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FTR #38 Il Martello

Lis­ten now: One Seg­ment [1]

Attempts by Ital­ian-Amer­i­can pub­lish­er Car­lo Tresca to inform the Ital­ian-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty about the repres­sive nature of Mus­solin­i’s “cor­po­rate state” gen­er­at­ed attempts at sup­press­ing Il Martel­lo (Tresca’s Ital­ian-lan­guage Amer­i­can paper). The sup­pres­sion appears to have been engi­neered by wealthy Amer­i­can inter­ests allied with Il Duce. Sem­i­nal Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist H.L. Menck­en was one of the few jour­nal­ists to cov­er this vio­la­tion of the First Amend­ment and an arti­cle he wrote for the Bal­ti­more Sun com­pris­es the mate­r­i­al for this pro­gram. At a meet­ing in New York City, Mus­solin­i’s diplo­mats called for the sup­pres­sion of Tresca’s work. Domes­tic fas­cists (some of whom were hon­orary mem­bers of Mus­solin­i’s fas­cist par­ty) prompt­ly under­took that sup­pres­sion. They engi­neered the inter­dic­tion of Il Martel­lo’s cir­cu­la­tion, the under­min­ing of the paper’s adver­tis­ing rev­enue and, ulti­mate­ly, the jail­ing of Tresca him­self on trumped-up charges. (Record­ed in the fall of 1995.)