Italians and the Radical Culture
From Contadini to Companeros
In our community, socialism and anarchism were in vogue.
A radical culture of unusual complexity, durability, and diversity came into being in Ybor City. Nurtured by the lector, sustained by a tradition of militancy, and tempered by the fires of nativist hostility, radicals imprinted their distinctive stamp on the entire community. Today it is difficult to gain a sense of this leftist orientation, since Ybor City seems becalmed in its new role as a tourist center. "But it wasn't like that when I was growing up there," exclaimed the novelist Jose' Yglesias. "It was extremely radical. Anarchists. Communists. And they were well organized." The visions of a just society held by these individuals frequently clashed with attitudes existing in the wider society and in some cases in the immigrant community itself. When radicals formed debating clubs and political groups, published newspapers, participated in strikes, led unions, and in many other ways attempted to spread their messages, friction resulted. The tensions resulting from these activities had important consequences for all of Ybor City.
Early-arriving Italians stepped into the ideological and organizational ferment of Ybor City with some firm guideposts from their past. Many had listened to the teachings of Lorenzo Panepinto and shared in the experience of the fasci. Not a few converted to socialism. All were only too familiar with the harsh lessons of Sicilian life, with its greedy landlords, grasping officials, and self-serving clergy. Angelo Massari spoke for hundreds of villagers as he recorded his first impressions of Tampa: "When in 1902 I landed in Tampa, I found myself in a world of radicals for which I was prepared, and when I listened to speeches against the Catholic Church and the priesthood, I was not at all surprised. In those days in Tampa, anarchists and socialists were many.
In the cigar factories Italians listened to the daily readings, with their stinging criticisms of capitalism; on the closely packed streets and corners of Ybor City and the open-windowed meeting halls of the clubs they heard debates about the working-class struggle; in the newspapers they read the points and counterpoints of radical speakers. They filtered all of this through their own encounter with leftist philosophies in the Old World. It was not long before they gravitated toward existing groups and in some cases formed their own.
By 1900 Italians possessed a radical culture that rivaled in variety and activity that of their Latin comrades. Ybor City and West Tampa contained left- and right-wing socialists, centrists, revolutionary and WWI syndicalists, pacifistic and "propaganda of the deed" anarchists, and a number of others as well. These individuals organized various socialist circoli (discussion groups) and sezioni (sections), anarchist gruppi (groups), debating clubs, speaking societies, and political organizations in both communities. The majority were small entities formed for the purposes of self-education and debate. Typical of these groups was the small anarchist club ihat attracted Angelo Massari shortly after he arrived in 1902. "In our community, socialism and anarchism were in vogue," Massari observed of the early years. "I associated with a group of friends who had organized a club for social studies. At the club I read pamphlets, newspapers, books, and all kinds of sociological literature. I also attended all the lectures and debates that the two groups, socialist and anarchist, organized, inviting to Tampa the greatest exponents of the two theories who were living in the North."
Each group typically included a secretary who was responsible for corresponding with like-minded individuals elsewhere and for maintaining a small club library. Whether it was a single shelf of books or a collection numbering into the hundreds, every club provided access to some literary material. These collections typically featured a wide assortment of reading matter, ranging from simple spelling and grammar texts to Italian-language editions of the great radical masters. Invariably included among the latter were the works of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Errico Malatesta. Most items in these club libraries were small, inexpensive pamphlets (opuscoli) offering polemical essays on various topics or excerpts from larger works.' Some were printed in the city, most commonly by La Poliglota Press, owned by the renowned Spanish anarchist Pedro Esteve, and featured the writings of local literati. More numerous, however, were the publications contained in several educational series sponsored by a variety of radical groups. Among the most popular in Tampa were Biblioteca Socialista-Anarchica, Biblioteca Popolare Edacativa, and Libreria Socrologica, distributed from a number of radical centers in the North.
To meet the social and cultural needs of their members, as well as provide for their political education, clubs collected small monthly dues, from ten to twenty-five cents per member, and periodically held various fund-raising functions such as picnics and benefits. More often than not members held meetings in their homes, although some of the larger groups were able to obtain nieeting space in the Labor Temple (usually free of charge) or one of the immigrant club buildings. The immigrant press of Ybor City is filled with meeting announcements for these groups, particularly in the years before World War I.
The anarchist Alfonso Coniglio formed a group named Risveglio (Awakening) and held meetings and teaching sessions in his home. His son Bruno remembered them clearly: "We had a long, last room like what we might call a porch, hut it was all enclosed, and we had a long table. we always had people come in. And he used that table for, let's see, one, two, three, about four pupils, all grownups who worked during the day. Twice a week they would come over and my father would teach them what little he knew. well, then others did the same thing." Other groups, among them La Voce dello Schiavo (The Slave's Voice), L'Alba Sociale (The Social Dawn), and Gruppo Volonta' (Group of the Will), met regularly and, in the case of the first two, for a time published newspapers bearing the same names (see below for an analysis of newspapers).
Socialists also supported a variety of circoli, which regularly advertised their meetings and agendas in the local newspapers. The Circolo di Studi Sociali, for example regularly met at 1702 Seventh Avenue under the sponsorship of publisher Vincente Antinori. In 1911 this group sponsored the creation of a consumer cooperative. The most popular socialist group was Gruppo Lorenzo Panepinto, begun by Giovanni Vaccaro in 1911 after Panepinto's assassination; by that June the organization counted more than 200 members. The club often held joint meetings with other radical groups in the area to raise money for worthy causes, hold debates, and plot strategy. It also pledged a yearly stipend of L1,200 to the socialist section of Santo Stefano Quisquina to assist in its work among the peasantry.
Unlike their anarchist comrades, who banded together in autonomous groups with little or no formal organization, many Italian socialists after 1910 organized into affiliated locals of the Socialist Party of America. Two such groups, designated “Italian locals," were located in Ybor City and West Tampa; they joined company with four other locals operating in Ruskin, Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Palmetto. 10 These other organizations were composed of native Americans, representing the ~grass roots socialism" that had made significant gains in the South and Southwest. Like Italians in Sicily, many southerners of this period had experienced agricultural distress and had responded with radicalism. In many ways a heightened class-consciousness gripped the South even as class-conscious Italians were entering Florida. The two intersected in Ybor City."
Sacco and Vanzetti
Although radical influence diminished in the cigar factories after 1921 and the red-scare repression diluted its impact in the wider community, leftists did not wholly abandon Ybor City. The scattered elements of the left rallied around two causes which gave their presence purpose and commitment. The first of these, the celebrated case of Sacco and Vanzetti, galvanized the Yhor City radical community, and particularly the Italian element within it, with an almost missionary zeal throughout the seven-year life of the affair. From its beginning in 1920 leftists scrutinized with intense interest the events surrounding the arrests, trial, conviction, appeals, and eventual executions in 1927. They collected money for defense funds, held rallies, sent telegrams and petitions, and staged protest strikes in support of the two anarchists in Massachusetts.
As in Italian American communities elsewhere, passions mounted as the date for execution neared. One manifesto of July 1, 1926, explained that the "bourgeoisie is trying to kill two comrades. .. their only crime was to be opposed to the war." The document summarized the details of the case, claiming, among other things, that the two men had been tortured by the police.67 CMIU Local 464, the Italian local, now headed by Alfonso Coniglio, coordinated a Pro-Prisoner Committee to raise money for the Sacco and Vanzetti defense fund. More militant radicals scoffed at the C MI U's use of peaceful protests, suggesting that the unionists were in fact on the side of the capitalist oppressors. In their view "only a general strike" could help free the men. Despite differences over tactics, wide community support greeted efforts to raise money and organize protests. On April 27, 1927, cigarworkers overwhelmingly approved a strike resolution and left the workbenches en masse for a one-day walkout. Three months later a Joint committee headed by Alfonso Coniglio, Vincente Antinori, Jose' Esposito and Francisco Alonzo organized another one-day strike involving 12,000 workers. When Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller announced on August 5 that he would not intervene in the case, cigarworkers again struck, this time sending 15,000 people to the streets.
Characteristically the Morning Tribune only saw evidence of radical excesses in these disruptions. One editorial on August 6 explained that Sacco and Vanzetti were "defiant of law, hostile to government, murderers at heart" and concluded, "We know of no convicted, condemned men who have enjoyed such exceptional indulgence at the hands of the law." An August 10 walkout again emptied the cigar factories. More than 5,000 cigarworkers, including several hundred women and children, jammed into the Labor Temple to hear speeches in Italian, English, and Spanish. Time alter time frenzied applause swept the audience as speakers extolled the condemned men. Ybor City's main thoroughfare, Seventh Avenue, was virtually deserted as every store fronting the street closed for the day after gracing the windows with crudely painted signs -"Save Sacco and Vanzetti," "Help the Innocents," and so on. The last and largest strike on August 23 ended with a memorial to "bid farewell to.
As always Tampa's elites rallied to the cause. Local leaders clamored to make a test case out of the May Day 1919 rally in Ybor City. Police arrested any individual found putting up notices of the gathering, and on the appointed day city officials called in the Home Guard Militia to break up protest meetings. After dispersing a small gathering the militia drilled for three hours, "with shining guns and bayonets," near several large factories in an effort to intimidate workers. "Gone and forgotten are the beautiful daydreams of how wonderful and beautiful the world would be when the German Kaiser had been put out of business," lamented one radical. "Now a greater struggle and more suffering." And so it was. The deportations, seizures, confiscation of records, closing of meetings halls, and intimidation of leaders and newspapers seriously weakened the Ybor City radical community.
The ten-month long strike in 1920 dramatically revealed the toll the red scare had taken in the Ybor City labor movement. Radicals had lost their influential roles to the more traditional union leaders who fought (unsuccessfully) for the closed shop. With the principal labor unions ascribing to AFL tactics, the radical labor edge of Ybor City had dulled. Radical labor leaders were not unaware of how events had worked against them. The "war and its waves of hysterical patriotism," raged one such leader, "have been used by manufacturers to prevent collective bargaining." Whatever their motives, owners freely branded every effort for improvement as anarchistic, socialistic, or Bolshevistic during the 1920 strike and thereafter. So complete was their victory that they imposed their antiunion "American Plan" virtually without check. The leftist presence, which had once pervaded the worker's movement, was reduced to a fading subculture during the ensuing decade.