Carlo Tresca
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Carlo Tresca (1879-1943) was an Italian-born American labour agitator.
Labor organizer
He was active as the branch secretary of the Italian Railroad Workers' Federation and editor of the newspaper Il Germe. Tresca moved to the United States in 1904, to escape a prison term for his activities in Italy. He settled in Philadelphia, where he became the editor of Il Proletario, the official newspaper of the Italian Socialist Federation (ISF). Tresca helped shift the political orientation of the ISF to Syndicalism, and, as his own views became more anarchist, Tresca resigned as editor of Il Proletario and began publishing his own newspaper, La Plebe. He would later transfer La Plebe to Pittsburgh and, with it, revolutionary ideas to Italian miners and mill workers in Western Pennsylvania.
Tresca joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1912, when he was invited by the union to Lawrence, Massachusetts to help mobilize the Italian workers during a campaign to free strike leaders Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, who were in prison on false murder charges. After the victorious strike in Lawrence, Tresca was active in several strikes across the United States; the Little Falls, New York textile workers' strike (1912), the New York City hotel workers' strike (1913), the Paterson, New Jersey silk workers' strike (1913), and the Mesabi Range, Minnesota, miners' strike (1916).
Opposition to Fascism and Stalinism
Tresca became a major figure among Italian-Americans in trying to halt Benito Mussolini's attempts to organize Italian immigrants into Fascist support groups. At this time, Tresca was editing an anti-Fascist newspaper named Il Martello, where he blasted Mussolini as a class enemy and traitor (the latter accusation made reference to the syndicalist roots of Fascism). Tresca's activities were being monitored in Rome, while, in the United States, he was under heavy surveillance from the American government. In 1926, Fascists attempted to assassinate Tresca with a bomb during a rally.
Shortly thereafter, in the 1930s, Tresca became outspoken against Communists and Stalinism, particularly after the Soviet Union had engineered the destruction of the anarchist movement in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Revolution. Prior to this, Tresca had supported the Bolsheviks, reasoning that a Communist state was preferable to a capitalist state, and regarding the Communists as allies in the fight against Fascism.
In early 1938 Tresca publicly accused the Soviets of kidnapping Juliet Poyntz to prevent her defection from the Communist Party USA underground apparatus. Tresca alleged that, before she had disappeared, Poyntz had talked to him about her disgust over Joseph Stalin's Great Terror.
In 1943, Tresca was assassinated, a murder which remains officially unresolved. Suspects include Fascists, Communist agents, and underworld Mafia figure Vito Genovese.