Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [69]
One imaginative reporter pictured Bresci as having been “indoctrinated” by Malatesta, “the head and moving spirit of all the conspiracies which have recently startled the world by their awful success.” He claimed that Malatesta had been glimpsed quietly drinking at an Italian bar in Paterson, but the police found no evidence that Bresci had ever met Malatesta. He had, however, either obtained or been given a revolver in Paterson with which he practiced shooting in the woods while his wife and three-year-old daughter picked flowers nearby. Also, he was given by his comrades, or somehow obtained, money to buy a steerage ticket on the French Line with enough left over to make his way from Le Havre to Italy.
“He was not insane enough to expect that the change of Government would follow his act,” explained Pedro Esteve, editor of the Paterson Anarchist journal, to a reporter. “But how else could he let the people of Italy know that there was any such force in the world as Anarchy?” An amiable and scholarly person whose bookshelves held the works of Emerson next to those of Jean Grave, Esteve accepted as quite reasonable that one of his own readers should go out and express the protest of the masses in a magnificent gesture.
Bresci’s comrades sent him a congratulatory telegram in prison and wore his picture on buttons in their coat lapels. They also insisted at a mass meeting in Paterson, attended by over a thousand persons, that there had been no plot. “We don’t need to make plots or talk,” said Esteve, who was the principal speaker. “If you are an Anarchist you know what to do and you do it individually and of your own accord.”
Bresci himself suffered the same fate as other instruments of the Idea. As Italy had abolished the death penalty, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, the first seven years to be spent in solitary confinement. After the first few months he killed himself in prison.
In the United States the newspaper account of King Humbert’s assassination was read over and over again by a Polish-American named Leon Czolgosz. The clipping became a precious possession which he took to bed with him every night. Twenty-eight at this time, he was small and slight, with a peculiar fixed gaze in his light-blue eyes. Born in the United States shortly after his parents came to America, he was one of six brothers and two sisters, and lived with his family on a small farm in Ohio. According to his father, he had “the appearance of thinking more than most children,” and because of his fondness for reading, was considered the intellectual of the family. In 1893, when he was twenty years old, he had been laid off during a strike in the wire factory where he worked, and afterward, according to his brother, “he got quiet and not so happy.” Prayer and the local priest having proved ineffective, he broke away from the Catholic Church, took to reading pamphlets issued by “Free Thinkers” and through these became interested in political radicalism. He joined a Polish workers’ circle where Socialism and Anarchism were among the topics discussed, and also, as he said later, “we discussed Presidents and that they were no good.”
In 1898 he suffered some undefined illness which left him moody and dull. He gave up work, stayed home, took his meals upstairs to his bedroom, kept to himself, read the Chicago Anarchist paper Free Society and Bellamy’s utopia, Looking Backward, and brooded. He made trips to Chicago and Cleveland, where he attended Anarchist meetings, heard speeches by Emma Goldman and had talks with an Anarchist named Emil Schilling to whom he expressed himself as troubled by the conduct of the American Army, which, after liberating the Philippines from Spain, was now engaged in war upon the Filipinos.