For the June 2 anniversary of the 1919 anarchist bombings, I’m posting an excerpt from my book on the 1919 steel strike and that year’s political upheaval.
It was a late Monday evening on June 2, 1919, and much of Pittsburgh was already asleep. A group of young men walked down Aylesboro Avenue in Squirrel Hill on the way home from a wedding in the upper-class neighborhood.
An explosion roared, blasting shrapnel into several homes. At 5437 Aylesboro Avenue, home of high-ranking Pittsburgh Plate Glass official B.J. Cassady, the front porch was blown to pieces, the house’s entire front face was destroyed and the interior was wrecked. Next door, U.S. District Judge W.H.S. Thompson’s home sustained several hundred dollars’ worth of damage. Shrapnel and debris rocketed into nearby houses. The blast reportedly threw a baby into a pile of broken glass, where it somehow remained unharmed. Passersby rushed in to help, but no one was badly injured.
Moments later, but nearly seven miles away, in Sheraden, another explosion rocked the home of a railroad employee at 2633 Glasgow Street. The likely intended target was the man who lived across the street: W.W. Sibray. He was an immigration inspector who played a key role in deporting suspected radicals in western Pennsylvania. A neighbor said she saw a mysterious man planting a package in a porch vestibule at one of the homes but attached little importance to the sighting at the time.
Officials quickly realized the twin Allegheny County bombs were part of a much larger plot. Explosives had detonated nearly simultaneously in eight cities from Boston to Washington, D.C., and some used as much as twenty-five pounds of dynamite. The explosives targeted lawmakers, mayors and even the U.S. attorney general, Mitchell Palmer. At every site, including in Pittsburgh, they left a manifesto titled “Plain Words.” The Pittsburgh Press reprinted the leaflet, which read in part:
The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop here in America, the world-wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked. A time has come when the social question’s solution can be delayed no longer; class war is on and cannot cease but with a complete victory for the international proletariat. The challenge is an old one, on ‘democratic’ lords of the autocratic republic! We have been dreaming of freedom, we have talked of liberty. We have aspired to a better world and you jailed us, you clubbed us, you deported us, you murdered us whenever you could.
End of excerpt.
If the June 1919 bombings in Pittsburgh were meant to kill agents of capitalism and the state, they failed spectacularly. But they drew immediate attention to the city’s radicals. Newspapers blamed a “red plot” and police ransacked Industrial Workers of the World offices. Officials targeted immigrant radicals, first in local raids and then, months later, in the nationwide Palmer Raids.
The real culprits were Galleanists — followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, who advocated spectacular acts of violence against class enemies. Galleani was soon deported and would later be jailed by Benito Mussolini’s regime. The raids that followed the bombings would lead to the deportation of hundreds of “alien anarchists,” included at least 20 from western Pennsylvania. The nationwide wave of repression would push the fledgling Communist movement deep underground.
Today, both targeted houses appear to be standing, according to county property records.
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