The upsurge in working-class militancy between 1910 and 1920 was a phenomenon that swept the entire world.38 Rather than seeing it as a mere epiphenomenon of the socialist revolution that did not happen, it deserves to be seen as a transformative event in its own right. In the United States, in the last 18 months of Wilson’s presidency, it was to unleash a veritable right-wing panic. In France, the delegates to the Versailles peace conference witnessed street battles on May Day 1919. By the summer of 1919 Rome appeared on the point of losing control of much of urban Italy.
