LUIGI GALLEANI, WROTE PAUL AVRICH in 1990, “has fallen into oblivion. Today he is virtually unknown in the United States outside a small circle of scholars and a number of personal associates and disciples, whose ranks are rapidly dwindling. No biography in English has been devoted to him, nor is he so much as mentioned in most general histories of anarchism or in the comprehensive survey of American anarchism by William Reichert.”
Yet, in his time, Galleani was the anarchist whose influence both A. Mitchell Palmer and William J. Flynn feared above that of all others. He had established such a track record of terrorism before arriving in the United States that the nations in which he settled seemed to feel more comfortable deporting him than imprisoning him. Behind bars, after all, he was an incentive for his fellow anarchists to attempt to free him, or, if that did not work, to seek reprisal through acts of violence. Deportation meant he was somebody else’s problem.
For organizing a demonstration of students in Switzerland in 1887, Galleani was dispatched to France, which later forwarded him home again to Italy, which seemed stuck with him. The Italian courts found him guilty of conspiracy and sentenced him to five years in prison. But he escaped and fled to London. It was from there that he booked passage to the United States, arriving as a forty-year-old in 1901.
He wasted no time in trying to advance his cause. When silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, went on strike, Galleani set out immediately for the factory town to speak on their behalf. By all accounts, he was fiery, eloquent, dramatic; the crowd that had gathered to hear him grew in both size and intensity as he raised his animus against capitalism to a crescendo. It was at this point, with the Paterson police believing that the mob was threatening to storm the factory and wreak vengeance against those who had continued to work inside, that they opened fire on the insurgents. One of the bullets struck Galleani in the face, but he survived with no more permanent damage than slight scarring. Arrested for inciting the riot, he managed yet another escape, this time fleeing to Canada, his life on the run continuing, but the pace picking up now as law enforcers in packs closed in.
Eventually he sneaked back into the United States and, taking up residence in the quarrying community of Barre, Vermont, became the editor of the largest Italian-language anarchist newspaper in the country, Cronaca Sovversia (Subversive Chronicle). The Great War was raging at the time and America had finally become a combatant; aliens were not eligible to serve but nonetheless had to register. Galleani was livid, and historian Paul Avrich paraphrases the article that Galleani wrote about it for his paper. “Once you register, the authorities will have you on their rolls; they will know where to find you should they want you. Compulsory registration, he argued, violated the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits ‘involuntary servitude.’ You need not collaborate with the warmongers, he declared. If you refuse to register in the thousands, the authorities will be hard put to arrest you.”
Before authorities shut down Cronaca Sovversia in 1918, fifteen years after its first issue, Galleani had published even more incendiary material, including several ads for a booklet that contained instructions for making nitroglycerine.
But it was as an orator, not a publisher, that he made his greatest mark. “You heard Galleani speak,” said Carlo Buda, an anarchist who had done so, “and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw!” And from another: “I have never heard an orator more powerful than Luigi Galleani. … His voice is full of warmth, his glance alive and penetrating, his gestures of exceptional vigor and flawless distinction.”
The spoken word mattered to radicals like these men. “Attending lectures was another popular activity among the Italian anarchists,” Avrich tells us, “and especially the lectures of Galleani, whom they prized above all other speakers.”
In September 1919, Galleani came out of hiding briefly to demonstrate his vocal gifts to fellow subversives in Taunton, Massachusetts. So inspired were they by his words that four of them immediately began work on a bomb, which they planned to drive to the American Woolen Company’s mill in the nearby town of Franklin. Workers there were striking, and the Galleanisti, as they were known, wanted to show their support. They did, in a manner of speaking, but not according to plan. The bomb exploded, all right, but in transit, not in the mill. All four anarchists were killed. Their support was noted and the strike kept on.
Police tracked Galleani from Taunton and this time caught him. But rather that having him stand trial on any of numerous charges that merited a hearing, U.S. officials inexplicably joined in the game of “hot potato” that Europeans had been playing with him. Galleani and eight of his cohorts were expelled from the United States and returned to Italy, where he served fourteen months in prison for sedition. Never again did he depart from his homeland.
His followers in the United States, however, did not need his presence to remain fervid about his principles. In Italy, after being released from prison, he continued his seditious activity, continued to write, urging on the working man, making his case for violence, his language becoming no less fiery with age or distance. His pamphlets and copies of his speeches were smuggled into America by the anarchists who continued to pass through the gates of Ellis Island, and the words were as often as possible converted into propaganda of the deed—the letter bombs, for example, that were mailed to prominent American citizens in 1919, the impetus for the first of the Palmer raids.
Also, with time, American authorities came to believe that the attack on Wall Street on September 16, 1920, the attack that killed more than forty Americans and wounded at least 140 others, was also the work of the Galleanisti. In fact, they were certain that one man was responsible for both making the bomb and positioning the wagon in front of the Morgan Bank, and although they could not prove it, they were no less certain of the man’s identity.
Other than that he was Carlo Buda’s brother, little is known of Mario Buda. He subscribed to Cronaca Sovversia, often made donations to it, admired Galleani as if he were a messiah. Whenever he could, he attended Galleani’s lectures, arriving mesmerized, departing with a vow to take action. A short, compact man, by mid-adulthood his hairline had receded from the tip of his forehead to the crown of his head. His cheeks were lined, slightly sunken; and a mustache spread a short distance across his upper lip. It is a description that fits many, although not all, of the eyewitness accounts of the man who fled from the wagon minutes before it erupted in flame.
Prior to that, the BOI had been keeping a close eye on Buda. Apparently, though, not close enough. Some investigators believed that he played a role of some sort in the South Braintree robbery for which Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and later both sanctified and executed. Others went so far as to suspect that Buda, Sacco, and Vanzetti were the leaders of the 1919 bombing wave.
Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted for the payroll robbery on September 11, 1920, and, according to the scenarios linking the three men, Buda, fearing that he might soon be joining his friends behind bars, went into hiding. But he was not seeking shelter so much as a private place to plot his revenge. He could not allow his two friends to be incarcerated or, should it come to that, executed without a sign of protest. “After selecting a target,” writes Susan Gage, “he made his way to New York, where he assembled the horse, wagon, and bomb materials. After depositing his load on Wall Street the morning of September sixteenth, he left for Providence, acquired a passport, and fled to Naples,” where he would live more than four decades longer than those he was alleged to have murdered. Like Galleani, with whom he surely visited from time to time, he never returned to American shores.
Avrich admits that Buda’s identity has not been proven and, at this late stage, never will be. Strangely, incomprehensibly, his name is not recorded anywhere in the Bureau of Investigation’s files on the bombing. But, says Avrich, Buda must be considered the leading suspect. The Wall Street bombing “fits what we know of him and his movements. I have it, moreover, from a reliable source and believe it to be true.”
Gage identifies that source as Charles Poggi, a New York waiter and earlier Italian immigrant. Although apparently not a Galleanisti himself, Poggi knew many of them, considered some of them paisani, and once told Avrich that Buda’s nephew openly bragged about “my uncle’s bomb.” At this stage, it seems more reasonable to accept Avrich’s conclusion than to reject it. There are no holes in his story, and no alternative conclusions that seem nearly as convincing.
MISSING FROM A PROMINENT ROLE in the investigation, which went on for twenty years, was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. By the end of 1920, with the job continuing to wear on him, he still had not fully regained his health, and his reputation was in decline because of his raids and the subsequent harassment of innocents simply because of their foreign birth. His title notwithstanding, he was gradually being forced to the outside of American law enforcement’s elite. He had also been left outside the field of potential Republican presidential nominees, with few besides himself taking his candidacy seriously. Soon, the Harding administration would be voted into office, and Palmer would be replaced as attorney general by Harry M. Daugherty.
As for the BOI, behind-the-scenes control was rapidly passing to Palmer’s young lieutenant, J. Edgar Hoover, who was just as likely as his nominal boss to harass innocents, but was much more sly and even destructive in his methods. Hoover would wield his control over the agency that replaced the BOI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for half a century, always serving the cause of law and order, but not always paying attention to justice.
The same, of course, could be said of Palmer and his methods of reacting to immigrants in 1920. He had always believed that foreigners were behind the Wall Street bombing, and as time went on he narrowed the field to anarchists and then to Italian anarchists. Although his scorch-the-earth methods cannot be condoned, it seems that—after so much time has passed, and with the case file still open somewhere on a dusty shelf at FBI headquarters—his conclusion was the right one after all. However irresponsible his behavior, however passionate his prejudices, A. Mitchell Palmer was one of the few people who knew the truth about the most ominous event in this year that so few people understood at the time and even fewer seem to understand now.