28 Facts About Pedro Esteve

Pedro Esteve was a Catalan American anarchist activist and newspaper editor.

Pedro Esteve first became involved in trade union organizing while working as a typographer, through which he joined the Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region and co-founded the Pact of Union and Solidarity.

Pedro Esteve then moved to Paterson, New Jersey, and joined the immigrant Italian anarchist community.

Pedro Esteve took over editing the newspaper La Questione Sociale in 1899, but he was forced to leave the city in 1902, following the assassination of William McKinley.

Pedro Esteve fled back to New York in 1911, after he was targeted by a lynch mob for supporting a strike.

Pedro Esteve intermittently published the newspaper Cultura Obrera, but the authorities shut it down on multiple occasions.

Pedro Esteve died in 1925, but Spanish anarchists revived his publication Cultura Proletaria, and it continued to print issues until 1953.

Pedro Esteve was born in into a working class family in Barcelona in 1865.

In 1886, Pedro Esteve helped to establish the anarchist newspaper El Productor and the social center Regeneradon.

Pedro Esteve became a public figure, speaking at political demonstrations in towns throughout Catalonia.

Pedro Esteve took up Malatesta's appeal against political sectarianism within the anarchist movement and became a more active trade union organizer.

On International Workers' Day of 1890, Pedro Esteve co-organized a week-long general strike to demand the eight-hour day.

Later that year, when Malatesta came to Barcelona, Pedro Esteve helped to propagate his ideas and accompanied on a lecture tour of Spain.

Pedro Esteve followed him there and met numerous leading anarchists including Jean Grave, Peter Kropotkin, Severino Merlino and Louise Michel, before returning to Barcelona in February 1892.

In July 1892, Pedro Esteve decided to emigrate to the United States.

Pedro Esteve began contributing to the newspaper El Despertar and, in September 1893, represented Cuban and Spanish anarchists at a conference in Chicago, which intended to unify anarchists of different tendencies.

Pedro Esteve tried then to return to Catalonia, but he was still wanted by the Spanish police, so he decided to go back to New York in early 1894.

Pedro Esteve opposed separatism, while his Cuban comrades supported it, leading to them splitting from the paper and leaving it under Pedro Esteve's editorship.

Pedro Esteve subsequently invited Malatesta to come to Patterson and participate in the newspaper's publication.

When one of the founders of La Questione Sociale, Gaetano Bresci, assassinated the King of Italy Umberto I, Pedro Esteve praised the attack as an exemplary act of propaganda of the deed.

Pedro Esteve then had to argue that anarchists were largely not violent, and that such violent attacks were only a response to state violence.

Between 1902 and 1905, Pedro Esteve went on a series of lecture tours of the Northeastern United States, speaking on subjects such as trade union organizing and the progressive education of the Ferrer movement.

Pedro Esteve left the editorship of La Questione Sociale to Ludovico Caminita.

In Tampa, Pedro Esteve took over the Antorcha, a social center for freethinkers of different nationalities, and established a Ferrer school to educate migrant students.

In September 1907, Pedro Esteve's son died in a petroleum explosion, in what Pedro Esteve himself believed to have been a state attack to force him to leave the country.

Pedro Esteve collaborated on other anarchist publications, including Emma Goldman's magazine Mother Earth.

In October 1914, Pedro Esteve published an open letter denouncing Kropotkin, which isolated him from sections of the anarchist movement.

Pedro Esteve was commemorated by a Catalan nationalist group in New York, which he had been working with over the previous years.