Giovannitti, Arturo

GIOVANNITTI, ARTURO (1884–1959). Poet, playwright, editor, orator-agitator on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and union official, Arturo Giovannitti gained the admiration of many. His politics were sometimes more passionate than consistent and, as a result, it was not unusual for a wide spectrum of the American Left—socialists, revolutionary syndicalists (IWW), anarchists, Greenwich Village bohemians, and trade unionists—to consider him one of their own.

Son of a modest doctor/pharmacist, Giovannitti was born in Ripabottoni, a small hill town of southern Italy in the region of Abruzzi-Molise. Upon completing school, at age seventeen, he emigrated to Canada, where he worked for a time in the coal and railroad industries. He became interested in the Protestant church and preached for a while at a Presbyterian mission. Becoming fluent in both English and French, he studied at several theological seminaries near Montreal. In 1904 Giovanniti moved to New York City.

The great metropolis of New York completely captivated Giovannitti, and he called it home for the rest of his life. He resumed his university studies at Columbia, but he soon became so deeply involved in radical politics within the Italian community that he never completed his degree. After convincing his comrades that he was no longer religious, he joined the Federazione Socialista Italiana (Italian Socialist Federation) in 1907. He always retained, however, a certain religious temperament, which manifested itself particularly in his poetry. By 1909 he had changed from a reformist socialist into a firm proponent of revolutionary syndicalism and had been chosen a member of the editorial committee of Il Proletario, the Italian-language journal of the IWW. In 1911 Giovannitti became the paper’s sole editor and it was in this capacity that he went to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in January 1912 to aid in the great textile strike that had just begun.

The effectiveness of Giovannitti and fellow IWW organizer Joe Ettor during the bitter Lawrence strike of 1912 made them marked men. During a confrontation with the state militia, a young girl among the striking demonstrators was killed. Although Ettor and Giovannitti were not present at the shooting incident and evidence indicated that a police officer’s bullet had actually killed the young girl, they were arrested and charged as accessories to murder. This blatant effort to break the strike by framing its leaders on false charges, a not unusual occurrence in that period, catapulted their case into national attention and turned their names into a rallying cry for the IWW and American labor. After almost a year of imprisonment, Ettor and Giovannitti were found innocent by a jury and set free.

Upon his release from prison Giovannitti chose not to reassume his position as editor of Il Proletario, though he still continued to work closely with the IWW and with his earlier comrade-in-arms, Ettor, and with the IWW’s Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and William Haywood. He now began to frequent the American radical and cultural circles that were then flourishing in Greenwich Village and associated with such American writers and artists as Max Eastman, John Reed, Floyd Dell, Robert Minor, Art Young, Mike Gold, and Boardman Robinson. He was one of the few Italian-born radicals of his generation who moved easily through the wider world of American culture. He started to write regularly for the Masses and even the usually conservative Atlantic Monthly published his poem “The Cage,” which dealt with his imprisonment during the Lawrence strike. In 1914 Giovannitti published his first book of poems (in English), Arrows in the Gale, which had an introduction by Helen Keller.

Giovannitti, like most of the American Left, fought fervently against America’s entry into World War I and undertook a tremendous schedule of antiwar agitation. He managed at the same time to write prolifically for the socialist and anarchist press, to edit two short-lived Italian-language political-cultural journals, Il Fuoco (1915, New York City) and Vita (1916, New York City), and to stage the first of many Italian-language dramas, Tenebre Rosse (Red Shadows).

Upon the entrance of the United States into World War I, the American Left was fiercely, and often illegally, attacked by the federal government for its antiwar position. The Red Scare, the great, irrational fear that shook American society as a result of the Bolshevik revolution, also unleashed a political reaction against the Left. Giovannitti, one of the prominent targets of the authorities, was able, only by chance, to escape the arrest and imprisonment that was the fate of most of the IWW leadership.

At war’s end, the political activity of Giovannitti changed direction. With the IWW essentially destroyed as a major force within the ranks of labor by governmental repression, he began to move from his almost total involvement with revolutionary syndicalism into a closer association with the main labor union movement. He played an important role in establishing Local 89, the Italian Dress Makers Union, of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). As a writer he became a contributing editor to Max Eastman’s Liberator, a member of the Workers Drama League, and a contributor to the New Masses, all groups that in time became more or less connected with the Communist Party. With the sponsorship of the union-backed Camera del Lavoro (The Italian Chamber of Labor, New York City), he undertook his last major editorial effort, the Italian-language cultural journal Il Veltro, 1924–1925.

During 1925 Ettor and Giovannitti reunited and fought together for a radical cause one last time. They made public appearances on behalf of two other Italian-born radicals, Sacco and Vanzetti, whose murder trial would not have the fortunate outcome of their own. (After 1925, Ettor essentially disappeared from the stage of radical politics, fading into the anonymous life of a farmer and wine maker in California. He lived quietly among Italian comrades, selling them wine, and died unnoticed in 1948.)

After 1930, Giovannitti no longer wrote much for the American press, radical or cultural. His activities became centered almost exclusively around organized labor—the ILGWU, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, the American Federation of Labor—and his writings now appeared mainly in union journals and obscure Italian-language publications. As part of the Alleanza Anti-Fascista di Nord America, he did play a role in the antifascist activities that were centered in New York City, but by now Giovannitti spent more time associating with figures of the labor establishment—Luigi Antonini, David Dubinsky, Sidney Hillman, August Bellanca, Norman Thomas. He was appointed the secretary of the Italian Labor Education Bureau (New York City), but a certain fire and direction had disappeared from his life. He had become more of a romantic symbol of the past than an energetic actor in the politics of the present.

Max Eastman once commented that the names of Ettor and Giovannitti were as well known to American radicals as Lenin and Trotsky. Their voices, which had been among the most intelligent and the most energetic in the fight for freedom and social justice in the beginning of this century, faded, however, into obscurity, melancholy examples of how difficult it is to sustain a lifelong radical posture in America.

Bencivenni, Marcella. Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940. New York: New York University Press, 2011,

“Omaggio a Arturo Giovannitti.” La Parola del Popolo (February–March 1962).

Tusiani, Joseph. “La poesia inglese di Arturo Giovannitti.” La Parola del Popolo (November–December 1978).

Watson, Bruce. Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream. New York: Viking, 2005.