Italian Americans

ITALIAN AMERICANS. The Italian American Left constituted a small but significant presence within the Italian immigrant community and the American labor movement from the late nineteenth century through World War II. Particularly between 1910 and 1919, Italian workers participated in, and often led, some of the most important labor strikes in US history, creating popular heroes and radical movements that nearly transformed Italian American life. In success and failure, they supplied the shock troops and also most of the outstanding intellectuals of class-conscious US anarchism and antifascism.

The earliest radical activity—part of the demographic cutting edge of an immigrant wave that would surpass any previous ethnic group, reaching nearly five million—developed around trades familiar to radical activity in the homeland. Skilled textile workers flocked to Paterson (“City of Anarchy”), New Jersey; marble and granite workers turned up at quarry sites in New England and Vermont. Soon, more scattered organization in a variety of trades, against the background of the socialist movement’s development in native Italy, tended in the direction of coordination. By 1896, the “Partito Socialista della Pennsylvania” launched the weekly Il Proletario destined to become one of the leading Italian American Left publications among nearly 200 Italian-language radical newspapers produced in the United States. Like the homeland movement, growing between bursts of activity and severe government repression, its US counterpart adopted a variety of strategies to meet the special needs of constituents.

Predominantly from the rural south and largely illiterate, Italian immigrants lacked for the most part the rudiments of formal political labor organization, either industrial skills or strong national self-identity. They faced unremitting exploitation at the lowest levels of American industry, their work often symbolized by the shovel of the menial laborer. Indeed, despite their eventual penetration of major industries such as textiles, mining, and cigar-making, they would continue to be viewed as a group apart, virtually nonwhite. Anarchism and syndicalism, with an emphasis on explosive rhetoric, spontaneous revolt and direct action, understandably took early precedence over a patient, electoral socialism dependent upon a stable, naturalized population.

In 1902 the Federazione Socialista Italiana del Nord America (FSI) consolidated the leading body of militants. Unique to any major immigrant grouping, its founders chose a year later to withhold their affiliation from the American Socialist Party, seeing it as politically too timid and near-xenophobic. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), with its class-conscious strategy, its fierce egalitarianism, and its American version of the extreme anticlericalism native to Italian radicals, became instead the FSI’s natural ally (and again uniquely, its economic expression: all FSI members were mandated to join the IWW).

The new ties to the IWW broke the insularity of the FSI and launched a period of intense activism, which catapulted Italian immigrant men and women in the forefront of early 1910s labor struggles. The Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912—with Carlo Tresca, Arturo Giovannitti, and Joe Ettor sharing the spotlight and the threat to their personal safety—marked FSI’s highest point. With no more than 300,000 members, it managed to direct support and related activities up and down the Atlantic Coast. The defeat of the Paterson strike the following year, and the eventual retreat of the IWW, victimized by wartime dissent and repression, marked the eclipse of FSI influence and syndicalism at large.

Ideologically divided, the Italian American Left became even more polarized toward two extremes: on the one hand, the more practical and mundane organization of industrial unions within the labor mainstream; on the other, the perpetuation of outright anarchist and communist agitation against capitalism and the new calamities brought by the war years. The “new unionism” of the garment industry (which by the mid-1910s was dominated by Italians) helped foster to an unprecedented degree ethnic cooperation, unity and interaction, exemplified in the creation of the Chamber of Labor in 1919 (a district-wide employment service inspired by homeland activities). New figures of importance, such as Emilio Grandinetti, August and Frank Bellanca, Luigi Antonini, Arturo Caroti, and Angela Bambace, who in 1956 became the first woman elected vice-president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, also emerged at the leftward edge of the Socialist Party mainstream, attaining national respectability and considerable influence. In coal-mining districts, and in the shoe and needle trades, immigrant socialists marched toward their goal of mobilization in unions and education in socialist principles. By 1919, they had achieved their immediate goals, at least in the New York area and other industrial towns, to a surprising degree.

However, textiles, coal mining, and shoes would soon be “sick” trades, and garments in a slump. More important, Italian American labor leaders had consolidated their energies just as the fierce governmental repression against radicals, the anti-labor “open shop” and revived nativism swept across America. Though the triumph of the Russian Revolution briefly galvanized revolutionary hopes, in a few years, nearly all the practical accomplishments of the Italian American Left had been eradicated, their movements virtually destroyed.

Fierce new struggles in the early 1920s, directed toward fascism and the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, marked the final heroic phase. Antifascist agitation, working against the unquestionably widespread appeal of Mussolini to nationalistic sentiments, became the new raison d’être of the Italian-speaking Left. A vigorous opposition, coming from the entire spectrum of the radical movement and representing about ten percent of the Italian American population, arose as soon as Mussolini came to power in 1922. A year later, under the auspices of the Italian Chamber of Labor, veterans from the anarchist, socialist, and communist guards together with newly arrived exiles, sought to put their difference aside and forge a united front, giving life to the Anti-Fascist Alliance of North America (AFANA). Claiming a total of 150,000 members, AFANA became the first organized opposition to fascism in the United States, subsidizing scores of antifascist activities, newspapers (most notably Il Nuovo Mondo and La Stampa Libera), lectures, and protests against fascist emissaries with an occasional foray into direct action against local Blackshirts.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case, underscoring the victimization of Italian Americans in general and anarchists in particular, proved the last hurrah. By the time of their execution in 1927, Italian American radicalism had begun its irreversible demise. Despite the persistent influence exercised by radical heroes like Tresca and Giovannitti, and labor leaders like Luigi Antonini and Angela Bambace, radicalism had lost its base of support. The Italian section of the Socialist Party of America counted only around 400 members by 1929, and the syndicalists too had shrunk to negligible numbers, crushed by the Red Scare and the interventionist crisis. Following the severe anti-war agitation of Cronaca Sovversiva’s anarchist editor Luigi Galleani, government repression reached deep into the Italian community, plucking out hundreds for deportation.

The only radicals who managed to gain strength after the war were the communists. Faced with few viable alternatives, many former FSI members—most notably Antonino Capraro, Ignazio Camarda, Antonio Presi, Ramondo Fazio, Flavio Venanzi and briefly Arturo Giovannitti—embraced communism, forming in 1921 the Federation of Italian Workers of America. Led by Vittorio Vidali (alias Enea Sormenti), an Italian communist who had arrived clandestinely in the United States, by 1928 it numbered about 1,000 members and published two important newspapers: Alba Nuova (1921-24) and Il Lavoratore (1924-31). After declining in the late 1920s, support for communism grew again by the mid-1930s, revived by the Great Depression and growing labor activism among American workers. The Italian communists’ main papers during this period, L’Unità Operaia (1932-1938) and L’Unità del Popolo (1939-1951), had a circulation of about 10,000 copies, while their main cultural organization, the Garibaldi-American Fraternal Society, had over 11,000 members organized into 130 lodges. Important Italian American artists, writers, and politicians, like Pietro Di Donato, Ralph Fasanella, Carl Marzani, Louis Fraina, and Peter Cacchione, emerged out of the multi-ethnic laboring culture of the 1930s. But not even the later popularity of radical New York City congressman Vito Marcantonio could sustain a substantial Left political culture.

Surviving Italian American radicalism tended increasingly toward anarchism of the extreme, almost individualist, varieties, best represented by the small cadre of New York City anarchists who published L’Adunata dei refrattari (1922-1971). Eclectic anarchist Carlo Tresca, editor of Il Martello, continued to be a popular figure until his mysterious, still unresolved, murder in 1943, but among a severely depleted constituency. Apart from the scattered and aging followings of the Socialist and Communist parties, Italian American radicalism drifted in its final decades toward a social life in local clubhouses established long before for a more aggressive purpose.

In the 1990s, a new generation of Italian Americans, however, began to rediscover the radical legacy through scholarly conferences and works that have documented the multifaceted expressions of a world that may have been lost but is no longer forsaken.

Bencivenni, Marcella. Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi, 1890-1940. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Cannistraro, Philip, and Gerald Meyer. Eds. The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor and Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

Fenton, Edwin. Immigrants and Unions: A Case Study; Italians and American Labor, 1870–1920. New York: University Press of America, 1975.

Gabaccia, Donna. Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Guglielmo, Jennifer. Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Pernicone, Nunzio. Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel. New York: Palgrave, 2005.

Pozzetta, George, ed. Pane e Lavoro: The Italian American Working Class. Toronto: The Multicultural history Society of Ontario, 1980.

Topp, Michael. Those Without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Topp, Michael. “The Italian-American Left: Transnationalism and the Quest for Unity.” In The Immigrant Left in the United States, edited by Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Vecoli, Rudolph. “Italian American Workers, 1880–1920: Padrone Slaves or Primitive Rebels?” In Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity, edited by S. M. Tomasi. New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1977.

Zimmer, Kenyon, Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America. Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2015.