Biography
Carlo Tresca was an Italian-American anarchist, syndicalist, orator, and newspaper editor who became one of the most prominent radical labor agitators in the United States. A leader of the Industrial Workers of the World during the 1910s, he helped lead the Lawrence (1912) and Paterson (1913) textile strikes and the 1916 Mesabi Range iron miners' strike in Minnesota, where he and other organizers were jailed for months on an accessory-to-murder charge arising from the strike that ultimately collapsed without trial. As editor of the anti-fascist weekly Il Martello ('The Hammer'), he became a leading voice against Mussolini's regime in America; at the behest of the Italian government, federal authorities prosecuted him for a two-line birth-control advertisement and he served about four months in the Atlanta federal penitentiary in 1925 before public outcry forced President Calvin Coolidge to commute the sentence to time served. A fierce opponent of both fascism and Stalinism, Tresca was assassinated on a Manhattan street corner on January 11, 1943, in a killing widely attributed to the Mafia and never officially solved.
