Still, he decided the risk was worth taking, and the IWW carefully mapped out a strategy to initially send over one hundred children from Lawrence to New York City. They placed ads in Socialist newspapers to help find and screen potential host families and recruited activists like the nurse and later founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger to help with the first children’s “exodus.” The children, registered by name, address, age, and nationality on a paper pinned to them and a duplicate kept by a secretary, were to be sent on a train to Grand Central Station. Chaperones would keep an eye on the children during the train ride and make sure that they met their host families at the station.
As anyone who has been raised by a traditional Italian mother knows, in normal circumstances she would more easily lie down on a train track than give her child to a complete stranger, even temporarily—but these were far from normal times. The strikers also feared keeping their children in Lawrence. Shortly after a bullet struck Anna LoPizzo, an eighteen-year-old Syrian boy died; he had taunted soldiers by throwing ice at them, and they responded by throwing bayonets at him. Sending children to New York City to stay with screened families seemed the lesser of two evils.
The striking workers employed a tactic used in towns in Italy: they sent their children to families in other cities.
And the children, donning white ribbons to stand out, were thrilled. They sang “The International” in Italian and French at the train station in Lawrence. Cheering families met them at Grand Central and placed their own coats on the children wearing threadbare garments. (Wealthy suffragettes who took up the Lawrence cause gained national attention by pointing out that the workers who made clothes for the world couldn’t afford to clothe their own children.) The evening of their arrival, the children were treated to a huge dinner prepared by the Hotel and Restaurant Workers union, topped off with ice cream, cake, and fruit. The children remained well fed for the duration of their stay, for many the first time in their lives, and the host families enrolled them in local schools.
The reaction in Lawrence, led by the mayor, was one of outrage. Lawrence could take care of its own children, he insisted, and many residents fumed that the strikers had unfairly slandered the town’s reputation. When the strikers attempted two weeks later to send another group of children to Philadelphia, Lawrence police tried to block them, dragging and clubbing some of the mothers. The melee, reported in national newspapers, caught the attention of President Taft, who ordered his attorney general to investigate.
Haywood’s instinct had been right; sending the children away changed the course of, and public sentiment toward, the strike. Congress decided to hold hearings, and the testimony they heard awoke a nation to the horrors taking place in the mills. Children described how they had to quit school at fourteen and work frenetically all day to keep pace with the machines, their labors earning them five dollars a week. They were asked if they had ever been injured on the job—a frequent occurrence—but one girl’s story captivated the hearing room. Camella Teoli was only thirteen, pulled out of school by a man who came to her parents’ house to recruit her. For the sum of four dollars, her father had given the man permission to forge her papers to say she was fourteen, the legal work age. Two weeks after she started, she had made the grave mistake of letting her pinned hair down, and the mill machines had scooped up the strands and torn off her scalp.
The strikers’ children marched in New York City, infuriating Lawrence officials.
Congress asked more questions: Why was a boy throwing ice attacked with bayonets? Why could families afford only bread and molasses? Why had the looms been accelerated? The congressional hearings were a public relations fiasco for the mill owners, and they knew it. They responded by offering the wage increase the union was demanding—amounting to roughly 15 percent, with a sliding scale that gave lower-paid workers the most—and ending the strike. Not only did the Lawrence strike increase these workers’ wages, but mill owners in neighboring New England towns, fearful that they would be targeted next, offered the same deal for an additional 250,000 workers. It was an extraordinary victory; the people of Lawrence rejoiced and the 240 children who had been sent away came home.
When the children testified in Washington about conditions in the mills, the owners knew sympathy had shifted to the strikers.
But although the strike ended in March, the summer arrived with Ettor and Giovannitti still in jail awaiting trial. By fall, they were brought into the courtroom, placed in a cage for all to peer into throughout the two-month trial. The prosecutors acknowledged that the men had been nowhere near the shooting, but they hoped to win the case by using the legal precedent set in the Haymarket Square trial. The accused in that case had been put to death not for planting bombs that killed six policemen in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886, but for writing in anarchist journals.
The fate of the men in Lawrence would depend in part on how the jurors viewed the aims and actions of the strikers and the response of the militia. Who were the instigators of violence, and who were its victims? The trial was receiving worldwide attention, with support pouring in from trade unionists for the three men. After the defense and prosecution rested, Ettor and Giovannitti took the unusual step of asking to address the jury. Giovannitti had spent his time in jail reading the Romantic poets, Shakespeare, and Kant, and writing poetry. The courtroom was unprepared for this pale, fragile Italian who spellbound them with his eloquence.
“I, the man from southern Italy, have not told [Americans] how they should run their business,” said Giovannitti in the vertiginous position of stepping out of a cage to defend his life from the electric chair. “I am not here now to tell you what the future of this country should be. I know this, though, that I come from a land which has been under the rod of oppression for thousands of years, oppressed by the autocracy of old, oppressed during the Middle Ages by all the nations of Europe, by all the vandals that passed through it. And now Italy is oppressed, I may say, even by the present authority, as I am not a believer in kingship and monarchy . . . When I came to this country it was because I thought that really I was coming to a better and a freer land than my own.”
The courtroom remained hushed. Giovannitti turned to the prosecutor to remind him of the trial’s location in Salem, Massachusetts. “I ask the District Attorney, who speaks about the New England tradition, what he means by that—if he means the New England traditions of this same town where they used to burn witches at the stake, or if he means the New England traditions of those men who refused to be any longer under the iron heel of the British aristocracy and dumped tea into the Boston Harbor and fired the first musket that was announcing to the world for the first time that a new era had been established—that from then on no more kingcraft, no more monarchy, no more kingship would be allowed, but a new people, a new theory, a new principle, a new brotherhood would arise out of the ruin and the wreckage of the past.”
Giovannitti implored the jury to acquit Joseph Caruso, the one who could not speak English and defend himself, saying that Ettor and he himself bore responsibility—the former as the strike’s leader, and the latter as “aider and abettor.” And Giovannitti courageously announced that if acquitted, he and Ettor would continue to participate and help in any future strike to better conditions of workers’ lives, “regardless of any fear and of any threat.”
Even some veteran reporters shed tears as they listened; no one spoke after Giovannitti returned to his cage, and the trial concluded. By evening the jury announced that it had reached a decision, and the next morning the jurors acquitted all three men.
The spontaneous uprising in Lawrence united strikers in the sentiment that they were not machines born to work and die.
The Lawrence strike was a turning point for Italian Americans. For the first time they had trusted themselves to challenge authority. They had not retreated in silence and suspicion. And two formidable Italian Americans, Ettor and Giovannitti, organizer and poet, had represented them and the
ir fellow millworkers with heroism and lyricism.
The events in Lawrence would later be known as the “Bread and Roses” strike, from the James Oppenheim poem of the same name. “Hearts starve as well as bodies,” read the poem, and workers needed not only bread but roses, too. The poem was published a month before the strike but later cited to express the sentiment found among the millworkers. The spontaneous uprising in Lawrence improved workers’ wages but also united them in their declaration that men and women were not machines born to work and die. They needed nourishment beyond a weekly paycheck—a feat hard to achieve if bosses pressed them so hard that only sleep could mitigate the pain. The months of singing, chanting, and believing in a cause greater than any single individual gave the workers a purpose and infused their days with dignity. For a brief moment in history they could believe, as Giovannitti exhorted in his courtroom speech, “that a new brotherhood would arise out of the ruin and the wreckage of the past.”
DOCUMENTI
PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE OF ARTURO GIOVANNITTI
Some of the collected correspondence of Arturo Giovannitti when he was in jail awaiting trial.
The Feast of San Gennaro, still celebrated in Little Italies today, began in Naples in the seventeenth century.
If religious devotion is expressed through the prism of cultural tradition, then the more austere Irish- and German-Americans, settling in America decades before the Italians, were unprepared for, and simply mortified by, the ways in which this new ethnic group worshipped. The Italians’ public displays of faith—communal, baroque, and operatic—evoked as much exoticism and strangeness as Rudolph Valentino portraying a turban-wrapped Arabian prince. Rather than Roman Catholicism providing a haven for the new immigrants and a point of commonality with others who shared the faith, their unorthodox practices made it clear that religion would become another source of conflict.
The American Catholic Church, dominated by an Irish hierarchy, held a rigid set of rules. Being Catholic meant attending sullen and subdued masses each week, officiated by a priest who was the sole intermediary between the people and the divine. The Irish Catholic Church announced its presence and its power early in America; by 1879, the huge and ornate St. Patrick’s Cathedral stood in New York City as testament to the scale of the faithful’s devotion.
The Italians, for the most part, did not regularly attend weekly mass in southern Italy. They held a good deal of anticlerical attitudes because village priests usually sided on behalf of the landed gentry and many were corrupt. Church attendance had been reserved mainly for baptisms, communions, weddings, and funerals, the symbolic markers of the life cycle to which the Italians paid due reverence. When Italians did show up in church, they were not quietly pious but boisterous, or, in the case of funerals, screamed, pounded their breasts, pulled out their hair, and even hired mourners to wail along with them.
Receiving the sacrament of First Communion was an important ritual of Italian-American religious devotion.
Italians were most comfortable professing their faith in the streets. Southern Italians spent a great deal of time outdoors, and the peasants brought their faith to public spaces, routinely holding processions, or feste (“feasts”), to honor saints on their name days and to venerate the Madonna. Many needed to be honored—there were over one hundred patron saints, with some performing miracles and being worshipped in more than one town—and the contadini lovingly carried them through their villages.
When the Italians brought these rituals to the New World, the Irish Catholic Church did not know what to make of them. An earthy physicality defined the Italians’ worship, literally and metaphorically, in the bend of the penitents’ bodies and their depiction of saints. The hierarchy had never seen women licking the stones of a church floor in sacrifice and prostrating themselves before a statue of the Madonna. Nor did they believe that street processions in which pilgrims carried larger-than-life statues—not to mention food stands selling fried dough, nougat, and pastries, and tables hosting gambling—were acceptable ways to honor the sacred.
Madonna! Who were these people? And what was going on with their saints?
The American Catholic Church found the vivid and gory depictions of saints appalling. The patron saint of the blind, Saint Lucy, appeared in paintings holding a platter of two eyeballs, their peering dark irises served like gothic hors d’oeuvres. Arrows pierced the body of the bloodied Saint Sebastian, a favorite of soldiers. The worship of San Gennaro, Neapolitans’ most important saint—whose feast day, September 19, is still widely celebrated today with street fairs in Italian-American neighborhoods—began after Vesuvius erupted in 1631. The bubbling lava killed three thousand people, and the next day, to soothe the chaos and fear, an archbishop brought out the congealed blood of San Gennaro. The blood, said to have been kept in the saint’s cathedral since the fourth century, liquefied before the faithful, and the miracle is still reenacted in Naples every September.
“Our Lady of Sorrows” expresses the devotion and pain of the Italian mother.
Southern Italians sought saints for miraculous interventions, not to provide moral guidance, which frustrated the Irish Catholic hierarchy. The Church also considered saints merely representations of the divine, not lifelike statues a hairbreadth from talking back. The Italians’ mystical bonds with their icons became a direct threat to the priest’s role as sole intermediary with the divine.
This intimate relationship was publicly celebrated and privately bartered. Italians believed that prayers provided a direct line to heaven, and they talked to, pleaded, fought with, and even dismissed saints in anger if prayers went unanswered. A nineteenth-century Neapolitan poem ’N paraviso (“In Paradise”) offers a glimpse into the Italian religious imagination. In this tale of unruly saints carping about heaven, the poet playfully suggests that even divine icons struggle with human foibles. They gossip (“Saint Clement is jealous of Saint Pascal”), argue, and whine. While the poem might undermine the idea of a glorious heaven, it also suggests that Italians see saints as family whose billowy breath feathers the cheeks of the faithful.
Only the Madonna, the poet concludes, is just and good, affirming the traditional Latin cult of the Virgin. The Italians brought their profound reverence for the Madonna, nostra mamma, to America, and they celebrated her in towns throughout the United States, in some places to this day. The celebration of the Madonna through the cult of Our Lady of Mount Carmel has existed since the seventeenth century, and in Roseto, Pennsylvania, she is revered in an annual procession called the “Big Time.” Every July the residents gather for this reunion and crown a local girl as queen. The largest of these early feast day celebrations took place on the streets of East Harlem, which by the 1920s attracted hundreds of thousands of Italians from along the East Coast.
The first East Harlem festa was held in 1882; the immigrants without their own church worshipped in a tenement courtyard ornamented only with a small painted picture of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the patron saint of the town of Polla in the province of Salerno. Two years later, the Italians of East Harlem commissioned from Polla their own statue of the Madonna, which resembled a Mediterranean young woman and was graced with long, flowing locks of human hair. The East Harlemites adorned her gown with jewelry they donated, and she wore small pendant earrings, as might a young Italian woman. Eventually, they crowned her, the prized gold supplied from their savings.
After receiving their glorious Madonna, the Italians decided they needed a true brick-and-mortar church in which to worship her. So they built one, stone by stone, heading to a plot of land at 115th Street to throw down pickaxes after finishing a laborious day of work. Materials were carried in carts loaned by local icemen and junkmen, and by working continuously on the project—even women pitched in when a mason’s union objected to so many men working for free—construction was completed in the course of one year.
Although Italian labor built the church, the hierarchy refused to fully open its doors to the immigrants
. The Irish clergy, still unsure of how to treat what they called the Italian “problem,” relegated parishioners to the basement to worship their Madonna from Polla. The clergy’s actions were mirrored in other communities in the United States, in which Italians worshipped in the back rows behind the more established Irish parishioners. The East Harlem Italians would remain in the basement until 1919, despite their anger and conviction that the clergy’s decision showed a profound disrespect to both them and the Madonna.
The Italians’ most important celebration of faith and culture remained on the streets during the July 16 festa for Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The weeklong event meant entertaining and housing out-of-town guests, preparing large meals of Italian specialties, and getting ready for the pilgrimage. The night before, they held vigils in the church; and on the day, family, friends, and devotees of the Madonna would come from all over the East Coast. Those from other boroughs in the city often walked barefoot for miles in the sweltering heat to make the pilgrimage to the Madonna. The statue from Polla remained in the church, taken out only on rare occasions, and a large replica was in procession through the streets.
The Italians believed that the Madonna would listen to their prayers and offer her benevolent healing powers. Those who sought a healing for physical ailments had large wax replicas of body parts and limbs molded for them to carry; others lifted huge candles in her honor. The weight of the candle was meant to match the gravity of the need, and some exceeded fifty pounds. Carrying hearts, legs, and arms, these grunting and sweating supplicants made their way through the thick summer air to light the wax body parts and candles in the church. One year, a sixty-nine-year-old man who had fallen unharmed from the fifth floor of a building thanked the Madonna by carrying, with the help of others, a 185-pound candle made to match his weight. Inside the church, several people would drag a woman along the church floor as she licked its stones before reaching the Madonna—a ritual that took place until it was stopped by the hierarchy in 1920.
The Italian Americans Page 9
