La Parola del Popolo [The Voice of the People]. Chicago, 1972-1976.
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La Parola del Popolo, Vol. XXII, No. 112 - Luglio-Agosto [July/August] 1972
La Parola del Popolo, Vol. XXII, No. 114 - Novembre-Dicembre [November/December] 1972
La Parola del Popolo, Vol. XXIII, No. 118 - Luglio-Agosto [July/August] 1973
La Parola del Popolo, Vol. XXIV, No. 120 - Novembre-Dicembre [November/December] 1973
La Parola del Popolo, Vol. XXVI, No. 133 - Marzo-Aprile [March/April] 1976
One of the longest-lived of the socialist publications, La Parola went through many name changes to evade postal authorities and for other reasons.
The Collection contains a large-format, 336-page commemorative edition for the 50th anniversary of the newspaper whose name since about 1922 was La Parola del Popolo, q.v. Its pages contain many illustrations by the leading leftist illustrator, Fort Velona (see Sotto il segno del littorio and Memorie di vita di tempeste sociali), and large black and white photographs of leading anti-fascist scholar Gaetano Salvemini and of Giacomo Battistoni (see holograph letter of Carlo Tresca to Battistoni in the collection), as well as of the objects of the “ommagios” [tributes] to several influential radicals.
In that commemorative edition, note the large number of prominent names in the "Sommario" of articles, including Domenico Saudino (q.v.), Filippo Turrati, Giovannitti and Mario De Ciampis.
Fort Velona’s summary in the 50th anniversary commemorative edition of the history of this important organ of Italian socialists shows the parallel growth of the Italian socialist movement in the U.S. and the newspaper that was its banner: after a period of name changes from La Parola dei Socialisti, its name in 1908, in a vain attempt to evade postal authorities’ efforts to prevent sending subscribers copies of the newspaper of the fledgling Federazione Socialista Italiana (La Fiaccola and L’Avanti! were two others), and following the ending of World War I, when postal suppression relaxed, the former La Parola dei Socialisti (see La morale di Arlecchino) was reborn as La Parola del Popolo in 1920.
From that time, when Egidio Clemente took over the renamed newspaper, publication continued uninterrupted until its final issue in 1982. Years after his editorship of La Parola, Clemente (b. Trieste, 1899; d. Chicago, ?) established his own imprint, which published Giovannitti’s Italian poems in 1957 (Quando canta il gallo, q.v.) and again, posthumously, in 1962, in a commemorative edition of “Collected Poems” of the English-language poems of the perfectly bi-lingual Giovannitti.
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