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The Ku Klux Klan Fights the Battle of Greenville, Maine

In 1924, dozens of Ku Klux Klan members paraded through the tiny logging town of Greenville, Maine, to bully some outsiders into leaving.

The outsiders refused to go. Instead, more than a hundred of their friends from the nearby logging camps descended on the town, and held their own march – all night long, in freezing weather.

The outsiders came to Greenville to organize the loggers into a union so they could improve their miserable working conditions. They were members of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The Wobblies had led the successful Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass., 12 years earlier, and now they were taking on the lumber barons.

The KKK didn’t like unions any more than it liked French-Canadians. They were more than happy to help the logging companies intimidate the Wobblies and any French Canadian logger thinking about joining a union.

The Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan grew explosively in 1924, after all but vanishing in Maine at the start of the 1920s. But a charlatan with a gift for public speaking moved to Maine to revive the Hooded Order.

Eugene Farnsworth had worked as a Salvation Army recruiter, a barber and a traveling magician – until an accident on stage killed his assistant. Not until 1923 did he find his true calling as the state’s King Kleagle.

That year, Farnsworth went on a speaking tour that drew thousands of enthusiastic listeners. His message of hate toward Catholics and foreigners appealed to Maine Yankees. Protestant ministers often joined Farnsworth on the podium to denounce the French-Canadian and Irish immigrants who worked in the textile mills and logging camps.

Farnsworth met with stunning success. In his first year he built the state’s Klan membership to 23,000. They marched in broad daylight wearing their white robes, and burned crosses at night. They even set off a bomb in the heavily French-Canadian city of Lewiston.

The Ku Klux Klan near the Canadian border, 1927

Maine, in fact, had the biggest KKK chapter outside the South in the 1920s. By 1925, more than 100,000 Mainers belonged to the bedsheet nightriders.

Maine’s Lumber Camps

The Klan, however, didn’t object when Yankee lumber barons brought French Canadians to work for them as near-slaves.

To harvest Maine’s great forests, the lumbermen needed tens of thousands of workers in their logging camps, sawmills and paper mills. They needed them to cut the trees, to build mills and camps and to drive the logs down Maine’s rivers.

The work in the logging camps required men to spend the long winter in the northern Maine woods. It was hard, dangerous and often deadly.

To find men willing to work under those conditions, lumber companies had to import foreigners. Employment agents found them in Boston, Bangor and Lewiston and tricked them into working in the woods. The camps, they said, were just a few miles from town where they could enjoy themselves during their time off.

The agents would drive the immigrants a short distance into the woods and drop them off. The workers sometimes had to walk 60 or 70 miles to the camp. Or they’d have to borrow money to hire a wagon to get there.

Peonage, Maine Style

Once at the camps, they didn’t leave until spring. They lived in primitive bunkhouses and bought necessities at the company store, usually at wildly inflated prices. Many couldn’t quit because of their debts to their employer. Sometimes they didn’t have the strength or the stamina to do the work, but that didn’t matter.

Winter in a logging camp, 1895

For an entire decade, they were virtual slaves. Maine lawmakers, pressured by the lumber barons, passed a law in 1907 that put loggers in jail if they quit their jobs. Before the Legislature repealed the law 10 years later, 342 men went to jail for walking away from the camps.

In 1911, the U.S. Immigration Commission reported on debt peonage in America. “Since the evils of involuntary servitude have been largely stamped out in the southern States, there has probably existed in Maine the most complete system of peonage in the entire country.”

Then in 1920, the Wobblies came to organize the mostly French-Canadian loggers into a union.

The Battle of Greenville

The Ku Klux Klan apparently didn’t want to kick out all of Maine’s Roman Catholics. Instead of confronting the lumber barons who brought French Canadians to the state, the KKK supported them.

Things came to a head between the KKK and the Wobblies during a cold winter weekend in Greenville, a small town on the shores of Moosehead Lake.

Bucolic Greenville, Maine.

Bob Pease, a Finn who headed the IWW in Maine, and two other Wobblies had moved into a boardinghouse in the town. From there they started to recruit loggers in the camps. Greenville’s selectmen ordered them to leave. They refused, saying they’d done nothing wrong.

A Portland Press-Herald reporter asked Pease why they stayed. “Because we want good wages, eight hours a day in the lumber camps and clean linen in our bunks,” he said. “The day of the old logging camp and the lumberjacks is about over with.”

One Saturday night in freezing weather, 40 members of the KKK came to Bob Pease’s boardinghouse and told him to leave. He called the county sheriff, who sent a deputy to protect them through the night.

On Sunday and Monday, some 175 members of the IWW streamed out of the logging camps to show solidarity for the organizers. Neither the boardinghouses nor the YMCA would put them up. Instead they marched up and down the streets all night long.

“We are going to stick,” said Pease, “and if the Klan starts anything, the IWW will finish it.” He called the Great Northern Paper Company “slave drivers,” but said the Wobblies were too strong for them.

The lumber interests had brought in the KKK, said Pease. And he pointed out most of their employees were the very people the Ku Klux Klan despised – French-Canadian Catholics.

The Wobblies wanted to organize all workers into one union.

A Whimper

In the end there was no violence, no trouble. Most of the Wobblies returned to the lumber camps, and the Klan melted away.

The lumber companies found other ways to squeeze out the Wobblies. They refused to hire anyone who’d joined the IWW. And the YMCA and the local merchants discriminated against them.

In response, Pease and the other Wobblies organized a boycott against four Greenville establishments.

For that, a grand jury in Bangor charged them with conspiracy.

On the day of their trial, 37 Wobblies came to the courtroom, only to find the court rescheduled.

Pease and the others received sentences of one to two years in jail. The Wobblies’ organizing collapsed.

But so did the Klan.

In 1926, the Klan membership fell by half. By the next year it had little more than 3,000 members. By 1930, fewer than 300.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Mario Buda, The Other Boston Bomber

On Sept. 16, 1920, an Italian immigrant named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon across from J.P. Morgan and Co. and down the street from the New York Stock Exchange.

Few noticed as the balding little man left his old horse and rusty wagon amid the lunchtime street bustle. Then the bells of Trinity Church chimed noon, and a deafening blast sent scores of people to the pavement. Windows shattered, shrapnel flew and a ball of flame and smoke rose to the sky.

Aftermath of the Wall Street bombing.

As victims lay bleeding in the street, Mario Buda melted into the crowd.

At least that’s what law enforcement officers – and since then, historians — surmised. Mario Buda made a likely suspect after four years of anarchist terror bombings eventually linked to him. He probably blew up Wall Street because his closest friends, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been charged with murder just five days earlier.

Anarchist Terror

World War I had ended nearly two years before the Wall Street bombings, but the anarchist violence it spawned didn’t stop with the Armistice.

Well before the war, anarchists had allied themselves with the radical labor unions, the Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies.

Inflation ate into workers’ earnings as war approached, and tens of thousands walked off the job for higher pay and shorter hours. Some of the biggest strikes in history had taken place just before the United States intervened in World War I, including the 1914 Ludlow massacre in Colorado and the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass.

Labor unrest had spread throughout New England in such actions as the 1912 American Woolen Mill strike in Willimantic, Conn., the 1913 Ipswich Hosiery Mill strike and the 1915 Bridgeport munitions workers strike.

As the United States edged closer to World War I, anarchists battled the capitalists who, they believed, made huge wartime profits off their downtrodden workers. Anarchists rejected all authority and embraced violence in the war against capitalism.

Beginning in 1912, an Italian immigrant named Luigi Galleani led the anarchists from his newspaper office in Lynn, Mass. The Justice Department called his newspaper, the Subversive Chronicle, the ‘most rabid, seditious and anarchistic sheet ever published in this country.’ Though small, the newspaper had subscribers all over the world.

Galleani found a receptive audience in some of the 30,000 Italians who lived in Boston—including a 30-something immigrant named Mario Buda.

Mario Buda

He was born in Sicily on Oct. 13, 1884, the son of a gardener. In 1907, then in his early 20s, he immigrated to the United States and worked as a gardener, in construction and in factories He returned to Italy in 1911, then came back to Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood two years later.

People described him as quiet, serious and proud; friends gave him the nickname Nasone, or Big Nose. Police considered him elusive and dangerous.

At first he commuted to his job in a Framingham hat factory. Then he and his brother started a cleaning store selling to Wellesley College students. All the while he went to anarchist meetings and anarchist picnics, took part in anarchist theater recitals and started an anarchist school.

As an anarchist, he supported labor strikes, and he met Nicola Sacco during the 1913 Hopedale, Mass., textile strike. Police shot and killed a worker during the 12-week strike, which failed in the end.

Three years later, in 1916, he met Bartolomeo Vanzetti at the Cordage strike in Plymouth, Mass.

Violence Begins in 1916

By 1916, the United States began to prepare for the war then raging in Europe. On New Year’s Day, a security guard discovered a wicker suitcase filled with dynamite in the Massachusetts Statehouse. It failed to go off.

But the next day, a bomb went off in Woburn, Mass., ripping apart a New England Manufacturing Co. factory. Rumor had it the company received threatening letters telling it to stop shipping goods to Europe.

Across the country, communities began to hold Preparedness Days to celebrate the military buildup for the U.S. entry into war. On July 22, 1916, an anarchist bomb went off in San Francisco during a Preparedness Day parade, killing 10 and wounding 40. Police suspected Mario Buda of setting off the bomb, but they never closed the case.

Luigi Galleani

Then in early December of 1916, an antiwar riot turned violent in Boston’s North End. Police arrested 10 people, including Mario Buda. In the courtroom he refused to take an oath on the Bible, and he received a five-month prison sentence.

A few weeks after the riot, a bomb rocked the North End, blowing up the Salutation Street police station. It didn’t hurt anyone, as it exploded on a quiet Sunday morning. But the bomb blew a hole through the three-foot brick wall and broke every window for blocks.

Mario Buda Bombs Milwaukee

When Mario Buda left prison, he went to Monterrey, Mexico, with Sacco, Vanzetti and another Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoci. Monterrey had an active community of Italian anarchists, and some historians suspect Buda and his friends honed their bomb making techniques while there.

On April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. Boston’s district attorney warned of more anarchist violence. Though most of the city’s 30,000 Italians supported the war, police described the North End as ‘anarchist headquarters.’

Two months later, police arrested the three leading anarchists in the United States. In New York, they arrested Emma Goldman, who’d once run an ice cream parlor in Worcester, Mass., and her lover Alexander Berkman. They arrested Luigi Galleani at his home in Wrentham, Mass., for an editorial he’d written opposing the draft.

Some Italian community leaders tried to distance themselves from the anarchists. In November, the pastor of the Italian Evangelical Church in Milwaukee held a loyalty rally in front of local anarchist headquarters. A riot broke out, and police shot and killed two anarchists and arrested 11.

An anti-anarchist cartoon

The Milwaukee killings propelled Mario Buda out of Mexico. Shortly after police shot the anarchists, someone discovered a package in the evangelical church basement. The janitor took it to the police station, where it exploded, killing nine police officers and a civilian.

Police never caught the culprit. Years later, though, anarchists revealed who made the bomb: Mario Buda.

The 1919 Anarchist Bombings

The year 1919 brought a wave of anarchist bombings. They started when Luigi Galleani delivered an inflammatory speech in Taunton, Mass., just prior to his deportation. The next day, four anarchists blew themselves up trying to plant a bomb in the American Woolen Co. in Franklin, Mass

The new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, vowed to crack down on ‘aliens and Bolsheviks, radicals, and anarchists.’

On April 28, mail bombs arrived at the homes and offices of 36 prominent men, including John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Jr., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,– and A. Mitchell Palmer. Only one exploded, blowing off the hands of a housekeeper.

Then in June 1919, large bombs went off within 90 minutes of each other in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Washington, D.C., and Paterson, N.J. A night watchman died in the New York explosion.

The bomb in Washington, D.C. blew up on the front porch of A. Mitchell Palmer. It exploded in the hands of the Italian anarchist who’d carried it, Carlo Valdinoci – one of Bruda’s traveling companions in Mexico. Valdinoci was picked up in little pieces on the front lawn of Palmer’s neighbors, Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor.

Did Mario Bruda have anything to do with the 1919 bombings? Probably.

Palmer Raids

Palmer immediately blamed anarchists and radicals for the bombings he termed ‘terrorism.’ Beginning on Nov. 7, 1919, the FBI started rounding up suspects in what became known as the Palmer raids. Led by J. Edgar Hoover, they were notorious for violating people’s rights. The FBI threw suspects into filthy, crowded prisons without telling them why. They arrested people just for visiting prisoners in Hartford’s notorious Seyms Street Jail.

All in all, the FBI caught up 10,000 people in its dragnet, many of them Italian or Jewish from Eastern Europe. In Connecticut they raided Ansonia, Bridgeport, Hartford, Meriden, New Haven, New London, South Manchester and Waterbury. In Massachusetts they raided Boston, Chelsea, Brockton, Bridgewater, Norwood, Worcester, Springfield, Chicopee Falls, Holyoke, Gardner, Fitchburg, Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill. And in New Hampshire, they rounded up people in Clarement, Derry, Lincoln, Manchester, Nashua and Portsmouth.

Francis Fisher Kane, U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania, resigned in protest. By such methods, he said, “we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.” His words proved prophetic.

Mario Buda Bombs Wall Street

Mario Buda called Sacco and Vanzetti ‘the best friends I had in America.’ Police arrested them in connection with the murder of two men during a robbery of the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company. Police had also questioned Buda, who escaped.

Prosecutors charged Sacco and Vanzetti with murder on Sept. 11, 1920. Five days later, a dilapidated wagon carrying 100 pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of sash weights blew up on Wall Street.

The Associated Press reported,

Office workers were just hurrying into the street for their noonday meal when a jet of black smoke and flame rose from the center of the world’s greatest street of finance.

Then came a blast and a moment later scores of men, women and children were lying, blood covered, on the pavement.

The explosion killed 38 people and injured 143, including J.P. Morgan’s son Junius. Joseph P. Kennedy, who’d been walking by, was badly shaken but unhurt. Most of the victims were clerks, stenographers and office boys.

American Anarchist Fighters

A letter carrier discovered several leaflets in a nearby mailbox. In crude letters, it read,

Free the Political Prisoners or it Will Be Sure Death for All of You! American Anarchist Fighters.

Federal investigators settled on Mario Buda as the perpetrator, as he had rented the horse that pulled the wagon bomb. But they never questioned him, and Buda slipped out of the country. The Wall Street Bombing case was never closed.

Mike Buda would resurface in Italy as Mike Boda and carry on his anarchist activities. He died in Italy on June 1, 1963.

The limestone walls at 23 Wall Street still bear the pockmarks of the 1920 bombing.

With thanks to The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day by Steve Puleo and Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background By Paul Avrich. This story was updated in 2022.

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Pasta la Vista – F.P. Ventrone Sparks the Providence Macaroni Riots

The summer of 1914 was a flashpoint for the Italian immigrant families in Providence, R.I. Squeezed on one side by an economic depression, they also began encountering unexpected increases in prices at the markets. Those two forces set the stage for the macaroni riots of 1914.

Pasta made from durum wheat

Providence’s steadily growing Italian population provided tremendous opportunities for merchants with ties to the immigrants’ mother country. English-speaking Irish immigrants had managed to insert themselves into the city’s Yankee-dominated political structure. But Italian and French-Canadian immigrants had less influence on the city’s institutions.

More than 54,000 Italian immigrants arrived in Providence between 1898 and 1932. And that meant a boon to the city’s Federal Hill merchants. The Italian-Americans distrusted American retailers. They did not understand Italian tastes – and many did not want to.

Delivering bread in Providence’s Italian district by Lewis Wicks Hine

Scandalous Pasta

Italian merchants, meanwhile, thrived on the loyal customers they found among their neighbors. Questions about pasta had already been roiling Federal Hill, however. In 1908, F.P. Ventrone had been accused of selling inferior American-made pasta labelled as Italian.

Macaroni Savoia Brand Gragano pasta was produced in Long Island, but labelled to look as if it came from Italy. It was not made with semolina from durum wheat, but dyed yellow to make it appear that it was. The scandal would then play out for years.

Then in 1914, the Italian community experienced a second shock to its kitchens. Pasta prices increased – a lot. The price of this dietary staple skyrocketed by as much as 60 percent. Stores blamed the problem on shortages and price increases caused by World War I in Europe.

The war was an ominous and frequent topic of conversation in the homes of Providence’s Italian families. Some suspected stores played on that fear to raise prices.

Logo of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies

Providence’s mayor commissioned a study that found no price gouging. The Labor Advocate newspaper – aligned with the Socialist Industrial Workers of the World labor movement – declared the study a “whitewash.” The newspaper then made a not-so-subtle threat. It predicted the establishment of Frank P. Ventrone would soon “come to an abrupt end so far as Federal Hill is concerned.”

On August 29, protesters began putting action to the words. Italian-Americans had been protesting in prior years over their treatment by the Providence establishment. Encouraged then by the IWW (which figured in the famous 1912 Bread and Roses Strike in Massachusetts), Italians had marched through the streets of Little Italy supporting labor politicians and Italian pride.

An IWW demonstration in New York City in 1914.

The Macaroni Riots

Skirmishes with police were not unheard of at these events, but they were minor compared to the macaroni riots of 1914. On August 29, a rally at the corner of Atwells and Dean Streets turned raucous. The crowd began marching down Atwells Street toward Frank Ventrone’s store.

Ventrone had come to America from Italy in the 1880s and had prospered as the Italian population of the city surged. Dubbed the “Macaroni King,” he imported pasta, produced it and wholesaled it to other groceries. He was the most obvious target for the mob.

La Pigna under the Atwells Avenue arch in Providence’s Little Italy

Rioters smashed Ventrone’s storefront windows. Looters stole pasta and scattered it in the street. As the macaroni riot grew, neighboring stores received similar damage, Pearlman’s Dry Goods, People’s Pharmacy and Cardegna’s barbershop all suffered broken windows.

Police skirmished with the rioters through the next day. Both sides dodged bottles, bricks and bullets.

Frank Ventrone had been vacationing at his summer home in Warwick when the violence broke out. Returning to the city, he tried to explain his side of the story. Retail sellers of pasta were raising prices dramatically, not his company, he said.

Ventrone then met with the leaders of the macaroni riots and agreed to lower his prices. He dropped the cost of a box of pasta to $1.40 from $1.60. And, he promised to make all his pasta available at wholesale prices to any customers who came to his store — not just retailers.

An Italian grocery store on Atwells Avenue today

More Macaroni Riots

The macaroni riots then bubbled over again on September 7. They responded to a Labor Day rally that decried low wages and general inflation. Police, though, had prepared and moved quickly to defuse it.

Fourteen civilians received injuries in the macaroni riots. Ten police officers and firefighters also got hurt. The riots also caused more than $20,000 in damage.

Eventually an economic recovery grew out of the need for American goods in war-torn Europe. Prosperity quelled labor disturbances in New England. And F.P. Ventrone prospered through 1951.

“Italian Christmas Cookies: And the stories of the Italians who brought them to America” is your ticket to a sweet journey through the history, culture and cuisine of Italy and the Italian community in America. Available now in paperback from Amazon. Click here to order.

Thanks to: Every Shout a Cannonball, The I.W.W. and Urban Disorders in Providence, Joseph W. Sullivan. This story about the macaroni riots was updated in 2023.

Images: By I, Infrogmation, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2287338. Pasta made from durum wheat By CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35498497.

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