Biography
Arturo Giovannitti was an Italian-American radical poet, editor of Il Proletario, and IWW organizer who co-led the 1912 Lawrence Bread and Roses textile strike with Joseph Ettor. Arrested on January 30, 1912 as an accessory to the murder of striker Anna LoPizzo despite being miles from the scene, he spent nearly a year in the Essex County Jail in Salem, where he wrote his most famous poem, 'The Walker.' He and Ettor were acquitted in November 1912 in one of the great labor-defense victories of the IWW era.
The Lawrence strike history reports that Joseph J. Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti were arrested, booked for murder and held without bail following the killing of striker Anna La Pizza. The history presents the arrests as an effort to break strike leadership. It supplies no new individual custody endpoint.
A Salem dispatch dated November 8 in the Victoria Daily Times reported defense testimony at the trial of Giovannitti, Joseph Ettor and Joseph Caruso for Anna Lopizzo’s death. A millworker testified that Ettor and Giovannitti had advocated nonviolence in public speeches; he described Giovannitti urging strikers to go home and avoid police and soldiers on Canal Street. The report explicitly contrasted this defense account with the prosecution’s account of an appeal for violence against strikebreakers. This is testimony reported during the trial, rather than a judicial finding. Victoria Daily Times, November 9, 1912, page 13, “Testifies for Defence.”
