File:1939-1943 Mazzini Society.jpg

The Mazzini Society (1939-1943) was an antifascist political association, formed on a democratic and republican basis, situating itself within the tradition of the Risorgimento, and created in the United States by Italian-American immigrants.

• See Intellectuals Displaced from Fascist Italy

The Society was founded by Gaetano Salvemini in Northampton, Massachusetts, on September 24, 1939, with Lionello Venturi, Michele Cantarella, Renato Poggioli and Roberto Bolaffio. The Board of Directors was made of Gaetano Salvemini, Lionello Venturi e Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (all professor in American Universities). The Presidency was offered to Max Ascoli. Besides Ascoli and Salvemini, there were Tullia Calabi, Lionello Venturi, Michele Cantarella, Roberto Bolaffio, interim president Renato Poggioli, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, and Carlo Tresca. Its newsletter was the periodical Mazzini News and later Nazioni unite ('Nations united'). Many members came from the antifascist resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà, or exiled such as Arturo Toscanini.

With the German occupation of France in June 1940 many Italian antifascists, exiled beyond the Alps, were forced to emigrate again; they found refuge in the United States. Many of them joined the Mazzini Society: Aldo Garosci, Alberto Cianca, and Alberto Tarchiani, who came from Giustizia e Libertà; Randolfo Pacciardi, the political secretary of the Italian Republican Party, who founded the Mazzinian weekly periodical La Giovine Italia in Paris in 1937; and the former foreign minister Carlo Sforza, who worked at La Giovine Italia under Tarchiani's direction.

Tarchiani quickly assumed the position of secretary of the association. Through the Mazzini Society, Sforza and Tarchiani planned to obtain the support of the US government for the creation of an Italian National Committee as a form of government in exile, with the progressive advance of Allied troops in North Africa in 1941–42, as well as an "Italian legion" under Randolfo Pacciardi, who had commanded the Garibaldi Battalion in the Spanish Civil War and came to the United States in December 1941.

The Mazzini Society operated in the United States as well as in Central and South America.

The Armistice and the formation of the Badoglio government in 1943 created a new situation, with the return of many of the antifascist exiles to Italy. The leadership of the Anti-fascist movement was taken by the Italian National Liberation Committee.