What do you think?
Rate this book
Anarchy in Bay View's Little Italy, September 9, 1917, and the Shocking Aftermath
Book by Anna Passante
77 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2008
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 1, 2011
This book is horrible and the author is brainless.
This book (admittedly)only summarizes newspaper articles written at the time*, as well as courtroom testimony and speeches by judges and lawyers as read through the same newspapers. When I read history, I take into account that most authors will accept police reports and newspaper articles at face value and prepare myself for seeing things through that lenses, but that's all Passante has done with this book. She's seemingly made no attempt to research things from the anarchists' perspective or actually find other accounts such as the courtroom documents themselves. And if she did, she didn't bother sharing her findings. It's infuriating.
Passante's unquestioning use of the racist, xenophobic, red-hating newspapers; quotes by prosecutors, policemen and judges that would fit the same description as well as no mention of the political climate of the time (the red scare**) make me feel justified in applying the same epithets to her. It also makes me wonder, "Has Passante ever even heard of the red scare?"
Another hallmark of when you know someone clearly has no idea what they're talking about when it comes to anarchism (one that Passante repeatedly makes) is her interchangeable use of the terms "socialist" and "anarchist" when describing the defendants.
Just to rub in how poorly researched the book is (and pointing to the fact that Passante really didn't look farther than the reactionary newspapers), Passante ends the book by saying, "After 91 years the mystery still remains. Who planted the bomb outside the Evangelical Church?" Since the book was published in 2008, I know for a fact that a simple internet search anytime from 2006 onward would have revealed many leads, if not outright answers to her question. For example, Passante should have read Paul Avrich's Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, in which Avrich documents the Galleanist Anarchist in america. They were mainly Italian, extreme militants, worship the deed, talk often of dynamite in both poetic and literal terms, published bomb making manuals and committed bombings across the country. And guess what? The Bay View anarchists were Galleanist, and the book speculates that Mario Buda made the bomb that was planted outside the church. There are also a number of essays that would have pointed Passante in this direction had she bothered looking for them. There is also Anarchist Voices, a collection of the interviews Avrich conducted for his well-researched books. These interviews would have given Passante candid testimony into the mindset of the many of the galleanists, though not necessarially any of the Bay View ones. None of these things (of course) are mentioned by Passante in her account of the Bay View anarchists, or was it bolsheviks? . . . she means socialists . . . just wait a minute while she checks one of the newspapers.
I would give this book an outright zero if it weren't for the fact that despite Passante's best efforts one still gets a small glimpse of what happened and what the anarchists were like.
The grump in me takes a small amount of pleasure in the fact that I am the first and at the moment only review of this or any of Passante's books on this website. Anna Passante, please stop writing them.
"[Historic invisibility] owes much to the violence of abstraction in the writing of history, the severity of history that has long been the captive of the nation-state, which remains in most studies the largely unquestioned framework of analysis."
*Almost all of which are mainstream newspapers, one or two socialist ones and no anarchist papers (though I doubt Passante can tell the difference).
** The late 1910s and early 1920s were marked by the US government's war on leftwing militants. The government rounded up thousands; arrested, tortured, jailed and deported hundreds (often through tribunals since defendants were non-citizens); and killed others through outright force or the slow bureaucratic machine of prisons and executions. The state also developed an eloborate system of spies and paid informants to gather information but also to develop rifts and disseminat mis-information among the groups they were infiltrating. The US also worked hand-in-hand with such wonderful people as Mussolini, when it came to groups like the Italian galleanists. I don't mean to portray those on the receiving end of this entirely as victims, they were waging war themselves on this system of exploitation and misery. Any study of this period, such as Passante's, is however irresponsible if it doesn't explain this context, and in my opinion reactionary if it chooses not to.
This book (admittedly)only summarizes newspaper articles written at the time*, as well as courtroom testimony and speeches by judges and lawyers as read through the same newspapers. When I read history, I take into account that most authors will accept police reports and newspaper articles at face value and prepare myself for seeing things through that lenses, but that's all Passante has done with this book. She's seemingly made no attempt to research things from the anarchists' perspective or actually find other accounts such as the courtroom documents themselves. And if she did, she didn't bother sharing her findings. It's infuriating.
Passante's unquestioning use of the racist, xenophobic, red-hating newspapers; quotes by prosecutors, policemen and judges that would fit the same description as well as no mention of the political climate of the time (the red scare**) make me feel justified in applying the same epithets to her. It also makes me wonder, "Has Passante ever even heard of the red scare?"
Another hallmark of when you know someone clearly has no idea what they're talking about when it comes to anarchism (one that Passante repeatedly makes) is her interchangeable use of the terms "socialist" and "anarchist" when describing the defendants.
Just to rub in how poorly researched the book is (and pointing to the fact that Passante really didn't look farther than the reactionary newspapers), Passante ends the book by saying, "After 91 years the mystery still remains. Who planted the bomb outside the Evangelical Church?" Since the book was published in 2008, I know for a fact that a simple internet search anytime from 2006 onward would have revealed many leads, if not outright answers to her question. For example, Passante should have read Paul Avrich's Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, in which Avrich documents the Galleanist Anarchist in america. They were mainly Italian, extreme militants, worship the deed, talk often of dynamite in both poetic and literal terms, published bomb making manuals and committed bombings across the country. And guess what? The Bay View anarchists were Galleanist, and the book speculates that Mario Buda made the bomb that was planted outside the church. There are also a number of essays that would have pointed Passante in this direction had she bothered looking for them. There is also Anarchist Voices, a collection of the interviews Avrich conducted for his well-researched books. These interviews would have given Passante candid testimony into the mindset of the many of the galleanists, though not necessarially any of the Bay View ones. None of these things (of course) are mentioned by Passante in her account of the Bay View anarchists, or was it bolsheviks? . . . she means socialists . . . just wait a minute while she checks one of the newspapers.
I would give this book an outright zero if it weren't for the fact that despite Passante's best efforts one still gets a small glimpse of what happened and what the anarchists were like.
The grump in me takes a small amount of pleasure in the fact that I am the first and at the moment only review of this or any of Passante's books on this website. Anna Passante, please stop writing them.
"[Historic invisibility] owes much to the violence of abstraction in the writing of history, the severity of history that has long been the captive of the nation-state, which remains in most studies the largely unquestioned framework of analysis."
*Almost all of which are mainstream newspapers, one or two socialist ones and no anarchist papers (though I doubt Passante can tell the difference).
** The late 1910s and early 1920s were marked by the US government's war on leftwing militants. The government rounded up thousands; arrested, tortured, jailed and deported hundreds (often through tribunals since defendants were non-citizens); and killed others through outright force or the slow bureaucratic machine of prisons and executions. The state also developed an eloborate system of spies and paid informants to gather information but also to develop rifts and disseminat mis-information among the groups they were infiltrating. The US also worked hand-in-hand with such wonderful people as Mussolini, when it came to groups like the Italian galleanists. I don't mean to portray those on the receiving end of this entirely as victims, they were waging war themselves on this system of exploitation and misery. Any study of this period, such as Passante's, is however irresponsible if it doesn't explain this context, and in my opinion reactionary if it chooses not to.
August 17, 2014
We read this for our book club as neighbor's living in Bay View. It is always interesting to read about places of which you are familiar. I had never heard of this bombing in which so many police officers were killed. There is not much information about the episode and Passante did a good job in researching the event. I learned a lot of Bay View lore and found it fascinating to learn that someone carried the bomb from the church over a half mile to the police station, dropping it along the way and not realizing it was real. I have read many books on Bay View and don't recall much information at all on the subject. Thank you, Ann, for bringing this episode to light.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews