NARRATOR
The IWW, Industrial Workers of the World, was a radical labor organization of the early twentieth century. It organized all workers—black, white, men, women, native-born, foreign, skilled, unskilled—which the American Federation of Labor refused to do. Its goal was revolutionary: to take over the industrial system and run it for the benefit of the people. When immigrant women in the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, went on strike in 1912, they were met with police violence and judicial intimidation. An IWW organizer, the poet Arturo Giovanitti, was arrested on spurious charges for murder. Here is his speech to the jury.
ARTURO GIOVANITTI
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.
There has been brought only one side of this great industrial question, only the method and only the tactics. But what about the ethical part of this question? 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, where at last there will not be any more slaves, any more masters…but just one great family of friends and brothers?
They say you are free in this great and wonderful country. I say that politically you are, and my best compliments and congratulations. 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 where 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….
I am twenty-nine years old—not quite. 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 felt the passion of living in my heart and I do want to live.
Whichever way you judge, gentlemen of the jury, I thank you.