Political Murder

Flame-red, the carnations lay upon six square feet of sidewalk of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and 15th Street. Flame-red, they rested in the cars of the funeral cortege that rolled by. On pavement and auto seat, in lapels of hundreds of mourners, they symbolized the passing of Carlo Tresca. Shot down last week on a street corner near his little Italian-language newspaper office, the jovial, goateed, almost legendary radical editor presented in death the spectacle, revolting to the U.S., of political assassination.

Tresca, son of a wealthy landowner, came over from his native Italy as a steerage immigrant in 1904. He knew one Benito Mussolini, the Socialist who had told him "Tresca, you are not radical enough." For the next 38 years this rotund journalist in the oversize black hat unceasingly championed the causes of the Left. In an earlier day he belonged to the same firebrand company as Emma Goldman and the I.W.W. His voice was raised in a long array of newspapers, of which the last was Il Martello (The Hammer). He campaigned in the Pennsylvania coal fields, in Manhattan's garment district. He scrapped with Communists, but above all with Fascists. Yet no one who met the man face to face, who sat down with him and a bottle of red wine at a restaurant table, could help liking him. Personally his enemies seemed few. Politically they were legion.

The number of these enemies was perhaps baffling to those investigating Tresca's murder. Said New York's District Attorney Frank S. Hogan: "It seems at some time or other, in politics and personalities, that Tresca was 'agin everything.' " Police had one important witness, several thin leads. A pistol had been found near the murder scene, and an abandoned car. An ex-convict had been spotted entering the same car just before the murder; he was in custody and being questioned. More than 100 detectives were on the case, for among the slain man's friends was Mayor LaGuardia.

Mussolini, long after his admonition to Tresca, had put the radical editor on the Fascist death list. There was belief that a Fascist agent might now have carried out the decree. But Tresca had powerful foes also in Communist ranks and among the "ex-Fascists" in this country, whose influence he bitterly fought. He was a man without a party, yet he spoke thoughts that are going through the minds of millions of his countrymen, here and in the homeland, who stand against oppression. But the disturbing thing was that Tresca's murder might have cast upon the New World the shadow of Old World political murder.

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