Joseph James Ettor
Joseph James "Smiling Joe" Ettor (1886 - 1948) was an Italian-American trade union organizer who was in the middle-1910s 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.
Biography
Early years
Joseph James Ettorn was born in 1886.
Union career
Ettor was an outstanding and inspirational public speaker who was fluent in Italian and English. His earliest organizing work on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) took place in the Western United States, where he had worked unionizing miners and migrant laborers.[1] He also had cut his teeth organizing foreign-born workers in the steel mills and shoe factories of the East.[1]
On January 1, 1912, in accordance with a new state law, the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts posted new rules limiting the hours of workers to 54 a week, down from a standard of 56 previously in effect.[2] It soon became clear that the employers had no intention of adjusting wage rates upwards to compensate for the lost work time, and a strike ensued.[2]
On January 12, 1912, the Italian-language branch of IWW Local 20 decided to send to New York City for Joe Ettor, the organization's top Italian-language leader, to come to Lawrence and lead the strike.[1] Ettor arrived with Arturo Giovannitti, secretary of the Italian Socialist Federation, a language federation of the Socialist Party of America and editor of the socialist newspaper Il Proletario [The Proletarian], who was not himself at the time a member of the IWW.[1]
During the walkout, which came to be known as the Bread and Roses Strike, IWW striker Anna LoPizzo was shot and killed. Joseph Caruso was charged with the murder and Ettor and Giovannitti, both of whom were giving speechs several miles away from the crime scene, were arrested as accomplices. The three were eventually acquitted.
Ettor was one of the leaders of the waiters strike of 1912 in New York City, and the Brooklyn barbers strike of 1913.
The question of violence was a perennial matter of debate within the IWW. Some, like Giovannitti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Vincent St. John, took the position that while the union did not favor violence, it would not shy away from its use if necessary to accomplish the social revolution.[3] Ettor, on the other hand, shared the orientation of "Big Bill" Haywood that the only kind of force to which the organization could lend its name was the use of the general strike for the overthrow of capitalism.[3]
Ettor became a member of the executive council of the IWW. In 1916, he was expelled from the IWW with Flynn after a dispute over the Mesabi range strike.
Death and legacy
In later years, Ettor ran a fruit orchard in San Clemente, California, where he died in 1948.
Footnotes
- ^ a b c d Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement of the United States: Volume 4: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917. New York: International Publishers, 1965; pg. 317.
- ^ a b Foner, History of the Labor Movement of the United States: Volume 4, pg. 315.
- ^ a b Foner, History of the Labor Movement of the United States: Volume 4, pg. 164.