On this day, 11 January 1943, Italian-American anarchist union organiser and newspaper editor Carlo Tresca was assassinated in New York City.
Tresca had been a railway union activist and editor back in Italy, and migrated to the US to avoid a prison term. In his new home, Tresca travelled around the country, helping organise workers with the Industrial Workers of the World union. He was active in organising and supporting strikes of miners in Pennsylvania, textile and hotel workers in New York, silk workers in New Jersey and miners in Minnesota. Tresca also dodged assassination, bombing and lynching attempts, arrests, deportation and bogus criminal charges of offences including murder.
With the rise of fascism in Italy, Tresca agitated strongly amongst Italian workers in the US to oppose fascists’ attempts to gain a foothold in the migrant community as well. Tresca was surveilled by the Department of Justice, and his anti-fascist newspaper Il Martello was held up in the post. Eventually when the Italian fascist government asked the US to suppress Il Martello, the government happily complied. They prosecuted Tresca for sending “obscene matter” through the post, and sentenced him to a year and a day’s imprisonment, until mass outrage forced the president to commute his sentence.
The most recent research suggests that Tresca was murdered by contract killer Carmine Galante, on the orders of fascist-sympathising mobsters.
After his death, Tresca’s friend Max Eastman wrote: “For Poetry’s sake, for the sake of his name and memory, Carlo had to die a violent death. He had to die at the hand of a tyrant’s assassin. He had lived a violent life. He had loved danger. He had loved the fight. His last motion was to swing and confront the long-expected enemy. So let us say farewell to Carlo as we hear him say—as he surely would if the breath came back—‘Well, they got me at last!’” https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2184240811761057/?type=3
