Search Results

This chapter focuses on how Paterson became the center of what is probably the most important Anarchist group in the world. Italian anarchists were at the forefront of persistent local labor unrest, including the violent 1902 silk strike and famous 1913 general strike conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). More infamously, a Paterson anarchist assassinated Italy's King Umberto I in 1900. However, by 1906, an exasperated Board of Aldermen threatened to bring charges of libel against publications that continued to equate the Silk City with anarchism. The chapter shows how behind the dramatic episodes that embarrassed city officials stood a dynamic radical subculture rooted in Paterson's Italian population and linked to major transnational revolutionary networks.

This chapter looks at how anarchist groups throughout the country maintained their functionality, with International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) organizer Anna Sosnovsky noting “a general revival amongst the Comrades.” By 1933, one anarchist newspaper counted seventy-five anarchist groups across the country, while a U.S. military intelligence agent reported a keen revival of anarchistic activities on the East Coast. This modest resurgence is reflected in available circulation figures from the era, which shows that the American anarchist press retained approximately three-quarters of its prewar readership. The spread of multiethnic, English-speaking international groups led to the unprecedented growth of the English-language anarchist press, while Italian-language anarchist periodicals maintained a higher combined circulation between 1925 and 1933.

Chapter 2 explains the role of government repression as the primary precipitant of Italian anarchist violence. Specifically it describes how, in a climate of growing economic hardship and social unrest among the peasantry and factory workers, in 1878 Giovanni Passanante’s failed “tyrannicide” of King Umberto I provided Italian authorities with a justification to attempt to deliver a mortal blow to socialism and the International. Repression took various forms. Socialists and anarchists groups were dissolved, their newspapers suppressed, rank-and-file members classified as “malefactors” and subjected to ammonizione (admonishment) and domicilio coatto (internal exile). Important anarchists were arrested and those who escaped detention, as in the case of Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero, forced into exile. These developments led many anarchists to embrace anti-organizational forms of revolutionary ideology and practices that rejected all forms of organization and exalted terrorist violence.

Bombings are traditionally associated with anarchism. Through a brief comparative survey, Chapter 3 explains that while this was a lethal weapon of struggle used by anarchists in Spain and France, the same was not the case for the bombings perpetrated by their Italian comrades. Spanish and French anarchists bombed activities and locations that attracted large numbers of people, especially members of the bourgeoisie. In contrast, instead of an abstract class enemy, Italian anarchists (in whatever country they struck) bombed buildings or targeted specific personalities along with tangible symbols of state power and repressive policies. The determination to strike those held responsible for repressive policies led to two attentats: Paolo Lega’s attempt on Prime Minister Francesco Crispi’s life followed by Sante Caserio’s assassination of the president of France, Marie Francois Sadi Carnot.

The conclusions discusses how political assassinations committed by Italian anarchists were not the product of conspiracies carried out by criminals and madmen. Rather they were the consequence of Italy’s grinding poverty and authoritarian methods of dealing with popular unrest and dissent, of the economic and political pressures that fostered mass migration, and finally, of the cosmopolitan nature of Italian anarchism. All six of the attentatori discussed in this book did not engage in acts of terrorism against faceless victims but instead struck out against those monarchs and chiefs of state deemed responsible, directly or indirectly, for crimes perpetrated against themselves, the people, or the anarchist movement.

This chapter analyzes Cultura Obrera (Labor Culture), published in New York City from 1911 to 1927. Pedro Esteve, the primary editor, gave expression to his ideas in this newspaper and while it represented Spanish firemen and marine workers, it reported on many other workers’ struggles in different parts of the world, for example, supporting and collecting funds for the Mexican revolutionary brothers Flores Magón. This newspaper, as all the anarchist press, was part of a transnational network and had a circulation not only in many parts of the United States but also in Latin American countries, including Argentina and Cuba, as well as on the other side of the Atlantic, in Spain and various European countries.

This chapter argues that anarchism was strongest among San Francisco's Italians, but the city's diversity, mixed neighborhoods, and the Italian community's small size relative to the total population meant that multiethnic alliances were both easy to forge and necessary to sustain radical activity. The result was the emergence of a pan-ethnic “Latin” movement encompassing Italian, French, and Spanish-speaking anarchists and syndicalists. By the First World War, San Francisco's anarchist groups had amalgamated into a loose coalition that extended across virtually the entire ethnoracial spectrum, and the city had become a major nexus of global radicalism that rivaled Paris in its myriad of international revolutionaries and progressives of all sorts.

Customarily both in Europe and the United States, government officials, the press and historians have described late 19^th century anarchists as murderous, bloody thirsty, irrational and wretched individuals The introduction details how the book will show that “propaganda of the deed,” as conceived and carried out by Italian anarchists, was the product of the revolutionary tradition of the Risorgimento; the influence of Russian anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin; the role of government repression in Italy, France and Spain; along with the experiences of Italian migrant laborers at home and abroad. Finally, the introduction described how the book will also provide biographical portraits and analysis of the major Italian perpetrators of political assassinations in fin-de-siècle Italy, France, and Spain.