On Dorothy Gallagher's All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca
Coser, Lewis
ALL THE RIGHT ENEMIES: THE LIFE AND MURDER OF CARLO TRESCA, by Dorothy Gallagher. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. 321 pp. $24.95. Carlo Tresca's life was exciting and...
...The anarcho-syndicalist Italianborn labor agitator, journalist, and fierce foe of capitalism, Stalinism, and fascism was a stormy figure on the American left...
...This last part of her book may be quite valuable for the clearing up of some of the mystery that has long surrounded the intricate relationship between the Mafia and American fascist circles as well as the wartime collaboration of the OSS and Lucky Luciano...
...It stands to reason that such a man would cause a great deal of both loving devotion and passionate hatred...
...After Mussolini's coming to power, he fought the powerful fascist agents in America...
...Beholden to no one—no organization, no labor bureaucracy, no national state—he fought his lonely battle with verve and a large measure of egocentric theatrics...
...The author has done a great deal of impressive research and has unearthed much new factual material about Tresca's life and his assassination...
...At the huge memorial meeting for the slain Tresca, which I attended and which was addressed by, among others, the veteran Russian Socialist and former companion of Lenin, Angelica Balabanoff, I was sitting near a burly Irish policeman who clearly didn't understand a word of Balabanoff 's fierce Italian oratory...
...He helped organize the unemployed in New York City and fought in strike battles on the Mesabi iron range and among New York City hotel workers...
...Tresca came to America from Italy in 1904, only in his twenties but already a veteran socialist organizer and pamphleteer who was a fugitive from justice, having been convicted of libel in the course of his fierce attacks against local dignitaries in the socialist paper of his native town...
...What is more, she fails to make us understand the man's historic position in the American labor movement and his major role in American anarcho-syndicalist circles before the First World War and after...
...He had by then definitively turned his back on the official socialist movement and cast his lot with the largely unorganized and semiskilled or unskilled foreign workers who were willing to listen to his revolutionary oratory and felt alienated from an official trade union movement that was largely organized around the craft ideals of native American labor...
...Tresca came fully into his own as a key leader and agitator during the famous strike of the textile workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912...
...Tresca was imprisoned several times in Pennsylvania coal towns and elsewhere...
...He fought epic battles against reformist union leaders and individualistic anarchists...
...But this account detracts from the main point, so that the book ends like a detective story rather than a contribution to American labor history...
...Dorothy Gallagher was fascinated, quite understandably so, by the romantic aspects of Tresca's life...
...The paper he edited, 11 Martello, became his preferred instrument to castigate the enemies of labor as well as its too timid and tepid friends...
...Nevertheless, there are enough new data and explanations here to inspire a future historian of the labor movement to provide a more balanced picture...
...These Italians, Poles, Greeks, Portuguese, and Russians were brought together under the banner of the IWW at a time when the American Federation of Labor was unwilling to help organize this foreign underclass...
...Why, then, is it an unsatisfying work...
...This vibrant and life-loving man strutted on the scene of the labor movement before and after the First World War as if it were an opera...
...But at her climax he burst into tears...
...That strike brought a labor victory and allowed the IWW, until then mainly rooted on the West Coast, to gain attention in the East Coast labor movement, as well as among the thirty-five thousand recent immigrants who were sweated in the worsted mills of Lawrence...
...So when he was assassinated on a New York City street corner in 1943, the police had few clues about who might have ordered the murder...
...Yet I feel that, even though the book has been praised by many reviewers, Alfred Kazin among SUMMER • 1989 • 409 them, Gallagher's account doesn't fully succeed in doing him justice...
...Neither this man nor those who hired him were ever indicted...
...Soon after his arrival in America, he plunged into the struggles of the American labor movement, first as a left socialist and soon after as a central figure in the anarchosyndicalist movement closely allied with the International Workers of the World...
...Many of us at the time suspected the GPU, others suspected the fascists...
...As a result, she has painted him as a Carlylian hero rather than as a figure who can be fully understood only against the background of the American labor movement in the turbulent first decades of our century...
...The author, alas, has not resisted this temptation nearly enough...
...This brilliant agitator, who was also an ardent womanizer and a fierce polemicist, who knew how to love and also to hate with passionate intensity, would naturally tempt his biographer to concentrate on his larger-than-life personality while neglecting the social and political context in which he acted out his life...
...He was so flamboyant in the American labor movement during the first four decades of this century that it would seem impossible to write a mediocre biography of him...
...P.S...
...Sponsored by the IWW leader, Big Bill Haywood, Tresca became one of the main organizers and propagandists in this historic strike...
...He became one of the handful of premature anti-Stalinists in the twenties...
...410 • DISSENT...
...Carlo Tresca's life was exciting and romantic, the stuff of legends...
...Gallagher spends some sixty pages of her book following the various clues and concludes by indicating the name of the probable assassin— who was clearly tied to fascist circles...
...A year later, when twenty-five thousand silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, struck, the IWW again took the lead and Tresca was back in the thick of the struggle...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
