Biography
Joseph Ettor was an Italian-American IWW organizer who, with Arturo Giovannitti, led the 1912 Bread and Roses textile strike of 23,000 workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. After striker Anna LoPizzo was shot dead by police on January 29, 1912, Ettor and Giovannitti — miles away addressing a strike meeting — were arrested as accessories to murder in an explicit attempt to behead the strike. After nearly a year in jail awaiting trial in Salem, they were acquitted in November 1912 following one of the most celebrated labor-defense campaigns of the early 20th century.
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 Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti 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.”
