Edmondo Rossoni
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The Honourable Edmondo Rossoni |
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|---|---|
 |
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| Minister of Agricolture and Forests | |
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In office January 24, 1935 – October 31, 1939 |
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| Prime Minister | Benito Mussolini |
| Preceded by | Giacomo Acerbo |
| Succeeded by | Giuseppe Tassinari |
| Member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies | |
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In office May 24, 1924 – August 5, 1943 |
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| Constituency | At-large |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
May 6, 1884 Tresigallo, Italy |
| Died | June 8, 1965 (aged 81) Rome, Italy |
| Political party |
Italian Socialist Party (1903–1915) Italian Fasces of Combat (1915–1921) National Fascist Party (1921–1943) |
| Profession | Trade unionist, journalist |
Edmondo Rossoni (May 6, 1884 – June 8, 1965) was a revolutionary syndicalist leader and an Italian fascist politician who became involved in the Fascist syndicate movement during Benito Mussolini’s regime.
Born to a working-class family in Tresigallo, a small town in the Province of Ferrara, Rossoni was imprisoned in 1908 for his revolutionary activities as a syndicalist. After leaving Italy in 1910 and arriving in the United States, Rossoni began to work with Big Bill Haywood as an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World union (IWW), and edited the revolutionary syndicalist newspaper Il Proletario (The Proletarian), which by1912 was the Italian-language newspaper of the IWW. In 1911 Rossoni gained some notoriety in the United States after he spat on an Italian flag at a New York demonstration. Seeing how poorly Italian immigrant workers were treated in the United States by capitalists and other revolutionary cadre, he returned to Italy at the outbreak of World War I with the purpose of “fusing nationalism with class struggle,” and volunteered for military service in the war.
Determined to merge socialism with nationalism, Rossoni joined Benito Mussolini's Fascist movement in 1921. After the March on Rome, he continued his political activities and became a major political force in Mussolini’s administration until 1943.
Along with Alfredo Rocco and Giuseppe Bottai, Rossoni is considered to have played a large role in the development of Italy’s Fascist State. His program of corporativismo integrale was seen as a “cosmetically altered version of sindacalismo integrale” that was to assist in the transformation of Italy into a “Fascist syndicate” state. Rossoni had learned in the United States to distrust both the capitalists and various orthodox socialist movements that urged internationalism, recalling his conversion to social nationalism at the first congress of Fascist unions in June 1922:
We have seen our workers exploited and held in low regard not only by the capitalists but also by the revolutionary comrades of other countries. We therefore know from experience how internationalism is nothing but fiction and hypocrisy.”
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Wikipedia