Hundreds of neighbors in their nightclothes rushed to the scene, along with every available police officer. A police officer was stationed at the church, but was taken by surprise and was unable to catch the bombers as they drove away. The mysterious bombers had terrorized the church, and the police seemed helpless to stop them. Nationalists disliked the church because it had opposed Italian reunification, while radicals and anarchists saw organized religion as an opiate of the masses. A number of North Beach Italians were sovversivi, or subversives, who subscribed to radical publications like L’Asino (the Donkey), an anticlerical satirical review founded in Rome that had a circulation in Italy of more than 100,000. The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940, one issue of L’Asino featured an open letter addressed to “Dear Madonna del Carmine, c/o Eternal Father — Heaven,” questioning her miraculous powers and asking sarcastically if she was the best and most powerful of all Madonnas. After the fourth bombing, San Francisco police, led by Detective Louis De Matei — a cousin of a priest at the church — devised a plan to catch the culprits. Thirteen undercover police officers were stationed inside and outside the church from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., linked by an elaborate system of phone and buzzers. Some policemen were disguised as women, while others were smuggled into the building in laundry and bread baskets. The first man laid his package against the building, struck a match and lit a fuse. The police opened fire, killing him instantly, and put out the fuse. The watchman tried to flee across Washington Square, but De Matei ran after him and opened fire, wounding the man. Catholic Action, Anti-Catholicism and National Security Politics in World War II San Francisco, Eklund was “a well-known figure in the community of single men who lived in boardinghouses and residential hotels in the South of Market neighborhood, the area Jack London made famous as a hotbed of radicalism in his 1909 short story 'South of the Slot.’” Eklund was a sidewalk preacher and rabble-rouser who had been arrested by the Seattle police during a demonstration held by supporters of the International Workers of the World. The IWW, with its slogan “one big union,” had significant support in San Francisco, but there is no evidence that Eklund was a member, and the IWW did not call for blowing up churches. Galleanisti carried out a number of bombings in the U.S., including an attack that killed 10 Milwaukee police officers and a 1920 Wall Street bombing that killed 38 people and injured 400. Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.
Reported by SFGate 11 hours ago.
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