La Salute è in voi
figured prominently in the prosecution of the 1915 Bresci Circle failed bombing of New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral, in which the case revolved around the anarchists' right to read.
[2] La Salute è in voi acknowledged that workers could not foment that revolution without the technical means and so provided readers plain directions for producing explosives.
During their march to city hall, one hit a guard with a rock and the police fired on the crowd, killing three workers and wounding more, but ultimately the laborers gained their pay raise by dint of those martyred.
It includes chemistry training, such as a Baumé scale to measure liquid density and determine the potency of compounds, but also provides potential household uses for the chemicals mentioned.
Similar to John Most's Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft, who popularized the concept of"propaganda of the deed", La Salute è in voi was written to make military technology accessible to lay readers without chemistry and engineering expertise, such as the textile workers and anarchist writers of the eastern United States, who were inspired by other bombings but did not have occupational access to dynamite or practical experience in bomb-making.
[7] Although its level of scientific detail regarding chemical-handling technique elevated the handbook from mere anarchist manifesto,[8][9] none of its contents were new: its simple information was available in encyclopedias, applied chemistry books, and industrial sources, such as Martin Eissler's 1897 standard manual on explosives.
This emphasis on science is likely owed to Ettore Molinari, a chemist and anarchist believed to have drafted an early version of the handbook, if not the full book.
La Salute è in voi featured more prominently in later editions of the newspaper as "an indispensable pamphlet for those comrades who love self-instruction".
[12] The initial printing contains a typographical error in which an "i", displayed as "1", would severely undercut the proportion of sulfuric acid in the nitroglycerin formula; Cronaca Sovversiva later ran a correction.
Though some historians surmised that this error led to errant explosions, realistically the incorrect formula would have produced a mess of acids rather than the much more volatile nitroglycerin.
[10] La Salute è in voi had a low profile for the nine years prior to the 1915 Bresci Circle's attempted bombing of New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral.
[8] There is no evidence that Galleanists relied on La Salute è in voi but, if they did, the fact that their bombs hit only themselves and bystanders, never their intended capitalist and government targets, would indicate that the handbook provided insufficient preparation for an attack.
[17] After Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian–American anarchists and international cause célèbre, were denied appeal and condemned to death in 1927, they signed their final, written communique to supporters with "La Salute è in voi".
