Dorothy Thompson

El Paso Herald/December 25, 1920

BOLOGNA, Italy, Dec. 25.—In Italy today every statement regarding the attitude of peasants particularly catches public attention. For capitalists, bourgeoise, government and radicals alike are asking “if a real crisis comes, what will the peasants do?”

And, strangely enough, the person who is best able to answer that burning question in Italy is an old woman.

The peasant movement here is invariably associated with the name, “Altobelli.” It was Altobelli who conceived and carried into execution the idea of forming a trade union of the Italian land workers; Altobelli who made that trade union into a great cooperative enterprise, which has established hundreds of villages, introduced irrigation, forwarded education, supervised immigration, literally revolutionized Italian agriculture, and drawn unto itself 1,000,000 members, so that it now is the most powerful single body of workers in the entire country.

Woman and Grandmother

You may finally find out that the great Altobelli, living in the most anti-feminist country in Europe outside, perhaps, of Turkey, where woman’s place still is decidedly in the home, is a woman—and a grandmother.

She is a plump little woman with gray hair and sparkling black eyes and a laugh which has not lost a note of its heartiness since her girlhood. After the peasants and her grandchildren, her chief passion is for old china, and her apartment in Bologna looks much more like the antique shop of a connoisseur in old pottery than it does like the study of the “general secretary of the Federation of Land Workers,” and “the national adviser on agriculture to the government” and of a member of the executive committee of the General Federal of Labor, all of which she is.

Altobelli was the first organizer of the Italian peasantry. Forty odd years ago she took a journey from Bologna to Mantua, arriving there in the middle of the first great harvest strike. She, who loved beauty, saw the unspeakable sordidness and ugliness of the peasant life of Italy at that time. She saw that the peasants were quarreling among themselves; that there was no unity among them, and that they needed organization. And thus she, a young woman at the time and a member of a conservative Catholic family, undertook to organize them.

Organized the Peasants

She started with the rather vague idea of forming mutual benefit societies. The Italian peasantry was divided into farm hands, who were hired and paid by the day and who constituted the largest and most miserable group of workers; permanent “help,” who worked the land on shares, and the peasantry proper, who lived on their own land, although much of it was very poor and the holdings very small.

All these groups she tried to bring together. Of course, she found her readiest audience among the poorest—the agricultural laborers. These workers still are the backbone of the organization. It grew from the first “League for the Betterment of the Workers of the Land” into 704 such leagues.

In 1901 they became amalgamated into one great body and became a trade union, affiliated with the General Confederation of Labor.

But they elected a man as their leader.

In 1905 there was another congress. Nominations were again made for leader. Name after name was suggested, but none received the support of the masses of the peasants. Finally one man, a bolder feminist than the rest, dared a proposal. “Altobelli is our man,” he cried.

A Cooperative Village

We were able to visit San Vittoria, one of the many hundreds of cooperative villages which have changed the whole life of the land workers of Italy under her leadership.

The whole village had been part of the old ducal estate of the family of “Greppi.” The estate had been neglected for years; the soil was used out; no improvements had been made for a long time. When the peasants, who lived in a wretched condition on this land, became organized, they offered to relieve the grand signor of his worry by renting the estate from him and working and managing it collectively. They formed an all inclusive and completely communal organization, putting every worker on a salary. They pooled their produce. Part of it they sold back to themselves through a cooperative store; part of it they sold outside, and when we were there they were even doing a sizable export business. Last year they had sold produce to the value of 1,500,000 lire to the United States.

Signora Altobelli pointed out the peasants’ particular joy and pride— the family archives of the Greppi, kept in cupboards along the walls of three large rooms. There were old deeds and titles granted to the popes and later by the kings to the family of the Greppi, and personal and political correspondence dating back to 1461. The old duke had left them there—and wisely—for no one would ever care for them with greater pride than these peasants who are now the cooperative owners of the ancient feudal estate.