Political Murder
All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca.
by Dorothy Gallagher.
Rutgers University Press. 324 pp. $24.95
This book presents one of the most remarkable personalities in 20th-century American history: an Italian-born labor leader of anarchist convictions, a pronounced anti-Stalinist, who was assassinated in 1943 in New York, very possibly at the instance of the Communist party. The Tresca case has been discussed for decades by veterans of the 1930’s dissident Left—anarchists, Lovestoneites, Trotskyites—and by a handful of historical scholars. That a book such as Dorothy Gallagher’s has been published, and, although written from a leftist viewpoint, that it should be accurate in its assessment of Soviet-sponsored political terrorism in the West during the period, seems a miracle: a small and flawed one, but a miracle nonetheless.
The character of Carlo Tresca is inseparable from the labor culture of the first half of this century, with its deep idealism and spirit of self-sacrifice and its genuinely religious attachment to the redemptionist doctrines of anarchism and socialism. His background was, unsurprisingly, middle-class. What is rather more surprising is that he did not, like so many petit-bourgeois rebels of the time, turn his back on university and guild and launch himself into the revolutionary movement at a precocious age. Rather, he trained professionally as an accountant, and, had he stayed in Italy, might well have remained an obscure figure in the vastness of Italian radicalism.
Tresca came into his own once he arrived here in 1904, at the age of twenty-five, in flight from a political trial in Italy. (His brother, who preceded him here, had established a medical practice.) He was soon editing an Italian-language newspaper in Philadelphia, with the characteristic title of Il Proletario.
Tosca’s declared enemies, in addition to the normal anarchist gallery of demons ranging from priests to bankers, included the Italian “padrone” who preyed on recent arrivals, extorting their meager capital in exchange for jobs, and the Italian criminal gangs, predecessors of the Mafia, who enacted similar roles as loan sharks. He soon attracted protests from Italian diplomatic officials in the United States as well as the unfriendly attentions of the federal postal service, which began barring issues of his periodicals from the mails.
By 1912 Carlo Tresca had become famous in the world of American labor and radicalism; in that year he was ushered into the full glare of national publicity by the celebrated textile workers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, called by the anarchosyndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). William Haywood, the former Rocky Mountain mine organizer and spokesman for the IWW, had left Lawrence under threat of indictment. With his powerful oratorical and publicity gifts, Tresca, who came to be known as the “bull of Lawrence,” rallied the strikers. The entire spectacle profoundly moved labor and liberal opinion throughout the nation.
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For the next twenty-five years, until the middle of the 1930’s, Tresca carried out a unique function as the civic conscience of the community of poorer Italian immigrants while becoming a popular figure as well in the bohemian political and literary circles that spawned individuals like John Reed, the early apologist for Lenin. His enemies continued to include the old symbols—the hypocritical priest, the parasitical gangster—but in the 1920’s and 1930’s he acquired two new and deadlier ones, Fascism and Communism.
Prior to his flight from Europe, Tresca had known Benito Mussolini, then a young socialist radical. After Mussolini’s accession to power in 1922, Tresca, through a journal he had begun to publish in 1917 called Il Martello (“The Hammer”), emerged as one of the most effective, popular, and irritating voices of Italian anti-Fascism. In the fight against Mussolini, Tresca early on exhibited a willingness to join with Moscow-line Communists. But by the time of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, if not earlier, Tresca had learned that Soviet Communism represented no less a menace to the cause he championed than Fascism.
The single event that seems to have pushed Tresca into active condemnation of the Soviet Union was the murder of the Italian anarchist writer Camillo Berneri in Republican Spain in 1937. Berneri, one of the best-loved figures in the international anarchist movement, was kidnapped and killed during fighting that broke out in Barcelona between anarchists and the dissident Communist Partit Obrer d’Unificacio Marxista (POUM) on the one side, and Soviet-controlled police, on the other. (This fighting is best described in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.) At the time, the Stalinist purges in the USSR were at their height, and Tresca saw the murder of Berneri as an extension of the purge apparatus into the West.
Then, a year later, in 1938, a second case erupted in New York after Juliet Stuart Poyntz, a well-known Communist intellectual and probable Soviet secret-police agent, disappeared; Tresca and a small group of active anti-Stalinists charged that Poyntz was another victim of the Stalinist purge.
These affairs and the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact drove Tresca into a fury of opposition to the Soviets and their Communist supporters around the world. But it was the entry of the U.S. into World War II, with the USSR cast as an ally in the struggle against Fascism, that set the stage for Tresca’s murder. He was shot to death on January 11, 1943, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 15th Street in Manhattan.
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There is sufficient evidence, as thoroughly developed by Dorothy Gallagher, to believe that the actual killer was Carmine (Lilo) Galante, an associate of John Dioguardi (Johnny Dio), a notorious mobster; Galante would later rise to the heights of Mafia power before being spectacularly gunned down in a Brooklyn restaurant in 1979, thirty-six years after Tresca. From the beginning, however, there was also speculation that the killer of Carlo Tresca, while owing a primary allegiance to the Mafia, was paid or otherwise guided by Soviet, Italian, or American Communists who sought the elimination of an eloquent opponent. (At the time of his death, Tresca was preparing an issue of Il Martello replete with attacks on Stalinism.) Speculation similarly surrounded the figure of another Italian political activist with whom Tresca had once been acquainted, Enea Sormenti, also known as Vittorio Vidali and, during the Civil War in Spain, as “Comandante Carlos Contreras” of the Soviet-controlled Fifth Regiment of the Spanish Republican forces.
Tresca was killed just as he was organizing a major political fight to influence the United States government in its wartime dealings with Italy. The Fascist regime was in a deep crisis, an Allied invasion was clearly on the agenda, and efforts were under way to coordinate the establishment of a post-Fascist government. These last were centered, in Washington, in an entity titled the Italian-American Victory Council, set up under the authority of the Office of War Information. The Communists, vying for a leading role in postwar Italy, sought to participate in the Victory Council, but Tresca called for a close watch on these activities by the U.S. government, and he also opposed involvement in the Victory Council by representatives of a New York Italian political boss, the newspaper publisher Generoso Pope.
Galante was arrested in the case, but was released and never charged. Indeed, New York authorities never indicted anybody in the murder, and to this day it remain officially unsolved. Miss Gallagher somewhat hesitantly concludes that the crime originated with the Mafia alone. But there remain curious coincidences that point to Communist-Mafia collaboration. One, which Miss Gallagher mentions without sufficient elaboration, is that two of the most notorious and extreme Stalinists in the history of the American union movement, the maritime leader Frederick N. (Blackie) Myers and the warehouse organizer Louis Goldblatt, were suspiciously close to Galante on the night of the murder. Another, which she seems not to know about, is that one Albert Marinelli, a New York politician with whom Johnny Dio and Lilo Galante were associated, had also been involved in an example of clearly illegal activities by Soviet agents in the U.S., the so-called “Robinson-Rubens” case.
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Dorothy Gallaghers achievements in this book are two: she has effectively recreated the atmosphere and attitudes of the Italian radical labor movement in America during the first half of this century, and she has extensively researched certain accessible but neglected subjects. Thus, she presents a useful recapitulation of known details about the life of the fearsome Vidali, including his decades-long attempt, while serving as a leading parliamentarian of the Italian Communist party, to clear himself of the Stalinist-killer label.
The drawbacks of All the Right Enemies consist of a number of gaps and errors—items like the death of Berneri and the Marinelli affair are left almost untouched, and Miss Gallagher is simply unfamiliar with some of the political history of the epoch—and an attitude, characteristic of many recent studies of radical movements, of moral neutrality as between Soviet Communism and “American capitalism.” Miss Gallagher, for example, equates the depredations of the Soviet secret police with the paranoid fantasies of American Left-liberals about “secret teams” of criminals in league with American intelligence authorities, and she closes with a slap at those who, sharing Tresca’s radical background, eventually broke completely with the Left and rallied to capitalist democracy in the face of the Communist betrayal of their ideals. Yet the truth is that such “apostates” have learned much better than today’s left-wing historians the real lessons of the death of Carlo Tresca—and of millions more.
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