Milwaukee’s Time of Terror

Saturday, November 24, 1917, was the day that Milwaukee confronted the reach and consequences of this anger. At 7:43 p.m., to be precise. That confrontation began inconspicuously enough with a scrubwoman, Erminia Spicciati.

Unlike the luckier ones, her circumstances bid her to bundle up and face the outdoors that raw, damp morning. She had to work. With her ten-year-old daughter Josie in tow, she was at work before 9 a.m. at the Italian Evangelical Mission Church, at 355 Van Buren Street, on the north edge of the Third Ward.

The church was the pride and domain of the Reverend August Giuliani. An Italian immigrant himself, Giuliani had been born in Vignanello, a town of a few thousand, on January 28, 1881. With a light complexion and brown hair, Giuliani had the fair appearance of Italy’s central and northern reaches. By about the turn of the century, this young man with the blue eyes took his vows as a Catholic priest. The novice stood a compact five foot six at most, weighed in at 160 pounds, and bore a rakish scar on his forehead.

Sometime in 1909, when Giuliani already may have been living in Rome, he met an American missionary woman, Katherine Eyerick.  She was five years his senior, fluent in Italian, and had worked with Milwaukee’s Italian immigrants for the Women’s Missionary Society since 1908.  How exactly August came to know Katherine is lost. But the fragmentary historical record suggests that the priest confronted a crisis in his vocation after he met her. She steamed back to the United States from Palermo in November 1910 on the Konig Albert, arriving in New York on November 25. On December 21, 1910, he boarded the Oceania in Palermo, bound for New York. He arrived at Ellis Island in dead winter, on January 5, 1911. Through Katherine’s intervention, he was in Milwaukee a week later, on January 12.23 By then, he had left the priesthood and the Catholic Church to convert to an evangelical stripe of Methodism.

Katherine continued to exert a considerable influence. They married that very year. August then plunged himself into evangelical work with the city’s Italians alongside the established Katherine. Together they combed Roman Catholic believers in the Third Ward for Protestant converts, often appealing first to belly and basics with charitable meals and clothing. The mission church followed in time. By 1917, August Giuliani had the church on Van Buren and two other mission houses, one a block west and four north at 721 Jackson Street and the second in the industrial town of West Allis on Milwaukee’s west side.

The mission put August and Katherine Giuliani and their church squarely within the relatively new settlement house movement that the Progressive era brought. Although Jane Addams was not the first to start a settlement house, her Hull House in Chicago was the most noted example of this movement. Beginning in the 1890s, the rise of settlement houses in the nation’s larger cities reflected the earnest wish of predominantly middle-class reformers to improve the education, the sanitary conditions, and, in general, the lives of the working classes by providing a variety of programs in one gathering place. This was hands-on, intensely local social work. A settlement house would reach out to the neighborhood’s residents, pulling them in for night classes, day care, wholesome entertainment, warm meals, books, or perhaps just a bath. Eventually, workers in the settlement house would come from the neighborhood itself. Such efforts often were the particular interest of Protestant denominations, which gave birth to the Social Gospel movement that accompanied and fed the emergence of progressive political thought in the middle classes from the 1880s into the 1920s.26 Reform-minded and collective in its orientation, the settlement house movement grew out of the progressive critique of Gilded Age excesses and the growing antipathy between the upper classes and the urban working classes. The Giulianis and their Protestant mission church fit comfortably into this mold of settlement work.

Giuliani’s energy and fervor served him well in his calling, despite his fragile English. He also may have had a sense of humor; in 1916, he wrote a thank-you card in the voice of his three-month old son, saying, in part, “sometime I feel lonesome and I like party.” Giuliani became a successful minister, and his work took him well out of town. This particular Saturday, November 24, 1917, was such a day. He had traveled to the small town of Markesan, Wisconsin, for a preaching engagement the following morning.

August left in charge his settlement worker and assistant, Maud Richter. Youthful but serious, she appears a soft but prim figure in newspaper photographs. Richter was not at the church when Erminia Spicciati, the scrubwoman, and her daughter arrived to start cleaning.

Probably it was Erminia’s daughter Josie who first noticed the strange package outside the church, nestled in the space between the exterior wall and the fence on the south face of the church. It was about 9 a.m. The child called her mother’s attention to the find, and the harried charwoman apparently was nonplussed. She brought the paper-wrapped package into the church and left it. Erminia turned back to her work for hours until Richter appeared at the church that afternoon.

Hearing Erminia Spicciati’s report upon her arrival, Richter went to investigate. Certainly the package looked like something that ought not be there; carefully wrapped, it was not rubbish or something a passerby had pitched carelessly. Police Captain John T. Sullivan later offered the most benign description, saying, “It looked like a big dinner pail, and innocent enough.” Perhaps. But a big dinner pail hardly should have found its way to that narrow, remote gap between wall and fence. For that matter, a more detailed description of the mysterious package suggested something substantially less innocent than a lunch pail. It was fourteen inches long, nine inches in both height and width, and “wound closely in a coil of wire”; to complete the effect, in the center sat a glass tube. The contraption may have weighed as much as twenty pounds.

Richter suspected the worst. It was a bomb. More inquisitive than sensible, she lugged it to the basement and “began fingering the infernal machine, and even pulled the glass tube from it,” she later admitted.  The glass tube contained brown liquid, and, after removing the vial, Richter could see a yellow powder inside the package.

Aside from the suspicious appearance of the package, Richter had good reason to consider the possibility of a bomb at her Third Ward workplace if ever she glanced at a newspaper. In the ten years up to October 1917, the papers reported, the Third Ward alone had accounted for sixteen murders—eleven of them unsolved. These had occurred in one small district of a city that still numbered no more than about 440,000 inhabitants. On the whole, Milwaukee had a modest murder rate. In 1917 the police had arrested only five people in the entire city for murder and one more for manslaughter. The Third Ward also had seen at least ten bombings according to the Milwaukee Journal ’s count. Racial and ethnic attitudes of the day made it all seem so simple. Bombs were the “particular weapon of Sicilians,” meaning Third Ward residents (not Italians; that was the code word for the Bay View colony), explained the Milwaukee Journal. “The Italian may use a knife, but he leaves the bomb and the sawed off shotgun to the Sicilian.”

In spite of her suspicions, Richter dithered. The short afternoon turned dark, and supper hour approached. It was 5:20 p.m. before Richter went around the corner to the YWCA, which was equipped with a telephone, to call the police.

Now the police dallied. Although the dispatcher promised to send an officer immediately, almost an hour passed while Richter waited at the church. No officer. Eventually, she decided to act. By this time, a sensible side prevailed, with a self-protective edge. She would send a neighborhood boy to the police station with the package. She summoned the church’s teenage handyman and part-time cornetist, Sam Mazzone. He was to go off with package in hand to the central police station several blocks to the northwest at Broadway and Oneida.41

Mazzone, then nineteen or twenty years old, was a “well dressed young man, smooth shaven, of average size, clear complexion and rather handsome appearance.” He rounded up a companion for the slow walk four blocks west and three north along streets only lightly traveled at that hour, the two young men gingerly cradling the heavy package found lying against the church wall nine hours earlier. They passed quietly in and out of pale spheres of light as street lamps shone. “Two Italian boys” appeared at the police station many minutes later.

What neither Mazzone nor Richter knew was that a police officer at last had responded. Detective McKenney was walking from the central police station to the Italian Evangelical Mission Church at the same time.  He and Mazzone never crossed paths.

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