Galleanisti

Galleanisti (Italian for Galleanists) generally refers to the 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!. 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.