Death
On January 29, 1912, officer Oscar Benoit fired on a group of striking workers, hitting and killing LoPizzo. [3] This was affirmed by nineteen witnesses. [4]
In the book Roughneck, Peter Carlson writes that
"At the barricades, pickets and police began to push and shove each other. The police advanced, packing the retreating marchers so tight that they could no longer move, and then began clubbing. Some strikers fought back. A policeman received a stab wound. A police sergeant ordered his men to draw their weapons and fire." [5]
The IWW offered its own account a year after the strike, based upon trial proceedings:
"[On] January 29, a striker, Annie LoPizzo, was killed on the corner of Union and Garden Streets, during police and military interference with lawful picketing. She was shot by a bullet said to have been fired by Police Officer Oscar Benoit, though Benoit and Police Officer Marshall claim it was fired from behind Benoit by a personal enemy of the latter, following an altercation." [6]
The charges and the trial
The death of Anna LoPizzo was used by the authorities during the Lawrence Strike as a means of disrupting and pressuring the union.
Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, both IWW organizers, were arrested for the murder although they were two miles away at the time of her death. Police claimed that they had been "inciting and procuring the commission of the crime in [pursuit] of an unlawful conspiracy", thus making them "accessories before the fact". [6] The two men were imprisoned without bail until trial. [7] A third man, Joseph Caruso, was later arrested for the murder. However,
"Three witnesses—his landlord, his child's god-father and his wife—helped Caruso to establish a complete alibi; he was at home eating supper when Annie Lo Pizzo was alleged to have been shot by him... Caruso said he was not a member of the I.W.W., but would join as soon as he got out [of the jail]." [8]
Bill Haywood returned to Lawrence to take control of the strike effort.
The trial of Caruso, Ettor and Giovannitti was held on September 30, keeping the two organizers out of action for eight months. At trial, Ettor and Giovannitti were locked in metal cages. The district attorney referred to them as "social vultures" and "labor buzzards". Yet they were not accused of the murder for which they were arrested. [9] All three were acquitted.
Significance of Anna LoPizzo's death
Anna LoPizzo's death on the picket line gave authorities a chance to remove the two main organizers from action for the duration of the strike, but it also became a rallying cry for the workers to demand justice. [10] A few days after LoPizzo's death, "a group of enraged Italian women happened upon a lone police officer on an icy bridge. After stripping him of his gun, club and badge, they sliced the officer's suspenders and took off his pants--a humiliation technique popular with the disorderly women of Lawrence--and dangled the officer over the freezing river". [10]
In another protest following LoPizzo's death, "a 22-year-old Syrian immigrant named Annie Kiami stepped in front of the crowd," called the police "Cossacks," and "wrapped an American flag around her body and dared them to shoot holes in [it]". [10] The protesting women quickly gained a reputation as radicals.
The Lawrence strike was ultimately successful because the workers stayed united in their demands. [11] Business writers began to question employers' and the local authorities' tactics relating not only to the strike, but specifically relating to the handling of Anna LoPizzo's death. One writer concerned about the success of the IWW's organizing tactics was Arno Dosch, who wrote in the magazine The World's Work ,
"The efforts that have been made by employers and by governmental authorities to repress the movement have been worse than useless. Every move that has been made against the I. W. W. has had the effect of winning sympathy... The trial of the three agitators, Mr. Ettor, Mr. Giovannitti, and Mr. Caruso, for the murder of a woman whose death was indirectly due to the strike, was a tactical error. Mr. Ettor won the support of millions of people when he said, " I have been tried here not for my acts, but for my views." [12]
Before the Lawrence Strike and the trial for the death of Anna LoPizzo, many businessmen categorically refused to recognize any unions. After the strike, the American Federation of Labor was courted by some employers, if only as a bulwark against the radical and militant Industrial Workers of the World. [13]
The foreboding on the part of employers resulted from their fears about what this new labor organization, the IWW, actually represented. Thompson quoted Harry Fosdick in the June issue of Outlook in 1912 as saying "Wages have been raised, work has been resumed, the militia has gone, and the whirring looms suggest industrial peace; but behind all this the most revolutionary organization in the history of American industry is building up an army of volunteers. The I.W.W. leaves behind as hopelessly passé, the methods of the American Federation of Labor. [14]
Some believed that the success of the strikers called for other measures. Fosdick quoted a Boston lawyer who stated, "The strike should have been stopped in the first twenty-four hours. The militia should have been instructed to shoot. That is the way Napoleon did it". [15]
The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) was a labor union that gained a reputation for militancy in the mines of the western United States and British Columbia. Its efforts to organize both hard rock miners and smelter workers brought it into sharp conflicts – and often pitched battles – with both employers and governmental authorities. One of the most dramatic of these struggles occurred in the Cripple Creek district of Colorado in 1903–1904; the conflicts were thus dubbed the Colorado Labor Wars. The WFM also played a key role in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 but left that organization several years later.
William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood was an American labor organizer and founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America. During the first two decades of the 20th century, Haywood was involved in several important labor battles, including the Colorado Labor Wars, the Lawrence Textile Strike, and other textile strikes in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence. On January 1, 1912, the Massachusetts government enforced a law that cut mill workers' hours in a single work week from 56 hours, to 54 hours. Ten days later, they found out that pay had been reduced along with the cut in hours.
In the United States criminal law, a frame-up (frameup) or setup is the act of falsely implicating (framing) someone in a crime by providing fabricated evidence or testimony. In British usage, to frame, or stitch up, is to maliciously or dishonestly incriminate someone or set them up, in the sense trap or ensnare.
Joseph James "Smiling Joe" Ettor (1885–1948) was an Italian-American trade union organizer who, in the middle-1910s, was one of the leading public faces of the Industrial Workers of the World. Ettor is best remembered as a defendant in a controversial trial related to a killing in the seminal Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912, in which he was acquitted of charges of having been an accessory.
Arturo M. Giovannitti was an Italian-American union leader, socialist political activist, and poet. He is best remembered as one of the principal organizers of the 1912 Lawrence textile strike and as a defendant in a celebrated trial caused by that event.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was an American labor leader, activist, and feminist who played a leading role in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Flynn was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a visible proponent of women's rights, birth control, and women's suffrage. She joined the Communist Party USA in 1936 and late in life, in 1961, became its chairwoman. She died during a visit to the Soviet Union, where she was accorded a state funeral with processions in Red Square attended by over 25,000 people.
Joseph Francis Quinn (1857–1929) was the first Irish American to become a judge in Massachusetts for any significant period of time. He served on the bench of the Essex County Superior Court after being appointed by Governor Eugene Foss in 1911 until his death in 1929. He lived in Salem and was the son of an immigrant from the days of the Great Famine. He attended the University of Ottawa in Canada due to discrimination against the Irish in the U.S. at the time, graduating in 1881, and went on to be admitted to the bar in Massachusetts in 1884 after attending Boston University School of Law and apprenticing under a local attorney. After working for the local U.S. Attorney, Joseph Quinn started his own thriving practice.
The 1913 Paterson silk strike was a work stoppage involving silk mill workers in Paterson, New Jersey. The strike involved demands for establishment of an eight-hour day and improved working conditions. The strike began in February 1913, and ended five months later, on July 28. During the course of the strike, approximately 1,850 strikers were arrested, including Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leaders Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
Labor federation competition in the United States is a history of the labor movement, considering U.S. labor organizations and federations that have been regional, national, or international in scope, and that have united organizations of disparate groups of workers. Union philosophy and ideology changed from one period to another, conflicting at times. Government actions have controlled, or legislated against particular industrial actions or labor entities, resulting in the diminishing of one labor federation entity or the advance of another.
David Courtney Coates was an American publisher and printer, labor union leader and socialist politician who served as the 11th Lieutenant Governor of Colorado, secretary and president of Colorado's State Federation of Labor, president of the American Labor Union and chairman of the National Party.
Orrin N. Hilton was a Denver judge and attorney who participated for the defense in several famous court cases. Judge Hilton successfully defended George Pettibone of the Western Federation of Miners when Pinkerton detective James McParland accused him of conspiracy to murder former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg.
Fred H. Moore (1882–1933) was a socialist lawyer and the defense attorney of the controversial Sacco and Vanzetti case. He had collaborated in many labor and Industrial Workers of the World trials. He played a minor role in several celebrated I.W.W. trials, including the Los Angeles Times bombing case in 1911 and the Ettor–Giovannitti case, which arose from the 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike. Following the acquittal of Ettor and Giovannitti, Moore spent the next several years roaming the country defending I.W.W. organizers. He was involved in the Centralia massacre trial and the mass prosecution, on charges of sedition, of the I.W.W. in Chicago in 1918. Errors in a later trial, however, led Big Bill Haywood to demand Moore's resignation as I.W.W. attorney in 1920. Moore's career was revived by his being hired to head the defense team for Sacco and Vanzetti in the summer of 1920.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is a union of wage workers which was formed in Chicago in 1905 by militant unionists and their supporters due to anger over the conservatism, philosophy, and craft-based structure of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Throughout the early part of the 20th century, the philosophy and tactics of the IWW were frequently in direct conflict with those of the AFL concerning the best ways to organize workers, and how to best improve the society in which they toiled. The AFL had one guiding principle—"pure and simple trade unionism", often summarized with the slogan "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." The IWW embraced two guiding principles, fighting like the AFL for better wages, hours, and conditions, but also promoting an eventual, permanent solution to the problems of strikes, injunctions, bull pens, and union scabbing.
Henry Converse Atwill (1872–1936) was an American politician who served as Massachusetts Attorney General from 1915 to 1919. He was born in Lynn in 1872.
Carmela Teoli was an Italian-American mill worker whose testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1912 called national attention to unsafe working conditions in the mills and helped bring a successful end to the "Bread and Roses" strike. Teoli had been scalped by a cotton-twisting machine at the age of 13, requiring several months of hospitalization.
The American Way is the second in a four novel series entitled Building of Empire, Crime and Politics; the Cornerstone of America by author Paddy Kelly. The American Way relates the events leading up to and through the Great Woolen Strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts when approximately 40,000 immigrants from nearly every country in Europe, sharing 30 religions and 127 ethnic back grounds organized a seven-week strike against the richest man in the world. This despite the fact that only ten percent of them spoke English. Released in 2011 the title of this historical fiction is originally taken from the opening lines of the 1950s Superman television program Adventures of Superman (1952–1958) ".. . truth, justice and the American way!" However the catch phrase is meant as an entendre in that the American Way, usually perceived as the right and good way, is also in reality a two edged sword of unprecedented levels of corruption found at all levels of industry and government at the time the story is set.
The 1912–1913 Little Falls textile strike was a labor strike involving workers at two textile mills in Little Falls, New York, United States. The strike began on October 9, 1912, as a spontaneous walkout of primarily immigrant mill workers at the Phoenix Knitting Mill following a reduction in pay, followed the next week by workers at the Gilbert Knitting Mill for the same reason. The strike, which grew to several hundred participants under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), lasted until January the following year, when the mills and the strikers came to an agreement that brought the workers back to the mills on January 6.
Winfield Scott Peters was an American lawyer and politician who served as District Attorney of Essex County, Massachusetts from 1899 to 1911.
