Labor's Lesson for Today's Resistance--The Working Class Virtue of Solidarity

 

Note:  It was my privilege to be asked to speak—and to host one year—from 2015 to 2019 at the annual Labor Day Event on Woodstock Square sponsored by McHenry County Progressives.  Today we will look back at the meat of my talk in 2016—a Presidential election year that turned out to have disastrous results.  Specifics about that race are now dated, but the themes they represent remain.  My remarks on the working class virtue of solidarity were adapted from earlier material, including one of my Labor Day sermons at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock.

The Old Man explaining the Working Class Virtue of Solidarity at the 2016 Labor Day event in Woodstock Square.

We gathered here last year [2015] for the first time, a small band of folks called together by some local fans of Bernie Sanders who wanted to celebrate his hero Eugene V. Debs and his connection to Woodstock.  As a fan of both, as well as an old Wobbly, and a soapboxer, I was thrilled to be asked to participate.

A lot has happened in the last year and here we are again.  Bernie Sanders, thanks to folks like those who organized the Labor Day event, went from being an obscure longshot, to the leader of a wide and deep political revolution, and came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic Party nomination.  When he didn’t some folks were heartbroken, other mad.  Some picked up their toys and went home in a sulk and huff.  Some picked up Bernie’s challenge to keep the Revolution going by going deep and wide—running for local office and trying to recapture Congress from troglodyte Republicans.  That’s what the folks here in McHenry County have done.

Some folks swore that no matter what they would never vote for Hillary Clinton, who apparently has horns and is the spawn of Satan, no matter what, no way, no how.  Others have either swallowed hard and followed Bernie’s appeal and decided to vote for Hillary, or with more enthusiasm vowed to actively work for her election along with the rest of the Democratic ticket.

People who were comrades in the campaign struggle a couple of months ago but are on opposite sides of the Hillary divide, are hurling invectives at one another, denouncing each other as traitors or saboteurs.  Relationships have been shattered.  That longed for political revolution is crippled by dissent.

Meanwhile genuine naked fascism has arisen as a mass movement and swallowed the traditional conservative party.  Ordinary Americans who have seen their lives and futures sacrificed time and again to corporate greed have been taught to blame their woes on a rotating cast of others—Mexicans and emigrants this week, Muslims and refugees next, women, gays, Black lives Matter protesters, scientists, the sick and the elderly.  Violence is in the air like the whiff of gunpowder.

Considering all this, on this Labor Day I want to commend to you the working class virtue of solidarity even if you have never considered yourself a worker.  

Solidarity by Käthe Kollwitz.

First, we need to consider what solidarity is not….

Solidarity is not sympathy.  Sympathy is a passive emotion.  It also implies a separation from the object of sympathy and can teeter on pity, which is just sympathy tinged with revulsion. Empathy might be closer to the meaning in that it implies a common understanding of the distress.  But empathy is also passive.  Solidarity demands action.

Solidarity is not charity.  Charity implies a power and privilege differential.  The more powerful and more privileged deign to give to the less fortunate who are expected to respond with appropriate gratitude and humility.  Solidarity is mutual aid among equals.

Solidarity is not altruism.  Altruism is supposedly selfless giving requiring sacrifice but expecting no reward—except perhaps praise for being saint-like.  Solidarity recognizes the commonality of our conditions and expects to receive support by right as well as give it.

Solidarity is not family.  Families—and by extension surrogate families like clans, nations, religions, races and others—are expected to support their members out of blood obligation.  Solidarity demands respect for commonality with the other.  Solidarity with the stranger dismantles walls and promotes peace instead of a mad scramble over scarce resources.

Solidarity is not utopian.  Utopians conjure up sweet dreams of the perfect.  Utopians may simply drift on in the opium cloud of that dream. More dangerously, some utopians construct rigid ideologies around their vision which eventually require the ruthless suppression of anything and anyone not in conformity to that ideology.  Solidarity is rooted in the common realities we face together and is interested in addressing the roots of the problems as well as ameliorating the immediate effects.

Solidarity is not all warm and fuzzy.  Warm and fuzzy denies oppression.  Solidarity recognizes that there are those whose own narrow self-interest causes them to exploit, subjugate, and abuse others.  And solidarity demands common action to defend against such depredations and—yes—boldly to ultimately defeat the oppressors.

Solidarity is a recognition of our place in humanity, an ethic, and an active response to our common interests.

Solidarity recognizes that justice requires cooperation and effort across all boundaries of separation.

Solidarity enlarges our communities, builds bridges of respect that can span differences.  It does not demand lock-step conformity to some ideological purity to act together in mutual support.  It requires listening, really listening and not just waiting our turn to deliver a lecture.  When generations of feminists support Hillary Clinton passionately it means not sneering that they are voting their vaginas, but understanding why and ultimately standing with them just as we hope that they will stand with us for the dismantlement of corporate power. 

Solidarity requires humility and taking the risk of having our fragile identities challenged.  We cannot give more than lip service to Black Lives Matter unless we understand and take ownership of the White privilege understanding it is not a moral flaw but a condition we are born to.  By breaking down our defenses we can collaborate in our mutual liberation with respect and understanding.

Solidarity recognizes that justice requires cooperation and effort across all boundaries of separation.

Most of all, solidarity requires commitment and action.  There are no sidelines, no room for mere cheerleaders.  Each and every one of us are called to put our bodies and our lives on the line again and again in some meaningful ways.  And we are buoyed by the knowledge that others are prepared to do the same for us.

Can we make a promise this Labor Day to commit to the working class virtue of solidarity?  Can we face the challenges not just of the coming elections, but in defending women’s bodies and choice, dismantlement the new slavery of mass incarceration, and standing in the Spirit Camp of the Standing Rock Sioux as they defend all of our water.  There is a lot to do.  No individual can do it all. But we can all do something. 

Solidarity recognizes that justice requires cooperation and effort across all boundaries of separation.
 

In the words of Ralph Chaplin in the great anthem of the Working Class:

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;

Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,

For the Union makes us strong!

 

Did Unitarians Murder Anna LoPizzo During the and and Roses Strike of 1912?

The Funeral of Anna LoPizzo, Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912.

I have always been proud of my active membership in the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—as a young man and my more mature identification as a Unitarian Universalist, a denomination justly identified for its commitment to social justice.  But sometimes modern UU’s are so proud of that reputation that they are loath to admit that not all of our Unitarian and Universalist forbearers were always on the side of the angels. 

We boast about early abolitionists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker and our very real martyrs in the Civil Rights Movement, but it was not until Black UUs held our collective feet to the fire to make us recognize our White privilege that we began to face the fact that Boston elite, who helped found and sustain Unitarianism, largely gained their wealth in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and then from the textile industry made possible by slave labor on Southern plantations.  Or that many Unitarians were violently opposed to abolitionism and shunned and isolated crusaders like Parker.  Or that post-Civil War Unitarians refused to recognize Black Unitarian congregations.  And in the 1960’s when push came to shove the UUA refused to stand by commitments made to Black members driving the majority of them from our faith.  Thankfully, we are finally coming to grips with that as we are with collective responsibility for settler colonialism and the suppression and near annihilation of our indigenous peoples.

But facing enduring class bias has been much harder.  We hate to admit that a deep streak of nativism and anti-Catholic prejudice and antisemitism made the Unitarian elite the often sworn enemy of unionism and that those same Brahmin families who made their fortunes on the backs of Blacks were among the most intransigent of capitalist bosses and their allies throughout the establishment.

The writer leading the annual Labor Day service at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock, Illinois back in 2012 during the pre-air conditioning days when hot weather services were held in the basement Religious Education room.

In 2012, the centennial year of the great IWW led Lawrence Textile Strike I addressed the issue in one of the annual Labor Day worship services I led for several years at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock, Illinois.  This is what I said.

It was cold on January 29, 1912.  Thousands of mill workers, mostly women and foreign-born, representing dozens of ethnicities and languages, had been on strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts since January 11.  Despite hardships and language barriers the strike had held firm through heavy police oppression and the mobilization of state militia units—the National Guard.  Leaders of the militant Industrial Workers of the World, including Big Bill Haywood, Carlo Tresca, Joseph Ettor, Arturo Giavannitti and 18-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had arrived to help organize the strike.

The strike, one of the most important labor struggles in American history, is remembered today as the Bread and Roses Strike for picket signs carried by the women.

The press coverage of the Lawrence Strike labeled this photo "immigrant worker types" purposely dehumanizing women strikers.

That morning Ettor led the largest mass march yet through the center of Lawrence’s business district.  Militia, with fixed bayonets, disbursed the march.  That afternoon while Ettor spoke to a mass meeting the regular pickets at the mill gates were attacked by police, who opened fire with pistols.  Twenty-three-year-old Anna LoPizzo was shot and killed.  Her funeral two days later was the largest event yet of the strike.

The policeman who fired the shot that killed her at short range was not punished.  Despite this, Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested and charged with LoPizzo’s murder.  They were held without bail.

Martial Law was declared and all public meetings and marches officially banned.  The governor called out 22 more Militia companies.  Two days later a 15-year-old Syrian boy was bayoneted to death.

This weekend, we look back on this as Unitarian Universalists not only as a reminder of decades of labor struggle, but to assess who we are and how our illustrious religious ancestors responded to manifest injustice.

If you think they flocked to the support of oppressed workers, you would be dead wrong.  On the contrary, the elite of American Unitarianism were united in its determination to do everything possible to crush the strike.  Not surprising in that among their numbers were most of the great families which made their fortunes in the New England textile industry, including the Lawrences and the Lowells and many of the leading ministers of Boston environs had married into or come from those families.  Almost to a man—and there were no women—they thundered condemnation from the pulpit, often using the most extreme language and advocating even more violence to suppress what they saw as a revolutionary uprising of unwashed foreigners, most of them despised Papists, Jews, and even Mohamadans.

 

No one could have been more respectable than Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell, scion of two Brahman families who made their wealth from the slave trade and then from New England textile mills.

The President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell—can you guess his familial connections—went further.  He encouraged the Governor to call up Harvard’s cavalry militia unit, mostly made up of the sons of New England’s wealthiest families, to active duty to smash the strike.  He also excused all students who answered the call from all class work and examinations.  The young men themselves could hardly contain their enthusiasm.  Several left behind letters expressing their hope to “make short work of the swine.”

 

National Guard cavalry, perhaps the Harvard unit, on duty during the Lawrence strike.

Of course, not every Unitarian in 1912 shared the intensity of the Boston Brahmin’s class hatred and xenophobia.  A few like rising young star John Haynes Holmes who would soon found the Community Church movement, advocated for a progressive stand on social justice, including support for working people.  In the Midwest where Jenkin Lloyd Jones had for decades presided over the quasi-independent Western Unitarian Conference and Unity movement, there was a good deal of pro-labor social gospel feeling.  But by in large, Unitarianism was still a tribal religion of the New England upper classes, and it showed.

Universalists of the period, who included many people of modest means and education in addition to small businesspeople and professionals, tended to support or oppose labor based on local circumstances and conditions.  Industrialist George Pullman is best remembered for being the cause of the great Pullman Strike of 1892 led by Eugene V. Debs of the American Railway Union, but he was a Universalist captain of industry and on a took a leading anti-labor role.

According to Bruce Watson, author of Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream, “If America had a Tomb of the Unknown immigrant paying tribute to the millions of immigrants known only to God and distant cousins compiling family trees, Anna LoPizzo would be a prime candidate to lie in it.”  She was so obscure that no known photo of her exists and there is even confusion over her age. Finally in 1990 a retired IBEW business agent worked to get a marker on her pauper's grave decorated with a Bread and Roses symbol.

It has taken decades for Unitarian Universalism to warm to the labor movement, despite progressive stands on other issues.  Most today are at least mildly supportive or neutral.  The old Brahmin class has long since abandoned Unitarianism for the respectability of Episcopalianism and Congregationalism.  Although we no longer have many super wealthy, we are among the highest income per-capita of all American religious organizations due the very large percentage of college graduates and professionals with advanced degrees.  Indeed, today the biggest barrier to more active solidarity with labor lies not in income prejudice, but in the refusal of many of us to acknowledge that we are, despite our degrees, by in large, wage earners ourselves.  We don’t like to think of ourselves as workers, which conjures in many minds images of dirty fingernails, bad teeth, and ignorance.

As we now strive to Side With Love and social justice, that is an attitude which we must abandon.

  

Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for September 4 2026

 

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.  

Walking the Walk

The League of Women Voters of McHenry County is sponsoring a series of County Board District Candidate Events.  The next two events feature County Board Districts 6 and 8 from 1-3 pm Saturday, September 12 at the Nippersink Library, 5418 Hill Road in Richmond and District 5 at the McHenry Library, 809 Front Street, McHenry.  Sunday, Sept 27 from 2-4 pm.

The League is a non-partisan organization dedicated to making democracy work through voter education, issue advocacy and citizen participation.  All candidates for each office were invited, but participation is voluntary and not guaranteed.

The fight to preserve threatened democracy is urgent at all levels of government.  Become an informed voter and the vote your conscience and principles.

Compassion for Campers

The McHenry County Mental Health Board which generously stepped up to offer a temporary home to the McHenry County Resource Center (MCHC) and Compassion for Campers (C4C) over the summer has rented the space to a new tenant effective October 1. After that MCHC must make new arrangements. An active search for a suitable location is under way, preferably in an accessible spot near public transportation options and space for on sight storage, shower and/or laundry facilities would be a plus.

Meanwhile C4C will be at the MCHC site, 620 Dakota Street in Crystal Lake this Friday, September 4, from 10 am to 2 pm and then on Friday, September 18.  Other service providers will be on hand for the last Resource Center event there on Friday, September 24.

Financial support is critical to fulfilling our mission. The best thing you can do is offer your critically needed financial support. Money donations are always welcome at     https://tinyurl.com/3bz96axe.   Look for updates here.  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org .

Mourning Wendell Berry and "The Mad Farmer Revolution"

 

Poet/philosopher/farmer Wendell Berry on his beloved Kentucky farm in 2016.

In a week of high-profile deaths including Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry may not have generated the same buzz, but the loss of his iconic voice struck a deep chord with many.  He died in his home on the farm in Port Royal, Kentucky Monday at the age of 92.  His Associated Press obituary noted, "Few authors were more tied to their home than Berry, an intellectual and spiritual heir to Henry David Thoreau and such Southern agrarians as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom.  In prose and poetry that mirrored the uncluttered and deeply felt life he advocated, Berry challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness and renewed the mysteries of birth, love, work and death."

This post is adapted from an Earth Day entry from 2011.

Wendell Berry was born with deep roots in the soil of Henry County, Kentucky in 1934.  His father was a lawyer and tobacco farmer.  Both sides of his family had tilled the local soil for five generations.  After graduating from a local military academy, he attended the University of Kentucky where he decided to become a writer.  He completed his Masters degree there in 1957 and married.  The following year he was named a Wallace Stenger Fellow at Stanford University where he studied under Stenger with Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, and other emerging writers. He continued academic pursuits with studies in Europe on a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship before taking up teaching at New York University’s University College in the Bronx.

While in New York, he completed his first book of poetry, November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three, a single long poem in ten stanzas as an elegy to John F. Kennedy and national loss.  Later in 1964 he published his first collection, The Broken Ground which explored the themes that would dominate his work, “the cycle of life and death, responsiveness to place, pastoral subject matter, and recurring images of the Kentucky River and the hill farms of north-central Kentucky.”

Berry returned to the University of Kentucky in 1965 to teach creative writing.  He moved in a circle of writers that included Thomas Merton.  He also began farming his property, Lanes Landing, in north central Kentucky on the western bank of the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio.  He grew corn, grain, and maintained a kitchen garden on the land where lived, worked, and wrote.  Much of Berry’s writing—poetry, fiction, and non-fiction was rooted in his experience on the land and in the surrounding community.

Berry left teaching in 1977 to devote himself to farming, writing and activism.  By then he had a major body of work already completed and was being recognized as voice of the emerging environmental movement.  In addition to a regular output of poetry including 26 volumes including chapbooks, short fiction, and essay memoirs of his farming experiences, Berry wrote practical guides to subsistence and small farmers for Rodale Press including Organic Gardening and Farming and The New Farm.  He has also wrote eight novels that together are a chronicle of a fictionalized Kentucky River town, Port William.  This long series has allowed him to trace the complex relationships between the land, the people, and the economic and technological changes that impact them.

                                                        One of Berry's most recent collections of verse.

Berry was a front-line activist not only for environmental causes, but against the Viet Nam War, nuclear energy, land raping mountain top removal coal mining, and against government regulation that threatened to make small scale farming impossible.  Not content with just writing or speaking, Berry frequently led or participated in demonstrations, including civil disobedience.

At age 75 Berry was still active both as a writer and activist.  He was honored with many prizes and awards, most including the National Humanities Medal in 1965.

The Mad Farmer Revolution

Being a Fragment of the Natural History of New Eden, in Homage To Mr. Ed McClanahan, One of the Locals The mad farmer, the thirsty one, went dry. When he had time he threw a visionary high lonesome on the holy communion wine. "It is an awesome event when an earthen man has drunk his fill of the blood of a god," people said, and got out of his way. He plowed the churchyard, the minister's wife, three graveyards and a golf course. In a parking lot he planted a forest of little pines. He sanctified the groves, dancing at night in the oak shades with goddesses. He led a field of corn to creep up and tassel like an Indian tribe on the courthouse lawn. Pumpkins ran out to the ends of their vines to follow him. Ripe plums and peaches reached into his pockets. Flowers sprang up in his tracks everywhere he stepped. And then his planter's eye fell on that parson's fair fine lady again. “O holy plowman,” cried she, “I am all grown up in weeds. Pray, bring me back into good tilth.” He tilled her carefully and laid her by, and she did bring forth others of her kind, and others, and some more. They sowed and reaped till all the countryside was filled with farmers and their brides sowing and reaping. When they died they became two spirits of the woods. On their graves were written these words without sound: “Here lies Saint Plowman. Here lies Saint Fertile Ground.” —Wendell Berry

    

Tiny San Marino--A Place of Refuge and the Oldest Republic

 

Perched on the top Monte Titano stand the three fortification towers of Guaita linked by walls and communication trenches, which offer spectacular panoramic views of San Marino.

The story goes like this.  Stone mason and sometimes preacher Marinus of Arba and his life-long pal Leo were forced by some political upheaval to leave their home of Rab, a Roman colony on the island of Arba in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of what is now Croatia.  The two young men settled in the northern Italian city of Rimini to find work reconstructing the city’s ruined walls.  But there they ran afoul of the infamous persecution of Christians ordered by the Emperor Diocletian and had to flee the city. 

At the same time some of Marinus’s sermons as an ordained Deacon were found somehow at odds with the not-yet codified tenets of the Church so he could find no refuge.  The pair fled to the rugged, remote, and unpopulated Apennine Mountains determined to live as monastic hermits equally free of the Emperor and the Pope.  By tradition on September 3, 301 CE Marius began laying the stones of a chapel and the establishment of a monastic community.

A much later German etching depicting Saint Marinus the Stone Cutter building his monastery.

Marinus died many years later in 366 with the words Relinquo vos liberos ab utroque homine—I leave you free from both men—meaning the Emperor and the Pope.  By then his community had grown and prospered and the monastery high on the top of Monte Titano had become a haven for refugees persecuted by both.  It would remain so through the centuries. 

Eventually Marinus was canonized as San Marino and the community that sprang up around his Hermitage would become known as the Most Serene Republic of San Marino.  The tiny nation, occupying less than 24 square miles, has maintained its independence ever since and celebrates September 3 not only as Marinus’s Feast Day, but as the foundation date of the Republic.

That makes San Marino easily the oldest surviving continuously sovereign state in the world, and because it never came under the rule of even a local nobleman or feudal governance by the Abby, also the oldest Republic.  This was made possible by its isolation, the terrain so rugged that it was said there was hardly a square inch of level ground, location away from traditional trade routes and invasion corridors, sometimes surprising friends in high places, and just plain dumb luck.

In its earliest years San Marino was informally ruled by the hermit monks of Church of St. Agatha on the top of Monte Titan.  This hardly was governance of any meaningful kind.  In the early 400’s with Rome near collapse eight neighboring towns joined with San Marino seeking protection from invading Goths.  These communes became the along with the original settlement became San Marino’s nine municipalities. With the expanded territory and population, the heads of families established themselves as ruling council known as the Arengo which governed from the 5th Century to 1243.  By then it grew to representatives of more than 50 extended families and was a cumbersome body and was riven by feuds and rival cabals. 

The Sammarinese, as citizens are known, fed up with oligarchic rule established their own Grand and General Council which Pope Innocent IV, the titular head of state, in one of the first acts of his Papacy, recognized as the country’s ruling body.  Every six months the Grand and General Council elected two Captains Regent to co-hold executive power.  They were not eligible for re-election, but could be returned to the position on later occasions.  Traditionally, the pair of Regents were drawn from opposing factions on the Council and since the adoption of a two-party system, from each of the political parties.  This form of governance was molded after the Senate and Consuls of the old Roman Republic.  This arrangement was codified the Leges Statutae Republicae Sancti Marini—Constitution of San Marino—recorded in a series of six books written in Latin in the late 1600.  In 1631the Papacy waived its light claims on San Marino and recognized its independence from the Papal States.

                                          

                                                     The Constitution of San Marino was codified and published in 1600.

If maintaining essential independence for nearly 1400 years from the declining years of the Roman Empire, through the Dark Ages, and the Renaissance when intrigue and war spread across the Italian Peninsula as the Papacy, ambitious city states, and various leagues and alliances struggled for supremacy was hard, the challenges of the Napoleonic Era, clash of Empires, and the rise of the European nation state were even more daunting.

In 1797 San Marino’s independence was threatened when Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Army was rampaging through Italy.  Somehow Antonio Onofri, one of the two serving Captains Regent, managed to befriend the General and impress him with his tale of San Marino’s long independence as a republic.  Napoleon at this stage of his career was still an ideologically committed Republican himself.  Not only did he offer to guarantee and protect San Marino’s independence, but he offered to award the country territory from adjacent states.  The grateful Grand and General Council politely refused that off rightly fearing that accepting a land grab would alienate more powerful neighbors and lead to attacks when the French would inevitably eventually leave Italy.

An even greater challenge was the long struggle of Italian Unification that began after the final fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and continued up to the final surrender of the Papal States and the location of a capital at Rome for the Kingdom of Italy.  San Marino began the period completely surrounded by the Papal States.  But in 1859 the rapidly expanding Kingdom of Sardinia extended its borders over Central Italy and San Marino lay astride the border between that Kingdom and the Papal States.  In accordance with its traditions, San Marino became of place of refuge for many fleeing the fighting, but especially for refugees from pro-unification areas.   In December 1860 the Papal province of Marche adjacent to San Marino was incorporated in the Kingdom of Sardinia.

San Marino was often blessed with friends in high places like the great Italian unifier Giuseppe Garibaldi.

That made San Marino an island in an area aflame for unification.  In gratitude and in recognition of the tiny nation’s long resistance to Papal rule, unification leader Giuseppe Garibaldi prevailed upon the soon-to-be King of Italy, Victor Emanuel II who led the Sarndinian-Piedmontese forces which had captured Marche, to respect the traditional independence of San Marino.

San Marino was not immune from its own domestic crisis.  By the turn of the 20th Century the citizenry was restive under the Grand and General Council which became increasingly oligarchic.  In a bold and unusual move in 1906 the Sammarinese Socialist Party agitated for and achieved a call to meeting of the ancient Arengo, where the heads of families, under some public duress, voted to authorize universal manhood suffrage for the first time in elections to the General Council.  The Socialists took advantage of the change to assume leadership of a majority coalition in the Council.  The oligarchs formed a counter-party and bided their time for a chance to resume power.

The eruption of World War I interrupted the internal political struggles and put independence once again at risk.  Italy initially entered the war on the side of Austria-Hungary, honoring old treaty obligations.  Then in May of 1915, Italy changed sides, declaring war on its former ally in hopes gaining territory along the frontier between the countries. San Marino, however, declared its neutrality, which was taken as hostile by Italy which feared that the small state could become a nest of Austrian spies and agents and that the country’s powerful new radio transmitter atop Monte Titano could be used by the enemy.

Italy tried to force the occupation of San Marino by units of the Carabinieri paramilitary police which the Republic refused and resisted.  In retaliation Italy cut San Marino’s telephone lines and established a partial blockade.  The Italians did not, however, invade the country.

Still within San Marino there was some popular support for the Italians.  Small numbers of Sammarinese formed a volunteer unit to fight with the Italians.  Another volunteer group set up a Red Cross field hospital.  This was regarded as hostile by the Austrians who broke diplomatic relations and threatened the country should the front move its way.

The Italians fared poorly in a brutal campaign that turned into retreat and then stalemate.  The Sammarinese once again offered shelter to refugees.

In the aftermath of World War I the old oligarchic faction reorganized under Giuliano Gozi, one of the volunteers with the Italian army and then serving as both Foreign Minister—effectively the leader of the Cabinet—and Interior Minister which put him in control of the Army and police forces.  Gozi founded the Sammarinese Fascist Party, modeled on the Italian Party, in 1922 and used street thugs to intimidate the Socialists and syndicalists—unionists.  In 1923 Gozi was elected the first Fascist Captain Regent.  After 1926 all other parties were banned and until the end of World War II both Captains Regents were Fascist in contradiction to the ancient Constitution. Although San Marino became a single party state, Fascist power was not absolute, and independents continued to hold a majority in the Grand and General Council until 1932.  After that a split in Fascist ranks weakened the Party.

Despite cordial relations with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists, San Marino once again declared its traditional neutrality with the outbreak of a general European War in 1939.  It had already not followed the Italian Party’s lead in adopting Anti-Jewish legislation in 1938.  It had a small, but long-standing Jewish population, and after persecution began in Italy some Jews found refuge in San Marino.  During the war anti-fascist Italian Partisans also occasionally found secret refuge there, although the local Fascists expelled those who were discovered.

In 1940 the New York Times erroneously reported that San Marino had declared war on Britain.  The Sammarinese government scrambled to wire London denying entering the war.  With the fall of Mussolini in Italy in July of 1943 and the subsequent official separate peace with the Allies, the Sammarinese Fascist Party lost power, although they were briefly restored in 1944.  The Fascists reiterated neutrality in April of 1944, but the British bombed the country on June 26 believing it was a repository for military supplies for the Germans.  The government denied allowing munitions of any nation to be stored on its territory. 

Indian troops passing the grave of a German soldier.  After they cleared out the Nazis in the Battle of San Marino in 1944 the British withdrew their troops from the tiny nation.

In early September the Germans forcibly occupied the country, the first and only time the country was overrun by a hostile power.  The Germans were already in general retreat in Italy.  On September 17 the 4th Indian Infantry Division attacked the Nazis and ousted them in the brief Battle of San Marino.  After driving the Germans out, the Indians quickly withdrew and left the country in the control of its own armed forces.

The German occupation effectively finished the Fascists as a political force in San Marino.  Multi-party parliamentary government was restored and in 1945 a coalition led by the Communists achieved a majority and ruled until 1957.  It was the first time anywhere in the world that Communists formed an elected government. 

The Grand and General Council was split for years between multiple parties, some of them quite small, a mirror of the situation in Italy.  In 2008 a new election law put restrictions on small parties forcing most of them out of existence or to join coalitions.  There were two main opposing coalitions, the Pact for San Marino, led by the Christian Democratic Party, and the United Left, led by the Party of Socialists and Democrats, a merger of the Socialist Party and the former communist Party of Democrats.  Today the center-right party coalition is the Republica Futura which was formed by fusion of the Popular Alliance (AP) and the Union for the Republic (UPR).  The other side has reformed as the Democratic Socialist Left. The frequent turn-over of Captains Regents has resulted in San Marino having more recognized female heads of state than any other nation in the world—15, including three who served twice.

In April 2017 two women, Mimma Zavoli and Vanessa D'Ambrosio were elected Captains Regent of San Marino.  At age 29 D'Ambrosio was the youngest head of state in the world.

Today San Marino is the smallest member of the Council of Europe but it is not a member of the European Economic Union or the European Parliament.  None-the-less, it is by agreement allowed to use the Euro as currency and as is customary has its own national images printed on the obverse side of notes, most of which are snapped up by collectors. 

With an economy relying heavily on finance, technical services, and tourism, the approximately 35,000 residents enjoy the highest per capita income in Europe and are the only country on the continent with more automobiles than people.  Its citizens are also among the most highly educated in Europe.  Unlike many small nations with substantial finance industries, San Marino does not rely on being a tax shelter.  There is a corporate profits tax rate of 19 percent. Capital gains are subject to a five percent tax, and interest is subject to a 13 percent withholding tax.  Foreigners use San Marino banks for their renowned stability and the high level of technical and personal services.

The Guard of the Rock on parade, one of the major units of the San Marino regular Army.

By agreement Italy is responsible for the general defense of San Marino, but the country maintains a fairly sizable military establishment for its size.  This includes colorful units with largely ceremonial duties including the Crossbow Corps, Guard of the Rock (also a combat unit and border patrol), and Guard of the Council Great and General (which protects the government).  In addition, every family with more than adult two males is required to provide a member of the Company of Uniformed Militia.  Participation is so popular that it is over subscribed.