Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!
The Anarchist Fighters.
The same evening a watchman was killed in New York when a bomb exploded on the steps of the town house of Judge Charles Nott. Our Lady of Victory Church in Philadelphia was bombed, and in Pittsburgh there were blasts at the homes of United States District Judge W. H. Thompson, who had once presided over a prosecution of Carlo Tresca, and Chief Inspector W. W. Sibray of the Bureau of Immigration.
In Boston Judge Hayden, who had dealt severely with the arrested May Day paraders, had his house almost demolished by a bomb made of iron pipe stuffed with shrapnel and dynamite. In suburban Newtonville, a similar bomb blew off the side of the house belonging to Representative Leland Powers, who had sponsored an anti-anarchy bill in the state legislature. Copies of PLAIN WORDS were found in the vicinity of both explosions.
Except for the watchman and the obliterated carrier, no one was injured in any of the bombings, but the effect over the country was one of dismay at the recurring challenge and indignation against the alien radicals held responsible. The New York Times might consider the bombings of “Bolshevik or I.W.W. origin,” but the public generally believed them the work of anarchists. Ever since Chicago’s Haymarket Massacre of 1886, when six policemen were killed by a bomb thrown at an anarchist meeting, Americans had been haunted by the image of the terrorist alien. President McKinley’s assassination by the half-mad half-anarchist Leo Czolgosz hardened the image. Such acts were in the tradition of the propaganda of the deed, as proclaimed by anarchist patriarchs like Malatesta and furthered gleefully by disciples like Johann Most in his Science of Revolutionary Warfare—A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poison, Etc., Etc.
But for their rare spectacular gestures of political violence, the anarchists would doubtless have been left to wither in the obscurity of their cult. The nobly absurd anarchic conception of a governmentless future when, in Vanzetti’s words, man would no longer be wolf to the man, was held in America by only a miniscule group—mostly immigrants from the more backward countries to whom it seemed quite feasible that workers could run factories cooperatively. Because by his philosophy of freedom each anarchist made his own basic decisions, there was no way of separating the theorist from the activist. Sacco and Vanzetti were said to be quietistic anarchists—as opposed to the activist bombers of June 2—yet the dividing line was as difficult to establish in 1919 as it was two generations before with the abolitionists, whose ranks could include John Greenleaf Whittier and John Brown.
“Property is theft,” Proudhon had said, and some anarchists accepted this literally, asserting, in Galleani’s words, “the right to expropriate the bourgeoisie—which lives by theft—whenever the need presses or the struggle against the evil social order demands it.” During the 1880s in Paris, one such anarchist expropriator, Clement Duval, was convicted of robbery and sent to Devil’s Island. His successor, François Ravachol, became one of the saints of anarchism through his bombings of the houses of judges. In the course of various robberies Ravachol committed several brutal murders.[3]
Galleani spoke well of both Duval and Ravachol, and when Duval escaped from Devil’s Island and reached the United States, published his prison memoirs and a biographical sketch in Cronaca Sovversiva. In 1917 this material appeared in book form, edited by Andrea Salsedo, a forty-year-old Sicilian who had helped Galleani with his newspaper.
The bombing of his house may well have caused Attorney General Palmer to believe that “resident aliens in large numbers and of a desperate type” were conspiring to overthrow the government by means of a “physical force revolution.” Certainly from then on Red plots became his phobia. Appointing William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret Service, Director of the Bureau of Investigation, Palmer ordered him to conduct “a dragnet for Reds all over the country.”