RARE! "Italian Exiled Politician" Gaetano Salvemini Hand Signed Picture Postcard

Description: Up for auction a VERY RARE! "Italian Exiled Politician" Gaetano Salvemini Hand Signed Picture Postcard. This item is authenticated by Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity. ES-844A Gaetano Salvemini: [ɡaeˈtaːno salˈvɛːmini]; 8 September 1873 – 6 September 1957) was an Italian anti-fascist politician, historian and writer. Born in a family of modest means, he became an acclaimed historian both in Italy and abroad, in particular in the United States, after he was forced into exile by Mussolini's Fascist regime. Initially engaging with the Italian Socialist Party, he later adhered to an independent humanitarian socialism, while maintaining a commitment to radical political and social reform throughout his life. Salvemini offered significant leadership to political refugees in the United States. His prolific writings shaped the attitudes of U.S. policymakers during and after the Second World War. His transatlantic exile experience endowed him with new insights and a fresh perspective to explain the rise of fascism, while shaping the memory of the war and political life in Italy after 1945. He advocated a third way between Communists and Christian Democracy for post-war Italy. Salvemini was born in the town of Molfetta, in Apulia in the poor south of Italy, in an extended family of farmers and fishermen of modest means. His father, Ilarione Salvemini, was a carabiniere and part-time teacher. He had been a radical republican who had fought as a Red Shirt following Giuseppe Garibaldi in his fight for Italian unification. His mother Emanuela (née Turtur) was a socialist. His parents' political leanings as well as the poverty of the region, shaped his own political and social ideals throughout his life. He was admitted at the University of Florence, where he met mostly students of northern Italy and engaged with young socialists who introduced him to Marxism (which he would revise critically later), the ideas of Carlo Cattaneo and the Italian socialist Filippo Turati's journal Critica Sociale, as well as his first wife Maria Minervini. After completing his studies in Florence in 1894, his historical studies on medieval Florence, the French Revolution and Giuseppe Mazzini established him as an acclaimed historian. In 1901, after years of teaching in secondary schools, he was appointed as a professor in medieval and modern history at the University of Messina. While in Messina, he lost his wife, five children and his sister in the devastating 1908 Messina earthquake before his eyes, while hiding under an architrave of a window; an experience that shaped his life. "I am a miserable wretch, without home or hearth, who has seen the happiness of eleven years destroyed in two minutes," he wrote. He went on to teach history at the University of Pisa and in 1916 was appointed Professor of Modern History at the University of Florence. Over the years, he aligned with Luigi Einaudi and gradually developed a pragmatic inquiry and inductive analysis, which he called concretismo – a combination of secular values from the enlightenment, liberalism and socialism – in contrast to more philosophical thinkers like Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci. Salvemini became increasingly concerned with Italian politics and adhered to the Italian Socialist Party (Italian: Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI). In 1910, he published an article in the socialist newspaper Avanti! entitled 'The minister of the underworld' (Il ministro della malavita), in which he attacked the power system and political machine of the liberal Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti who dominated Italian political life from the start of the 20th century. Salvemini reproached Giolitti to exploit the backwardness of Southern Italy for short-term political goals, appeasing the landlords while engaging with corrupt political go-betweens with ties to the underworld. According to Salvemini, Giolitti exploited "the miserable conditions of the Mezzogiorno in order to link the mass of southern deputies to himself".He opposed the costly military campaign in Libya during Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912). The war did not meet the real needs of the country in need of far-reaching economic and social reforms, according to Salvemini, but was a dangerous collusion between unrealistic nationalism and corporate interests. In 1911, Salvemini left the PSI because of the "silence and indifference" on the war by the partyand founded the weekly political review L'Unità that would serve as the voice of militant democrats in Italy for the next decade. He criticised the government's imperial designs in Africa as chauvinist foolishness. However, he did favour Italy's entry in the First World War on the side of the Entente, in order to achieve a greater political, economic and social stake in the nation by the masses, as well as national self-determination. He became one of the leaders of the democratic interventionists with Leonida Bissolati. Through the fight for democracy abroad, he believed, Italy would rediscover its own democratic roots. Consistent with his interventionist position he joined as a volunteer in the first two years of the war.As a member of the PSI he fought for universal suffrage, for the moral and economic rebirth of Italy's Mezzogiorno (Southern Italy) and against corruption in politics. As a meriodanalist he criticised the PSI for its indifference for the problems of the South of Italy. While he abandoned the Socialist Party to adhere to an independent humanitarian socialism, he would maintain a commitment to radical reform throughout his life. Elected on a list of ex-combatants, he served in the Italian Chamber of Deputies as an independent radical from 1919 to 1921 during the revolutionary period of the Biennio Rosso. He supported the internationalist programme of self-determination of the U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, which envisioned a re-adjustment of the frontiers of Italy along clearly recognizable lines of nationality, in contrast to the irrendentist policy of Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino. In the immediate post-war period, Salvemini was initially silent about Italian Fascism, but as a deputy he soon dissented from the political line of its parliamentary group and started a lively polemic against Benito Mussolini, who he had admired in the past as socialist leader, to the point that Mussolini even challenged him to a duel, which never took place. Nevertheless, as late as 1922, he considered the fascist movement too small to be a serious political challenge. Salvemini was more opposed to old-style politicians like Giolitti. "A return to Giolitti would be a moral disaster for the whole country," he wrote. "Mussolini was able to carry out his coup ... because everybody was disgusted by the Chamber." While in Paris he was surprised by Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922, which initiated the Fascist take over of Italy. In 1923, he held a series of lectures on Italian foreign policy in London, to the ire of the Fascist government and Florentine fascists. The walls of Florence were plastered with posters saying: "The monkey from Molfetta should not return to Italy". Instead, Salvemini not only returned home, but resumed his lectures at the University, regardless of the threat of fascist students. He joined the opposition after the murder of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti on 10 June 1924, when it became clear that Mussolini wanted to establish a one-party dictatorship. He worked to maintain a strong network of contacts among anti-fascist intellectuals throughout Italy, while much of the Italian academic world bowed to the regime. With his former students and followers Ernesto Rossi and Carlo Rosselli he founded the first clandestine anti-fascist newspaper Non mollare (Don't Give Up) in January 1925. A half year later he was arrested and put on trial, but was released on a technicality, although he was kept under surveillance. Threats against his life were published in the Fascist press and his lawyer was beaten to death by Fascist blackshirts. His name was on top of the list of the Fascist death squads during raids on 4 October 1925 in Florence. However, Salvemini had fled to France in August 1925. He was dismissed from the University of Florence and his Italian citizenship was revoked in 1926. In exile Salvemini continued to actively organize resistance against Mussolini in France, England and finally in the United States. In 1927, he published The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, a lucid and groundbreaking study of the rise of Fascism and Mussolini. In Paris he was involved with the founding of Concentrazione antifascista in 1927 and Giustizia e Libertà with Carlo and Nello Rosselli in 1929. Through these organizations, Italian exiles were helping the anti-fascists in Italy, spreading clandestine newspapers. The movement intended to be a third alternative between fascism and communism, pursuing a free, democratic republic based on social justice.

Price: 999.99 USD

Location: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

End Time: 2024-09-06T21:05:31.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD