Galleani, Luigi

GALLEANI, LUIGI (1861–1931). The dominant figure of the Italian antiorganizational anarchist movement in the United States, Luigi Galleani was less a theorist than an agitator and propagandist who believed that ideas without action were sterile. His anarchism was of Bakuninist derivation but strongly influenced by Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. For Galleani, anarchism was simply the absolute negation of authority and the autonomy of the individual in free association with others. But he rejected individualistic anarchism, emphasizing the solidarity of the proletariat as the basis for anarcho-communism. The anarchist society, in his opinion, could only be realized through social revolution, which required the violent and total destruction of the existing social order. Galleani hailed all spontaneous expressions of the revolutionary spirit, including the individual violent acts of Gaetano Bresci and Leon Czołgosz, as preparation of the masses for the final battle, the general strike that would bring about the collapse of the capitalist system. A charismatic orator, facile writer, and fierce polemicist, Galleani for a half century exerted a powerful influence over a substantial segment of the Italian workers in both Italy and the United States.

Born in Vercelli (Piedmont) on 12 August 1861 into a middle-class and monarchist family, Galleani received a good bourgeois education. But as a student of law at the University of Turin, he was swept up in the socialist ferment of the 1880s. His writings in the labor press, his speeches in the piazza, his prominent role in workers’ organizations and strikes quickly established Galleani as a fiery leader of the emerging radical movement in northern Italy. These activities also brought him to the attention of the authorities, resulting in arrests, imprisonments, and a period of exile. In the split between anarchists and socialists that culminated at the Congress of Genoa in 1892, Galleani, then an organizational anarchist, was a leading exponent of the intransigent, antiparliamentary position. During the Crispian reaction of the nineties, he was sentenced to prison and. confinement, but escaped after several years from the island of Pantelleria.

Upon his arrival in the United States in October 1901, Galleani immediately resumed his work of agitation and propaganda. He became editor of La Questione Sociale of Paterson, New Jersey, but because of his dramatic part in a violent silk-workers’ strike fled to Canada in 1902. Reentering the United States under the pseudonym Luigi Pimpino, he began publication of Cronaca Sovversiva in Barre, Vermont, on 6 June 1903. For sixteen years, Cronaca was Galleani’s pulpit, from which he preached the gospel of anarchism and lashed his enemies, particularly the socialists. Although he successfully solicited articles from such notables as Peter Kropotkin, Galleani complained that “the Cronaca in spite of the variety of pseudonyms ends up being the work of only one person.” The newspaper had a circulation of some 5,000 with wide distribution in Europe as well as both Americas.

Cronaca bore the stamp of Galleani’s mind and character: forceful, polemical, passionate. Although his avowed purpose was the intellectual and moral elevation of the workers, one wonders how many of the semiliterate immigrants were able to master his elegant, sometimes ornate, prose. Many of his writings were subsequently republished in book or pamphlet form, as were tracts by other leading anarchists. Copies of these could be found in libraries of the circoli di studi sociali and in the homes of ordinary workers. Galleani also vigorously carried on the propaganda of the spoken word, delivering thousands of speeches in meeting halls and miners’ shacks in the course of frequent tours. Wherever there were labor struggles, he leaned into the fray, suffering arrests and jailings. While it is difficult to measure the efficacy of this propaganda, the scores of autonomous groups of “Galleanisti” that sprang up around the country were evidence of conversions.

When the Great War broke out, Galleani, vehemently antimilitarist and antinationalist, took an uncompromising position. It was a quarrel among the bourgeoisie for power and profits. Rather than use arms against other workers, the proletariat should use them to reclaim its land, bread, and liberty, he believed. Galleani published anti-war tracts in which he sought to dissuade immigrants from returning to Italy for military service. In a 26 May 1917 issue of Cronaca, American military conscription was condemned as a form of slavery and thus contrary to the Constitution! During the war, Galleani and Cronaca came under increasing scrutiny by federal intelligence agencies. Galleani himself was arrested, as were hundreds of subscribers, and Cronaca was eventually suppressed. Its last regular issue was that of 18 July 1918, but two clandestine issues appeared in March and May 1919. Defiant to the last, Galleani called upon the comrades to avenge themselves upon their tormentors. Whether by coincidence or not, a series of bombings took place in the spring of 1919, culminating with explosions in eight cities on 2 June. On 24 June Galleani was deported, but the United States had not heard the last of him. He resumed publication of Cronaca in Turin in April 1920 with a special American edition under the masthead “A Stormo!” Galleani was finally silenced by the Fascist regime. Sentenced repeatedly to prison and confinement, he lived the last years of his life ill and destitute; he died alone at Caprigliola (Tuscany) on 4 November 1931. Meanwhile, the “Galleanisti” in America had established a new publication, L’Adunata dei Refrattari (The Gathering of the Incorrigibles). Published from 1922 to 1971, L’Adunata continued to propagate Galleani’s ideas. The “Galleanisti” persisted as a militant and troublesome presence in the Italian American Left until well after World War II. As their dreams of anarchism receded in the face of twentieth-century realities, they became more and more sectarian, devoted to maintaining the purity of the ideals that Galleani had taught them.

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