No License to Serve: Prohibition, Anarchists, and the Italian-American Widows of Barre, Vermont, 1900–1920

ROBIN HAZARD RAY

On 27 February 1907, two of the 19th–20th century’s leading anarchists—Luigi Galleani (1861–1931) and Emma Goldman (1869–1940)—appeared together on the stage of the Opera House

in Barre, Vermont, a small city dedicated to the granite industry, to urge their listeners to vote. Given that anarchists as a political species have long disdained the vote, and that these two had no language in common and disagreed on many philosophical points, this appearance demands an explanation. One possible answer is to be found in the poverty and misery of a disenfranchised group—Italian-American widows of granite workers. It may be that the desperate circumstances of these women forced Galleani and Goldman temporarily to suspend their boycott of the vote in order to support a “no license” policy on liquor sales and to become something they disdained: political leaders. An exploration of the case reveals a great deal about the nature of immigrant politics in the context of local pressures, and about the struggle for survival and for a voice in power politics on the part of women in the nascent twentieth century.

     Before delving into the particulars of the Vermont case, it is useful to get a sense of who these two anarchists were and what they believed.

Galleani the Intransigent

Luigi Galleani was an important figure in the Italian anarchist movement within the United States from his arrival in 1901 until his deportation in 1919. In those years, he edited the Paterson (NJ) weekly Il Proletario; founded and edited the long-lived weekly Cronaca Sovversiva (Barre, VT and Lynn, MA); and through his speaking tours influenced countless members of the Italian working class across the country. His most famous adherents are without doubt Nicolò Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were put to death in 1927 following a highly controversial trial.

     Among his admirers and detractors alike, Galleani was regarded as the epitome of ideological intransigence. His brand of anarchism eschewed not only the state (whether monarchy or democracy), the military, the judiciary, and capitalism, but any form of organization whatsoever, including the labor union. “Anarchism rejects authority in any form,” he wrote in 1924–25, “to the principle of representation, it opposes the direct and independent action of individuals and masses: to legalitarianism and parliamentarian action, it opposes rebellion, insurrection, the general strike, the social revolution.”

By corollary, the vote was to be avoided, as it was seen as legitimizing the state and its methods.

     In the stridency of his anti-organizationalism, he diverged from anarcho-syndicalists like Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), who saw the general strike as a means of fortifying the power of the labor union and therefore the workers, and hewed closer to anarcho-communists like Errico Malatesta (1853–1932). To Galleani, the strike was not a means to an end—such as better wages or safer working conditions—but the end itself. He used his speeches and writings not to urge his followers to achieve a set of goals, but rather, I would argue, to use action or self-education to achieve a set of feelings: pride, defiance, dignity, self-respect, selective solidarity. Galleani’s purist anarchism was therefore more of a psychological or even a religious belief system than a political one, since the achievement of political power was not his aspiration. His language reflects this emotional, quasi-religious aim: those who died in the cause of anarchy were “martyrs,” and even “sainted martyrs,” and the anarchist press published posters depicting these martyrs, which “the faithful” or “coreligionists” (fedi and coreligionisti), presumably hung in their homes in place of Catholic religious prints.

     By contrast, Michael Bakunin (1814–1876) advocated “an organization formed by the people themselves, apart from all governments and parliaments, a free union of associations of agricultural and factory workers, of communes, regions, and nations, and finally, in the remote future, the universal human brotherhood, triumphing above the ruins of all States.”

In other words, he was anti-authoritarian and “federalist,” but did not disdain organization per se, as did Galleani.

     Galleani’s uncompromising strain of anarchism was of very long standing, dating to the earliest years of his involvement with the movement. As a youth, taking the stage at the Worker’s Congress in Genoa in 1892, he helped to effect the rupture between the anarchist wing and the socialist party proper, thereby sealing the doom of his movement. His admiring biographer, Ugo Fedeli, frames this event as a triumph of revolutionary principles over compromise. He writes:

At Genoa, it was undoubtedly Galleani who…was most firmly and decisively hostile to the continuing confusion and compromise [within the Worker’s Party], which was immobilizing the competing forces and rendering them useless. The Worker’s Party had accumulated too many misunderstandings and other baggage that were too weighty to carry forward into the future; it was better that each side take its own path and dedicate itself to a course of action that was most appropriate to its own convictions.

The socialist sector of the party, naturally, viewed the schism differently: Galleani, wrote the socialist Carlo Gabos in his pamphlet on the Genoa meeting, was “the most violent obstructionist” in the gathering, and much to blame for the weakening and defeat of the socialists in later years.

     Galleani forged a reputation for himself as a man of pure principles, unwilling to be bribed by money or position, always more than eager to speak truth to power and take the consequences. After the failed anarchist rising of 1893–94 in Sicily and Tuscany, Galleani was among the thousands of anarchists who were swept up for trial and sentenced to prison or internal exile (domicilio coatto). The tribunal that heard their cases in the anarchist stronghold of Carrara got a full measure of Galleani’s hard-line oratory as he came to the bar in his own defense. His aggressive confrontation of the witnesses and his willingness to question the very legality of the proceedings proved his eagerness to take on every adversary, regardless of the cost to himself.

     The tribunal sentenced him on 8 June 1894 to three years’ imprisonment, followed by two years of “vigilanza speciale.”

In the event, Galleani spent two years in prison, and then in October of 1894 he was shipped to the island of Pantelleria—an unproductive volcanic island that, like Lampedusa, Ustica, Lipari, and Ponza, had been deemed a good place to send troublemakers from Roman imperial times up to the Fascist era. There he was to complete his sentence in domicilio coatto.

     The use of domicilio coatto, along with that of “ammonizione” (warning or admonishment), was sanctioned by public security measures voted by the rightist government of Italy in 1862, and it permitted authorities to confine anyone from drifters to enemies of the state for indefinite periods of time, with no right of appeal. In the 1870s, as the economy of the newly united Italy staggered, social unrest mounted, and radicalism grew among both urban and rural workers, domicilio coatto was widely used to neutralize perceived insurgents, socialist and anarchist alike.

The desolate islands of the Mediterranean became a stopping point in the careers of most of the famous Italian radicals of this period, including Errico Malatesta (confined on Ustica and Lampedusa); Galileo Palla (1865–1944; exiled to Pantelleria), and Luigi Fabbri (1877–1935; sent to Ponza).

     Some of the islands afforded the detainees no more than a squalid existence, with no means to earn a living and very little provided for their subsistence.

Galleani, however, managed to evade harsh communal living conditions on Pantelleria and instead, according to Fedeli, found himself a job tutoring local children. Apparently the father of one of his pupils furnished him with a suite of rooms in the neighborhood called Beccimulsa in the main town. It would seem natural that other prisoners might resent the relative luxury of Galleani’s accommodations, and indeed suspect him of either collaboration or abandoning his fellow radicals, but if so one gets no hint of it from Fedeli’s account.

    It was on Pantelleria that the incident of “I Morti” took place. Fedeli writes: “In July 1897, some Roman anarchists—among them Saverio Merlino, who had already begun leaning toward parliamentarianism—thinking to be able to shorten [Galleani’s] sentence, had proposed to make him a protest candidate in the election that was to take place that year.”

The idea, evidently, was to put up protest candidates in elections on the mainland, in order to expose the desperate conditions on the islands of exile, to give a name to the nameless prisoners. But Galleani refused outright. Any participation in elections, even as a protest candidate, served to validate the state and its institutions, which he rejected root and branch. Instead,

The prisoners on Pantelleria proposed to the prisoners on all the other islands that they hold a public protest and at the same time an anarchist affirmation, against every authoritarian, legalistic, and parliamentarian deviation, and against the illusion of protest candidature. The proposal, suggested by Galleani and sent from Pantelleria, was passed to many militants on various other islands, and was accepted.

The prisoners went on to publish the sole issue of a newspaper they called I Morti (“The Dead”) on 2 November 1899; the whole front page was taken up with an article by Galleani, which “truly set the tone for the entire newspaper, because it was an affirmation of libertarian, revolutionary, and anti-electoral intransigence.”

Though unsigned, the article is instantly recognizable as his work: it is florid and oratorical, characterized by cascades of dependent clauses that seem, in their fervor, to lose track of their substantives. It reads, in part:

[B]eing forced to live, like many of us, for ten or more years far from the world that fights and loves, far from the lives that we adore and remember, from the struggles that are our aspiration, our pride and our life, far from every joy, from every intellectual pleasure, from all the intimate celebrations of the heart, to know the aspiration to liberty that is so acute and tormenting to our spirits, and at the same time needing to arrange our environment to render it less corrupt, our relations with others less wretched, our battles more open and broad.

     But I say to everyone, if in order to escape this place we must bow before a banner that is not our own, our liberation is paid for by barter, if we must leave these barren rocks having lived even one day of which we must be ashamed, if we must return diminished, stunted, altered, after having burned the incense of lying adoration before the idols that we have repudiated…Better to remain here!

     In fact, Galleani himself was not made to choose between his liberty and his principles. He struck up an affair with a married woman, Maria Rallo, whom the FBI later characterized as “the wife of his jailor,”

and with her help and that of a pupil’s father, he bribed a ship captain to take him, Maria, her son Salvatore Errera, and a daughter, Ilia, to Africa. Nevertheless, the period of confinement on Pantelleria and his leadership role in the publication of I Morti did much to bolster his reputation as an ideological intransigent, firmly set against any cooperation with or participation in the political process.

     I will not dwell here on Galleani’s arrival in the United States (October 1901), on his assumption that same month of the editorship of the anarchist weekly La Questione Sociale of Paterson, New Jersey, nor on his leadership role in the violent strike by silkworkers in that city in May and June of 1902. All of this is covered admirably in Paul Avrich’s Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background.

It is sufficient here to affirm that Galleani’s intransigent stance did not alter appreciably from the publication of I Morti to at least the time of his trial—on charges relating to the Paterson riot—in 1907. In the course of that trial, Galleani was called to the stand but refused to swear on the Bible.

     In the interval between the Paterson riot and his trial, Galleani had moved to Barre, Vermont, and there established his newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva, in 1903. In its pages he continued to rally “the faithful” to what was in essence a secular religion, anarchy.

     But it was also here that, just once in his entire career, he changed his stance on the vote.

Emma Goldman, Tireless Agitator

Emma Goldman is much better known than Galleani in the English-speaking world. This is in part because, though born in Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), she emigrated early to the United States, in 1885, mastered English (which Galleani never did), and spent most of her adult life in America. She published copiously during her lifetime and much has been written about her since, interest in her life and career having been revived by the first wave of feminist studies in the 1970s.

     Already in Russia, Goldman had been exposed to anarchist ideas, which she was quick to embrace. Once in the United States, in her late teens, she was further radicalized by the demeaning working conditions she experienced in the New York needle-trade. She soon met Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), who was to become her lover, political partner, and lifelong friend. She also met the anarchist Johann Most, editor of Die Freiheit newspaper, then engaged in a defense of the Haymarket anarchists. Most helped Goldman launch her speaking career, though they soon fell out over personal and doctrinal differences. By age twenty-five, Goldman was touring the country giving speeches on economic injustice and the crushing personal cost of the capitalist labor and social system. She was jailed at various times, most often for inciting to riot.

     Like Galleani, Goldman found the state to be everywhere and at all times an instrument of oppression and psychological trauma. In her essay “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” (1910), she defines anarchism as “The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”

Anarchism, she argues, “is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination.”

     Goldman is now studied primarily for her advocacy on women’s issues and sexual freedom, as well as for her personal and principled rejection of marriage, which she deemed an unpaid form of prostitution. Her passionate grappling with the “Woman Question” is taken for granted, in part because selective anthologizing of her works over the years has winnowed out many other topics on which she spoke and wrote, and has made it appear that women’s issues ranked higher in her constellation of concerns than they in fact did.

Careful reading of her works shows that the social and economic degradation of women was only one of the many issues she addressed. The wide-ranging essay “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” for example, in which she lays out her creed, makes no special mention of women or women’s issues.

     Among her widely reproduced writings on the “woman question” is her essay “The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation.” It casts the push for equal rights as a doomed half-measure that leaves untouched the shackles of capitalism and emotional oppression. In it, Goldman asserts that until woman has learned to defy “internal tyrants,…to listen to the voice of her nature, whether it call for life’s greatest treasure, love for a man, or her most glorious privilege, the right to give birth to a child, she cannot call herself emancipated.”

     Goldman confounded many would-be supporters of her day by rejecting woman suffrage, calling it a modern “fetich” (i.e., fetish). In an essay on the topic, she pours scorn on women in general and suffragists in particular: “Woman, even more than man, is a fetich worshipper, and though her idols may change, she is ever on her knees, ever holding up her hands, ever blind to the fact that her god has feet of clay,” the “idol” in this case being suffrage.

Goldman sees women’s pursuit of the vote not as a bid for freedom and liberty:

“On the contrary, [the suffragists] insist always that it is woman suffrage which will make her a better Christian and home keeper, a staunch citizen of the State. Thus suffrage is only a means of strengthening the omnipotence of the very Gods that woman has served from time immemorial.”

She goes on to cite countries and states where women have gotten the vote and to ask rhetorically whether working conditions there are any better or individuals any freer. She perceived, correctly, that much of the push for woman suffrage came from women seeking more not less interference in the social lives of others, especially their alcohol consumption. The achievement of the vote for women in Colorado, she opines, “instead of elevating woman, has made her a political spy, a contemptible pry into the private affairs of people.”

In addition, she finds the suffragist movement “a parlor affair,” whose members declined to canvas in poorer districts and clung to unequal modes of behavior, so long as they were the beneficiaries: “Woman demands the same rights as man, yet she is indignant that her presence does not strike him dead: he smokes, keeps his hat on, and does not jump from his seat like a flunkey.”

     This, then, does not seem like someone who would tread the boards to get out the vote, any more than does Galleani. Let us now turn to Barre, Vermont, and see what special conditions might have brought these two figures to their surprising mission.

The Stonecarvers of Barre

It was not happenstance that Galleani chose Barre as his home, nor that Emma Goldman should have visited this remote city repeatedly over her American career. The granite quarries there attracted waves of immigrant workers, starting with Aberdeen Scots in the 1880s and ending with French-Canadians in the 1920s, with Finns, Spanish, and others in between. But by far the bulk of the immigrant labor was provided by Italians, in particular northern Italians from the provinces of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Tuscany. Many of the latter, particularly the skilled stone carvers and stonecutters from the marble industry of Carrara, in Tuscany, were dedicated anarchists. We will remember that the Carrarese were among the groups whose failed uprising led to the Tribunal and Galleani’s incarceration on Pantelleria.

     Historian Nunzio Pernicone writes:

[T]he anarchist movement had developed a unique subculture in the province of Massa-Carrara, located in the area known as the Lunigiana. The movement here was unique from the standpoint of social class, numerical strength, and revolutionary militancy. Whereas anarchists elsewhere tended to be artisans and workers of various types, as well as students and autospostati [self-exiles] from the middle class, the militants of Massa-Carrara were primarily workers in the marble industry. The hard core of the Lunigiana anarchists were the quarrymen (cavatori), who excavated the precious Carrara marble found only in the Apuane Alps. As a group, they constituted the most politically advanced segment of the Lunigianian proletariat and the aristocracy of the marble industry workers....The difficult, dangerous, and isolated nature of the work fostered a spirit of independence and individualism, which, together with Massa-Carrara’s historical tradition of perceiving state authority as foreign and oppressive, made the quarrymen natural candidates for anarchism.

In Carrara, the anarchist Galileo Palla remarked, “even the stones are anarchists.”

And once recruited to the cause, the cavatori remained loyal forever.

     Quarrying and stone carving in the Italian marble industry were dangerous occupations, as they are everywhere, but with the move from Italy and marble to Vermont and granite a new peril, silicosis, soon presented itself among the immigrants. Marble dust, consisting almost exclusively of calcium carbonate, is a substance that the human body can absorb and metabolize fairly readily; furthermore the carving workshops in coastal Italy could be opened for ventilation most of the year. Consequently, men could work for decades cutting and sanding marble with relatively little impact on their health. The situation in Barre was quite different. The Barre Gray Granite, much in demand for its fine-grained evenness and durability, is chemically about sixty-nine percent silica (SiO2).

Silica, unlike calcium carbonate, cannot be absorbed by the body, and even relatively short periods of exposure to high levels of silica dust will set off a pulmonary crisis.

     The granite workers themselves became aware of the problem soon after a technological advance—the pneumatic “hammer” patented in 1890—made granite carving swifter, more profitable, and far more productive of dust. Already in 1903, The Granite Cutters’ Journal, a union periodical, had made the connection between the skyrocketing rates of tuberculosis among granite workers and their dusty working conditions. Barre’s union scribe for the journal wrote with great bitterness in 1906, renewing his call for better ventilation in the granite sheds: "[T]he winter will soon be upon us, and the dust boxes, called sheds, closed up again for the season; each ready to produce its quota of candidates for the premature inheritance of six feet of earth, a stupid condolence resolution, and perchance a rock-faced marker!”

Yet it was not until the 1920s that the U.S. Health Department dispatched Dr. A. E. Russell and his colleagues to study “The Health of Workers in Dusty Trades,” including the granite industry.

     The progress of silicosis was both predictable and inevitable. Affected men first complained of shortness of breath “increasing in severity with length of exposure.” Soon the panting and fatigue are accompanied by pain in the chest, frequent colds, and finally an “unproductive cough.”

Invariably, the tuberculosis bacillus found its way into the men’s weakened lungs. The granite sheds shut tight against the Vermont winters, with many men working and coughing in a confined space, assured the ready transmission of the bacillus. In some cases, Russell theorized, the trauma of the silica dust may have revived a dormant tuberculosis infection from childhood. In any case, he searched with little success for granite workers who suffered from silicosis only, without tuberculosis; he found only a very few, among the youngest study subjects.

     As the disease progressed, nodules in the lungs coalesced into a rigid network and intertwined with the tubercular adhesions. The men would usually continue working, but from the moment they developed the characteristic cough—grimly called the “stonecutter’s chuckle”—they knew what to expect. Weight began to drop off, reducing well-nourished, muscular men to bony shadows. Eventually the patient could no longer get up and go to work. Russell found that, on average, a man lived a little less than fifteen months after he stopped working.

The silica nodules, hardened by the waxy secretions of the bacillus, ultimately broke through the tissues, filling the lungs with blood. The men drowned, gasping for air. In autopsy, the lungs of affected men could literally be stood up on the examining table, rigid as a dried sponge.

     The most severely affected were also the most skilled, the men who did the detailed lettering and carving on the granite pieces, with their faces close to the spray from the pneumatic hammer. Their rate of extinction was so extreme that it was literally off the charts: Russell and his coauthors had to adjust the scale of the graph at Figure 23 of their study so that the upward spike of the pneumatic-tool cutters’ mortality rate, plotted against age and compared with the nearly flat mortality rate of rural Vermonters, could fit on the page.

The carvers’ annual mortality rates were over sixty per thousand by age fifty-five.  That means that six percent of them were dying every year in that age bracket alone.

     By chance, it was also to most skilled who were the most likely to be anarchists. The Barre Italians were quite divided in their political loyalties, but it seems clear that the higher up in the industry hierarchy a man worked, the more likely he was to be anarchist rather than socialist. It is hard to know whether this was the result of thoughtful political conviction—the skilled man, on careful consideration, choosing the anarchist creed—or whether there were social factors at work: it may be that anarchism became a kind of social club to which one aspired, like Freemasonry. In any case, it is clear that Galleani had come to Barre to be among his brother anarchists, but was soon surrounded instead by their widows.

Prohibition and the Widows’ Dilemma

The predicament of an immigrant woman whose husband died was nothing short of dire. There was at that time, of course, no Social Security to support her and her children. A collection might be taken up to help with the burial costs and, in Barre, friends often volunteered to make a man’s gravestone free of charge. Many socialist Italians participated in mutual-aid societies (società di mutuo soccorso), and similar associations were set up by other ethnic groups.

But the anarchists by and large disdained any kind of organization, and thus did not participate; their widows were on their own.

     Jobs for women were hard to come by in Vermont at that time, especially if one did not speak English. In other Vermont towns, women were employed in wool manufacturing, but there was little of this in Barre. If the widow was fortunate enough to own her house, she could take in boarders, and many did so.

Other widows reemigrated to Italy, where their families could help support the children.

If neither of these avenues was open to her, a widow had chiefly two options: prostitution or selling liquor.

     Some women must indeed have resorted to prostitution, though what little evidence I can find indicates that the Italian women in Barre were not inclined toward this source of income.

For the rest, liquor offered a means by which almost anyone could earn a living.

     One tends to think of prohibition as something that began with the Eighteenth Amendment—proposed in December 1917 and ratified by two-thirds of the states in January 1919—and ended with its repeal in December 1933.

In fact, the sale of liquor had been regulated piecemeal—town by town, state by state—across the United States since the temperance movement had begun to accelerate in the 1830s. Vermont was one of the first states in the nation to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol (excepting only communion wine and hard cider), in the “Temperance Law” of 1853.

Nevertheless, as the early chroniclers of prohibition Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell noted in 1901, “in [Vermont’s] so-called ‘cities,’…all of which are small (the largest having a population of about 18,000 in 1899), the law has for years been systematically violated.”

     Emma Goldman herself took notice of the pervasive violation of prohibition in Barre and its deleterious effects on householders. On a visit that in her memoir Living My Life she dates to 1899, Goldman observed,

Vermont was under the blessings of Prohibition….In company with my host [Salvatore Palavicini] I made the rounds of some private homes. To my astonishment I found that almost all of them had been turned into saloons. In one such place I found almost a dozen men visibly under the influence of liquor….The stuffy kitchen, with the children of the family inhaling the foul air of whisky and tobacco, constituted a drinking-den. Many such places were thriving under the protection of the police, to whom part of the income was regularly paid….Another result of Prohibition was the increase of prostitution. We visited several houses on the outskirts of town, all doing a flourishing business….By the closing of the saloons the brothel became the only place where the men coming into town could find some distraction.

She claimed to have seen Barre’s mayor and chief of police thoroughly drunk in one Italian family kitchen.

     Though Goldman blamed prohibition for this sad state of affairs, in fact the state’s repeal of prohibition did not cause these evils to go away. In 1902, after half a century of ill-enforced and ineffective prohibition, Vermont went to “local option,” which left it up to each town or city to decide whether to be wet or dry.

Finally in 1904, prohibition was repealed across the whole state, and “wet” prevailed until national prohibition went into effect under the Volstead Act of 1920. Despite local option and then legalization in Vermont, the proliferation of private speak-easies continued unabated. This is because only licensed taverns were permitted to sell liquor, and the cost of a license was unaffordable for the poor, including Barre’s widows. Edwin Granai, who has thoroughly researched the legal history of prohibition in Vermont, writes that “a license required a $3000 bond and a $1000 annual fee,” not to mention start-up costs.

Payoffs to the police were sometimes not enough to avoid legal consequences for the individuals running unlicensed speak-easies. For reasons unknown—possibly political pressure, inadequacy of bribes, orders to eliminate the competition, or personal retribution—the police would periodically raid homes and arrest those found to be “furnishing.” In Barre, it is likely that ethnic tensions among the mostly Scotch-Irish police force, the Anglo-Saxon professional and political caste, and the large working-class Italian population contributed to the more zealous persecution of the latter.

     Many of these prosecutions were joltingly cruel. Granai discovered that his own grandmother had been one of the many Italian widows arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for liquor offenses. Elvira Granai was, at the time of her arrest in 1917, a stonecutter’s widow with eleven children, seven of them minors still living at home. The youngest was two years old. These circumstances did not deter Judge H. William Scott from finding her guilty on the very day of her arrest and sentencing her to five months in the Vermont House of Corrections. As Granai notes, she spoke no English, had no legal representation, and was not afforded a jury of her peers.

Nor was his grandmother in any way unusual: “The city court dockets covering the early years of the century show that about once a week an Italian widow would be arrested, tried, and fined or imprisoned for selling alcohol without a license. If they could pay the $500 fine, a year’s wages in the stone shed, they could avoid going to jail. Almost none, of course, had the $500.”

The number of Italian widows imprisoned in this period therefore must be counted in the hundreds.

     Elvira Granai’s arrest occurred in 1917. In 1907 the Barre voters had had a choice. It was put to the vote whether to keep the system as it was—“license only” liquor sales, which benefited those who already owned taverns or had the means with which to buy them—or go to “no license,” under which poor widows would have been free to sell liquor in their homes, without having to produce the unheard-of sum of $3,000. This, then, was the ballot question that brought Emma Goldman and Luigi Galleani to the stage of the Barre Opera House.

Democracy Thrust upon Them

Reporters from both of Barre’s daily newspapers went to the speeches on 27 February; one estimated the crowd at 500, the other at 900. Goldman spoke first, addressing the gathering in English, according to the Barre Argus report of the next day subtitled “Famous Anarchist Hammers Everybody and Wants No License.” Though she lambasted the ballot box as “not clean and…only used to throw sand in the eyes of the working men,” she nevertheless urged the assembled to “do everything in their power to defeat the license law.” The class inequity of liquor laws were alluded to: “She said it is necessary for the working man to have his liquor, but the wealthy man has the best of it. He gets drunk, is carried home in his cab, while the poor man has to be made a public show of. This she laid at the feet of the wealthy politician whom she claimed got his money by stealing it from the poor.”

     The Barre Times reported that she inveighed against those who managed to corner the liquor licenses while getting others arrested for selling: “She declared that voting would not do any good, but if men were going to vote, she told them to vote against granting licenses to a few ‘spies,’ and to give the right of selling liquor to everybody. She repeatedly advised the voters to consider what they were voting for.”

     When Galleani took the stage, many people walked out and the reporting became much less detailed, presumably because his delivery was in Italian. He had recently returned to Barre after having been arrested in January 1907, on charges relating to the Paterson riots.

The Times reporter wrote, “Galleani spoke in a satirical vein and several times was interrupted by applause, while Goldman had an uninterrupted discourse to the end.” The Argus reported:

In his discourse he set forth that they wanted to upset their whole power against the license question at the polls next Tuesday....Miss Goldman denied the report that she was hired to come to Barre by the Anti Saloon league. All Galleani’s friends in Barre will vote no license, because they are sore over his arrest and will take this way of getting back at men they think were responsible for his incarceration. The Italians were advised a year ago by Galleani to vote no license and resolutions were adopted. The city went no license by 12 votes last year. This meeting threatens to injure the no license cause in Barre rather than help it.

     Cronaca Sovversiva also covered the dual address at the Opera House. It quoted Goldman as emphasizing the need to work for “economic liberation”: “Splendid and convincing was her criticism of the situation created by the equivocal dilemma: whether to support privileged license or the hypocritical Temperance, showing how it can only lay bare the betrayal, the lies, the corruption.”

The paper inveighed against the “pirates,” “spies,” and indeed the socialists, who allegedly defended the monopoly of the entrenched powers.

Defeat

In this interesting case, Goldman and Galleani were essentially encouraging their followers to vote within the State against the extension of State power. As the Argus reporter noted, the vote in the previous year had carried for “no license” by a mere twelve votes. He was also, perhaps, not wrong in predicting that the vocal support of two foreign-born anarchist leaders would harm rather than advance the cause so crucial to the Italian widows. On 5 March 1907, the city of Barre voted by a margin of 152 votes to go “license only.” According to the Daily Times, “The no-license men were counting on getting better support in the fifth ward through disgruntled voters, but it failed to materialize.”

The “license” supporters, by contrast, had mobilized a well-organized and well-financed voter drive, with “a score of double teams and barges impressed into the service” of getting their voters to the polls.

     “It is the sad, worn-out truth,” the Cronaca Sovversiva gloomily observed the following week, “that with ‘license’ nothing triumphs but hypocrisy and corruption. Under the pretense of liberty, the fermented beverage trade is in fact reduced to a monopoly of three or four crooks who can sell whatever crap [porcherie] they want, at whatever price they want: hence hypocrisy.”

     The widows of Barre would have to wait for Repeal, in 1933, by which time it was far too late to do them any good. Meanwhile, police raids on Italian households started promptly: on 25 March 1907, the home of one G. Guidelli was raided for “furnishing,” with Mrs. Guidelli brought up on charges and fined $500.

     As for Galleani, he would remain in Barre for a few more years before moving his family and newspaper to Massachusetts in 1912. It is unclear what further efforts, if any, he made on behalf of his “constituency,” the granite widows. His first appeal to the vote was also, to my knowledge, his last. Both Galleani and Goldman were deported from the United States under the Alien and Sedition Act in 1919, never to return.