The Drowning Girls and Comrades by Beth Graham & Charlie Tomlinson & Daniela Vlaskalic

Author:Beth Graham & Charlie Tomlinson & Daniela Vlaskalic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
Published: 2013-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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1 An excerpt from The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus. The poem engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

2 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

3 Luigi Galleani.

4 Eugène Pottier and Pierre De Geyter.

5 Francis Scott Key.

6 The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.

Historical Notes

Between 1880 and 1920, four million Italian immigrants crossed the Atlantic to the United States. The majority of immigrants were males between the ages of twenty-four and forty-five. Many expected to stay in the United States only long enough to earn money to improve their family situation. Others intended to send for their families as soon as they could.

Shortly after the end of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Red Scare took hold in the United States. A nationwide fear of communists, socialists, anarchists, and other dissidents suddenly grabbed the American psyche in 1919 following a series of anarchist bombings. People were jailed for expressing their views, civil liberties were ignored, and many Americans feared that a Bolshevik-style revolution was at hand.

The Bolshevik Revolution was the culmination of events, which led to the overthrow of the Russian government in the fall of 1917. Russia had entered World War I (1914–18) in 1914, and by 1917 the country was facing hardships, including shortages of food and fuel. The people had lost faith in the war effort; they were no longer willing to send young men into battle only to be killed. The Bolsheviks were an extremist faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (later renamed the Russian Communist Party) who seized control of the government and ushered in the Soviet age.

According to Paul Avrich, three common perspectives united anarchists. American anarchists wanted to abolish the state and destroy the power of most established institutions; they wanted the stateless society to be based upon voluntary co-operation; and they feared and combated most forms of Marxist socialism, particularly the communist model, with its reliance on centralized state authority to carry out the class aims of the proletariat.

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson appointed a new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, a Pennsylvania attorney with liberal credentials, including past support for workers’ rights and womens’ suffrage. Palmer, however, reversed his views. In April, the post office discovered thirty-eight bombs that had been mailed to leading American politicians and capitalists. Shortly thereafter, an Italian anarchist was blown up outside Palmer’s residence. The nation’s top law-enforcement official became convinced that a radical plot was underway.

Despite finding no credible evidence that a communist plot was underway, Palmer staged more raids in January 1920. With the assistance of local law-enforcement officials throughout the country, as many as six thousand suspects were arrested and detained.

During the afternoon of April 15, 1920, Frederick Parmenter, a paymaster, and Alessandro Beradelli, a security guard, were murdered during a robbery of fifteen thousand, seven hundred seventy-six dollars and fifty-one cents from the Slater & Morrill Shoe Company.

The arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti coincided with the period in America known as the Red Scare, 1919–20. While neither

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