The struggle against the deportation of anti-fascist Italian radical Enea Sormenti to Mussolini’s Italy and the real possibility there of jail, torture, and death.

‘The Sormenti Case: A Challenge to American Labor’ by James P. Cannon from Labor Defender. Vol. 2 No. 1. January 1927.

ENEA SORMENTI, one of the outstanding leaders of the anti-Fascisti movement in the United States, is facing deportation to Italy at the hands of the American Secretary of Labor and his department at Washington. The legal charge against him is that he has broken the law of the land in entering the country without the consent of the authorities. But we know that this is not the reason why he is being held for deportation. Comrade Sormenti has been in this country for years and during the entire period he made no secret of his work and. movements but appeared publicly, everywhere, prosecuting his activities without fear and openly. We realize that the authorities want to ship Sormenti to Italy because the agents of Mussolini in America have demanded that he be sacrificed to the Fascist thirst for blood because of his splendid work against Fascism.

Who is Enea Sormenti? He is one of those many fighters whose ranks have been so ruthlessly depleted by the terrorism of Mussolini, one of these young men who grew in the movement in the period of the war and the subsequent revolutions. Inspired with an unbroken devotion to the working class cause and a hatred for its oppressors, he has seen the tragic fate of the Italian labor movement under Fascism. With thousands of his Italian comrades, he fought as courageously and spiritedly at the moment of defeat as at the moment of victory. He is one of that heroic band of Italian refugees who are carrying the exposure of the Mussolini murder regime before the world.

The Italian workers in the United States who know Sormenti, and there are thousands of these, admire and follow him because of his tested devotion to the struggle. They have found in him one of the bitterest foes of the Fascist hydra. They know of his incessant activities in building the Anti-Fascist Alliance of North America and the League for Italian Refugees. They are proud to say of him that he has earned the most violent hatred of the Fascisti in Italy and the United States.

Why do Sormenti and his comrades carry on such a bitter struggle against Fascist Italy? Because Italy under Fascism is the embodiment of the most frightful terror against the working class and the poor peasantry. The soil of Italy is thickly dyed with the blood of its people, and beneath it lie the corpses of the flower of its working class fighters. Mussolini permits no relief organization for political prisoners to exist, nor does he allow an investigation as to their number or condition. But it is common knowledge that tens of thousands of them fill the prisons of Fascism to bursting.

Who does not know the bloody record of Fascism? Everyone is acquainted with it. Under Fascism in Italy, the life of the workers has become a nightmare of terror. Their homes have been destroyed. Their families have been murdered or broken up. The trade union movement has been wiped out and its organization made illegal. Only the spurious, emasculated “Fascist labor unions” which are the instruments of the Fascist bosses, are permitted to exist. The splendid co-operative movement of the Italian workers has been demolished. Not only the homes of the workers, but their trade union and labor centers as well have been sacked and burned down. Their press has been made illegal, raided and destroyed; their political organizations smashed or driven underground. Thousands of the best representatives of the Italian working class have been brutally murdered and imprisoned for long terms solely because of their devotion to the cause of labor. The hours of labor have been increased by Fascist ukase. Wages have fallen, while the cost of living has gone up. No strikes for improved conditions are permitted under Mussolini’s rule, and the workers know the frightful penalties that await them if they dare to express their organized power—or their opinions.

Now, fearful of the great and suppressed power that is inherent in the working class, Mussolini has taken the most desperate measures to remove all possibilities of revolt and to insure his tottering regime. New repressive laws have been passed by the Fascist Chamber of Deputies—that mockery of representative government in its fullest Fascist bloom.

No opposition party is permitted to occupy seats in the Chamber or in the Senate. These are reserved exclusively for the Fascisti. Mussolini personally now appoints half of the members. A new series of arrests of workers and labor leaders has taken place in every center of the country.

Attacks upon the workers are the order of the day. Fascist raids upon the remnants of the workers’ press take place with renewed ferocity. Italy is swept by one wave of terror after another.

In this issue of the Labor Defender there is a summary of the new repressive laws. But the cold printed word can only weakly convey the horrors that have been intensified by these laws in Italy. Not since the dark days of Torquemada has there been such a systematically terrible extermination of those in the slightest way opposed to the powers as today under Fascism.

What, then, is Mr. James J. Davis, the Secretary of Labor, doing when he deports Sormenti into the hands of Mussolini? What is Davis doing when he puts at the service of Mussolini his department for the purpose of ferreting out the Italian refugees, arresting them -and shipping them back?

Davis is acting as the bloodhound for Italian Fascism.

Around his neck is the leash of the blackshirts. The foes of Fascism who have slipped through the bloody claws of Mussolini and escaped to the United States in the hope of asylum are being retrieved for Fascism by the American Department of Labor and its secretary, Davis. Faithful servitor of the Italian Caesar he is rendering unto him that which is his by right of the dagger and bludgeon.

Davis may earn his keep with Mussolini, but he is violating a cherished American tradition. It is the tradition of the right of asylum to political refugees who have fled from tyranny and murder. In former days, the people of America were proud to receive on their shores the revolutionaries of Europe hunted by Kaiser and Ozar. Many of these rebels, like Carl Schurz, became integral parts of American political life, honored and respected by all. This tradition has become one of America’s proudest possessions.

It is a long time from the days of Carl Schurz to the days of Mussolini’s lieutenant, Davis. The Fascist regime in Italy is propped up by Wall Street dollars. Reaction is strong in America, and it recognizes its bloodbond with dictatorship in Italy. It seeks to erase this great tradition of asylum.

But the American workers and progressives, who, like those in every other part of the world, have turned away horrified by the Fascist regime, have become the defenders of this tradition. Mr. Davis and his tribe may sink to the lowest depths of servility to accommodate the Italian assassins. But the labor movement of the United States will repudiate Davis and rally to Sormenti and his comrades.

The International Labor Defense has already issued a call to action, for the danger is imminent. For Sormenti to be deported to Italy is to send him to the gallows and worse. He is a man marked by Fascism, and Davis knows this well. “We know, too, that the murderer of the Chighi Palace gloats in anticipation of his victims writhing in torture or still in death.

But the workers of the United States will stay the hand of Mussolini and Davis. They have done this before, when, in 1907, their great protest halted the deportation of the Russian radical, Rudowsky, to the hangmen of the Czar. They must now build a living wall of defense around Sormenti and his comrades and staunchly oppose his planned assassination. The clutching hand of Mussolini must not be allowed to descend upon our comrade, for he is fighting also the battle of American labor which has so severely denounced Fascism.

The workers of America will join in this great movement to defend the right of asylum to political refugees. They will not allow America to become a Fascist trap.

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1927/v02n01-jan-1927-LD.pdf