The Italo-American Anti-Fascist Opposition

Abstract

W HEN the French historian Henri Michel accused America of perpetuating a systematic of the World War II resistance movements, he echoed not only a widespread resentment on the continent but also betrayed a touch of European ethnocentrism.' To most Americans, it is true, the war against fascism began only after December 7, 1941, and then quickly took on a technological image of massive American industrial might liberating Europe from totalitarianism, of General Motors triumphing over Krupp and Messerschmitt. To Frenchmen, the struggle began on June 18, 1940, when Charles de Gaulle made his famous radio appeal from London and coined the inspirational watchword resistance; to Italians, as early as 1924, when Benito Mussolini's enemies formed the Aventine Opposition. Looking upon the resistance as a moral act of noble vision, it is understandable why Europeans were bewildered by America's cavalier indifference. The purpose of this essay is not to apologize for America's ignorance of this heroic epic of human courage but rather to suggest, to continental as well as to American scholars, that the resistance cannot be strictly regarded as a unique European phenomenon. For America produced, thanks to the efforts of Italo-American labor leaders, radical partisans, and a few liberal intellectuals, one of the first anti-Fascist campaigns in the western world. American opposition originated in the Italo-American labor movement, a genre of trans-Atlantic radicalism that embraced the socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist traditions of Italy as well as the Marxist (i.e., DeLeonite) and reformist (i.e., the Lassallean) traditions of the American Left.2