Blackwell Reference Online

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Giacinto Menotti Serrati was a prominent socialist leader in the 1919 general election that ushered in an era known as the Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years). Serrati headed a fraction of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) that merged into the Partito Comunista d'Italia (Communist Party of Italy, PCd'I). Serrati was born in Spotorno in the Ligurian coastal region of northwest Italy on November 25, 1872. His father was a devotee of Garibaldi and mayor in Oneglia, the family home town, where the younger Serrati became organizer of the first socialist league. Serrati became a militant in Milan's Socialist Party and attended the International Congress in Zurich in 1893, but was forced into exile by the Italian authorities until 1899. Upon his return, Serrati organized the Italian Socialist Party in Switzerland. In 1902, Serrati moved to New York, where he became editor of the Italian weekly, Il Proletario , and organized socialist Italian immigrants into an Italian Socialist Federation. In 1903 the federation split from the Socialist Labor Party in the West Hoboken Congress, fiercely criticized by the Socialist Labor Party's leader Daniel De Leon . In 1906 Serrati returned to Switzerland, where he joined the intransigent tendency of Oddino Morgari in the Socialist Party and conducted a long struggle against Filippo Turati's reformism. He was only permitted to return to Italy in 1909, ... log in or subscribe to read full text