Word: nenni
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...nearly two years, Socialist Boss Pietro Nenni had carried on his policy of collaboration with the Communists. Eventually it must lead to complete fusion, but Nenni first needed a showdown with the anti-Communist elements in his party. As the Congress opened last week, Communist observer Umberto Terracini put it this way: "We have come here as to the house of a brother in need who is entering the crisis of a most grave sickness and who must make an irrevocable decision...
...august Aula Magna (Great Hall), eleven spotlights probed the platform where Socialist leaders fretfully shuffled back & forth under a huge wooden banner of a hammer and sickle and book (the Italian Socialist emblem). Delegates, observers and guests, filling the unheated auditorium to capacity, shivered in their overcoats. Pietro Nenni sat snugly at the rear of the platform, carefully concealed from view by a bowl of bright red carnations...
...moment of the dramatic session came when Matteo Matteotti, 25, son of Italy's famous anti-Fascist martyr (TIME, Aug. 7, 1944), moved to the speaker's microphone. His wide mouth and slightly jutting jaw firmly set, his deep-set eyes solemn and stern, young Matteotti charged Nenni's party leadership with spreading "fear and terrorism," and denounced the Congress as illegal. The delegates rose and screamed: "Degenerate son!" But Matteotti doggedly finished his job, handed the presiding officer what he called documentation proving Nenni's terroristic methods, and calmly walked off the platform...
...minutes later, greeted by a standing ovation, Nenni's round, smiling face emerged from behind the carnations. In a grey chalk-stripe suit with a tan shirt and a red silk tie, carefully disarranged to avoid any appearance of bourgeois neatness, he spent two hours and twelve minutes in passionate exhortation. As Nenni's voice rose & fell in practiced intonation, while he raised a warning finger, clenched his right fist, grandly embraced Congress in widespread arms, or modestly spread his long, strong fingers against his chest in a self-effacing gesture, men & women stared seriously and intensely, many...
...words were eloquent, but studded with cliches about unity of the proletariat, relentless class struggle, economic as well as political liberty. Nenni carefully balanced a tribute to British Socialism with a salute to the Russian Revolution. The audience greeted the first silently and the second with wild applause...