Abstract
This article deals with entangled transatlantic political developments in the first quarter of the twentieth century from a southern European angle, focusing on the trajectories and ‘careers’ of Italian activists and migrants.
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Notes
- 1.
For an account of the ‘great migration’ affecting Italian society in the decades between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, see Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi and Emilio Franzina (eds.), Storia dell’emigrazione italiana, vol. 1: Partenze, vol. 2: Arrivi (Rome: Donzelli, 2001).
- 2.
Charles S. Maier, Once within Borders. Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) convincingly stresses the weight of new technologies with regard to the massive growth of migration in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
- 3.
One quite famous anarchist commune was the Colonia Cecilia in Brazil. See Elena Bignami, In viaggio dall'utopia al Brasile. Gli anarchici italiani nella migrazione transoceanica (1876–1919) (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2017); Afonso Schmidt, Colonia Cecilia. Una comune di giovani anarchici italiani nel Brasile di fine Ottocento (Assago: Edizioni dell’Asino, 2015).
- 4.
Nunzio Pernicone, Carlo Tresca. Portrait of a Rebel (Oakland: AK Press, 2010).
- 5.
Alceste De Ambris, ‘Partendo. Ai compagni del parmense’, L’Internazionale 2, December 19, 1908, 226, p. 1. The journal was one of the most influential periodicals amongst the syndicalist milieu in Italy.
- 6.
Although women’s migration has long been overshadowed, studies conducted in the last few decades have highlighted the noticeable participation of women in all aspects concerning migration experiences. Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution. Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City (1880–1945) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 45; Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta (eds.), Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
- 7.
Travis Tomchuk, Transnational Radicals. Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S. 1915–1940 (Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, 2015), pp. 78–79.
- 8.
The impact of Italian migrants in Latin American countries was particularly substantial in Brazil and Argentina. Edilene Toledo and Luigi Biondi, ‘Constructing Syndicalism and Anarchism Globally. The Transnational Making of the Syndicalist Movement in São Paulo, Brazil 1895–1935’, in Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (eds.), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940. The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 363–393.
- 9.
For a concise but thoughtful account of the Lawrence strike, see Michael Miller Topp, ‘The Lawrence Strike’, in Gabaccia and Ottanelli (eds.), Italian Workers of the World, pp. 139–159.
- 10.
Elisabetta Vezzosi, ‘Sciopero e rivolta. Le organizzazioni operaie italiane negli Stati Uniti’, in Bevilacqua, De Clementi and Franzina (eds.), Storia dell’emigrazione italiana, vol. 2, pp. 271–282.
- 11.
Despite their anonymity, women engaged at the forefront in numerous strikes occurring not only at the textile mills of Lawrence, but in most of the factories in which they worked. After the successful strike at Lawrence, women workers and activists waged another impressive showdown at Paterson mills in February 1913. Guglielmo, Living the Revolution, pp. 188–189.
- 12.
Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront. Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 39.
- 13.
This circumstance allowed for direct communication that in some cases resulted in explicit support for strikes and other ‘direct actions’ occurring outside the national borders: as for instance in August 1910, when the editors of L’Internazionale called out a boycott on the ‘bloody Republic’ of Argentina, where worker protests were violently suppressed. See Tullio Masotti, ‘Riprendiamo la campagna per I fratelli argentini’, L’Internazionale 4, August 27, 1910, 313, p. 1.
- 14.
Rossoni emigrated to the US after being expelled from Brazil. He had left Italy already in June 1908 to escape a conviction for political reasons. In the following years he moved between France, Brazil, the US and Italy again. In the US he participated personally in the Lawrence upheavals. Angelo Trento, ‘Italian Anarchists in São Paulo’, in Gabaccia and Ottanelli (eds.), Italian Workers of the World, pp. 102–120.
- 15.
John J. Tinghino, Edmondo Rossoni. From Revolutionary Syndicalism to Fascism (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 73–74. The author argues that, as happened to many others at the time, the national reframing of worker conflicts in emigration countries ‘helped [some Italian activists] create a new, masculinist, expansive and violent Italian nationalism that would soon find its leader in Italy in Benito Mussolini – himself a former sympathizer with revolutionary syndicalism and a returned immigrant’.
- 16.
For a nuanced account of the complex relationship between ethnic identity and class-consciousness, see Vezzosi, ‘Radical Ethnic Brokers’.
- 17.
Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, p. 59.
- 18.
Miller Topp, ‘The Lawrence Strike’, p. 146.
- 19.
‘La congiura dei briganti del capitalismo americano contro Ettor e Giovannitti. La storia del complotto’, from Il Proletario, reprinted in L’Internazionale 6, August 17, 1912, pp. 1–2.
- 20.
Alberto Argentieri, ‘Salviamo dalla “sedia elettrica” Ettor e Giovannitti. Quel che si può fare e si deve fare; Per le vittime politiche. Imponenti Comizi a Milano e a Verona. La costituzione di un comitato a Bologna’, L’Internazionale 6, June 8, 1912, n. 406.
- 21.
Alceste De Ambris, L’ Internazionale 6, September, 1912.
- 22.
Charles L. Bertrand, ‘Revolutionary Syndicalism in Italy’, in Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (eds.), Revolutionary Syndicalism. An International Perspective (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), pp. 139–154.
- 23.
The title refers to Mario G. Rossi, ‘Il movimento cattolico tra Chiesa e Stato’, in Giovanni Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto (eds.), Storia d’Italia, vol. 3: Liberalismo e democrazia (Rome-Bari: Editori Laterza, 1999), pp. 199–247.
- 24.
S. Tramontin, ‘Il sindacalismo cristiano dall’età giolittiana al fascismo’, in Francesco Malgeri (ed.), Storia del movimento cattolico in Italia, vol. 3: Popolarismo e sindacalismo cristiano nella crisi dello stato liberale (Il Poligono editore, 1980), pp. 205–318.
- 25.
Advocates of a Christian conception of corporatism were also quite active in France, Germany and Austria. On the transnational circulation of corporatist visions of society and their heterogeneous cultural roots, see Matteo Pasetti, L’Europa corporativa. Una storia transnazionale tra le due guerre mondiali (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2016), pp. 44–58.
- 26.
1902 Catholic craft unions numbered about 100,000 members, while socialist organizations attracted three times more. Rossi, ‘Il movimento cattolico’, p. 227.
- 27.
Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants Against the State. Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (Urbana, Springfield and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), p. 134.
- 28.
The group of ‘interventionists’ coincided with that of the revolutionary syndicalists and converged into the USI led by Alceste De Ambris, Filippo Corridoni, Michele Bianchi, Cesare Rossi among others. For a detailed account, see Matteo Pasetti, Tra classe e nazione. Rappresentazioni e organizzazione del movimento nazional-sindacalista (1918–1922) (Rome: Carroci, 2008).
- 29.
Giancarlo Carcano, Cronaca di una rivolta. I moti torinesi del '17 (Turin: Nuova Società, 1977).
- 30.
John Paul Newman, ‘Revolution and Counterrevolution in Europe 1917–1923’, in Silvio Pons and Stephen A. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge History of Communism, vol. 1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country, 1917–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 96–120.
- 31.
Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: the History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 152.
- 32.
This was the case with the eight-hour day agreement for metalworkers that industrialists and the metalworkers’ trade union Fiom signed in February 1919. Stefano Musso, Storia del lavoro in Italia dall’Unità a oggi (Venice: Marsilio, 2011), p. 147.
- 33.
Eley, Forging Democracy, pp. 170–172.
- 34.
During the war, part of the industrial production was militarized and subjected to regional and national coordinating structures. Luigi Tomassini, Lavoro e guerra. La “Mobilitazione industriale” italiana 1915–1918 (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1997); Giovanna Procacci (ed.), Stato e classe operaia in Italia durante la prima guerra mondiale, (Milan: Angeli, 1983).
- 35.
The rhetorical image of a ‘new Italy’ actively created through immense patriotic efforts by the whole population circulated copiously within the nationalist as well as the syndicalist press. Pasetti, Tra classe e nazione, p. 32.
- 36.
Alceste De Ambris, ‘Le deliberazioni votate al Congresso dell’Unione socialista italiana’, Il Rinnovamento 15, May 31, 1918, quoted in idem., p. 37.
- 37.
As for the complex, somehow ambivalent relationship between feelings of national belonging by internationalist anarchists inspiring analysis and approach is offered by Constance Bantman and Bert Altena (eds.), Reassessing the Transnational Turn. Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies (Oakland: PM Press 2017).
- 38.
Robert Overy, The Interwar-Crisis 1919–1939 (London: Longman, 1994).
- 39.
Angelo O. Olivetti, ‘Nazione e classe’, L’Italia nostra, May 1, 1918, quoted in Pasetti, Tra classe e nazione, p. 10.
- 40.
Emilio Gentile, Fascismo. Storia e interpretazione (Rome: Laterza, 2005).
- 41.
On the crucial weight of violence behind the success of fascism’s ascent to power see Giulia Albanese, ‘Violence and Political Participation during the Rise of Fascism (1919–1926)’, in eadem and Roberta Pergher (eds.), In the Society of Fascists. Acclamation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy (New York: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 49–68.
- 42.
Michael Arthur Ledeen, The First Duce. D’Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977).
- 43.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Working-Class Internationalism’, in Frits van Holthoon and Marcel van der Linden (eds.), Internationalism in the Labour Movement 1830–1940, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Brill, 1988), pp. 3–16, here p. 10.
- 44.
Ibid.
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Tolomelli, M. (2023). Global Versus National Revolutionaries: Italian Trajectories from the ‘Great Migration’ to the ‘Fascist Revolution’. In: Berger, S., Weinhauer, K. (eds) Rethinking Revolutions from 1905 to 1934. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04465-6_6
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