GAETANO SALVEMINI IN THE UNITED STATES: A STUDY IN ITALIAN ANTI-FASCIS

Gaetano Salvemini entered the United States in 1927, at fifty-three years of age, as an exile from Fascist Italy. After several American lecture tours, he accepted a position as Lauro de Bosis lecturer of Italian history at Harvard University where he taught from 1934-1947. It has been argued that he retreated to a life of semi-retirement in Cambridge and relatively little attention has been focused on his years at Harvard. This study uses a wide array of sources--letters, memoirs, interviews, official American and Italian records--to describe Salvemini's life in the United States. An overwhelming body of evidence documents his contributions, both to the study of Fascist Italy and to the anti-Fascist campaign in exile.;When Salvemini arrived at Harvard, he was a distinguished historian who had actively engaged in the major issues of Italian political life for a quarter century. With the assistance of colleagues in Cambridge, and with the support of the Harvard administration, he overcame the Italian government's attempts to discredit him and to prevent his hiring. In exile, he published his trilogy on Fascist Italy; his only methodological treatise, Historian and Scientist; a critique of Allied policy, What to Do with Italy; and hundreds of articles on the Fascist state. At Harvard he contributed his influence to the first serious, systematic American study of modern Italy through the work of H. Stuart Hughes, Norman Kogan, and A. William Salomone.;Although Salvemini wrote very little pure history after arriving in the United States, he maintained in his articles and speeches a steady stream of rhetorical pressure on the Italian government. He was perhaps Mussolini's most persistent enemy in exile. In 1939 he helped to found the anti-Fascist Mazzini Society, and during the war he supplied American officials information on Fascist activities in the United States. Although he largely failed to influence Allied policy on Italy, Salvemini served as the "conscience" of an entire generation of anti-Fascists in exile.