Gaetano Salvemini (; 8 September 1873 His mother, Emanuela Salvemini (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.
Salvemini was admitted at the University of Florence, where he met students of northern Italy and engaged with young socialists who introduced him to Marxism, the ideas of philosopher and revolutionary Carlo Cattaneo, and the Italian socialist journal Critica Sociale edited by Italy's foremost Marxist Filippo Turati. After completing his studies in Florence in 1894, his historical studies on medieval Florence, the French Revolution, and Giuseppe Mazzini established him as an historian of note.
Engaging with socialism
Salvemini became increasingly concerned with Italian politics and adhered to the Italian Socialist Party (, PSI). Salvemini reproached Giolitti for exploiting the backwardness of Southern Italy for short-term political goals by 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."
Salvemini opposed Italy's costly military campaign in Libya during Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912). He thought that the war did not meet the real needs of the country in need of far-reaching economic and social reforms, but was a dangerous collusion between unrealistic nationalism and corporate interests. He founded the weekly political review ', which served as the voice of militant democrats in Italy for the next decade. He criticised the government's aspirations to build an Italian Empire and its designs in Africa as chauvinist foolishness. Salvemini wanted to achieve a greater political, economic, and social stake in the nation by the masses, as well as national self-determination.
Within Italy's left-interventionist movement, he became one of the leaders of the democratic interventionists with Leonida Bissolati.
Resisting fascism
thumb|left|236px|The March on Rome that led fascism to power in Italy. Salvemini joined the opposition and became an anti-fascist.
In the immediate postwar period, Salvemini was initially silent about Italian fascism.
While in Paris, Salvemini was surprised by Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922, which initiated the National Fascist Party take over of Italy. A half year later, he was arrested and put on trial; he 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. Earlier, in August, Salvemini had fled to France. He was dismissed from the University of Florence, and his Italian citizenship was revoked in 1926.
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.
In the United States
Salvemini first toured the United States in January 1927 and lectured with a clear anti-fascist agenda. His lectures were disturbed by fascist foes. His forced exile nevertheless gave him a "sense of freedom, of spiritual independence". Rather than exile or refugee, he preferred the term fuoruscito, an originally-contemptuous label employed by fascists that was adopted as a symbol of honour by political exiles from Italy, He published The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (1927), contradicting the widely held belief that Mussolini had saved Italy from Bolshevism.
In 1934, Salvemini accepted a position created especially for him, to teach Italian civilization at Harvard University, where he would remain until 1948. Alarmed by the outbreak of the Second World War after Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939, he and other Italian exiles founded the anti-fascist Mazzini Society in Northampton, Massachusetts. Salvemini joined the Italian Emergency Rescue Committee, which raised money for Italian political refugees and worked to convince American authorities to admit them.
Salvemini obtained United States citizenship in 1940 in the belief that he would have greater opportunity to influence American policies toward Italy. In fact, government agencies like the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation solicited his advice on fascism and Italian matters in general. As an intellectual, Salvemini left an undeniable mark on the study of Italian history at Harvard and other universities by changing their original focus on language, art, and literature to a critical and systematic study into modern Italy.
The increasing prominence of Max Ascoli, Carlo Sforza, and Alberto Tarchiani in the Mazzini Society consequently led to the progressive distancing of Salvemini from active decision making. Salvemini's fear was that Franklin D. Roosevelt would give Winston Churchill and his conservative agenda a free hand in postwar Italy that would benefit the monarchy and those who had collaborated with Mussolini. After Mussolini's fall in July 1943, Salvemini became increasingly concerned that the Allies of World War II and Italian moderates favoured a conservative restoration in Italy. To provide an alternative, together with Harvard professor Giorgio La Piana, Salvemini authored What to Do With Italy?, in which they sketched a plan for the postwar reconstruction of Italy with a republican and social-democratic programme. Salvemini was also a familiar figure in the younger years of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., editor of the campaign speeches for peace strategy then known as The New Frontier for John F. Kennedy.
Back in Italy
thumb|right|Salvemini later in his life
Although a United States citizen, Salvemini returned to Italy in 1948 and was reinstated to his old post as Professor of Modern History at the University of Florence. After twenty years of exile, he started his first speech at his old university with "As we were saying in the last lecture". As a left-leaning republican, he was disappointed with the victory of Christian Democracy in the 1948 Italian general election and the influence of the Catholic Church in the country. As a historian, he wrote mainly about recent and contemporary history but was also noted for his studies of the Italian medieval commune. His The French Revolution: 1788–1792 is an outstanding explanation of the social, political, and philosophical currents and monarchical incompetence that led to that cataclysm.
Death and legacy
Salvemini spent the last period of his life in Sorrento, in the Campania southern Italian region, and never ceased to denounce the ancient Italian evils: inefficiency, scandals, and the lengthy justicial procedures that continued to favour the powerful. He lamented the public schools, which he considered not to be forming a real critical conscience.
Salvemini was among the first and most effective opponents of fascism. According to his biographer Charles L. Killinger, Salvemini embodied a political culture such that "the Fascists were anti-Salvemini before he became anti-Fascist, and their efforts to silence him made his name synonymous with early Italian resistance to the new regime." Although a prolific historian, he was not the kind of person to separate scholarship from political activity. Throughout his exile, he actively organized resistance to Mussolini, assisting others in escaping Italy, and he played an important role in spurring both elite and public opinion in America against the fascist regime.
Giolitti's biographer Alexander De Grand describes his subject's foe as a "major historian, driven by an austere moralism" and as a "difficult man who attracted deep attachments and bitter enmity", who "constantly sought to turn his ideas into practical policy, yet he was a mediocre – no, terrible – politician", quoting Salvemini's fellow exile Max Ascoli, who described him "as the greatest enemy of politics of all the men I have known". Nevertheless, Salvemini was an imperative force who left a permanent mark on Italian politics and historiography. As a party activist, political commentator, and public officeholder, he championed social and political reform, and his name is tantamount to early Italian resistance to Fascist Italy.