A Great Conspiracy against Our Race. Peter G. Vellon
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such as the New York Times, which labeled it “one of the best of the city’s foreign language papers.”49
Although mainstream newspapers dominated circulation within the Italian immigrant colonies, radical or sovversivi (subversive) publications rivaled their intellectual grip on the community.50 Championing class struggle and class consciousness, radical newspapers contained political theory and consistently reported news of labor activities and strikes. Italian language newspapers not only tried to connect workers with employers but also often functioned as their protectors. Especially in radical newspapers, numerous articles detailed the scurrilous practices of American employers and Italian labor bosses, alerting Italians to strike activities and employer exploitation around the country.51 For example, religious festivals such as those at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in East Harlem were harshly condemned as sad spectacles where the church and prominenti padded their own pockets with the hard-earned wages of ignorant and exploited Italian workers.52
Radicals in turn created an oppositional culture and celebrated their own holidays, such as May Day (Primo Maggio), and their own heroes such as Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist who assassinated King Umberto I of Italy in 1900. In addition to picnics, theater, processions, and other community-building activities, the press became a critical tool for spreading the message. Although radical newspapers did not carry commercial advertisements, their existence was mercurial, and frequently papers would meander in and out of circulation under different titles. However, even in the face of daunting obstacles such as financial insecurity and state and federal repression, radical newspapers persisted and were extremely influential.53
Il Proletario (the Proletariat) originated in Pittsburgh in November 1896 and by 1902 had become the official organ and mouthpiece for the Federazione Socialista Italiana del Nord America (FSI; Italian Socialist Federation of North America). The paper started as a weekly and promptly went out of business in 1897 due to lack of funds, but it soon was resurrected in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1898. Borrowing a method utilized in Italy to maintain solvency, the paper organized a donor list and moved to New York in 1900 to merge with Giovane Italia. Giacinto Menotti Serrati, born in 1874 in the northern Italian region of Liguria, assumed the editorship of the newspaper in 1902 and on May 1, 1903, turned it from a weekly to a daily. However, although Serrati had collected $4,100 by early 1903, he needed twice that amount to operate the paper. Due to financial concerns, the paper returned to its weekly status in January 1904 and ceased publication six months later. Although the paper did not publish exclusively in New York, it was headquartered there for some time, as well as in other northeastern cities, until moving to Chicago in 1916. This socialist newspaper and many other Italian radical newspapers were, in the words of Robert Park, “mendicant journal(s). They are either regularly supported by the parties and societies they represent, or they are constantly driven to appeal to the generosity of their constituency to keep them alive.”54
In 1904, Carlo Tresca, noted radical and labor organizer, arrived in the United States and assumed the editorship of Il Proletario.55 Tresca, who was born in 1879 in the southern Italian region of Abruzzi, revived the paper and was instrumental in rooting Il Proletario and the Italian socialist movement within the broader American labor struggle. Migrating from Italian-centered dictates and aligning more closely to the doctrines of revolutionary industrial unionism, Tresca saw the value of using the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as the vehicle to push Italians beyond their own provincial worldviews and establish them within a larger, class-based movement. According to Bruno Cartosio, Tresca was the one who “really transformed Il Proletario into an Italian-American newspaper.”56
The fortunes of Il Proletario reflected the twists and turns within the Italian socialist movement during this period. An ideological split emerged between those who viewed the IWW’s revolutionary socialism as the path toward class liberation and moderates who wanted to work within the American socialist movement. In 1907, Giuseppe Bertelli left his editorial position at Il Proletario and started his own newspaper in Chicago. Although Il Proletario and the Italian socialist movement suffered from consistent infighting, from 1909 through World War I, Il Proletario reached the height of its influence and circulation. This period coincided with a maturing working-class activism, the rising influence of the IWW, and the prominent role played by Italian workers in that struggle, especially in northeastern industrial areas such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey.57 During the repressive period of World War I, legislation such as the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, and the Trading with the Enemy Act made it possible for the Department of Justice and the U.S. Post Office to suppress any publication the federal government deemed subversive. Il Proletario was forced to move its headquarters from Boston to the IWW headquarters in Chicago in 1916. Ironically, it was during this period that Il Proletario reached its high point in circulation at 7,800 copies.58 Along with the IWW, Il Proletario came under intense government scrutiny as its offices were raided, its mailing privileges denied, and its editor, Angelo Faggi, was arrested and deported to Italy in 1919. The newspaper resumed under the title La Difesa, after the war became Il Nuovo Proletario, and in 1920 published again under the original masthead of Il Proletario. Although the newspaper would continue to publish for almost two decades, its lack of strong organizational support reflected the chilling effectiveness of repressive antilabor campaigns.59
Along with Italian socialists and syndicalists, Italian anarchists were at the vanguard of the American radical movement. Within the silk mills of the industrial city of Paterson, New Jersey, existed a prominent history of Italian radical politics dating back to the 1890s. With the migration of Italian anarchists in the 1880s and 1890s, Paterson would become home to one of the most important anarchist groups formed throughout the country. The enclave was composed mostly of northern Italian immigrants employed predominantly as skilled weavers and dyers. Anarchists formed the Il Gruppo Diritto all’Esistenza (Right to Exist Group) and along with French and Spanish anarchists helped establish Paterson as a major center of anarchist activity in the Northeast. In 1895, Pietro Gori, the Sicilian-born anarchist, playwright, and activist lawyer who moved to Tuscany at an early age, founded La Questione Sociale (the Social Question) along with Catalan anarchist Pedro Esteve.
In the late 1890s, Il Gruppo Diritto all’Esistenza had a membership of between 90 and 100 people that would soon increase to anywhere from 500 to 2,000. La Questione Sociale had become one of the most important newspapers of Italian American anarchism in the United States, with a circulation that reached 1,000 copies locally. These numbers were quite large for a community of approximately 18,000, especially when the readers’ families are added to the original 1,000. In addition, 2,000 copies of the paper were distributed to anarchist groups around the United States, as well as internationally. Some of the most important voices in the Italian American anarchist movement, such as the aforementioned Pietro Gori, Giuseppe Ciancabilla (born in Rome), Errico Malatesta (born in the province of Caserta, southern Italy), Luigi Galleani (born in Piedmont), and Ludovico Caminita, served as editors of the paper. In March 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt and Mayor Andrew McBride of Paterson ordered postal authorities to bar La Questione Sociale, claiming that the paper published immoral content that violated obscenity laws. In 1909, the paper was resurrected as L’Era Nuova until federal raids forced it out of business in 1917. Major setbacks in strike activities, especially the 1913 textile workers’ strike in Paterson, as well as the onset of World War I, redirected the paper’s focus to other issues such as the arrest of radicals and the socialist role in alleviating the plight of workers.60
Uplifting the Race in the Pages of the Press
The Italian language press provided an institutional framework for the cultural transformation of the Italian immigrant population and the development of a collective Italian identity as American and white in the United States. In conjunction with an exploding Italian population in New York City, Italian language newspapers addressed multiple needs and facilitated immigrant orientation to new surroundings. According to historian Rudolph Vecoli, the press “took on an importance [it] lacked in the old country.”61 For example, Il Progresso published classified employment listings on its front page that sought “twenty bricklayers” to work on Spring Street