Biography
Giovanni Baldazzi was sentenced to ten years in prison. He served in Leavenworth Penitentiary from August 30, 1918, to December 1921, when he was granted clemency and deported.
From Kenyon Zimmer's Red Scare Deportees index (kenyonzimmer.com, compiled from INS deportation case files): Active in Italian anarchist circles by 1903, he wrote for several anarchist papers and advocated the general strike. Repeatedly arrested for labor activism, he shifted in 1906 toward individualist anarchism and spent 1907–1910 moving between England, France, and Italy as a sales representative. Expelled from France in 1912, he again engaged in labor struggles in Italy. In 1914 he collaborated on Utopia, a pro-war, syndicalist-leaning newspaper edited by then-socialist Benito Mussolini.
Migrating to the United States later that year, he joined the IWW, became an organizer for its Bakers’ Union in New York, and contributed to (and later edited) the IWW’s Italian-language newspaper Il Proletario. Arrested in Pennsylvania in 1917 for “pernicious activities” and opposition to conscription, he was a defendant in the 1918 federal IWW trial and received a sentence of ten years and a $30,000 fine. His sentence was commuted in 1922 on condition of deportation on February 21, 1922.
Back in Italy, Baldazzi gravitated to Fascist institutions—working for the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro and later the fascist newspaper La Stirpe—though he never joined the National Fascist Party. 1931–1936 employed as a translator for the Italian National Olympic Committee and the Federazione Internazionale dei Tecnici Agricoli. In 1935, however, he was placed under government surveillance as a suspected antifascist. He began advocating for a liberal-democratic renewal in Europe and petitioned unsuccessfully to emigrate to France in 1936. Died in 1940.
