La Controcorrente: organo d'agitazione e di battaglia contro il fascismo /The Countercurrent: against all fascism everywhere. Boston, 1940-1946.

Aldo (Aldino) Felicani, a typographer and anarchist who started newspapers in Cleveland and elsewhere in the U.S. and who was intimately involved in trying to save Sacco and Vanzetti (he was the treasurer of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee in 1920-23, q.v.), founded La Controcorrente in 1938 in Boston with Gaetano Salvemini, Ernesto Rossi and Piero Calamandrei. The collection contains 10 issues of the newspaper, which contained a Section One in Italian and a Section 2 in English, beginning with No. 9 of Vol. II, September 1940, when La Controcorrente was published monthly, evidently having begun in January 1940, and also has the October and November monthly issues for that year.

It continued as a monthly through March (the collection has the February 1941 edition), then became bimonthly with No. 3 of Vol. III, the April-May issue. (The collection contains that issue and Nos. 4 and 5, the June-July and August-September issues.)

It returned to monthly publication with No. 6 (October 1941); the collection has the January and February 1942 issues, Nos. 9 and 10 of Vol. III.

The tenth issue in the collection is from August 1946, Vol. VIII - No. 2. 

Some issues were as many as 8 pages each of Italian and of English text (without illustrations), but most were 4 pages each of Italian and of English text. In all cases, Section Two (the English language version) is enveloped inside of the Section One in Italian.

The 1940-1942 issues are all fold in the middle newspaper style. The 1946 issue is a tabloid.

La Controcorrente was unique among journals of the Italian American left that I have seen. It was, plain and simple, anti-fascist, that is to say, the tone and, I suspect, the origins of the newspaper were not anarchist-become-anti-fascist (despite Felicani's early politics), socialist-become-antifascist (despite Salvemini's early politics), or communist-become-antifascist.

Consistent with that, and perhaps reflecting the single-mindedness of the intellectual Salvemini, as noted it lacked illustrations unlike, say, La Cronaca Sovversiva or Il Martello, on the left, or Il Carroccio, on the right, as if to say "We mean business, and that's the business of anti-fascism, not of entertaining you or creating a cultural as well as political magazine."

Anita Pasolini was the editor of the 1940-1942 issues; publisher Felicani was the editor by 1946, although I do not know when that change occurred. The most frequent contributor in all years was one of the founders and also the most famous writer: Gaetano Salvemini, a professor of history at Harvard at the time who had become an American citizen in 1940, some years after the Fascists revoked his Italian citizenship (in 1926) and he was dismissed from the faculty of the University of Florence. Initially a member of the Italian Socialist Party, Salvemini evolved into a kind of independent humanitarian socialism divorced to a greater or less degree from actual politics. Indeed, even his friends in the U.S. among Italian exiles years later, like Max Ascoli, declared Salvemini was "terrible" at politics.

In exile since 1925 in France (where he collaborated with the Rossellis to form Giustizia e Libertà), England and finally the U.S., Salvemini was above all an ardent anti-fascist. By 1940, when La Controcorrente began, Salvemini had become a U.S. citizen. 

From the beginning, in 1940, La Controcorrente attacked Mussolini and fascism for the damage it inflicted on Italy and Italians, and declared that contrary to the criticism leveled against it, was not "Communist-inspired." (The articles in the two sections were not for the most part the same ones translated from one language to the other.)

Indeed, in the box providing its address and other particulars, the newspaper also proclaimed its purpose as being to "present the truth concerning Fascism wherever it exists . . . We are concerned with no political or economic cause." It also notes that in the February 1941 issue that in its two years of existence, it had published in its English section articles by Hemingway, Angelica Balabanoff, George Seldes, and R.H. Markham, among others. (I found an article, as well, that Upton Sinclair was said to have offered to provide to the newspaper.) In the Italian section, the writers included, beside Salvemini, Glauco Glauci, Arturo Giovannitti and Libero Martello; and as seems to have been a practice in virtually all the leftist and other Italian magazines and newspapers in the U.S., there appears a list of recent subscribers, a list that includes at times familiar names (e.g., Virginio De Martin, the publisher of Renzo Novatore's Verso la nulla creatore, q.v.).

Besides attacking Mussolini, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh incited its ire; La Controcorrente also attacked New York's Il Progresso Italo-Americano - or more particularly, its publisher, Generoso Pope - for their constant praise for Mussolini and fascism, while at the same time with its articles critical of American politics and politicians. While Il Progresso proclaimed it was an "American" newspaper promoting American ideals, it was staffed with Italian journalists who, by diktat from Mussolini, should not have been allowed to work in non-Italian newspapers as foreign correspondents. The criticism was consistent with that of Carlo Tresca, who famously called Pope a "man of straw." La Controcorrente had similar criticisms of James Donnamura's La Gazzetta of Boston for its silence about General Franco and the events taking place in Spain.

Of great interest is that the 1946 issue - as noted, in tabloid not middle fold style - contains 16 pages all in Italian. It contains, as in the earlier issues, an article by Salvemini, but the absence of an English language section, unlike in the earlier issues is surprising. Also, unlike the earlier issues from 1940-1942, where Felicani's name as publisher is nowhere to be found, in this 1946 issue, Felicani is listed on page 1 as both "editor and publisher."

Of course, the most important change is that by 1946, Mussolini is gone. So the criticisms throughout this issue are of Palmiro Togliatti and current Italian electoral politics, the peace treaty conference in Paris, interference in Italian politics by the Vatican, and a sarcastic article about the "big lasagna Neanderthal from Savoy," an article trying to shed light on the crime of the assassination of Carlo Tresca, and several criticisms of Il Progresso and other "cafoni" (boors) in New York for their support of the Italian Labor Council.

While still enlightening and entertaining, without Mussolini as the focus of its anti-fascist efforts, La Controcorrente seems by this time to have lost its way somewhat. The absence of an English language version suggests that its diehard readers in 1946 were fighting old battles of less interest to English-language readers. I would be surprised if the newspaper continued long after this issue.  

The collection includes:

La Controcorrente, Vol. 2, No. 9 - September 1940
La Controcorrente, Vol. 2, No. 10 - October 1940
La Controcorrente, Vol. 2, No. 11 - November 1940
La Controcorrente, Vol. 3, No. 1 - February 1941
La Controcorrente, Vol. 3, No. 3 - April-May 1941
La Controcorrente, Vol. 3, No. 4 - June-July 1941
La Controcorrente, Vol. 3, No. 5 - August-September 1941
La Controcorrente, Vol. 3, No. 9 - January 1942
La Controcorrente, Vol. 3, No. 10 - February 1942
La Controcorrente, Vol. 8, No. 2 - August 1946