The ongoing coverage of the Boston marathon bombs has reminded me of Luigi Galleani and the anarchists of the late 19th / early 20th century. We don’t know what was behind these bombs, and I’m not going to speculate; but it’s worth remembering that there was a period of time when these sorts of bombings were more of a common problem.
1919 was apparently a very bad year.
In late April 1919, at least 36 booby trap dynamite-filled bombs were mailed to a cross-section of prominent politicians and appointees, including the Attorney General of the United States, as well as justice officials, newspaper editors and businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller. Among all the bombs addressed to high-level officials, one bomb was notably addressed to the home of a Federal Bureau of Investigation (BOI) field agent once tasked with investigating the Galleanists, Rayme Weston Finch, who in 1918 had arrested two prominent Galleanists while leading a police raid on the offices of their publication Cronaca Sovversiva.
These bombings fed into the Palmer Raids, the Red Scare of 1919-1920, persecution of immigrants, and contributed mightily to the rise of J. Edgar Hoover and all of the civil rights abuses he stood for.
I had been unaware of the word “Galleanists” which then led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleanist
He’s one of the most influential guys I had never heard of.
Of note is that the Anarchists of then had the same ideology as the more ambitious Left of today.
It seems you periodically return to thoughts of Galleani:
https://www.masson.us/blog/?p=7842
Yup, that was the link in the main body of the post referring to Galleani. I’m sure it was having written that earlier post that made my mind go there when thinking of yesterday’s bombings.
I would say by and large the bulk of the “Left” today is further away from the Anarchist ideology than the bulk of the Left in the early 20th century.
The Anarchists probably identified some legitimate problems, but their solutions were crap.
I grew up in northeast Ohio in the 60’s and 70’s and there were roughly 35~40 bombings in Cleveland due to a mob war about 1977.
The most well known was the Danny Greene incident. Too late and I don’t have time to provide the links.
Plate o’ shrimp. I had a conversation about mob activity in Cleveland at lunch yesterday — mostly we talked about Youngstown; but Cleveland got mentioned.
Found this.
“The streets of Cleveland in the late 1960s and 1970s were quite a bit different than today. The city was dubbed “Bomb City U.S.A.” by the press after 36 bombs were exploded in the city in 1976.”
“For those who were not here to experience it firsthand–the mob wars that existed in the Cleveland in the mid 70s sound like they came from straight out of Hollywood movie.”
Read more: http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/local_news/cleveland%27s-war-with-the-mob-revisited#ixzz2QkCWV0uo
http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/local_news/cleveland%27s-war-with-the-mob-revisited
A nice little film was made a couple of years ago about Danny Greene and the Cleveland mob war, “Kill the Irishman.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1416801/
Dog, as in plate, shrimp, plate of shrimp from Repo Man?
Absolutely!
For those who haven’t seen the movie, this is the quote:
Great film. And the Miller character was a scream.
And as a collection attorney, you probably liked Bud’s statement to Otto when they drove by the homeless.
“If there was just some way of finding out how much the M*****F***ers owe and making them pay it.”