(Italian for Galleanists) are followers or supporters of the insurrectionary anarchist Luigi Galleani, who operated most notably in the United States following his immigration to the country. The vast majority of Galleanisti or Galleanists were similarly poor and working class Italian immigrants or Italian Americans, and especially Italian anarchists and Italian immigrants or Italian-Americans involved in the labor movement of the time. 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 his newspaper.
The police used La Salute è in voi, Galleani's Italian-language bomb-making handbook, to profile anarchist attackers. Historians later used the handbook as proof of Galleanist responsibility for crimes and detectives referenced it as evidence of Galleanist conspiracy. Its invocation represented a 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.
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 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, the type of capitalist violence that 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 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.