#title “The Whole World Is Our Country”
#LISTtitle Whole World Is Our Country
#subtitle Immigration and anarchism in the United States, 1885–1940
#author Kenyon Zimmer
#date 2010
#topics United States of America, history, immigrants
#source <[[https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/7910][https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/7910]]>
#rights Copyright © by Kenyon Zimmer. Open Access.
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-10-06T05:54:59.358Z
#notes Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
;
; University of Pittsburgh
;
; “THE WHOLE WORLD IS OUR COUNTRY”: IMMIGRATION AND ANARCHISM IN THE ; UNITED STATES, 1885–1940
;
; by
; **Kenyon Zimmer**
; BA, Bennington College, 2002
; MA, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
;
; Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
; the Department of History in partial fulfillment
; of the requirements for the degree of
; Doctor of Philosophy
;
; University of Pittsburgh
; 2010
;
;
; UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
; SCHOOL OF ARTS & SCIENCES
;
; This dissertation was presented
; by
; Kenyon Zimmer
;
; It was defended on
; April 29, 2010
; and approved by
;
; Donna Gabaccia, Professor, Department of History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
; Patrick Manning, Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh
; Marcus Rediker, Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh
; Dissertation Advisor: Richard Oestreicher, Associate Professor, Department of History,
; University of Pittsburgh
;
; Copyright © by Kenyon Zimmer
; 2010
;
;
; **“THE WHOLE WORLD IS OUR COUNTRY”: IMMIGRATION AND ANARCHISM IN THE UNITED STATES, 1885–1940**
; Kenyon Zimmer, PhD
; University of Pittsburgh, 2010
;
*** Synopsis | ~~
From the 1880s through the 1940s tens of thousands of anarchists were active in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them first- and second-generation immigrants. But most were not yet devotees of the anarchist cause when they arrived on American shores. Instead, a clear link existed between migration and the embrace of anarchist ideology. This study asks how and why thousands of migrants became anarchists, and how their embrace of an anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan ideology shaped their identities, experiences and actions.
Utilizing anarchist publications, government surveillance files, and archival materials, it focuses on Eastern European Jews and Italians—the two largest segments of the anarchist movement by the turn of the century—and the development of anarchism among these groups in three important centers of American anarchism: New York’s Lower East Side, Paterson, New Jersey, and San Francisco. It then follows the changing fortunes of the movement in the face of war, the Russian Revolution, the First Red Scare, and the birth of communism and fascism, and ends with an examination of immigrant American anarchist participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, and that conflict’s dramatic impact on the movement in the United States.
This study argues that it was American conditions that usually made immigrants into anarchists, rather than European ones, inextricably linking the histories of migration and American anarchism. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of post-migration radicalization defies categorization within most historiographical paradigms of European immigration that focus on the construction of “hyphenated” American identities or “hybrid” transnational ones. Anarchists chose an alternative: they embraced an ideology that opposed both Americanization and Old World nationalisms, severing their attachments to their states of origin while willfully resisting assimilation into their host society. They formulated a radical cosmopolitan outlook and identity that embraced diversity, rejected hierarchies, and extended solidarity across national, ethnic, and racial divides. This cosmopolitanism was ultimately unable to withstand the onslaught of competing nationalisms ranging from Americanism to fascism to Zionism, but it stands as an important example of a transnational collective identity delinked from nationalism, the nation-state and racial hierarchies.
*** List of Tables
Table 1. Total Known Circulation of the American Anarchist Press, 1880–1940
Table 2. Total Known Circulations of the American Yiddish and Italian Anarchist Press, 1880–1940
Table 3. Italian-Born Population of Paterson, 1890–1930
Table 4. Number of Silk Firms in Paterson, 1890–1909
Table 5. Nativity of San Francisco’s Population, 1900
Table 6. Italian-Born Population of San Francisco, 1890–1920
Table 7. Composition of Selected Occupational Categories in San Francisco by Parents’ Place of Birth, 1900
Table 8. Deportations under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, 1918–1925
Table 9. American Anarchist Publications with Known Circulations, 1880–1940
Table 10. Known American Anarchist Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
*** Acknowledgements
I have incurred many debts while working on this dissertation. First and foremost I must thank Amanda Zeiders, my partner in crime (and life) throughout the years I was writing it. She has put up with more than I ever could have asked her to, and in return has kept me sane and never hesitated to remind me of what is important. As promised, she will receive two copies of this manuscript, one to read and one to burn. I hope she enjoys the first activity as much as the second.
I have been privileged to work with a number of wonderful mentors over the years. The prehistory of this project dates back to my classes with Derek Hutchinson and Jim Jennings at the Mendocino Community High School, where Derek exposed me to the writings of Howard Zinn and Jim introduced me to academic research and writing. At Bennington College my growing love of history and interest in radical politics were nurtured by Ron Cohen, Mansour Farhang, David Phillips, Miroslava Prazak, Eileen Scully, Susan Sgorbati, Carol Symes and Paul Voice, as well as outside of the classroom by my friends and fellow members of the Bennington Student Action Network, and through innumerable discussions back in California with Clay Hinson and Dan Young. A senior year Field Work Term internship at the Emma Goldman Papers under the guidance of Candace Falk, Jessica Moran and Barry Pateman cemented my continuing fascination with the history of anarchism. At the University of Pittsburgh I was fortunate to work with a number of inspiring and supportive professors including Kathy Blee, Alejandro de la Fuente, Patrick Manning, Lara Putnam, Marcus Rediker, Rob Ruck and Bruce Venarde. Richard Oestreicher and Donna Gabaccia, in particular, have been unflagging in their encouragement and assistance even as I subjected them to endless chapter drafts.
A number of other scholars have generously shared their time, thoughts, and materials with me. Marcella Bencivenni, Kirk Shaffer and Michael Miller Topp all offered extensive comments on conference presentations based on this dissertation, while Barry Pateman read drafts of multiple chapters and Bill Chase and Fraser Ottanelli provided valuable feedback on Chapter 7. Salvatore Salerno and Jennifer Guglielmo were both exceedingly generous in sharing their own research and thoughts on the Paterson anarchists, and Bob Helms, Barry Pateman and Nunzio Pernicone all answered obscure questions I posed to them. Fellow graduate students have also lent invaluable assistance. I was privileged to have been able to coordinate research trips with my friends and colleagues Matthew Casey, Bayete Henderson and Dave Struthers. Dave Struthers and Travis Tomchuk also gave me copies of important primary documents from their own research and helped to shape my thinking through hours of conversations. Tania Boster, Roland Clark, Isaac Curtis, Niklas Frykman, Marie Skoczylas and all of my friends in Pittsburgh have contributed to this project through innumerable formal and informal discussions—and, at times, welcome distractions. Olivia Cummings and Anna Torres also shared their own insightful work and thoughts on anarchism, ethnicity, and race with me.
The unsung heroes of any study are, of course, the staff of the various libraries and archives where the research is done. Above all others, the members of the Interlibrary Loan Department at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library have indulged my every whim and heroically tracked down the most obscure of sources. The personnel of Hillman’s Microforms Collection were also helpful and pleasant throughout the countless hours I spent in front of microfilm readers. I must additionally extend my thanks to the staff at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University, the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome, the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, the incomparable International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, as well as to Julie Herrada and the friendly folks at the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Gail Malmgreen and the staff of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.
This project was made possible by the financial support of numerous institutions. The University of Pittsburgh kindly funded much of my research with a C. Y. Hsu Summer Research Fellowship, an Arts and Sciences Summer Fellowship, an Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, a Samuel P. Hays Summer Research Grant and a Lillian B. Lawler Predoctoral Fellowship. The Yiddish research for this dissertation would have been impossible without a Steiner Summer Internship for Yiddish Studies at the National Yiddish Book Center, where I learned from wonderful teachers like Robert Adler Peckerar and Naomi Tencer, and the NYBC also granted me a Gildin Yiddish Book Scholarship. From the Immigration History Research Center I received a Grant-in-Aid enabling me to delve into their expansive collection of Italian newspapers, and special dispensations from the World History Center and Professor Alberta Sbragia of the European Union Center of Excellence and European Studies Center allowed me to present some of my findings at the 2010 European Social Science History Colloquium in Ghent.
Finally, special thanks are due to Christopher Daley and Sophie Feyder, who munificently opened their home to me when I was stranded for several days in Belgium while frantically finishing this dissertation, due to an Icelandic volcano with an unpronounceable name. Someday I hope to return the favor.
*** A Note on Transliteration
For Yiddish words I have followed the YIVO transliteration system. Yiddish names, however, are rendered more familiarly as they appear in the catalogs of the Library of Congress and the National Yiddish Book Center, with the YIVO transliteration of surnames appearing in parentheses with their first appearance in the text if they differ. Authors of newspaper articles, as well as names in the titles of books and articles, have been transliterated as they originally appeared. I have also taken the liberty of capitalizing the Yiddish and Italian names of organizations and periodicals according the English standards.
*** Dedication | ~~
In memory of Paul Avrich and Howard Zinn
** 1.0 Introduction
During his sojourn in the United States in 1895–96, the Italian lawyer and renowned anarchist poet and playwright Pietro Gori wrote Senza Patria (Without a Country), which went on to become one of his most popular plays. Gori’s drama follows a disillusioned peasant and veteran of the war for Italian unification as he immigrates to America and finds “not a homeland (patria)” but only “a little more bread.” At the end of the story he comes to realize that workers like himself “are foreigners of every country!….we are outcasts! we are bastards!” He therefore becomes a radical and a partisan of “the true, sacred ideal: one single patria: the world; one single family: humanity….”[1] The protagonist’s estrangement from the nation-state is depicted as painful and alienating, but ultimately emancipatory, as he realizes that to have no country of one’s own means that one is instead a citizen of the world. To be “i senza patria” (those without a country), as Italian-speaking anarchists commonly identified themselves, was to stand in solidarity with the members of all countries. In his popular Stornelli d’esilio (Songs of Exile), first published in 1904 in the United States, Gori declared, “The whole world is our country / liberty is our law” (Nostra patria è il mondo intero / nostra legge è la libertà).[2] Here was the anarchist program stripped to its bare essentials: freedom and cosmopolitanism taken to their logical extremes.
Significantly, migration to the United States was the precipitating factor in Gori’s tale. This reflected the fact that transatlantic migration was crucial to the formation of an anarchist movement in the United States. From the 1870s through the 1940s, American anarchism was overwhelmingly a movement of first- and second-generation immigrants. Nor should this be surprising, as by 1880 foreign-born migrants and their children composed the majority of the American working class. During the period of class recomposition that accompanied the Second Industrial Revolution, the migrant workers whose labor powered American capital drew on forms of resistance and ideologies from their native countries, while also adapting these to their changed circumstances and developing new ones.[3] This process of segmented class composition produced different forms and degrees of radicalism within separate ethnoracial groups,[4] which in turn influenced and were influenced by the ideas and actions of other such groups.
And, like the migrant Italian peasant of Senza Patria, most foreign-born anarchists in the United States were not yet devotees of the anarchist cause when they arrived on American shores. Instead, a clear causal link existed between migration to the United States and the embrace of anarchist ideology. As Louis Adamic observed, “While anarchism no doubt had foreign roots, it was an American growth in America, nurtured in American soil.”[5] This study asks how and why tens of thousands of migrants became anarchists, and how their embrace of an anti-nationalist and radically cosmopolitan ideology shaped their identities, experiences and actions. It is “a social history of politics,” combining the methodologies of social, cultural, and labor history, transnational studies, critical race theory, and discursive analysis to recover the worlds from which these anarchists emerged, the new social worlds they created, and the ideal world they sought to build.[6]
*** 1.1 Outline and Scope of Project
Anarchism emerged as an international mass movement in the last decades of the nineteenth century in reaction to the global expansion of capitalist modes of production and the rise of modern nation-states. Fusing anti-capitalism with anti-statism, anarchist ideology rejected the nation-state as a legitimate socio-political unit, an acceptable guarantor of rights, or a viable vehicle for systemic change. Anarchists instead envisioned a borderless world of freely constituted autonomous communities and federations, with economies based on collectivist or libertarian communist principles. By 1902, one journalist estimated that the movement’s adherents worldwide numbered one million.[7] In the United States they numbered in the tens of thousands—perhaps over a hundred thousand at the movement’s peak—and immigrants made up the overwhelming majority. Rather than attempt a general and therefore cursory overview of anarchism in the United States, I have chosen to focus on two major immigrant populations— Eastern European Jews and Italians—in three important centers of the anarchist movement: New York’s Lower East Side, Paterson, New Jersey, and San Francisco.
This study therefore begins by analyzing the growth of anarchism in each of these cities from the 1880s until the First World War. Chapter 2 explores the emergence of a Yiddishspeaking anarchist movement in New York’s Jewish ghetto, which brought together sweatshop workers and Russified Jewish intellectuals under the influence of the city’s German anarchists. In Paterson, the subject of Chapter 3, silk weavers and dyers from Northern Italy established a movement that dominated the Italian community and labor movement for nearly three decades. Chapter 4 traces the formation of a multiethnic anarchist movement in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood and its many interactions with a diverse array of other migrant workers and radicals. Chapter 5 follows the changing fortunes of the anarchist movement in the face of major national and international developments between 1914 and 1924—war, the Russian Revolution, the First Red Scare, and the birth of communism and fascism—and Chapter 6 chronicles anarchists’ ongoing campaigns against communism and fascism within their communities, and their attempts to forge an “international” English-speaking movement. Finally, Chapter 7 examines American anarchist participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 and this conflict’s dramatic impact on the movement in the United States, which collapsed in its aftermath.
Several considerations guided the choice of both the case studies and the timeframe used in this study. One is the existing scholarship on anarchism. The first wave of immigrant anarchism, which consisted primarily of Germans and Czechs and roughly coincided with the decade of the 1880s, has received by far the most historical attention and been ably documented by a number of scholars.[8] The historiography on anarchism among the “new immigrants” arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe between 1880 and 1920, however, is much less complete. Because Italians and Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews made up the largest segments of this second wave of immigrant anarchism, they constitute the core subjects of this study, although their interactions with workers and radicals of different ethnoracial backgrounds are also central to my analysis.
The Lower East Side was the center of Jewish politics and culture and in the United States, and it occupied the same position within the Jewish anarchist movement. Unlike the Italian-speaking movement, which produced at least eighty-three anarchist publications in twelve states, Yiddish-speaking anarchists established just twenty, all but three them published in New York City. Of these, the Lower East Side’s Fraye Arbayter Shtime (Free Voice of Labor) was the undisputed leader and, running from 1890–1977, the only Yiddish anarchist paper to last more than five years.[9] With a print run of around 30,000 at the outbreak of the First World War, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime was also the most widely circulating anarchist publication in American history, with a peak readership estimated by one journalist to top 150,000. To a large degree, the history of Yiddish anarchism in New York City is the history of Jewish anarchism in America.[10]
Paterson, meanwhile, was long known as the capital city of Italian American anarchism. Along with Barre, Vermont, Spring Valley, Illinois, and Tampa, Florida, it was one of a handful of communities in which a large local anarchist movement competed, sometimes successfully, for dominance among Italian immigrants.[11] Out of these communities, that of Paterson was by far the most important in terms of the influence it exercised locally, nationally, and internationally. Nevertheless, the historiography on the Paterson anarchism is sparse and fragmentary, especially in English.[12]
San Francisco is a less obvious choice for study. Cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had larger numbers of anarchists, and the Bay Area does not have a reputation as a significant historical center of anarchism.[13] However, San Francisco produced the third-most anarchist publications of any American city between 1880 and 1940, behind only New York and Chicago. As a Pacific port city, moreover, the city was home to a diverse population that gave rise to a uniquely diverse anarchist movement that included Asians and Latin Americans as well as Europeans and native-born Americans, linking the local movement to anarchist activities on four continents. The interactions between the different elements of the movement are also important examples of panethnic and interethnic working-class cooperation and solidarity in a region and period characterized by stark ethnoracial divides.
The persistence of significant anarchist activity in each of these locations through the 1920s and 1930s determined the chronological scope of this dissertation. This may surprise some readers, as historians have been strangely eager to pinpoint the supposed death of American anarchism at convenient historical markers such as the Haymarket Affair of 1886–87 or the Russian Revolution and Red Scare of 1917–20. Nevertheless, a plethora of evidence attests to the continuation of anarchist activity up until the outbreak of the Second World War. The movement’s high point in terms of participants and influence was from 1900 to 1914, and though it underwent a slow decline throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, it experienced a brief revival in the second half of the 1930s due to the Spanish Civil War. This is reflected in the circulation of the American anarchist press, which peaked at over 100,000 in 1910 and, after a period of decline, stabilized at between 20,000 and 40,000 from 1921 to 1940 (see Table 1). Both the ascent of communism and the government repression of the Red Scare depleted anarchist ranks, but to a much smaller degree than has been assumed. More important were the increasing isolation of anarchism from the labor movement and the rest of the Left due to its anticommunism, and the immigration restrictions imposed in 1921 and 1924. Nevertheless, the anarchist movement remained in the forefront of the anti-Fascist activity in the 1920s and 1930s, and it contributed at least 100–200 members to the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
I am interested not only in the prominent activists and writers who helped mobilize the movement, but also in the majority of largely anonymous individuals who constituted its base. The German-born anarchist intellectual Rudolf Rocker urged,
We must never forget that the most important people in any movement are the ordinary rank and file, the men and women whose names are rarely mentioned, but without whom, without their tireless day to day work there would be no movement…I did all I could; but so did others. That must never be forgotten.[14]
And the day-to-day activities of anarchist migrants extended well beyond the traditional political sphere and into everyday life. Anarchists formed communities which, as Rudolph Vecoli notes, “served the social and cultural needs of their members.” In form, anarchists’ social and cultural institutions often mirrored those of their larger immigrant communities, but in content they were antithetical. Thus, while the mainstream foreign-language press, popular religion, theater, and “the annual calendar of national celebrations, observances, parades, and ethnic fairs” fostered ethnic nationalism, a similar set of explicitly anti-national institutions sustained anarchism: the anarchist press, anti-religious activities, radical theater, and secular festivities and revolutionary commemorations. These were in turn rooted geographically in networks of taverns, restaurants, libraries, schools, meeting halls, and street corners where anarchists congregated and carved out autonomous spaces for themselves. Any understanding of anarchism as a movement would be impossible without an understanding of the local cultures and spaces in which it was embedded.[15]
Local anarchist spaces and communities, however, where themselves nodes within what Benedict Anderson has described as “infinitely complex inter-continental networks that characterize the Age of Early Globalization.”[16] People, information, ideas, and funds all circulated through these networks and influenced local movements. This study therefore approaches anarchism at the local and national levels from a transnational and global perspective. In Adam McKeown’s description, “A global perspective highlights the transnational institutions and diasporic circulation of people, goods, money, and ideas…It is not necessarily a panorama of…migration around the world, but an analysis of the different ways in which the nodes of migrant networks were linked together and how they changed over time.”[17] Only from such a perspective can the scope of anarchists’ activities and cosmopolitanism be appreciated. Therefore, though this study takes migrants’ entry into the United States as its starting point, it also traces many of those who remigrated either temporarily or permanently. Through such remigrations, the anarchism that took root among Italians and Jews in America was linked to struggles and adapted to circumstances abroad. As Dana Frank discovered, “many of the most wonderful and creative examples of transnational solidarity…flit below the radar screen of the official story of institution building…Transnational people become all-important carriers, whether through immigration or unwilling diasporas.”[18] I therefore follow many migrants who spent time involved in the American anarchist movement as they move on to activities elsewhere around the globe.
Remigration has long been a problematic topic for historians of immigration, who have been far more concerned with those migrants who remained in the United States and became “Americanized” rather than with those who left again. But as Donna Gabaccia notes, “Many of the ‘immigrants’ of the past were not immigrants at all; they were not particularly interested in becoming American or even in migrating to the United States rather than to some other destination.”[19] The major works that have been published on remigration, moreover, deal almost exclusively with the permanent return of migrants to their countries of origin.[20] But migration, especially in the case of itinerant labor radicals, was often a multi-stage, multidirectional phenomenon rather than a one-time relocation or two-way “round trip to America.”
Italians, in particular, were especially prone to multiple migrations. Approximately half of all Italian migrants to the United States remigrated, and of all Italians arriving in the country from 1896 to 1910, between 10% and 40% had been to America at least once before. According to contemporary observer Robert F. Foerster, Italian migration patterns revealed “an amazing frequency of proletarian globetrotting, a frequency unequalled by the upper-class travelers of the richer countries.”[21] Anarchists had even higher rates of remigration; of the 2,000 individuals included in the recent Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani (Biographical Dictionary of Italian Anarchists) 141 migrated to the United States at some point between 1884 and 1939, and of these, ninety-nine, or 70.2%, subsequently remigrated. However, thirty-two of these remigrants—nearly one-third—later returned to the United States.[22] This constant movement maintained links between Italian anarchists and their comrades not only in Italy, but throughout Europe, South America, and North Africa. Jewish American immigrants had a much lower rate of remigration, just 5.2% between 1908 and 1925, although in the 1880s and 1890s it may have been closer to 15%-20%.[23] Within this population, however, anarchists and other radicals were certainly among the most likely to remigrate, as thousands returned to Russia during the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1917.
In addition to people, information and ideas circulated within anarchist networks, usually in the form of publications. It would be difficult to overstate the functional importance of newspapers in the anarchist movement. Nunzio Pernicone observes, “The press—not political parties, federations, or trade unions—was the institutional base of the Italian immigrant Left, linking thousands of readers spread out across the country and abroad,” and the same can be said for the Jewish anarchist movement. Newspapers flowed across oceans and national borders, as did financial contributions to them.[24] The printed word created an imagined, text-based transnational community of anarchists, and transmitted the movement’s ideology across space while sustaining collective identities across time.[25] As anarchism was not a political party that one joined and, in the United States, attempts to create formal federations with official memberships almost all failed, belonging to the anarchist movement or a faction within it rested largely on affiliation with a specific publication. When a Bureau of Investigation informant in Richmond, California told the Belgian-born anarchist Jules Scarceriaux that he wished to become an anarchist, Scarceriaux replied: “First step…is to subscribe to the Anarchist paper.”[26]
The circulation figures of American anarchist publications are therefore the best guide available for gauging the approximate size of the movement’s following at any given time. According to Pernicone, “The true strength of the Italian-American Left…was reflected in the readership of its newspapers.”[27] Table 1 graphs the combined circulations of all anarchist periodicals published in the United States between 1880 and 1940 for which at least fragmentary circulation data has been located (excluding publications that lasted less than four issues), and gaps in this data have been filled through extrapolation. Although only a minority of all publications is included (76 of 208 that I have identified), nearly all of those for which no data could be found were small, ephemeral affairs with circulations that probably did not exceed 1,000–2,000. The figures shown, therefore, are lower than the actual totals for each year by a margin of several thousand, but are nevertheless a useful indication of the approximate size of the movement.[28]
Table 1. Total Known Circulation of the American Anarchist Press, 1880–1940
[[k-z-kenyon-zimmer-the-whole-world-is-our-country-1.jpg]]
The resulting projections for the total circulation of the anarchist press correspond closely with historian’s estimates of the number of anarchists in the United States. According to the preeminent historian of American anarchism, Paul Avrich, “Scattered across the country…anarchists reckoned in the tens of thousands at the crest of the movement between 1880 and 1920, with 3,000 in Chicago alone during the late decades of the nineteenth century and comparable numbers in Paterson and New York.”[29] Over this stretch of time the combined known circulation of the anarchist press grew from approximately 16,000 in 1880 to a peak of over 100,000 in 1910, and then declined to around 21,000 in 1920, broadly matching Avrich’s estimate—although the graph also shows that the press maintained a circulation of roughly 20,000–40,000 through the 1920s and 1930s. Margaret Marsh more specifically estimates, “In the late nineteenth century there were at least fifteen to twenty thousand committed anarchists in the United States, and perhaps an additional thirty to fifty thousand sympathizers.”[30] The corresponding circulation of the American anarchist press in 1883–1900 fluctuated between 30,000 and 70,000, conforming closely to Marsh’s numbers of “committed anarchists” and “sympathizers” combined.
Circulation figures additionally allow for comparisons between the sizes of various language groups within the movement. The data in Table 2, for instance, reveals a significant divergence between the evolutions of Italian- and Yiddish-speaking anarchism. It shows that the Jewish anarchist movement was significantly larger than its Italian counterpart from the turn of the century until its decline beginning with the First World War, after which the Italian movement overtook it. If these figures are accurate reflections of the number of Jewish and Italian anarchists—including both active militants and passive supporters—then the subject of this study represents a substantial body of immigrants, numbering at least 30,000–40,000 by the First World War.
Table 2. Total Known Circulations of the American Yiddish and Italian Anarchist Press, 1880–1940
[[k-z-kenyon-zimmer-the-whole-world-is-our-country-2.jpg]]
*** 1.2 “New Immigrants” and New Anarchists
Numerous scholars of American labor and radical history have posited a relationship between immigration and working-class militancy, but they disagree among themselves as to the nature of this relationship. Did migrants bring their revolutionary ideologies with them from abroad? Did their experiences in the United States radicalize or deradicalize them? Were certain groups of migrants predisposed to radical politics, and others insulated against them? Were radicalism and ethnic identities mutually reinforcing or mutually exclusive?
Rudolph Vecoli described Italian American radicalism as “in large part a mirror image of the contemporaneous Left in Italy,” and claimed that anarchists “brought their doctrines to America with them.”[31] Subsequent studies by historians like Donna Gabaccia, Michael Miller Topp and Davide Turcato have highlighted the continuity and ongoing connections between Italian and Italian American radicalism.[32] However, the Italian American Left in fact differed drastically from its Italian counterpart. Anarchism was the dominant ideology of the Left in Italy in the 1870s, attracting around 25,000 followers, but in the 1880s and 1890s it was eclipsed by Marxist socialism and declined dramatically.[33] According to the estimates of both the Italian government and historians, during the movement’s subsequent revivals in 1914 and 1919 there were no more than 10,000 anarchists throughout the country; the Italian Socialist Party, by contrast, had some 58,000 members in 1914 and almost 220,000 by the end of 1920.[34] Italian syndicalism—a revolutionary movement based on class struggle through direct action at the point of production and the general strike rather than parliamentary politics—emerged at the turn of the century as an appendage of the Socialist party, and anarchists did not play a major role within it until 1916.[35]
In the United States, the situation was reversed. Anarchism only began to take root among Italian American immigrants in the late 1880s, after the movement’s decline within Italy, and the Italian American anarchist press reached its peak in the 1920s. Conversely, the Italian Federation of the Socialist Party of America and, later, that of the Communist party never exceeded 1,000 members each. Moreover, the Italian American syndicalist movement remained completely independent of political parties and, in many communities, was dominated by anarchists. Italian American syndicalism was also predicated on industrial unionism, which never gained a foothold in the Italian movement, rather than craft union organization.[36] The dominance of anarchism and syndicalism within the Italian American Left, in other words, sharply differentiated it from Italian radicalism in Italy. As Gabaccia notes, “There may in fact have been little that was peculiarly Italian about the anarcho-syndicalist labour movements and intermittent mass strikes that so often characterized Italian labour activism” outside of Italy.[37]
Transplantation also fails to account for the rise of anarchism among Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews in America in the late 1880s, for the simple reason that there were no Jewish anarchist groups, nor any anarchist movement all, in the Russian Empire prior to 1903.[38] Moreover, the movement that did eventually arise there was Russian-speaking and enamored with violence, placing it squarely at odds with the moderate Yiddish anarchist movement in the West. The same holds true for the earlier wave of “old immigrant” anarchism; in Germany in the 1880s there was “no anarchist movement to speak of,” just a couple hundred anarchists scattered between small cells, but thousands of well-organized German-born anarchists resided in America, almost none of who had been anarchists before leaving Germany.[39] And even though the declining Italian movement contributed a number of important activists to the United States, most Italian American anarchists had not been members of the movement in Italy.[40]
In other words, despite the fact that anarchism is usually regarded as having been imported to the United States as part of the cultural baggage of European immigrants, the vast majority of foreign-born anarchists were in fact not yet anarchists at the time of their arrival. Rather, for tens of thousands of migrants, adoption of anarchist ideology and participation in anarchist organizations and activities resulted from their experiences as immigrant workers in America. In most cases, anarchism arose as part of migrants’ acculturation to American society, and a deep desire to change the political and economic order they encountered.[41] As Vincenzo Ferrero, a leading figure in San Francisco’s Italian anarchist community, observed, “It was the American experience of struggle that made them anarchists. Most came as young men with a sense of awareness of injustice. They began to read and listen and so became anarchists. Some came as socialists and became anarchists here.” Ferrero’s longtime comrade Domenico Sallitto agreed, noting, “Their hopes for a better life, a better society in America, were disappointed. It was just as ruthless and cruel a society as the one they had left.”[42]
Some historians have posited a link between migration and Italian American anarchism, specifically citing most Italian migrants’ status as sojourners as the reason many found forms of politics and resistance that relied on direct action rather than voting rights or union membership attractive.[43] However, northern Italians, who predominated in Paterson’s anarchist movement, had significantly lower rates of return migration than southern Italians.[44] More importantly, high rates of remigration are not found among most other segments of the movement. The German migrants who dominated American anarchism in the 1880s and had a rate of return of only 14.2%-20.5%, while Greeks and Hungarians had rates estimated to exceed 40% but were not attracted to anarchism in significant numbers.[45] Moreover, Eastern European Jews overwhelmingly intended their migrations to be permanent and had the lowest remigration rate of any American immigrant group—yet before the First World War anarchism was more widespread among American Jews than Italian Americans, in both absolute and relative terms. At their respective peaks, Yiddish-language anarchist publications had a circulation of 30,000 in 1914 (almost 2% of the Jewish population), while in 1915–16 and 1928–29 the Italian-language press reached a circulation of around 20,000 (approximately 1.1% of the Italian population).[46]
Competing schools of thought exist on the roots of Jewish American radicalism. The first is strongly influenced by the argument of Moses Rischin that Jewish radicalism was “Judaism secularized;” that is, that it grew out of the messianic strain within Jewish religion and Jewish radicals constituted “a prophetic minority, responding to biblical norms of social justice, interpreted in a modern context.”[47] Furio Biagini has specifically applied such an argument to Jewish anarchism in the United States and elsewhere.[48] Other proponents of the messianic interpretation of Jewish radicalism, however, explicitly exclude anarchism on the grounds that “[t]he concept of the rule of law was too deeply rooted in Jewish tradition for the extreme individualism of the anarchists to have much appeal for most Jews.”[49]
Another group of historians emphasizes the influence of the Russian revolutionary Nihilist and Populist movements on Jewish migrant radicals.[50] Arthur Liebman, meanwhile, argues that it was American conditions that led to the emergence of a strong secular Jewish radical subculture. He also forcefully challenges the messianic thesis, noting, “A theory seeking to explain the politics of this [radical] minority cannot rely on one factor or several factors that characterize or affect virtually all Jews.”[51] Most recently, Tony Michels has agreed that “eastern European Jews did not import a preexisting socialist tradition to the United States,” and he highlights the encounter between Jewish migrants and the preexisting German socialist and anarchist movements in the United States as the factor that gave rise to the Jewish American Left.[52] My own findings, presented in Chapter 2, coincide with those of Liebman and Michels— that is, it was their experiences as immigrant workers and exposure to the radicalism of German immigrants that turned many Jews to anarchism.
A parallel to the messianic thesis exists within the historiography of Italian and Italian American anarchism. Originally popularized by Gerald Brenan and Eric Hobsbawm, this analysis claims that Southern European anarchism was a millenarian ideology of peasant “primitive rebels” from cultural and economic “backwards” regions.[53] Rudolf Vecoli, Paul Buhle, and other historians have cited Hobsbawm’s work to explain the prevalence of anarchism among Italian Americans.[54] Brenan’s and Hobsbawm’s writings on anarchism, however, have long been discredited by scholars of Spanish anarchism, and Hobsbawm himself notes that anarchism made few inroads among Italian peasants. Nunzio Pernicone’s work, as well as statistical data compiled by the editors of the Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani, conclusively shows that peasants made up an insignificant portion of the Italian anarchist movement.[55]
The claim that anarchism was an ideology of “petty-bourgeois” peasants and artisans, which dates back to Karl Marx, has also been thoroughly refuted, and not just for the Italian case. Although large-scale peasant anarchist movements did emerge in Spain, Mexico, and Ukraine, anarcho-syndicalist movements among industrial wage workers were far more common throughout Europe and the Americas. Moreover, even in Spain, Mexico, and the Russian Empire, anarchism was predominantly urban and working-class.[56] Nevertheless, the usually judicious historians Paul Avrich and Nunzio Pernicone, both authorities on Italian American anarchism, claim that most of the movement’s adherents had been peasants and artisans in Italy.[57] But of the 141 Italian American anarchists included in the Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani, the vast majority was made up of wage workers and only 5% came from peasant backgrounds.[58] Meanwhile, according to the Russian census of 1897, a paltry 2.9% of Jews within the empire worked in agriculture, and just 1.9% of Jewish immigrants arriving in America between 1899 and 1910 had.[59] Within the Jewish anarchist movement discussed in Chapter 2, wage workers overwhelmingly predominated.
Some historians of American immigration have described anarchism as a manifestation of migrants’ “despair,” or as a movement of “the disaffected, disenchanted, and defeated” who “felt bypassed by the forces and opportunities for entry into mainstream opportunity or, in other words, incorporation.”[60] Although disillusionment was crucial in turning migrants toward anarchism, these explanations do not withstand scrutiny. Many anarchists had plenty of opportunities to become incorporated but consciously chose not to be. For all of its popular associations with violence and destruction, anarchism was not simply a negative philosophy opposed to existing arrangements. It also held out an alternative vision of modernity based on ethical precepts that, for many new arrivals, seemed far more just than those prevailing in industrial America. As Richard Oestreicher notes, “Most people do not begin to think about the world differently, do not begin to act upon such thinking, until they begin to see meaningful ways of acting.” Or, in the words the American anarchist Harry Kelly, “it is hope that makes men revolutionists and not despair.”[61]
High rates of return migration, messianism, “primitive” millenarianism, peasant origins, and despair cannot account for the emergence of anarchism among Jewish and Italian migrants. More satisfying explanations can be found using the comparative method to identify what those migrant groups that provided the greatest number of recruits to the anarchist cause had in common. Four shared characteristics appear to have been important. First, anarchism was overwhelmingly working-class in composition, with skilled and semi-skilled workers significantly overrepresented in its ranks. Second, it usually emerged in immigrant communities where religious belief and observance of traditional religious authority were significantly diminished. Third, it was often strong among migrant groups that lacked an independent nationstate of their own, that came from only recently consolidated nation-states, or that had yet to be incorporated into the political systems of their home countries. Fourth, it tended to appeal to members of migrant groups that faced ethnoracial discrimination in the United States.
Yet however important the above attributes may have been, they remain, by themselves or collectively, insufficient explanations for the adoption of anarchism by specific individuals or communities. Ideologies are not superstructures generated ex nihilo from material and social conditions. Working-class migrants living in the context of these conditions first had to encounter anarchist ideas, recognize the anarchist critique of capitalist America as corresponding with their own experiences, and find in the anarchist program a plausible agenda for change to bring about a future society they deemed desirable. For this to occur a large number of migrants from a given ethnic group had to be exposed to articulations of anarchism in a language and a cultural symbolic system they understood, and which spoke to their specific conditions and experiences. Intellectuals and activists who translated, adapted, and propagated anarchism were therefore of the utmost importance and decisively determined the makeup of the anarchist movement in America.
Most intellectuals from southern and eastern Europe were initially unable to pursue professional careers in the United States and as a result they entered the industrial workforce and underwent proletarianization. This experience placed them among their exploited fellow migrants and bridged the often wide cultural gap between intellectuals and workers.[62] According to Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, “throughout the world, immigration seems to have predisposed workers and radical intellectuals and professionals to a ‘rapprochement,’ as immigration somewhat eroded class lines or more accurately, demarcated them differently.”[63]
To sum up, it was American conditions that usually forged migrants into anarchists, rather than European ones. The immigrant experience itself reproduced anarchism, inextricably linking the histories of migration and American anarchism. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of post-migration radicalization defies easy categorization within historiographical paradigms of European immigration that focus on the construction of “hyphenated” American identities or “hybrid” transnational ones.[64] Anarchists chose an alternative: they embraced an ideology that opposed both Americanization and Old World nationalisms, severing their attachments to their states of origin while willfully resisting assimilation into their host society.
*** 1.3 Radical Cosmopolitanism
Rejection of nationalism and the nation-state did not entail a denial of nationality as such. “Anarchism, for all its international pretensions, for all its faith in the unity of mankind, has always been divided into national and ethnic groups,” notes Paul Avrich. “Nor should this be surprising. For anarchists, cherishing diversity against standardization and uniformity, have always prized the differences among peoples—cultural, linguistic, historical—quite as much as their common bonds.[65] To be “without a country” did not mean that one ceased to be, for instance, an Italian or a Jew. As Davide Turcato explains,
Some concept of nationhood must certainly be posited for Italian anarchists…, if nothing else, because of their mutual identification as Italians. This consisted in their sharing common origins, language, and culture…However, their relationship to nationalism, nation-building, and nation-states was the exact reverse of long-distance nationalists. Their ideology was not nationalist, but anti-nationalist, and their project was not to uphold or build the nation-state, but to abolish it.[66]
Mikhail Bakunin, one of the fathers of the European anarchist movement, sharply differentiated nationality and love for one’s native place from state citizenship and political patriotism.
The State is not the Fatherland, it is the abstraction, the metaphysical, mystical, political, juridical fiction of the Fatherland. The common people of all countries deeply love their fatherland; but that is a natural, real love. The patriotism of the people is not just an idea, it is a fact; but political patriotism, love of the State, is not the faithful expression of that fact: it is an expression distorted by means of a false abstraction, always for the benefit of an exploiting minority.
He succinctly summed up the anarchist viewpoint by declaring “there is no greater enemy for a nation than its own State.”[67]
Anarchists adhered to an “internationalism” that was anti-nationalist, anti-statist and multicultural. It was not synonymous with the Eurocentric universalism of the Enlightenment, but instead fits David Hollinger’s definition of “cosmopolitanism.” According to Hollinger, “Cosmopolitanism shares with all varieties of universalism a profound suspicion of enclosures, but cosmopolitanism is defined by an additional element not essential to universalism itself: recognition, acceptance, and eager exploration of diversity.” Anarchists, as cosmopolitans, embraced human diversity without essentializing nationality or ethnoracial identity, and they emphasized voluntary affiliation over heredity and ancestry. Hollinger’s distinction between cosmopolitanism and pluralism states this important difference well:
Pluralism respects inherited boundaries and locates individuals within one or another of a series of ethno-racial groups to be protected and preserved. Cosmopolitanism is more wary of traditional enclosures and favors voluntary affiliations. Cosmopolitanism promotes multiple identities, emphasizes the dynamic and changing character of many groups, and is responsive to the potential for creating new cultural combinations. Pluralism sees in cosmopolitanism a threat to identity, while cosmopolitanism sees in pluralism a provincial unwillingness to engage the complex dilemmas and opportunities actually presented by contemporary life.[68]
In the language of current political scientists and philosophers, most anarchists were “rooted cosmopolitans,” but their roots were limited to attachment to their native cultures and languages and did not extend to nation-states—they were not “cosmopolitan patriots.”[69] Some historians have labeled this a form of “cultural nationalism.”[70] However, in order to avoid potential confusion I prefer to eschew the terminology of nations altogether and instead to use the term “radical cosmopolitanism” to encapsulate the anarchists’ views on nationality and belonging. Just how successful anarchists were in putting these beliefs into practice is one of the major questions of this study. The evidence shows that the demographics and cultures of specific immigrant communities rather than a failure on the part of anarchists to live up to their ideals most often determined the limits of their cosmopolitanism. One factor highlighted by the examples presented here is the importance of linguistic affilation, as language could act as either a barrier or a bridge between different groups of migrants. Harry Kelly noted, “Differences in languages separated the groups of varied national origin,” rather than nationalism or ethnic exclusivity.[71] The evolution of anarchism in America was therefore strongly influenced by the languages in which it was spoken. It is no coincidence that the early Italian American movement was closely linked to its “Latin” cousins, the French- and Spanish-speaking movements. Affinities between these groups clearly had as much to do with linguistic similarity as with a supposed shared “Latin” temperament. Similarly, the early Yiddish-speaking movement was closely affiliated with its German precursor in the Lower East Side, precisely because Yiddish and modern German are closely related. As Tom Goyens observes in his study of German American anarchism, “The boundaries of language and politics coincided.”[72]
Links between different linguistic groups were, in turn, largely mediated through English. Not only was this the language most immigrants came to have in common, it was also, like the anarchist movement itself, derived from both Germanic and Latin roots. As early as 1893 the English-language paper Solidarity, founded by the Italian anarchist Francesco Saverio Merlino, was bringing together a scattering of Germans, Jews, Frenchmen, Italians and native-born Americans into a cosmopolitan radical community of readers.[73] Language acquisition was no easy task, however. Many migrants simply failed to master English, or only did so after a residence of many years. And a fully integrated multiethnic movement was impossible so long as its constituent parts could not communicate with one another.
Nevertheless, most anarchists were more than willing to offer support, and in some cases to risk life and limb, for the struggles of peoples whose languages they could not speak. The many examples of “actually existing cosmopolitanism” that can be found in the history of this movement are a remarkable testament to the potential of radical cosmopolitanism as a way of viewing the world and living within it.[74] But radical cosmopolitanism was articulated and enacted differently in the three communities included in this study. Yiddish-speaking anarchists in New York City were truly “rooted cosmopolitans,” whose sphere of activity rarely extended beyond the Jewish community despite their ideological commitment to interethnic and interracial solidarity. In Paterson, by contrast, Italian anarchists fostered an interethnic cosmopolitanism, consciously building ties to other immigrant groups and cooperating with them during labor struggles. San Francisco’s anarchist movement, by contrast, promoted and embodied a multiethnic cosmopolitanism that brought diverse groups together into an increasingly unified whole.
The anti-national cosmopolitanism of the anarchists was of course at odds with the goals of the American state in which they lived. As Ernest Gellner warns, “A man without a nation defies the recognized categories and provokes revulsion.” In the aftermath of the Haymarket Affair of 1886, in which eight prominent Chicago anarchists—seven of them immigrants—were tried in connection with a bomb thrown at police during a demonstration, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly declared that anarchists “form precisely the element from which modern civilization has most to apprehend. They are at odds with society from the foundations upward.
They deny the justice and the desirability of any existing institutions.” He correctly concluded, “The anarchists are not to be regarded as fair material for citizenship.”[75] For more than half a century the American government attempted to eradicate the threat that anarchism posed, both physically and discursively. Over time other nationalist projects, including Zionism and fascism, also competed with Americanization for immigrant’s loyalties, diminishing the opportunities for cosmopolitanism to take root. Nevertheless, in an age when a new phase of globalization appears to be undermining states’ authority and sovereignty, migrant anarchists present novel historical examples of alternative forms of collective and self-identity delinked from nationalist projects, the nation-state, and racial hierarchies.
** 2.0 “Yiddish Is My Homeland”: Jewish Anarchists in New York City, 1886–1914
Emerging from the sweatshops and tenement houses of New York’s Lower East Side, anarchism was the dominant current within the Yiddish-speaking Left and labor movement in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Although it was then overtaken by socialism, Yiddish anarchism did not decline after the turn of the century; rather, it reemerged as a dynamic force on the Yiddish Left and steadily grew in size. With the decline of German American anarchism after the 1880s, Yiddishspeaking Jews emerged as the largest segment within the anarchist movement in the United States until the First World War, as evidenced by the readership of their newspapers.
Over these three decades the character of Yiddish anarchism changed dramatically. Initially modeled after the German American anarchist movement, the early Jewish movement promoted violent insurrection and was wary of organized labor even as its members played a leading role within Jewish labor unions. But the movement rapidly took on its own distinct form, evolving semi-autonomously from the rest of the American anarchist movement and adopting a more pragmatic outlook that emphasized the long-term evolution of social relations in a libertarian direction and practical engagement with the day-to-day struggles of the working class. Inevitably, due to their shared language, culture, and interests, Yiddish anarchists were concerned first and foremost with their fellow Jewish immigrants. Yiddish anarchism was not merely written and spoken in the Yiddish language; it was deeply embedded within the secular Yiddish culture developed by Jewish intellectuals and workers, and it played no small role in constructing this culture of yidishkayt (a Yiddish word literally meaning both “Yiddishness” and “Jewishness”). Perhaps in no other American case did anarchists exert such a strong influence on the cultural landscape of their fellow immigrants.
Yet in doing so, Yiddish anarchists became enmeshed in a complicated web of tensions between the reification of their ethnoracial identity and the universalist impulse of their cosmopolitan politics. As Tony Michels observes, Yiddish radicals
built—in spite of themselves—a distinct Jewish labor movement and a new kind of Yiddish culture that was secular, politically radical, and universalistic. Internationalist in principle but based in a particular minority group, the Jewish labor movement contained a basic contradiction that would never be resolved.[76]
The Yiddish language became the foundation on which Jewish anarchism was built, but it also closed off Yiddish anarchists from much of the world around them. Anarchists who opposed Jewish nationalism and separatism thus fostered an insular Yiddish culture and separate Jewish identity in the United States. Their movement contributed some of the most vocal spokespeople to the Left wing of the emerging Jewish territorialist and Zionist movements, but also to leftwing anti-Zionism. Such cleavages within the anarchists’ ranks illustrate the difficulties they faced in navigating the paradoxes of a “rooted cosmopolitanism” that simultaneously exalted Jewish identity while professing to be pluralist and accepting of difference and diversity.
*** 2.1 From Shtetl to Ghetto
In 1880 there were an estimated four million Jews residing in the Russian Empire, and by 1897 their numbers exceeded 5,200,000.[77] Most lived within the Pale of Settlement, a region along the Empire’s western border with Germany and Austria-Hungary that had been part of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Russian monarchy, having inadvertently acquired many unwanted Jewish subjects through the partitioning of Poland, undertook what has been called a “cold war” or “cold pogrom” against Russian Jewry, enacting a long list of discriminatory legislation.[78] Tsar Alexander II relaxed some of these policies, but following his assassination in 1881 a wave of pogroms swept through Russia and a host of new anti-Semitic laws limited Jews’ access to education and jobs and barred them from residing outside of the Pale.[79]
Within the Pale, 77.8% of the Jewish population lived in urban settings and Jews constituted a majority in the cities of Bialystok and Vilna.[80] The urbanization of Russian Jewry was a product of both deliberate government policy and “the general economic decline of Jewish life in the villages.” The result was an oversaturated urban labor market in which Jewish artisans and workshop employees faced increasing competition at the hands of larger, mechanized factories that excluded Jews from employment. Jewish workers were, in turn, exploited to an ever growing degree by their own, usually Jewish, employers.[81]
A 1907 report written for the United States Bureau of Labor found that the larger workshops in which Russian Jews worked were
virtually sweat shops of the worst order...[T]he workingmen live, eat, and sleep in the work-room, and, being under constant supervision, the only limitation upon the workingday is the generosity of the proprietor of the shop. During the busy season the girls in the dressmaking establishments may work from 6 o’clock in the morning until 12 midnight.
Historian Simon Kuznets estimates that between a fifth and a quarter of the Jewish population lived “at miserably low economic levels.”[82] This economic dislocation, combined with official and unofficial anti-Semitism, sparked a mass emigration beginning in 1881. Between 1881 and 1914 over a million Russian Jews entered the United States.[83]
In both Austria-Hungary and Romania, Jews had greater legal freedoms but still faced informal and formal exclusions. Maximum quotas were put on Romanian Jewish participation in both education and industry beginning in 1886–87, and in 1899 a severe depression and series of pogroms prompted the “Romanian Exodus,” proportionately the largest emigration of Jews from any country of the era. Nearly 30% of Romania’s Jewish population left between 1871 and 1914.[84] Between 1899 and 1910 the Jewish emigration rate from Austria-Hungary was lower, but still significant, at 0.74% annually.[85] Nevertheless, more than three quarters of all Eastern European Jewish immigrants to America came from the Russian Empire.
Artisans and skilled wage laborers were overrepresented among these migrants, accounting for more than 67% of Jewish immigrants to America in 1899–1910 but less than 35% of Jewish workers in Russia in 1897. Commercial and professional Jews were underrepresented, constituting only 5.3% and 1.3% of immigrants, respectively, but more than 30% and 5% of Jews within Russia. In other words, those who made the journey tended to be from those occupations experiencing mechanization, deskilling, and Gentile competition, and whose occupational knowledge was likely to be transferable to jobs in America.[86]
What they discovered upon their arrival, however, was far from a terrestrial paradise. In his memoirs Marcus Eli Ravage (Revici), a Romanian Jewish immigrant to New York, observed,
the immigrant is almost invariably disappointed in America. At any rate, of this much I am certain: I myself was very bitterly disappointed in America. And, unless observation has been altogether astray with me, I think I am justified in the generalization that nearly all other newcomers are at least as disappointed as I was.[87]
This disillusionment stemmed not just from alien surroundings, but from the working, living, and social conditions they encountered.
Jewish workers were overwhelmingly concentrated in the garment industry. One of every three Jewish immigrant workers claimed to have previous experience in this trade, and in New York the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) froze foreign-born Jews out of most other skilled trades.[88] Their arrival, moreover, coincided with a dramatic expansion in American garment production; from 1880 to 1890 the number of establishments in the men’s clothing industry nationwide increased 226.2%, and between 1879 and 1899 the number of women’s clothing establishments grew from 562 to 2,701 (by 1919 the number was 7,711).[89] These garment factories and workshops were, if anything, worse than those in which Jews had labored in the Old World. Anarchist editor Saul Yanovsky noted that American sweatshops were nothing like those he had seen in Pinsk, where at least “[t]he air in the workroom was fine and clear.”[90] Marie Ganz, who arrived in the United States with her family in 1896 at the age of five, vividly described the first workshop she entered:
Forty or fifty men and women sat hunched up, their heads bent low over as many footpower sewing machines. Pale, heavy-eyed folk they were… and, over all, in the centre [sic] of the room stood a man who, I immediately realized, was the boss…There was a surly expression in his eyes, and his face was cold and hard.[91]
This was a quintessential “sweatshop,” hundreds of which were dispersed throughout the Lower East Side. They were small, non-mechanized outfits run by contractors on whom large garment firms relied to sew bundles of pre-cut materiel into finished pieces of clothing for a set price. Contractors underbid each other for jobs but could only return a profit by paying their employees less than the initial cost of the material, creating “an ideal setting for superexploitation.” Sweatshop operators were usually former garment workers and labored alongside their employees, and if they failed to accumulate enough capital they would themselves return to the ranks of the workers the following season.[92]
Sweatshop conditions were uniformly poor and unsanitary, and fifteen and sixteen hour workdays were common, though during the busy season workers might labor through the entire night.[93] Safety regulations did not exist and employer negligence led to incidents like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, in which 148 garment workers died. Such events left a deep impression on Jewish workers and helped to radicalize them. The sister of future anarchist and labor leader Rose Pesotta (Peysoty) had worked at the Triangle factory the year before the fire, in which two of Pesotta’s Ukrainian Jewish schoolmates perished, and the anarchist Mary Abrams had been working at the factory earlier on the day of the disaster.[94]
The living conditions within the tenement houses of the Lower East Side also contributed to discontent. Marie Ganz provided this description of her family’s lodgings:
It was a home of two tiny rooms. The room in the rear was not much larger than a goodsized clothes closet, and not the stuffiest of closets could be more lacking in sunlight and air. The walls were as blank as an underground dungeon’s. There was neither window nor ventilating shaft. The room in front, almost twice as large, though half a dozen steps would have brought anybody with full-grown legs across its entire length, was a kitchen and living-room by day, a bedroom by night. Its two little windows gave a view of a narrow, stone-paved court and, not ten feet away, the rear wall of another tenement. The sunlight never found its way into that little court…In this little bit of home lived five persons.[95]
According to the anarchist buttonhole maker and poet David Edelstadt (Edelshtat), tenement houses belonged to “the history of the terrible crimes of man against man,” and revealed the “wild brutality of the twofaced animal, that people call ‘man.’“[96]
These conditions created fertile ground for radicalism within the Jewish working class. Ganz, who was organizing strikes and giving anarchist speeches at age fourteen, declared,
those days of suffering put a bitterness into my heart that never left it. The spirit of rebellion broke loose in me then—rebellion against the conditions that had left us and so many others in such fearful poverty and misery while others lived in comfort….My attitude toward the capitalistic class and toward the law was the natural result of a childhood spent in destitution, of bitter experiences in the sweatshops.
Such attitudes were widespread; Marcus Ravage recalled his surprise when one day, “I suddenly realized that everybody I knew was either a socialist or an anarchist.”[97] Many Jewish migrants discovered, along with David Edelstadt, that “in the free republic / something is only free on paper, / and there the factories are full of slaves, and every boss—a vampire.”[98]
*** 2.2 Pioneers of Freedom
Despite such conditions, a Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement emerged only with the intervention of a small cadre of educated Jewish migrants, who began their radical activities within Russian- and German-speaking circles and only gradually turned their attention to the mass of Jewish workers. These activists belonged to a tiny minority of secular Jewish intellectuals deeply influenced by the Haskalah—the “Jewish Enlightenment”—that had spread to Eastern Europe from Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Inspired by the same universalist and humanist ideals as the European Enlightenment, the Haskalah aimed to “normalize” Jewish existence through the emancipation of Jews and their incorporation into European society. This entailed secularization, linguistic and cultural assimilation, and abandonment of “parasitic” economic roles such as moneylenders and merchants in favor of “productive” occupations like farming and manufacturing. This Jewish intelligentsia—the inteligentn—was therefore composed of Jews who spoke Russian instead of Yiddish, rejected orthodox Judaism, and held anachronistic Jewish traditions in contempt. As Abba Gordin put it, young Russian Jewish intellectuals like him chose “assimilation” over having “to live like a mummy.” Most of them were also sympathetic to or actively involved in Russian leftist and revolutionary politics, particularly the Nihilist and Populist movements.[99]
This vital minority of migrant intellectuals was instrumental in founding the Jewish labor, socialist, and anarchist movements in America. Some left Russia for want of educational or economic opportunities; others, like Isidore Kopoloff (Kopelov), did not wish “to sit and wait for a wedding match with a dowry and then to become middlemen, shopkeepers, or to walk about the streets without purpose—for us, worldly, enlightened, socialist-minded youths this was impossible.”[100] Many felt the pogroms of 1881 demonstrated that Jewish assimilation within anti-Semitic Russia was impossible and joined Am Oylom (Eternal People), a movement with vaguely socialist, nationalist, and populist principles that aimed to remake Jewish society by forming agricultural communes in the United States where Jews would take up productive labor. Five or six Am Oylom groups with a combined membership of over 1,000 arrived in America in 1882, but only two succeeded in founding collective farms as planned; the rest fell apart, without most members ever leaving the vicinity of New York City.[101] Out of the wreckage of Am Oylom rose some of the leading figures of Yiddish anarchism, including David Edelstadt, Roman Lewis (Luis) and Hillel Solotaroff (Zolotarov).
None of these early Jewish intellectuals, however, were anarchists at the time of their arrival. A disproportionate number of Russian Jews and Jewish immigrants had some past experience in (non-anarchist) radical circles, but before 1905 a majority of those active in the Jewish American Left had still not been radicals in the Old World.[102] Although the two most influential figures within the international anarchist movement, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, were both Russians, they spent most of their radical careers in exile and no explicitly anarchist organization existed within the Russian Empire until after the turn of the century. “Bakuninism” had been an important influence on the Russian Nihilist and Populist movements, but only as a doctrine that promoted armed revolution and held that an immediate transition to socialism was possible. According the Franco Venturi, “a genuinely Bakuninist organization was never founded in Russia.”[103] Therefore, despite having read Nihilist and Populist writings, neither Emma Goldman nor Alexander Berkman knew what anarchism was before arriving in America in the second half of the 1880s, while Joseph J. Cohen (Kahan), who had been an active socialist in Minsk for more than a decade, never encountered the term “anarchism” before emigrating in 1903. According to the anarchist engineer Leon Moisseiff (Moiseief), who had been a Marxist in Russia, “anarchism as a popular movement was alien to us.” He read Bakunin and other anarchists only after coming to America, “and their principles were to me a new phenomenon.”[104]
Three factors, however, predisposed the Jewish inteligentn of the 1880s and 1890s to anarchist ideas. The first was the heritage of the Haskalah, which emphasized secular education, self-improvement, and social responsibility—ideals that also attracted Jewish intellectuals to Nihilism, Populism, and other socialistic movements.[105] The second was the romantic and intellectual legacy of these Russian revolutionary movements, which easily lent themselves to anarchist appropriation. The two most influential Russian works among radical Jewish intellectuals were Peter Lavrov’s philosophical tract, Historical Letters, and Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel, What is to be Done? Both were explicitly materialist but also emphasized the subjective role of the individual—and the radical intellectual in particular—in consciously bringing about historical change by helping to enlighten the toiling masses and prepare them to bring about revolution. Lavrov further promoted a socialist society “in which the element of the State is reduced to a minimum so insignificant that it can be looked upon as really eliminated.”[106]
One of the first organizations founded by Jewish radicals in New York was the Russian Progressive Association, which immediately following its formation in November 1886 held a fundraising ball that collected $110 for the Russian revolutionary movement, which was sent directly to Peter Lavrov himself. What is to be Done?, meanwhile, was serialized in 1890 in New York’s Der Morgenshtern (The Morningstar), a radical Yiddish paper with anarchist leanings.[107] As the Yiddish Left in America polarized between social democrats and anarchists over the next few years, the anarchists were able to claim the legacy of Russian revolutionary conspiracy and violence as their own in contrast to the socialists’ focus on legal, electoral politics. When the anarchist Alexander Berkman traveled to Pittsburgh in 1892 to make his attempt on the life of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, he signed into his hotel as “Rakhmetov,” after the idealized revolutionary protagonist of Chernyshevsky’s novel.[108]
The third and most immediate bridge between the inteligentn and anarchism was the German-speaking anarchist community of New York and its leading figure, Johann Most. As soon as members of the Jewish intelligentsia began looking outside of their own Russianspeaking circles, they naturally gravitated toward the large and active German socialist and anarchist circles in their vicinity. Germans predominated within both the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and the anarchist International Working People’s Association (IWPA), and in 1886 a writer for Johann Most’s paper Freiheit (Freedom) estimated there were some 2,500 mostly German anarchists residing in New York City.[109] Moreover, the German language was familiar to most Jews from Prussia and easy to learn for others who spoke Yiddish, because both languages developed out of High German. Many Jewish intellectuals therefore learned German in America before they mastered English, and German radicals “served as the midwives of the Jewish labor movement.”[110]
The memoirs of those involved in the Yiddish anarchist movement of 1880s and 1890s unanimously note the enormous impact of Johann Most. According to Chaim Weinberg (Vaynberg),
To say that Most could inspire an audience is not enough. He electrified, simply enchanted each listener, whether an adversary or a friend….Johann Most could so mesmerize his listeners that they would at any time go with him should he call them to man the barricades. He could bring the apathetic person to tears with his hypnotizing power.[111]
Nor was Most’s impact limited to his speeches. Weinberg, who was literate only in Yiddish, had a friend read aloud to him from Freiheit every week, while the German-speaking garment worker Isaac Benequit (Y. A. Benekvit) was an avid reader of the paper long before fellow Jewish anarchist Isidore Kopeloff spotted him with a copy of it and invited Benequit to his first anarchist meeting.[112] To outsiders, Most appeared to be the “high priest” or “the god of almost all the Jewish anarchists.”[113]
For a few years Jewish anarchism was simply an appendage to the German movement. Before they had had their own organizations and publications, Jewish anarchists like Kopeloff participated in German ones and read Freiheit, for which Alexander Berkman worked as a compositor. When Johann Most took the young Emma Goldman—who had learned German as a girl in Prussia—under his wing, he did so hoping that she would become “the first woman speaker in the German anarchist movement in America,” and some of the first anarchist works to appear in the Yiddish language were translations of Most’s writings. Johann Most also married the Jewish anarchist and midwife Helene Minkin.[114] Yiddish anarchists in turn adopted Most as one of their own, referring to him as “our Most” and financially supporting him.[115]
The impetus for the first autonomous and specifically Jewish organizing effort was the Haymarket Affair of 1886. Two days after the date of execution was set for seven of Chicago’s leading anarchists, who had been convicted of inspiring an unknown assailant to hurl a bomb at police in Haymarket Square during a workers’ demonstration, a small gathering of Jewish anarchists established the Pioneers of Freedom. The group’s name was rendered in a heavily Germanized Yiddish (Pionire der Frayhayt rather than Pionirn di Frayhayt) and its meetings were held in Russian until the following year, but it nevertheless played a decisive role in the formation of a Yiddish-language anarchist movement. The group was founded by obscure rankand-file workers, but they were soon joined by a growing cadre of intellectuals—many of them university students—from organizations like the Russian Progressive Union.
By 1888 the Pioneers boasted an impressive array of anarchist speakers and writers including Roman Lewis, Hillel Solotaroff, Isidore Prenner, Max Girdzshansky, Moyshe Katts, Saul Yanovsky, Alexander Berkman, and the poets David Edelstadt and Joseph Bovshover. They met at 56 Orchard Street, the home of former Talmudist scholar and Am Oylom member turned “ultra-radical socialist” Abraham Jacob Netter (Neter). This became the “spiritual-intellectual center” of radicalism on the Lower East Side, a place where socialists, anarchists, and atheists could be found reading and discussing Marx’s Das Kapital and the works of Bakunin and Kropotkin in between lectures and speeches. Netter’s daughter, Anna, was one of the only female members of the Pioneers of Freedom and, in Emma Goldman’s description, an “ardent worker” who “gave unstintingly of her time and meagre [sic] earnings.”[116]
The Pioneers of Freedom, under the influence of the Russian revolutionary movement and Most, were steeped in romantic ideas of imminent revolution, “propaganda by the deed,” and a cult of revolutionary martyrdom. Saul Yanovsky remembered that the first backroom meeting of the Pioneers he attended “had the appearance of true conspiracy,” and Alexander Berkman recalled,
Its inner membership met in secret, being an ‘underground’ body…Everything was ‘for the movement’ in those days; it was our sole thought, and we lived and breathed only in the sign of the Social Revolution…A little while yet, and the oppressed and outraged masses will raise their mighty arm: industry will stand still, the plutocrats will tremble— there will be a short, decisive struggle, and the Social Revolution will conquer.
Lifelong anarchist Michael Cohn (Kohn) similarly reflected that the Pioneers were “impractical, naïve-lyrical dreamers, convinced, that presently the social revolution will come, which will at last bring a new, a free world.”[117] The group affiliated itself with the IWPA and subscribed to that organization’s Pittsburgh Manifesto of 1883, a document co-authored by Most that called for “Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary and international action,” and “Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative organization of production,” as well as “Equal rights for all without distinction of sex or race.”[118]
The first task of the Pioneers was to raise support for the Haymarket defendants, and a ball they held in the Lower East Side collected $100 for that purpose.[119] The execution of four of the defendants and the suicide of a fifth on November 11, 1887 propelled other budding Jewish radicals into the anarchist movement, including Emma Goldman and David Edelstadt. Edelstadt wrote that with the Haymarket Affair “a new era started, a new period in the American workers’ movement. The illusion, the empty hopes for American freedom of speech and of press got their last deadly blow.”[120] Ironically, however, it was precisely the greater degree of freedom of speech and assembly in the United States that allowed radical intellectuals and agitators to reach the immigrant working class with their message.
Sweatshops and tenements were the crucible in which Jewish laborers and intellectuals came together as equals on common ground. Despite their educations the inteligentn were forced, at least during their first years in America, to make a living with their hands alongside other newly arrived migrants. “The plight of the intellectuals among the immigrants,” according to Jewish labor historian Elias Tcherikower, “was pitiful.” In his first months in New York Saul Yanovsky, who had attended gymnasium in Bialystok, moved rapidly between poorly paying jobs as a dishwasher, sheet-metal worker, cloakmaker, capmaker, and shirtmaker. (Shirt making was especially favored by intellectuals because it was a relatively easy occupation to learn and not physically demanding).[121] Like the sweatshop, the tenement house was usually an unavoidable experience. The anarchist Hillel Solotaroff, for instance, lodged in one with his parents and younger brother while working toward his medical degree, and he later shared a room in a tenement with David Edelstadt.[122]
But the influence and social standing of Jewish intellectuals was unique among American immigrant groups. As Ronald Sanders notes, they
were driven be a natural dialectic of circumstance into identifying their lot with that of the Russian-Jewish immigrant masses, and thereby into taking up positions of moral leadership among them. Indeed, there was a vacuum of moral leadership among the Jewish immigrants in America that had to be filled.
This vacuum resulted from a conspicuous lack of distinguished rabbis and religious scholars in America, which contributed to a collapse of religious authority and observance among Jewish immigrants.[123] In Irving Howe’s words, New York’s Jews were “triply uprooted: from their old homes, from their religious traditions, and from their customary work and culture,” and they looked to new sources for direction. Radicals replaced rabbis as leaders of much of the Jewish community, creating “nothing short of a revolution in Jewish culture and politics.”[124] The radicals constituted a learned elite to which fellow Jews, following their traditional respect for men of learning, conferred great authority. And anarchist speakers and writers like Dr. Hillel Solotaroff, Dr. Jacob Merison, Dr. Katherina Yevzerov-Merison, Dr. Max Girdzshansky, and Dr. Michael Cohn were not averse to invoking their academic credentials.
But in order to effectively influence Jewish workers, Russified intellectuals had to literally speak a different language. Most were from Russian-speaking families and disparaged Yiddish as a “jargon.” Abraham Cahan (Kahan) noted that Russian was the “identification mark” of a Jewish intellectual, and anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman privately conversed with each other in “our beloved Russian” rather than Yiddish.[125] Ironically, many of the founders of Yiddish-language radicalism, as well as modern Yiddish literature, acquired that language only after migrating. Berkman recalled, “I really learned Yiddish in America, through association with my many Yiddish friends and comrades.” Saul Yanovsky’s mother had spoken Yiddish but he “felt an inconceivable nervousness” about speaking it himself and had to relearn the language in America, and David Edelstadt, one of the pioneers of modern Yiddish poetry, began as a Russian poet and had to learn how to write and spell Yiddish from his comrade Moyshe Katts and by studying Yiddish newspapers.[126]
The Pioneers of Freedom found both a model to emulate and a source of Yiddishlanguage literature in the Jewish ghetto of London’s East End. There, a Jewish proletariat was similarly concentrated in dilapidated housing and hundreds of garment sweatshops, and it was there that the very first Yiddish-language radical groups and publications appeared. The revolutionary socialist poet Morris Winchevsky (Vintshevsky) established Der Poylisher Yidl (The Little Polish Jew) in 1884, which he replaced following year with Der Arbayter Fraynd (The Worker’s Friend), a paper that was “open to all radicals.” By 1887 anarchists had emerged as the majority within the Arbayter Fraynd Group and formed their own organization, the Knights of Liberty (Riter fun Frayhayt). This group was responsible for publishing much of the material used by American Jewish anarchists in the early years of the movement.[127]
London was the “spiritual center” of Yiddish anarchism in the 1880s and 1890s. In Rudolf Rocker’s words,
Our movement in London was a hub, from which spokes went out in all directions, to a great number of people, in all countries…Want of work, material privations, and often that restless migratory impulse proper to many Jewish proletarians, led hundreds of good comrades from London to France, Belgium, Germany, Egypt, South Africa, and to the North and South of America; most of whom maintained their contact with the London movement.[128]
Some of these remigrants, including the labor poet David Goldstein (Goldstayn), founded branches of the Knights of Liberty in Philadelphia and Boston, which in turn distributed and raised funds for the London paper.[129] Jewish anarchists in America began contributing to the Arbayter Fraynd, and in 1889 the movements in London and New York forged closer ties through a transatlantic exchange of editors: the Pioneers of Freedom enticed Arbayter Fraynd writer Joseph Jaffa to come edit their new publication, Di Varhayt (The Truth), while Pioneers member Saul Yanovsky was invited to London to take over editorship of the Arbayter Fraynd. Nevertheless, the initial decision to switch from Russian to Yiddish agitation was taken reluctantly; many intellectuals shared the Haskalah viewpoint that Yiddish was an inferior language and both a mark and a cause of Jewish separateness. But on August 18, 1882 New York’s first Yiddish-language socialist speech was delivered by Abraham Cahan—who at the time was closer to the anarchists than the social democrats—and over the following decade socialists and anarchists built up a “Yiddish public culture” through an endless succession of Yiddish meetings, newspapers and pamphlets.[130] The Yiddishist Chaim Zhitlowsky (Zhitlovsky) observed that, in spite of themselves, the first generation of “anti-Yiddish Jewish intellectuals” (anti-idishe-idishe inteligents) “planted in the sandy desert of assimilation the first palm tree and struck the first springs of the oasis of Jewish culture in the Yiddish language.” By 1889 the anarchist Michael Cohn was defending Yiddish against assimilated Jews who disparaged it, writing, “Our broad literature on socialism will serve as fair proof that we are able to express all we want in our Jewish tongue, or, as you prefer to call it, jargon.” The once-Russified intellectuals had become “Yiddishized,” a decade before Jewish socialists in Russia began to dabble in Yiddish-language propaganda.[131]
Their Yiddish-language activities took three forms: mass protest meetings, educational lectures on political and scientific topics, and self-education associations (fortbildung-foraynen) where workers learned to read and discuss political literature.[132] The energetic efforts of the Pioneers of Freedom, Knights of Liberty, and other groups quickly bore fruit. Anarchist lectures in New York and Philadelphia drew hundreds of listeners, and by the early 1890s groups affiliated with the Pioneers had been established in several cities including Baltimore, Boston, New Haven, Providence, Paterson, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis.[133] By all accounts, anarchism was the dominant current within American Jewish radicalism and labor unions in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and the anarchists boasted better speakers and writers than the social democrats. In 1910 socialist Philip Krantz admitted, “Jewish workers, by and large, were both by temperament and in response to their pariah life inclined more to anarchism than to social-democracy.”[134] However, incessant struggles between these two rival movements, as well as internal splits within anarchist ranks, nearly destroyed Yiddish anarchism before the turn of the century.
*** 2.3 Anarchism and the Jewish Working Class
The first recorded involvement of Russian Jewish workers in a labor dispute occurred during the 1882 New York dock strike, in which employers recruited newly arrived Jews and Italians to replace striking Irish longshoremen. According to Alexander Harkavy, a former Am Oylom member and one of those employed as a strikebreaker, “We at the time did not understand the meaning of ‘strikes’ and ‘scabs,’ and sought jobs on the ships without knowing whether we would succeed in finding any or not.” Better informed radicals, however, explained the nature of conflict to their fellow migrants, prompting hundreds to walk off the job and join the striking union.[135] Similar scenes repeated, on a smaller scale, in workplaces throughout the Lower East Side as laboring Jewish intellectuals agitated among their fellow workers and helped them fight for better conditions. In 1886, during the first Jewish cloakmakers’ strike, young Russian Jewish socialists and anarchists showed up to agitate against the contracting system and assisted in organizing a union. Workers therefore “became accustomed to the fact that whenever they were in trouble, the people who came to them with help and advice were the socialists and anarchists.”[136] But as the line between these two camps of influential radicals hardened, the ideological conflicts between them deeply divided the Yiddish labor movement.
The early Yiddish anarchists were strongly influenced by Ferdinand Lassalle’s theory of an “iron law of wages,” which held that labor market competition inevitably drove wages down to subsistence levels and attempts by workers to improve their wages were therefore doomed to fail. Like Johann Most, many anarchists believed that for workers “worse is better” because poor conditions would lead to working-class revolt. Hence, they viewed labor unions as a field for propaganda rather than practical action; according to an 1890 declaration, anarchists should participate in unions in order to “spread dissatisfaction, plant the seeds of freedom and equality, to bring unconscious (umbavuste) workers to their class consciousness…and to spread the ideas of social revolution, anarchism and communism!”[137]
In practice, however, anarchists also organized some of the first unions of Jewish workers in New York and Philadelphia, within which anarchism was the main current. In the early 1890s anarchist unionists like Moyshe Katts, Roman Lewis, and Chaim Weinberg then helped reorient the anarchist movement’s theoretical position on the labor movement.[138] Yiddish socialists were meanwhile eager to displace the anarchists and in October 1888 they founded the United Hebrew Trades (UHT), a federation of unions associated with the Socialist Labor Party. Four months later the Pioneers of Freedom countered by forming their own federation, the United Workingmen’s Organizations of America, which included New York’s cloakmakers’, knee-pants makers’, and pants makers’ unions, but the anarchists’ federation never became more than a paper organization and most of its members subsequently joined the UHT.[139]
In the meantime, the Pioneers set out to found a revolutionary Yiddish newspaper, and they took the Arbayter Fraynd as their model. Seeking to duplicate the London paper’s nonpartisan approach to radicalism, they first invited Arbayter Fraynd founder Morris Winchevsky to become the new publication’s editor. Winchevsky, however, wanted no more dealings with anarchists, so the Pioneers next turned to the London anarchist writer Joseph Jaffa, who accepted the post and migrated to New York. Di Varhayt, which debuted on February 15, 1889, was therefore the world’s first explicitly anarchist publication to appear in the Yiddish language. The paper maintained a high intellectual standard, serializing Marx’s “Critique of Political Economy” in its pages, and also featured contributions from Johann Most as well as David Edelstadt’s first Yiddish poems. For the average reader, however, the articles were too theoretical, too long, and written in a difficult, overly-Germanized Yiddish derisively referred to as daytshmerish. Furthermore, Jaffa was preoccupied with affairs in London and used the paper as a platform to attack his opponents there. As a result, Varhayt reached a limited circulation of around 2,500 and its finances were so poor that some of the Pioneers used their rent money to keep it afloat, and were evicted. The paper folded after four months and twenty issues.[140]
Lacking the financial resources to sustain a paper of their own, the Pioneers of Freedom returned to their original aim of a nonpartisan publication. In late 1889 they approached the Yiddish-language sections of the SLP with a proposal that the two organizations cooperate on a paper overseen by one anarchist editor and one socialist editor. A conference between the two movements convened on Christmas Day with forty-seven delegates representing thirty-one labor and radical organizations. Most of the socialist delegates, led by Morris Hillquit (Hilkovits) and Louis Miller, opposed the proposal, and after seven days and seven nights of debate the resolution was defeated by a single vote. The SLP instead founded its own paper, Der Arbeter Tsaytung (The Workers’ Newspaper), a month later. The anarchists, however, still hoped to produce an “impartial” paper. The first to appear was Der Morgenshtern, an independent effort on the part of Dr. Abba Braslavsky, a radical socialist estranged from the SLP, and the anarchist printer Ephraim London (father of future socialist congressman Meyer London). Though officially nonpartisan, Der Morgenshtern was openly critical of the SLP and sympathetic to anarchism, and when Braslavsky left the publication he was replaced by the anarchists Joseph Jaffa and A. Tanenboym. After six months the paper closed down to make way for a new effort, Di Fraye Arbayter Shtime (The Free Voice of Labor).[141]
On January 12, 1890, 215 delegates representing the Pioneers of Freedom, the Knights of Liberty, and other anarchist groups from across the East Coast and Midwest had convened in New York to make arrangements for their movement’s new publication, and the first issue of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime debuted on July 4, 1890.[142] Still pursuing a bipartisan vision, the paper featured both a socialist and an anarchist editor, though several individuals cycled through these posts during the first two years of the publication. Representing the socialists—but not the SLP—was Dr. Braslavsky, who was followed by Isaac Hourwich (Yidshak Aysik Ha Levi Hurvits), who co-edited a single issue in 1891 but continued to contribute occasional articles. The anarchist editorship passed from Roman Lewis, who had a reputation as the “best anarchist speaker,” to Hillel Solotaroff and Jacob Merison, two leading young intellectuals from the Pioneers of Freedom, and then to David Edelstadt. With Hourwich’s departure Moyshe Katts became Edelstadt’s coeditor, thus ending the paper’s pretense of nonpartisanship.[143]
With Edelstadt at the helm the Fraye Arbayter Shtime enjoyed a significant degree of popularity, especially among “the more intellectual layer of revolutionary-disposed Jewish immigrant youth.” In addition to his militant but unpretentious editorials, Edelstadt’s poems, which described the miseries of the Jewish ghetto and incited readers to revolution, were loved by many and put to music, becoming hymns of the Jewish labor movement. According to one member of the Pioneers, “during the period in which Edelstadt edited the paper, the circulation went up so much that we even started to think about a daily paper.” But it was still a shoestring operation; Alexander Berkman later reminisced:
We were very poor in funds, but rich in enthusiasm. Our compositors and printer worked more for love than money, and now and then the editor was generously given a quarter to buy a meal. Some of us saved our room rent for the benefit of the paper, and for a long time we slept under the make-up table in the basement where the ‘office’ of our paper was. Often our sleep would be disturbed in the middle of the night by Edelstadt waking us to read a poem he had just composed.[144]
Toiling in the damp cellar that constituted the paper’s office also damaged the health of Edelstadt, who contracted tuberculosis. After nine months as editor he grew so ill that he was forced to move to a drier climate, and he died in Denver in October 1892 at the age of twentysix. With Edelstadt gone the paper struggled, attaining no more than half or a third of the Arbeter Tsaytung’s circulation of 6,000–8,000.[145] Then the contest for leadership in the labor movement spilled over into the world of letters, and the rivalry between the two papers subsequently spilled over into the unions.
In 1890 New York’s cloakmakers, “the worst paid workers in the garment trades,” began a strike movement that soon included some 3,000 workers. The strikers turned to the UHT, which sent Joseph Barondess to oversee the strike. Barondess was a charismatic garment worker who had arrived in the United States two years earlier and become a social democrat, and he quickly organized the strikers into Operators’ and Cloakmakers’ Union No. 1. He also began gravitating toward the anarchists, who enjoyed strong support among the cloakmakers. Roman Lewis was appointed assistant manager of the union and Barondess brought in Emma Goldman, who already had a reputation as an anarchist speaker, to agitate on behalf of the strike.[146]
Seeking support from the English-speaking public, Barondess also recruited the aid of Thomas Hamilton Garside, a Scottish preacher-turned-radical who, after falling out with the SLP, had become active within anarchist circles in Philadelphia and New York. Garside was instrumental in raising funds for the strike and delighted the Yiddish anarchists by arguing for revolutionary acts of “propaganda by the deed” and against electoral politics during debates with socialists. He was therefore selected by the union to negotiate its settlement with employers. The settlement reached, however, did not demand the expulsion of strikebreakers or the fixing of piece-work rates, and was condemned by the socialists. The cloakmakers resoundingly rejected the agreement and continued the strike, winning their demands at the end of July 1890. In June 1891 the New York Times and other newspapers revealed that Garside had become a Deputy U.S. Marshall after moving to Philadelphia following the strike.[147] Cloakmaker Abraham Rosenberg recalled, “Before the strike the anarchists in our union had the upper hand,” but after the fiasco with Garside their reputation was greatly reduced.[148]
Socialist leaders took this opportunity to launch a campaign against Barondess, backed by the SLP and the Arbeter Tsaytung. Barondess in turn was supported by the anarchists and the Fraye Arbayter Shtime. Then in March 1891, Barondess was arrested on spurious charges of extortion for accepting a fine imposed by the union on an employer in the form of a check made out to his name. Convicted and sentenced to twenty-one months, Barondess was released on bail while the case was appealed. Impoverished and fearing prison, he fled to Canada but was discovered and returned to New York, where he was imprisoned until the Cloakmakers’ succeeded in gaining him a pardon from the governor in June 1892. Barondess’s ill-conceived flight provided his socialist critics with ample ammunition against him and his backers.[149]
In the meantime, the anarchists faced an embarrassing spectacle when the Fraye Arbayter Shtime’s typesetters went on strike after the Pioneers fired the printers’ confrontational (and socialist) foreman and refused to reinstate him. The typesetters all belonged to the UHTaffiliated Hebrew American Typographical Union, and when the Fraye Arbayter Shtime hired a new printing crew the UHT condemned the anarchists for employing “scabs” and in September 1891 called on all members of its affiliated unions to boycott the newspaper. A minor labor dispute within the offices of the paper therefore embroiled the entire Jewish labor movement, as unions were forced to choose between supporting and opposing the boycott.[150] The most important UHT union, Operators’ and Cloakmakers’ Union No. 1, refused to endorse the boycott and withdrew from the UHT. The socialists promptly founded a rival organization, the International Cloakmakers’ Union, and the industry-wide United Garment Trades of New York and Vicinity. The anarchists and their allies, in turn, organized a rival United Trade Unions of New York and Vicinity. Its first affiliate was the Hebrew Typographical Union No. 317, composed of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime’s new typesetters and chartered by the American Federation of Labor.[151]
The Yiddish anarchists found a convenient ally in the AFL, which for years had been fighting the influence of the Socialist Labor Party within the union movement. Moreover, the AFL’s policy of abstaining from electoral politics in favor of workplace organizing mirrored the anarchists’ own priorities, and in part reflected the influence of anarchist unionists within the federation.[152] Barondess and the anarchists therefore supported the AFL’s United Garment Workers’ fight against the UHT’s efforts to organize unions in the men’s clothing industry. The conflict between the two camps descended into slanders and fistfights.[153]
In the midst of this organizational warfare the Fraye Arbayter Shtime was forced to cease publication in 1892, though it reappeared sporadically throughout 1893, reportedly “with some assistance from the American Federation of Labor.” The UHT continued its boycott, but the anarchists and their allies in the United Trade Unions in turn called a mass meeting at New Erving Hall where a counter-boycott of the socialist Arbeter Tsaytung was declared. Nevertheless, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime could not survive the economic downturn that began in 1893 and folded in April of the following year. It was temporarily replaced by Di Yunyon Tsaytung (The Union Newspaper), an organ of the United Trade Unions edited by Barondess and supported by the AFL.[154] The incessant infighting and onset of an industrial crisis reduced the membership of the rival Jewish labor federations to “between a few dozen and a few hundred” by 1894. To avoid complete collapse, the rival typographical unions amalgamated together and the two cloakmakers’ unions likewise reunited, but the reorganized cloakmakers’ union disintegrated in 1895–96 after a failed general strike led by Barondess.[155]
Just when the Jewish unions were falling apart, the Yiddish anarchist movement was itself rent internally by a controversy over “propaganda by the deed.” On July 23, 1892 Alexander Berkman travelled to Pittsburgh, where he shot and stabbed steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. The attempted assassination was retaliation for Frick’s employment of mercenaries to break a strike at the Carnegie Steel Company’s mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, where a clash had resulted in the deaths of nine workers. Berkman believed that his act “would fire the hearts of the disinherited, and inspire them to noble deeds. It would carry to the oppressed the message of the New Day, and prepare them for the approaching social revolution. Homestead might prove the first blush of the glorious Dawn.”[156] But Frick did not die, and the revolution did not come. Berkman’s act exacerbated the feud between socialists and anarchists, as well as a simmering conflict within the German and Yiddish anarchist movements between Johann Most and his opponents. Discontent with Most’s domination of the German movement and his illdefined economic ideas had led to an oppositional current centered around Joseph Peukert and his paper, Die Autonomie (Autonomy), which espoused total decentralization of the anarchist movement and a communist economics based on the principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” In turn, Most falsely accused Peukert of being a police spy and polemics flew back and forth.[157] In 1891 Most’s former protégés Berkman and Goldman had joined the Autonomie Group and severed all ties with him. Nevertheless they were shocked when Most, who had spent the previous decade calling for just such acts of violence against the ruling class, responded to Berkman’s attempt by stating, “America is not the place for assassinations.” An outraged Goldman mounted the stage at one of Most’s lectures and horsewhipped him, but many Yiddish anarchists continued to revere Most and accepted his new stance, and Goldman found herself barred from an anarchist meeting in the Lower East Side because its organizers agreed with him. Among many younger Jewish anarchists, however, Berkman’s name remained “a kind of talisman, a source of enthusiasm and encouragement.”[158]
Pressure to reconsider violent tactics also came from abroad. In 1891 Saul Yanovsky, a “gifted and cunningly sarcastic writer and editor,” took over editorship of the Arbayter Fraynd. Under his direction the paper shed its nonpartisan policy, became outspokenly anarchist communist, and urged anarchists to take part in labor unions while combating union bureaucrats and politicians.[159] Yanovsky was initially a believer in “propaganda by the deed” and defended Berkman’s act, but after a Spanish anarchist threw two bombs into a crowded theater in Barcelona in 1893, killing as many as twenty people, he became a critic of individual acts of violence. This sparked such a controversy in London that Yanovsky was forced to resign from his post.[160] In the United States, however, Yanovsky’s views gained a wide hearing through both the Arbayter Fraynd and the Knights of Liberty, which in turn had a moderating influence on the Pioneers of Freedom.[161] Thereafter, Yiddish anarchism put “constructive” activity above all else.
*** 2.4 Free Voice of Labor
The revitalization of Yiddish anarchism after the turn of the century was inseparable from the vision of Saul Yanovsky. When he returned to New York in 1895 the movement was in shambles, having lost both its only publication and its dominance in the garment unions. Joseph Barondess returned to the socialist fold and in 1892 Roman Lewis, one of the most active anarchist unionists, had declared himself a social democrat, later becoming an assistant District Attorney in Chicago on the Democratic ticket.[162] The one sign of life was Di Fraye Gezelshaft (Free Society), a thick intellectual anarchist journal founded in 1895 against the advice of Yanovsky, who believed that a popular newspaper was needed.[163]
After his return, Yanovsky joined several other comrades in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime Group, which aimed to reestablish the defunct newspaper. At a national Yiddish anarchist convention in 1899 this group succeeded in winning support for its project over the opposition of the partisans of the Fraye Gezelshaft, and the Fraye Arbayter Shtime was revived later that year with Yanovsky as its editor.[164] When the members of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime Group began their work, as Hertz Burgin remarks, “They did not have a movement to lead.” But during his twenty years as editor, Yanovsky helped to build up a movement that dwarfed the first wave of Yiddish anarchism.[165]
After the turn of the century the Yiddish press became a central institution of Jewish American life and wielded enormous political and cultural influence. Literary critic B. Rivkin (Barukh Avram Weinreibe) noted, “Even complete illiterates—and there were quite a few among the early immigrants—as well as the many half-illiterates, who could spell out a few words in the Hebrew prayer books, now troubled to learn the alphabet in order at least to be able to read a daily Yiddish paper.” This represented a momentous change in the intellectual and cultural world of Eastern European Jews, most of who had never seen a Yiddish newspaper before coming to America.[166] Jews, however, boasted an unusually high literacy rate; in 1897 64.6% of the Russian Empire’s male Jewish population and 36.5% of its female Jewish population were literate, and among Jewish migrants between 1908 and 1912 male literacy was 80.3%.[167] The written word also helped to bridge linguistic divisions within the Jewish population. Marcus Ravage noted,
Though both spoke Yiddish, the Jew from Austrian Poland will at first hardly understand his coreligionist from Lithuania. Their dialects differ enormously in accent and intonation and very appreciably in vocabulary. And each separate group entertains a humorous, kindly contempt for the speech and manners and the foibles of all the others.[168]
The standardization of written Yiddish, pioneered in America by the anarchist-affiliated lexicographer Alexander Harkavy, marked an important step in bringing Jewish workers from different regions together.
Nowhere was the impetus to read and discuss what was read stronger than within the Left. In his 1902 study of the Jewish Lower East Side, Hutchins Hapgood noted that the radical newspaper “has largely displaced the rabbi in the position of teacher of the people.” Historian Tony Michels describes how Jewish radicals “read together in private homes, parks, cafés, and workplaces…Not satisfied with newspapers, they formed self-education societies where they read and discussed journals, pamphlets, and books.” The first such self-education society was founded in 1888 in by the Pioneers of Freedom, who quickly followed it up with a separate group for the growing minority of women attracted to their efforts.[169]
Whereas the Varhayt, the first Fraye Arbayter Shtime, and the Fraye Gezelshaft had been full of dense articles written “in an almost impossible language,” Yanovsky’s new Fraye Arbayter Shtime was written in a simpler and less pretentious Yiddish similar to that of the popular American Yiddish press. Appearing once a week, the paper “combined the functions of a labor paper, a journal of radical opinion, a literary magazine, and a people’s university.”[170] Yanovsky maintained a staunch anarchist line in his editorials, but he opened his pages to a wide range of radical viewpoints; socialists like Isaac Hourwich and Labor Zionists like Nachman Syrkin were frequent contributors, though they could always expect trenchant, and at times withering, responses from Yanovsky. Hourwich even served as president of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime Publishing Association for several years. Reaching a broad audience, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime presented “a critical attitude towards each and any kind of dogmatism, prejudice, and preestablished view.”[171] To bolster its finances the paper also opened up its pages to advertisements, including those for products like Camel Cigarettes and Ex-Lax, two of its most faithful sponsors; in 1905 a scandal erupted in anarchist circles when an ad for a commercial bank appeared.[172]
Yanovsky was not an original thinker, drawing most of his ideology and theory from Peter Kropotkin. Nor did his trademark sarcasm and unbending will make him very personable; as fellow anarchist Israel Ostroff put it, Yanovsky “was a good man, but when he hit you he hit too hard.” Instead, it was as a speaker and a writer that he excelled and won over thousands of supporters. In Rudolf Rocker’s description, Yanovsky
had a keen sense of logic, he could grasp the connections between things, and present them clearly to his readers. His language was natural and alive, and he made his readers think. He was a born journalist…No one among all the comrades in America achieved so much as a writer and a speaker for the movement as Yanovsky did.
“Lightning-fast in his thinking,” according to Lucy Lang, “he was a masterful coiner of epigrams, and his speeches were a startling blend of pathos and satire. He was short and slight, always unkempt, and in spite of his Vandyke beard, almost boyish in appearance.”[173] For Yanovsky, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime became his life, “his first and only love.” “He was not only editor of the ‘F. A. S.’,” Joseph Cohen recalled, “by himself he filled every number with notices, translated articles under a variety of pseudonyms, and he also singlehandedly had to do all of the hard physical labor that the newspaper required. He was editor, manager, bookkeeper, errand boy and peddler (pakn-treger)—all in one.”[174]
In February 1901 the paper’s offices moved to 185 Henry Street, which “accommodated a reading-room for the comrades and a space for frequent little fundraisers (unterhaltungen).”[175] But on September 6, 1901 President William McKinley was shot by the novice anarchist Leon Czolgosz, an American-born child of Polish immigrants, and he died eight days later. In the assassination’s aftermath police arrested several prominent anarchists in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York, including Emma Goldman and Johann Most, and on the evening of September 16, the day after McKinley succumbed to his wounds, a mob ransacked the offices of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and assaulted Yanovsky—despite the fact that three days earlier he had condemned Czolgosz’s act in the paper.[176] During the period of popular anti-anarchist sentiment that followed, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime had to relocate to “a small, dark room, without windows—a kind of large closet—on the fifth floor of a tenement house on Rutgers Street,” and in April 1902 the paper removed the words “Anarchist-Communist Organ” from its masthead to make it less objectionable to the public.[177]
Despite such difficulties, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime persevered. In its first year the paper’s circulation doubled from 4,000 to 8,000, and by 1910 it was printing 15,000–20,000 copies of each issue, one-third the print run of the immensely popular Forverts (Yiddish Daily Forward).[178] Between Yanovsky’s barbed editorials, the paper’s coverage of working-class struggles in America and abroad, and its literary offerings, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime appealed to wide base. Yanovsky had a deep appreciation for Yiddish poetry and literature and an unparalleled reputation for discovering new literary talent. Moshe Shtarkman described the paper as “a central tribune for Yiddish literature in America,” and Robert E. Park noted that the Fraye Arbayter Shtime was “the peculiar organ of the Yiddish intellectual. To be able to say ‘I have written for Yanovsky’ is a literary passport for a Yiddish writer.”[179] Writers whose work first appeared in the anarchist paper included Mani Leib, A. Glanz-Leyeles, and Jacob Glatstein (Glatshteyn). Yiddish historian Joseph Chaikin counts Yanovsky alongside Abe Cahan as one of the six most influential editors in the history of the American Yiddish press. As one of his successors at the Fraye Arbayter Shtime noted, Yanovsky
occupied a dominant position not only in the Yiddish anarchist press, but in all of Yiddish journalism in America. For a few continuous decades he was the spiritual trailblazer for innumerable Jewish journalists, writers, actors, trade-union organizers and community leaders in Jewish society, and hence in the social life of millions of immigrant Jews in their new home.[180]
No other anarchist of any nationality attained such influence in the United States, and no other anarchist publication in the country approached the Fraye Arbayter Shtime’s peak weekly circulation, in 1914, of 30,000—the equivalent of approximately 5% the circulation of the entire Yiddish American daily press. Yanovsky claimed that under his editorship it reached 50,000 readers, while journalist Israel Shenker puts the number at three times that.[181]
This increase in readership was a reflection of the dramatic growth of the movement between 1899 and 1914. As Paul Avrich notes, “The Yanovsky era saw the rapid expansion of Jewish anarchism throughout America.” At least ten new Jewish anarchist groups were formed in New York City in these years, in addition to both the Fraye Arbayter Shtime Group and the multiethnic circle that gravitated around Emma Goldman’s English-language magazine, Mother Earth, which was founded in 1906. In 1910–11 Yanovsky also revived the journal Di Fraye Gezelshaft as a literary supplement to the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and organized a network of fifty “Fraye Gezelshaft Clubs” across the country.[182] When the Russian Jewish historian and former anarchist Max Nomad arrived in the United States in 1913 he found that “anarchism still had a mass following among the Jewish sweatshop workers of New York.” The city eclipsed London as the center of worldwide Yiddish anarchism and in turn, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime received “support from an infinite number of groups in the United States, Canada, South America, Russia, France, England and elsewhere.”[183]
While connected to such transnational networks, Yiddish anarchism in New York was also very much localized, embedded in the social institutions and cultural practices of the Lower East Side. Cafés, theaters, literature, and fraternal organizations were permeated with an anarchist influence that too often goes unnoticed. Anarchism had become part of the very fabric of American Jewish life. The German anarchists and socialists who had resided in the Lower East Side before mass Jewish immigration had centered their movement around a network of saloons and beer halls. As in most areas, Jewish anarchists initially imitated the Germans and frequented radical centers such as Justus Schwab’s saloon at 50 First Street in the Lower East Side, described by Emma Goldman as “a Mecca for French Communards, Spanish and Italian refugees, Russian politicals, and German socialists and anarchists who had escaped the iron heel of Bismark.”[184] The first meeting of the Pioneers of Freedom that Saul Yanovsky attended was in the back room of a saloon on Allen Street, where the group “didn’t have to pay any rent for the room, but each person had to order a glass of beer whether he wanted it or could drink or not.” However, because beer drinking was not part of Jewish culture, the venue for anarchist meetings and socializing shifted to the area’s many Jewish cafés. Emma Goldman was first introduced to New York’s anarchists, including Alexander Berkman, at Sachs’ café on Suffolk Street, which was “the headquarters of the East Side radicals, socialists, and anarchists, as well as of the young Yiddish writers and poets.” Later, Schmuckler’s Café at 167 East Broadway Street became “the mecca of the radicals.” Yiddish anarchist Thomas Eyges recalled, “Editors, journalists, poets, and would-be poets came there—those the world recognized and those it did not; authors, speakers, organizers and radical kibetzers in general, who liked to rub elbows with celebrities.” These “celebrities” included anarchist figures like Yanovsky, who needed only descend the stairs from the office of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, which for a time was located on the second floor of the same building.[185]
Many anarchist groups also became branches of the Workmen’s Circle (Arbayter Ring), a radical Yiddish fraternal society founded in 1900 by Jewish socialists. The Workmen’s Circle provided both an organizational structure and access to a nationwide working-class constituency. Morris Nadelman recalled that the loosely organized Fraye Arbayter Shtime Group became a branch after its members “figured out that by belonging to the Workmen’s Circle, which was an official organization, by paying dues and getting benefits, they had more of a chance to exist.” By the 1920s there were two dozen such anarchist branches, including both the Fraye Arbayter Shtime Group and New York’s International Group.[186]
In January 1911 a coalition of anarchists and sympathizers—largely Jews—opened the English-language Francisco Ferrer Center on St. Mark’s Place in the Lower East side, though it moved to 63 East 107th Street in Harlem the following year, reflecting the large-scale Jewish migration to upper Manhattan in this period. It was named for and modeled after the libertarian pedagogy of the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, whose execution in Barcelona in 1909 on charges of fomenting a popular insurrection had sparked an international outcry. The Ferrer Center offered a day school for children supervised by historian Will Durant (who left in 1913 to marry one of his pupils, fifteen-year-old Ida Kaufman, the daughter of a Jewish anarchist mother), as well as lectures and evening classes for adults.[187]
If cafés and organizations like the Workmen’s Circle and the Ferrer Center were hubs of Jewish radicals’ social life, the Yiddish theater was at the center of their cultural life. Anarchists loved the realist dramas of playwrights like Jacob Gordin and Sholem Asch, which brought the confrontation between outmoded Jewish tradition and modern ideals of free thought, romantic love, and revolution to the stage. The acclaimed Yiddish actor Jacob Adler made his New York debut in 1899 as the lead in a production of The Beggar of Odessa at the Windsor Theater to raise the startup funds to re-launch the Fraye Arbayter Shtime. Eighteen years later Adler, along with Sholem Asch and the writer Moyshe Nadir, participated in a benefit show to prevent Alexander Berkman’s extradition to California in connection with the Mooney-Billings case (see Chapter 5). Adler joked, “This Berkman has been haunting prisons all his life, and I have been playing benefit performances for him all my life.”[188] Yiddish actors and playwrights aided anarchist causes and also relied on the anarchist press; a favorable review in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime could make one’s theatrical career, and a poor review could ruin it.
Anarchist influence extended beyond the pages of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and the Yiddish stage. Writers like Moyshe Katts, Jacob Merison, Katerina Yevzerov-Merison, Abraham Frumkin, and B. Rivkin became familiar to readers of the non-anarchist press through their contributions to a wide spectrum of Yiddish publications; Katts was for many years the literary editor of the Forverts and then of Philadelphia’s Di Idishe Velt (The Jewish World), and Solotaroff wrote a weekly column for the independent liberal Der Tog (The Day), established in New York in 1914. Moreover, in July 1911 a group of prominent Yiddish writers, including anarchists like Merison and Solotaroff, formed the Yidisher Literatn Klob (Yiddish Writers’ Club) for “the elevation of Yiddish literature in all its forms,” and elected Solotaroff its first president. Two years later Merison and others formed the Kropotkin Literatur Gezelshaft (Kropotkin Literary Society) for the purpose of publishing the great works of European radical philosophy. It produced Yiddish translations of the writings of Lassalle, Marx, Kropotkin, Darwin, and others—many of them done by Merison himself—and the society grew to include 4,000 members who contributed one dollar a year toward the cost of each volume.[189] The anarchist Max M. Maisel, who had a radical bookstore at 424 Grand Street in the Lower East Side, also ran a publishing house that produced Yiddish translations of writers as varied as Georg Brandes, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Ivan Turgenev, Margaret Sanger, and Shakespeare. Yiddish readers’ exposure to European writers was, to a large degree, mediated by anarchists.
Yiddish anarchists became recognizable figures within Jewish popular culture, as well. In a short humorous piece that appeared in Der Tog in 1914, the writer described a young man who
read the Yiddish paper and was an anarchist. And because he was an anarchist, he wanted to like music, and he let his hair grow until it was big enough for both an anarchist and a violin virtuoso. Bertha felt he was the right man for her, so she no longer looked with disfavor upon Yiddish papers, ceased buying the Times every morning, and donned an anarchist blouse with a black tie.[190]
Here, the author invoked several tropes to make the anarchist characters familiar to readers: an attachment to Yiddish rather than an English newspaper, an appreciation for music, and specific modes of dress and personal appearance all served as signifiers of anarchism. In the very act of mocking anarchist pretentions and behaviors, this also story reveals the ubiquity of anarchists and stereotypes about them within the Jewish community.
*** 2.5 No Gods, No Masters
Of course, not all Jews welcomed the anarchists in their midst. The mob that ransacked the offices of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime following McKinley’s assassination was “a Jewish rabble” angered by the bad reputation the anarchists gave to their community, and a month afterwards New York’s conservative Jewish Times proclaimed that they “ceased to be Jews when they became anarchists.” In 1917 the Hebrew Institute of Chicago similarly refused to allow Alexander Berkman to speak there because he “had brought disgrace upon the Jewish people by his attempted assassination of Frick.”[191] The most outspoken opponents of Yiddish anarchism were assimilated German Jews, garment firm owners, and what existed of a rabbinical establishment. And just as the Jewish Times attempted to define the anarchists as outside of the Jewish community by virtue of their politics, so too did the anarchists attempt to redefine the Jewish community as one in which capitalists and, especially, religious leaders were the outsiders.
Historian Nathan Goldberg dubbed the anarchists’ focus on educating Jewish workers “the anarchist ‘Haskalah,’“ and the description is apt.[192] Deeply imbued with Enlightenment ideals, anarchists believed that only a secular, scientific worldview was capable of bringing about revolution and working-class self-emancipation. According to Thomas Eyges,
To become a radical in those days, one had invariably first to abandon religious belief, to deny the existence of God. Then, as a matter of course, one became convinced or the uselessness of religious ceremonies, and then followed the abandonment of church or synagogue. This was considered necessary in order to leave the mind free to consider life from a materialistic, rather than from a theological, point of view.[193]
Religion, from this perspective, was objectively counterrevolutionary and those who propagated it functionally allied themselves with economic and political elites.
Anarchists therefore sought to leverage the existing cleavage between Jewish workers and religious authorities that had resulted from migration. The most potent form this antireligious activity took was the Yom Kippur Ball, an invented radical tradition that originated in London in 1888 and spread to New York the following year. In the 1890s and 1900s anarchists also held Yom Kippur Balls in Newark, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Providence, and St. Louis, as well as cities such as Paris, Montreal, and Havana.[194] On the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, while religious Jews fasted and prayed for atonement, anarchists and socialists paraded in the streets and then retired to meeting halls or parks to hear radical speakers, feast, and dance. Marcus Ravage recalled that the Lower East Side’s radicals “ostentatiously went about with big cigars in our mouths and bags of food in our pockets,” and one report of the inaugural 1889 ball claimed each participant paraded with “a piece of pork in his hand, growling the Marseillaise and other street songs in Russian and in jargon [i.e. Yiddish].” Fistfights with enraged observant Jews were common.[195] From 1890 to 1893 the Pioneers of Freedom also annually produced thousands of copies of a paper on the eve of Yom Kippur with the Hebrew title Tefilah zakah layamim hanora’im, leshabatot, lemo’adim, ulekhol yemot hashanah (A Pure Prayer for the Days of Awe, for Sabbaths, Holidays and for All Days of the Year), filled with viciously satirical prayers and revolutionary poetry.[196]
On Passover, radicals also staged balls where, according the Ravage, “we consumed more forbidden food and drink than was good for us,” and published satirical versions of the Passover Hagadah. Some groups held a secularized Passover Seder where revolutionary songs, echoing the holiday’s theme of emancipation, were sung.[197] Radicalism also replaced religiosity on the Jewish Sabbath; Yiddish anarchist groups often held their weekly public lectures on Friday evenings (and their English-language lectures on Sundays), and anarchists would privately host shabes dinners where traditional gefulte fish was served but the songs of David Edelstadt replaced religious liturgy.[198] In September 1904 the general secretary of the Workmen’s Circle, Leo Rozentsvayg, sparked weeks of debate in the Yiddish anarchist and socialist press with a letter to the Fraye Arbayter Shtime condemning Circle members who attended Rosh Hashanah prayer services as “three-day-a-year Jews” and “traitors.” Orthodoxy and radicalism were framed in sharply antagonistic terms, although as Rozentsvayg’s letter revealed, some Jews tried to juggle commitments to both.[199]
Radical anti-religious efforts met with fierce opposition from observant and assimilated Jews, who in 1889 pressured the owner of Claredon Hall to back out of his contract with the Pioneers of Liberty, forcing New York’s first Yom Kippur Ball to relocate at the last minute to the Labor Lyceum in Brooklyn, where attendees heard speeches from Johann Most, Saul Yanovsky, Roman Lewis, and the socialist M. Zametkin. The following year the opposition succeeded in getting the mayor to close the Labor Lyceum for the holiday, again forcing the anarchists to find an alternate venue. In 1893 a Yom Kippur ball was held without incident at Claredon Hall, but the following day a group of angry Jews, who the paper pointedly labeled “pogromists,” ransacked the Fraye Arbayter Shtime’s offices at 11 Pike Street.[200] In Chicago, a group of Jewish businessmen and politicians hired a corporate attorney to prevent a “Grand Yom Kippur Concert and Ball” from being held there in 1905.[201]
Most commentators have viewed the anarchists’ anti-religious campaign as an unmitigated failure that drove potential recruits away from the movement. Almost all cite a passage from Isidore Kopeloff’s memoir in which he states, “The war against God…played a great part in the decrease of anarchist influence in Jewish life.” But Rebecca Margolis notes that Kopeloff also wrote of the first Yom Kippur Ball: “Perhaps the Pioneers gained more from the negative publicity associated with the event, than if it had taken place quietly.”[202] In fact, there is little evidence that such activities offended the majority of the Lower East Side’s Jews, who had little commitment to Judaism, did not attend synagogue, and had “a live-and-let-live attitude toward private religious practice.”[203] New York’s first Yom Kippur Ball attracted an audience of 2,000—a full 1% of the city’s estimated Jewish population. The following year another 2,000 people turned out for a meeting at Cooper Union to protest the denial of the Labor Lyceum to the anarchists. Joseph Cohen called Yom Kippur Balls “a very popular institution among the people,” and Margolis agrees with this assessment, concluding that they “enjoyed mass support in the 1890s” and “created visibility and generated support for the anarchist cause.”[204] At the very least, the period in which these activities were most visible (1889–1891) coincided with the peak of the first wave of Jewish anarchism rather than its decline.
The support that these events drew came, quite intentionally, at the expense of respect for traditional Jewish authorities. As Matthew Frye Jacobson notes, a Yom Kippur Ball “was clearly meant not to demonstrate national solidarity, but to challenge the traditional lines of authority within the ‘nation.’“[205] Because the minority of religiously observant Jewish immigrants was unlikely to provide recruits for the anarchist movement, the anarchists lost little by alienating them; rather, they aimed their anti-religious activities at the mass of Jews already estranged from Judaism. They gradually replaced Yom Kippur Balls with less confrontational “Yom Kippur gatherings” and Yom Kippur picnics, but such events still served to separate Jewish identity from Judaism. Anarchists “imparted a new revolutionary content to traditional popular activities, creating a kind of alternative society, or counterculture,” in which anarchism and class solidarity replaced religious bonds.[206]
*** 2.6 Anarchism, Nationalism, and Yidishkayt
But why did anarchists tie their politics to their Jewishness at all? The simple answer is that they had to; at the very least, the use of Yiddish was essential for reaching out to their coworkers and neighbors. As the anarchist worker Morris Nadelman put it, “I feel myself so much at home when I speak Yiddish….English is too artificial. Yiddish, the mame-loshen [mother tongue], is something you’re born with, just like your mother’s milk—it’s right there. And that’s how you feel about it.”[207] But more than this, circumstances forced all Russian Jews to have, as Paul Avrich notes, “an intense consciousness of being Jewish.”[208]
In Russia their Jewishness had dictated their life opportunities and identified them, during periods of popular anti-Semitism, as targets of mob violence. The anarchist Joseph Cohen was a three-year-old boy in Minsk when the pogroms of 1881 occurred and recorded in his memoirs, “My very first recollections are those which impressed upon me that I was born a Jew, a scion of a persecuted race suffering oppression, misery and injustice all through the ages.” Even those Jews, like Emma Goldman, who “never felt particularly Jewish” and focused their attention on English-language activities aimed at American-born workers, could not avoid being “marked” through the common everyday practices of others as Jews and members of the “Hebrew race.”[209]
The act of racial marking was central to the earliest Yiddish anarchist statement on “The Jewish Question,” published by Moyshe Katts as a series of articles in the first issues of Di Varhayt. Katts set out to explain “what after all binds together the Jewish people and why the Jews exist [after] so long more or less intact.” He argued that Jews were neither a nation (natsie), because they lacked a territory of their own and a language common to all Jews, nor a religious group (religie), because of the existence of non-religious Jews such as himself. Rather, they were a people (folk), and the basis of their common identity as a people was their shared experiences of oppression dating back to “the beginning of their history.” In sum, “hate and persecution against them binds Jews together.” Katts located the source of this persecution in anti-Semitic ruling classes. The persistence of both official and unofficial prejudice in “civilized” countries like Germany, he argued, demonstrated that the Haskalah strategy of assimilation was a dead end, and even in the United States scientific and political elites propagated anti-Semitism under the guise of “the immigration question.” The interests of Jewish workers (Katts did not discuss Jewish capitalists) therefore coincided with those of workers of all nationalities: all stood to gain from uniting to overthrow the capitalist class and its political allies. “The Jewish question will come to disappear only then,” he wrote, “when the social question has been solved.” Implied in his argument was the expectation that Jews would cease to exist as a distinct group with the disappearance of anti-Semitism.[210]
David Edelstadt expressed similar views during the first decade of the movement. The poet was clearly aware of and concerned with the particular hardships faced by Jews, who he called “our unfortunate people (umgliklekhn folk).” In verse he lamented, “Brothers, we wear a threefold chain— / as Jews, as slaves, as thinkers, / we are hunted and tormented to death / by anti-Semites and executioners!” However, like Katts, Edelstadt implied that it was uncertain Jews would remain a people in the post-revolutionary future.[211] Some Yiddish anarchists at the time, however, did not even believe that “the Jewish question” was worth discussing in a country free of pogroms and anti-Semitic legislation; when Katts first visited the offices of Di Varhayt to inquire about responses to his articles, Jacob Merison brusquely responded, “Ah, what? Rubbish! Discover America!”[212]
But more complex and nuanced understandings of the relationship between Jewish identity, radicalism, and the Yiddish language also emerged. This can be seen in the life and work of Alexander Harkavy, the foremost Yiddish lexicographer of his day. Harkavy was born in 1863 in the Russian village of Navaredok, and after receiving an extensive education and mastering Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Russian, he joined the Am Oylom movement in 1882 and sailed for America, meeting David Edelstadt in Liverpool en route. After Harkavy’s group failed to establish an agricultural colony he worked a variety of odd jobs, before becoming a language teacher and turning his attention to the study of Yiddish.[213] His subsequent political and educational activities, however, seemingly traversed the entire spectrum of Jewish politics: he was a Jewish nationalist and proto-Zionist, a freethinking anarchist and internationalist, a proponent of Yiddish, and an advocate of Americanization—all at the same time.
During a brief residence in Montreal in 1887 Harkavy founded the first North American section of Hovevei Tsion (Lovers of Zion), a movement promoting Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. But after returning to the United States he affiliated with the Pioneers of Freedom and in 1890 he edited the short-lived freethought paper Der Idisher Progres (Jewish Progress) in Baltimore. Though nominally an anarchist, Harkavy preferred not to identify himself with any one political faction and “guarded against narrow partiality.”[214] Accordingly, in 1897–98 he edited the nonpartisan radical journal Der Nayer Gayst (The New Spirit), which Paul Buhle describes as “the first aesthetics journal of the U.S. Left.” It counted some of New York’s most prominent Yiddish anarchists among its contributors, including Joseph Bovshover, Michael Cohn, Joseph Jaffa, and Moyshe Katts. One of Harkavy’s own contributions playfully combined his linguistic studies with his political sympathies by invoking the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; in an article about cognates and word borrowing across languages, using the Yiddish word royb (robbery) as an example, Harkavy concluded with the comment, “Not for nothing did Proudhon say: Property is robbery! (Aygenthum iz royb).”[215]
Through his lexicographical work Harkavy “almost single-handedly created an intellectual environment conducive to Yiddish in an assimilation-prone society while mastering Yiddish lexicography of the twentieth century.” He also worked to help Jewish immigrants adjust to American life. In 1891 he published his first of many instructional language books for Jewish immigrants, Der englisher lehrer (The English Teacher), followed quickly by the first of his many Yiddish-English dictionaries. Between 1892 and 1899 Harkavy also wrote short Yiddish primers on Christopher Columbus, George Washington, the Constitution, and American citizenship, and from 1904 to 1909 he worked for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society teaching American history and civics at Ellis Island. All the while, he remained active in radical circles.[216] The seeming contradictions between Harkavy’s undertakings only make sense when viewed through the lens of radical cosmopolitanism—a coherent worldview based in both anarchist ideology and the immigrant experience, and shared by many of Harkavy’s anarchist contemporaries. Harkavy’s forays into Jewish colonization movements were responses to the dangers that anti-Semitism posed to Russian Jewry, and neither Am Oylom nor Hovevei Tsion was predicated on the idea of establishing a Jewish state—rather, both aimed to relocate Jews to more hospitable environs where they might have the opportunity to rebuild a secular Jewish society as an autonomous segment of their host country. In a 1907 lecture in London under the auspices of the anarchist Arbayter Fraynd Group, Harkavy described the Jews positively as an “international nation” and argued that during their time in the Diaspora (goles) they “had created more, accomplished more in all realms of human culture.” Jewish autonomy and Jewish statelessness, in other words, were not at odds with each other in Harkavy’s view.[217]
His “Americanization” work, meanwhile, was done in recognition that adaptation to America required the acquisition of English and a passing familiarity with American history and politics. Although his language books have been hailed as “an important instrument in the Americanization of the Jewish immigrants,” they also taught English to opponents of the American government like the anarchist Abraham Frumkin, who subsequently aided Harkavy in the compilation of his 1898 Yidish-Englishes verterbukh (Yiddish-English Dictionary).[218] In accordance with radical cosmopolitan ideals, Harkavy believed that Jews who learned English could at the same time cultivate a unique Yiddish language and secular Yiddish culture that, in the absence of a Jewish nation-state and outmoded religion, would serve as the basis for their shared identity as a people. His vision, which came to be shared by most Yiddish anarchists, was of a bilingual, bicultural Jewish working class liberated from religious and patriotic dogmas, existing in cooperation with workers of other ethnoracial backgrounds.
This cosmopolitanism was put to the test in April 1903, when the world was shocked by a three-day pogrom in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev (now part of Romania) that left nearly fifty Jewish residents dead and hundreds injured. Like the pogroms of 1881, it caused many Jewish radicals to question the prospects of their universalist or cosmopolitan ideals. Isidore Kopeloff found, “My entire previous cosmopolitanism, internationalism et cetera vanished with one blow, like a barrel with the bottom suddenly knocked out.”[219] A similar reaction was had by Hillel Solotaroff, who published series of articles titled “Serious Questions” in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime that “was soon exciting the entire Jewish radical world.” According to Solotaroff,
The history of the past fifty years is living testimony to the facts that neither the progress of nations, the light of science, nor even the brotherly ideals of fighters for freedom or advocates of social ideals in any way prevented the persecutions or eased the suffering and pain of the Jewish people…To preach internationalism to the Jewish people is to preach its destruction.
Solotaroff, a repentant Moyshe Katts, and a number of other radicals called a meeting at 412 Grand Street, “where before a packed hall they all declared themselves Jewish nationalists.”[220]
Solotaroff’s nationalism, however, was not of a statist variety. Like his fellow radical cosmopolitans, Solotaroff rejected the universalist goal of a homogeneous humanity and argued that the Jews constituted a people with a right to an autonomous existence—and, he now insisted, an autonomous territory was also necessary for their survival. But this territory would be an anarchist communist one, composed of communes each made up of separate ethnic groups or combinations of ethnic groups (felker) according to their own desires, all freely federated in “one union of all mankind” (almenshlikhen farband). The only suitable territory for Jewish resettlement, he claimed, was Palestine, not for religious or historical reasons but because it was “underdeveloped.”[221] But Saul Yanovsky and the vast majority of Yiddish anarchists condemned such “heretical” ideas, and the Fraye Arbayter Shtime maintained Moyshe Katts’s previous position that only revolution could solve “the Jewish question” in Russia.[222]
However, this surprising combination of anarchism and Jewish nationalism gained force with the arrival on Chaim Zhitlowsky in October 1904. Zhitlowsky came to New York with Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, “the grandmother of the Russian Revolution,” as an emissary of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, a neo-Populist movement with a program that verged on anarchism. Many Yiddish anarchists viewed the Socialist Revolutionaries as their counterparts in Russia and several, including Moyshe Katts, Isaac Benequit and Emma Goldman joined sections of the party that were established in America.[223] During his eighteen-month tour of the United States, Zhitlowsky also spoke to Yiddish audiences promoting what he called “progressive Jewish nationalism,” based on three main tenets: Jews were a nation (natsion) bound by a common Yiddish language and culture; it was the duty of Jewish intellectuals to elevate this secular Yiddish culture; and the survival of the Jewish people necessitated Jewish self-governance within a territory its own (though not necessarily in Palestine).[224] Zhitlowsky’s revolutionary socialism and Jewish territorialism closely approximated the views of “nationalist” anarchists like Hillel Solotaroff, resulting in a fusion of territorialism and anarchism.
According to Zhitlowsky, when he arrived in New York he “found among the local intelligentsia only the following three men with an awakened progressive-national consciousness: Moyshe Katts, Joseph Barondess, and Dr. Hillel Solotaroff.” Soon other veterans of the anarchist movement rallied behind Zhitlowsky and his territorialism, including Isidore Kopeloff and Jacob Merison. In 1906 Zhitlowsky founded the short-lived socialist territorialist journal Dos Folk (The People), which was edited by Solotaroff and Katts after Zhitlowsky returned to Europe. In 1908 Zhitlowsky returned and, with the aid of Kopeloff and Merison, founded the more successful Dos Naye Lebn (The New Life). When Zhitlowsky again departed for Europe in 1913 Merison became the journal’s editor, but quit the following year after Zhitlowsky repeatedly postponed his own return.[225]
These anarchists embraced territorialism with different degrees of commitment. Jacob Merison remained active and prominent in the Yiddish anarchist movement and through his theoretical writings built up a reputation as “the Kropotkin of the Lower East Side.” Hillel Solotaroff also remained an anarchist because, according to Chaim Weinberg, he
couldn’t go over to the nationalists wholeheartedly…But at the same time, he separated himself more and more from the anarchists, because he felt that they disapproved of his nationalist inclinations. He was never really accepted by the nationalists as one of their own, and among us, the Jewish anarchists, he was gradually less and less remembered.[226]
Kopeloff, by contrast, completely disengaged from the anarchist movement. So did Moyshe Katts, who submerged himself in the Socialist Revolutionaries and the territorialist movement, though he remained close to his old comrades and personally considered himself “to be the same anarchist as ever.” After moving to Philadelphia around 1915 Katts joined the labor Zionist organization Poale Zion.[227]
Poale Zion, like socialist territorialism, had certain affinities with anarchism. The main ideologues of the movement, Nachman Syrkin and Ber Borochov, formulated a “minimum program” for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and a socialist “maximum program” that they sometimes described in strikingly anarchistic language. Syrkin, a former territorialist and frequent contributor to the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, once described the Jewish homeland he sought as one in which “the state becomes superfluous: in its place comes the union of free producers.” Borochov, who migrated to the United States in 1914, declared the following year:
I am an anarchist-socialist. I regard the politics of state and organized coercion as a means of protecting private property which will perforce be abolished by a collective organization of labor. I am a Marxist without the Zukunftsstaat [future state]. Be that as it may, I regard the differences between socialists and anarchists as…a question for the far off future, not a question that warrants the split in today’s labor movement.[228]
A small group of anarchists and former anarchists was therefore attracted to Poale Zion.
The Yiddish literary critic Moshe Shtarkman concluded, “The fact, that pioneers of Yiddish anarchism in America later also became pioneers of Zionist socialism in this country, shows only their logical conclusion: to free mankind requires each to begin with freeing his own people (folk).”[229] The territorialism of anarchists like Solotaroff was a straightforward attempt to synthesize radical cosmopolitan ideas with the perceived need for an autonomous Jewish existence. Such a reconciliation was ideologically possible because socialist territorialism, like the earlier Am Oylom and Hovevei Tsion movements, was not an inherently statist pursuit. It could, Solotaroff argued, take the form of a federation of self-administered communes without need for a state—the goal of all communist anarchists.
However, the popularity of Solotaroff’s views should not be overstated. The entire American Zionist movement, including its territorialist and socialist components, was “marginal and precarious” before 1914. When Moyshe Katts joined Poale Zion, he joined a politically insignificant party which counted only 1,500 members nationwide in 1905, and slightly fewer by 1924. The territorialist Dos Naye Lebn, edited by Zhitlowsky and Merison, reached a circulation of 3,000 in 1909, at a time when Yanovsky’s stridently anti-Zionist and anti-territorialist Fraye Arbayter Shtime printed 15,000 copies weekly.[230] The “heretical” fusion of anarchism and Jewish nationalism won over a very small fraction of the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement, and those who left anarchism for territorialism or labor Zionism moved from one minority Left tendency to a much smaller one.
The majority of Jewish anarchists saw Jewish nationalism in all of its forms as irreconcilable with cosmopolitanism and libertarianism. Emma Goldman recalled that Zhitlowsky “never tired urging upon me that as a Jewish daughter I should devote myself to the cause of the Jews,” but she replied that she could not as she “had become aware that social injustice is not confined to my own race.”[231] The March 1906 inaugural issue of Goldman’s Mother Earth included an article that observed, “The Jewish circles in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities of America are aroused over the visit of a spectre call Nationalism, alias Territorialism.” The author, a Jewish anarchist who signed the piece only as “Internationalist,” argued,
True, the territorialists will have nothing to do with an organized Jewish state; they aim for a free commune. But, if it is certain that small states are subordinated to great powers and merely endured by them, it is still more certain that free communes within powerful states, built on coercion and land robbery, have even less chance for a free existence.
The article further argued that those radicals who hopped on the territorialist bandwagon had “retrogressed from a universal view of things to a philosophy fenced in by boundary lines, from the glorious conception that ‘the world is my country’ to the conception of exclusiveness,” and therefore “deserve severe censure.” “To confront one brutal outbreak of national sentiment with the demand for another form of national sentiment,” it warned, “means only to lay the foundation for a new persecution that is bound to come sooner or later.”[232] As if to confirm this prediction, a distinct anti-Arab current surfaced at this same time in the writings of Hillel Solotaroff, whose vision of autonomous ethnic communes gave way to the argument that historical laws demonstrated that the “superior” culture of Jewish settlers in Palestine would inevitably come to replace the “primitive” culture of the Palestinians.[233]
In 1907 Peter Kropotkin weighed in on the topic in response to a letter from an anarchist and Poale Zion member in Paris. In two articles originally published in a Russian anarchist paper in London and republished in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, the venerated revolutionist argued against Zionism on several grounds. First, since “capital has become international,” the workingclass struggle against it had to be international and not national; second, Palestine’s geography and climate were unsuitable for large-scale agriculture and colonization; third, the Jews were historically not an agricultural people and hence were unsuited to work the land even if settlement was feasible; and fourth, the socialist current within the Zionist movement was a minority that would be overruled by religious and traditionalist elements, resulting in a theocratic state. Kropotkin did concede that the nationalist struggles of “oppressed peoples”—including Jews—were progressive and just, if only because so long as minority populations were engaged in struggles for national rights they could not be engaged in struggle for social revolution. However, he held that Zionism was not a true struggle for Jewish rights; rather, Jews should fight to sustain their distinctive language and culture, which enriched humanity as a whole, while struggling for civil equality wherever they resided within the Diaspora.[234]
Saul Yanovsky similarly maintained that Jews required and benefited from a unique Yiddish culture, but any sort of Jewish territorial settlement in Palestine or elsewhere would inevitably require a state to secure its existence and hence patriotic loyalty to that state—thereby becoming the very antithesis of anarchism.[235] Eventually even Solotaroff seemed to recognize the truth of Yanovsky’s argument; following the First World War he abandoned his territorialism for Zionism and, though he still tried to convince his fellow anarchists that a Jewish state would somehow “blossom to become an anarchist-communist society,” he reportedly declared at a memorial for the Haymarket martyrs: “I still am for a Jewish homeland, because if ever I will be hanged, I would prefer to be hanged by a Jewish hangman.”[236] Though tongue-in-cheek, this comment nevertheless betrayed Solotaroff’s recognition of the inherent contradiction between his anarchism and his support for an ethnically exclusive state-building project.
In the place of a state-based nationalism, most Jewish anarchists instead identified Jews as a folk without need of a territorial homeland. Rather, Jewishness was defined through secular Yiddish language and culture, as encapsulated in the term yidishkayt. B. Rivkin famously argued that Yiddish culture functioned as a “spiritual territory for the territoryless Jews.” And it is no coincidence that Rivkin, though an eclectic radical in the tradition of Alexander Harkavy, was firmly in the anarchist camp.[237] Herman Frank, who edited the Fraye Arbayter Shtime from 1940 to 1951, identified the central difference between Jewish nationalism and anarchist yidishkayt:
[Jews] can and may…freely live their lives in their manner and in their language, on the basis of a mature humane personality and engaged development of the spiritual humanity and the ethical-Jewishness (etish-aleidishe) in each Jewish person. This is the point and intent of ethno-cultural freedom in contrast to harmful and world-destroying “ethnocentrism.”[238]
The “ethno-centrism” of Zionism and other nationalist projects rested on exclusivist logic, whereas the “ethno-cultural freedom” allowed by radical cosmopolitanism valued the contributions of all cultures to humanity as a diverse whole.
As Irving Howe notes, proponents of yidishkayt “held fast to the premise that modern Jews could be faithful to their own traditions while becoming citizens of the world. The culture of Yiddishkeit [sic], or at least its ‘advanced’ secular portion, set itself the goal of yoking the provincial to the universal.”[239] And as recent studies of American Jews and racial ideology observe, yidishkayt posited Jews as a culturally-defined people (folk) rather than a nation or a race (rase) and therefore “did not rest upon invidious comparison for its existential meaning.”[240] The anarchist Ahrne Thorne, who edited the Fraye Arbayter Shtime in its final years before it closed down in 1977, explained in an interview, “I have no country of my own, so to speak—I am a citizen of America, I consider myself part of American society—but Yiddish is my homeland....To anarchists, your identity, [is] what you feel, [it means] be true to yourself; if you feel like a Jew, fine, perfect; if you love Yiddish, great, build it.”[241]
*** 2.7 Revisionism and Revolution
Territorialism and Zionism were not the only challenges to the anarchism of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime. Throughout his career Yanovsky was accused by opponents within the movement of being a “despotic” editor, and they made numerous attempts to launch rival publications.[242] Moreover, the meteoric rise of the new Socialist Party of America in the Lower East Side, the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the failed Russian revolution of 1905 all produced divergent currents within Yiddish anarchism. Joseph Cohen thus called the years from 1902 to 1913 “the period of revision in our movement.”[243]
Many younger anarchists, including Cohen, found Yanovsky’s brand of anarchism too tame. These dissidents found somewhat unlikely allies in a group of intellectuals who had grown estranged from Yanovsky, including Jacob Merison and Hillel Solotaroff, as well as Moyshe Katts before his conversion to territorialism. The latter two had supported Emma Goldman’s defense of Leon Czolgosz against Yanovsky’s condemnations, and Merison and Solotaroff had disagreed with Yanovsky in 1899 about what kind of publication the movement needed.[244] One of the main centers of this opposition was Philadelphia’s Radical Library Group, which was founded in 1905 and grew to include a membership of two hundred.[245] In 1906 members of the Radical Library, along with Merison and Solotaroff, founded the paper Broyt un Frayhayt (Bread and Freedom). Independently, the young anarchist Julius Edelsohn began publishing Lebn un Kamf (Life and Struggle) in New York. Neither paper, however, survived the year.[246] In 1911 a new effort was undertaken by the Federated Anarchist Groups of America, a brief-lived coalition of dissident Yiddish anarchist groups including the Radical Library and New York’s Anarkhie Group. The front page of the first issue of the federation’s paper, Dos Fraye Vort (Free Speech), featured an article by Hillel Solotaroff condemning the “official anarchism” of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and promoting a “new” anarchism.[247] But the young federation was divided over what this new anarchism should look like.
Since the late 1890s Jacob Merison had been urging anarchists to abandon their “taboos” and approach their work in practical terms, which included supporting political reforms that were in the interests of the working class and taking part in electoral politics “to spread decentralizing principles of government and to counteract the manifest tendencies of State Socialism.” These revisionist ideas prompted widespread criticism, including a series of rebuttals by Yanovsky. But others, looking at the growth of the Socialist party and seeing revolution as an increasingly distant possibility, supported Merison’s stance. Moreover, the federation needed figures of Merison’s stature, and his ideas won over enough supporters that the organization deadlocked on the question of including political participation in its declaration of principles. The Fraye Arbayter Shtime therefore dismissed the Fraye Vort because it countenanced electoral politics, and hence was not anarchist. Only three issues of the upstart paper appeared.[248] In 1913 a new organization, the Zsherminal (Germinal) Group, was formed in the Bronx and published a similarly short-lived journal, and in 1913–14 the Federated Anarchist Groups put out another publication called Frayhayt. The circulation of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, however, only grew. Meanwhile, the labor union landscape had changed dramatically. After a brief upsurge of cloakmakers’ organizing in the late 1890s, the United Hebrew Trades had broken away from the Socialist Labor Party as part of a larger schism led by the independent socialist Forverts. Then, in 1900, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was chartered by the AFL as the first nation-wide union in the garment industry. It was also unique within the AFL in its advocacy of socialism, and from 1903 until 1923 the union’s presidency was occupied by socialists. Yiddish anarchists also actively participated in the ILGWU, though as junior partners. When the union began its campaign for a general strike of cloakmakers in 1908, it met with representatives from both the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and the Forverts to garner their support, and called on anarchist speaker Chaim Weinberg to help agitate among its members.[249]
For a few years the revolutionary syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, also appeared within the garment industry. Many of its Jewish adherents were members of the SLP, who made up one of the main factions within the union until 1908 when the IWW repudiated all participation in politics in favor of direct action.[250] Anarchists also constituted a vocal minority—and an increasingly influential one—within the IWW, alongside left-wing socialists and militant industrial unionists. At least a dozen anarchists of eight different nationalities attended the union’s founding as official delegates, including Josef Peukert and Haymarket widow Lucy Parsons.[251] Although no Yiddish anarchists were present, many were enthusiastic about the new organization. Between 1905 and 1909 at least fifteen predominantly Jewish IWW unions were formed in and around New York, with a combined membership of a few thousand. The SLP’s Yiddish paper Der Arbayter (The Worker) became a virtual organ of the IWW and in 1906 the union’s various garment workers’ locals combined into IWW Local 59, which included four branches. Local 59 led several strikes in 1907, but with meager results.[252]
The new union faced bitter opposition from both the ILGWU and the Forverts, which had affiliated with the Socialist Party after the latter was founded in 1901. Although the IWW was best known for “organizing the unorganized,” in New York’s garment industry it instead poached most of its membership from existing unions, many of which the Socialist Party controlled. In a few instances during the struggle between the two organizations, each supplied its own members as strikebreakers against the other.[253]
Anarchists were caught in the middle. They had labored for years to help establish a strong union for Jewish garment workers, which now existed in the form of the ILGWU, but they resented the Socialist Party’s dominance of that organization. In principle they agreed with the syndicalism of the IWW, but they were wary of the SLP’s influence within it. Then, when the SLP was forced out of the IWW, most of that union’s Yiddish branches went out of existence. After 1908 only a few die-hard anarchist members, most of whom held dual memberships in the ILGWU, maintained a small branch in Brooklyn.[254]
As the IWW faded away, the ILGWU ascended. In late 1909 Local 25 led the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” a general strike of mostly female shirtwaist makers, who won settlements in 339 of 352 struck firms.[255] This was followed by the “Great Revolt” of 1910, in which 50,000–60,000 mostly male cloak and suit makers participated. One of the important figures to emerge out of this strike was the wall-eyed, street-tough organizer Morris Sigman (Zigman). Having arrived in the United States in 1903, Sigman became a presser in a cloak shop where he formed an independent union that affiliated with the SLP’s Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance in 1904, and subsequently with the IWW when the Alliance transferred all of its branches into that organization in 1905. Sigman then became an organizer for IWW Local 59, but by 1909 he had joined the ILGWU. He had also become a staunch anarchist, and around 1909 or 1910 was appointed assistant secretary of the Anarchist Federation of New York. Alexander Berkman, who founded the Federation in 1908, remembered Sigman as “a man of sterling character and unflinching courage in behalf of his ideals,” and “a most reliable comrade.” During the 1910 strike Sigman was also chairman of the ILGWU’s picket committee and a member of the strike settlement committee, and in 1914 he was elected secretary treasurer of the union.[256] Another Yiddish anarchist involved the 1910 strike was the Romanian-born Abraham Mitchell, a vice-president of the ILGWU.[257]
Even as individual anarchists rose within the ranks within the ILGWU, however, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime maintained an ambivalent attitude toward the organization. The novel collective bargaining structure that came out of the settlement of the 1910 strike, the “Protocol of Peace,” was based on a Progressive vision of class harmony engineered through arbitration by impartial experts—flying in the face of anarchist principles. When Isaac Hourwich publicly condemned the Protocol in 1913, therefore, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime supported his position. (Sigman, however, opposed Hourwich’s campaign.)[258]
While the Fraye Arbayter Shtime was battling critics and political heretics and the ILGWU and IWW faced off, a third development strongly influenced the Yiddish anarchist movement: the emergence of Russian anarchism and the Russian revolution of 1905. In 1903, the first anarchist group within the Russian Empire was founded in the Polish textile center of Bialystok by Russian-speaking Jewish revolutionaries who had broken with the socialist General Jewish Labor Bund and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Far removed from the Yiddish, evolutionary anarchism of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, the anarchist movement that emerged in Bialystok, Odessa, and elsewhere was part of general oppositional current within Russian socialism that advocated violent revolution, terrorism and armed “expropriation,” and condemned social democrats as “opportunists” and “compromisers”[259]
By 1903 Jewish workers in Bialystok were particularly desperate, as the introduction of power looms squeezed thousands of them out of the workforce. Weavers therefore constituted the largest contingent of the new anarchist movement. Morris Shulmeister recalled, “Many of the bosses—even Jewish bosses—preferred to hire Polish weavers because the Jews wouldn’t work on Saturday. Jewish and Polish workers armed themselves and sometimes fought over the right to work. That is how we won the right to a job.” The anarchists “were armed also for our revolutionary activities.”[260] By its height in 1905–7, the early Russian anarchist movement included an estimated 5,500 members across the Empire.[261]
During the revolutionary upheaval of 1905 most Russian anarchists “applauded indiscriminate, reckless, and boundless violence.” Estimates for the number of people assassinated at anarchist hands—employers, police, soldiers, etc.—range from over 3,000 during 1905–7 to more than 10,000 between 1901 and 1916 (a figure that is certainly inflated).[262]
Although this extraordinary degree of violence was alien to the anarchism of the Lower East Side, many in America defended it as a necessity in the context of Russian anti-Semitism and anti-radicalism. A correspondent for Mother Earth argued, “Terrorism, in Russia, is a phase of warfare essential to the side of the people because of the peculiar circumstances under which the revolution is being conducted,” and was “not merely justified—it is a practical necessity.”[263]
The outbreak of pogroms during the fighting of 1905–7 made the struggle especially salient to Jewish migrants. Many aided their comrades in Russia, either materially or by returning in person. Emma Goldman helped to arrange for arms to be smuggled into Russia by the German anarchist sailor Eric B. Morton, and in her statement to the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam held in June 1907 she reported, “Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been sent from America to assist our Russian brothers…Scores of our Jewish comrades have also returned to Russia to aid by word and deed the heroic struggle against Tsardom.”[264] Among those who returned was “Victor Rifkind” (Rivkin?), who was “well known in the Anarchist centers of Paris and New York” and, after going back to Bialystok, helped establish an illegal anarchist printing house. He then travelled to Warsaw where he took part in a terrorist group before being captured and executed along with fifteen other anarchists.[265] Another return migrant was Joseph Spivak, who had come to New York in 1902 but travelled to Uman in Ukraine to take part in the revolution and the Jewish self-defense movement.[266]
With the failure of this revolution, a new wave of Russian Jewish radicals migrated to America, including many members of the newborn anarchist movement. In an attempt to attract these migrants, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime Group founded a daily anarchist paper, Di Abend Tsaytung (The Evening Newspaper). From the beginning, however, the paper had problems with deadlines and distribution, and instead of modeling its contents on other daily papers it was “a kind of miniature edition” of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime. The experiment lasted only two months.[267] Most of this new generation of Russian-born anarchists, moreover, “did not consider Yanovsky and the Fraye Arbayter Shtime group to be real anarchists or revolutionists and had a low opinion of them.” They instead gravitated to the more militant IWW or formed their own revolutionary organizations.[268]
The most important of the latter was the Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada (UORW), founded in New York in 1908. The majority of its members were ethnic Russians, of whom around 45,000 migrated to the United States in the tumultuous period of 1904–8, but there was a disproportionate number of Jews among both the organization’s leadership and rank-and-file. By the spring of 1914 the UORW had a membership of 7,000, and in 1919 its New York branch counted 237 dues-paying members.[269] Prominent Jews within the organization included Maksim Raevsky (real name L. Fishelev), who had become an anarchosyndicalist in Paris before moving to New York where he edited the UORW paper Golos Truda (Voice of Labor); Khaym (“Efim”) Yartchuk, a former member of one of the first groups formed in Bialystok; and the carpenter Hyman (“Nikofor”) Perkus.[270] Jacob Kirilovsky, better known by his Russian penname Daniil Novomorskii, had been the foremost anarcho-syndicalist in Russia and was sent to a labor camp in Siberia in 1905, but escaped to New York the following year and contributed to both the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and Golos Truda.[271] In 1917 the Parisian anarchosyndicalist Volin (V. M. Eikhenbaum) and the young Jewish anarchist Rose Pesotta joined these figures.[272]
The UORW’s constitution, belatedly drafted in 1914, demonstrated a dual commitment to furthering the revolutionary movement in Russia and participating in the American labor movement. Its aims were:
To unite all Organizations of Russian Workers in the U.S. and Canada for the common struggle against Capitalism and Government.
To aid the movement of liberation in Russia.
To help the revolutionary actions of the American Workers…
To build up Organizations where there are none and to aid those already in existence.
The primary task of the organization was to “train the Working Class to [take] initiative and independent action in all its acts, thus educating it in the consciousness of the absolute necessity of a General Strike—of the Social Revolution.”[273]
Russian Jews also founded the Anarchist Red Cross in 1911, an organization dedicated to maintaining contact with and providing material aid to anarchists imprisoned in Russia. According to one former member, its New York branch had “more than a hundred” participants. Saul Yanovsky initially accused the Anarchist Red Cross of misusing the funds it raised, but with the aid of Alexander Berkman its members showed him their financial records and the Fraye Arbayter Shtime became a strong supporter of the organization.[274] Russian anarchist women meanwhile formed their own Women’s Society (Zhenskoe Obshchestvo).[275]
Like the pioneer generation of Jewish anarchist intellectuals, most of these radicals preferred to speak and read Russian, and identified themselves as Russian revolutionaries rather than Jews. Odessa-born anarchist Kate Wolfson, who came to New York in 1907, recalled, “We read the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, but we were more in the Russian movement than the Yiddish.”[276] Some, however, maintained a firmer foot in each camp. Former Socialist Revolutionary Party member Boris Yelensky arrived in Philadelphia in 1907 and gravitated toward anarchism under the influence of Yanovsky and Joseph Cohen, joining the Radical Library Group, the UORW, and the Anarchist Red Cross.[277] For those more inclined to visions of the general strike or armed revolution than education and incremental change, however, the IWW and UORW held far more appeal than the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and ILGWU, creating a generational divide within the movement. At the same time, the IWW and UORW offered Jewish anarchists important opportunities to collaborate with non-Jewish comrades— opportunities that were altogether too rare for the Yiddish movement.
*** 2.8 The Linguistic Conundrum
“The Yiddish anarchist movement,” wrote Joseph Cohen, “was a world unto itself.”[278] Cohen’s comment was meant to positively describe the depth and breadth of a political and cultural milieu within which Jewish migrants could live their entire lives: anarchist midwives like Helene Minkin and, for a time, Emma Goldman delivered babies; children attended anarchist schools and were cared for by anarchist doctors; workers joined anarchist-led unions and discussion groups; families read anarchist newspapers and attended anarchist picnics and speeches; and when they died their passing was marked with anarchist funerals. Israel Ostroff noted, “Anarchism gave the immigrants a sense of belonging, of family, community, common ideals and aspirations, which we desperately needed.”[279] This world, however, was an insular one, bounded geographically by the borders of Jewish neighborhoods and linguistically by the use of Yiddish, limiting interethnic and interracial collaboration.
From the earliest days of the movement, figures like Alexander Harkavy and David Edelstadt had urged Jewish workers to learn English—while simultaneously retaining Yiddish— in order to “unite with the American proletariat and take part in the great struggle for freedom of all workers in America.”[280] In the final issue of the first Fraye Gezelshaft in 1900, Jacob Merison closed the journal by declaring that Jews alone cannot bring about revolution and therefore needed to propagate their ideals in English in order to unite with other American workers.[281] Emma Goldman also criticized Jewish anarchists in the United States and Canada for being “still too Jewish, I fear, to really appreciate the great necessity of a wide-spread agitation in the language of the country they live in.”[282] By the turn of century Goldman had turned her focus to popularizing anarchism among native-born American workers and intellectuals, although she continued to deliver some lectures in Yiddish. When Alexander Berkman was released from prison in 1906 he joined Goldman in publishing Mother Earth and then founded his own English-language paper, The Blast (see Chapter 4). Because of these endeavors Goldman and Berkman became the best-known Jewish anarchists in the country and consequently in the historiography of American anarchism, but they were neither typical nor representative of the Jewish anarchist movement.
In a few instances Yiddish functioned to include non-Jews rather than exclude them. As already noted, the early movement was able to adopt Johann Most as its teacher because of the similarities between German and Yiddish. According to one of Most’s biographers, he “peppered his German with Yiddish, and demanded revolution of Jews who gathered around, peppered their Yiddish with German, and applauded.”[283] A more striking example is Rudolf Rocker, a German who first encountered Jewish anarchists in Paris in 1893. Moving to London in 1895, Rocker immersed himself in the Jewish anarchist movement of the East End, taught himself Yiddish, began contributing Yiddish articles to the Arbayter Fraynd in 1896, and two years later became editor of that paper. By the turn of the century Rocker had established himself on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the leading intellectuals of Yiddish-language anarchism—an anarchist “rabbi” to some—and he was still an immensely influential figure when he migrated to the United States in 1931.[284] American-born anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre meanwhile became “the apostle of anarchism to the Jewish immigrants of the Philadelphia ghetto, learning to read and to some extent to speak and write the Yiddish language.” De Cleyre was herself converted from socialism to anarchism after a debate with a Jewish anarchist in Pittsburgh, and she was an active member of Philadelphia’s Radical Library Group, which in 1905 became Branch 273 of the Workmen’s Circle. In turn, Chaim Weinberg recalled, “All of our comrades learned the English language with Voltairine’s help.”[285]
“Yiddish anarchist” was therefore a category of identity that allowed for the inclusion of non-Jewish speakers of Yiddish, and that left open the possibility of multiple attachments— bilingual migrants could be both Yiddish anarchists and English-speaking “American” anarchists at the same time. The Yiddish term genose (comrade), moreover, was used to refer to all anarchists, linguistically creating a common category of belonging based on ideology rather than language or ethnoracial background. Emma Goldman went so far as to liken ideology to biology when she told Rose Pesotta that anarchists, not Jews, were her true “flesh and blood.”[286]
For many Jewish women, anarchists of other nationalities literally became family, through marriage. Helene Minkin married Johann Most, Ukrainian Jewish anarchist Milly Witcop was unofficially “married” to Rudolf Rocker, and three of the most prominent men in the English-speaking anarchist movement married Jewish women: anarchist editors John H. Edelman and Harry Kelly were the husbands of the sisters Rachel and Mary Krimont, and Ferrer Center co-founder Leonard D. Abbot’s wife was the anarchist Rose Yuster. It was also common for Italian men in the movement, who outnumbered women among Italian American immigrants three to one, to enter into romantic relationships with Jewish anarchist women.[287]
Jewish anarchists also undertook sporadic attempts to formally organize across ethnic lines. In 1908 Alexander Berkman formed the Anarchist Federation in New York, intended to bring together anarchist groups of all nationalities. Although details are sketchy, the federation for certain included Yiddish, English, and German-language branches, and possibly others.[288] In 1914 a different umbrella organization, the International Anarchist Communist Federation, existed in New York and included Russian, Spanish, Italian, and Jewish members, but only one small Jewish group, the Friends of Art and Education, appears to have affiliated with it.[289] Yet by 1908 the New York Times Magazine noted a preponderance of interethnic radical activity in the Lower East Side, remarking, “To-day the anarchistic cafes of the East Side are crowded with the comrades of many nations, and they all resemble Babel as much as a cellar can resemble a tower.”[290]
Harmony did not always prevail between Jewish anarchists and their comrades, however. In one isolated case, several Jews and Italians, as well as Voltairine de Cleyre, were arrested on February 20, 1908 after an anarchist-organized march on Philadelphia’s city hall turned into a confrontation with police. The Fraye Arbayter Shtime collected “a very considerable sum” for those arrested in the “Broad Street Riot,” but after the release of de Cleyre and the Jewish defendants it did not turn over the money, claiming that donors specified that the funds were for the arrested Jews. Only after de Cleyre published a protest in Mother Earth was the money given to the defense fund for the Italians.[291]
The Ferrer Center was an important multiethnic anarchist institution with a high degree of Jewish participation, but its association with more militant elements of the movement brought trouble. During the financial downturn of 1914 a group of English-speaking Jewish, Latvian and Italian anarchists and IWW members associated with the Center organized a movement of the city’s unemployed. The leading figures of this movement included Alexander Berkman, Marie Ganz, Italian anarcho-syndicalist Carlo Tresca, second-generation Irish American anarchist Charles Plunkett, and twenty-one-year-old Frank Tannenbaum, described by Tresca as “a young, alert, restless, inspired and inspiring Jew.” The anarchists urged laid off workers to take direct action to meet their needs; Ganz advised them to go to uptown restaurants, order food, and “tell them to send the bill to the mayor,” and Tannenbaum led marches to the city’s churches demanding that they house and feed the needy, eventually leading to his imprisonment on charges of inciting to riot.[292]
In the midst of this campaign came news of the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado, where an attack on striking miners had left at least twenty-seven men, women, and children dead, including the Italian anarchist Carlo Costa and his wife and children.[293] Leaders of the unemployed movement now turned their attention to John D. Rockefeller, who owned the Colorado mine. Marie Ganz led a march to Rockefeller’s offices with the intent, she announced, to shoot him, but he was not in and Ganz was sentenced to sixty days hard labor.[294] A small group of others, including Berkman, Plunkett, Irish Canadian anarchist Arthur Caron, and the Latvian anarchists and sailors Carl Hanson and Charles Berg (the latter a veteran of the 1905 Russian Revolution), intended to make good on Ganz’s threat. According to Plunkett, “Caron, Hanson, and Berg had been collecting dynamite for Russia and storing it” in the apartment of Louise Berger, Hanson’s half-sister and fellow anarchist. They constructed a bomb intended for Rockefeller’s home in Tarrytown, New York, but the device accidentally detonated in Berger’s tenement on Lexington Avenue, killing Caron, Hanson and Berg, as well as occasional Ferrer Center attendee Marie Chavez. In the aftermath of the explosion the Ferrer Modern School was forced to relocate to rural Stelton, New Jersey, where an anarchist colony was formed, though the Ferrer Center remained open in New York until 1918.[295] The Fraye Arbayter Shtime, of course, frowned upon conspiracies and bombs, and did its best to distance itself from these events—and, consequently, English-speaking militants.
Jewish anarchists’ relationship with African Americans was even more complicated. Scholars like Karen Brodkin, Eric Goldstein, and David Roediger argue that most Americans did not consider Eastern European Jews to be fully “white,” nor did Jews conceive of themselves as such, until after the Second World War.[296] Jews faced many forms of “everyday anti-Semitism” and discrimination, but still enjoyed most of the legal protections enjoyed by “Anglo-Saxons.” Because they implicitly fell on the right side of the American “color line,” Jews were shielded from anything resembling the racism faced by people of color; Irving Howe remarks that African Americans “served, through bitter circumstance, as a kind of buffer for American Jews.”[297]
Yet according to Goldstein, “Eastern European Jews, unlike their acculturated counterparts of Central European origin, remained largely resistant to embracing whiteness as a central aspect of their identity in the years before World War I.” Instead, “Jewish workers enthusiastically embraced the comparison of themselves to black slaves, taking it to mean that they, too, would win their freedom. Jewish labor organizers frequently used the comparison to encourage union resolve,” including anarchists like David Edelstadt. The consumptive poet wrote a number of pieces dealing with African Americans—”our dark brothers (unzer brider shvartsen)”—and abolitionism. In one poem about John Brown he praised the white radical because, “To black slaves he was the first / to extend a brotherly hand,” and to recognize “that people of all races and colors / must and will be free!”[298] In 1911 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in a popular Yiddish edition translated by the anarchist Joseph Jaffa, and Rose Pesotta recalled that in the 1910s she and her schoolmates in Ukraine knew the book “almost by heart.”[299]
Yet before the First World War, African Americans were an abstraction to most of New York’s Jews rather than a presence in their lives. The Lower East Side remained an immigrant enclave, Harlem was largely a neighborhood of upwardly-mobile Jews, and virtually no African Americans were employed in the garment trades, rendering interactions between the two groups almost nonexistent.[300] But when Yiddish anarchists did encounter institutionalized racism they did not eagerly claim the advantages of whiteness. Thomas Eyges, who worked as a traveling insurance salesman, recalled riding a streetcar in the South and being repeatedly asked by the conductor to vacate a seat designated “for negroes only.” When he asked, “But what’s the difference?” the conductor responded, “If you say that again, I’ll throw you off the car headlong, see?” Eyges promptly exited the streetcar at its next stop.[301]
However, this antiracism rarely translated into collaboration. Examples of black-white anarchist organizing, or of African American anarchists in general, are extremely rare. Abraham Cahan recalled a German anarchist commemoration of the Paris Commune in the 1880s at which he met “a Negro, speaking good German, singing the revolutionary songs and wearing a red ribbon sash across his chest.”[302] The only nationally-known anarchist of color was Lucy Parsons, but her own ethnoracial background remains unclear; Parsons maintained throughout her life that she was of Mexican and Native American rather than African heritage, while most contemporaries (and her biographer) believed she was African American.[303] Whatever the case, in 1905–6 Parsons joined a group of Jewish anarchists in Chicago in publishing The Liberator— named after William Lloyd Garrison’s famous abolitionist newspaper—and in 1915–16 she collaborated with the Russian Jewish anarchist Aron Baron in editing The Alarm. Black Harlem radical Hubert Harrison agitated for the IWW and taught at the Ferrer Center in 1914–15, but then moved on to “race conscious” activism.[304]
Despite their commitment to cosmopolitanism and antiracism, Yiddish-speaking Jewish anarchists rarely translated these into lasting relationships with radicals and workers of other ethnoracial groups. But linguistic and cultural barriers, rather than racialized ones, were the main causes of this separation. Only when Jewish anarchists participated in English-speaking efforts could they have any hope of connecting with populations outside of the Jewish ghetto, save for Germans and Russians. And to abandon Yiddish for English would destroy the entire communal, cultural, and institutional base of the Jewish anarchist movement.
*** 2.9 Di Froy in Der Gezelshaft
The greatest shortfall of Yiddish anarchist cosmopolitanism was its failure to extend its equalitarian critique to gender. In the same inaugural issue of Mother Earth that featured its critique of territorialism, Emma Goldman succinctly stated the task of radical cosmopolitans: “The problem that confronts us to-day, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be oneself, and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own innate qualities.”[305] Goldman, however, was not writing about Jewish emancipation, but rather woman’s emancipation.
Traditional Jewish culture was rigidly divided according to patriarchal gender relations. Joseph J. Cohen recalled that even as a six-year-old he was the undisputed household authority when his father and older brother were away. Later, when studying at kheder, Cohen was instructed by a rabbi in whose opinion “females did not count; they were merely auxiliaries to the male, which alone justified their existence.”[306] In the very first line of her memoirs, Lucy Robbins Lang wrote: “My arrival in this world was a disappointment to a number of people, and especially to my grandfather, Reb Chaim.” The birth of a female grandchild brought “disappointment and humiliation,” and Lang’s grandfather ceased talking to her mother for a time. In her autobiography Emma Goldman described her father’s authoritarian and at times violent rule of his household. In a rage he once yelled at her, “Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefülte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children.”[307]
Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century traditional shtetl culture was going through a slow transformation under Western and secular influences.[308] As Lang relates, “Echoes of modernism reached Korostyshev,” her home town, and her mother “refused to shave her head and insisted on wearing her own hair, albeit under a small peruke. She was a pioneer. Because she had lived in a big city [Kiev] for a number of years, our house became the center of rebellion against the stringent rules that forbade all joy of living.” Similarly, Rose Pesotta’s unconventional father enrolled his daughters at a private girls’ school and hired a private tutor for them in the summers.[309] Even Emma Goldman’s father gave his daughter an education far beyond what a woman of her mother’s generation was likely to have received.
Migration and the subsequent adjustments to American life further altered patterns of family and work. Whereas female Jewish breadwinners in the Old World were looked upon with respect, “over time immigrants came to think of it as a source of embarrassment” and circumscribed married women’s sphere almost exclusively to the household. Thus, although Eastern Europe Jewish immigrants had one of the highest proportions of females among them— more than 40%—only 2% of married Jewish women in New York worked outside of the home in 1880, and only 1% did so in 1905.[310] In their place families sent their teenage children into the workforce in large numbers, and it was from among these unmarried factory girls that Yiddish anarchism drew most of its female recruits.
In anarchist rhetoric and ideology, women and men were equals. David Edelstadt’s poem “To Working Women” called on them to “Help us to carry the red banner / Forward, through storm, through dark nights / …We are fighting together, like strong lions / For freedom, for equality, for our principles!”[311] Marcus Ravage, for one, reported that this spirit of collaboration and equality actually materialized within Jewish radical circles:
A woman was but a human being in petticoats; therefore if you happened to want company at Warschauer’s, or felt the need of giving play to your opinions at the theater, you need not hesitate to address the first girl that came your way; therefore, also, you need not spare her in a battle of ideas; but therefore, also, you need not expect to be looked up to as a superior creature with a whole chain of exploded privileges and immunities. She was in every way your human equal and counterpart, whatever the animal differences between you might be.[312]
However, testimonies from numerous other anarchists, male and female alike, paint a more problematic picture.
Yiddish anarchism indisputably attracted a large number of women; in fact, it was probably the most gender-balanced segment of the anarchist movement in America. Contemporary press accounts and magazine illustrations consistently noted the sizable presence of women at anarchist lectures and social events; in Emma Goldman’s description, “Jewish meetings are always packed—with men, women, infants, and baby-carriages.”[313] In this respect the Yiddish movement was far in advance of its German predecessor, in which women had a marginal presence, and more in the tradition of Russian radicalism which had welcomed and idealized female revolutionists in the mold of the character of Vera from Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done?[314]
A few Jewish women made names for themselves as speakers. Emma Goldman was the most successful, but she delivered most of her speeches in English before non-Jewish audiences, as did Rebecca (“Becky”) Edelsohn and Marie Ganz, who both came to the fore during the demonstrations of the unemployed in 1914.[315] One of the few notable female Yiddish agitators was Sarah (“Sonia”) Edelshtat, the sister of David Edelstadt, whose entire family—parents and siblings—was involved in the movement. Another was Anna Netter, who “made a name for herself by her untiring activity in the anarchist and labour ranks,” but after marrying the anarchist Michael Cohn she contracted cancer and lived her remaining years as an invalid.[316] Female speakers remained a rare species. Although male anarchists celebrated outspokenly militant women, militancy remained a masculine trait. According to Alexander Berkman, “to be a true revolutionist” meant “to be a man, a complete MAN.”[317]
Abraham Frumkin recalled that women typically “excelled with their silence” at meetings. “But,” he added, “when it came to practical assignments and fund drives, they were in the forefront.”[318] Here a gendered division of labor, common to radical social movements throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, becomes visible. Men occupied the public and leadership roles, while women worked behind the scenes at the “practical” tasks and reproductive labor that sustained the movement. Such divisions were even more pronounced in living arrangements: Emma Goldman recalled that when she and Alexander Berkman shared an apartment out of which they did piece-work for a garment company, “Often we worked eighteen hours a day in the one light room of our flat, and I had to do the cooking and the housework besides.” Similarly, when a group of Jewish anarchists in Philadelphia established a cooperative house in 1906, they found, “The first difficulty was finding a radical woman who would cook and keep house.” The notion that cooking and cleaning could be done by male anarchists, or be evenly distributed among all members of a household, was not entertained even by Goldman.[319] The garment industry in which most anarchists worked was also stratified by sex, as were the garment unions. Occupations and wages were segmented by gender, and the cloakmakers’ unions and ILGWU worked to formalize such segmentation—despite the fact that the majority of the membership of the latter was female after 1909. One clause in the settlement agreement of the anarchist-led cloakmakers’ strike of 1890 read, “That no part of this agreement shall refer or apply to females employed by the Cloak Manufacturers’ Association.” Later, when ILGWU’s “Protocol of Peace” expanded to the “women’s trades” in 1913, it institutionalized higher pay rates for male occupations (cutters and pressers) and unequal rates for men and women working the same, less valued jobs. The national leadership of the ILGWU remained entirely male until 1916, when it acquired a single female vice-president. Even the direction of women’s strikes like the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” was taken over by male leaders, with women leading the struggle only at the shop level.[320] Nevertheless, anarchist women were among the staunchest rank-and-file union militants. They were the first on the picket lines and not afraid to clash with strikebreakers and the authorities; late in her life anarchist Fanny Breslaw recalled with a chuckle how during strikes she fought police by kicking them in the legs rather than punching them, so they could not identify who had struck them.[321] Activists like Breslaw and Rose Pesotta “chose to labor within the male-dominated ILGWU, while challenging positions taken by the male leaders.”[322]
Unlike their Italian comrades (see Chapter 3), there is little evidence of female Yiddish anarchists organizing independent groups to pursue their interests as women, though Joseph Cohen does mention a “women’s group of Detroit” active in the 1920s.[323] Instead, informal personal networks of feminist solidarity based on kinship, Old World ties, and shared ideology provided support. Rose Pesotta’s sister, Esther, had taken part in the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” and wrote home to Rose of her experiences, helping to prepare Rose to plunge into the labor movement after her own arrival in 1913. Pesotta’s closest friend and comrade was fellow ILGWU member Anna Sosnovsky, who was born in 1900 in the same town as Pesotta and was Fanny Breslaw’s sister. A third sister, Lisa Luchkovsky, was also an active anarchist; all four women came to anarchism after migrating to New York around 1912–13.[324] Similarly, Sarah Taback’s sister preceded her to New York from the Ukrainian shtetl of Felshtin and became an anarchist, and Sarah followed her into the movement after her own arrival in 1914.[325] These women continued to rely on their radical female friends and relatives for support within the movement. A different form of female solidarity is related in a remarkable anecdote from Chaim Weinberg, who recalled attending a meeting of English-speaking Jewish anarchists in Pittsburgh where a large proportion of those present were prostitutes, indicating the existence of a radical network of female sex workers in that city.[326]
Aside from Emma Goldman, female intellectuals—rather than agitators or union organizers—were almost totally absent from the Yiddish movement. A notable exception was Katherina Yevzerov-Merison, the wife of Jacob Merison. One of only a handful of immigrant Jewish women who received an extensive religious and secular education in Russia before migrating, she obtained a medical degree from New York University five years after her 1888 arrival in America. As early as 1890 Yevzerov-Merison was contributing liturgical parodies to the anarchists’ anti-religious Tefilah zakah, and she earned distinction as a writer on “the woman question” for the anarchist and socialist press.[327]
In 1907 Yevzerov-Merison published the booklet Di froy in der gezelshaft (The Woman in Society), adapted from a series of articles she had published in Di Fraye Gezelshaft in 1900. Providing a broad overview of women’s roles in ancient and medieval civilizations, drawn from historical and anthropological works such as Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), Yevzerov-Merison demonstrated the radically different nature of gender relations across societies, thereby disproving supposedly natural gender roles. She then argued that women in modern society had come to occupy positions as men’s equals both intellectually and in the workplace, and consequently, “One must root a new idea in the minds of both sexes: a woman is a worthy human being (mensh), and not a parasite or a small child.”[328] Yevzerov-Merison, like her husband, also broke with anarchist orthodoxy by supporting electoral reform, as well as women’s suffrage. Whereas Emma Goldman argued that “suffrage is an evil, that…has only helped to enslave people” to state power, Yevzerov-Merison believed suffrage to be a necessary first step to social equality between the sexes, and wrote, “if one cannot introduce socialism in its entirety all at once, one should introduce as many pieces of it as possible.”[329]
Despite the accomplishments of women like Goldman and Yevzerov-Merison, the world of the influential Yiddish radical inteligentn remained a male domain. As Norma Fain Pratt notes, “not one woman was permanently employed on a [Yiddish] radical paper as part of the editorial staff.”[330] There was, however, one arena in which the Yiddish anarchist press did enthusiastically embrace female intellectual production: poetry and literature. Saul Yanovsky and the Fraye Arbayter Shtime championed the work of poets like Anna Margolin, Celia Dropkin, and Fradel Stock (Stok), and short-story writer Yente Serdatzky. But according to a 1915 Fraye Arbayter Shtime article by the radical modernist poet Aaron Glanz-Leyeless (GlantsLeyeles), this contribution was rooted in innate differences between the sexes. “By nature women are not egotistical,” he wrote. “By nature women are bound organically to other lives. Out of her body new life comes. Another kind of knowing exists for her. She has a second dimension and understands nature. She is a mother in the deepest sense of the word.” Thus, Glanz-Leyeless recognized the importance of women’s writing while reducing womanhood to its traditional maternal definition, a self-sacrificing role that abrogated the sovereign individual at the center of anarchist politics.[331]
But such conventional notions of womanhood clashed with Yiddish anarchist ideals of love and sexuality. Two sources strongly influenced these ideals: the Russian nihilist model as presented in Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done?, and the philosophy of “free love” espoused by American freethought and anarchist publications like Moses Harman’s Lucifer: The Light Bearer. Both condemned marriage as the legal enslavement of economically dependent women and instead extolled the right of a man or woman to enter into or terminate a romantic relationship at will, or to carry on multiple relationships simultaneously, for either emotional or sexual fulfillment.[332] The pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own sake was also the subject of Fradel Stock’s groundbreaking erotic writings in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, which celebrated women’s sexual assertiveness.[333]
The memoirs of anarchist women like Emma Goldman, Lucy Robbins Lang, and Marie Ganz leave no doubt that anarchists’ celebration of sexual autonomy helped young women find the self-confidence and self-assertiveness to choose and refuse romantic relationships as they desired. But they also attest to the fact that jealousy and possessiveness posed constant and often insurmountable obstacles. From her romantic relationship with Johann Most in the late 1880s onwards, Goldman found that anarchist men frequently expected their lovers to settle down, have children, and run a household.[334] Lucy Robbins Lang recounted the story of the anarchist sisters Rose and Jessie Kleinman, who shared a male lover. “How we Anarchists boasted of this!” she wrote. “How clearly it proved our superiority to the hypocritical bourgeoisie! Of course we never doubted that Rose, Jessie, and Charlie were all perfectly happy. Then one day Rose left the other two, and, after a period of lonely existence, committed suicide.”[335] In another incident David Caplan—later imprisoned in connection with the Los Angeles Times bombing of 1910 (see Chapter 4)—induced his lover Vera Bayer, an anarchist who “looked like a mulatto,” to move into a cooperative house in Philadelphia that included Caplan and his wife, Fannie. The latter was so threatened by the other woman’s presence that she attempted to poison Bayer, and then spilled a cup of boiling fat on her, sending Bayer to the hospital for six weeks.[336]
Lang further observed that an anarchist woman “went in dread of pregnancy. If she did have a child, the man resented the curtailment of his freedom, while the woman felt that she was bearing too much of the burden.” If the couple separated, the child was invariably left in the care of the mother. Such was the case with David Caplan, who left his wife and children to be with Vera Bayer after the scalding incident, and then fathered a child with Bayer—whom he later also left.[337] This is one of the reasons that anarchist women like Emma Goldman outspokenly promoted birth control (Margaret Sanger began her career as a birth control advocate as an anarchist and devotee of Goldman). Anarchist men also supported these efforts; a group of Yiddish anarchist IWW members, including Isadore Wisotsky and Jacob Schwartz, arranged for UORW printer William Shatoff to produce 10,000 copies of a Yiddish-language translation of one of Sanger’s pamphlets on birth control methods.[338] Nevertheless, Lucy Robbins Lang concluded that even in anarchist “free unions,” “the women who accepted them were not any better off than those who were conventionally married. ‘The woman keeps house for her man, whether he’s a husband or a lover.’“[339]
Despite their ideal of polyamory, for most Jewish anarchists “free unions” became a form of serial monogamy. Some of these unions lasted for lifetimes without formal legal sanction, though it was not uncommon for partners to describe one another as a “husband” or “wife” regardless. Terrance Kissack finds that immigrant anarchists’ “largely middle-class, Englishspeaking peers were more enthusiastic in their advocacy of free love and more expansive in their interpretation of what that might allow.”[340] Yiddish anarchists’ romantic ideals were also, unlike those of some English-speaking anarchists’, strictly heterosexual. Men like Thomas Eyges found homosexuality “disgusting,” and Emma Goldman, who championed homosexual rights (in English), found that both Jewish and Italian anarchists “condemned me bitterly…because I had taken up the cause of the Homo Sexuals [sic] and Lesbians as a persecuted faction in the human family.”[341]
Like Jewish women in general, most female anarchists ceased to work outside of the home once they married or had a child.[342] But they continued to work on behalf of the movement, not least by morally and materially supporting their husbands’ or lovers’ more public activities, in what Karen Rosenberg has described as “a secularization of the tradition in which wives support Talmudic scholars.” Moreover, as Rosenberg notes, these women’s activities have been obscured by the numerous male anarchist intellectuals who in their memoirs failed to record their wives’ roles. Abraham Frumkin and Joseph Cohen are rare examples of memoirists who acknowledged the support and activities of their wives.[343] Moreover, of the Jewish anarchist women who published memoirs—Emma Goldman, Rose Pesotta, Lucy Robbins Lang, and Marie Ganz—all except for Lang remained unmarried for most of their radical careers, and all were primarily involved in English-language organizing and wrote in English rather than Yiddish, attesting to their marginality within the Yiddish-speaking movement.
Try as they might to break free from Jewish tradition and “bourgeois” values, most Yiddish anarchists nevertheless engaged in long-term monogamous heterosexual relationships and reproduced many of the patriarchal aspects of Jewish and American society. Yet the movement’s equalitarian rhetoric, its inclusion of a large proportion of women among its rankand-file, its organizers, and even a few within its intelligentsia, and its strident defense of (hetero)sexual freedom for both men and women, still placed it in the vanguard of women’s liberation for its time. In spite of its shortcomings, Yiddish anarchism held forth and took great strides toward attaining a vision of radical equality in all aspects of human life.
*** 2.10 Conclusion
Irving Howe’s bestselling World of Our Fathers, in keeping with the prevailing historical narrative of the Jewish Left, depicts “cosmopolitanism” and “internationalism” as naïve illusions held by an early generation of Jewish radicals who promoted complete cultural assimilation, and who were inevitably surpassed by a new generation that recognized the necessity of Jewish nationalism. In an important 1997 essay, Jonathan Frankel takes this narrative to task. He notes that most of the first generation of Russian Jewish radicals in America, such as the former members of Am Oylom, held a quasi-nationalist “Jewish populist” viewpoint that evolved into internationalist socialism and cosmopolitan anarchism only after the nationalism spurred by the pogroms of 1881 had led to dead ends. He further observes that internationalist and cosmopolitan views remained dominant in the Jewish Left even after the Kishinev pogrom and the creation of specifically Jewish and Yiddish-language radical organizations.[344]
As this chapter demonstrates, the recognition of Jewish particularism and the embrace of yidishkayt by anarchists did not contradict their cosmopolitanism. Rather, radical cosmopolitan ideology, suffused in yidishkayt, presented an alternative to both Jewish nationalism and Americanization. Furthermore, the Yiddish anarchist movement wasn’t washed away by the nationalist and territorialist upsurge following the Kishinev pogrom; it continued to grow by leaps and bounds, peaking just before the First World War. But the same growing attachment to the Yiddish language and culture that enabled and fostered this growth also limited the possibilities and opportunities for Jewish anarchists to translate their cosmopolitanism into meaningful action outside of their own immediate community. It further allowed for the survival of certain patriarchal elements of traditional Jewish culture to survive, and blurred the lines between radical cosmopolitanism, Jewish nationalism, and Zionism. Unlike the Italian anarchists of Paterson or San Francisco, most Jewish anarchists in New York City became more insular and isolated from other immigrant groups over time rather than less so.
** 3.0 I Senza Patria: Italians and Anarchism in Paterson, New Jersey, 1892–1915
Located along the Passaic River seventeen miles south of New York City, Paterson was the third-largest city in New Jersey by the turn of the century, as well as the largest producer of silk in the country. It was also a notorious hotbed of anarchism—in 1901 The Outlook claimed, with a touch of hyperbole, “Paterson has come to be the center of what is probably the most important Anarchist group in the world.” Between 1895 and 1920 the city was a major international anarchist center, and anarchists were at the forefront of persistent local labor unrest, including the violent general strike of 1902 and the famous 1913 silk strike conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). A Paterson anarchist also assassinated the king of Italy in 1900. The city’s radical reputation was so widespread that in 1906 its exasperated Board of Aldermen considered bringing charges of libel against publications that equated Paterson with anarchism.[345]
Behind the dramatic and violent episodes that so embarrassed city officials stood a dynamic radical subculture deeply rooted in an Italian migrant population and linked to transatlantic revolutionary networks. This oppositional culture was not merely transplanted from Italy; anarchism in Paterson instead resulted from the interactions of migrants from northern Italy and the dynamics of local industry, and was decisively shaped by the tireless efforts of a small cadre of anarchist émigrés. This culture was institutionalized to such a degree that anarchism successfully contended for hegemony among local Italian workers and many of their neighbors for more than three decades.
Like Jewish anarchism in New York City, anarchism in Paterson was contained principally within the bounds of ethnicity and language. However, despite the fact that Paterson’s anarchists were predominantly from northern Italy, they were not a homogeneous lot. Ethnic and linguistic boundaries were more permeable in Paterson, and less isolating. The “Italian” movement included northern and southern Italians alike, as well as Spaniards, Frenchmen, and a scattering of other multilingual radicals. It was also far more successful than New York’s Jewish garment unions at forging alliances with workers of other ethnic backgrounds—especially Germans, Poles and Jews—during times of unrest in the silk industry. These factors combined to form a distinct local anarchist culture that was not only strongly antinationalist, but also anti-imperialist and antiracist. Though rooted in the Italian community, anarchists in Paterson constructed a cross-ethnic cosmopolitanism through both their words and their deeds.
*** 3.1 Italians in the Silk City
Large numbers of Italians began arriving in New Jersey in the 1870s, and their numbers swelled by nearly 1,000% between 1880 and 1890—and again between 1890 and 1910. Wool and silk workers from northern Italy initially settled in West Hoboken (now Union City), and were first introduced into the silk mills of neighboring Paterson in 1887 as strikebreakers. The availability of better wages in Paterson, however, quickly drew most Italian weavers to that city, and its Italian-born population grew at a rate similar to that for the entire state. By 1910 an estimated 7,000–8,000 Italians were employed in Paterson’s silk mills and dyehouses, making them the largest ethnoracial group in the industry’s workforce. The census counted 9,317 Italian-born residents in Paterson that year, but a contemporary study, apparently including both first- and second-generation Italian Americans, placed their number at twice that.[346]
Table 3. Italian-Born Population of Paterson, 1890–1930[347]
| Year | Italian-Born Population | Total Population | Italian % of Total |
| 1890 | 845 | 78,347 | 1.1 |
| 1900 | 4,226 | 105,171 | 4.1 |
| 1910 | 9,317 | 125,600 | 7.4 |
| 1920 | 11,566 | 135,875 | 8.5 |
| 1930 | 12,404 | 138,513 | 9.0 |
Unlike the vast majority of Italians who came to the United States, Paterson’s early Italian migrants were overwhelmingly from northern Italy. Although northern Italy produced many emigrants, they typically went to European destinations rather than to the Americas.[348] For male and female textile workers from Biella in Piedmont and Como in Lombardy, however, temporary labor migrations to Europe had established a “culture of mobility” that, for some, expanded into transatlantic migration. Most were skilled weavers, whose control over the local labor market had been broken by the introduction of the power loom in the late 1870s, giving rise to both increased labor militancy and severe repression. Many sought better opportunities in New Jersey, where in the 1890s wages were, on average, double those in Biella.[349]
Hence, a second notable characteristic of Paterson’s Italian community was its high proportion of skilled workers. Whereas only 15.6% of Italian migrants arriving in the United States between 1899 and 1910 were classified as skilled, 58.7% of Paterson’s Italian wageearners were silk workers in 1910, almost all of them skilled. Of these, over 90% had been wageworkers in Italy, mostly employed as wool and silk weavers.[350] Many had therefore participated in the nascent but aggressive Italian labor movement, which was loosely organized around mutual aid societies, embryonic labor unions called leghe di resistenza (leagues of resistance), the shortlived Partito Operaio Italiano (Italian Labor Party), and socialist and anarchist groups. Biellese weavers “established a reputation for militancy and a tradition of collective solidarity underpinned by a network of social relations and co-operative associations which made an important contribution to the development of a distinctive working-class consciousness in Italy.”[351] These experiences equipped Paterson’s northern Italians to quickly adapt to industrial labor in its silk mills, and to collectively fight for improvements in those mills.
Southern Italians were first brought to Paterson as ditch diggers by Italian labor contractors (padroni) in the 1880s, but they did not arrive in significant numbers until after 1900. For many years they remained “completely at the mercy of the ‘Padroni’ system,” entering the silk industry only as strikebreakers, but southerners were gradually able to enter lower-skilled and lower-paid positions in silk mills and dyehouses. A small number—around 20%—had worked in the silk industry before coming to America, and the men among these fortunate few earned wages on par with those of northern Italian males, but only because their introduction into the workforce dragged down the northerners’ wages. In the city’s segmented workforce skilled British and German men earned significantly more than their Italian counterparts, and jealously guarded their privileged positions against the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe.[352] Initially, northern Italians treated their southern countrymen much as they themselves were treated by the “old immigrants,” but by 1910 Paterson’s Italian population was evenly split between northerners and southerners and relations between them had improved.[353]
The workforce within the silk industry was divided evenly between men and women, and Italians had the highest percentage of wage-earning women of any group in the city.[354] By dint of their experience and skills, northern Italian women made significantly more than not only their southern sisters, but women of any other nationality, including native-born Americans. They earned wages almost equal to those of Italian men working the same looms, but because they were usually assigned to lower-grade machinery female silk workers made a median wage only about 60% that of a male worker in 1907–8.[355]
Table 4. Number of Silk Firms in Paterson, 1890–1909[356]
| Year | Firms |
| 1890 | 83 |
| 1891 | 116 |
| 1892 | 88 |
| 1894 | 58 |
| 1896 | 91 |
| 1898 | 125 |
| 1899 | 136 |
| 1901 | 174 |
| 1909 | 276 |
The changing structure of silk manufacturing also undercut weavers’ job security. Since its origins in the mid-nineteenth century, the industry had suffered from increasing instability caused by decentralization, changing fashions, seasonal markets, and price fluctuations, resulting in regular cycles of unemployment and labor conflict—including thirty-one strikes between 1888 and 1894. From 1890 to 1910 the number of competing silk firms varied greatly, creating an even more uncertain labor market in which the majority of workers “floated” between jobs throughout the year.[357] Thus while the number of jobs in Paterson’s silk mills more than doubled between 1880 and 1901—from 9,800 to 21,827—competition placed immense pressure on employers to increase productivity while reducing wages, which in turn lead to mounting labor unrest and ethnic tensions within the workforce between groups earning different wage scales.
Whatever benefits accrued to Italians who entered this unstable industry due to their skills were largely offset by relentless labor market competition, lower wages, the introduction of the multiple-loom system of production, and regular periods of unemployment and underemployment.[358] In 1905 a local Italian anarchist declared,
The occupation of weaver has become the most miserable of all. If one considers that the silk industry is subject to the periodic crises that recur every year and that consequently the weaver is condemned to unemployment for a good third of the year, one can affirm that, on average, the wages of the weaver do not exceed one dollar per day.
William Gallo recalled that his father Firmino, another anarchist and jacquard (pattern) weaver who migrated from Biella, “earned very little, though he left at seven in the morning and came home at six or seven at night, eleven or twelve hours a day…Many times during my lunch break at school, I would bring his lunch pail to the factory and watch his looms as he ate.”[359]
Conditions were even worse within the city’s silk dying houses. According to another local anarchist, “The dyers are really and truly mobs in which the life of the poor workers is not worth a cigarette butt (cicca).” Unlike weavers, Paterson’s dye workers were employed in a few large-scale plants rather than small family-owned enterprises. Master dyers and finishers were skilled occupations, but most of the workforce was made up of unskilled dyers’ helpers—many of them from southern Italy—who worked in teams adding chemicals to dye tubs under the direction of master dyers, and commanded meager wages.[360]
Despite differences in skill and wage levels, weavers like Firmino Gallo felt the effects of proletarianization nearly as much as the unskilled dyers’ helpers. Visiting in 1913, IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn found Paterson to be “a typical textile town with the same poor shabby fire-trap wooden houses for the workers, dreary old mills built along the canal. The people were poorly dressed, pale and undernourished.”[361] Although Paterson’s Italian workers were comparatively better situated than most Italian Americans, the conditions of their labor as well as ethnic and gender discrimination gave them cause for discontent.
Sophie Cohen, a Jewish silk weaver, recalled, “Paterson had a prison-like feeling when you walked through the narrow streets where the mills were.” IWW member Henry McGuckin had a similar impression of his childhood home, describing it as “a city where people just worked from one day to the next and had no life of their own that was not at the beck and call of the hundreds of mill-whistles that blew to tell you when to wake up, when to report to work, when to eat lunch, and when to go home.”[362] As these accounts suggest, the line between factory and society—the “prison” and the “streets,” or work time and leisure time—was often blurred, and struggles in the mills were at the same time community struggles. When these expanded beyond a single occupational or ethnoracial group, as they did in 1894, 1902, and 1913, Paterson would teeter on the brink of open insurrection, with anarchists in the forefront.
*** 3.2 Anarchists and Neighbors
Anarchism spread within the Italian population through the intervention of a handful of veteran Italian activists and along the same familial and local networks that shaped the process of chain migration from Biella and Como. However, anarchism did not arrive in Paterson with migrants from Italy, nor did most of its Italian anarchists bring their ideology with them across the Atlantic. When Italians began arriving in Paterson it was already home to a well-established anarchist movement comprised of German and French migrants with whom they interacted, and several important individual radicals of other ethnic backgrounds were absorbed into the Italianspeaking anarchist community.
The first Italian anarchists arrived in America in the 1870s after the suppression of the Italian Federation of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA, the so-called First International). Little is known about their activities, although an Italian section of the IWMA was formed in New York City in 1871. In 1885 the Gruppo Socialista-Anarchico-Rivoluzionario Italiano “Carlo Cafiero” (“Carlo Cafiero” Italian Revolutionary-Socialist-Anarchist Group), named after the well-known Italian radical, was established in New York, possibly as a successor to the Italian IWMA branch. According to one source, this group was composed of anarchist émigrés from Rome.[363] In 1888 it began publishing L’Anarchico, the first Italian American radical newspaper, which lasted for less than a year. The first Italian anarchist group in New Jersey was the Circolo Comunista Anarchica Carlo Cafiero (Carlo Cafiero Communist Anarchist Circle), formed in 1887 in Orange Valley, a town about fifteen miles south of Paterson, and modeled after the New York organization.[364]
In 1892 the flagging Italian American movement was revived by the arrival of the wellknown lawyer and criminologist Francesco Saverio Merlino, who stayed in the country for six months. In New York Merlino helped launch the anarchist paper Il Grido degli Oppressi (Cry of the Oppressed) and worked with English-speaking anarchists to found the paper Solidarity. He also embarked on a multilingual lecture tour that took him through Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and Orange Valley and West Hoboken in New Jersey. In November 1892 Il Grido degli Oppressi noted the existence of Italian anarchist groups in New York, Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, as well as Orange Valley and Paterson.[365] Paterson’s Circolo Studi Sociali (Social Studies Circle) met at 441 Main Street, but it was soon replaced by the Gruppo Augusto Spies, named in honor of the German immigrant Haymarket martyr August Spies. In November 1893 this organization was replaced by the Right to Existence Group (Gruppo Diritto all’Esistenza), which had thirty members at its founding.[366]
Nearly all Right to Existence Group members were skilled weavers from Biella. An 1897 proclamation from the organization was signed by thirty-six individuals; all but six had Biellese names and of fourteen whose occupations are known, all but one were silk weavers.[367] As late as 1920 federal agents still found that Paterson’s anarchists were “made up mostly of aliens from the north of Italy, commonly known as PIEDMONTESE…Nearly all of the members of the group are engaged in the silk industries in Paterson and are mostly expert weavers.”[368]
However, Piedmont was never a major center of Italian anarchism. In 1874 the Piedmontese section of the IWMA’s Italian Federation was the third-smallest. Although the region was, comparatively, anarchism’s strongest base in northern Italy in the 1880s, the movement there collapsed over the following decade; in the late 1890s Piedmont was home to just 7 out of 149 (or 4.7%) of the country’s known anarchist groups.[369] Nevertheless, the silk factories of Biella were home to one of Italy’s earliest militant, class-conscious labor movements. This included an active anarchist group in the municipality of Mongrando, a silkproducing center of some 4,200 residents at the turn of the century, and it was former members of this group who constituted the nucleus around which anarchism in Paterson was built.[370]
Right to Existence Group founding member Firmino Gallo, as well as his companion, Ninfa Baronio, were both anarchists in Mongrando before they emigrated to find work in 1892. They were followed by Ninfa’s sisters Serafina, Divina, Anetta, and Jennie, and her brothers Egisto and Abele, all of whom became involved in Paterson’s anarchist movement, as did her son with Firmino, William.[371] Alberto Guabello, another weaver from Mongrando, had been active in the Italian anarchist movement since at least 1891 and was imprisoned multiple times as a “dangerous anarchist” and seditionist, including an 1894 sentence for allegedly plotting a Piedmontese insurrection with Charles Malato and other anarchists. In 1898 Guabello emigrated to Paterson to avoid yet another prison term.[372]
That same year fellow Biellese anarchist weavers Camillo Rosazza Riz, Clemente Boffa, and Ottavio Porrino also fled to Paterson. Other Biellese anarchists who subsequently migrated included Adele and Paolo Guabello (Alberto Guabello’s sister and brother) in 1904, and Serafino Grandi, who had edited the Biellese anarchist paper L’Alba, in 1909.[373] Antonio Cravello, another weaver from Biella, was a socialist when he migrated around 1878, but in Paterson he became an anarchist and in 1895 was joined by his parents and his sister Ernesta (“Ernestina”), who likewise joined the anarchist ranks.[374] Throughout these years, anarchists in Paterson and Biella supported one another’s activities and publications in a reciprocal exchange across the Atlantic.
From Como came Cesare Roda Balzarini, a weaver who had been “one of the most avid agitators” during a major silk strike there in 1888. He taught his daughter Maria both the art of silk weaving and the tenets of anarchism, and at the age of fourteen she, too, took part in the 1888 strike, and in 1891 she was condemned to three months imprisonment for singing “seditious songs.” A year later the family moved to Milan, where their home “served for meetings and as a place of refuge for anarchists from Como and other travelers,” and in May of 1893 they relocated to Paterson, where they continued their anarchist activities.[375]
Migrant radicals like these formed an experienced core around which Paterson’s Italianspeaking anarchist movement coalesced. They came to Paterson through two different routes: initially individuals like Gallo, Baronio, and Cravello came as typical labor migrants; subsequently, Italian radicals forced to flee persecution chose Paterson as their destination because it was home to an anarchist community with a growing international reputation. This was a kind of “radical chain migration,” in which a few pioneer radical migrants were followed by comrades with whom they were in direct or indirect contact. Thus exiles from other parts of Italy began seeking refuge in Paterson, such as the Milanese anarchist Giovanni Baracchi, a bookbinder who fled Italy in 1898 and arrived in Paterson around 1901, where he became a silk weaver and lived until his death in 1936.[376]
Anarchist ideology then spread outward from this cadre through the occupational and familial bonds that characterize more conventional chain migrations, drawing coworkers and family members into the movement. Contrary to the image of the unattached male Italian migrant, entire families of silk workers settled in Paterson. In this context, as Franco Ramella notes, “Relationships differing in content were superimposed on one another: relatives, friends, neighbors, and workmates were often the same people.”[377] The local anarchist movement therefore involved extended family networks. Firmino Gallo and Ninfa Baronia’s son William, who was born in Paterson and became an anarchist himself, recalled,
When I was a tot, around ten or eleven, I worked for [Paterson’s anarchist newspaper,] La Questione Sociale…We used to fold the paper, address it, and bring it to the post office. Instead of going out and playing after school, I worked for the paper. I was working all the time…We were raised in an anarchist milieu. We rejected religion and government, even democracy. And we rejected war.[378]
Marriages or “free unions” between radicals, such as those between Firmino Gallo and Ninfa Baronio and between their daughter, Lena, and Alberto Guabello’s anarchist son, Spartaco, melded the local anarchist community into a vast kinship group. Among Paterson’s Italian workers, anarchism was a family value.
Italian American anarchism therefore differed greatly from Jewish American anarchism in both its transatlantic origins and its patterns of growth. Like their Jewish counterparts, however, Paterson’s early Biellese anarchists encountered an already existing anarchist movement composed of “old immigrants” when they arrived in the 1880s and 1890s. German anarchists were active in Paterson and nearby cities from 1881 until at least 1902. One of their organizations, the Gruppe Paterson, counted eighty members in 1892.[379] The name of the Gruppo Augusto Spies also attests to possible German influence on Paterson’s Italian radicals, and the group may have included some German members. Whatever the case, German and Italian anarchists worked side by side during the tumultuous strikes of 1894 and 1902 (see below). Another link between these two groups was the printer Franz Widmar, who arrived in Paterson in 1898. Widmar was a Slovenian from Trieste, at that time a territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had been active in Trieste’s anarchist movement, in which Italian migrants predominated, and came to America after being expelled from Trieste for writing two articles for Paterson’s anarchist newspaper, La Questione Sociale (The Social Question). A man of great intelligence, Widmar was fluent in Slovenian, Italian, German and French, and became a prominent member of the Right to Existence Group.[380]
The Italian anarchists forged a closer relationship with Paterson’s French and Belgian radicals than with the Germans, however. 2,000–3,000 French-speaking silk workers came to the city in the 1870s and 1880s, some of who formed a French-language “social-revolutionary” group in the late 1870s.[381] In West Hoboken Italian and French anarchists organized meetings and social events together, and in Paterson northern Italians “associated freely with the French” and aided their French-speaking comrades in raising money for Les Temps Nouveaux, the preeminent Parisian anarchist paper. This conviviality had its roots in the seasonal labor migrations of weavers from Biella and Como to southern France and the similar migrations of French weavers to northern Italy. Many Italian and French weavers in Paterson had prior experience working alongside members of the other group and familiarity with their language.[382] With the decline of the once-strong French-speaking anarchist movement in Pennsylvania’s mining communities, Paterson became home to one of the last French American anarchist papers, Germinal, edited there from 1899 to 1902 by occasional La Questione Sociale contributor Michel Dumas.[383]
Germinal was typeset by the Spaniard Pedro Esteve, who used the same machine to publish both La Questione Sociale and the Spanish-language anarchist paper El Despertar (The Awakening). Esteve had been an active anarchist in his native Barcelona, but fled to New York in 1892 to avoid arrest. There he worked on El Despertar, becoming its editor in 1895 and relocating it to Paterson. Esteve was also fluent in Italian, and was the only founding member of the Right to Existence Group not native to Italy. Otherwise unsympathetic American reporters described Esteve as “intelligent, keen, [and] sober,” and remarked, “A more amiable, cultivated, and really scholarly man it would be hard to find anywhere…If you knew nothing of his antecedents you would take him at once for a professor in some university of the Continent.” Esteve quickly became one of the foremost figures within the Right to Existence Group, and he soon married Maria Roda Balzarini (who went by Maria Roda).[384] In 1900 the Right to Existence Group was also joined by Battista Cominetti, a socialist from Piedmont who “converted” to anarchism in Paterson and was, according to the Italian consul in New York, “if not Spanishborn, at least the child of Spaniards.”[385] Though Paterson had virtually no Spanish community to speak of, it was closely linked to Spanish-speaking radicals—including Cubans and Puerto Ricans—in nearby New York City as well as in Tampa, Florida, where Pedro Esteve, Maria Roda, and Franz Widmar were all active at various times. On July 11, 1897, for instance, Italian anarchists hosted a festa for “the Spanish comrades who came from Brooklyn and New York.” Two decades later, an Italian anarchist picnic included not only Esteve and his family, but also “another half-dozen Spanish comrades” and the Mexican anarchist Rafael Romero Palacios.[386]
Around the turn of the century Paterson also began attracting a large number of Jewish migrants from the textile centers of Poland. In 1891 a small group of Yiddish-speaking anarchists staged a mass meeting in Paterson and also sent a delegate to the annual Jewish anarchist convention in New York.[387] This was probably the Grupe Frayhayt (Freedom Group), which was active until at least 1910 and, along with the Paterson branch of the Workmen’s Circle, donated money to Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth. Evidence of cooperation between the Jewish and Italian anarchists of Paterson is sparse, though in 1900 a New York Times reporter noted that “Morris Provitz, a Russian Anarchist, who has been living in Paterson for some time,” was “seen among the Italians there a great deal,” and in 1915 Jews and Italians cofounded a local anarchist Modern School.[388] In 1892 an English-speaking anarchist group called Solidarity was formed, but does not seem to have lasted long.[389]
Regardless, in 1900 the New York Herald found that “anarchy has gained an effectual foothold among the Italian, German, French, Spanish and other foreign residents of Paterson and adjacent cities.”[390] Ties between the various ethnic segments of Paterson’s anarchist movement were informally maintained through multilingual intellectuals like Franz Widmar and Pedro Esteve, and through occasional “international” meetings open to “comrades of all languages,” such as one held on February 5, 1899 in Helvetia Saloon featuring Emma Goldman, Johann Most, and the Italian Pietro Raveggi.[391] The cross-ethnic solidarity established through a shared anarchist ideology facilitated the incorporation of multilingual non-Italians into Paterson’s Italian-speaking movement, informed Italian anarchists’ cosmopolitan outlook, and proved essential for mobilizing the city’s multiethnic workforce in times of struggle.
*** 3.3 La Questione Sociale
In July 1895 the Right to Existence Group, composed of a handful of relatively unknown Biellese silk workers and political refugees, begin publishing La Questione Sociale. But both the timing of the publication’s debut and the caliber of the anarchist figures that associated themselves with it guaranteed the paper an international readership. This, in turn, transformed Paterson into a central hub of the global anarchist movement. In 1895, due to antiradical legislation passed by Italian Premier Francesco Crispi, Italy lacked a single anarchist publication, and America’s Il Grido degli Oppressi had folded the previous year. Paterson’s new paper therefore “fulfilled a fundamental role in the Italian anarchist movement worldwide” at the time of its appearance.[392] The press functioned as the institutional base of the Italian American anarchist movement, prompting Alberto Guabello to reflect in 1915, “The history of this weekly publication is, you could say, the whole history of the anarchist movement among Italians in this country…To La Questione Sociale is due the credit for having created in this country a radical movement.”[393] The press was viewed as an essential weapon in the revolutionary struggle. In future La Questione Sociale editor Ludovico Caminita’s view, “The pen in our hands is an axe to decapitate privilege and abuse of authority…And our pen will be the pick that will demolish this wicked world made of privileges. It will be the goad which will spur on the helots towards the barricades for the triumph of the social revolution.”[394]
The first issue of La Questione Sociale was edited by members of the Right to Existence Group, but shortly after its appearance Antonio Agresti, a well-known proponent of “propaganda by the deed” and individual “expropriations” who had been active for several years in Italian anarchist circles in France and England, arrived in Paterson and was assigned the post of editor.[395] On Agresti’s heels came the renowned anarchist Pietro Gori, who visited Paterson as part of an agitational tour of the Untied States and gave his first lecture in the city on July 27, 1895. Gori remained in Paterson for three months, during which time editorship of La Questione Sociale passed to him.[396]
Dubbed “the knight errant of anarchy” by contemporaries and historians, Gori traveled from coast to coast delivering more than three hundred lectures in the span of a year. American anarchist Harry Kelly recalled of Gori, “He had a fine tenor voice, was a poet of merit, played the guitar, and was a highly competent speaker and writer; in short, [he was] one of the most gifted men imaginable, and one of the most capable propagandists I have ever met.” Wherever Gori travelled he helped Italian migrants organize local anarchist groups, which under his guidance were joined together into the brief-lived Federazione Socialista-Anarchica dei Lavoratori Italiani nel Nord-America (Anarchist-Socialist Federation of Italian Workers in North America). He also contributed to and solicited subscriptions for La Questione Sociale.[397]
Although both Agresti and Gori had returned to Europe by July of 1896, their brief affiliation with La Questione Sociale bestowed sterling radical credentials upon it. With their departure the editorship of the most important Italian-language anarchist publication in the country—and for a brief moment, in the world—was given, ironically, to the Spaniard Pedro Esteve. The paper shared its offices with those of Esteve’s El Despertar in a third-story room of “a tumble down frame building” at 355 Market Street.[398] Both Esteve and La Questione Sociale, however, soon became ensnared in a transnational debate within the Italian-speaking anarchist movement over the relationship between anarchism and the labor movement.
By the 1890s Italy’s once formidable anarchist movement was in steep decline due to heavy government repression and the rise of the nascent Italian Socialist Party, the leaders of which included a few prominent defectors from the anarchist camp—including Andrea Costa, Carlo Cafiero, and Francesco Saverio Merlino.[399] These changing fortunes prompted two opposing reactions within anarchist ranks, with some calling for greater anarchist organization and involvement in labor unions, and others demanding abstention from all formal organizations.
At the head of the organizzatori (“organizationists”) stood Errico Malatesta, a former pupil of Mikhail Bakunin and the most famous and revered Italian revolutionary of his day. In 1889, he called for the formation of an anarchist “party”—it would not be a political party that ran candidates for election, but a well-organized federation of groups dedicated to a mutually agreed upon program. In Malatesta’s words, the “party” would be “the totality of all who embrace the program, who advocate its triumph and who consider themselves bound not to do anything opposed to it.”[400] The goal was a more tightly organized movement capable of building a mass following and penetrating the labor unions.
But some Italian anarchists saw those who promoted tighter organization as potential apostates who would drag anarchism into the mire of bureaucracy and electoral politics, exactly as Costa, Cafiero, and Merlino had tried to do. These antiorganizzatori (“anti-organizationists”) rejected all types of formally constituted organizations, even anarchist ones, as inherently authoritarian and bureaucratic. The factionalism between these two groups was not long in coming to America, and culminated not in Italy, but in Paterson and the pages of La Questione Sociale.
The majority of Right to Existence Group members agreed with Malatesta’s organizationist ideas, and in 1897 the group offered the editorship of La Questione Sociale to Francesco Cini, a comrade of Malatesta’s recently arrived from London.[401] When Cini vacated the position a year later the group offered it to another of Malatesta’s protégés, Giuseppe Ciancabilla. An educated Roman, Ciancabilla had been won over to anarchism from socialism during a debate with Malatesta in 1897 and quickly established a reputation within anarchist circles. But unbeknownst to Paterson’s anarchists, Ciancabilla had since became close to the anti-organizationist group around Les Temps Nouveaux in Paris, and the repression of workers’ uprisings in Sicily and Milan had shattered his faith in organized mass action and the labor movement. He turned instead to individual acts of “propaganda by the deed” as the only hope for generating spontaneous revolutionary upsurges, and had unsuccessfully plotted to kill General Bava-Beccaris, the man who had commanded the bloody repression of the Milanese protests that left over one hundred people dead. Ciancabilla also defended the anarchist Luigi Luccheni’s assassination of Empress Elizabeth of Austria, which led to his expulsion from Switzerland and relocation to Paterson.[402]
When Ciancabilla took charge of La Questione Sociale the paper’s tone changed dramatically; in Rudolph Vecoli’s description, “If Gori was anarchism’s poet of love, flowers, and fraternity, Ciancabilla was its poet of hatred, blood, and vendetta.”[403] The paper also took an editorial stand against anarchist federations and labor union organization. Ciancabilla and his cadre of supporters argued that the role of anarchists in the labor movement was to propagandize (with deeds as well as words), not to organize; according to Ciancabilla “organization (not free agreement, nor free association, we mean), is absolutely anti-anarchist.” Fierce polemics between the antiorganizzatori and the organizzatori, represented by Pedro Esteve, filled the pages of the paper.[404]
In May or June of 1899 Esteve entreated Errico Malatesta himself to come rescue La Questione Sociale. Esteve had gone on a lecture tour with Malatesta in Spain in 1891, and the two men remained in close contact thereafter. Malatesta, residing in London after his escape from an Italian penal island, immediately agreed to come to Paterson, attesting to the international importance of the paper. Arriving on August 12, Malatesta lodged at Esteve’s home and at a special meeting of the Right to Existence Group he was elected editor of La Questione Sociale by a margin of eighty to three. As editor he established a system in which editorial duties were shared with the entire group, making La Questione Sociale a truly collective endeavor.[405] The dissenting members of the group—Giuseppe Ciancabilla, Alberto Guabello and Giovanni Della Barile—immediately seceded and founded their own paper, L’Aurora (The Dawn), but Guabello soon broke from the new paper and returned to La Questione Sociale. For the next two years the rival publications battled for leadership of the Italian anarchist movement in America and beyond, and Malatesta took his campaign to the road, travelling to New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Illinois, Florida, and Cuba (where occupying American forces attempted to prevent him from speaking).[406]
The divide among Paterson’s anarchists was based on a fundamental disagreement over the mechanics of revolutionary change—that is, over how to resolve “the social question.” In the parlance of the time, Malatesta and his followers called themselves “socialist-anarchists” to emphasize their commitment to creating a mass movement based in the working class and its organizations. Unlike syndicalists, they did not believe that labor unions were in themselves capable of emancipating workers, but “they can always serve to educate, to morally elevate the working classes and to prepare them, to train them to fight,” and can help precipitate revolution.[407] The organizzatori were not opposed to violence, viewing it as a necessity, however unfortunate, in the course of social revolution. “The victorious insurrection,” according to the new La Questione Sociale, “is the most effective action for popular emancipation.” Individual acts of violence in the absence of popular struggle or organization, however, were viewed as ineffective and counterproductive.[408] Malatesta further argued that “organization is not a transitory necessity, a question of tactics and opportunity, but it is a necessity inherent to human society, and should be regarded by us as a matter of principle.”[409]
Ciancabilla and his followers came to the opposite conclusion. “The majority of workers,” L’Aurora pointed out, “believe that an increase of wages or a reduction of hours of work is the maximum of the claims [a union] can achieve,” and unions were therefore poor vehicles for pursuing more radical goals.[410] Influenced by a deterministic reading of Peter Kropotkin’s evolutionary theory of mutual aid, as well as by Italian positivism and Marxist historical materialism, the antiorganizzatori believed that revolution was an inevitable product of historical laws. The compromise of formal anarchist organization was therefore unnecessary and would influence the outcome of revolutionary change for the worse. This “revolutionary fatalism” helped, in part, to justify the increasing isolation of anarchism within Italy.[411] But the antiorganizzatori’s critique of the oligarchic, bureaucratic, and conservative tendencies of organizations like unions was also based on very real and important observations that resonated with the core of the anarchist critique of political power.[412] The founders of L’Aurora did not identify themselves as individualists but, like Kropotkin, called themselves anarchist communists, because they believed in free association and the abolition of private property and wages (even though Malatesta and the socialist-anarchists did as well).[413]
It was perhaps inevitable that the antiorganizzatori would latch on to propaganda by the deed. Pier Carlo Masini observes,
Because they denied parties, denied the work of organization, of congresses, of drafting a program, refused participation in unions, to the individualists [i.e. the antiorganizzatori] there remained only one means of struggle and political presence: the individual act. And the individual act—assassination (l’attentato) or any other form of violent protest—was at the center of their revolutionary commitment.
Using the uprisings and jacqueries that precipitated the French Revolution as their model, they believed that a series of insurrectionary acts by revolutionary minorities or individuals would eventually inspire a mass uprising.[414] In Ciancabilla’s view, “We are the aristocracy of the proletariat. The knights of the ideal. The masses sleep. The socialists delude themselves.” In this conception, anarchist violence would spontaneously create the mass movement that the rival organizzatori hoped to consciously bring into being through organizing efforts.[415] But at the heart of the antiorganizzatori’s program lay a contradiction: if they rejected organization on the grounds that revolution was inevitable, why did the masses need an anarchist vanguard to spur them on? Had Ciancabilla and his supporters fully embraced the implications of their determinism, they would have negated their own role as historical actors completely.[416] (Malatesta, by contrast, rejected determinism in all its forms.[417])
The conflict between Paterson’s anarchist factions came to a dramatic climax at a debate held on November 12, 1899 at Tivola and Zucca’s Saloon in West Hoboken, where a temperamental barber and anti-organizationist named Domenico Pazzaglia drew a pistol and fired at Malatesta, wounding him in the leg. Pazzaglia was subdued by his own comrades, including a thirty-year-old weaver Gaetano Bresci.[418] Eight months later, on July 29, 1900, Bresci shot and killed King Umberto I of Italy in the Milanese suburb of Monza. His act gave concrete expression to abstract debates over “propaganda by the deed,” bringing Paterson’s anarchist community to the attention of the world and ultimately undermining the influence of the antiorganizzatori.
*** 3.4 American Regicide
A rash of anarchist assassins and would-be assassins struck across Europe in the 1890s, and a disproportionate number of them came from Italy. Within a span of five years Italian anarchists killed the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, and the Empress of Austria.[419] Former anarchist Francesco Saverio Merlino, who acted as Gaetano Bresci’s defense attorney, argued that Italians were responsible for more violent acts than anarchists of other nationalities simply because Italy had a higher homicide rate in general. Merlino’s point may have had merit: Italian traditions of family honor and vendetta, the Italian unification movement’s validation of tyrannicide, and the Italian state’s weak claim to a monopoly of “legitimate” violence certainly shaped Italian anarchists’ perceptions of justifiable uses of force and individuals’ responsibility to right wrongs. La Questione Sociale, for instance, sometimes equated political assassination with vendetta, and a February 1900 article about the recent repression of bread riots in Italy called for “vendetta, vendetta; yes vendetta, and without mercy!”[420]
Gaetano Bresci, who departed for Italy the following month, answered this call. Born in the Tuscan city of Prato, Bresci joined an anarchist circle there as a young man and was imprisoned for fifteen days in 1892 after disregarding police instructions during a strike. He migrated to West Hoboken in 1898 and immediately joined the Right to Existence Group, but allied himself with Ciancabilla and L’Aurora after the split.[421] Bresci’s actions at the altercation in West Hoboken were not motivated by affection for Malatesta, with whom he had personally quarreled, but rather by concern for the safety of others at the meeting.[422] One of the main points on which he disagreed with Malatesta was the merits of individual acts of violence.
As Bresci afterward explained, his execution of Umberto was prompted by the bloody repression of protesters in Milan the previous year and King Umberto I’s commendation of General Bava-Beccaris—the same man Giuseppe Ciancabilla had earlier intended to kill. “When in Paterson I read of the events in Milan, where they even used cannons,” he testified, “I wept with rage and prepared myself for vengeance. I thought of the king who awarded a prize to those who carried out the massacres, and I became convinced that he deserved death.” But Bresci’s act was also that of an alienated labor migrant; “Besides avenging the victims,” he admitted, “I wished to avenge myself, as I was forced, after having lived a very hard life, to emigrate.”[423]
Despite Bresci’s insistence that he had acted on his own, suspicion immediately fell upon Paterson’s anarchist community and the Right to Existence Group in particular. Sensational rumors circulated in the American and Italian press of a vast international conspiracy hatched in the offices of La Questione Sociale, masterminded from afar by Malatesta, or, according to some, carried out at the behest of the exiled queen of Naples, Maria Sofia, or Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia.[424] These stories were fueled in part by a peculiar murder-suicide that occurred in Paterson on July 17, 1900, shortly before Bresci’s regicide.
Giuseppe Pessina, a foreman at the Weidmann Dye Works, was shot by the dyer, pianist, and anarchist Luigi Bianchi (known in Paterson as “Sperandio Carbone”), who soon after turned the gun on himself. Two days later, the funeral director preparing Bianchi’s body claimed to have found a suicide note pinned to his jacket pocket. The letter stated that Bianchi had been chosen by a drawing of lots among anarchists on February 2 to kill the King of Italy, but was allowed to choose “a substitute” and settled on the “brute” Pessina. Speculation that Bresci had been charged with carrying out the task after Bianchi demurred surfaced following Umberto’s death. But the authenticity of the suicide note was immediately questioned—police, who supposedly somehow overlooked the document, were unable to produce the original copy for a handwriting comparison, and different translations of it appeared in the press, some versions implausibly stating that the drawing of lots had occurred in Milan rather than Paterson.[425] Moreover, Bianchi had personal motives for the murder, none of which were mentioned in the letter: Pessina was known for his dislike of anarchists, had refused to pay for piano lessons Bianchi had given to his children, and the day before the attack he had fired Bianchi from the dye-works. In October 1900 the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered an inquiry into the possible connection between Bianchi and Bresci and concluded that “no anarchist plot existed in Paterson or West Hoboken for the assassination of the late King Humbert of Italy.”[426]
Two Italian anarchists who travelled on the same ship as Bresci, the Paterson barber Nicola Quintavalle and former Paterson resident Antonio Laner, were arrested in Italy on suspicion of complicity in the affair, as was Emma Quazza, a nineteen-year-old Paterson socialist and fellow passenger with whom Bresci had an affair. All three were eventually released due to lack of evidence.[427] Attention next turned to the weaver and former Right to Existence Group treasurer Luigi Granotti, known as Il Biondino (“The Blond”), who like Bresci had joined the L’Aurora faction of the Paterson movement. Granotti had also departed for Italy a few days before Bresci and was in Monza on the day of the assassination. Thought to be a second gunman, Granotti was the target of an international manhunt that lasted for several years, but he secretly returned to Paterson and lived there undetected until his death in 1949.[428]
It is certainly possible that Granotti was involved in a plot with Bresci. In his 1911 study of Paterson’s Italians, Carlo C. Altarelli wrote: “One who belonged to the [Right to Existence] group, told me that it might be that a certain Granotti, treasurer of the Association and administrator of ‘La Questione Sociale’, knew of Bresci’s intention.” It is also possible, but unproven, that a handful of others, including Giuseppe Ciancabilla, knew of Bresci’s plan. But no evidence supports the theory of a conspiracy involving the Right to Existence Group or a larger international plot.[429]
Errico Malatesta, who had returned to London in a few months before the assassination, was accused by many at the time of masterminding the act but instead responded to it by eloquently stating his opposition to propaganda by the deed:
We know that these attentats, with the people insufficiently prepared for them, are sterile and often, by provoking reactions which one is unable to control, produce much sorrow, and harm the very cause they were intended to serve.
We know that what is essential and undoubtedly useful is not to kill a king, the man, but to kill all kings—those of the Courts, of parliaments and of the factories—in the hearts and minds of the people; that is, to uproot faith in the principle of authority to which most people owe allegiance.[430]
Even before the assassination of Umberto, the organizzatori were clearly in ascendency. The circulation of La Questione Sociale, which had been 3,000 when Ciancabilla took it over in 1889, remained at 3,000 at the end of 1899 after Malatesta had returned to Europe and editorial duties were turned over to his fellow organizationist Franz Widmar.[431] Circulation figures for L’Aurora are unavailable but were certainly lower; Ciancabilla had difficulty keeping his paper solvent and was forced to relocate it, first to a small community of supporters in Yohoghany, Pennsylvania, and then after an eight-month hiatus to Spring Valley, Illinois, where an upstart group of antiorganizzatori had temporarily won control of the local anarchist club. Nevertheless, L’Aurora folded in 1901.[432]
Ciancabilla, of course, expressed unqualified support for Bresci’s deed. But the Right to Existence Group, diverging from Malatesta’s stance, also applauded Bresci’s act. None of its members mourned the loss of a monarch, especially one under whom many had personally suffered want and repression, and a condemnation of Bresci would have certainly exacerbated divisions within the local anarchist community. 15,000 copies of a special free issue of La Questione Sociale honoring Bresci were printed in August 1900, which including only a passing critique of the tactical value of assassination (“We make propaganda for collective action of the masses,” it emphasized). This was followed in November by a special single-issue publication titled Umberto e Bresci.[433] The organizzatori successfully appropriated Bresci as a revolutionary martyr, who would be honored every July, while at the same time maintaining their commitment to organizing a mass anarchist movement.
*** 3.5 Anarchist Community and Culture
Locally, anarchism did assume the proportions of a mass movement within the immigrant community. In 1900 the New York Herald was shocked to learn,
It has come to such a point that anarchist meetings are no longer held behind closed doors in Paterson. Meetings addressed by anarchist leaders are public gatherings in halls connected with various saloons…There are hundreds of workingmen, regularly attending these meetings…The meetings are attended, too, by women.
That same year P. Maresi, the former head of local Italian mutual aid society, told the New York Times that of his fellow Italian residents, “all of them are more or less Anarchists.”[434] In the silk city, anarchism was a way of life embedded in community institutions and shared cultural practices. As Paul Avrich observes of Italian American anarchists, “Rather than await the millennium, they tried to live the anarchist life on a day-to-day basis within the interstices of American capitalism. They formed, in effect, tiny enclaves, little nuclei of freedom, as they saw it, which they hoped would spread and multiply throughout the world.”[435]
At its height from 1895 to 1908, Paterson’s Italian anarchist community counted at least 1,000–2,000 members—out of an Italian population of less than 5,000 in 1900, and less than 9,500 in 1910. In 1900 La Questione Sociale had a local circulation of 1,000, which, Davide Turcato notes, means the paper “was read approximately in every other Italian household.”[436] Within this larger anarchist community a core group of between 100 and 500 activists carried out the essential tasks of publishing literature, regularly attending meetings, arranging public events, and organizing in their workplaces.[437] The size of the movement slowly declined between 1908 and the First World War, but it remained substantial; William Gallo, born in Paterson in 1897, recalled, “There were about three or four hundred anarchists in Paterson when I was a child.”[438]
Paterson’s anarchist community was therefore much larger than the membership of local anarchist organizations. The Right to Existence Group peaked at between 90 and 120 members at the turn of the century, and a host of smaller groups were formed in the city: the Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna (Woman’s Emancipation Group) in 1897, the Gruppo Socialista Anarchico “Pensiero ed Azione” (Socialist Anarchist “Thought and Action” Group) and the Gruppo Propaganda Femminile (Woman’s Propaganda Group) in 1899, and the antiorganizationist Gruppo Veritá (Truth Group) and Gruppo i Risorti (The Insurgents Group) in 1903.[439] Combined, the members and sympathizers of these groups were numerous enough to support several local institutions, where consumption and leisure were fused with radical politics.
One was a birreria (tavern) at 325 Straight Street run by the Piedmontese weaver and Right to Existence member Federico Aimone and his business partner Bianco. Anarchist meetings regularly took place in its back room, which was also home to a small anarchist bookstore that carried Italian, Spanish, and French publications. In its early years La Questione Sociale also received its mail at the bar’s address. Unlike the all-male world of German workingclass bars, women were welcome, and the anarchist feminist Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna held its meetings at Aimone and Bianco’s.[440]
In West Hoboken, according to that city’s police captain, there were in 1900 “about forty of the [anarchist] fellows who congregate in various saloons in town here and chiefly at Tivola & Zucca’s saloon, center of Central Avenue and De Mott Street.” It was there that, in 1899, Malatesta was shot in the leg. In the 1910s Tony Ramella’s hall and saloon at North Seventh and Temple Streets in Paterson was also “known to be a meeting place of Italian anarchists.”[441] Another Paterson tavern was run by Right to Existence founding member Giovanni Tamaroglio, a Piedmontese weaver who came to Paterson in 1895. By 1910, however, an Italian secret police report noted that there was
reason to believe that the professions of anarchism he continues to make are not sincere but due primarily if not exclusively for reasons of personal financial interest, aimed at maintaining and possibly increasing his customers among the Italians living there and who also profess themselves anarchists.
This assessment may have been correct; by 1925 Tamaroglio no longer had anarchist ties and was instead operating a small, non-radical bookstore out of his home.[442] Nevertheless, his continued efforts to cater to anarchists’ purchasing power indicate that they represented a substantial customer base.
For many years the back room of Bartoldi’s Hotel at 278 Straight Street was another center of anarchist activity. It hosted numerous meetings and events organized by the Right to Existence Group, and Gaetano Bresci, who lived with his wife in West Hoboken, rented a room at the hotel on the weeknights he worked in Paterson. Though the hotel was destroyed or remodeled into an apartment building—likely after the fire and flood of 1902—Firmino Gallo, Ninfa Baronio, and their children later resided at the same address, which was also the location of the anarchist Beniamino Mazzotta’s print shop.[443]
In 1903 Gallo opened the Libreria Sociologica at 77 Ellison Street, which served as “a casual meeting place of many anarchists, who purchase[d] there anarchist publications of Italy, France, and the United States.” The rear of the store also housed Franz Widmar’s New Era Press.[444] The Libreria functioned as a national clearinghouse for anarchist literature; in 1920 federal agents confiscated receipts for orders from customers in twenty-seven states, as well as Canada.[445] For anarchists who experienced economic mobility, opening a saloon or print shop was a way to advance economically while remaining intimately rooted in the working-class community.[446]
Local anarchists also founded a cooperative grocery store on Park Avenue, which had a meeting space upstairs that was used for socializing, lectures, dances, and performances. William Gallo recalled that members of the anarchist club
met every Saturday and practically every evening. They played cards, had a drink of wine or beer, but not too much liquor. Every Saturday there was a dance, with music played by a little orchestra…Father and Mother, especially Mother, did quite a lot of acting at the club, which had a small stage.[447]
The anarchists had their own mandolin orchestra, La Simpatica, and a Circolo Corale Figli del Lavoro (Children of Labor Chorale Circle) that performed at celebrations such as Primo Maggio (May Day), the anniversary of Umberto I’s assassination, and the anarchists’ annual, secularized feste della frutta (harvest festivals). These celebrations replaced national and religious holidays, creating “a counterculture of invented traditions with which to contest the nationalist-clerical hegemony over the immigrants.”[448]
Through the popularization of radical plays and observances, Paterson functioned as a center of radical cultural production. The first anarchist festa della frutta in America, with 400 people in attendance, was held there in 1894, and the following year North America’s first known filodrammatica (amateur radical Italian theater group) was formed in Paterson. As Marcella Bencivenni notes in her study of Italian American radical culture, “Next to the press, the stage was the most powerful vehicle of propaganda and education, and represented the primary source of income for radical papers and other political activities.”[449] La Questione Sociale and the Libreria Sociologica also printed songbooks and plays such as Gori’s Primo Maggio and Senza Patria, which were performed for decades across the continent. These frequent entertainments, in addition to raising money for anarchist publications and activities, were opportunities for anarchist families from diverse backgrounds to take part in or consume productions infused with radical messages.
The politicization of leisure even extended to the way anarchists dressed. Women would signify their ideological leanings by adorning “a dress trimmed with red and a red hat band,” or “red ribbons in their caps,” and on special occasions such as May Day by dressing “in bright red or in white with red sashes and caps.”[450] Men meanwhile sported distinctive flowing black neckties known colloquially as “anarchist ties.” (Italian residents of Barre, Vermont, referred to the local anarchists simply as “the black ties.”)[451]
All of these institutions and practices not only helped create an Italian anarchist movement, they also helped make Italians out of Piedmontese, Lombardians, and Sicilians who before migrating had little sense of a shared “Italian” identity. In 1899 La Questione Sociale was pleased to announce that the Circolo Sociale e Filodrammatico (Social and Theater Circle) was
set up by some serious and intelligent youths of Southern Italy together with other of our companions from Piedmont…We can not fail to express our satisfaction to note between the Italian elements of Paterson signs of the disappearance of the spirit of parochialism (campanile) that always held the children of the various regions of Italy apart and we hope that the example set by the members of this Circle that meets our greatest sympathies has many imitators.[452]
However, this group only delivered one recorded performance, while on at least eight occasions between 1899 and 1916 other anarchist filodrammatiche in Paterson gave performances in the Piedmontese dialect—although given the frequency of anarchist performances throughout these years, this number is actually surprisingly low. A clear northern Italian bias existed within anarchism in Paterson—the meeting space above the cooperative grocery was called the Piedmont Club—but it was accompanied by a sustained effort to overcome both regional and national divisions. The name of Paterson’s first drama group, La Cosmopolita, makes this intention clear.[453] Significantly, nearly every anarchist office and hangout was located on or near Straight Street, an area originally settled by northern Italians but which was largely populated with southern Italians by 1910, and these institutions remained there despite the demographic shift.[454]
La Questione Sociale also played an important role in creating a larger Italian identity. Only between 2.5% and 10% of Italians actually spoke the official, Tuscan variety of Italian at the time of unification; most continued to converse in regional dialects, of which there were fifteen main groups, some of them mutually unintelligible. In his 1911 study of Paterson’s Italian community, Carlo C. Altarelli noted that in the 1890s and 1900s “the Italian language was spoken by few; those of the north…spoke their language [i.e. Piedmontese], and the Southern[ers] keeping by themselves, spoke their different dialects.”[455] The Piedmontese dialect spoken by Paterson’s early anarchists is distinct enough to be classified as its own Romance language, and is closely related to both French and Catalan—partially explaining the ease with which Italian, French, and Spanish anarchists collaborated. However, all literate Italians (as well as many illiterate ones) were also familiar to some degree with standard Italian, and this was the language in which La Questione Sociale was printed. Regional variants of some vocabulary occasionally found their way into La Questione Sociale (such as operaje instead of operaie [workers]), but in general it was just as legible to a migrant from Palermo as one from Biella. The Italian-language press, therefore, was a medium through which migrants from different regions of Italy could communicate with one another, and was critical to constructing a unified “imagined community” of Italian-speaking anarchists both locally and globally.[456]
In fact, aside from their very first issues, La Questione Sociale and its successor, L’Era Nuova, were never edited by a northern Italian during their more than twenty years in print. Instead, their three longest-lasting editors were the Pedro Esteve, Franz Widmar, and the Sicilian Ludovico Caminita. The latter was born Michele Caminita in 1878 and migrated to the Untied States in 1902 with his younger brother, Ludovico, whose name he adopted after the real Ludovico died in a Winnipeg hospital in 1903 from a “compound fracture of [the] thigh and bed sores.” In the elder Caminita’s words, “I use that name as [a] pseudonym in memory of a victim of capitalist greed and evil.”[457] A socialist when he migrated, Caminita embraced anarchism in early 1906 after a debate with Esteve, who invited him to Paterson where he became editor of the paper after Esteve relocated to Tampa later that year.[458] Under the editorship of men like Gori, Malatesta, Esteve, Widmar, and Caminita, La Questione Sociale became an organ of a transnational Italian-speaking movement rather than a Piedmontese or even strictly “Italian” one. Readers of the paper could therefore be found across Europe, the Americas, and northern Africa, as reflected in reports from groups and receipts of subscriptions and donations regularly printed in its pages.
Because of the importance of literacy and the printed word within this movement, education also fell within the purview of local anarchist undertakings. As of 1911 Paterson had no night school or reading room for Italians, except for those run by the anarchists.[459] At the end of 1899 the Right to Existence Group opened an evening school for Italian workers, and in 1903 they founded a Università Popolare (People’s University) that offered evening classes for adults and lasted until 1914. In November 1915 Italian and Jewish anarchists opened the Scuola Moderna Francesco Ferrer (Francisco Ferrer Modern School) under the directorship of “our friend, Doctor A. Rubino,” an unlicensed physician and member of the syndicalist Federazione Socialista Italiana (Italian Socialist Federation, or FSI). The Scuola Moderna was a “rationalist” Sunday school attended, during its five years of existence, by between thirty and eighty children.[460] In 1915 anarchists also formed the Circolo di Coltura Operaia (Workers’ Culture Circle) for adults, which held weekly lectures and opened a small library of both Italian and English radical literature. In 1916 several students of the Ferrer School, most of them Americanborn children of Italian radicals, formed the English-langauge Young Men’s Ferrer Club (also known as the Francisco Ferrer Association), which soon took over the storefront and library of the Circolo di Coltura Operaia at 315 Straight Street.[461] The portraits hanging on the walls of the Ferrer Club’s headquarters spoke to its members’ interethnic cosmopolitan: they included the Italian anarchists Michele Angiolillo, Sante Caserio, and Gaetano Bresci, as well as Proudhon, Kropotkin, Johann Most, Francisco Ferrer, Octave Mirabeau, Leo Tolstoy, the Haymarket Martyrs, the Russian radical Stepniak, and the German Jewish critic Max Nordau. This was reflected, to a lesser degree, in the group’s membership, which included the Frenchmen Souverine Forgnone and Gustave Coppens (formerly an active IWW member in Lowell, Massachusetts), as well as Max Goodman, a Jew who was actually a federal informant.[462]
In 1916 Antonio Rubino and a group of southern Italian radicals formed the Circolo Instruzione e Delitteo Edmondo De Amicis (Edmondo De Amicis Educational and Hobby Circle), named after the Italian socialist novelist, to replace the Circolo di Coltura Operaia. The Circle had its own meeting room on Straight Street, complete with a small library.[463] The following year the Philosophical Society of Paterson was formed, which brought in radical speakers from New York including Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Harry Kelly, and the African American socialist and IWW member Hubert Harrison.[464] Compared to their Jewish comrades in New York, Paterson’s Italian anarchists were significantly more active and successful in forming interethnic ties.
Anarchists also took their quest for working-class solidarity to Italian parochialism’s major stronghold in the United States: the mutual aid society. These organizations typically restricted membership to migrants from a particular village or region in Italy, and twenty-five existed in Paterson in 1911.[465] The most overtly nationalist and monarchist of these groups, such as Paterson’s self-proclaimed “10 Reggimento Cavalleria, Guardia Vittorio Emanuele” (10th Cavalry Regiment of Victor Emanuel’s Guard), were ridiculed in La Questione Sociale.[466] However, in Piedmont mutual aid societies had for decades functioned to protect workers’ interests, in many ways resembled craft unions more than fraternal lodges, and operated on the anarchistic notion “that the members could improve their moral and material conditions by their own efforts, depending upon neither secular nor ecclesiastical authority.”[467] Many northern Italian anarchists therefore joined Paterson’s mutual aid societies and influenced their workings. Gaetano Bresci belonged to one, as did the anarchist brothers Jacques, Antonio and Francesco Pitea. In nearby Dundee Lake (now Elmwood Park), anarchist Nicola Pirozzi was vice president of a mutual aid society where “a large number of the members are anarchists, all of the remainder are Roman Catholics.”[468]
In 1908 Antonio Rubino, the syndicalist who later led the Scuola Moderna, even became the national head of the Order Sons of Italy in America—the largest Italian fraternal society in the country—but he was forced to resign in 1910 for reasons that remain obscure.[469] Nevertheless, during the silk strike of 1913 the Paterson lodge of the Sons of Italy gave substantial aid to the strikers with the stipulation that it be distributed among them “without distinction of race, religion or nationality.” Local anarchists remarked that this act on the part of an organization “founded on essentially patriotic and national principles” was evidence “that the propaganda of internationalism made for so many years in Paterson by the radicals did not remain without fruit.”[470]
Mutual aid societies, however, were male terrain, as were the Young Men’s Ferrer Club and the Right to Existence Group. Despite male anarchists’ commitment to interethnic solidarity and cooperation, they often overlooked gendered divisions within their own movement. Women, despite their strong representation in Paterson’s silk workforce, were not encouraged to participate in meetings, lead strikes, or edit newspapers. Instead, they were urged to partake in recreation and family-centered events like dances, picnics, annual celebrations, and theatrical performances—the same field of activity to which most female Italian immigrants were restricted.[471] But many were not content with such roles, and mounted an important challenge to patriarchal attitudes within Paterson’s anarchist community.
*** 3.6 L’emancipazione Della Donna
Women were an integral but small minority within Italian American anarchism from its beginnings. In 1885 an Italian paper noted that there were “many women” in Chicago’s Circolo Comunista Anarchica Carlo Cafiero, and a list of eighty-eight subscribers to New York’s L’Anarchico in 1888 contained the names of six female readers.[472] A female weaver who returned to Biella from Paterson in 1889 described to a local reporter how, “Twice a week, in the evening, together with almost all of her female comrades from Biella, she would go to the lectures of Gori and Ciancabilla in a special hall, always crammed with people, and capable of holding up to two thousand.”[473] Anarchist women in Paterson energetically organized themselves to advance not only anarchism, but their own rights and interests as victims of sexism, and they made the city America’s most prominent center of radical Italian feminism.
Some female anarchists, like Maria Roda and Giuseppe Ciancabilla’s companion Ersilia Cavedagni (also known as Ersilia Grandi due to an earlier marriage), had been radicals in Italy.[474] Most, however, were like the silk weaver Ernestina Cravello, who was born in Biella in 1880 and in 1895 migrated with her parents to join her brothers in West Hoboken. Italian authorities noted Cravello’s intelligence and “good reputation” before her migration, but through her brothers she quickly became involved in the Italian American anarchist movement. In the wake of King Umberto’s assassination American newspaper reporters dubbed her “the Queen of the Anarchists,” chiefly because Cravello was attractive, articulate and fluent in English. The New York Herald described her as “a handsome young woman” with “a magnetic influence over the Paterson anarchists,” and mused, “She seemed a born leader, with beauty, wit and power greater than Emma Goldman ever possessed.”[475]
Four factors, however, limited the number of prominent Italian anarchist women. First, females made up only one quarter of all Italian migrants to the United States between 1820 and 1928.[476] Second, in unfamiliar new surroundings, many Italian families subjected girls and women to stringent control over their activities outside of the home and workplace. Third, most Italian women continued to work even after marriage, taking on domestic duties in addition to workplace ones that made it “particularly difficult for women to involve themselves in ongoing union activities” and other forms of activism.[477] And finally, as Jennifer Guglielmo notes in her study of Italian American women’s radicalism, the evidence “suggests that women’s activism was not only distinct from men’s, but…it was also largely invisible or insignificant to them.”[478]
Ironically, many men relied on the very female labor that they refused to acknowledge as important. Performances by filodrammatiche, in which women were especially active, provided most of the funding for publications like La Questione Sociale. Moreover, because Italian women traditionally managed household finances, many of the donations listed in these papers under men’s names in fact represented, in part, women’s domestic labor. In her memoirs, poet Diane Di Prima recalls that during her childhood in New York her anarchist grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, “worked enormously hard for his family—but he would at any time throw everything over for an ideal,” and “it was the women,” like her grandmother Antoinette Rossi, “who attended to all the practical aspects of life” and kept food on the table.[479] Women’s unacknowledged contributions were sometimes more direct; Ersilia Cavedagni edited L’Aurora in Spring Valley after Ciancabilla was arrested in 1901, and Carlo Tresca’s wife Helga produced his publications when he was away.[480] Paterson’s Alberto Guabello, according to his grandchildren, was “lazy” and depended on his wife Adelegisa to do “all the work” running their print shop, while Ludovico Caminita described his wife Amalia as “the woman who walked heroically at my side, a smile of comfort on her lips, always ready to support me in difficult moments, along the Via Crucis of my fate, lined with thorns.”[481]
Yet these same radical women occasionally met with outright hostility from male comrades, who demeaned them as “worse than dogs, because they are bitches” or told them to “shut up.”[482] More often, they faced less direct forms of sexism. As Carlo Tresca quipped in his autobiography, “we men do not take women’s counsels seriously.” American-born Jewish anarchist David Koven, who worked closely with Italian anarchists in New York and San Francisco in the 1930s and 1940s, recalled that his friend Giovanni (“John”) Vattuone “was a very forceful, macho-man and some of our comrades railled [sic] against what they perceived as John’s sexist attitudes…John was a product of the 19th century, and few anarchist men of his time treated women as equals.”[483] In one especially troubling example of this attitude, a male anarchist ostensibly writing in favor of women’s rights in La Questione Sociale argued that the “black race” was “certainly inferior to the White in many respects,” but nevertheless “illustrious men did not hesitate to ask for their equality, and humanity has given them rights,” proving that equality of rights was not dependent on equality of abilities—thereby reinforcing the supposed biological inferiority of both women and African Americans under the guise of egalitarianism.[484]
In response to such attitudes, women organized groups of their own. In September 1897 Maria Roda announced the formation of the Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna, declaring,
Men say we are frivolous, that we are weak, that we are incapable of supporting the struggle against this intolerable society, that we cannot understand the ideal of anarchism…But they are the cause of our weakness, our undeveloped intellects, because they restrict our instruction…and ignore us.[485]
Similar complaints were widespread among anarchist women, who were supported by a number of male comrades self-conscious of other men’s behavior. One such supporter was Roda’s husband, Pedro Esteve, who opened the pages of La Questione Sociale to women’s writings; another was Giuseppe Ciancabilla, who similarly published a number of articles on the topic of women’s emancipation in L’Aurora. Other anarchist gruppi femminili (feminist groups) subsequently appeared in West Hoboken, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Barre, San Francisco, and the coal towns of Illinois.[486] Roda also forged transnational ties, corresponding with Louise Reville, a Parisian anarchist and birth control advocate who helped publish L’Action Feministe in Paris.[487] Ernestina Cravello likewise worked toward feminist solidarity, across ideological rather than oceanic divides, by cooperating with the antiorganizzatora Ersilia Cavedagni in an unrealized project to launch an Italian anarchist feminist publication.[488]
Despite such women’s contributions, revolutionary militancy was often equated with masculinity in anarchist culture. Thus famed anarchist editor Luigi Galleani wrote of “virile rebellions,” and a reader of Paterson’s La Jacquerie declared in a letter, “I lose all patience here with these unfortunates who would cause their masculine organs to be cut off to please the priest or the king.”[489] Most radical plays performed by Italian anarchists portrayed women as virtuous victims in need of rescue by revolutionary men. However, anarchist feminists in Paterson formed the Teatro Sociale (Social Theater), which performed dramas about women’s self-emancipation.[490]
Women also appropriated notions of masculinity and femininity to define their enemy. In 1895 La Questione Sociale printed an article—later reproduced as a pamphlet by the Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna—by Anna Maria Mozzoni, a prominent Italian feminist with both socialist and anarchist ties. She asked her female audience:
And for you, oh woman of the people, what is the patria? It is the policeman who comes to take your child to make him a soldier—it is the tax collector who extorts the family tax (fuocatico) from your always almost extinct family—…it is the law that gives your children as property to your husband and that declares yourself his slave and servant. Of the glories of this patria, of its joys, its assets, its favors, not even one reaches you.[491]
A few years later Ernestina Cravello explained on behalf of the Right to Existence Group, “We approved [of] the killing of Carnot, the President of France. We approved the killing of Canovas, Prime Minister of Spain. We did not approve the killing of Elizabeth, Archduchess of Austria. We do not war on women.”[492] Patriarchy and the state were thus linked in anarchist feminist discourse. Anarchist women were not interested in “electoral feminism”—suffrage—but instead concerned themselves with “women’s emancipation” through direct action.[493]
The most immediate form of emancipation they sought was from the bonds of marriage. The New York Herald noted that Paterson’s anarchist meetings were attended by women “who, although in no sense disorderly, fall in readily enough with the anarchist doctrines regarding the looseness of the marriage tie.” According to an Italian Catholic journalist writing about Paterson’s Italian migrants, “All of the girls, after a few months, come to abandon the church. Weddings are made into free unions, children are christened…in public assemblies, between cups of wine and anarchist songs.”[494] In 1920 Gemma Mello, a Piedmontese silk weaver and part of Paterson’s minority of anti-organizationist anarchists, told federal agents that she believed in neither God (“I have never seen him”) nor marriage. When the agents pressed her to elaborate on this titillating topic, she explained:
A. “I believe in comradeship.”
Q. “What do you mean by comradeship?”
A. “Well if I get out of jail I’m going to get a lover either in this country or Italy.”
Her Bureau of Investigation file further notes, “She is an advocate of free love and had among her collection books on this subject.”[495]
Despite the alarm with which outsiders greeted talk of “free love,” the ideal “free union” envisioned by the Italian anarchists was similar to the serial monogamy practiced by Jewish anarchists. These unions were often life-long, as in the case of Maria Roda and Pedro Esteve or Ninfa Baronio and Firmino Gallo, couples who had eight and six children together, respectively. William Gallo recalled, “The same was true of all of my aunts and uncles, and none of them ever separated or divorced, none of them.” Ninfa and Firmino legally married during the post-World War I Red Scare only when Firmino was faced with the choice, given by immigration officials intent on upholding sexual mores, between getting married or being stripped of his citizenship and deported as an anarchist.[496]
Free unions were predicated not only on romantic love, but also on a shared dedication to anarchist ideals. In 1911 prominent Biellese anarchist Tomaso Concordia congratulated Paterson’s Serafino Grandi for having “taken as your mate a young revolutionary woman. In this way, besides sexual love, you’ll experience the love for the ideal, probably loftier than the first.”[497] But not all relationships lived up to this model. Many Italian anarchist men, despite their ideology, were domestically “despotic” and “padrone di casa” (bosses of the home).[498] Nicola Quintavalle, the West Hoboken barber suspected of involvement in the assassination of Umberto I, was once arrested for threatening to kill his female companion, and the shoemaker Giovanni Rosco, a subscriber to La Jacquerie in Manchester, New Hampshire, routinely beat his wife. Such domestic violence was a pervasive feature within Italian families on both sides of the Atlantic.[499] Males’ disregard for their female partners took less violent forms, as well. Gaetano Bresci left on what he knew would be a one-way trip to kill the King of Italy, leaving his pregnant wife and daughter without means of support and ignorant of his plans. For years afterward, the family had to rely on donations from sympathetic anarchists. And Carlo Tresca, a frequent visitor to Paterson and hero of the 1913 strike, was a notorious philanderer who treated his wife poorly.[500]
Even egalitarian relationships came at a price. Amalia Canova (née Fontanella) carried on an affair with Ludovico Caminita while married to another man, and created a scandal in 1908 when she ran away to Pennsylvania with the notorious anarchist. She was disowned by her family and lost custody of her three-year-old daughter, and in 1917 Ludovico Caminita was still begging her father to reestablish contact with her.[501] Most free unions also reproduced a gendered division of domestic labor. In 1900 Ernestina Cravello was working at the Paragon Mill and, emboldened by her sudden notoriety, broke off a marriage engagement “that she might devote her life to the cause of Anarchy.” But by 1902 she was married to a fellow anarchist, Gaspare Ferro, and she left the mills to become a mother, eventually raising five children. Ninfa Baronio also “did not work in the mills but took care of the house and the children.”[502]
La Questione Sociale promoted free unions, but simultaneously fetishized women’s role as mothers. Antonio Agresti noted, “we think that the one great honor, the greatest triumph for the woman would be to be a mother, to have children: but for society the woman that has children is not a mother until she is united with a man, labeled, branded, stamped, [and] registered like a package for delivery.” He asked, “Where is the respect for the will of the woman? Where is the respect for her freedom; where is the respect for her individuality?”[503] That women, emancipated from the arbitrary authority of a husband, would still inevitably aspire to motherhood was beyond question. Another writer sermonized, “If there is in contemporary society a noble, sublime, I might say holy mission; it is certainly the mission of the mother, taken in its true sense. The mission of the mother is aimed principally at the education of children.” Whereas, a “bourgeois mother will not instill in children the love of humanity, but instead the selfish love of things,” anarchist mothers would instill in children “love of their own freedom united with respect for the freedom of others.”[504]
Female anarchists took up this line of reasoning as well, in order to highlight the importance of their domestic and reproductive labor. Ersilia Cavedagni wrote, “The woman is and will always be the educator of the family, that which has and will always have the most direct and the most important influence on the children.”[505] By laying claim to “anarchist motherhood,” women placed themselves as integral to the process of sustaining revolutionary ideology through the next generation.[506] In doing so they reinforced many aspects of the “bourgeois” patriarchal system they sought to undermine, yet they still stood at the vanguard of the women’s movement of their day. By taking action both on their own and in collaboration with male comrades, they played a crucial role in the construction of Paterson’s radical Italian subculture and its interethnic cosmopolitan vision, to which they added a strong feminist current.
*** 3.7 “Free Country,” the Patria, and the Pope
The anarchists’ ideology was most clearly expressed, of course, in their press. A contributor to the very first issue of La Questione Sociale recounted how he, “like thousands of others emigrated to this land of America believing it possible to find a living (un pane) less bitter and less backbreaking. But alas! Here too I met new disappointments and new abuses, new falsehoods told by the holders of social wealth.” Significantly, this migrant signed his article with the name “Un Cosmopolita” (A Cosmopolitan), specifically highlighting the cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist nature of his radicalism.[507] Similar expressions of disillusionment with America had been common since the first days of Italian American anarchism, such as L’Anarchico’s charge in 1888 that coming to the United States was “like changing the sheets but not the bed.”[508] As such statements make clear, migrant anarchists found both the Old World they had left and the New World they came to intolerable. In their place anarchists sought to construct a new society without borders.
The very name of the Right to Existence Group was a protest against the America that its members encountered; Ernestina Cravello explained, “We are not treated well. The Americans insult us like dogs…They treat the English much better. We have the right to live.” In the words of novelist John Dos Passos, Italian immigrants “planted the perfect city of their imagination in America. When they came to this country they either killed the perfect city in their hearts and submitted themselves to the system of dawg eat dawg [sic] or else they found themselves anarchists.”[509] Italian American anarchists regularly used “Free Country” as the ironic title of reports detailing violence against immigrants, workers, and African-Americans.[510] They also tried to make the economic and social plight of immigrant workers known within Italy.[511] There was an element of hyperbole to this; both wages and political freedoms were greater in the United States. A female weaver who returned to Biella in 1889 told a local newspaper, “Life over there is incomparably better than in Italy; you’re paid more, you dress better, even the factory girls wear bonnets.” Nevertheless, she had also been active in Paterson’s anarchist movement and declared that she “approved of the anarchy that will save the world.” The material benefits of America did not outweigh its failures.[512]
Anarchists were not alone in holding these sentiments. After Bresci assassinated Umberto, Italian American business and religious leaders condemned the act, but the larger Italian American community’s attitude was more ambivalent. Italian migrants’ satisfaction with both the Italian monarchy and American democracy can perhaps be gauged by the results of a campaign on the part of the Italian American monarchist paper L’Araldo Italiano to raise $1,000 for a stone wreath to be placed at Umberto’s tomb in Rome: La Questione Sociale answered with a call to raise $1,000 for Gaetano Bresci’s American-born wife and two daughters, and reached its goal first—through the sale of postcards depicting Bresci superimposed over the Statue of Liberty.[513] For some, the anarchist cause championed by Bresci seemed to fulfill the promises of liberty and equality that both the Italian state and America had failed to uphold.
Italians had the lowest naturalization rate of any European immigrant group, and in 1920 two-thirds of New Jersey’s Italian-born residents were not citizens. State politics, dominated by a system of “boss rule” based on graft and patronage, offered them little incentive to naturalize or take part in the democratic process. In 1911 there were only 900 Italian voters in Paterson, most of who reportedly sold their votes to the highest bidder.[514] Italian anarchists, unlike their socialist rivals, made no attempt to persuade fellow migrants to become citizens, and often advised them against doing so. Paterson anarchist Nicola Pironi told an undercover Bureau of Investigation informant, “Citizen papers are only good to wipe my ass on.”[515] Some anarchists did, however, naturalize for pragmatic purposes. Firmino Gallo gained American citizenship around 1899, and Ludovico Caminita took out his first papers around 1905, but never completed the naturalization process—a decision that would later have major repercussions (see Chapter 5). Franz Widmar didn’t even bother applying for citizenship, knowing that as an anarchist, “I cannot be given the paper.”[516] For at least two of Paterson’s anarchists, however, citizenship proved to be the first step on the path of upward mobility, Americanization, and deradicalization: Cesare Casarico, an anarchist dyer and clerk, was naturalized in 1888 and by 1910 he had joined the capitalist ranks and opened his own silk manufacturing workshop, making him one of only four or five local Italians to succeed in doing so at the time. By 1920 Annibale Stramsi, a former antiorganizationist anarchist, had also become a citizen and owner of a silk mill.[517]
However, like many Jewish anarchists, Paterson’s radicals did promote the acquisition of English. The evening school begun by anarchists in 1899 taught English as well as “American history, traditions, and social norms,” not for the sake of “Americanization,” but to allow migrants to better adapt to their environment.[518] Few of the anarchists themselves, however, mastered English; a reporter attending a Paterson anarchist meeting in 1900 noted, “All the speeches were in Italian, as the speakers refused to hold forth in English, on the ground that they should only make themselves ridiculous by speaking in an unfamiliar tongue.”[519] Most Italian anarchists’ day-to-day interactions remained confined to their own linguistic group, and while they urged fellow migrants to learn English, they also wanted to keep alive their own native language and culture. Ludovico Caminita gave Italian lessons to the American-born children of immigrants, and in 1925 Vittorio Cravello wrote to his sister that he intended to return to Italy so that his son could learn Italian.[520] Bilingualism and retention of a distinct Italian identity, rather than linguistic and cultural assimilation, were the anarchists’ goals.
This continued attachment to Italian language and culture can not be viewed as an expression of nationalism. In Italian American anarchist literature no term was subjected to as much abuse as la patria—literally, “the fatherland,” meaning Italy. Driven from their native environs by poverty, economic displacement, and political repression, anarchist migrants sometimes identified themselves as “bastards of our country” and Italy as their uncaring “stepmother.”[521] More often, however, they embraced the title of Pietro Gori’s play and proclaimed themselves i senza patria (those without a country). A 1907 Italian-language leaflet distributed by “the Anarchists of Phillipsburg and Newark, NJ” declared, “In the jumble of all prejudices, hypocrisies and conventionalisms of society, if there is one falsehood that needs to be fought and demolished more than others for the disastrous consequences that it produces, it is certainly the PATRIA.”[522] During his editorship of La Questione Sociale, Errico Malatesta drew up an anarchist program that called for, “War on patriotism…Abolition of borders, [and] brotherhood between all peoples,” and the rival L’Aurora declared that “a new conscience was forming called Solidarity, a new patria called Brotherhood, and a new society called Libertarian Socialism.”[523] Articles denouncing the very notion of a patria or patriotism were regular features of virtually all Italian-language anarchist publications.
This is not to say that anarchists had no sentimental attachments to Italy. According to Paterson’s L’Era Nuova,
We anarchists are against the Patria, against all Patrias of the present social order. The reason we are against the Patria is because in its name injustice, barbarity, inequality, economic exploitation, [and] political lies are perpetuated…
We want to demolish this carnivorous, unjust, Barbarous, murderous (Caina) Patria, and on the ruins of its rotting carcass we want to plant [the] avenging, sublime and terrible fear of tyrants, the flag of Anarchy. We want a single family: Humanity; a single Patria: the World…
[But] if by Patria one means the land (terra) in which we were born, the blue sky that smiled on us in infancy, childhood forays into the sultry days of June in search of plums to be looted…we too are patriots—or rather poets of this romantic patriotism and sweet memory.[524]
Ludovico Caminita reminisced, “Italy is one of the finest countries in the world. Her theatres [sic], churches, monuments, parks, country-sides and her sea coasts are marvelous. But,” he continued, “Italy is also one of the poorest…The misery of the people would set my blood and brains boiling…and thrust me irresistibly to devote all my intellectual energy for the emancipation of the proletarians from wage slavery.” Ernestina Cravello similarly explained, “We have a beautiful country in Italy, but we are forced to leave it or die. Thousands of Italians need bread in their own country, where plenty can be produced, but if they ask for it they are thrown into prison.”[525]
To counteract the pernicious influence of Italian nationalism among their fellow migrants, anarchists took aim at September 20th celebrations of Italian unification, publishing special “anti-patriotic” papers on that date.[526] La Questione Sociale and L’Era Nuova also ran articles every September railing against the supposed blessings of the Italian nation-state; the first of these, in 1895, admonished, “workers, on this day on which you talk with rebounding phrases for a patria of narrow and petty borders, raise your eyes to the great patria of humanity…: the earth, to the great family of generous hearts: humanity.”[527] In 1899 Paterson’s “Committee against the Celebration of September 20th” arranged a lecture by Malatesta at Feist Hall and printed 10,000 circulars to be distributed in other cities.[528] Christopher Columbus, who the prominenti (Italian immigrant businessmen and politicians) touted as an icon of Italian American identity, was similarly targeted. Anarchists and syndicalists campaigned against and disrupted Columbus Day parades, and condemned the explorer as “a pirate and an adventurer,” who was “indifferent to massacre” and “a man without principles,” whose plunder of the New World set the stage for “the martyrdom of the negroes in the States of the South,” and “the prejudices and hatreds of race.”[529]
Like their Jewish comrades, Italian anarchists never regarded their ethnic group as a cohesive community with shared interests, and they deliberately sought to fragment it along ideological and class lines. Nowhere was this more evident than in the centrality of anti-religious propaganda within their tactical arsenal. In 1896 Pietro Gori gave a lecture in Paterson on the topic of “Science and Religion” and told his audience, “The war on religion” was of “immense…interest to the working class, which has everything to gain with the progress of science and free thought…For free thinking men, the word religion has a certain unpleasant taste; religion and freedom are contradictory terms.”[530] Against a church that promoted class cooperation and Americanization, anarchists seized upon the figure of Lucifer as the consummate rebel; more than one signed their writings under his name, and an individualist anarchist newspaper published in New York in 1923–26 bore the title La Rivolta degli Angeli (Revolt of the Angels). Ludovico Caminita even named his son Lucifero.[531]
Italian migrants were ripe for anticlerical propaganda; Catholic, Protestant, and secular observers repeatedly noted low levels of Church attendance among Italian Americans, and this only changed with the second and third generations.[532] The Church had opposed the incorporation of the Papal States into the new Italian nation-state, and for decades anticlericalism was a staple of the Italian American press across most of the political spectrum. Though nominally Catholic, Italians in the United States they were alienated by the Irish-dominated American Catholic Church which, until the turn of the century, often relegated Mass for Italians to church basements.[533]
Paterson’s anarchists held their weekly meetings on Sundays, forcing community members to choose between church and their own “brief and friendly discussions.” The city was home to only a single Italian Catholic church prior to 1910, and this had difficulty collecting adequate funds from parishioners to pay its mortgage. According to a careful observer of Paterson’s Italians, “In the yearly parade of the Holy Name Society those who take part can be counted on the fingers,” and though “the Italians are nominally Catholic….a spirit of anticlericalism is in the air.”[534] In other anarchist havens like Spring Valley and Barre, Vermont, Catholic churches found it impossible to function altogether and closed down.[535]
The wealthy prominenti, and in particular the padroni, or labor contractors, were the other main target of anarchist wrath within the Italian community. Francesco Saverio Merlino famously exposed how the padrone system at times bordered on slavery, with greenhorn Italian migrants brought to worksites under false pretenses and forced to work by armed guards.[536] As Paul Buhle notes, “By attacking the padrone, radicals could draw the class lines in their own community, dispute the sway of the prominenti, and appeal for the unification of all workers across ethnic lines.”[537] Thus a single issue of Paterson’s anarchist paper La Jacquerie referred to those attending an anarchist congress in Florence as “our Italian brothers,” and to Emma Goldman, who spoke not a word of Italian, as “our Emma.”[538]
Further afield, the Paterson anarchists consistently supported anti-imperialist and antiracist struggles. As Benedict Anderson notes, in the late nineteenth century anarchism “was the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial capitalism, autocracy, latifundism, and imperialism.”[539] La Questione Sociale’s first years coincided with the Italian invasion of Eritrea and Ethiopia (“Abyssinia”) as well as the Cuban War of Independence, and in both instances the anarchists championed the cause of the anti-imperialist forces, declaring
we know that our patria is not the land where we were born, but that, for us, it is the highest concept and no more limited than the entire Universe: we know that we, ourselves, give absolute solidarity to the oppressed of Italy, with those of Abyssinia, of Armenia, as with the glorious insurgents of Cuba and the strong and courageous exiles of far-away Siberia, that, finally, we, without distinction of color, race, language [or] custom, have shared affection and adoration for all the oppressed of the humanity.
An Italian circular signed “The Anarchist Residents in North America” similarly stated:
Our sympathies go to all those who defend themselves against any form of usurpation.— We applaud the Cubans who want the independence of their island, the Abyssinians fighting to defend their land (terra) from foreign invasion.—And we all feel morally driven to sympathize with Abyssinia not only for this reason, but also because we see behind the veil of the self-styled civilizing expedition the mark of the exploitation, speculation, [and] rapacity of the capitalists who alone reap the fruit of the battles, of the practices of death, of the blood shed in conquering Abyssinia.[540]
For many anarchists, the Cuban War of Independence appeared to be a potential anarchist revolution in the making. Dozens of Italian and Spanish migrants in the United States went to Cuba to take part in the rebellion, joining the members of a large indigenous Cuban anarchist movement. Most were cigar makers living in Florida who worked alongside Cuban migrants, but Harry Kelly recalled encountering five young anarchists who “had lately come from Italy; [and were] on their way to Cuba to fight for her against Spain.” In 1898 Emma Goldman aided a textile strike twenty miles southwest of Paterson in Summit, New Jersey, where she also worked with Italian anarchists “in behalf of Cuban freedom.”[541]
La Questione Sociale posed the question, “is this, by chance, an anarchist revolt?” It answered in the negative, but found hope in the prominence of the anarchist faction within the revolutionary forces “which gives, today, life, blood, and energy to the fight,” and therefore “will not be without influence in the economic and political reconstruction of the island”—a reconstruction that “will be such as to allow for the Cubans the peaceful evolution towards the abolition of all oppression and all authority.”[542] However, the less optimistic argued that Cuban independence alone would not benefit the Cuban people at large, but simply replace the Spanish ruling class with a Cuban one. Notable within this camp was Pedro Esteve, who had lived in Havana for part of 1894 and urged anarchist neutrality in the conflict. Esteve’s refusal to support Cuba’s “political revolution” had earlier led to the split within El Despertar that left the paper under his editorship, and in Paterson he had debated the question with the Cuban anarchist Enrique Creci, a follower of José Martí who was later killed in combat after returning to Cuba. Nevertheless, when the United States entered the struggle against Spain in 1898, even those anarchists who had advocated Cuban independence could not bring themselves to support American imperialist efforts.[543]
Despite his stance on Cuban independence, Esteve resolutely opposed Spanish imperialism and praised the 1897 assassination of Spain’s Prime Minister, Antonio Cánovas Del Castillo, at the hands the Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo. Angiolillo’s act was motivated both by the Spanish government’s repression of anarchists in Spain and its bloody suppression of independence movements in Cuba and the Philippines.[544] As Esteve put it in La Questione Sociale, “A just revenge (vendetta) removed from the world this man who made blood flow so generously in Spain and in the colonies.” A reporter visiting the paper’s offices in 1900 noted, “Two big medallion busts of Michile Angiolello [sic], the assassin of Minister Canovas of Spain, hang on the walls, and big pictures of him are scattered in various parts of the room.”[545]
The anti-imperialism of Paterson’s anarchists was rooted in their opposition to both state power and racist ideology. Seeing through Italy’s “civilizing” pretensions and lamenting the Italian people’s enthusiasm for the imperial adventure in Ethiopia, Antonio Agresti wrote in La Questione Sociale: “Oh! How much better would they be, the Italian vassals, to direct at Italy itself all of their manias for colonization and civilization.” Another writer for the paper took a swipe at scientific racism and “those who believe the Latin people to be an aristocratic species of mankind” by cataloging the horrors of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonialism.[546] This inversion of popular tropes of civilization and savagery was carried further by L’Era Nuova, which extolled the virtues of Native Americans, Australian aborigines, Asians, Africans, Arabs, Jews, and all “the races of color,” while declaring, “Since the most ancient times the white race behaved against the other races like a predatory animal.” Whites’ “systematic destruction of the races of color” would result in the “loss of human variety, the beauty of the entire human species, deprived of its very beautiful and powerful branches”—in other words, the loss of cosmopolitanism.[547]
The Italian anarchist press also routinely condemned the “barbaric” treatment of African Americans.[548] Italian American anarchists’ rejection of racism was undoubtedly linked to their own experiences as racialized subjects. Like other groups of “new immigrants,” prior to the Second World War Italians were categorized as belonging to a distinct racial group—variously labeled Mediterranean or Latin, and including separate Southern Italian and Northern Italian or “Alpine” races—that was inferior to the Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, or Aryan “races” of central and western Europe. Although legally defined as “white,” Italians faced widespread racial prejudice. They were excluded from certain occupations, received lower rates of pay than, and were informally barred from many of the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Native-born Americans and other immigrant groups often refused to work alongside Italians, who were also the only European nationality to be victimized in several lynchings in the decades around the turn of the century (aside from the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, an American-born Jew).[549] However, the very act of condemning the “white race” for its crimes against “the races of color” inadvertently reproduced racial categories.[550] Within this racial matrix Italians occupied an ambiguous position—La Questione Sociale lamented American workers’ “race hatred” toward Italians, but also included the Genoan Christopher Columbus within the ranks of the predatory “white race,” and Franz Widmar made reference to “all of the races: White, black, yellow, [and] red,” leaving little doubt as to which category Italians belonged.[551] Nevertheless, this racialism rarely led to racism.
In the second half of the 1890s, the Dreyfus Affair in France revealed some ambivalence on the part of Italian anarchists toward Jews. La Questione Sociale categorically condemned anti-Semitism, but one writer reinforced anti-Semitic stereotypes by claiming that centuries of persecution had forced Jews “to hide their assets with the appearance of the most sordid misery; and it is in this way that they developed their avarice and excessive love of money that is now the hallmark of their race.” Another contributor, however, countered by arguing that the work of the French anarchist and geographer Eliseé Reclus had shown that Jews were not a separate Semitic race but a “much mixed” one, and that while Jews might share “habits…and special customs” as a result of persecution, the majority lived in poverty rather than capitalist luxury.[552]
Like their Marxist rivals, Paterson’s anarchists sometimes reduced racism to crass economic causes. In 1906 Ludovico Caminita argued, “That which goes with the name of racial hatred is nothing but the result of a conflict of economic interests, which the bourgeoisie created and maintains for the sake of its class hegemony.”[553] More often, however, articles in La Questione Sociale, L’Era Nuova, and La Jacquerie dealt with racism and racialism as concepts and problems in themselves. In 1915 a contributor to L’Era Nuova attacked not just racial hierarchies but the idea of race itself, arguing it was an “historical notion” rather than “a notion of natural science,” and racial categories were nothing more than conglomerations of “heterogeneous ethnic elements and based initially on intellectual factors: language, religion, custom, law, civilization, etc.”[554] According to historical sociologist Salvatore Salerno, whatever its shortcomings, “the anarchist press in Paterson contains the most sustained and detailed critique of race in the United States” from this period.[555]
Within Paterson’s multiethnic working class such antiracist and cosmopolitan sympathies were more than abstractions, as anarchists were at the forefront of efforts to unite all local workers against their employers. According to L’Era Nuova, “The International will not be born ‘one great day’: it is born from that moment when the human mind hears it in the spontaneous voice of instinct. It exists today, slumbering because the people, the great beast so strong and docile, are deceived; later they will awaken.”[556] Anarchists brought their interethnic cosmopolitanism—their living “International”—into being through their actions, on occasion rousing the working-class “beast” from its slumber. Nowhere was this more evident than in Paterson’s often violent history of labor unrest.
*** 3.8 “A Mob Ruled It”
Although Paterson’s anarchists gained notoriety through Gaetano Bresci’s act of “propaganda by the deed,” most devoted their time and energy to building a revolutionary labor movement. La Questione Sociale’s immediate constituency was Paterson’s Italian working class, but it was also an avid proponent of multiethnic labor solidarity and industrial unionism across craft lines. Contrary to the stereotype of “unorganizable” Italian migrants, in Paterson Italians began to join unions as soon as they arrived. By 1887, 154 of the city’s less than 800 Italians belonged to the Knights of Labor, and a number also joined the militant but short-lived Progressive Union of Silk Workers.[557] Thereafter Italians remained prominent in Paterson’s labor movement, with anarchists at the forefront.
The first major strike involving Italians began in March 1894 when the city’s ribbon workers walked off the job. The wildcat strike quickly spread to other branches of the silk industry as strikers, joined by their spouses and children, roamed from mill to mill calling on workers to join them and breaking windows and machinery if they met resistance. Leadership of the strike quickly fell to radicals: strikers eagerly listened to speeches by Italian anarchist Antonio Ferrari, German anarchist Michael Schick, English anarchist Peter Grasse, and Socialist Labor Party (SLP) founder Daniel De Leon, who had many Jewish followers in Paterson. Italians and Germans cooperated closely and were the most militant strikers, and all of those arrested for rioting belonged to these nationalities. Their unruliness worked, to a degree—terrified dyehouse owners and several mill owners met strikers’ demands, though the ribbon weavers failed to secure theirs.[558] Afterwards, local German anarchist Charles Doebbler was convicted of planting a bomb (that failed to explode) at the home of William Strange, one of the owners who had refused to settle.[559]
In February 1897, Italian anarchists in West Hoboken formed a Lega di Resistenza Internazionale (International League of Resistance) composed of “various nationality groups that are autonomous” following a successful multiethnic strike. Shortly afterward Paterson anarchists met at Mazzini Hall to found their own Lega di Resistenza fra i Tessitori Italiani (League of Resistance of Italian Weavers). By December, Paterson’s Lega di Resistenza included over 500 members, had led a string of successful strikes, and was arranging to send propagandists to organize silk workers in Pennsylvania. One of its leading figures was Right to Existence member Vittorio Cravello, and La Questione Sociale acted as the unofficial mouthpiece for the League, for the first time promoting the general strike as a revolutionary tactic.[560]
The League federated with the United Silk Workers of Hudson County, but was expelled in February 1899 for reasons that are unclear and dissolved. The United Broad Silk Weavers’ Association, an independent craft union founded in 1898, also expelled anarchist members after McKinley’s assassination in September 1900.[561] Yet even at their most vulnerable, in the aftermath of Bresci’s assassination of Umberto, anarchists successfully conducted several small strikes to reinstate silk workers who had been fired because they were known anarchists.[562]
In 1902 the anarchists were put to a more severe test, during the most violent and bitterly fought strike in Paterson’s history. The year began with successive disasters: The city experienced the Great Fire on February 8, which burned the offices of La Questione Sociale to the ground, followed by the Great Flood on 2 March, which inundated the Italian section of town. Most of Paterson’s mills and dyehouses were destroyed, damaged, or closed down by the catastrophes, leaving thousands of workers temporarily unemployed. On April 22, shortly after the dyehouses reopened, Italian dyers’ helpers at the Auger & Simon mill walked out after their demand for a raise was refused. As in 1894, they marched to nearby dyehouses to entreat others to join the strike and, armed with stones and dye sticks, broke in the windows and doors of mills where workers refused or were not allowed to join them. One dyehouse owner was beaten unconscious and another was thrown into a dying vat and suffered minor acid burns. The next day police trying to disperse a crowd of 2,000 strikers opened fire, seriously injuring at least one worker.[563] Although the timing of the 1902 strike, following a period of halted production, was in the strikers’ favor, unskilled and easily replaced dye workers still operated from a position of weakness. Success hinged upon their ability to coerce owners into closing their dyehouses, to prevent potential strikebreakers from working, and to spread the strike to other ethnic groups and branches of the industry, thus accounting for the mass, violent character of the strike.
By April 24, 3,000–3,500 dye workers were on strike. Though Italians and Germans again predominated, at strike meetings “the proceedings were slow because of the many nationalities represented.” Workers reiterated their demand for a wage increase, and additionally asked for a reduction of the work week to fifty-five hours, the introduction of five-minute wash periods before lunch and quitting time, and a five-year contract. In May they formed the United Dyers, Helpers and Finishers of America which, like the earlier league of resistance, was organized into language branches, each of which had a representative on the central executive board. The union was formed with the aid of both De Leon’s Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA) and the United Silk Workers of America (USWA), but its secretary was the anarchist Giovanni di Nardo, who had attempted to organize a league of resistance among dye workers in 1899.[564] The conservative USWA, however, turned down the organization’s application for admission and refused to call a general strike, while employers refused to negotiate with the new union.[565]
With the strike deadlocked, anarchists again stepped in. The leading figure of the new phase of the strike was Luigi Galleani, who had arrived in Paterson the previous year after escaping incarceration on the island of Pantelleria for attempting to organize, along with Errico Malatesta and others, a series of uprisings throughout Italy. Galleani had previously helped organize strikes in Piedmont—including Biella—in 1888, and he replaced Esteve as editor of La Questione Sociale in October of 1901. But once again the Right to Existence Group had appointed a man whose doctrines had changed without their knowledge; like Ciancabilla, Galleani had become an anti-organizationist who viewed labor unions as an unnecessary evil that bred authoritarianism and perpetuated the capitalist system. Although he was a proponent of strikes, Galleani viewed them as potential insurrections that should be pushed to their furthest extremes in every instance. Thus, workers’ actual demands were largely irrelevant to him.[566]
Nevertheless, in order to reach out to non-Italian workers Galleani brought in several anarchists from New York who did not share his views, including the Englishman William MacQueen and the Austrian anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Grossman. At a mass meeting of 5,000 silk workers at Belmont Park in Paterson’s suburb of Haledon on June 18, Galleani exhorted his listeners to initiate a general strike throughout the industry, while MacQueen and Grossman added a call for the formation of “one big silk union.” The crowd voted unanimously in favor of both proposals, and members of the USWA forced their recalcitrant leaders to join the strike.[567]
Immediately after the meeting, Galleani led a crowd of 1,500–2,000 workers on a march to Paterson. Growing in number, the marchers stormed numerous silk mills, breaking in windows and doors, and bringing the entire city to a halt. According to a reporter for the New York Times, “Never in its long career of lawless deeds has this city witnessed a sight so remarkable as it saw to-day. A mob ruled it.” During a roving street battle that lasted for several hours, strikers attacked employers, mill guards, and police, who responded by firing indiscriminately into the crowd. The city’s firemen were armed and dispatched to aid the embattled police force, and over one hundred shots were fired. Silk weaver Charles Krattiger, who was twelve at the time, later recalled, “there was all kinds of violence and destruction of property…The policemen they threw into the river. There was a couple of men that was crippled for life.” At least eight workers and one policeman sustained bullet wounds and hundreds more were injured by clubs, rocks, and fists. Galleani himself received a superficial gunshot wound to the face and another Italian anarchist, Lora Salvino, was killed.[568]
The governor sent two infantry battalions and a cavalry troop to Paterson in the riot’s aftermath, and the mayor tried to prevent La Questione Sociale from being printed anywhere in Passaic county. In response, the paper’s staff removed the contents of their temporary office in “a building in the rear of a Chinese laundry” to an undisclosed location. The USWA ordered all of its members back to work, and the strike was called off on July 12. Galleani, Grossman, and MacQueen were charged with inciting to riot and malicious mischief, for which Grossman and MacQueen were each sentenced to five years. Both men fled to England, but MacQueen returned to face trial and served three years in prison before being deported back to England.[569] Galleani, meanwhile, went into hiding in Barre, Vermont, where he founded his own influential antiorganizationist paper, Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), in 1903. When he finally returned to Paterson in 1907 to face trial, seven of the twelve jurors refused to convict.[570]
Although the strike had failed in the face of overwhelming force, it briefly brought together most of Paterson’s silk workers regardless of nationality, skill, or industrial sector, and gave them a sense of power most had never known. Nine years later an observer still found, “The 18th of June is a day remembered by the dyers, as a day in which they were able to show that patience has its limits, and that a popular furor is above the gun and the sword.”[571] The strike’s failure diminished the militancy of neither the anarchists nor their fellow silk workers. In January 1903 anarchists formed a new Unione fra Tessitori e Tessitrici di Lingua Italiana (Union of Italian-Speaking Male and Female Weavers), and Paterson workers conducted at least fifteen silk strikes in 1903–1904.[572] Pedro Esteve and other anarchists also ventured afar in their efforts, aiding Italian members of the United Mine Workers (UMW) on strike in Colorado and Utah in these same years.[573] Esteve then travelled on to Chicago, where he attended the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World in June 1905, albeit in an unofficial capacity.[574] In the IWW, Esteve and the Italian anarchists found a national organization that could accommodate their militant demands while also bringing them together with workers of different nationalities.
*** 3.9 One Big Union
Among the dozen or so official anarchist delegates present at the formation of the IWW were the Italian miners Joseph Corna and Antonio Andrà. Both were organizers for the UMW in Spring Valley, where they soon founded an IWW local. Corna was also a regular contributor to La Questione Sociale, which greeted the birth of the new organization with enthusiasm.[575] The IWW served as the “one big union” Paterson’s workers had called for in 1902, and over the next decade they seized upon the union’s ideology of revolutionary syndicalism in an attempt to control and transform their workplaces.
Soon after the IWW was founded, the Right to Existence Group invited representatives from it to speak in Paterson.[576] In November 1905 the anarchist Alberto Guabello headed a successful strike against the Victoria Silk Company with aid from the union, and in March 1906 IWW Silk Workers’ Union Local 152 was formed in Paterson, which had four branches by the end of the year. One of these was the Italian Silk Worker’s Union (created out of the Unione fra Tessitori e Tessitrici, of which Guabello had been secretary), and another was the Unione Tintori, Manovali e Finishers (Dyers’, Helpers’, and Finishers’ Union), headed by Giovanni Di Nardo. German syndicalists like Adolf Lessig and Polish Jews belonging to the SLP also joined Local 152, which elected Guabello as its secretary and over the next year conducted twenty-four strikes involving about 800 workers.[577]
In March the organization launched an organizing drive among dyers’ helpers and finishers, who, according to one report, “responded to our call in scores and joined our union.” When several IWW members were fired from the Auger & Simons dyehouse during the campaign, their fellow workers successfully struck to have them reinstated, and Local 152 grew to 1,000 members. Later that month, in an effort to undercut IWW influence, most of Paterson’s dyehouses announced raises across the board. Also in March, Guabello headed a two-week strike at the New Jersey Silk Company that succeeded in raising wages.[578] Meanwhile, a one-day strike at the Kramer Hat Band Company forced a recalcitrant worker to join the union, while another held to reinstate discharged IWW members at the Graf Hat Band Company, where previously “everybody in the shop joined the I. W. W.” after it won them a 10% wage increase, failed. Although led by men, many of the participants in these strikes were female; according to a visiting IWW organizer from New York, “It is very encouraging to see the splendid stand taken by the girls and women in these mills. They grasp the situation and perform their part in a very practical and creditable manner.” Efforts were also underway to organize boilermakers, bricklayers, flax dressers, piano makers, and barbers, and Guabello succeeded in forming a woodworkers’ local, all of which brought another 500–600 members into the union.[579]
In April, Ludovico Caminita and Guabello, commended in the union’s paper as “strong advocates and good speakers for the I. W. W.,” organized 120 workers at the American Locomotive Company, who successfully struck in June against the appointment of an unpopular foreman.[580] By May it was reported that the IWW in Paterson was “flourishing like a green bay tree; every day adds to its strength and all the workers in the city are interested,” and it counted some 1,200 weavers and 900 dyers’ helpers among its members.[581] Concerned that female winders, quillers and cloth packers, who made just $2 to $4 a week, could not pay monthly dues, Local 152 successfully petitioned the IWW’s General Executive Board (GEB) to approve a plan under which workers making less than $5 a week were required to pay dues of only fifteen cents a month. The union also added a cultural dimension to its presence, forming a “Musical Auxiliary.”[582] Paterson’s status as the major IWW foothold in the textile industry was reaffirmed in May 1908 when the union convened its “First Convention of Textile Workers” there, with Paterson supplying ten of the twenty-two delegates—including Alberto Guabello and Firmino Gallo. The resulting National Industrial Union of Textile Workers was the first industrial union (rather than independent local) formed by the IWW.[583]
Throughout, under Caminita’s editorship, La Questione Sociale acted as the unofficial local IWW organ. The paper featured the union’s logo on its masthead and was promoted by the IWW’s Industrial Union Bulletin as one of several “supporters of the Industrial Union movement.” A decade later Guabello recalled, “Under the influence of propaganda done by our newspaper, the IWW made rapid progress in Paterson.”[584] In La Questione Sociale and other publications, Caminita condemned the craft unions of the xenophobic American Federation of Labor as “the home of nationalist hatred, the factories of scabs (krumiri),” and promoted the general strike as “the only effective weapon to defeat the bourgeoisie.”[585]
Anarchists were only one of three local blocs involved with the IWW, however. Shortly after the promising 1908 Textile Convention, factionalism ripped Local 152 apart. The anarchists were closely aligned with members of the Federazione Socialista Italiana, which adopted a revolutionary syndicalist platform in 1906 under the leadership of Carlo Tresca. The FSI required that all its members join local IWW unions where possible, and the entire organization was officially absorbed into the union in 1911. In 1905 there were 52 FSI members in Paterson, and another 136 spread between nearby Passaic, Newark, Hoboken, and Orange.[586] The organization’s most important figure in Paterson was Eligio Strobino, a weaver from Biella who served at various times as national Secretary of the FSI, editor of its paper Il Proletario, and an IWW organizer. Strobino also managed Paterson’s anarchist-founded cooperative store and was secretary of the anarchists’ Università Popolare.[587]
The third faction was made up of members of the Socialist Labor Party, most of them Jewish weavers. SLP member Rudolph Katz was an organizer for Local 152, and was elected to the IWW’s GEB in 1907.[588] Caminita, despite the barbed polemics he often exchanged with FSI leaders, promoted cooperation with its members and others who “cannot decide between socialism and anarchy and prefer to call themselves syndicalists…[We] battle with their aid, since we know that we agree with them in many things on the field of action.”[589] But his tolerance did not extend to the SLP, which remained wedded to electoral politics alongside industrial unionism. In September 1907, Caminita was one of three Paterson delegates to attend the third national convention of the IWW, where he “sustained against De Leon the thesis that labor organizations could and should not become affiliated with any political party, be it socialist, communist, anarchist, democratic, republican, etc.” Caminita’s motion to strike the words promoting action “on the political field” from the Preamble to the IWW’s constitution lost by a vote of 113 to 15, but a similar motion passed a year later, resulting in the ejection of De Leon and the departure of his followers.[590]
The De Leonites reconvened in Paterson to reorganize what they claimed was the “true” IWW and which became known as the “Detroit IWW,” since its headquarters were later established in that city. SLP members attempted to bring Local 152 into the new organization and took out warrants against IWW loyalists who refused to give up the local’s property; IWW members in turn had Rudolph Katz charged with false arrest and perjury, and maintained control of the union’s property.[591] Before the 1908 convention Paterson reported 3,500 IWW members; in its aftermath Local 152 counted only 219 in good standing, and it was officially nonexistent in 1909–1910. The anarchists’ partial victory within the IWW had cost them dearly in Paterson.[592]
At the same time, a brief but powerful anti-anarchist scare gripped the nation. In Paterson, this campaign began in February 1907 after Roberto Cortese, a local judge who had helped prosecute Italian organized crime (the “Black Hand”), was killed by a mail bomb. A “Vigilance Committee of Law and Order,” mistakenly blaming anarchists for the crime, sent a threatening letter to Ludovico Caminita warning him that “the American citizens will not allow any foreigners to band together to take life and destroy property.” In July, Caminita was arrested and questioned about inflammatory articles he had written about the Cortese murder.[593]
Over the following year a string of violent acts attributed to anarchists provoked a national backlash. On February 23, 1908, a Denver priest was shot and killed by Giuseppe Alia, an Italian immigrant who was labeled an anarchist in the press. On March 2, a Jewish immigrant named Lazarus Averbuch was killed during a scuffle in the home of Chicago’s chief of police, who insisted the young man was an anarchist who had intended to kill him. It is unclear whether Alia or Averbuch were in fact affiliated with the anarchist movement. But with fears of a nationwide anarchist plot mounting Paterson’s new Mayor, Andrew McBride, appealed to President Theodore Roosevelt to have La Questione Sociale banned from the mails, ostensibly in response to an article by Caminita advising workers to arm themselves. At Roosevelt’s urging, postal authorities barred the paper at the end of March on the pretense that it did not meet the legal definition of a newspaper.[594]
Meanwhile, on March 28 a nineteen-year-old Russian Jewish anarchist named Selig Silverstein, who had been beaten by New York police a week earlier, attempted to throw a bomb at officers during a demonstration of the unemployed in Union Square but killed a bystander and seriously injured himself when the device detonated prematurely. Roosevelt called for new legislation barring anarchist material from the mails, with the justification, “The Anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind, and his is a deeper degree of criminality than any other.”[595] Mayor McBride pledged to “quarantine” and eliminate anarchism in Paterson, and he ordered the police to prevent anarchists from holding a public protest meeting, and then to disperse a gathering of seventy-five people held in the privacy of the offices of the defunct La Questione Sociale.[596] On April 26, Caminita was arrested in Syracuse “on suspicion of being an anarchist” after giving a lecture on behalf of the IWW, but he was released two days later on the condition that he never return to the area. A month later he was indicted in New Jersey for inciting to riot, based on articles that had appeared in La Questione Sociale.[597]
The Right to Existence Group, however, was unbowed and launched a new paper, L’Era Nuova, in June 1908. Caminita was replaced by Camillo Rosazza Riz and then Franz Widmar as editor, and the organization renamed itself the L’Era Nuova Group. In the repressive atmosphere of 1908 only seven individuals attended a November meeting of the group, but over the following decade it grew to include a core of between fifteen and thirty-three members.[598] Having lost his position at La Questione Sociale and facing constant police harassment, Caminita absconded in the company of the wife of another man and relocated to Philadelphia, where in 1909 he briefly published an anarchist journal called L’Internazionale. Carlo Tresca then induced Caminita to move to Pittsburgh to work on Tresca’s paper La Plebe and its successor, L’Avvenire.[599] At the end of 1910, having disagreed with Tresca’s financial and personal dealings, Caminita moved to Los Angeles. There his wife gave birth to a son and he became engrossed in work on behalf of the anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party), which was also supported by L’Era Nuova (see Chapter 4).
In early 1912, however, Caminita returned to Paterson. City authorities immediately had him arrested on charges of publishing articles hostile to the American government during his tenure as editor of La Questione Sociale—a position he had not held for four years. While on bail he was again arrested, this time for drawing an anti-imperialist cartoon critical of Italy’s invasion of Libya. The offending work depicted an Italian general, arm-in-arm with a woman from the Red Cross, proudly surveying an endless line of Arab corpses hanging from gallows. Firmino Gallo, who had displayed the image in the window of the anarchist Libreria Sociologica, was also arrested, and both men were charged with inciting hostility against a foreign government.[600] In the meantime, however, Local 152 had been revived, and it counted 500 members by the beginning of 1913.[601] Despite the best efforts of the authorities, Paterson’s anarchists remained rooted in the immigrant community and at the head of the local labor movement.
*** 3.10 The 1913 Silk Strike
The dramatic 1913 strike of Paterson’s 25,000 silk workers is one of the most well chronicled labor struggles in American history.[602] However, for all of the attention the strike has received, only historian Steve Golin has attempted to place it within the context of Paterson’s long history of immigrant labor struggles and local IWW organizing. “Local militants,” Golin rightly points out, “planned the general strike, organized it, began and controlled it,” but he also claims that these militants “remain largely unknown.” Because Golin, like all other historians of the strike, relies exclusively on English-language documents, he entirely overlooks the role of local Italian anarchists.[603] Inexplicably, although L’Era Nuova was the only periodical produced during the strike by actual participants, no writer on the event has utilized it. Yet the background and context of the struggle cannot be understood apart from its anarchist dimensions. In 1919 Ludovico Caminita justifiably declared, “damn modesty, the I. W. W. enjoys the glory which to a great extent is due to us.”[604]
The strike began on February 1, 1913 as a walkout of weavers at the Doherty Mill—the largest in the city—protesting the increase in loom assignments from two to four per worker. With the introduction of an automatic stop motion that would immediately shut down a loom in the event of a break in the thread, mill owners were confident that weavers could operate more than two looms, as they did in the lower-end silk mills of Pennsylvania.[605] But weavers were fully aware of the effect that the four-loom system would have on both the job market and wages. L’Era Nuova observed, “Not only would unemployment be increased a third or double [sic], but also those who continued to work would have their already miserable wages reduced in proportion to the increase in unemployment.” Thus, “merely as a result of the increased number of unemployed hands, you will find yourself obligated to work double for a paltry wage so small that it will not be sufficient to satisfy more than the most elementary needs.”[606]
On February 24, IWW Local 152 called for a general strike throughout the silk industry. Although the organization had only around 500 members, Irma Lombardi recalled, “We didn’t have trouble persuading people to strike. They were happy to fight back. They were disgusted with these conditions.” Local 152’s membership quickly swelled to nearly 10,000.[607] The strike was, as Golin notes, “an attempt by the workers to control the rate of production”—the weavers demanded a return to the two-loom system and a reduction of the work day to eight hours, while the dye workers who joined the strike sought control through the formation of closed shops and shop committees, as well as a minimum apprenticeship age of sixteen and an eight-hour day.[608]
This was not the first strike against the multiple-loom system in Paterson. The Doherty Mill had first tried to introduce the four-loom system in 1910, precipitating two years of sporadic strikes led by the Paterson local of the SLP-affiliated “Detroit IWW,” which won wage increases and halted the spread of the four-loom system. The Chicago-based IWW meanwhile dispatched national organizers to counteract the influence of its rival, which collapsed in late 1912.[609] IWW Local 152, however, formed an Eight-Hour League that spent the three months prior to the 1913 strike agitating for both a reduction in the workday and the abolition of the multiple-loom system, with L’Era Nuova serving as its local mouthpiece.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who arrived in Paterson in February 1913, recalled, “The IWW (Local 152) had a good sized organization there, a local membership and leadership known to the workers.”[610] Margaret Sanger, who came from New York to help organize female strikers, was more specific in identifying this local leadership:
[T]he Italian anarchists had been working among the silk workers for years, sowing the seeds of dissatisfaction and rebellion against their slavery, and when the strike was called this small minority formed the backbone of the strike, which gave to it most of its revolutionary momentum.[611]
In March, in the midst of the strike, L’Era Nuova casually referred to the IWW as “the anarchists’ union,” and in April it more accurately noted that Local 152 had been “in intimate contact in these recent years with the anarchists.”[612] It is no coincidence that the out-of-town organizers who came to aid the local IWW lodged with local anarchists—during part of her time there Flynn stayed at the home of Firmino Gallo and Ninfa Baronio, where she “insisted on sleeping on the floor,” while William D. Haywood slept at the home of Paolo Guabello.[613] During the nearly seven months of the strike, 2,388 arrests were made, about half of them involving Italians, and a quarter involving women. Anarchists were among the most militant and dependable picketers and many were among those arrested. At one picket line Paolo Guabello was ordered to disperse by police but “didn’t move fast enough and was clubbed to the ground,” bleeding profusely. Ninfa Baronio, who was there to escort her fifteen-year-old son William home, witnessed the attack and, “though weak and thin physically,” covered Guabello with her body and was clubbed as well. Both anarchists were hauled away in a police carriage while William ran after it, shouting “Mama, Mama!”[614] B. Bertone, an anarchist who had come from Cedar Point, Illinois to aid the strikers, was arrested on May 10 as part of a group urging strikebreakers to walk off of the job. Two months later the wife of the anarchist Ambrogio Pagani was arrested and sentenced to fifty days imprisonment for insulting a police officer, and Pagani himself was sentenced to twenty days for trying to intervene.[615] Serafino Grandi was arrested along with a certain Ianfranco, and Ludovico Caminita served a one-year prison sentence for “rioting” in connection with the strike.[616]
Although the mob actions of the 1894 and 1902 strikes were absent, Paterson’s anarchists were much more willing to sanction and utilize physical coercion than visiting IWW organizers like Flynn and “Big Bill” Haywood. This was especially true as the strike dragged on in the face of employer intransigence. Sanger recalled, “At Paterson the Italian groups were not behind Bill [Haywood]. As soon as he began to temper his language and sound a more wary note of advice, his once-faithful adherents repudiated him.”[617] Instead, they began to target mill owners, foremen, and strikebreakers with violent, often anonymous reprisals. Violence and property destruction were rare during the first months of the strike, but over time assaults on strikebreakers became “an almost daily occurrence,” and in June a series of small bombs exploded around the city.[618] One was detonated in Prospect Park, a Dutch neighborhood that was, according to L’Era Nuova, “a den of scabs,” slightly damaging the home of some strikebreakers. Though the anarchist paper declined to assign credit for the bombings, it did muse, “If these attacks (attentati) sow fear among the traitors and arouse the anger of the police, they find in return the approval of the strikers and keep the hope of victory alive in them.” In July another bomb exploded outside the home of two dye employers who had been warned to refrain from hiring scabs, resulting in “much fright and little damage.” L’Era Nuova advised the two victims that “this is only a warning.” That same month the anarchist Vittorio Ponderano was arrested for belonging to a gang of strikers that assaulted the son of factory owner Henry Doherty.[619] Over the course of the strike dozens of individuals were assaulted, twenty-eight homes were stoned at night, and between six and fourteen were damaged by bombs, though none of the explosions caused more than $25 in damage. Sanger felt that a greater degree of violence “might have brought out the militia, thereby intensifying the situation by burdening the taxpayer so that pressure be brought upon the bosses and an earlier settlement made,” but the experience of 1902 suggests that state violence would have been able to end the strike long before taxpayers felt their pocketbooks pinched.[620] Ultimately, these acts played a minor role in the struggle.
But anarchist influence was not confined to such deeds. The many years of local anarchist organizing were also evidenced in the cooperation of the different ethnic groups involved in the strike and their refusal to be divided along ethnic lines. Unlike Paterson’s earlier leagues of resistance or the IWW’s 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, strikers were not organized according ethnicity or language, but as a single unit. Sophie Cohen recalled, “When we went to a picnic or mass meeting, we didn’t care if someone was a different nationality. The children played together and the people talked together, as well as they could.” And though it is noteworthy that half of all of those arrested were Italians, it is equally as noteworthy that half were not. Contrary to some historians’ claims, this was not “an Italian strike.”[621]
The silk manufacturers attempted to use patriotism as a wedge between strikers and the IWW by declaring March 17 “Flag Day” and draping their mills with American flags. Local socialists responded by handing out small American flag pins to strikers, who marched down Main Street under a banner reading, “We wove the flag; we dyed the flag. We live under the flag; but we won’t scab under the flag.” This was far from a patriotic display “aimed at both the mill owners and the radicals of the I.W.W.,” however.[622] L’Era Nuova observed that “the overwhelming majority” of marchers “found [the pins] not to their taste,” but kept them on to avoid negative publicity that would come if they were “trampled by the thousands of feet that…beat the pavement of this city of Paterson of so little patriotism.” Far more emblematic of the strike, the paper pointed out, were the numerous occasions on which thousands of strikers of different nationalities sang the Internationale and the Marseilles together.[623] The strikers and their supporters did not act as Americans, Italians, Germans, or Jews, but as working-class cosmopolitans. Socialist John Reed recounted that during his time in Paterson’s jail, a Jewish striker told him, “T’ree great nations stick togedder like dis.” He made a fist. “T’ree great nations—Italians, Hebrews an’ Germans.” The glaring exceptions to this solidarity were the western Europeans and native-born Americans who remained outside of the orbit of local radicalism. Reed was told, “English peoples no go on picket line…’Mericans no lika fight!”[624]
Ultimately, it was this division that broke the strike. On July 18 the English-speaking ribbon weavers abandoned their fellow strikers and agreed to settle on a shop-by-shop basis, prompting other groups of workers to do the same. The strike was officially called off in August, marking a major defeat for the IWW. Around 2,000 workers, most of them IWW members, were blacklisted, and by May of 1914 Local 152 had shrunk to a membership of 1,300.[625] The insularity of Paterson’s ethnic radical communities from native-born and English-speaking workers had created an unbridgeable divide between them.
*** 3.11 Conclusion
Even in defeat, however, Paterson’s anarchists and syndicalists accomplished much. To prevent a repeat of the strike, most mills voluntarily did away with the three- and four-loom system and established a nine-hour day.[626] Sophie Cohen recalled
Even though the big strike was lost in Paterson, there was a feeling of togetherness among the workers. We had a medium of expression. From then on, there were a series of strikes and every shop had to be reorganized. Every shop fought for the eight hour day all the way down the line—and the four loom system…Well, there was always some shop going on strike for one reason or another. The thing in 1913 that we really acted on and won was the two loom system.
Employers also found that the blacklist was difficult to enforce among hundreds of small mills and against skilled workers upon whose labor they depended, and the IWW carried out a series of successful strikes in 1914 to reinstate union members, force non-union workers to join organized shops, and expel former strikebreakers.[627] City authorities also attempted to prevent anarchists and IWW members from giving public speeches in the aftermath of the strike, but a concerted free speech campaign organized by a multiethnic array of anarchists and socialists from Paterson and New York, including Emma Goldman and Carlo Tresca, succeeded in pressuring a new mayor to repeal the ban on radical meetings in 1916.[628]
Despite the best efforts of employers, politicians and police, anarchism remained too deeply rooted in Paterson’s community to be quashed. The single most important factor contributing to these victories was the interethnic solidarity that was so central to the anarchists’ cosmopolitan vision. Key to the success of this cosmopolitanism was its defense and valorization of the ethnic subcultures in which anarchism had rooted itself, combined with an anti-nationalist and anti-racist imperative that prevented this valorization from taking exclusivist and chauvinistic forms. Its major weakness, which undermined the 1913 strike, was its failure to incorporate the western European and native-born American workers who strongly resisted affiliation with “undesirable” immigrants and “alien” radical ideas. As long as the silk industry continued to draw most of its workforce from among southern and eastern European immigrants, however, Italian anarchists and their multiethnic allies constituted the most powerful element of Paterson’s labor movement. Although hard-hit by governmental repression during the post-war Red Scare, the anarchists would continue to be a vital presence in the city’s immigrant community through the following decade.
** 4.0 “All Flags Look Alike to Us”: Immigrant Anarchism in San Francisco, 1894–1916
With the discovery of gold in 1848 San Francisco became a boom town, drawing prospectors and those catering to their needs from across the globe. In 1869, with the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a new wave of foreign-born workers flooded the city from eastern ports of entry. By 1890 the city had a population of nearly 300,000, making it the eighth-largest metropolis in the United States, and it more than doubled in size over the next four decades.[629] Anarchist activity in the city grew apace; according to the San Francisco Police Department’s captain of detectives approximately 500 anarchists lived in the city in 1908, and in 1921 a Bureau of Investigation agent noted, “There is quite a large colony of [anarchists] in and around the Bay Cities.”[630] This “colony” constituted what was probably the most diverse local anarchist movement in the country. At least thirteen anarchist newspapers encompassing seven languages were published in the Bay Area between 1880 and 1940—including the only Serbian and Chinese ones in the country—ranking the region behind only New York and Chicago as a center of production for the American anarchist press.
At its lowest point, in 1900, the proportion of foreign-born San Franciscans stood at slightly more than one-third, made up primarily of migrants from Germany, Austria, Ireland, China, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. Aside from the large number of Asians, “old immigrants” from western and northern Europe dominated San Francisco’s foreign-born population well into the twentieth century. However, by 1930 Italians narrowly outnumbered all other immigrant groups besides the Irish, comprising 16.1% of all non-Asian immigrants[631]
Table 5. Nativity of San Francisco’s Population, 1900[632]
| Place of Birth | Percent of Total |
| Native-born | 65.1 |
| Canada | 1.5 |
| China | 4.1 |
| France | 1.4 |
| Germany and AustriaHungary | 10.8 |
| Great Britain | 3.6 |
| Ireland | 4.7 |
| Italy | 2.2 |
| Japan | 0.5 |
| Mexico | 0.4 |
| Russia | 0.4 |
| Scandinavia | 2.8 |
| All Others | 2.6 |
Equally as unique as the city’s ethnic makeup was its economic structure. Because of its distance from major sources of most raw materials, manufacturing and mechanical industries employed only about a third of the city’s workforce between 1880 and 1920. What factory production did exist was highly decentralized and produced goods primarily for regional markets. Within the manufacturing sector, moreover, no single industry or set of industries predominated; the largest concentrations were in food processing, metalwork, printing, construction, clothing, and tobacco, but all of these combined made up less than half of all firms and employed just over half of all manufacturing employees.[633] The relative absence of unskilled factory work and “new immigrants” made the city an ideal setting for the craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), whose local affiliates formed the powerful San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC) and even more powerful Building Trades Council (BTC), which “became perhaps the most powerful labor organization in the country.” By the turn of the century San Francisco had a reputation as a “closed-shop town.” From 1901–1911 the city was governed by a Union Labor Party that, despite widespread corruption, claimed to represent workers’ interests.[634] At first glance, these conditions appear very unfavorable for the emergence of anarchism and syndicalism. Migrants from Italy and Russia made up less than 5% of the population in 1900 and, unlike their counterparts in the Midwest and Northeast, the city’s substantial German population had little record of anarchist activity. The dominance of the craft-oriented, nonradical AFL and of the Union Labor Party was a further curb on radical growth. Nevertheless, anarchism did take strong root in the Bay Area within the overlapping fissures of the region’s ethnoracial and economic order. San Francisco’s reputation for unionization obscured the labor movement’s failure to organize most of the city’s factory workers or the migratory farm laborers who spent their winters there. Almost all local AFL unions also excluded Asians and African Americans, and most were either informally closed to “Latins” (Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, and Mexicans) or tried to segregate members of these racialized groups into separate organizations. Reflecting this attitude, the heroine of California socialist Jack London’s 1913 novel Valley of the Moon declared, “We’re Saxons, you an’ me,…and all the Americans that are real Americans, you know, and not Dagoes and Japs and such.”[635] And it was precisely among such “un-Americans” that anarchism and the IWW made a foothold.
However, as Tomás Almaguer notes in his study of California’s “racial fault lines,” a complex and multilayered racial hierarchy existed within the state’s heterogeneous population. “One key aspect of the racial formation process in California,” he observes, “was the differential racialization of the various cultural groups that settled within this geographical region.”[636] Anarchism therefore manifested differently within groups occupying different positions within this hierarchy. As in Paterson, it was strongest among San Francisco’s Italian-, French-, and Spanish-speaking migrants. But given the smaller number of Italians and the more heterogeneous population, the anarchist community that emerged was a multilingual, panethnic “Latin” one, more similar to that of Tampa’s Ybor City than to Paterson’s.[637] Anarchists among the almost insignificant Eastern European Jewish population, meanwhile, carved out a niche within the left wing of the city’s English-speaking labor movement rather than forming their own Yiddishspeaking milieu. Over time, links were established between these Latin and English-speaking poles, both of which also formed ties to budding groups of Asian radicals. By the time of America’s entrance into the First World War, San Francisco’s panethnic anarchist groups had amalgamated into a loose coalition that extended across virtually the entire ethnoracial spectrum, bringing into being a uniquely multiethnic cosmopolitan movement.
The formation of this movement was accelerated by the internal migration of leading anarchist personalities from the East Coast, and the transnational migration of radicals from Europe, Asia, and Central America. Migrants of the first type, including Giuseppe Ciancabilla, Ersilia Cavedagni, and Alexander Berkman, linked San Francisco’s anarchist community to those of Paterson and New York’s Lower East Side. Those of the second type, including Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón, Shusui Kotoku, and Har Dayal, linked it to revolutionary and antiimperialist struggles in Asia and Latin America. Through these transnational radical networks San Francisco’s anarchists both influenced and were influenced by events abroad, making the city an important nexus of global radicalism.
*** 4.1 Italian Anarchism in San Francisco
San Francisco’s anarchist movement was centered in the Latin Quarter of North Beach, located at the base of Telegraph Hill, where Italians began settling alongside French, Basque, Spanish, Portuguese, and Mexican migrants beginning in the 1860s. Demarcated by Jones Street to the west and Broadway Street to the south—beyond which was Chinatown—North Beach was, by the turn of the century, the largest Italian colony on the West Coast. By 1924 San Francisco’s Italian population stood at 24,000, the sixth-largest in the nation, and the Italian proportion of the city’s foreign-born residents was second only to New York’s. But the neighborhood in which most of these Italians settled was by no means homogeneous; in 1910 70% of North Beach residents had parents born in countries other than Italy.[638] San Francisco, like Paterson, was unusual in that a majority of its Italian residents hailed from the north of Italy. Only in 1918 did southern Italian immigrants, largely from Calabria and Sicily, outnumber their northern brethren entering California. Overall, however, the Italian population of San Francisco was far more heterogeneous than its counterpart in Paterson; between 1899 and 1914 the four main regions of origin of its Italians—Tuscany and Liguria in the north and Calabria and Sicily in the south— together supplied only around 45% of the population.[639]
Table 6. Italian-Born Population of San Francisco, 1890–1920[640]
| Year | Italian-Born Population | Total Population | Italian % of Total |
| 1890 | 5,212 | 298,997 | 1.7 |
| 1900 | 7,508 | 342,782 | 2.2 |
| 1910 | 16,919 | 416,912 | 4.1 |
| 1920 | 23,924 | 506,676 | 4.7 |
The number of skilled workers among the Italians was also much smaller than in Paterson. 65% came from farming backgrounds, and in 1900 Italians made up 34% of the city’s agricultural laborers. Italians also dominated the Bay Area’s truck farming industry along with Mexican, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese migrants. The only other occupations in which Italians constituted a significant proportion were hucksters and peddlers, bootblacks, and fishermen, with Genoese and Sicilian migrants monopolizing the latter. As late as 1950, foreign-born Italians in California “were among the lowest on the socio-economic scale.”[641]
In the most heavily unionized occupations—the building trades and sailors—Italians made up only 2.0% and 0.6% of employees, respectively, in 1900. Although Italians were already establishing their own labor societies in San Francisco in the 1880s, California’s union leaders were convinced that they were “unorganizable” and undesirable. A 1908 report from San Francisco’s Italian Vice-consul found that Italians in the state were regularly excluded from unions that accepted Italian members on the East Coast. “The results,” he noted, “are that those not belonging to the Unions are unable to practice their trades.”[642] Excluded from most unions— and therefore the most heavily unionized industries—Italian workers were favored as unorganized labor by employers in industries like canning and as strikebreakers by the Employers’ Association, thereby reinforcing unions’ disdain.[643]
Table 7. Composition of Selected Occupational Categories in San Francisco by Parents’ Place of Birth, 1900[644]
| Occupational Group | United States | Great Britain | Germany | Ireland | Scandinavia | Italy | China | Other |
| Professions | 36.3 | 11.0 | 14.1 | 15.6 | 1.9 | 1.4 | 2.6 | 17.0 |
| Building trades | 23.3 | 13.4 | 16.3 | 23.7 | 5.4 | 2.0 | 0.5 | 15.3 |
| Metal trades | 16.1 | 13.5 | 15.0 | 31.0 | 4.5 | 2.5 | 1.0 | 15.5 |
| Sailors | 12.0 | 8.3 | 11.5 | 8.3 | 38.2 | 0.6 | 0.2 | 20.9 |
| Fishermen, Hucksters, Bootblacks | 5.6 | 3.1 | 8.0 | 8.4 | 4.3 | 40.3 | 13.7 | 16.6 |
| Laborers | 13.4 | 6.0 | 11.1 | 39.9 | 5.9 | 6.4 | 5.2 | 12.2 |
| Garment and Textile workers | 14.2 | 4.8 | 7.9 | 22.3 | 1.9 | 3.8 | 30.6 | 14.7 |
| Laundry workers | 6.3 | 1.9 | 4.1 | 13.2 | 1.9 | 1.0 | 52.4 | 19.4 |
| Cigarmakers | 4.2 | 1.2 | 11.2 | 3.5 | 0.7 | 2.5 | 68.3 | 8.4 |
These tensions were illustrated in two incidents in the summer of 1906, a few months after the devastating earthquake and fire of April 18. On July 30, the 700 members of the newly formed Street Railway Construction Workers’ Union, most of them Greeks and Italians, went on strike against the United Railroads after the linemen and firemen did so, demanding an eight-hour workday and a daily wage of $2.50. Members of the Carmen’s Union, however, remained on the job, singing, according to Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Joseph Ettor, “To ___ with the ___ foreigners.” The carmen eventually joined the strike on August 26, but settled with the company on September 5, leaving the railway construction workers to fend for themselves. Their strike was lost and its leaders fired. Later that summer a group of Italians working on street construction walked off the job after a foreman “began to swear at ‘the ___ dagos,’“ and hastily assembled a protest march of 3,000 foreign-born workers under a red flag. Afterwards the Street Construction Workers’ Union, acting on the advice of the San Francisco Labor Council, had fourteen of the protest leaders arrested for inciting to riot.[645] American employers, unionists, and the local English-language press all agreed with Jack London’s appraisal that non-”Anglo-Saxons” like Italians did not count as “real Americans” worthy of inclusion and protection.[646]
With such forces arrayed against them, it should not be surprising that a number of marginalized Italian workers turned to anarchism. When Pietro Gori spoke at Columbus Hall in North Beach during his whirlwind tour of the United States in 1896, a writer for the local Italian American press observed that the large audience was quite sympathetic to his anarchist message after enduring “hardships and endless humiliations” in California.[647] The author was Cesare Crespi, an educated republican journalist born in 1857 near Milan and the grandfather of San Francisco’s Italian anarchist movement.
Years earlier, Crespi had absconded to Scotland with a married countess from a “wellestablished” family and her young son, Enrico (“Eugene”) Travaglio. The three migrated to New York around 1882 and a year later moved to San Francisco, where Crespi wrote anticlerical articles for the Italian liberal paper La Voce del Popolo before founding his own weekly, Il Messaggero. Eugene Travaglio, meanwhile, apprenticed as a sailor at age fourteen, jumped ship in Siberia after his captain shot a sailmaker and tried to force Travaglio to help cover up the incident, and spent three years working with the International Geodetic Survey on the Yangtze River. There he met an acquaintance of the prominent French anarchist and geographer Élisée Reclus, and in 1894 he returned to San Francisco an anarchist. That same year Crespi helped the eighteen-year-old Travaglio, whose mother had died during his absence, start up an eclectic weekly anarchist paper called Secolo Nuovo (New Century), the first Italian anarchist publication on the West Coast.[648]
Secolo Nuovo remained a local paper throughout its twelve-year existence, with a circulation of no more than 1,800. It was, like Giuseppe Ciancabilla’s L’Aurora, anarchist communist and anti-organizationist, and it presented “Anarchy” as a “social science that propagates the abolition of borders and militarism, human brotherhood, the cessation of all violence and of all exploitation of man by man.” A peculiar feature was an English-language section composed of humor pieces and additional non-radical material culled from other sources, apparently included to misrepresent the paper’s contents to the American businesses that purchased advertisements in its pages.[649] Though Crespi was the official editor of the paper, he appears to have remained a liberal with anarchist sympathies; he published the non-radical Il Messaggero until at least 1896 and continued to write for La Voce del Popolo, of which he became editor-in-chief in 1917.[650]
In 1900, meanwhile, Travaglio began editing his own monthly paper, La Protesta Umana (Human Protest). The anarchist Cassius V. Cook, who first met Travaglio around this time, described him as “a dashing, graceful vigorous son of Italy, with fine dark eyes and black hair.”[651] Travaglio sided with Giuseppe Ciancabilla in the split between Paterson’s La Questione Sociale and L’Aurora, and after La Protesta Umana folded in September 1900 Travaglio moved to Spring Valley, and subsequently Chicago, where he revived the paper as the “literary supplement” to L’Aurora. In Chicago he lived at the home of Abe and Mary Isaaks, Russian Mennonite immigrants who became anarchists in the United States and published the important English-language papers Firebrand and its successor Free Society, the latter of which had been produced out of San Francisco from 1897 until the Isaaks relocated to Chicago in 1900. Free Society was, like La Protesta Umana, anarchist communist in orientation and defended Gaetano Bresci’s assassination of King Umberto I, and Travaglio learned the printing trade while working as a typesetter for it during his time in Chicago.[652] However, in September 1901 Travaglio and the Isaaks were briefly arrested, along with several other Chicago anarchists, following the assassination of President McKinley. In Spring Valley, Ciancabilla was also arrested for publishing articles praising the assassination and L’Aurora was forced to close down in December, despite Ersilia Cavedagni’s efforts to continue it.[653] Undeterred, Ciancabilla and Cavedagni joined Travaglio in Chicago where the trio revived La Protesta Umana in February 1902, before moving it back to San Francisco in March 1903.
The new La Protesta Umana continued Ciancabilla’s crusade against the organizzatori. In an appeal for funds to restart the paper, Ciancabilla and Travaglio cited the “profound, inevitable” divide between “us anarchists and the watered-down legalists of the so-called socialist-anarchist party, whose pernicious and reactionary work attends, especially in Italy, to distort the sound libertarian and revolutionary conception of the anarchist ideal.”[654] But La Protesta Umana’s “pure” anarchism manifested itself in little more than philosophical polemics and paeans to anarchist martyrs like Bresci and Emile Henry. Its pages carried few notices of actual anarchist activity, and dedicated far more attention to political developments in Italy than in America. Fundraisers in San Francisco for La Protesta Umana could draw hundreds of supporters, but never enough money, and the paper shut down in 1904 after Ciancabilla took ill and died at the age of thirty-two. Secolo Nuovo closed two years later when the earthquake of 1906 leveled most of the city, including Travaglio’s print shop.
Not long after, however, a small but dedicated group of Italians produced the individualist anarchist papers Cogito, Ergo Sum in 1908 and Nihil in 1908–9. The first was edited by Carlo Dalboni, a mechanic from Mantova, Lombardy, who arrived in San Francisco in 1906 with a well-established record of promoting individual acts of rebellion and “propaganda by the deed.” Italian authorities tracking his movements considered him “one of the most dangerous anarchists,” as well as “very intelligent and very courageous.”[655] Nihil, an unofficial successor to Dalboni’s paper, was edited by the stone mason Adolfo Antonelli, likewise an individualist proponent of violent insurrection and assassination, whose writings had led to his repeated imprisonment in Italy and England.[656]
These individualists had less traction among Italian migrants than other currents of anarchism, however. Cogito, Ergo Sum lasted just three issues, while Nihil, having survived the government’s efforts to suppress it during the anti-anarchist scare of 1908, did not survive the following year.[657] Yet the lines between individualists, anti-organizationists, and socialistanarchists were not very rigid in San Francisco. Michele Centrone, a former socialist turned anarchist who arrived in San Francisco in 1903, collaborated on La Protesta Umana and published Nihil, but was additionally a distributor of Luigi Galleani’s anti-organizationist Cronaca Sovversiva, the secretary of Local 95 of the AFL’s United Brotherhood of Carpenters (a “Latin” local), and a member of the syndicalist IWW.[658] The editor of the Spanish section of the individualist Cogito, Ergo Sum, moreover, was Jaime Vidal, a staunch anarcho-syndicalist.
The socialist-anarchist current represented by La Questione Sociale also found adherents in the Bay Area. During Pietro Gori’s 1896 visit local Italians founded the Alleanza SocialistaAnarchica (Socialist-Anarchist Alliance), which adhered to—but outlived—Gori’s Federazione Socialista-Anarchica dei Lavoratori Italiani nel Nord-America. In 1898 the Alleanza was joined by an anarchist Gruppo Italiano, and the following year a Circolo Educativo di Studi Sociali (Educational Social Studies Circle) was founded by La Questione Sociale correspondent Luigi Raveggi when he visited the city during a speaking tour.[659] These socialist-anarchist groups did not found their own publications, but instead maintained close contact with La Questione Sociale and like-minded papers.
By 1916 the various strands of the Italian movement were brought together in the Gruppo Anarchico Volontà (Anarchist Will Group), which had between thirty and forty regular members and a meeting hall at 1602 Stockton Street. A visiting anarchist in 1916 noted, “Numerous revolutionary booklets, newspapers, etc. are fastened on with clothes pins to a railing midway up the wall and are strung out the entire length of the hall, easily accessible to all who care to read them.”[660] Group member Michele Centrone distributed between sixty and seventy copies of the weekly Cronaca Sovversiva to readers in the Bay Area, but according to the Bureau of Investigation, “Probably most of the members [of the Volontà Group] read the copy of the Cronaca sent to the Gruppo headquarters, and did not subscribe individually.” Therefore, Cronaca Sovversiva, which represented only one of the main currents of Italian American anarchism, had at least one hundred local readers.[661]
The same anarchist writer quoted above also noted that the Volontà Group “appears to be made up of young men chiefly, though a few women attend its sessions.” The absence of even a handful of prominent Italian anarchist women in San Francisco is striking. Ersilia Cavedagni, who had established her radical reputation well before coming to the city, is the only notable exception. The dossiers on expatriated anarchists in the Italian government’s Casellario Politico Centrale (Central Political Files) contain virtually nothing on other female activists in the Bay Area before the First World War. In 1899 a certain Bianca or Blanche Gaffe, who was either Italian or French, resided in the city and attempted to recruit members for a California anarchist colony to be called “New Ideal,” but the project does not appear to have materialized.[662]
This can partially be explained by the skewed gender ratios of the city’s migrant communities; in 1920 there were 164 Italian males for every 100 females.[663] Even so, there were certainly women involved in Italian and Latin anarchist groups in San Francisco. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that a strongly gendered set of relations divided male roles from female ones within the local movement. Jewish anarchist Lucy Robbins Lang, who for a time lived communally with her male companion and four Italian anarchists on Telegraph Hill, recalled:
We all contributed what we could and took what we needed out of our home—a touch of communism that worked very well. Victor, Nick, and Bambino might have libertarian principles, but they always behaved in the most chivalrous way toward Cilia, the fourth member of the [Italian] quartet.
More revealing is male anarchists’ attitude towards Sophia Bresci, widow of the regicide Gaetano Bresci. Shortly before the First World War she relocated to San Francisco with her two daughters, who had attended college in Chicago with financial aid from Italian anarchists. Though Sophia, an American-born child of Irish immigrants, was never radical herself, she was a frequent, if somewhat bemused, guest of honor at local anarchist events. In return she depended upon financial support from the anarchist community, which was motivated by a combination of guilt, reverence, and chivalry.[664] There is little doubt that such paternalistic chivalry included patriarchal assumptions regarding women’s proper roles, especially if the women in question were wives or daughters. Not surprisingly, women excluded from leadership roles in turn organized their own gruppo femminile, the Group Louise Michel.[665]
Male members of the Volontà Group did, however, work with female radicals to distribute information on birth control throughout North Beach. On March 10, 1916 Rebekah (“Reb”) Raney, a birth control advocate and contributor to Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth and Alexander Berkman’s The Blast, distributed 5,000 pamphlets on “preventatives” during a meeting in defense of Emma Goldman, who had recently been arrested in New York for doing the same. The Volontà Group then had the pamphlet translated into Italian and printed 20,000 copies under the heading, “WORKERS! Procreate Only When You Like!” Joseph Macario, one of the group’s members, was arrested and convicted of distributing the “indecent” material, but his six-month sentence was suspended after a group of influential San Francisco women intervened on his behalf.[666]
San Francisco lacked the radical tavern culture of Paterson—perhaps due to the absence of German anarchist predecessors—but some of North Beach’s Italian restaurants were owned by anarchists and sympathizers and served as meeting places. A 1914 guide to the city’s “bohemian” restaurants patronizingly described one such establishment, located on Broadway:
Up in the second story on a large building you may see a sign that tells you meals will be served and rooms provided. One of these is the rendezvous of Anarchists, who gather each evening and discuss the affairs of the world, and how to regulate them. But they are harmless Anarchists in San Francisco, for here they have no wrongs to redress, so they sit and drink their forbidden absinthe, and dream their dreams of fire and sword, while they talk in whispers of what they are going to do to the crowned heads of Europe.[667]
This writer’s assessment of anarchists’ “dreams of fire and sword” was not entirely wrong, at least insofar as the individualists and anti-organizationists were concerned. But it was a serious error to conclude that Italians had “no wrongs to redress” in the Golden State, or that their activities were limited to plotting against “the crowned heads of Europe.” Victimized as foreigners and shamelessly exploited as workers, California’s Italian anarchists had much to strike back against, though they usually did so without taking up arms.
*** 4.2 Latin Anarchism and the Iww
Due to San Francisco’s diverse population and mixed neighborhoods, as well as the Italian community’s smaller size relative to the total population, multiethnic alliances were both easy to forge and necessary to sustain radical activity. The result was an emergent panethnic “Latin” movement encompassing Italian, French, Spanish, and Mexican anarchists. At several junctures important alliances were also formed across the ethnoracial boundaries that separated Latin radicals from other groups, notably Asians, Russians and Russian Jews, and native-born whites. The IWW provided the organizational structure on which much of this Latin radicalism was built, and also served as a vehicle through which broader connections were established.
In 1896 members of San Francisco’s Alleanza Socialista-Anarchica adopted a Declaration of Principles committing them to breaking down national and ethnic barriers:
The workers of all countries—despite the declarations of the turgid charlatans of government—are subjected to two forms of tyranny: one economic and one political…
We do not pretend that the social question confines itself within the narrow boundaries of one country (patria)—but it embraces all countries…—the internationalism of the aims of emancipation must be affirmed on every occasion, and the principle that all workers consider the workers of all other nations as brothers must be upheld, seeking the most high ideals of true civilization, the solidarity of all peoples.[668]
Initially, however, Italian anti-organizationists were more successful at forming interethnic ties. The decision to relocate La Protesta Umana from Chicago to San Francisco had been based on the support the paper received from a number of Italians, Spaniards and Frenchmen in the Bay Area. After this move, the French-speaking Germinal Group collaborated on the paper, which in 1904 published several French supplements. One of the leading figures of Germinal Group was Raymond Bachmann, who had formerly worked on the French anarchist paper La Tribune Libre in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, as well as Paterson’s Germinal. Following the suspension of La Protesta Umana, the Germinal Group published its own single-issue paper, L’Effort, which pledged itself to combating “great hollow words, such as God, Religion, Homeland (Patrie), Flag, Government, Honor, etc.”[669] Italians and local Spanish anarchists, meanwhile, co-organized plays and feste libertarie (anarchist festivals), and after Ciancabilla’s death Ersilia Cavedagni took a Spanish anarchist named Leon Morel as her new companion.[670]
In late 1906 a group of English-speaking radicals further contributed to the formation of an interethnic movement by founding The Emancipator, “A Sociological and Free-Thought Journal Standing for Conscientious Organized Labor” with strong anarcho-syndicalist sympathies. Though printed in English, the paper included Paterson’s Ludovico Caminita among its contributors and established some of the first links to Mexican radicals; a certain M. Sanchez was involved in the paper’s production and it printed several articles denouncing of the “Czarism” of Mexico’s President Porfirio Díaz. In early 1907, however, The Emancipator was absorbed by The Demonstrator, published out of the anarchist colony in Home, Washington.[671] Nevertheless, during the paper’s brief existence members of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party, or PLM), an organization founded in 1905 by exiled Mexican revolutionaries in the United States, established contact with it and other anarchist publications that supported their cause.[672]
The following year, the various threads of the nascent Latin movement coalesced behind the aforementioned Cogito, Ergo Sum, a trilingual paper featuring material in Italian, French, and Spanish. None of the articles were translated into the other two languages, suggesting that readers were expected to be at least semi-literate in all three.[673] The title of the new publication was chosen precisely because Latin was the common root of these three languages, thereby linking Latin identity to a common linguistic heritage. The first issue proudly announced that the “French, Italian and Spanish comrades” had founded a theatrical group together, and the paper’s lists of financial contributions show that it reached a diverse readership stretching nationally from Los Angeles to Paterson, and internationally into Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, and France.[674] Editor Carlo Dalboni had an ideal background for forging such connections—he had spent most of the 1890s moving between the multiethnic radical strongholds of Trieste, Lugano, Zurich, Paris, and London.[675] Though it lasted only three issues, Cogito, Ergo Sum established important interethnic and transnational connections, solidifying a distinct Latin anarchist community in San Francisco.
As these publications were helping to form a Latin radical movement on paper, an organizational basis for this movement was built through the IWW. The only California delegate at the founding convention of the IWW had been a representative from San Francisco’s socialistinfluenced Journeymen Tailors’ Protective and Benevolent Union, and no delegate from California was present at its second convention.[676] However, six months prior to the organization’s formation, Bay Area members of the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance had already formed an Industrial Union Club headed by George Speed, a fifty-year-old veteran socialist and union organizer, and the club was soon chartered as IWW Mixed Local 173. But the union had done little more than set up an office south of Market Street and organized an ephemeral Pacific Coast Musicians’ Union when the 1906 earthquake hit the city, forcing Local 173’s members to live and operate out of a tent.[677]
In the disaster’s aftermath, Latin radicals and workers emerged as the leading force within the organization. In June 1906 the socialist Joseph Ettor, a twenty-year-old Brooklyn-born son of Italian migrants who had recently joined the IWW, organized hundreds of the Italian laborers helping to clear debris and rebuild the city into the Building Construction Union’s Local 501, the IWW’s first industrial union local in California. Though Local 501 lasted until at least 1908, it made little headway in an industry that the AFL’s Building Trades Council controlled through the closed shop. Nevertheless, in 1906 the Italian-language Mixed Local 363 was established to accommodate the IWW’s growing number of Italian members.[678]
The union met with greater success when it targeted a segment of the workforce that established unions had failed to penetrate: San Francisco’s Latin bakeries. In 1900 the unions of the German and American bakers had merged and set up a separate local for French and Italian bakers, but it failed to enlist Latin members and thereafter regarded them as a threat. Workeremployer relations within the Latin bakeries remained “a quasi-feudal arrangement in which food and a bed were exchanged for low wages and a seven-day work week…[H]ygiene was nonexistent, and workers slept in lofts that one investigator described as filthy and revolting.”[679] With Italian organizers like Ettor at the helm, however, the IWW chartered Bakery Workers’ Local 175 in May 1907 with eighty-five members, which in June spawned a separate branch for French bakers.[680]
This initial success was short-lived. A strike carried out in late 1907 by Local 175 and involving about 100 bakers apparently ended in defeat and both George Speed and Joseph Ettor were appointed as National Organizers for the IWW and left the city, and in their absence Local 363 disbanded.[681] In May 1908 both Local 173 and Local 501 passed resolutions calling on the IWW’s General Executive Board (GEB) to condemn the suppression of Paterson’s La Questione Sociale, indicating local anarchist involvement, but for the next two years the organization languished in the Bay Area. Ettor, returning to San Francisco in February 1908, complained that “most of the veterans to No. 173 have allowed themselves, for one reason or another, to drop out,” and to make matters worse in July of the following year half the local’s members were out of work.[682] In 1910 Local 173 helped establish Mixed Local 174 across the bay in Oakland under the leadership of Portuguese member Richard (“Blackie”) Ford. Ford, however, neglected the work of building up the new local and instead led an unsuccessful effort to take over the Oakland local of the Socialist party, leading to his expulsion from the IWW for using the organization for “his own aggrandizement and benefit.” A month later Local 173’s financial secretary and another member disappeared with $12.97 of the organization’s funds.[683]
Despite these misfortunes, the Bay Area IWW soon experienced resurgence. By July 1910 the new Oakland local had fifty members and Mixed Local 173 counted around 300, though only ninety were in good standing. Two years later Local 173 had to move into a larger hall at 3345 Seventeenth Street, near Mission, to accommodate its growing membership. By 1917 Local 173, redesignated a branch of the General Recruiting Union after the IWW’s reorganization the previous year, had “several hundred” members.[684]
This growth was fostered by a new cadre of Latin radicals. Among them was the French Army veteran, laundry worker, and syndicalist Basil Saffores, who was probably a former member of France’s anarcho-syndicalist Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labor). In 1911 Saffores reported, “Things are going pretty good for us down here. There is a strong sentiment in favor of THE ONE BIG UNION…Lately I had some of my friends join the I. W. W. and we are doing a lot of propaganda work among the Frenchmen.” In particular, Saffores and his comrades organized French bakers and laundry workers, who were “shamefully exploited” and not organized within existing AFL unions.[685]
In the summer of 1911, a group of leftwing Italian socialists withdrew from the Socialist Party and, in conjunction with local Italian anarchists, formed the Latin Branch of Local 173, which included both Italian and French members and maintained a storefront in North Beach. Members of the Latin Branch revived the IWW’s campaign among bakery workers and in September 1911 established a Latin local of the Bakery Workers’ Industrial Union. In December 1911, Edmondo Rossoni of the IWW-affiliated Federazione Socialista Italiana spoke under the auspices of the Latin Branch on “One Big Union for all the Workers,” and in February and May of the following year the branch published two single-issue bilingual French-Italian papers.[686]
One of the Latin Branch’s leading figures was the anarchist Luigi Parenti, a Tuscan migrant who had helped lead a strike of streetcar workers in Lucca but was not politically radical until after his arrival in San Francisco in 1910. Parenti joined the IWW within a year, and in 1913 he embarked on a statewide lecture tour on behalf of the organization. He also corresponded with Carlo Tresca in New York and leading anarcho-syndicalist Armando Borghi in Italy on behalf of the Latin Branch, and was arrested in 1916, along with Michele Centrone, while giving a street speech protesting Tresca’s arrest during an IWW strike on the Mesabi Iron Range. By that time, Italian authorities considered Parenti to be “one of the most dangerous propagandists in the anarchist movement across the United States,” describing him as “taciturn in character, educated, intelligent, [and] cultured,” while the IWW’s Industrial Worker called him “an enthusiastic, energetic, and convincing speaker.” As an organizer, Parenti moved between jobs in hotels, restaurants, foundries, factories, and the railroads, and he led a multiethnic steelworkers’ strike in South San Francisco around 1916, resulting in another arrest.[687]
Under the leadership of men like Saffores and Parenti the Latin Branch extended its membership to include workers in the sausage making, shoemaking, cannery, and fishing industries. It helped organize a number of strikes and job actions in these trades, but many of these were not officially carried out under its own auspices—as a 1914 investigation by the California Commisison of Immigration and Housing found, “many trade unionists [i.e. AFL members] in San Francisco were interested in the I. W. W., some going so far as to have cards in both organizations.”[688] For instance, at the end of 1912 around 150 female cannery workers struck, and they were joined by a few Italian men who belonged to the IWW, including A. Cappiali. Together with Luigi Parenti and other members of the Latin Branch, Cappiali organized picket lines of sympathizers and held meetings to support the striking women, a third of whom joined the IWW during the strike. Parenti was, once again, arrested, on charges of inciting to riot.[689] Similarly, a successful 1913 strike at the Frank & Hyman Shoe Company was called by the Shoeworkers’ Union, but a number of this organization’s leaders also carried IWW cards and helped recruit IWW members to man the picket lines, and as a result “most of the strikers [were] joining the I. W. W.”[690] In 1915 French laundry workers under the leadership of IWW organizer Basil Saffores founded what would become the Syndicat des blanchisseurs français de San Francisco (San Francisco Union of French Laundry Workers), an independent organization with strong but informal ties to the IWW. The union, which led a major strike in 1917, was characterized by “a militant, workers’ internationalist stand.”[691]
In 1917 IWW and dissident AFL members formed the Toilers of the World, a union intended to organize agricultural workers while avoiding the stigma attached to the IWW’s name as a result of increasing wartime repression (see Chapter 5). The organization received a federal charter from the AFL and successfully organized Bay Area cannery workers, who struck that July. Federal troops were called in, but the Toilers succeeded in obtaining a favorable settlement in San Jose. The organization, which was the only significant union to organize cannery workers before the 1930s, left the AFL in 1918 but rejoined it a year later after a failed campaign for the eight-hour day, and dissolved in 1922.[692] Under its own auspices, meanwhile, the IWW’s Latin Bakery Workers’ Industrial Union threatened to strike for improved working conditions and a six-day work week in 1916, and in 1917 Local 173 helped organize a short and successful fishermen’s strike on the Sacramento River.[693] Although the strength of the AFL in California severely limited the IWW’s field of action, its neglect of Latin and unskilled laborers left many arenas open to syndicalist and anarchist activity.
As in Paterson, although the IWW’s local leadership was entirely male, its membership was not. Half of the workers involved in the 1913 shoemakers’ strike were women, and the workers the union organized in the laundries and canneries were predominantly female.[694] IWW organizers made concerted efforts to reach out to women; in 1909 the Industrial Worker reported, “It is customary to require no initiation fee for women, and the dues are only half of the due from men.” The paper also supported women’s economic independence from men and “general equality and mutual respect in the relations of the sexes,” but it could envision this being possible only by having women become independent wage earners.[695]
In 1908, San Francisco IWW member Sophie Vasilio (née Beldner) had proposed a radical alternative:
I believe the married woman of the working class is no parasite or exploiter. She is a social producer. In order to sustain herself, she has to sell her labor power, either in the factory, directly to the capitalist, or at home, indirectly, by serving the wage slave, her husband, thus keeping him in working condition through cooking, washing and general housekeeping…And as an industrial factor in society, I believe the wage slave’s wife has got a right to belong to a mixed local.
But this proposal, which recognized unwaged housework as an integral form of reproductive labor upon which the capitalist system depends, never gained a serious hearing. Wife and worker remained seemingly incompatible roles, leaving the IWW dominated by a masculinist perspective.[696] Though this circumscribed the possibilities for women’s participation and leadership, it simultaneously aided the organization in breaking down racialized barriers. Testifying before Congressional Committee on Industrial Relations in 1916, George Speed declared,
that while a good many people in the State [of California] object to the Jap and Chinese, I want to say, as far as I am concerned, one man is as good as another to me; I don’t care whether he is black, blue, green, or yellow, as long as he acts the man and acts true to his economic interests as a worker.[697]
Speed’s racial egalitarianism was an example of what David Roediger has called “efforts to disarm race through masculinity”—efforts that fused class and gender in a way that marginalized women within working-class struggles, but brought together working men across ethnoracial lines.[698] The most dramatic examples of this multiethnic male solidarity centered on the IWW’s efforts to organize migrant laborers, and radicals’ support for the Mexican Revolution.
*** 4.3 Free Speech and the Mexican Connection
Between 1906 and 1919 the IWW engaged in more than twenty-six “free-speech fights,” most of them on the West Coast. These were struggles between street speakers attempting to organize migrant laborers and local authorities intent on preventing the IWW from establishing a foothold in their communities. Typically, permits for street meetings would be revoked or local ordinances banning public meetings would be passed, IWW members would defy the law and be arrested, and in response a call would be issued for additional members to “invade” the city, speak on the streets until they were arrested, and flood the local jail until the union gained the right to hold meetings once again.[699] But the series of free-speech fights that shook California between 1910 and 1912 were not isolated clashes between local governments and labor radicals; rather, they were part of a continental cycle of rebellion the connected North American anarchists, syndicalists, and socialists to the revolutionary movement in Mexico.
There were few Mexican radicals present in the Bay Area, but with good reason. In 1900 Mexican-born migrants constituted just 0.4% of the city’s population, and in 1923 a reporter estimated that they numbered no more than 4,000—still less than 1% of all San Franciscans, and around one-sixth the number of Italians.[700] Yet Mexican revolutionaries found some of their strongest supporters north of the border among Italian American anarchists. There were structural as well as cultural commonalities that inclined Italians and Mexicans to identify with one another; members of both nationalities were viewed with disdain by “Anglo-Saxon” Californians, including those who controlled the state’s AFL affiliates. Though not officially barred from AFL unions, Mexicans were met by “an attitude of contempt and scorn and they [were] generally regarded as the most degraded race” by “white” workers and union members, leading them, as one IWW organizer noted, to become “extremely suspicious and distrusted [sic] with any form of unionism.”[701] In 1911, California IWW member Jack Whyte made a revealing comment when he reported that the union’s local in Fresno was “making good headway among the Mexicans, Italians and the floating element of the so-called white race”—on the one hand, Whyte noted that Italians and Mexicans were conventionally categorized as something other than “white,” while on the other, he made his own doubts about the epistemological validity of the “white race” clear. By questioning the premises on which California’s racial hierarchy was built, Whyte, and the IWW in general, differentiated themselves from the vast majority of California unionists.[702]
The IWW made inroads among Mexican workers on both sides of the border soon after it was formed. In 1906 it enlisted members in the Mexican state of Sonora, and in November of that year the Gran Liga Mexican de Empleados de los Ferrocarrileros (Great League of Mexican Railway Employees) contacted the union, through anarchist member Albert Ryan of Arizona, to express its “desire to establish fraternal relations with the I. W. W.” In 1908 the California IWW began reaching out directly to Mexicans by translating union literature into Spanish, building an adobe IWW hall to house a new local in the border town of Holtville, and publishing a Spanishlanguage paper in San Diego, Libertad y Trabajo (Liberty and Labor), under the supervision of Joseph Ettor. San Francisco’s Latin Branch also began featuring Spanish speakers at its events.[703] These efforts paid off over the next few years, as hundreds of Mexicans took out IWW cards.[704]
This success was directly linked to the growing connections between the IWW and the Partido Liberal Mexicano. By 1908 most of the PLM’s leaders, under the influence of brothers Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón, had adopted anarcho-syndicalist ideas and the organization’s paper Regeneración, based out of Los Angeles, had a substantial following on both sides of the border. Increasingly, the western IWW and the PLM relied on one another for support and recruitment.[705] Among the PLM’s active members was Fernando Palomárez, a Mayo Indian from Sinaloa who also belonged to the IWW and helped Joseph Ettor organize San Diego’s Local 378 and edited its paper Libertad y Trabajo. In mid-1908 Palomárez returned to Mexico where he led an attempted PLM uprising of Yaqui Indians in Sonora and then attempted to assassinate President Díaz, before escaping back to the United States.[706] Another leading figure in the PLM was the anarchist Práxedis Guerrero, who in 1905 had lived in San Francisco where he published a short-lived radical paper, Alba Roja (Red Dawn).[707]
Given the Bay Area’s small Mexican population, however, the IWW recruited most of its Mexican members in central and southern California. Outside of San Diego, it was most successful in attracting migratory Mexican laborers—as well as Russians, Chinese, and Japanese—in Fresno under the leadership of organizer Frank Little. These efforts were quickly met with the revocation of the union’s permit for street meetings, and on April 17, 1910 a “Mexican socialist” soapboxer was arrested, precipitating a major free-speech battle that attracted radicals from across the West—including members of San Francisco’s Latin Branch— and lasted until March of the following year. But the final destination of many of the socialists, anarchists, and IWW members who headed to Fresno was in fact Mexico, where revolution broke out in November 1910.[708]
The PLM’s revolutionary efforts were concentrated in Baja California, just over the border from the IWW outposts of San Diego and Holtville. The uprising was planned by PLM leaders in Los Angeles, who dispatched Fernando Palomárez to oversee its implementation. Holtville became the point through which arms were smuggled to the PLM’s partisans, and by April 1911, the San Diego local dissolved because “practically all the Mexican members” left to join the fighting.[709] The most committed support for the PLM in the United States came from the IWW, Italian anarchists, and Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth. Veteran Paterson anarchists Ludovico Caminita and Vittorio Cravello arrived in Los Angeles at the end of 1910, and in May 1911 both men were founding members of the International Committee of the Mexican Liberal Junta, an organization of Italian, American, German, Russian, Polish, and Mexican radicals formed to garner support for the PLM. Given the timing of the two Italians’ arrival, it is likely that they were involved in planning the PLM’s invasion of Mexicali at the end of January 1911.[710] Cravello believed, “In all the history of our age there has not been a movement of such great importance as that which is taking place in neighboring Mexico.” The reason, according to Caminita, was that “Mexico will be the first to put into practice the cornerstone of the communist program: socialization of the land and of the means of production.” Moreover, “If today the Mexican is able to expropriate the land owners, the proletariat of the others will not tarry to do the same and to quickly change into reality our persecuted and damned utopia.”[711] The anarchists’ support for the Mexican Revolution was based on the firm belief, shared by the PLM, that the insurgents in Mexico were in the process of establishing an anarchist communist society.[712]
The PLM’s initial conquest of Mexicali on January 29, 1911, accomplished with a force of less than twenty PLM fighters and one American IWW member, generated great enthusiasm among radicals in the United States and spurred several hundred volunteers to join its forces over the following months.[713] In early May, a force of approximately 250 insurgents, about half of them IWW members, crossed the border and captured Tijuana. Injured on the way was commander Jack Mosby, an Oakland IWW member, staunch PLM supporter, and soldier of fortune reported to have run guns during the Cuban War of Independence, fought in the Boer War, the Panamanian revolt against Colombia, and the Philippine-American War, and deserted from the Marines. Because the PLM enjoyed the support of many African American radicals— some of them members of the organization—several were among the American volunteers in Tijuana, marking a rare instance of African American engagement with anarchism.[714] An enthusiastic report published in the Industrial Worker claimed, “We have got a Utopia down here,” and urged others in the United States to “take the first train and come down here. Here, there are no bosses and you are FREE.”[715] Over the next month a number of additional IWW members, including Frank Little and Swedish-born IWW songwriter Joe Hill, joined the PLM’s forces at Tijuana, as did a group of at least fifty Italian American anarchists.[716]
The Italians travelled from as far north as Vancouver and as far east as Philadelphia, though most were residents of western states. At least one was a well-known San Francisco anarchist: Adolfo Antonelli, the former editor of Nihil, who had long extolled the virtues of armed insurrection. Paterson’s Ludovico Caminita also participated.[717] What these new recruits found in Tijuana, however, little resembled the revolutionary struggle they had envisioned. The PLM’s force, which accepted all volunteers, was plagued by the presence of adventurers, mercenaries, and “filibusters” seeking to annex the region to the United States for personal gain. Moreover, the presence of so many foreign troops and widespread accusations that the insurgents were filibusters and bandits dissuaded large numbers of Mexicans from joining the cause and led to tensions—including occasional outbursts of violence—within the PLM’s own ranks. By the end of May, no more than 10% of the fighters were Mexican. Finally, the fact that Tijuana itself was a tiny desert town of around 100 residents, combined with the summer heat, pillaging by some volunteers, and the lack of military action between early May and late June, disillusioned many with the entire affair. Although the filibustering element was expelled after Jack Mosby returned from his convalescence in Los Angeles and was elected to command on June 3, many of the IWW members and Italian anarchists had already departed in disgust. The PLM’s exiled leadership in California, meanwhile, was unable to provide adequate ammunition or instructions.
In June, the insurgents at Mexicali surrendered to a superior force, and at the end of that month Mosby’s force of 155 foreigners and 75 Mexicans and Indians was routed by Federal troops at Tijuana, ending any prospects for an anarchist communist revolution in northern Mexico.[718] In anarchist circles, controversy over the revolt erupted immediately afterward. An open letter signed by eight Italian anarchist volunteers and published in Cronaca Sovversiva claimed that the PLM’s struggle was “neither political nor social” and warned anarchists against supporting it. Sebastiano Messaglia, an Italian anarchist from Vancouver who spent five days at the PLM camp in Tijuana, simply reported that during his stay “I saw armed men who were fighting for a cause that does not belong to me.” Cronaca Sovversiva, the Parisian Les Temps Nouveaux, and a few other Italian-language radical papers attacked the PLM as a liberal organization posing as an anarchist one, and charged that it was in cahoots with American capitalist interests. According anarchist historian Max Nettlau,
Superficial anarchists could not understand why the social elements in Mexico did not immediately come up with an anarchist society and they knew very little about the historical substance of the movement to understand the multiple relations of the few anarchists within the innermost core of that movement.[719]
The PLM and the insurgents were adamantly defended, meanwhile, by L’Era Nuova, individualist anarchist Massimo Rocca’s Novatore (with which Adolfo Antonelli was affiliated), and Spanish anarchist Jaime Vidal’s La Fuerza Consciente, which moved from New York to Los Angeles in October 1913 and subsequently relocated to 958 Pacific Street in San Francisco. The PLM’s own paper, Regeneración, began publishing a four-page Italian-language supplement edited by Ludovico Caminita for the purpose of combating Cronaca Sovversiva’s accusations.[720]
The debate so consumed the Italian-speaking movement that in late 1911 and early 1912 conventions were held in Brooklyn and Boston to discuss “the Mexican question.” Predictably, the Brooklyn gathering, convened by L’Era Nuova, found that Mexico was experiencing a social revolution, while the Boston convention, called by Cronaca Sovversiva, came to the opposite conclusion and charged that Regeneración and L’Era Nuova had misled their readers. Caminita in turn accused Galleani of “revolutionary masturbation.”[721] Some radicals refused to abandon hope in the Mexican cause, and touted Emiliano Zapata’s army as an anarchist movement. In September 1913 a group of thirteen PLM members and IWW member Charles Cline attempted to join Zapata’s forces, but were arrested at the Texas border after an altercation that left a deputy sheriff and one of their own dead. The Italian anarchist Vittorio Cravello headed their defense campaign.[722] In late 1914 a Bay Area anarchist paper reported that it was “in receipt of several letters from men who wish to go to Mexico and fight for Land and Liberty,” but it advised them “that the Mexicans be left to fight their own battles…The Mexicans have proved themselves excellent fighters, and foreigners who go into their country, ignorant of its customs and language, are sure to be looked on with suspicion and to be more of a nuisance than they are worth.”[723]
Ludovico Caminita, meanwhile, embarked on a nationwide lecture tour in defense of the PLM at the end of 1911, eventually returning to Paterson. When Caminita stopped in Chicago in February 1912 he debated Filippo Perrone, a fellow Sicilian anarchist and IWW member who had travelled from Milwaukee to Baja and was one of the dissident volunteers who had signed the controversial letter published in Cronaca Sovversiva.[724] Six months earlier in San Francisco, Perrone, fresh from Tijuana, was at the forefront of one of the most unusual free-speech fights in the IWW’s history, which illustrated the links between the Mexican Revolution, Italian anarchism, and the IWW.
For some time, members of the Latin Branch of Local 173 had been holding Sunday street meetings at the corner of Broadway and Grant in North Beach, primarily as a means to recruit neighborhood bakery workers. However, the meetings were also near Saints Peter and Paul Italian Catholic Church, and the radicals often indulged in anti-religious propaganda as well.[725] At one such meeting on August 6, 1911, police responded to complaints from the nearby church and arrested two speakers, who were fined $10. The following Sunday IWW speakers defied a new police ban and addressed a crowd of 200 listeners at the nearby corner of Broadway and Grant. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, police moved in to arrest Filippo Perrone and the other speakers after Perrone “spoke disparagingly about the American flag, condemned law and order, denounced all form[s] of government and ended with a tirade against the Pope.” The audience then turned violent and forced the police to flee with their prisoners to a nearby firehouse, which “[t]housands of infuriated men besieged” with rocks and bricks until reinforcements arrived. One officer nearly had his thumb bitten off by a rioter, and ten individuals were arrested, including Perrone and Latin Branch members Michele Centrone, Fred Rovaldi, and Nazareno Parella.[726] The arrested men were reportedly beaten while in police custody and each was held on $1,000 bail on charges of refusing to disperse and inciting to riot. Nazareno Parella told the local press, “I belong to the Industrial Workers of the World, and so does Perrone. The others do also, I believe…Some of the men arrested were in the campaign for free speech at Fresno, but not all of them.”[727]
The arrests engendered an outpouring of support from the local Latin community. Two days after the riot a protest meeting drew a crowd of 2,000, and in the affair’s aftermath the ranks of IWW were swelled with “several hundred” new members, including an estimated one half of the city’s Italian bakers and two dozen more in Oakland (though most drifted away over the following months). Even the conservative local paper L’Italia defended the radicals’ right to freedom of speech, and the charges against those arrested were quietly dropped. “Thousands” were present at a victory meeting on August 20 at the corner of Grand and Green streets to listen to Rovaldi, Centrone, and other recently released prisoners.[728] An unusual testament to the number of anarchist sympathizers came from an investigation carried out by the Oakland World, which found that North Beach business owners were not among those who pressured the police to suppress the Latin Branch’s street meetings, because “nearby businessmen were pleased with the anarchists since they brought in so much business.”[729]
In January 1912 San Francisco police again arrested speakers from Local 173, prompting a series of illegal outdoor meetings over the following month that “led to several minor riots in which policemen and spectators were injured,” and immediately afterwards Oakland Local 174 had its permit for street meetings withdrawn, leading to repeated clashes betweem officers and IWW supporters.[730] Neither effort, however, prevented IWW speakers from continuing their open-air meetings. Small as the organization may have been, its much larger multiethnic base of community support made it impossible to quash.
In the summer of 1912, when Joseph Ettor and the syndicalist Arturo Giovannitti faced a possible death sentence as a result of their participation in the IWW’s textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Latin Branch formed a defense committee that included all of San Francisco’s Italian newspapers—including the conservative L’Italia—as well as the French-language L’Echo de l’Ouest, with Luigi Parenti acting as the committee’s recording secretary. Its first mass meeting on July 20, featuring speeches in Italian, Spanish, and English, raised over $500.[731] At a New Years gathering at the IWW’s headquarters in 1913, more than 1,500 “men, women and children, representing practically every civilized nation of the world, assembled in the hall and participated in the general jollification that began early in the evening and lasted until the break of day.” The walls were “decorated with flags of all nations and on the wall above the speakers’ stand were these two mottoes: ‘All flags look alike to us,’ and ‘One Big Union.’“[732]
Other California IWW locals did not fare as well. In San Diego, around 100 IWW members who had fought with the PLM and been arrested after crossing back into the United States were released from Army custody in early 1912. City officials, fearful of the men who had participated in a revolution less than fifteen miles away, passed an ordinance banning street speaking, sparking the IWW’s most bitter free-speech fight. Over the course of the struggle vigilantes viciously beat IWW members, killing more than one, and when Emma Goldman came to San Diego on May 15 as part of a previously scheduled lecture tour, her manager and lover Ben Reitman was abducted and tortured, the letters “I.W.W.” branded on his buttocks. In the face of overwhelming vigilante violence, the IWW was forced to abandon the fight by October.[733]
The free-speech fights in Fresno and San Diego, unlike the struggle in San Francisco, resulted from the IWW’s efforts to recruit migratory farm laborers who spent their winters in those cities. As of the beginning of 1913, these efforts had produced meager results. But that changed in August, when around 2,000 hop pickers at the Durst Ranch in Wheatland, located 120 miles northeast of San Francisco, went on strike against deplorable working conditions. The workers, who were a motley assortment of Italians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Greeks, Turks, Poles, Lithuanians, Japanese, and native-born Americans, were led by an ad-hoc committee of thirty current and former IWW members, including Herman Suhr and expelled Oakland IWW member Richard Ford. After Ford and Suhr presented the strikers’ demands to the ranch owners, local authorities were called in and attempted to arrest the two men. A shot was fired to disperse the crowd, sparking a violent altercation in which a deputy sheriff, a District Attorney, and a black Puerto Rican hop picker were killed. Ford and Suhr were charged with murder and their trial became a cause célèbre; a meeting at San Francsico’s Dreamland Rink on March 1, 1914 to protest the life sentences handed down in the case attracted 5,000 attendees.[734]
Despite the strike’s failure and the convictions of Ford and Suhr, the Wheatland “Hop Riot” signaled a major breakthrough for the IWW in California, undermining longstanding racial, ethnic, and linguistic divisions. Investigations carried out afterwards by the California Commisison of Immigration and Housing revealed the extent to which the IWW’s efforts were responsible for this remarkable showing of multiethnic solidarity. Approximately one hundred of the workers at the ranch (5%) were IWW members, including several veterans of the free-speech fights in Spokane, Fresno, and San Diego. An additional three hundred “knew in a rough way the—for them curiously attractive—philosophy of the I. W. W. and could also sing some of its songs.” A survey of 222 of the state’s migratory workers similarly found that 8% were IWW members but “37 per cent advocated the complete destruction of the present political system,” and an undercover investigator found that all of the migratory laborers he encountered knew of the IWW and, among the unskilled, support for it was “widespread and vehement.”[735] Although there were only about 5,000 IWW members in California in 1915, organizer George Speed estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 migrant workers in the state had passed through its ranks, and “the sentiment of the great bulk and great number of the migratory workers is strongly with the I. W. W.” Following the Wheatland strike, the IWW saw an increase in its California membership and became the main labor organization of western farm laborers. By 1917, San Francisco was home to a core group of some 300 mostly immigrant activists who constituted the “directing force” of the city’s IWW membership.[736] The key to the organization’s success was its ability, in times of struggle, to foster solidarity across the “racial fault lines” that so deeply divided California’s working class.
*** 4.4 The Yellow Peril and the Anarchist Menace
Nowhere was the multiethnic cosmopolitanism of Bay Area anarchists and syndicalists more evident than in their ongoing relations with California’s Asian workers. Writing in 1935, historian Ira Cross noted, “No issue has played so prominent a part in the crowded history of the California labor movement as has Oriental immigration. From the earliest years agitation directed against the immigrants from the Far East has been almost incessant, and frequently violent.” Chinese migrants—followed by the Japanese and Asian Indians (“Hindus”)—were the “indispensible enemy” against which California’s “Anglo-Saxon” working class unified itself.[737] Dana Frank has even suggested that “anti-Chinese agitation was the great unifier of the internationalist white working class in North America.” But this was demonstrably not the case with West Coast anarchists and IWW members.[738]
In the 1880s, the anti-Chinese crusade had been headed by the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), a revolutionary socialist organization founded by an eclectic San Francisco editor and radical named Burnette Haskell, who falsely claimed it was the official Pacific Coast branch of the defunct First International. Despite the IWA’s avowed goal “to obliterate sectional and racial prejudices, with a view to the International Unification of the producers of all lands,” Haskell described the Chinese as a “savage, vicious, idol-worshipping and barbarous race” and declared “a war of the races.”[739] The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 effectively barred all further immigration of workers from China, but in 1900 Chinese still made up more than 4% of San Francisco’s population. Their place in the unskilled labor market, however, was quickly being filled by a new “Yellow Peril” in the form of Japanese migrants.
Although the Japanese were never as numerous as the Chinese—in 1910 they constituted less than 1% of San Franciscans, and statewide they never exceeded 0.021% of the population— the labor movement energetically worked to exclude them from both California and its unions. In 1903, the AFL refused to grant a charter to the Sugar Beet Farm Laborers’ Union of Oxnard (formerly the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association) unless it expelled its Japanese members. Two years later, representatives from the San Francisco labor movement founded the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, and in 1910 the San Francisco Labor Council resolved that its affiliated unions should admit African Americans—who made up only 0.5% of the city’s work force—but overwhelmingly overruled the culinary union’s proposal that Asian workers also be admitted, and instead asked its affiliates to withdraw members from any establishment employing Asians.[740] Most socialists also subscribed to anti-Asian racism. The Socialist party of California passed a resolution calling for the exclusion of Asian immigrants in 1906, and the national party followed suit in 1907. Though many of California’s leftwing socialists “fought any resolution which discriminated on a racial basis,” they were consistently overruled by the majority. Jack London once exclaimed during an argument over Japanese exclusion, “I am first of all a white man and only then a Socialist!”[741]
But what of those “Latin” migrants who could not, like London, base claims to superiority on “Anglo-Saxon” heritage? Affinities between “white” but “colored” groups like Italians and Mexicans, and their Asian neighbors south of Broadway, were unpredictable and unstable. As early as 1860 some of San Francisco’s Italians were involved in the anti-Chinese movement, and in 1880 a “Swiss-Italian Anti-Chinese Company of Dragoons” was formed. Competition between Asian and Italian fishermen, truck farmers, and farm laborers also engendered bitter feelings, and around the turn of the century the city’s Italian youths could be found playing a game “of tying the long hair of Chinese people in a knot then running like hell!” The conservative paper L’Italia, moreover, supported Asian exclusion through the 1910s.[742]
However, the ambiguous position of Italians and other “Latins” also created ruptures in California’s racial order through which solidarity could be built with “non-whites” (the JapaneseMexican Labor Association being one early example). IWW organizer J. H. Walsh inadvertently highlighted the similar—though by no means equivalent—treatment dished out to Latins, Asians, and African Americans when he noted that the average “American” worker couldn’t stand “to think of belonging to an organization that takes in ‘Japs,’ ‘Chinks,’ ‘Dagoes,’ and ‘Niggers.’“ Sensitive to these connections, the liberal La Voce del Popolo defended the rights of Chinese workers, and in 1909 even L’Italia opposed pending legislation that would bar Japanese immigration, out of fear that it could lead to passage of a similar ban on Italian immigrants.[743]
The IWW was the sole American labor organization of the era that opposed Asian exclusion and actively recruited Asian members,[744] and anarchist go-betweens were largely responsible for its success in forging links with Asian workers. At the 1905 founding convention of the IWW it was the tailor Andrew (“Al”) Klemencic, a French-speaking Slovenian anarchist born, like Paterson’s Franz Widmar, near Trieste, who first brought up the issue of solidarity with Asian workers:
We know we have got Austrians, Chinamen, Japs, and people of all nationalities here in this country. So we have got Frenchmen, Germans and Italians, and we are a cosmopolitan crowd. Now, then, all lines there were ever established have always been established by men who were a bunch of robbers, thieves and exploiters, and we want to combine ourselves as humanity, as one lot of people, those that are producing the wealth of our oppressors, and we want to have under that banner our brothers and sisters of the world.[745]
And over the next two decades, “hundreds of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian workers flocked to the call of the IWW.”[746]
The first opportunity to bring Asians in San Francisco under banner of the IWW came in November 1906 with the arrival of Kotoku Denjiro, better known as Shusui Kotoku. An early member of Japan’s socialist movement, Kotoku had just finished a prison sentence for opposing the Russo-Japanese War, during which he had begun to read anarchist materials. In 1904 the American journalist Leopold Fleischmann had met Kotoku in Tokyo and put him in correspondence with San Francisco’s Albert Johnson, a ferryman and “veteran Anarchist of California” who helped arrange Kotoku’s visit to the United States. Johnson had also sent him copies of Free Society, which Kotoku found to be “a very good magazine, I think.”[747]
Kotoku roomed at the home of the Jewish anarchist Rose Fritz, who was known as “an opponent of discrimination against the Japanese” and supplied him with further literature, and his own observations of mutual aid in action following the 1906 earthquake led Kotoku to fully embrace anarchism. His “change in thought,” however, was also due to his exposure to the IWW, which invited him to speak at one of its meetings in Oakland and in turn introduced him to the notion of the revolutionary general strike.[748] Kotoku instilled these anarcho-syndicalist ideas in the Shakai Kakumeito (Social Revolutionary Party) that he founded with a small group of Japanese radicals in Berkeley on June 1, 1906. The party’s program called on members to abolish private property and class inequality, as well as to “eliminate national and racial prejudice” and “unite with the comrades of the world to carry out a great social revolution.”[749] Kotoku retuned to Japan less than a month after the Social Revolutionary Party was founded, but remained in contact with American anarchists and IWW members and almost singlehandedly established an anarchist movement in Japan.[750] The remaining members of the party, however, energetically continued their work in the Bay Area. They founded a newspaper, Kakumei (Revolution), which promoted the IWW, and worked with J. H. Walsh to translate IWW pamphlets into Japanese. The first issue of Kakumei caused a public scandal when local newspapers alleged that it called for the assassination of President Roosevelt, but it gave equal attention to exhorting American workers to unite with Japanese migrants, noting, “Rejection of one nation from your country will not put a stop to the capitalist class taking all and leaving you only what he [sic] must in order to keep you alive so that you produce more wealth for them.”[751]
Another writer for the paper lamented, “So far as I know not a single Socialist paper in this country spoke out plainly on this Japanese question without showing race prejudice…Do they think that they can stop capitalism by excluding Japanese workers form the land?”
Nevertheless, he was
looking forward [to] when all American Socialists will give up ‘America’ just as I did ‘Japan,’ and come to real, international, scientific socialism, and shake hands with all people of all climates without any prejudice and distinction, and let us accomplish unitedly [sic] the entire overthrow of the present system of society.
While the Socialist Party did not respond to this protest, the anarchist paper The Emancipator reprinted the article in full in order to “testify our sentiments of fraternity to our Japanese brothers.”[752] In 1907 the IWW passed a resolution “protesting vehemently against the AntiAsiatic agitation,” and the following year the anarchists of Cogito, Ergo Sum also took up the defense of the Japanese, and argued that their supposed “inferiority” was not due to any physical or intellectual flaws, but to the disadvantages they faced because of “the stupid prejudice [of] ‘The difference of the races’.”[753] In 1913 the Industrial Worker responded to an anti-Japanese article printed in the California socialist paper The Social Democrat by stating,
The person who thinks that the Japanese or Chinese are inferior in intellect or ability to the average Missourian or the Connecticut Yankee is a stranger to the facts. All workers can be organized, regardless or race or color, as soon as their minds are cleared of the patriotic notion that there is any reason for being proud of having been born of a certain shade of skin or in an arbitrarily fenced off portion of the earth.
It concluded, “There are but two nations—the exploiters and the exploited; but two races—the robbers and the robbed.”[754] These were extraordinary expressions of solidarity, given that these same years marked the fevered peak of anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast.
Events in California had a major impact on the fortunes of the anarchist movement in Japan. On November 3, 1907, a holiday in honor of the Japanese Emperor’s birthday, some members of the Social Revolutionary Party mimeographed an “Open Letter” to the Emperor that was distributed among the Bay Area’s Japanese community and signed by the “Anarchist-Terrorists.” The letter denied the divinity of the Emperor and concluded by predicting his assassination and an imminent revolution.[755] This letter, Kotoku’s biographer notes, not only caused a local stir, but “set in motion a historical chain reaction that led to increasingly violent and desperate confrontations between Japanese socialists and the [Japanese] government.” These culminated in 1910 in the trial of twenty-six anarchists, including Shusui Kotoku, for conspiring to assassinate the Emperor.[756] Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth headed a vigorous amnesty campaign on behalf of the convicted radicals, but twenty-four were found guilty and sentenced to death, including Kotoku, who was hanged in January 1911.
The IWW, meanwhile, was strengthening the ties it had first forged through Kotoku. In 1908 organizer George Speed, influenced by a pessimistic report given by a Japanese IWW member, felt that the small organization in California was ill-equipped “for the present time and under present conditions” to undertake the task of organizing Asian workers.[757] His trepidation, however, went unheeded and the union energetically reached out to Asian workers. In May 1907 the IWW local in Vancouver requested “Japanese, Chinese and Hindoo [sic] literature,” and in 1908 the union’s Holtville local was busily distributing IWW materials among both Mexican and Japanese agricultural workers. West Coast IWW organizers also made a practice of offering both Asian and African American workers free initiation fees and dues.[758]
The IWW clearly recognized that in barring Asians from unions, white workers were creating the very labor market segmentation that allowed employers to pay lower wages to Asians and, in turn, to lower the wages of others working in the same occupations. A writer for The Industrial Worker astutely asked, “Which is better: to have Japanese in the union with you, or to force him to scab on the outside?” The paper also drew on anarchist wrtiers to bolster its case; in March 1911 it reprinted a piece on the Asian exclusion movement from the Dutch anarcho-syndicalist Christian Cornelissen’s Bulletin international du mouvement syndicaliste (International Bulletin of the Syndicalist Movement) that observed, “nothing is more fatal to the interests of the workers as a class than the creation of a class of inferior beings from an economic point of view, as well as from a political standpoint.”[759]
Japanese radicals responded positively to these sentiments. In August 1908 Takeuchi Tetsugoro, one of the founding members of the Social Revolutionary Party, helped form the Furesuno Rodo Domeikai (Fresno Labor League), which enrolled 2,000 of the region’s 4,0005,000 Japanese grape pickers under a program dedicated to increasing wages, eliminating corrupt labor contractors, and “elevat[ing] the status of workers.” Though these were bread-and-butter demands, the League’s paper, Rodo (Labor), was militantly anarcho-syndicalist. In September 1909 the League held a joint rally with the Fresno branch of the IWW, which was composed primarily of Mexicans and Italians. However, this Latin-Asian alliance was short-lived, as the League was unable to maintain a steady membership and dissolved the following year.[760]
The IWW, like the Fresno Labor League, proved unable to retain a large Japanese membership. One reason was that Japanese farm workers already exercised effective bargaining power through their own labor associations, headed by Japanese labor contractors who made a practice of underbidding all other groups’ wage rates in order to monopolize a worksite, and then threatening to have their workers strike just before the harvest.[761] T. Takahashi, a Japanese anarchist and IWW member in Chicago, further attributed the union’s limited success among Japanese workers to “[t]he race-problem, material conditions and the despicable attitude of American workers against the Japanese,” who “have been so long isolated from the labor movement in this country, that suspicion is still burning in their minds, and it is hard to make him [sic] understand that there are white workers who would make comrades of them, who would co-operate and fight with them together.” In 1909 Takahashi tried to overcome such barriers by founding The Proletarian, a bilingual English-Japanese anarcho-syndicalist paper that urged readers of both languages, “Let us unite! Not only in words, for unless our unity develops into action, the emancipation of wage slaves can not be accomplished. Salvation lies in the unity of workmen regardless of race or color!” In 1910 San Francisco’s Japanese anarchists also launched a new paper, Shinsei (Rising Star).[762]
At least some Japanese workers responded to this literature. On April 11, 1911, a Japanese radical was arrested in San Diego, along with eight Mexicans and four Americans, on his way to join the PLM’s forces in northern Mexico.[763] In December 1918 the IWW successfully brought hundreds of Mexican and Japanese workers together in an organizing drive among southern California orange pickers, but these members drifted away after a failed strike the following month. Nevertheless, Japanese workers participated en masse in the Seattle General Strike of 1919, and during the San Pedro free-speech fight of 1923 IWW protestors were kept fed with two tons of fish donated by local Japanese fishermen who told the recipients, “We are your brothers.”[764] IWW and anarchist efforts on behalf of the Japanese were no match for the exclusion movement, however, and as a result of the 1906 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between the United States and Japan, passports were no longer issued for Japanese emigrants coming to America unless they had previously spent time there.[765]
Initially, the IWW had even less success among Chinese migrants, in part because there were no Chinese socialist or anarchist organizations in San Francisco before the First World War that could act as conduits. The union printed Chinese-language materials as early as 1906, some Chinese farm workers joined the Fresno local in 1910, and a “Chinaman” was reportedly among the foreign volunteers fighting with the PLM in Tijuana in 1911, but it was not until after the war that the IWW organized a significant number of Chinese workers.[766] In 1919–1920 large numbers of Chinese workers joined the IWW in Vancouver, where they carried out a series of strikes, and in 1925 a third of the union’s membership in Portland, Oregon was reportedly Chinese.[767] In San Francisco, Chinese radicals and workers formed the Sanfanshi Gongyi Tongmeng Zonghui (Workers’ League of San Francisco) in 1919, which enrolled around 1,000 members and soon changed its name to the Meizhou Gongyi Tongmeng Zonghui (Workers’ League of America), which lasted until around 1927. One of the organization’s officers was Liu Zhongshi, known to non-Chinese comrades as “Jonesie” (a corruption of Zhongshi) or “Red Jones,” a laborer who had migrated from Canton in 1909 before becoming an anarchist and proponent of the IWW.[768] Nevertheless, in the 1910s the IWW was probably more influential within anarchist circles in China than among Chinese migrants in the United States.
As both Chinese and Japanese labor became scarce in California agriculture, a new source was found, in the form of migrants from India, who began arriving in the United States in large numbers in 1906. These Indian laborers, largely Sikhs from the Punjab, received a welcome much like the one that had greeted Chinese and Japanese migrants: they were the victims of several riots along the West Coast between 1907 and 1909, they were excluded from AFL unions, and in 1907 the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League changed its name to the Asiatic Exclusion League in order to add Indians to the groups it campaigned to keep out of the country.[769] Indians differed from other Asian migrants in their appearance; though dark-skinned, Sikhs who abandoned their traditional turbans could and did pass themselves off as Mexicans, Portuguese, Italians, and even African Americans in order to lessen the discrimination they faced. It was also common for Indians to join and intermarry within Mexican and African American communities, but not Chinese or Japanese ones.[770] Indians therefore had much stronger cultural and everyday ties to San Francisco’s Latins.
The arrival of the Hindu intellectual Har Dayal in 1911 was crucial to bringing together Indians and Latin radicals. Dayal had several years of experience in the Indian independence movement, but like Kotoku he converted to anarcho-syndicalism during his stay in California, helped found radical organizations among his fellow migrants, and plotted revolution in his country of origin. Already exposed to anarchist ideas while living in Europe, Dayal moved to Berkeley in April 1911, where he rubbed shoulders with radicals of all stripes. He soon founded and became secretary of the International Radical Club, a motley assortment of revolutionaries, intellectuals, and eccentrics which met at an Italian restaurant in North Beach.[771]
Dayal was quickly attracted to anarchism and the IWW, and became secretary of Oakland’s IWW Local 174 for a time. His ideological shift was evident in a speech he gave to Local 174 in July 1912 on “The Future of the Labor Movement,” in which the Indian nationalist condemned patriotism as having been “devised to divide the laborers into their various countries and thus into a false division of society.” He also called for “cooperation between the labor movement and the woman’s movement. The workers and the women are two enslaved classes and must fight their battles together.” Finally, he denounced parliamentary socialism as a dead end and instead promoted direct action and the general strike.[772]
To pursue these goals, Dayal founded the Fraternity of the Red Flag, a multiethnic organization with a declaration of principles calling for personal self-improvement, the abolition of private property, religion, and government, the emancipation of women, the “establishment of Universal Brotherhood, and the abolition of patriotism and race-feeling.” Claiming to represent members on five continents, the Fraternity pledged to “devote its efforts chiefly to the establishment of Modern Schools, and the promotion of industrial organization and strikes (in cooperation with the I.W.W. and the Syndicalist movements). In Asia and Africa, it will further the movements of progress and revolt in various countries.” In 1913, Dayal opened the Bakunin Institute, an anarchist training center, in a small building on six acres of land in nearby Hayward that had been donated by a “female comrade” from the Fraternity.[773]
The Institute published its own paper, Land and Liberty, edited by the British anarchist William C. Owen. A former Asian exclusionist and member of San Francisco’s IWA, Owen had embraced anarchism in the 1890s, become a supporter of the rights of both Asian and Mexican migrants, and was fresh from a stint editing the English-language page of the PLM’s Regeneración.[774] Land and Liberty’s first issue trumpeted, “Wherever men or women battle for freedom they will find in us a champion, whether that battle is in Mexico or the United States, in Europe or the Orient.” Unlike those anarchists who had been skeptical of supporting the Cuban War of Independence, the paper argued that
the impending struggle in Mexico, Ireland, Egypt, India, [and] everywhere,…is based on the Anarchist doctrine that the individual is entitled to self-ownership. Because Anarchists cling to this as their fundamental tenet, they sympathize with and do their best to assist national movements of revolt throughout the world.[775]
This brand of anti-imperialism came perilously close to replacing anti-nationalist cosmopolitanism with an internationalism that celebrated post-colonial nation-states.
This tension was also clear in Har Dayal’s activities among fellow Indian migrants. At a meeting in Portland, Oregon in May 1913, Dayal helped form the Indian nationalist Hindu Association of the Pacific Coast, known popularly as the Ghadar or Ghadr movement after its Urdu-language publication, Ghadr (Mutiny), which Dayal edited in San Francisco. The magazine, which had a weekly print run of 25,000, was not an anarchist publication but instead drew on “a broad range of ideas of nationalist, revolutionary, and anarchist movements to formulate its opposition to British rule.” It reached readers in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America as well as the United States and India.[776]
California’s budding Indian radical movement was dealt a severe blow when Har Dayal and other Ghadar leaders were arrested on March 25, 1914, just a week before the first issue of Land and Liberty appeared, for allegedly violating the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903. Freed on $1,000 bail, Dayal fled to Switzerland. The Bakunin Institute and Land and Liberty were left in the hands of W. C. Owen, who in late 1914 closed down the Institute and relocated the paper to San Francisco.[777] Nevertheless, the Ghadar movement endured, and would form close ties to the anarchist group around Alexander Berkman’s the Blast (see below). A large number of Indian laborers also joined the IWW in Marysville, a town just outside of Wheatland, and they were a prominent group in the “Hop Riot” of 1913.[778] Sustained interethnic activity, however, remained elusive.
Despite their remarkable challenge to California’s prevailing racial ideologies, the efforts of the Bay Area’s anarchists and syndicalists to bring Asian migrants into the revolutionary fold met with mixed, and sometimes meager, results. But their impact cannot be measured solely by looking at northern California. In 1916 Czech-born anarchist Hippolyte Havel, editor of The Revolt, remarked:
Japanese, Chinese, Hindoo [sic] and Egyptian revolutionary papers propagating the same ideas we do are lying on my desk.
The social revolt cannot be confined in the narrow circle of Europe and America. If we cannot bring into our movement the people of the Orient then our cause is lost. Happily our ideas are spreading to a larger extent than some of our pessimists dream.
THE REVOLT is proud to be in connection with the rebels in the far East. We are proud of the small share we are contributing toward the universal emancipation.[779]
San Francisco’s anarchists contributed more than a “small share” to this spread of anarchist ideas to Asia. They were directly responsible for the establishment of anarchism in Japan via Shusui Kotoku, whose interactions with Chinese students in Tokyo subsequently helped introduce anarchism to China, where for the two decades following 1911 it was the dominant tendency of the Left—bringing full circle the transnational transmission of anarchist ideology that began with Eugene Travaglio’s unplanned journey down the Yangtze.[780] It was also through San Francisco that anarchism, via Har Dayal, first entered the Indian diaspora, where it later influenced figures like Bhagat Singh.[781] The activities of the city’s anarchists played out on a global as well as a local stage, and must be measured accordingly.
*** 4.5 “A Truly International Gathering”
There was no Jewish counterpart to the Bay Area’s vibrant Latin anarchist movement, or even to the smaller and more ephemeral radical organizations founded by Asian radicals. Yiddishspeaking Jews from Eastern Europe migrated to the West Coast in extremely small numbers; in 1900 the number of Russian-born residents of San Francisco—including non-Jews—was only 1,500 (0.04% of the city’s population), and by 1920 it had grown to just 5,800 (0.01% of the population).[782] Nevertheless, the earlier financial and political success of the city’s German Jewish population, the relative absence of anti-Semitism in the American West, and the presence of so many other racialized minorities positioned Eastern European Jews much closer to migrants from western and northern Europe, as well as to native-born “whites,” than were their counterparts on the East Coast. As Louis Sloss, a descendent of one of San Francisco’s pioneer German Jewish families, remarked, “The opportunities offered in the way of escaping from one’s Jewishness may have been unique in San Francisco.”[783]
The city lacked a distinct Eastern European Jewish ghetto or Yiddish-speaking community, and few Jews were employed in the local garment industry, precluding the emergence of a Yiddish labor or anarchist movement such as existed in New York.[784] Instead, Jews participated in the radical movement largely as individuals and operated almost entirely within English-language circles. Yet even these were limited in size; in 1914 Land and Liberty complained, “In San Francisco there is a great dearth of English [anarchist] speakers.”[785] The Jewish-Anglo anarchist milieu was also much closer to the radical wings of the Socialist Party and the AFL than to the IWW, which prevented Jews from establishing strong ties with Latin radicals until the First World War.
The Bay Area’s earliest prominent Jewish anarchist was Sigismund Danielewicz, the Polish-born cofounder of the Coast Seamen’s Union and a member of Haskell’s International Workingmen’s Association, in which he had been the sole dissenting voice supporting the rights of Chinese migrants. Danielewicz turned to anarchism after the dissolution of the IWA and edited the anarchist communist paper The Beacon in San Diego and Berkeley from 1889 until around 1891, and later contributed to Free Society.[786] A more permanent figure was Rose Fritz, who came to the Bay Area in the 1880s from Kiev and was active in the anarchist movement through the 1930s. Though trained in medicine in Russia she was unlicensed in the United States, but practiced it regardless and ran a nursing home near Los Gatos. For many years she served as the San Francisco agent for Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, and she housed Shusui Kotoku during his stay.[787]
Another figure close to Goldman was Alexander Horr, who was born in Hungary and raised an orthodox Jew but became an anarchist after migrating to New York in the 1880s. He arrived in the Bay Area in 1907 following three years at the utopian Freeland Colony (formerly the Equality Colony) on Puget Sound. In San Francisco he became secretary of the jitney bus drivers’ union, opened the Liberty Book Store at 1260 Golden Gate Avenue with the socialist William McDevitt, and was “the leading spirit” of the radical Social Science League. In 1909 Horr briefly published the paper Freeland, and he also arranged Goldman’s numerous Bay Area appearances. During the anarchist scare of 1908 he was arrested for street speaking and “outrageously maltreated,” and authorities unsuccessfully attempted to revoke his citizenship. Goldman was also barred from making several scheduled appearances in San Francisco and then arrested along with Ben Reitman on charges of “conspiracy to riot.” A protest meeting at Victory Theater was broken up by police, but Goldman and Reitman were acquitted, as was Horr.[788]
In 1906 Lucy Fox (later Lucy Robbins Lang) and Bob Robbins, both Russian Jewish migrants who had been active in Chicago’s anarchist movement and affiliated with Free Society, arrived in San Francisco. They soon opened the St. Helena Vegetarian Café on Market Street— the city’s first vegetarian restaurant—which became an important locus of radical activity.[789] In 1907 Julius (“Ike”) Edelsohn arrived from New York, where he had been an active anarchist with his sister Becky and briefly edited the Yiddish anarchist paper Lebn un Kamf. Edelsohn’s arrival seems to coincide with the appearance of the Frayhayt Group, in which he took part. This was probably the Bay Area’s first Jewish anarchist organization.[790] Anarchists were also active in the Radical Branch (Br. 511) of the Workmen’s Circle, which had twenty-five members at its founding in 1911 and thirty-nine by 1925.[791] Nevertheless, there were simply not the numbers to form a distinct Jewish anarchist community. Tellingly, when Lucy Fox and Bob Robbins moved into a communal house on Telegraph Hill with four other anarchists, their roommates were all Italians rather than fellow Jews.[792]
The English-speaking radicals who frequented the St. Helena Vegetarian Café, meanwhile, were mostly members of the leftwing minority within the San Francisco Labor Council and Building Trades Council. Chief among them was Norwegian-born anarchist Eric B. Morton, who had attempted to tunnel Alexander Berkman out of prison in 1901 and who, in 1905, had smuggled arms to revolutionaries in Russia. In San Francisco he edited the short-lived anarchist paper Freedom in 1910–11 and was a prominent member of the Mill-Men’s Union, which earned him terms on both the BTC and SFLC. He lost his position on the latter, however, when he was expelled “for violating the taboo against employing Orientals.[793] The German anarchist Anton Johannsen, meanwhile, had been a respected union organizer among Chicago’s carpenters before moving to San Francisco shortly after the earthquake, where he became an organizer for the state Building Trades Council and later for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Pragmatic in his anarchism, Johannsen was, in Michael Kazin’s description, “a radical libertarian who believed in strong leadership and organizational discipline, a pacifist who could defend confessed murderers when they acted in the union cause.”[794] Johannsen’s fellow German anarchist Matthew Schmidt, a union carpenter, was also an occasional patron of the café, as was Los Angeles iron worker and militant unionist James B. McNamara (who was not himself an anarchist).[795] A final member of this cadre was the Russian Jewish streetcar operator David Caplan, formerly active in the anarchist movement in Philadelphia, who was not a union member but nevertheless aided the radicals in their organizing efforts.[796]
All of these men were close to Olaf Tveitmoe, the Norwegian-born secretary of the BTC. Tveitmoe, who also edited the BTC’s paper, Organized Labor, was well-known as a radical and had ties to socialists, syndicalists, and anarchists alike. Yet he was also AFL president Samuel Gompers’ close ally, a proponent of craft unionism, and president of the Asiatic Exclusion League.[797] Regardless of his seemingly contradictory politics, when the BTC and Labor Council decided to launch a campaign to organize workers in Los Angeles in 1910, Tveitmoe recruited San Francisco’s anarchist unionists to help him lead it. As believers in “direct action” and sabotage, Tveitmoe and his crew were not afraid to resort to property destruction. Their efforts ended disastrously, however, after a bomb prematurely went off at the offices of the anti-union Los Angeles Times on October 1, 1910, causing the deaths of twenty-one employees. The confessions of James McNamara and his brother John, both leaders in the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, not only brought the campaign to a halt but also resulted in the trials of dozens of other accomplices. Tveitmoe and Johannsen were among those indicted for illegally transporting explosives across state lines, but charges against them were eventually dropped. Both men, however, openly criticized the AFL’s leadership for refusing to aid the McNamara brothers following their confession.[798]
Anarchists Matthew Schmidt and David Caplan were indicted for aiding the McNamara brothers with the bombing of the Times building and went into hiding. The private detective agency of William J. Burns, which had succeeded in tracking down the McNamara brothers in 1911, employed Donald Vose, the son of anarchist Gertie Vose of the Home Colony, to infiltrate the anarchist movement in order to locate Schmidt and Caplan. Vose first discovered Caplan working as a barber near Seattle, then travelled to New York where he hung around the offices of Goldman’s Mother Earth and the Francisco Ferrer Center until Schmidt surfaced. Both of the fugitives were arrested in February 1915 and their trials became a cause célèbre for San Francisco’s radicals.[799]
Donald Vose, however, continued to frequent radical circles, moving to San Francisco and living with Lucy Fox and Bob Robbins. Fox, discovering a pistol and incriminating notes among his belongings, realized that Vose was an informant and alerted her comrades, who began keeping him under surveillance and planned to kidnap and have him “brought before a secret labor council and given the choice of either openly repudiating Burns or being detained until after the trial.” Alexander Berkman, who moved to California in late 1915 to help with Schmidt and Caplan’s defense, reportedly wanted to shoot Vose, but was talked out of it. When Schmidt learned of the abduction scheme, however, he had it called off for fear of its possible impact on his trial.[800] Schmidt was subsequently found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, while Caplan was sentenced to ten years for manslaughter.
In January 1916, in the midst of the defense campaign for Schmidt and Caplan, Berkman founded The Blast, a “Revolutionary Labor Weekly” that helped bring together the different ethnic and panethnic segments of Bay Area radicalism. A decade after his release from prison, Berkman was as militant as ever and still revered within anarchist ranks. He viewed San Francisco’s strong labor movement as fertile ground for fostering revolutionary classconsciousness. Lucy Robbins Lang later concluded that The Blast “made little impression upon San Francisco labor,” but this is only partially true. The Blast’s mission was
to get the rebels throughout the country in closer touch with each other, to develop a better mutual understanding among them, to crystallize the scattered revolutionary sentiment in some definite active expression, regardless of theoretical differences and varying isms.[801]
In this, Berkman had some success, attracting the aid not only of anarchists like Eric B. Morton and the young Texas-born cartoonist Robert Minor, but also of leftwing socialists like Tom Mooney, a member of the International Molders Union and former publisher of San Francisco’s leftwing socialist paper Revolt. Berkman also founded the Current Events Club, which held weekly meetings at 1254 Market Street and for a time was “the largest of local anarchistic organizations.” In December 1916, this was joined by the Jack London Memorial Library and School of Social Sciences (renamed the People’s Institute in 1918), formed jointly by the Socialist Party, the IWW, and members of The Blast circle.[802]
The Blast’s career was almost cut short, however, after the issue of April 1916 was excluded from the mails for carrying “indecent” articles about the birth control campaign discussed above. Using a loophole in the postal code, in June the postal inspector stripped the paper of its second-class mailing privileges on the grounds that it was not a “newspaper or other periodical publication” due to irregularities in its publishing schedule—irregularities caused by the postal service itself.[803] But Berkman continued publication of The Blast and shipped copies of it in bulk to his comrades Thomas and Lizzie Bell in Arizona, whose children traveled by bicycle to mail out smaller batches of the paper through scattered post office boxes.[804]
Berkman was also “in touch with Hindu revolutionists and Anarchists of the Hindustan Gadar [sic] organization.” Har Dayal had earlier arranged lectures by Russian, Polish and Irish radicals for Ghadar members, and was “on intimate terms” with German anarchist Anton Johannsen. After Dayal’s departure, leadership of the Ghadar movement fell to Ram Chandra, who contributed articles to Mother Earth and was close to several affiliates of The Blast.[805] One of these was Ed Gammons, an Irish nationalist who in 1910 migrated to the United States, where he became an anarchist and IWW member. Moving to San Francisco in 1914, Gammons roomed with Eric B. Morton, became secretary of the Schmidt-Caplan Defense League, and contributed to The Blast. He was also a member of the Friends of Freedom for India and produced Englishlanguage literature for the Ghadar Party, which in 1919 published his pamphlet Invincible India, with illustrations by Robert Minor.[806]
Berkman, who spoke better Russian than Yiddish, also established ties to local Russian anarchists. Within San Francisco’s Russian-born population, speakers of Russian probably outnumbered those of Yiddish; when Sholem Asch’s controversial play “The God of Vengeance” was performed in San Francisco in 1917 it was presented in Russian translation rather than the original Yiddish. By 1912, IWW Mixed Local 173 had formed a third, Russianlanguage Branch, and in 1918 the Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada (UORW) had 384 members in San Francisco. Copies of the UORW’s paper, Golos Truda, were available at the Russian Reading Room in Oakland, the Russian Library at 716 Golden Gate Avenue, and the UORW headquarters at 624 Rhode Island Street.[807]
Russian anarchists briefly made local headlines in 1915 and 1916 in connection with two shootouts with San Francisco police. The first occurred on the night of September 11, 1915 when Gregory Chesalkin, alias George Nelson, held off more than fifty police for seven hours from his room in a boardinghouse before taking his own life. Chesalkin, an iron worker, jitney driver, and UORW member, had robbed a Los Angeles bank with two other men on August 20, apparently with the goal of sending the money to revolutionaries in Russia.[808] Eight months later, on May 26, 1916, Russian anarchist Vladimir Osokin, known as “Philip Ward,” was accused of passing counterfeit coins and resisted arrest, shooting and killing a police sergeant. After fleeing the scene, he barricaded himself in a boathouse and exchanged gunfire with more than a hundred officers, dying after two hours from multiple wounds. Several years earlier, Osokin had escaped from Siberia after eight years of imprisonment for revolutionary activities and fled to the United States. He was also an iron worker, possibly linking him to Chesalkin and his scheme to raise funds for Russian. Osokin’s funeral was sponsored jointly by the UORW, the Federative Committee of Russian Radical Organizations, the Freedom Group, and the Volontà Group.[809]
The diversity of the funeral committee illustrated the increasing consolidation of San Francisco’s multiethnic anarchist movement. Latin anarchists, too, were drawn into the orbit of The Blast, which forged a close relationship with the Volontà Group. Every Thursday night the Italians’ headquarters hosted an “International Meeting” where speeches were “made in a dozen languages,” and on Fridays female members convened the Group Louise Michel, “A club of Radical Women of every nationality.” Saturdays, meanwhile, were set aside for discussions in English and Italian. The Blast and the Volontà Group also held joint fundraising picnics. One such outing was described as “a truly international gathering, such as can be found only on the Coast: men, women and children of practically every country on the face of the globe fraternized in a truly international spirit.”[810] San Francisco’s anarchists increasingly acted as a single, multiethnic movement, within which cosmopolitanism was as much an everyday practice as an ideology.
*** 4.6 Conclusion
In 1916, IWW Latin Branch organizer Luigi Parenti came to the attention of both the Italian and American governments when he enclosed a postcard with a letter to family members back in Italy. The postcard was a photograph of Parenti and seven other Italian anarchists—probably all members of the Volontà Group—posing with guns. On the reverse side he had written:
To my dear father and my sister Assunta,
I send this present as a token of affection and so that you may see how a group of young subversives without a ‘country’ prepare themselves to freely use arms to be ready for the coming day of the revolution against priests, bosses, and government.
Not only did Parenti underline the words “senza ‘patria’“ (“without a ‘country’“) for emphasis, he also placed the word “patria” itself within derisive quotation marks. The Italian authorities who discovered Parenti’s postcard quickly brought him under surveillance through the Italian Consul in San Francisco, and also forwarded a copy of the document to the American Bureau of Investigation, which began its own file on Parenti. A year later, when examined prior to his extradition to Chicago to stand trial with other IWW leaders, Parenti reasserted his statelessness, declaring: “The I. W. W. is the organization to which I militate—[that] I work in, I am interested in, the United States I have nothing to do with.”[811]
This rejection of both Italian and American nationality clearly befuddled and frightened government officials. The Bureau of Investigation subjected Parenti’s postcard to several retranslations, as though seeking to divine some hidden meaning. For Parenti and his comrades, however, self-identification as “those without a country” was the internalization of the radical cosmopolitan politics they espoused, and they acutely understood the power of language and the need to redefine those concepts underpinning the structures of power against which they arrayed themselves. One of Parenti’s fellow Latin Branch members sourly described Italy as,
Our Patria that has denied us bread, freedom, [and] existence, which forces us to traverse this great and vast Ocean called the Atlantic, in search of a living (un tozzo di pane) less hard; the Patria that forces us to leave our parents, our sisters, our friends, [and] our native land (paese), yet here in faraway America we are tormented and often hear whispered in the ears of us wretches this meaningless (sgrammaticata, literally “ungrammatical”) word ‘Patria.’
Looking toward the revolutionary future, the author warned, “For you cops (sbirri), kings, emperors, governments, patriots, there will be no more land of milk and honey (la cuccagna) as in the past. We stand to redeem the world, humanity.”[812] From the perspective of a global “humanity,” talk of a “patria” was incomprehensible. Thus the French anarchists who published L’Effort had denounced “Homeland, Flag, Government, Honor, etc.” as “great hollow words” that needed to be abolished, and antiracists used terms like “the so-called white race” and made liberal use of quotation marks around phrases like “the difference of the races.”[813]
Alexander Berkman engaged in this war of words even more explicitly. A tongue-incheek “War Dictionary” published in The Blast in 1917 included the following definitions:
HUMANITY—Treason to government.
LOYAL CITIZEN—Deaf, dumb, and blind.
PATRIOTISM—Hating your neighbor.
SEDITION—The proof of Tyranny.
UN-AMERICAN—Independent opinion.[814]
By proclaiming themselves members of a treasonous and stateless “humanity” rather than “loyal citizens,” anarchists like Berkman defined themselves as inassimilable and, from the perspective of the United States government, intolerable. With the tide of patriotic fervor that accompanied America’s entrance into the First World War, authorities would do everything in their power to expunge anarchism, bringing state power into battle with radical cosmopolitanism. The war also marked the ascent of the nation-state over other types of immigrants’ affinities, posing grave difficulties for anti-nationalist anarchists.
** 5.0 Anarchism in Crisis: War, Revolution, and Reaction, 1914–1924
On July 4, 1914, L’Era Nuova commented on the recent slaying of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo:
The assassination (attentato) is not of an anarchist character. It is of a nationalist character…But this does not mean that the anarchists [don’t] feel complete solidarity for the perpetrators of the assassination that so happily succeeded…The anarchists salute them and are not afraid to demonstrate their complete solidarity.[815]
This declaration revealed the unresolved nature of anarchism’s relationship with anti-imperialist nationalism that dated back, within the Italian American movement, to the Cuban War of Independence. Was national independence—and hence statehood—really a cause for which anarchists could have “complete solidarity”? And conversely, was independent statehood something that anarchists could or should defend in the face of foreign aggression? After the assassination precipitated a war that soon engulfed much of the world, the international anarchist movement fractured over precisely these questions. On the whole, however, anarchists worldwide and in the United States upheld their commitment to anti-militarism, class solidarity, and radical cosmopolitanism to a far greater degree than did the international socialist movement, which was shattered by the support given to national war efforts by most party majorities (the Socialist Party of America and the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party being important exceptions).[816]
L’Era Nuova’s glorification of Ferdinand’s assassination also illustrated many anarchists’ uncritical approval of all forms of violence and revolt directed against ruling regimes, regardless of the broader political context in which these occurred and the political reaction likely to follow. This led to almost universal anarchist support for the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of Russia’s Provisional Government, as well as to a startling rise in acts of anarchist violence perpetuated in the United States. Anarchists therefore aided in the establishment of a Communist dictatorship they soon condemned, and helped provoke increasing state repression against themselves and other radicals. The First World War spawned several other phenomena that also threatened the very foundations of anarchism and its cosmopolitan, anti-statist version of internationalism: the 1917 Balfour Declaration pledging British support for the Zionist cause, the wartime push for the Americanization of immigrants, and Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy in 1922. Everywhere, it seemed, nationalism was on the rise and state power was being consolidated and directed against dissidents like the anarchists. Most historians of the American Left, in fact, place the demise of the domestic anarchist movement within this period.
The anarchists did not, however, disappear, aside from a small number who were deported—and many of the latter clandestinely reentered the United States. Nor were the vast majority won over and absorbed by the new Communist movement. What did change were the movement’s composition, short-term objectives, and relationships with the labor movement and other radicals. The crises sparked by the war crystallized tensions within anarchists’ cosmopolitanism, compelling most to strongly reaffirm the movement’s anti-nationalist and antistatist dimensions. This pushed them further to the margins of the Left and, combined with state repression and demands for immigrant assimilation, undermined their influence within immigrant communities in cities like New York and Paterson.
*** 5.1 Intervention and Anti-Militarism
At the close of 1914, Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth lamented, “Anarchism, as a worldmovement, has been devitalized and confused by the war-crisis.”[817] Like the socialist Second International, anarchist ranks were divided over what stance to take toward the conflict. Four camps quickly emerged: a small but well-respected group that believed a German victory would imperil all revolutionary progress in Europe and that therefore supported the Allied war effort; a tiny but vocal group of Italian anarchists who embraced Italian nationalism and called for Italy to enter the war to reclaim its national glory on behalf of its much-maligned working class; a large number of Jewish and Russian anarchists who hoped to see a German victory over Russia that would depose the hated Tsar; and a majority who stuck to their antimilitarist principles.
The most earth-shattering development, for most anarchists, was Peter Kropotkin’s vigorous support of the Allies. The revered anarchist was enamored with the French revolutionary tradition, and believed a German victory would be an irreparable setback for European radicalism and mean “the enslavement of the entire European civilization by military ideals.”[818] He also based his argument on anti-imperialist principles, asserting that German expansionism and aggression against other nationalities could only be quashed by a complete military defeat. In October 1914, Kropotkin’s views were made public in a letter published in the London anarchist paper Freedom, in which he wrote:
I consider it the duty of everyone who cherishes the ideals of human progress…to do everything in one’s power, according to one’s capacities, to crush down the invasion of the Germans into Western Europe…The territories of both France and Belgium MUST be freed of the invaders. The German invasion must be repulsed—no matter how difficult this may be. All efforts must be directed that way.[819]
In February 1916 Kropotkin joined other pro-Ally anarchists, most of them from embattled France, in signing the “Manifesto of the Sixteen” calling on anarchists to participate in what they saw as a war of international working-class resistance against German imperialism. Kropotkin’s stand was, according to Goldman, “a staggering blow to our movement.”[820]
In Italy, meanwhile, a small scattering of anarchists, led by the individualist anarchist Massimo Rocca (“Libero Tancredi”) and the anarcho-syndicalist Maria Rygier, began promoting Italian intervention against Germany. Rocca had lived in the United States from 1908 until 1911 and published the obscure paper Novatore (Innovator) in New York in 1910–11. A proponent of an abstract individualist anarchism and irrationalism strongly influenced by Max Stirner and Frederick Nietzsche, he had long been opposed to antimilitarism because he viewed wars as an ideal time for revolutionary violence. While living in the United States, Rocca had also reacted strongly to the denigration of Italian migrants, and as early as 1910 he had imbued his anarchism with a pseudo-nationalist color by arguing that there existed an innate connection between “latinness” (latinità) and anarchism, in contrast to German authoritarianism, Slavic apathy, and Chinese immobility. He began arguing in favor of “spreading nationalism among the Italian workers, reinforcing their class consciousness with a national consciousness [in order to] sweep from history this third Italy and create a fourth proletarian Italy” from which workers would not need to emigrate. Rocca’s newfound nationalism had led him to support Italy’s invasion of Libya in 1911.[821] Rygier, by contrast, maintained that she was opposed to “reactionary patriotism and imperialism,” but agreed with Rocca that those who pushed for Italy to aid the “Latin peoples” of France and Belgium were the true internationalists, and that the neutrality of the antimilitarists was in fact a betrayal of internationalism. Antonio Agresti, who had lived in the United States in 1895–96 and briefly edited La Questione Sociale, was among their handful of supporters.[822] Fellow anarchists in Italy treated this tiny minority of interventionists “with uncommon disdain.”[823] However, a major split occurred among the more than 100,000 members of Italy’s Unione Sindacale Italiana (Italian Syndicalist Union), when a substantial minority of interventionist syndicalists left the organization after failing to sway the antiwar anarcho-syndicalist majority led by Armando Borghi, a prominent anarchist who became the union’s new secretary-general.[824]
In the United States, the “Manifesto of the Sixteen” and the interventionists found few supporters. New York’s dwindling Czech anarchist paper, Volnè Listy (Free Press), reprinted pro-Ally articles by the likes of Kropotkin and Jean Grave, for which it was condemned by the Czech Hippolyte Havel in his paper Revolt.[825] Harry Kelly argued that the citizens of any nation had a “duty to repel the invader” and repeatedly noted his personal agreement with Kropotkin’s stance, but did not press the issue and even signed an antiwar anarchist manifesto in May 1915. Kelly later noted that his stance was so unpopular among his comrades, “if the anarchist movement had been an organized one I probably would have been expelled.”[826]
More assertive in his pro-Ally stand was Land and Liberty editor William C. Owen. “To me it appears absurd to talk of internationalism at this juncture,” he wrote, “because military invasion renders the practice of internationalism at once impossible.” Owen argued that antiwar anarchists were condoning Germany’s invasion of Belgium and therefore denying international solidarity to the Belgian working class, which had a right to self-defense. He also attacked radical cosmopolitanism—or at least a simplistic caricature of it—as a dangerous abstraction:
Great as are the worker’s wrongs, it is not true that, as a class, he has neither home nor country. It is not true that he has nothing to lose but his chains. It is not true that it makes no difference to him whether he lives under Prussian military rule, as an inhabitant of an annexed and conquered country, or as a citizen of a land that has known how to defend itself.[827]
But Owen’s position isolated him from most of his comrades, some of who now regarded him as “an English spy,” and Land and Liberty folded in July 1915. Earlier that year two small dynamite bombs exploded at the building that formerly housed the defunct Bakunin Institute and Land and Liberty; it is unclear if the explosives, which did minimal damage, were placed by anti-radical vigilantes or anarchists outraged at Owen.[828] Regardless, Owen fled the country and returned to England after an indictment was handed down on February 18, 1916 against himself and Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón in connection with the paper Regeneración.[829]
Only a handful of Italian American anarchists, such as Philadelphia’s Filippo Bocchini, embraced interventionism.[830] However, interventionism gained a significant voice in the Italian American Left through Edmondo Rossoni, a leading figure in the syndicalist Federazione Socialista Italiana (FSI). After arriving in the United States in 1910, Rossoni, like Rocca, was shocked by the treatment of Italian workers and began to argue that proletarian internationalism would be possible only after Italy and Italians abroad were respected by outsiders. In August 1914 Rossoni declared his support for the Allies in the FSI’s paper, Il Proletario, and urged Italy to join in the war effort in order to regain its past grandeur. But at his public lectures Rossoni was shouted down and beaten by antiwar FSI members, and under pressure from many of the organization’s chapters he withdrew from the FSI. He then founded L’Italia Nostra, a short-lived pro-war Italian nationalist paper, before returning to Italy in 1916 to volunteer for the military.[831]
Conversely, prior to 1917, popular and radical Jewish American opinion was strongly anti-Russian, and therefore did not support the Allies.[832] Believing that a German victory would bring an end to anti-Semitic Tsarist rule, some Jewish anarchists, including Michael Cohn, publicly supported the German war effort. Another contributor to the Fraye Arbayter Shtime mused, “No matter how terrible German militarism may be, the Jews of Russia would profit politically, economically and above all spiritually” from its triumph.[833]
More enthusiastic in their support of Germany were the Indian radicals of the Ghadar movement. After fleeing the United States in 1914, Har Dayal made his way to Berlin and joined the Berlin India Committee, an organization of Ghadar members that worked with the German government to foment a revolt against British authorities in India. The Germans offered money, arms, and expertise in the hopes of loosening Britain’s hold on its colonies, though they did not expect the uprising to actually succeed.[834] Dayal called on his American radical contacts for aid; in October 1915 he wrote to Alexander Berkman asking, “Can you send some earnest and sincere comrades, men and women, to help our Indian revolutionary party at this juncture?…Perhaps you can find them in New York or at Paterson….They should be real fighters, I. W. W.’s or anarchists.” Dayal also asked for the addresses of “prominent anarchist comrades” in Europe, and indicated that he was already receiving help from members of the Dutch anarchist movement. An IWW member named Jones served as the liaison in New York between German agents and the Ghadar movement, and another IWW member was reportedly in Berlin working with the committee.[835] Dayal, however, failed to enlist the aid of American anarchists, as did the German government, which sent an agent who “tried to hire anarchists to blow up shipping and start strikes in munitions plants” as the United States began gearing up for war in 1915.[836] But hundreds of Ghadar members from the United States, and several thousand from other countries, returned to India in 1914–15 to carry out the Berlin India Committee’s plan. They succeeded in instigating scattered mutinies and uprisings, but the pan-Indian revolution they hoped for failed to materialize.[837]
The vast majority of anarchists in the United States, however, firmly opposed the war. Most anarchist papers, including Luigi Galleani’s Cronaca Sovversiva, Paterson’s L’Era Nuova, Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, Alexander Berkman’s The Blast, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, and the Spanish-language Cultura Obrera, founded by Pedro Esteve in New York in 1911, all refused to take sides in the war. An “International Anarchist Manifesto on the War” calling for neutrality was issued in 1915, and included Goldman, Berkman, Hippolyte Havel, Harry Kelly, Vladimir Shatoff, Joseph J. Cohen, and Saul Yanovsky among its signatories.[838]
Although Yanovsky maintained his policy of editorial tolerance and printed Kropotkin’s articles supporting the Allies, he and other Yiddish anarchists registered their strong disagreement in the pages of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime. Their arguments all rested on the same inescapable fact: to support the Allies was to support “Russian despotism.” For Jews who had suffered under Tsarist anti-Semitic policies and for revolutionaries whose comrades in Russia languished in Siberian exile, this was unpardonable.[839]
L’Era Nuova often explained its own antiwar stance in similar terms: “We equally hate Russian tyranny and Teutonic arrogance, Austrian oppression and English treachery, [and] the Republican ferocity of French capitalism as much as that of any constitutional or absolute monarchy.”[840] Franz Widmar and Pedro Esteve also carried on an extensive argument with Kropotkin in its pages. The Russian anarchist bolstered his anti-imperialist argument by echoing his earlier statements, made in relation to Zionism, that oppressed nationalities had a right to independence. Widmar replied that the “principle of nationality” was flawed because it falsely assumed that the borders of countries like Belgium and France coincided with actual divisions between homogeneous nationalities, while Esteve cited Cuba as a case in which independence from imperial rule had not substantially improved conditions. Like his Yiddish comrades, Esteve also countered Kropotkin’s call to aid the oppressed peasants of Belgium by noting that there were also oppressed peasants in Russia in need of emancipation.[841]
When Italy entered the conflict in May 1915 and called on its citizens abroad to return and join the Italian Army, L’Era Nuova urged, “Do not leave!” It also reprinted a circular from
the Italian anarchist group La Rivolta of Los Angeles which proclaimed,
We answer that we bastards of the patria, forced from an early age to leave our country (paese) and our dearest loved ones, our friends and relatives, to cross huge oceans, to traverse endless continents, among people who do not know and do not understand us, that we, forced to have to wander for a piece of bread under the lash of torturers insensitive to our suffering, we cannot, we will not help this stepmother of a country (patria matrigna), from which we never received a single favor.
The document concluded with the call, “Down with the fratricidal war! Down with countries (patrie)! Long live the International of the people!!”[842] Throughout the war, L’Era Nuova published a deluge of articles attacking the concepts of the patria—”a self-serving word used by political candidates and journalists”—nationality, and Italian patriotism.[843] Brooklyn’s Club Avanti, a multiethnic group of Spanish, Italian, Latin American, and Jewish radicals, contributed a statement affirming that “Countries (patrie), borders, barriers, [and] nations, are lies…The Patria of the worker is the world and all workers are his brothers.”[844]
L’Era Nuova condemned interventionists like Rocca and Rygier as traitors to anarchism who had committed moral “suicide.” It published an epigraph for Rocca that read:
@Honor and Pride of Our Patria… He Fell Heroically
Not for Human Liberty
But for Race Hatred
In Defense of the Caesarian Masters of the Third Italy.[845]
The mention of “Race Hatred” was a reference to interventionists’ argument that the European conflict was a “race war” between Latin and Teutonic peoples. This prompted renewed attacks on racism in L’Era Nuova. The paper patiently critiqued racialized theories of the war, noting that one could not argue for any “racial affinity” between the French and their Russian and Japanese allies, and that the war also pitted Russian Slavs and Poles against Austrian Slavs and Poles, while the Germanic populations of countries like Switzerland remained neutral, refuting any notions of racial solidarity. “[N]either race, nor nationality is at stake in this War,” it maintained, “but [only] capitalist and class interests, commercial and industrial rivalries.”[846]
When a regiment of Indian soldiers mutinied in Singapore, the paper condemned England’s “prejudice of racial superiority” and praised the “so-called inferior races” for “having given this time to the whites, civil and superior, an example of dignity and admirable consistency.”[847] Another writer went further, attacking not just racial hierarchies but the idea of race itself. “We know,” she wrote, “that pure races don’t in fact exist and that every State is a heterogeneous mixture of various ethnic elements.” The notion of biologically separate races based on blood relation (identità del sangue) was an “arbitrary conception of race” rather than a scientific one, and the only meaningful distinction between peoples was between “the two races, of the bosses and the proletarians.”[848]
Despite the pro-war views of William C. Owen and the Ghadar movement, anarchists in the Bay Area displayed a militant antimilitarist spirit. One went so far as to suggest that “Kropotkin should have died before this war. Then he would have been held in grateful remembrance by future working classes.”[849] In September 1914 a coalition of the city’s various anarchist organizations printed and distributed 2,000 copies of The Social Revolution, a “large and well-illustrated four-page paper” published in English, Italian, French, and German under the motto, “If we must fight, let us fight for the Social Revolution.” This group also held mass meetings and Sunday evening conferences at its headquarters at 1344 Powell Street.[850] In August 1915, Italian anarchists in San Francisco printed 100,000 copies of a poster reproducing an antiwar appeal from Cronaca Sovversiva titled “Figli non tornate” (Children Do Not Return), which urged migrants not to take up arms for the Italian state.[851] The predominantly anarchist members of the Latin Branch of IWW Local 173, meanwhile, redirected funds they had raised for Rossoni’s Il Proletario to L’Era Nuova, due to the former’s pro-war stance.[852]
For the vast majority of anarchists in the United States, interventionist claims that the British, French and Russian empires were combating imperialism rang hollow. Nor did most follow Kropotkin and others in believing that independent nation-states for oppressed nationalities represented progress toward a stateless world; Hippolyte Havel condemned the “plea for small nationalities” as “a new pernicious theory smuggled lately into the anarchist movement.” An Italian anarchist from Brooklyn voiced the opinion of the larger movement when he declared, “All of you, so-called radicals, who advance illogical and meaningless ruminations (Teutonic danger, Latin race, French liberty) in support of your warmongering theses, you are responsible for a great and dark crime.”[853] But as American intervention in the war came to appear inevitable, authorities could not tolerate such unpatriotic sentiments, and preemptively launched a national movement for war “Preparedness.”
*** 5.2 “Preparedness” and “Slackers”
On July 22, 1916, a “Preparedness Day Parade” was winding its way through San Francisco’s streets when a bomb exploded on a crowded sidewalk along the parade route, killing ten people and injuring forty. Suspicion immediately fell on the city’s anarchists, socialists and labor activists, and police quickly arrested local leftwing labor leaders Tom and Rena Mooney, Warren Billings, Israel Weinberg, and Edward Nolan. Tom Mooney, as mentioned in Chapter 4, was associated with Berkman’s The Blast, as was Billings, who had arrived in San Francisco in 1913 and immediately become involved in the shoemakers’ strike co-organized by the IWW. Weinberg was a naturalized Russian Jewish jitney bus driver, an anarchist, and an officer in the jitney bus drivers’ union, and Nolan was a minor official in the Machinists’ Union. An Italian anarchist named Fedone or Fedoni was also arrested, but soon released, and the Jewish anarchist Alexander Horr, learning that police were looking for him, preemptively announced that he would press charges in response to any unlawful arrest.[854] Although Horr avoided harassment, city authorities began an all-out campaign against local anarchists, portending a national trend.
The offices of The Blast were repeatedly raided in connection with the bombing, and on August 2, four Italian and French immigrants were arrested for distributing a leaflet, signed by the Blast Group, the Volontà Group, the Union of Russian Workers, and the Frayhayt Group, protesting the persecution of local anarchists. The men were first threatened with deportation, but then sentenced to ninety days imprisonment for violating a city ordinance against distributing handbills on public streets.[855] On August 10, anarchist Massimo Civello was arrested for displaying an image of a priest suggestively embracing a nun, and on September 29, nine Italian anarchists, including Luigi Parenti, Michele Centrone and Louis Tori, were arrested “one after another” when they attempted to speak in public about the guilty verdict handed down in the case of Warren Billings, and sentenced to prison terms ranging from ten days to three months for “disturbing the peace.”[856] Alexander Berkman, knowing that an indictment against him in the bombing case was imminent, departed for New York and successfully fought off extradition back to California. The Blast was left under the care of Berkman’s companion, M. E. Fitzgerald, who then followed Berkman and moved the publication to New York.[857]
Tom Mooney and Warren Billings were meanwhile found guilty and sentenced to death, but Rena Mooney and Israel Weinberg were acquitted and Ed Nolan was never brought to trial. In 1918 the sentences of Mooney and Billings were commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1939 they were pardoned on the basis of evidence that false testimony was used against them during their trials. Some eyewitness statements suggest that the actual bombers may in fact have been either Mexican or Italian. Several witnesses described one or two “dark” or “swarthy” men as placing the suitcase bomb, and Pauline Turkel, who for many years worked as Emma Goldman’s secretary, claimed that she was “told by a very reliable source that the 1916 bombing in San Francisco was done by Mexican revolutionaries.” This source was almost certainly either Goldman or Berkman.[858] Moreover, Partido Liberal Mexicano leaders Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón had been arrested in California several months earlier and were sentenced to prison on May 21, just two months before the bombing.[859]
However, in early 1919 Luigi Galleani, while being questioned by an immigration inspector, claimed to know for a fact that the bomb had been planted by an Italian anarchist who had conferred with him about the act beforehand. The inspector pressed for more information but Galleani insisted “the secret was not his to give,” stating only that the bomber, “if he had any honor,” would come forward if Mooney was to face the death penalty.[860] On May 6, 1920 several government officials held a conference to discuss the implications of this information and mentioned four possible suspects, including IWW Latin Branch member Louis Tori, but the investigation did not proceed.[861]
Regardless, anti-radicalism became a national obsession after the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917. Twelve days after the declaration of war against Germany, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, requiring all males between the ages of 21 and 30 (amended in 1918 to ages 18 to 45) to register for military conscription. Unnaturalized aliens, who were not eligible for military service, were nevertheless still required to register and faced the possibility of a year in prison if they failed to do so. And on June 15, 1917 the Espionage Act passed, making it a federal crime “to cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States,” punishable by up to twenty years in prison and a $10,000 fine. In a span of less than three months, anarchists’ refusal to support the Allied war effort was transformed from an abstract matter of principle into a dangerous liability.
Even William C. Owen’s pro-Ally Land and Liberty hadn’t had the stomach for conscription, declaring in February 1915 that to introduce the military draft “will carry us back directly to chattel slavery,” and in June of the following year a writer for L’Era Nuova similarly called conscription “the modern slavery.”[862] Members of the IWW’s Latin Branch in San Francisco placed an anti-conscription placard in the window of their headquarters at 403 Broadway Street reading, “In 1861 [sic] Uncle Sam freed the blacks; in 1917 Uncle Sam enslaved the whites”—a doubly unfortunate message that not only misstated the date of the abolition of slavery, but obscured the fact that African Americans were also eligible for conscription. Nevertheless, police responded by raiding the office and arresting the four members who were present, including Luigi Parenti. All were tried on spurious charges of vagrancy and sentenced to thirty days in jail.[863] Alexander Horr was also arrested and sentenced to sixty days for delivering an anti-war speech on a public sidewalk.[864]
The week after passage of the Selective Service Act, Luigi Galleani called on his readers to refuse to register, even if they were not eligible for service, as both a matter principle and because the law excluding unnaturalized aliens might change.[865] In New York, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman worked with both American-born and Russian Jewish anarchists to form the No-Conscription League. Its first mass-meeting, held at the Harlem River Casino on the day the Act passed, attracted an audience of 8,000, and another meeting on June 4 brought out 15,000.[866] Less than a month later, the day after the Espionage Act went into effect, Goldman and Berkman were arrested under the new legislation and convicted. The young Jewish anarchists Morris Becker and Louis Kramer were also arrested for failing to register for the draft; Kramer declared that he refused to do so because he “was a ‘citizen of the world’ and against the war.”[867] Dr. Benzion Liber, a prominent Lower East Side doctor and anarchist who published a small alternative medical journal, called on his fellow physicians to refuse to serve in the military.[868] Anarchists in Paterson also agitated against the war and the draft. The day after Congress declared war, the offices of L’Era Nuova were raided and Franz Widmar and typographer Giuseppe Marchese were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for printing a leaflet that had been left in the doorways of residences around the city, calling “upon the workingmen to refuse to become ‘murderers for Wall Street,’ and to resist the attempts of their ‘master’ to induce them to engage in murder.”[869] After conscription was introduced, members of the L’Era Nuova Group produced and distributed posters urging men not to register, and Italian families in the city with members eligible for the draft received unsolicited copies of L’Era Nuova in their mailboxes. On June 1, 1917 the anarchists Gaetano Troiani and Giuseppe Martorelli were arrested while distributing English-language manifestos opposing the war effort, and four days later Marchese was again arrested but released.[870] The following September Firmino and Ninfa Gallo were held for questioning and two months later Firmino was tried for violating the Espionage Act, but the result was a hung jury.[871] Alberto Guabello, Serafino Grandi, and Pietro Baldesserotto were also arrested on September 28, 1918 and held for deportation, but their warrants were cancelled on August 5, 1919.[872]
Some Jewish anarchists, however, were forced to reevaluate their stance on the war after the Tsar was overthrown in March 1917. With the despotic Russian monarchy no longer represented among the Allies, the central pillar of Saul Yanovsky’s opposition to Kropotkin’s position collapsed. In the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, Yanovsky now began to argue that a victory for the Western democracies was to be preferred over a German victory. Even more shocking to most of his anarchist comrades, Yanovsky also praised Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points as the most pragmatic way to ensure a lasting postwar peace in Europe.[873] An undercover Bureau of Investigation Agent who shadowed Yanovsky during a visit to Pittsburgh in April 1918 reported that the anarchist’s speeches were “decidedly pro-war, and he urged all young men to join the army and fight the Germans.” Although Yanovsky “was heckled by the audience…he succeeded in holding his own on the pro-war question.”[874] (Nevertheless, over the following months scattered issues of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime were still deemed unmailable under the Espionage Act.[875]) Yanovsky’s reversal on the war, though frowned upon by most fellow anarchists, was representative of a general shift in the attitude of American Jews. In November 1917, Jewish sympathy for the Allied cause was further cemented by the Balfour Declaration, in which the British government expressed its intention to help found “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine—a cause that Yanovsky continued to vigorously oppose.[876]
For a few Jewish anarchists, including Marie Ganz, the changing circumstances of the war and America’s entrance into it were enough to sweep away their radical politics. “I thrilled to the martial spirit around me,” Ganz wrote in her apologetic 1919 memoir. “And of a sudden the spirit of national pride awoke in me. The flag bore a new meaning. Oh, America, mighty and just, rallying to save the world! I was proud that I, I too, was an American.”[877] Such retreats from anarchist antimilitarism and radical cosmopolitanism, coupled with the mirage of an imminent wave of global revolution following the Russian model, engendered a new wave of oppositional Yiddish anarchist groups that militantly protested the war. One of these coalesced around the paper Der Shturem (The Storm), which was forthright in its advocacy of violent revolution, declaring, “Force has enslaved the world, force will liberate the world,” and invoking Bakunin’s famous phrase, “The spirit of destruction is the spirit of construction.” The paper also lamented, “Our self-conscious Jewish workmen have not only lost their heads in the war rumble, why they simply are out of their minds,” and condemned the “hypocritical leaders of the Jewish workers” for promoting the purchase of Liberty Bonds. In January 1918, after in internal split, Der Shturem was replaced by the equally militant paper Frayhayt.[878]
Some members of this group possessed false registration cards that allowed them to circumvent the draft.[879] Many other anarchists who refused to register, however, crossed the border into revolutionary Mexico along with thousands of other so-called “slackers.”[880] Abe Winokour, a Jewish anarchist and paperhanger from Philadelphia, was among them, as was the twenty-four-year-old Jewish anarchist writer Itzok Isaac Granich, who in Mexico embraced communism and adopted the pseudonym “Mike Gold.”[881] More plentiful were Italian anarchists, especially the followers of Luigi Galleani; several dozen galleanisti, including Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, temporarily settled in Monterrey (Vanzetti, for one, had taken out his first paper for naturalization and was therefore eligible for military service). Many of them were not only avoiding registration, but also anticipated the outbreak of revolution in their native Italy and feared that the United States government would make their return there difficult.[882] From Paterson, Spartaco Guabello and William Gallo—both American-born and therefore eligible for the draft—also fled to Mexico via Los Angeles, but when they swam back across the Rio Grande after the war they were arrested by Texas Rangers and served five months in prison in Del Rio. Il Bollettino de L’Era Nuova, which had replaced L’Era Nuova, congratulated Gallo and Guabello’s parents for the young men’s stand.[883]
Other anarchist men registered for the draft but were among the more than 337,000 Americans who failed to report for duty when called.[884] IWW Latin Branch member and agricultural laborer Louis Tori, though an unnaturalized alien, had registered in accordance with the law but was nevertheless called to report for service on the dubious grounds that he “had made no claim for exemption” at the time of his registration. He was about to leave for Tijuana with a false passport when he was caught by authorities. Additionally, according to an undercover federal agent, Tori had tried “to make arrangements to purchase quite a supply of chemicals for the manufacture of incendiary bombs” before his departure.[885] This led to his inclusion in the government’s list of possible suspects responsible for the Preparedness Day bomb, and also may link him to the galleanisti in Monterrey, who spent part of their time there experimenting with explosives.[886] Philip Grosser, a Jewish anarchist born in Boston in 1890, was conscripted in August 1917 and refused to serve. Contrary to established procedure, Grosser was court-martialed in a military court on the premise that he had become a member of the military the moment he was drafted, and sentenced to thirty years hard labor. He was released at the end of 1920 only after a public campaign had been waged on his behalf.[887]
For anarchists like these, being a soldier on behalf of a government was unthinkable. The No-Conscription League printed a reported 100,000 copies of its declaration of principles that stated, “We oppose conscription because we are internationalists, anti-militarists, and opposed to all wars waged by capitalistic Governments. We will fight for what we choose to fight for; we will never fight simply because we are ordered to fight.”[888] Alberico Pirani, an Italian anarchist living in Chicago, fled to Mexico and then Venezuela during the war to avoid registration, returning in 1919. Interviewed by a New York Times reporter in 1977, Pirani tied his past antimilitarism directly to radical cosmopolitanism: “I’m international. I ain’t got no country. When you mention country and religion, wash your mouth. That’s the way you kill millions of people, for God and country and flag.”[889]
Such attitudes were completely at odds with wartime demands for “100% Americanism” and the assimilation and incorporation of America’s immigrants. Military service in a time of war was regarded by advocates of Americanization as a fundamental duty of all citizens, and by many immigrants as an opportunity to prove themselves the equals of native-born Americans and therefore worthy of social and political inclusion.[890] But immigrant anarchists did not seek this kind of inclusion. When Franz Widmar was arrested in April 1917, he unhesitatingly declared that “he was not an American citizen and had no intention of becoming one.”[891] For those demanding total loyalty from immigrants, such a statement was tantamount to treason. Fear of foreign radicalism was then amplified a hundred fold in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.
*** 5.3 Russian Dawn
The Russian Revolution fundamentally altered the course of modern history, and irreparably changed the course of anarchism in the United States. Radicals of all stripes had been overjoyed by news of the February Revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar, but most anarchists were skeptical of the new Provisional Government. Alexander Berkman wrote that it “feels like any other government. It wants to strengthen its position and to perpetuate itself in power…But they will have to reckon with the Russian people.” L’Era Nuova similarly worried that Russia was experiencing a “political” revolution that only brought forth a new government to carry on the war in place of the old.[892] But the Provisional Government precipitated its own demise by issuing a blanket amnesty for all political prisoners and exiles and helping to fund their repatriation.
Thousands of Russian-born revolutionaries returned from America in 1917 and 1918, including Leon Trotsky, who would orchestrate the Bolshevik seizure of power and the dissolution of the Provisional Government. These repatriations were handled by regional committees consisting of representatives from the Russian Federation of the Socialist Party, the Union of Russian Workers (UORW), and other socialist and anarchist groups, that took over Russian consular offices. In New York and Pittsburgh, these committees were firmly under anarchist control.[893] At least 8,421 Russians and “Hebrews,” including an estimated 600 anarchists, left the United States in 1917, and more than 12,000 Russian-born migrants followed them over the next three years. By one estimate the UORW, which peaked at over 10,000 members in 1918, “lost half its membership” to return migration in this period.[894] This included the entire editorial staff of the UORW’s paper Golos Truda, with their printing press in tow. The members of Brownsville’s Yiddish Grupe Broyt un Frayhayt (Bread and Freedom Group) also departed en masse with their own press.[895] Many of these returned Russian American anarchists would have a profound impact on both the revolution and, later, American anarchists’ critiques of it.
UORW organizers founded the Union of Anarcho-syndicalist Propaganda in July 1917 after their arrival in Petrograd, and reestablished Golos Truda, which called for a renewed revolution that would “be anti-statist in its methods of struggle, Syndicalist in its economic content and federalist in its political tasks.” Golos Truda’s circulation quickly reached twentyfive thousand and, according to Victor Serge, “at various moments ... rivaled Lenin’s Pravda in influence.”[896] Its program found strong support among several unions and within the factory committee movement that sought workers’ control over production. Former Anarchist Red Cross member Boris Yelensky helped organize the workers of the Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk. In the Donets Basin, returnees organized a reported twenty-five to thirty thousand miners under the program of the IWW, and in July 1917 the IWW’s General Executive Board (GEB) approved a request that the Cyrillic type from the union’s defunct Russian-language newspaper be sent to repatriates in Vladivostok “to be used in starting a Russian I.W.W. paper there.”[897]
Anarchists meanwhile swelled the ranks of the revolutionary Red Guards and workers’ militias, and occupied “key military positions” in the Red Army well into 1918.[898] During the civil war that followed the revolution, anarchists also led partisan forces in Ukraine and Tambov. The peasant army of Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno was the largest and best-known, but there were others, including a band in the Donets Basin led by the Jewish anarchist Maxim Cherniak, who before the revolution had lived for eleven years in Chicago and Brooklyn working as a barber but in Russia remade himself into a military commander against the White Army.[899]
John W. Copp’s study of the biographies of nearly 600 Russian anarchists active during the revolution reveals that one in ten were émigrés who had returned from extended time abroad, almost always in the United States or Western Europe.[900] Morris Nadelman, a Ukrainian Jew from Kamenetz, recalled,
when the Revolution broke out, all the immigrants in Germany and the United States came back to Russia as revolutionists. Through them, I learned, more or less, the philosophy of different groups, parties, and the principles which I [now] possess already… I was more inclined, to follow or believe in those anarchistic theories.[901]
Numerous American visitors recalled encountering Russian anarchists and syndicalists they had known in the United States; Robert Minor wrote: “I ran across these American-Russians everywhere, and every one of them who has been here [in America] got his political education here.”[902] The Russian anarchist movement, largely under the guidance of returned migrants from America, mushroomed from a mere 200 members at the beginning of 1917 to an estimated 10,000, active in 130 towns and cities, the following year.[903]
However, the same conditions that contributed to anarchism’s phenomenal growth—the failure of the Provisional Government to stabilize the economy or pull out of the war—fostered far greater support for the Bolsheviks. For decades, anarchists had argued that any socialist revolution aimed at the capture of state power was bound to end in tyranny. Yet in 1917 they proved to be among the Bolsheviks’ closest allies, swept up in the enthusiasm of the moment and delighted by the libertarian turn in the declarations of Lenin, who called for “workers’ control” and “the ‘smashing’ of the present-day state machine.”[904] Many anarchists in New York City had met Leon Trotsky during his two-month stay there, during which he lectured before Jewish anarchist groups and attended painting classes at the Ferrer Center, and Emma Goldman reported that the anarchists returning from America “left this country with the determination to help the Bolsheviki.”[905] At least four anarchists belonged to the Petrograd Soviet’s Military-Revolutionary Committee, which under Trotsky’ leadership engineered the October Revolution, including three returned from America: UORW activists Vladimir (“Bill”) Shatoff and Khaim (“Efim”) Yartchuk, and I. S. Bleikhman, a Jew who had become an anarchist during his stay in the United States from 1904 to around 1913. (Trotsky distinctly recalled Bleikhman’s “Jewish-American accent sharp as vinegar.”)[906] In a bizarre turn of events, anarchists hoping to hasten the destruction of the state eagerly helped establish a Marxist dictatorship.
In August 1919 Lenin noted, “Very many Anarchist workers are now becoming sincere supporters of Soviet power,” and according to Soviet historian S. N. Kanev, in 1922 no less than 633 anarchists were incorporated into the Bolshevik Party.[907] Some abandoned their anarchism entirely in favor of communism, while others endorsed the dictatorship of the proletariat, or an ostensibly syndicalist “dictatorship of labor,” as a necessary transitional step on the road to anarchism.[908] Others were wary of Bolshevik authoritarianism but felt that cooperation was necessary until the counterrevolutionary forces arrayed against the revolution were defeated.[909] Many such “Soviet anarchists” collaborated with the new regime, occupied government posts, and took out membership in the Communist party, including UORW organizers Daniil Novomirskii, Bill Shatoff, and Buford deportee Nikofor (“Hyman”) Perkus.[910]
Novomirskii was made an official of the newly formed Communist International (Comintern), but in 1921 he turned in his party card out of disgust with Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the suppression of anarchist critics of the regime. He was briefly imprisoned and emerged “a frightened and broken man.” He worked editing Soviet publications and pursued scientific research, explaining to a friend around 1923, “I’m no longer young and I have my wife to think of…Under the Czar we believed that the Revolution would bring universal freedom. The Revolution came. What are we to cling to now that the princess of our dreams has turned into an ogress?”[911] Shatoff served a number of roles, including Chief of Police of Petrograd and overseer of the construction of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway, remaining both a faithful party member and an ideological anarchist until he was purged under Stalin in the mid-1930s.[912]
Former Golos Truda editor and occasional Fraye Arbayter Shtime contributor Maksim Raevsky (L. Fishelev) returned to Russia on the same boat as Trotsky, and through the Bolshevik leader he acquired a clerical “non-political” position in the new government after dropping out of the anarchist movement. But in the mid-1920s a certain Fishelev, described by Victor Serge as “an old companion of Trotsky in Canada” (where Trotsky and his fellow passengers, including Raevsky, had been detained on their way to Russia), was sent to a prison camp for printing a Trotskyist platform.[913]
As these examples suggest, Jews predominated in ranks of the returned Russian anarchists. The proportion of Jews within the anarchist movement in Russia during the revolution also stood at over 25%—more than five times their representation in the Bolshevik Party (renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in 1922.[914] When the new government established a Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs (Yevkom) in January 1918, therefore, it was forced to draw on Yiddish-speaking anarchists. Of the five initial members of the Yevkom only one was an old-time Bolshevik, while three were returned anarchist émigrés. These were Samuel Agursky, an undistinguished Jewish anarchist from Chicago who converted to Leninism, and Alexander Schapiro and A. Kantor, both veterans of London’s Jewish anarchist movement and occasional contributors to the Fraye Arbayter Shtime.[915]
The anarchist background of the Yevkom’s members was evident in their actions. They named their first Yiddish newspaper, edited by Schapiro and Kantor, Di Varhayt—a title not used by a radical Jewish paper since the Pioneers of Freedom’s first publication—and in November 1918 Agursky became editor of another paper titled Der Frayer Arbeter. Agursky was also a frequent visitor to the home of Peter Kropotkin and an energetic proponent of the Lower East Side’s anarchist “sweatshop poets” David Edelstadt and Joseph Bovshover.[916]
The Jewish “Soviet anarchists” (though Agursky would perhaps be better described as an “anarcho-Bolshevik”) were also more militant in their anti-Jewish nationalism and anti-Zionism than the Communist party’s leadership. According to Guido Goldman, “It is evident that during these first years all anti-Zionist harassment emanated from the Jewish Communists [i.e. the Yevkom], who expressed considerable consternation over the government’s indifference to its activities.” In April 1919, the Yevkom issued a decree ordering the abolition of all specifically Jewish communal organizations in the Soviet Union, and their replacement with non-ethnically exclusive “proletarian” ones. The decree was signed by Samuel Agursky and the Commissar of Nationalities, Joseph Stalin. In 1920, after much prodding, the Soviet regime followed the advice of the Yevkom and turned its attention to the suppression of Zionism. Agursky, himself a former member of the General Jewish Labor Bund, also helped lead the regime’s campaign to suppress that organization.[917]
The root of these policies lay in the anarchists’ militant anti-nationalism, which belittled, as Kantor had earlier in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, the notion of “Jewish ‘patriotism’.”[918] But radical cosmopolitanism here gave way to a destructive proletarian universalism that demanded uniformity rather than diversity and, contrary to basic anarchist principles, called on the power of the newly established Soviet state to compel Jewish obedience. Schapiro, for one, seems to have regretted his role in this, and moved on to a post in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs before turning firmly against the Soviet regime in 1921. The government, meanwhile, came to view the Yevkom itself as too nationalist, and dissolved it in April 1924.[919]
As the Bolsheviks consolidated their power, their once sunny relationship with the anarchists quickly darkened. The dismayed anarchist minority watched powerlessly as the soviets, trade unions, and factory committees in which they had placed so much hope were transformed into appendages of centralized Soviet power and workers’ control gave way to “oneman management” and militaristic “iron discipline” in the workplace.[920] In April 1918, the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage) raided increasingly restive anarchist groups in Moscow and Petrograd and encountered resistance, resulting in more than fifty deaths and five hundred arrests. In the aftermath of these raids numerous anarchists fled to the Volga or Ukraine, where Bolshevik authority had yet to solidify, and many placed their hopes in Nestor Makhno’s peasant army, which briefly established an autonomous region of several hundred square miles in which “free soviets” were formed.
The Makhnovists’ Cultural and Educational Section, which articulated the movement’s ideology, was soon filled with returnees from America, including the Jewish anarchists Volin, Aron Baron, Elena Keller, and Joseph and Leah Goodman (Gutman).[921] Their participation is an important counterpoint to the charge, originating with the Soviet government and repeated by many historians, that Makhno was an anti-Semite and pogromist. Although it is certain that some members of the Makhnovist movement did engage in pogroms, Makhno himself, according to Paul Avrich, “did all in his power to counteract anti-Semitic tendencies among his followers,” and usually had those responsible for violence against Jews executed. Elias Tcherikower’s study of Ukrainian pogroms similarly found no evidence implicating Makhno and noted the presence of many Jews the Makhnovist ranks, although Tchrikower did note in a 1935 letter that “the average Jew in the Ukraine considered red Makhno a pogromshchik; and the fear of Makhno among the Jews was very great.”[922] However, the Russian Jewish anarchist Mark Mratchny, who was sent to Gulyai-Polye to edit the Makhnovist paper Put’k Svodobe (The Road to Freedom), recalled asking his Jewish host, “’What is Makhno? An anti-Semite or what?’ He answered, ‘Our only prayer is that the bat’ko [i.e. Makhno] should stay with us.’ They had only praise for him. He was in no way at all a pogromshchik.”[923] In 1924 Saul Yanovsky accused Makhno of committing pogroms in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, but on the occasion of Makhno’s death seven years later he publicly recanted, writing, “I cannot forgive myself that I could so misjudge a man merely on the basis of calumny by his bitter enemies.”[924]
Regardless, Makhno’s army was hardly a safe haven for anarchists. It was engaged in a protracted struggle against the White Army, Ukrainian nationalists, and intermittently against the Bolsheviks, and in November 1920 the Red Army betrayed a treaty with the Makhnovists and routed their forces, marking the end of major anarchist activity in the Soviet Union.[925] Whatever possibility may have existed that the revolution would take an anarchist turn was gone, though it took the March 1921 suppression of the Kronstadt “free soviet,” which called for the restoration of civil liberties and democratic soviets in the place of one-party rule, to finally convince some Russian anarchists of this fact.[926] Their comrades in the United States, meanwhile, were facing the possibility of their own movement’s destruction at the hands of the American government.
*** 5.4 Dynamite and Deportation
During and immediately following the First World War, many radicals and anti-radicals alike believed that revolution was a real possibility in America. An unprecedented upsurge in anarchist violence was both a cause and a result of these sentiments; between July 1914 and September 1920 anarchists claimed the lives of between forty-four and fifty-four more or less random victims, in addition to those of eight anarchists killed when their own explosives detonated prematurely.[927] These acts, combined with skyrocketing inflation, a strike wave involving more than four million workers over the course of 1919, and revolution spilling westward from the Soviet Union into Germany and Hungary, prompted the massive government backlash known as the “First Red Scare.”[928] Although socialists and members of the newly formed Communist parties were also targeted, anarchists and syndicalists were the authorities’ first targets and victims.
For more than a quarter-century, Congress and the courts had simply tried to legislate anarchism out of existence. In 1891 the New York Court of Appeals ruled that to publicly identify oneself as an anarchist constituted a misdemeanor breach of the peace, and the following year the Illinois Supreme Court decided that to falsely brand someone an “anarchist” was libel, as it ascribed to them “vicious, degrading, or absurd principles…in a community where anarchy is clearly seen to be no political creed or body of principles, but the enemy of all government and the natural foe of each good citizen.” In his first address to Congress following the assassination of McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt thundered that “Anarchy is a crime against the whole human race; and all mankind should band against the anarchist,” and demanded the legal exclusion of anarchist immigrants from the United States.[929] In 1903 the Anarchist Exclusion Act passed, barring alien anarchists from entering the country or becoming naturalized citizens, and after 1906 immigrants seeking naturalization had to declare that they were not anarchists. Mother Earth replied, “Citizenship has no meaning to [anarchists], since their ideal of human liberty and righteousness goes beyond the narrow bounds of nationality; it is the international republic of free spirits….Since the State denies us the rights of citizenship, it must, to be consistent, exempt us from the duties of citizenship, from the exercise of coercion and invasion.”[930]
The restrictions of 1903 and 1906, moreover, were easy to evade and difficult to enforce. Between 1903 and 1921 the United States excluded only thirty-eight anarchists under this legislation, and between 1911 and 1919 it deported just fourteen.[931] But revisions to the statutes in 1917 and 1918 greatly expanded the government’s power by allowing for naturalized foreignborn anarchists to be stripped of their citizenship if they came to hold anarchist doctrines, and by removing the 1903 act’s limitation of deportation to the first three years of an alien anarchist’s residence. Henceforth, deportation was legally mandated for any foreign-born anarchist, regardless of citizenship status or length of residence.[932]
As Mai Ngai illustrates in her study of American immigration law, all forms of exclusion produce “a new legal and political subject”—in this case, the illegal anarchist alien—”whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship and without rights.”[933] Conscious of this fact, writers for the Italian-language anarchist press sometimes signed their articles with names like “Il residente illegalmente” (The Illegal Resident), “The Undesirable,” and “The Outlaws of Every Country.”[934] Additionally, authorities still had recourse to the Espionage Act, and the 1918 Sedition Act greatly expanded their ability to police radical speech, making it a crime to
utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States, or any language intended to…encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of its enemies.[935]
With these expanded anti-anarchist and anti-radical laws in hand, the Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Immigration planned a series of mass arrests of America’s alien radicals with the intention of deporting them en masse.
Because of both its size—estimated at around 100,000 members—and its leadership of a number of strikes in industries deemed integral to the war effort, the IWW was the first target. On September 5, 1917, indictments for violating the Espionage Act were handed down for 166 prominent IWW members, including Luigi Parenti of San Francisco’s Latin Branch. Except for four members who demanded separate trials, including Carlo Tresca and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, all were found guilty at their federal trial in Chicago. Parenti was sentenced to five years and a $30,000 fine, and throughout his initial detention from September 1917 to June 1919 he was refused permission to communicate with his wife and three daughters, one of them born while he was incarcerated. Parenti was finally reunited with his family only after he was released on bail while the case was appealed.[936]
In 1919–1920 Parenti worked as an organizer for an independent Italian fisherman’s union in San Francisco, then got a job as a correspondent for La Voce del Popolo. Some of his anarchist comrades criticized him for working for a liberal newspaper, but he assured Aldino Felicani that he remained “the Parenti that I was, I am, and I will be in the fore with respect to my ideas.”[937] In May 1921 the IWW’s appeal was rejected and Parenti again entered prison, but arranged to have his sentence commuted on the condition that he be deported and pay for the repatriation of his family, as well. They arrived in Italy in August 1922.[938]
The federal IWW trial was only the beginning of the campaign against the organization in California, which, in the opinion of one historian “assumed a savagery never seen before or after in America, in any antiradical effort.”[939] On August 11, 1917, a crowd of 600 soldiers stationed in Oakland marched to the IWW headquarters in that city and demolished it, and on January 19 of the following year the homes of suspected IWW members in Berkeley and Palo Alto were raided and searched.[940] Latin Branch organizer Basil Saffores was arrested in connection with the deaths of a few hundred sheep in South San Francisco, only to be released once it was discovered that spoiled beans fed to the animals by their owner had been the cause.[941] Saffores was again arrested, along with Michele Centrone and Italian anarchists and IWW members John Jorio and Massimo Civello, after a bomb exploded outside the Sacramento home of Governor Stephens in January 1918. All charges were dropped when no evidence linking the men to the bombing was found.[942]
Almost immediately afterwards fifty-three California IWW members were indicted under the Espionage and Selective Service Acts, and forty-six faced trial in Sacramento (five prisoners died in jail and two turned state’s evidence). Their defense committee, based in San Francisco, was raided by authorities seven times over a six-month period. Forty-three of the IWW members, including Louis Tori, were convinced that they would not receive a fair trial and engaged in a “silent defense,” refusing to obtain council or speak during the proceedings. All were found guilty and received sentences ranging from one to ten years.[943] However, Basil Saffores, Albert Fox, and radical social worker Theadora Pollok, the only female defendant, undertook an active defense and received lighter sentences; Fox and Saffores served two months and Pollock was fined $100. This created bitter feelings in the organization and in 1919 the three were expelled from the IWW. Saffores petitioned to be readmitted, but was denied.[944]
On May 15, 1918 Michele Centrone was once again arrested, this time under the newly revised anti-anarchist immigration statute, and held for deportation. Centrone posted a $2,000 bail, but in November 1919 he surrendered himself to immigration authorities at Angel Island because the mounting interest payments on his bond were too high for him to pay. At wit’s end, he wrote to the Secretary of Labor, the Commissioner of Immigration, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer asking for them to proceed with his deportation. In February 1920 he finally appealed to the anti-immigrant and anti-radical congressman Albert Johnson, writing, “As you are one of the Congressman [sic] who wish to rid this Country of the Reds, I take the liberty to turn my plea to you with the request that you bring my case to a conclusion.” With Johnson’s intervention, Centrone’s deportation finally proceeded.[945] After Mussolini came to power, however, Centrone emigrated to Mexico under the name of “Francesco Paglia” and from there made his way to New Orleans, where he was arrested and was once again deported to Italy.[946]
In the meantime, California passed a criminal syndicalist law aimed specifically against the IWW and raids on IWW offices and homes throughout San Francisco and Oakland followed in May and June 1919.[947] In 1921 San Francisco’s Chief of Police simply ordered his officers to stop all IWW meetings and arrest any IWW members, and the San Francisco local began holding its meetings on the lower deck of ferry boats crossing the bay to avoid police raids.[948] In June 1919 Giuseppe Scali and another Bay Area Italian anarchist named Di Ciuccio were deported, and in the face mounting repression most members of the San Francisco chapter of the Union of Russian Workers dropped out.[949]
Simultaneous with the Sacramento IWW trial, San Francisco hosted the sensationalized “Hindu Conspiracy” trials. As part of the German government’s alliance with the Ghadar movement, a German agent had purchased 275 tons of munitions in the United States to aid antiBritish colonial subjects and tried to ship them out of Washington, but the weapons were confiscated by the State Department and eventually led to the discovery, with the aid of British intelligence, of the Indian-German plot. After a series of well-publicized trials, twenty-nine Indian and German defendants were convicted of conspiring to violate American neutrality laws.[950] The prosecutions and accompanying revelations about Ghadar leaders misappropriating German funds for personal use severely damaged the movement, and by 1919 Har Dayal had turned against the Germans, disavowed anarchism and violent revolution, and made peace with the British Empire.[951] In the aftermath of the trials a California Bureau of Investigation agent arranged a meeting between a British Secret Service agent and Ed Gammons, the former contributor to The Blast, who had recently fallen out of favor with Ghadar leaders and, disillusioned, agreed to become a paid informant for the British government.[952]
On the other side of the country, Luigi Galleani’s Cronaca Sovversiva was denied use of the mails in June 1917 and ceased publication in 1918, only to be followed by a succession of related papers under different titles. But in June 1919 Galleani and eight of his comrades were deported.[953] Carlo Tresca’s anarcho-syndicalist paper L’Avvenire was also closed down by authorities in 1917, but in April of the following year Tresca took over another radical publication, Il Martello (The Hammer), founded in New York in 1916, and turned it into one of the most influential Italian-language radical papers in the country.[954] In June 1917 postal authorities banned L’Era Nuova from the mail, prompting the paper to solicit volunteers to locally distribute copies that would be shipped to them in bundles, but this system only lasted until October, when the paper shut down.[955] The L’Era Nuova Group issued a single issue paper called Nuovi Tempi (New Times) in March 1918, and followed this in March 1919 with Il Bollettino de L’Era Nuova (The New Era Bulletin), which ran for five issues. This, in turn, was replaced by the illegal paper La Jacquerie, which was sent to former subscribers of L’Era Nuova in bundles that were taken by train to New York and other nearby cities to be mailed in small batches out of scattered letter boxes.[956] Berkman’s The Blast, though likewise barred from the mails, continued to appear until his arrest with Emma Goldman, but Goldman’s Mother Earth was published under the editorship of comrades for another two months until it too was banned from the mails; it was then replaced by the Mother Earth Bulletin, which lasted another seven months.
The Fraye Arbayter Shtime, although the largest-circulating anarchist paper in the country, had an easier time of it. Several issues were held up by postal authorities, but it never lost its mailing privileges altogether. Yanovsky’s belated support for the Allies undoubtedly helped the paper escape suppression, and the intervention of liberal and conservative Jews on behalf of the socialist Forverts after it had been briefly banned for anti-war articles in October 1917 probably also discouraged action against it.[957] The violent rhetoric of Frayhayt and Shturem, however, did bring action against them, and the Shturem Group had to assemble an illegal print shop of its own because it was unable to find a willing printer. On August 23, 1918 several members of this group, including Jacob Abrams, Mollie Steimer, Hyman Lachowsky, Samuel Lipman and Jacob Schwartz, were arrested for distributing a circular that urged workers to call a general strike against American military intervention in Russia. Schwartz died in police custody, and the rest were found guilty under the Sedition Act and eventually deported in November 1921.[958]
National anti-radical sentiment peaked in the spring and summer of 1919 after a series of bombings across the country. At the end of April, explosive devices were mailed to the homes of twenty-nine individuals all in some way affiliated with anti-radicalism. Intended to simultaneously strike their targets on May Day, only one of the bombs functioned correctly, maiming a maid rather than its intended target; most were discovered before reaching their destinations. These failed attempts were followed by the bombings of several homes on the night of June 2, 1919, with explosions occurring in Boston, New York, Paterson, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Washington DC, including one at the home of Attorney General Palmer. Again, however, none of the intended targets were killed or seriously injured, and the man who placed the bomb at Palmer’s residence was blown apart when the device exploded prematurely. At each bombing site copies of a circular titled “Plain Words” were strewn, which expressed the exasperation and pent-up rage of the immigrant revolutionaries:
We have been dreaming of freedom, we have talked of liberty, we have aspired to a better world, and you jailed us, you clubbed us, you deported us, you murdered us…There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.[959]
According to historians Robert D’Attilio and Paul Avrich, as well as the Bureau of Investigation’s own conclusions, the bombings were carried out a group of Luigi Galleani’s followers, who first formulated the plot in the summer of 1917, while they were in Mexico, in response to Galleani’s arrest that June.[960] For these radicals American political corruption, capitalist exploitation, and anti-radical repression had left no alternative but violent retaliation. In late 1919 the galleanisti’s paper Il Refrattario raged, “In this Republic of sharks and ‘pimps’ nothing can be obtained without violence!”[961]
Believing the bombings were linked to an international Bolshevik conspiracy, Attorney General Palmer ordered coordinated nationwide raids on the meeting places of the Union of Russian Workers on November 7, 1919. In New York City 162 men and women were arrested, and many beaten, at the UORW’s headquarters on Fifth Avenue.[962] After the raid, UORW members stored most of the organization’s radical literature in the offices of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime. They did so just in time, as on November 8, state authorities raided seventy-three radical centers and made more than 500 arrests. The Bureau of Immigration issued deportation warrants for all of the arrested foreign-born radicals.[963]
Over the course of 1919–1920, deportation warrants were supplied for more than 6,000 suspected alien radicals.[964] The sailing of the USS Buford on December 21, 1919 marked the high point of the deportation campaign and was a major victory for the Bureau of Investigation and its rising star, J. Edgar Hoover, who headed its antiradical General Intelligence Division. On board the Buford were his prize catches, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, whose case he had personally argued, as well as 247 other Russian-born radicals, most of them members of the UORW.[965] This was intended to be just the first of many such mass expulsions.
*** 5.5 Breaking Caminita
The Red Scare and Hoover’s personal intervention also dealt a near fatal blow to the anarchist movement in Paterson. The deprivations of the war had hit that city’s working population hard, leaving thousands of families without coal for heat and making basic items such as sugar virtually unattainable. Nonetheless, military purchases of textiles, including silk, had enabled local weavers to make significant gains in the workplace.[966] And until February 1920, anarchism appeared to be on the rise in the city.
In September 1915, Local 152 of the IWW (rechristened Textile Workers Industrial Union No. 100 the following year) helped organize a committee of silk weavers to establish a new wage scale, and over the next year the local gained 300 new members and controlled wage committees in twenty mills. In February 1916 the IWW also collaborated with the Workers’International Industrial Union (formerly the “Detroit IWW”), the Socialist Party, the United Textile Workers, and the conservative Brotherhood of American Silk Workers on an organizing drive for the nine-hour day, which was instated that April without a strike. On September 5, 1917 authorities stormed Paterson’s IWW hall as part of the nationwide raids against the organization and “took practically everything but the furniture, the chairs and the desk,” but in mid-1918 Local 100 still had more than 600 members in good standing.[967] Throughout 1918 and 1919 the organization competed with the newly formed Amalgamated Textile Workers of America, which attracted Jewish socialists, labor Zionists, and former members of the “Detroit IWW” but failed to draw Italians away from the IWW. Throughout, the IWW continued to agitate for the eighthour day.[968]
Paterson’s anarchists were also busy outside of the silk mills. Surveying anarchist activities in and around New York in May 1915, Emma Goldman noted “the most energetic efforts have been made by our friends of L’Era Nuova of Paterson.”[969] Later that year they founded the Scuola Moderna Francesco Ferrer and Circolo di Coltura Operaia, followed in 1916 by the Circolo Istruzione e Diletto Edmondo De Amicis and Paterson Philosophical Society, all of which joined the anarchist Libreria Sociologica in giving anarchism a vital and visible presence in the community. The bombings of June 2, 1919, however, placed the L’Era Nuova Group at the top of the Bureau of Investigation’s list of targets.
One of the explosions occurred at the Paterson home of Harry Klotz, president of the Suanhna Silk Company and a member of the executive board of Paterson’s manufacturers’ association. The explosion “tore a hole large enough for a good sized man to climb through” in the building’s foundation and did “considerable damage” to an adjacent building. Klotz and his family were on vacation at the time, though another family occupying the second floor of the home was shaken up. Klotz was an outspoken opponent of the forty-four hour week, and the previous winter an IWW strike at the Suanhna mill had resulted in the discharge of two L’Era Nuova Group members.[970] The Bureau of Investigation immediately seized on the apparent—yet false—connection between the bombing spree and the L’Era Nuova Group.
Special Agent Frank R. Stone, who oversaw the Paterson investigation, made an arrangement with the Army’s Military Intelligence Division whereby the Italian American Sergeant Joseph Define was hired out as an undercover operative who became known to Paterson’s radicals as “Joseph Termini,” an Algerian-born anarchist, and to the Bureau of Investigation as agent N-122. Within less than a month, Define had gained the trust of Firmino Gallo and infiltrated both the Francisco Ferrer Association and the L’Era Nuova Group.[971]
After more than seven months of investigation Bureau agents, along with dozens of volunteers from the American Legion, descended on Paterson on the night of February 14, 1920, with J. Edgar Hoover tagging along on his first federal raid. They rounded up twenty-nine local anarchists, including Ludovico Caminita, Beniamino Mazzotta, Franz Widmar, Firmino Gallo, Serafino Grandi, and Alberto and Paulo Guabello.[972] Joseph Define (“Termini”) was initially arrested and imprisoned with the anarchists to maintain his cover, but a guard at the Passaic County Jail let slip to the other prisoners that he was “a spy for the federal agents.” Define was then allowed to “escape” and disappeared from Paterson.[973] Mazzotta, who was a naturalized citizen and denied being an anarchist, was released the day after the raids, but Caminita was held on $10,000 bail and the nine others on bails of $5,000 each. All were relocated to Ellis Island to await deportation.[974] Caminita later recounted the scene: “All along the way the sidewalks were lined with people, who hailed us waiving caps and handkerchiefs. A policeman said to a federal agent, ‘You see? We told you that public opinion is with them.’“[975]
The Bureau’s attention was fixed on Caminita. Through sheer chance, the Bureau had discovered that he was the anonymous editor of La Jacquerie: In June 1919 the editorial group of suppressed L’Era Nuova had sent letters to that paper’s 3,000 subscribers informing them that La Jacquerie would be appearing as “another paper better than L’Era Nuova,” and that recipients of the new paper should “[h]ide it and do not be caught by the police. If some one asks you who sends it to you, answer and say you do not know.” All funds and correspondence were to be directed to “L. M. Caminita, 12 Planten Ave., Paterson, N. J.” But one Canadian reader failed to take the cautionary message to heart and a copy of the letter was found “in the street” in Guelph, Ontario, and turned in to authorities. It was then forwarded to the British Assistant Provost Marshal in New York, who in turn handed it over it to the Department of Justice in September 1919.[976]
During his interrogation the night of his arrest, Caminita initially denied editing La Jacquerie but eventually—after being punched and slapped, according to his own account—he reversed himself and not only admitted to producing the paper but took responsibility for the entirety of its content, claiming, “I have no contributors. They cannot write. I wrote all of the articles myself.” Caminita further claimed that he received no financial support for the publication and that it only had “about 300” subscribers, thereby shielding its readers. When asked about the June bombings he denied any knowledge about them, stating, “I don’t believe in terrorism,” and speculating that the attacks were a “frame-up.”[977]
At immigration hearings the following month, however, Caminita retracted many of his previous admissions in an obvious effort to avoid deportation. He denied having written for or edited La Jacquerie, and sought to ingratiate himself to his interrogators. The classes he taught at the Ferrer School, Caminita claimed, instructed immigrants “[t]o be good citizens of this country,” and he declared that the United States had “one of the best governments in the world”—a carefully worded answer calculated to appease the authorities without contradicting his belief that all governments were illegitimate and abusive.[978] At one point Caminita even claimed that Franz Widmar edited La Jacquerie, revealing tensions dating back at least as far as Caminita’s displacement as editor when La Questione Sociale was succeeded by L’Era Nuova.[979]
On March 8, 1920, J. Edgar Hoover came to Ellis Island to “informally” interview Caminita in person. Hoover was a shrewd interrogator, reporting to Bureau of Investigation director William J. Flynn afterwards that the anarchist “has a boy about ten years of age in whom he has centered his affection,” and “by playing on Caminetta’s [sic] emotions”—that is, by threatening to separate Caminita from his ill wife and American-born son through either imprisonment or deportation—Hoover was able to extract “much information.” Although he quickly realized that Caminita had no first-hand knowledge of the bombings, he exploited the editor’s longstanding feud with the anti-organizationists. “By working upon Caminetta’s [sic] feelings,” he noted, “I was able to point out that by assisting the Government in this matter he was also helping his own group in Paterson, N.J., for he claims that his group is not a terroristic organization, and has always opposed acts of violence.”[980]
At the same time, Hoover told Caminita that “certain Italians” had accused him of masterminding the bomb plot, and “this has made him very bitter.” The “certain Italians” Hoover named were almost certainly Carlo Tresca and the socialist Girolamo Valenti, editor of La Folla (The Crowd), where Caminita had briefly worked in New York during the war. Caminita had anonymously attacked both men in the pages of La Jacquerie as insincere self-seekers and traitors to the working class, and Tresca responded with an article in Il Martello that named Caminita as the editor of La Jacquerie, as did an article by Valenti in La Folla that further suggested that Caminita’s attacks on other radicals marked him as a government spy—a baseless but self-fulfilling charge that was echoed by Tresca.[981] Although American authorities already knew the identity of La Jacquerie’s editor through the letter passed to them by Canadian officials, they intentionally led Caminita to believe that they had learned of it only through Il Martello and La Folla.[982]
Threatened with separation from his family due to the actions of one group of political rivals, and believing himself betrayed by another, Caminita succumbed to Hoover’s manipulations and named several prominent galleanisti he considered likely perpetrators of the bombings, including Filippo Caci, a member of Paterson’s small anti-organizationist Gruppo gli Insorti (Insurgents Group). He also agreed to look through a list of subscribers to Cronaca Sovversiva and mark the names of those he considered “dangerous individuals.”[983] The Bureau of Investigation retained Caminita as a source of information by using the threat of deportation as leverage while obtaining a succession of temporary postponements of his deportation warrant. Agent Emmett T. Drew wrote to Hoover that “it would of course be very disastrous to the best interests of the government if Caminita should be deported,” but the possibility of deportation hung over the anarchist’s head for more than four years.[984] Although Caminita was released from Ellis Island on bond in September 1921, he was rearrested on January 24, 1922 under his outstanding deportation warrant, and Hoover again “held several interviews with him” before releasing him in March. The purpose of these interviews was to convince Caminita to write a damaging exposé of the Italian American Left, with the intention of having it published in a mainstream American newspaper. Still burning with indignation at Tresca’s false charges and apparent connection to his arrest, Caminita consented and used the opportunity to pen a vicious attack against Tresca and other radicals against whom he bore a grudge. Ironically, Caminita suggested that Tresca was himself an informant.[985]
Although Carlo Tresca did expose a number of government spies within the anarchist movement—including Joseph Define—the harmful consequences of false allegations were made clear in the case of Caminita, who became a government informant as a consequence, in part, of being falsely labeled as one. By May 1920, when Tresca began warning anarchists and IWW members that Caminita had supplied information to Hoover, he was correct.[986] Debate over Caminita’s possible guilt raged in the Italian-language anarchist press on both sides of the Atlantic after his second arrest in 1922. An Italian American anarchist committee was formed to investigate the charges against him and concluded that, although there was no evidence that Caminita was employed as a spy, he had become “a very dangerous element in the labor movement in general.” In June and July 1922 the anti-organizationist L’Adunata dei Refrattari similarly declared that Caminita was no longer “worthy” of belonging to the radical movement and was “a dangerous element for radicals (sovversivi),” although it doubted that he was actually a spy in the pay of the Department of Justice. Also in July, Tresca published excerpts in Il Martello from Caminita’s 1920 statements to the Bureau of Investigation that he had somehow obtained.[987] A November 1923 Bureau report noted with satisfaction, “The effect of Subjects’ [i.e. Caminita’s] confinement by the Immigration authorities, his several releases, and the fact that he has not been deported, upon his own associates in anarchists circles in New York and elsewhere, has been quite marked and has created a sensation.”[988]
Feelings were especially bitter against Caminita because he was blamed for the arrests of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two galleanisti who were tried and sentenced to death on charges of participating in a robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts on April 15, 1920, in which a guard was killed. The connection between this pair and Caminita was Roberto Elia, who, along with Andrea Salsedo, was informally held for months by the Bureau of Investigation. Both Elia and Salsedo cooperated with their interrogators, but on May 3, 1920 Salsedo either jumped or was pushed from a fourteenth floor window of the Bureau’s offices in New York, and the news of his death was accompanied by Bureau statements confirming that he and Elia had supplied information about his fellow galleanisti. Two days later Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested.[989] It was widely believed that Caminita’s testimony had implicated Elia and Salsedo, who in turn implicated Sacco and Vanzetti. According to Luigi Antonini, the Italian vice-president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU),
We had a man, Caminita, who revealed to the Department of Justice all the activities of the radical movement, and he caused the death of Salsedo and the imprisonment of Sacco and Vanzetti, but this gentleman is through with radical activity. He cannot show his face any more amongst our people.[990]
These same charges have been repeated by many historians.[991] However, Elia’s arrest occurred on February 25, 1920, two weeks before Hoover interviewed Caminita. It was in fact the Paterson printer Beniamino Mazzotta who, on the night of his arrest, had first suggested that Elia may have printed the “Plain Words” circular found at the scenes of the bombings.[992]
Nevertheless, Caminita became a pariah within the anarchist and labor movements. Still under the constant threat of deportation, he severed all radical ties and found employment at the conservative New York World and New York Herald. In addition, Paterson’s L’Era Nuova Group, Libreria Sociologica, Ferrer School, and Young Men’s Ferrer Association were all permanently dissolved, as was the local IWW organization. The state’s campaign to eliminate the anarchists appeared to be proceeding nicely. But it soon encountered resistance from within both the Department of Labor and the ranks of the anarchists themselves, whose disregard for national borders manifested in a number of creative ways.
*** 5.6 The Frontiers of State Power
The downfall of Caminita and the deportations of Berkman, Goldman, and Galleani highlighted foreign-born anarchists’ vulnerability to state repression and exclusionary immigration statutes. But deportation proved to be far less than the “absolute weapon against the foreign-born radical” that some historians have made it out to be.[993] Deportation proceedings, which fell under the purview of the Department of Labor, involved an unwieldy bureaucratic process requiring all deportation warrants to be personally signed by the Secretary of Labor or an Assistant Secretary of Labor, acting on the evidence furnished by district immigration inspectors.[994] In the early days of the Red Scare, immigration officials worked hand-in-hand with the Bureau of Investigation, issuing blanket deportation warrants on evidence provided—or promised—by the latter. But plans for successive mass deportations following the Buford soon collapsed.
In March 1920 liberal Assistant Secretary of Labor, Louis F. Post, became acting head of the Department of Labor and began subjecting all deportation cases to close review, dismissing most of them for lack of evidence and outraging the Department of Justice.[995] In many cases— for instance, those of Franz Widmar, Alberto Guabello, and other Paterson anarchists—he cancelled warrants even when sufficient evidence of anarchist beliefs existed. Of the more than 6,300 deportation warrants issued for suspected alien radicals in 1919–1920, less than 900 were eventually enacted, including those for approximately 350 anarchists and UORW members (most of those deported under anti-anarchist statutes were in fact socialists and Communists).[996] For the entire period of 1918–1925, the total number of radical deportees stood at less than 950.
Table 8. Deportations under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, 1918–1925[997]
| 1918 | 1919 | 1920 | 1921 | 1922 | 1923 | 1924 | 1925 |
| 2 | 7 | 314 | 446 | 64 | 13 | 81 | 22 |
Thus, the vast majority of foreign-born anarchists whose deportations were legally mandated in theory remained securely at liberty in practice. This was only partially due to interbureau hostility. Although denaturalization of foreign-born anarchists was legally sanctioned, it involved a lengthy process that rendered it almost impossible.[998] Emma Goldman’s citizenship, for example, had been stripped based on a technicality regarding her former husband’s naturalization, rather than under the anti-radical provisions of immigration law. Individuals like Paterson’s Firmino Gallo and Beniamino Mazzotta, who had deigned to take out American citizenship, were therefore shielded from deportation. So, too, was Carlo Tresca, for the simple reason that authorities were unable to ascertain his citizenship status.[999]
Others at risk of deportation were able to produce false documentation protecting their residency in the United States. In San Francisco, the Chinese anarchist and labor organizer Liu Zhongshi (“Red Jones”) was arrested and threatened with deportation, but produced documentation purporting to show that he was born in the United States. Zhongshi was likely a “paper son”—one of tens of thousands of legally barred Chinese immigrants who purchased falsified documents reporting their American birth or relation to legal Chinese American families.[1000] Jewish anarchist Bob Robbins, who “had never become a naturalized citizen of the United States, for he had scorned naturalization as a betrayal of the ideal of internationalism,” reentered the country after a disillusioning visit to the Soviet Union with a false name and passport. Similarly, Alberico Pirani, one of the anarchist “slackers” who took refuge in Mexico, returned to the United States using a false Venezuelan passport.[1001] If the First World War gave rise to the modern system of passports and the state “monopolization of the legitimate means of movement,” it also gave rise to the modern black market in forged documents that undermined this monopoly and on which many anarchists and other “illegal immigrants” relied.[1002]
Additionally, deportation was often thwarted by deportees themselves. Jack Isaacson, who took responsibility for an antiwar article published in the New York paper Freedom in 1919 and was ordered deported, fled to Canada but returned to the United States and lived under his wife’s maiden name, Denenberg, for the rest of his life.[1003] Filippo Perrone, the Italian anarchist arrested in 1911 during the San Francisco “Free-Speech Fight” after returning from the Mexican Revolution, was arrested in Seattle and deported in early 1922, but clandestinely migrated to New York in 1926 and remained in America under the name “Vincenzo Lentini” until the end of the Second World War. Erasmo Abate, an active anarchist in Philadelphia, was also deported in 1922 and also returned in secret a few years later.[1004] Manuel Rey y García, a Spanish anarchist and one of those convicted at the mass IWW trial in Chicago, was another 1922 deportee who illegally returned and, under a the false name “Louis G. Raymond,” lived the rest of his life in America.[1005] And in 1928 Raffaele Schiavina, who had been deported in 1919 with Luigi Galleani, also reentered the country. In each case, these deportees remained active in anarchist activities after they returned, and there were surely many more such individuals who kept lower profiles than these examples.
Finally, the very characteristics that made deportation possible—a world political system of sovereign states with rigid boundaries and border controls—could work against the government’s efforts to rid the country of anarchists. Nowhere was this clearer than in the case of Marcus Graham. Graham was the alias used by Shmuel Marcus (Markus), a Jewish immigrant born in 1893 in the Romanian city of Dorohoi. After migrating to Philadelphia with his family in 1907, Graham took up the semiskilled occupation of egg candling and then became a garment cutter. He was first exposed to socialism through a fellow garment worker, and during his two years at the National Farm School outside of Philadelphia a fellow student introduced him to the Fraye Arbayter Shtime. Graham soon joined Philadelphia’s anarchist Radical Library Group, becoming its secretary and one of its most militant members. In Joseph J. Cohen’s description, “nature endowed him with a measure of obstinacy, chutzpah and with a hot revolutionary temperament.”[1006] When the war came, Graham was among the sharpest critics of both the American government and of anarchists like Saul Yanovsky who gave it conditional support.
With the passage of the Selective Service Act, Graham, “along with several friends,” fled to Montreal to avoid registration. There, under the name “Robert Parsons” (in homage to Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons and German American anarchist editor Robert Reitzel), he took an active part in Canadian antiwar and anti-conscription agitation. With authorities looking for him Graham moved to Toronto, where he and his comrades produced four issues of a Yiddish antiwar paper titled Der Eyntsiker (The Unique One), after the German philosopher Max Stirner’s individualist anarchist tract, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845). Though no issues have survived, Graham later recalled it was dedicated to “denouncing Yanovsky.”[1007]
Around early April 1919, Graham secretly returned to New York and joined what remained of the former Shturem Group in producing The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin, which claimed to represent a nationwide revolutionary movement with the unweildy name of the “American Anarchist Federated Commune Soviets.” Other members of the group included Hippolyte Havel, Mollie Steimer (who was out on bail), Ethel Bernstein, and twenty-two-yearold pressman Arthur Katzes. The latter two were both members of the UORW and would be deported on the Buford before the end of the year. The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin condemned American intervention in Russia and called on American workers to arm themselves, organize “anarchist soviets”—many of which, it claimed, already existed with thousands of members across the country—and call a revolutionary general strike that would topple the government.[1008] Because the publication flagrantly violated the Sedition Act, members of the group distributed it in and around New York by throwing copies out of windows and off of roofs, or stuffing them into mailboxes in working-class neighborhoods. On April 15, 1919 Graham traveled to Paterson for this purpose, but was arrested after a suspicious police officer demanded to see the contents of his suitcase, which contained 2,500 copies of the first issue of the Bulletin. Held for two weeks in the Passaic County Jail, Graham was interrogated and manhandled by local and federal authorities. Throughout, he insisted that his name was Robert Parsons and he was a Canadian citizen, born in a town whose public records had conveniently been destroyed in a fire years before. Graham was transferred to Ellis Island to await deportation to Canada, but on May 14 he posted a $1,000 bail and returned to the task of editing the Bulletin. Several other members of the group were caught distributing the paper—Steimer on September 17 and Bernstein and Katzes on September 30—but the Bulletin continued to appear, much to the chagrin of authorities.[1009] (In Paterson, the children of prominent local citizens—including those of a rabbi, a silk manager, and, reportedly, an African American minister—were paid to hand out copies.[1010]) The Bureau of Investigation meanwhile learned from British authorities that the Canadian address at which “Parsons” claimed to have resided was false, and there was no record of his presence in Canada before 1917. Nevertheless, on November 18, 1919 a deportation warrant was issued for the return of “Robert Parson (or Parsons)” to Canada.[1011]
Graham, however, jumped his bond and failed to report for deportation. Instead, he left the editorship of the Bulletin in the hands of Hippolyte Havel and made his way to England where, he believed, the quasi-syndicalist shop stewards movement was on the verge of sparking a revolution. During his three months’ stay Graham became greatly disillusioned with the British labor movement and its leaders, but he also met William C. Owen who, despite Owen’s earlier views on the war, Graham held in high esteem and befriended. Graham then returned to Toronto, where he published two issues of The Awakener, which was modeled on The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin and advocated armed revolution and “the destruction of every institution that upholds the present system of economic slavery.” After a few months, Graham again secretly made his way to New York, where he took over editorship of the Bulletin’s successor, Free Society, founded in January 1921.[1012]
The following month, Graham was arrested as he exited the New York Public Library and was returned to Ellis Island. There he was interrogated for twenty-four hours, stripped naked, and beaten with fists, blackjacks, and sticks, but refused to divulge where his group’s secret printing establishment was located.[1013] He also continued to insist that his name was Parsons and he was a Canadian citizen, though he “stated that he is willing to go to any country to which the authorities might choose to deport him.” Both Graham and the authorities knew, however, that he had them beat. The Bureau of Investigation had established that Graham—who it still believed was named Parsons—was not born in Canada, and incorrectly concluded that he was “a Russian subject.” But, an exasperated agent noted, “Canadian Authorities are not inclined to receive him and at the same time a permit to leave this country for Russia was not as yet obtained for him.” The United States in fact had no diplomatic relations with the new Soviet Union, which began to refuse the repatriation of Russian anarchist deportees in March 1921. Immigration officials also approached the Mexican government, but it was not interested in harboring a known anarchist. After six months, Graham was again released on bond.[1014]
Ignorant of both Graham’s real name and place of birth, the United States government suddenly found its own borders working against it. As Jane Perry Clark noted in her classic study of American deportations,
A fact often too little appreciated by those anxious to rid the country of ‘undesirables’ with all possible speed is that the United States can deport no one unless some other country is willing to receive the deportee. No matter how deportable a foreigner may be under our laws or how entirely unwelcome here, we must keep him here unless some other country is willing to take him in, for he cannot eternally wander the seas.[1015]
As a de facto “man without a country,” Graham was literally not deportable. Nor was he alone; Mayer L. Nehring, a Jewish IWW member and pharmacist living in Cleveland, was part of a group of anarchists who were deported to Russia in 1921 but refused entry upon arrival and returned to the United States, where Nehring’s paradoxical legal status was eventually resolved by a presidential pardon.[1016] Graham, however, remained the most impossible of “impossible subjects,” living openly for decades as an illegal alien out on bail from a warrant mandating his deportation but which the government was unable to execute.[1017]
Ironically, at the same time the government was having trouble expelling some foreignborn radicals, it was unable to hold on to those it wished to incarcerate—namely, the likely perpetrators of the 1919 bombings. After the raids on the L’Era Nuova Group and the arrest of Gemma Mello, a member of Paterson’s anti-organizationist Gruppo gli Insorti, a month later, the other members of Gli Insorti disappeared. Many stowed away on ships to Italy, including Filippo Caci and Ruggero Bacchini, the men suspected by Caminita, the Bureau of Investigation, and historian Paul Avrich of planting the Paterson bomb.[1018] No one ever faced trail for the bombings. The parting shot of the galleanisti was taken on September 16, 1920, when a powerful bomb carried in a horse-drawn cart exploded on Wall Street across from the New York offices of J. P. Morgan, Inc., killing more than thirty people. The bomb was likely a response to the indictments of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the bomber, Paul Avrich has shown, was almost certainly the anarchist Mario Buda who, like Bacchini and Caci, fled to Italy afterwards. Again, the geographical limits of the United States hampered the government’s efforts to suppress alien anarchists; state power ended at the borders across which anarchists so frequently moved.[1019]
Unlike earlier outrages, the Wall Street bombing did not provoke a new wave of repression. Public opinion had turned against the Red Scare and its violations of civil liberties, and therefore, according to Robert K. Murray, the bombing “filled the nation with the resolute desire not to become again either ridiculous or panic-stricken.” The Red Scare had come to a sudden and violent end. By the close of 1921 postal authorities had ceased banning radical periodicals from the mails and restored all second-class mailing privileges, and Joseph Cohen reported to Max Nettlau, “The censorship is not strict here now. We are preaching Anarchism openly.”[1020] Within three years, all remaining prisoners held under the Espionage and Sedition Acts were released. Just as this uneasy peace was reached, however, anarchists found themselves facing new crises caused by the advent of two new states: the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy.
*** 5.7 Communists and Anticommunists
With fragmentary, unreliable, and often contradictory news about the Russian Revolution and Soviet regime reaching America, misinformation and wishful thinking initially led most anarchists to view the revolution as the realization of their own ideals. While Emma Goldman was out on bail before her trial and deportation, she toured the United States defending the new Bolshevik regime as the “voice [of] the inarticulate Russian people,” and Alexander Berkman hailed the October Revolution as “the Messiah come,” lavishly praising the Bolsheviks as “the expression of the most fundamental longing of the human soul that demands fullest individual liberty.”[1021] This ideological fuzziness extended the other way as well; in 1919 the Communist party hall in San Francisco proudly displayed Goldman’s portrait alongside those of Lenin and Trotsky.[1022] Over the next few years the anarchist movement underwent a difficult process of disillusionment and internal strife as it grappled with the realities of Soviet communism.
Anarchist reactions to the Bolshevik seizure of power had been almost universally positive. For a time, many anarchists considered themselves Bolsheviks. In January 1918 the Fraye Arbayter Shtime carried an adoring article about “Our Trotsky” that hailed him as a hero of the Jewish people, and on May Day of the following year the anarchist Philip Grosser and other imprisoned conscientious objectors paraded around their stockade “carrying a few magazine photographs of Lenin and Trotzky,” and some of the prisoners signed up for the Communist party.[1023] On March 2, 1918 New York’s Francisco Ferrer Association sent a cable to Trotsky announcing: “Ferrer Association is with you to the death. Are forming Red Guards to help you defend the Revolution.” That same month Paterson’s Italian anarchist paper called on readers to join the “American Red Guard” because “the cause of the Bolshewiki [sic] is the cause of all workers.” Many anarchists joined hundreds of other aspiring Red Guard volunteers, but they were foiled by the State Department’s ban on American travel to Russia.[1024]
Whatever other disagreements they had, in 1917 and 1918 the Italians of the L’Era Nuova Group, Galleani’s Cronaca Sovversiva, and Carlo Tresca’s Il Martello all concurred that support for the Bolsheviks was paramount. Il Martello even printed a long excerpt from the Communist Manifesto and lauded the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”[1025] When asked by Bureau of Investigation agents if he was opposed to all governments, Paterson’s Serafino Grandi replied, “I believe in a government of the workers, for example, the one in Russia.” In 1919 Firmino Gallo’s Libreria Sociologica was well-stocked with Communist publications, including The New York Communist, Soviet Russia, and The Revolutionary Age, and a search of his home in 1920 turned up a “Receipt of payment of dues to the communist party.”[1026] It was not unusual for Jewish or Italian anarchists to take out membership in one of the two American Communist parties formed in 1918, but it was unusual for them to remain members after 1923 or 1924. Saul Yanovsky, however, condemned the Bolsheviks immediately upon their seizure of power, privately insisting that the dictatorship was “not anarchistic” and “Not kosher,” and labeling Lenin a “Mephistopheles” who would not live up to his libertarian rhetoric. Watching the stampede of Jewish radicals returning to Soviet Russia, he lamented, “I have raised a generation of idiots.”[1027] In 1918 he began to voice his criticisms in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, warning, “The Russian Tsar used terror against all who were his opponents, and the Bolsheviks now use this exact same medium of all despots.”[1028] But Yanovsky’s standing within the movement had plummeted following his reversal on the war, and between 1914 and 1919 the circulation of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime dropped more than 50%, to 12,000. The following year Yanovsky, after two decades at the post, was forced to resign as editor. He was replaced by his longtime rival Jacob Merison, but Merison was also critical of the Bolsheviks and within a few months was forced to leave after refusing to print a pro-Communist article by Michael Cohn.[1029]
Beginning at the end of July 1920, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime was edited by the Communists Moyshe Kats and Haim Kantorovitch (Kantorovitsh), briefly losing its anarchist identity. At the same time, virtually all of the Yiddish anarchist organizations in New York City had disbanded or lapsed into inactivity. The Fraye Arbayter Shtime Group, rethinking its choices, decided to recruit Joseph J. Cohen to take over the newspaper and turn it back into an explicitly anarchist publication once again. Cohen also opened its pages to a spirited debate on the Soviet dictatorship, and in 1921 he oversaw the formation of the Yidishe Anarkhistishe Federatsie fun Amerike und Kenede (Jewish Anarchist Federation of America and Canada), which was created to support the Fraye Arbayter Shtime. The federation had twenty-five chapters at its founding, and breathed new life into the movement.[1030]
All the while, disturbing reports from anarchists in the Soviet Union trickled into the United States. “As time went on,” Harry Kelly recalled, “word came from some of our comrades overseas that the new Soviet nation was not the workers’ paradise that it had been pictured in the early elated reports from Petrograd and Moscow. Letters from the disillusioned were read aloud at some of our meetings.”[1031] Already in November 1918, Der Shturem Group member Bernard Sernaker gave a Yiddish speech in New York in which he declared, “I hope the revolution will spread until it pushes in the doors of Ellis Island,” but added, “I am against the Bolshevik Government and against all forms of government…founded on force.”[1032] At the beginning of 1919 one writer noted, “a considerable number of Anarchists do not agree with the Bolsheviki in Russia.” Two months later Il Bollettino de L’Era Nuova urged its readers to “aid the Bolsheviks in all that truly serves the emancipation of the proletariat,” but followed this with a warning that the Bolsheviks made use of “a government, of an authority that, however different in form from capitalist governments and authority, will be a substantial obstacle to all additional progress.”[1033] Russian-speaking anarchists, who had access to a few copies of Petrograd’s Golos Truda that made their way to the United States, were firmer in their rejection of Bolshevism. During a conference of Russian radicals in New York on January 6, 1919 to establish a “Soviet of Workers’ Deputies of the United States and Canada,” controversy erupted when anarchist delegates refused to endorse the Bolshevik regime. Some delegates walked out in disgust, and others labeled the dissenters “Anarcho-Mensheviks” and “counter revolutionists.” This prompted a reprimand from the Comintern which, ironically, demanded cooperation with the anarchists.[1034]
In February 1919 the first of a series of articles by Robert Minor, who had arrived in the Soviet Union on the eve of the April 1918 raids against the anarchists, were published in the United States. Minor described a popular, anarchistic revolution that had been betrayed by the Bolsheviks. His reports caused a stir within American radical circles and were attacked in the socialist press.[1035] But the Anarchist Soviet Bulletin took up Minor’s defense in its first issue. The Bolsheviks, it later explained, had “no faith in the workers’ intelligence and capacity to run things himself [sic].” Therefore “Bolshevism stands for new slavery—Centralized Government,” whereas “Anarchism stands for Decentralization—for real freedom.”[1036] In September 1919, La Jacquerie carried an article by Errico Malatesta on anarchism and dictatorship, which noted,
upon this question the opinion of anarchists could not be doubtful and in fact, before the Bolshevist revolution was doubted by no one. Anarchy signifies non-government and therefore with greater reason no dictatorship[,] which is absolute government without control and without constitutional limitations…We respect [the Bolsheviks’] sincerity, we admire their energy, but, as we have never been in agreement on theoretical ground, we shall not be able to consolidate with them when they pass from theory to practice.[1037]
Three months later Ludovico Caminita, who had yet to be arrested, delivered a speech “attacking Lenine [sic] and Trotsky.” Il Martello, however, dismissed Minor as an “intellectual” writing for the “reactionary” press and continued to support the Soviet regime until 1921.[1038]
After 1920, the trickle of critical anarchist writings became an international deluge, with important anticommunist pieces by a growing number of influential figures reaching American readers. Rudolf Rocker’s essay, “Soviet System or Dictatorship?,” was first serialized in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime beginning in May 1920; it praised soviets as model popular revolutionary councils, and contrasted them with revolutionary dictatorship, a concept he labeled “Jacobin” and “wholly bourgeois and as such, [it] has nothing to do with socialism.” In June Luigi Galleani condemned Lenin in Cronaca Sovversiva, which he had reestablished in Turin; 4,000 copies of each issue were sent back to the United States, specially printed under a different title (A Stormo!) to avoid confiscation.[1039] Before his death in Russia in February 1921, Kropotkin also wrote on the Russian situation, lauding soviets, appealing against foreign intervention because it “necessarily strengthens the dictatorial tendencies of the government,” and concluding, “We are learning to know in Russia how not to introduce communism….”[1040] In 1921 the editors of The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin changed its name to Free Society because the term “soviet” had become too closely associated with the Communist regime, and the soviets themselves “had become nothing but…tools in the hands of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party.”[1041]
Within the Soviet Union, meanwhile, the Communists banned internal factions in the aftermath of the Kronstadt affair, ordered renewed raids on anarchist groups, and deported leading anarchists (including Goldman, Berkman, Volin, Efim Yartchuk, and Alexander Schapiro). In 1923, anarchists were included in the first group of prisoners sent to the island of Solovetsky, the initial outpost of the “Gulag Archipelago,” and by 1924 anarchist relief groups could count at least 300 Russian anarchists in prisons or work camps, 181 exiled abroad, and scores who had been executed or died in prison. According to one well-informed source, approximately 90% of the anarchists who had returned from America eventually met their deaths in Russian prisons, camps, or at the hands of the Cheka and its successors.[1042]
In 1922–24, the newly exiled Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman wrote several influential critiques of Bolshevism, and Berkman compiled a valuable collection of first-hand accounts from Russian political prisoners for the book Letters from Russian Prisons (1925), published by a committee of American radicals and liberals headed by American Civil Liberties Union founder Roger Baldwin.[1043] The production of most of these publications was paid for by Michael Cohn, who wrote to Berkman in May 1922,
I am busy lecturing against Bolshevism. You know, I presume, that I was a hog-headed Bolsh for the first 2, 3 years following the Soviet Revolution. But the Vetcheka’s recent activities, the requisitions in the villages of Russia, the Kronstadt uprising and also the recent face about of the Bol. Regime itself, made my position untenable.[1044]
Mike Gold and, to the shock of his comrades, early anticommunist Robert Minor were among the few who abandoned their anarchism and became full-fledged Communists. Within the Yiddish movement well-known figures Dr. Benzion Liber, M. Tsipin and Charles Kuntz (Kunts) all joined the Party; Kuntz had been a Tolstoyan anarchist before visiting Russia during the revolution and later headed the Organization for Jewish Colonization in Russia (Yidishe Kolonizatsye Organizatsye in Rusland, or ICOR).[1045] Anthony Capraro, who helped organize the 1912 IWW strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was a rare Italian anarchist who stuck with the Party, but already in 1921 the anarchist Luigi Quintiliano warned “that Capraro is crazy for being a Communist; that they are opposed to Anarchy and he is really against us.”[1046]
In 1919 the anarchist-turned-Communist Samuel Agursky briefly returned to the United States with funds and a mandate from the Comintern to help form a unified American Communist party, and was a fraternal delegate at the May 1920 convention that created the United Communist Party of America. He also contributed a series of articles about the Russian Revolution to the then Communist-friendly Fraye Arbayter Shtime. Saul Yanovsky, however, witheringly asked, “How come that a great revolution, which is shaking a sixth of the globe to its foundations, chose a dolt like you to represent it? If Lenin could find no better spokesman than you, then certainly the revolution is not going to amount to much.” Agursky made few inroads among his former comrades, although Bob Robbins enthusiastically returned to Russia with him—and not too long after, fled back to America.[1047]
Although there was no definitive anarchist “canon” of theory on the Russian Revolution, there were several generally accepted critiques of Soviet communism. All believed that the revolution had been anarchistic in the beginning, and corroborated the anarchists’ faith in the capacity of ordinary people to collectively restructure society from below. The spontaneous insurrection of February 1917 and the forms of self-organization that followed, from soviets to partisan armies, all seemed to conform to anarchist theory. “The Russian masses,” Berkman later wrote with only slight exaggeration, “were not too ‘backward’ to abolish the Tsar, to defeat the Provisional Government, to destroy capitalism and the wage system, to turn the land over to the peasantry and the industries to the workers.” This interpretation, historian Edward Acton notes, has much in common with recent social histories of the revolution, especially in its “willingness to take seriously the aspirations of the masses, to credit them with an independence, sense of direction and rationality of their own.”[1048]
According to the anarchists, however, “disastrous results were inevitable” from the moment the Bolsheviks seized power. It was not a question of “the character of the Bolsheviki,” Goldman insisted, but one of the “principles and methods of Bolshevism.” The dictatorship of any minority party or group—especially one faced with civil war and foreign intervention— would necessarily resort to unilateral decrees and terror, thereby becoming a “dictatorship over the proletariat.”[1049] This interpretation was based on anarchism’s theory of class, which differed from the strictly economic definition of the Marxists. As far back as 1873, Mikhail Bakunin had predicted that socialist revolutionaries who seized state power would immediately begin “concentrating in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production, and will divide the people into two armies, one industrial and one agrarian, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form a new privileged scientific and political class.” Political power exercised through monopolies of the means of coercion was viewed as analogous to control of the means of production. Abba Gordin, a former “Soviet anarchist” who fled to the United States in 1924, explicitly compared the two: “A ruler is an owner. He owns a certain Public force, a public energy. He uses and, very often, almost always, abuses it.” Hence anarchists perceived two different, but not mutually exclusive, forms of class division, one economic and one political. Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri maintained that the state is a “creator of privilege, thereby bringing about new class divisions.... In short, class divisions will persist and classes will never be finally abolished as long as the state remains.” A “workers’ state” was therefore a contradiction in terms and, accordingly, the “fundamental characteristic of Bolshevik psychology was distrust of the masses, of the proletariat.”[1050] This is essentially the same critique, it may be noted, behind anarchists’ disapproval of statist national liberation struggles.
This new anticommunist consensus almost immediately led to conflict within the labor movement. The IWW experienced resurgence between 1917 and 1924, and during this period both the Comintern and American Communists made a concerted effort to bring the organization into the Communist fold.[1051] The IWW’s initially sympathetic attitude toward the Soviet Union, however, followed a trajectory analogous to that of the anarchists, and by 1922 a majority of the membership was hostile to the Soviet Union and American Communists’ attempts to capture the union. But tensions between pro- and anticommunists also overlapped with those between anarchist and syndicalist decentralists and those who supported a more centralized union structure, and these came to a head at the 1924 IWW convention, where a group of decentralists drew up an “Emergency Program” for reorganization and accused the GEB of being dominated by a “political machine” under Communist influence. The union split amid fistfights and legal battles, and the Emergency Program faction seceded and founded its own stillborn version of the IWW. In the meantime most rank-and-file members “dropped out the middle,” leaving the IWW with 12,000–17,000 members in 1925, and just 3,000–8,000 by 1930.[1052]
A fierce struggle also broke out in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. When Saul Yanovsky resigned as editor of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, he already had a new position waiting for him at ILGWU; Morris Sigman, the anarchist and general manager of the Joint Board of the Cloakmakers’ Union, helped recruit Yanovsky for the editorship of the ILGWU’s new newspaper, Justice, and its Yiddish-language edition, Gerekhtikayt. Yanovsky was given almost total editorial freedom, and according to one authority on the union, under his direction these publications became “among the liveliest and best edited labor papers of America.” But an increasing number of ILGWU members were attracted to communism, which Yanovsky vigorously attacked.[1053]
Inspired by the Russian Revolution, in 1917 a group of radical women had formed the Current Events Committee within the New York Waist and Dress Makers’ Union, Local 25, which criticized the union’s social democratic leadership for being too conservative. By the time Yanovsky entered the scene the Current Events Committee had disappeared, but in its place radicals had formed the Workers’ Council, which advocated the formation of shop delegates leagues modeled on both soviets and the British shop delegates’ movement that had briefly inspired Marcus Graham (who was himself an ILGWU member). This movement spread throughout the union and attracted anarchist, syndicalist and socialist members as well as Communists. In 1921, however, the shop delegate leagues joined the Trade Union Educational League, which the following year became an affiliate of the Communist Red International of Labor Unions, prompting most non-Communist radicals to withdraw. It was then that the anarchists, “who had played a leading role in the opposition movement from the beginning, at last realized that the Communists had captured the whole left flank” of the membership.[1054]
In 1921, the union’s General Executive Board ruled that the leagues violated the union’s constitution, but this did little more than engender sympathy for the radicals and further tarnish the reputation of the administration. At a special convention in February 1923 Morris Sigman, who had served as the union’s first vice-president in 1920–22, was elected president of the ILGWU, with an unofficial mandate from both his anarchist comrades and his social democratic backers to quash Communist influence. He lost little time, ruling in August 1923 that the shop delegate leagues constituted dual unions, ejecting several Communists from the union or depriving them of the right to hold office, and dissolving or reorganizing Communist-controlled locals.[1055] At the ILGWU’s convention the following year, anarchist and former UORW member Rose Pesotta—whose lover and fellow anarchist Theodore Kushnarev had been deported on the Buford and briefly imprisoned by the Bolsheviks—introduced a motion demanding the release of all political prisoners in the Soviet Union, which passed by a vote of 222 to 25.[1056] Thereafter, in the revealing words of anarchist ILGWU member Isadore Wisotsky (Vitsotsky), “The Russian Revolution was fought out on the streets of New York and in meeting Halls.”[1057] This “civil war” within the ILGWU lasted for several years, all but exhausting anarchist influence within the union (see Chapter 6). In the cases of both the IWW and ILGWU, anarchists were propelled into disastrous conflicts by an anticommunist imperative stemming from the Russian Revolution, isolating themselves on the Left and preventing significant new growth or coalitions. Italian anarchists, meanwhile, were engaged in a battle against a very different enemy that also took the form of a powerful new state apparatus.
*** 5.8 From Biennio Rosso to Fascism
Those Italians, like Luigi Galleani, who were deported during the Red Scare, arrived in Italy during the radical upheaval known as the biennio rosso (Two Red Years). In 1919 and 1920 the country experienced mass protests over inflation and the war, and in September 1920 a mass movement of factory takeovers by radical workers led to the creation of a system of factory councils, which formed their own armed “Red Guards” to protect themselves. Italy appeared to teeter on the edge of revolution. The Italian anarchist movement, the Socialist party, and the labor unions all experienced massive growth, and anarchists played a crucial part in the factory occupations. This was especially the case in Turin, where Galleani reestablished Cronaca Sovversiva at the beginning of 1920 with the aid of fellow deportee Raffaele Schiavina.[1058]
Italians in the United States were intimately acquainted with these developments through reading copies of both Cronaca Sovversiva and the daily Umanità Nova, founded in early 1920 by Malatesta and other leading Italian anarchists. The linotype machine on which Umanità Nova was printed had been purchased by an anarchist group in Boston, which raised the funds in conjunction with Paterson’s Libreria Sociologica through voluntary contributions from 460 individuals across the United States. American subscriptions to Umanità Nova were also forwarded through the Libreria Sociologica, and the Bureau of Investigation noted that “for some time an average of 10 copies [of Umanità Nova] a day arrived in Paterson alone.”[1059] Reaction, however, came swiftly and fiercely, in the form of both official government repression and the new Fascist movement headed by Benito Mussolini. Cronaca Sovversiva was shut down in October 1920, and in June 1921 Schiavina and the paper’s typographer were sentenced to six months imprisonment and a 300 lire fine. The following November Galleani was sentenced to the first of several prison sentences, and he remained the subject of constant surveillance until his death from a heart attack in 1931.[1060] Fascist squadristi, meanwhile, targeted working-class centers and radicals with extralegal violence, leading to two years of virtual civil war on the streets of Italian cities. Anarchists were among the first and most militant opponents of Mussolini’s new movement; in May 1921 Paolo Schicchi wrote to the anarchist Joe Russo in Oakland, California, “we are fighting the Fascisti. We have been the only ones fighting them with success. Help us. I need above all a good gun and an excellent pistol.”[1061]
Former Philadelphia anarchist Erasmo Abate, who had been charged with criminal syndicalism and deported to Italy in 1922, was dispatched to Ancona by Malatesta to aid the anti-Fascist struggle there. Together with the Communist Mario Zingaretti, Abate helped head the local section of the Arditi del Popolo (The People’s Warriors).[1062] The Arditi were armed paramilitary units that grew out of the leftwing of the Italian veteran’s movement, as well as the earlier workers’ self-defense units formed during the factory occupations. The Arditi movement was founded in June 1921 by Argo Secondari, a war veteran with anarchist leanings who had been radicalized in South America before returning to Italy to serve in the military, and the organization quickly grew to include at least 144 sections with 20,000 members throughout Italy. There was widespread anarchist involvement in the Arditi, which defended working-class and radical centers and engaged in several pitched battles with Fascist squads, including a dramatic defense of Parma against an armed Fascist invasion.[1063]
In Turin, the anarchist group around Galleani was also involved in armed resistance to the squadristi. Its leading figures included Raffaele Schiavina and Ilario Margarita, who had helped form the “Red Guards” in 1920 and with whom Schiavina lodged. Although the Turin anarchists were in close contact with the Arditi del Popolo and acted in concert with them, they appear to have operated as an autonomous or semi-autonomous group. Regardless, in August 1921 Schiavina was arrested and tried along with seven Communists accused of leading sections of Turin’s Arditi.[1064] Although the defendants were acquitted by a sympathetic jury, the Arditi soon collapsed as a result of fierce repression and the Socialist and Communist parties’ refusal to support them. With the disintegration of the Arditi del Popolo and Mussolini’s ascension to power in 1922, mass resistance to fascism within Italy became an impossibility.[1065]
According to historian Carl Levy, “Between 1921 and 1926 the anarchist rank and file were driven out of the factories and forced into poverty and exile. The anarchists probably suffered greater violence in proportion to their numbers than other political opponents of fascism.”[1066] Ruggero Baccini, one of the likely Paterson bombers of 1919, had returned to his native Lazio to avoid arrest and beginning in 1922 was involved in numerous clashes with Fascists there, resulting in a gunshot wound as well as a short prison sentence. In 1927 he was charged with murder and fled to France, where he distributed anarchist literature until his expulsion in 1931; he then moved to Spain, where he died sometime before 1936.[1067] Natale Girolimetti, another Red Scare deportee, was less fortunate; after his return he was severely beaten by Fascists and imprisoned. Seeking refuge abroad, he was expelled successively from France, Luxemburg, and Germany, before dying in prison in Forlì, Italy, in 1928.[1068]
A few former anarchists, however, were incorporated into the new Fascist regime. In its early years Italian fascism was an inchoate movement encompassing a wide spectrum of tendencies, and it included a large number of syndicalists and much smaller group of anarchists who had embraced interventionism during the First World War. Among them were the former syndicalist and FSI leader Edmondo Rossoni, and the former individualist anarchist Massimo Rocca (“Libero Tancredi”), who was the regime’s leading economic theorist for a time. However, in 1924 Rocca was expelled from the Fascist Party due to differences with Mussolini and two years later Fascist violence forced him to flee to France. Despite his estrangement from the regime, in Paris he acted as an informant for the Italian secret police.[1069]
Other radicals feigned loyalty to the Fascist government to protect themselves and their families. Former San Francisco anarchist Luigi Parenti, whose wife and three daughters had accompanied him when he was deported in 1922, initially participated in anarchist activities in Italy and subscribed to anarchist and syndicalist papers (including Carlo Tresca’s Il Martello and the FSI’s Il Proletario), and in 1926 he attended a convention of the outlawed Unione Sindacale Italiano. In 1928, however, he travelled to Rome to meet with Edmondo Rossoni—whom he had known in America—and began working on behalf of the Fascist labor unions and as a correspondent for Il Telegrafo, a Fascist paper in Livorno. In 1929 the government reported that Parenti “demonstrates obedience to the directives of the Regime.” But in early 1930, authorities discovered that Parenti was still secretly receiving copies of Il Martello. That February he was arrested and charged with rape, but the sentence was commuted—suggesting that the charge may have been manufactured in retaliation for Parenti’s infidelity to the Italian state, and used to ensure his good behavior. In 1932 he reportedly displayed “good moral and political conduct” and “ideas in full agreement with the directives of the Regime.” Yet Parenti’s coerced acquiescence remained only a facade; in 1942 he died in Paterson, New Jersey, having secretly reentered the United States to settle among his anarchist comrades.[1070]
*** 5.9 Conclusion
Parenti’s choice of Paterson as final place of residence illustrated that anarchism’s roots in there were too deep to be eradicated even by wholesale arrests and clever manipulations on the part of the Department of Justice. Although the local movement never recovered from the damage inflicted by the Red Scare and Caminita’s betrayal, it was far from extinguished. In San Francisco, moreover, the anarchist movement grew after the war, demonstrating the persistence and potentialities of its multiethnic cosmopolitanism. As Hippolyte Havel confidently wrote in 1918, “The authorities may deport a few poor devils, but never anarchism.”[1071]
Nevertheless, global and domestic changes engendered by the war increasingly isolated immigrant anarchists over the following decade. Although many developments took a toll on the movement—fascism, Zionism, Americanization, and communism among them—there was one in particular that virtually guaranteed its eventual disappearance. The war had brought transatlantic migration to a virtual standstill, and Congress, motivated by a combination of nativism, scientific racism, and antiradicalism, sought to make this state of affairs permanent by passing the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which drastically reduced the number of Southern and Eastern European migrants allowed entry into the United States per year. In 1924 it imposed even more stringent quotas, though these were not implemented until 1929.[1072] Here, the American state struck at the very root of the domestic anarchist movement—migration and working-class mobility. The effects of immigration restriction were slow to develop, but their outcome was inevitable: cut off from a significant flow of potential new recruits, immigrant anarchism would eventually wither away. Yet for more than two decades, foreign-born anarchists would continued to keep their cosmopolitan vision alive.
** 6.0 “The Undesirables of This Country”: Anarchists on the Defensive, 1925–1936
In 1925, Jewish anarchist and ILGWU organizer Ana Sosnovsky noted “a general revival amongst the Comrades.” By 1933 an anarchist newspaper counted at least seventy-five anarchist organizations across the country, and American Military Intelligence reported “a keen revival of activities among the anarchists” on the East Coast. In 1939, with the Spanish Civil War fueling increased interest in anarchism, there were “some one hundred groups throughout the country actually functioning.”[1073] Available figures show that, from the mid-1920s to the end of the 1930s, the anarchist press retained between one-half and three-quarters of its total known 1914 circulation of over 61,000, and Italian-language anarchist publications reached their peak distribution between 1924 and 1932, with a combined circulation of more than 15,000–20,000. Meanwhile, multiethnic “international groups” composed of English-speaking immigrants and native-born Americans became common, leading to a revival of the English-language anarchist press. Prior to the onset of Popular Front period in 1935, the circulation of the American anarchist press was equivalent to between ten and fifteen percent that of the Communist Party.[1074]
What these numbers fail to convey, however, is the increasing isolation of the anarchists and the restricted sphere of their activities. Fermin Rocker, the son of anarchists Rudolf Rocker and Milly Witcop, recalled, “All through the 1920s anarchists were at best fighting a rear guard action against the spread of communism and fascism.”[1075] The visible resurgence of Italian anarchism was almost entirely owing to antifascism. Michael Miller Topp notes, “The rise of fascism in Italy in 1922 changed the lives of Italian American syndicalists and other radicals irrevocably. From that moment, this generation of Italian American Leftists devoted themselves to battling fascism rather than working toward a more just society.” Similarly, Joseph J. Cohen labeled the decades after 1920 the “defensive” era of Yiddish anarchism.[1076]
Worldwide, Eric Hobsbawm observes, the decades after the First World War marked “the apogee of nationalism.”[1077] The competing claims placed on immigrants by wartime Americanization campaigns and European nationalist movements had created strong national sentiments where in many cases none existed before, forcing most to form patriotic attachments to either the United States or their country of origin, or to synthesize the two into a “hyphenated” national identity. In each case, the outcome was at odds with radical cosmopolitanism. Even the brand of internationalism preached by the Communist Party at the time often manifested as a pseudo-nationalist long-distance worship and defense of the “workers’ fatherland.”[1078] But the anarchists had no choice other than to cling to their anti-nationalist principles all the more tenaciously, lest they be absorbed and co-opted by the very nationalist movements they abhorred.
Anarchists played an almost insignificant role in most of the major domestic social, cultural and political movements brought about by the Great Depression: the campaigns of the unemployed, the labor upsurge that led to the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the formation of an influential Popular Front, and, of course, the creation of the multiethnic New Deal coalition and welfare state. These movements’ commitment to statecentered solutions to workers’ problems, to the self-conscious “Americanization” of the working class and its political commitments, and to the consolidation of a unified “white” race composed of European “ethnic groups” made them anathema to anarchists’ anti-statist, anti-nationalist, and anti-racialist principles, and threatened the ethnic, foreign-language base of American anarchism.[1079] The prominent role of the Communist Party in many of these efforts made them that much less palatable.[1080]
Nevertheless, anarchists’ determined fight against these developments was not all in vain. Jewish anarchists and their allies successfully challenged Communist hegemony in the garment unions and spawned a small second-generation anarchist movement; their Italian comrades in Paterson prevented fascism from gaining a foothold there throughout the 1920s; and in San Francisco the multiethnic anarchist movement actually grew and flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Anti-statism (including anti-Communism), anti-nationalism, and cosmopolitanism were still viable tenets for tens of thousands of immigrants and their children.
*** 6.1 Neither “Workers’ Fatherland” nor “Jewish Homeland”
After the war, Yiddish anarchists fought a drawn-out, losing battle against Communism on one hand and Zionism on the other. Already in 1924, Harry Kelly described Fraye Arbayter Shtime editor Joseph J. Cohen as having “practically given up the idea of revolution and from all accounts he seems pretty pessimistic over things.” Under Cohen’s editorship, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime slipped to a circulation of 7,000–10,000—a third of its peak under Yanovsky, though still enough to make it one of the most widely circulated anarchist papers in the country.[1081] The working-class Jewish community in which anarchism was based was also slowly coming apart; by 1920 only 40% of New York City’s Jews lived in Manhattan. This geographic mobility was a sign of economic mobility, and by the second half of the 1920s many former garment workers— including many anarchists—had entered professional occupations.[1082]
The Union of Russian Workers, in which many of the more militant Jewish anarchists had found a home, lost most of its leadership and much of its membership to return migration and deportation. Renamed the Union of Russian Toilers after 1922, its remaining Russian members drifted toward Communism, anti-Communist and anti-Semitic Russian nationalism, mysticism, or sectarian squabbling, leaving the Russian-speaking movement just a few hundred strong by the end of the 1930s.[1083] The new Communist movement, meanwhile, threatened to absorb both the garment unions, and radical Jewish youths, workers and intellectuals flocked to the Party.[1084] By the second half of the 1930s an estimated one-half of the Communist Party’s membership was Jewish, and its Yiddish-language paper Frayhayt reached a circulation of between 20,000 and 65,000 (estimates vary considerably). In 1934 Michael Cohn described the majority of the Party’s members to Alexander Berkman as “Jewish boys and girls—fanatical and ignorant most of them—shout and march and amount to nothing after all is said and done.”[1085] But already by the mid-1920s it was apparent that Communism had supplanted both the Socialist Party and anarchism as the fastest-growing and most influential faction of the Jewish Left.
Yet there were a few bright spots. Affiliates of the Jewish Anarchist Federation maintained a reasonably high level of activity, the largest being the Bronx’s Amshol Group—a merger of two predominantly anarchist branches of the Workmen’s Circle—with around sixty members. In the early 1920s Jewish anarchists also opened the Free Workers’ Center at 176 (later 219) Second Avenue, which “always buzzed with activity” including lectures, meetings, and dances, and included a vegetarian diner run by Ida Cohen.[1086] The anarchist colony centered around the Modern School in Stelton and a new anarchist settlement formed near New York’s Lake Mohegan in 1923 were home to vibrant multiethnic communities in which Jews predominated, and the anarchists’ Camp Germinal (Zsherminal), founded by Jewish anarchists outside of Philadelphia in 1924, hosted 120 children in the summers.[1087]
A small but vocal cadre of Yiddish anarchists also remained active in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). Most had long records of union militancy that, in many cases, had moved them upwards within the union’s hierarchy by the mid-1920s. ILGWU president Morris Sigman was only the most visible of these. Others included Bernard Shane and Louis Levy, the former and presiding managers of Cloakmakers Local 1, respectively; Rose Pesotta, Joseph Schneider (Shnayder), Mendel (“Max”) Bluestein and Leibush Frumkin, all members of the Executive Board of Local 22; and Nicholas Kritzman, head of Local 9.[1088] Israel Feinberg, general manager of the Joint Board of the Cloakmakers’ Union and an ILGWU Executive Board member and vice-president, had become an anarchist in London before migrating to New York in 1912. Feinberg had strayed some from the movement (in 1916 and 1920 he campaigned for the socialist Meyer London), but he nevertheless maintained close anarchist ties.[1089] Most of these officials belonged to the ad-hoc Anarchist Group of the ILGWU, which also included rank-and-file militants like Isadore Wisotsky, Israel Ostroff, Ana Sosnovsky, Rose Mirsky, and Simon Farber, who like Feinberg had become an anarchist in London and had earlier been a leading figure in shop delegate movement.[1090]
Throughout the second half of the 1920s, the anarchists in the ILGWU were totally consumed with the union’s “civil war.” The Anarchist Group was in the forefront of efforts to curb Communist influence, and from his post as editor of Justice and Gerekhtikayt, Saul Yanovsky wrote increasingly hostile pieces on the USSR and the Communists. The Communist “Left” within the ILGWU, he maintained, was a “cancer, that is devouring the innards of the union,” and had to be excised “with a strong, fast hand.”[1091] A single Jewish anarchist, Isidore Farbiash, sided with the Communists because, in his words, “I thought they were more effective and also I liked their slogan of a maximum of two years for all union officers.” But Farbiash switched sides in 1926 after becoming disillusioned with the Communists’ intentions. The small number of Italian anarchists in the union, however, supported the Communists’ demands for greater rank-and-file representation.[1092] A few other anarchist members, including Anna Sosnovsky, sided with neither faction and accused both of “seeking nothing but control.”[1093] Most anarchists, however, felt that saving the ILGWU from Communist control was imperative.
President Sigman’s loyalties were divided between the union membership, which overwhelmingly supported the Communists’ program, the Yiddish anarchist movement to which he felt himself beholden, and the social democrats who had long monopolized the union hierarchy and whose support was critical to maintaining Sigman’s position.[1094] In the words of labor journalist Benjamin Stolberg, Sigman “suffered from the dilemma of the born libertarian in a place of power.” Perhaps more insightful was a union member who noted that Sigman “didn’t have his own power.”[1095] Under pressure from both the anti-Communist anarchists and the powerful socialist officials on whom he depended, he resorted to startlingly authoritarian tactics. Sigman repeatedly suspended Communist members and dissolved or reorganized Communistdominated locals for “conduct detrimental to the organization.” But in 1925, under pressure from the socialists of the powerful Forverts to bring conflict to an end, Sigman negotiated a truce and allowed expelled Communists back into the union, and they were then elected en masse to the boards of several of the ILGWU’s largest locals. Israel Feinberg resigned from the Joint Board and General Executive Board in protest, and Saul Yanovsky likewise resigned his post rather than condone the concessions made to “the worst enemies of the union.”[1096] The Anarchist Group of the ILGWU, however, published its own Yiddish-language anti-Communist paper, Der Yunyon Arbeter (The Union Worker) from 1925 to 1927, edited by Simon Farber.
The temporary peace brokered by Sigman, meanwhile, was undermined by the resistance of some socialist officials and by his own refusal to agree to endorse the formation of a labor party. When Communists then led a drawn-out and unsuccessful strike of New York cloak makers in 1926, the breach was reopened, and Sigman once again suspended Communist members.[1097] For Sigman and his anarchist supporters, balancing their roles as anti-Communists and union officials with their libertarian commitments proved impossible. The activities of the Communists were undeniably part of an effort to capture control of the union, yet their campaign against the union’s entrenched bureaucracy and moderate socialist officials mirrored the anarchists’ own longtime demands. In opposing them, the anarchists allied themselves with the same leadership they had long criticized and against a majority of the membership whose interests they claimed to have at heart. And even though women like Rose Pesotta and Rose Mirsky were leading anti-Communists in the union, their defense of the almost exclusively male leadership against the predominantly female membership’s calls for greater representation further entrenched a gendered division of power within the ILGWU.[1098]
By 1928, the union’s treasury and membership had been decimated. Sigman was reelected to the presidency but resigned after the General Executive Board divided locals he had previously amalgamated on an industrial union model—a cause he held dear since his IWW days, and one of the few constructive accomplishments of his administration. At the same time, the Communists pulled out to found a dual union, leaving the ILGWU’s leadership in the hands of the increasingly moderate social democrats. In the end, the “civil war” left “several dead and hundreds injured and maimed”—including the anarchist Joseph Schneider, who was shot and killed by a Communist supporter he had forced out of the union.[1099] The struggle nearly destroyed the union, and exhausted the political capital of the anarchist bloc within it. As a critical anarchist journal later noted, “Because [the anarchists] did not take an independent position and swung their influence to the corrupt officialdom, they unwittingly became a support for the machine politicians.”[1100]
In the 1930s the aging anarchist contingent within the union made common cause with the followers of former Communist Jay Lovestone’s “right opposition,” forming a “progressive” minority within the ILGWU. Some anarchists continued to hold important positions within the organization—in 1929 Simon Farber became editor of Gerekhtikayt (for which Yanovsky began writing again in 1930), Rose Pesotta became a vice-president in 1934, and Israel Feinberg and then Louis Levy were placed in charge of the union’s Pacific Coast District—but they played the role of the “loyal opposition” and became increasingly enmeshed in the union bureaucracy.[1101]
The combined influence of immigration restriction, the allure of Communism, and the anarchists’ increasing marginality left the Yiddish-speaking movement bereft of a younger generation of participants. In 1934 Abraham Bluestein, the son of two longtime anarchists, vented to Alexander Berkman that the movement was
stagnant, stagnating, submerged, impotent, weak, ineffectual…[and] confined in its leadership (speakers, writers etc.) to a few old comrades who have devoted their lives to the Cause, and very ably at that, but comrades, nevertheless, who are OLD, who no longer possess the vitality, the strength and the energy to carry on as they once did.[1102]
In 1933 Joseph J. Cohen resigned as editor of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime amid accusations by some critics that he was too moderate and others that he was too soft on Communism. Cohen pursued his longtime dream of founding a self-sufficient anarchist colony, forming the Sunrise Co-operative Farm Community in Alicia, Michigan. Like all such enterprises, it collapsed after several years, unable to sustain itself and wrought with factions—including one group of Jewish anarchists who wanted to turn it into an exclusively Yiddish-speaking settlement.[1103]
Cohen was temporarily replaced by a committee of editors elected at the annual convention of the Jewish Anarchist Federation, which included Michael Cohn, Leibush Frumkin, Dr. J. Globus, Abe Grosner, and Saul Yanovsky. Yanovsky, however, could not tolerate the arrangement and, according to Cohn, was “brusque and extremely abrupt, cussing and abusing everybody who dares to differ with him.” In late 1934 Mark Mratchny, an anarchist refugee from the Russian Revolution, became the paper’s sole editor. By that time, however, the Fraye Arbayter Shtime’s circulation had dropped to just 5,000.[1104]
Meanwhile, both anti-Semitism and Zionism were on the rise in America. The second Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1915—the year of Leo Frank’s lynching—and by 1920 it claimed four million members, who focused their attention not only on African Americans, but also on Jews and other immigrant minorities. Industrialist Henry Ford published half a million copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1920–22, a notorious forgery purporting to be evidence of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination, and accompanied it with an extended commentary on “The International Jew” in his paper, The Dearborn Independent. Formal and informal exclusion of Jews from hotels, social clubs, universities, and other establishments also reached its height, and of course Eastern European Jews were one of the groups targeted by the immigration quotas of 1924.[1105] With the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s, “quasi-fascist and anti-Communist anti-Semitism” gained significant traction in the United States. According to a 1939 public opinion poll, 42.3% of Americans “believed that hostility towards Jews stemmed from unfavorable Jewish characteristics.”[1106] This growing intolerance, European pogroms and fascism, and the Balfour Declaration all contributed to the growth of Zionism.
In 1914 there were 12,000 members of the Federation of American Zionists, but by 1919 this had exploded to 176,000. These numbers contracted over the following two decades, but remained significantly larger than the prewar movement; in 1939 the Zionist Organization of America had a membership of 42,000 while Poale Zion counted 4,500 members.[1107] This Zionist upsurge attracted a few anarchist followers. Bessie Zoglin, part of a small circle of Jewish anarchists in Kansas City, became a Labor Zionist in the late 1920s; late in her life she told historian Paul Avrich, “I had lost my god in the anarchist movement, the international revolutionary movement, and was looking for another. Here it was.” However, she still considered herself an anarchist and argued that the ideologies were not contradictory. “There’s no conflict between the two. In fact my Zionism is my anarchism.” Nevertheless, Joseph J. Cohen recorded that, until the Second World War, “the mood among the comrades was very strongly anti-Zionist and anti-national.”[1108]
*** 6.2 Confronting Fascism
Italian anarchists in both Italy and the United States, meanwhile, were immersed in a struggle against a very different kind of nationalism. Within Italy itself, mounting any kind of mass resistance became impossible. Mussolini’s regime imprisoned tens of thousands of radicals and anti-Fascists, and placed another 160,000 under special surveillance—to say nothing of the victims of extralegal violence at the hands of Fascist squadristi. In 1927 Mussolini also founded the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo (Organization for Vigilance and the Repression of Antifascism, or OVRA), whose agents operated both in and outside of Italy.[1109] This situation led to a mass emigration of anti-Fascist activists and intellectuals, known collectively as the fuorusciti, a word roughly translated as “political exiles.”
The largest concentration of these exiles was in Paris, the destination of former American deportees Raffaele Schiavina and Erasmo Abate in 1923. Schiavina campaigned there on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, and in 1925 he began the paper Il Monito, which he published until he secretly returned to the United States in 1928. Erasmo Abate, meanwhile, cofounded the antiFascist Comitato di Azione (Action Committee), composed of anarchists, socialists and republicans. With the backing of Italian masons—another target of Fascist violence—the Comitato recruited Ricciotti Garibaldi, nephew of legendary Italian republican Giuseppe Garibaldi, to lead an anti-Fascist invasion of Italy to overthrow Mussolini.[1110]
Garibaldi, Abate later noted, was a “magic name,” and it succeeded in attracting hundreds of anarchists and other radicals seeking to take action against fascism. Some anarchists wanted nothing to do with other elements of the movement, but still hoped to coordinate an autonomous anarchist contingent that would act in concert with the Garibaldi Legion. But Ricciotti Garibaldi proved a bitter disappointment to all. Abate became suspicious of Garibaldi and withdrew from the plot in February 1925, illegally making his way back to the United States. In November of the following year Garibaldi was arrested by French police, who revealed that he had, since the summer of 1925, been in the employ of Italian Fascist agents seeking to discredit the anti-Fascist movement abroad. This stunning development led to bitter recriminations within the Italianspeaking anarchist movement for years afterwards.[1111]
Most anti-organizationist anarchists had been suspicious of working with non-anarchist elements from the beginning, and some turned to individual acts of violence aimed against members of the Fascist regime, and Mussolini in particular. Between 1926 and 1933 at least five anarchists made attempts on Mussolini’s life or were arrested while preparing to carry out the deed.[1112] Other anarchists, however, continued to work towards the formation of a large-scale antiFascist opposition. In 1929 the organization Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty) was founded in Paris by the socialist Carlo Rosselli and other anti-Fascists. Its membership included socialists, republicans, and anarchists (but not Communists), who all found echoes of their own ideologies in the organization’s vaguely-defined “liberal socialist” vision for post-Fascist Italy.[1113] One such anarchist was former San Francisco resident Michele Centrone, who left Italy for France in 1924. Around 1929 he was expelled and settled in Brussels, where he joined an antiFascist group composed of anarchists and Communists, and in 1931 he returned to France but was arrested and expelled to Switzerland, where he was again arrested and deported to the German border, before eventually making his way to Luxemburg. In a 1932 letter, Centrone reasoned “that it is better to live exiled than imprisoned.” By 1933, he had secretly returned to Paris, where he joined Giustizia e Libertà.[1114] When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, a group of Giustizia e Libertà members, including Centrone, would form the first unit of foreigners to join the anti-Fascist struggle there (see Chapter 7).
Some fuorusciti, meanwhile, sought refuge in the United States. Among the best known were the socialist historian Gaetano Salvemini, the anarcho-syndicalist Armando Borghi, and Borghi’s companion, the anarchist poet Virgilia D’Andrea. Borghi, who arrived in America in 1926, was disillusioned with United Front organizing based on his experiences with Communists in Italy and the Garibaldi Affair, and he therefore became associated with the intransigents of L’Adunata dei Refrattari, despite their opposition to syndicalism. In 1930, Borghi’s visa was not renewed and he was forced into hiding. As a result, his influence within the anti-Fascist movement was limited. D’Andrea, a much-respected writer and speaker who arrived in 1928, was not hindered legally but was in ill health and died in a New York hospital in 1933.[1115] Far more influential were lesser-known Italian anarchist refugees, including Erasmo Abate and Raffaele Schiavina.
After his 1925 return, Abate resumed an active role in the anarchist and anti-Fascist movements under the name “Hugo Rolland.” Schiavina similarly adopted a pseudonym (“Max Sartin”) upon his reentry in 1928. A year earlier Schiavina’s friend and comrade from Turin, Ilario Margarita, had arrived and taken over the editorship of the anti-organizationist paper L’Adunata dei Refrattari, and Schiavina immediately succeeded him in this post, at which he remained until the paper closed down in 1971.[1116] It is impossible to determine how many other anarchist refugees entered the United States legally or illegally in these years, but they certainly numbered at least several dozen. Giuseppe Esposito, an individualist anarchist “with republican tendencies,” had participated in the revolutionary upsurge of the biennio rosso and illegally expatriated in 1925 after becoming “the subject of reprisals on the part of fascist elements.”[1117] Maria Simonetti migrated to France in 1925 and to New York in 1930, where she became one of the few prominent women within the L’Adunata dei Refrattari circle. Both Vincenzo Capuana, a typographer from Spezia, and Salvatore Sechi, a coal loader from Lazio, fled to the United States after bombing Fascist gatherings in 1924 and 1929, respectively. Ottavio Volpin joined the Italian Navy in order to reach the United States, where he deserted in 1925, but he was arrested and deported in 1932. In 1922 Giovanni Vattuone also jumped ship in New York, fleeing Fascist threats on his life, and later helped smuggle Armando Borghi into the country.[1118]
Yet neither the United States government nor the Italian American community was welcoming toward the fuorusciti. John P. Diggins estimates that anti-Fascists made up “somewhat less than ten percent of a total Italo-American population of 4,600,000 in 1930.” By contrast, a majority of Italian Americans were sympathetic to fascism, especially in the 1930s.[1119] The Fascist regime also had admirers within the State Department, who worked with Italian officials in an effort deport Italian anti-Fascists back to Italy where they could be dealt with by Mussolini’s regime. This included a concerted attempt to deport Carlo Tresca in 1923–1925, which involved both the Italian Consul and the Bureau of Investigation, but the affair collapsed amid legal obstacles and public outcry.[1120]
The most influential supporters of Mussolini were the prominenti, who controlled much of the political and economic life of America’s Little Italies. These community leaders were almost unanimous in their admiration for fascism, but their commitment was usually more opportunistic than earnest.[1121] And, although the anti-Fascist movement was based almost entirely in working-class organizations, the vast majority of Italian American Fascists and Fascist supporters were themselves workers. The isolation of most Italian migrants—a result of both the nativist prejudices of American-born workers and the relative insularity of Italian American communities—led many to support Mussolini’s mission to make Italy a great power.[1122] In most cases, however, it was not necessarily the particulars of Fascist ideology the garnered support. According to Madeline J. Goodman,
Prominenti discovered that the power of fascism derived from the fact that it could easily be attached to other loyalties, and identities, [that] Italian-Americans found meaningful during this period. They linked the ideology to Italian nationalism, Italian cultural identity, Americanism, religion and family. In the 1920s and first half of the 1930s…Americans and Italian-Americans justifiably had little concrete understanding of the meaning or consequences of adhering to fascist ideology…Italian-Americans would come to experience fascism as part of a cultural system, rather than as a distinctly political ideology.
This was especially true after 1929, when the militant Fascist League of North America (FLNA) was dissolved and replaced with a variety of pro-Fascist cultural institutions and organizations.[1123]
As in Italy, a handful of former anarchists were among the Fascists’ ranks. Filippo Bocchini, a former comrade of Erasmo Abate’s in Philadelphia, became a Fascist in the early 1920s and in 1934 he founded the Fascist Party of Pennsylvania, running for the House of Representatives as the party’s sole candidate. The directorate of the first Fascist organization in the United States, formed in New York in 1921, included the former anarcho-syndicalist Umberto Menicucci. Finally, Domenico Trombetta, a tailor turned dress manufacturer who migrated to New York in 1903, had once been active in the anarchist and syndicalist movements but became one of the most outspoken supporters of Mussolini as a member of the Central Council of the FLNA from 1925 to 1929 and editor of the Fascist paper Il Grido della Stirpe (The Cry of the Race) from 1923 to 1941. All of these former anarchists had become interventionists during the First World War; as Stefano Luconi notes, wartime Italian nationalism served as “a sort of halfway house on the road to fascism for radicals who had become disenchanted with working-class empathy across ethnic lines.”[1124] Such examples, however, are extremely rare.
The epicenter of Italian American fascism and anti-fascism was New York City, and it was the anarcho-syndicalists and organizzatori who spearheaded the latter. Carlo Tresca was “the most premature of ‘premature’ anti-Fascists,” and the driving force behind the 1923 formation of the Anti-Fascist League of North America (AFLNA). Tresca and his followers maintained unusually good relations with Italian Communists, whom they viewed as important anti-Fascist allies and who made up an influential bloc within the AFANA alongside socialists, syndicalists, and Italian leaders of the garment unions.[1125] Pedro Esteve, meanwhile, was part of group that in 1924 founded the anti-Fascist Umanità Nova in Brooklyn, named after the daily Italian anarchist paper that had been suppressed in 1922. The new publication proclaimed its intention to engage in “all of those actions, without exception, tending to repay to the greatest criminals in recorded history, tit for tat (pan per focaccia).”[1126] Living up to their rhetoric, Italian anarchists and their allies battled Mussolini’s supporters however they could—with invectives, humor, fists, bricks, bats, stilettos, or pistols, as the situation demanded.[1127]
The antiorganizzatori of L’Adunata dei Refrattari, meanwhile, were fiercely opposed to united fronts with Communists or with Tresca, who they considered a Communist sympathizer (his name appeared on Friends of the Soviet Union literature at least as late as 1929) and a charlatan.[1128] As in the past, they instead relied on clandestine acts of violence carried out by individuals and small groups. Members of this movement were, for instance, almost certainly responsible for an explosion at the Italian Consulate in New York on February 12, 1927; for seven mail bombs sent from the post office in Easton, Pennsylvania to Italian government officials in New York and Pennsylvania; and for another batch of bombs sent the following day from New York to Fascist officials and supporters in other cities. As in 1919, these devices failed to eliminate their targets; the only victims were a postal employee and an explosives expert.[1129] The antiorganizzatori also helped to plot and fund similar actions within Italy. As early as 1929, Italian anarchists in the United States and France hatched an unrealized plan to assassinate Mussolini when the Duce visited Milan that year.[1130] On April 4, 1931 Emidio Recchioni, an Italian anarchist, delicatessen owner, and naturalized British citizen living in London, placed a call in L’Adunata dei Refrattari to raise funds “per la nostra guerra” (“for our war”)—that is, to finance the assassination of Mussolini. Recchioni himself donated a thousand dollars to the cause. Within several months another $10,000 had been collected by L’Adunata and forwarded to Europe.[1131] Some of this money financed Brooklyn anarchist Michele (“Mike”) Schirru, a naturalized American citizen who plotted with Recchioni and others to kill Mussolini with bombs, but Schirru was under surveillance by Italian authorities and arrested in Rome before carrying out the plan. He was sentenced to death by firing squad, becoming another anarchist and anti-Fascist martyr.[1132]
In 1933 another plot was undertaken by the fuoruscito Vincenzo Capuana, who had been arrested in New York in 1926 and served five years in Sing-Sing for possession of explosives reportedly intended for the offices of the pro-Fascist paper Corriere d’America. After his release Capuana moved to Pittsburgh, where he arranged with comrades to make an attempt on Mussolini’s life. He traveled to Italy via Spain and Algeria, but was arrested based on a tip from an informant and imprisoned for using a false passport. He served several more prison sentences in Italy for anti-Fascist activities before his death in 1943.[1133]
Despite the fact that the OVRA always remained several steps ahead of their plans, the anarchists pressed on. These plots were a sign of increasing desperation and a seeming reversion to the era of “propaganda by the deed,” but they were also undertaken only after mass action had failed and were based on the not unreasonable premise that the death of the dictator might seriously destabilize Fascist rule. On July 24, 1935 the militants of L’Adunata dei Refrattari convened a secret meeting in Newark in order “to start a campaign to fight fascism with violent actions,” and a new fund for sponsoring actions in Italy was begun.[1134] The outbreak of the civil war in Spain, however, soon absorbed their attention.
Although anarchists of all stripes sympathized with violent acts against Mussolini and his supporters, the methods used to finance some of these actions deepened existing divisions within the Italian-speaking movement. Some members of the antiorganizzatori engaged in bootlegging, counterfeiting, theft, and even racketeering to fund their cause. The Biellese anarchist Vittorio Blotto raised money by producing illegal liquor and counterfeit money in Florida and then Sommerville, New Jersey, and Art Shields fondly recalled an Italian anarchist and member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee “who made and sold excellent wine, in spite of Prohibition.” Brooklyn anarchist Ovidio Sanvenero and San Francisco’s Andrea Sardi, meanwhile, both served prison terms for counterfeiting.[1135] In 1926 Italian American anarchists opposed to L’Adunata and the methods of its followers convened a convention in Pittsburgh, resulting in the formation of the new organizationist and anti-Fascist paper Germinal, which was published out of Chicago and supported United Front endeavors. One of the driving forces behind the effort was Erasmo Abate, who after the conference wrote to Max Nettlau,
For a good many of us murder is murder, banditism is banditism, bootlegism is bootlegism, thieving is thieving, and not Anarchism; and, if the boys of L’Adunata think that a bandit who murders and rapes is a great Anarchist they have all the liberty in the world to think that way, but we feel entitled to have equal liberties to think the opposite.[1136]
Not even a common enemy as formidable as fascism could unite the Italian-speaking movement.
Another major rift within the anarchist and anti-Fascist movements concerned the Communist Party. From its first issue, L’Adunata dei Refrattari came out against United Front tactics and maintained that Soviet Communism and Italian fascism were virtually identical and “all the characteristics, practices, and tendencies” of the two were the same. A more cautious writer for the same paper acknowledged that Soviet Communism and Italian fascism had very different origins, motives, and justifications, but argued that both regimes were nevertheless functionally similar. “It will not be because one or the other dictatorship killed or imprisoned or deported or burned a few more or a few less that will make us favor the Fascist or the Bolshevik dictatorship with more sympathy,” he declared. “[B]e it white or red; all reactions and persecutions are done in the name of humanity, of the patria, of the bourgeoisie or of the proletariat.”[1137] These claims were bolstered by the well-publicized case of Francesco Ghezzi, an Italian anarchist who had fled to the USSR to avoid arrest, but in 1929 was incarcerated by the Soviets for his anarchist activities. For the galleanisti, it was ideologically incomprehensible for libertarians to aid the agents of Soviet totalitarianism in the name of combating their Fascist counterparts.[1138]
A similar view was held by the social democratic and garment union majority of the AFANA, which in 1926 left the organization in response to growing Communist influence within it. This split was partially precipitated by the struggle occurring within the ILGWU, and the dissidents formed their own Anti-Fascist League for the Freedom of Italy. Tresca and his adherents remained within the AFANA, but by 1932 even they had found the Communists’ “zigzag politics” intolerable and renounced the United Front, though they continued to work with other non-Communists.[1139] But for Italian anarchists, Communism posed much less of a threat than it did to the Yiddish movement; the Italian Federation of the Communist Party never exceeded 1,000 members in these decades and its influence within the anti-Fascist movement all but vanished once it was isolated from Tresca and the anarchists.[1140] Meanwhile, Tresca’s Il Martello grew to reach a circulation of 8,000 in 1929, and the rival L’Adunata dei Refrattari sustained a circulation of around 5,000 through the interwar years, but represented around 12,000–15,000 followers.[1141]
New York City was not the only site of anti-Fascist resistance, however. The conflict brought new life to the flagging anarchist movement in Paterson, where by the mid-1920s the silk industry was in steep decline. An anarchist Circolo Educativo (Educational Circle) existed there in 1925, and the pages of both Il Martello and Brooklyn’s Umanità Nova listed several subscribers in Paterson, including such familiar figures as Alberto Guabello and Sarafino Grandi.[1142] Around 1924 local anarchists, including Guabello and Grandi, helped organize the Anti-Fascist League of Paterson, which in 1926 became a branch of the AFANA.[1143] A sister organization was formed in neighboring Haledon, and both later became part of the Anti-Fascist Federation of New Jersey.
The Anti-Fascist League published its own paper, La Scopa (The Broom), founded in August 1925 with its offices in the old storefront of the Francisco Ferrer Association at 215 Straight Street. The paper was edited by the old-time Paterson anarchist and printer Beniamino Mazzotta and by Francesco Pitea (who wrote under the name “Libero Arsenio”), a poet, former miner, and silk worker who before the Red Scare had belonged to the Ferrer Association along with his brothers Jacques and Antonio.[1144] Other individuals involved included former Right to Existence Group and IWW members Firmino Gallo, Paolo Guabello, Eligio Strobino and Pietro Baldiserotto, all now in their forties and fifties.[1145] Support for their anti-Fascist efforts, however, was fairly widespread; a festa held by the Anti-Fascist League of Haledon in December 1927 sold 504 admission tickets and raised $481.71.[1146]
La Scopa was unique in its choice of weapon against fascism: humor. Cartoons, satirical poems and songs, and biting sarcasm aimed at exposing the hypocrisy and criminality of fascism were to be found throughout its pages, alongside regular news stories and editorials about the anti-Fascist struggle. It also favored the United Front, and Alberto Guabello urged his comrades to consider the merits of short-term practical action and broad coalitions over ideological purity.[1147] La Scopa railed against Fascist supporters in the Paterson community, including the Italian Chamber of Commerce and the local Italian Consul, Matteo Ricco, whose offices were two blocks from those of the paper.
These efforts seem to have some impact in the 1920s. Although New Jersey was honeycombed with official Fascist organizations—including ones in Camden, Garfield, Hackensack, Hoboken, Jersey City, Montclair, Nutley, Orange, Trenton, West Hoboken, and West New York—none were formed in Paterson.[1148] Members of the Anti-Fascist League were prepared to counter any pro-Fascist manifestations at Paterson’s 1926 Columbus Day celebration, but were happy to discover that, “Either fear, or prudence, or sense,” had prevented any utterances in favor of Mussolini or the appearance of a single Fascist uniform. In May 1927 a contributor to La Scopa wrote, “We note with pleasure that Paterson Fascism has evaporated,” but warned, “If the anti-Fascists cease their activity for one moment, we would immediately see the evil beast raise its head.”[1149] The anarchists were also aided by Haledon’s police commissioner, who was none other than Paterson-born anarchist William Gallo. Gallo had dropped out of active involvement in the movement after his imprisonment for evading the draft, but used his position within the police force, and later as a councilman for eight years, to aid Paterson’s anarchists when they were arrested during clashes with Fascists.[1150] Such encounters could sometimes turn deadly; in May 1926 Giovanni Faiddi, an anarchist living in neighboring Elizabeth, was gunned down on his way home after “a discussion” with a local Fascist leader named Castranova.[1151]
Two doors down from La Scopa’s offices Alberto Guabello ran a “Stationary, Ice-Cream & Cigar Store,” which he used to help fund the paper. It was also supported by the Associated Silk Workers (ASW), an independent union formed in the early 1920s by former Italian, German, and Jewish members of the IWW. The ASW had led a successful strike of 5,000 workers in 1924 that won, among other demands, a return to the two-loom system.[1152] Meetings of the Anti-Fascist League were often held in the ASW’s hall at 201 Market Street, and La Scopa regularly published news of the union’s activities. Despite these links, the paper faced serious financial difficulties and was unable to survive through 1928, even after it began selling small advertisements in its pages.
Almost immediately after the paper ceased, anarchists’ energies were absorbed in a renewed labor struggle when the ASW launched a strike of 3,000 workers in October 1928, winning agreements in shops employing more than half of them. In the midst of this struggle, however, the same divisions that had fractured the AFANA appeared in Paterson and twenty-two Communist Party members were expelled from the ASW; the Communists formed the rival National Textile Workers’ Union, but it never gained many local members.[1153] Earlier that year Firmino Gallo had been asked by comrades in Chicago to help edit Germinal, but an injury that put him on crutches prevented him from making the journey.[1154] Gallo was by this time over sixty years old. Armando Borghi, who visited Paterson in the late 1920s, recalled,
Bresci had come to Italy from Paterson, New Jersey. Great was their merit in resisting a hostile environment, challenging the fascists’ ambushes and casting flashes of light in the darkness. But as a rule they belonged to the older generation, and lived on memories and hopes more than immediate practical activities. And they were few in number.[1155]
The Anti-Fascist League of Paterson remained in existence through the 1930s, but was mostly dormant until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In the meantime, labor struggles in the declining silk mills occupied most of local radicals’ attention, as the Depression exacerbated their decline. The ASW helped lead large strikes in the industry in 1931, 1932, 1933, and 1934, but everything the silk workers had fought for since the glory days of the IWW steadily eroded until by 1938 those weavers who still found employment were tending six looms apiece.[1156] The material base of Paterson’s anarchist movement was crumbling, along with its ability to keep fascism at bay.
A final note, however, is needed on the strange career of Ludovico Caminita. Shunned by his former comrades in Paterson after providing information to the Bureau of Investigation during the Red Scare, the editor found employment first with the New York World and New York Herald, and then with the Il Corriere d’America and Il Bollettino della Sera, both pro-Fascist papers.[1157] With the threat of deportation still hanging over his head, he publicly supported Mussolini’s regime and in February 1923 the anarchist paper La Difesa declared, “Caminita has become a Fascist. When a dead body begins to roll down it has to touch bottom.”[1158] In 1929 Caminita and his family moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he took over the editorship of Il Minatore, a labor paper aimed at local Italian coal miners that was described by Italian officials as “far from anarchist or otherwise contrary to Italy or to the regime.” But in November 1931, a year after he was removed from the Italian government’s list of “subversives,” Caminita was arrested in connection with the dynamiting of the home of Italian Vice Consul Fortunato Tisca, though he was soon released for lack of evidence.[1159] Unable to escape the stigma of either his radical past or his betrayal of that past, Caminita remained suspect in the eyes of Fascists and anti-Fascists alike.
His last major undertaking was a celebratory 1943 biography of Amedeo Obici, the Italian immigrant entrepreneur and philanthropist who had founded Planters Peanuts near Scranton in 1906. The book referred to the United States as “this great nation” and, echoing the claims of many Italian American Fascists, argued that “Love for the country (patria) of origin is not in conflict with love for the adopted country.”[1160] The coerced deradicalization and Americanization of Ludovico Caminita was seemingly complete—except for the fact that he went out of his way to mention his own personal friendship with Umberto Molinari, brother of the Italian anarchist and chemist Ettore Molinari, and the back page of the biography proudly listed “Other Works by Ludovico Caminita,” most of which were radical tracts dating back to his Paterson days. Underneath his proclamations of Italian and American nationalism, it seems, his heart still belonged to his radical past.[1161]
*** 6.3 L’emancipazione
Anti-fascism also galvanized San Francisco’s Italian anarchists, and to greater effect than in Paterson. The postwar period brought mixed results for the Bay Area’s immigrant workers; a vigorous open-shop campaign inaugurated by local employers in 1921 seriously damaged organized labor and reduced union enrollment by almost a third within three years, but the 1920s were also a decade of expanded economic opportunities, rising wages, and greater social acceptance for the region’s Italians, who by 1930 numbered more than 27,000.[1162] One sign of this transformation was the 1931 election of Angelo Rossi, the son of a Genoese gold rusher, as mayor of San Francisco, a position he held until 1943. And Rossi, like most of the prominenti, was an outspoken enthusiast of Mussolini. The largest local Italian paper, L’Italia, was also staunchly Fascist, and its editor purchased the liberal La Voce del Popolo in order silence its criticisms of Mussolini.[1163] When the prominent Italian intellectual and anti-Fascist Benedetto Croce visited nearby San Mateo, he was attacked and beaten by a group of young Fascists.[1164]
Organized anarchist activity, meanwhile, was at its nadir between the Red Scare and 1927. Two events galvanized the local movement out of its stupor: the final phase of agitation to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti before their executions in August 1927, and Armando Borghi’s lecture tour through California that same month.[1165] Borghi’s visit was organized by Vincenzo Ferrero, a cook who was born in 1885 in the Piedmontese city of Asti and emigrated to the United States in 1905. Though not radical before his arrival, Ferrero “immediately plunged into anarchist activity,” spending time in Chicago and New York before moving to San Francisco and joining the Gruppo Anarchico Volontà.[1166] Though the Volontà Group dissolved in the aftermath of the Preparedness Day bombing and the Red Scare, Ferrero remained active and in July 1926 he published a single-issue paper, La Scolta (The Lookout), focused primarily on Sacco and Vanzetti. In June 1927 he announced in L’Adunata dei Refrattari that his group of comrades intended to begin “a small monthly publication to agitate and debate local problems specifically and those of the Pacific coast in general,” and the first issue of the new paper, L’Emancipazione (Emancipation), appeared under Ferrero’s editorship that August, coinciding with both Borghi’s visit and the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti.[1167]
In many ways, L’Emancipazione was a West Coast supplement to L’Adunata, though it attracted readers and contributors from across the country as well as in countries like Argentina, Switzerland, and Belgium. By 1931 it was printing 3,000 copies of each issue, which were distributed to over 2,000 subscribers.[1168] The following year the Italian Consulate in San Francisco declared Ferrero to be “without a doubt the worst and most dangerous element among [the] many anarchists residing in this district.”[1169] At the end of 1927 he had overseen the formation of the Gruppo Emancipazione to support the paper, and a circular calling for members and aid was disseminated throughout the Italian communities of central California.[1170] In late 1928, a Circolo Educativo Libertario (Libertarian Educational Circle) was also formed in North Beach.[1171] According to Anthony Martocchia, who arrived in San Francisco in 1930, the city was home to “a wonderful group” of Italian anarchists at least 300 strong, most of them northerners and followers of Luigi Galleani.[1172]
The Emancipation Group attracted both old-timers and a new generation of radicals and anti-Fascist exiles. Among the older members was Adolfo Antonelli, who had edited the individualist paper Nihil two decades earlier, and who now worked on L’Emancipazione and was active in local anti-Fascist circles (though in a 1931 letter to his elderly mother in Italy, Antonelli feigned ignorance as to why his name had been added to a list of subversives to be arrested immediately upon their entrance to Italy).[1173] Among the younger members was Vigna Antonio Pietro (“Peter”) Casassa, a miner born in Turin in 1899 who had no record of radicalism before his emigration in 1920, and who later fought in the Spanish Civil War (see Chapter 7).[1174] The Calabrian Raffaele De Rango, by contrast, had been an individualist anarchist in Italy and was among those who joined Massimo Rocca in calling for Italian intervention in the First World War, but unlike Rocca his interventionism did not propel De Rango into the nascent Fascist movement. Instead, he emigrated in 1920 along with his wife and fellow anarchist, Mercedes Valeria, to Chicago, where the couple’s home became the meeting place of an anti-Fascist organization that took the name Arditi del Popolo, after the armed resistance movement in Italy. By 1928 De Rango had relocated to Oakland, where he helped with L’Emancipazione and anti-Fascist efforts.[1175]
Another new figure soon to play an important role was the the Sicilian anarchist Domenico Sallitto, who arrived in Oakland in 1930. Sallitto’s father had run a small café in Calatafimi where Sallitto, a former choirboy, was radicalized by a University professor and became involved in socialist circles before migrating to New York in 1902. There he became a supporter of Galleani’s Cronaca Sovversiva although, according to his second wife, Aurora Alleva, Sallitto “was a malatestiani in many ways” rather than a strict anti-organizationist. In the 1920s he was “out day and night” working behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, and he also participated in the International Group of New York, an English-language organization composed primarily of Jewish anarchists. There he met his first wife, who moved with him to California and in 1932 gave birth to a daughter, but succumbed to tuberculosis soon after. Though he had worked in a metal cabinet shop in New York, Sallitto found employment as an apricot picker in California, where he quickly became an active member of the Emancipation Group.[1176]
L’Emancipazione was militantly anti-Fascist, praising every attempt on Mussolini’s life, chronicling the repression of anti-Fascists in Italy and throughout Europe, and combating L’Italia and other local manifestations of support for Mussolini.[1177] When Virgilia D’Andrea visited San Francisco in February 1930, her appearances raised more than $300 for political prisoners in Italy.[1178] Like galleanisti elsewhere, those in San Francisco also sometimes resorted to violence in their fight. On the night of July 30, 1927, Dominick Caffodio and Angelo Luca were driving in Luca’s care on their way to plant a dynamite bomb at the Italian consulate in San Francisco when the device exploded prematurely. Both men were launched from the vehicle; Caffodio was killed and Luca suffered severe burns and two broken legs, one of which had to be amputated. Luca was arrested and authorities confiscated a list of the names and addresses of 106 Italian anarchists in the greater Bay Area region, copies of which made their way into the hands of the Italian government. The charges against Luca, however, were eventually dropped.[1179]
But unlike their counterparts in New York, San Francisco’s galleanisti worked with liberal and socialist anti-Fascists. In the aftermath of Gaetano Salvemini’s California lecture tour in 1929, the loose coalition that had coordinated the affair formed the Associazione Libero Pensiero (Free Thought Association), headed by the Los Angeles-based sociology professor Constantino (“Constantine”) Panunzio. Panunzio spoke at an anti-Fascist conference on September 20 of that year at San Francisco’s Liberty Theater, and the Associazione supported the city’s anti-Fascist liberal paper Il Corriere del Popolo. The organization’s membership, though described by Italian authorities as “absolutely minimal,” included Ferrero and other Bay Area anarchists.[1180] After L’Emancipazione ceased publication in 1932 to make way for an Englishlanguage paper, local anarchists continued to support and contribute to Il Corriere del Popolo, which beginning in 1935 was edited by the socialist Carmelo Zito.[1181]
Like the anarchists of L’Adunata dei Refrattari, however, those of L’Emancipazione brooked no compromise with Communists. Stephen Schwartz notes, “North Beach was never conquered by the Communists. Among the Italians, as well as in the small Spanish enclave on Broadway between Little Italy and Chinatown, the ‘older’ anarchists had never lost their appeal.”[1182] In March 1928 the Emancipation Group even published a special single-issue English-language anti-Communist paper, Communist Dictatorship E pos , rather than the regular monthly edition of L’Emancipazione.[1183]
And like earlier manifestations of Bay Area anarchism, this group had an unusually strong commitment to multiethnic cosmopolitanism. L’Emancipazione stated this in no uncertain terms, defining its objective as “overcoming all race hatred for the solidarity of all peoples, [and] the destruction of all borders: to inaugurate the true and sincere pact of human solidarity”[1184] Such a pact was struck, in embryo, within Bay Area anarchism. A 1927 conference on “Fascism and Class Struggle” in Stockton featured not only an Italian anarchist speaker, but also Sam Cohen, a Jew, speaking in English. Cohen was, according to Ferrero, “the traveling salesman of anarchism, a hobo with a purpose. Wherever he went he would stop at street corners and lecture about anarchism.” A tailor by trade, he also had an abrasive and combative personality and “didn’t get along with anybody, either philosophically or personally.” Cohen provoked the ire of the Fascists and Communists he berated as well as of the Jewish anarchists associated with the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, whom he considered reformists and closet social democrats. The local galleanisti, however, admired his intransigence and militancy.[1185]
Expanding their multiethnic base, in October 1927 the Emancipation Group decided to form an umbrella “international group” representing all of the various segments of the region’s anarchist movement. This built on the model of San Francisco’s prewar weekly International Meetings held by the Volontà Group. To initiate the formation of such an organization, organizers invited all local anarchist groups and individuals to a large picnic. According to L’Emancipazione’s description of the event,
They ate, they sang, they debated. Laughter and voices mingled in the air. The Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, French, Chinese and Italian, instead of [sounding like] the Discord of Babel, seemed to harmonize together. And English of course, but perhaps it is useful to note that it was only spoken by the undesirables (indesiderati) of this country [i.e. immigrants] and that there was no trace of natives?[1186]
At a more formal meeting on December 3, 1928, Italian, Russian, Polish, Jewish, and Chinese anarchists established the International Group of San Francisco, for which English served as the unofficial lingua franca. Within a month a “Mexican group in Berkeley” and “some Frenchlanguage comrades” also joined, although the organization did not officially reconvene until June of the following year.[1187]
The International Group was dominated by the anti-organizationist Italians and a small number of similarly-minded Jewish anarchists like Sam Cohen and, after 1932, Marcus Graham. They butted heads with Russian and Polish members, some of them former members of the Union of Russian Workers and of a more organizational bent. Although the anti-organizationists blocked an attempt to make the group an official federation of local organizations with a central committee of delegates from each affiliate, the International Group functioned much like such a federation. According to Ferrero, “Each national group had its own members but attended picnics and lectures together and worked together in common causes,” including the publication of L’Emancipazione and its English-language successor, Man!.[1188] The only local organization to remain aloof from the group was San Francisco’s small Anarchist Branch (Br. 693) of the Workmen’s Circle, which was a member of the Jewish Anarchist Federation and supported the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, making it anathema to the likes of Cohen and Graham.[1189] Outside of this group, there were few other Jews in the movement; of the older generation Alexander Horr, for one, had become a socialist and run on the Socialist Party ticket for governor in 1922.[1190] Additionally, the defeat of the Partido Liberal Mexicano’s forces in Baja California and the imprisonment of its leadership left the Mexican American Left in shambles, although anarchosyndicalism remained the dominant strain of Mexican labor militancy in Southern California.[1191]
The International Group of San Francisco did, however, include the dozen or so members of Pingshe (The Equality Society), a group founded in 1925 by Liu Zhongshi (“Jonesie” or “Red Jones”) and other Chinese anarchists. They were, according to a writer for L’Emancipazione, “all young, intelligent and sober-faced, and indeed give us a good example of activity and coherence.”[1192] The group was initially founded as an overseas branch of the anarchist Equality Society in Shanghai, which included the well-known Chinese novelist Ba Jin (Li Pei Kan). Liu Zhongshi and Ba Jin maintained a close correspondence and the San Francisco group published literature that was smuggled into China, making Pingshe “part of a sophisticated network including mainland Chinese anarchists who were organizing under the threat of imminent state repression.” In 1926 the group also founded its own journal, Pingdeng (Equality), with a circulation of around 2,000. Zhongshi recalled, “We put out the paper and distributed it free of charge. We sent it to China and all over the United States.”[1193]
Like their Italian counterparts, the Chinese anarchists focused on combating nationalism—in the form of China’s Kuomintang party—as well as the growing Communist movement within their own community. But, again like the Italians, the Chinese were also engaged in other struggles outside of their ethnoracial community through their involvement in the International Group. Though most of its members lacked a firm enough grasp of English to contribute to the anarchist press in that language, some produced striking woodcuts for L’Emancipazione and Man! and helped out in other ways. Domenico Sallitto recalled, “One of the best pictures of Jonesie [i.e. Zhongshi] was at a lecture by Armando Borghi. Jonesie came before everyone else, set up the chairs, listened attentively to Borghi’s lecture—never understanding a word—then put away all the chairs and was the last to leave.”[1194] This solidarity extended both ways; when two of the Chinese anarchists were arrested in March 1928 and held for deportation, members of the International Group successfully secured their release.[1195] These interethnic relations were personal as well as political; Pinshe member Eddie Wong married the Polish Jewish anarchist Bella Friedman, and after the couple moved to New York City in 1929 they were active in that city’s International Group. As Jane Mee Wong notes, Pingshe was “Internationalist and American at the same time,” and its history “rips apart the notion of Asians as perpetual foreigners, interested only in the affairs of the homeland.”[1196]
Pingteng ceased publication in 1929, but the Pingshe Society remained active through the 1930s and briefly issued a new monthly journal in 1934. Its members supported local labor struggles, including the 1938 strike of Chinese women against National Dollar, a major milestone in Chinese American labor history.[1197] In fact, the Chinese anarchists were the bridge that initially connected the ILGWU with the Chinese workforce in San Francisco. In 1933 anarchist Rose Pesotta was sent to organize garment workers in California, where she worked under the supervision of Israel Feinberg. In 1934 and 1937 she worked in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and recounts in her autobiography how she first made contact through “a group of Chinese students” who lived in a tenement on Stockton Street that was “crowded with books and pamphlets,” including many by “Karl Marx, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Juares, and other writers and social reformers.” Her hosts were, of course, members of Pingshe, who had been in contact with the International Group of New York since at least 1927, when Pesotta was its secretary. These comrades arranged a meeting with sympathetic American-born female Chinese workers, who became the backbone of the 1938 strike.[1198]
Pingshe issued a circular during the 1938 strike declaring, “We, Pingshe, may not be in total agreement with the extent of their demands, but we fully respect the courage and persistence of these workers,” and the group called on the city’s working class to “Rise, rise! All of us of different gender, nationalities and race, unite together! Stop slogging our lives away!…Rise to fight for our freedom, struggle together!”[1199] Like their Italian comrades, the Chinese anarchists of San Francisco had broken free from both nationalism and assimilationism and articulated a radically cosmopolitan libertarian alternative.
*** 6.4 “The Language of the Future”
San Francisco’s multiethnic movement would have been impossible without the use of English as the common tongue facilitating communication between the different segments of the International Group. But for immigrant anarchists whose organizations, publications, and social functions were all carried out in foreign languages and had been so for decades, this was often a difficult transition. In 1928 Los Angeles Jewish anarchist Joseph Spivak complained of “the lack of interest in the English propaganda and the lack of the proper methods of organization” by the anarchist movement, claiming that “there are enough active anarchists in this country to build one of the strongest movements,” but that the insularity ethnic anarchist groups prevented unification.[1200] The following year a national anarchist conference was convened in Cleveland “with the express purpose of placing the English propaganda on a sounder and more extensive scale.”[1201] By the 1930s, the need for English-language literature was a constant topic of discussion.
In 1922 Joseph Cohen had tried to introduce an English-language page in the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, explaining, “I want the comrades who do not read Jewish [i.e. Yiddish] to get an idea of what we are trying to do—a general line at least—and I want the children of our Jewish readers to get acquainted with the libertarian ideas and movements.” In the 1930s a fourpage English supplement did appear in the paper, called The Voice of Youth, but young readers found it “old-fashioned and outdated, almost a translation of the Yiddish into English,” and it was discontinued after the Post Office ruled it constituted a separate publication.[1202] A more successful effort was The Road to Freedom, founded in 1924 by the International Group of New York (also referred to as the Road to Freedom Group).
This group was a coalition of Jews, Italians, Spaniards, native-born Americans, and a smattering of others, though the Jewish element predominated. Its first two secretaries were Abraham Blecher, a former IWW member who also sat on the board of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, and Rose Pesotta, who was the organization’s “most dynamic force.”[1203] Marcus Graham, who the government had been unable to deport during the Red Scare, was also a member but his more extreme views put him “on the fringe[,] always alone,” and he quit the group in 1925.[1204] The Road to Freedom Group also attracted a few younger anarchists, including Jack Frager, who was born in Russia in 1902 and had participated in the 1917 revolution before emigrating to Argentina in 1921, where he became an anarchist, and then to New York.[1205] Sam Dolgoff, also born in Russia in 1902 and, like Frager, a housepainter, migrated to the United States with his family in 1906 and joined the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) in 1917, but was expelled for insubordination and told, “You are not a socialist. You are an anarchist.” Thereupon he joined the Road to Freedom group and the IWW.[1206] Although the group counted only around twenty regular members, The Road to Freedom had about 3,000 subscribers.[1207]
In an invitation to the organization’s 1928 conference, Pesotta declared, “No language should be a barrier to the ideals of Anarchism but unfortunately, the segregation of language groups has in many cases brought about disastrous discord the larger part of which is based solely upon misunderstanding.”[1208] At the conference itself Hippolyte Havel, the first editor of The Road to Freedom, lamented the lack of an “American” anarchist movement. “There is a Spanish Anarchist movement, Italian Anarchist movement, a Jewish Anarchist movement etc.,” all of which remained separate. Meanwhile, American-born anarchist Harry Kelly somberly observed that, as a result of immigration restriction,
within the next 25 years, 95% of the present language papers will have disappeared because the foreigners will have become Americanized to such an extent that there will be no one to read the foreign language papers. The movement must be in the English language which will be the language of the future.
But others expressed little faith in the “American type” adopting anarchist ideas, and pointed out that many of the “foreign comrades” were not literate in English and therefore had to rely on foreign-language publications.[1209]
Although Kelly’s predictions were irrefutably accurate, there were two important facts that he and Pesotta overlooked. The first was that the Yiddish and Italian anarchist movements were deeply embedded within specific ethnic and linguistic communities, and could not simply transform themselves into parts of a generic English-language “American” movement. The second was that discord between the various components of the anarchist movement was not simply due to “misunderstandings” caused by linguistic difficulties, but also to fundamental doctrinal differences. In part, these differences existed because of the semi-autonomous evolution of anarchism within different immigrant communities. But they also existed within these communities—between the Italian antiorganizzatori and anarcho-syndicalists, or between the evolutionary anarchism of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and the insurrectionism of Marcus Graham and other Jewish dissidents. American-born anarchist W. S. Van Valkenburgh, who became editor of The Road to Freedom in 1928, noted this fragmentation in a letter to Alexander Berkman the following year:
There are now three [anarchist] centres within three blocks of one another. Imagine this: The Clarion—[at] 9th St, 5 doors east of 2nd Ave…[The International Group’s] International centre [at] 227 E 12th St…[The] Free Workers Centre, [at] 219 Second Ave…One from one centre will not go to another centre.[1210]
This sectarianism contributed to the collapse of The Road to Freedom in 1932. Marcus Graham had left because he felt the group was working “hand in hand” with the moderate anarchists of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and being “corrupted” by the influence of Joseph J. Cohen. San Francisco’s Sam Cohen similarly accused Cohen, who he considered “a disgrace to our ideal,” of “capturing” the paper and turning it into “a weekly English edition of the Jewish one.”[1211] Yet Van Valkenburgh complained that The Road to Freedom was “not considered by the Jewish [Anarchist] Federation nor by the Freie Arbiter Stimme [sic] outfit as being of any importance in the field of Anarchist propaganda,” and accused the Yiddish-speaking anarchists of being “hidebound Nationalists who consider Anarchism their own private monopoly.”[1212]
These differences led to constant infighting within the Road to Freedom Group itself. Sam Dolgoff recalled:
The extreme “individualists”…were against everything. Even a temporary committee of two or three comrades was denounced as a “bureaucracy.” A proposed committee of relations to coordinate common aims was denounces as a “conspiracy.” Others insisted that an anarchist should never be interested in labor movements because the struggle for better working conditions was a reformist capitulation to capitalism. Some were Tolstoyan pacifists. Others advocated assassination of rulers, expropriations, etc.[1213]
Such divergences were reflected in the pages of The Road to Freedom, which lacked a coherent point of view or program of action. Like the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, the paper tried to attract younger, second-generation immigrants by including a “youth page,” but it failed to generate interest.[1214]
Perpetually several hundred dollars in debt, The Road to Freedom folded in 1932. Several “English Propaganda Conferences” in New York, however, succeeded in establishing a new weekly paper, Freedom, the following year. These conferences included participants from the Jewish Anarchist Federation, the Spanish Cultura Proletaria Group, the Italian Centro Sociale, and the Union of Russian Toilers.[1215] Freedom was edited by an unlikely trio of veteran anarchists consisting of Harry Kelly, Manuel Rey y García (“Louis Raymond”), and Moritz Jagendorf. Jagendorf was an Austrian-born dentist and theater director, while Rey y García was an anarchosyndicalist who had been convicted at the mass IWW trial in 1917 and was deported—twice— but returned a third time and lived under his assumed name with his wife, the Jewish anarchist Lilly Sarnoff.[1216] The editors did not have high expectations for the paper, however. In the first issue they wrote, “We do not pretend that the masses are calling us or that we would know exactly what they would want if they did. We think we know what is good for them, but beyond that we decline to go.”[1217] Against criticisms that the paper was not militant enough, Kelly replied, “Far be it from us to want to suppress or modify any indignation against the present system but we have been hearing violent phrases for so long they seem rather trite to us, besides, they never made any revolution that we have heard of.”[1218]
But Kelly saw hope for change with the onset of the Great Depression, and he tentatively suggested: “Perhaps capitalism is breaking down…Suppose we assume the revolution is actually here,” concluding, “The time is ripe and rotten ripe for a constructive program that will bear the stamp of realism.” He continued in the next issue:
Let us organize our groups for production; garment workers, for instance, and then get in touch with groups of farmers, asking them what they can exchange for clothing…and place the goods in stores where it [sic] can be paid for in groceries, vegetables, etc. Laugh at it, pooh pooh it, as you will, it brings food and clothing where it is most needed and with it strength and a will to live and do things. It requires initiative and a willingness to do something besides talk.[1219]
Kelly’s pragmatism, however, did not appeal to younger and more militant anarchists, who met his ideas with scorn; he related an incident in which a young comrade declared: “’We are violent revolutionists,’ and, turning over the pages of FREEDOM said, ‘why should we be discussing this barter movement?’“ After seventeen months the enterprise folded due to chronic financial difficulties and because, Kelly noted, it “did not reach an American audience.”[1220]
In the meantime, the younger members of the Road to Freedom Group had long since abandoned it. In 1927 the Rising Youth Group was formed in New York by Sara and Elizabeth Goodman, twin daughters to two longtime Jewish anarchists. Possibly the first group of its kind, it consisted almost entirely of the American-born children of immigrant Jewish and Italian anarchists, who described themselves as “young people who work in the shops.”[1221] It also absorbed a small Yiddish youth group in the Bronx called Di Yunge Older (The Young Eagles).[1222] In 1928 the group began publishing The Rising Youth, which criticized the moderate anarchism of The Road to Freedom and the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, and the insularity of the latter. But like The Road to Freedom, it sought to reach a broad and popular American audience. “Anarchy, when it prevails,” the paper declared,
will arise from the masses. As a theory it deals with them; in practice it directly concerns them; why should we in propagating it remove it from them[?]…We must also realize that anarchy cannot exit permanently as a result of a sudden upheaval of society unless preceded by education and organization. It is not enough to work simply for a revolution. We must also prepare for the consequences of that revolution. This has been proved in actual practice by the recent Bolshevik experiment in Russia.[1223]
The Rising Youth cultivated a modest readership—including San Francisco’s Liu Zhongshi and one G. Ardito in Paterson[1224]—but both the publication and the group folded when the Goodman sisters left it in 1929. It was almost immediately replaced by the short-lived Militant Anarchist Youth, which included Jack Frager. After its demise, Frager and Sam Dolgoff helped form the Friends of Freedom, which in 1932 became the Vanguard Group.[1225]
The intellectual mentor of the Vanguard Group was Mark Schmidt, an older Russian Jewish emigrant who had returned to Russia during the 1917 revolution as a supporter of the Bolsheviks, but came back to America an anarchist. The Vanguard Group felt that anarchists’ previous efforts to reach the American public had been ineffectual and the movement would remain weak as long as anarchists were “cooped up within the confines of little national colonies” and unable to work together.[1226] The group, together with its youth affiliate, known as both Rebel Youth and the Vanguard Juniors, grew to include some sixty members of different nationalities, mostly the children of Jewish and Italian anarchists.[1227] Among them were Abe Bluestein, the son of ILGWU anarchists Mendel and Esther Bluestein; Clara Freedman, the daughter of Jewish Anarchist Federation secretary and Fraye Arbayter Shtime manager Samuel Freedman; Roman Weinrebe, the son of Jewish anarchist writer B. Rivkin; Eddie and Bella Wong, formerly of the San Francisco International Group; and Glenn Carrington, a homosexual African American photographer and parole officer who wrote under the name “George Creighton” and often spoke on “the Negro question.”
The group published the journal Vanguard from 1932 to 1939. It adhered to an organizationist anarchist communism strongly colored by anarcho-syndicalism, and rejected mainstream labor unions—including the ILGWU and the new CIO—as hopelessly bureaucratic, undemocratic, and non-revolutionary. When some of the older anarchists within the ILGWU approached the group to recruit members as organizers in 1933, they were rebuffed for these reasons.[1228] Instead, the Vanguard Group proclaimed its support for what remained of the IWW.
Estranged from the anarchists of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime—which included many of their own parents—members of the group instead forged strong ties with Carlo Tresca and the militant anti-Fascists of Il Martello. In 1934, Tresca created an English-language page in his paper that was edited by Vanguard members and ran until 1939. According to Abe Bluestein, Tresca was
facing the same situation as the comrades of the other language movements, namely, a movement of middle-aged and old comrades that is failing to attract the youth. And he feels that only English propaganda can ever attract them and draw them back to the movement.[1229]
The following year the Vanguard Group transferred its headquarters to the offices of Il Martello at 94 Fifth Avenue. Tresca had long been interested in such an effort; in 1919 he was already arguing that “the Americanization of the proletariat,” in terms of linguistic and cultural adaptation, was “a necessary, an inescapable condition.” Radical immigrants wishing to work on behalf of “collective interests, the interests of the international community,” needed to use English to communicate across ethnic lines. However, “Citizenship, [and] the electorate,” he added, “are unnecessary accidents.”[1230]
But the English page of Il Martello failed to attract much interest, and Vanguard’s circulation peaked at 3,000, the same as the failed Road to Freedom and about a third to a half of the circulation of Il Martello or the Fraye Arbayter Shtime in this period.[1231] Although both the Road to Freedom Group’s efforts and the Vanguard Group’s relationship with Italian anarchosyndicalists were significant instances of cross-ethnic coalitions, they were limited in their outcomes. Both groups focused, unsuccessfully, on creating a movement of native Englishspeaking “Americans,” and in the process veered toward a shallow universalism that attempted to ignore cultural difference. Similar strategies were successfully employed in this same period by organizations like the CIO and, to a lesser extent, the Communist Party, but with one crucial difference—both the CIO and the CP steeped their efforts in the language of “Americanism” and invoked nationalist and patriotic themes, options that were not available to anti-nationalist anarchists.[1232]
*** 6.5 Cosmopolitans on Trial
Although in May 1928 L’Emancipazione had criticized Joseph Spivak for insisting on the need for an English-language movement, the International Group of San Francisco gradually came to the same conclusion.[1233] In October 1932 L’Emancipazione announced that it would discontinue and be replaced by a new publication “using the language of the land,” and asked that Italianspeaking readers subscribe to L’Adunata dei Refrattari instead.[1234] But San Francisco’s immigrant anarchists celebrated and sustained their diversity of cultures and languages even as they came together in support of English-language agitation. For instance, a fundraiser for the new paper held on April 22, 1933 at Equality Hall featured a “three-act play in the Russian language…[a] piano solo by Macario Jr…Recitation by S. Menico [Domenic Sallitto]…Songs in German and English by Eleanor Eyre, accompanied by Louise Gerboth…[and a] Popular Balalaika Orchestra.”[1235] Here, multiethnic cosmopolitanism, rather than universalism or Americanization, was nurtured.
In a remarkable turn of events—and one that linked the histories of anarchism in the Lower East Side, Paterson, and San Francisco—Vincenzo Ferrero stepped down as editor to make way for the Romanian Jewish anarchist Marcus Graham, who was recruited by members of the International Group to take over the post (and who had, it will be recalled, been arrested in Paterson in 1919). After leaving the Road to Freedom Group, Graham had passed through a period of self-doubt and reflection, and spent his days compiling and editing An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, which he published in 1929. Fannie Luchkofsky, an old comrade from the Anarchist Soviet Bulletin days, encountered Graham in June 1926 and noted, “he seems to be very distracted, he kept on saying that he does not know where he stands in his ideals. I am afraid he will some day become a Communist. Is it possible?”[1236] Instead, Graham reaffirmed his intransigent anti-organizationist and insurrectionary anarchism, and discovered his affinity for the ideas of the Italian galleanisti. In 1927, writing under his real name of Shmuel Marcus, he contributed several English-language articles to L’Adunata dei Refrattari, mostly relating to the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Graham’s attraction to the Italians was also facilitated by his Old World roots; although he could not write Italian he almost certainly could read it, since it was very similar to his native Romanian—apparently the same reason that a 1915 article in L’Era Nuova had classified Romanians as part of the “Latin race.”[1237]
Graham spent much of 1930 “hitch-hiking from city to city from East to the Middle West and East to South,” placing copies of the Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry in public libraries.[1238] After a brief excursion into Mexico, however, Graham was arrested crossing back into the United States at Yuma, Arizona, for possessing anarchist literature—that is, copies of his Anthology. Authorities attempted to enforce his outstanding deportation warrant from 1919, but were forced to release him after two weeks when they once again could not establish his country of birth. In late April 1932, Graham made a series of appearances in San Francisco as part of a nation-wide lecture tour, and it was there that he was approached by Ferrero with an offer to edit the International Group’s new publication.[1239]
Shortly before taking his post, however, Graham enraged many Yiddish- and Englishspeaking anarchists with a scathing review of Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life, published in L’Adunata dei Refrattari. Alexander Berkman wrote a letter of protest to that paper stating, “There is hardly a person in our movement who has been a little more prominent than Graham that Graham did not attack…I personally do not consider Graham worthy of notice.” W. S. Van Valkenburgh similarly wrote a letter claiming, “certainly nobody in the movement ever could take Marcus seriously.”[1240] But the galleanisti did take Graham seriously, and considered him one of their own (although they were not always enthusiastic about some of his eccentricities, such as his veganism and his opposition to industrial machinery). So closely did the politics of the Italians and the new editor align that some critics claimed the new publication was “an Italian paper with English vocabulary,” despite its Jewish editor.[1241]
At Ferrero’s suggestion the paper took as its name Man! The Measure of All Things, from the Greek sophist philosopher Protagoras.[1242] The paper was overseen by the International Group as a whole, and despite Graham’s ideological rigidity, as an editor he was open to differences of opinion and under his guidance Man! came to be one of the finest English-language anarchist papers of its era. According to a letter from Graham to his friend, the anarchist archivist Agnes Inglis, it also reached “the largest reading circle that any libertarian publication may perhaps ever had,” although precise circulation figures remain elusive.[1243]
The paper continued L’Emancipazione’s strident campaign against fascism, both in its Italian and German forms, and repeatedly warned of impending world war as a result of its growth. Although Man! did not openly advocate violence, it warmly approved of the actions of those who practiced it, including Marinus van der Lubbe, who was accused of burning down the German Reichstag after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. The paper defended the act “as a signal for the German working class to rise against the bloody dictatorship of the Nazis,” and condemned German communists and socialists for distancing themselves from it, thereby allowing the Nazis to use the fire as a pretext to crush the German Left and consolidate their power. The International Group even convened a public debate at the Labor College on the merits of Van der Lubbe’s alleged action, which featured Graham arguing in favor of it.[1244]
Man! was relentlessly critical of the New Deal, which it called “nothing but a new lease on life to safely continue an injust [sic] system of life” under capitalism. Raffaele Schiavina, who was a frequent contributor to Man! under the name “Melchior Seele,” described Roosevelt’s policies as “an enormous conscription of public wealth to repair the abysmal cracks made into the private fortunes of the basic capitalistic institutions of the nation.” Others compared the emerging welfare state to the corporate Fascist state and viewed Roosevelt as an aspiring benevolent dictator.[1245] On these points the paper was in agreement with the anarchists of Vanguard and other groups, although many of the older generation of Jewish anarchists, while recognizing that the New Deal flew in the face of their principles, nevertheless believed it was a necessary emergency measure for workers and the unemployed.[1246]
One of the most striking aspects of Man! was its discourse on race. As anarchists and cosmopolitans, its contributors refused to believe in racial hierarchies and insisted that the freedom of each individual was linked to the freedom of all. In the words of Samuel Polinow (Polinov), an old acquaintance of Graham’s from Philadelphia’s Radical Library Group and an occasional contributor to the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, “the theory of higher or lower blood raciality suggests very much a burlesque skit.” To counter it, he argued,
The ideal of Anarchism should be to unite all isolated peoples in one solidified humanity…Only in this manner can we expect to extirpate the silly egotism which every Nordic idiot carries in his manly chest. And only in this order of society can we ever think of eradicating the racial animosity which every national ‘banner’ brings upon our stricken world.[1247]
Graham, recalling his journey through the American South a few years prior, wrote, “I shall never forget the degrading experiences that I underwent as a white man, at witnessing the mistreatment and shameful degradation that the Negro of the South is forced to undergo.” Racism, he argued, was damaging and humiliating for members of both the oppressed group and the oppressing group. Graham clearly categorized himself here as “white,” reflecting a larger shift in American Jewish racial identity that unfortunately reinforced the racial categories on which the Jim Crow system was built.[1248] But some of his collaborators attacked racialization itself. Dr. J. Globus, a Jewish anarchist and dentist who was “undogmatic, of moderate temper, [and] friendly with all groups,” deconstructed “The Racial Myth” in the paper, explaining that “Race, or more correctly racism, [is] the mystification and exaggeration of the simple fact, that people differ somewhat in the pigment content of their skins or in other small ways.”[1249] Less innovative was Man!’s antiorganizationist stance, which completely estranged it from the local labor movement. The paper called unions “a protective barrier against any spontaneous revolution action that may arise from among the exploited toilers,” and denounced anarchist labor organizers—specifically naming Rose Pesotta and Anna Sosnovsky of the ILGWU—for accepting “the N.R.A. [National Recovery Act] fascist scheme” and holding paid union positions. Graham claimed, “the Anarchist movement holds no brief for such desertions from Anarchist principles.” This deeply wounded Pesotta and prompted a spirited defense from Hippolyte Havel, who replied, “Rose Pesotta and Anna Sosnovsky did not cease to be a part of the Anarchist movement by the dictum of Marcus Graham.”[1250] Although some of the International Group’s affiliates, such as Pingshe, supported union efforts (and worked with Pesotta specifically), Man! remained hostile to official unions. This included the International Longshoremen’s Association that initiated the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. While the paper supported the rank-and-file strikers, especially in their acts of resistance against the authorities, it condemned the union’s “deceitful mis-leaders” and accused them of “selling out” the membership.[1251]
By the time of the strike, however, Man! and the International Group were already embroiled in what would become a six-year campaign initiated against them by the Department of Justice and local immigration authorities. In early 1934 agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, “evidently…having obtained the mailing list from the local Post Office,” began visiting subscribers to Man! and threatening the immigrants among them with deportation. Then, on the night of April 11, immigration officials raided the paper’s office in Oakland. This was located on a mezzanine above a small restaurant at the corner of Tenth and Jefferson owned and operated by Vincenzo Ferrero and Domenico Sallitto. The anarchist pair never turned away a customer for lack of money and fed many “down and out” comrades and workers for free, thereby barely scraping by themselves, and both men lodged on the premises. The raid had been ordered after Immigration Service agents had visited the Labor College to find out who had rented it for the debate on Van der Lubbe, which Sallitto had chaired, but during their search of the premises they also discovered old issues of L’Emancipazione in Ferrero’s room and arrested both men as alien anarchists.[1252]
The Italian Consul, which was informed of the arrests by the local Immigration Inspector only in February 1935, expressed that it was “very much interested in the deportation of this alien [Sallitto] and would be only too glad to issue a passport for [the] alien’s return to Italy,” where he would face certain imprisonment or worse for his anti-fascism.[1253] Sallitto appealed to the New York anarchist Valerio Isca, who was a fellow Sicilian from Calatafimi, for aid. Isca immediately retained the services of the attorney Isaac Schorr, who was a partner in the firm of Hale, Schorr, and Nelles, which had close ties to the American Civil Liberties Union and a long record of defending radicals and immigrants, including Eugene V. Debs, Roberto Elia, and members of the Union of Russian Workers. Schorr had previously been part of the defense council for the Italian anarchists Greco and Carillo, falsely accused in 1927 of murdering a Fascist in New York, and Schorr was himself an “anarchist sympathizer” and subscriber to Man!. He instructed Ferrero and Sallitto to transfer their case to New York, which they did. Sallitto’s daughter, who authorities threatened to place in an orphanage, was cared for comrades there while Ferrero and Sallitto were incarcerated at Ellis Island.[1254]
Isca also organized the Ferrero-Sallitto Defense Conference and held a fundraising meeting at the Stuyvesant Casino, but the event raised only seventeen dollars. As Isca later related to Paul Avrich,
I emerged from the meeting broken-hearted. I must have looked very dejected, because a block away I met Rose Pesotta and she asked me what was the matter. I told her, and she said, “Come with me. We crossed the street and went to a candy store that had a telephone booth. She called Philip Kapp, treasurer of the Joint Board of the ILGWU, and told him to send a messenger to Ellis Island the following morning with two thousand dollars for Ferrero and Sallitto’s bail. She hung up and told me to go home and not to worry.[1255]
Pesotta graciously did not mention the treatment she had received in the pages of Man!. The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born (ACPFB), a Communist front organization specializing in deportation cases, offered its aid, which Sallitto, who was less sectarian and intransigent than Ferrero, accepted. Carol Weiss King, who had worked on the Sacco-Vanzetti defense and was the ACPFB’s most prominent attorney, was appointed to his case.[1256]
With the Sacco-Vanzetti executions still fresh in their minds, American radicals and liberals mounted a massive defense campaign. Organizations like the Socialist Party, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Greater New York Federation of Churches joined the Ferrero-Sallitto Defense Conference, which had sub-sections in Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and San Francisco. A crowd of 2,000 turned out for a Ferrero-Sallitto rally in Union Square on September 23, 1936, and a letter sent to the Department of Labor protesting the deportation proceedings was signed by a hundred prominent liberals and intellectuals, including Sherwood Anderson, Alice Stone Blackwell, Clarence Darrow, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Max Eastman, Arthur Garfield Hays, Langston Hughs, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Upton Sinclair, Ida B. Tarbell, Norman Thoamas, and Mary Heaton Vorse. In 1937 Democratic Representative Emmanuel Celler of Brooklyn, a longtime opponent of immigration exclusion, even introduced a bill to congress to block the deportation of Ferrero, who testified in person before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. (The bill failed to pass.)[1257] In the meantime, the international network of Italian anarchists developed its own contingency plans; “trusted sources” informed the Italian Ministero dell’Interno that Italian anarchists in Geneva had offered to help Ferrero and Sallitto reenter Europe through Spain, from whence they could be smuggled into France.[1258]
Fortunately for the two men, such action proved unnecessary. The final say in all deportations rested with Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who had worked to liberalize America’s deportation system and “creatively used provisions of existing law to suspend deportations and to legalize the status of certain illegal immigrants in hardship cases.”[1259] And although, in theory, there was no legal way for an alien anarchist to enter or remain in the United States, she had allowed Rudolf and Milly Rocker to obtain temporary visas when they arrived in 1933 after fleeing Nazi Germany, and in 1934 she granted Emma Goldman permission to visit the country for several months. After learning of a dinner that Secretary Perkins would be attending in New York, Valerio Isca and a few other anarchists showed up for an audience with her. According to Isca, she told them:
I know why you came, and I know about the case. As far as Sallitto is concerned, we have no proof that he is an anarchist, so he will be released and his bail returned. As for Ferrero, we have ample proof that he is an anarchist—he was the editor of an anarchist paper, and so on. My advice is to have him disappear, and we will not look for him. You will lose a thousand dollars [in bail], but it can’t be helped.[1260]
Sallitto’s deportation warrant was vacated and he returned to Oakland in January 1938 with Aurora Alleva, an American-born Italian anarchist who had met and married him during the defense campaign. In October of that year Ferrero was granted a sixty-day stay of deportation to allow him to voluntarily leave the country and thereby avoid being turned over to Fascist hands, but the Italian consul refused to issue him a visa for any country other than Italy. With the complicity of Perkins, therefore, he jumped his bail and fled to Canada, then secretly returned to the Bay Area, where he continued to take part in anarchist activities and resided under the moniker of “John the Cook” until his death in 1985.[1261]
In the midst of the Ferrero-Sallitto case, authorities also turned their attention to the elusive Marcus Graham. In October 1936 he was arrested, once again under his deportation warrant of 1919. Using a new tactic, immigration agents took him before a judge and asked him to state his place of birth, and charged him with contempt of court when he refused to do so. Graham was sentenced to six months, prompting a massive campaign for his release organized by the ACLU, which enlisted the support of such figures as John Dewey, Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1938 the ACLU went so far as to call Graham’s appeal of his contempt charges one of “the chief issues of national importance pending in the courts.”[1262] Throughout Graham’s detention Man! continued to appear, published by comrades in New York and Los Angeles.
Immigration authorities once again ran up against an obstacle that confounded the very logic upon which the modern world of nation-states was built: by refusing to reveal his citizenship Graham made himself functionally stateless, rendering one of the most powerful nations on earth incapable of removing him to another sovereign state. As Man! had earlier observed, “The editor is a man without a country—and truly so, since the entire world is the only country he recognizes as his, and also that of every human being.”[1263] But even as anarchists like Ferrero and Graham escaped the clutches of the state, their cosmopolitanism seemed less and less tenable in world where nationalism was everywhere on the rise.
*** 6.6 Conclusion
Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in December 1934 revealed Italian anti-Fascists’ failure to dissuade their fellow immigrants from embracing Italian nationalism and imperialism. Most Italian Americans enthusiastically greeted Italy’s “civilizing” mission and celebrated the victory of the great “Italian race” over the “barbarous” Africans. After the fall of the capital city of Addis Ababa, thousands of Italians marched through Harlem with fireworks and an effigy of Haile Selassi, enraging their African American neighbors. Italian anti-Fascists joined African Americans in counter-protests, demonstrating both cross-racial solidarity and their near complete estrangement from their own ethnoracial community.[1264] Armando Borghi recalled that the big Italian anti-Fascist rallies in New York never reached 2,000 participants, while Fascist rallies during the Ethiopian war drew tens of thousands.[1265]
The fact that even a few formerly anti-statist anarchists could have embraced the totalitarian model of Italian fascism attests to the enduring allure of nationalist ideology. John P. Diggins attributes the failure of the Italian American anti-Fascist opposition to the fact that they were “incapable of reaching the Italian-Americans because they allowed the Fascists to exploit the rhetoric of patriotism and appear as the only genuine Italophiles.” Madeline J. Goodman concurs, arguing that anarchists and other anti-Fascists “emerged from the war with no claim to either American or Italian national identity and nationalist rhetoric,” and therefore had “little or no means of establishing their legitimacy, or a persuasive ideology of anti-fascism.”[1266] Anarchists were of course fundamentally opposed to invoking patriotic appeals, though they did try on occasion. In November 1924, Umanità Nova asked who the real enemies of Italy were and argued, “The friends of the patria today are the fascists who assassinated the patria”—thereby positioning the anti-Fascists as the true Italian patriots. Paterson’s La Scopa also featured an inscription above its title that read, “He is anti-Italian who betrays the interests of Italy, who will disfigure civil achievements, who steals rights paid for with blood. We fight against the fascist usurper in the name of the supreme interests of Italy.” But these positions were not—indeed, could not be—sustained. Another contributor to Umanità Nova echoed the conventional anarchist line by posing the question, “Do I have a patria?” and answering in the negative, and a writer for La Scopa described the offices of that paper as “the headquarters of the antinationalists.” L’Adunata dei Refrattari simply stated that it was impossible to be both an antiFascist and an Italian patriot.[1267]
Similarly, Jewish anarchists who resisted Zionism were labeled anti-Jewish, and all anarchists were labeled un-American in an era when the language of “Americanism” was bringing together workers of different (European) nationalities within what Lizabeth Cohen calls the CIO’s “culture of unity.”[1268] As Gary Gerstle notes, “the nation itself is a structure of power that, like class, gender, and race, necessarily limits the array of identities available to Americans seeking diversity.”[1269] “Anarchist” was one of those identities proscribed by Americanism—it could not be reconciled with a nationalist veneration of American government and political traditions. Over the years anarchists like Voltairine de Cleyre had attempted to appropriate the most libertarian aspects of American republicanism and transcendentalism as part of a native American anarchist tradition, but the results were always unconvincing.[1270] Anarchism, like anarchists, strongly resisted assimilation.
This was the secret to the persistence of anarchism, but also its Achilles Heel. With immigration at a virtual standstill and increasing pressures and incentives for foreign-born workers to Americanize, its days were numbered, and not even a successful transition to an English-speaking movement could have changed that. Anarchists’ anti-nationalism and idealization of cosmopolitan variety placed them squarely at odds with the dominant trends of the time. It is perhaps no coincidence that the final great struggle waged by anarchist immigrants took place not in the United States, but across the Atlantic, in Spain.
** 7.0 “For a Patria Without Borders”: American Anarchists and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
At five in the morning on August 28, 1936, the militiamen of the Francisco Ascaso Column began their attack on a Fascist position at Monte Pelato, located between Huesca and Almudévar in the Aragon region of Spain. Among the seven members of the unit who died during the successful five-hour offensive was fifty-seven-year-old Italian anarchist Michele Centrone, formerly of San Francisco, who was killed instantly when a bullet struck his forehead. Centrone, who had been living illegally in Paris and was one of many Italian anarchists involved in the anti-Fascist organization Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), had arrived in Spain shortly after fighting began there in July and joined the anarchist Ascaso Column’s Italian section, organized by Giustizia e Libertà founder Carlo Rosselli and prominent Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri. Approximately 250 of its initial 300 volunteers were Italian anarchists.[1271] Many, like Centrone and Berneri, would lose their lives in Spain.
Unlike their more famous counterparts in the Communist-organized International Brigades, foreign anarchist volunteers fought for a fundamental transformation of Spanish society rather than to uphold the Spanish Republic. Centrone’s comrades in the United States therefore commemorated him as a martyr to the cause of anarchism, not democracy, and wrote a number of tributes to his memory.[1272] One such piece, titled “Why We Fight,” was penned by a fellow member of the Ascaso Column who made it clear that Centrone had neither sought to defend the republican government, nor to reclaim Italian national honor by fighting a proxy war against Italian fascism. Rather, Centrone
felt offended by those who said that they had gone to fight and die for the prestige (lustro) of the patria—of the ‘true’ Italy—and for its glorious, but moldering, traditions. He had gone to Spain to fight for the Social Revolution: for a liberty without shackles, for a justice that does not admit privilege, for a patria with neither borders, nor bastards.
The author echoed the anti-nationalist sentiments long perpetuated by the immigrant anarchist press in America, arguing that the anarchist partisan in Spain was struggling,
Not for the liberation of his patria—a name empty of meaning, which raises no enthusiasm in the heart of the bastard of all nations: but for the liberation of himself, his brothers, his children and grandchildren from the tyranny of the policeman and the padrone; not for the conquest of power, which he neither knows nor wants to exercise: but for bread and freedom, for security and justice, for well-being and progress.[1273]
The fight in Spain, in other words, was the culmination of half a century of anarchists’ transnational activity and critiques of nationalism. Another article written by a group of Italians in Spain declared, “To those without a county we say: your place is alongside the Spanish people, who fight for a society of equals.”[1274] Anarchists like Centrone took up arms for an antistatist revolution that happened to be taking place on Spanish soil, but which concerned, from their point of view, all of humanity.
The outbreak of revolutionary ferment that accompanied the Spanish Civil War unexpectedly revitalized the American anarchist movement which, aside from Italian American anti-Fascist activity, was in the doldrums. In early 1935 Hippolyte Havel noted that many comrades wrote to him complaining of “the stagnation in our movement,” while Vanguard Group member Abe Bluestein described it as “stagnating, submerged, impotent, weak, ineffectual, torn and wracked with personal squabbles, composed of a few isolated ‘autonomous’ groups that are hardly more than pink tea societies.”[1275] Beginning in July of 1936, however, anarchists rallied around the Spanish cause and devoted their energy to raising funds and support for their counterparts in Spain. Others followed in Centrone’s footsteps and went to Spain to take up arms. But anarchists in the United States became so invested in the conflict that they tied their own fate to that of their Spanish comrades, with disastrous results. When the resistance in Spain collapsed, so did the anemic American anarchist movement.
*** 7.1 “Arms for Spain!”
By the 1930s, Spain was the last remaining European country with a mass-based anarchist movement, organized within the million-member anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor, or CNT) and the militant Federación Anarquista Ibérica (Iberian Anarchist Federation, or FAI), known collectively as the CNT-FAI. When rightwing Nationalist military forces attempted a coup against a recently-elected Popular Front government on July 17, 1936, they were defeated in Madrid, Barcelona, and other parts of the country by an unlikely combination of police and armed workers led by anarchists and socialists, leaving only about half of Spain in the hands of the military rebels.[1276] More importantly, from the anarchists’ point of view, a full-fledged social revolution seemed to be underway.
Many employers and land owners either abandoned their enterprises, were imprisoned or killed for supporting the uprising, or ceded to employees’ demands, allowing workers from anarchist and socialist unions to take over the majority of Spanish industry and to collectivize over half of the agricultural land in Popular Front Spain. Within a week of the uprising key factories and public utilities were functioning relatively smoothly under workers’ control.[1277] Even Soviet and Spanish communists, who opposed anarchists’ efforts, conceded that had collectivization not taken place “it would have been impossible to sustain the war for three months, let alone three years.”[1278]
To foreign anarchist observers it appeared, “The dream of Bakunin is no longer utopian, no longer a myth; it is a living reality in Spain.” According to L’Adunata dei Refrattari, “Spain today confirms the observations of our predecessors, and confirms these in an area that in past experiences was never even approached: the social-economic area, offering suggestive examples of practical anarchist realizations.”[1279] Over sixty years later Clara Freedman Solomon of the Vanguard Group recalled, “The inspiration of the revolution was tremendous. Here was anarchism in practice on a large scale, a true people’s revolution. And anarchism worked in the factories and farms.”[1280] Fate seemed to have given the anarchists another chance at making their revolution, and one with far more promising prospects than had existed in either Mexico or Russia. As one anarchist paper approvingly put it, “There are no Lenins and Trotzkys in the Spanish revolution. The workers and peasants of Spain are their own pilots.”[1281]
The Spanish situation was far more complicated and problematic than American anarchists realized, however. Some peasants were coerced into joining agrarian collectives by armed anarchists, and within the industrial collectives a division between union militants and apolitical workers developed. In addition, the harsh circumstances of an embargoed wartime economy in the midst of the Great Depression severely limited their productive potential. The German anarcho-syndicalist Helmut Rüdiger later criticized the CNT because its
propaganda of the first months was allowed to portray an exaggerated optimism, and account was not taken of how complicated was the problem in both social and military terms…All of this made the foreign comrades think that the Social Revolution had already advanced much more than was really true.[1282]
Furthermore, the question of whether the institution of anarcho-syndicalist practices should be a priority in the midst of a civil war was never seriously debated; most anarchists simply declared that the war could only be won if accompanied by a revolution able to inspire heroism in the Spanish masses.
But the intricacies of the situation were obscured from American view. At the height of the enthusiasm in the first months of the war, one writer called on readers to follow the lead of the Spaniards, declaring, “There are no national revolutions. The Spanish revolution is rapidly assuming an international scope. Its battle front is extending to all parts of the world. And we here, at one of its most important sectors, have to take our rightful place.”[1283] But with an American revolution not in the offing, anarchists instead undertook massive efforts to publicize and gain support for the revolutionary accomplishments of the CNT and Spanish workers, and to contribute financial and material aid to the war effort of the Popular Front (and the CNT’s forces in particular). One of the first steps taken was the creation of the United Libertarian Organizations (ULO), an unprecedented collaborative effort that brought together under a single umbrella nearly every major American anarchist and syndicalist organization, including the Jewish Anarchist Federation, the Il Martello and Il Proletario groups, the Cultura Proletaria Group, the Union of Russian Toilers, the English-language Freedom and Vanguard groups, as well as the General Recruiting Union and Marine Transport Workers’ Union (MTW) of what remained of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Only the anti-organizationist purists of L’Adunata dei Refrattari and Man! were conspicuously absent. The ULO immediately began publishing a semi-monthly newspaper, Spanish Revolution, edited by a committee that included W. S. Van Valkenburgh and members of the Vanguard Group. The paper quickly reached a circulation of 7,000, making it one of the highest circulating English-language anarchist papers in America up to that point.[1284]
The pages of its fellow anarchist publications were also filled with enthusiastic news and commentary about Spain. New York’s Spanish paper Cultura Proletaria (Proletarian Culture) was transformed into a virtual organ of the CNT’s Foreign Information Bureau and expanded from four to six pages, while L’Adunata dei Refrattari doubled its size from four to eight pages and “became a world organ for the Italian anarchist contingent in the Spanish Civil War.”[1285] During the first three years of the conflict the known circulation of the American anarchist press rebounded from declining figures during the first half of the 1930s, rising from just over 25,000 in 1935 to more than 40,000 in 1938. The English-language anarchist press, augmented by Spanish Revolution, reached its highest circulation ever, jumping from around 7,000 to nearly 20,000, while the diminished Fraye Arbayter Shtime doubled its circulation from 5,000 in 1935 to 10,000 by 1940.[1286]
The CNT also appointed Maximiliano Olay, a Spanish anarchist who had immigrated to the Untied States in 1917 via Cuba, as its full-time “Permanent Delegation of the CNT in North America,” funded by the CNT’s representatives in France and headquartered at 170 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Olay and his wife Anna, a Jewish anarchist, relocated from Chicago and invested most of their energies in the Spanish Labor Press Bureau, a newswire service intended to get accurate information about the CNT-FAI placed in major American news outlets.[1287] Whatever their failings, according to Allen Guttman “the anarchists’ analyses of the Spanish war were sometimes more informed and cogent than the liberals’ naive comments upon Spain’s complete religious freedom and dedication to capitalism.”[1288]
The Spanish anarchists and Popular Front forces needed arms as well as moral support, however. With nearly all of Spain’s armament plants in Nationalist-held territory, workers in Barcelona and Madrid hastily constructed a munitions industry from scratch by converting hundreds of plants for wartime production. But the arms produced, which were understandably not always of the best quality, were far from sufficient.[1289] Meanwhile, a Non-Intervention Pact between the major world powers, including the United States, France, Britain, the USSR, Germany, and Italy, prevented the Popular Front forces from obtaining weapons from abroad— though Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy immediately broke the agreement and supplied the Nationalist forces with troops, advisors and equipment.
Before the embargo went into effect, members of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers boycotted ships bound for Nationalist Spain and urged all other maritime workers “to refuse to ship or handle cargo bound for Spanish Morocco, Portugal or Spanish ports where fascism is in power. The cause of the workers who are now fighting in Spain is yours.” In September 1936 the MTW organized a strike onboard the S. S. San Jose in Philadelphia, thought to be carrying explosives bound for Franco’s forces, but strikebreakers were brought in from New York to man the ship.[1290] Once the embargo was in place, some MTW members volunteered for work ships that ran Franco’s naval blockade of Popular Front ports to clandestinely deliver supplies.
A final shipment of American armaments bound for the Popular Front departed onboard the Spanish Mar Cantábrico on January 6, 1937, just hours before the Spanish Embargo Act went into effect. The ship carried over $2,000,000 worth of airplanes, parts, munitions and other supplies. Also on board were five Spanish anarchists returning from America. They included César Vega, a resident of the anarchist colony at Mohegan; Tomás Fernández, who had for years been associated with Cultura Proletaria and its predecessor, Cultura Obrera; and Andrés Castro, who intended to join one of the CNT’s militias. Vega carried a pistol and some mortars purchased with the help of his comrades at Mohegan, and Fernández was apparently charged by the CNT with overseeing the shipment. But after taking on more munitions in Mexico—the only country besides the USSR willing to aid the Popular Front government—the Mar Cantábrico was captured by Franco’s navy. Those on board were executed and the ship was sunk, but not before Vega was allowed (or forced) to write a final farewell to his wife and child; Mohegan cofounder Harry Kelly remembered that it was “a brave letter and voiced no regrets.”[1291]
Ultimately, although syndicalists and anarchists emphatically condemned “the farce of neutrality,” they never mounted a significant campaign to rescind the embargo and lacked the resources to do so.[1292] On one occasion, the MTW instead called upon the government to enforce the embargo—against the Texas Oil Company, which was illegally sending millions of dollars of oil to Franco on a generous line of credit.[1293] For the most part, anarchists focused on circumventing the embargo by directly funneling money and supplies to their Spanish comrades. In the midst of the Great Depression, working-class anarchists and their sympathizers contributed tens of thousands of dollars to this end, almost entirely though individual donations that rarely exceeded the single digits and were just as often recorded in cents rather than dollars. These funds were forwarded to anarchist organizations that, in turn, sent them to CNT representatives in France. The initiative for collecting this money fell entirely to individuals and local organizations. Thus three Spanish anarchists at a Brooklyn factory took up a collection among their workmates and raised $184, and at the beginning of the war residents of the anarchist colony in Stelton, New Jersey, donated one day’s wages to the cause, totaling $167. Those without money to spare found other ways to contribute, such as a group of Spanish anarchists who donated their labor to produce 2,000 sheepskin jackets for soldiers at the front.[1294]
The Spanish Civil War, notes Fiorello B. Ventresco, “was regarded by the Italian Left everywhere as the decisive battle against fascism.”[1295] In Paterson, where anarchist activity had been dormant since La Scopa folded in 1928, a new Gruppo Libertario organized a series of multilingual lectures, performances, feste, and film showings to publicize and raise funds for the struggle in Spain, in conjunction with the revived Anti-Fascist League and Spanish radical groups. One such event at the Dover Club on November 7, 1936 collected a sum of $231.38, which was divided equally between L’Adunata dei Refrattari and the CNT.[1296]
Later that month another festa was held in San Francisco for “the companions of the Spanish comrades,” which raised $247.15, and the founding conference of Boston’s Comitato Pro Spagna Rossa (Committee for Red Spain) in September, which featured Italian anarchist C. Zonchello as its main speaker, raised $469.50.[1297] Through such efforts L’Adunata dei Refrattari, though suffering from a $1,000 deficit in its own finances, collected over $7,500 for Spain from its readers during the first six months of the struggle. By August 1937 the ULO had also sent $7,200 in donations to the CNT, while Chicago’s Free Society Group and the Detroit International Libertarian Committee against Fascism had each raised sums of around $9,000. The Spanish anarchists’ Comité de Defensa y de Auxillio al Pueblo Español (Committee for Defense and Aid to the Spanish People), meanwhile, collected and sent $11,422.07 to Spain between January and September of 1937.[1298]
Carlo Tresca and the Il Martello Group also collected both money and arms to smuggle to the anarchist militias. Il Martello raised a fund for the Italians of the Ascaso Column, and according to Abe Bluestein, Tresca secretly purchased weapons and “had people coming over on the ships from France and other places” to transport them.[1299] It is unclear how successful such ventures were. Italian-born anarchist sailor Bruno Bonturi, better known as “Bruno l’americano” because he had lived in the United States for several years, travelled from Spain to New York sometime in late 1936 or early 1937 to purchase arms for the CNT. He made contact with the Vanguard Group (and, presumably, Tresca) for this purpose, but according to Clara Freedman Solomon, “It turned out to be a plan in futility. There simply was no way to do this in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.” Bonturi returned to Spain with only a small quantity of weapons purchased by members of the Vanguard Group.[1300] In Stelton, anarchists began a fund to purchase an airplane to donate to the CNT in memory of the legendary Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, who had been killed during the defense of Madrid in November 1936, but there is no record that they succeeded in raising the necessary amount.[1301] Whatever shipments of arms American anarchists may have successfully engineered, they were clearly miniscule.
Even the monetary aid, though an impressive sacrifice, was a mere drop in an ocean of need. With anarchist movements abroad unable to provide the necessary support the CNT desperately turned, with the rest of the Spanish Popular Front, to the Soviet Union. Between August and October 1936 the Soviets began sending military advisors and critical arms to Spain, in return for the government’s substantial gold reserves. CNT representative Mariano Vázquez later declared, “our tragedy is that we could not turn to a world anarchist movement capable of providing arms in abundance, capable of pressuring the democratic powers, that could have, to put it in a nutshell, sabotaged fascism.”[1302]
*** 7.2 Volunteers for Revolution
For some members of the American anarchist movement, mere material aid was not enough. The opportunity to simultaneously fight fascism on the battlefield and defend a workers’ revolution appealed to many, especially Italian-born anarchists who were already engaged in an ongoing battle against Italian Fascists, and Spanish migrants eager to return and remake their land of birth according to their libertarian ideals. Unfortunately, precise figures and details about most anarchist volunteers are impossible to determine. Scant records exist on foreigners who served outside of the International Brigades and most migrant anarchists who departed from the United States to fight in Spain sought to remain anonymous because, under anti-anarchist immigration laws, they could be barred from reentering. As some of their Italian-born comrades later explained, “the men of action made their way to Spain in silence, by their own means or with the aid of comrades. Their names are not always famous and they could not make themselves known without also exposing themselves to reprisals.” Nevertheless, Jewish anarchist Esther Dolgoff recalled, “Many did go [to Spain] and never came back.”[1303]
I have been able to assemble biographical information on forty-three members of the American anarchist movement who went to Spain to fight, and this sample unquestionably represents only a portion of the total number who made the journey.[1304] The ethnic backgrounds of all but one are identifiable: twenty-nine were Italian, seven Spanish, three Jewish, and three Irish; only four were probably born in the United States. One well-informed source, however, relates that “several dozen” (diverse decini) Italian American anarchists went to Spain, while historian Fraser Ottanelli puts their number at between forty and sixty.[1305] The number of Spanish migrants who returned from America was also certainly much larger than indicated here; all but one of the Spaniards included in this sample were identifiable only because their deaths rendered secrecy moot and resulted in obituaries that appeared in the Spanish American anarchist press. Ironically, it is those who survived the war whose names have been lost to history. But if we assume that those who died represent only a fraction of those who fought, then these unnamed Spanish-born survivors must have numbered in the dozens. All told, at least 100–200 American anarchists—that is, anarchists who resided in the United States, regardless of birthplace— probably fought in Spain.[1306]
These volunteers were among the 2,000 or so foreign anarchists who took up arms alongside their Spanish comrades. The largest group was the estimated 600–1,000 Italian anarchists—out of 3,500–4,000 total Italian-born volunteers—who fought in Spain.[1307] Historian Gerold Gino Baumann estimates that 2,900 Latin Americans also volunteered for the Popular Front, and if his sample of 128 individuals with known political allegiances is representative of this larger number, then over 15%, or 400–500, of these volunteers were anarchists.[1308] More than 250 French and 200 German anarchists also fought, and they were joined by at least a hundred assorted anarchists from Bulgaria, Belgium, Switzerland, Russia, Holland and elsewhere.[1309]
Although the number of American anarchists appears modest, it was of a respectable size when compared to the number of anarchist volunteers supplied by other countries, as well as to the relative sizes of the anarchist and Communist movements in the United States. The proportion of Americans within the total number of foreign anarchists—between 5% and 11%— was actually the same as the proportion of Americans within the International Brigades.[1310] Various estimates place the number of Americans who served in the American section of the Brigades, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, at between 2,600 and 3,300, of whom between 72% and 80% (or 1,872 and 2,640) were members of the Communist Party or Young Communist League.[1311] The number of American Communist volunteers was therefore between ten and twenty-five times larger than the number of American anarchist volunteers—a ratio that was probably close to that between the memberships of each movement in the United States. In other words, anarchists were at least as likely as Communists to go to Spain, but there were fewer of them to begin with.
This is rather remarkable, considering the obstacles anarchists faced. Communist volunteers benefited from an international recruiting effort coordinated by the Comintern and financed by national Communist parties, which arranged and paid for their journeys across the Atlantic and over the Pyrenees into Spain.[1312] Anarchists, by contrast, had to find their ways individually or in small groups, a task made all the more difficult by a ban on all travel from the United States to Spain enacted in January 1937. Some volunteers did receive a little assistance from comrades—an Italian anarchist picnic in San Francisco on July 11, 1937 collected $156 “for our combatants for Liberty”—but most had to pay for their own passage.[1313] At least six anarchists suppressed their disdain for Communists and joined the Lincoln Battalion, usually because it was their only way to get to Spain.[1314] Others tried to sign up for the battalion but were turned away, and some, like Enrico Arrigoni (“Frank Brand”), initially tried to join but “smelled the stink of totalitarian communism under their democratic cover” and changed their minds.[1315]
Furthermore, not only was there no anarchist recruitment effort, but beginning in September 1936 the CNT explicitly asked foreign anarchists not to come to fight. Its forces lacked weapons, not soldiers, and it therefore suggested that anarchists abroad would be of greater help remaining in their home countries to raise funds for arms and working to end the embargo.[1316] Finally, few anarchists went to Spain after May 1937 because of the campaign of repression that had begun against the CNT-FAI (see below). Leading anarchists like Carlo Tresca began dissuaded aspiring volunteers by arguing that they would be of more help in the United States, and in Spain “the Communists are going to get a hold of you; they’ll find out you’re an anarchist, put you in the front line and shoot you.”[1317]
An exception to the CNT’s policy against foreign volunteers was an unsuccessful effort to recruit anarchist pilots for the Popular Front air force, which was controlled by Soviet advisors who excluded CNT members and often refused air support to anarchist units. In response to an appeal from the CNT, a group of more than a dozen Spanish and Italian American anarchists in New York secretly began flight training in the winter of 1937. The Spanish air force, however, required that foreign pilots have 2,500 hours of flight time, and the dire military situation prompted half of the aspiring pilots to leave for Spain before their training was completed.[1318] One member of this group was Armando Vecchietti, a thirty-three-year-old Italian-born miner who had lived in the United States since he was a child (and was therefore called “Amerigo” or “Americo”), and who was killed at Teruel on June 20, 1937 fighting with the Lincoln Battalion.[1319]
In addition to the few, like Vecchietti, who served in the Lincoln Battalion, at least seven Italian American anarchists joined the Italian-speaking Garibaldi Battalion of the International Brigades. Under the leadership of the republican Randolfo Pacchiardi, the Garibaldi Battalion the most politically tolerant International Brigade unit and included a large number of anarchists.[1320] Most anarchist volunteers, however, were among those foreigners—variously estimated to number between 2,000 and 10,000—who served in regular Spanish units.[1321] At least 1,000 foreign volunteers flocked to Spain in the first weeks of the war, months before the organization of the International Brigades, and most of these early volunteers, like Michele Centrone, joined anarchist militias. In September 1938 the Republican government could still count 1,946 foreignborn fighters serving in regular Spanish units.[1322] Some sources claim that Americans formed an anarchist “Sacco and Vanzetti Column” in September 1936 and fought alongside the Durruti Column on the Aragon front, but the evidence is weak.[1323] The International Group of the Durruti Column, however, contained an unknown number of American anarchists among its 400 members, including the Italian-born sailor Giuseppe Paliaga.[1324]
In certain respects, these anarchists resembled the volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Like most members of the International Brigades, they were what historian Michael Jackson calls “marginal men”: political exiles and migrant workers, often unmarried and without families. “There is little evidence,” he notes, “that any of the Americans or the exiles had much to leave. They were available for recruitment.”[1325] Seamen and maritime workers predominated; of those anarchist volunteers whose occupations are known, fourteen (45%) worked at sea or on the docks.[1326] Several factors account for the preponderance of maritime anarchists. First, anarchism and syndicalism persisted among American maritime workers, some of whom had connections to radical movements on both sides of the Atlantic, well into the 1930s.[1327] Second, seamen were most likely to have direct knowledge of and relationships with Spanish American anarchosyndicalists, who since the turn of the century had been a significant presence as firemen in ships based out of the ports of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.[1328] And critically, maritime workers had familiarity with and access to transatlantic transportation.
Of the remaining volunteers, three (10%) were miners with histories of militant union struggle, and an equal number were unskilled laborers. Most of the remainder were independent skilled laborers—a barber, a bricklayer, an engraver, an electrician, two journalists, a goldsmith, and a mechanic and baker—and a single shopkeeper. Most of the anarchist volunteers therefore came from occupations that, like maritime labor, required travel or migration, were subject to high levels of labor conflict and instability, or were easily transferable skilled trades. They represented a specific sub-set of the American anarchist population characterized by high levels of mobility.
The overwhelmingly immigrant composition of the anarchist contingent—around 90% were born outside of the United States—contrasted sharply with that of the Lincoln Battalion, which was only 30%-40% foreign-born.[1329] This illustrates not only the immigrant composition of American anarchism, but also the Communist party’s far greater success in attracting secondgeneration immigrants into its ranks. Similarly, anarchist volunteers were older, with an average age of thirty-seven, whereas only 28%-36% of Lincoln Battalion volunteers were over the age of twenty-nine—though part of this difference is due to the fact that Italian-born volunteers, who made up a greater percentage of the anarchists, had an average age of around thirty-five; Garibaldi Battalion commander Randolfo Pacchiardi recalled, “My volunteers were not younger than twenty; those in the majority, were thirty, forty years old.”[1330] As Fraser Ottanelli notes, the age of Italian American volunteers indicates that the decision to go to Spain “was neither a sign of restless youthful ardor nor the last hurrah of aging radicals. Rather, it was a serious step that reflected personal and political experiences and maturation over time.”[1331] The oldest American volunteers were Pietro Cerruti, a weaver and former resident of Clifton, New Jersey born in 1885 and previously affiliated with L’Era Nuova, and his fellow Italian immigrants Domenico Rosati and Enrico (“Henry”) Albertini, both born in 1887.[1332]
Italian American anarchist volunteers were primarily drawn from the ranks of the militants associated with L’Adunata dei Refrattari, though anarcho-syndicalists and individualist anarchists were also represented among them. Nearly all of them were first-generation migrants, but they were divided between longtime American residents and recent anti-Fascist refugees. Of those whose date of arrival is known, seven first came to the United States between 1904 and Mussolini’s March on Rome, and ten afterwards.
Among the earlier generation was an unidentified anarchist from San Francisco who served in the Ascaso Column (later reclassified as the Ascaso Division), “had the good fortune” to have known Michele Centrone in California before Centrone’s deportation, and was briefly reunited with Centrone in Spain.[1333] The miner Vigna Antionio Casassa was born in Turin in 1899 and emigrated to the United States in 1920, where he became known as a “militant anarchist” in San Francisco before leaving for Spain and joining in the Garibaldi Battalion, with which he fought at the Ebro front in the fall of 1938.[1334] Both men had almost certainly been involved in the L’Emancipazione Group and the International Group of San Francisco.
Some of the Italians, like Bruno “l’americano” Bonturi, came and went more than once in the decades before the war, fostering important transatlantic ties. Bonturi briefly returned to Italy in 1922 after living in the United States for six years, and temporarily went to Italy again in 1930, before migrating with his wife, Iolanda Prato, in 1934 to Barcelona, where the couple was active in anarchist circles. They were expelled from Spain in 1935, Iolanda for prostitution and Bruno for facilitating his wife’s alleged activities, but with the outbreak of the civil war Bruno returned to Spain and participated in the workers’ revolution underway in Barcelona before the CNT dispatched him to help oversee the Port Bau station on the border with France and then, as discussed above, to New York to purchase arms. Returning to Europe, Bonturi was briefly imprisoned in France for possession of a false Spanish passport (given to him by the Popular Front government’s consulate in New York), and then returned to Spain where he fought with both the Ascaso Column and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. This personal history clearly shows that Bonturi, like Centrone, participated in the war not as an Italian, a Spaniard, or (despite his nickname) an American, but as an itinerant revolutionary.[1335] Another veteran radical migrant was Domenico Rosati, who came to Pennsylvania in 1906 where, due to his radical activities, he was arrested for “instigating revolt” in 1916. Returning to Italy four years later, he participated in the factory takeovers of the biennio rosso and was imprisoned. Upon his release he remigrated to the United States and became involved with Il Martello and moved to Paterson. In Spain he joined the Ascaso Column.[1336]
Giuseppe Esposito, another participant in the biennio rosso, was among the recent refugees, having fled to America in 1925. Though formerly associated with the anarchist turned Fascist Massimo Rocca, Esposito became a staunch anti-Fascist and took up arms in Spain.[1337] The sailor Giuseppe Paliaga deserted ship in New York in 1929 and in Spain fought with the Durruti Column, while Patrizio (“Comunardo”) Borghi, son of the exiled anarcho-syndicalist Armando Borghi, joined his father in the United States in 1932 and then went to Spain to fight in the Garibaldi Battalion.[1338]
Details of Spanish return migrants are sketchier. According to Valerio Isca, New York’s Cultura Proletaria Group “was the largest in New York, containing maybe two hundred members, some of whom went back to Spain during the Civil War.”[1339] Among the few about whom detailed information is available was the sailor Claro J. Sendón, who first became involved in the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Argentina after jumping ship there at age sixteen. He later migrated to New York, where he was associated with Cultura Obrera and Cultura Proletaria. When the civil war broke out he immediately returned to Spain and joined the CNT, participating in its implementation of workers’ control and fighting in one of its militias at Teruel, before becoming a member of the CNT’s National Committee. In that capacity he returned to the United States in late 1937 on a speaking tour, but succumbed to longstanding respiratory problems and died in New York on November 1, 1937.[1340] Sendón’s longtime friend in New York, Alvaro Gil, also returned to fight in Spain.[1341]
The preponderance of Italians and Spaniards further set the anarchists apart from the Lincoln Battalion volunteers, who were disproportionately Jewish (estimates range from 25% to 50%).[1342] The overrepresentation of Jews among communist volunteers was probably simply a reflection of the ethnic makeup of the Communist party, which was as much as 50% Jewish at this time, as well as of the Lincoln Battalion’s inclusion of a large number of Jewish university students, who made up nearly 18% of its volunteers, whereas there were no known students among the anarchist volunteers.[1343] The anarchist contingent, by contrast, had a noticeable lack of Jews. Joseph J. Cohen recalled, “Younger comrades journeyed to help in the struggle, with material not obtainable in Spain through the ‘Non-Intervention’ blockade,” but the names of only three Jewish anarchists who went Spain as military volunteers have been uncovered: thirty-threeyear-old IWW longshoreman Virgil Morris, who joined the Lincoln Battalion; eighteen-year-old Vanguard Group member Douglas Stearns (also known as “Douglas Clark”), who fought with a militia organized by the leftwing anti-Soviet Partido Obrero de Unifación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, or POUM) and then with the CNT’s 227th Muerte Battalion; and Justus Kates, who fought with an unidentified anarchist militia.[1344]
On the face of it, the absence of Jewish volunteers is striking. Yiddish was still the third most widely-used language in the American anarchist press (behind Italian and English), and the English-speaking anarchist movement was composed largely of second-generation Jews. Furthermore, scholarship on foreign volunteers has strongly emphasized the role of Jews in the International Brigades and the importance that their ethnic identity played in their opposition to fascism.[1345] However, this reductionist ethnic interpretation has also been criticized, especially with reference to American Jewish volunteers, who often did not strongly identify as Jews.[1346] Additionally, the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement was both aged and atrophied by the time of the Spanish Civil War—the circulation of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime had fallen to only 5,000 in 1935, about half that of the Italian-language anarchist press, and unlike the Italian movement there was not a clandestine inflow of militants from Europe. Furthermore, Yiddish anarchism had long since abandoned revolutionary rhetoric in favor of an evolutionary program, producing few militants prepared to kill or be killed on the Spanish battlefield. It is not surprising, therefore, that the few Jewish volunteers were young, second-generation anarchists associated with English-speaking organizations.
A handful of other English-speaking volunteers also fought. The best-known was thirtyseven-year-old Irish migrant Patrick Read, a former Communist and veteran of both the First World War and Irish War of Independence, who in the United States had become a committed anarchist and IWW member. Read originally went to Spain as a member of the Socialist Party’s abortive Eugene V. Debs Column, which failed to materialize, and first fought with a French battalion of the International Brigades before his political views got him transferred to the more tolerant Lincoln Battalion, where he became head of communications and was renowned for his bravery. Despite the fact that “most Lincolns despised the anarchists and had considered them virtual enemies of the Republic,” Lincoln volunteer Harry Fischer thought Read was “probably the best soldier in the battalion,” and fellow volunteer Lenny Lamb recalled: “The anarchists I knew were incredibly courageous…in his actions [Read] was brave and wonderfully generous and very, very likable.”[1347]
Other anarchist IWW members who belonged to the Lincoln Battalion included the sailor Harry Owens, who was killed in action sometime in 1937, and Raymond Elvis Ticer, a sailor based out of San Francisco.[1348] Vanguard Group member Gilbert Connolly, said to be a grandson of Irish revolutionary James Connolly, fought in an unidentified anarchist unit.[1349] In addition to Owens and the others listed above, there were at least nine other American IWW members who served in the International Brigades, some or all of whom may have identified as anarchists.[1350]
Furthermore, several International Brigade volunteers embraced anarchism or joined anarchist units while in Spain.[1351] At least one Lincoln Battalion member reportedly deserted to join a CNT unit, and volunteer Albert Wallach is said to have made contact with the CNT offices in Barcelona in an attempt to do the same.[1352] Lincoln Battalion and Communist Party member Bernard Spaulding took out membership in the CNT while in Spain and, according to Robert Rosenstone, another volunteer began attending anarchist meetings and “others were coming under the influence of the doctrines he adopted.”[1353] Giuseppe (“Peppino”) Sallustro, an Italianborn communist who lived in the United States for the less than a year before leaving to join the Garibaldi Battalion, also forsook communism for anarchism while in Spain.[1354] Significantly, there are no known no instances of the reverse taking place.
Evaluating the contributions of American anarchists to the Spanish struggle is difficult. On the one hand, their numbers were far too small to have made any measurable difference in the course of the war. On the other, their very presence brings attention to the decisive role of the anarchist militias, which have been, at best, ignored in most histories of the war, and at worst, misrepresented and ridiculed.[1355] George Orwell, who served in a militia organized by the POUM, afterwards wrote:
The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of ‘revolutionary’ discipline that the militias stayed in the field at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing to keep them, except class loyalty.[1356]
Foreign-born anarchists were among those who stayed in the field during this period, and they merit more serious attention and appreciation than most historians have granted them.
Michele Centrone was just one of those who died in this effort, which also claimed the lives of 16% of known American anarchist volunteers.[1357] In giving their lives they made a direct contribution, however small, to holding fascism at bay months before aid arrived from other sources. Just as important, from the anarchists’ perspective, they were giving the social revolution that they had spent decades pursuing a chance to develop behind the lines. These explicitly revolutionary aspirations were in marked contrast to those of the International Brigades, whose primary goal was defense of the republican state.[1358] According to disillusioned Lincoln Battalion veteran William Herrick,
The irony is that though nearly all of my comrades in the International Brigades were Leninists and Stalinists, believers in the great proletarian revolution, only a few…recognized that what had taken place in Catalonia and Aragon led by the ridiculed Anarchists…was that very proletarian revolution, the thought of which permeated every moment of our lives.[1359]
From the beginning, however, anarchists perceived the war as a revolutionary situation, for which many were willing to risk life and limb.
*** 7.3 Women and Noncombatants
The fact that all of the volunteers discussed above were men should not go unnoted. Spanish female fighters were present in Popular Front militias since the first days of the war, and many remained even after all women were ordered to be withdrawn during the militarization of the militias that began in late 1936. The image of the armed miliciana (militia woman) quickly became iconic within the international anarchist press. However, as in Spain, such images were not used to encourage women to take up arms; rather, they “seduced, enticed, or shocked men into carrying out their military duties.” By December 1936 “foreign volunteers were being warned that women could not join the militia,” ostensibly because of problems with prostitution and venereal disease at the front.[1360]
In the American anarchist press, images of female fighters were rarely accompanied by mention of their activities in writing, and the accomplishments of Spanish anarchist women in general were rarely noted. Thus the Spanish-language Cultura Obrera featured no articles on female fighters and rarely mentioned the activities of the Spanish anarchist-feminist organization Mujeres Libres (Free Women).[1361] One piece in Cultura Obrera praised women for aiding men “in their struggles for freedom,” clearly relegating female activity to a secondary role. “You can organize auxiliary committees,” it suggested to female readers, “composed exclusively of women for business in which they are physically and spiritually better trained than men to carry to a successful conclusion.” Fighting on the Spanish battlefront was clearly not included in this category of activities.[1362] In an article praising the “valiant maliciano (militiaman),” Tampa’s trilingual anarchist anti-Fascist paper La Riscossa saluted “all those brave ones who…rushed from the outset to assist the most ‘manly’ (‘macho’) people of the earth”—explicitly linking the Spanish struggle to masculinity.[1363] L’Adunata dei Refrattari and Il Martello simply never mentioned women in relation to combat, showing that many male Italian anarchists’ views of revolutionary activity remained as strongly gendered.
Nevertheless, at least forty-two Italian-born women fought in Spain (1.2% of all known Italian volunteers), including at least ten anarchists, who constituted a disproportionate 38.5% of all female volunteers whose politics are known.[1364] In other words, despite the patriarchal attitude of many of their male comrades, Italian anarchist women were more willing to volunteer for combat than Italian women of other political groups, and some of them found enough support within anarchist ranks to make this desire a reality. This appears to have been true of at least one Italian American woman. Maria Giaconi, the daughter of central Italian peasants, had joined a brother in Jessup, Pennsylvania in 1912 and soon became involved in the Italian anarchist community there. Moving to nearby Peckville, she became a fiery anarchist speaker, married the noted local anarchist Adolfo Ligi, and corresponded with such anarchist luminaries as Errico Malatesta and Camillo Berneri, leading the Italian government to categorize her among those “dangerous subversives capable of committing terrorist acts (attentati).” Then, in 1936, she abruptly disappeared, eluding federal agents and private detectives monitoring her activities. That October, Italian authorities received word from “confidential sources” that Giaconi had gone to Spain and joined “a fighting detachment against General Franco’s uprising.” By March of the following year she was reported to be living in New York “with a daughter married to a sailor.” Although evidence confirming Giaconi’s presence in Spain is lacking, it seems likely given her reputation for militancy, her connection to Berneri, the timing of her disappearance, and the maritime connections of her son-in-law.[1365]
Giaconi’s activities within the largely masculine world of Italian American anarchism, and her likely participation in a Spanish militia, are testaments to decades of work on the part of anarchists of both sexes who struggled to place women on an equal footing with men. If she did indeed take up arms in Spain, Giaconi was the only known American female of any political persuasion to do so. Her exceptional defiance of gender norms was also probably rooted in the peculiarities of the anarchist community in Jessup; according to Diva Agostinelli, who was born there in 1921, local male anarchists were notable for their egalitarian treatment of women.
(When Agostinelli moved to Philadelphia, however, she found “it was a more traditional Italian culture and [male anarchists’] attitude towards women stank.”)[1366] The absence of other women able to follow Giaconi’s example, however, highlights the persistence of more traditional gender roles within most anarchist communities.
Some female anarchists went to Spain in other capacities, as did some men. Anarchist David Koven, who was eighteen years old when the war broke out, recalled that several Jewish anarchist women he knew in New York “took themselves to Spain when the anti-fascist struggle broke out in 1936 and worked as nurses in the field hospitals set up by the revolutionary forces.” In doing so they helped to meet the Popular Front’s critical need for medical personnel—a need far greater than that for soldiers.[1367] But this was also a highly gendered role. The Spanish Popular Front slogan, “Men to the Front, Women to the Home Front,” applied just as much to Americans and other internationals as it did to Spaniards. As Shirley Magnini notes, “Women—from both sides—were considered ‘men’s helpers,’ not protagonists of the war.”[1368] Almost all foreign women were relegated to caretaking roles such as nursing. Yet, just as a minority of women like Maria Giaconi and other milicianas broke out of established gender roles, so too did some men.
On November 7, 1938 a group of male Italian anarchists in Barcelona, including Italian American volunteer Armando Rodriguez, founded the Campo ‘L’Adunata dei Refrattari’— named for the Italian American publication—to care for the increasing number of orphans created by the war, thus taking on a traditionally feminine, maternal role.[1369]
The Jewish anarchist Selma Cohen came with her partner, twenty-seven year-old Abe Bluestein, to work at the CNT’s headquarters in Barcelona. Bluestein had been elected as the delegate of New York’s Libertarian Group to an international anarchist conference scheduled to be held in Barcelona in 1937. He was also recruited, on the basis of the recommendation of Fraye Arbayter Shtime editor Mark Mratchny, to take over the English-language desk of the CNT’s Foreign Information Bureau. Mratchny, a veteran of the Russian Revolution, had met the German anarcho-syndicalist Augustin Souchy, acting head of the Bureau, when the latter had visited Russia in 1920. Cohen and Bluestein’s arrival in Barcelona was thus facilitated by transnational anarchist networks established over the previous two decades.[1370] Their main function was to put out the English-language version of the monthly I.W.M.A. Bulletin of Information and to conduct English radio broadcasts that could be heard in the United States and elsewhere. They also toured the collectivized farms of Aragon, about which Bluestein wrote for the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, and their office became an unofficial welcoming center for Englishspeaking foreigners—as well as for disillusioned International Brigade members seeking to leave the country.[1371]
A conference of Spanish anarchists convened in New York on January 24, 1937 also elected Luis Zugadi, Marcelino García, and the Italian anarchist Enrico Arrigoni to participate in the scheduled Barcelona congress and to report on Spanish events for Cultura Proletaria, which García edited. Arrigoni, who had spent time in Barcelona in 1920, briefly served in an anarchist militia, but all three men wrote extensively for the American anarchist press.[1372] Another unidentified American anarchist who wrote under the name “Beobachter” also contributed a number of reports from Spain. An additional influential eyewitness was Emma Goldman who, though deported nearly two decades earlier, remained a respected figure in the American movement and regularly contributed to its press. She arrived in Spain in September 1936 and tirelessly campaigned on behalf of the CNT-FAI.[1373] All of these writers’ articles, in conjunction with occasional letters from foreign volunteers and the CNT’s own press releases, were instrumental in shaping American anarchist opinion regarding the Spanish Civil War and the revolutionary efforts of the Spanish workers.
Other veteran anarchists also wished to go to Spain, but were unable to do so. Both Rudolf Rocker and Rose Pesotta hoped to see the Spanish revolution firsthand, but Goldman told Rocker that he would be of greater benefit agitating abroad, and International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union president David Dubinsky forbade Pesotta from making the trip.[1374] Carlo Tresca was similarly anxious to get to Spain, but was unable to obtain a passport that would allow him to travel to Europe. After some trepidation Armando Borghi also prepared to go to Spain, until events in Barcelona in May 1937 suddenly and irreparably changed anarchist views of the struggle there.[1375]
*** 7.4 The May Days
At the end to September 1936, the CNT-FAI made the historic and controversial decision to participate in the government of semi-autonomous Catalonia, and in November it entered the national Popular Front government in Madrid. This unprecedented compromise of anarchist principles was forced upon the CNT-FAI because its leaders did not believe the organization was strong enough to fight on two fronts against both Franco and the various parties of the Popular Front, and it also did not wish to allow the latter to use state power for their own benefit and against the popular revolution already underway. Thus, in the name of preserving both antiFascist unity and the revolutionary gains of the Spanish workers, several anarchist militants awkwardly accepted governmental posts.[1376] This political collaboration caused many in America to waver in their wholesale rejection of the Popular Front strategy, and most anarchists were reluctant to criticize their Spanish comrades given the exigencies of the situation. But as the influence of the heretofore marginal Spanish and Catalan Communist parties grew within the two governments, some began to voice their misgivings.
Rudolf Rocker warned that the Soviet Union, through its influence in Spain, would seek to terminate the social revolution in an attempt to appease Western nations so that they might intervene and undermine the threat Nazi Germany posed to the USSR.[1377] Emma Goldman, with the experience of the Russian Revolution very much in mind, also warned her American comrades that the “villainous gang” of Communists in Spain would attempt to “sabotage” the revolution if given the chance. Even Cultura Proletaria, which never wavered in its support of the CNT’s decisions, cited the Russian example to warn its readers against “the wolves of Moscow.”[1378] Yet both Rocker and Goldman, along with writers like Enrico Arrigoni and Maximiliano Olay, staunchly defended the anarchists’ collaboration with political parties as a necessity imposed by the war.[1379]
A growing number of others, however, began criticizing this policy as it became increasingly clear that the CNT was enmeshed in “a one-sided ‘unity’, in which the C.N.T….made all the concessions, and from which the political parties reaped the benefits.” French anarcho-syndicalists were particularly vocal in this regard, and some exiled veterans of the Russian Revolution warned that history had demonstrated that collaboration with antianarchist parties was suicidal.[1380] Surprisingly, both Man! and L’Adunata dei Refrattari, usually outspoken in their condemnations of those who deviated from anarchist principles, were slow to criticize the Spanish anarchists. However, in November 1936 L’Adunata said of the CNT-FAI’s participation in the government: “It does not take many words…to show that this is not an anarchist program,” and the following month editor Raffaele Schiavina defensively argued, “To say that the participation of the anarchists in the anti-Fascist government of Spain is an exception (deroga) to the principles of anarchism, is neither an insult nor a crime against the heroic defenders of Madrid or the valiant fighters of the Aragon front, it is a simple statement of fact.” By April 1937 the paper was accusing the CNT of shortsighted “political opportunism” and exchanging polemics with Cultura Proletaria.[1381]
Within Spain, meanwhile, foreign anarchists began clashing with their Spanish comrades over the CNT-FAI’s policies. An Italian member of the Ascaso Column commented that the Spanish anarchists held a “rather dismal opinion of the Italian volunteers” and were “scathingly and contemptuously unappreciative of the mentality of their Italian comrades.” Because most Italian American volunteers came from the ranks of the ultra-revolutionary galleanisti, they were vigilantly critical of deviations from a purely anarchist position and the CNT-FAI’s participation in the Popular Front governments quickly elicited their criticism.[1382] Equally as upsetting to these Italian volunteers was the state-mandated incorporation of the militias into a regimented and centralized Popular Army beginning in late 1936. Additionally, many of the Italians were stationed on the Aragon front, where the lack of action—due in part to republican and communist reluctance to supply the anarchists there with arms—fostered further discontent. Opposition to the process of militarization led most members of the Italian Battalion of the Ascaso Division (now the 149th Brigade) to quit the front in April 1937, after carrying out one last offensive as an autonomous, anarchist unit. Enrico Arrigoni, who visited what remained of the Battalion at the end of the month, reported that “most of them had returned to Barcelona a few days ago, upset by the forced inactivity in which they have remained for many months.”[1383]
Shortly after this visit, a special May Day edition of Cultura Proletaria printed an article by Arrigoni arguing that the revolution taking place in Spain was moving forward and in no immediate danger.[1384] Almost as soon as his words saw print, however, Arrigoni learned firsthand that he was woefully incorrect. On May 3, Barcelona’s communist chief of police dispatched officers to evict CNT members from the city’s Telephone Exchange, as part of an ongoing effort to dislodge anarchists from strategic posts. The Telephone Exchange had been retaken from Nationalist soldiers after a bloody fight during the first days of the war by workers headed by the anarchist Durruti, and had been repaired and controlled since that time by anarchist and socialist union members. It had also been legally recognized by the Catalan government and was operating under the auspices of an official government representative.[1385] The workers therefore saw the raid as an outrage and resisted with force, and the conflict quickly spilled out into street fighting throughout the city, pitting anarchists and members of the POUM against Catalan police and communists. The fighting lasted several days before CNT-FAI leaders negotiated a ceasefire, and it left at least 400 dead, 1,000 wounded, and thousands imprisoned, while crippling the strength and influence of both the POUM and the anarchists.[1386] The international anarchist community, and Italians in particular, were especially outraged at the arrest and assassination Camillo Berneri, one of the most prominent living Italian anarchist intellectuals and a regular contributor to the Italian American anarchist press.[1387]
A number of American anarchists were caught up in the events of the “May Days.” Abe Bluestein arrived in Barcelona on April 30, 1937, ahead of Selma Cohen, and set out to begin work at the CNT’s Foreign Information Bureau the following Monday—May 3. On his way to the anarchists’ Barcelona headquarters he encountered pitched battles in the streets and watched in horror as anarchists were shot down while attempting, like him, to enter the Casa CNT-FAI. Fortunately, however, Bluestein ran into Enrico Arrigoni, who led him into the building safely by another route. Bluestein remained in the Casa CNT-FAI throughout the fighting, giving nightly radio broadcasts about events outside.[1388] Arrigoni also wrote of the violence in graphic detail for Cultura Proletaria, and L’Adunata dei Refrattari afterwards published a firsthand account by Aldo Aguzzi, one of about 200 Italian anarchists who had recently quit the Ascaso Division and were in Barcelona when the conflict—in which several members of this group were killed—began.[1389]
The government of Catalonia claimed that the May Days were an attempt by the POUM and its anarchist allies to seize power, and viewed the fighting as a threat to the republic’s ability to sustain its struggle against the Nationalists. Meanwhile, former anarchist Robert Minor, now the highest ranking American Communist in Spain, presented the Comintern’s version of events to the members of the Lincoln Battalion, claiming, “The uprsing was started by the Trotskyite [sic] POUM, and the ‘uncontrollables’ among the Anarchists, under the direction of Franco’s fifth column and Italian and Nazi secret agents.”[1390] As a result of such accusations the POUM was outlawed, the CNT was forced out of both the Barcelona and Madrid governments, and a wave of armed repression forcibly dissolved many collectivized enterprises, destroying anarchist hopes of sustaining and expanding the social revolution. Nevertheless, the majority within the CNT-FAI continued to believe that the military imperatives of the situation necessitated any and all concessions required to maintain a united front against the Nationalists, including cooperation with communists.
After the May Days, George Orwell observed, “there was a peculiar evil feeling in the air—an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred.” The international anarchist congress scheduled to convene in Barcelona was cancelled, and many dispirited foreign anarchists left Spain.[1391] In July 1937 L’Adunata dei Refrattari printed a letter from an Italian member of the Ascaso Division who reported, “Many of our brave comrades still remain on the front, individually or in small groups. Soon others will leave, including some of those who came from America.”[1392]
Those who remained risked reprisals at the hands of republicans or the communists’ secret police, who increasingly viewed any expression of dissent as the divisive work of Fascist spies. Enrico Arrigoni, for instance, was arrested in late September or early October after stridently condemning the “counterrevolutionary” Popular Front. Imprisoned for two months, he was released only after Bluestein and Emma Goldman convinced the American Consul in Barcelona to intervene. Arrigoni had attained American citizenship years before, using a forged Columbian birth certificate he had purchased in Havana—ironically, therefore, he was delivered from the wrath of supposed fellow revolutionaries by the hands of a government against which he had campaigned for decades, by asserting rights of citizenship in which he did not believe.[1393] During his time in prison Arrigoni wrote a series of articles for Cultura Proletaria about the anarchist inmates of the Carcel Modelo, signed “Un Encarcelado” (One of the Imprisoned). The paper, however, made no mention that Arrigoni was the author or even that he had been arrested, apparently for fear of reprisals against him so long as he remained in Spain.[1394]
Other arrests followed. Janet Hardy, a “little Polish comrade” who may have been a companion of Arrigoni, was arrested in July or August of 1938 on charges of “espionage.”[1395] Bruno “l’americano” Bonturi was also reportedly arrested on similar charges.[1396] IWW and Sailors’ Union of the Pacific member Lloyd (“Sam”) Usinger, an anarchist who had run the naval blockade on Spain and then possibly served in the International Brigades, was imprisoned for his work on behalf of the CNT, which included smuggling disaffected members of the International Brigades out of Spain. One of those Usinger had attempted to help was an Abraham Lincoln Battalion volunteer named Albert Wallach, who had repeatedly deserted and then affiliated with the CNT. Wallach, however, was discovered while trying to stow away on a ship and may have been executed by a fellow American volunteer, although historians of the Lincoln Battalion continue to argue over the evidence in this case.[1397]
There were several other reported instances of political repression within the International Brigades, but both the degree of persecution and the evidence supporting the allegations varies. According to Robert Rosenstone’s highly favorable account of the Lincoln Battalion, one volunteer was slated for execution because he had been attending anarchist meetings and spreading anticommunist ideas within the unit. However, a blizzard intervened and the unsuspecting soldier was sent back to the United States due to severe frostbite, unaware of his narrow escape from death.[1398] Both the IWW newspaper, The Industrial Worker, and the anarchist paper Challenge, founded by Abe Bluestein after his return from Spain, carried reports of an incident in which three anarchist and syndicalist battalion members, including IWW members Ivan Silverman and Harry Owens, were killed after being intentionally ordered into an exposed position.[1399] These men may, however, simply have fallen victim to what one historian has called the “lethal incompetence demonstrated by brigade high command.”[1400]
Other anarchists in the International Brigades faced less serious reprisals. Virgil Morris, a dissatisfied Lincoln Battalion volunteer who was vocally critical of the unit’s communist leadership, was repeatedly arrested for both desertion and on suspicion of spying, but survived the war.[1401] Irish anarchist and IWW member Pat Read was transferred from a French unit to the Lincoln Battalion because of his political views, and was eventually ejected from the American unit for “always talking against the Communist Party,” despite his sterling reputation as a soldier.[1402] His fellow Lincoln Battalion member Bernard Spaulding, by contrast, took out membership in the CNT but apparently faced no disciplinary action as a result.[1403]
In all, at least five of the American anarchists in Spain about whom information is available were imprisoned by the republican government or Soviet intelligence agents, most of them for voicing dissenting opinions. Their fellow foreign anarchist volunteers were no luckier; at least thirty-eight French anarchists were imprisoned in Spain and “about thirty” German anarchists suffered the same fate.[1404] With the dénouement of the Spanish anarchist movement, the dissolution of many industrial and agricultural collectives, and the death or imprisonment of a number of their comrades from the United States, American anarchists came to view the Spanish conflict in an entirely new light. For them, it had been transformed from an epic battle between anarcho-syndicalist revolution and fascism, into a desperate struggle against both fascism and communism (the anti-anarchist republicans were largely overlooked) in which the very survival of Spanish anarchism hung in the balance, and within which the goal of social revolution all but disappeared. After the May Days, Carlo Tresca lamented, “Ah! Anarchists have yet to undergo much torment before finding a ‘patria’.”[1405]
*** 7.5 Fascismo Rojo
Enrico Arrigoni gloomily concluded from his prison cell in Madrid, “As in Russia, the Communist counterrevolution is marching.”[1406] Arrigoni was not the only observer to draw parallels between events in Spain and the fate of anarchism in the Russian Revolution. San Francisco’s Man! declared, “Our Anarchist comrades in Spain have so quickly forgotten what happened to the anarchist peasantry of Ukrainia [sic] as well as to the entire Anarchist movement in Russia,” adding, “The bloody massacre of Kronstadt has been repeated in Barcelona.” L’Adunata dei Refrattari agreed that “the analogy between the ferocious repression of Kronstadt in 1921 and the bestial repression of Barcelona in 1937 is incontestable.”[1407] Emma Goldman similarly wrote to Rudolf Rocker that “it is a repetition of Russia with the identical method of Lenin against the Anarchists.”[1408] Seen through the lens of Russia, history appeared to be tragically repeating itself in Spain, and after the May Days many anarchists viewed communism as an even more immediate enemy than fascism.
Though anarchist writers in the United States had noted similarities between communism and fascism since the latter first appeared, and had even used the term “Red Fascism” to describe the Soviet Union long before it became commonplace in America’s Cold War vocabulary, the two became even more synonymous with one another in the anarchist mind after the May Days.[1409] Spanish Revolution declared, “The line between Franco and Spanish Stalinists is rapidly being obliterated,” and, “More than anyone else the Spanish anarchists should have been aware of the Fascist trend of the Moscow government.” It further reckoned that, “Were it not for the predatory design of German Fascism upon Russian territory, we would perhaps, see a gentleman’s understanding between Moscow and Berlin in respect of Spain.”[1410]
The militantly anti-Catholic anarchists of Cultura Proletaria not only denounced the Spanish communists’ ideology as “Fascismo Rojo,” but resorted to Biblical language, labeling them “Caines.”[1411] Abe Bluestein, who had never invoked Jewishness as an explanation for his anti-fascism, wrote that the communists’ strategy of blaming the May Days on the POUM “is only another version of the nazi tactic that makes a political scape goat [sic] of the Jews by holding them responsible for everything,” thereby linking communism to nazism.[1412] Carlo Tresca, who had been among the most tolerant of anarchists when it came to working with communists, now joined in these condemnations. “Fascism and bolshevism—it will seem strange to the ignorant, easy prey for illusions, [who] simply look on the surface of things and events without further investigation—are not two parallel lines, but converging ones…They are twins.” And the sailor Lloyd Usinger came ironically close to repeating the same slanders that communists like Robert Minor leveled against the CNT-FAI and the POUM when he claimed, “The Communists have sabotaged and sold out the workers in Spain, in the interests of the Fascists and the Landowning class.”[1413] Events in Spain also reinforced anarchists’ view that communism was a monolithic movement. Four months after the May Days, L’Adunata dei Refrattari declared, “A Spanish communist party does not in fact exist, as an Italian, French, Scandinavian, American and so on do not exist either…The communist parties of all countries have their center in Moscow and act under the supervision of Moscow officials.”[1414]
After Abe Bluestein returned to New York in early 1938, he found echoes of the street fighting he had witnessed in Barcelona when on at least two occasions Communist Party members assaulted anarchists selling copies of Bluestein’s new paper Challenge at Popular Front rallies in support of republican Spain.[1415] Communist disruptions and assaults at the street meetings of the United Libertarian Organizations, meanwhile, became so violent that the organization appealed privately and publicly for the formation of a “defense body” to protect speakers from “the fascist tactics of Communist Party hoodlums.” A special appeal was made to Tresca to dispatch “some of the boys over there,” where the skills they had honed fighting Italian American Fascists were turned on communist aggressors. Sam Dolgoff recalled that one-legged W. S. Van Valkenburgh, the main organizer of these meetings, “would attach his wooden leg and assail the communists with his crutches” when they attempted to rush the speakers’ platform.[1416] Elsewhere, anarchist events were guarded against communists by street-tough IWW members armed with sticks and pipes concealed in rolled-up newspapers or handkerchiefs.[1417] At the Sunrise Co-operative Farm Community founded by Joseph J. Cohen, former anarchist and colony member Paul Boattin returned for a visit during the Spanish Civil War, but was chased off by the shotgun-wielding Italian anarchist Angelo Di Vitto, a former friend and comrade, because Boattin had joined the Communist Party.[1418]
As in Spain, the stark limits of the Popular Front were marked in blood. Shortly after the May Days, L’Adunata dei Refrattari printed a cartoon depicting a pile of corpses under the caption, “What the Communists mean by the united front of revolutionary workers.”[1419] Anarchists now held mass meetings, along with anti-Soviet radicals from the Socialist Party, Workmen’s Circle, ILGWU, and dissident Marxist groups, “to protest the government of Spain” for the persecution of anarchists and the POUM. The imprisonment of the American Russell Blackwell, a member of the Revolutionary Workers’ League, a small Trotskyist splinter group that supported the POUM, became a particular cause célèbre.[1420] And at the beginning of 1939 an assembly of Italian anarchists meeting in Pennsylvania concluded that “the ultimate disgrace is contained in the iniquitous conduct of the Popular Front.”[1421] Tensions also grew within anarchist ranks. Mark Schmidt, the eldest member and intellectual leader of the Vanguard Group and one of the editors of Spanish Revolution, was a proponent of the Popular Front and remained so even after the May Days. Schmidt clashed with his own followers as well as with the ULO on this question, and was divested of some of his editorial duties.[1422]
A deep current of pessimism also appeared within the American movement following the May Days. Donations for Spain dropped off sharply; during the five months following the Barcelona fighting the ULO collected only $60.35. Suddenly struggling for financial solvency, Spanish Revolution limped on until May 1938 and then ceased. With anarchist morale collapsing along with the Spanish front, critics of the CNT-FAI became more vocal. L’Adunata called the Spaniards’ political collaboration a “fiasco” and “a scandal that had to end and has ended.”[1423] Abe Bluestein was convinced that the CNT’s continued cooperation with communists and republicans was “suicidal,” but conceded, “we cannot find it in our hearts to condemn [them] so long as we, and the workers of all countries outside of Spain, failed to help them as they deserved.” However, Bluestein did not wish to air his criticisms in print, lest they further injure the cause of the Spanish anarchists.[1424] He did, however, publish critiques by foreign anarchists like Alexander Schapiro, the former anarchist member of the Soviet Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs who was later deported from the Soviet Union, and repentant CNT-FAI leader Diego Abad de Santillán, who both argued that the Spanish anarchists should have pushed ahead with the social revolution as far as possible and prevented the reestablishment of the Catalan government; and failing that they should not have negotiated a ceasefire during the May Days and instead tried to dislodge the Popular Front government. According to Schapiro, the Russian Revolution had already proved “there can be no compromise or agreement with elements ideologically opposed to the new [anarchist] order.”[1425]
Such criticisms received a mixed reception. L’Adunata dei Refrattari and Man! heartily agreed with them, while the Jewish anarchists of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime strongly supported Emma Goldman’s position that the CNT-FAI had acted out of necessity and had no realistic alternative. Cultura Proletaria, Spanish Revolution, and the Vanguard Group also held the latter view. Arrigoni argued, “To believe that the anarchists by themselves could defeat the fascism of four nations—of Spain, Italy, Germany and Portugal—and at the same time fight against the counter-revolution represented by the anti-anarchist coalition of all [Popular Front] parties— from the communists to the bourgeois parties—is to greatly overestimate our forces.”[1426] But even the CNT’s defenders felt, “If anything, the anarchists were too yielding, too eager to obtain the co-operation of others in the basic tasks of war and revolution.” “Part of the blame,” conceded Cultura Proletaria, “also lays with anarchism, with its excessive naïveté, with its political infantilism, with its excessive generosity towards its more or less sincere allies in the antifascist struggle.”[1427] Nevertheless, as Emma Goldman wrote, “people in a burning house cannot stop to consider theories. They must use the best methods at hand to save themselves from being burned alive.”[1428] Yet by 1938 the debates raging within the anarchist press were purely academic; the Spanish anarchist movement had already been crippled and Franco’s forces were inexorably advancing across the remaining territory controlled by the Popular Front.
*** 7.6 Conclusion
Before the final Fascist victory in early 1939, American anarchism had already collapsed as a movement. The cessation of Spanish Revolution was followed in quick succession by the closure of Challenge, Vanguard, the individualist paper Discussion, the German-language Gegen den Strom and the Italian Il Pensiero, all in the period of 1938–39, and the termination of Man! and the Italian Intesa Libertaria in 1940, leaving American anarchism with its fewest publications since 1882. Though the Fraye Arbayter Shtime weathered the storm, its editor Mark Mratchny did not. The fall of Spain, he recalled, “was a crushing disappointment to me. I had also become disappointed with my work. I felt like a rabbi in an empty synagogue. So I resigned from the Fraye Arbayter Shtime and from the anarchist movement.”[1429] Reeling from what George Woodcock has described as “the last, greatest defeat of the historical anarchist movement,” and already suffering the effects of immigration restriction and political marginalization, the majority of demoralized American anarchists ceased partaking in anarchist activities.[1430]
In his work on Italian American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, Fraser Ottanelli argues that
anti-Fascism enabled class-conscious Italian Americans to combine cosmopolitan or internationalist ideologies—anarchist, Communist, humanist, or Socialist—with a definition of what it meant to be an Italian “patriot” or a “true” American, rooted in the redemption of their place of origin, in the defense of their country of adoption, and in the worldwide struggle against oppression.
Thus, “For Italian American radicals, opposition to fascism accelerated the process of selfdetermination and adjustment to U.S. society.”[1431] This appears to have been especially true of American-born, second-generation Italians, as well as for members of the Communist Party, which was self-consciously attempting to “Americanize” itself. But as already discussed, it does not hold for the anarchists discussed here, who had long since embraced their status as “those without a country” and “bastards” of their native land, and who could never adapt the language of nationalism or patriotism to suit their goals. Those who were able to return, including Enrico Arrigoni, Abe Bluestein and Selma Cohen, did not reconcile themselves to American nationalism and capitalism but instead remained lifelong anarchists.[1432]
The majority of the anarchist volunteers, however, never returned to America, although few had a choice in the matter. Most were not American citizens, and were not fortunate enough to possess counterfeit documents like Arrigoni’s, making it extremely difficult to enter the United States. But none wished to return to Fascist Italy or to remain in Francoist Spain, and they found themselves scrambling for refuge in whatever state would take them in. On his return to the United States in early 1939, Bruno Bonturi was held on Ellis Island along with several other Italian veterans of the war, including fellow anarchist Pietro Fusari. Bonturi claimed to be an American citizen by virtue of the naturalization of his father, which the Italian government accepted as true but American immigration authorities did not; denied entry, Bonturi eventually departed for Chile. From there he wrote to his aging mother asking her to send him photographs of his wife and child who remained in Italy, and soon thereafter he forsook his anti-nationalist principles and petitioned Mussolini’s regime to allow him to repatriate. Heartsick and alone in an unfamiliar country, Bruno “l’americano” asserted that he had never sought American or Spanish citizenship and, as a loyal Italian citizen, he desired to return to the patria. His ultimate fate is unknown.[1433]
A number of Bonturi’s fellow volunteers found the world to be even less hospitable upon leaving Spain. Those who stayed until the end of the war ended up in French refugee camps, which were transformed into concentration camps once Germany occupied France in 1940. Italian American anarchists Domenico Rosati, Giuseppe Sallustro, Benedetto Mori, Pietro Deiana, Alvaro Ghiara, and Armando Rodriguez were all interned by the Vichy regime, as were former L’Adunata dei Refrattari editor and Ascaso Column volunteer Ilario Margarita (who had left the United States in 1931) and tens of thousands of their Spanish comrades. Sallustro secured his release from the camp at Gurs with financial aid sent from the Italian American anarchist turned Communist Pietro Allegra, but he was arrested in Nazi-occupied Belgium on June 2, 1940 and deported to Italy, where he was sentenced to five years incarceration on the island of Ventotene. There his health quickly broke down, and in 1941–42 he was shunted between various Italian hospitals.[1434]
Pietro Deiana, Alvaro Ghiara, and Armando Rodriguez were all handed over to Hitler rather than Mussolini and placed in Nazi concentration camps. Deiana’s fate is unknown, but both Ghiara and Rodriguez survived long enough to be liberated by the Allies. Rodriguez, however, was freed by the Soviet Army, which transferred the former prisoners to the Soviet Union, where an anarchist like Rodriguez was likely to end up in a Siberian labor camp. He was therefore forced to escape from his own rescuers, eventually making his way back to Italy.[1435] Shunned and persecuted by the United States, European fascism, and Soviet communism alike, Rodriguez was symbolic of the fate of anarchism as a whole in the era of the Second World War and its Cold War aftermath.
The onset of the Second World War fractured what remained of American anarchism, as most Yiddish-speaking anarchists supported the Allies against Hitler, second-generation Jews split between pro-war anti-Fascists and pacifists, Spaniards opposed the war but still wished to strike back at Franco, and Italians split along factional lines with L’Adunata dei Refrattari opposing the war and Il Martello offering conditional support. In Paul Avrich’s words, “The divisions of the war left the anarchists in a shambles, and what had once been a flourishing movement shrank to the proportions of a sect.”[1436] In some cities factionalism broke out between ethnic segments of the movement; in Detroit, for instance, Spanish and Italian anarchists accusing Jewish comrades working to get Jews out of Europe of ethnic bias, enraging the latter.[1437] But in San Francisco, Italian and Spanish anarchists opposed to the war aided a group of about fifty non-Italian conscientious objectors, many of who were Jewish and members of poet Kenneth Rexroth’s Libertarian Circle, which also helped Japanese Americans in California avoid or escape wartime internment.[1438]
The war also starkly illustrated the success of nationalism, patriotism, and Americanization. After the United States went to war against the Axis powers, including Italy, the vast majority of pro-Mussolini Italian Americans abruptly embraced Americanism, decoupling their italianità from identification with fascism and the Italian state.[1439] Many nonanarchist anti-Fascists, meanwhile, had linked antifascism to Americanism and other nationalist creeds, bringing into being a new doctrine of “antifascist nationalism.”[1440] As Paul Buhle notes, the commitment to anti-fascism led to “three great failings for the Left”: radicals no longer emphasized the fundamental transformation of American society; they threw their support behind the Western democracies (and hence their imperial projects); and they relented in their opposition to militarism and war.[1441] No significant anti-war movement emerged, and only 0.5% of inductees into the armed forces resisted the draft, as opposed to 12% during the First World War.[1442] America’s tiny scattering of anti-war anarchists were of course no match for this outpouring of patriotism. San Francisco’s Man!, one of the most successful experiments in creating a multiethnic, multiracial American anarchist movement, ceased publication in 1940 not because the government was finally successful in suppressing it, but because after going through nine printers in seven years it could no longer find an establishment willing to print it during the national buildup to the new war.[1443] The anarchists’ dream of a cosmopolitan patria without borders, for which many had fought and died in Spain, seemed further away than ever as the world became consumed in yet another conflict between adversarial fatherlands, empires, races, and patriots.
** 8.0 Conclusion
@[D]ignity…is that homeland without nationality, that rainbow that is also a bridge, that murmur of the heart no matter what blood lives in it, that rebel irreverence that mocks frontiers, customs officials and wars.
—Subcommandante Marcos (1996)[1444]
By the end of the Second World War, the existence of people “without a country” had become a bitter reality. In her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, Hannah Arendt described statelessness as “the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history.” The denationalization of “undesirable” citizens and the shifting of national boarders across much of Europe during the two world wars had created millions of “displaced persons” without citizenship. Under the Westphalian system of international law, Arendt noted, such a person was a “an outlaw by definition,” denied basic human rights and protections guaranteed by citizenship in a nation-state.[1445] In a world where nationalism ran rampant, being stateless had become a living nightmare for millions.
On the one hand, this confirms that the anarchists, with their hopes for a stateless world, were egregiously out of step with the major political developments of their era. Their refusal to make peace with capitalism, communism, or “Americanism” seemingly rendered them anachronisms by the time of the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War era. Yet, the same refusal to compromise that marginalized them appears to vindicate their radical cosmopolitanism in historical hindsight. Their critique of democratic republics’ inability to solve class conflict and their warnings about the dangers of nationalism, socialist dictatorship, and inevitable conflict between Zionists and Palestinians all proved substantially correct. Looking back already in 1948, Lucy Robbins Lang, who had long since strayed from her anarchist roots, reflected:
It is easy to say that Anarchist ideals are impractical, but as I look back and think of friends of mine who have lived by those ideals for half a century, I am not so sure. I have seen ideologies come and go, and I have seen the enthusiastic advocates of some of these ideologies end either in disillusionment or in betrayal of their principles. In a world in which totalitarianism flourishes, I know of no more worthy ideal than the respect for the individual that is the foundation of Anarchism.[1446]
This respect for the individual, the defense of human variety as a positive good in itself, was the very core of anarchists’ cosmopolitan thought and practice. In the words of Roger Baldwin, whose own ideological path lurched from anarchist to fellow traveler to anti-communist, “The anarchists, as I knew them, were always right and always ineffective.”[1447]
Baldwin’s assessment, however, is overstated. That anarchists failed to remake the entire world according to their ideals is of course true. But they did remake themselves and their communities, and at various times they brought into being remarkable examples of solidarity and collective efforts that bridged national and racial divides. Jewish anarchists had the most difficulty bringing these to realization, due to the insular nature of New York’s Jewish community and Yiddish culture. Italians in Paterson more easily absorbed bilingual immigrants into their movement, and were much more successful in forging ties with and mobilizing other groups of workers, except for native-born Americans and English immigrants. Their comrades in San Francisco came closest to creating a truly multiethnic, cosmopolitan movement that, although relatively small, was a significant and sometimes dominant force among immigrant workers.
Most of Baldwin’s encounters with anarchism occurred during its protracted decline in the face of postwar immigration restriction, government repression, and the rise of new competitors for immigrant workers’ loyalty. These included Zionism, fascism, communism and the New Deal coalition, all of which looked to the state to solve the dilemmas of working-class and immigrant life. The one beacon of hope in the interwar years was Spain, which briefly revived anarchists’ hopes that the libertarian socialist society they desired might yet come into being. When Spain was lost, so was most of this hope.
Nevertheless, the anarchists provide examples of immigrant behavior and acculturation that do not easily fit existing historiographical models. They were not caught between Old World loyalties and Americanization, but consciously chose an alternative to both, based on antinationalist, anti-capitalist, and cosmopolitan principles. As Eric Hobsbawm notes, anarchists comprised “a small body of men and women to whom the states…to which they belonged were genuinely irrelevant, the future being, as it were, their only real ‘country.’“[1448] With scholarship on the history of American immigration and labor increasingly focusing on the seemingly inescapable influence of nationalism and racism, it is worth taking note of those who stood against the tide and, in doing so, shattered the myth of primordial and inexorable divisions among humankind.
The tenacity of anarchists’ commitment to this goal, as well as the transnational dimensions of their movement, is poignantly illustrated by an incident reported by Rose Pesotta. While touring Europe in 1946 on behalf of relief efforts organized by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, Pesotta was visiting the Łódź Ghetto when a man came running up to her waving a newspaper. It was, she discovered, a copy of the Fraye Arbayter Shtime, and the man turned out to be a lifelong friend of one of Pesotta’s comrades in New York. He introduced her to the few surviving members of the Jewish anarchist group in Łódź, which had seen twenty of its members shot during the Nazi occupation. “Curiously enough,” Pesotta noted, “none of them asked for help for themselves, or for visas, but all they wanted was moral support, literature, a printing press and a linotype machine in Polish,” so that they could publish translations of anarchist writings.[1449] Having survived the worst human slaughter in history, a few idealists in the remnants of a Nazi ghetto tapped into a transnational network of radicals in order to disseminate their vision of a new world based on humanity’s potential to overcome nationalism and racism and cooperate for the common good. And they wished to resume their efforts not among their fellow Jews, but among the Polish population that had contributed so much to anti-Semitic persecution during the war. Even the Holocaust could not extinguish anarchist aspirations.
Yet with the defeat of fascism (except in Spain), a global Cold War dichotomy emerged between the Soviet-centered “Left” and anticommunist “Right,” in which anarchists had no place. Their hopes were shattered by the new supra-national division of the world into these two hostile camps and the unaligned “Third World,” in which communism was on the rise and anarchism on the wane. So long as the Cold War persisted, anarchism was widely regarded, even by some anarchists, as irrelevant. Some tried to walk the tightrope between compromise and hypocrisy, usually by supporting the Western democracies against Soviet totalitarianism.[1450] The Fraye Arbayter Shtime was among this camp, prompting Joseph J. Cohen to condemn its “cold war mentality” and accuse the most ardent of anti-communists among the Jewish anarchists of acting as “the right wing of the State Department.” In 1969 former communist Melech Epstein sarcastically commented that the Fraye Arbayter Shtime was “as anarchistic as the New York Times and, in foreign policy, less liberal.”[1451]
A few anarchists in the United States became deeply involved in anti-communist activities as a consequence of the events of the Spanish Civil War. Carlo Tresca, a latecomer to the anti-communist cause, signed his name to the Dewey Commission’s exposé of the Moscow Trials and implicated the Communist Party in the disappearance of dissident member Juliet Stuart Poyntz before a New York Grand Jury (sparking intense controversy among fellow anarchists).[1452] Abe Bluestein immersed himself in both anti-Fascist and anti-communist activity. He became a member of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, the executive secretary of its affiliated Joint Boycott Council, and executive director of the anti-Fascist Labor League for Human Rights, but was also the first executive secretary of the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), created by the American Federation of Labor in 1944 to combat communist influence in the labor movements of postwar Europe. Former communist Jay Lovestone quickly succeeded Bluestein as head of the FTUC, and under his leadership the organization was soon sharing intelligence with, and running operations for, the Central Intelligence Agency in return for substantial financial subsidies.[1453]
But anarchist anti-communists like Tresca and Bluestein were never themselves part of the network of “professional anti-communists” to which Lovestone belonged and who, as Ellen Schrecker describes, constituted an essential part of the machinery of McCarthyism. Nor did they, as Alice Wexler suggests, contribute to “the anti-Communist Cold War consensus,” which developed quite independently of anarchist influence.[1454] They never supported governmental repression of Communist Party members and none served as informants for anti-communist congressional committees—though at least one anarchist, the Italian watchmaker Giordano Bruch, was deported in 1953 after appearing before such a committee. Anarchist anticommunism was an alternative to, rather than a forerunner of, McCarthyism.[1455]
It was, however, an alternative that was ignored. Just four months after Franco’s victory came the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, an event some former communists and fellow travelers called their own “Kronstadt.” But anarchist anti-communism had virtually no impact on this new generation of anti-Stalinists, which was instead drawn to the Trotskyist opposition, Cold War liberalism, or embarked on the long journey to conservatism.[1456] The only prominent exceptions were Politics editor Dwight Macdonald, who moved toward anarchism in the 1940s, and Kenneth Rexroth, whose Libertarian Circle in San Francisco served as a bridge between that city’s older generation of immigrant anarchists and the Beat Generation.[1457]
Postwar revelations about the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel, meanwhile, led many Jewish anarchists and former anarchists to make peace with Zionism. Already in 1938 Emma Goldman noted,
Of late the Jewish comrades have become more Jewish than they were thirty years ago. That seems to me to lie in the terrible situation of the Jews in the whole world. The mad persecution of millions of people, the denial of asylum and shelter has again brought the wandering Jew to the fore.[1458]
This trend was even more pronounced a decade later, and Fraye Arbayter Shtime editor Herman Frank was forced out of his position in 1951 due to his intransigent anti-Zionism. He criticized the “new type of Zionist-Anarchist ideology” as being “even more vague and more involved in internal contradiction than the pristine cosmopolitan faith preached by the founders of the Jewish Anarchist movement.”[1459] Most of his comrades, however, accepted Israel as necessary for the survival of the Jewish people.
Others settled for liberal Americanism. After the war Thomas B. Eyges began to experience “a steady glow and warm glimmer towards the religious philosophy and nationalistic psychology” brought on “by the dreadful, merciless attrocities [sic] perpetrated upon the defenseless Jews in Germany, Poland and elsewhere in Europe, by the Nazi gang.” Rather than embracing Zionism, however, he abandoned his radicalism in favor of the New Deal, writing that he had “always loved America, a great cosmopolitan nation with a true political democracy. Every American individual walks the street autonomously free…The arrangements of the political administration of the United States,” he lamely argued, “have always been the nearest resemblance to [the] ideal of a free society—even under Anarchism.”[1460]
Immigrants who remained anarchists clung to their foreign-language periodicals as a unifying force long after it may seem to have been practical to do so; L’Adunata dei Refrattari lasted until 1971, and the Fraye Arbayter Shtime until 1977. They had spent decades building up ethnic anarchist cultures, and to divest them of their specific Italian or Jewish content (heavily embedded in the languages in which they were written and spoken) would have been to do away with the cement that held these segments of the movement together. But this also estranged many anarchists from their own children. As early as 1907, Hillel Solotaroff observed,
With few exceptions, the children…of the socialists, anarchists, and free-thinkers to not belong to them, do not share their ideas and ideals. And what, for example, would happen to the immigrant Jews in the United States if the doors were closed?…In a few generations, they would forget their language, leave their literature, give up their way of life and become—what? Americans?…They will become that strange androgynous type represented by the assimilated Jew everywhere in Europe.[1461]
Thirty-one years later, Goldman observed that this had come to pass. Her comrades, she found, “have done nothing to acquaint their children with the ideas for which they were willing to sacrifice so much. The irony of it is that the younger generation have drifted away and certainly never acquire the Yiddish, consequently they do [not] know what is going on.”[1462]
Similarly, Domenico Sallitto believed that since most Italian immigrants were “almost illiterate…they couldn’t communicate well with their children. There was a language barrier and a cultural barrier.” Further, “Children of anarchists shied away from the movement because the parents themselves often failed to practice what they preached…[T]he Italian anarchist father was often an authoritarian at home.”[1463] For many American-born children of immigrants, assimilation was a path to autonomy from their parents and acceptance by their American peers.[1464] However, the Vanguard Group and similar organizations attest to the fact that some anarchists did successfully pass on anarchist values and ideology to their children.
Thus, even the movement’s seemingly irreversible collapse left in place a small network of committed activists, many of them from this minority of second-generation immigrant anarchists, who sustained anarchist activity throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Their labors allowed anarchism to be rediscovered by part of the New Left of the 1960s, and subsequently by a large section of the anti-corporate globalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s. It was precisely the refusal of their predecessors to accommodate nationalism, communism, or Cold War anti-communism that kept the anarchist tradition free from the taint of these movements’ poisonous legacies.[1465]
After the Second World War, migration and anarchism were no longer linked in the United States. But as anarchists and other activists today challenge the globalization of corporate capitalism and the simultaneous restrictions placed on global migration and undocumented migrants, it would do them well to look back at the anarchists of yesterday and the radical cosmopolitanism they developed discursively and in practice. Here is a “usable past” in which collective identities, modes of organization, and solidarities transcended race and nation, and at the same time embraced and nurtured diversity. If such ideas seemed hopelessly utopian in the middle of the twentieth century, they seem somewhat less so now. Speaking to an anti-Fascist meeting in Brooklyn in October 1929, with fascism and nationalism ascendant almost everywhere, Armando Borghi rejected “the theory of a ‘moratorium’ on ideas,” and insisted that “history certainly moves toward anarchism.”[1466] At the very least, history may now be moving away from the age of nationalism, thereby opening the way for new, cosmopolitan political subjectivities like those forged by anarchists a century ago.
** Appendix A: Circulation of the American Anarchist Press, 1880–1940
To measure the size of the anarchist movement and its linguistic subgroups, I compiled a database of the annual average circulations of all anarchist publications produced in the United States from 1880 to 1940, for which I could locate circulation figures (excluding publications that lasted for less than four issues). The database includes 78 titles, out of a total of at least 208 that appeared in this period. Circulation data were often fragmentary over the full run of a publication, and gaps were filled through extrapolation based on figures from other years. In some cases, figures were extrapolated based on those of a periodical’s predecessor and/or successor. The graphs generated from this data are included in the Introduction. Below are the titles and publication information of the periodicals included in the database, as well as the ranges of their known circulation figures and the sources of their circulation information.
Table 9. American Anarchist Publications with Known Circulations, 1880–1940
| Title | Language | Place of Publication | Began | Ended | Circulation Range |
| Die Abend Zeitung | Yiddish | New York | 1906 | 1906 | 7,000[1467] |
| L’Adunata dei Refrattari | Italian | New York | 1922 | 1971 | 5,000[1468] |
| The Agitator | English | Home, WA | 1910 | 1912 | ca. 800[1469] |
| The Alarm | English | Chicago; New York | 1884 | 1889 | 2,000–3,000[1470] |
| L’Allarme | Italian | Chicago | 1915 | 1917 | 2,000–6,000[1471] |
| Amerikanskie Izvestiia | Russian | New York | 1920 | 1924 | ca. 3,000[1472] |
| L’Ami des Ourviers | French | Hastings, PA | 1894 | 1896 | ca. 5,000[1473] |
| L’Anarchica/Il Diritto/Il Refrattario | Italian | New York; Providence, RI | 1918 | 1919 | 2,000[1474] |
| Der Anarchist | German | Chicago | 1886 | 1886 | 300[1475] |
| The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin | English | New York | 1919 | 1920 | 2,000[1476] |
| Arbeiter Zeitung | German | Buffalo, NY | 1886 | 1898? | 1,569[1477] |
| Der Arme Teufel | German | Detroit | 1884 | 1900 | 2,750–7,000[1478] |
| L’Avvenire | Italian | Steubenville, OH; New Kensington, PA; Pittsburgh; New York | 1910 | 1917 | 4,000[1479] |
| Il Bollettino de L’Era Nuova | Italian | Paterson, NJ | 1919 | 1919 | 3,000[1480] |
| Budoucnost | Czech | Chicago | 1883 | 1886 | 360–760[1481] |
| Challenge | English | New York | 1938 | 1939 | 5,000[1482] |
| Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung | German | Chicago | 1879 | 1910 | 3,000–15,120[1483] |
| El Corsario | Spanish | New York | 1910? | 1919 | 1,400[1484] |
| Cronaca Sovversiva | Italian | Barre, VT; Lynn, MA | 1903 | 1919 | 3,200–5,000[1485] |
| Cultura Proletaria | Spanish | New York | 1927 | 1953 | 4,000[1486] |
| Dĕlnick Listy | Czech | New York | 1893 | 1898 | 1,200[1487] |
| Delo Truda | Russian | Chicago; New York | 1927 | 1939 | 200–300[1488] |
| The Demonstrator | English | Home, WA | 1903 | 1908 | ca. 800 |
| Discontent | English | Home, WA | 1898 | 1902 | 1,200[1489] |
| Domani | Italian | Brooklyn, NY | 1919 | 1919 | 1,000–1,500[1490] |
| L’Emancipazione | Italian | San Francisco | 1927 | 1932 | 3,000[1491] |
| Eresia | Italian | New York | 1928 | 1932 | 2,000–3,100[1492] |
| L’Era Nuova | Italian | Paterson, NJ | 1908 | 1917 | 3,000[1493] |
| Die Fackel | German | Chicago | 1879 | 1910 | 5,000–25,000[1494] |
| The Firebrand | English | Portland, OR | 1895 | 1897 | 2,189–3,000[1495] |
| Fraye Arbayter Shtime/Fraye Arbeter Shtime | Yiddish | New York | 1890 | 1977 | 3,000–30,000[1496] |
| Di Fraye Gezelshaft | Yiddish | New York | 1895 | 1900 | 2,000–2,500[1497] |
| Di Fraye Gezelshaft | Yiddish | New York | 1910 | 1911 | 6,000–8,000[1498] |
| Free Society | English | San Francisco; Chicago; New York | 1897 | 1904 | 3,115[1499] |
| Free Society | English | New York | 1920 | 1922 | 1,000[1500] |
| Freedom | English | New York; Stelton, NJ | 1919 | 1919 | 2,000–2,500[1501] |
| Freedom | English | New York | 1933 | 1934 | 2,000[1502] |
| Freiheit | German | New York | 1882 | 1910 | 3,000–5,000[1503] |
| Golos Truda | Russian | New York | 1911 | 1917 | ca. 2,800[1504] |
| La Jacquerie | Italian | Paterson, NJ | 1919 | 1919 | 3,000[1505] |
| Khleb i Volia | Russian | New York | 1919 | 1919 | 4,547[1506] |
| Lampcka | Czech | Chicago | 1885 | 1886 | 750[1507] |
| Land and Liberty | English | Hayward, CA; San Francisco | 1914 | 1915 | 3,500[1508] |
| The Liberator | English | Chicago | 1905 | 1906 | 1,000[1509] |
| Liberty | English | Boston; New York | 1881 | 1908 | 750–1,000[1510] |
| Lucifer | English | Valley Falls, KS; Topeka, KS; Chicago | 1883 | 1907 | 850–1,676[1511] |
| Man! | English | San Francisco; New York; Los Angeles | 1933 | 1940 | ca. 5,00010,000[1512] |
| Il Martello | Italian | New York | 1916 | 1946 | 2,500–10,500[1513] |
| The Modern School | English | New York; Stelton, NJ | 1912 | 1922 | ca. 500[1514] |
| Mother Earth | English | New York | 1906 | 1917 | 3,000–6,000[1515] |
| Mother Earth Bulletin | English | New York | 1917 | 1918 | ca. 3,000[1516] |
| Den Nye Tid | Danish | Chicago | 1877 | 1884 | 1,600–2,800[1517] |
| L’Ordine | Italian | New York | 1919 | 1920 | 1,250[1518] |
| Die Parole | German | St. Louis | 1884 | 1891? | 1,600–2,200[1519] |
| Pingdeng | Chinese | San Francisco | 1927 | 1929 | 2,000[1520] |
| La Plebe | Italian | New Kensington, PA; Pittsburgh | 1906 | 1909 | 3,000[1521] |
| Práce | Czech | Chicago | 1886 | 1887 | 500[1522] |
| Punto Rojo | Spanish | El Paso, TX | 1909 | 1910 | 10,000[1523] |
| La Questione Sociale | Italian | Paterson, NJ | 1895 | 1908 | 3,000–3,250[1524] |
| Regeneración | Spanish | Los Angeles | 1910 | 1918 | 3,986–21,000[1525] |
| Le Rèveil des Masses | French | New York; Newfoundland, PA | 1888 | 1890 | 5,000[1526] |
| Le Rèveil des Mineurs | French | Hastings, PA | 1890 | 1893 | 5,000[1527] |
| Revolt | Swedish | Chicago | 1911 | 1916 | 1,000[1528] |
| The Road to Freedom | English | Stelton, NJ; New York | 1924 | 1932 | 1,200–3,000[1529] |
| Secolo Nuovo | Italian | San Francisco | 1894 | 1906 | 1,700[1530] |
| La Sferza | Italian | Westfield, NJ | 1924 | 1925 | ca. 1,000[1531] |
| Solidarity | English | New York | 1892 | 1898 | ca. 1,000[1532] |
| Spanish Revolution | English | New York | 1936 | 1938 | 7,000[1533] |
| The Syndicalist | English | Chicago | 1913 | 1913 | ca. 800[1534] |
| Vanguard | English | New York | 1932 | 1939 | 3,000[1535] |
| Di Varhayt | Yiddish | New York | 1889 | 1889 | 2,500[1536] |
| Der Verbote | German | Chicago | 1874 | 1910 | 3,150–8,000[1537] |
| Volné Listy | Czech | New York | 1890 | 1917 | 4,500[1538] |
| The Woman Rebel | English | New York | 1914 | 1914 | ca. 2,000[1539] |
| The Word | English | Princeton, MA | 1872 | 1893 | 1,050–2,050[1540] |
| Die Zukunft | German | Philadelphia | 1884 | 1885? | 2,000[1541] |
** Appendix B: American Anarchist Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War
Table 10. Known American Anarchist Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
Name | Date of Birth | Nationality | Occupation | Arrival in US | Affiliation in US | Unit(s) in Spain | Notes | Source |
| Abruzzo, Alfonso | 1885 | Italian | ? | 1904 | Galleanisti | ? | | Antonioli et al. |
| Albertini, Enrico | 1887 | Italian | Goldsmith | 1915 | L’Era Nuova | International Brigades | | Istituto per la storia della Resistenza |
| Arrigoni, Enrico | 1894 | Italian | Bricklayer | 1924 | Cultura Proletaria | Ascaso Division | Quit to report for anarchist press | Arrigoni |
| Bacchetta, ? | 1886 | Italian | ? | ? | ? | ? | | La Spagna nel nostro cuore |
| Bonturi, Bruno | 1902 | Italian | Sailor | 1916 | Vanguard Group | Ascaso Column; Abraham Lincoln Battalion | Denied reentry to US | CPC; Antonioli et al. |
| Borghi, Patrizio | 1914 | Italian | Baker; Mechanic | 1932 | L’Adunata dei Refrattari | Garibaldi Battalion | Son of Armando Borghi | Antonioli et al.; La Spagna nel nostro cuore |
| Buzzi, Ernaldo | 1900 | Italian | Electrician | ? | ? | ? | | La Spagna nel nostro cuore |
| Casassa, Vigna Antonio | 1899 | Italian | Miner | 1920 | L’Emancipazione Group | Garibaldi Battalion | | CPC |
| Castro, Andrés | ? | Spanish | ? | ? | Cultura Proletaria? | N/A | Captured and executed on arrival | Cultura Proletaria, August 21, 1937 |
| Cerruti, Pietro | 1885 | Italian | Laborer; Weaver | 1913 | ? | ? | Wounded | Istituto per la storia della Resistenza |
| Chiappini, Renato | 1904 | Italian | Sailor | ? | ? | ? | | La Spagna nel nostro cuore |
| Clerico, Liberato | 1889 | Italian | Bartender | ? | ? | ? | | Ottanelli, “Anti-Fascism”; La Spagna nel nostro cuore |
| Connolly, Gilbert | ? | Irish | ? | ? | Vanguard Group | CNT militia | | Avrich, Anarchist Voices |
| Deiana, Pietro | 1902 | Italian | Sailor | ? | L’Adunata dei Refrattari | ? | Interned by Vichy, then Nazis | La Spagna nel nostro cuore; Un trentennio |
| Di Giovanbattista, Giuseppe | ? | Italian | ? | ? | ? | ? | | La Spagna nel nostro cuore |
| Esposito, Giuseppe | 1895 | Italian | Sailor | 1925 | Individualist anarchist | ? | | CPC |
| Fernández, Tomás | ? | Spanish | ? | ? | Cultura Proletaria | N/A | Captured and executed on arrival | Cultura Proletaria, August 21, 1937 |
| Fonda, Guerrino | 1904 | Italian | Sailor | 1931 | ? | ? | | CPC |
| Fusari, Pietro | 1895 | Italian | Laborer | 1920s | ? | ? | Denied reentry to US | La Spagna nel nostro cuore; Ottanelli, “Anti-Fascism” |
| Gabriele, Biagio | 1895 | Italian | Peasant; Barber | ? | ? | ? | | La Spagna nel nostro cuore |
| Giaconi, Maria | 1892 | Italian | Peasant; “Housewife” | 1912 | Galleanisti | ? | Participation not confirmed | CPC; Antonioli et al. |
| Ghiara, Alvaro/Albaro | 1902 | Italian | Sailor | ? | ? | ? | Interned by Vichy, then Nazis; liberated by Allies | La Spagna nel nostro cuore; Un trentennio |
| Gil, Alvaro | ? | Spanish | ? | ? | Cultura Proletaria | 70th Brigade | | Cultura Proletaria, May 8, 1937 |
| Kates, Justus | ? | Jewish | ? | Native-born | ? | Anarchist militia | Fought on Huesca front | Carroll |
| Martocchia, Antonio/Anthony | 1903 | Italian | Laborer | 1920 | L’Emancipazione Group | ? | | Ottanelli, “AntiFascism” |
| Mori, Benedetto | 1899 | Italian | Sailor | ? | ? | ? | Interned by Vichy regime | La Spagna nel nostro cuore |
| Morris, Virgil | 1910 | Jewish | Longshoreman | ? | IWW | Abraham Lincoln Battalion | Repeatedly arrested for desertion and suspicion of spying | White part 1; Eby, Comrades |
| Owens, Harry | ? | Irish American? | Sailor | Native-born? | IWW | Abraham Lincoln Battalion | Killed in action (April?) 1938 | White part 1 |
| Paliaga, Giuseppe | 1905 | Italian | Laborer; Sailor | 1929 | ? | Durruti Column | | La Spagna nel nostro cuore |
| Read, Patrick J. | 1899 | Irish | Journalist | 1932 | IWW | XIVth [French] International Brigade; Abraham Lincoln Battalion | Expelled from both units for political views | White part 1 |
| Rodriguez, Armando | ? | Italian | ? | ? | L’Adunata dei Refrattari | Ascaso Divison? | Interned by Nazis after war, liberated by Soviets | Un trentennio | | Rosati, Domenico | 1887 | Italian | Miner; Merchant | 1906 | Il Martello Group | Ascaso Column | Interned at Argèles-sur-Mer by Vichy | CPC; Antonioli et al. |
| Sallustro, Giuseppe | 1900 | Italian | Engraver | 1935 | Communist Party | Garibaldi Battalion | Became anarchist in Spain. Interned by Vichy. | CPC; Antonioli et al. |
| Sendón, Claro J. | ? | Spanish | Journalist | ? | Cultura Proletaria | CNT militia | Died during visit to US on speaking tour for CNT | Cultura Proletaria, December 18, 1937 |
| Sironi, Luigi | 1897 | Italian | Sailor | ? | Galleanisti | ? | | Ottanelli, “AntiFascism” |
| Stearns, Douglas Clark | 1918 | Jewish | Sailor | Native-born | Vanguard Group | Unknown POUM militia; Muerte Battalion | Committed suicide after his return | Carroll; Dolgoff, Fragments |
| Ticer, Raymond Elvis | 1913 | American | Sailor | Native-born | IWW | Abraham Lincoln Battalion | | White part 2 |
| Vecchietti, Armando | 1904 | Italian | Miner | 1915 | | 25th Division | Killed in action at Teruel, June 20, 1937 | Antonioli et al.; Un trentennio |
| Vega, César | ? | Spanish | ? | ? | Mohegan Colony | N/A | Captured and executed on arrival | Cultura Proletaria, August 21, 1937 |
| Unknown | ? | Italian | ? | ? | L’Emancipazione Group | Ascaso Column | | L’Adunata dei Refrattari, October 3, 1936 |
| Unknown | ? | Spanish | ? | ? | Cultura Proletaria | N/A | Captured and executed on arrival | Cultura Proletaria, August 21, 1937 |
| Unknown | ? | Spanish | ? | ? | Cultura Proletaria | N/A | Captured and executed on arrival | Cultura Proletaria, August 21, 1937 |
| Total Volunteers | Age Range | Ethnic Composition | Occupational Composition | Type of Unit Served In |
| 42 | 18–51 | 67% Italian
17% Spanish
7% Jewish
7% Irish
2% American | 12 Sailors
8 Misc. Skilled Workers
3 Laborers
3 Miners
2 Journalists
1 Housewife
1 Longshoreman | 9 International Brigades
12 CNT units |
** Bibliography
*** Primary Sources
**** Manuscript Collections
Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Industrial Workers of the World Collection
John Nicholas Beffel Collection
Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome, Italy
Casellario Politico Centrale (CPC)
Emma Goldman Papers, University of California, Berkeley, CA
Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Periodicals Collection
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (IISH)
Alexander Berkman Papers
L’Adunata dei Refrattari Archives
CNT (España) Archives, Archivo del Comité Nacional CNT
David Koven Papers
Fraye Arbayter Shtime Archive
Hugo Rolland Papers
Max Nettlau Papers
Rudolf Rocker Papers
Senya Fléchine Papers
Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Agnes Inglis Papers
American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born Records
Mark Mrachnyi Papers
Subject Vertical File
Warren Van Valkenburgh Papers
Kate Sharpley Library, Grass Valley, CA
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Record Group 65 (FBI)
Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85 (INS)
Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, NY
John Nicholas Beffel Collection
Oral History of the American Left
**** Newspapers and Periodicals
L’Adunata dei Refrattari. New York, 1922–1971.
L’Anarchico. New York, 1888.
The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin. New York, 1919–1920.
The Alarm. Chicago, 1915–1916.
L’Aurora. West Hoboken, NJ; Yohoghany, PA; Spring Valley, IL, 1899–1901.
The Awakener. Toronto, 1920.
Behind the Bars. New York, 1924.
The Blast. San Francisco; New York, 1916–1917.
Il Bollettino de L’Era Nuova. Paterson, NJ. 1919.
Challenge. New York, 1938–1939.
The Clarion. New York, 1932–1934.
Cogito, Ergo Sum. San Francisco, 1908.
Communist Dictatorship E pos . San Francisco, 1928.
Il Contro-pelo. Barre, VT, 1911–1912.
Cronaca Sovversiva. Barre, VT; Lynn, MA, 1903–1919.
Cultura Proletaria. New York, 1927–1953.
La Difesa. New York, 1923–24.
Doctrina Anarquista-Socialista. Paterson, NJ, 1905.
L’Effort. San Francisco, 1904.
The Emancipator. San Francisco, 1906–1907.
L’Emancipazione. San Francisco, 1927–1932.
L’Era Nuova. Paterson, NJ, 1908–1917.
Eresia. New York, 1928–1932.
Di Fraye Gezelshaft. New York, 1910–1911.
Di Fraye Tsukunft. New York, 1915–1916.
Free Society. New York, 1920–1922.
Freedom. Stelton, NJ, 1919.
Freedom. New York, 1933–1934.
Fraye Arbayter Shtime/Fraye Arbeter Shtime. New York, 1890–1977.
The Industrial Union Bulletin. Chicago, 1907–1909.
The Industrial Worker. Joliet, IL, 1906–1907.
Industrial Worker. Spokane, WA; Chicago, 1909–1931.
Industrial Worker. Chicago, 1931–1938.
Industrial Workers of the World Bulletin. Chicago, 1906–1907. I.W.M.A. Bulletin of Information. Barcelona, 1937.
La Jacquerie. Paterson, NJ, 1919.
Land and Liberty. Hayward, CA; San Francsico, 1914–1915.
Il Lavoratore Industriale/Le Travailleur Industriel. San Francisco, 1912.
IL Lavoratore Italiano. Pittsburg, KS, 1906–1911.
The Liberator. Chicago, 1905–1906.
Man! San Francisco; Los Angeles; New York, 1933–1940.
Il Martello. New York, 1916–1946.
Mother Earth. New York. 1906–1917.
Mother Earth Bulletin. New York, 1917–1918.
N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual. Philadelphia, 1880–1901.
N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory. Philadelphia, 1910–1929.
N. W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals. Philadelphia, 1930–1969.
Der Nayer Gayst. New York, 1897–1898.
New Unionist. Los Angeles, 1927–1931.
The New York Times. New York, 1851-present.
Novatore. New York, 1910–1911.
Nuovi Tempi. Paterson, NJ, 1918.
One Big Union Monthly. Chicago, 1919–1938.
Per la Chiarezza: A Proposito di Polemica Fra Compagni? New York, 1930.
La Protesta Umana. San Francisco; Chicago, 1900–1905.
La Questione Sociale. Paterson, NJ, 1895–1908.
The Rebel Worker. New York, 1918–1919.
Il Refrattario. New York, 1919.
Regeneración. Los Angeles, 1910–1918.
Revolt. San Francisco, 1911–1912.
Revolt. New York, 1916.
La Riscossa. Tampa, 1936–1941.
The Rising Youth. New York, 1928–1929.
La Rivolta degli Angeli. New York, 1924.
The Road to Freedom. Steleton, NJ; New York, 1924–1932. The San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco, 1865-present.
La Scolta. San Francisco, 1926.
La Scopa. Paterson, NJ, 1925–1928.
Secolo Nuovo. San Francisco, 1894–1906.
The Social War Bulletin. New York, 1918.
Solidarity. New York, 1892–1898.
Solidarity. Chicago, 1920–1921.
Spanish Revolution. New York, 1936–1938.
Umanità Nova. New York, 1924–1925.
Umberto e Bresci. Paterson, NJ, 1900.
Vanguard. New York, 1932–1939.
**** Government Publications
Boehm, Randolph, ed. U.S. Military Intelligence Reports: Surveillance of Radicals in the United States, 1917–1941. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984. Microfilm.
New York State Senate, Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities. Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb It. 4 vols. Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1920. Ricciardi, Giulio. “Le Condizioni del Lavoro e L’Emigrazione Italiana in California.” In Emigrazione e colonie: raccolta di rapporti dei rr. agenti diplomatici e consolari, 3:243–260. Rome: Cooperativa Tipografica Manuzio, 1908.
San Francisco Department of City Planning, The Population of San Francisco: A Half Century of Change, 19001950. San Francisco: San Francisco Department of City Planning, 1954.
United States Bureau of the Census. The Statistical History of the United States: From Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1976.
United States Commission on Industrial Relations. Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations. 16 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916.
United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Communist Labor Party Deportation Cases. 66th Congress, 2nd Session. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920.
United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Rules. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on Charges Made Against Department of Justice by Luis F. Post and Others. 66th Congress, 2nd Session. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920.
United States Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Bolshevik Propaganda. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 65th Congress, 3rd Session and thereafter, pursuant to S. Res. 439 and 469. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919.
**** Articles, Books and Pamphlets
“1 Killed, 1 Near Death as Auto Explodes; Police Suspect Bombing.” San Francisco Examiner, July 31, 1927. Reprinted at Western Neighborhoods Project, [[http://www.outsidelands.org/black-hand-1927.php][www.outsidelands.org]]
A. V. “Underground History: The Revelations of an International Spy.” Pearson’s Magazine, May 1903.
Aguzzi, Aldo. “Italian Anarchist Volunteers in Barcelona & the Events of May 1937.” In Pages from Italian Anarchist History, translated by Paul Sharkey, 13–17. London: Kate Sharpley Library, 1995.
American Newspaper Directory. New York: Geo. P. Rowell & Co., 1900.
Aquilano, Baldo. L’Ordine figli d’Italia in America. New York: Società Tipografica Italiana, 1925.
Arrigoni, Enrico. Freedom: My Dream. New York: Libertarian Book Club, 1985.
“Assassination was Plotted in New Jersey Town.” New York Herald, July 31, 1900.
Avrich, Paul, ed. The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Bakunin, Michael. Statism and Anarchy. Edited by Marshall S. Shatz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Barondes, Joseph. “Zikhroynes fun amol.” In M. Katts Zamelbukh, edited by A. Frumkin and Khaym Faynman.
Philadelphia: Merts, 1925.
Benequit, I. A. Durkhgelebt un durkhgetrakht. Vol. 2. New York: Farlag “Kultur Federatsie”, 1934.
Berkman, Alexander. Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism. New York: Jewish Anarchist Federation, 1929.
———. Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. 1912; reprint, Pittsburgh: Frontier Press, 1970.
———. The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1922). 1925; reprint, London: Pluto Press, 1989.
———. The Russian Tragedy. Edited by William G. Nowlin. Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1976.
Bluestein, Abe. Forgotten Men, What Now? Bronx, NY: Libertarian Publishers, 1935.
Bonsal, Stephen. “Underground New York ‘Sees Red’ Once More.” New York Times Magazine, March 15, 1908.
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[1] Pietro Gori, Senza Patria, reprinted in Pietro Gori, Scritti scelti (Cesena: L’Antistato, 1968), 2:329–61.
[2] Pietro Gori, “Stornelli d’esilio,” in Canzioniere dei Ribelli (Barre, VT: Edizioni de la Cronaca Sovversiva, 1904), reprinted in Giuseppe Vettori, Canzoni italiane di protesta (Rome: Newton Compton, 1974), 354.
[3] Herbert Gutman (with Ira Berlin), “Class Composition and the Development of the American Working Class, 1840–1890,” in Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Ira Berlin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 380–94. See also Catherine Collomp and Marianne Debouzy, “European Migrants and the U.S. Labor Movement 1880s-1920s,” in Roots of the Transplanted, ed. Dirk Hoerder, Horst Rössler, and Inge Blank, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1994), 339–81.
[4] I use the term “ethnoracial” because the differences between groups now considered to be “ethnic” and “national” were often understood to be “racial” during the period under study. The term is therefore intended to encapsulate “the perceived biological, historical, and behavioral qualities by which groups bounded themselves and were bound by others at different times and different places.” Allison Varzally, Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines, 1925–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 9.
[5] Louis Adamic, Dynamite! The Story of Class Violence in America, rev. ed. (Gloucher, MA: Peter Smith, 1960),
[6] On this framework see Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), xi.
[7] George Sands Goodwin, “What Anarchy Is—A View in Detail,” The Era: A Monthly Magazine of Literature, December 1902, 599. Useful international overviews of the history of anarchism include Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, ed. Heiner Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996); George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (New York: Meridian, 1962); Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: HarperCollins, 1992); Jason Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms: Rethinking the Global Context (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2003); Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2009).
[8] Thomas Čapek, The Čechs (Bohemians) in America: A Study of Their National, Cultural, Political, Social, Economic and Religious Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), chap. 12; Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary and Labor Movements, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1958); Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870–1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988); James R. Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
[9] Paul Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism in the United States,” in Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 191–92. In the 1930s the Fraye Arbayter Shtime changed the spelling of its name to the Fraye Arbeter Shtime, in accordance with more standard Yiddish orthography. For the sake of convenience I have used the original spelling throughout the text, but in citations I spell it according to how it was rendered at the time.
[10] Israel Shenker, “Anarchy’s the Rule as Anarchists Gather for a Banquet in New York,” New York Times, June 5, 1977. The only significant studies of Jewish anarchism in America not written by participants are N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” in Geshikhte fun der yidisher arbeter-bavengung in di Faraynikte Shtatn, ed. E. Tsherikover, vol. 2, 2 vols. (New York: YIVO, 1945), 297–318; Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism”; Furio Biagini, Nati altrove: il movimento anarchico ebraico tra Mosca e New York (Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 1998).
[11] On these other communities, see Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Labor Unions, a Case Study: Italians and American Labor, 1870–1920 (New York: Arno Press, 1975), chap. 10; Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Italian Immigrants in the United States Labor Movement from 1880 to 1929,” in Gli italiani fuori d’Italia: gli emigrati italiani nei movimenti operai dei paesi d’adozione 1880–1940, ed. Bruno Bezza (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983), 280; Gianna S. Panofsky, “A View of Two Major Centers of Italian Anarchism in the United States: Spring Valley and Chicago, Illinois,” in Italian Ethnics: Their Languages, Literature and Lives, ed. Dominic Candeloro, Fred L. Gardaphe, and Paolo A. Giordano (Staten Island: American Italian Historical Association, 1990), 271–96; Caroline Waldron Merithew, “Anarchist Motherhood: Toward the Making of a Revolutionary Proletariat in Illinois Coal Towns,” in Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, ed. Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 217–46; Gary Ross Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
[12] George W. Carey, “The Vessel, the Deed, and the Idea: Anarchists in Paterson, 1895–1908,” Antipode 10/11 (1979): 46–58; George W. Carey, “’La Questione Sociale’: An Anarchist Newspaper in Paterson, N.J. (1895–1908),” in Italian Americans: New Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity, ed. Lydio F. Tomasi (New York: American Italian Historical Association, 1985), 289–98; Patrizia Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations of Northern Italian Workers in Europe and in Paterson, New Jersey, 1880–1913” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 1992); Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition: Italian Women and Working-Class Politics in New York City, 1880–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2003), chap. 3; Salvatore Salerno, “No God, No Master: Italian Anarchists and the Industrial Workers of the World,” in The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 171–87; Salvatore Salerno, “I Delitti della Razza Bianca (Crimes of the White Race): Italian Anarchists’ Racial Discourse as Crime,” in Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 111–23. Most of what had been published on Paterson anarchists in Italian focuses on the regicide Gaetano Bresci. See Luigi Vittorio Ferraris, “L’assassinio di Umberto I e gli anarchici di Paterson,” Rassegna storica del Risorgimento 55 (1968): 47–64; Arrigo Petacco, L’anarchico che venne dall’America: Storia di Gaetano Bresci e del complotto per uccidere Umberto I, revised ed. (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2001); Roberto Gremmo, Gli anarchici che uccisero Umberto I°: Gaetano Bresci, il “Biondino” e i tessitori biellesi di Paterson (Biella: Storia Ribelle, 2000); Giuseppe Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci: Vita, attentato, processo, carcere e morte dell’anarchico che “giustiziò” Umberto I, 2nd ed. (Salerno: Galzerano Editore/Atti e memoire del popolo, 2001); Francesco Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello, Firmino Gallo e altri anarchici di Mongrando nella catena migratori dal biellese a Paterson N. J.,” Archivi e storia, no. 23/24 (2004): 143–258.
[13] The handful of existing studies that touch on various segments of San Francisco’s anarchist movement include Richard H. Frost, The Mooney Case (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968); Stephen Schwartz, From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (New York: The Free Press, 1998); Paola A. Sensi-Isolani, “Italian Radicals and Union Activists in San Francisco, 1900–1920,” in The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 189–203; Jane Mee Wong, “Pingshe: Retrieving an Asian American Anarchist Tradition,” Amerasia Journal 34, no. 1 (2008): 133–51.
[14] Rudolf Rocker, The London Years, trans. Joseph Leftwich (1956; reprint, Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 8.
[15] Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Italian American Workers, 1880–1920: Padrone Slaves or Primitive Rebels?,” in Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity, ed. S. M. Tomasi (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1977), 42; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 55, passim. See also Rudolph J. Vecoli, “‘Primo Maggio’ in the United States: An Invented Tradition of the Italian Anarchists,” in May Day Celebration, ed. Andrea Panaccione (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1988), 55–83; Marcella Bencivenni, “Italian American Radical Culture in New York City: The Politics and Arts of the Sovversivi, 1890–1940” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2003); Goyens, Beer and Revolution.
[16] Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005), 233.
[17] Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 61.
[18] Dana Frank, “Where Is the History of U.S. Labor and International Solidarity? Part I: A Moveable Feast,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1, no. 1 (2004): 96.
[19] Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1133.
[20] See especially Betty Boyd Caroli, Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900–1914 (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1973); Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), chap. 4; Dino Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 18701929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
[21] Caroli, Italian Repatriation, 46; Robert F. Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times (1919; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 35–36.
[22] These are my calculations from Maurizio Antonioli et al., eds., Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani, 2 vols. (Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 2003–4). It should be noted that nearly one-fifth of the anarchists’ remigrations from the United States took the form of involuntary deportations.
[23] Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern Europe, 1881–1914,” in Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies: The European and North American Working Classes during the Period of Industrialization, ed. Dirk Hoerder (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 423–34.
[24] Nunzio Pernicone, “Italian Immigrant Radicalism in New York,” in The Italians of New York: Five Centuries of Struggle and Achievement, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro (New York: The New-York Historical Society/John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 1999), 86; Davide Turcato, “Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 1885–1915,” International Review of Social History 52 (2007): 407–445.
[25] See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991); Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
[26] N. H. Castle, “In Re: Jules Scarceriaux,” September 17, 1919, file 313369, Old German Files (hereafter cites as OG), Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Record Group 65 (hereafter cited as FBI), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
[27] Nunzio Pernicone, “Murder under the ‘El’: The Greco-Carillo Case and the Fascist League of North America,” Italian American Review 6, no. 2 (Autumn -Winter 1998 1997): 23.
[28] This is not to say that every reader of an anarchist periodical was an anarchist; studies of the reading habits of Italian and Jewish immigrants from the period show that actual newspaper readership was significantly higher than the number of copies printed, indicating that there were plenty of readers of the anarchist press who would not have identified as anarchists, but still allowing for the use of circulation figures as a rough indicator for those who did. Eliot Lord, J. D. Trenor, and Samuel J. Barrows, The Italian in America (New York: B. F. Buck, 1905), 246; Mordecai Stoltes, The Yiddish Press: An Americanizing Agency (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1925), 39. The sources for this database are presented in Appendix A.
[29] Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), xviii.
[30] Margaret S. Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 10.
[31] Vecoli, “Italian Immigrants,” 274; Vecoli, “‘Primo Maggio’,” 56.
[32] Donna Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Michael Miller Topp, Those without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Turcato, “Italian Anarchism.”
[33] Pier Carlo Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani da Bakunin a Malatesta (1862–1892) (Milan: Rizzoli Editore, 1969); Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
[34] Introduction to Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, ix; Carl Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists (New York: Berg, 1999), 9; Vincenzo Mantovani, Anarchici alla sbarra: la strage del Diana tra primo dopoguerra e fascismo, new ed. (Milan: Saggiatore, 2007), 175; Albert S. Lindermann, The Red Years: European Socialism versus Bolshevism, 1919–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 9, 296.
[35] Armando Borghi, Mezzo secolo di anarchica (1898–1945) (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1954), 87–96; Carl Levy, “Currents of Italian Syndicalism before 1926,” International Review of Social History 45, no. 2 (August 2000): 209–250.
[36] On Italian American socialism see Elisabetta Vezzosi, Il socialismo indifferente: immigrati italiani e Socialist Party negli Stati Uniti del primo Novecento (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 1991); Elisabetta Vezzosi, “Socialists or Radicals? Italian Immigrants in the Socialist Party of America,” in The Italian Diaspora: Migration Across the Globe, ed. George E. Pozzetta and Bruno Cartosio (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1992), 11731. On communism see Gerald Meyer, “Italian Americans and the American Communist Party,” in The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 205–227. On syndicalism see Bruno Cartosio, “Gli emigrati italiani e l’Industrial Workers of the World,” in Gli italiani fuori d’Italia: gli emigrati italiani nei movimenti operai dei paesi d’adozione 1880–1940, ed. Bruno Bezza (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983), 359–95; Topp, Those without a Country; Salerno, “No God, No Master.”
[37] Donna Gabaccia, “International Approaches to Italian Labour Migration,” in The Italian Diaspora: Migration Across the Globe, ed. George E. Pozzetta and Bruno Ramirez (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1992), 25.
[38] Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Herman Frank, “Anarkhosotsialistishe ideyan un bavengungen bay yidn,” in Geklibene shriftn (New York: Dr. Herman Frank BukhKomitet/Bialistoker Historishe Gezelshaft, 1954), 267.
[39] Andrew R. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany: The Early Movement (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972); Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 77 (quote), passim.
[40] This rarely acknowledged point is made in Nunzio Pernicone, “Anarchism in Italy, 1872–1900,” in Italian American Radicalism: Old World Origins and New World Developments, ed. Rudolf J. Vecoli (Staten Island: American Italian Historical Association, 1971), 2; Paul Avrich interview, in Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists, videocassette (Pacific Street Films, 1980).
[41] Following Dirk Hoerder, I prefer the term “acculturation,” defined as the “process of migrants’ coming to terms with a new culture after having developed a full personality in the culture of origin,” over “adaptation,” “accommodation,” or “assimilation.” Dirk Hoerder, “From Migrants to Ethnics: Acculturation in a Societal Framework,” in European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 212.
[42] Vincenzo Ferrero interview and Dominick Sallitto interview, in Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 164–65, 166.
[43] Pernicone, “Italian Immigrant Radicalism,” 78; Bencivenni, “Italian American Radical Culture,” 37.
[44] Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 59, 101.
[45] Günter Moltmann, “American-German Return Migration in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Central European History 13, no. 4 (December 1980): 378–92; Wyman, Round-Trip to America, 10–12.
[46] United States Bureau of the Census, The Statistical History of the United States: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 117. For circulation figures see Table 2.
[47] Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) 166; Moses Rischin, “The Jewish Labor Movement in America: A Social Interpretation,” Labor History 4, no. 3 (Fall 1963): 227–247; Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 3 (quote), passim. See also J. B. S. Hardman, “The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States: Jewish and Non-Jewish Influences,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52, no. 2 (September 1962): 98–132; Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
[48] Biagini, Nati altrove. Biagini draws heavily on Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe; a Study in Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). Löwy, however, argues that the fusion of Jewish mysticism and libertarian socialism was restricted to Jewish intellectuals in Central Europe. A more ambivalent conclusion about the relationship between the two traditions is reached by Chaim Seeligmann, “Apocalisse, messianismo laico utopia,” in L’Anarchico e l’ebreo: storia di un incontro, ed. Amedeo Bertolo (Milan: Elèuthera, 2001), 45–53.
[49] Robert Wolfe, Remember to Dream: A History of Jewish Radicalism (New York: Jewish Radical Education Project, 1994), 262.
[50] Ezra Mendelsohn, “The Russian Roots of the American Jewish Labor Movement,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 16 (1976): 150–77; Steven Cassedy, “Chernyshevskii Goes West: How Jewish Immigration Helped Bring Russian Radicalism to America,” Russian History 21, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 1–21; Steven Cassedy, To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
[51] Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), quote on 25.
[52] Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
[53] Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War, 2nd ed. (1950; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 191–92; Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), chap. 5.
[54] Vecoli, “Italian American Workers,” 46 n. 15; Paul Buhle, “Italian-American Radicals and Rhode Island Labor, 1905–1930,” Radical History Review 17 (1978): 123; Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 153.
[55] Eddie May, “‘Primitive Rebels’ in Spain: Historians and the Anarchist Phenomenon,” in Conflict and Coexistence: Nationalism and Democracy in Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Harry Hearder, ed. Scott Newton, David Bates, and R. A Stradling (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 196–218; Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, 93–94; Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 79–80, 278; introduction to Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, xiv. See also Donna Gabaccia, “Neither Padrone Slaves nor Primitive Rebels: Sicilians on Two Continents,” in “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working Class Immigrants, ed. Dirk Hoerder (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 95–117.
[56] Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 284; George Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 5658; John W. Copp, “The Role of the Anarchists in the Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921: A Case Study in Conspiratorial Party Behavior during Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1992), 45–53.
[57] Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 45; Pernicone, “Italian Immigrant Radicalism,” 82; Nunzio Pernicone, Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 21.
[58] Calculated from Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico.
[59] I. M. Rubinow, “Economic Conditions of the Jews in Russia,” Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor 15 (1907): 500; Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910 (1914; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 141.
[60] Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in U.S.A.: An Industrial, Political and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement, new ed. ([New York]: Ktav Publishing House, 1969), 1:195; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 105; Elliot R. Barkan, “Introduction: Immigration, Incorporation, Assimilation, and the Limits of Transnationalism,” Journal of American Ethnic History 25, no. 2–3 (Winter-Spring 2006): 7–8.
[61] Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 18751900 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 253; Harry Kelly, introduction to Thomas B. Eyges, Beyond the Horizon: The Story of a Radical Emigrant (Boston: Group Free Society, 1944), 16.
[62] On the proletarianization of migrant intellectuals see Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted,” The Journal of American History 51, no. 3 (December 1964): 414; Paul Buhle, “Themes in American Jewish Radicalism,” in The Immigrant Left in the United States, ed. Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 414; Mendelsohn, “Russian Roots,” 167.
[63] Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, “Levantine Trajectories: The Formulation and Dissemination of Radical Ideas in and between Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria, 1860–1914” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2003), 335.
[64] For an important critique of the “immigrant paradigm,” see Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere?.”
[65] Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 315.
[66] Turcato, “Italian Anarchism,” 416. For a less coherent study of the same phenomenon see Adam Elie Vital, “Patriotic Anarchism: The Case of Italy, 1860–1882” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1992).
[67] G. P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (New York: The Free Press, 1953), 324; Bakunin quoted in Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 309.
[68] David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 84, 3–4.
[69] On these concepts see Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
[70] Robert Ventresca and Franca Iacovetta, “Virgilia D’Andrea: The Politics of Protest and the Poetry of Exile,” in Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, ed. Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 299–326; Topp, Those without a Country, 61.
[71] Harry Kelly, “Roll Back the Years: Odyssey of a Libertarian,” unpublished manuscript, n.d , XVIII:5, boxes 2627, John Nicholas Beffel Collection, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University (hereafter cited as Tamiment Library). See also Constance Bantman, “Internationalism without an International? Cross-Channel Anarchist Networks, 1880–1914,” Revue Belge e Philologie et d’Histoire/Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis 84, no. 4 (2006): 961–81.
[72] Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 215.
[73] [Max Nettlau], “F. S. Merlino (1856–1930),” manuscript, n.d., folder 131, L’Adunata dei Refrattari Archives, IISH; Solidarity, January 21, 1893; John H. Edelmann, “The Conference,” Solidarity, February 9, 1893.
[74] I borrow this term from Bob Robbins, introduction to Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 1–19.
[75] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 6; George Frederic Parsons, “The Labor Question,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1886, 111–12.
[76] Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 23.
[77] Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew Under Tsars and Soviets, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), 64; Rubinow, “Economic Conditions,” 488.
[78] Baron, Russian Jew, 61; Elias Tcherikower et al., The Early Jewish Labor Movement in the United States, trans. Aaron Antonovsky (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1961), 24.
[79] Baron, Russian Jew, 39–40, 44–45, 53.
[80] Rubinow, “Economic Conditions,” 491, 493.
[81] Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 4, 6, 14–15.
[82] Rubinow, “Economic Conditions,” 529; Simon Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 79.
[83] Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews,” 42, 120.
[84] Joseph, Jewish Immigration, 73–76, 78–80, 106, 108; Joseph Kissman, “The Immigration of Rumanian Jews Up to 1914,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 2–3 (1947): 160–79.
[85] Joseph, Jewish Immigration, 112.
[86] Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews,” 105, 122; Joseph, Jewish Immigration, 154.
[87] M. E. Ravage, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant, ed. Steven G. Kellman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 47.
[88] Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 37; Rischin, The Promised City, 231.
[89] Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, Appendix, tables 13, 14, and 15; Louis Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924), 515.
[90] S. Yanovsky, Ershte yorn fun yidishn frayhaytlekhn sotsializm (New York: Fraye Arbeter Shtime, 1948), 54.
[91] Marie Ganz, Rebels: Into Anarchy—and Out Again (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1919), 38–39.
[92] Howe, World of Our Fathers, 80 (quote); Judith Greenfield, “The Role of the Jews in the Development of the Clothing Industry in the United States,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 2–3 (1947): 190–94; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, chap. 3–4; Daniel Soyer, “Cockroach Capitalists: Jewish Contractors at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalism, and Reform in the New York City Garment Industry, ed. Daniel Soyer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 91–113.
[93] Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 21.
[94] Rose Pesotta, Days of Our Lives (Boston: Excelsior Publishers, 1958), 251; Ida Radosh interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 339.
[95] Ganz, Rebels, 1.
[96] David Edelshtat, “Tenement hayzer,” in B. J. Bialostotsky, ed., David Edelshtat gedenk-bukh: tsum zekhtsikstn yortsayt, 1892–1952 (New York: Dovid Edelshtat Komitetn, 1953), 233.
[97] Ganz, Rebels, 88, 155–56; Ravage, An American in the Making, 106.
[98] D. E., “Natur un mensh,” Di Varhayt, March 29, 1889, reprinted in Bialostotsky, David Edelshtat gedenk-bukh, 381–82.
[99] Abba Gordin, Draysik yor in Lite un Poyln (oytobiografie) (Buenos Aires: Yidisher Ratsionalistisher Gezelshaft, 1958), 304–5; Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Mendelsohn, “Russian Roots”; Cassedy, To the Other Shore.
[100] I. Kopeloff, Amol in Amerike: zikhroynes fun dem yidishn lebn in Amerike in di yorn 1883–1904 (Warsaw: Kh. Bzshoza, 1928), 7.
[101] Abraham Menes, “The Am Oylom Movement,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 4 (1949): 9–33; Mendelsohn, “Russian Roots,” 152–55.
[102] Haberer, Jews and Revolution; Sorin, Prophetic Minority, 46.
[103] Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960), 438 (quote), passim.
[104] Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931; reprint, Salt Lake City: Peregrine and Gibbs M. Smith, 1982), 9; Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912; reprint, Pittsburgh: Frontier Press, 1970), 60; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung in Amerike: historisher iberblik un perzenlekhe iberlebungen (Philadelphia: Radical Library, Branch 273 Arbeter Ring, 1945), 142–43; Leon Moisseiff, “M. Katts—der faraynigender element in der bavegung,” in M. Katts Zamelbukh, ed. A. Frumkin and Khaym Faynman (Philadelphia: Merts, 1925), 39–40.
[105] Haberer, Jews and Revolution, 15.
[106] Cassedy, To the Other Shore; Lavrov quoted in Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 463.
[107] Kopeloff, Amol in Amerike, 191–92; Cassedy, To the Other Shore, 96.
[108] Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 120; Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, 45.
[109] Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 157. On the IWPA and German American anarchism in general, see also David, History of the Haymarket Affair; Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy; Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs.
[110] Abe Cahan, The Education of Abraham Cahan, trans. Leon Stein, Abraham P. Conan, and Lynn Davison (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 227; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 43.
[111] Chaim Weinberg, Forty Years in the Struggle: The Memoirs of a Jewish Anarchist, ed. Robert P. Helms, trans. Naomi Cohen (Duluth: Litwin Books, 2008), 7, 9. See also I. A. Benequit, Durkhgelebt un durkhgetrakht, vol. 2 (New York: Farlag “Kultur Federatsie”, 1934), 59; Kopeloff, Amol in Amerike, 106; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 6.
[112] Leon Kobrin, “Chaim Weinberg, the Anarchist Speaker,” in Weinberg, Forty Years, 153; Benequit, Durkhgelebt un durkhgetrakht, 2:53–55.
[113] Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 5; Kobrin, “Chaim Weinberg,” in Weinberg, Forty Years, 154.
[114] Cahan, Education, 244, 254–58; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 9, 116, 47; N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 309, 303; Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 101–2.
[115] Benequit, Durkhgelebt un durkhgetrakht, 2:270, 59.
[116] Michael Cohn, “In Neters keler,” in David Edelshtat gedenk-bukh: tsum zekhtsikstn yortsayt, 1892–1952, ed. B. J. Bialostotsky (New York: Dovid Edelshtat Komitetn, 1953), 183–85; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 55. Goldman herself does not appear to have been a member of the group; see Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 75.
[117] Yanovsky, Ershte yorn, 84; [Alexander Berkman], “Stray Thoughts (on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the F.A.S.),” manuscript, 1924, folder 191, Alexander Berkman Papers (hereafter cited as Berkman Papers), IISH; Cohn, “In Neters keler,” 183.
[118] N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 297–98; “To the Workingmen of America,” 1883, quoted in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 75.
[119] N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 305–6.
[120] D. E., “Der 4-ter Mai ’86,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, May 15, 1891, quoted Ori Kitz, The Poetics of Anarchy: David Edelshtat’s Revolutionary Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 31.
[121] Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 120–21; Yanovsky, Ershte yorn, 51–58.
[122] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 4; Kitz, Poetics of Anarchy, 43.
[123] Ronald Sanders, The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 53; Charles S. Liebman, “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life,” in American Jewish Yearbook, vol. 66 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1965), 27–30; Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 159–65.
[124] Howe, World of Our Fathers, 307; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 15.
[125] Cahan, Education, 204; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 112.
[126] [Alexander Berkman] to Zalmen Reisen, February 1931, folder 65, Berkman Papers, IISH; Yanovsky, Ershte yorn, 87; Abba Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky: zayn lebn, kemfn un shafn, 1864–1939 (Los Angeles: Sh. Yanovsky Odenk Komitet, 1957), 129; M. Katts, “Zayn geshtalt,” in David Edelshtat gedenk-bukh: tsum zekhtsikstn yortsayt, 18921952, ed. B. J. Bialostotsky (New York: Dovid Edelshtat Komitetn, 1953), 178–79; Kitz, Poetics of Anarchy, 42.
[127] Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, chap. 11; William J. Fishman, Jewish Radicals: From Czarist Stetl to London Ghetto (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 138–59.
[128] Herman Frank, “Anarkho-sotsialistishe ideyen,” 262; Rocker, The London Years, 7; Rudolf Rocker, “Kropotkin and the Jewish Labor Movement in England,” manuscript, n.d., folder 335, Rudolf Rocker Papers (hereafter cited as Rocker Papers), IISH, 2.
[129] Benequit, Durkhgelebt un durkhgetrakht, 2:107; Weinberg, Forty Years, 19; N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 310–11.
[130] Cahan, Education, 237–38; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, ch. 2; N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 306.
[131] Dr. C. Zhitlowsky, “Dr. Hillel Zolotarov un zayn natsionalistisher anarkhizm,” in Hillel Solotaroff, Geklibene shriftn, ed. Joel Entin, vol. 1 (New York: Dr. H. Solotaroff Publication Committee, 1924), 12; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 63 (Cohn quote), 61.
[132] Dr. J. A. Merison, “Der ershter period fun der anarkhistisher bavegung,” in M. Katts Zamelbukh, ed. A. Frumkin and Khaym Faynman (Philadelphia: Merts, 1925), 31.
[133] Cohn, “In Neters keler,” 56; Benequit, Durkhgelebt un durkhgetrakht, 2:107; N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 312–14; Hertz Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung in Amerike, Rusland un England (New York: Fareynigte Idishe Geverkshaften, 1915), 356.
[134] Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher un zeyere yunyons: erinerungen (New York: Klok Opereytors Yunyon Lokal 1, 1920), 22; Kopeloff, Amol in Amerike, 231; Weinberg, Forty Years, 22, 24; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 311; Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 208; Krantz quoted in Ibid., 192.
[135] Alexander Harkavy, “Chapters from My Life,” in The East European Jewish Experience in America, ed. Uri D. Herscher, trans. Jonathan D. Sarna (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1983), 60; Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 56.
[136] Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 8, 22; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 30. Rosenberg mistakenly dates the cloakmakers’ strike as occurring in 1885; see Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 290–91.
[137] Leon Kobrin in Weinberg, Forty Years, 155; Joseph Barondes, “Zikhroynes fun amol,” in M. Katts Zamelbukh, ed. A. Frumkin and Khaym Faynman (Philadelphia: Merts, 1925), 35–36; Fraye Arbayter Shtime, December 25, 1890, quoted in N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 315–16.
[138] Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 327–28; Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 22; N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 315. Around 1890 Johann Most accepted a syndicalist-like view of the importance of union struggles; see Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 100.
[139] Morris U. Schappes, “The Political Origins of the United Hebrew Trades, 1888,” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 5, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 13–44. In 1899 anarchists in Philadelphia also organized a Jewish Federation of Labor that included that city’s cloakmakers’ union. Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 44.
[140] Elias Schulman, “Di ‘Varhayt’,” in Zamlbukh likhvoyd dem tsvey hundert un fuftsiksn yoyvl fun der yidisher prese, 1686–1936, ed. Jacob Shatsky (New York: Amopteyl fun YIVO, 1936), 197–211; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 159–61; I. Kopeloff, “M. Katts’s tetigkayt in der anarkhistisher un sots. revolutsionerer bevegung,” in M. Katts Zamelbukh, ed. A. Frumkin and Hayim Fineman (Philadelphia: Merts, 1925), 22–23. The first issue of Di Varhayt appeared before Joseph Jaffa’s arrival and was edited by Hillel Solotaroff and David Edelstadt.
[141] Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 95–96; Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 240–45; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 180–81.
[142] Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 182–83, 312.
[143] Benequit, Durkhgelebt un durkhgetrakht, 2:54–55 (quote); Dr. J. A. Merison, “Der ershter period,” 32–33; Moshe Shtarkman, “80 yor ‘Fraye Arbayter Shtime’,” in Geklibene shriftn, vol. 1 (Tel-Aviv: Cyco-Publishing House, 1979), 110–11.
[144] Shtarkman, “80 yor ‘Fraye Arbayter Shtime’,” 111; Simon Rich, “Tsu der forgeshikhte fun der Fraye Arbayter Shtime,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, January 29, 1943, quoted in Kitz, Poetics of Anarchy, 68; [Berkman], “Stray Thoughts.”
[145] Sanders, The Downtown Jews, 112; Kitz, Poetics of Anarchy, 57; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 100.
[146] New York State Bureau of Labor Statistics, quoted in Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 45; Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 29–30; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 20–30; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 54–56.
[147] Cahan, Education, 408–9; Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 216; Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 23–24; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 51–54; Weinberg, Forty Years, 165–66 n. 35; “Still Hunting for Marsh,” New York Times, June 23, 1891; “Believe Garside No Longer,” New York Times, June 24, 1891.
[148] Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 29.
[149] Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 49–54; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 59–63.
[150] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 63–64; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 331. The socialist Arbeter Tsaytung‘s tyepsetters had struck twice the previous year but in both instances the UHT, which supported that paper, intervened to resolve the disputes. Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 285 n. 71.
[151] Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 52, 61; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 332–35; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 72.
[152] See J. F. Finn, “AF of L Leaders and the Question of Politics in the Early 1890s,” Journal of American Studies 7, no. 3 (December 1973): 243–65; George B. Cotkin, “The Spencerian and Comtian Nexus in Gompers’ Labor Philosophy: The Impact of Non-Marxian Evolutionary Thought,” Labor History 20, no. 4 (Autumn 1979): 510–23; Carlotta R. Anderson, All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 166–67, 190.
[153] Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 335; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 74; Epstein, Jewish Labor, 1:210.
[154] Sanders, The Downtown Jews, 162–63; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 73; Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 64, 61.
[155] Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 76–83; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 332, 338.
[156] Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, 7.
[157] Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, chap. 8, 10–11; Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 124–42.
[158] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 74–75, 106; Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 130–31; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 194.
[159] Herman Frank, “Anarchism and the Jews,” in Struggle for Tomorrow: Modern Political Ideologies of the Jewish People, ed. Basil J. Vlavianos and Feliks Gross (New York: Arts, 1953), 280 (quote); Fishman, Jewish Radicals, 197–201; Rocker, The London Years, 62.
[160] Yanovsky, Ershte yorn, 204–210; Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 193–201; Fishman, Jewish Radicals, 203.
[161] N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 310.
[162] Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 329; Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism,” 184–85.
[163] S. Yanovsky, “Genose H. Zolotarov der frayhayts-pioner in der idisher arbeter bavegung in Amerika,” in Geklibene shriftn, ed. Joel Entin (New York: Dr. H. Solotaroff Publication Committee, 1924), 27–32.
[164] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 104.
[165] Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 649.
[166] B. Rivkin, Grunt-tendentsn fun der yidisher literatur in Amerike, ed. Mina Bordo-Rivkin (New York: Ikuf, 1948), 53–54; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 518; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 91–92.
[167] Rubinow, “Economic Conditions,” 557; Joseph, Jewish Immigration, 147. The literacy rate of Jewish women was roughly the same as in Russia.
[168] Ravage, An American in the Making, 63.
[169] Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter of New York, new ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 177; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 113–15 (quote on 115); N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 306.
[170] Joseph Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in Amerike: a tsushteyer tsu der 75 yoriker geshikhte fun der Yidisher prese in di Fareynikte Shtatn un Kanade (New York: Farlag M. Sh. Sklarski, 1946), 71; Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism,” 184.
[171] Herman Frank, “Anarchism and the Jews,” 282–83.
[172] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 167–68.
[173] Israel Ostroff interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 350; Lucy Robbins Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful (New York: Macmillan Company, 1948), 112; Rocker, The London Years, 63.
[174] Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 315; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 116.
[175] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 117.
[176] Sidney Fine, “Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley,” The American Historical Review 60, no. 4 (July 1955): 777–99; Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 258–59.
[177] Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 159.
[178] Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 249, 314; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1910, 1160.
[179] Shtarkman, “80 yor ‘Fraye Arbayter Shtime’,” 111; Robert E. Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922), 100.
[180] Chaikin, Yidishe bleter, 112, 255–60; Herman Frank, “Anarkho-sotsialistishe ideyen,” 280.
[181] Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 314; Mordecai Stoltes, The Yiddish Press: An Americanizing Agency (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1925), 28; Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 479; Israel Shenker, “Anarchy’s the Rule as Anarchists Gather for a Banquet in New York,” New York Times, June 5, 1977.
[182] Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism,” 190–91, 293 n. 61; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 445, 258. These were the Anarkhie Group, Likht Group, International Group, Zsherminal Group, Frayhayt Group, Solidarity Group, Broyt un Frayhayt Group, Jewish Self-Education Group, Anarchist Red Cross, and Friends of Art and Education Group.
[183] Max Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters and Demagogues: Reminiscences (New York: Waldon Press, 1964), 153; “The Anarchist Movement,” The Road to Freedom, December 1926.
[184] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 119. On Schwab’s saloon see also Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 43–45; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 43.
[185] Yanovsky, “Genose H. Zolotarov,” 29; Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 124, 233; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 5; Eyges, Beyond the Horizon, 127–28. On Jewish café culture see also Howe, World of Our Fathers, 235–38.
[186] Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism,” 190; Nadelman (“Morris N.”) quoted in David P. Shuldiner, Of Moses and Marx: Folk Ideology and Folk History in the Jewish Labor Movement (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999), 64.
[187] Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), chap. 4; Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem was Jewish, 1870–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
[188] Hapgood, Spirit of the Ghetto, 141; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 116–17.
[189] Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 148–49.
[190] F. Stick in Der Tog, January 14, 1914, quoted in Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control, 179.
[191] Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 258–59; Jewish Times, October 11, 1901, quoted in Rebecca E. Margolis, “A Tempest in Three Teapots: Yom Kippur Balls in London, New York and Montreal,” in The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader, ed. Richard Menkis and Norman Ravvin (Calgary: Red Deer Press, 2004), 154; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 103.
[192] N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 307.
[193] Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 77; Eyges, Beyond the Horizon, 75.
[194] Fishman, Jewish Radicals, 155–56; Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 257; Karin Hofmeester, Jewish Workers in the Labour Movement: A Comparative Study of Amsterdam, London and Paris, 1870–1914, trans. Lee Mitzman (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 230; Margolis, “Tempest in Three Teapots.”
[195] Ravage, An American in the Making, 107; Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 107 (quote); Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 365.
[196] Israel Davidson, Parody in Jewish Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907), 79–84, 257, 26063; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 70.
[197] Ravage, An American in the Making, 107; Shuldiner, Of Moses and Marx, 133–34.
[198] See, for instance, S. Marcus, “Anarchist Conference,” Revolt, February 5, 1916; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 30.
[199] L. Rozentsvayg, “Arbayter ring,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, September 17, 1904; Annie Polland, “‘May a Freethinker Help a Pious Man?’: The Shared World of the ‘Religious’ and the ‘Secular’ Among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants to America,” American Jewish History 93, no. 4: 393–406.
[200] Kopeloff, Amol in Amerike, 235–39; Margolis, “Tempest in Three Teapots,” 146; Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 259, 263–66.
[201] T. K., “Poor Jews!” The Liberator, October 22, 1905.
[202] Kopeloff, Amol in Amerike, 275; Margolis, “Tempest in Three Teapots,” 146.
[203] Isaiah Trunk, “The Cultural Dimension of the American Jewish Labor Movement,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 16 (1976): 349; Charles S. Liebman, “Orthodoxy,” 30; Sarna, American Judaism, 161, 171.
[204] Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 263–64; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 70; Margolis, “Tempest in Three Teapots,” 141–42, 147.
[205] Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 77. Emphasis in original.
[206] Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism,” 130.
[207] Nadelman quoted in Shuldiner, Of Moses and Marx, 65.
[208] Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism,” 180.
[209] Joseph J. Cohen, The House Stood Forlorn: Legacy of Remembrance of a Boyhood in the Russia of the Late Nineteenth Century (Paris: [Editions Polyglottes], 1954), 17; Goldman quoted in Naomi Shepherd, A Price Below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 285. On racial “marking” see Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (1990): 1–20. On the different forms of American Anti-Semitism see David A. Gerber, “Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 3–54.
[210] Moyshe Katts, “Di idnfrage,” in Geklibene shriftn: artiklen, eseyen un felyetonen, ed. J. Entin and A. Frumkin (New York: M. Katts Shriftn-Komitet, 1939), 25–38. Reprinted from Di Varhayt, February through March, 1889.
[211] See Abba Gordin, “Edelshtats lebn un shafn,” in David Edelshtat gedenk-bukh: tsum zekhtsikstn yortsayt, 18921952, ed. B. J. Bialostotsky (New York: Dovid Edelshtat Komitetn, 1953), 51, 53.
[212] Dr. J. A. Merison, “Der ershter period,” 30–31.
[213] Harkavy, “Chapters from My Life.”
[214] Bernard G. Richards, “Alexander Harkavy,” in American Jewish Yearbook, ed. Harry Schneiderman, vol. 42 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1940), 163; Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 165; N. Goldberg, “Pionire der frayhayt,” 306; A. Frumkin, In friling fun idishn sotsializm: zikhroynes fun a zshurnalist (New York: A. Frumkin Yubiley Komitet, 1940), 19394.
[215] Paul Buhle, “Themes in American Jewish Radicalism,” in The Immigrant Left in the United States, ed. Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 85; Alexander Harkavy, “Di role fun sprakh in felker-kunde: a folologishe unterzukhung,” Der Nayer Gayst, October 1897, 19–20.
[216] Dovid Katz, “Alexander Harkavy and his Trilingual Dictionary,” in Alexander Harkavy, Yidish-EnglishHebreisher verterbukh/Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), vii, x; Harkavy’s bio-bibliografie (New York: Hibru Publishing Kompany, 1933).
[217] A. Frumkin, In friling, 194.
[218] Sanders, The Downtown Jews, 386; A. Frumkin, In friling, 186–87, 192–93.
[219] Kopeloff, Amol in Amerike, 458.
[220] Frank, “Anarkho-sotsialistishe ideyen,” 286; Dr. Hillel Zolotarov, “Ernste fragen,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, May 23, 1903; Barondes, “Zikhroynes fun amol,” 38. It should be noted that Yiddish radicals used the terms “internationalism” and “cosmopolitanism” interchangeably, and their Zionist, territorialist, and Bundist opponents, as well as many historians, usually equated these with assimilation. My own usage of “cosmopolitanism,” like that of many anarchists, is of course different, as outlined in the Introduction.
[221] Zhitlowsky, “Dr. Hillel Zolotarov”; Mina Grauer, “Anarcho-Nationalism: Anarchist Attitudes towards Jewish Nationalism and Zionism,” Modern Judaism 14, no. 1 (February 1994): 14–16.
[222] Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 279–80.
[223] Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), chap. 2, 4; Kopeloff, “M. Katts’s tetigkayt”; Benequit, Durkhgelebt un durkhgetrakht, 2:2728; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 359.
[224] Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 128–29.
[225] Zhitlowsky, “Dr. Hillel Zolotarov,” 14 n.; Leon Elbe, “Der teritorialistisher farzukh,” in M. Katts Zamelbukh, ed. A. Frumkin and Khaym Faynman (Philadelphia: Merts, 1925), 61–62; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 140, 14647.
[226] Weinberg, Forty Years, 112.
[227] Kopeloff, “M. Katts’s tetigkayt,” 27–29; Khaym Faynman, “M. Katts un di nats.-sotsialistishe bavegung in Filadelfia,” in M. Katts Zamelbukh, ed. A. Frumkin and Khaym Faynman (Philadelphia: Merts, 1925), 135–39; Weinberg, Forty Years, 111.
[228] Syrkin quoted in Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 302; Ber Borochov, “Two Currents in Poale Zion,” in Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation: Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism, ed. Mitchell Cohen (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984), 151. Emphasis in original.
[229] Moshe Shtarkman, “Nokh fuftsik yor ‘Fraye Arbeter Shtime’,” in Geklibene shriftn, vol. 2 (Tel-Aviv: Farlag “Israel-Bukh”, 1980), 77.
[230] Howe, World of Our Fathers, 204; C. Bezalel Sherman, “The Beginnings of Labor Zionism in the United States,” in Early History of Zionism in America (New York: Amer, 1958), 285–86; Moshe Cohen, ed., Labor Zionist Handbook: The Aims, Activities and History of the Labor Zionist Movement in America (New York: Poale Zion Zeire Zion of America, 1939), 62, 75; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 146–47; 1160. See also Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975), 104, 145.
[231] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 370.
[232] Internationalist, “National Atavism,” Mother Earth, March 1906, 49–56.
[233] Grauer, “Anarcho-Nationalism,” 15–16.
[234] “Kropotkin vegn tsionizm,” in Kropotkin-zamlbukh, ed. Jacob Sigal (Buenos Aires: Grupe ‘Dovid Edelshtat’, 1943), 208–13; P. Kropotkin, “Nokh vegn anarkhizm un tsionizm,” in Kropotkin-zamlbukh, ed. Jacob Sigal (Buenos Aires: Grupe ‘Dovid Edelshtat’, 1947), 218–20; Grauer, “Anarcho-Nationalism,” 5–7. Kropotkin’s articles originally appeared in Listki “Khleb i Volia”, June 7 and July 5, 1907.
[235] Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 305–313.
[236] Frank, “Anarkho-sotsialistishe ideyen,” 289; Ahrne Thorne, interview by Buhle Paul, December 15, 1982, tape 265, box 2, The Oral History of the American Left, Tamiment Library.
[237] B. Rivkin, “The Distinguishing Characteristics of Yiddish Literature,” trans. Sam Schwartz, Direction, February 1937, 95. See also Rivkin, Grunt-tendentsn; Mina Bordo-Rivkin, ed., B. Rivkin: lebn un shafn (New York: L. M. Shtayn, 1953).
[238] Herman Frank, “Anarkho-sotsialistishe ideyen,” 300. For a similar argument see A. Kantor, “Di natsionale individualistet,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, June 13, 1914.
[239] Howe, World of Our Fathers, 643.
[240] Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 75, 96; Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 186 (quote).
[241] Thorne, interview.
[242] Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 249; Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism,” 188.
[243] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 133.
[244] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 370.
[245] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 172–79; Morris Beresin interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 223.
[246] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 197–207.
[247] Ibid., 259–66. The front page of the first issue of the paper is reproduced in Ibid., 263.
[248] See J. A. Merison, Di teorie un praktik fun anarkhizm (New York: Naye Gezelshaft un Ferrer Senter Brentches fun Arbayter Ring, 1927); Dr. J. A. Maryson, “A Letter to Mother Earth,” Mother Earth, December 1907, 445–46; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 193, 259–60, 265.
[249] Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 181; Weinberg, Forty Years, 71–77.
[250] Epstein, Jewish Labor, 1:377.
[251] Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), chap. 3; Max Nettlau, untitled manuscript, n.d., 83, copy in author’s possession; Industrial Workers of the World, The Founding Convention of the IWW: Proceedings (1905; reprint, New York: Merit Publishers, 1969). Nettlau, citing Les Temps Nouveaux of August 26 and December 30, 1905, states that eleven anarchist delegates attended but names only three; Salerno identifies an additional five. Neither author lists Chicago anarchist Julia Mechanic or Italian anarchists Joseph Corna and Antionio Andrà.
[252] Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 599; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 123–25.
[253] Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 125–26; Abraham Rosenberg, Di klokmakher, 144–45; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 601–2; Buhle, “Themes in American Jewish Radicalism,” 88.
[254] Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 142; Abraham Blecher interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 352.
[255] See Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, chap. 21; Maxine Seller, “The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand: Sex, Class and Ethnicity in the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909,” in “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working Class Immigrants, ed. Dirk Hoerder (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 280–303.
[256] Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 124–25, 187–88, 593; A. B. [Alexander Berkman] to Tillie Sigman, August 25, 1931, folder 58, Berkman Papers, IISH.
[257] For mention of Mitchell’s anarchism see Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 295.
[258] Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 266, 270–71; Melech Epstein, Israel Feinberg: Fighter for Freedom and Social Justice/Yisroel Faynberg: kemfer far frayhayt un sotsyaler gerekhtikayt (New York: Lerman Printing Company, 1948), 45–46. On of Protocol of Peace see Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, chap. 23.
[259] Ezra Mendelsohn, “Worker Opposition in the Russian Jewish Socialist Movement, from the 1890’s to 1903,” International Review of Social History 10 (1965): 268–282; Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 17–20; Gordin, Draysik yor, 368.
[260] Inge Blank, “Plebian Protest and the Rise of the Jewish Labor Movement in Czarist Russia,” in Roots of the Transplanted, ed. Dirk Hoerder, Horst Rössler, and Inge Blank, vol. 2 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1994), 226; Morris Schulmeister interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 360. See also Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters and Demagogues, 44, 129.
[261] Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 68–69 n. 120; Anna Geifman, “The Anarchists and the ‘Obscure Extremists’,” in Russia under the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion 1894–1917, ed. Anna Geifman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 94. See also L. Levin and J. Lyons, “A Letter from Russia,” Mother Earth, November 1906, 38–47.
[262] Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 46–54, 64; Geifman, “The Anarchists,” 93 (quote); Richard Bach Jensen, “The Evolution of Anarchist Terrorism in Europe and the United States from the Nineteenth Century to World War I,” in Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism, ed. Brett Bowden and Michael Davis (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2008), 157–59. Geifman’s is the higher estimate, which Jensen doubts is accurate. If true, it would mean that on average every single anarchist in Russia was responsible for the deaths of two people.
[263] Kellogg Durland, “The Necessity of Terrorism in Russia,” Mother Earth, December 1907, 449–54.
[264] Goldman, Living My Life, 364; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 41; [Emma Goldman], “The Situation in America,” Mother Earth, November 1907; Emma [Goldman] to Bakushka [Catherine Breshkovskaya], April 14, 1905, in Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica M. Moran, eds., Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, 2 vols. (to date) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003–4), 2:158.
[265] Translation of undated clipping by F. W. [Franz Widmar] in Les Temps Nouveaux, file 8000–385063, OG, FBI.
[266] Joseph Spivak interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 330.
[267] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 185–86; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter, 197–98.
[268] David Babich interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 364–65; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 123.
[269] V. V. Obolensky-Ossinsky, “Emigration from and Immigration into Russia,” in International Migration, ed. Walter F. Willcox, vol. 2 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1931), 529; Buhle, “Themes in American Jewish Radicalism,” 112 n. 25; New York State Senate, Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb It (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1920), 1:861.
[270] See Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 133, 137–38; Victor Lynn interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 367.
[271] Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 61–62; Max Strypyansky, “Non-Conformists of the Russian Revolution,” Soviet Russia, July 1921, 32; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 188, 189. Paul Avrich incorrectly states that Novomirskii remained in a Russian labor camp until the revolution of 1917. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 124.
[272] See Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 133, 137–38; Victor Lynn interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 367; Elaine J. Leeder, The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1993), 25–26.
[273] Edgar B. Speer, “The Russian Workingmen’s Association, sometimes called the Union of Russian Workers (What It Is and How It Operates),” April 8, 1919, file 325570, Bureau Section Files (hereafter cited as BS), FBI.
[274] Boris Yelensky, In the Struggle for Equality: The Story of the Anarchist Red Cross (Chicago: Alexander Berkman Aid Fund, 1958); Morris Greenshner interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 377; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 281.
[275] Sarah Taback interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 430.
[276] Kate Wolfson interview, in Ibid., 74.
[277] Boris Yelensky interview, in Ibid., 388–89.
[278] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 100.
[279] Israel Ostroff interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 350.
[280] D. E., “A vikhtike noytvendigkayt,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, May 22, 1891, quoted in Kitz, Poetics of Anarchy, 67. From 1895 to 1899 Saul Yanosky made his living giving English lessons to fellow Jewish migrants. Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 253.
[281] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 113.
[282] Emma Goldman, “En Route,” Mother Earth, December 1908, 353.
[283] Frederic Trautmann, The Voice of Terror: A Biography of Johann Most (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 82.
[284] See Rocker, The London Years; Mina Graur, An Anarchist “Rabbi”: The Life and Teachings of Rudolf Rocker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
[285] Avrich, An American Anarchist, 6, 46–47, 229; Weinberg, Forty Years, 56.
[286] Emma Goldman to Rose Pesotta, January 30, 1940, quoted in Shepherd, A Price Below Rubies, 285.
[287] See Bartolomeo Provo interview and Esther Travaglio interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 119, 162.
[288] “To the Anarchists of America,” Mother Earth, January 1908; Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 199–201.
[289] “Correspondence,” Mother Earth, February 1914, 379–80. Other member groups included Club Avanti, the Russian Progressive Circle, and the Cultura Obrera Group.
[290] Stephen Bonsal, “Underground New York ‘Sees Red’ Once More,” New York Times Magazine, March 15, 1908, SM2.
[291] Avrich, An American Anarchist, chap. 8; Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Case of the Imprisoned Italians in Philadelphia,” Mother Earth, October 1908, 324–26; Voltairine de Cleyre, “Report Concerning the Italian Prisoners in Philadelphia,” Mother Earth, January 1909, 397–98.
[292] See Alexander Berkman, “The Movement of the Unemployed,” Mother Earth, April 1914, 36–43; Carlo Tresca, The Autobiography of Carlo Tresca, ed. Nunzio Pernicone (New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 2003), 209–250 (quote on 209); Ganz, Rebels, 126–54 (quote on 126); Avrich, The Modern School Movement, 199211.
[293] On Costa see Tresca, Autobiography, 235.
[294] Ganz, Rebels, 185–87, 200.
[295] Charles Plunkett interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 218; Avrich, The Modern School Movement, 215–35.
[296] Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks; Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness; David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White; The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
[297] Gerber, “Anti-Semitism”; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 631.
[298] Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 75, 80; David Edelstadt, “Dzshan Braun,” in Bialostotsky, David Edelshtat gedenk-bukh, 367–68, originally published in Fraye Arbayter Shtime, June 5, 1891.
[299] Harriet Beecher Stowe, Onkel Tom’s kebin; oder, di shvartse shklaven in Amerika, trans. J. Jaffa (New York: Hibru Publishing Kompany, 1911); Rose Pesotta, Bread Upon the Waters, ed. John Nicholas Beffel, new ed. (New York: ILR Press, 1987), 9.
[300] Gurock, When Harlem was Jewish; Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 75–76.
[301] Eyges, Beyond the Horizon, 126.
[302] Cahan, Education, 258.
[303] Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1976). Lucy Robbins Lang, for one, described Parsons as being “of Indian descent,” with no mention of blackness. Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 31.
[304] Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 234–36.
[305] Emma Goldman, “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation,” Mother Earth, March 1906, 9.
[306] Joseph J. Cohen, The House Stood Forlorn, 46, 47.
[307] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 1, 5; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 12.
[308] Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 30–42.
[309] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 9; Pesotta, Days of Our Lives, 104–111.
[310] Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 66–69; Joseph, Jewish Immigration, 179; Kessner, The Golden Door, 76.
[311] David Edelshtat, “Tsu di arbayter froyen,” in Bialostotsky, David Edelshtat gedenk-bukh, 321–22.
[312] Ravage, An American in the Making, 108.
[313] Emma Goldman, “The Joys of Touring,” Mother Earth, March 1908, 36.
[314] Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 155–58; Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). When a young Emma Goldman asked Johann Most if there were any prominent female anarchists in America, he replied, “None at all, only stupids.” Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 34.
[315] Ganz, Rebels; The Anarchist Response to War and Labor Violence in 1914: Rebecca Edelsohn, Alexander Berkman, Anti-Militarism, Free Speech and Hunger Strikes (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003).
[316] Weinberg, Forty Years, 48; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 54, 672.
[317] Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, 10. Emphasis in original.
[318] Abraham Frumkin, “The Anarchist Ideal,” in Memoirs of My People: Through a Thousand Years, ed. Leo W. Schwarz (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), 508.
[319] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 81; Weinberg, Forty Years, 65.
[320] Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 117–18; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 54, 156–57; Leeder, The Gentle General, 18–19.
[321] Fanny Breslaw interviewed in Free Voice of Labor.
[322] Leeder, The Gentle General, 55. See also Alice Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,” in Gendering Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 38–51; Alice Kessler-Harris, “Problems of Coalition Building: Women and Trade Unions in the 1920s,” in Gendering Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 52–70.
[323] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 439.
[324] Pesotta, Days of Our Lives, 168–69; Pesotta, Bread Upon the Waters, 11; Rina Garst interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 253. Alice-Kessler Harris claims that Pesotta lacked “female bonding” and “female friendship networks,” and instead “relied on men for support,” but Pesotta’s biographer refutes this. Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable,” 51; Leeder, The Gentle General, 140–41.
[325] Sarah Taback interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 430.
[326] Weinberg, Forty Years, 120.
[327] Steven Cassedy, ed., Building the Future: Jewish Immigrant Intellectuals and the Making of Tsukunft (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1999), 194; Tcherikower et al., Early Jewish Labor Movement, 256; Zalman Reisen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1926), 2:469–70.
[328] Katherina Yevzerov, Di froy in der gezelshaft (New York: Grupe “Zsherminal”, 1907), quote on 19.
[329] Emma Goldman, “Woman Suffrage,” in Anarchism and Other Essays, 3rd ed. (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1917), 197; Katerina Yevzerov-Merison, “The American Women’s Movement and the Victory for Women in the Last Elections,” in Cassedy, Building the Future, 194–201 (quote on 198). The latter article originally appeared in the Yiddish socialist journal Tsukunft in 1917.
[330] Norma Fain Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers, 1890–1940,” American Jewish History 70 (September 1980): 81.
[331] Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 77, 80, 83; A. Glants, “Kultur un di froy,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, October 30, 1915.
[332] See Stites, Women’s Liberation Movement, chap. 4; Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977).
[333] Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 78.
[334] Emma Goldman, Living My Life.
[335] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 30.
[336] Weinberg, Forty Years, 57, 66–68.
[337] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 33; Weinberg, Forty Years, 68.
[338] Isadore Wisotsky, “Such a Life,” unpublished manuscript, n.d , 58, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (hereafter cited as Labadie Collection). Anarchists’ role in the birth control movement is well covered in Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, revised ed. (New York: Penguin, 1990).
[339] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 43.
[340] Terence Kissack, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008), 26.
[341] Eyges, Beyond the Horizon, 124; Emma Goldman to F. Heiner, June 1–8, 1934, quoted in Kissack, Free Comrades, 27–28.
[342] Hapgood, Spirit of the Ghetto, 83.
[343] Karen Rosenberg, “The Cult of Self-Sacrifice in Yiddish Anarchism and Saul Yanovsky’s The First Years of Jewish Libertarian Socialism,” in Yiddish and the Left, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 190; A. Frumkin, In friling; Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung.
[344] Jonathan Frankel, “The Roots of ‘Jewish Socialism’ (1881–1892): From ‘Populism’ to ‘Cosmopolitanism’?,” in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 58–77.
[345] Francis H. Nichols, “The Anarchists in America,” The Outlook, August 10, 1901, 860; “Paterson is Angry,” New York Times, June 20, 1906.
[346] James Earl Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry of Paterson, New Jersey, 1872–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1941), 75; Dennis J. Starr, The Italians of New Jersey: A Historical Introduction and Bibliography (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1985), 62; Carlo C. Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions of the Italian Colony of Paterson, N.J.” (MA thesis, Columbia University, 1911), 2–3.
[347] Starr, The Italians of New Jersey, 62.
[348] Gianfausto Rosoli, “Italian Migration to European Countries from Political Unification to World War I,” in Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies: The European and North American Working Classes During the Period of Industrialization, ed. Dirk Hoerder (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 95–116; Franco Ramella, “Across the Ocean or over the Border: Expectations and Experiences of Italians from Piedmont in New Jersey and Southern France,” in Distant Magnets: Expectations and Realities in the Immigrant Experience, 1840–1930, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Horst Rössler (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1993), 105–125; Paola Corti, “Women Were Labour Migrants Too: Tracing Late-Nineteenth-Century Female Migration from Northern Italy to France,” in Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, trans. Gabriele Scardellato (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 133–59.
[349] Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 95–99; John A. Davis, “Socialism and the Working Classes in Italy before 1914,” in Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (New York: Berg, 1989), 206; Ramella, “Across the Ocean,” 107–9.
[350] Kessner, The Golden Door, 36; Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 131–33, 142–44, 148.
[351] On the labor and radical movements in Italy see Richard Hostetter, The Italian Socialist Movement, I: Origins (1860–1882) (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958); Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations”; Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani da Bakunin a Malatesta (1862–1892); Pernicone, Italian Anarchism; Davis, “Socialism and the Working Classes,” 206 (quote).
[352] Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 2–3; Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 130, 147, 150; Rudolph J. Vecoli, The People of New Jersey (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1965), 69, 88–92.
[353] Vecoli, The People of New Jersey, 191; Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 3–4.
[354] Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 151–52.
[355] Ramella, “Across the Ocean,” 109–10; Delight W. Dodyk, “Women’s Work in the Paterson Silk Mills: A Study in Women’s Industrial Experience in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Women in New Jersey History: Papers Presented at the Thirteenth Annual New Jersey History Symposium (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1985), 16.
[356] Philip B. Scranton, “An Exceedingly Irregular Business: Structure and Process in the Paterson Silk Industry, 1885–1910,” in Silk City: Studies on the Paterson Silk Industry, 1860–1940, ed. Philip B. Scranton (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1985), 56.
[357] Scranton, “Exceedingly Irregular Business”; Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 96, 106, 156.
[358] Scranton, “Exceedingly Irregular Business.”
[359] “L’organizzazione dei tessitori,” La Questione Sociale, March 25, 1905; Firmino Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 154.
[360] Vittorio Cravello, “Le tintorie di seta,” Cronaca Sovversiva, May 18, 1907; Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 24–25.
[361] Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 156.
[362] Sophie Cohen interview, in Stewart Bird, George Georgakas, and Deborah Shaffer, eds., Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1985), 61; Henry E. McGuckin, Memoirs of a Wobbly (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1987), 28.
[363] Gino Cerrito, “Sull’Emigrazione Anarchica Italiana negli Stati Uniti d’America,” Volontà 22, no. 4 (August 1969): 269–76; Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 205; Ferraris, “L’assassinio di Umberto I,” 48–49. The exact wording of the Gruppo Carlo Cafiero‘s name changed over time; I have used the version that appeared in the first issues of L’Anarchico.
[364] Leonardo Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, 2 vols. (Florence: Crescita Politica, 1972–76), 2:290.
[365] Giampietro Berti, Francesco Saverio Merlino: Dall’anarchismo socialista al socialismo liberale (1865–1930) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1993), 193–201; “Small Notes,” Solidarity, July 9, 1892; “L’Associazione dei Lavoratori Italiani,” Il Grido degli Oppressi, November 10, 1892, cited in Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, 2:291. See also “11th November Commemorations,” Solidarity, November 19, 1892.
[366] Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 148. Rigazio cites several issues of Il Grido degli Oppressi, to which I have not had access.
[367] “Movimento operaio,” La Questione Sociale, April 15, 1897.
[368] Frank R. Stone to J. E. Hoover, May 7, 1920, file 61–4625, OG, FBI.
[369] Hostetter, The Italian Socialist Movement, 322; Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 76, 222; Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists, 20; Enzo Santarelli, “L’Anarchisme en Italie,” Le Mouvement Social, no. 83 (June 1973): 139.
[370] Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 180.
[371] Firmino Felice Gallo file, busta 2256, CPC; Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 136; Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 153.
[372] Alberto Augusto Guabello file, busta 2548, CPC; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Guabello, Alberto Augusto”; Dora Marucco, “Processi anarchici a Torino tra il 1892 ed il 1894,” in Anarchici e anarchia nel mondo contemporaneo: Atti del Convegno promosso della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi (Torino, 5, 6 e 7 dicembre 1969) (Turin: Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 1972), 217–41; Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 184–88; Gremmo, Gli anarchici che uccisero Umberto I°, 53–54.
[373] Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 166–67, 181, 213; “Necrologia,” L’Era Nuova, November 1, 1913; Adele Guabello file, busta 2548, CPC; Serafino Grandi file, busta 2504, CPC.
[374] Antonio Cravello file and Ernestina Cravello file, busta 1524, CPC.
[375] Cesare Roda-Balzarini file and Maria Roda-Balzarini file, busta 4368, CPC. See also Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 133–35.
[376] C. Forgnone, “Quelli che se ne vanno,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, December 19, 1936; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Baracchi, Giovanni Matteo”.
[377] Ramella, “Across the Ocean,” 110.
[378] Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 155.
[379] Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 33–34, 135, 151.
[380] Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Widmar, Francesco”. Widmar published articles under the pseudonym “Francis Miward,” and some English-language sources erroneously spell his name “Widmer.” On anarchism in Trieste see Gabaccia, “International Approaches,” 27; Ennio Maserati, “Gruppi anarchici a Trieste dalla fine dell’Ottocento al 1914,” Nuova Rivista Storica 53, no. 5–6 (December 1969): 618–65.
[381] Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 75; Max Nettlau, Anarchisten und Sozialrevolutionäre: Die historische Entwicklung des Anarchismus in den Jahren 1880–1886 (1931; reprint, Vaduz: Tropos, 1981), 200.
[382] Corti, “Women Were Labour Migrants Too”; Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 167, 190; Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 2–3 (quote); “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, May 20, 1899.
[383] See Ronald Creagh, “Socialism in America: The French-Speaking Coal Miners in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880–1920, ed. Marianne Debouzy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 143–56.
[384] Joan Casanovas i Codina, “Pedro Esteve (Barcelona 1865-Weehauken [sic], N.J. 1925): A Catalan Anarchist in the United States,” Catalan Review 5, no. 3 (July 1995): 57–77; “Assassination was Plotted in New Jersey Town,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900; Nichols, “The Anarchists in America,” 863. Esteve moved from New York to Paterson in 1898, but was already playing an active role in the Right to Existence Group in 1895.
[385] B. Cominetti, “Per una conversione,” La Questione Sociale, January 13, 1900; B. o G. B. Cominetti file, busta 1428, CPC.
[386] “Movimento operaio,” La Questione Sociale, July 15, 1897; “Il nostro picnic famigliare,” L’Era Nuova, July 8, 1916.
[387] Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 75–76; Vecoli, The People of New Jersey, 193; Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 200; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 356.
[388] “Mother Earth Sustaining Fund,” Mother Earth, June 1907, 203, August 1908, 272, and February 1910, 399; “Anarchist Meeting Quiet,” New York Times, August 3, 1900; “Scuola Moderna F. Ferrer,” L’Era Nuova, October 16, 1915.
[389] See Solidarity, December 3 and December 17, 1892.
[390] “Openly Preached Anarchy in Paterson,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900.
[391] “Avviso” La Questione Sociale, November 30, 1895; “Movimento operaio,” La Questione Sociale, February 4, 1899. On Raveggi see Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Raveggi, Pietro”.
[392] Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 288; Turcato, “Italian Anarchism,” 425.
[393] A. Guabello, “Un po’ di storia,” L’Era Nuova, July 17, 1915.
[394] Translation from La Jacquerie, May 21, 1919, file 61–4185, OG, FBI. The only surviving issues of La Jacquerie are held in Bureau of Investigation files, which also contain translations of articles from issues that can no longer be found.
[395] On Agresti see Hermia Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 122–25; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Agresti Antonio”.
[396] A. Guabello, “Un po’ di storia,” L’Era Nuova, July 17, 1915; Turcato, “Italian Anarchism,” 421. As Turcato points out, many historians mistakenly credit Gori with founding La Questione Sociale.
[397] Maurizio Antonioli, Pietro Gori, il cavaliere errante dell’anarchia: Studi e testi (Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 1995); Pier Carlo Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani nell’epoca degli attentati (Milan: Rizzoli Editore, 1981), chap. 5; Kelly, “Roll Back the Years,” XVIII:4, Tamiment Library; Turcato, “Italian Anarchism,” 422–23.
[398] A. Guabello, “Un po’ di storia,” L’Era Nuova, July 17, 1915; “Assassination was Plotted in New Jersey Town,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900.
[399] See Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 290–91 and chap. 8; Hostetter, The Italian Socialist Movement, 421–31; Berti, Francesco Saverio Merlino. See also “Astensionisti o parlamentaristi?” La Questione Sociale, February 28, 1897.
[400] Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 250. On the evolution of Malatesta’s ideas see also Giampietro Berti, Errico Malatesta e il movimento anarchico italiano e internazionale, 1872–1932 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003).
[401] On Cini see Pietro Dipaola, “Italian Anarchists in London (1870–1914)” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2004), passim; La Questione Sociale, April 15, 1897.
[402] On Ciancabilla see Ugo Fedeli, Giuseppe Ciancabilla (Cesena: Edizioni Antistato, 1965); Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Ciancabilla, Giuseppe”.
[403] Vecoli, “‘Primo Maggio’,” 64.
[404] G. C., “Discutendo,” La Questione Sociale, January 28, 1899 (quote); G. C., “Dove andiamo?” La Questione Sociale, June 24, 1899; Pedro Esteve, “Dove andiamo?” La Questione Sociale, July 29 and August 5, 1899; S. Pallavicini, “Le Unioni Operaie e gli Anarchici,” La Questione Sociale, December 17, 1898; “Ancora delle Unioni operaie,” La Questione Sociale, December 31, 1898.
[405] George Carey, “‘La Questione Sociale’: An Anarchist Newspaper in Paterson, N.J. (1895–1908),” in Italian Americans: New Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity, ed. Lydio F. Tomasi (New York: American Italian Historical Association, 1985), 294; “Cio’ che sara’ il nostro giornale,” La Questione Sociale, September 2, 1899; [Ludovico Caminita], “Riceviamo e Pubblichiamo,” Regeneración: Sezione Italiana, August 12, 1911.
[406] G. Ciancabilla, G. Della Barile and A. Guabello, “Idee e tattica (dicharazioni dei dissidenti),” La Questione Sociale, September 2, 1899; Berti, Errico Malatesta, 288.
[407] “Gli anarchici e le societa’ operaje,” La Questione Sociale, October 14, 1899.
[408] “Il nostro programma,” La Questione Sociale, September 30, 1899. See also P. Esteve, editorial reply to O. Boffino, “Per meglio spiegarci,” La Questione Sociale, September 30, 1897; “Conferenze Esteve,” La Questione Sociale, August 19, 1899.
[409] E. Malatesta, “Il principio dell’organizzazione,” La Questione Sociale, October 7, 1899.
[410] “Gli Anarchici e le Associazioni operaie,” L’Aurora, June 29, 1901.
[411] See Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 239–43; Cerrito, “Sull’Emigrazione Anarchica Italiana,” 270; Adriana Dadà, L’anarchismo in Italia, fra movimento e partito: storia e documenti dell’anarchismo italiano (Milan: Teti Editore, 1984), chap. 3.
[412] An unusually lucid discussion of anarchist debates over organizations can be found in Davide Turcato, “European Anarchism in the 1890s: Why Labor Matters in Categorizing Anarchism,” WorkingUSA 12, no. 3 (September 2009): 451–66.
[413] G. Ciancabilla, G. Della Barile, and A. Guabello, “Idee e tattica (dicharazioni dei dissidenti),” La Questione Sociale, September 2, 1899. Many historians incorrectly refer to the antiorganizzatori as individualists, though Masini is more careful when he notes, “In the history of the anarchist movement there are at least three species of individualism, similar to one another but not necessarily interdependent: a theoretical individualism, a so-called anti-organizationist individualism, and an individualism of action.” Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani nell’epoca degli attentati, 225.
[414] Ibid., 227. See also C. Alexander McKinley, Illegitimate Children of the Enlightenment: Anarchists and the French Revolution, 1880–1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), chap. 2–3.
[415] Ciancabilla quoted in Petacco, L’anarchico che venne dall’America, 9; Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, 20, 124.
[416] Marie Fleming, “Propaganda by the Deed: Terrorism and Anarchist Theory in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Terrorism in Europe, ed. Yonah Alexander and Kenneth A. Myers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 8–28.
[417] See, for instance, Errico Malatesta, “Peter Kropotkin: Recollections of an Old Friend,” in Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1965), 257–68.
[418] “A Rectification Demanded!” Man!, March 1933; Petacco, L’anarchico che venne dall’America, 7–12.
[419] See Richard Bach Jensen, “Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 116–53; Richard Bach Jensen, “The Evolution of Anarchist Terrorism”; Carl Levy, “The Anarchist Assassin and Italian History, 1870s to 1930s,” in Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy: Transformations in Society and Culture, ed. Stephen Gundle and Lucia Rinaldi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 207–221.
[420] Petacco, L’anarchico che venne dall’America, 119; Jensen, “The Evolution of Anarchist Terrorism,” 138–39; “L’uccisione di Canovas del Castillo,” La Questione Sociale, August 15, 1897; Silvino Ostorero, “Patria!” La Questione Sociale, February 17, 1900 (quote). On the transplantation of traditions of vendetta within Italian American communities see Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted,” The Journal of American History 51, no. 3 (December 1964): 409.
[421] The details of Bresci’s life can be found in Petacco, L’anarchico che venne dall’America; Gremmo, Gli anarchici che uccisero Umberto I°; Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci.
[422] See Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci, 118.
[423] Quoted in Carey, “The Vessel, the Deed, and the Idea,” 50.
[424] See Carey, “The Vessel, the Deed, and the Idea,” 47–48; Petacco, L’anarchico che venne dall’America, chap. 15; Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci. Petacco suggests that there was a plot involving Maria Sofia, but produces no evidence of its existence and relies on the theory that Malatesta, whom Bresci strongly disliked, acted as the gobetween. Furthermore, as Galzerano notes, it strains credulity to believe that anarchists would have knowingly aided an aspiring monarch and even if they had, “the former queen of Naples could not have had any dynastic interest at stake as she had no offspring and her husband had died in 1894.” Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci, 980; “Interview with Giusseppe Galzerano—What’s all this about a Bourbon Plot?,” Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library, no. 26 (March 2001): 5. See also Levy, “The Anarchist Assassin,” 215. For the Ethiopian story see A. V., “Underground History: The Revelations of an International Spy,” Pearson’s Magazine, May 1903, 478–87.
[425] “Assassination was Plotted in New Jersey Town,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900; “Assassin’s Lot Fell upon Anarchist Here,” New York Times, July 31, 1900; “Bresci Chosen by Lot in West Hoboken,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900; “Murder of Humbert Parallels Pessina’s,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900.
[426] “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, June 23 and July 20, 1900; Carey, “The Vessel, the Deed, and the Idea,” 48–50. The Right to Existence Group denied that “Carbone” was an anarchist, but L. Bianchi had previously appeared among the names of donors to La Questione Sociale (see the issue of January 31, 1897).
[427] “Assassin’s Comrade Nicola Quintavelli [sic],” New York Times, August 2, 1900; Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci. In 1901 the New York Times reported that Pedro Esteve acknowledged that “Quintocavello” and “Lani” had “sailed on the same steamship with Bresci for the same purpose. All three went to do that which Bresci did…Those three men did not know what the other was going for, and two of them were sorry when they found another was ahead of them.” “Anarchists Laud Humbert’s Murder,” New York Times, July 30, 1901. In light of other evidence, however, the veracity of this story is questionable.
[428] Gremmo, Gli anarchici che uccisero Umberto I°; Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci, 347–89.
[429] Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 7. See also Cerrito, “Sull’Emigrazione Anarchica Italiana,” 271; Levy, “The Anarchist Assassin”; Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci; Carey, “The Vessel, the Deed, and the Idea”; Jensen, “The Evolution of Anarchist Terrorism,” 332 n. 44. Works that allege some sort of larger plot existed include Woodcock, Anarchism, 346; Gremmo, Gli anarchici che uccisero Umberto I°; Berti, Errico Malatesta, 312; Petacco, L’anarchico che venne dall’America. However, the first edition of Petacco’s book contains no mention of a conspiracy; see Arrigo Petacco, L’anarchico che venne dall’America (Milan: Mondadori, 1969). Other authors allow for the possibility of a plot but come to no conclusions on the matter. Ferraris, “L’assassinio di Umberto I”; Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani nell’epoca degli attentati, 148–49.
[430] E. Malatesta, “La tragedia di Monza,” Cause ed Effetti (London), August 1900, as quoted in Carey, “The Vessel, the Deed, and the Idea,” 52.
[431] “Avviso importante,” La Questione Sociale, February 11, 1899; “La nostra situazione,” La Questione Sociale, May 12, 1900. Franz Widmar acted as editor from the time of Malatesta’s departure until the summer of 1900, and was then replaced by Pedro Esteve.
[432] Panofsky, “Two Major Centers,” 275–76. A third Paterson newspaper, Movimento, was published around 1901 by Right to Existence Group member Beniamino Mazzotta, but it reportedly endorsed political candidates, indicating that it was not a purely anarchist organ. Unfortunately, no copies have survived. See C. Rosazza, “? ? ?” L’Aurora, November 16, 1901.
[433] “Per la liberta’!” La Questione Sociale, August 4, 1900; Umberto e Bresci, November 24, [1900].
[434] “Openly Preached Anarchy in Paterson,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900; “Searching among Paterson Anarchists,” New York Times, August 1, 1900.
[435] Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 54.
[436] “Anarchist Meeting Quiet,” New York Times, August 3, 1900; Petacco, L’anarchico che venne dall’America, 25; Gremmo, Gli anarchici che uccisero Umberto I°, 62 n. 4; Carey, “‘La Questione Sociale’,” 291, citing La Questione Sociale, April 7, 1900; Turcato, “Italian Anarchism,” 246.
[437] “Openly Preached Anarchy in Paterson,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900; Ferraris, “L’assassinio di Umberto I,”
[438] Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 82. See also Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 65.
[439] “Cio’ che sara’ il nostro giornale,” La Questione Sociale, September 2, 1899; Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 6; Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci, 635, 652; Ferraris, “L’assassinio di Umberto I,” 52; Carey, “‘La Questione Sociale’,” 292, 294; “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, November 18 and December 23, 1899; Mario Mapelli, “I gruppi anarchici italiani attivi in USA tra il 1899 e il 1904,” Bollettino Archivio G. Pinelli, no. 14 (December 1999): 13–14.
[440] Gremmo, Gli anarchici che uccisero Umberto I°, 39; Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 169. On German anarchist bar culture see Goyens, Beer and Revolution.
[441] “Searching among Paterson Anarchists,” New York Times, August 1, 1900; [Joseph] Define, “Special Report: in re Radical Propaganda at Paterson N.J. and Vicinity,” n.d. [1919], file 8000–385063, OG, FBI.
[442] Giovanni Tamaroglio file, busta 5013, CPC.
[443] “Membership List of Francisco Ferrer Ass’n,” n.d. [1920], and Frank R. Stone, “In the Matter of: L’Era Nuova Group,” February 18, 1920, file 61–4625, OG, FBI.
[444] [Joseph] Define, “Special Report: in re Radical Propaganda at Paterson N.J. and Vicinity,” n.d. [1919], file 8000–385063, OG, FBI; United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, “Appendix B: History of the L’Era Nuova Group of Anarchists at Paterson, N. J., Including Activities of Certain Leaders, Official Organs, and Connection with the Francesco Ferrer Association,” in Communist Labor Party Deportation Cases, 66th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 38; “Fermino [sic] Gallo (Alias Frank Gallo); Anarchist,” February 20, 1920, file 289493, OG, FBI.
[445] Firmino Felice Gallo file, busta 2256, CPC; Emmett T. Drew to J. E. Hoover, May 25, 1920, and “List of persons purchasing radical literature from FIRMINO GALLO, manager of the LIBRERIA SOCIOLOGICA, 77 Ellison St., Paterson, N.J.,” n.d. [1920], file 289493, OG, FBI.
[446] See Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 52–53.
[447] Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 155.
[448] Vecoli, “’Primo Maggio’,” 58.
[449] Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 173; “Per Maria Barbera,” La Questione Sociale, August 15, 1895; Bencivenni, “Italian American Radical Culture,” 201–2.
[450] “Anarchist Meeting Quiet,” New York Times, August 3, 1900; Buhle, “Italian-American Radicals,” 129; Margaret R. Sanger, “The Paterson Strike,” in The Revolutionary Almanac: 1914, ed. Hippolyte Havel (New York: Rabelais Press, 1914), 49. See also “Among Paterson Anarchists,” New York Times, August 1, 1900.
[451] Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 245; Mari Tomasi, “The Italian Story in Vermont,” Vermont History 38 (1960): 81.
[452] “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, October 21, 1899.
[453] “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, November 11, 1899; Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 178–79; Franco Ramella, “Reti sociali e mercato del lavoro in un caso di emigrazione: gli operai italiani e gli altri a Paterson, New Jersey,” in Tra fabbrica e società: mondi operai nell’Italia del Novecento, ed. Stefano Musso (Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1999), 771–72.
[454] On Straight Street see Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 3–4.
[455] Anna Laura Lepschy, Giulio Lepschy, and Miram Voghera, “Linguistic Variety in Italy,” in Italian Regionalism, ed. Carl Levy (Washington, D.C.: Berg, 1996), 69–80; Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 2–3.
[456] On the importance of standardized languages in the formation of “imagined communities” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44.
[457] Ludovico Caminita file and Michele Caminita Michele file, busta 973, CPC.
[458] Ludovico Caminita, “Twenty Years of Experience in the Radical Movement,” unpublished manuscript, 1922, 3–7, file 61–115, OG, FBI; US Congress, “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 32; Ludovico Caminita file, CPC. On Esteve’s move to Tampa see Casanovas i Codina, “Pedro Esteve,” 73–74; Mormino and Pozzetta, Immigrant World of Ybor City, 150.
[459] Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 21.
[460] “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, December 9, 1899; Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 157; translation of Members of the “Scuola Moderna” to Fermino [sic] Gallo, April 5, 1917, file 289493, OG, FBI; “Scuola Moderna F. Ferrer,” L’Era Nuova, October 16, 1915; “Comunicati,” L’Era Nuova, December 25, 1915; “Cronaca di Paterson,” L’Era Nuova, February 3, 1917.
[461] “Una Scuola Ferrer a Paterson,” L’Era Nuova, September 25, 1915; Adolfo Piccinni, “Una visita alla Scuola Moderna,” L’Era Nuova, February 12, 1916; “Cronaca di Paterson,” Nuovi Tempi, March 1918.
[462] “Francisco Ferrer Association: List of Pictures Removed from Walls of Meeting Rooms of Francisco Ferrer Association, 315 Straight Street, Paterson, N.J.,” n.d. [1920], and “Membership List of Francisco Ferrer Ass’n,” n.d. [1920], file 61–4625, OG, FBI; “Items of Interest,” Industrial Worker, April 29, 1909; Michel Cordillot, ed., La sociale en Amérique: dictionnaire biographique du mouvement social francophone aux États-Unis (1848–1922) (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2002), s.v. “Coppens, Gustave”. My thanks to Salvatore Salerno for informing me of Max Goodman’s true identity.
[463] “Cronaca di Paterson,” L’Era Nuova, December 23, 1916; “Cronaca di Paterson,” Il Bollettino de L’Era Nuova, March 1, 1919; “Cronaca di Paterson,” Nuovi Tempi, March 1918.
[464] “Comunicati,’ L’Era Nuova, March 17, 1917.
[465] Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 20.
[466] “Movimento operaio,” La Questione Sociale, January 7, 1899; G. Ciancabilla, “L’Emigrazione Italiana alle Colonie di Paterson e di altri siti,” La Questione Sociale, February 11, 1899.
[467] Hostetter, The Italian Socialist Movement, 27–28, 137. Emphasis in original.
[468] “Searching among Paterson Anarchists,” New York Times, August 1, 1900; “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 40; Report of Joseph Define, n.d. [July 1919], file 289493, OG, FBI.
[469] Baldo Aquilano, L’Ordine figli d’Italia in America (New York: Società Tipografica Italiana, 1925), 69, 73.
[470] “La Bandiera, ultimo rifugio dei furfanti!” L’Era Nuova, March 22, 1913.
[471] See Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 135.
[472] “Movimento Rivoluzionario,” Il Paria (Ancona) August 2, 1885, cited in Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, 2:290 n. 4; “Sottoscrizione permanente,” L’Anarchico, February 1, 1888.
[473] Biella Cattolica (Biella), September 9, 1900, quoted in Ramella, “Across the Ocean,” 122–23 n. 11.
[474] On women’s radicalism and anarchism in Italy see Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” chap. 1; Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 108–9, 225–26. On Cavedagni see Ersilia Cavedagni file, busta 1205, CPC; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico s.v. “Cavedagni, Ersilia”; Merithew, “Anarchist Motherhood,” 225–26.
[475] “Assassin’s Lot Fell upon Anarchist Here,” New York Times, July 31, 1900; “Italian Anarchists are Exultant,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900. See also Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 136–38.
[476] Donna Gabaccia, “Women of the Mass Migrations: From Minority to Majority, 1820–1930,” in European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 92.
[477] Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 91–93; Colombia Marie Furio, “Immigrant Women and Industry: A Case Study, the Italian Immigrant Women and the Garment Industry 18801950” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1979), 27; Charles Anthony Zappia, “Unionism and the Italian American Worker: A History of the New York City ‘Italian Locals’ in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, 1900–1934” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1994), 166; Dodyk, “Women’s Work,” 17. In 1907–8 over 41% of Paterson’s female Italian silk workers were married, compared to just 11.7% of all female silk workers in the city. Dodyk, “Women’s Work,” 15–16.
[478] Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 131.
[479] Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 182; Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (New York: Viking, 2001), 2. Emphasis in original.
[480] Merithew, “Anarchist Motherhood,” 237; Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 39.
[481] Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 136; Ludovico Caminita, “On the Island of Tears: Ellis Island,” in Voices of Italian American Literature with a Critical Anthology, ed. Martino Marazzi, trans. Ann Goldstein (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 126.
[482] Merithew, “Anarchist Motherhood,” 217, 234.
[483] Tresca, Autobiography, 160; David Koven, “Giovanni ‘John’ Vattuone, 1899–1994,” manuscript, 1994, file 131, David Koven Papers (hereafter cited as Koven Papers), IISH.
[484] g h, “Emancipazione della donna,” La Questione Sociale, July 7, 1900.
[485] Maria Roda, “Alle operaie,” La Questione Sociale, September 15, 1897, as translated in Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 132.
[486] Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 132–35; “Notice,” The Blast, July 1, 1916; Panofsky, “Two Major Centers,” 275; Merithew, “Anarchist Motherhood.”
[487] Luigia [sic] Reville, “Ai Rivoluzionari,” La Questione Sociale, May 5, 1900; Carey, “‘La Questione Sociale’,” 292.
[488] Vittorio Cravello file, busta 1524, CPC.
[489] G. Pimpino [Luigi Galleani], “Fratelli,” Cronaca Sovversiva, May 28, 1904; translation of La Jacquerie, May 21, 1919, file 61–4185, OG, FBI. See also Tresca, Autobiography, 32, 51; Bencivenni, “Italian American Radical Culture,” 83. A front-page article in La Questione Sociale, written in English, rendered the anarchist subject as explicitly male: “We simply ask to be considered for what we are: Men. Yes, men striving for [the] liberty and welfare of all human beings.” “To the American People,” La Questione Sociale, December 8, 1900.
[490] Bencivenni, “Italian American Radical Culture,” 208–9; Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 149–50.
[491] Anna Maria Mozzoni, “Alle Figlie del Popolo” La Questione Sociale, July 1895; A. M. Mozzoni, Alle figlie del popolo (Paterson, NJ: Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna, 1902).
[492] “Italian Anarchists are Exultant,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900.
[493] Anita Sweedsky, “Femminismo elettorale o Emancipazione della donna?” L’Era Nuova, June 6, 1913.
[494] “Openly Preached Anarchy in Paterson,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900; Gremmo, Gli anarchici che uccisero Umberto I°, 36.
[495] Examination of Jemma [sic] Mello, March 16, 1920, and “Jemma Mello (Alias Gemma Mello) (Alias B. Emilio),” May 1, 1920, file 31585, OG, FBI.
[496] Gallo interview, Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 153–54, 156.
[497] Translation of Thomaso [sic] Concordia to My Dear Comrade [Serafino Grandi], May 1, 1911, file 61–4625, OG, FBI.
[498] Jean A. Scarpaci, “Angela Bambace and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union: The Search for an Elusive Activist,” in Pane e Lavoro: The Italian American Working Class, ed. George E. Pozzetta (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1980), 109–110; Montesano Rocco, “La donna,” L’Aurora, December 16, 1899.
[499] “Quintavalli Lived Here,” New York Times, August 3, 1900; Report of M. E. Sullivan, March 8, 1920, file 376286, OG, FBI; Jennifer Mary Guglielmo, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Coalition,” 38–39.
[500] See Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci, 595–610; Dorothy Gallagher, All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Pernicone, Carlo Tresca; Caminita, “Twenty Years of Experience,” 29.
[501] “Anarchist Elopers Found in Virginia,” New York Times, June 14, 1908; translation of [Ludovico Caminita] to Mister Fontanella, October 9, 1917, file 61–115, OG, FBI.
[502] “Paterson Anarchists Quiet,” New York Times, August 5, 1900; Ernestina Cravello file and Vittorio Cravello file, busta 1524, CPC; Gaspare Paolo Ferro file, busta 2045, CPC; Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 154.
[503] A. Agresti, “La Donna,” La Questione Sociale, March 15, 1896.
[504] Va Nuds Pieds, “Alle Madri,” La Questione Sociale, June 30, 1897.
[505] Ersilia, “La donna,” L’Aurora, October 28, 1899. For a similar statement from a later period see Tina Cacici, “La donna e’ l’anima dell’universo!” Il Martello, March 1, 1920.
[506] See Merithew, “Anarchist Motherhood.” Italian American socialists similarly argued for revolutionary motherhood; see Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 230–31.
[507] Un Cosmopolita, “Ai lavoratori,” La Questione Sociale, July 1895.
[508] L’Anarchico quoted in Rudolph J. Vecoli, “‘Free Country’: The American Republic Viewed by the Italian Left, 1880–1920,” in In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880–1920, ed. Marianne Dobouzy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 25.
[509] “Assassin’s Lot Fell upon Anarchist Here,” New York Times, July 31, 1900; John Dos Passos, Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen (Boston: Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, 1927), 57.
[510] See, for instance, Ludovico Caminita, Free Country! ([Paterson]: n.d., n.p.); Vecoli, “‘Free Country’.”
[511] Gianfausto Rosoli, “From ‘Promised Land’ to ‘Bitter Land’: Italian Migrants and the Transformations of a Myth,” in Distant Magnets: Expectations and Realities in the Immigrant Experience, 1840–1930, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Horst Rössler (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1993), 229.
[512] Biella Cattolica (Biella), September 9, 1900, quoted in Ramella, “Across the Ocean,” 109.
[513] See Levy, “The Anarchist Assassin,” 213.
[514] Starr, The Italians of New Jersey, 23–24; Vecoli, The People of New Jersey, 163; Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 23.
[515] Vezzosi, Il socialismo indifferente, 62; Berti, Francesco Saverio Merlino, 197; Report of Joseph Define, n.d. [ca. July 27, 1919], file 289493, OG, FBI.
[516] Alfred Hampton to J. E. Hoover, July 21, 1920, and Testimony of Fermino [sic] Gallo, February 14, 1920, file 289493, OG, FBI; “Memorandum in re: Ludovico Caminita,” November 15, 1923, file 61–115, OG, FBI; Interrogation of Francis Widmer [sic] by Special Agent Frank R. Stone and Emmet T. Drew, February 14, 1920, file 8000–385063, OG, FBI.
[517] Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 299–300; Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 22; Emmett T. Drew, “Memorandum In re: Explosion of bomb at Paterson, N. J,” May 14, 1920, 7, file 211793–0, BS, FBI. After the First World War it became increasingly common for former silk weavers to open their own shops. Nancy Fodelson, “They Paved the Streets with Silk: Paterson, New Jersey Silk Workers, 1913–1924,” New Jersey History 97, no. 3 (Autumn 1979): 140–41.
[518] “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, December 9, 1899.
[519] “Anarchist Meeting Quiet,” New York Times, August 3, 1900.
[520] “Hearing in the Case of Ludovico Caminetta [sic],” March 3–5, 1920, file 54861/181, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85 (hereafter cited as INS), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland; Vittorio Cravello file, busta 1524, CPC.
[521] Gli Anarchici del Gruppo “La Rivolta,” “La guerra e gl’Italiani,” L’Era Nuova, July 31, 1915. See also Antonioli, Pietro Gori, 23.
[522] Gli Anarchici di Phillipsburg and Newark, NJ, “Agl’Intelligenti,” leaflet, n.d. [1907], folder 3374, Max Nettlau Papers (hereafter cited as Nettlau Papers), IISH.
[523] “Il nostro programma,” La Questione Sociale, September 9, 1899; L’Aurora, April 27, 1901.
[524] R. Ingargiola, “Senza Patria,” L’Era Nuova, January 13, 1914.
[525] Caminita, “Twenty Years of Experience,” 1; “Italian Anarchists are Exultant,” New York Herald, July 31, 1900.
[526] See “Il nostro bilancio negli Stati Uniti,” L’Aurora, September 22, 1900.
[527] I gruppi comunisti anarchici di West Hobochen [sic], New-York, Paterson, etc., “XX Settembre” La Questione Sociale, September 15, 1895 (emphasis in original).
[528] “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, September 30, 1899.
[529] Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Italian Immigrant Press and the Construction of Social Reality,” in Print Culture in a Diverse America, ed. James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 23; Elisabetta Vezzosi, “Class, Ethnicity, and Acculturation in Il Proletario: The World War One Years,” in The Press of Labor Migrants in Europe and North America, 1880s to 1930s, ed. Christian Harzig and Dirk Hoerder (Bremen: Publications of the Labor Newspaper Preservation Archive, 1985), 452; Tresca, Autobiography, 143–44; Franceso Saverio Merlino in Il Grido degli Oppressi, quoted in Berti, Francesco Saverio Merlino, 198. See also Panofsky, “Two Major Centers,” 273–74.
[530] Pietro Gori, Scienza e Religione: Conferenza tenuta il 14 luglio 1896 a Paterson N. J. negli Stati Uniti d’America (Rome/Florence: F. Serantoni, 1905), 13. Emphasis in original.
[531] See also Ludovico Caminita, Che cose è la religione, 2nd ed. (Chieti: C. di Sciullo, 1906).
[532] Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times, 397–98; Silvano M. Tomasi, Piety and Power: The Role of the Italian Parishes in the New York Metropolitan Area, 1880–1930 (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1975), 137, 144; Vecoli, The People of New Jersey, 235.
[533] Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Prelates and Peasants: Italian Immigrants and the Catholic Church,” Journal of Social History 2, no. 3 (Spring 1969): 217–268; Silvano M. Tomasi, Piety and Power, 76–78.
[534] “Record Book of L’Era Nuova Group, Paterson, New Jersey,” 1920, file 54861/164, INS; Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 21–22.
[535] Vecoli, “Italian Immigrants,” 280; Panofsky, “Two Major Centers,” 277–78.
[536] “Slavery in the United States (By One Who Had Endured It),” Solidarity, July 9, 1892. This article was reprinted as S. Merlino, “Italian Immigrants and their Enslavement,” The Forum, April 1893.
[537] Buhle, “Italian-American Radicals,” 124.
[538] “Il convegno degli anarchici Italiani” and “Meglio tardi che mai,” La Jacquerie, May 21, 1919, copy in file 614625, OG, FBI.
[539] Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags, 54.
[540] “I sognatori e la patria,” La Questione Sociale, April 15, 1896; Gli Anarchici Residenti nel Nord America, “Al popolo italiano,” n.d. [1895], folder 3378, Nettlau Papers, IISH.
[541] Frank Fern ndez, Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2001), 31–35; Pedro Esteve, A Los Anarquistas de España y Cuba: Memoria de la Conferencia Anarquista Internacional celebrada en Chicago en Septiembre de 1893 (Paterson, NJ: El Despertar, 1900), 33–35; Kelly, “Roll Back the Years,” VIII:1, Tamiment Library; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 230, 267.
[542] R. R. “A proposito di Cuba,” La Questione Sociale, 30 November 1895.
[543] Esteve, A Los Anarquistas de España y Cuba, 73–84; Casanovas i Codina, “Pedro Esteve,” 68–70; Fern ndez, Cuban Anarchism, 34, 37; Darren Heber Plank, “Spanish Anarchists’ Reactions to the 1898 War between the United States and Spain: Explanations of their Reaction to the War” (MA thesis, University of Texas at Arlington, 2005).
[544] Casanovas i Codina, “Pedro Esteve,” 70; Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags, 189–95. For anarchist commentary on the subsequent American occupation of the Philippines see M. Dumas, “Cose interne,” La Questione Sociale, July 1, 1899.
[545] “L’uccisione di Canovas del Castillo,” La Questione Sociale, August 15, 1897; “Searching among Paterson Anarchists,” New York Times, August 1, 1900.
[546] A. A., “La guerra in Africa” La Questione Sociale, November 30, 1895; Solitario, “Gentile sangue latino!” La Questione Sociale, June 30, 1897.
[547] “I Delitti della Razza Bianca,” L’Era Nuova, February 20, 1909. See also Salerno, “I Delitti della Razza Bianca.”
[548] For an overview see Vecoli, “‘Free Country’.”
[549] See James R. Barrett and David Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 3–44; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003); Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness; John Highman, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 90–91, 169, 184–85, 264.
[550] See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 255.
[551] Editorial response to “Una Lettera di P. Kropotkin,” L’Era Nuova, December 12, 1914.
[552] F. C., “Cristiani ed Ebrei,” La Questione Sociale, January 30, 1898; Evening [Pietro Raveggi], “L’antisemitismo,” La Questione Sociale, April 15, 1898.
[553] Ludovico Caminita, “Odio di razza?” La Questione Sociale, May 19, 1906.
[554] Fanny Dal Ry, “Guerra di razze,” L’Era Nuova, February 6, 1915.
[555] “Guerra di razze,” L’Era Nuova, February 6, 1915; Salerno, “I Delitti della Razza Bianca,” 122–23.
[556] Luigi Quarti, “Il principio di nazionalita’,” L’Era Nuova, April 17, 1915.
[557] Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 271, 212–14.
[558] “Riotous Strikers Sent to Jail,” New York Times, March 14, 1894; “Violent Acts by Paterson Strikers,” New York Times, March 14, 1894; Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 156–59; Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 137, 215–16.
[559] “New Jersey Anarchist Convicted,” New York Times, July 12, 1894; “Riotous Strikers are Sentenced,” New York Times, August 9, 1894.
[560] “Movimento operaio nel New Jersey,” La Questione Sociale, February 28, 1897; “A West Hoboken,” La Questione Sociale, February 28, 1897; “Movimento operaio,” La Questione Sociale, February 28, May 1, March 30, August 15, and December 15, 1897; “Come avverera’ l’Anarchia,” La Questione Sociale, June 16, 1897.
[561] “Movimento operaio,” La Questione Sociale, February 4, 1899; Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 161–64; Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 219–20, 228–30, 233; “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, September 15, 1900.
[562] Galzerano, Gaetano Bresci, 578.
[563] “Paterson Strikers Riot,” New York Times, April 23, 1902; “Shots Exchanged by Strikers and Police,” New York Times, April 24, 1902.
[564] Giovanni Di Nardo, “Una proposta,” La Questione Sociale, December 30, 1899.
[565] Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 177–83; “Shots Exchanged by Strikers and Police,” New York Times, April 24, 1902; “No General Strike, Silk Weavers Decide,” New York Times, June 27, 1902.
[566] On Galleani see Ugo Fedeli, Luigi Galleani: quarant’anni di lotte rivoluzionarie (1891 –1931), new ed. (Catania: Centrolibri, 1984); Nunzio Pernicone, “Luigi Galleani and Italian Anarchist Terrorism in the United States,” Studi Emigrazione 30 (September 1993): 469–89.
[567] Fedeli, Luigi Galleani, 74–75; Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 183. On Grossman see Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 189–93.
[568] “Mad Riot in the Streets of Paterson,” New York Times, June 19, 1902; “Troops Called Upon to Protect Paterson,” New York Times, June 19, 1902; Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 184–90; Testimony of Charles Krattiger, in “United States vs. Haywood, et al., 14 August 1918,” 11752, folder 6, box 117, Industrial Workers of the World Collection (hereafter cited as IWW Collection), Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.
[569] “Troops Called Upon to Protect Paterson,” New York Times, June 19, 1902; “Paterson Anarchist Newspaper Removed,” New York Times, June 25, 1902; Cronaca Sovversiva, May 18, 1907. In Europe, Grossman adopted the name “Pierre Ramus” and remained a prominent anarcho-syndicalist. MacQueen contracted tuberculosis in prison and died in England in 1908.
[570] Cronaca Sovversiva, May 18, 1907.
[571] Altarelli, “History and Present Conditions,” 10.
[572] Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 195; La Questione Sociale, February 7, 1903.
[573] Carey, “The Vessel, the Deed, and the Idea,” 56. On the UMW strike see Philip F. Notarianni, “Italian Involvement in the 1903–04 Coal Miners’ Strike in Southern Colorado and Utah,” in Pane e Lavoro: The Italian American Working Class, ed. George E. Pozzetta (Toronto: The Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1980), 4765.
[574] Casanovas i Codina, “Pedro Esteve,” 73. See also Doctrina Anarquista-Socialista, July 30, 1905.
[575] La Questione Sociale, July 15, 1905; La Questione Sociale, June 23, 1906; Industrial Workers of the World, The Founding Convention of the IWW. Antionio Andrà’s name appears in these proceedings as “Anton Andra.” On Corna see Panofsky, “Two Major Centers,” 278.
[576] Salerno, “No God, No Master,” 177.
[577] “The General Movement,” Industrial Worker, May 1906; “Local Advisory Board,” Industrial Workers of the World Bulletin, no. 5, January 10, 1907; Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 160; Salerno, “No God, No Master,” 179; “Report of the General Secretary-Treasurer on the Work of the Organization,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, September 14, 1907.
[578] “Paterson Silk Workers,” Industrial Union Bulletin, March 23, 1907; “Victory at Paterson,” Industrial Union Bulletin, April 6, 1907; Fred Thompson and Jon Bekken, The I.W.W.: Its First One Hundred Years, 1905–2005 (Cincinnati: Industrial Workers of the World, 2006), 27; Sione, “Industrial Work, Militancy, and Migrations,” 251; Charles H. Chase, “Splendid Progress in Paterson,” Industrial Union Bulletin, April 13, 1907.
[579] Charles H. Chase, “Splendid Progress in Paterson,” Industrial Union Bulletin, April 13, 1907 (quote and membership figure); Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 201; “Local Executive Board,” Industrial Union Bulletin, March 23, April 6 and June 8, 1907.
[580] “Local Executive Board,” Industrial Union Bulletin, April 20, 1907; “Call for Assistance,” Industrial Union Bulletin, June 15, 1907; R. Katz., “Fight Won against Big Corporation,” Industrial Union Bulletin, April 27, 1907.
[581] “Paterson Forging Ahead,” Industrial Union Bulletin, May 25, 1907.
[582] “A Proposition from Paterson,” Industrial Union Bulletin, June 29, 1907; “Work of General Executive Board Following Convention,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, October 12, 1907; “A Musical Auxiliary,” Industrial Union Bulletin, June 6, 1907.
[583] “An I. W. W. National Industrial Union of Textile Workers Organized,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, May 9, 1908; “Textile Workers Convention,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, May 16, 1908; Thompson and Bekken, The I.W.W., 27–28.
[584] “Industrial Union Publications,” Industrial Union Bulletin, April 27, 1907; A. Guabello, “Un po’ di storia,” L’Era Nuova, July 17, 1915.
[585] Lodovico [sic] Caminita, “Unionismo Americano,” Il Lavoratore Italiano, September 21, 1906.
[586] Cartosio, “Gli emigrati italiani,” 364–66; Topp, Those without a Country, 43. In 1910 a minority of FSI members split from the organization and affiliated with the Socialist Party. See Vezzosi, Il socialismo indifferente.
[587] Vecoli, “Italian Immigrants,” 291.
[588] Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, 164, 176–77; Anne Huber Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 39.
[589] La Jacquerie, November 1, 1919, quoted in US Congress, “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 36.
[590] Caminita, “Twenty Years of Experience,” 16–17; Rudolph Katz, “With De Leon Since ’89,” in Daniel De Leon: The Man and His Work, a Symposium ([New York]: National Executive Committee, Socialist Labor Party, 1919), 131–41; Paul Frederick Brissenden, The I.W.W.: A Study of American Syndicalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919), 1899–89. On the 1908 convention and split, see Brissenden, The I.W.W., chap. 7; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 103113.
[591] Brissenden, The I.W.W., 228–29; Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike, 40–41; Adolf Lessig, “Paterson Loyal to the ‘Wreck’,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, February 20, 1909. On anarchist influence and involvement in the IWW generally, see Louis Levine, “The Development of Syndicalism in America,” Political Science Quarterly 28 (September 1913): 451–79; Salerno, Red November, Black November.
[592] W. E. Trautmann, “To the Fourth Annual Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, October 24, 1908; “Subtract the Dead Ones—Add the Live Ones,” The Industrial Union Bulltin, November 7, 1908; “Directory I. W. W. Local Unions,” Industrial Worker, August 26, 1909 and March 5, 1910.
[593] “Vigilantes Warn Anarchist Editor,” New York Times, March 25, 1907; Carey, “The Vessel, the Deed, and the Idea,” 56.
[594] Robert J. Goldstein, “The Anarchist Scare of 1908: A Sign of Tensions in the Progressive Era,” American Studies 15, no. 2 (Fall 1974): 55–78; “Rout out Anarchy, Says the President,” New York Times, March 29, 1908.
[595] Goldstein, “The Anarchist Scare of 1908,” 69; “Roosevelt Demands Action on Anarchy,” New York Times, April 10, 1908.
[596] “To Drive Out the ‘Reds,’” New York Times, April 3, 1908; Il Gruppo La Questione Sociale, “Ai Compagni, agli Amici e Simpatizzanti della Questione Sociale,” leaflet, April 16, 1908, file 3378, Nettlau Papers, IISH; “Police Stop Red’s Meeting,” New York Times, April 4, 1908.
[597] “Anarchist Editor Arrested,” New York Times, April 26, 1908; “Persecution—What Next?” The Industrial Union Bulletin, May 2, 1908; “Observations and Comments,” Mother Earth, May 1908, 125 and June 1908, 179.
[598] “Record Book of L’Era Nuova Group, Paterson, New Jersey,” 1920, file 54861/164, INS; “Master List, L’Era Nuova Group, Paterson N.J.,” n.d., file 61–4625, FBI.
[599] “Riceviamo e Pubblichiamo,” Regeneración: Sezione Italiana, August 12, 1911; Caminita, “Twenty Years of Experience,” 31–33. In his memoir, Caminita misdates or omits many of these events.
[600] “Fra Gli Azzeccagarbugli,” Regeneración, April 6, 1912; Firmino Felice Gallo file, busta 2256, CPC; “Christian Civilization in War and Peace,” Mother Earth, October 1912, 253–54; “I nostri processi,” L’Era Nuova, February 22, 1913. In 1915 these charges were dropped. “Il processo Gallo-Caminita,” L’Era Nuova, May 9, 1915.
[601] “Something Diding [sic] in Patterson! [sic]” Industrial Worker, March 14, 1912.
[602] The best studies of the strike are Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike; Golin, The Fragile Bridge. Others include Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 244–65; Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 4:chap. 15; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), chap. 11.
[603] Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 41. Golin, who implicitly equates anarchism with violence, erroneously claims that anarchist activity in the city ended in 1908 when “those leaders of the Italian anarchist group who had not fled Paterson in 1902 were arrested, and their journal was permanently closed down” (27).
[604] Translation of La Jacquerie, May 21, 1919, file 61–4185, OG, FBI.
[605] Morris William Garber, “The Silk Industry of Paterson, New Jersey, 1840–1913: Technology and the Origins, Development, and Changes in an Industry” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1968), 247.
[606] “Ha ritirato le corna la polizia!” L’Era Nuova, March 8, 1913; “Lo sciopero di Paterson: Cio’ che ne pensa un tessitore,” L’Era Nuova, March 22, 1913. See also Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 33–34.
[607] Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike, 217; Irma Lombardi interview, in Bird, Georgakas, and Shaffer, Solidarity Forever, 71; Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 67.
[608] Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 67; Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike, 76–77.
[609] Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 234–51; Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike, 45–60.
[610] Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 155.
[611] Sanger, “The Paterson Strike,” 47. On Sanger’s activities in Paterson see Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 141–43.
[612] “Ha ritirato le corna la polizia!” L’Era Nuova, March 8, 1913; “La terribile disfatta dell’A.F.L.,” L’Era Nuova, April 26, 1913.
[613] Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 155.
[614] Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 58; Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 155; “La vera lotta incomincia da oggi in poi!” L’Era Nuova, March 29, 1913.
[615] “Lo sciopero continua!” L’Era Nuova, May 10, 1913; “Verso la fase tragica!” L’Era Nuova, July 5, 1913.
[616] Translation of Ninfa [Baronio] to Comrade [Serafino] Grandi, May 10, 1913, file 61–4625, OG, FBI; “Memorandum in re: Ludovico Caminita,” November 15, 1923, file 61–115, OG, FBI.
[617] Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938), 84.
[618] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 274; James D. Osborne, “Paterson: Immigrant Strikers and the War of 1913,” in At the Point of Production: The Local History of the I.W.W., ed. Joseph R. Conlin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 61–78; James D. Osborne, “Italian Immigrants and the Working Class in Paterson: The Strike of 1913 in Ethnic Perspective,” in New Jersey’s Ethnic Heritage: Papers Presented at the Eighth Annual New Jersey History Symposium, ed. Paul A. Stellhorn (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1978), 22 (quote).
[619] “La lotta si fa piu’ aspra!” L’Era Nuova, June 21, 1913; “Ancora una bomba,” L’Era Nuova, July 12, 1913; “Verso la fase tragica!” L’Era Nuova, July 5, 1913.
[620] Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 249–53; Sanger, “The Paterson Strike,” 47.
[621] Cohen interview, in Bird, Georgakas, and Shaffer, Solidarity Forever, 62; Osborne, “Italian Immigrants,” 21; Vecoli, “Italian Immigrants,” 292.
[622] Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 81–82; Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike, 76; Martin C. Mooney, “The Industrial Workers of the World and the Immigrants of Paterson and Passaic, N. J., 1907–1913” (MA thesis, Seton Hall University, 1969), 87.
[623] “La Bandiera, ultimo rifugio dei furfanti!” L’Era Nuova, March 22, 1913.
[624] John Reed, “War in Paterson,” The Masses, June 1913.
[625] “Le vendetta dei Manufatturieri: La ‘lista nera,’” L’Era Nuova, August 3, 1913; Cohen interview and Mignone interview, in Bird, Georgakas, and Shaffer, Solidarity Forever, 67, 83; Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 192–92; Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 270.
[626] Un Tessitore Ribelle, “Alla vigilia di un nuovo sciopero,” L’Era Nuova, November 29, 1913; Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 194–96.
[627] Cohen interview, in Bird, Georgakas, and Shaffer, Solidarity Forever, 68; Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 196; David J. Goldberg, A Tale of Three Cities: Labor Organization and Protest in Paterson, Passaic, and Lawrence, 1916–21 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 35; Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 265, 270.
[628] Il Vecchio della Montagna, “Emma Goldman in Paterson,” L’Era Nuova, December 20, 1913; “Grandioso Comizio per la liberta’ di parola in Patersion,” L’Era Nuova, January 3, 1914; A. G., “La rivincita di Emma Goldman,” L’Era Nuova, January 17, 1914; “Si comincia bene!” L’Era Nuova, September 11, 1915; “Lets Miss Flynn Speak,” New York Times, January 21, 1916; Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 171–73.
[629] Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); William Issel and Robert W. Cherney, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 24, 54.
[630] Frost, The Mooney Case, 47; Report of Edw. P. Morse, April 23, 1921, file 202600-1687-1, BS, FBI.
[631] Issel and Cherney, San Francisco, 56.
[632] San Francisco Department of City Planning, The Population of San Francisco: A Half Century of Change, 19001950 (San Francisco: San Francisco Department of City Planning, 1954), 19.
[633] Robert Edward Lee Knight, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1900–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 43; Issel and Cherney, San Francisco, 54, 55.
[634] See Knight, Industrial Relations; Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Issel and Cherney, San Francisco, 83 (quote), passim.
[635] Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Issel and Cherney, San Francisco, 77; Joseph Giovinco, “’Success in the Sun?’: California’s Italians during the Progressive Era,” in Struggle and Success: An Anthology of the Italian Immigrant Experience in California, ed. Paola A. Sensi-Isolani and Phylis Cancilla Martinelli (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1993), 27–28; Kazin, Barons of Labor, 23–24; Jack London, The Valley of the Moon (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 21–22.
[636] Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 9.
[637] Mormino and Pozzetta, Immigrant World of Ybor City. For another example see Phylis Cancilla Martinelli, “Examining the Relationships of Italians and Mexicans in a ‘Mexican Camp’ and a ‘White Man’s Camp’: Mexicans and Euro Latins in the Arizona Copper Industry, 1900–1930,” in Italian Immigrants Go West: The Impact of Locale on Ethnicity, ed. Janet E. Worrall, Carol Bonomo Albright, and Elvira G. Di Fabio (Cambridge: American Italian Historical Association, 2003), 55–65.
[638] Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 19, 106; Deanna Paoli Gumina, The Italians of San Francisco, 18501930/Gli Italiani di San Francisco, 1850–1930 (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1978), 21; Issel and Cherney, San Francisco, 74.
[639] Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 21–22.
[640] Samuel Baily, Immigrants in the Land of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 224; Issel and Cherney, San Francisco, 24.
[641] Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 150; Issel and Cherney, San Francisco, 74; Hans Christian Palmer, “Italian Immigration and the Development of California Agriculture” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1965), 157 (quote), 365. On Italian truck farmers and fishermen see Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 214, 218–26; Gumina, Italians of San Francisco, 79–107.
[642] Gumina, Italians of San Francisco, 133; Giulio Ricciardi, “Le Condizioni del Lavoro e L’Emigrazione Italiana in California,” in Emigrazione e colonie: raccolta di rapporti dei rr. agenti diplomatici e consolari, vol. 3 (Rome: Cooperativa Tipografica Manuzio, 1908), 247–48.
[643] Knight, Industrial Relations, 252, 276; Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 115; Giovinco, “‘Success in the Sun’,” 27.
[644] Issel and Cherney, San Francisco, 57.
[645] Knight, Industrial Relations, 174–75; Joseph J. Ettor, “The San Francisco Labor Council,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, June 6, 1908.
[646] Paola A. Sensi-Isolani, “‘La pelle in California, i soldi in Italia’: The Italian Strike in McCloud, California, 1909,” Studi Emigrazione 27 (Spring 1990): 108–119; Giovinco, “‘Success in the Sun’,” 28, 37 n. 6.
[647] Cesare Crespi, “Il Miraggio Californiese,” Il Messaggero, December 3, 1897, quoted in Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 222.
[648] Umberto Lucarini, “Cesare Crespi,” La Parola del Popolo 9 (January 1958): 286–87; Francesca Loverci, “Le idee di Mazzini in California: Iniziative politiche e giornalistiche dei repubblicani italiani a San Francisco dagli anni del ‘gold rush’ al 1905,” in Il Mazzinianesimo nel mondo, ed. Giuliana Limiti, vol. 2 (Pisa: Istituto Domus Massiniana, 1996), 137 n. 104; Esther Travaglio interview and Vincenzo Ferrero interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 161, 164.
[649] Newspaper Directory and Advertisers’ Manual (Detroit: G. M. Savage Advertising Agency, 1907), 19; Secolo Nuovo quoted in “Movimento sociale,” La Questione Sociale, August 4, 1900. This description is based on the only two surviving issues of Secolo Nuovo I have been able to locate, both of which are from 1903 and reproduced on microfilm at the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
[650] Lucarini, “Cesare Crespi.”
[651] Cassius V. Cook, “Why Emma Goldman is a Dangerous Woman,” Mother Earth, March 1915, 442.
[652] On Firebrand and Free Society see Jessica M. Moran, “‘Propaganda Work’: English-Language Anarchist Newspapers in the United States, 1895–1917” (MA thesis, San Francisco State University, 2009), chap. 1–2.
[653] Travaglio interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 161; “Ai compagni,” L’Aurora, March 2, 1901; Enrico Travaglio file, busta 5198, CPC; “La disgrazia del signor William McKinley,” L’Aurora, September 14, 190; Giuseppe Ciancabilla and Mario Mapelli, Fired by the Ideal: Italian-American Anarchist Responses to Czolgosz’s Killing of McKinley, trans. Paul Sharkey (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2002); L’Aurora, September 28, 1901; “L’arresto arbitario del compagno Ciancabilla,” L’Aurora, October 2, 1901.
[654] G. Ciancabilla and E. Travaglio, “La Protesta Umana,” circular, January 1902, folder 3378, Nettlau Papers, IISH. Emphasis in original.
[655] Carlo Guglielmo Dalboni file, busta 1577, CPC.
[656] Adolfo Antonelli file, busta 154, CPC; Dipaola, “Italian Anarchists in London (1870–1914),” 77–79, 187, 19093, 201–2.
[657] Robert J. Goldstein, “The Anarchist Scare of 1908,” 70; Hippolyte Havel, “The Coalition against Anarchists,” Mother Earth, February 1909, 421.
[658] Michele Centrone file, busta 1243, CPC; “Michele Centrone,” n.d., file 321621, OG, FBI; L’Ignoto, “Michele Centrone,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, October 3, 1936; “Our Comrades Who Fall,” Man!, October-November 1936.
[659] “Movimento sociali,” La Questione Sociale, August 2, 1899.
[660] Ferrero interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 163; Reb Raney, “A Group That Does Things,” The Blast, April 1, 1916.
[661] “Michele Centrone,” n.d., file 321621, OG, FBI.
[662] Reb Raney, “A Group That Does Things,” The Blast, April 1, 1916; Bianca Gaffe, “Compagni, attenti!” La Questione Sociale, January 28, 1899; Cordillot, La sociale en Amérique, “Gaffe, Blance”. For a rare but slim exception from the Italian files see the Carrara Daniele Da Massa file, busta 1597, CPC.
[663] Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 163.
[664] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 84, 89; Alberico Pirani interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 411. See also Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 154. Michele Centrone appears to have been romantically involved with one of the Bresci daughters. See translation of Joe Russo to [L. Gianelli?], October 11, 1919, file 202600–2159, BS, FBI.
[665] “Notice,” The Blast, July 1, 1916.
[666] “Birth Control Propaganda,” The Blast, March 15, 1916; Raney, “A Group that Does Things,” The Blast, April 1, 1916; David Leigh, “A Word to the Fearful,” The Blast, April 15, 1916.
[667] Clarence E. Edwords, Bohemian San Francisco: Its Restaurants and Their Most Famous Recipes (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1914), 68.
[668] L’Alleanza Socialista Anarchica, Federazione Socialista-Anarchica dei Lavoratori Italiani nel Nord-America, “Dichiarazione di principii,” n.d. [1896], folder 3374, Nettlau Papers, IISH.
[669] Bruno Cartosio, “Italian Workers and Their Press in the United States, 1900–1920,” in The Press of Labor Migrants in Europe and North America, 1880s to 1930s, ed. Christian Harzig and Dirk Hoerder (Bremen: Publications of the Labor Newspaper Preservation Archive), 428; R. D., “Bachmann, Raymond,” Sans patrie ni frontières: Dictionnaire international des militants anarchistes, 2006, [[http://militantsanarchistes.info/spip.php?article177][militantsanarchistes.info]]; René Bianco, Ronald Creagh, and Nicole Riffaut-Perrot, Quand le coq rouge chantera: anarchistes français et italiens aux États-Unis d’Amérique; bibliographie (Marsielle/Montpellier: Editions Culture et Liberté/CIRCAN, 1986), 25; L’Effort, December 1904.
[670] Sensi-Isolani, “Italian Radicals,” 192; Ersilia Cavedagni file, busta 1205, CPC.
[671] L. Caminita, “The Revolutionist,” The Emancipator, November 1906; “The Political and Economical Situation of Mexico,” The Emancipator, May 1907; John T. Reif, “We Denounce the Mexican Czarism,” The Emancipator, May 1907; [Emma Goldman], “The Situation in America,” Mother Earth, October 1907, 329.
[672] Antonio I. Villarreal to Henry Max Morton [Tomas Sarabia], June 4, 1907, in Chantal López and Omar Cortés, eds., El Partido Liberal Mexicano (1906–1908) (Mexico City: Ediciones Antorcha, 1986), 184–85.
[673] On this point see Gabaccia, “International Approaches,” 28.
[674] “Penso dunque sono!” Cogito, Ergo Sum, September 15, 1908; Cogito, Ergo Sum, October 15 and November 15, 1908.
[675] Carlo Guglielmo Dalboni file, busta 1577, CPC.
[676] Hyman Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California: 1905–1931” (MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1947), 17, 19.
[677] Ralph Edward Shaffer, “Radicalism in California, 1860–1929” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1962), 90, 220; “The General Movement,” The Industrial Worker, February 1906; “Who Joseph Ettor Is,” Industrial Worker, May 23, 1912. Mixed locals consisted of workers in trades where there were not yet enough IWW members to form industrial union locals.
[678] “Who Joseph Ettor Is,” Industrial Worker, May 23, 1912; Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769–1913 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 854 n. 60; “Local Executive Board,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, March 16, 1907.
[679] Knight, Industrial Relations, 46; Sensi-Isolani, “Italian Radicals,” 194.
[680] “Local Executive Board,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, May 18 and June 8, 1907.
[681] “Report of the General Secretary-Treasurer on the Work of the Organization,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, September 14, 1907; “Executive Board Matters,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, April 25, 1908.
[682] “Another Protest Resolution” and “Resolutions of Protest,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, May 30, 1908; “Executive Board Matters,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, April 25, 1908; Joseph J. Ettor, “An Appeal to the Old Guard of Frisco,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, February 22, 1908; “I. W. W. in Frisco,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, July 1, 1909.
[683] Shaffer, “Radicalism in California,” 164–65; “Expelled,” Industrial Worker, April 30, 1910; “They Fell from Grace,” Industrial Worker, May 28, 1910.
[684] “Flourishing Union in Oakland,” Industrial Worker, July 9, 1910; Frost, The Mooney Case, 11; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 22; “San Francisco Progress,” Industrial Worker, May 30, 1912; “United States vs. Haywood, et al., August 14, 1918,” 11723, folder 6, box 117, IWW Collection.
[685] Harvey Duff, The Silent Defenders, Courts and Capitalism in California (Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World), 53; “What the Locals are Doing,” Industrial Worker, July 6, 1911; B. Saffores, “L’Exploitation des Français en Californie,” Il Proletario/Le Prolétaire, February 17, 1912, quoted in Clifford H. Bissell, “The French Language Press in California,” California Historical Society Quarterly 39, no. 4 (December 1960): 314; Knight, Industrial Relations, 46, 191 n.
[686] Sensi-Isolani, “Italian Radicals,” 193–95; “What the Locals Are Doing,” Industrial Worker, July 6, 1911; “Is the I. W. W. to Grow?” Industrial Worker, January 11, 1912; B. Saffores, “Rossoni in Frisco,” Industrial Worker, January 11, 1912; Bissell, “French Language Press,” 314; Il Lavoratore Industriale/Le Travailleur Industriel, May 1, 1912. In 1913 the Latin Branch announced plans to publish an Italian-language single-issue paper, Il Risveglio Operaio, but it is unclear if this project came to fruition. In March 1916 it produced another single-issue paper, Guerra di Classe. “Italian First of May Annual,” Industrial Worker, April 3, 1913; United States Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Bolshevik Propaganda, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 65th Congress, 3rd Session and thereafter, pursuant to S. Res. 439 and 469 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 1090–91.
[687] Luigi Parenti file, busta 3732, CPC; “Parenti Touring Coast,” Industrial Worker, January 30, 1913; The United States of America vs. William D. Haywood, et al., no. 6125, Proceedings Before Francis Krull, United States Commissioner, at San Francisco, Cal., in Re Removal of Certain Defendants, vol. 2, 26 October 1917, 135–36, 14344, 149, folder 2, box 103, IWW Collection.
[688] Sensi-Isolani, “Italian Radicals,” 198–99; Carleton H. Parker, The Casual Laborer and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 68–69.
[689] “I.W.W. Strike in Frisco Canneries,” Industrial Worker, January 2, 1913.
[690] Knight, Industrial Relations, 268–70; F. Monaco, “San Francisco Shoe Workers’ Strike,” International Socialist Review, May 1913.
[691] Cordillot, La sociale en Amérique, s.v. “Saffores, B.”; Donna Kesselman, “Thirty Years of Social History,” Labour/Le Travail, no. 45 (Spring 2000): 219.
[692] Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 90–91; Knight, Industrial Relations, 343–44; Sensi-Isolani, “Italian Radicals,” 199; Elizabeth Reis, “The AFL, the IWW and Bay Area Cannery Workers,” in Struggle and Success: An Anthology of the Italian Immigrant Experience in California, ed. Paola A. Sensi-Isolani and Phylis Cancilla Martinelli (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1993), 124–145.
[693] Gumina, Italians of San Francisco, 137, 139; United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916), 11724.
[694] Knight, Industrial Relations, 3, 268; Reis, “The AFL, the IWW and Bay Area Cannery Workers.”
[695] “The Women Workers of the World,” Industrial Worker, July 29, 1909.
[696] Sophie Vasilio, “Women in the I. W. W.,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, April 25, 1908; Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 129–30.
[697] United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report, 5:4947.
[698] David R. Roediger, “Gaining a Hearing for Black-White Unity: Covington Hall and the Complexities of Race, Gender and Class,” in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994), 127–76.
[699] Brissenden, The I.W.W., 265–66, 367; Philip S. Foner, ed., Fellow Workers and Friends: I.W.W. Free-Speech Fights as Told by Participants (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).
[700] The Population of San Francisco, 19; Robert H. Wilson, “San Francisco’s Foreign Colonies: No. 3—SpanishMexican,” San Francisco Examiner, December 2, 1923, [[http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hgfc3.htm][www.sfgenealogy.com]].
[701] William Wilson McEuen, “A Survey of the Mexicans in Los Angeles” (MA thesis, University of Southern California, 1914), 27–28, 36; Roderick MacDonald, “San Diego News,” Industrial Worker, June 18, 1910.
[702] Jack Whyte, “Ignorance in Fresno,” Industrial Worker, May 18, 1911.
[703] Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 84; “Local Advisory Board,” Industrial Workers of the World Bulletin, no. 4, December 1, 1906; The Industrial Union Bulletin, May 16, 1908; William Allen, “It’s Not a Land of Promise,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, June 27, 1908; F. Martinez Palomarez, “Help Madero’s Victims,” Revolt, March 16, 1912; “The 11th of November Memorial Meeting,” Industrial Worker, November 21, 1912.
[704] Douglas Monroy, “Fence Cutters, Sedicioso, and First-Class Citizens: Mexican Radicalism in America,” in The Immigrant Left in the United States, ed. Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 11–44; Norman Caulfield, “Wobblies and Mexican Workers in Mining and Petroleum, 1905–1924,” International Review of Social History 40 (1995): 51–76.
[705] Troy Robert Fuller, “‘Our Cause is Your Cause’: The Relationship between the Industrial Workers of the World and the Partido Liberal Mexicano, 1905–1911” (MA thesis, University of Calgary, 1997).
[706] F. Martinez Palomarez, “Help Madero’s Victims,” Revolt, March 16, 1912; Ethel Duffy Turner, Revolution in Baja California: Ricardo Flores Magón’s High Noon, ed. Rey Devis (Detroit: Blaine Ethridge, 1981), 2, 6; M. V. “Historical Background,” in Ricardo Flores Magón, Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader, ed. Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Cowen Verter (Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 67.
[707] Ward S. Albro, To Die on Your Feet: The Life, Times, and Writings of Práxedis G. Guerrero (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996), 72, 103.
[708] F. H. Little, “Struggle for Free Speech in North and West,” Industrial Worker, June 4, 1910; Street, Beasts of the Field, 604–615; Foner, Fellow Workers and Friends, chap. 3; “Police in Street Battle with I. W. W.,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 1911; Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 4:185–89.
[709] Turner, Revolution in Baja California, 4–5, 17; “What the Locals Are Doing,” Industrial Worker, April 20, 1911.
[710] Javier Torres Parés, La Revolución sin frontera: El partido Liberal Mexicano y las relaciones entre el movimiento obrero de México y el de Estados Unidos, 1900–1923 (Mexico City: Universidad Autonoma de Mexico and Ediciones y Distribuciones Hispanicas, S.A. de C.V., 1990); “Un Llamamiento a los Trabajadores del Mundo,” Regeneración, May 27, 1911; Dave Struthers, “The World in a City: Transnational and Inter-Racial Organizing in Los Angeles, 1900–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2010), chap. 4.
[711] V. Cravello, “Sempre Avanti,” Regeneración: Sezione Italiana, August 12, 1911; [Ludovico Caminita], “Movimento Sociale Internazionale,” Regeneración: Sezione Italiana, September 2 and September 9, 1911.
[712] Parés, La Revolución sin frontera, 79–80, 171–72.
[713] Turner, Revolution in Baja California, chap. 2; Lowell L. Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution: Baja California, 1911 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 39–40, 47. See also Pablo L. Martínez, Historia de Baja California: Edición crítica y anotada (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2003), chap. 43–44.
[714] Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution, 110–11; “Hero of Numerous Wars Asks Liberty,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 20, 1912; Gerald Horne, Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 70, 135, passim.
[715] “To Arms, Ye Braves,” Industrial Worker, June 8, 1911. See also S. G. [Stanley M. Gue], “Reds Gain a Great Victory,” Industrial Worker, May 25, 1911; Sam Murray, “From the Red Republic,” Revolt, June 17, 1911.
[716] Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution, 139; Turner, Revolution in Baja California, 63; Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003), 77–88; Martínez, Historia de Baja California, 570.
[717] The most extensive list of Italian participants can be found in Cronaca Sovversiva, January 6, 1912. On Antonelli and Caminita’s presence, see Sebastiano Messaglia, “Uno sguardo vagabondo: Alla rivoluzione messicana,” Il contro-pelo, February 1912; L’Era Nuova, June 24, 1911.
[718] Turner, Revolution in Baja California, 63–64, 110; Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution, 140, 146–52, 172, 180–81; Richard Griswold del Castillo, “The Discredited Revolution: The Magonista Capture of Tijuana in 1911,” The Journal of San Diego History 26, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 265–69; Chili-Con-Carne, “Rebels are Defeated But Not Conquered,” Industrial Worker, July 6, 1911.
[719] Sebastiano Messaglia, “Uno sguardo vagabondo: Alla rivoluzione messicana,” Il contro-pelo, February 1912; Parés, La Revolución sin frontera, 156–57; Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution, 185–86; Nettlau, untitled manuscript, 455.
[720] See, for instance, Polinice, “Carattere anarchico della rivoluzione nel Messico,” L’Era Nuova, July 1, 1911; Libero Tancredi [Massimo Rocca], “Ancora sul ritorno dei nostril compagni dal Messico,” L’Era Nuova, July 8, 1911; Libero Tancredi [Massimo Rocca], “Messico Eroico,” Novatore, May 1, 1911; McEuen, “Survey of the Mexicans,” 92.
[721] Errico Malatesta [Ludovico Caminita?], “Il Convegno di Brooklyn, N.Y.,” Regeneración, November 11, 1911; Cronaca Sovversiva, January 6, 1912; “Tra il Prosciutto e la Birra,” Regeneración, February 3, 1912; “Del Rivoluzionari Messicani,” Regeneración, December 9, 1911.
[722] See George Duval, “The Educational Value of the Mexican Revolution,” Mother Earth, June 1915, 142–43; “La Rivoluzione nel Messico,” L’Era Nuova, January 3, 1914; Victor [sic] Cravello, “Appeal of the Rangel-Cline Defense Fund,” Mother Earth, December 1913, 304–7; “Tyranny in Texas,” Mother Earth, February 1914, 377–79. The arrested men received life sentences, put were pardoned in 1926.
[723] “The Public Forum,” Land and Liberty, September 1914.
[724] “La Nostra Propaganda in Chicago,” Regeneración, February 17, 1912; “Il Contradditorio di Chicago,” Regeneración, February 24, 1912. See also Filippo Perrone file, busta 3875, CPC.
[725] On anti-clericalism among Northern California’s Italians, see Paola A. Sensi-Isolani, “Tradition and Transition in a California Paese,” in Struggle and Success: An Anthology of the Italian Immigrant Experience in California, ed. Paola A. Sensi-Isolani and Phylis Cancilla Martinelli (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1993), 66.
[726] “Police in Street Battle with I. W. W.,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 1911; J. Lebon, “Persecution in Frisco,” Industrial Worker, August 24, 1911; “Police Have No Case Against the I. W. W. Men,” Industrial Worker, August 31, 1911; “Free Speech,” Revolt, August 19, 1911; “Under ‘Labor’ Administration Free Speech Brutally Suppressed,” Revolt, August 19, 1911; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 32–33; Sensi-Isolani, “Italian Radicals,” 195–97.
[727] “Under ‘Labor’ Administration Free Speech Brutally Suppressed,” Revolt, August 19, 1911; “Police in Street Battle with I. W. W.,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 1911.
[728] J. Lebon, “Persecution in Frisco,” Industrial Worker, August 24, 1911; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 33; B. Saffores, “Bakers Join the I. W. W.,” Industrial Worker, September 28, 1911; Donald T. Murphy, “I. W. W. Wins Victory in Frisco,” Industrial Worker, August 31, 1911.
[729] Quoted in Shaffer, “Radicalism in California,” 251.
[730] “Police Fight Frisco I.W.W.,” Industrial Worker, February 1, 1912; “San Francisco Justice,” Industrial Worker, February 8, 1912; “Workers Outraged in Oakland!” Industrial Worker, March 7, 1912; “Oakland Thugs Active,” Industrial Worker, March 14, 1912; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 34–36.
[731] B. Saffores, “Latin Defense Committee in Frisco,” Industrial Worker, July 25, 1912; “Ettor-Giovannitti Protest Meeting in San Francisco,” Industrial Worker, August 1, 1912.
[732] “Toilers Enjoy Unique Social,” Industrial Worker, January 9, 1913.
[733] W. Dirk Raat, Revoltosos: Mexico’s Rebels in the United States, 1903–1923 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981), 58; Rosalie Shanks, “The I.W.W. Free Speech Movement: San Diego, 1912,” Journal of San Diego History 19, no. 1 (1973): 25–33; Foner, Fellow Workers and Friends, chap. 3; Street, Beasts of the Field, 618–21; “Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman Tell of San Diego Experience,” Industrial Worker, June 6, 1912; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 494–501.
[734] On Wheatland see Parker, The Casual Laborer, 61–68, 171–99; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 68–78; Cletus E. Daniel, “In Defense of the Wheatland Wobblies: A Critical Analysis of the IWW in California,” Labor History 19 (Fall 1978): 485–509; Vincent DiGirolamo, “The Women of Wheatland: Female Consciousness and the 1913 Wheatland Hop Strike,” Labor History 34 (1993): 236–55; Greg Hall, Harvest Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World and Agricultural Laborers in the American West, 1905–1930 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001), chap. 2. Ford was paroled in 1925, as was Suhr the following year.
[735] Parker, The Casual Laborer, 72, 189 (quote), 191; Gregory R. Wolrol, “Observing the I.W.W. in California, May-July 1914,” Labor History 25, no. 3 (Summer 1984): 440.
[736] United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report, 5:4941, 4945; Hall, Harvest Wobblies, 53, passim; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 300.
[737] Cross, History of the Labor Movement, 73 (quote), 262–67, chap. 6–7; Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy; Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 164–74.
[738] Dana Frank, “U.S. Labor and International Solidarity,” 113. For extremely rare examples of anarchist antiAsian sentiments, see the biographical entry on Henry Weismann in Falk, Pateman, and Moran, Emma Goldman, 2:516; Morris Marcus, “The Exclusion of the Chinaman,” The Demonstrator, August 22, 1906.
[739] Cross, History of the Labor Movement, 162; Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 172, 222. On the IWA generally see Cross, History of the Labor Movement, chap. 10; Shaffer, “Radicalism in California,” chap. 2.
[740] Kazin, Barons of Labor, 21; Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 1, 27–28; Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 201–2; Street, Beasts of the Field, 464; Knight, Industrial Relations, 213. Despite the Labor Council’s resolution, however, African Americans remained informally barred from most Bay Area unions until the 1930s. Broussard, Black San Francisco, 48–50.
[741] Shaffer, “Radicalism in California,” 215; Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 30; Kazin, Barons of Labor, 171 (quote). See also Aileen S. Kraditor, The Radical Persuasion, 1890–1917: Aspects of the Intellectual History and the Historiography of Three American Radical Organizations (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 177–85.
[742] Sebastian Fichera, “The Meaning of Community: A History of the Italians of San Francisco” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1981), 184, 189–91, 195–97; Micaela di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian-Americans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 56.
[743] J. H. Walsh, “Japanese and Chinese Exclusion or Industrial Organization, Which?,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, April 11, 1908; Fichera, “The Meaning of Community,” 185, 197–98; Giovinco, “‘Success in the Sun’,” 33. See also Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival, 36, 50, 74.
[744] Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 7; Daniel Rosenberg, “The IWW and Organization of Asian Workers in Early Twentieth Century America,” Labor History 36, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 77–87.
[745] Industrial Workers of the World, The Founding Convention of the IWW, 298. On Klemencic (whose name was sometimes spelled Kleminsic), see Cordillot, La sociale en Amérique, s.v. “Klemincic, A.”.
[746] Robert G. Lee, “The Hidden World of Asian Immigrant Radicalism,” in The Immigrant Left in the United States, ed. Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 276.
[747] Hippolyte Havel, “Kotoku’s Correspondence with Albert Johnson,” Mother Earth, August 1911, 180, and November 1911, 286; F. G. Notehelfer, Kōtoku Shūsui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 61–62, 123, chap. 5.
[748] Notehelfer, Kōtoku Shūsui, 124–27; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 41 (quote); George Elison, “Kōtoku Shūsui: The Change in Thought,” Monumenta Nipponica 22, no. 3/4 (1967): 437–467.
[749] Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 105–6.
[750] Notehelfer, Kōtoku Shūsui, 131–32; “Kotoku’s Correspondence with Albert Johnson,” Mother Earth, August 1911, 180–84, September 1911, 207–9, and November 1911, 282–87; D. Kotoku, “Seed Sowing in Japan,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, December 21, 1907.
[751] “Local Advisory Board,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, March 9, 1907; “Secret Service Men on the Trail of Japanese Publishers,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 30, 1906. The controversial passage read: “Our policy is toward the overthrow of [Emperor] Mikado, King, [and] President as representing the Capitalist Class as soon as possible, and we do not hesitate as to means.”
[752] “American Socialists and Japanese,” The Emancipator, May 1907. The author of the Japanese article is given as Kiichi Kaneko.
[753] “Minutes of the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World, October 4, 1906-September 15, 1911,” folder 1, box 7, IWW Collection; E. Bouvard, “Anti-japonais,” Cogito, Ergo Sum, September 15, 1908; Albert Elysée, “Blanches et jaunes,” Cogito, Ergo Sum, October 15, 1908 (quote).
[754] “The Yellow Peril,” Industrial Worker, May 15, 1913.
[755] “Plot Alleged against Mikado,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 11, 1907; Ichioka, The Issei, 107–9.
[756] Notehelfer, Kōtoku Shūsui, chap. 7–8.
[757] “Japanese Going to Manchuria,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, July 27, 1907; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 8.
[758] “Local Advisory Board,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, May 4, 1907; William Allen, “It’s Not a Land of Promise,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, June 27, 1908; Joseph Murphy interview, in Bird, Georgakas, and Shaffer, Solidarity Forever, 51.
[759] Industrial Worker, April 8, 1909; “The Yellow Peril,” Industrial Worker, March 30, 1911. See also “Silly Race Prejudice,” Industrial Worker, April 22, 1909.
[760] Ichioka, The Issei, 110–13; Street, Beasts of the Field, 488–89.
[761] Hall, Harvest Wobblies, 58; Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 74–76, 82; Street, Beasts of the Field, chap. 17.
[762] T. Takahashi, “From a Japanese Fellow Worker,” The Industrial Union Bulletin, June 20, 1908; T. Takahashi, “An Appeal for Solidarity,” Industrial Worker, July 15, 1909; “International Notes,” Mother Earth, July 1910, 174 and April 1910, 64.
[763] Turner, Revolution in Baja California, 35.
[764] Hall, Harvest Wobblies, 159; Art Shields, On the Battle Lines, 1919–1939 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 9–10, 101.
[765] Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 44.
[766] H. Mark Lai, “A Historical Survey of the Chinese Left in America,” in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, 1976), 65; Horne, Black and Brown, 135.
[767] Gregor Benton, Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 13, 123 n. 68.
[768] Lai, “A Historical Survey,” 65; Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 191; Red Jones interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 409–410.
[769] See Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), chap. 2.
[770] Ibid., 40, 41, 45.
[771] Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), 112–14; Frost, The Mooney Case, 48.
[772] Maia Ramnath, “‘The Haj to Utopia’: Anti-Colonial Radicalism in the South Asian Diaspora, 1905–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2008), 110; Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal, 110–11, 132.
[773] Ramnath, “‘The Haj to Utopia’,” 112–13; Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal, 115–16.
[774] Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 268–69; Stephen Schwartz, From West to East, 169–70, 175.
[775] “Against Slavery We Fight,” Land and Liberty, May 1, 1914; “Spirit of the Press,” Land and Liberty, May 30, 1914.
[776] Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal, 138–40, 151; Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India, 183, 186 (quote).
[777] “Our Apologies,” Land and Liberty, October 1914.
[778] Murphy interview, in Bird, Georgakas, and Shaffer, Solidarity Forever, 51–52.
[779] “Are We Dreaming?” The Revolt, January 22, 1916.
[780] Notehelfer, Kōtoku Shūsui; Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 27, 119, passim.
[781] Harish K. Puri, “The Influence of Ghadar Movement on Bhagat Singh’s Thought and Action,” Pakistan Vision 9, no. 2 (December 2008): 70–84.
[782] Kazin, Barons of Labor, 20.
[783] See John Livingston, “Introduction,” in Jews of the American West, ed. Moses Rischin and John Livingston (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 21–22; Fred Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Rudolf Glanz, “Jews and Chinese in America,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 3 (July 1954): 219–34; Irena Narell, Our City: The Jews of San Francisco (San Diego: Howell-North, 1981), 379 (quote).
[784] See Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, chap. 7.
[785] “San Francisco Propaganda,” Land and Liberty, August 1914.
[786] Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 221–23; [Benjamin Tucker], “On Picket Duty,” Liberty, August 10, 1899; Blaine McKinley, “‘The Quagmires of Necessity’: American Anarchists and Dilemmas of Vocation,” American Quarterly 34, no. 5 (Winter 1982): 506.
[787] Ferrero interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 164; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 41.
[788] Charles Pierce LeWarne, Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885–1915 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 104–112; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 42; Frost, The Mooney Case, 113; Cassius V. Cook, “San Francisco Echoes,” Mother Earth, March 1909, 29 (quote); Hippolyte Havel, “The Coalition against the Anarchists,” Mother Earth, February 1909, 422; Emma Goldman, “On Trial,” Mother Earth, February 1909, 411–17.
[789] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 41–42.
[790] Falk, Pateman, and Moran, Emma Goldman, 2:197 n. 2; “Mother Earth Sustaining Fund,” Mother Earth, June 1907, 203, and July 1907, 234; “Amsterdam Conference Fund,” Mother Earth, August 1907, 259.
[791] A. S. Zaks, Di geshikhte fun Arbayter Ring, 1892–1925 (New York: Natsionale Ekzekutiv Komite fun Arbeyter Ring, 1925), 2:xxxiv.
[792] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 84.
[793] Frost, The Mooney Case, 39.
[794] Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of Labor, ed. James R. Barrett, new ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004); United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations, vol. 11 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916); Kazin, Barons of Labor, 73–74, 299, passim.
[795] Knight, Industrial Relations, 232; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 45.
[796] Weinberg, Forty Years, 66–69, 183 n. 127; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 89.
[797] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 45, 59; Kazin, Barons of Labor, 72–73, 301, passim.
[798] Knight, Industrial Relations, 226–33; Kazin, Barons of Labor, 204–8; “Johanson [sic] Turns on Sammy Gompers!” Industrial Worker, January 23, 1913.
[799] Emma Goldman, “Donald Vose: The Accursed,” Mother Earth, January 1916, 353–57; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 545–46, 550–51; LeWarne, Utopias on Puget Sound, 204–5.
[800] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 77–82.
[801] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 89; “The Great Adventure,” The Blast, June 1, 1917.
[802] “Anarchists Deny Responsibility for Dynamiting,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 25, 1916; Shaffer, “Radicalism in California,” 284.
[803] Alexander Berkman, “To Hell with the Government,” The Blast, May 1, 1916; “More Suppression,” The Blast, July 1, 1916.
[804] Marion Bell interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 30.
[805] Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1922) (1925; reprint, London: Pluto Press, 1989), 54; Harish K. Puri, Ghadar Movement: Ideology Organization and Strategy, 2nd ed. (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University, 1993), 83; Ramnath, “‘The Haj to Utopia’,” 215; Ram Chandra, “The Mighty Police Constable in India,” Mother Earth, July 1916, 558–60; Ram Chandra, “Press Censorship in India,” Mother Earth, May 1917, 89–92.
[806] E. P. Morse, “Weekly Intelligence Report: San Francisco District,” October 9, 1920, file 313343, OG, FBI; “In Re: Edward Gammons,” n.d. [1920], file 337716, OG, FBI. A copy of Invincible India is included in the latter file.
[807] The Blast, January 1, 1917; “San Francisco Progress,” Industrial Worker, May 30, 1912; Shaffer, “Radicalism in California, 324 n. 72; “Mailing List—‘Golos Truda’—Russian Nihilist Newspaper,” n.d., file 54235/36-C, INS. See also Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 298–99.
[808] “Robber, Barricaded, Fights Police, Kills Self,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 1915; “Brief History of Criminal Tragedy,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 13, 1915; “Third Bandit in Flight; Pal Dies by His Own Hand,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 13, 1915; Barry Pateman, “Anarchism in San Francisco,” talk delivered at the Alexander Berkman Social Club, San Francisco, June 28, 2008, [[http://www.gabcast.com/index.php?a=episodes&query=&b=play&id=21057&cast=83549&castPage][www.gabcast.com]].
[809] “Policeman’s Slayer Shot after Siege,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 1916; “Anarchist’s Sweetheart Defies Law,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 5, 1916; “To the People of San Francisco,” The Blast, June 1, 1916; Frost, The Mooney Case, 59. In March 1917, San Francisco police arrested Michele Centrone, Michele Bombino, and two other Italian anarchists on charges of passing counterfeit currency, possibly linking them to the Russians. Centrone was acquitted but the other three were each sentenced to a year in prison. [Raffaele Schiavina, Ugo Fedeli, and Gigi Damiani], Un trentennio di attività anarchica (1915–1945) (Cesena: L’Antistato, 1953), 134.
[810] “Notice,” The Blast, July 1, 1916; “Anarchists Deny Responsibility for Dynamiting,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 25, 1916; The Blast, January 29 and April 1, 1916; “The Call of the Blast,” The Blast, July 15, 1916.
[811] Luigi Parenti file, busta 3732, CPC; Luigi Parenti file, file 8000–2050, OG, FBI; The United States of America vs. William D. Haywood, et al., no. 6125, 157, folder 2, box 103, IWW Collection.
[812] Ettore Gambertoglio, “La patria,” Il Lavoratore Industriale/Le Travailleur Industriel, May 1, 1912. Emphasis in original.
[813] L’Effort, December 1904; Jack Whyte, “Ignorance in Fresno,” Industrial Worker, May 18, 1911; Albert Elysée, “Blanches et jaunes,” Cogito, Ergo Sum, October 15, 1908.
[814] Alexander Berkman, “War Dictionary,” The Blast, June 1, 1917.
[815] “L’attentato di Sarajevo,” L’Era Nuova, July 4, 1914.
[816] See Goerges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); David Kirby, War, Peace and Revolution: International Socialism at the Crossroads, 1914–1918 (Aldershot: Gower, 1986); Wayne Thorpe, “The European Syndicalists and War, 1914–1918,” Contemporary European History 10, no. 1 (2001): 1–24; Ralph Darlington, “Revolutionary Syndicalist Opposition to the First World War: A Comparative Reassessment,” Revue Belge e Philologie et d’Histoire/Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis 84, no. 4 (2006): 983–1003. An overview of anarchist opposition to the war remains to be written.
[817] “Observations and Comments,” Mother Earth, December 1914, 307.
[818] Peter A. Kropotkin, “What the Attitude of a Radical Should Be Toward the War,” Current History, October 1916-March 1917, 109.
[819] Peter Kropotkin, “A Letter to Steffen,” Freedom, October 1914, reprinted as “Gen. Kropotkin’s klohrer shtandpunkt vegen der milkhome,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, October 24, 1914; and quoted in “Kropotkin on the Present War,” Mother Earth, November 1914, 273–80; and Alexander Berkman, “Pietro Kropotkin e la Guerra,” L’Era Nuova, November 1, 1914.
[820] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 564.
[821] Libero Tancredi [Massimo Rocca], “Latinita’ e Rivoluzione,” Novatore, November 1910; Stephen B. Whitaker, The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 39–49 (quote on 43); Ugo Fedeli, “Gli anarchici e la guerra: 2,” Volontà 4, no. 11 (May 15, 1950): 685–86.
[822] Ugo Fedeli, “Gli anarchici e la guerra: 1,” Volontà 4, no. 10 (April 15, 1950): 624, 627; Alessandro Luparini, Anarchici di Mussolini: dalla sinistra al fascismo, tra rivoluzione e revisionismo (Montespertoli: M. I. R. Edizioni, 2001), chap. 1; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Agresti, Antonio”.
[823] Whitaker, Anarchist-Individualist Origins, 71–80 (quote on 71); Pier Carlo Masini, “Gli anarchici italiani tra ‘interventismo’ e ‘disfattismo rivoluzionario’,” Rivista Storica del Socialismo, no. 5 (1959): 208–211.
[824] Charles L. Bertrand, “Italian Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Crisis of Intervention: August-December, 1914,” Canadian Journal of History 10, no. 3 (December 1975): 349–67.
[825] “Amicus Plato,” Revolt, January 29, 1916.
[826] “Observations and Comments,” Mother Earth, October 1914, 246; “Amicus Plato,” Revolt, January 29, 1916; “International Anarchist Manifesto on the War,” Mother Earth, May 1915, 119–22; Harry [Kelly] to John [Beffel], October 27, 1947, folder 3, box 6, John Nicholas Beffel Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.
[827] “War and Sinews of War,” Land and Liberty, November 1914; “Up, Guards, and At Them!” Land and Liberty, December 1914; “Can We Stand Neutral,” Land and Liberty, November 1914.
[828] “Firing on Fort Sumter,” Land and Liberty, June 1915; “Another Bomb Fiasco,” Land and Liberty, February 1915.
[829] Raat, Revoltosos, 266; Stephen Schwartz, From West to East, 181–83.
[830] See Stefano Luconi, “From Left to Right: The Not So Strange Career of Filippo Bocchini and Other Italian American Radicals,” Italian American Review 6 (Autumn /Winter 1998 1997): 65–67.
[831] John J. Tinchino, Edmondo Rossoni: From Revolutionary Syndicalism to Fascism (New York: Peter Lang, 1991); Topp, Those without a Country, 128–30, 135, 149–50, 153, 167.
[832] Christopher M. Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 60–67.
[833] Michael Cohn, “In a oykhuh mit Peter Kropotkin,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, October 31, 1914; Michael Cohn, “Vos iz tsu thon,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, December 12, 1914; “Observations and Comments,” Mother Earth, December 1914, 306; A. Veslof in Fraye Arbayter Shtime, November 21, 1914.
[834] Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India, chap. 9; Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal, 179–82; Puri, Ghadar Movement, 102–113.
[835] Har Dayal to Dear Comrade [Alexander Berkman], October 20 and October 25, 1915, quoted in Thomas J. Tunney, Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters (New York: Small, Maynard & Company, 1919), 247–50; Ramnath, “‘The Haj to Utopia’,” 208–9, 215.
[836] Tunney, Throttled, 250.
[837] Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India, 190–93; Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal, 194–206; Puri, Ghadar Movement, 230–42.
[838] “Manifesto Anarchico Internazionale,” L’Era Nuova, April 3, 1915; “International Anarchist Manifesto on the War,” Mother Earth, May 1915, 119–22.
[839] See, for instance, [Saul Yanovsky], “Oyf der vakh,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, October 24, 1914; “Rusisher despotism bayt zikh nit azoy gikh,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, November 28, 1914; Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 322–28.
[840] E. A., “La nostra attitudine davanti alla guerra,” L’Era Nuova, August 15, 1914.
[841] “Una Lettera di P. Kropotkin,” L’Era Nuova, December 12, 1914; “Lettera di Pietro Kropotkin,” L’Era Nuova, January 3, 1915; P. Esteve, “Discutendo: A Pietro Kropotkin,” L’Era Nuova, January 9 and January 16, 1915.
[842] “Non partite!” L’Era Nuova, June 26, 1915; Gli Anarchici del Gruppo “La Rivolta,” “La guerra e gl’Italiani,” L’Era Nuova, July 31, 1915. See also Elpedio Parenti, “Io no!” L’Era Nuova, August 7, 1915.
[843] “Diologo con un Soldato,” L’Era Nuova, February 12, 1916 (quote). See also A. Fernando Herold, “Alcune note sulla Patria ed il Patriottismo,” L’Era Nuova, August 15, 1914; Euclide, “Il loro patriottismo!” L’Era Nuova, January 22, 1915; Tomaso Concordia, “Abasso la Patria!” L’Era Nuova, June 26, 1915; R. Rosa, “La Patria,” L’Era Nuova, October 2, 1915; Fanny Dal Ry, “Patria e umanita’,” L’Era Nuova, January 22, 1916; Il Bandito di N. Y., “Delinquenza patriottarda,” L’Era Nuova, June 24, 1916; “La patria,” L’Era Nuova, September 9, 1916; Romolo Remo, “La patria dei poveri,” L’Era Nuova, January 27, 1917; Eliseo Reclus, “Del principio di nazionalita’,” L’Era Nuova, June 26, 1915 and May 6, 1916.
[844] Club Avanti, “Contro la guerra,” L’Era Nuova, June 26, 1915. On Club Avanti see Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants, 139–41.
[845] Somebody, “Un documento….. umano,” L’Era Nuova, September 30, 1916; “Il suicide di L. Tancredi e M. Rigier,” L’Era Nuova, May 8, 1915; Nat., “Sferzate,” L’Era Nuova, July 31, 1915.
[846] “Questione di razze?” L’Era Nuova, January 30, 1915.
[847] “Razze superiori, imparate!” L’Era Nuova, February 27, 1915.
[848] Fanny Dal Ry, “Guerra di razze,” L’Era Nuova, February 6, 1915.
[849] “Our Letter Box,” Land and Liberty, April 1915.
[850] “The Social Revolution,” Land and Liberty, October 1914. No copies of The Social Revolution have survived; however, material from it is reprinted in the above article, as well as in “If We Must Fight, Let It Be for the Social Revolution,” Mother Earth, October 1914, 255–60.
[851] Un trentennio, 126.
[852] “Nostre corrispondenza,” L’Era Nuova, January 16, 1915.
[853] “Amicus Plato,” Revolt, January 29, 1916; Ingargiola, “Ruffiani e Vigliacchi!” L’Era Nuova, November 7, 1914.
[854] “Seven Bomb Suspects in Jail,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1916; Frost, The Mooney Case, 45, 113, 268; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 88. Frost incorrectly claims that Weinberg “had never been a radical” (75).
[855] “A Raid and a Visit,” “Down with the Anarchists!” and “On the Firing Line,” The Blast, August 15, 1916; “Venders of ‘Red’ Bills to Receive Sentences,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 5, 1916; Un trentennio, 131.
[856] “Nostre corrispondenze,” L’Era Nuova, October 21, 1916; “The Truth Forbidden,” The Blast, October 15, 1916.
[857] Frost, The Mooney Case, 252–53.
[858] “San Leandro’s ‘Dark Man’ is Yet at Large,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1916; Frost, The Mooney Case, 114, 136; Pauline H. Turkel interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 59. Cf. Grace Umrath interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 26. Umrath, the granddaughter of anarchists Abe and Mary Isaak, claims that some anarchists and members of the Moony-Billings defense committee believed the two men to be guilty.
[859] Raat, Revoltosos, 266.
[860] Charles H. McCormick, Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 25. See also Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 138.
[861] “Memorandum for the Secretary,” n.d. [May 1920], file 20713, OG, FBI.
[862] “Can We Stomach Conscription?” Land and Liberty, February 1915; Giuseppe Sergi, “La moderna schiavitu’,” L’Era Nuova, June 17, 1916.
[863] Don S. Rathbun, “In Re: LUIGI PARENTI et al—I. W. W. Activities,” September 18, 1917, file 8000–2050, OG, FBI.
[864] Shaffer, “Radicalism in California,” 276–77.
[865] “Matricolati!...,” Cronaca Sovversiva, May 26, 1917.
[866] “Anarchists Demand Strike to End War,” New York Times, May 19, 1917; Emma Goldman, “The No Conscription League,” Mother Earth, June 1917, 112–14; “Anarchists Awed by Police Clubs,” New York Times, June 5, 1917.
[867] “The Trial and Conviction of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman,” Mother Earth, July 1917, 129–63; L. D. A., “Observations and Comments,” Mother Earth, July 1917, 166.
[868] Zosa Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1972), 1:211, 358.
[869] “Two Arrests in Paterson,” New York Times, April 8, 1917; “Al nostro posto, come prima!” L’Era Nuova, May 19, 1917.
[870] US Congress, “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 34, 40; Report of J. B. Wolverton, September 15, 1917, file 61–4625, OG, FBI; “I nostri arrestati,” L’Era Nuova, July 6, 1917.
[871] Report of E. T. Drew, September 20, 1918 and November 26, 1918, file 289493, OG, FBI.
[872] “Five Anarchists Sought by Flynn,” New York Times, September 9, 1920; Un trentennio, 142.
[873] “Wilson, der klohrster un fartshritlikhster,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, January 12, 1918; Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 329–32.
[874] C. A. Young, “In re: Yanofsky — Anarchist,” April 9, 1918, file 170108, OG, FBI.
[875] See letters from W. H. Lamar to Postmaster, file 250619, OG, FBI.
[876] Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism; Sterba, Good Americans, 132, 163–72.
[877] Ganz, Rebels, 268–69.
[878] Richard Polenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (New York: Penguin, 1987), 22–23; R. W. Finch, “In Re: ‘Der Sturm’,” July 11, 1918, file 8000–252583, OG, FBI.
[879] Polenberg, Fighting Faiths, 48, 63.
[880] See Dan La Botz, “American ‘Slackers’ in the Mexican Revolution: International Proletarian Politics in the Midst of a National Revolution,” The Americas 62, no. 4 (April 2006): 563–90.
[881] Rina Garst interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 254; Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 71.
[882] Un trentennio, 135–36; Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 60–65.
[883] US Congress, “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 40; “Special Report: in re Radical Propaganda at Paterson N.J. and Vicinity,” n.d. [1919], 5, file 8000–385063, OG, FBI; “Gallo-Guabello,” Il Bollettino de L’Era Nuova, March 29, 1919; William Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 156.
[884] Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 1:355.
[885] E. P. Morse, “In Re: Louis Tori (Alias Jacob Tori); I.W.W. Matters,” December 31, 1917, file 110181, OG, FBI.
[886] Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 102–3.
[887] Philip Grosser, Alcatraz, Uncle Sam’s Devil’s Island: Experiences of a Conscientious Objector in America during the First World War (1933; reprint, London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2007); Stephen M. Kohn, American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition Acts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), chap. 8.
[888] “Anarchists Demand Strike to End War,” New York Times, May 19, 1917.
[889] Alberico Pirani interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 143; Israel Shenker, “Anarchy’s the Rule as Anarchists Gather for a Banquet in New York,” New York Times, June 5, 1977.
[890] See Madeline J. Goodman, “The Evolution of Ethnicity: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in the Italian-American Community, 1914–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1993), chap. 1; Sterba, Good Americans.
[891] “Two Arrests in Paterson,” New York Times, April 8, 1917.
[892] Alexander Berkman, “America and the Russian Revolution,” Mother Earth, May 1917, 76; N. Cuneo, “La Rivoluzione in Russia,” L’Era Nuova, March 24, 1917.
[893] New York State Senate, Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb It, 4 vols. (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1920), 1:628–29; Report of John R. Dillon, May 25, 1917, file 10110–38, Military Intelligence Division, U.S. Army, Record Group 165, NARA, in Randolph Boehm, U.S. Military Intelligence Reports: Surveillance of Radicals in the United States, 1917–1941 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), microform reel 1:190–206.
[894] Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 1:292; Tunney, Throttled, 269; Melech Epstein, The Jew and Communism: The Story of Early Communist Victories and Ultimate Defeats in the Jewish Community, U.S.A., 19191941 (New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1959), 24.
[895] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 336.
[896] “Declaration of the Petrograd Union of Anarcho-syndicalist Propaganda,” Golos Truda, August 11, 1917, in Paul Avrich, ed., The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 71; Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, trans. Peter Sedgwick (1963; reprint, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 213.
[897] Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 125, 146–47, 167 n. 60; Copp, “Role of the Anarchists,” 64–65, 70–76; Carmen Sirianni, Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience (London: Verso, 1982), 50–52; Boris Yelensky, In sotsialn shturem: zikhroynes fun der rusisher revolutsie (Buenos Aires: Yidisher Ratsionalistisher Gezelshaft, 1967), 14–54; “Synopsis of Minutes of Meeting of General Executive Board, Held June 29th-July 6th, 1917,” folder 3, box 7, IWW Collection.
[898] Rex A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 113–14, 121, 182–83, 286; Michael M. Boll, The Petrograd Armed Workers Movement in the February Revolution (February-July, 1917): A Study in the Radicalization of the Petrograd Proletariat (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979), 147–51; Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 42 n. 61, 89.
[899] On Cherniak see Yelensky, In sotsialn shturem, 85. On other anarchist partisan leaders see Oliver H. Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia: A Study of the Green Movement in the Tambov Region 1920–1921 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1976), 64, 111, 130; Ossip Tsebry, Memories of a Makhnovist Partisan (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 1993).
[900] Copp, “Role of the Anarchists,” 54–56.
[901] Morris Nadelman (“Morris N.”) quoted in Shuldiner, Of Moses and Marx, 64.
[902] Robert Minor, “Russia—The World’s Greatest Labor Case: A Speech in San Francisco,” New York Call, September 14, 1919.
[903] S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 143; Copp, “Role of the Anarchists,” 110–11, 172; Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 173–74 n. 7.
[904] See Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 219–20; V. I. Lenin, “Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution,” in Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin, Anarchism and Anarchosyndicalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 266–67; V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1919; reprint, Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 64.
[905] Dora Keyser interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 311; Avrich, The Modern School Movement, 150; Emma Goldman, “An Unpublished Letter,” Freedom, October-November 1919.
[906] Wade, Red Guards, 182; Nick Heath, “Bleikhman, Iosif, 1868–1921,” libcom.org, 2004, [[http://libcom.org/history/bleikhman-iosif-1868-1921][libcom.org]]; Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman, vol. 2 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), 14.
[907] V. I. Lenin, “Letter to Sylvia Pankhurst,” in Engels, Marx, and Vladimir Lenin, Anarchism and Anarchosyndicalism, 295; Martin A. Miller, “Anarchism vs. Marxism in the Russian Revolution: A Review of Recent Literature,” International Labor and Working Class History, no. 9 (May 1976): 36.
[908] Anthony D’Agostino, Marxism and the Russian Anarchists (San Francisco: Germinal Press, 1977), 163–65.
[909] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 729–31; Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1922), 35–36.
[910] On Perkus see Paul Rose interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 338.
[911] Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 120, 155; Todorov Kosta, Balkan Firebrand: The Autobiography of a Rebel Soldier and Statesman (Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1943), 206.
[912] Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, passim; Anna Louise Strong, “The Anarchist Who Builds an Empire,” New York Times, March 9, 1930; Nellie Dick interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 290; Matthew J. Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).
[913] Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters and Demagogues, 163–65; Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 223.
[914] Copp, “Role of the Anarchists,” 59; Solomon M. Schwartz, The Jews in the Soviet Union (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1951), 261.
[915] Solomon M. Schwartz, Jews in the Soviet Union, 92–95; Guido G. Goldman, Zionism under Soviet Rule (19171928) (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), 23–24.
[916] “Recent Impressions of Russia: Verbatim Report of a Conversation with Albert Rhys Williams,” The Liberator, December 1918, 29–30; Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 103.
[917] Guido G. Goldman, Zionism under Soviet Rule, 32, 56 (quote), 65.
[918] A. Kantor, “Idisher ‘patriotizm’,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, October 10 and October 17, 1914.
[919] Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 119; Guido G. Goldman, Zionism under Soviet Rule, 26.
[920] See Jay B. Sorenson, The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism, 1917–1928 (New York: Atherton Press, 1969); Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1917–1921: The State and Counterrevolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975); Gennady Shkliarevsky, Labor in the Russian Revolution: Factory Committees and Trade Unions, 1917–1918 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 169–77; Sirianni, Workers Control.
[921] Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 184–85, 205–6, 215; Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 19201922) (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1925), chap. 24; Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (London: C. W. Daniel, 1925), 109–110; Michael Palij, The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1918–1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 260; Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918–1921), trans. Lorraine Perlman and Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Red & Black, 1974), 212, 231.
[922] Paul Avrich, “Nestor Makhno: The Man and the Myth,” in Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 122–23; Elias Tcherikower, Di ukrainer pogromen in yor 1919 (New York: YIVO, 1965), 300–2, 34748 (quote). See also Voline [V. M. Eikhenbaum], The Unknown Revolution, 1917–1921, ed. Holley Cantine and Fredy Perlman (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 699.
[923] Mark Mratchny interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 383.
[924] Sh. Yanovsky, “The Ever-Recurring Lie,” Freedom, November 1934, reprinted in Nestor Makhno, My Visit to the Kremlin (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 1993).
[925] See Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement; Palij, The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno; Alexandre Skirda, Nestor Makhno, Anarchy’s Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 1917–1921, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland: AK Press, 2004).
[926] See Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
[927] Richard Bach Jensen, “The Evolution of Anarchist Terrorism,” 156–57. See also Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti.
[928] Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955).
[929] Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 108; “Libelous to Call a Man an ‘Anarchist’,” Harvard Law Review 5, no. 6 (January 15, 1892): 288; “President Roosevelt’s First Message,” The New York Times, December 4, 1901.
[930] “Observations and Comments,” Mother Earth, July 1906, 2.
[931] William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 33.
[932] On the evolution of these laws see Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 215–31.
[933] Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4. Emphasis in original.
[934] For these examples see Il residente illegalmente, “Ribattendo il chiodo,” L’Adunate dei Refrattari, April 24, 1926; Undesirable, “La Tragedia di una Bella Gloria,” L’Emancipazione, July 1928 [cover misdated June 1928]; Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control, 245.
[935] Robert K. Murray, Red Scare, 14.
[936] Kohn, American Political Prisoners, 90, 122.
[937] Translation of Luigi Parenti to [Aldino] Felicani, March 29, 1921, file 202600–143, BS, FBI.
[938] Kohn, American Political Prisoners, 122; Ellen Doree Rosen, A Wobbly Life: IWW Organizer E. F. Doree (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 134.
[939] Stephen Schwartz, From West to East, 189.
[940] Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 138, 142.
[941] Duff, Silent Defenders, 24.
[942] “Quartet Held as Suspects in Dynamite Plot,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 10, 1918; “Cronache del Sant’Uffizio,” Cronaca Sovversiva, February 2, 1918.
[943] C. E. Argabright, “In re: Jacob Tori,” August 5, 1919, OG file 110181; Duff, Silent Defenders.
[944] Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 153; “39 I.W.W. in Legal Action,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 17, 1919; F. W. Kelly, “In Re: BASILE [sic] SAFFORES – Convicted I. W. W.,” June 16, 1919, file 216806, OG, FBI.
[945] Michele Centrone to Mr. Wm. B. Wilson, April 29, 1919, and J. G. Lawlor to Honorable Edward White, July 14, 1919, file 321621, OG, FBI; Maria Sakovich, “When the ‘Enemy’ Landed at Angel Island,” Prologue, Summer 2009, [[http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2009/summer/angel.html][www.archives.gov]].
[946] Michele Centrone file, busta 1243, CPC.
[947] “California Makes Desperate Attempt to Crush Unionism,” The Rebel Worker, July 1, 1919; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 165–66; Kohn, American Political Prisoners, 164.
[948] Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 183; Stephen Schwartz, From West to East, 190.
[949] Un trentennio, 143; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 299.
[950] Joan M. Jensen, “The ‘Hindu Conspiracy’: A Reassessment,” The Pacific Historical Review 48, no. 1 (February 1979): 65–83; Karl Hoover, “The Hindu Conspiracy in California, 1913–1918,” German Studies Review 8, no. 2 (May 1985): 245–61.
[951] Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal, 218–19; Puri, Ghadar Movement, 114–15.
[952] E. P. Morse, “Weekly Intelligence Report: San Francisco District,” October 9, 1920, file 313343, and H. B. Peirce to Lewis J. Bailey, November 1, 1920, file 337716, OG, FBI.
[953] Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, 2:207–9; Fedeli, Luigi Galleani, 102–4.
[954] Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 103–6.
[955] “Sequestrati!” L’Era Nuova, July 6, 1917.
[956] US Congress, “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 14.
[957] Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 337. On the Forverts see Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 1:181–82.
[958] Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 2:19; Polenberg, Fighting Faiths.
[959] Un trentennio, 145–46; Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, chap. 9–10 (quote on 81).
[960] Robert D’Attilio, “La Salute è in Voi: The Anarchist Dimension,” in Sacco-Vanzetti: Developments and Reconsiderations—1979 (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1982), 75–89; Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti; McCormick, Hopeless Cases.
[961] Quoted in Revolutionary Radicalism, 2:853.
[962] Robert K. Murray, Red Scare, 196–97; Julian F. Jaffe, Crusade against Radicalism: New York During the Red Scare, 1914–1924 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972), 85, 179.
[963] David Babich interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 364–65; Robert K. Murray, Red Scare, 197; Jaffe, Crusade against Radicalism, 85, 179.
[964] Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens, 215–31.
[965] On Hoover’s role see Kenneth D. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007), chap. 12.
[966] “Cronaca di Paterson,” Nuovi Tempi, March 1918; David J. Goldberg, Tale of Three Cities, chap. 2.
[967] “Si comincia bene!” L’Era Nuova, September 11, 1915; Goldberg, Tale of Three Cities, 36–37; testimony of Charles Krattinger, in “United States vs. Haywood, et al., 14 August 1918,” 11757, folder 6, box 117, IWW Collection; E. T. Drew, “Adolph Lessig [sic], Paterson N.J.,” May 5, 1918, file 200813, OG, FBI.
[968] “Cronaca di Paterson,” Il Bollettino de L’Era Nuova, March 1, 1919; David J. Goldberg, Tale of Three Cities, chap. 9.
[969] E. G., “Our Agitation in and About New York,” Mother Earth, May 1915, 124.
[970] Emmett T. Drew, “Memorandum In re: Explosion of bomb at Paterson, N. J,” 1–2, May 14, 1920, file 2117930, BS, FBI; Testimony of Serafino Grande [sic], February 14, 1920, file 381751, OG, FBI.
[971] Frank R. Stone to Mr. Hoover, 6 August 1919, and Report of Joseph Define, 27 July, 1919, file 289493, OG, FBI. William Young and David E. Kaiser incorrectly surmised that the Bureau’s undercover agent within the L’Era Nuova Group was Eugenio Ravarini, an informant hired by a New York attorney to investigate the June bombings and later employed by the Bureau of Investigation under the codename D-5. Paul Avrich and other historians have repeated this error. See William Young and David E. Kaiser, Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 20; Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 179; McCormick, Hopeless Cases, 54. Avrich, Young and Kaiser appear to have based their inferences on the fact that at the time of the Paterson arrests Ravarini’s family lived in the same house as Firmino Gallo; however, reports filed by Ravarini clearly show that he spent very little time in Paterson. See [Eugenio Ravarini], unsigned report, February 17, 1920, and similar reports, in file 360086, BS, FBI. My thanks to Salvatore Salerno for information on Joseph Define.
[972] “Terrorists Caught in Paterson Raids,” New York Times, February 16, 1920; Ackerman, Young J. Edgar, chap. 30. Ackerman’s account suffers from many inaccuracies, including repeated misspellings of Luigi Galleani’s name.
[973] Caminita, “Island of Tears,” 126; “Master List, L’Era Nuova Group, Paterson N.J.,” n.d., file 61–4625, OG, FBI.
[974] “Hold 10 as Paterson Reds,” New York Times, March 4, 1920.
[975] Caminita, “Island of Tears,” 128.
[976] Translation of Editorial Group of the Era Nuova to Dear Companion, June 1919, file 61–4185, OG, FBI; British Assistant Provost Marshal to Capt. Frank Burke, September 9, 1919, file 61–4625, OG, FBI.
[977] Testimony of Ludovico Caminita, February 14, 1920, file 61–115, OG, FBI.
[978] “Hearing in the Case of Ludovico Caminetta [sic],” March 3–5, 1920, file 54861/181, INS.
[979] “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 37.
[980] [J. Edgar Hoover], “MEMO. to Chief Flynn,” March 8, 1920, and [J. Edgar Hoover], “MEMO. to Chief Flynn,” March 8, 1920 (both documents have identical titles and dates), file 360086, BS, FBI.
[981] Caminita, “Twenty Years of Experience,” 56–57; file 61–115, OG, FBI.
[982] “Terrorists Caught in Paterson Raids,” New York Times, February 16, 1920; David J. Goldberg, Tale of Three Cities, 197.
[983] [J. Edgar Hoover], “MEMO. to Chief Flynn,” file 360086, BS, FBI.
[984] Emmett T. Drew to J. E. Hoover, April 22, 1920, file 61–115, OG, FBI.
[985] “Memorandum in re: Ludovico Caminita,” November 15, 1923, and Edward J. Brennan to William J. Burns, September 14, 1922, file 61–115, OG, FBI; Caminita, “Twenty Years of Experience,” 46–56. I have been unable to confirm that this document was actually published.
[986] Frank R. Stone to J. E. Hoover, June 15, 1920, file 61–115, OG, FBI; Report of William J. West, January 12, 1921, file 202600–143, OG, FBI; “Memorandum in re: Ludovico Caminita,” November 15, 1923, file 61–115, OG, FBI.
[987] Il Martello, February 11, 1922; Remo il contadino, “Il Garbuglio Caminita,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, June 30, 1922; C. Zonchello, “Per intenderce e farla finite!” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, July 30, 1922; Report of D. Di Lillo, February 21, 1922, file 61–115, OG, FBI; Il Martello, July 1, 1922. Translations of some of these articles can be found in file 61–115, OG, FBI.
[988] “Memorandum in re: Ludovico Caminita,” November 15, 1923, file 61–115, OG, FBI.
[989] Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, chap. 13–14; McCormick, Hopeless Cases, 55–60.
[990] Antonini quoted in Zappia, “Unionism and the Italian American Worker,” 293.
[991] Young and Kaiser, Postmortem, 20–21; Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 181; McCormick, Hopeless Cases, 55; Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 213; Ackerman, Young J. Edgar, 233.
[992] The above cited historians all rely on a memo written by Hoover to William J. Flynn dated March 8, 1920, which states, “It was through Caminetta [sic] that we obtained the lead upon Elia.” But another memo from Hoover to Flynn written on the same day notes, “I did not inform him [Caminita] that we had [already] learned [of] the print shop where the circular was put up,” and, “It was Mazzotta who first stated that if anyone printed ‘Plain Words’ in New York is was Roberta Elia.” Multiple copies of both memos can be found in file 360086, BS, FBI. Paul Avrich quotes from both documents, but fails to recognize that Elia’s arrest preceded Hoover’s interview of Caminita.
[993] Highman, Strangers in the Land, 220.
[994] For a detailed description see Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens, chap. 8–12.
[995] See Louis F. Post, The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty: A Personal Narrative of an Historic Official Experience (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1923); Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters; Ackerman, Young J. Edgar.
[996] Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens, 220–21; Kate Holladay Claghorn, The Immigrant’s Day in Court (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923), 453–60.
[997] Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens, 225 n. 1.
[998] Ibid., 227–28.
[999] Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 100–1.
[1000] Vincenzo Ferrero interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 165; Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 204–6, 217–22.
[1001] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 214; Pirani interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 143.
[1002] See John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ngai, Impossible Subjects.
[1003] Maurice Hollod interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 208; Avrich, The Modern School Movement, 337–38.
[1004] Filippo Perrone file, busta 3875, CPC; Un trentennio, 150; Hugo Rolland [Erasmo Abate] interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 159.
[1005] Louis G. Raymond interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 394–95.
[1006] Marcus Graham, “Autobiographical Note,” in MAN!: An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries, ed. Marcus Graham (London: Cienfuegos Press, 1974), vii-xii; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidishanarkhistishe bavegung, 393.
[1007] Marcus Graham, “Autobiographical Note,” vii-xii. See also M. D. Davis, “In Re: Robert Parsons,” July 15, 1919, file 359916, OG, FBI.
[1008] Polenberg, Fighting Faiths, 178–81; G. J. Crystal, “Robert Parsons; 1614 Cadieux Street, Montreal, Canada,” April 19, 1919, file 359916, OG, FBI; “To the Workers, Farmers, Soldiers and Sailors!” and “Anarchist Soviets Formed,” The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin, April 1919.
[1009] G. J. Crystal, “Robert Parsons,” April 19 and April 21, 1919, file 359916, OG, FBI; “Refuse Hearing to Howe,” New York Times, November 29, 1919; Polenberg, Fighting Faiths, 184–85.
[1010] G. J. Crystal, “American Anarchist Federated Commune Soviets,” August 10, 1919, and Frank R. Stone, “American Anarchist Federated Commune Soviets Circular,” August 12, 1919, file 359916, OG, FBI.
[1011] M. D. Davis, “In Re: Robert Parsons,” July 15, 1919, file 359916, OG, FBI; V. J. Valjavec, “In Re: Robert Parsons – Anarchist Activities,” March 10, 1921, file 203991, OG, FBI.
[1012] Marcus Graham, “A Man Died,” The Rising Youth, December 1929; Graham, “Autobiographical Note,” xii-xv; “A Call to Action!” The Awakener, May 1920.
[1013] Graham, “Autobiographical Note,” xiv; “Charges Police Beat Him,” New York Times, February 27, 1921; Marcus Graham, “Third Degree,” in Marcus Graham, ed., An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry (New York: The Active Press, 1929), 197.
[1014] V. J. Valjavec, “In Re: Robert Parsons – Anarchist Activities,” March 10, 1921, file 203991, OG, FBI; Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens, 224–25, 407–8; Marcus Graham, “Autobiographical Note,” xiii. The actual timeline of events is garbled in Graham’s own recollections, in which his two arrests and detentions are conflated into one.
[1015] Jane Perry Clark, Deportation of Aliens, 400.
[1016] Kohn, American Political Prisoners, 120. See also “An Open Letter to the Russian Premier Lenin,” Free Society, December 1921.
[1017] See Ngai, Impossible Subjects.
[1018] Emmett T. Drew, “Memorandum In re: Explosion of bomb at Paterson, N. J,” May 14, 1920, file 211793–0, BS, FBI; Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 157, 197; United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Rules, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on Charges Made Against Department of Justice by Luis F. Post and Others, 66th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 36.
[1019] Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 205–7. See also McCormick, Hopeless Cases, chap. 5; Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded.
[1020] Murray, Red Scare, 257; Jaffe, Crusade against Radicalism, 225–27; Jos. J. Cohen to Dear Comrade [Max Nettlau], December 12, 1921, folder 303, Nettlau Papers, IISH.
[1021] Emma Goldman, “The Great Hope,” Mother Earth Bulletin, January 1918; A. B., “Russia and Elsewhere,” Mother Earth, October 1917; Alexander Berkman, “The Surgeon’s Duty,” Mother Earth Bulletin, January 1918.
[1022] Shaffer, “Radicalism in California,” 306.
[1023] N. Tobias, “Unzer Trotsky,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, January 19, 1918; Grosser, Alcatraz, 8, 15.
[1024] Revolutionary Radicalism, 1:846–47; “Salviamo la rivoluzione russa!”; Avrich, The Modern School Movement, 251; Weintraub, “The I.W.W. in California,” 298; Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 108–9.
[1025] “Salviamo la rivoluzione russa!,” Nuovi Tempi, March 1918 (quote); Cizeta, “Realta’ e Speranze: A proposito della rivoluzione russa,” Cronaca Sovversiva, May 20, 1918; “Il manifesto dei comunisti,” Il Martello, May 20, 1919; “Fine e principio,” Il Martello, February 1, 1919.
[1026] Testimony of Serafino Grande [sic], February 14, 1920, file 381751, OG, FBI; “Special Report: in re Radical Propaganda at Paterson N.J. and Vicinity,” n.d. [1919], file 8000–385063, OG, FBI; “List of Evidence found in Home of Ferino [sic] Gallo,” n.d., file 289493, OG, FBI.
[1027] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 240; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 112.
[1028] Fraye Arbayter Shtime, June 26, 1918, quoted in Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 352.
[1029] Revolutionary Radicalism, 2:2004; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 340–42.
[1030] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 343–47; Herman Frank, “Anarchism and the Jews,” 282. On the Communist Moyshe Kats see P. Novik, ed., Moysheh Kats bukh: zamlung fun oytobiyografishe skitsn, derinerungen, eseyen vegn literatur, geshikhte, portretn un polemik (New York: Moysheh Kats Bukh-Komitet, 1963). He should not be confused with the anarchist, Moyshe Katts.
[1031] Kelly, “Roll Back the Years,” XXVII:2, Tamiment Library.
[1032] Report of Roy C. McHenry, November 13, 1918, file 325661, OG, FBI.
[1033] “Our Comrades on Trial,” Freedom, January 15, 1919; “Il Bolscevichismo,” Il Bollettino de l’Era Nuova, March 1, 1919; “Noi e i Bolscevichi,” Il Bollettino de l’Era Nuova, April 1, 1919.
[1034] J. Abrams, “The Second Russian Convention,” Freedom, February 15, 1919; Revolutionary Radicalism, 1:65253.
[1035] See Robert Minor, “Una lettera dalla Russia,” Il Bollettino de L’Era Nuova, May 10, 1919; Fred Graham [Marcus Graham], Anarchism and the World Revolution: An Answer to Robert Minor, 2nd ed. (n.p.: n.p., 1921); Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 201–4. Minor’s articles were originally published in the New York Evening World and Butte Daily Bulletin.
[1036] “The Answer — Is Guilty!” The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin, April 1919; “Anarchism and Bolshevism,” The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin, August 1919. Emphasis in original.
[1037] Quoted in US Congress, “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 35.
[1038] “Memorandum in re: Ludovico Caminita,” November 15, 1923, file 61–115, OG, FBI; Il Tamburino, “In defesa del governo bolshevico,” Il Martello, supplement, February 16, 1919.
[1039] R. Rocker, “Raten-sistem oder diktatur?,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, May 15 through May 29, 1920; Luigi Galleani, “Lenin,” Cronaca Sovversiva, June 12 through July 10, 1920, cited in Fedeli, Luigi Galleani, 166. On A Stormo! see Ibid., 106.
[1040] “Kropotkin’s S.O.S. for Russia,” Freedom, October-November 1919; “Peter Kropotkin’s Last Message,” Free Society, March 1921.
[1041] “An Explanation,” Free Society, January 1921.
[1042] Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 230–32; Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 20–21; “Transfer of All Politicals to Solovietski,” and “The Latest News from Russia,” Behind the Bars, January 1924; Voline, “Le vittime del potere comunista,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, July 21, 1923 through October 13, 1923; George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 310–11; Yelensky, Struggle for Equality, 36.
[1043] Alexander Berkman, “Cronstadt: La Comune di Parigi della Russia,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, April 30, 1922; Alexander Berkman, The Russian Tragedy (a Review and an Outlook) (Berlin: Sindikalist, 1922), Alexander Berkman, The Kronstadt Rebellion (Berlin: Sindikalist, 1922), and [Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Schapiro], The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party (Berlin: Sindikalist, 1922), all reprinted in Alexander Berkman, The Russian Tragedy, ed. William G. Nowlin (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1976); Emma Goldman, The Crushing of the Russian Revolution (London: Freedom Press, 1922); Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia; Berkman, Bolshevik Myth; International Committee for Political Prisoners, Letters from Russian Prisons (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925).
[1044] M A C [Michael A. Cohn] to Sasha [Alexander Berkman], May 18, [1922], folder 14, Berkman Papers, IISH; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 953.
[1045] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 371, 420, 446; Albert Rhys Williams, Through the Russian Revolution (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1921), 185.
[1046] Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Anthony Capraro and the Lawrence Strike of 1919,” in Pane e Lavoro: The Italian American Working Class, ed. George E. Pozzetta (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1980), 3–27; P137, “In Re: Italian Anarchists,” May 6, 1921, file 211793, BS, FBI. See also Kenyon Zimmer, “Premature AntiCommunists?: American Anarchism, the Russian Revolution, and Left-Wing Libertarian Anti-Communism, 19171939,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 6, no. 2 (2009): 56–57.
[1047] “Report to the Communist International of the Joint Convention of May 26–31, 1920,” Early American Marxism, [[http://marx.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/1920/06/0600-ucp-reportonconv.pdf][marx.org]]; S. Agursky, “Bleter oys der geshikhte fun der rusisher revolutsie,” Fraye Arbayter Shtime, March 6 through April 17, 1920; Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 176–77, 214–15.
[1048] Alexander Berkman, Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (New York: Jewish Anarchist Federation, 1929), 168; Edward Acton, “The Libertarians Vindicated? The Libertarian View of the Revolution in Light of Recent Western Research,” in Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, ed. Edith Rogovin Frankel, Jonathan Frankel, and Baruch Knei-Paz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 388–405 (quote on 393).
[1049] Berkman, Now and After, 168; Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, 250–51; Berkman, The Russian Tragedy, 20.
[1050] Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, ed. Marshall S. Shatz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 181 (emphasis added); Abba Gordin, “Authority,” The Clarion, February-March 1934; Luigi Fabbri, Anarchia e communismo “scientifico” (Milan: Tempi Nuovi, 1922), repr. and trans. in Nikolai Bukharin, Luigi Fabbri, and Rudolf Rocker, The Poverty of Statism (Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1981), 13–49 (quote on 20); The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party, 41. See also Novomirsky, Anarchist-Communist Manifesto (n.p.: The A.C.G., 1921), 5.
[1051] See Gregory Zinoviev, “The Third International Appeals to the I. W. W.,” Solidarity, August 14, 1920; Fred Thompson, “They Didn’t Suppress the Wobblies,” Radical America 1, no. 2 (1967): 1–5; John S. Gambs, The Decline of the I.W.W. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 82–83, 165; Hall, Harvest Wobblies; Nigel Anthony Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905 –1930 (Norman: University of Oaklahoma Press, 1998); Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
[1052] See Zimmer, “Premature Anti-Communists?,” 60–61; Gambs, Decline of the I.W.W.; Thompson and Bekken, The I.W.W., 143 (quote).
[1053] Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 339–43, 552–69; Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 494.
[1054] Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 352–59; Kessler-Harris, “Problems,” 65; Zappia, “Unionism and the Italian American Worker,” 265–66; Benjamin Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress: The Story of a Famous Union and the Men Who Made It (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1944), 116 (quote).
[1055] Levine, Women’s Garment Workers, 357; Zappia, “Unionism and the Italian American Worker,” 270.
[1056] Pesotta, Bread Upon the Waters, 99–100; Leeder, The Gentle General, 26–30, 33. A similar motion had passed two years earlier, see Zappia, “Unionism and the Italian American Worker,” 269.
[1057] Wisotsky, “Such a Life,” 237, Labadie Collection.
[1058] See Luigi Di Lembo, Guerra di classe e lotta umana: l’anarchismo in Italia dal Biennio rosso alla Guerra di Spagna (1919–1939) (Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 2001), 75–86; Mantovani, Anarchici alla sbarra, 39–292; Martin Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists, chap. 4.
[1059] Un trentennio, 25; US Congress, “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 40.
[1060] Fedeli, Luigi Galleani, 111–15.
[1061] Translation of Paolo Schicchi to Joe Russo, May 23, 1921, file 202600–2159, BS, FBI. See also Mantovani, Anarchici alla sbarra; Di Lembo, Guerra di classe e lotta umana.
[1062] Hugo Rolland [Erasmo Abate], Il sindicalismo anarchico di Alberto Meschi (n.p.: La Nuova Italia, 1972), ix-x.
[1063] Eros Francescangeli, Arditi del Popolo: Argo Secondari e la prima organizzazione antifascista (1917–1922) (Rome: Odradek, 2000); Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Secondari, Argo”; Di Lembo, Guerra di classe e lotta umana, 129–33; Antonio Sonnessa, “Working Class Defense Organization, Anti-Fascist Resistance and the Arditi del Popolo in Turin, 1919–22,” European History Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2003): 183–218.
[1064] Sonnessa, “Working Class Defense Organization”; Max Sartin, “Breve autobiografia,” Bollettino Archivio G. Pinelli, no. 13 (August 1999): 44; Roberto Gremmo, “La ‘Cronaca Sovversiva’ di Galleani, le ‘bande armate’ di Raffaele Schiavina e la bomba del giovane anarchico Musso,” Storia Ribelle, no. 18 (Fall 2005): 1657–67.
[1065] Francescangeli, Arditi del Popolo, chap. 4; Tom Behan, The Resistible Rise of Benito Mussolini (London: Bookmarks, 2003).
[1066] Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists, 223.
[1067] Un trentennio, 141; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Bacchini, Ruggero”.
[1068] Fabrizio Giulietti, Il movimento anarchico italiano nella lotta contro il fascismo, 1927–1945 (Rome: Piero Lacaita Editore, 2003), 42–43 n. 72.
[1069] See Tinchino, Edmondo Rossoni; Whitaker, Anarchist-Individualist Origins; Luparini, Anarchici di Mussolini.
[1070] Luigi Parenti file, busta 3732, CPC; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Parenti, Luigi”.
[1071] “To Hon. Wilson, Secretary of Labor,” The Social War Bulletin, May 1918.
[1072] See Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 117–20; Ngai, Impossible Subjects.
[1073] Anna L. Sosnovsky to Mollie [Steimer], January 12, 1925, folder 29, Senya Fléchine Papers (hereafter cited as Fléchine Papers), IISH; Freedom, March 18, 1933; Kenyon A. Joyce, “Estimate of the Subversive Situation as of February 28, 1933,” in Boehm, U.S. Military Intelligence Reports, microfilm, reel 24:0972; Conference Committee for Anarchist Propaganda in English to J. J. Cohen, May 1, 1939, in “Anarchism—Cohen, Joseph J.,” Subject Vertical File, Labadie Collection.
[1074] For anarchist figures see Table 1. For Communist figures see Solon De Leon, ed., American Labor Press Directory (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1925), 20–22; Klehr, Heyday of American Communism, 5, 166.
[1075] Fermin Rocker interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 39.
[1076] Topp, Those without a Country, 256; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 528.
[1077] Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 5.
[1078] Communist editor Melech Epstein later noted, “Communism was synonymous with the Soviet Union.” Epstein, The Jew and Communism, 265.
[1079] Major works exploring these aspects of the period include Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971); Staughton Lynd, ed., “We are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Gary Gerstle, Working- Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness.
[1080] On the Communist Party in this period see Klehr, Heyday of American Communism; Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 192835 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
[1081] Harry [Kelly] to Sasha [Alexander Berkman], October 10, 1924, folder 43, Berkman Papers, IISH; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1923, 1376; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1924, 1398; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1925, 1419; Thorne, interview.
[1082] Kessner, The Golden Door, 109–10, 117, 155; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 472–73.
[1083] Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 237–50; Victor Lynn and Wanda Swieda interviews, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 368, 371; Vladimir F. Wertsman, “Russians,” in Dirk Hoerder, ed., The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-1970s: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 2:112.
[1084] See Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, chap. 5; Epstein, The Jew and Communism.
[1085] Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left, 59, 346, 622 n. 86; Epstein, The Jew and Communism, 138; Michael [Cohn] to Sasha[Alexander Berkman], April 19, 1934, folder 16, Berkman Papers, IISH.
[1086] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 409; Israel Ostroff interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 350; Clara Freedman Solomon, A Memoir: Some Anarchist Activities in New York in the ‘Thirties and ‘Forties ([Los Angeles]: Clara Freedman Solomon Memorial Gathering, 2001), 5 (quote).
[1087] Avrich, The Modern School Movement, 256–97; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 387–90.
[1088] Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress, 116, 334–36; Clara Larsen interview, Israel Ostroff interview and Morris Greenshner interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 341, 350, 380.
[1089] Epstein, Israel Feinberg. The translated English-language section of this book downplays the influence of anarchism in Feinberg’s later years; see, however, pages 117–18 of the original Yiddish-language section.
[1090] In addition to the sources cited above, see Wisotsky, “Such a Life,” Labadie Collection; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 409; Sonya Farber interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 346.
[1091] Gerekhtikayt, June 9, 1925, quoted in Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 374.
[1092] Isidore Farbiash interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 348; Jennifer Guglielmo, “Donne Ribelli: Recovering the History of Italian Women’s Radicalism in the United States,” in The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 124; Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 177.
[1093] Anna L. Sosnovsky, “Garment Worker Tells about Wreck of Old Militant Union,” New Unionist, July 30, 1927. I previously misidentified Sosnovsky as an active anti-Communist within the union. Zimmer, “Premature AntiCommunists?,” 62–63 n. 58.
[1094] On Sigman’s relationship with the anarchist movement see Irving Sterling interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 457.
[1095] Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress, 122; Anonymous male #2, interview by David Gurowsky, November 24, 1974, tape 123B, ILGWU, Oral History of the American Left, Tamiment Library. See also Epstein, The Jew and Communism, 128.
[1096] Epstein, Israel Feinberg, 66–67; Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 375.
[1097] Irving Sterling interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 457; Epstein, Jewish Labor, 2:140–41, 147–48; Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress, chap. 7. Several more recent studies have been made of the ILGWU’s “civil war,” but none properly identify Sigman, Yanovsky, and their comrades as anarchists and instead erroneously describe them as “conservative” and “right wing” socialists. See David Gurowsky, “Factional Disputes within the ILGWU, 1919–1928.” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, 1978); Stanley Nadel, “Reds versus Pinks: A Civil War in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union,” New York History 66, no. 1 (1985): 49–72; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 9 (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 274–75; John Holmes, “American Jewish Communism and Garment Unionism in the 1920s,” American Communist History 6, no. 2 (2007): 171–95.
[1098] Kessler-Harris, “Problems”; Daniel E. Bender, Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Antisweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 174, passim. However, Benjamin Stolberg’s claim that, “Unlike so many leaders in the AFL, Sigman was incapable of sex prejudice,” may be worth noting. Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress, 121.
[1099] Epstein, The Jew and Communism, 141 (quote); Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 424; Harold Seidman, Labor Czars: A History of Labor Racketeering (New York: Liverlight Publishing, 1938), 280–81.
[1100] S. Weiner [Sam Dolgoff], “For an Anarchist Policy in the Trade Unions,” Vanguard, April 1935. See also Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 446.
[1101] Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress, 153–54; Robert J. Alexander, The Right Opposition: The Lovestonites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930’s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 46; Paul Buhle, “Anarchism and American Labor,” International Labor and Working Class History, no. 23 (1983): 3.
[1102] Abe Coleman [Bluestein] to Alexander Berkman, February 1, 1934, folder 62, Berkman Papers, IISH.
[1103] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 482–96; Joseph J. Cohen, In Quest of Heaven: The Story of the Sunrise Co-operative Farm Community (New York: Sunrise History Publishing Committee, 1957).
[1104] Michael [Cohn] to Dearest Friends and Comrades [Rudolf and Milly Rocker], March 23, 1933 and Michael [Cohn] to Rudolf [Rocker], July 12, 1933, folder 78, Rocker Papers, IISH; M. A. Cohn to [Max] Nettlau, February 4, 1935 and Michael A. Cohn to [Max] Nettlau, February 8, 1935, folder 307, Nettlau Papers, IISH.
[1105] John Highman, “Social Discrimination against Jews, 1830–1930,” in Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 138–73; Henry L. Feingold, “Anti-Semitism and the Anti-Semitic Imagination in America: Case Study—the Twenties,” in A Midrash on American Jewish History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 177–92.
[1106] Gerber, “Anti-Semitism,” 29–31; Gerstle, American Crucible, 161.
[1107] Urofsky, American Zionism, 145, passim; Cohen, Labor Zionist Handbook, 87, 251.
[1108] Bessie Zoglin interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 345–46; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 428.
[1109] Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance (1961; reprint, New York: Howard Fertig, 1974), 40; Mimmo Franzinelli, I tenticoli dell’Ovra: Agenti, collaboratori e vittime della polizia politica fascista (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999).
[1110] Rolland, Il sindicalismo anarchico, 182–84.
[1111] Rolland, Il sindicalismo anarchico, 185 n. 22, 188–90; Di Lembo, Guerra di classe e lotta umana, 176–77; Franzinelli, I tentacoli dell’Ovra, 127–28. On polemics within the anarchist movement over the Garibaldi Affair, see the Hugo Rolland Papers (hereafter cited as Rolland Papers), IISH.
[1112] Giuseppe Galzerano, “Attentati anarchici a Mussolini,” in Atti della giornata di studi su L’antifascismo rivoluzionario: Tra passato e presente (Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 1993), 77–98; Levy, “The Anarchist Assassin,” 208–9.
[1113] Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies, 60–67; Stanislao G. Pugliese, Carlo Roselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 4; Di Lembo, Guerra di classe e lotta umana, 184–87; Giulietti, Il movimento anarchico italiano, 128–39.
[1114] “Nel vortice della bufera infernale,” L’Emancipazione, June 1928; Michele Centrone file, busta 1243, CPC.
[1115] Stanislao G. Pugliese, “Italian Exiles in America, 1922–1945,” The Italian Journal 7, no. 4 (1993): 32–35; Borghi, Mezzo secolo, 333–63; Adriana Dadà, “L’arrivo di Borghi negli Stati Uniti tra alleanza anti-Fascista e purismo ideologico,” Bollettino del Museo del Risorgimento 35 (1990): 145–60; Valerio Isca interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 146–47; Ventresca and Iacovetta, “Virgilia D’Andrea.”
[1116] Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.vv. “Abate, Erasmo,” “Margarita, Ilario,” and “Schiavina, Raffaele”.
[1117] Giuseppe Esposito file, busta 1895, CPC.
[1118] Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.vv. “Simonetti, Maria,” “Capuano, Vincenzo,” “Sechi, Salvatore,” and “Volpin, Ottavio”; David Koven, “Giovanni ‘John’ Vattuone, 1899–1994,” manuscript, 1994, 5, 9, file 131, Koven Papers, IISH.
[1119] John P. Diggins, “The Italo-American Anti-Fascist Opposition,” The Journal of American History 54, no. 3 (December 1967): 582; Goodman, “Evolution of Ethnicity.”
[1120] Philip V. Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy: Italian Americans and Fascism, 1921–1929 (West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1999), 70; Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, chap. 13.
[1121] Philip V. Cannistraro, “Generoso Pope and the Rise of Italian American Politics, 1925–1936,” in Italian Americans: New Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity, ed. Lydio F. Tomasi (Staten Island: American Italian Historical Association, 1985), 264–88; Goodman, “Evolution of Ethnicity,” chap. 3; Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy, chap. 3; Stefano Luconi, “Mussolini’s Italian-American Sympathizers in the West: Mayor Angelo J. Rossi and Fascism,” in Italian Immigrants Go West: The Impact of Locale on Ethnicity, ed. Janet E. Worrall, Carol Bonomo Albright, and Elvira G. Di Fabio (Cambridge: American Italian Historical Association, 2003), 124–33.
[1122] See Goodman, “Evolution of Ethnicity,” chap. 5; Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Making and Un-Making of the Italian American Working Class,” in The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 51–75; Stefano Luconi, “Ethnic Allegiance and Class Consciousness among Italian-American Workers, 1900–1941,” Socialism and Democracy 22, no. 3 (2008): 123–42.
[1123] Goodman, “Evolution of Ethnicity,” 122 (quote), chap. 6; Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy, 110–17; Gaetano Salvemini, Italian Fascist Activities in the United States, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1977), 91–164.
[1124] Luconi, “From Left to Right,” 61; Salvemini, Italian Fascist Activities, 36–37; Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy, 17; Luconi, “Ethnic Allegiance,” 132 (quote). Luconi also describes the early Fascist Giuseppe Mizii as an “anarcho-syndicalist,” but his only citation is to Cannistraro, who specifically calls Mizii “a syndicalist,” while the record for Mizii in the online catalogue of the CPC labels him a “socialist.” Luconi, “Ethnic Allegiance,” 130; Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy, 15–16.
[1125] Gallagher, All the Right Enemies, 4; Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, chap. 15.
[1126] Noi, “Contro il mostro fascista: agire, agire, agire!” Umanità Nova, November 1, 1924.
[1127] See Diggins, “Italo-American Anti-Fascist Opposition”; John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Philip V. Cannistraro, “Luigi Antonini and the Italian Anti-Fascist Movement in the United States, 1940–1943,” Journal of American Ethnic History 5, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 21–40; Fiorello B. Ventresco, “Crisis and Unity: The Italian Radicals in America in the 1920s,” Ethnic Forum 15, no. 1–2 (1995): 12–34; Fiorello B. Ventresco, “The Struggle of the Italian Anti-Fascist Movement in America (Spanish Civil War to World War II),” Ethnic Forum 6, no. 1 (1986): 17–48; Pernicone, “Murder under the ‘El’”; Pernicone, Carlo Tresca. Pedro Esteve passed away at his home in Weehawken, New Jersey on September 14, 1925.
[1128] See Per la Chiarezza: A Proposito di Polemica Fra Compagni?, February 1, 1930; Nunzio Pernicone, “War among the Italian Anarchists: The Galleanisti’s Campaign against Carlo Tresca,” in The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 77–96.
[1129] S. Menico, “Cargone Fasciste,” L’Emancipazione, January 15, 1932; Un trentennio, 158; McCormick, Hopeless Cases, 142–43.
[1130] Giulietti, Il movimento anarchico italiano, 121.
[1131] Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Recchioni, Emidio”; Alfio Bernabei, “The London Plot to Kill Mussolini,” History Today 49, no. 4 (April 1999): 2(1); Amedeo Fulvi file, busta 2196, CPC.
[1132] Giulietti, Il movimento anarchico italiano, 169–76; Giuseppe Galzerano, Michele Schirru: Vita, viaggi, arresto, carcere, processo e morte dell’anarchico italo-americano fucilato per l’«intenzione» di uccidere Mussolini (Salerno: Galzerano Editore/Atti e memoire del popolo, 2006). The dismissive version of Schirru’s activities and arrest given in Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies, 107, is grossly inaccurate.
[1133] Un trentennio, 156; Di Lembo, Guerra di classe e lotta umana, 181–82; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Capuana, Vincenzo”.
[1134] Amedeo Fulvi file, busta 2196, CPC; Giulietti, Il movimento anarchico italiano, 222.
[1135] Amedeo Fulvi file, busta 2196, CPC; Shields, On the Battle Lines, 31; Valerio Isca interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 152; Andrea Sardi file, busta 4607, CPC. See also Sam Dolgoff interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 420.
[1136] Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, 2:219–21; Erasmo Abate to [Max] Nettlau, June 28, 1926, folder 15, Rolland Papers, IISH. Abate is probably making specific reference to the French “illegalist” anarchist Clement Duval, who lived among the American galleanisti in New York after his escape from Devil’s Island in 1901, and whose autobiography was serialized in Cronaca Sovversiva before its suppression and later published as a book by L’Adunata dei Refrattari in 1929.
[1137] “É permesso?” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, April 15, 1922; “Giocobinismo, bolscevismo e…fascismo,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, March 24, 1923; Brand [Enrico Arrigoni], “Il fascismo italico e’ bestiale quanto quello russo,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, January 2, 1926.
[1138] On Ghezzi see Mantovani, Anarchici alla sbarra, 619–26.
[1139] Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, chap. 15; Ego Sum [Carlo Tresca], “Il fronte unico,” Il Martello, September 14, 1934 (quote).
[1140] Meyer, “Italian Americans and the American Communist Party.”
[1141] Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 105; Paul Berman, “The Torch and the Axe: The Unknown Aftermath of the SaccoVanzetti Affair,” The Village Voice, May 17, 1988; Robert D’Attilio, “L’Adunata dei Refrattari,” in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 4.
[1142] “Sottoscrizioni,” Umanità Nova, February 14, 1925; “Abbonamenti,” Umanità Nova, December 20, 1924 and January 1925; Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 172.
[1143] L. Gremmo, “Ai membri della nostra Lega,” La Scopa, October 1926.
[1144] Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, 2:219; “Master List, L’Era Nuova Group, Paterson N.J.,” n.d. [1920], file 61–4625, OG, FBI; US Congress, “History of the L’Era Nuova Group,” 40; Bencivenni, “Italian American Radical Culture,” 146–49.
[1145] Firmino Felice Gallo file, busta 2256, CPC; “Sottoscrizione del Dollaro,” La Scopa, December 17, 1927; Pinotta, “Eventi del giorno,” La Scopa, July 16, 1927.
[1146] “La Festa della Lega di Haledon,” La Scopa, December 17, 1927.
[1147] A. G., “Songo e realta’,” La Scopa, September 24, 1927.
[1148] Starr, The Italians of New Jersey, 46.
[1149] “La Commemorazione Colombiana,” La Scopa, October 16, 1926; X., “Valorifascisti in ribasso in Paterson,” La Scopa, May 28, 1927.
[1150] William Gallo interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 153, 156.
[1151] “Corrispondenze,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, May 29, 1926.
[1152] Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 323–34, 337–42; Fodelson, “The Paved the Streets,” 14245.
[1153] Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 345–47, 353.
[1154] Firmino Gallo to Errico Malatesta, February 26, 1928, in Firmino Felice Gallo file, busta 2256, CPC.
[1155] Borghi, Mezzo secolo, 340.
[1156] Wood, “History of Labor in the Broad-Silk Industry,” 353–63, 373, 388–410, 422–41; Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 202.
[1157] “Memorandum in re: Ludovico Caminita”; J. E. H. to W. W. Sibray, March 29, 1924, and J. E. H. to Mr. Burns, October 16, 1922, file 61–115, OG, FBI.
[1158] “Sferzate,” La Difesa, February 10, 1923.
[1159] Ludovico Caminita file, busta 973, CPC; “Cleared of Bombing Consul’s Home,” New York Times, December 10, 1931.
[1160] Ludovico Caminita, Obici: biografia (New York: Tipografia Editrice Scarlino, 1943), 10, 225.
[1161] Ibid., 207–9.
[1162] Kazin, Barons of Labor, 95–99, 256; Sensi-Isolani, “Italian Radicals,” 200.
[1163] Fichera, “The Meaning of Community,” 201–210; Gabriella Facondo, Socialismo italiano esule negli USA (1930–1942) (Foggia: Bastogi, 1993), 29–40.
[1164] Gumina, Italians of San Francisco, 197.
[1165] “Cronache Californiane” and “Borghi in California,” L’Emancipazione, September 1927.
[1166] Vincenzo Ferrero file, busta 2034, CPC; Vincenzo Ferrero interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 163; Aurora Sallitto, interview by David Koven, audio cassette, January 1992, IISH.
[1167] La Scolta, July 1926; V. Ferrero, “Ai compagni dell’ovest,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, June 11, 1927.
[1168] R. De Rango, “Ai Compagni,” L’Emancipazione, March 1931.
[1169] Vincenzo Ferrero file, busta 2034, CPC.
[1170] R. P., “Cronaca del Movimento Locale,” L’Emancipazione, December 1927.
[1171] “Corrispondenze,” L’Emancipazione, November 15, 1928.
[1172] Anthony Martocchia and Philip Lamantia, interview by Paul Buhle, transcript, October 31, 1982, 7–8, 15, Oral History of the American Left, Tamiment Library.
[1173] Adolfo Antonelli file, busta 154, CPC.
[1174] Vigna Antonio Pietro Casassa file, busta 1138, CPC.
[1175] Raffaele De Rango file, busta 1739, CPC; Luparini, Anarchici di Mussolini, 55–56 n. 145.
[1176] Domenico Sallitto file, busta 4537, CPC; David Koven, “An Anarchist Life: Domenic Sallitto, 1902–1991,” manuscript, 1992, 1–2, Subject Verticle File, “Sallitto, Domenic”, Labadie Collection; Aurora Sallitto, interview.
[1177] See, for example, “La Situazione Precipita!” L’Emancipazione, January 1931; Uno, “Lo squadrismo in Colonia,” L’Emancipazione, July-August 1931; S. M., “La fogna colonial,” L’Emancipazione, December 15, 1931.
[1178] Ario, “Conferenze Virgilia D’Andrea,” L’Emancipazione, February 15, 1930; “Comunicati,” L’Emancipazione, April 15, 1930.
[1179] “1 Killed, 1 Near Death as Auto Explodes; Police Suspect Bombing,” San Francisco Examiner, July 31, 1927, online at Western Neighborhoods Project, [[http://www.outsidelands.org/black-hand-1927.php][www.outsidelands.org]]; Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 504 n. 309; “Comunicati e Corrispondenze,” L’Emancipazione, January 1928. A copy of the list of names can be found in the Vincenzo Ferrero file, busta 2034, CPC, and in the files of other individuals included on it.
[1180] “Per la Commemorazione del XX Settembre” L’Emancipazione, August 15, 1929; Vincenzo Ferrero file, busta 2034, CPC.
[1181] On Zito and Il Corriere del Popolo see Facondo, Socialismo italiano; Bénédicte Deschamps, “Opposing Fascism in the West: The Experience of Il Corriere del Popolo in San Francisco in the Late 1930s,” in Italian Immigrants Go West: The Impact of Locale on Ethnicity, ed. Janet E. Wor, Carol Bonomo Albright, and Elvira G. Di Fabio (Cambridge: American Italian Historical Association, 2003), 109–23. On anarchist involvement with the paper see Adolfo Antonelli file, busta 154, Luigi Chiesa file, busta 1302, and Gilberto Moni file, busta 3354, CPC.
[1182] Stephen Schwartz, From West to East, 245.
[1183] Communist Dictatorship E pos , March, 1928. A copy of this issue can be found in the Labadie Collection.
[1184] Nino Napoletano, “Internazzionalismo,” L’Emancipazione, July-August 1931.
[1185] “Corrispondenze,” L’Emancipazione, September 1927; Vincenzo Ferrero interview and Dominick Sallitto interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 165, 167.
[1186] “Cronaca Locale,” L’Emancipazione, November 1927.
[1187] R. P., “Cronaca del Movimento Locale,” L’Emancipazione, December 1927; “Comunicati e Corrispondenze,” L’Emancipazione, January 1928; “Comunicati,” L’Emancipazione, June 15, 1929.
[1188] Vincenzo Ferrero interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 163.
[1189] See “Comunicati e Corrispondenze,” L’Emancipazione, January 1928; “A Discussion Among Comrades,” L’Emancipazione, June 15, 1932; “Comunicati,” L’Emancipazione, May 15, 1929; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidishanarkhistishe bavegung, 457; Martocchia and Lamantia, interview, 10.
[1190] Shaffer, “Radicalism in California,” 333.
[1191] See Douglas Monroy, “Anarquismo y Comunismo: Mexican Radicalism and the Communist Party in Los Angeles during the 1930s,” Labor History 24 (Winter 1983): 34–59; Monroy, “Fence Cutters, Sedicioso, and FirstClass Citizens,” 24–28.
[1192] Red Jones interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 409; “Cronaca Locale” L’Emancipazione, November 1927.
[1193] R. Tong, “The Chinese Anarchist Movement in U. S. A.,” Man!, August-September 1933; Wong, “Pingshe” (quote on 134); “Cronaca Locale” L’Emancipazione, November 1927; Red Jones interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 409. In the second half of the 1920s there were also Chinese anarchist groups in Los Angeles and New York City, as well as a “Chinese Equality Group of Boston.” See Lai, “A Historical Survey,” 66; “Minutes of the Road to Freedom Conference Held in New York, Oct. 12th to 14th, 1928,” folder 1032, Nettlau Papers, IISH.
[1194] Wong, “Pingshe,” 135–39; Red Jones interview and Dominick Sallitto interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 410, 167.
[1195] “Cronaca del Movimento Locale,” L’Emancipazione, April 1928 and May 1928; Lai, “A Historical Survey,” 76 n. 10.
[1196] Bella Wong interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 410; Wong, “Pingshe,” 134.
[1197] Wong, “Pingshe,” 142, 145–46.
[1198] Pesotta, Bread Upon the Waters, 71; Joseph Spivak, “Our Organized Movement,” The Road to Freedom, October 1927. On the strike see Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 209–222; Thomas Dublin, “How Did the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and Chinese Garment Workers Unite to Organize the 1938 National Dollar Stores Strike?,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000, 2004, [[http://asp6new.alexanderstreet.com+was2.object.details.aspx?dorpid=1000636695][asp6new.alexanderstreet.com]].
[1199] Quoted in Wong, “Pingshe,” 145–46.
[1200] Joseph Spivak, “What is Wrong with Our Movement,” The Road to Freedom, April 1928.
[1201] “Cominicati,” L’Emancipazione, August 15, 1929.
[1202] Jos. J. Cohen to Dear Friend & Comrade [Max Nettlau], February 26, 1922, folder 303, Nettlau Papers, IISH; Louis Slater interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 344; Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 454.
[1203] Abraham Blecher interview and Jack Frager interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 352, 423; Leeder, The Gentle General, 107–8.
[1204] Frager interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 432; Hippolyte Havel to Dear Comrade [T. L. Miles], November 13, 1925, folder 6, Fraye Arbayter Shtime Archive (hereafter cited as FAS Archive), IISH.
[1205] Frager interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 431–32; Ed Stamm, “Jack (Yankel) Frager: January 3, 1903 to March 7, 1998,” Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library, no. 21, February 2000, [[http://flag.blackened.net/ksl/bullet21.htm#Frager][flag.blackened.net]].
[1206] Sam Dolgoff, Fragments: A Memoir (Cambridge: Refract Publications, 1986), 1–8; Sam Dolgoff interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 420.
[1207] Jack Frager interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 432.
[1208] “Cominicati,” L’Emancipazione, October 1928.
[1209] “Minutes of the Road to Freedom Conference Held in New York, Oct. 12th to 14th, 1928,” folder 1032, Nettlau Papers, IISH.
[1210] [W. S.] Van [Valkenburgh] to Sascha [Alexander Berkman], June 14, 1929, folder 62, Berkman Papers, IISH.
[1211] Hippolyte Havel to Dear Comrade [T. L. Miles], November 13, 1925, folder 6, FAS Archive, IISH; “A Discussion Among Comrades,” L’Emancipazione, June 15, 1932.
[1212] [W. S.] Van [Valkenburgh] to Sascha [Alexander Berkman], June 14, 1929, folder 62, Berkman Papers, IISH.
[1213] Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 11.
[1214] “Youth Answers a Question” The Road to Freedom, June 1929; Louis Genin interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 441.
[1215] “The Manager’s Notes,” Freedom, January 23, 1933; Claire Grosner, “English Propaganda Conference,” Freedom, March 18, 1933.
[1216] Moritz Jagendorf interview and Louis Raymond interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 219–22, 394–95.
[1217] “To Our Readers” Freedom, January 1, 1933.
[1218] Freedom, January 9, 1933.
[1219] Harry Kelly, “Make the Revolution Now!” Freedom, March 11, 1933; H. K., “Notes and Comments,” Freedom, March 18, 1933.
[1220] H. K., “Current Events,” Freedom, February 25, 1933; Harry Kelly to [Max] Nettlau, January 14, 1935, folder 704, Nettlau Papers, IISH.
[1221] The Rising Youth, December 1929.
[1222] Audrey Goodfriend interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 460.
[1223] Sara Goodman, “Our Place in the World,” The Rising Youth, May 1929.
[1224] The Rising Youth, July 1928; “Our Activities,” The Rising Youth, May 1929.
[1225] Jack Frager interview and Louis Genin interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 433, 441.
[1226] “Declaration of Policy,” Vanguard, April 1932.
[1227] Solomon, A Memoir, 7. In 1934 the youth section briefly printed its own paper, Rebel Youth, edited by Irving Sterling.
[1228] S. Morrison, “The I.L.G.W.U. Calls upon Youth,” Vanguard, February 1933; Sidney Solomon interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 451.
[1229] Abe Coleman [Bluestein] to Alexander Berkman, February 1, 1934, folder 62, Berkman Papers, IISH. See also “Build ‘Il Martello’,” Il Martello, September 14, 1934.
[1230] Il Tamburino [Carlo Tresca], “Assimilazione non è violenza,” Il Martello, April 19, 1919.
[1231] See Appendix A.
[1232] See Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal; Ottanelli, Communist Party of the United States.
[1233] “Surrogati che non valgono ne’ il tempo ne’ la spesa,” L’Emancipazione, May 1928.
[1234] “Compagni,” L’Emancipazione, October 1932.
[1235] Man!, April 1933.
[1236] Fannie [Luchkofsky] to Mollie [Steimer], June 24, 1926, folder 39, Fléchine Papers, IISH.
[1237] “Questione di razze?” L’Era Nuova, January 30, 1915.
[1238] Marcus Graham to Max Nettlau, May 10, 1930, folder 502, Nettlau Papers, IISH.
[1239] Marcus Graham, “Autobiographical Note,” xii-xiv; “Il Compagno Graham arrestato,” L’Emancipazione, September 1930; “Lecture Schedule of Marcus Graham,” L’Emancipazione, April 15, 1932.
[1240] Alexander Berkman to Editor [of] L’Adunata [dei Refrattari], December 16, 1932, folder 7, Berkman Papers, IISH; Walter Starrett [W. S. Van Valkenburgh] to Editor, L’Adunata dei Refrattari, December 31, 1932, folder 62, Berkman Papers, IISH. See also Sam Dolgoff interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 421.
[1241] Slovak, “Carbon Monoxide,” Man!, March 1934.
[1242] Graham, “Autobiographical Note,” xviii; Vincenzo Ferrero interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 163.
[1243] M. G. to A. I., December 30, 1935, box 4, Agnes Inglis Papers, Labadie Collection.
[1244] “The Burning of the Reichstag Trial,” Man!, October 1933; Melchior Seele [Raffaele Schiavina], “Marinus Van Der Lubbe,” Man!, November 1933; M. G., “The Vindication of a Revolutionist,” Man!, December 1933; Marcus Graham, “The Role of the Socialists and Communists in the Assassination of a Revolutionist,” Man!, February 1934; “An Open Challenge to Debate,” Man!, March, 1934.
[1245] “What Could Be Done?” Man!, July 1933; Melchior Seele [Raffaele Schiavina], “A New Deal?” Man!, January 1934; Man!, November 1933.
[1246] See, for instance, Abe Bluestein, Forgotten Men, What Now? (Bronx, NY: Libertarian Publishers, n.d. [ca. 1935]); Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 506.
[1247] Samuel Polinow, “How to Combat Fascism-Nazism,” Man!, June 1938; Samuel Polinow, “Anarchism and the National Spirit,” Man!, April 1933.
[1248] [Marcus Graham], “The Scottsboro Case of Injustice,” Man!, May 1935. On the “whitening” of American Jews see Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks; Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness.
[1249] Sam Dolgoff interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 421; Dr. J. Globus, “The Racial Myth and Internationalism,” Man!, August 1934.
[1250] “Anarchists and the Labor Movement,” Man!, January 1934; Hippolyte Havel, “A Question and a Protest,” Man!, February 1934.
[1251] Marcus Graham, “Was There a General Strike?” Man!, August 1934.
[1252] Aurora Sallitto, interview; Fight against Deportation: Free Ferrero and Sallitto (New York: Ferrero-Sallitto Defense Committee, 1936), 4; Case File, “Sallitto, Domenick,” box 48, American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born records (hereafter cited as ACPFB), Labadie Collection.
[1253] Domenico Sallitto file, busta 4537, CPC; Fight against Deportation, 9–10.
[1254] Valerio Isca interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 147; Koven, “An Anarchist Life,” 4. On Schorr see McCormick, Hopeless Cases, 114; Ackerman, Young J. Edgar, 173–74; Pernicone, “Murder under the ‘El’,” 31.
[1255] Valerio Isca interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 148.
[1256] On the ACPFB see John W. Sherman, A Communist Front at Mid-Century: The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, 1933–1959 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001). However, Sherman’s central argument, that the ACPFB was entirely beholden to the Communist Party and refused to defend anti-Communists, does not hold up in light of its defense of Sallitto.
[1257] See the press releases in “Anarchism—Deportations and Raids—Ferrero-Sallitto Defense Conference,” Subject Vertical File, Labadie Collection; and Case File, “Ferrero, Vincent,” box 32, ACPFB, Labadie Collection.
[1258] Domenico Sallitto file, busta 4537, CPC.
[1259] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 82–86.
[1260] Valerio Isca interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 148.
[1261] Koven, “An Anarchist Life,” 4; Case File, “Sallitto, Domenick,” box 48, AACPFB; Paolo Finzi, “Ricordando John, cioè Vincenzo,” Bollettino Archivio G. Pinelli, no. 32 (December 2008): 38–39.
[1262] Freedom of Thought Arraigned: Four Year Persecution of “MAN!” (Los Angeles: Marcus Graham Freedom of the Press Committee, 1939); Eternal Vigilance! The Story of Civil Liberty, 1937–1938 (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1938), 15.
[1263] “Government’s Foul Conspiracy to Destroy Man!” Man!, May 1934.
[1264] Fiorello B. Ventresco, “Italian-Americans and the Ethiopian Crisis,” Italian Americana 6, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1980): 4–27; Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival, chap. 6; Goodman, “Evolution of Ethnicity,” 232–47.
[1265] Borghi, Mezzo secolo, 340.
[1266] Diggins, “Italo-American Anti-Fascist Opposition,” 597; Goodman, “Evolution of Ethnicity,” 51, 178.
[1267] Maris Baldini, “Nemici della Patria?” Umanità Nova, November 14, 1924; L’Albatro, “Ho una patria lo?” Umanità Nova, March 7, 1925; Pinotta, “Eventi del giorno,” La Scopa, January 21, 1928; “La maledizione del patriottismo,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, November 16, 1935.
[1268] Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal.
[1269] Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” The Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (September 1997): 527.
[1270] See Voltairine de Cleyre, “Anarchism and American Traditions,” Mother Earth, December 1908 and January 1909; Blaine McKinley, “Anarchist Jeremiads: American Anarchists and American History,” The Journal of American Culture 6, no. 2 (1983): 75–84.
[1271] Di Lembo, Guerra di classe e lotta umana, 199; La Spagna nel nostro cuore, 1936–1939: tre anni di storia non dimenticare (Rome: AICVAS, 1996), s.v. “Centrone, Michele”; Pugliese, Carlo Roselli, 201–5; Michele Centrone file, busta 1243, CPC; “Our Comrades Who Fall,” Man!, October-November 1936; “I nostri caduti: Centrone erano morti,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, September 12, 1936; “Solidarietà Rivoluzionaria,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, October 17, 1936; Giulietti, Il movimento anarchico italiano, 248.
[1272] Alcine Frigerio, “Come sono caduti,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, September 19, 1936; L’Ignoto, “Michele Centrone,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, October 3, 1936.
[1273] “Perché combattono,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, September 19, 1936.
[1274] Il gruppo degli Ignoti, “Ai Compagni,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, November 7, 1936.
[1275] Hippolyte Havel, “Proposed Lecture Tour,” Man!, January 1935; Abe Coleman [Bluestein] to Alexander Berkman, February 1, 1934, folder 62, Berkman Papers, IISH.
[1276] On the anarchists’ role see Juli n Casanova, Anarchism, the Republic, and Civil War in Spain, 1931–1939, ed. Paul Preston, trans. Andrew Dowling and Graham Pollok (London: Routledge, 2005), 101; Robert J. Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, 2 vols. (London: Janus, 1998), 1:128–31.
[1277] For overviews see Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, chap. 11–21; Sam Dolgoff, ed., The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939 (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990). I prefer the term “Popular Front” over the less accurate “Republican” as a label for the coalition of anarchists, socialists, communists, republicans, and Catalan nationalists.
[1278] Rudolf Rocker, The Tragedy of Spain (New York: Freie Arbeiter Stimme, 1937), 25; José Sandoval interview, in Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 325 (quote). See also Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, 1:487; Casanova, Anarchism, 135.
[1279] L. Frank, “The New Economy in Catalonia,” Vanguard, February-March 1937; “Iniziativa spontanea,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, December 18, 1937.
[1280] Solomon, A Memoir, 8. Emphasis in original.
[1281] “Spanish Workers are their Own Leader,” Spanish Revolution, January 25, 1937.
[1282] Michael Seidman, Workers against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chap. 5–6; Casanova, Anarchism, 140–42; Rüdiger quoted in Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, 2:1140.
[1283] “An Appeal to Libertarians,” Spanish Revolution, November 6, 1936.
[1284] Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 19.
[1285] Berman, “The Torch and the Axe.”
[1286] Michael A. Cohn to [Max] Nettlau, February 8, 1935, folder 307, Nettlau Papers, IISH; N. W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, 1940, 1190.
[1287] See folder 63B, CNT (España) Archives, Archivo del Comité Nacional CNT (hereafter cited as CNT Archives), IISH.
[1288] Allen Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), 139.
[1289] “New Defense Industries Created,” Spanish Revolution, September 25, 1936; “Workers Build Efficient War Industry,” Spanish Revolution, January 24, 1938; José Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, ed. Chris Ealham, trans. Paul Sharkey and Chris Ealham, 3 vols. (Hastings, East Sussex: Meltzer Press/ChristieBooks, 20016), 2:81–92; Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, chap. 18; Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
[1290] MTW IU 510, “To All Marine Transport Workers,” leaflet, n.d. [1936], file 12, box 71, IWW Collection; Matt White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Civil War,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, no. 42/43 (Winter 2006): 39–47.
[1291] “Spanish Ship Off with Plane Cargo,” New York Times, January 7, 1937; E. Fernandez, “La tragedia del ‘Mar Cantabrico’,” Cultura Proletaria, August 21, 1937; “Shelled by Rebels,” New York Times, March 9, 1937; Juan Anido interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 397; Kelly, “Roll Back the Years,” XXXVII:G15, Tamiment Library.
[1292] Luis Montes, “La Farsa de la Neutralidad,” Cultura Proletaria, May 8, 1937.
[1293] “Oil For Lisbon Goes to Franco, Let’s Stop It,” Industrial Worker, May 22, 1937; Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 417, 943; Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart, 137–38.
[1294] “Colectado en una Fabrica: En Nueva York,” Cultura Proletaria, October 17, 1936; “Warm Clothes for Spanish Fighters,” Spanish Revolution, November 6, 1936; “Durruti Airplane,” Cultura Proletaria, January 23, 1937.
[1295] Ventresco, “Italian Anti-Fascist Movement,” 18.
[1296] L’Adunata dei Refrattari, September 5, October 17, November 14 and December 5, 1936, and February 6, 1937; V., “Contra el Militarismo Español: Gran Mitin Antifascista en Paterson, N.J.,” Cultura Proletaria, August 15, 1936; Espi, “De Paterson, N. J.,” Cultura Proletaria, October 17, 1936; “Exhibición de la película ‘Fury over Spain,’ en Paterson,” Cultura Proletaria, August 14, 1937; “Actos a Celebrarse,” Cultura Proletaria, October 30, 1937; “Comunicazioni,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, November 21, 1936.
[1297] “La solidarità dei compagni dei fratelli di Spagna,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, November 28 and September 26, 1936.
[1298] Calculated from the regular financial reports published in L’Adunata dei Refrattari and Spanish Revolution; as well as Boris Yelensky, “25 Years of ‘Free Society’ Activity in Chicago,” in The World Scene from the Libertarian Point of View (Chicago: Free Society Group of Chicago, 1951), 93; Spanish Revolution, August 20, 1937; “Comité de Defensa,” Cultura Proletaria, November 5, 1937.
[1299] Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 225; Gallagher, All the Right Enemies, 159.
[1300] Bruno Bonturi file, busta 743, CPC; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Bonturi, Bruno”; Solomon, A Memoir, 8; Sidney Solomon interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 450.
[1301] “Durruti Airplane,” Cultura Proletaria, January 23, 1937.
[1302] Howson, Arms for Spain; David T. Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 77–79; Stanley G Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 130; Vázquez quoted in Casanova, Anarchism, 152.
[1303] Un trentennio, 171; Esther Dolgoff, interview by B. Lemisch, audiotape, January 7, 1982, tape 67A, Oral History of the American Left, Tamiment Library.
[1304] See Appendix B for a full list of these volunteers.
[1305] Un trentennio, 171; Fraser M. Ottanelli, “‘If Fascism Comes to America We Will Push it Back into the Ocean’: Italian American Antifascism in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States, ed. Fraser Ottanelli and Donna Gabaccia (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 178–95; Fraser Ottanelli, “Anti-Fascism and the Shaping of National and Ethnic Identity: Italian American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 9–31. Ottanelli estimates that the total number of Italian American volunteers was “over two hundred” or “almost 300,” and that anarchists made up one-fifth of this number. Historian Robert D’Attilio puts the number at “more than a handful, less than a hundred.” Berman, “The Torch and the Axe.”
[1306] It should be noted that some of the migrants here counted as “American” anarchists are also included in enumerations of volunteers from their countries of birth calculated by other writers.
[1307] For various estimates see Ronald Creagh, “Red Years, Black Years: Italian Anarchists’ War against Fascism,” in Anarchisten gegen Hitler: Anarchisten, Anarcho-Syndikalisten, Rätekommunisten in Widerstand und Exil, ed. Andreas G. Graf (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2001), 108; Giulietti, Il movimento anarchico italiano, 245 n. 551. Franco Giannantoni and Fabio Minazzi, eds., Il coraggio della memoria e la guerra civile spagnola (1936–1939): studi, documenti inediti e testimonianze, con las prima analisi storico-quantitativa dei volontari antifascisti italiani (Milan: AICVAS, 2000), found 328 anarchists among 1,948 Italian volunteers whose political allegiance is known, or 16.8%, which works out to between 588 and 672 anarchists within the estimated total of Italian volunteers.
[1308] Gerold Gino Baumann, Los Voluntarios Latinoamericanos en la Guerra Civil Española en las Brigadas Internacionales, las Milicias, la Retaguardia y el Ejército Popular (San José, Costa Rica: Guayacán, 1997), 212–44, 254.
[1309] David Berry, “French Anarchists in Spain, 1936–1939,” French History 3, no. 4 (December 1989): 427–65; David Berry, “French Anarchist Volunteers in Spain, 1936–1939: Contribution to a Collective Biography of the French Anarchist Movement,” Research on Anarchism, 1997, [[http://raforum.info/article.php3?id_article=2721][raforum.info]]; David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), chap. 12; Josie McLellan, Antifascism and Memory in East Germany: Remembering the International Brigades 1945–1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 18; Dieter Nelles, “The Foreign Legion of the Revolution: German Anarcho-Syndicalist[s] and Volunteers in Anarchist Militias during the Spanish Civil War,” libcom.org, 2008, [[http://libcom.org/library/the-foreign-legion-revolution][libcom.org]].
[1310] Michael Jackson, Fallen Sparrows: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994), 75.
[1311] For various estimates see Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 14, 71; Cecil B. Eby, Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (University Park PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 438; Michael Jackson, Fallen Sparrows, 78; Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 152–53, 160. Although often called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American unit was in fact a battalion (several of which make up a brigade).
[1312] See R. Dan Richardson, Comintern Army: The International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1982); Epstein, The Jew and Communism, 306.
[1313] “Comunicazioni,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, July 24, 1937.
[1314] The anarchists who joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion included Bruno Bonturi, Virgil Morris, Harry Owens, Patrick J. Read, Raymond Elvis Ticer, and Armando Vecchietti.
[1315] Irving Sterling interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 458; Enrico Arrigoni, Freedom: My Dream (New York: Libertarian Book Club, 1985), 268–70.
[1316] Berry, “French Anarchists,” 430; Sterling interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 458.
[1317] D., “Le recompense ai volontari della Liberta’,” Il Martello, December 14, 1937; Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 22930, 336 n. 20; Gallagher, All the Right Enemies, 159–60 (quote).
[1318] [Abe Bluestein] to [Emma Goldman], July 1, 1937, box 2, Warren Van Valkenburgh Papers (hereafter cited as Van Valkenburgh Papers), Labadie Collection; Un trentennio, 171–72; John Carver Edwards, Airmen without Portfolio: U.S. Mercenaries in Civil War Spain (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 25. On Communist control of the air force see Stanley G Payne, Spanish Civil War, 170–71; Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, 1:247.
[1319] Un trentennio, 191; La spagna nel nostro cuore, s.v. “Vecchietti, Amerigo”; “Chi erano…,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, July 17, 1937; Tranquillo [Giuseppe Ruozi], “Americo Vecchietti,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, September 25, 1937.
[1320] Randolfo Pacciardi, Il Battaglione Garibaldi: volontari italiani nella Spagna repubblicana (1938; reprint, Rome: La Lanterna, 1945); Margaret Jane Slaughter, “Italian Antifascism: The Italian Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1972).
[1321] R. Dan Richardson, “Foreign Fighters in Spanish Militias: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939,” Military Affairs 40, no. 1 (February 1976): 7–11; Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 367; Baumann, Los Voluntarios Latinoamericanos, 254.
[1322] Richardson, “Foreign Fighters,” 10; Michael Jackson, Fallen Sparrows, 68.
[1323] See Cecil B. Eby, Between the Bullet and the Lie: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 104; Andreu Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales de la guerra de España (Barcelona: Ariel, 1974), 599; Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (New York: Penguin, 2006), 126. No mention of such a unit can be found anywhere in the American Italian-, Spanish-, or English-language anarchist press from the period. Both Castells and Beevor appear to rely entirely on Eby for their information, though Beevor refers to the unit as the “Sacco and Vanzetti centuria.” Eby provides no citation for his claim and, although the book doesn’t appear in his bibliography, he appears to base it on the following passage from Agustín Souchy, Nacht über Spanien: Bürgerkrieg und Revolution in Spanien (Darmstadt-Land: Verlag die Freie Gesellschaft, 1954): “In September 1936 the ‘Sacco and Vanzetti’ Column was formed, composed of international combatants, who joined the units led by Durruti” (181). Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart, which does appear in Eby’s bibliography, also mentions, “There were in Spain anarchists who fought as the ‘Sacco-Vanzetti Column’” (137). Neither of these two sources, however, states that these anarchists were Americans, and no mention of this column is made in Eby’s later, more thoroughly-researched Comrades and Commissars. There were at least three units named after Sacco and Vanzetti active in the war, but none of these match Eby’s description: the Batallón Sacco y Vanzetti was founded by the CNT in the Basque region in the first weeks of the war and made up mostly of Italians; the Sacco y Vanzetti section of the Centuria Commune de Paris was composed of Americans, but was a Communist unit and not formed until around October 1936; and the Sacco y Vanzetti battery of the anarchist Tierra y Libertad Column was composed primarily of Spaniards and Germans. See Francisco Manuel Vargas Alonso, “Anarquismo y Milicias de la CNT en Euzkadi,” Vasconia 24 (1996): 259–99; Castells, Brigadas Internacionales, 99, 539–40, 599; Nelles, “Foreign Legion of the Revolution.”
[1324] Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, trans. Chuck Morse (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 486; La spagna nel nostro cuore, s.v. “Paliaga, Giuseppe”.
[1325] Michael Jackson, Fallen Sparrows, 29, 48.
[1326] Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion,” The Journal of American History 54, no. 2 (September 1967): 327–37.
[1327] On maritime syndicalism in the 1930s see Stephen Schwartz, Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors’Union of the Pacific, 1885–1985 (Somerset, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1986); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Howard Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets?: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
[1328] See James Phillips to FW [Fred] Thompson, January 5 and February 1, 1932, folder 3, box 145, IWW Collection; Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront, 39, 66–67, 91; Hyman Weintraub, Andrew Furuseth: Emancipator of the Seamen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 102, 104–5; Stephen Schwartz, Brotherhood of the Sea, 38.
[1329] Carroll, Odyssey, 16; Eby, Comrades and Commissars, 268. By contrast, 78% of Canadian volunteers were immigrants—though no Italians and only one anarchist are known to have been among their ranks. Michael Petrou, Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War (Vancouver: UCB Press, 2008), 22–24.
[1330] Rosenstone, “Men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion,” 328; Carroll, Odyssey, 15–16; Ottanelli, “Anti-Fascism and the Shaping of National and Ethnic Identity,” 12; Giannantoni and Minazzi, Il coraggio della memoria, 88; Pacciardi, Battaglione Garibaldi, 111.
[1331] Ottanelli, “Anti-Fascism and the Shaping of National and Ethnic Identity,” 12.
[1332] Domenico Rosati file, busta 25538, CPC; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Rosati, Domenico”; Fraser Ottanelli, e-mail message to the author, September 15, 2008.
[1333] L’Ignoto, “Michele Centrone,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, October 3, 1936.
[1334] Vigna Antonio Pietro Casassa file, busta 1138, CPC; Spagna nel nostro cuore, 125.
[1335] Bruno Bonturi file, busta 743, CPC; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Bonturi, Bruno”; La spagna nel nostro cuore, s.v. “Bonturi, Bruno”.
[1336] Domenico Rosati file, busta 25538, CPC; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Rosati, Domenico”; La spagna nel nostro cuore, s.v. “Rosati, Domenico”.
[1337] Giuseppe Esposito file, busta 1895, CPC.
[1338] Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Borghi, Armando”; La spagna nel nostro cuore, s.vv. “Borghi, Armando”, “Borghi, Patrizio” and “Paliaga, Giuseppe”. Patrizio Borghi used his father’s passport while in Spain, causing Italian authorities to report that Armando Borghi was present in Barcelona in April and May 1937 and resulting in the mistaken inclusion of the elder Borghi in the rosters of Italian volunteers in Spagna nel nostro cuore and Giannantoni and Minazzi, Il coraggio della memoria.
[1339] Valerio Isca interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 148.
[1340] “El Camarada Claro J. Sendon: Su vida agitada y su muerte,” Cultura Proletaria, December 18, 1937.
[1341] Luis Zugadi, “España!” Cultura Proletaria, May 8, 1937.
[1342] Rosenstone, “Men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion,” 334; Albert Prago, Jews in the International Brigades in Spain (New York: Jewish Currents, 1979).
[1343] Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left, 59; Rosenstone, “Men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion,” 331–32.
[1344] Joseph J. Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 520; Eby, Comrades and Commissars, 99; White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Civil War,” 42; Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 19; Carroll, Odyssey, 72.
[1345] Prago, Jews in the International Brigades; David Diamant, Combattants juifs dans l’arm e r pu licaine espagnole, 1936–1939 (Paris: ditions Renouveau, 1979); Zvi Loker, “Balkan Jewish Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War,” trans. Norman Marsden, Soviet Jewish Affairs 6, no. 2 (1976): 71–82; Joshua Rothenberg, “The Jewish Naftali Botwin Company (an episode from recent history),” Jewish Frontier 47, no. 4 (April 1980): 14–19; Arno Lustiger, “German and Austrian Jews in the International Brigade,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 35, no. 1 (1990): 297–320.
[1346] Rothenberg, “Naftali Botwin Comany,” 15; Gerben Zaagsma, “Jewish Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War: A Case Study of the Botwin Company” (MA Thesis, University of London, 2001); Saul Wellman, “Jewish Vets of the Spanish Civil War: Personal Observations at Conference in Israel,” Jewish Currents 27, no. 6 (June 1973): 8–13.
[1347] Carroll, Odyssey, 154; Matt White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Revolution, pt 2,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, no. 45 (Winter 2006–2007): 26; Harry Fisher, Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1998), 23, 67; Lenny Lamb interview, in John Gerassi, The Premature Antifascists: North American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939, An Oral History (New York: Praeger, 1986), 125. On the Eugene V. Debs Column see Carroll, Odyssey, 72.
[1348] White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Civil War,” 44; White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Revolution,” 27.
[1349] Clara Solomon interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 448. Connolly’s name is not included in existing rosters of known American or Irish volunteers in the International Brigades, suggesting that he fought in a Spanish anarchist unit. See “Roll Call—American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War,” The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, [[http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/alba_names.html][www.nyu.edu]]; R. A. Stradling, The Irish and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39: Crusades in Conflict (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999).
[1350] White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Civil War”; White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Revolution.”
[1351] Similarly, Dieter Nelles notes, “More than 50 volunteers that had belonged to socialist or communist organizations in Germany, became a member [sic] of the CNT in Spain.” Nelles, “Foreign Legion of the Revolution.”
[1352] [Abe Bluestein], “International Brigade in Spain,” Challenge, July 30, 1938; Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, Secret World, 157–58.
[1353] White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Civil War,” 45; Robert A. Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 310.
[1354] Giuseppe Sallustro file, busta 4537, CPC; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Sallustro, Giuseppe”.
[1355] See, for instance, Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 438–84, 545; Richardson, “Foreign Fighters,” 8; Robert Garland Colodny, The Struggle for Madrid: The Central Epic of the Spanish Conflict (1936–37) (New York: Paine-Whitman, 1958), 36, 74–75; Arthur H. Landis, Death in the Olive Groves: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 67–68; Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1965), 329; Carroll, Odyssey, 154–55. For serious attempts to evaluate the anarchists’ military role see Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, chap. 5–10; Paz, Durruti, chap. 18–22.
[1356] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1951; reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1980), 28–29.
[1357] This mortality rate was similar to that of the International Brigades. See Michael Jackson, Fallen Sparrows, 106.
[1358] See Steve Nelson, James R. Barrett, and Rob Ruck, Steve Nelson: American Radical (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 187; Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left, 268; Carroll, Odyssey, 74.
[1359] Michael Jackson, Fallen Sparrows, 4; Herrick quoted in Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 832 n. 14.
[1360] Shirley Magnini, Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 80–84, 112–15; Mary Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War (Denver: Arden Press, 1995), 50–54, 105–116 (quotes on 53 and 110).
[1361] “A Todas las Mujeres del Mundo,” Cultura Proletaria, November 14, 1936. On Mujeres Libres see Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, rev. ed. (Oakland: AK Press, 2005).
[1362] Gariñeno, “Mujer en la Lucha por la Libertad,” Cultura Proletaria, July 3, 1937.
[1363] “¡Salud, valiente Miliciano!” La Riscossa, March 20, 1939.
[1364] Giannantoni and Minazzi, Il coraggio della memoria, 52–53, 101–219. At least six French women also fought in the Durruti Column. Berry, “French Anarchist Volunteers.”
[1365] Maria Giaconi file, busta 2378, CPC; Roberto Lucioli, Gli antifascisti marchigiani nella guerra di Spagna (1936–1939) ([Ancona]: ANPI/Instituto Regionale per la Storia del Movimento di liberazione nelle Marche, 1992), 153; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Giaconi, Maria”.
[1366] Rebecca DeWitt, “A 79 Year Old Woman Who Bowls: An Interview with Diva Agostinelli, Anarchist,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Spring 2001, [[http://flag.blackened.net/ias/9diva.htm][flag.blackened.net]].
[1367] David Koven, “On Hanging In,” unpublished manuscript, 1986, folder 131, Koven Papers, IISH. See also Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 151–53; Frances Patai, “Heroines of the Good Fight: Testimonies of U.S. Volunteer Nurses in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939,” Nursing History Review 3 (1995): 79–104.
[1368] Magnini, Memories of Resistance, 92.
[1369] Un trentennio, 172–73.
[1370] Bluestein, “Biography”; S. Freedman to Emma [Goldman], March 10, 1937, folder 1, FAS Archive, IISH; Abe Bluestein, introduction to Agustín Souchy, With the Peasants of Aragon: Libertarian Communism in the Liberated Areas, trans. Abe Bluestein (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos, 1982). Diamant, Combattants juifs, incorrectly lists Bluestein as one of the “American Jews in the Spanish Republican Army” (62).
[1371] Bluestein, “Biography,” C24. Bluestein wrote to Mark Mratchny: “Every week or two, an American or an Englishman, or a German [will] escape from the I.B. and come to us for aid.” Abe [Bluestein] to Mark [Mratchny], September 27, 1937, folder 8, Mark Mrachnyi Papers (hereafter cited as Mrachnyi Papers), Labadie Collection.
[1372] “Nuestra Reunion,” Cultura Proletaria, January 30, 1937; Arrigoni, Freedom. Arrigoni’s articles appeared under the pseudonyms “Brand,” “Brandt,” “Arri-Goni,” and “Un Encarcelado.”
[1373] See Emma Goldman, Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, ed. David Porter, 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006).
[1374] Graur, An Anarchist “Rabbi”, 219; Leeder, The Gentle General, 113–14.
[1375] Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 226; Borghi, Mezzo secolo, 357.
[1376] Detailed studies of the CNT-FAI in this period include Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War; Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War; Casanova, Anarchism; Robert W. Kern, Red Years, Black Years: A Political History of Spanish Anarchism, 1911–1937 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Affairs, 1978); Peirats, The CNT; Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1936–1939) (London: Freedom Press, 1953).
[1377] Rocker, The Tragedy of Spain, 35. This same interpretation of Soviet motives is given in Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War. For a different argument see Stanley G Payne, Spanish Civil War.
[1378] “Emma Goldman on the United Front,” Spanish Revolution, January 8, 1937; Emma Goldman, “Enemy Within,” Man! December 1936-January 1937; “Los lobos de Moscú,” Cultura Proletaria, January 30, 1937.
[1379] See Goldman, Vision on Fire; Brand [Enrico Arrigoni], “El Realismo de los Anarquistas,” Cultura Proletaria, January 16, 1937; M. O. [Maximiliano Olay], “Tacto, tácticas y principios,” Cultura Proletaria, March 27, 1937.
[1380] Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, 37 (quote); Wayne Thorpe, “Syndicalist Internationalism Before World War II,” in Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective, ed. Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (Brookfield, VT: Scholar Press, 1990), 255–56; Berry, French Anarchist Movement, chap. 11.
[1381] “Il programma della C.N.T.,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, November 7, 1936; Max Sartin [Raffaele Schiavina], “Inter nos,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, December 5, 1936; “Gli avvenimenti di Spagna e la rivoluzione sociale,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, April 3, 1937; Armando Borghi, “Una aclaración del compañero Armando Borghi,” Cultura Proletaria, April 24 [misdated April 10], 1937.
[1382] Aldo Aguzzi, “Italian Anarchist Volunteers in Barcelona & the Events of May 1937,” in Pages from Italian Anarchist History, trans. Paul Sharkey (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 1995), 13–17, originally published in L’Adunata dei Refrattari, August 13, 1938.
[1383] Un trentennio, 186–89; Di Lembo, Guerra di classe e lotta umana, 209; Brand [Enrico Arrigoni], “En el Frente de Aragon,” Cultura Proletaria, July 3, 1937.
[1384] Brand [Enrico Arrigoni], “La revolución seguirá su camino,” Cultura Proletaria, May 1, 1937.
[1385] “Workers Supervise Telephone System,” Spanish Revolution, September 25, 1936; Paz, Durruti, 442; Stanley G Payne, Spanish Civil War, 217.
[1386] For the anarchists’ version of events, see Agustín Souchy, The Tragic Week in May (Barcelona: Oficina de Información Exterior de la CNT y FAI, 1937). For the larger context of the May Days as “a complex three-way power struggle played out between anti-capitalist libertarians, middle-class Catalanists and centralist liberals,” see Helen Graham, “‘Against the State’: A Genealogy of the Barcelona May Days (1937),” European History Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1999): 485–542; as well as Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War, 134–35, 147–48.
[1387] According to Burnett Bolloten and George Esenwein, Berneri may have actually been killed by undercover agents of Mussolini rather than Communist police, though definitive evidence is lacking. Bolloten, Spanish Civil War, 875–877 n. 32. However, all contemporary accounts implicated the Communists, as do documents within the Italian government’s own secret police files; see the list of Italians killed in Spain dated February 1, 1939, a copy of which is in Michele Centrone’s file, busta 1243, CPC. This list admits to fascists’ role in the assassinations of Carlo and Nello Rosselli, but lists Berneri as a victim of Communists. The significance of this document is discussed in Pugliese, Carlo Roselli, 221.
[1388] Bluestein, introduction to Souchy, With the Peasants of Aragon; Bluestein, “Biography,” C16-23; Abe Coleman [Bluestein] to [Mark Mratchny], May 12, 1937, folder 8, Mrachnyi Papers.
[1389] Brand [Enrico Arrigoni], “El Pueblo Revolucionario de Barcelona en Armas,” Cultura Proletaria, June 12, 1937; Arrigoni, Freedom, 313–24; Aguzzi, “Italian Anarchist Volunteers.”
[1390] Helen Graham, “Against the State”; Minor quoted in Steve Nelson, The Volunteers: A Personal Narrative of the Fight against Fascism in Spain (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1953), 118.
[1391] Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 195; The Anarchist Federation of Iberia, “About the Congress,” Man!, JulyAugust 1937.
[1392] Tranquillo [Giuseppe Ruozi], “Comicato,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, July 10, 1937. See also Aguzzi, “Italian Anarchist Volunteers,” 17.
[1393] Brand [Enrico Arrigoni], “Nuevas cadenas para el pueblo español,” Cultura Proletaria, October 2, 1937; Martin Gudell to Secretario del Comité Regional, October 18, 1937, folder C16 CNT Archives, IISH; Arrigoni, Freedom, 297–98, 436; Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Brand: An Italian Anarchist and His Dream,” unpublished manuscript, 2003, 5, 12, copy in author’s possession.
[1394] Un Encarcelado [Enrico Arrigoni], “Desde España: Tras las Rejas de la Contrarrevolucion,” Cultura Proletaria, December 25, 1937 through January 15, 1938.
[1395] Selma [Cohen] to Mollie [Steimer], August 11, 1938, folder 9, Fléchine Papers, IISH.
[1396] Sidney Solomon interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 450–51.
[1397] Stephen Schwartz, Brotherhood of the Sea, 123. On Wallach see also Carroll, Odyssey, 185–87; Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, Secret World, 155–63; Eby, Comrades and Commissars, 422.
[1398] Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left, 310. Michael Petrou suggests that this story “bears striking similarities to the case of Albert Ernest Burton,” a Canadian miner accused of “Trotskyism” who was “lost on patrol in no man’s land” in Teruel, and possibly captured and executed by Franco’s troops. Petrou, Renegades, 134. It is by no means clear, however, that these two accounts refer to the same incident.
[1399] [Abe Bluestein], “International Brigade in Spain,” Challenge, August 13 and August 27, 1938; “Ivan Silverman, Two Other Wobs Killed in Spain,” Industrial Worker, September 10, 1938; Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 20. Bluestein’s version, which relied on second-hand accounts from International Brigade members he met while in Barcelona, lists those killed as Harry Owens, “Morris,” and Ray Steele, whereas the Industrial Worker lists only Ivan Silverman by name. Bluestein’s inclusion of Steele is definitely an error, as Steele did not die in battle. However, there were rumors circulating among Lincoln Battalion members that Steele, officially the victim of an enemy sniper, was actually killed by the Communist Anthony De Maio, the same man implicated in Albert Wallach’s death. William Herrick, Jumping the Line: The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical (Oakland: AK Press, 2001)., 211–12. It is likely that Bluestein conflated two different stories he had heard.
[1400] Petrou, Renegades, 64 (quote). See also White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Civil War,” 43–45.
[1401] White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Civil War”; Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, Secret World, 182.
[1402] Carroll, Odyssey, 165–66; White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Revolution,” 26; Fisher, Comrades, 119.
[1403] White, “Wobblies in the Spanish Civil War,” 45.
[1404] David Berry, “French Anarchist Volunteers in Spain, 1936–1939: Contribution to a Collective Biography of the French Anarchist Movement—Appendices,” Research on Anarchism, 1997, [[http://raforum.info/article.php3?id_article=240][raforum.info]]; Nelles, “Foreign Legion of the Revolution.”
[1405] Il Martello, May 28, 1937, quoted in Ventresco, “Italian Anti-Fascist Movement,” 27.
[1406] Un Encarcelado [Enrico Arrigoni], “Desde España: Tras las Rejas de la Contrarrevolucion,” Cultura Proletaria, December 25, 1937 through January 15, 1938, translated in Arrigoni, Freedom, 397–98.
[1407] Marcus Graham, “Counter-Revolution at Work” and “Conspiracy against Spain,” Man! June 1937; “Kronstadt e Barcellona,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, April 30, 1938. A more optimistic correspondent insisted, “Barcelona is not Cronstald [sic]: and the last word has not been said in Spain.” “Corrispondenze,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, June 12, 1937. Spanish Revolution, May 21, 1937, similarly declared, “Barcelona is not Kronstadt.”
[1408] Emma Goldman to Rudolf Rocker, May 14, 1937, quoted in Emma Goldman, Vision on Fire, 55.
[1409] On the popularity and problems of “Red Fascism” as a concept, see Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930’s1950’s,” The American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (April 1970): 1046–64.
[1410] Spanish Revolution, July 19, 1937; “Fascism cannot be Fought with the Aid of a Totalitarian Party,” Spanish Revolution, August 20, 1937.
[1411] “Fascismo Rojo,” Cultura Proletaria, October 23, 1937; “Los caínes en España,” Cultura Proletaria, May 20, 1937.
[1412] I.W.M.A. Bulletin of Information, June 1, 1937.
[1413] [Carlo Tresca], “Linee Convergenti,” Il Martello, September 14, 1940; Usinger quoted in Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront, 245.
[1414] G. Daminai, “La libertà spirituale e l’anarchismo,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, September 11, 1937.
[1415] “‘Challenge’ Worker Beaten,” Challenge, June 4, 1938; “Communist ‘Democracy,’” Challenge, June 18, 1938.
[1416] Jack White [Schlesinger] to “Comrades,” in “Anarchism—United Libertarian Organizations,” Subject Vertical File, Labadie Collection; Jack White [Schlesinger], “Uno scandalo intollerabile,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, September 4, 1937; “Per la libertà di parola,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, September 25, 1937; W. S. [Van Valkenburgh], “Street Meetings on Spain,” Cultura Proletaria, October 2, 1937; Starrett [W. S. Van Valkenburgh] to Carlo [Tresca], August 14, 1937 and Walter Starrett [W. S. Van Valkenburgh] to Carlo [Tresca], August 24, 1937, box 2, Van Valkenburgh Papers; Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 19.
[1417] Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 55–56; Abe Bluestein interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 438.
[1418] Philip Trupin interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 298.
[1419] L’Adunata dei Refrattari, June 26, 1937.
[1420] [Maximiliano Olay] to Necesio Galve, January 28, 1938, folder 63B:1, CNT Archives, IISH; “Blackwell Must be Freed,” Challenge, August 27, 1938; “Blackwell Defense Committee Formed,” Challenge, November 5, 1938; “Amer. Committee Defends Blackwell,” Challenge, November 12, 1938. Years later, Blackwell became an anarchist and cofounded New York’s Libertarian League with Sam and Esther Dolgoff. Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 74–75.
[1421] “I libertari degli Stati Uniti serano le loro file,” Il Martello, January 29, 1939.
[1422] Sam Dolgoff interview and Louis Genin interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 424, 442, 445; Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 23; Starrett [W. S. Van Valkenburgh] to Maximiliano [Olay], September 23, 1937 and Starrett [W. S. Van Valkenburgh] to [Mark] Schmidt, September 16, 1937, Van Valkenburgh Papers, box 2.
[1423] “Le tragiche ciornate di maggio a Bercellona,” L’Adunata dei Refrattari, May 29, 1937.
[1424] [Abe Bluestein], “Trotskyites,” Challenge, August 6, 1938; Abe [Bluestein] to Molly [Steimer] and Senya [Fleshine], June 3, 1938, folder 9, Fléchine Papers, IISH.
[1425] A. Shapiro, “Reflections on the Spanish Revolution,” Challenge, June 25 through July 9, 1938; Diego de Santillan, “Revolution and War in Spain,” Challenge, August 27 through September 17, 1938.
[1426] Abe [Bluestein] to Mollie [Steimer] and Senya [Fleshine], July 27, 1938 and Abe [Bluestein] to Mollie [Steimer] and Senia [Fleshine], February 11, 1938, folder 9, Fléchine Papers, IISH; Brand [Enrico Arrigoni], “Revolucionarismo Catastrofico,” Cultura Proletaria, July 24, 1937, also reprinted as Brandt [Enrico Arrigoni], “Catastrophic Revolution,” One Big Union Monthly, September 1937.
[1427] “Fighting in Barcelona Provoked by Communists and Republican Politicians,” Spanish Revolution, May 21, 1937; “La Tragedia del Anarquismo,” Cultura Proletaria, July 10, 1937.
[1428] “Emma Goldman and the Alliance Proposals,” Spain and the World (London), March 4, 1938, reprinted in Spain 1936–1939: Social Revolution and Counter-Revolution; Selections from the Anarchist Fortnightly Spain & the World (London: Freedom Press, 1990), 242–45. On debates within the English-language anarchist press see also Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart, 137–39.
[1429] Mark Mratchny interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 385.
[1430] Woodcock, Anarchism, 474.
[1431] Ottanelli, “Anti-Fascism and the Shaping of National and Ethnic Identity,” 23; Ottanelli, “‘If Fascism Comes’,” 190.
[1432] See Wilson, “Brand”; “Abraham Bluestein, 88, Dies; an Advocate of Anarchism,” New York Times, December 14, 1997.
[1433] Ottanelli, “Anti-Fascism and the Shaping of National and Ethnic Identity,” 30 n. 60; Bruno Bonturi file, busta 743, CPC.
[1434] Sallustro file, CPC; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Sallustro, Giuseppe”.
[1435] La spagna nel nostro cuore, s.vv. “Deiana, Pietro”, “Ghiara, Alvaro” and “Rosati, Domenico”; Un trentennio, 172–73.
[1436] Cohen, Di yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 522–23; “La Guerra y el Pueblo Americano,” in Maximiliano Olay, Mirando al Mundo ([Buenos Aires]: Impresos Americalee, 1941), 63–67; Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 417.
[1437] Eleanor Litwak interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 305.
[1438] Anthony Martocchia and Philip Lamantia, interview by Paul Buhle, transcript, October 31, 1982, 9–10, Oral History of the American Left, Tamiment Library; Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 102–4, 112–16; Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, ed. Linda Hamalian, revised and expanded ed. (New York: New Directions Books, 1991), 490–97, 499–503.
[1439] Luconi, “Mussolini’s Italian-American Sympathizers,” 129–30; Goodman, “Evolution of Ethnicity,” chap. 7.
[1440] Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 146–50.
[1441] Paul Buhle, “Antifascism,” in Buhle, Buhle, and Georgakas, Encyclopedia of the American Left, 46–48.
[1442] Gerstle, American Crucible, 189.
[1443] M G to Comrade [Agnes] Inglis, June 8, 1940 and [International Group of San Francisco] to Dear Friend, n.d. [1940], box 4, Agnes Inglis Papers, Labadie Collection.
[1444] Quoted in Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic, Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism, and Radical History (Oakland: PM Press, 2008), 157.
[1445] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 277–79, 283.
[1446] Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 28.
[1447] Roger Baldwin interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 62.
[1448] Eric Hobsbawm, “Working-Class Internationalism,” in Internationalism in the Labour Movement, ed. Fritz van Holthoon and Marcel van der Linden, vol. 1 (New York: E. J. Brill, 1988), 12.
[1449] [Rose Pesotta], “Trip to Lodz,” August 6, [1946], manuscript, folder 7, box 11, John Nicholas Beffel Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit. On the anarchist group in Łódź before and during the war see Eliezer Hirshauge, Troym in farvirklekhung: zikhroynes-fartseykhenungen un bamerkungen vegn der anarkhistisher bavegung in Poyln (Tel-Aviv: Dina Huzarska-Hirshauge, 1953), 49–53, 8889.
[1450] See, for instance, the various contributions to The World Scene from the Libertarian Point of View (Chicago: Free Society Group of Chicago, 1951).
[1451] Sam Dolgoff interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 423; Epstein, Jewish Labor, 1:XLII.
[1452] Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, chap. 20.
[1453] Selma [Cohen] to Mollie [Steimer], March 11, 1937, folder 9, Fléchine Papers, IISH; Moshe R. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933–1941: An Historical Analysis (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982), 301, 313–14; Roy Godson, American Labor and European Politics: The AFL as a Transnational Force (New York: Crane, Russak & Company, 1976), 36–37, 41–48; Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, AntiCommunist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999).
[1454] Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 2–3, 170 (quote), 240.
[1455] See Zimmer, “Premature Anti-Communists?”; Antonioli et al., Dizionario biografico, s.v. “Bruch (Bruk), Giordano”.
[1456] Louis Fischer in Richard Crossman, ed., The God that Failed, new ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 204, 221–23., 204, 221–23. For other examples see Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1960s (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1987); John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
[1457] Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel; Hamalian, Life of Kenneth Rexroth.
[1458] Emma Goldman to Dorothy [Giessecke], March 21, 1938, folder 1, FAS Archive, IISH.
[1459] Audrey Goodfriend, “Testimonianze,” in L’Anarchico e l’ebreo, ed. Amedeo Bertolo (Milan: Elèuthera, 2001), 225; Herman Frank, “Anarchism and the Jews,” 287–88, 289 (quote).
[1460] Eyges, Beyond the Horizon, 148, 193.
[1461] H. Zolotarov, “Di yidishe aynvanderung far di letste 20–30 yar,” Di Tsukunft, September 1907, quoted in Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 505.
[1462] Emma Goldman to Dorothy [Giessecke], March 21, 1938, folder 1, FAS Archive, IISH.
[1463] Dominick Sallitto interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 166.
[1464] See, for instance, Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 50.
[1465] For an attempt at filling in the history of this period see Kenyon Zimmer, “‘Alone, with the Truth, against all the World’: The American Anarchist Movement, 1927–1969,” senior thesis, Bennington College, 2002.
[1466] Armando Borghi, “Anarchico e’ il pensiero e verso l’anarchia va la storia?” in Mischia sociale (Da…alla Cooper Union) (New York: Edizioni Sociali, [ca. 1930]), 174, 197.
[1467] Chaikin, Yidishe bleter, 198.
[1468] Berman, “The Torch and the Axe.”
[1469] Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 124.
[1470] Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 3:37.
[1471] Jerome Davis, The Russian Immigrant (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), 126.
[1472] Extrapolated from the circulation of Le Rèveil des Mineurs.
[1473] New York State Senate, Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, Revolutionary Radicalism, 2:852, 2004.
[1474] Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 124.
[1475] New York State Senate, Revolutionary Radicalism, 2:2004.
[1476] American Newspaper Directory (New York: Geo. P. Rowell & Co., 1900), 671.
[1477] Richard Oestreicher, “Robert Reitzel, Der Arme Teufel,” in The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850–1940, ed. Elliot Shore, Ken Fones-Wolf and James P. Danky (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 147–67; Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 3:376; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual, 1894, 1897, 1898, and 1900.
[1478] Pernicone, “War among the Italian Anarchists,” 81.
[1479] Extrapolated from the circulation of L’Era Nuova and La Jacquerie.
[1480] Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 2:241; Bruce Nelson, “Arbeiterpresse und Arbeiterbewegung: Chicago’s Socialist and Anarchist Press, 1870–1900,” in The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850–1940, ed. Elliot Shore, Ken Fones-Wolf and James P. Danky (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 100.
[1481] Abe [Bluestein] to Molly [Steimer] & Senya [Fléchine], June 3, 1938, folder 9, Senya Fléchine Papers, IISH.
[1482] Nelson, “Arbeiterpresse,” 100; Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 124; Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 3:389; Jon Bekken, “The First Anarchist Daily Newspaper: The Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung,” Anarchist Studies 3 (1995): 18.
[1483] New York Times, February 24, 1919.
[1484] Pernicone, “War among the Italian Anarchists,” 81; Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 50; Cartosio, “Italian Workers and their Press,” 425.
[1485] Marcelino García interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 392.
[1486] Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 2:244.
[1487] Ibid.
[1488] Laurence Veysey, The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in Twentieth Century America (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 36.
[1489] Kenneth O. Ghormley, “The L.F.D.B.A. Celebrates Its Centennial: Anarchy at Home,” The Fortnightly Club of Redlands, California, [[http://www.redlandsfortnightly.org/papers/ghorm99.htm][www.redlandsfortnightly.org]].
[1490] Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 3:60; New York State Senate, Revolutionary Radicalism, 2:2005.
[1491] R. De Rango, “Ai compagni,” L’Emancipazione, June 1931.
[1492] Frank Brand interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 174; Eresia, January 1932, 65.
[1493] Extrapolated from the circulations of La Questione Sociale and La Jacquerie.
[1494] Bekken, “First Anarchist Daily Newspaper,” 18; Nelson, “Arbeiterpresse,” 100; Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 124; Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 3:407.
[1495] American Newspaper Directory, 67; La Questione Sociale, October 15, 1897.
[1496] Sanders, The Downtown Jews, 112; Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 100; Gordin, Sh. Yanovsky, 249, 294, 314; Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 651; New York State Senate, Revolutionary Radicalism, 2:2004; Israel Shenker, “Anarchy’s the Rule as Anarchists Gather for a Banquet in New York,” New York Times, June 5, 1977; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1910–11, 1913, 1917–18, 1920, 1923–25; Michel A. Cohn to [Max] Nettlau, February 8, 1935, folder 307, Max Nettlau Papers, IISH; N. W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, 1940.
[1497] Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 2:579; A. Frumkin, In friling, 85.
[1498] Di Fraye Gezelshaft, January 1910 and May 1910.
[1499] American Newspaper Directory, 67.
[1500] S. Busha, “Free Society,” February 25, 1921, file 202600–1081, BS, FBI.
[1501] Freedom, April-May 1919; New York State Senate, Revolutionary Radicalism, 2:2006.
[1502] Freedom, March 18, 1933.
[1503] Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, 205; Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 3:411; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual, 1894, 1897; New York Herald, July 31, 1900; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1904–1910.
[1504] “Mailing List—‘Golos Truda’—Russian Nihilist Newspaper.” n.d. [ca.1917], file 54235/36-C, INS.
[1505] US Congress, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, 536.
[1506] New York State Senate, Revolutionary Radicalism, 1:862.
[1507] Nelson, “Arbeiterpresse,” 100.
[1508] Land and Liberty, June 1915.
[1509] The Liberator, September 3, 1905.
[1510] James J. Martin, Men against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827–1908 (De Kalb: Adrian Allen Associates, 1953), 268; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual, 1894, 1898.
[1511] N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual, 1884–86, 1888–90.
[1512] Estimated based on M. G. [Marcus Graham] to A. I. [Agnes Inglis], December 30, 1935, box 4, Agnes Inglis Papers, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
[1513] New York State Senate, Revolutionary Radicalism, 2:2004; Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 105.
[1514] New York State Senate, Revolutionary Radicalism, 2:2006.
[1515] Barry Pateman, correspondence with the author; “Reporte de Emma Goldman en el Congresso Anarquista de Amsterdam celebrado en agosto de 1907,” in López and Cortés, El Partido Liberal Mexicano, 65; New York Times, May 8, 1910.
[1516] Extrapolated from the circulation of Mother Earth.
[1517] Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 124.
[1518] Extrapolated from the circulation of Il Domani.
[1519] Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 3:453.
[1520] “Cronaca Locale,” L’Emancipazione, November 1927.
[1521] Ludovico Caminita, “Twenty Years of Experience in the Radical Movement,” unpublished manuscript, 1922, 47, file 61–115, Old German Files, FBI.
[1522] Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 2:253.
[1523] Dave Poole, “Praxedis G. Guerrero, 1882–1910,” The Struggle Archive, [[http://struggle.ws/anarchists/guerrero/biography.html][struggle.ws]].
[1524] La Questione Sociale, June 30, 1897 and February 11, 1899; Carey, “‘La Questione Sociale’,” 291; Rigazio, “Alberto Guabello,” 205.
[1525] James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman: University of Oaklahoma Press, 1992), 59; W. Dirk Raat, Revoltosos: Mexico’s Rebels in the United States, 19031923 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981), 27; Mother Earth, April and August 1911; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1916.
[1526] Extrapolated from the circulation of Le Rèveil des Mineurs.
[1527] Creagh, “Socialism in America,” 149.
[1528] Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 1:164.
[1529] De Leon, American Labor Press Directory, 26; Jack Frager interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 432.
[1530] Newspaper Directory and Advertisers’ Manual, 19.
[1531] Untitled subscription list of La Sferza, n.d. [1925], folder 15, Hugo Rolland Archive, IISH.
[1532] American Newspaper Directory, 722.
[1533] Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 19.
[1534] Extrapolated from the circulation of The Demonstrator.
[1535] Sam Dolgoff interview, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 450.
[1536] Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der idisher arbayter bevegung, 161.
[1537] Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 124; Nelson, “Arbeiterpresse,” 100.
[1538] New York Times, May 8, 1910.
[1539] Sanger, An Autobiography, 109.
[1540] N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual, 1880–86, 1888–90, 1893.
[1541] Hoerder, Immigrant Labor Press, 3:504.