by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
Gentlemen, it is up to you, and as I stated before, I have no fear of the result. I ask for no favor. I ask only for justice, and that is all my comrade Giovannitti asks, and that is all my comrade Caruso asks.
I thank you.
14
Ettor and Giovannitti’s testimonies in the Salem trial were issued as a pamphlet about 1913 by the I.W.W. An article in Current Opinion (January 1913) stated: “Near the close of his trial [Giovannitti] made before the court the first speech he has ever made in the English language. It held all hearers spellbound. ‘In twenty years of reporting’ said a veteran reporter afterward, ‘I have never heard the equal of that speech.’” This excerpt from Giovannitti’s statement is from the I.W.W. pamphlet, Ettor and Giovannitti Before the Jury at Salem, Massachusetts (Chicago, n.d.).
ADDRESS OF THE DEFENDANT GIOVANNITTI TO THE JURY
Mr. Foreman and Gentlemen of the Jury:
It is the first time in my life that I speak publicly in your wonderful language, and it is the most solemn moment in my life. I know not if I will go to the end of my remarks. The District Attorney and the other gentlemen here who are used to measure all human emotions with the yardstick may not understand the tumult that is going on in my soul in this moment….
There has been brought only one side of this great industrial question, only the method and only the tactics. But what about, I say, the ethical part of this question? What about the human and humane part of our ideas? What about the grand condition of tomorrow as we see it, and as we foretell it now to the workers at large, here in this same cage where the felon has sat, in this same cage where the drunkard, where the prostitute, where the hired assassin has been?
What about the ethical side of that? What about the better and nobler humanity where there shall be no more slaves, where no man will ever be obliged to go on strike in order to obtain fifty cents a week more, where children will not have to starve any more, where women no more will have to go and prostitute themselves—let me say, even if there are women in this courtroom here, because the truth must out at the end-where at last there will not be any more slaves, any more masters, but just one great family of friends and brothers.
It may be, gentlemen of the jury, that you do not believe in that. It may be that we are dreamers. It may be that we are fanatics, Mr. District Attorney. We are fanatics. But yet so was Socrates a fanatic, who instead of acknowledging the philosophy of the aristocrats of Athens, preferred to drink the poison. And so was Jesus Christ a fanatic, who instead of acknowledging that Pilate, or that Tiberius was emperor of Rome, and instead of acknowledging his submission to all the rulers of the time and all the priestcraft of the time, preferred the cross between two thieves.
And so were all the philosophers and all the dreamers and all the scholars of the Middle Ages, who preferred to be burned alive by one of these very same churches concerning which you reproach me now of having said that no one of our membership should belong to them. Yes, gentlemen of the jury, you are judges. You must deal with facts. You must not deal with ideas….
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. It was not exactly hunger that drove me out of my house. My father had enough money saved and he had enough energy saved to go and give an education to my brothers. He could have done the same with me and I could now be a professional man down there.
But I thought I could visit the world and I desired coming here for that purpose. I have no grudge against this country. I have no grudge against the American flag. I have no grudge against your patriotism….
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 the 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 the tea into 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….
He is not the one who is going to strangle this new Hercules of the world of industrial workers, or rather, the Industrial Workers of the World, in its cradle. It is not your verdict that will stem, it is not your verdict that will put a dam before this mighty onrush of waves that go forward. It is not the little insignificant, cheap life of Arturo Giovannitti offered in holocaust to warm the hearts of the millionaire manufacturers of this town that is going to stop Socialism from being the next dominator of the earth. No. No.
If there was any violence in Lawrence it was not Joe Ettor’s fault. It was not my fault. If you must go back to the origin of all the trouble, gentlemen of the jury, you will find that the origin and reason was the wage system. It was the infamous rule of domination of one man by another man. It was the same reason that forty years ago impelled your great martyred President, Abraham Lincoln, by an illegal act, to issue the Proclamation of Emancipation—a thing which was beyond his powers as the Constitution of the United States expressed before that time.
I say it is the same principle now, the principle that made a man at that time a chattel slave, a soulless human being, a thing that could be bought and bartered and sold, and which now, having changed the term, makes the same man—but a white man—the slave of the machine.
They say you are free in this great and wonderful country. I say that politically you are, and my best compliments and congratulations for it. But I say you cannot be half free and half slave, and economically all the working class in the United States are as much slaves now as the negroes were forty and fifty years ago; because the man that owns the tool wherewith another man works, the man that owns the house where this man lives, the man that owns the factory where this man wants to go to work—that man owns and controls the bread that that man eats and therefore owns and controls his mind, his body, his heart and his soul….
But I say and I repeat, that we have been working in something that is dearer to us than our lives and our liberty. We have been working in what are our ideas, our ideals, our aspirations, our hopes—you may say our religion, gentlemen of the jury____
But I say, whether you want it or not, we are now the heralds of a new civilization. We have come here to proclaim a new truth. We are the apostles of a new evangel, of a new gospel, which is now at this very same moment being proclaimed and heralded from one side of the earth to the other.
Comrades of our same faith, while I am speaking in this case, are addressing a different crowd, a different forum, a different audience in other parts of the world, in every known tongue, in every civilized language, in every dialect, in Russia as in Italy, in England as in France, in China as in South Africa—everywhere this message of socialism, this message of brotherhood, this message of love, is being proclaimed in this same manner, gentlemen of the jury, and it is in the name of that that I want to speak and for nothing else.
After having heard what my comrade said and what I have said, do you believe for one single moment that we ever preached violence, that a man like me as I stand with my naked heart before you—and you know there is no lie in me at this moment, there is no deception in me at this moment—could kill a human being?
You know that I know not what I say, because it is only the onrush of what flows to my lips that I say. Gentlemen of the jury, you know that I am not a trained man in speaking to you, because it is the first time I speak in your language. Gentlemen, if you think that there has ever been a spark of malice in my heart, that I ever said others should break heads and prowl around and look for blood, if you believe that I ever could have said such a thing, not only on the 29th of January, but since the first day I began to realize that I was living and conscious of my intellectual and moral powers, then send me to the cha
ir, because it is right and it is just. Then send my comrade to the chair because it is right and it is just….
Gentlemen of the jury, I have finished. After this comes your verdict. I do not ask you to acquit us. It is not in my power to do so after my attorney has so nobly and ably pleaded for me. I say, though, that there are two ways open. If we are responsible, we are responsible in full. If what the District Attorney has said about us is true, then we ought to pay the extreme penalty, for if it is true it was a premeditated crime. If what he said is true, it means that we went to Lawrence specifically for that purpose and that for years and years we had been studying and maturing our thoughts along that line; then we expect from you a verdict of guilty.
But we do not expect you to soothe your conscience and at the same time to give a helping hand to the other side—simply to go and reason and say, “Well, something has happened there and somebody is responsible; let us balance the scales and do half and half.” No, gentlemen. We are young. I am twenty-nine years old—not quite, yet; I will be so two months from now. I have a woman that loves me and that I love. I have a mother and father that are waiting for me. I have an ideal that is dearer to me than can be expressed or understood. And life has so many allurements and it is so nice and so bright and so wonderful that I feel the passion of living in my heart and I do want to live.
I don’t want to pose to you as a hero. I don’t want to pose as a martyr. No, life is dearer, to me than it is probably to a good many others. But I say this, that there is something dearer and nobler and holier and grander, something I could never come to terms with, and that is my conscience and that is my loyalty to my class and to my comrades who have come here in this room, and to the working class of the world, who have contributed with a splendid hand penny by penny to my defense and who have all over the world seen that no injustice and no wrong was done to me.
Therefore, I say, weigh both sides and then judge. And if it be, gentlemen of the jury, that your judgment shall be such that this gate will be opened and we shall pass out of it and go back into the sunlit world, then let me assure you what you are doing. Let me tell you that the first strike that breaks again in this Commonwealth or any other place in America where the work and the help and the intelligence of Joseph J. Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti will be needed and necessary, there we shall go again regardless of any fear and of any threat.
We shall return again to our humble efforts, obscure, humble, unknown, misunderstood—soldiers of this mighty army of the working class of the world, which out of the shadows and the darkness of the past is striving towards the destined goal which is the emancipation of human kind, which is the establishment of love and brotherhood and justice for every man and every woman in this earth.
On the other hand, if your verdict shall be the contrary, if it be that we who are so worthless as to deserve neither the infamy nor the glory of the gallows—if it be that these hearts of ours must be stilled on the same death chair and by the same current of fire that has destroyed the life of the wife murderer and the parricide, then I say, gentlemen of the jury, that tomorrow we shall pass into a greater judgment, that tomorrow we shall go from your presence into a presence where history shall give its last word to us.
Whichever way you judge, gentlemen of the jury, I thank you.
15
James Oppenheim’s poem, “Bread and Roses,” was inspired by one of the 1912 Lawrence strike parades in which the young mill girls carried a banner, “We want bread and roses too” Although it may have been published elsewhere earlier, it was printed in the I.W.W. newspaper Industrial Solidarity (April 27, 1946). Oppenheim (1882–1932), a poet and novelist, was editor of the little magazine The Seven Arts. His poems appeared frequently in the Industrial Pioneer and the One Big Union Monthly. His poem, “Bread and Roses” was set to music by Caroline Kohlsaat. Arturo Giovannitti wrote an Italian song with the same title, “Pan e Rose,” which was popular with the Italian Dressmakers Local 89 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union.
BREAD AND ROSES
By JAMES OPPENHEIM
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!
(1) For a more exhaustive study of textile evolution in New England see chapter on “New England,” in Turner’s “Rise of the New West,” American Nation Series; “The Record of a City,” by Geo. F. Kenngott; and the Citizens Committee’s Report on the Lawrence Strike, Boston American, March 18, 1912.
(2) See Special Weekly Circular, Sept. 7, 1912, Wagner, Dickerson & Co., bankers and brokers, N. Y.; Special Stock, Bank and Trust Company Circular, February, 1912, Turner, Tucker & Co., Bankers, Boston, Mass.; and articles on “The Great Textile Interests,” Business Supplement, New York Sun, April 28, 1912, for statistics on dividends, capital, floor space, etc., of Lawrence Mills herein specified.
(3) These figures and facts are furnished by a reliable Wall Street Journalist.
(4) “Speech of Wm. D. Haywood on Case of Ettor and Giovannitti, Cooper Union, N. Y.,” pamphlet published by Ettor-Giovannitti Defense Committee, Lawrence, Mass. p. 7.
(5) Statement of Congressman Victor Berger, p. 8, Report of House Committee on Rules, Lawrence Strike.
(6) Appeal issued by Local 20, I.W.W., Lawrence, Mass.
(7) Report General Organizer James P. Thomspon, 7th Convention I.W.W., Sept., 1912, Chicago, 111.
(8) Report on strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Mass., in 1912. P. 19. Charles P. Neil, Commissioner of Labor, Washington, D. C.
(9) Report of House Committee on Rules, Lawrence Strike, 1912. pp. 139–176.
(10) P. 25. Neil Report on Lawrence Strike.
(11) Ibid. p. 24.
(12) A perusal of police court proceedings in Lawrence press will convince the reader of this fact.
(13) Cooper Union Speech on Ettor-Giovannitti case. pp. 4–5.
(14) Neil Report, p. 27.
(15) Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh, Occupational Diseases in the Textile Industry. New York Call, Dec. 29, 1912.
(16) Ibid.
(17) In narrating events at Lawrence, the writer has drawn on the Neil Report, the Berger Congressional Investigation Report, testimony of witnesses at the Salem trial, and personal conversations with participants. His sources of information are thus both official and unofficial.
(18) The Neil Report, pp. 31–32.
Chapter 7
Paterson: 1913
“We believe the most violent thing the workers can do is when they quit work”
Adolph Lessig, a Paterson silk worker testifying to the Senate Commission on Industrial Relations (Washington, 1916), III, p. 2458.
Less than a year after the Lawrence strike, Bill Haywood was describing the industrial conditions of an ideal society to an audience of striking silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, the “Silk City” of America.
It will be Utopian. There will be a wonderful dining room where you will enjoy the best food that can be p
urchased; your digestion will be aided by sweet music which will be wafted to your ears by an unexcelled orchestra. There will be a gymnasium and a great swimming pool and private bathrooms of marble. One floor of this plant will be devoted to masterpieces of art and you will have a collection even superior to that displayed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. A first-class library will occupy another floor … the workrooms will be superior to any ever conceived. Your work chairs will be morris chairs, so that when you become fatigued you may relax in comfort.1
Haywood’s audience included recently arrived Italian, Jewish, and Polish immigrants who worked at unskilled or semiskilled jobs in the Paterson silk mills. Paterson, a grimy industrial city on the banks of the Passaic River, had a population of 124,000 in 1913; more than one-third of its 73,000 workers held jobs in the silk industry. The glowing picture of a future industrial society had meaning for the workers who spent ten hours a day in the silk mills, often wearing their overcoats at work in winter in the unheated buildings or suffocating in summer in workrooms where artificial humidifiers were used to provide the necessary degree of dampness for silk weaving. The dye houses were so choked with steam and acid fumes that the dyers often could not see people near them. Early deaths from tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases were frequent.
High-speed automatic looms which were simple to run had been introduced into the factories about the turn of the century. Some of these could be operated by women. Silk manufacturers moved their plants to Pennsylvania, where even lower wages were paid to the wives and daughters of coal miners, who worked to eke out a family living.
In 1911 Paterson manufacturers decided to enter the field of cheap silk production by expanding the number of looms in the plants. Where the operators had previously run just two looms, now they were required to operate three and four simultaneously. Paterson workers claimed that the new system would cause unemployment and force wages down from about $11.80 to the Pennsylvania average of $6.56 a week. “It is,” wrote one writer in Survey magazine, “as if a vineyard were giving way to a hay farm.”2