My Ears Are Bent (21 page)

“My pop’s a barber, see? They brought him over here from Salerno, Italy, to help put up the Third Avenue El. He was just a common laborer, but he had too much sense. He saved his money and opened a barber shop. Well, he retired years and years ago, but he still carries his tools around with him, his clippers and his straight razor. He’s got a mania about haircutting.

“When people come to my house he goes up and grabs at their hair and tells them they need a haircut. If they don’t resist he makes them sit down right there, and he gives them a haircut. He won’t take money. One day I had him on a movie set with me, and he sees Johnny Weissmuller with his long, flowing hair. Pop almost had a fit. He walks up to Johnny and says, ‘What’s a matter with you? Why don’t you have your hair cut? Sit down and I cut it.’ I had to grab him. Every morning he goes up to the priest’s house
in Ridgewood where he lives and shaves the priest. He won’t take a dime. Just a way of amusing himself.”

The comedian stood up and lit a cigar. It was raining outside. He walked to the stage door. A group of chorus girls were huddled there, waiting for the rain to slack up, so they could dash across the street to the drugstore for coffee. They had polo coats over their rehearsal clothes. Two of them were singing a song from the show.

“Look at them angels,” said Durante, smacking his hands together. “Can you blame me for loving the pickle works? Why, it’s a privilege to work here. I should be paying the boss for the privilege of working here. Geeze.”

On one of the final nights of the city’s last political campaign Max Steuer made an interminable, bitter speech over WOR in which he shouted; “Why, I’ll show you the kind of man La Guardia is. He associates with criminals. He associates with this man, Carlo Tresca.”

When they heard these remarks many solid citizens, puzzled over which lever to pull, felt better about Fiorello La Guardia. They considered Mr. Steuer’s statement a recommendation of the Fusionist.

This man, Carlo Tresca, is the town anarchist. He has lived as an exile in the United States—mostly in New York—since 1904 and is one of the city’s veteran practicing political refugees. Exiled long before Mussolini came into power, he became, after 1922, a leader of the thousands of Italians exiled to the United States by the fascist dictatorship. For twelve years, a period in which strife over the Mussolini program split the Italians in this country into factions and precipitated murders and bombings and civil wars in a hundred Little Italys, Tresca has carried on a persistent campaign against the man he sometimes calls “Little Benito.”

A gracious Italian, distinguished in appearance, he wears a black hat and is heavily bearded. He sometimes takes six hours for dinner and would rather be considered a villain than a hero. For many years the police believed—perhaps correctly—that he was one of the country’s most dangerous men and that he frequently tossed bombs. But he is a sly anarchist.

After the bomb explosion in Wall Street in 1920, for example, his photograph was published with the caption “Police Want This Man.” Members of the Bomb Squad finally located him in the People’s House at 7 East Fifteenth Street, sitting in an office, sleepily reading a book on political economy. They discovered
a package in his pocket. They unwrapped it and found three cheese sandwiches.

“They are nice boys,” he says, referring to the Bomb Squad. “Since then, whenever there is a bomb, they come to see me. They ask me what I know, but I never know anything. So we have wine.”

Now his life is comparatively placid. Years have passed since Tresca, the perennial dynamiting suspect, the antifascist, the militant editor, the I.W.W. agitator, the companion in labor struggles of sharp-tongued Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and of fat Emma Goldman, was suspected of an earth-rocking crime. Plagued by nostalgia, he sits at a restaurant table, smokes his pipe, drinks dark red wine, and recalls the headlines of other years: “Tresca Confirms Bomb Plot Aimed at Rockefeller,” and “Waterbury Cops Bar Tresca Again: Arrest Companion,” and “Haywood, Tresca, Miss Flynn and Two More Indicted.”

He speaks often of the jails and festivals of other years. There was the Red Revel of the Anarchists in 1915. It was held in the Harlem Casino, and Emma Goldman appeared as a nun. The revel began with a waltz called “The Anarchists’ Slide,” which consisted of two long dips, a short slide, and what Ben Reitman, Miss Goldman’s manager, styled “the eternal swing.”

“Ain’t it a grand sight?” Reitman is supposed to
have yelled when Miss Goldman tried vainly to essay the two dips and the slide. “Let ’er rip, Emma.”

“I had a good time that night,” said Tresca, who always was the idol of the lady anarchists.

And there was the time a policeman tore off Tresca’s vest during a confused riot at Sixth Avenue and Forty-first Street and disclosed a romance. The vest, torn in three places, was taken to a police station. In one of the pockets the ruthless cops found a small, worn volume, “Love Sonnets” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A line in one poem—“And tell thy soul their roots are left in mine”—was underscored and beneath it was scribbled, “I love you, Carlo. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, December 12, 1912.” Miss Flynn, known as “The Joan of Arc of the I.W.W.,” and leader of many strikes in New Jersey silk mills, was a married woman. Tresca also was married. For a time newspapers referred to them as “the trade-union lovers.”

With sardonic amusement Tresca recalls another headline: “Tresca Penniless, He tells Creditors.” One year ago his newspaper, Il Martello (The Hammer), in which Mussolini was soundly whacked each week, went bankrupt. Tresca’s tendency to recall other days is no sign that he is slowing up. He returned that week from a trip through Italian communities in New England with Athos Terzani, the antifascist who is
accused of having murdered another antifascist during a meeting in Queens of Art J. Smith’s Khaki Shirts of America, a fascist organization. In December he will start publishing Il Martello again.

Tresca has three lairs. He may be found in the office, on the top floor of a loft building at 52 West Fifteenth Street, of La Stampa Libera, the nation’s leading antifascist newspaper, for which he occasionally writes an essay. (This is the newspaper whose name Steuer scornfully mispronounced in his radio speech. It supported La Guardia.)

You go up to the office in a slow, grimy elevator. Most of the editors and reporters were exiled by Mussolini. They are suspicious of visitors. At noon the editors spread cheese and wine on their tables. And Tresca, if present, makes a few scurrilous remarks about Mussolini.

Tresca also puts in a daily appearance at the Manhattan office of the Industrial Workers of the World, on the third floor of 94 Fifth Avenue, one of those buildings inhabited by commercial artists, sign painters, and radical organizations. On the floor above is the office of his dormant newspaper. There is a row of benches in a hall outside the office, and scores of antifascist exiles use the room as a headquarters. Tresca listens to their tribulations, gives them good advice.

“Sure,” said Tresca, “I tell you all about the exiles
from Italy. After the Fascisti took power in 1922 around 20,000 left the country, a big crowd every month, and come to the United States. For years they come. They had political beliefs very unpopular, or were Masons, or did not like any more how things looked. So they leave. The most famous, the wealthy, go to Paris or Switzerland. Great mass come here.

“Most famous to come here is Professor Gaetano Salvemini, historian and once a member of Chamber of Deputies—like a congressman here. On his way here Salvemini stops in London. There they send word his property is confiscated. He laughs. ‘How funny!’ he said. ‘It is a compliment. All the property I have are few dry books and some sticks of furniture.’ He is a respected history professor now at Yale. If he touches his foot on Italian dirt he get thirty years in jail, but maybe Mussolini would reduce the term to twenty-five. Who knows?

“Also famous was Vincenzo Vacirca. He was a deputy also. Also had his little home confiscated. Was a famous editor here one time and at present is olive oil salesman in Brooklyn. Another was Virgilia D’Andrea, most outstanding in Italian labor movement and a fine poet. She was beaten up, insulted, and her home destroyed. Only salvation was exile. Here she died a month ago.

“There were many more very famous. They are taken care of, you see, somehow, but what of the
masses, the laborers and those kind of people? Not so good. Terrible. In this city there are at least 15,000 militant antifascist. All hate Mussolini very much. Positively, I know at least 3,000 are here in clandestine. They are living day by day in fear, exiles all. They change their homes two, three times a month. You see, those who live in clandestine are aliens. If they get deported, it means death in Italy. So they live in horrible fear. A racket goes on, based on fear. The fascists hunt the exiles out.

“A fascist finds an alien. All right. One night a man knocks on the door. He comes in and says, ‘I am from Department of Justice. We have to deport you now.’ Then he says $200 will straighten this little matter out. It is a shakedown—see? I stopped that racket three times, but up it springs again. For a time everything is quiet, and then one of my boys comes in, says they are shaking down again in the Bronx, on Staten Island, every place where Italian exiles live. It is hard for those in clandestine to get jobs. They live bad. They are unknown soldiers of antifascism.

“In Italy a man may have to go into exile if he says, ‘No prosperity here. Hard times all the time.’ That is called a crime against the honesty and soundness of Italian finance. Once Mussolini announce he gives amnesty to all exiles. A friend of mine, Anthony Vellucci, decides to go home. We try to talk him out, but
it is no good. He believes Mussolini to tell the truth. He goes. When he gets home they arrest him and say, ‘You must spend five years in prison on the island. Then everything is all right.’ Nice business. Five years on that malaria island and Heaven is next stop.”

Tresca delights in telling of an encounter with Mussolini in 1904.

“In Italy,” he said, “I worked with socialist labor union of railroad workers. Also was editor of Il Germa [The Seed]. It is very powerful paper. Suddenly I am arrested for something I write, given sentence of eighteen months in jail or ten years in exile. So I take the exile. On my way here I stop in Basel, Switzerland. There is another exile living there. His name is Benito Mussolini. He is very weak-tempered and vain, a man who would push himself forward so people applaud. I argued all night with him. He says he is a very radical man, an extreme socialist. Next day he says goodbye to me at the station and he says, ‘Tresca, you are not radical enough.’

“Can you imagine? I am an anarchist now; and what is Mussolini, who was so radical? A traitor to the cause. He remembers that incident, and if I go anywhere near Italy I don’t live long.”

When Tresca first came to New York he worked as editor of Il Proletario. Then he went to Pittsburgh,
founded an anti-Catholic newspaper, La Plebe [The Mob]. Every Italian revolutionist is an anti-Catholic.

“Well,” he said, “the churches there pulled together and started a paper to counteract mine. That is no good, so they start libel suits against me. No good either. So they send an emissary to kill me, pay him $500 in advance for job. He comes with an open razor. See this scar?”

Tresca has a broad scar which extends from a corner of his mouth to his right ear. It is very decorative.

“But I grabbed the razor. So he doesn’t kill me, just slits my throat. Since they can’t kill me they get the postal authorities against me. A good stunt. It succeeds. But I start another paper.”

Then he left Pittsburgh, aided in the defense of Ettor and Giovannitti in Lawrence, Massachusetts, assisted in the silk-mill strikes in New Jersey and the hotel strike in New York in 1912. He led the Mesabi Range iron-ore strikes in northern Minnesota in 1916, was arrested for the murder of a deputy sheriff but never tried. During the war period, under cover, and with great difficulty, he started Il Martello. During 1917 only twenty-seven issues of the newspaper were banned.

In 1925 he was sentenced to a year in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta for publishing a two-line advertisement on birth control. President Calvin Coolidge cut the sentence to four months. In the Atlanta
prison Tresca enjoyed himself. He collected evidence on an interprison dope ring, brought it out between the soles of his shoes. The Department of Justice begged him for the evidence, but he laughed and said, “I am only interested in tearing down your government.” On his way home he stopped in Washington and followed a group of college students into the White House.

“They were on a hand-shaking expedition,” he said. “So I stood in line and shook the president’s hand. I wanted to say, ‘Mr. Coolidge, I am the man you pardoned from the penitentiary. Thank you ever so much.’ But I didn’t say it. I was afraid a guard would rush up when he heard my name and yell, ‘For God’s sake, Mr. President, be careful. He may have a bomb in his hip pocket.’”

A few years after he left prison, the bomb period of Tresca’s career came to a close. In a few weeks he will start publishing Il Martello again and his life will once again become turbulent.

In this agitated metropolis nightlife joints sprout like jimsonweeds after a spring rain.

A former coffeepot counterman with delusions of grandeur withdraws his savings and leases a vacant store, a cellar or a second-floor hall. Carpenters erect a secondhand bar with defective beer pipes and hammer
some grooved boards together for a dance floor. A few cases of what are known as choice wines and liquors are toted in, and checked gingham cloths are laid on two dozen unsteady tables. The proprietor’s wife buys some pots and pans and two bottles of pickled cherries and turns the kitchen over to “the chef,” an unshaven ex-plumber. Miss Lucy de Lulu, an apprentice fan dancer, is hired at $12.50 a week, and an orchestra—piano, violin, saxophone and drums—is engaged. Neon signs begin to flicker and El Clippo is born.