Part 2 : Appendix 3

Appendix III

Fact and Fiction on the Shooting Incident at a Meeting Addressed by Malatesta in West Hoboken in 1899

This minor incident in a very full life would have been put in its proper perspective but for the exaggerated importance attributed to it, as well as the falsification of the facts, by writers more concerned with satisfying their publishers’ interest and with entertaining the reading public, than with establishing the facts as well as getting them in their proper perspective.

“Max Nomad”—described in the publisher’s blurb of the original American edition of his book Rebels and Renegades[294] as “the pen-name of a political emigrant from prewar [1914–18] Europe who has been either a sympathetic observer of, or an active participant in the extreme left-wing revolutionary movements” in some European countries as well as in the United States since—devotes the first of his “sketches of persons still living, who have been prominently identified with revolutionary or labor movements,” to Malatesta. The sketch, nearly fifty pages long is a combination of the kind of concoction of half truths one would expect from a newspaper hack and the anti-libertarian hysteria of one who at the time [1932], at least, was a revolutionary of the authoritarian school, an admirer of Lenin and Trotsky as well as Stalin and William Z. Foster. Suffice it to say, that in the mid-twentieth century Max Nomad’s name crops up in the columns of the American Socialist Call and in the New Leader peddling anti-Communism and still as anti-anarchist as ever!

In Rebels and Renegades, Nomad writes of Malatesta’s stay in America:

The inevitable discussions as to the merits or demerits of organization now began again, and this time almost cost him his life. During one of these disputes G. Ciancabilla, the leader of the “anti-organizzatori” seeing that the majority were siding with the old champion, emphasized his own argument by emptying his revolver into the body of his opponent. The hero escaped, and Malatesta, unable to leave the place on account of his wound, was arrested. He refused to name his assailant, although the police left him for a time without any treatment in the hope of forcing him to give the desired information. Ciancabilla remained a prophet among the guardians of the Holy Grail of unrestrained individual liberty, and died a few years later in California where he edited a paper with the fitting title La Protesta Umana.

It was an easy matter to demolish Nomad’s fantasy: Ciancabilla was not at the meeting at which Malatesta was shot at; and his assailant was one Domenico Pazzaglia, a barber, “unknown to most of the comrades and ignored by the few who knew him.”[295] The anarchist monthly man! (March 1933)[296] further points out that Ciancabilla disapproved of Pazzaglia’s act. The July number of that journal published a letter from Nomad in which he apologized for confusing Ciancabilla with Pazzaglia, but asserts that the latter was a follower of Ciancabilla that is, presumably an “anti-organizzatore.” Was Ciancabilla such?

In 1897 he was editor of the socialist paper Avanti! (Forward) and published a most interesting interview with Malatesta which took place in “a small railway station, in between trains, and we talked for about an hour, arm in arm, walking up and down the platform under the very noses of two carbineers and a plain clothes detective, detailed to keep a watch on stations.”[297]

Apart from the relationship between the two men, which was to become more intimate when Ciancabilla became an anarchist, what is interesting about the preamble to this interview is that this was the period when Malatesta was living incognito in Ancona and the object of a nation-wide police hunt! Was Ciancabilla’s preamble one of the many attempts to put the police off the scent, or did he really meet Malatesta in “a small railway station”? I must confess that I am curious to know the answer! Anyway, it was during this period that Ciancabilla as well as a number of other socialists, among them Mamolo Zamboni (father of the Zamboni who years later—in 1926—made the unsuccessful attempt on Mussolini’s life) joined the anarchists under the influence of Malatesta. I find it surprising therefore that in so short a time Ciancabilla should have become the spokesman of the individualist section of the Italo-American anarchist movement. Not only was he the Italian translator of Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread (we know, Mussolini also translated Kropotkin!) but even in September 1899 he was expressing the view in Questione Sociale that he could not conceive individual or collective well-being without order, social services, and “a harmonious society based on associations and collectivities functioning organically.”[298]

Thirty years after his libel on Ciancabilla and on Malatesta (for Nomad’s potted historical sketch can be faulted factually on every page—irrespective of his sneers and guffaws) George Woodcock’s history of anarchism was published in the United States as a paperback,[299] and because Professor Woodcock was content to rely on Nomad rather than Nettlau, Fabbri, Borghi, or even his erstwhile comrades in the English speaking world, for his references to Malatesta, he repeated the Nomad libel, presumably unaware of Nomad’s subsequent rectification. Not only must one charge Woodcock with not having checked his sources, especially when they are Marx Nomad; but when he was politely informed of his error by anarchists in the United States, he felt it sufficient to change two words in the passage complained of when his History appeared in an English edition[300] to put the record right. I must reproduce the whole paragraph from the American edition in order also to illustrate the slapdash way these professionals of the written word happily churn out the words by the thousand:

As a result of the tense atmosphere which followed the 1898 rising, Malatesta was not released at the end of his prison term, but instead, with a number of other leaders of the movement, was sent to exile for five years on the island of Lampedusa. He did not stay there long. One stormy day he and three of his comrades seized a boat and put out to sea in defiance of the high waves. They were lucky enough to be picked up by a ship on its way to Malta, whence Malatesta sailed to the United States. There his life once again took a sensational turn, which this time almost brought it to an end. He became involved in a dispute with the individualist anarchists of Paterson, who insisted that anarchism implied no organization at all, and that every man must act solely on his impulses. At last, in one noisy debate, the individual impulse of a certain Ciancabilla directed him to shoot Malatesta who was badly wounded but who obstinately refused to name his assailant. Ciancabilla fled to California, and Malatesta eventually recovered; in 1900 he set sail for London which by now had become his favorite place of exile.

In the Pelican edition, Professor Woodcock deletes the two references to Ciancabilla by name and in place of the first substitutes “a Comrade” and for the second “the would-be assailant.” Thus is serious history written: a named comrade becomes “a Comrade” (with a capital C) and “Ciancabilla” becomes the “would-be-assailant” and in Professor Woodcock’s two editions both “fled to California.” Not in the interests of history but in order to debunk the Woodcocks and the army of self-appointed historians who have neither the love of their métier nor a sense of responsibility towards their readers, I have quoted the paragraph from Woodcock’s history in full. I do not propose to analyze the paragraph for factual errors,[301] the reader can do this for himself by comparing it with my brief account of this period. I cannot resist however, underlining what I think is the prize sentence from Professor Woodcock’s paragraph: “One stormy day he and three of his comrades seized a boat and put out to sea in defiance of the high waves!”