The range of radical Italian opinion in the United States unites in the Anti-Fascist Alliance and renounces their Italian citizenship in protest of Mussolini’s murderous regime. Includes a statement signed by leading figures like Carlo Tresca, Arturo Giovannitti, Vincenzo Vacirca, and Enea Sormenti. The Alliance did battle with Blackshirts throughout the 1920s in a mini-civil war among Italian immigrant communities in the U.S.

‘Thousands in America Renounce Mussolini’s Italy’ by Esther Lowell from New Leader. Vol. 3 No. 11. March 27, 1926.

“Brigand of Predappio, We Toss It At Your Feet Is Answer To Fascist Expatriation Of Citizens Here”

THOUSANDS of Italian workers in the United States are offering renunciation of their Italian citizenship in demonstration of their sympathy with anti-Fascist editors here who are being deprived by Dictator Mussolini of their citizenship and property (if they have any) in Italy. Vincenzo Vacirca, Socialist editor of the daily Italian labor and anti-fascist Il Nuovo Mondo, and Carlo Tresca, editor of Il Martello, are two opponents of Fascism hit by present action in Italian courts. Their cases are among the 200 of other exiles under the Fascist law against all critics of Mussolini and Fascism.

In the greatest anti-Fascist rally New York has seen, a large group of Italians anticipated Mussolini’s attack upon them and publicly renounced their Italian citizenship.

“We feel ashamed of being citizens with the murderers of Matteoti, with the blackshirts, in the land of blackest reaction,” their statement reads. After mentioning their natural affection for their native land, they ad “But we are now not proud to have been born there, where murderers like Mussolini can head the government.

The signers presented a united front of anti-Fascist opinion despite otherwise varied views: Arturo Giovannitti of the Italian Chamber of Labor, Luigi Antonini of the Intl Ladies Garment Workers union, Gioacchino Artone of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers among the trade union signers: Giuseppe Genovese, 82-year-old Garibaldini and veterans of the last war; Carlo Tresca, Girolamo Valenti, G. Cannata, etc. Vincenzo Vacirca is expected to sign on his return from speaking trip in western Pennsylvania. He reports from Pittsburgh that thousands of workers there offered to renounce their Italian citizenship in sympathy with him and that hundreds of letters and telegrams are encouraging him to keep up the fight.

Tried to Kill Vacirca

“Mussolini’s reason for picking me among the first seven must be my unflinching opposition and denunciation of his system and crimes,” Vacirca asserts. “He tried to haye me assassinated while I was a member of a Fascist the Italian parliament; agent shot at me four times, missing me and killing two of my friends. My house has been devastated, my mother and children have been terrorized, my wife beaten and I was Anally compelled to escape to Switzerland and then to America.”

“After the Matteoti murder, I devoted all my strength to vindicate my great friend,” says Vacirca, who was of the right wing in the Italian Socialist party, “persuaded as I am that Mussolini ordered his assassination. This is a trivial thing for a man who has suffered what I have suffered at the hands of Fascismo.”

Carlo Tresca comments that he has always considered himself “a citizen of the world” and that the recent Fascist law legalizes his position! Tresca and Vacirca become men without a country by Mussolini’s action. “What will the United States government do if it wants to deport me?” Tresca asks grinning. “I certainly intend to keep on with my activities, to which the government previously took exception.” He served several months in Atlanta for a birth control ad which appeared in his paper during his absence, although he declares that his anti-Fascist and radical work really brought the prosecution.”

New Yorkers Issue Statement

The following statement was issued at the anti-Fascist Alliance in N.Y.C.: “We, the undersigned, were born In Italy and it is, therefore, natural for us to harbor a deep, passionate love for the country that gave birth to Bruno, Galileo, Masaniello, Bandiera, Pisacane, Pellico and Matteotti.

“In Italy, on our mothers’ knees, we learned to speak the language of Dante; in Italy we left our parents, friends, schoolmates and childhood companions; in Italy we received our education and had our individual conscience shaped.

“To Italy our thought turns with filial devotion. We cannot, however, forget that in that very Italy we were taught by our parents, who had almost witnessed the heroic deeds of the ‘risorgimento,’ that the Savoia tyrants first persecuted and then exploited the two giants Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the former advocating a spirit of brotherly love among all the people of the earth, the latter being always ready to fight for liberty in every land.

“In Italy we also learned, by gazing higher and beyond, to confidently expect the advent of a better day, when, with the elimination of all the frontiers, the people of the earth would consider themselves the children of one great mother.

“In Italy we worked, too, for the propagation of this new faith, mingling our voice with that of Benito Mussolini, the renegade of today.

The Murder of Matteotti

“As long as Italy marched together with all the civilized countries we, considered an honor to be one of its citizens. But today we feel ashamed to be the countrymen of Giacamo Matteotti’s murderer.

“A land controlled by a band of brigands; a land where all liberties are denied, where all rights and the very existence of the people are dependent on the will of professional murderers; a land whose judiciary is the servant of the tyrant smeared with the blood of so many martyrs of an idea; a land where so large is the number of people, who, either through fear or for the lust of gain have voluntarily submitted to a gang of thieves and murderers; a land of this kind is a blot to all men hating self-respect and dignity.

“You want by the new law of the expatriates, to deprive us of our Italian citizenship. It is not necessary to relate all the murders, destructions and violence that are the history of Fascismo. The facts are well known. We simply say that as long as the Italian Government is headed by a man like Mussolini who sold himself to a foreign country in 1914, who has become from 1920 to this very day the hired assassin of a hungry and liberty  destroying middle class, the murderer of Giacamo Matteotti, we do not know what to do with the Italian citizenship.

The Brigand of Predappie

“Let all the thieves, murderers, black shirted marauders claim it. We repudiate it. We tear it into pieces in your face, brigand of Predappio.

“We do consider ourselves the sons of Italy, but of that Italy which frets and waits and prepares in silence the day of liberation.

“The day will come when the chains will not bind Italy any longer and liberty will cease to be a ‘rotten goddess.’ We will ask, then, to be reinstated as citizens of Italy. That day will probably find us at our place, as the refugees who went back to deliver their native land from the black shirted assassins.

“However, as long as the present shameful condition is allowed to continue, we feel dishonored before the world to be born in the same country that gave birth to the murderers of Pilati, a war cripple, to the men responsible for the slaughter of Turin, to the Duminis whose arms are the dagger and the club.

“No, you cannot take the citizenship away from us.

“Brigand of Predappio, we toss it at your feet.

Carlo Tresca, Pietro Allegra, Alberto Guabello, Alberto Pullini, Gerolamo Valenti, Giocchino Artoni, J. La Rosa, Eduardo Molisan, Natale Cuneo, Y.S. Cavalla, G. Cannata, Luigi Quintiliano, Francesco Coco, Enea Sormenti, Giuseppi Altieri, Francesco Cancellieri, A. Giovannitti, Luigi Antonini, Giuseppe Genovese, Brutus Pertiboni, Leonardo Frisina.

New Leader was the most important Socialist Party-aligned paper from much of the 1920s and 1930s. Begun in 1924 after the S.P. created the Conference for Progressive Political Action, it was edited by James Oneal. With Oneal, and William M. Feigenbaum as manager, the paper hosted such historic Party figures as Debs, Abraham Cahan, Lena Morrow Lewis, Isaac Hourwich, John Work, Algernon Lee, Morris Hillquit, and new-comers like Norman Thomas. Published weekly in New York City, the paper followed Oneal’s constructivist Marxism and political anti-Communism. The paper would move to the right in the mid 30s and become the voice of the ‘Old Guard’ of the S.P. After Oneal retired in 1940, the paper became a liberal anti-communist paper under editor Sol Levitas. However, in the 1920s and for much of the 1930s the paper contained a gold mine of information about the Party, its activities, and most importantly for labor historians, its insiders coverage of the union movement in a crucial period.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-leader/1926/v03n11-mar-27-1926-NL.pdf