Paterson, New Jersey, Anarchism

PATERSON, NEW JERSEY, ANARCHISM. On 15 July 1895, an Italian-language anarchist newspaper, La Questione Sociale, was launched in Paterson, New Jersey. Sponsored by an affinity group called the Right to Existence, it found its readers and constituents largely among skilled silk weavers and dyers brought to the Paterson mills as cheap labor. While anarchists (many of German and French-Canadian origin) were active in the “Silk City” before 1895—in particular in the strike of 1894—it was the Italian group whose activities inaugurated the period of greatest anarchist influence in Paterson.

The influence of Errico Malatesta, the distinguished protégé of Mikhail Bakunin, was decisive in the formation of the paper. He had previously founded two other papers of the same name, in Florence (1883–1884) and Buenos Aires (1885).

In 1895, exiled by governmental responses to the attentats of individualist anarchists (like Sante Caserio’s assassination of French president Carnot), a small group of anarchist émigrés met in London, among them Malatesta and his friend Pietro Gori—a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer, playwright, poet, and orator who had achieved distinction in the legal defense of anarchists in Italy.

At this time, Francesco Saverio Merlino, editor of Il Grido degli Oppressi, published from Bleecker Street, Manhattan, invited Gori to New York on a speaking tour. Malatesta urged him to accept. Once there, Merlino, Gori, and Pedro Esteve—the Catalan anarchist printer, intellectual, and friend of Malatesta from the days of the Barcelona uprising of 1892—resolved to launch the Paterson paper. Esteve, who combined editorial skill with technical ability, provided important supportive links to other ethnic communities, like the Yiddish—through Emma Goldman.

Gori’s speaking tour to Italian communities ranging from Barre, Vermont, to San Francisco, and the articles he contributed to the new journal as editor in chief, along with the managing editorship of Esteve, put La Questione Sociale on a sound basis with a circulation of about three thousand by 1896. Max Nettlau, writing in 1924, ranked it, along with L’Anarchie of Paris and Freedom of London, as among the seventeen most influential anarchist newspapers in the world by 1900.

The Right to Existence group in Paterson was composed of approximately a hundred anarchists, who were predominantly of the Bakuninist-Malatesta “communal anarchist” tradition. Rejecting the authoritarianism of government and the state, they nevertheless accepted the possibility of communal organization on a voluntary, consensual basis if organized “from the ground up.” They were called the “organizzatori” as opposed to anarchists of the extreme “Max Stirner” type who were termed “antiorganizzatori.”

As organizzatori, they worked actively to foster a class-conscious worker’s union movement in Paterson whose aims would ultimately be revolutionary. One of their leaders was Antonio Guabello, who led a successful strike of the Industrial Workers of the World against the Victoria Silk Mill in 1905. Ernestina Cravella, a bilingual worker in the Paragon Mill, served as their spokesperson to the English-speaking press. A multilingual Tyrolean, Francis Widmar, served as the group’s business manager and fundraiser.

In contrast to the situation with local socialist organizations, women like Cravella played an active role in the leadership of the group. Esteve’s companion, Maria Roda, for example, a friend of Emma Goldman and a feminist, was effective in fostering propaganda groups among millworkers—many of whom were women—as early as 1897. She linked these efforts with those of Louise Reville in Paris (1900), who formed an international group around the periodical Feminist Action.

The group’s educational efforts included public meetings featuring such speakers as John Turner of Britain, Johann Most, Emma Goldman, and Peter Kropotkin himself (17 November 1897). Writers like Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus contributed articles. The group founded a press that published Italian-language editions of anarchist classics—along with original work by Malatesta and other distinguished Italians.

All of this was thrown into turmoil by the events that occurred after Gori’s resignation due to illness in 1896. The successor chosen in 1898 to succeed him as editor in chief was Guiseppe Ciancabilla, a twenty-eight-year-old writer of brilliance who had personally been recruited to anarchism by Malatesta in Ancona, Italy. But Malatesta—by 1898 imprisoned on the island of Lampedusa—and the group did not realize that Ciancabilla, while in Parisian exile, had gravitated to an extreme individualist position—assuming the nom de plume of “Atomo.”

As editor, he found himself diametrically opposed to the group and to the dismayed Esteve. An ideological war filled the pages of La Questione Sociale through the summer of 1899. Control was dramatically recaptured by the group, however, when Malatesta effected a daring escape from Lampedusa on 9 May 1899 and appeared in Paterson to confront Ciancabilla personally. Ousted from the editorship, Ciancabilla moved his office to West Hoboken (now Union City), where he gathered his supporters and started to publish L’Aurora, an individualist paper. One of these supporters was Gaetano Bresci, weaver in Paterson, but resident in West Hoboken. Bresci was to travel back to Italy in 1900 where, on 29 July, he would assassinate King Umberto.

By that time, Malatesta had returned to Europe, having placed the paper in the hands of Esteve. When the storm of reprisals broke on anarchists everywhere in the aftermath, the Right to Existence group, as the most articulate, visible, and well-established organization in the region, bore the brunt of hostile Establishment action. Ciancabilla moved west, where he died as the editor of the individualist newspaper La Protesta Humana, on 11 September 1904, at age thirty-three.

Weathering the storm, the group resolved to emphasize American workers’ issues, giving less coverage to events in Europe. A disastrous winter in 1901–1902, in which fire and flood contributed to destitution in the millworkers’ neighborhoods, led to mill closings and layoffs at the very time that living conditions became most desperate. The silk-dyers’ strike of 1902 was the result, with the group deeply involved with the Italian workers.

Meanwhile Luigi Galleani had been recruited as editor in chief of La Questione Sociale. A Genoese lawyer, forty-one, recently escaped from the penal island of Pantelleria, he spoke French and Italian with equal fluency. And the strike committee had to organize itself by language: Italian, German, Dutch, French, and English being widely spoken by the strikers. Anarchists were strongest among the Italian- and German-speaking groups.

As the strike dragged on from April to July of 1902, the moderate leadership of Paul Breen and James McGrath of the American Federation of Labor failed to cope effectively with management’s strategy of subcontracting dyeing operations to non-striking mills in Pennsylvania. The Paterson weavers failed to join the strike. These factors proved fatal. The dyers were ready to grasp at straws by mid-June.

It was at this point that Galleani combined forces with two anarchist colleagues who came upon the strike-ridden Paterson scene: Rudolph Grossman, an Austrian, and William McQueen, a Scotch disciple of William Morris. The three—covering the languages spoken by the strikers—addressed a meeting of eight thousand on 17 June. The subject: an exhortation to promote a general strike.

The speeches were fiery—especially Galleani’s—and the frustrated and anguished strikers burst out of the meeting, violently damaging mill property. People were injured by pistol and shotgun fire—including Galleani. Martial law was declared in the city from 21 June to 2 July. The strike was smashed, the union fragmented. First Galleani, then Grossman fled to avoid prosecution. McQueen remained to face charges of inciting to riot. Convicted, he languished in prison until 1907 when, pardoned over Theodore Roosevelt’s objections, he returned to England, health shattered, to die in 1909.

It took Esteve three years to restore the paper to solvency after the 1902 fiasco. Finally, it went under for the last time in March 1908—a victim of the anti-”red” campaign of that year. President Roosevelt and reform Republican mayor McBride cooperated to remove the paper’s mailing privileges—under obscenity statutes!

The high-water mark of anarchism in the city had passed. By the time of the Great Silk Strike of 1913—the apogee of the Industrial Workers of the World—the socialist movement was in the ascendancy, and had absorbed many of the erstwhile members of the Right to Existence group.

Carey, George W. “The Vessel, the Deed and the Idea: Anarchists in Paterson, 1895–1908.” Antipode 10–11 (1979).

The Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. PBS American Experience. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goldman-paterson-silk-strike-1913/