(Italian for Galleanists) were the followers or supporters of Luigi Galleani, an Italian immigrant to the United States who operated as an insurrectionary anarchist in the US. The vast majority of Galleanisti or Galleanists were similarly poor and working-class Italian immigrants or Italian Americans, especially anarchists and those involved in the labor movement. Galleanists remain the primary suspects in a campaign of bombings between 1914 and 1920 in the United States.
Galleani and his group promoted radical anarchism by speeches, newsletters, labor agitation, political protests, secret meetings, and, above all, direct action, often referred to as propaganda of the deed. Many used bombs and other violent means to promote their political position, practices that Galleani actively encouraged but in which he apparently did not participate, except for writing the bomb-making manual La Salute è in voi!.
Composition The Galleanisti were a group of Italian anarchists and radicals in the United States who followed Luigi Galleani and his message of "heroic" violence in the face of capitalist oppression. Galleani was a figurehead in the Italian anarchist movement who, following the violence of the 1913 Paterson silk strike, turned from promoting a general strike to promoting individual acts of violence against capitalist targets. He believed that the spectacle of terrorism would trigger popular revolt. For the part of his followers, Galleani prompted a symbolic war that continued after his deportation and the raid on the offices of his newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva.
The police used La Salute è in voi, Galleani's Italian-language bomb-making handbook, to profile accused anarchists. Historians later used the handbook as proof of Galleanist responsibility for crimes and detectives referenced it as evidence of Galleanist conspiracy. Its invocation represented power through threat of violence.
Galleani attracted numerous radical friends and/or followers into the Galleanisti, including Frank Abarno, Gabriella Segata Antolini, Pietro Angelo, Luigi Bacchetti, Mario Buda (also known as "Mike Boda"), Carmine Carbone, Andrea Ciofalo, Ferrucio Coacci, Emilio Coda, Alfredo Conti, Nestor Dondoglio (also known as "Jean Crones"), Roberto Elia, Luigi Falzini, Frank Mandese, Riccardo Orciani, Nicola Recchi, Giuseppe Sberna, Andrea Salsedo, Raffaele Schiavina, Carlo Valdinoci, and, most notably, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Carlo Buda, the brother of Galleanist bombmaker Mario Buda, said of him, "You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw."
Activities Galleanists were primary suspects in a campaign of bombings between 1914 and 1920. Instances included mail bombs to business and government officials and the 1920 Wall Street bombing, which killed 38 people. In effect, however, none of the Galleanisti bombs hit their targets: capitalists, police, or judges. Their casualties were themselves and bystanders. Their bombing methods borrowed from the Italian Black Hand extortion rackets, in which the attacker would write a threat of future violence and place bombs in doorways. These extortionists adapted fireworks, a popular Italian industry, with shrapnel or stolen dynamite from construction jobs. Anarchists, however, lacked the community experience with high explosives and thus overestimated their ability to create working bombs and underestimated their own risk.
Bresci Circle New York City Galleanisti formed the Bresci Circle in honor of Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist assassin of Umberto I of Italy. By 1914, almost 600 members met regularly at a rundown house in East Harlem. A plot to bomb the Rockefellers increased police interest in the group.
Several months after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre that had incensed Galleanisti, a group of anarchists carried a bomb to the Tarrytown estate of the Ludlow coal mine owner, John D. Rockefeller, in July 1914. They miscalculated, both in failing to trigger the device and since Rockefeller was then out of town. A member of the Circle was arrested and the bomb, which they carried to an East Harlem tenement near the Circle's headquarters, exploded, demolishing half of the building and killing three anarchists.
While no group took responsibility for four additional bombings in 1914, the police continued to suspect the Bresci Circle. In October 1914, bombs exploded at St. Patrick's Cathedral and the priest's house at St. Alphonsus Church. There were also attacks on the Bronx County Courthouse and the Tombs, a Manhattan jail. The newly inaugurated New York City bomb squad sent undercover detectives to infiltrate the group. The plant coordinated a trap for an attempted bombing at St. Patrick's in March 1915 that involved fifty disguised officers and caught Frank Abarno and Carmine Carbone. The anarchists and police differ in their accounts of initial meetings, including Abarno and Carbone accusing the police of entrapment, since the undercover agent supplied the bomb materials and laboratory. Their trial revolved around La Salute è in voi and the defendants' right to read any books of any kind, including bomb-making handbooks. They ultimately received sentences for six to twelve years. The case rekindled fear of easily accessible bomb-making instructions and sensationalism around anarchism.
1916 One Chicago-based Galleanist, chef Nestor Dondoglio, known by the alias Jean Crones, laced soup with arsenic in an attempt to poison some 100 guests, all figures in industry, business, finance, or law, at a banquet in 1916 to honor Archbishop Mundelein. J.B. Murphy, a doctor among the guests, furnished a hastily prepared emetic that induced vomiting. None of the guests died, though many suffered greatly. Police discovered many vials of poison when they searched Dondoglio's rooms, but never apprehended him. Dondoglio left a series of taunts for the police, then fled to the East Coast. He survived in abject poverty, hidden in the homes of other Galleanists, until his death in 1932.
On December 6, 1916, the Galleanist Alfonso Fagotti was arrested for stabbing a policeman during a riot in Boston's North Square. On December 17, Galleanists exploded a bomb at the Salutation Street station of the Boston harbor police. Fagotti was convicted, imprisoned, and later deported to Italy.
Some historians have also suspected the Galleanists of perpetrating the Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco on July 22, 1916. No known Galleanists were among those indicted for the attack, but the time bomb's design and construction – a cast steel pipe packed with explosives, a timing mechanism, and metal slugs designed to act as shrapnel and increase casualties – was typical of later Galleanist bombing campaigns, the work of Mario Buda in particular. Additionally, in an ominous apparent reference to the earlier mass poisoning by the Galleanist Nestor Dondoglio, San Francisco police recovered two unsigned letters urging the head waiter at the St. Francis Hotel to poison soup served to Police Commissioner James Woods, one of the organizers of the Preparedness Day march.
Mexico About 60 Galleanisti left for Mexico following the April 1917 American entry into World War I and Galleani's advice to avoid draft registration. Their motives for emigrating varied from draft evasion to fighting the then-ongoing Mexican Revolution to preparing for an expected revolutionary moment in Italy. Morale quickly waned as they created new identities but struggled to find work, communicate through language barriers, contribute to the Mexican Revolution, and accept that the Italian revolution would not be forthcoming. Growing increasingly disillusioned, the group split by August, with most traveling north for work and some traveling south for Latin America.
1917–1918 Mario Buda is thought to have constructedDell'Arte, Giorgio, La Storia di Mario Buda, Io Donna 26 January 2002, http://www.memoteca.it/upload/dl/E-Book/Mario_Buda.pdf Watson, Bruce, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind, Viking Press (2007), , , p. 15 the large black powder bombBalousek, Marv, and Kirsch, J. Allen, 50 Wisconsin Crimes of the Century, Badger Books Inc. (1997), , , p. 113 with an acid "delay" detonatorBalousek, Marv, and Kirsch, J. Allen, 50 Wisconsin Crimes of the Century, Badger Books Inc. (1997), , , p. 113: The bomb's homemade "fuse" used sulfuric acid dripping from a glass vial onto a metal plate to ignite its black powder charge, a touchy mechanism at best. that exploded on November 24, 1917, at a Milwaukee police station. Patrolmen had taken it there after its discovery in a church basement.Memorial Page: The Most Tragic Day in Law Enforcement History The Indianapolis Star, "Bomb Mystery Baffles Police", November 26, 1917 The blast killed nine policemen and a female civilian, one of the worst incidents of terrorist violence in the United States up to that time. The bomb appeared to have been directed at Reverend August Giuliana, who had recently led a street revival meeting opposed by local anarchists.
In late 1917 and early 1918, bombings occurred in New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Milwaukee that were later attributed to Galleanists, but no criminal prosecutions followed. In February 1918, U.S. authorities raided the offices of Cronaca Sovversiva, suppressed publication, and arrested its editors. Although a staff member hid the subscription list, officials gained more than 3,000 names and addresses of subscribers from an issue already prepared for mailing.
On January 17, 1918, a 19-year-old Galleanist, Gabriella Segata Antolini, was arrested for transporting a satchel filled with dynamite, which she had received from Carlo Valdinoci.McCormick, Charles H., Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers, University Press of America (2005), , When questioned, Antolini gave a false name and refused to cooperate with the police; she was imprisoned for fourteen months before being released. While in prison, Antolini met the noted anarchist Emma Goldman, with whom she became friends.
On December 30, 1918, the Philadelphia homes of the President of the Chamber of Commerce, the Acting Superintendent of Police, William B. Mills, and Judge Robert von Moschzisker were heavily damaged by explosive bombs filled with metal slugs, an act later attributed to the Galleanist group. A woman standing across the street from Superintendent Mills' home was struck above the eye by a metal slug. At each site leaflets were scattered denouncing "the priests, the exploiters, the judges and police, and the soldiers" whose time was coming to an end.In response to the violence and social unrest, in October 1918, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1918, also known as the Anarchist Exclusion Act, a law that expanded the list of activities that defined someone as an anarchist and justified deportation. In turn, Galleani and his followers distributed a flyer in February 1919 that said: "Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores. The storm is within and very soon will leap and crash and annihilate you in blood and fire... We will dynamite you!" A series of bombings of prominent businessmen and officials followed, including a bomb at the home of Judge von Moschzisker, who in 1908 had sentenced four Italian anarchists to long prison terms.
1919