The Radical History of Italian Americans

As the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ 1492 voyage to the Americas approached, a newspaper opined that, rather than being a hero, the navigator was “a pirate and adventurer,” the figure who inaugurated the era of “colonial politics” and was guilty of committing a “series of terrible massacres and usurpations against the native people and the Africans.” This interpretation, while supported by a substantial body of historical scholarship, is sharply contested by leaders of some Italian-American organizations, who laud Columbus as a symbol of ethnic pride. As a consequence, across the United States, Italian-American organizations and conservative advocacy groups have fought legal battles against the removal of Columbus statues or the renaming of the holiday to Indigenous Peoples Day.

Basil M. Russo, the national president of the Italian Sons and Daughters of America, writes that “parades and days created in Columbus’ honor were the outlets through which Italians in America expressed their pride and heritage,” while the National Italian American Organization’s official statement describes the explorer as having undertaken a “courageous voyage,” and the Columbus Heritage Foundation says that it opposes “hateful attacks against statues fueled by misleading and misinformed narratives.” More recently, Donald Trump entered these debates, signing an executive order that declared Columbus the “original American hero” and later enthusing, “We love the Italians!” What makes the newspaper article quoted above so interesting is that these criticisms of Columbus weren’t published in 2026 and they didn’t appear in The Nation or The Progressive. Instead, they were written in 1892 and published in the Italian-American newspaper Il Grido degli Oppressi (The Cry of the Oppressed).

Underneath all of the present-day stereotypes of Italian-Americans as insular, provincial, or conservative, there is a too often obscured history of political radicalism.

Italian-Americans are often perceived as politically conservative as they’ve moved from being predictably Democratic voters to Republican ones. Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, media personality Jesse Watters, and of course former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani are all prominent conservative Italian-Americans. According to a 2016 BuzzFeed News analysis of post-election polling, Americans of Italian descent were the second-largest European ethnic group to vote for Trump, ahead of the Irish and English, and behind only German-Americans, with a 2023 poll from the Italian American Policy Center concluding that 51% of Italian-Americans voted for Donald Trump. These findings led author Christine Grimaldi, writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books, to refer to such voters as “Paesanos of shame.”

Critic and novelist John Pistelli reflects that many of Trump’s attributes his critics revile and his supporters celebrate—his brashness, loudness, vulgarity, and tackiness—embody negative stereotypes long associated with an ethnic group to which he does not belong. Just as Bill Clinton was sometimes referred to as the first Black president, Pistelli writes, Trump is “the first Italian-American president.” Pistelli mournfully notes that “We were the first of the white ethnics to make the break with the left, and we made it more thoroughly than anyone else,” wondering about the possibility of a “redemptive political identity.” Yet underneath all of the present-day stereotypes of Italian-Americans as insular, provincial, or conservative, there is a too often obscured history of political radicalism. Today, left-wing Italian-Americans (such as myself) may agree with Grimaldi and Pistelli that we’ve been saddled with Alito, Pompeo, and Giuliani, but only a century ago Italians were associated with radical thinkers such as the poet and journalist Pietro Gori, the theorist Giuseppe Ciancabilla, the revolutionary Errico Malatesta, the lawyer Francesco Merlino, the politician Vito Marcantonio, and the labor activist Luigi Antonini. Paul Avrich notes in Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background that Italians “comprised one of the largest and most militant of the ethnic groups which made up the immigrant anarchist movement,” while Paul C. Mishler and William Mello, writing in the journal International Labor and Working-Class History, describe a “lost world” of Italian-American radicalism, one often obscured by later images of Italian-American conservatism.

For much of the past century there has been scant everyday evidence of this once vibrant radical politics, though faint cultural memories can still be found for those looking. Richard Lenzi, writing in his 2019 study Facing Toward the Dawn: The Italian Anarchists of New London, recounts a woman in Connecticut who remembers her fisherman father having “read the old anarchist papers,” while the son of a stonemason explains that the “anarchy thing… happened when they first came over.” Whereas today the stereotype of Italian-American politics centers on somebody like Giuliani defending Trump, the community was once associated with radicals like Luigi Galleani who wrote in 1925 that “Anarchism rejects authority in any form.” This political tradition first emerged in the impoverished regions of southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno, or “land of the mid-day sun.” The region—including Naples, Calabria, and Sicily—was also the homeland of many of the Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States during the first half of the twentieth-century.

“History has offered few settings more conducive to radicalism than Southern Italy,” writes Gerald Meyer in the journal Science & Society, describing a region that was effectively feudal and that didn’t share equally in the economic benefits of the nineteenth-century risorgimento, which resulted in the political unification of the Italian peninsula, but which disproportionately benefited the industrialized north, whose inhabitants in turn disdained their southern countrymen. Meyer writes that this was a place “where entrenched feudal socioeconomic structures” led Italians to “embrace anarchism,” especially the variety associated with the Russian theorists Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, both of whom were warmly received in the Mezzogiorno. Carlo Tresca, the Italian-born American anarchist theorist and activist, who not only fought fascist supporters in the immigrant community but also Mafia-infiltration of labor unions, astutely noted that for many Italians, “You did not need to read Karl Marx to be convinced that society as it stood had to be changed.” This was a leftism distinct from Marxism and later communism, but nonetheless opposed to the state, the capitalist class, and clericalism. Southern Italian culture was as rich a soil for anarchist thinking as the volcanic ash around Vesuvius, where a rural, marginalized, and oppressed people viewed as others within their own ostensible nation imagined alternative political possibilities.

Nor did arriving in the United States dampen many Italians’ enthusiasm for anarchism. Marcella Bencivenni in Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940, with “Sovversivi” translating as “Subversives,” writes that “thousands of Italian immigrant workers were radicalized by their experience in America, particularly by their exposure to ethnic discrimination and economic exploitation,” so that they may have brought their Bakunin with them, but their radicalism also “rested on the specific nature and conditions of Italian immigration.” She notes that among southern Italian immigrants to the United States, the vast majority were unskilledmanual laborers, with only 0.5% of those who entered through Ellis Island classified as professionals and fully “83.9 percent were contadini, land-poor peasants who generally lived in small villages under pre-modern social and economic conditions.” Furthermore, America’s racial discourse categorized southern Italians as separate from their often fairer-skinned northern countrymen, with U.S. immigration officials using “South Italian” as an entirely separate designation. Frequently the mass media and nativist politicians inveighed that “southern Italians were ‘by nature’ emotional, bloody-minded, treacherous, and vengeful.” Not only were Italians economically dispossessed in the New World, initially used as scabs against the labor unions that wouldn’t allow them to join, but they were also the focus of racist violence, such as the infamous mass lynching of eleven Sicilians in New Orleans in 1891, the largest such event in American history.

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Because many Italian immigrants arrived without having been shaped by the Anglo-American racial order, many initially found solidarity with Black Americans. In the South, Italians were frequently employed in manual labor alongside Black workers, and in the North, Italian and Black neighborhoods—frequently the most impoverished—often abutted each other. As Rudolph Vecoli writes in Italian Americana, “Employers and labor leaders referred to them as ‘black labor.’” “Unlike American socialists,” writes Bencivenni, “who virtually ignored the plight of blacks, Italian radicals offered in their papers detailed reports of some of the most brutal lynchings in the history of the American South, openly attacking the U.S. government for denying African Americans equal rights, legal protection, and human dignity.”

Events like the murder of a Black man named Michael Griffith by Italian teenagers in the Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach in 1986, and only three years later, the murder of Yusef Hawkins in Brooklyn, along with the protests that followed, have underscored the racial tension and violence that often defined the late twentieth-century relationship between Italian-Americans and Black Americans, as so memorably fictionalized in Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing. Yet only a generation before those tragic events, the Italian radical press repeatedly and vociferously advocated for racial justice, at least until “they became aware of the terrible price to be paid for being ‘black’ [so] they hastened to distance themselves from African Americans and to be accepted as white,” as Vecoli writes.

This process resembles that experienced by Irish and Jewish immigrants, among others, and was part of the phenomenon of “becoming white,” as historian Noel Ignatiev described it, though for Italians it unfolded more gradually. As Meyer writes, “Long after anarchism had waned among other ethnic communities, the harshness of Southern Italians’ lives in a new world and the unwelcoming reception of the host society recreated a social setting that perpetuated” radical politics, while Bencivenni states that many within the community pursued the “creation of a new anarchic society with a passion and vigor that remained undiminished for more than fifty years.”

“It was in the Little Italys that anarchism briefly thrived … a vast archipelago of densely populated, proletarianized enclaves … whose residents were almost entirely working-class people, who experienced derision and discrimination.”

Anarchism was unequivocally a powerful organizing force in Italian communities and an influential force in labor politics. Meyer describes how “it was in the Little Italys that anarchism briefly thrived … a vast archipelago of densely populated, proletarianized enclaves … whose residents were almost entirely working-class people, who experienced derision and discrimination.” This was a complex and often contradictory series of movements, with factions often squabbling (though setting aside their differences to fight the fascist Blackshirts ascendant in Italy itself) that nonetheless organized a widespread cultural infrastructure including not just radical cells, but also folk orchestras, theater troupes, and above all newspapers.

Bencivenni lists New York-based groups that included the Bresci group, the Gruppo Socialista-Anarchico Rivoluzionario, the Club Indipendente Bassa Citta, the Circolo Libertaria, La Nuova Civilta, the Circolo di Studi Sociali, and the Club Avanti Risveglio, with anarchist organizations present in “all of the city’s major Italian neighborhoods as well as across the Hudson River in Paterson, Orange Valley, West Hoboken, and Newark,” and in Midwestern industrial centers and coal and steel towns. She further enumerates groups like I Nuovi Viventi in Spring Valley, Illinois; I Liberi of New Britain, Connecticut; Gruppo Autonomo of East Boston; Demolizione of Latrobe, Pennsylvania; Gruppo Liberta of Needham, Massachusetts; and Risveglio of Ybor City, Florida, “to name a few.” With some irony, despite the negative stereotype, the vast majority of Italian-Americans have no personal or familial connection to organized crime, yet many second- and third-generation Americans of Italian descent likely have some familial connection with anarchism (though whether the Italian Sons and Daughters of America would be delighted by that reality is another question).

Newspapers were central to forging this identity. More than two hundred anarchist papers were published during the peak periods of Italian immigration, and continued even after Congress’s 1924 Reed-Johnson Act virtually halted southern European immigration for four decades. The Italian radical press, explains Bencivenni, “represented the primary medium of communication for hundreds of Italian comrades throughout the United States and across the Atlantic, providing an essential transnational network of regular contacts and information for radical leaders, organizers, and workers” in periodicals with names like Il Grido della Folla and Il Proletario. Papers like the communist Alba Nuova sought “to awaken the workers’ minds and promote consciousness of one’s rights,” as their editors wrote in 1921. The periodical had 6,000 subscribers and a circulation of 20,000 copies. Anti-fascist dailies like Il Nuovo Mondo and La Stampa Libera had 25,000 and 35,000 subscribers respectively, with Bencivenni noting that “Actual readership of radical newspapers was probably appreciably higher,” as copies were shared between impoverished homes and read aloud in factories, so that “even illiterate workers were exposed to political propaganda and radical ideas.”

The effects of these publications were hardly only theoretical, as Italian anarchists exerted a powerful influence on labor strikes. Distinctly Italian, with L’Unita del Popolo quoting not Marx or Bakunin but rather Garibaldi’s call to “Be united, o People, be united, and you shall be free,” the Italian radical press understood itself to represent an oppressed people who, contrary to the charge of sociologists that these immigrants were “amoral familists” concerned only with their immediate families, saw solidarity with other oppressed peoples as central to both individual and mass liberation. “During this period, Italian immigrant workers formed the mass base and Italian anarchists provided the leadership,” explains Meyer, particularly during the general strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, “two of the most spectacular labor uprisings in American history.”

Italian anarchists, many of them escaping Mussolini’s regime, were also instrumental in building the anti-fascist movement in the United States as Rome attempted to make ideological inroads in immigrant communities. Philip V. Cannistraro in the Journal of American Ethnic History describes how resistance to Mussolini’s dictatorship during the 1920s was spearheaded by a “small group of syndicalists, émigré labor militants, [and] often controversial socialists,” such as Luigi Antonini, secretary of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union who “played a key role in these first years of the Italian-American anti-Fascist” movement. Many immigrants who arrived in the United States from Europe, including some Italians who came during the two years between Mussolini’s March on Rome and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, left Italy because of the rise of fascism. Once they arrived in the New World, some turned around and went back to fight fascism not with words and strikes but with bullets and bombs. More than three hundred Italian-Americans, distinct from Italian volunteers, fought in the famed International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War to defend Republican Spain against Franco’s fascists.

If any event resounds in the tragic history of Italian-American radicalism, it’s the arrest, trial, and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

While Mussolini and Hitler armed Franco, an Italian-American volunteer for the anti-fascist cause named Giuseppe Dalleo said “we will fight to the last drop of blood to demonstrate to the world that the true sons of Italy have contributed to the struggle for liberty.” Italian-Americans served both in the Garibaldi Battalion, which represented Italy, as well as the American Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Fraser Ottanelli, writing in the Journal of American Ethnic History, argues that these volunteers, whether serving under the tricolor or the stars-and-stripes, “challenged the ‘official’ image of Italians as militaristic, aggressive, and imperialist,” instead creating an “alternative definition of italianità” based on an “egalitarian tradition and of the battle for universal freedom… rooted in the redemption of their place of origin, in the defense of their country of adoption, and in the worldwide struggle against oppression.”

Persecution of Italian anarchists, because they were both anarchists and Italian, defined the first Red Scare in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution. The notorious Palmer Raids, named after the U.S. Attorney General, primarily targeted Italian and Jewish radicals for denaturalization and deportation, often with the most spurious justifications. But if any event resounds in the tragic history of Italian-American radicalism, it’s the arrest, trial, and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, respectively a cobbler and a fishmonger, who were accused of murdering a night watchman during a Braintree, Massachusetts, bank robbery in 1920. Followers of Galleani, the anarchist who advocated violent “propaganda of the deed” in the form of assassinations and terrorist attacks to agitate against capitalist exploitation, Sacco and Vanzetti maintained that they were innocent, while critics argued that anti-anarchist and anti-Italian prejudice overshadowed the evidence presented against them.

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“Nothing symbolized the end of Italian American radicalism more clearly than the trial and executions of… Sacco… and Vanzetti,” writes Michael Miller Topp in Those Without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists, for “they showed how dangerous—and how life-threatening it had become to be an immigrant radical in the United States.” The defense of the two became a cause not just among Italians across the political spectrum, for whom their defense was “couched in ethnic as well as class terms,” (even Mussolini protested their execution), but also among leftists throughout the United States. Tresca wrote that the “innocence of these two men must be brought out,” arguing that they “may be guilty of political heresy, but not of a common crime.” Both men were strapped into the electric chair in 1927; on the day of their execution, twenty thousand protesters gathered on Boston Common. Sacco’s last words were “Long live anarchy,” followed by “Farewell mother.” They would be formally recognized as having been treated unjustly by Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis fifty years later.

In the aftermath of Sacco and Vanzetti, many Italian-Americans shifted towards the center and then the right as many white ethnics moved from the inner city into the suburbs. While this phenomenon is evident among virtually every immigrant ethnic group in the United States over its history, Italian-Americans have, rightly or wrongly, often been particularly marked with a reputation for conservatism that this past radical history belies. Much stereotyping about Italians predictably revolves around the mob, sometimes encouraged by Italian-Americans themselves. In New York’s Little Italy, now more a tourist attraction than an actual ethnic neighborhood, T-shirt vendors sell wares featuring Al Capone or John Gotti, but imagine if they instead were emblazoned with images of Carlo Tresca, Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, or Luigi Galleani? “Everything must belong to everybody,” thundered Galleani, imagining a world without a “king, without governments, without masters,” a vision that inspired followers and, for a time, struck fear into the hearts of the powers-that-be.

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