Carlo Tresca was an Italian-American newspaper editor, orator, and labor organizer.
Background
Carlo Tresca was born on March 9, 1879 in Sulmona, Abruzzi, Italy. He the third son and fourth of eight children of Filippo and Filomena (Faciano) Tresca. Both parents came from established wealthy families. When Carlo was still young, however, his father, who managed the family estate and engaged in business ventures and local politics, lost the ancestral lands and home through speculative investments.
An unruly and pugnacious youth, he later attributed his lifelong rebellion against authority to his father's domineering character.
Education
Tresca attended primary, grammar, and high school in Italy. Tresca had no hope of attending university as his family's finances were poor during the economic slump of the 1880s. He studied at a seminary instead, but left soon after, emerging as an anticlerical atheist.
Career
The social unrest of the 1890's reached the provincial town of Sulmona when a group of militant railroad workers formed a socialist club, which Tresca soon joined. He was bored by Marxist theory, but talk of class struggle appealed to his combative nature.
While earning a meager salary as branch secretary of a railroad workers' union, he threw himself into a local campaign to organize the peasants. The response to his first speech told him that he had discovered his vocation as "a man of command, of action. " As editor and founder of the socialist weekly Il Germe, he wrote scathing attacks on the clerical and secular establishment of Sulmona which led to his conviction for libel in 1904.
Faced with the harsh sentence of a year's imprisonment plus six months of solitary confinement, he chose to go into exile and, at twenty-five, fled to the United States. His wife joined him sometime later.
Going to Philadelphia, where readers of Il Germe had collected money for his emigration, Tresca joined the Italian Socialist Federation and became editor of its newspaper, Il Proletario. He left the group, however, after two years, having grown weary of internal bickering over fine points of socialist doctrine, and, attracted to the communist anarchism of Enrico Malatesta, began his own weekly, La Plebe.
Convicted in 1908 of libeling the Italian consul of Philadelphia, Tresca moved his paper to Pittsburgh, where he became involved in a number of labor disputes. In 1909 he was again convicted of libel, this time for alleging that a local Roman Catholic priest was having an affair with his maid, and soon afterward the Post Office Department revoked the mailing privileges of La Plebe: Tresca then went to New Kensington, Pa. , where a friend helped him found another newspaper, L'Avvenire. Through his attacks on labor agents, bankers, consular officials, and priests, all of whom he felt exploited the Italian immigrant, Tresca emerged as a spokesman for the Italian worker. He gradually broadened his appeal to workers of other nationalities by becoming active in the Industrial Workers of the World, helping to lead their strikes and free-speech fights in Lawrence, Massachussets (1912), Paterson, N. J. (1913), and elsewhere.
At this time, as earlier, he was the target of several assassination attempts, one of which left an ugly scar on the left side of his face. During the 1915 I. W. W. strike at the iron mines in the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, Tresca was arrested as an accessory to the murder of a sheriff's deputy, but the charge was later dropped.
By World War I, Tresca had acquired a reputation as "one of the most rabid of the I. W. W. trouble makers", although he had actually broken with the group two years earlier. He was arrested in September 1917, along with other present and former Wobbly leaders, on a charge of conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, and though he was never tried, his newspaper, L'Avvenire, was banned from the mails. Tresca then purchased another paper, Il Martello, and transformed it into a champion of radical causes, though, with uncharacteristic discretion, he tempered his statements against American participation in the war.
When, after the war, Tresca again turned to labor agitation, he experienced a cold reception from most union leaders, who considered him too radical, an impression reinforced by his willingness to associate with Communists.
Gradually, however, Tresca became alienated from the Stalinists by their repressive tactics in the Soviet Union and abroad, particularly the party purges of the 1930's. In 1937 he joined a commission headed by John Dewey to investigate Soviet charges against Leon Trotsky. Thereafter he wrote exposés of the Stalinists, denouncing the Moscow treason trials as a sham and assailing the Communist "liquidation" of anarchists and other non-Communist Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War.
By the 1930's he had become a hero of the non-Communist American left; Max Eastman considered him, after Eugene Debs, "the most universally esteemed and respected man in the revolutionary movement".
A contentious figure with many enemies, Tresca was shot and killed one January night in 1943 as he left his office in New York City. His death stirred considerable controversy; some thought the Communists responsible, others the Fascists, and yet others, the underworld.
A memorial committee headed by the Socialist leader Norman Thomas kept the investigation into his death alive for more than a decade, but the murder was never solved. Tresca's body was cremated at Fresh Pond Crematory, Maspeth, Long Island.
His mother, a devout Catholic, wanted him to become a priest, but he refused, having imbibed at an early age his father's anticlericalism.
Politics
Tresca was an anachronism in twentieth-century America, a European romantic revolutionary of nineteenth-century vintage.
Tresca was frustrated in his ambition to become a lawyer and disillusioned with the capitalist system and bourgeois society.
Tresca had been from the beginning an implacable foe of the Fascist regime in Italy. His strong attacks in Il Martello on the Fascisti in Italy and the United States prompted the Italian ambassador to request that Tresca be silenced. In response, the federal government in 1923 brought Tresca to trial on a charge of sending obscene material through the mails. The charge stemmed from a four-line advertisement in Il Martello for a book on birth control; he was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. When the political nature of his conviction came to light, public protests persuaded President Coolidge to commute his term to four months. Tresca immediately resumed his battle against the Fascists both in the meeting halls and on the streets of America's "Little Italy, " where his followers frequently clashed with the "Blackshirts. " During World War II, Tresca cooperated with the Office of War Information in organizing the Italian-American Victory Council, a body intended to shape United States policy toward a liberated Italy. He joined the Mazzini Society, newly organized by anti-Fascist exiles from Italy.
In both groups he took an uncompromising stand against the admission of Communists and ex-Fascists, thus embarrassing those who were seeking to live down past associations
Personality
Ruggedly handsome, with neatly trimmed beard and glasses, he wore a large black hat and flowing cloak. When not in the midst of a fight, he was reported to be genial and charming.
Connections
He married Helga Guerra, on September 20, 1903.
The strenuous pace of tempestuous years, together with several amorous interludes, was more than his marriage could stand, and in 1914 his wife sued for divorce, naming Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the "girl rebel" of the I. W. W. , as corespondent.
He was survived by his second wife, Margaret De Silver, and her two children by a previous marriage, Burnham and Harry, as well as by his daughter by his first marriage, Beatrice.