In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

43 4­ Doffed­Hats­and­Hon­ ored­Flags;­ But­oned­Coats,­Pigs,­and­Rags A merica’s most prominent historian of anarchism, Paul Avrich, has argued that the disturbance in Bay View on September 9, 1917, was the “opening battle” in a war “in which anarchists with bombs stood on one side and the authorities on the other.”1 He linked the events in Milwaukee that autumn, especially the bomb blast, to Mario Buda and Carlo Valdinoci, followers of Luigi Galleani and companions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. All four helped to publish and distribute Cronaca Sovversiva—the newspaper so conspicuously absent from the haunts and homes of Bay View’s malcontents that September. Buda and Valdinoci went to Mexico with Sacco and Vanzetti in the spring of 1917. There, dozens of Italian anarchists, committed Galleanists, regrouped to oppose the world war.2 They trickled back into the United States in autumn 1917. Buda later would be with Sacco and Vanzetti the night of their arrest on May 5, 1920, but would escape.3 Valdinoci met a gruesome fate on June 2, 1919, blowing himself to bits when he set a bomb at Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C.4 But if only the explosion at the central police station later that autumn drew national attention to Milwaukee, it was the events in Bay View more than two months earlier that established the context for the November bombing. The eleven who would face trial before Christmas stood charged not with the bombing, for which jail provided their airtight alibi. They faced trial for the September 9 melee. Unlike before his first two rallies in the Italian Colony, this time Giuliani spoke in advance to the chief of police and to the U.S. Department of Justice.5 Forewarned, the Milwaukee police stationed two or three detectives in plain clothes at the rally site and sent another two on the street car with the group.6 44 Doffed­Hats­and­Honored­Flags;­Butoned­Coats,­Pigs,­and­Rags Giuliani again brought his group to a halt at the intersection of Potter and Bishop Avenues. Trouble simmered quietly a block south. An Austrian immigrant, Steve Zawec, ran a tavern there in a larger frame building at 300 Bishop Avenue.7 At the front on the ground floor, the tavern did its essential work, quenching the thirst left by a day in close companionship with the rolling mill’s furnaces. The bar accommodated a pool table and tables for card games.8 Upstairs were living quarters for rent. At the very back of the building, to the east, a cobbler kept a small shop. In between tavern and shoemaker, the building included a windowless hall. This Zawec rented for $3 a month to a ragtag bunch of local Italians who participated in a small chapter of the Circolo di Studi Sociali.9 The Circolo was a loose organization that promoted anarchist ideas and appealed to working Italians. According to Avrich, dozens of these small groups dotted America; their dimes and quarters later would keep alive the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee until Massachusetts executed the two men.10 Today, facts are murky; whether Bay View had a functioning chapter of the Circolo or just a casual group who came into possession of anarchistic pamphlets, photographs, and leaflets is a question lost to time. The Bay View confrontation was a local affair on September 9. With the exception of John LaDuca, the socialist speaker invited from Chicago to address the group, the people gathered on the street corner lived in the neighborhood within a block or two. Or they came with Giuliani from the Third Ward, just two or three miles to the north as the crow flies but a generation of assimilation removed. True, some in Bay View’s Italian Colony had been there only days or weeks, drifting from farm or quarry to find work in the rolling mill.11 But others had been in the neighborhood for years, working either in the mill or in the shops that supported the colony. That Sunday was bright and clear in the way that Wisconsin is on a good day in September. Rain had pushed summer out a few days earlier. With the humidity gone, even in midafternoon the crisp air and the unfiltered blue sky whisked in the first chill of autumn.12 A day before, the temperature had reached 70 degrees at noon. This Sunday, it would top...

Share