His friends provided an abundance of cigars and food. He emerged from jail with his reputation enhanced not only among his comrades but also among his family members:

At home I found a remarkable change. I was received in an atmosphere of dignity and respect. I felt that for the first time my parents, my older brother and sisters took me seriously, not as a flippant, boyish, impertinent warrior of miniature battles, but as a man, a real man, a man of courage and endurance.³⁰

After his homecoming dinner, with the entire family gathered around the table, Tresca’s father offered him a cigar, permitting him to smoke in his presence for the first time. This gesture of acceptance and equality, marking a genuine turning point in their habitually tense father-son relationship, meant a great deal to Tresca.³¹

Union Leader and Editor

Since its founding in 1900, the Federazione dei Sindacati e Sodalizi Ferroviari (Federation of Railroad Workers Unions and Brotherhoods), with a membership of 12,000, had emerged as one of the largest and most militant labor organizations in Italy. One of its three affiliates, the Sindacato dei Macchinisti, Fuochisti, ed Affini (Firemen, Engineers, and Related Workers Union), held a conference in Milan on June 25- 29, 1903. The leaders decided to establish headquarters in Sulmona because the traslocati from the North had played an important role in the rise of the union.³² A few months later, the union selected Tresca to serve as its local secretary. The job provided a small stipend, but it was the only income Tresca earned during his years in Sulmona, amounting to just enough to cover his personal expenses.³³

Save for this position as secretary, Tresca’s career was not destined to include trade-union officialdom. By 1903, he had developed into a full-fledged agitator-editor in the classic tradition of Italian radicalism, much like his future enemy Benito Mussolini. Tresca’s natural inclination for leadership and direct action was complemented by his considerable talents as a journalist. He had been involved with the publication of Il Germe from its inception, reading proofs, writing small items and getting the paper ready for circulation.³⁴ Less than a year later, he was serving on the editorial staff and contributing articles; in October 1903, he became direttore or editor-in-chief of the newspaper.³⁵ ,³⁶

Tresca’s journalistic style, ironically, was very similar to Mussolini’s. The political newspaper for Tresca was not a vehicle of discourse or theorizing but an instrument of war. Replete with sarcasm, insults, contempt, irony, and dry humor, Tresca’s articles blitzed his enemies ferociously and without restraint, always targeting the jugular. Yet Tresca’s journalistic campaigns were driven by more than raw fury. Even as a young man he possessed acute insight into the relationship between power and corruption, and knew intimately the political terrain upon which he operated and how to obtain the ammunition needed for his campaigns. These qualities made Tresca a formidable muckraker. Thus within a month of his becoming director of Il Germe, Tresca attacked the richest and most powerful man in Sulmona—the Cavaliere Nicola dei Baroni Sardi De Letto, head of the Pia Casa Santissima Annunziata, the city’s principal hospital. Tresca accused the baron of soliciting gifts from the contractors who serviced the hospital. Tresca’s principal source of damaging information was none other than Don Filippo, who formerly belonged to the rival clique and knew the full extent of Sardi De Letto’s transgressions.³⁷ The baron promptly sued Tresca for libel. Greeting the news with his characteristic indifference toward danger, Tresca responded in Il Germe: Will the judge be objective or an arm of the litigant? We do not care. We are conscious of having performed our duty and we willingly accept the challenge to prove our accusations.³⁸ Tresca had already come to regard libel as an occupational hazard, but under Italian law libel it was a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment from one to five years and a minimum fine of 1,000 lire. Moreover, the Italian penal code, as written and interpreted, generally favored the litigant over the defendant. A libel suit, therefore, was an effective means with which to silence or intimidate an adversary. Italians of every political persuasion (except the anarchists) utilized this tactic, including Tresca.

The Baron Sardi De Letto was not Tresca’s only adversary. No less than four political newspapers operated in Sulmona in 1903: the socialist Il Germe, the republican La Democrazia, the monarchist L’Araldo, and the clerical Il Popolo. Polemics between them were commonplace, but the exchanges between Il Germe and La Democrazia were more frequent because they were rivals for the same constituency. They became highly acrimonious after the death of Filippo Corsi, whose friendship with Tresca had transcended political rivalry. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies, Corsi fell off a balcony while giving his victory speech and was fatally injured. Friendship with Corsi remained a cherished memory for Tresca through his life.³⁹

But no such ties existed between Tresca and the new editors of La Democrazia. In October 1903, they published a story claiming that Tresca had approached Corsi’s widow with an offer to resurrect La Bandiera, the newspaper her husband had formerly published. Tresca and several railroad workers representing the local PSI section visited the widow Corsi and obtained a signed document denying that any such visit or offer had ever taken place. Eager to escalate the conflict, the republican editors responded with a flyer bearing the widow Corsi’s name and reasserting the original accusation. La Democrazia continued to publish articles repeating the allegation. Wanting legal vindication, Tresca promptly sued the widow Corsi for libel. In exchange for dropping his suit, she substantiated Tresca’s version of events, but he was not content to leave the matter at that. He now filed a libel suit against the editors of La Democrazia—for phrases and affirmations offensive to my personal dignity and honor. They, in turn, counter-sued him for libel.⁴⁰

By 1904, Tresca’s record of popular agitation and outspoken advocacy of violent revolution convinced police that he was a dangerous subversive who exercised too much influence over local socialists, workers, and peasants .⁴¹ It was only a matter of time before they moved against him. Ignoring danger signs, Tresca selected a very sensitive subject—the Italian army—to address in L’Avvenire, the PSI’s official organ in the Abruzzo. Anti-militarism was particularly acute among Italian socialists and anarchists, and for good reason: the armed forces consumed one-quarter of government expenditures; troops were always in readiness to suppress workers and peasants; and conditions in the army were extremely brutal. Tresca’s story concerned a young official who killed himself because of mistreatment. Merely publishing the story was an invitation for trouble, but Tresca recklessly provoked retaliation with his intemperate language, describing the army as the most monstrous, immoral, degenerate organism of brutal force. Issues of L’Avvenire containing the offending article were confiscated and Tresca was brought up on charges.⁴²

Helga

Constant involvement with labor agitation and radical journalism did not prevent Tresca from indulging in his favorite pastime—pursuit of women. Tresca’s autobiography is curiously reticent about his love life, even to the extent of failing to mention that he married a young woman named Helga Guerra. Born on April 24, 1881, in the small hill town of Saludecio in the Romagna, Helga was named after the heroine in a German novel her mother had once read. Her father, Vincenzo Guerra, was the municipal clerk, a position that provided respectability and social standing,