The ANNOTICO Report

Definition of an Anarchist is: Those who Promote Change through Violence.

Just like the Founding fathers of the United States, and All the
Independence movements through out the world, that overthrew threw
Colonialistic and Imperial "masters", and All the movements that overthrow
Oligarchies,
with their Robber Baron Puppeteers.

Almost with the first arrival of Italians in the US in the great wave
between 1880 and 1922, Italians were in the forefront of  the battle for
Significant Reforms.

Sacco and Bartolo Vanzetti were the best known, but only two of the many
thousands of Italian anarchists in the United States. Others were: Carlo
Cafiero, Luigi Galleani, Carlo Tresca, Francesco Saverio Merlino, Petro
Gori,
Giuseppe Ciancabilla, Errico Malatesta, and Gaetano Bresci, etc, etc

..One cannot deal with Sacco and Vanzetti without talking about anarchism;
and the greatest single shortcoming in the literature on the case- a
literature that is vast, enormous- is its failure to come to grips with
Sacco and Vanzetti as anarchists. Anarchism was a central feature of their
lives....

Three quotations from their writings which illustrate this point. First, a
quotation from Vanzetti's brief autobiography, The Story of a Proletarian
Life:

I am and will be until the last instant (unless I should discover that I am
in error) an anarchist, because I believe that communism is the most humane
form of social contract, because I know that only with liberty can man
rise, become noble, and complete.

We find a similar idea in Sacco's writings- for example, in one of his last
letters to his son Dante, written on August 18, 1927, five days before the
execution. He advises Dante to help the persecuted and oppressed "as your
father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of
freedom for all and the poor workers."

We can find numerous statements of this kind in their manuscripts and
published works - from a letter of Vanzetti to Virginia MacMechan, who was
one of those Boston "Brahmins", who helped to teach him English in prison.

This letter dates from 1923, right in the middle of the case:
"Oh friend, the anarchism is as beauty as a woman for me, perhaps even
more, since it include all the rest and me and her. Calm, serene, honest,
natural, vivid, muddy and celestial at once, austere, heroic, fearless,
fatal, generous and implacable-all these and more it is".

Sacco and Vanzetti, then, were two of the many thousands of Italian
anarchists in the United States.I'd like to   give you some general idea of
what the Italian anarchist movement was like, the movement to which these
two men dedicated their energies and ultimately their lives: its origins,
its ideas, its chief figures, its activities.

The first Italian anarchist groups in the United States appeared in the
1880s, at the same time as the beginnings of large-scale Italian
immigration into this country. Most of these immigrants were of the peasant
and working classes, and the anarchists came largely from these segments of
Italian society. The initial group was formed in 1885 in New York City,
which became a leading center of Italian anarchism in America. It was
called the Gruppo Anarchico - Rivoluzionario Carlo Cafiero, Cafiero being
one of the most famous of the anarchist leaders in Italy in the late
nineteenth century. Another group of the same name was formed two years
later in Chicago, the most important center of Italian anarchism in the
midwest. The first newspaper published by the Italian anarchists in the
United States appeared in 1888. It was called simply L'Anarchico, The
Anarchist, and was issued by the Cafiero group in New York.

>From New York and Chicago the movement began to spread as the immigrants
increased in number. At first, it was concentrated mainly in the large port
cities on the eastern seaboard, where the immigrants tended to settle when
they arrived. Consequently, by the early 1890s we find Italian anarchist
groups in such places as Boston and Philadelphia besides New York. From the
east, the movement gradually filtered westward, with small groups appearing
in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit. Finally, by the mid-1890s we have
groups as far west as the Pacific coast, the first Italian anarchist group
in San Francisco being founded in 1894.

Among the events which gave an impetus to the formation of these groups was
the Haymarket Affair of 1886 and 1887. It is often said in history books
that the explosion in Chicago's Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, which
caused the death of seven policemen and led to the hanging of four
anarchists and the suicide of a fifth in his cell, precipitated the
downfall of the anarchist movement in the United States, because the
authorities proceeded to crush the movement in Chicago and to suppress it
in New York and other cities around the country.

Precisely the opposite was the case. The Haymarket executions stimulated
the growth of the anarchist movement both among native Americans and
immigrants, and there was a rapid rise in the number of Italian anarchist
groups after 1887. November 11, 1887, marks a key date in the history of
anarchism in the United States and around the world. That was the date of
the hanging of the four anarchists , who were demonstrably innocent of any
connection with the bomb-throwing. The fact that these men were ready to
sacrifice their lives for their fellow workers was so moving to many young
people around the country, some of them newly arrived, that they began to
read anarchist literature and to join anarchist groups.

A second important event was the arrival from Italy of a series of
distinguished anarchist writers and speakers. Beginning in the 1890s,
virtually every famous Italian anarchist visited our shores. Some stayed
only three or four weeks, some several years, and a few, like Luigi
Galleani and Carlo Tresca, remained for much longer periods of time. I'd
like to tell you a little bit about them and about their impact on the
anarchist movement.

The first major figure to arrive here was Francesco Saverio Merlino, who
came to New York City in 1892, at a very early phase of the movement.
Merlino had not only a beautiful command of his native Italian, but he also
spoke English quite fluently, having lived in London for a number of years
before coming to the United States. This, by the way, was not always the
case with the leading Italian anarchists in America, to say nothing of the
rank and file, whose English often left much to be desired. But Merlino,
had this great advantage. As a result, he was not only able to found one of
the earliest Italian anarchist journals in this country, Il Grido degli
Oppressi (The Cry of the Oppressed), but he also founded an
English-language anarchist journal called Solidarity, which appealed to
native Americans as well as to Italians who were beginning to learn the
language of their adopted land. In addition to founding these papers,
Merlino conducted a speaking tour through the United States, remaining for
some months in Chicago. Hi s propaganda, both oral and written, gave
anarchism another strong impetus, and so it was unfortunate for the
movement that he should have returned to London in 1893.

But Merlino was only the first of a whole series of anarchist spokesmen.
The second, Pietro Gori, who arrived in New York in 1895, had an even
greater impact on the growth of the movement. Gori spent a whole year in
the United States. Like Merlino, he was trained in the law, as was Luigi
Galleani. (The rank and file, as I have noted, were virtually all working
people) These leaders, coming from middle-class and upper middle-class
families, were akin to the Russian Populists, those conscience-stricken
noblemen, Bakunin and Kropotkin among them, who felt that they had a debt
to the people and went to teach the people about revolution. Gori too was
from a prosperous family, a university graduate, a lawyer by profession,
who cast his lot among the working people. He was a magnetic speaker, a
poet and playwright, whose poems were often recited and plays often
performed at Italian anarchist gatherings in North and South America as
well as Europe.

During his stay in the United States Gori held between 200 and 400
meetings- estimates vary - the space of a single year. This meant that he
held a meeting almost every day. He would bring along his mandolin and
begin to sing songs, and this would attract a crowd who would stay to
listen to what he had to say about anarchism. In this way he won numerous
converts and started many new anarchist groups. He resembled a religious
evangelist, a wandering minstrel, going from town to town between Boston
and San Francisco, preaching the gospel of anarchism, which to some became
a kind of secular religion. Gori, unfortunately for the movement, fell ill
after his return to Europe, and died in 1911, at the age of 45, depriving
anarchism of one of its most capable and beloved apostles.

...One of the most impressive, yet least well known, of these speakers and
writers was Giuseppe Ciancabilla, who had been born in Rome. (Gori,
incidentally, hailed from Messina, Merlino from Naples, Galleani from the
Piedmont, and Tresca from the Abruzzi, and the rank and file similarly came
from all parts of Italy.) Ciancabilla arrived in America in 1898 and
settled in Paterson, New Jersey, a major stronghold of Italian anarchism in
the east. He became the editor of La Questione Sociale (The Social
Question), a paper which

Gori had helped to establish in 1895 and which was now one of the leading
organs of Italian anarchism in the United States. Ciancabilla eventually
moved westward, settling among the Italian miners of Spring Valley,
Illinois. After the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, the
anarchist groups were raided by the police, and Ciancabilla was driven from
pillar to post, arrested, manhandled, and evicted. All this happened long
before the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, but already the Italian anarchists were
victims of police persecution. Driven out of Spring Valley, driven in turn
out of Chicago, Ciancabilla wound up in San Francisco, where Pietro Gori
had lectured in 1895. He was editing a journal there called La Protesta
Umana when he suddenly took ill and died in 1904 at the age of 32, one of
the most intelligent and capable of the Italian anarchists in America. More
needs to be said about Ciancabilla, and I would hope that some graduate
student in the audience will take up this subject and produce a study of
the man and his influence in the movement.

Two of the most celebrated of the Italian anarchist leaders - and I put the
word "leaders" in quotes, because the anarchists recognized no leaders in
their movement but only guides and spokesmen -were Errico Malatesta and
Luigi Galleani. (A third was Carlo Tresca, about whom Professor Pernicone
will tell you this afternoon.) Malatesta, also from a middle-class family,
arrived here in 1899. But, again unfortunately for the movement, he
remained only a few months. He too took up the editorship of La Questione
Sociale, addressed numerous audiences throughout the east, and helped
increase the size of the movement. During one of his lectures, in West
Hoboken, New Jersey, the representative of a rival faction, or an
individual with some private grudge -the motives of this man, Domenico
Pazzaglia by name, remain unclear - pulled out a pistol and shot Malatesta
in the leg. Malatesta was not severely wounded, and he refused to press
charges against his assailant. I might add that the man who subdued
Pazzaglia and took away his gun was none other than Gaetano Bresci, the
anarchist from Paterson who went to Italy in 1900 to assassinate King
Umberto at Monza, and another figure who deserves further study. On leaving
America, Malatesta stopped briefly in Cuba before returning to London. A
few years later, he went back to his native country, only to be placed
under house arrest by Mussolini-but that is another story.

Finally, we come to Luigi Galleani, who was without doubt the most
important figure in the Italian anarchist movement in America, winning more
converts and inspiring greater devotion than any other single individual.
Galleani, as I have said, was born in the extreme north of Italy, near
Torino, and, like Merlino and Gori, was trained as a lawyer, although he
never practiced law, having transferred his talents and energies to the
anarchist cause. Soon after arriving in America, Galleani became involved
in a strike at Paterson, not the great strike of 1913 but an earlier one of
1902, in which he made eloquent and fiery speeches to the workers. Arrested
for inciting to riot, he managed to escape to Canada, and then, under an
assumed name, took refuge for several years in Barre, Vermont, another
Italian anarchist stronghold.

The Barre anarchist group, one of the earliest in New England, had been
established in 1894. Here we have a case where anarchists in Italy, the
Carrara stone and marble cutters, virtually transplanted their movement in
the United States, pursuing their same occupations and beliefs as in the
old country. It was among these dedicated men and women that Galleani
launched his celebrated Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), one of
the best anarchist journals in any language. Galleani edited his magazine
on a weekly basis, moving it from Barre to Lynn, Massachusetts, where it
continued to appear from 1912 until its suppression by the United States
government in 1918.

Galleani was an uncompromising internationalist, who opposed the First
World War with all the strength and eloquence at his command. He was, by
the way, a great speaker in addition to being a first-rate editor. I would
say that he ranks among the half-dozen leading orators of the anarchist
movement, along with Johann Most, Emma Goldman, and Sébastien Faure. A
moving speaker, he had a lilting voice with a tremolo that held his
audience captive. He spoke easily, powerfully, spontaneously, and his
bearing was of a kind that made his followers revere him as a kind of
patriarch of the movement. But after his paper was shut down by the
government, he himself was arrested on charges of obstructing the way
effort. "Contro la guerra, contro la pace, per la rivoluzione sociale", was
his slogan, "Against the war, against the peace, and for the social
revolution" He was deported to Italy in 1918. After Mussolini's accession
to power, he was banished to a remote island, where he died in 1931 in his
71 st year. I might add that it was to the Galleani wing of the movement
that both Sacco and Vanzetti belonged...

I have said that nearly all of the Italian anarchists in the United States
were working people. It might be useful to tell you a little bit about the
kinds of jobs that they had, before moving on to their radical ideas and
activities. In New York City they were well represented among the garment
and construction workers, and in Paterson among the workers in the great
silk factories. We find them among the quarry workers of Barre, the
shoemakers of Lynn, the construction and garment workers of Boston, and the
cigar workers of Philadelphia. Speaking of cigar workers, there was a whole
community of anarchist cigar workers, both Spanish and Italian, in Tampa,
Florida, dating back to the 1880s and 1890s. An indication of the type of
people they were is that while they were rolling cigars they had a reader
sitting on an elevated platform reading anarchist and socialist literature
to them, so that their minds would be developed along with their work
skills.

Going back north, Italian anarchists were very numerous among the miners of
southern Pennsylvania and southern Illinois; and in Cleveland, Chicago, and
Detroit they were heavily represented in a variety of trades, as they were
in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Ideologically, the Italian anarchists fell into four categories:
Anarchist-Communist, Anarcho-Synclicalist, Anarchist-Individualist, and
just plain anarchist, without the hyphen. These categories overlapped;
there were no hard- and-fast divisions between them. Vanzetti, for example,
considered himself an Anarchist-Communist, which meant that he not only
rejected the state but also rejected the private ownership of property in
favor of communal ownership. The Anarcho-Syndlicalists, among whom Carlo
Tresca was a powerful influence, placed their faith in the trade-union
movement, a movement which the Anarchist-Communists generally shunned
because they feared that a padrone, a boss, would emerge within the union
with special privileges and authority. They detected the kind of "iron law
of oligarchy" which a number of European sociologists, notably Robert
Michels, were evolving after the turn of the century. The third group were
individualist anarchists, who were suspicious of both the communal
arrangements of the Anarchist-Communists and the labor organizations of the
Anarcho-Syndi calists, and who relied instead on the actions of autonomous
individuals.

Some of the most interest ing, not to say exotic, Italian anarchist
periodicals were published by individualists, such as Nihil and Cogito,
Ergo Sion ("I think, therefore I am, " with emphasis always on the "I"),
both appearing in San Francisco early in the century, and Eresia (Heresy)
in New York some twenty years later. Their chief prophet was the
nineteenth-century German philos opher Max Stirner, whose book The Ego and
His Own served as their testament.

There was also a fourth group that I think deserves to be mentioned, if
only because it is so often neglected. This group consisted of anarchists
who refused to attach any prefix or suffix to their name, but who called
for anarchism pure and simple. They sometimes called themselves "anarchists
without adjectives' " not communist anarchists or syndicalist anarchists or
individualist anarchists; and the figure whom they most admired was
Malatesta, an out standing personality and thinker who, like Galleani, is
crying out for a student to come along and write his biography. (Professor
Pernicone, it might be mentioned, is completing a biography of that third
great Italian anarchist, Carlo Tresca.) In this very audience, one hopes,
someone is already burrowing away in the archives and doing the necessary
work.

I have said that many of the Italian anarchists, especially of the Galleani
school, tended to shun the trade unions. Because of this, the Italian
anarchists did not play a conspicuous role in the organized American labor
movement, differing in this respect from the Jewish anarchists, who were so
prominent in the textile unions, above all the International Ladies'
Garment Workers' Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Not
that the Italian anarchists were absent from these unions, but their role
was not a major one because of their suspicion of formal organizations that
might harden into hierarchical and authoritarian shape, with their own
officials, bureaucrats, and bosses. The Russian anarchists, by contrast,
organized a Union of Russian Workers in the United States and Canada which
boasted nearly 10,000 members. Avoiding this type of activity, the Italian
anarchists contented themselves with participation in strikes and
demonstrations. We have mentioned the Paterson strikes of 1902 and 1913, to
which we might add the Lawrence strike of 1912; and we know that Sacco and
Vanzetti both took part in strikes in Massachusetts, Sacco at Hopedale and
Vanzetti at Plymouth.

In forming groups, publishing newspapers, and agitating and striking for
better working conditions, the Italian anarchists were creating a kind of
alternative society which differed sharply from the capitalist and statist
society that they deplored. They had their own clubs, their own beliefs,
their own culture; they were building their own world in the midst of a
system which they opposed. Rather than wait for the millennium to arrive,
they tried to live the anarchist life on a day-to-day basis within the
interstices of American capitalism. They formed little enclaves, little
nuclei of freedom, which they hoped would spread and multiply and
eventually engulf the entire country and the entire world. After ten or
twelve hours in the factory or mine, they would come home, eat supper, then
go to their anarchist club and begin to churn out their pamphlets and
newspapers on makeshift printing presses.

Aldino Felicani is just one example of such an anarchist, and the amount of
literature in his possession that Norman di Giovanni described to us last
night was only a small fraction, large as it was, of the total output of
literature produced by these self-educated workingmen, a token of their
dedication and idealism. I would estimate, from my own research, that there
were in the neighborhood of 500 anarchist newspapers and journals published
in the United States between 1880 and 1940, in a dozen or so different
languages. Of these, the number of Italian papers-and this would include
the numeri unici, the single numbers issued for special
occasions-approached 90 or 100 titles, an astonishing figure when you
consider that they were produced by ordinary workers in their spare time,
mainly on Sunday and in the evening. And in addition to newspapers and
journals, a flood of books and pamphlets rolled off the presses, comprising
an enormous alternative literature, the literature of anarchism.

Beyond their publishing ventures, the Italian anarchists engaged in a whole
range of social activities. Life was hard for these working-class
immigrants, but there were many moments of happiness and laughter. They had
their orchestras and theater groups, their picnics and outings, their
lectures and entertainments. Hardly a week went by that there was not some
traditional social activity, but with a new radical twist. Leafing through
one of the old newspapers, I recently came across a picnic at the
restaurant of Mrs. Bresci, the widow of Gaetano Bresci. Mrs. Bresci was
holding a picnic in her restaurant in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. (The
police later drove her out of town, and she drifted westward with her two
daughters, who may still be alive in California.) Picnics were very
important occasions, not merely to dance and drink wine and have fun, all
of which was done, but also to collect money for the anarchist press in
order to turn out all those pamphlets and journals that I was talking
about. New York and New Jersey anarchists made excursions up the Hudson in
rented boats, and when they got up to Bear Mountain, or wherever they were
going, they would have a picnic, and out would come the food and the
mandolins, and then of course the collection.

Lectures were another frequent activity for the Italian anarchists, and
especially the lectures of Galleani, whom they prized above all other
speakers. The lectures were held in rented halls and in anarchist
clubhouses - of the Gruppo Autonomo of East Boston, for example, or of the
Gruppo Diritto all'Esistenza of Paterson or the Gruppo Gaetano Bresci of
East Harlem, or perhaps of a Circolo di Studi Sociali, a "circle of social
studies:' hundreds of which existed throughout the country. How do we know
about these groups? Look at any anarchist paper, and you will see them
listed, with the weekly or monthly contributions of their members, 25
cents, fifty cents, a dollar, and it all added up. In fact, it was these
very contributions that kept the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee going
though seven years of struggle on behalf of the two victims. That's why
there was some point to the voice raised in the front row yesterday.
Everybody was talking about Felicani -Felicani did this and Felicani did
that, and indeed he did do all those things and was a great, a wonderful
man, without whom there would have been no defense effort. But the activity
of the rank-and-file anarchists in all those mining towns of Pennsylvania,
and all the quarters and half-dollars that they sent in which made up the
defense fund, should not be forgotten.

The Italian anarchists also had their dramatical societies, a particularly
interesting aspect of the "counter-culture' I have been speaking about.
Amateur theater groups in the small towns and large cities put on hundreds
of plays, some of them by Pietro Gori, such as The First of May. Another
play that was frequently performed was called The Martyrs of Chicago and
dealt with the Haymarket Affair of the 1880s. There was a Pietro Gori
Dramatical Society in New York City that lasted until the 1960s and was
dissolved only because of the death and old age of its members.

Anarchist schools formed another part of this alternative culture, schools
named after the Spanish educator and martyr Francisco Ferrer, who was shot
in the trenches of Montjuich Fortress in October 1909. There were Italian
and non-Italian Ferrer Schools in the United States, called Modern Schools,
a name which suggests what they were aiming for a school to match the
modern, scientific age of the twentieth century, in contrast to the
parochial schools, which the anarchists saw as drenched with the spirit of
religious dogma and superstition, or the public schools, in which leaders
and generals and presidents were glorified. The Modern Schools were schools
in which the children were educated in an atmosphere of freedom and
spontaneity, in which they would learn about the working-class movement and
about revolutions, as well as how to think and live freely. There were at
least two Italian anarchist schools that I know about - I'm sure there were
more that I don't t know about-one of them in Paterson and the other in
Philadelphia. Both were Sunday and evening schools attended by adults and
children alike.

Finally, a word about celebrations, another example of how traditional
modes of life were transmuted into radical occasions and expressions.
Instead of celebrating Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving, the three great
holidays for the anarchists were the working-class day on May First, the
anniversary of the Paris Commune on March 18th, and the anniversary of the
Haymarket executions on November I I th. Every year, in every part of the
country, hundreds of meetings were held to commemorate these occasions. In
the same connection, one more point might be noted, namely baptisms. One
reads of Emma Goldman, for example, making a coast-to-coast lecture in 1899
and stopping in Spring Valley, Illinois, among the Italian and French
miners, who bring their babies to her so she can baptize them, not with the
names of saints, but with the names of great rebels or of Zola's novel
Germinal, which was so popular among the radicals of that period.

This, then, is a brief description of the Italian anarchist movement in the
United States. I would like, however, to repeat something that I said at
the beginning, that Sacco and Vanzetti were merely two rank-and-file
members of this extensive movement. They did everything that the others
did. They subscribed to the newspapers -one finds in the columns of La
Cronaca Sovversiva their 25-cent and 50-cent contributions. They attended
-religiously, one might almost say - the lectures of Luigi Galleani. They
passed out the announcements of these lectures and circulated the
literature of their movement, the pamphlets, the leaflets, the journals.
They attended the concerts and picnics; one need only read Upton Sinclair's
remarkable novel Boston, still a valuable source on Sacco and Vanzetti, to
see the importance of the "pic-a-nic,' as he spells it in his not entirely
successful attempt to convert Italian-American English into the printed
word. They also acted in the theater groups. Both Sacco and his wife Rosina
took part in anarchist plays, as did their friend Vanzetti. They agitated
during strikes, something I've already mentioned. They took part in
demonstrations. Vanzetti, when he was arrested, had in his pocket an
announcement of a protest meeting which he had drafted, and which, I was
happy to see, appears in the exhibition of materials on display upstairs
from the Felicani Collection. He also, in prison, wrote articles for the
anarchist press, some of which appeared in L'Adunata dei Refrattari, a
successor to La Cronaca Sovversiva, which ceased publication as recently as
1971 after fifty years of existence.

To the very end, then, Sacco and Vanzetti remained active anarchists,
continuing their work even in prison. Through their articles and letters,
through their speeches in court, they were carrying on their agitation,
propagating the ideas of their creed. To ignore the anarchist dimension is
to ignore the most cherished part of their lives. Let me conclude with a
quotation from Malatesta which goes far to explain their tireless
endeavors.

"The point" Malatesta wrote in A Conversation Between Two Workers, "is not
whether we accomplish anarchism today, tomorrow, even within ten centuries,
but that we walk towards anarchism today, tomorrow, and always."

http://www.saccovanzettiproject.org/
pages/context/avrich.htm