Eigthy years ago Carlo Tresca was killed .He lived fighting against political and social injustice

This is how Carlo Tresca will remembered in Abruzzo

Born in 1879 in Sulmona, assassinated on 11 January 1943 in New York, he was a naturalized American trade unionist, journalist, publisher, anarchist, anti-fascist and American playwright, newspaper publisher and leader of the labor movement in the United States.

  by Odoardo Di Santo

On 11 January 1943 the stormy life of Carlo Tresca tragically ended, an incomparable social agitator engaged in countless battles for social justice, for freedom of speech, for the rights of the damned, against the exploitation of workers and  always in defense of the working class. And especially against all dictatorships.

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the assassination of Carlo Tresca.

On the evening of Monday 11 January 1943, Carlo Tresca, courageous and uncompromising editor of the radical newspaper II Martello, was in the company of the Italian lawyer Giuseppe Calabi, father of Tullia Zevi, future president of the Union of Italian Jewish communities, an anti-fascist like Tresca in the Mazzini Society.

They left the newspaper office at about 9.38 and walked near 15th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York.

The traffic signal forced them to stop.

A man approached Tresca and shot him four times with an automatic weapon.

The victim collapsed on the pavement, under the light of a dim lamp. The killer fled in a dark-colored automobile that sped off down 15th Street and disappeared into the darkness of the night.

Tresca died almost before the car had disappeared.

For more than ten years, Tresca's friends gathered on the anniversary of his death and placed red carnations at the site of the assassination.

The Tresca Memorial Committee, made up of eminent American men of culture, friends and acquaintances, such as John Dewey, John DosPassos, Edmund Wilson commissioned the artist Minna Harkay to sculpt the bronze bust of Carlo Tresca which Margaret De Silver, his last companion shipped to Sulmona.   

With Ignazio Silone presiding, the bust was installed at the corner of the municipal park of Sulmona.

The newspaper Il Sagittario reported that Angelica Balabanoff, socialist activist who in 1917 had been first secretary of the Comintern, pronounced the commemorative oration.

After the interlude of twenty years of fascist obscurantism, post-war information was still scarce.

   Paolo Casciola wrote in CARLO TRESCA, FIGHTER LIBERTARIAN (1879-1943): "I was somewhat surprised to find that most of the Sulmona people I interviewed at the time, especially young people, were completely unaware of who Tresca was, an exemplary figure of libertarian fighter".

  The idea of ​​the monument to Tresca gave rise to a debate which saw on the one hand the diocese opposed to erecting the statue of an anti-clerical in front of the bishop's palace but strangely on the same positions was the communist party which through the mouth of our philosophy professor C. Autiero explained to us how it was inappropriate to erect a monument when there were still so many obscure sides to clarify that we obviously ignored.

We students were somewhat confused because, as we understood, on the other side then there was what today is defined as the civil society which favored the recognition of a citizen of exceptional quality who, although controversial had "made" a name for himself.

Keeping alive a laudable tradition, the City of Sulmona’s Municipal Administration and the "Carlo Tresca’s Study and Research Centre” organized a series of events during the month of January to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of his death.

The documentary “The best good hearted man in the world. The legend of Carlo Tresca” will be viewed with the participation of the writer Maurizio Maggiani, author of the novel Eternal Youth.

Furthermore the first Italian edition of the book “Carlo Tresca. Portrait of a rebel” by Nunzio Pernicone,will be released, with Francesco Susi, professor emeritus of the University of Roma Tre contributing to the conversation.

Carlo Tresca was born in 1879 in Sulmona, an ancient city in Abruzzo, in the Peligna valley.

Socialist agitator, at the age of twenty he became secretary of the Ferrovieri ( railway) Syndicate, and editor of the newspaper Il Germe in which he denounced the local bourgeoisie and in 1904 was sentenced twice for slander and libel. 

To avoid prison at the age of twenty-four, he first fled to Switzerland, where he met Benito Mussolini, among other radical Italian refugees, and then went to America.   

In the United States he became editor of the socialist newspaper La Voce del Popolo of Philadelphia, then founded several newspapers including, La Plebe, which cost him new charges, new arrests and even an assassination attempt. After the suppression of the Plebe, he started L'Avvenire which cost him a further nine-month prison sentence.

Finally he became editor of Il Martello. 

Without being a member, he cooperated with the IWW, the International Workers of the World, the union that organized migrant workers of various "ethnic" origins: Italians, Jews, Spaniards, and he immediately assumed a leading role.

Tresca suffered an exceptional number of detentions (36) and criminal trials and also did several years in prison.

He participated in the hat makers' strike of Philadelphia in early 1905, and later in 1912 in the legendary class strike of the textile workers of the American Woolen Company in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which gave him national reputation.

He then led more strikes up to the miners' lockout at Mesaba Range, Minnesota, where he was charged, among other things, with the murder of a striker. But the accusation was withdrawn, ridiculous as it was.

At the Mesaba Range, miners were paid piece work per cart of coal carried out of the mine.

However, in the absence of any protection, for example, if they took out 800 carts, the bosses paid 600. It was enough. Hence the strike.

In those days it was hard for us children to believe it.
Yet my grandfather Francesco who worked 16 years in the West Virginia coal mines explained that that was the brutal system and that there was no recourse.

The IWW and the anarchists naturally played a key role as leaders of that struggle, in which Tresca, Haywood, Giovannitti, Emma Goldman and Aleksandr Berkman distinguished themselves

 Tresca editor of Il Martello distinguished himself in the campaign in favor of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. 

 Tresca's  was involved in the fight against fascism in the Anti-Fascist Alliance of North America (AFANA), founded in New York as a "united front" body of Italian anti-fascist forces in the United States.

 At the time Tresca believed that the Communists were valid and useful allies in the fight against fascism.  

 But later came its break with Stalinism, following the ignominy of the Moscow trials of 1936-38 and in the aftermath of the bloody "May Days" of 1937 in Barcelona when the Stalinists attacked the anarchists. 

  At the same period Tresca became involved in the Mazzini Society, a political association created to fight fascism,at the end of 1939 on the inspiration of Gaetano Salvemini

According to Il Martello, the Mazzini Society was to be a "progressive democratic" organization, without fascists (or former fascists) or Stalinists.

It also had to prevent the "infiltrations" and "maneuvers implemented several times by the fascist "fifth column" headed by Generoso Pope, a prominent ItalianAmerican businessman and editor of Il Progresso Italo-Americano.

 In the Italian-American Victory Council (CIAV), promoted by the US Office of War Information (OWI), at the end of 1942 Tresca applied the same anti-fascist and anti-communist discriminant instigating hatred against him both by ex-fascists such as Pope ( whose ties to the Italian-American Mafia were known) and the Stalinists.

Pope was  most powerful and most dangerous because of his ties to the New York mafia. The relationship between Pope and Frank Garofalo, a prominent element of the New York underworld, was known (…) for Tresca,Pope was a "gangster" and a "racketeer" with relationship with the heads of the New York mafia, such as Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese.

It must also be said that, in the aftermath of the assassination, some isolated voices publicly and directly pointed the accusing index particularly against Carmine Galante. 

The fascist origin the assassination  was credited above all by Stalinist exponents.

  Even Charles "Lucky" Luciano in a long interview in 1970 in Naples repeatedly pointed the finger at Vito Genovese and fascism.

Many questions however remain still open. 

After eighty years, the assassination of Carlo Tresca remains a mystery and not only due to the inertia of American justice conditioned by multiple and perhaps unconfessable considerations.

The writer Max Eastman, authoritative voice of the American left, after the death of Carlo Tresca wrote:

"For the sake of his name and his memory Carlo had to die a violent death. He lived a violent life, he had loved dangers, he loved the fight. His last motion was to swing and confront the long expected enemy”.