1920 (46 page)

In her book
Cigarette Wars
, Cassandra Tate not only agrees with Brill, but is more explicit:

Particularly when smoked by women, cigarettes seemed to unleash a disquieting sexuality. Although there is an element of sensuousness in the use of any kind of tobacco (the mouth and hands being intimately involved whether it is chewed, snuffed, or smoked in pipes, cigars, or cigarettes), the effect seems more pronounced with cigarettes. Perhaps this has something to do with the frequency with which cigarettes are brought to the mouth, with the smoke being deeply inhaled, suggesting a titillating degree of intimacy.

MRS. FORRESTER, WHO LIVED IN
the relative isolation of a small town in the Midwest, would have been even more shocked had she seen how some young women in New York were attiring themselves. Author Bill Bryson writes: “The amount of fabric in the average dress, it was calculated, fell from almost twenty yards before the war to a wispy seven after.” It hardly seems possible. Especially when one can also read, from journalist Frederick Lewis Allen, that by the time the decade had reached its later years, “young women had reduced the yardage of their garments by one-half.” If both surmises are true, which is unlikely, the onset of the Great Depression very nearly coincided with the invention of the G-string.

Nonetheless, it
is
true that a minority of women now dressed, at least for evenings in Harlem nightclubs and other such recreations, with “breathtaking skimpiness.” In this way and others, from overly rouged cheeks to flesh-colored stockings, which from a distance seemed to be no stockings at all, they were advertising more access to themselves than they had ever done before: permitting hugs, kisses, even the ultimate in access: sexual intercourse without sanction of marriage.

Were such displays of redefined femininity inevitable? Probably. Women had worn the yoke of the male ever since the first human beings had organized themselves into communities. Were the displays inevitable in the United States in 1920? Just as probably, and not solely because of the Nineteenth Amendment. Margaret Sanger might not have opened her first birth-control clinic yet, but her public insistence on a woman's right to make all decisions related to her body had echoed throughout their intended audience for more than half a decade now. If a woman wanted to take cigarette smoke into her body, it was her right. If she wanted to clothe her body scantily, it was her right. If she wanted either to give birth or protect herself from such a possibility, she was yet again within her rights. Or so she believed, and so she behaved, for the first time ever, despite opposition in varying degrees to these freedoms, opposition that exists to the present time.

It was not what the Misses Stanton, Mott, Stone, and Anthony had had in mind when they labored so hard, so long ago, for female equality.

AND, AS IT TURNED OUT,
the Roaring Twenties was not the decade that anyone had in mind when he or she looked ahead after the Great War, nor the period that future generations imagine when they look back through the distorted lens of popular culture. The flappers are a kind of footnote in this book because that is precisely what they were in their time, a time more desperate than carefree, more unjust than equitable, more punishing than leisurely, more revolutionary than placid, more worrisome than confident, more threatening than assured.

But it was also a time of excitement, excess, and enthusiasm, sudden leaps in the national blood pressure, fanaticism over distractions in an era in which so much happened from which Americans needed distraction. That the Red Sox had made a mistake in selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees was evident several months after the transaction, as he accumulated statistics in 1920 that read like fantasies or misprints; his 54 home runs, for example, were more than fourteen of the other fifteen major league
teams
amassed that year and broke the existing record (his own record, by the way) by 25. Ruth also drove in 137 runs, batted an eye-popping .376, and single-handedly saved a sport that had been mired in the ignominy
of the so-called Black Sox scandal only the year before. The Curse of the Bambino, which would supposedly prevent Boston from winning the World Series again for 86 years, was under way.

But Ruth was not alone in fevering the popular culture. Jack Dempsey beat the bruising Frenchman Georges Carpentier in the first million-dollar heavyweight prize fight; the Book-of-the-Month Club was founded and became an immediate success; crossword puzzles turned into a national rage, as did the Chinese table game of mah jongg, in which the players manipulated 144 tiles instead of 52 playing cards. Americans were fascinated by pointlessness: flagpole sitters sat as still as Buddhas on their elevated platforms; marathon dancers were just barely moving after dragging themselves across the dance floor as long as they could, in some cases for several days with minimal breaks; and six-day bicycle races also became an inexplicable attraction for both rider and viewer.

Said the Broadway star Billie Burke, “The Roaring Twenties were very pleasant if you did not stop to think.” Most people didn't stop to think. And still don't, as they look back.

If they did, they would see not just the pervasiveness of hardship throughout the decade, but the horrible prelude it proved to be—for at its opposite end, there was a different kind of explosion on Wall Street. The stock market crashed, and much of the United States crashed along with it. The value of investments dropped like never before, never since; the term “Depression” described not just the ruination of financial accounts, but the attitude of an entire nation, so many people so painfully victimized by a lack of income and, with it, a lack of opportunity. The New Deal helped, but it took another Great War, after yet another decade, to jump-start economic growth again. Ten years, it might have been, from Prohibition to stock-market crash, but they held a century's worth of turmoil and jubilation, irrationality and intrigue, optimism and injustice.

It all began in 1920.

L
UIGI GALLEANI, WROTE PAUL AVRICH
in 1990, “has fallen into oblivion. Today he is virtually unknown in the United States outside a small circle of scholars and a number of personal associates and disciples, whose ranks are rapidly dwindling. No biography in English has been devoted to him, nor is he so much as mentioned in most general histories of anarchism or in the comprehensive survey of American anarchism by William Reichert.”

Yet, in his time, Galleani was the anarchist whose influence both A. Mitchell Palmer and William J. Flynn feared above that of all others. He had established such a track record of terrorism before arriving in the United States that the nations in which he settled seemed to feel more comfortable deporting him than imprisoning him. Behind bars, after all, he was an incentive for his fellow anarchists to attempt to free him, or, if that did not work, to seek reprisal through acts of violence. Deportation meant he was somebody else's problem.

For organizing a demonstration of students in Switzerland in 1887, Galleani was dispatched to France, which later forwarded him home again to Italy, which seemed stuck with him. The Italian courts found him guilty of conspiracy and sentenced him to five years in prison. But
he escaped and fled to London. It was from there that he booked passage to the United States, arriving as a forty-year-old in 1901.

He wasted no time in trying to advance his cause. When silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, went on strike, Galleani set out immediately for the factory town to speak on their behalf. By all accounts, he was fiery, eloquent, dramatic; the crowd that had gathered to hear him grew in both size and intensity as he raised his animus against capitalism to a crescendo. It was at this point, with the Paterson police believing that the mob was threatening to storm the factory and wreak vengeance against those who had continued to work inside, that they opened fire on the insurgents. One of the bullets struck Galleani in the face, but he survived with no more permanent damage than slight scarring. Arrested for inciting the riot, he managed yet another escape, this time fleeing to Canada, his life on the run continuing, but the pace picking up now as law enforcers in packs closed in.

Eventually he sneaked back into the United States and, taking up residence in the quarrying community of Barre, Vermont, became the editor of the largest Italian-language anarchist newspaper in the country,
Cronaca Sovversia (Subversive Chronicle)
. The Great War was raging at the time and America had finally become a combatant; aliens were not eligible to serve but nonetheless had to register. Galleani was livid, and historian Paul Avrich paraphrases the article that Galleani wrote about it for his paper. “Once you register, the authorities will have you on their rolls; they will know where to find you should they want you. Compulsory registration, he argued, violated the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits ‘involuntary servitude.' You need not collaborate with the warmongers, he declared. If you refuse to register in the thousands, the authorities will be hard put to arrest you.”

Before authorities shut down
Cronaca Sovversia
in 1918, fifteen years after its first issue, Galleani had published even more incendiary material, including several ads for a booklet that contained instructions for making nitroglycerine.

But it was as an orator, not a publisher, that he made his greatest mark. “You heard Galleani speak,” said Carlo Buda, an anarchist who had done so, “and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw!” And from
another: “I have never heard an orator more powerful than Luigi Galleani. … His voice is full of warmth, his glance alive and penetrating, his gestures of exceptional vigor and flawless distinction.”

The spoken word mattered to radicals like these men. “Attending lectures was another popular activity among the Italian anarchists,” Avrich tells us, “and especially the lectures of Galleani, whom they prized above all other speakers.”

In September 1919, Galleani came out of hiding briefly to demonstrate his vocal gifts to fellow subversives in Taunton, Massachusetts. So inspired were they by his words that four of them immediately began work on a bomb, which they planned to drive to the American Woolen Company's mill in the nearby town of Franklin. Workers there were striking, and the Galleanisti, as they were known, wanted to show their support. They did, in a manner of speaking, but not according to plan. The bomb exploded, all right, but in transit, not in the mill. All four anarchists were killed. Their support was noted and the strike kept on.

Police tracked Galleani from Taunton and this time caught him. But rather that having him stand trial on any of numerous charges that merited a hearing, U.S. officials inexplicably joined in the game of “hot potato” that Europeans had been playing with him. Galleani and eight of his cohorts were expelled from the United States and returned to Italy, where he served fourteen months in prison for sedition. Never again did he depart from his homeland.

His followers in the United States, however, did not need his presence to remain fervid about his principles. In Italy, after being released from prison, he continued his seditious activity, continued to write, urging on the working man, making his case for violence, his language becoming no less fiery with age or distance. His pamphlets and copies of his speeches were smuggled into America by the anarchists who continued to pass through the gates of Ellis Island, and the words were as often as possible converted into propaganda of the deed—the letter bombs, for example, that were mailed to prominent American citizens in 1919, the impetus for the first of the Palmer raids.

Also, with time, American authorities came to believe that the attack on Wall Street on September 16, 1920, the attack that killed more than forty Americans and wounded at least 140 others, was also the work of the
Galleanisti. In fact, they were certain that one man was responsible for both making the bomb and positioning the wagon in front of the Morgan Bank, and although they could not prove it, they were no less certain of the man's identity.

Other than that he was Carlo Buda's brother, little is known of Mario Buda. He subscribed to
Cronaca Sovversia
, often made donations to it, admired Galleani as if he were a messiah. Whenever he could, he attended Galleani's lectures, arriving mesmerized, departing with a vow to take action. A short, compact man, by mid-adulthood his hairline had receded from the tip of his forehead to the crown of his head. His cheeks were lined, slightly sunken; and a mustache spread a short distance across his upper lip. It is a description that fits many, although not all, of the eyewitness accounts of the man who fled from the wagon minutes before it erupted in flame.

Prior to that, the BOI had been keeping a close eye on Buda. Apparently, though, not close enough. Some investigators believed that he played a role of some sort in the South Braintree robbery for which Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and later both sanctified and executed. Others went so far as to suspect that Buda, Sacco, and Vanzetti were the leaders of the 1919 bombing wave.