WHO KILLED CARLO TRESCA?
Geltman, Emanuel
It has been 40 years since Carlo Tresca was gunned down on the streets of New York, at 5th Avenue and 15th Street (January 11, 1943). Who killed him? Mussolini's Fascists? The...
...Flamboyant surely, Tresca was an anarchist, but his own kind: "I seek only freedom, not anarchy...
...He was equally incapable of the communist type of duplicity...
...It might be too late to unravel the leads and suppositions...
...I remember, when I was a kid, hearing him speak at Sacco and Vanzetti demonstrations in his heavily accented Italian-American voice, which seemed to grow heavier the longer he was in this country...
...Commission members included Norman Thomas, chairman, Angelica Balabanoff, William Henry Chamberlain, Frank Crosswaith, John Dewey, Varian Fry, Sidney Hertzberg, John Haynes Holmes, Sidney Hook, A. Philip Randolph, Oswald Garrison Villard, Edmund Wilson, Bertram Wolfe...
...But we can remember...
...He had a great faith without bitter intolerance...
...Whoever wrote the report did a remarkable job...
...Immediately after the murder, then New York District Attorney Frank Hogan and the police launched an active investigation...
...As such we shall miss him sorely...
...Mafioso hirelings working for either (Genovese hit men...
...Everyone was his friend, even his jailers—except Fascists, Communists, and "ex-Fascists...
...Why now...
...He loved life too much to be forced into any Procrustean bed of dogma...
...A few years later I would see him at radical meetings or, on rare occasions, watch him hold forth at a favorite Italian restaurant, John's, enjoying the food, drinking red wine...
...It is an "anniversary" year...
...He was a figure of courage, incapable of the sustained cruelty which has marred the communist as well as the fascist movement...
...Case closed...
...Their report was published as a pamphlet in October 1945, with introductions by Arturo Giovannitti and John Dos Passos...
...There were leads a-plenty, clear lines of investigation—and, then, nothing...
...Norman Thomas, who tried as hard as he could to press the inquiry (and that was his way), said of Tresca: In a very real sense, Carlo Tresca was the last of "old-school" radicals or revolutionaries...
...WHO WAS TRESCA...
...The Stalinists...
...They didn't shoot...
...There is the occasion when Tresca and others have come to Lawrence, Mass., in 1913 (I haven't the book at hand and rely on memory), to lead a march in support of textile strikers...
...In slightly over 20 pages, there is a summary of Tresca's life, his beliefs, government stalling, and all the investigatory information then available, including such "byways" as Tresca's persistence in looking into the matter of the disappearance of Julia Stuart Poyntz a few years earlier...
...Fiorella LaGuardia, then mayor of New York, was also his friend, but when Tresca's widow, Margaret De Silver, tried to see LaGuardia, in order to press him about the investigation, the Little Flower closed his petals and his ears...
...A much abused word comes to mind: legendary...
...Silence...
...17105, at $3.95, postpaid...
...Tresca enjoyed living too much to risk his life in a grand gesture...
...This reissued pamphlet is available from Mountain Laurel Publications, P.O...
...or those Tresca called "ex-Fascists...
...Deputy sheriffs, rifles poised, face the marchers...
...It's worth getting...
...A "byway" that could have been most relevant...
...This report has now been reissued, with an introduction and some editing (as to facts) by Warren Hope of Mountain Laurel Publications...
...Bravado, courage...
...Hardly...
...Box 1621, Harrisburg, Pa...
...237 With official channels clearly dismembering the investigation, the Carlo Tresca Memorial Commission undertook to put the known facts together...
...In Heroes I have Known Max Eastman preents an admiring portrait...
...Quoted in Hope's introduction...
...Tresca stops the march and, alone, marches right up to the guns...
...It was, quite simply, the thing to do...
...More important, the case can never be closed for people of conscience, especially those for whom radical and labor history remain compelling...
...Poyntz reportedly once had been a Soviet agent and Tresca pointed a finger at a Communist agent who could have had a hand in her mysterious disappearance...
...He loved men better than the abstraction, mankind...
Vol. 30 • April 1983 • No. 2
