The Italian Ambassador to the Secretary of State .
Washington , December 6, 1906 .
Mr. Secretary of State: Your excellency knows that the Italian Government buys every year in the United States, in Kentucky and [Page 950] Tennessee, to be precise, large quantities of tobacco leaf, viz, about 34,000,000 pounds for the needs of the tobacco monopoly. The purchases are made by agents who operate in 20 sections of the country, and in some of which they have established, at convenient places, “factories” where the tobacco purchased in the vicinity is received and cured; this tobacco, acquired through lawful contracts and duly paid to the growers, becomes Italian property.
The dissentions and competition prevailing between the Dark District Tobacco Planters’ Association and the growers who had remained independent have already been the cause, about this time last year, of serious breaches of the peace. The members of the association, or a number of them, first used abjurgation and intimidation with the independents; then organized bands of “night riders,” armed and masked, who, threatening death and destruction of property, demanded their promise to withdraw from their contracts and to enter into no other. On the night of December 8 two factories of the agents of the Italian Government at Trenton, Ky., managed by Mr. Joseph P. Russell, were set on fire and completely destroyed, with all the tobacco they contained. Other acts of violence were committed, to the prejudice of the American Tobacco Company and others, at Elkton, Ky., Adairville, Ky., Cadiz, Ky., Olmstead, Ky., Russellville, Ky.
The situation this year appears from reports that have reached this embassy to be no less, if not more threatening. Since the middle of November the “night riders” have resumed their performances in Caldwell and Lyon counties and elsewhere. During the night of November 30–December 1 the town of Princeton, Ky., was held in sway for over an hour by a gang of 300 masked men, who destroyed “stemmeries” and the tobacco therein stored, worth from seventy-five to one hundred thousand dollars. A plantation at Hopkinsville, Ky., was threatened at about the same time.
These disturbances may not only lead, as they did last year, to the destruction of supplies of tobacco already purchased by the agents of the Italian Government, which made them Italian property, but also prevent the seriously threatened planters from fulfilling their obligations or entering into new contracts of sale. If such a condition of affairs were to repeat itself or endure, the Italian Government might be constrained to seek elsewhere the whole or a part of the tobacco it requires every year. This embassy is therefore confident that the local authorities will, for the common good, see that the above-mentioned rivalries will not lapse into criminal acts, and that commerce shall not be hampered in its freedom or stripped of its guaranties. The Royal embassy ventures, with this end in view, to appeal in behalf of the Italian agents and of all with whom they deal, as well as of the goods purchased by them, for that “most constant protection and security” that is guaranteed by the treaties.
Trusting that an answer from your excellency will bring me this assurance,
I have, etc.,