LUIGI GALLEANI
SEE ALSO MY OTHER BLOG
http://cronacasouversivafeneon.blogspot.com
THE 1886 CHICAGO HAYMARKET RIOT,BOMBING, TRIAL AND EXECUTIONS, LIKE THE LATER TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF SACCO AND VANZETTI (1920-27) HAD IMMENSE INTERNATIONAL REPERCUSSIONS
The events ignited the lifelong radicalism of immigrants in the USA, most prominently known today the young worker Emma Goldman, and that of a future immigrant, Luigi Galleani, founder of La Cronaca Sovverisiva described by Federal Agents during the "Red Scares" of 1917 and 1919 as the most dangerous journal ever published in the United States--and which it probably remains as to this day:
Under threat of prosecution, he took refuge in France, from which he was expelled for taking part in a May Day demonstration. Moving to Switzerland, he visited the exiled French anarchist and geographer Elisée Reclus, whom he assisted in the preparation of his Nouvelle Géographie universelle, compiling statistics on Central America. He also assisted students at the University of Geneva in arranging a celebration in honor of the Haymarket Martyrs, who had been hanged in Chicago in 1887, for which he was expelled as a dangerous agitator. Returning to Italy, Gaileani continued his agitation, which got him into trouble with the police. Arrested on charges of conspiracy, he spent more than five years in prison and exile before escaping from the island of Pantelleria, off the coast of Sicily, in 1900.
(more below)
Note: Elisee Reclus is one of the greatest geographers of the 19th Century and one of the Founders of Social Geography still very much in use today. Reclus was forced into exile as a surviving member of the Paris Commune of 1871.
see also this blog link
http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com/2008/12/anarkeyology-of-social-geography-elisee.html
EXECUTION OF THOSE CHARGED, FOUND "GUILTY" AND SENTENCED TO DEATH FOR HAYMARKET RIOT
GALLEANI'S PIECE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN CRONACA SOVVERSIVA 3 MAY 1913
PIETRO GORI'S "IL MARTIRIO CHICAGO" ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN "IL PENSIERO" 16 NOVEMBER 1910
The Direct Role of the Haymarket Events in the Life of Luigi Galleani
Gaileani was born on August 12, 1861, in the Piedmont town of Vercelli, not far from the city of Turin. The son of middle-class parents, he was drawn to anarchism in his late teens and, studying law at the University of Turin, became an outspoken militant whose hatred of capitalism and government would burn with undiminished intensity for the rest of his life. Gaileani, however, refused to practice law, which he had come to regard with contempt, transferring his talents and energies to radical propaganda.
Under threat of prosecution, he took refuge in France, from which he was expelled for taking part in a May Day demonstration. Moving to Switzerland, he visited the exiled French anarchist and geographer Elisée Reclus, whom he assisted in the preparation of his Nouvelle Géographie universelle, compiling statistics on Central America. He also assisted students at the University of Geneva in arranging a celebration in honor of the Haymarket Martyrs, who had been hanged in Chicago in 1887, for which he was expelled as a dangerous agitator. Returning to Italy, Gaileani continued his agitation, which got him into trouble with the police. Arrested on charges of conspiracy, he spent more than five years in prison and exile before escaping from the island of Pantelleria, off the coast of Sicily, in 1900.
Galleani, now in his fortieth year, began an odyssey that landed him in North America. Aided by Elisée Reclus and other comrades, he first made his way to Egypt, where he lived for the better part of a year among a colony of Italian expatriates. Threatened with extradition, he moved on to London, from which he soon embarked for the United States, arriving in October 1901, barely a month after the assassination of President McKinley. Settling in Paterson, New Jersey, a stronghold of the immigrant anarchist movement, Galleani assumed the editorship of La Questione Socialelhe Social Question, then the leading Italian anarchist periodical in America. Scarcely had he installed himself in this position when a strike erupted among the Paterson silk workers, and Galleani, braving the anti-radical hysteria which followed the shooting of McKinley, threw all his energies into their cause. In eloquent and fiery speeches he called on the workers to launch a general strike and thereby free themselves from capitalist oppression. Paul Ghio, a visitor from France, was present at one such oration. "1 have never heard an orator more powerful than Luigi Galleani," he afterwards wrote. "He has a marvelous facility with words, accompanied by the faculty—rare among popular tribunes — of precision and clarity of ideas. His voice is full of warmth, his glance alive and penetrating, his gestures of exceptional vigor and flawless distinction."
[[Paterson N.J. was an important city for Italian Anarchists as it was there that Gaetano Bresci --Born in Tuscany in 1869, killed May 22, 1901 by prison guards who claimed it a "suicide--was working & living in when mass protests over high bread prices all over Italy led to the massacre of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Milan by the canons of General Bava Beccaris. To honor this brutal "return to order,' King Umberto I decorated the butcher-General. Determined to kill the king. Bresci went to Italy & in Monza, where the King was visiting, put three bullets into him on July 29, 1900]]
The strike occurred in June 1902. Clashes took place between the workers and the police, shots were fired, and Galleani was wounded in the face. Indicted for inciting to riot, he managed to escape to Canada. A short time after, having recovered from his wounds, he secretly recrossed the border and took refuge in Barre, Vermont, living under an assumed name among his anarchist comrades who regarded him with intense devotion. It was in Barre, on June 6,1903, that Galleani launched La Cronaca Sovversiva, the mouthpiece for his incendiary doctrines and one of the most important and ably edited periodicals in the history of the anarchist movement, its influence, reaching far beyond the confines of the United States, could be felt wherever Italian radicals congregated, from Europe and North Africa to South America and Australia. In 1906, however, during a polemical exchange with G.M. Seratti, the socialist editor of Il Proletario in New York, the latter revealed Gaileani’s whereabouts (a charge also levelled at the English writer H.G. Wells), and Galleani was taken into custody. Extradited to New Jersey, he was tried in Paterson in April 1907 for his role in the 1902 strike. The trial, however, ended in a hung jury (seven for conviction, five for acquittal), and Galleani was set free.
Galleani returned to Barre and resumed his propaganda activities. Now in his late forties, he had reached the summit of his intellectual powers. Over the next forty years his fiery oratory and brilliant pen carried him to a position of undisputed leadership within the Italian-American anarchist movement. An eloquent speaker, Galleani had a resonant, tilting voice with a tremolo that kept his audience spellbound. He spoke easily, powerfully, spontaneously, and his bearing was of a kind that made his followers, Sacco and Vanzetti among them, revere him as a kind of patriarch of the movement, to which he won more converts than any other single individual. Galleani was also a prolific writer, pouring forth hundreds of articles, essays, and pamphlets that reached tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of readers on several continents. Yet he never produced a full-length book : the volumes appearing over his signature, such as Faccia a Faccia coi Nemico, Aneliti e Singulti, and Figure e Figuri, are collections of shorter pieces previously published in La Cronaca Sovversiva. In this respect he resembles Johann Most, Errico Malatesta, and Benjamin Tucker (author of Instead of a Book : By a Man Too Busy to Write One), rather than, say, William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, or Peter Kropotkin
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