Quando canta il gallo [When the Rooster Crows]. Chicago: E. Clemente & Sons, 1957.

Giovannitti (b. Campobasso, 1884 - d. New York, 1959) immigrated to Montreal at 17, where he became a Protestant pastor; he then moved to Pennsylvania, preaching predominantly to miners. In Springfield, Mass., his interest in socialism began. In 1905, he arrived in New York, where he joined the Federazione Socialista Italiana. He participated in the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Mass., where 25,000 workers went on strike, half of them women, who developed the slogan, “We want bread and roses too,” that gave its name to that strike.

It was there that Giovannitti was accused falsely of homicide and arrested, along with Joseph Ettor and Joseph Caruso. Put on the stand in the legendary trial at Salem, he delivered an apologia, in English, that became famous and was published several times, in Italian as well, and which identified him as a charismatic leader. See Pagine Scelte for the text in Italian.

Unlike the case with Tresca and most of the other radicals, Giovannitti’s political beliefs did not include overt anti-clericalism or a rejection of Christian principles; indeed, reflecting his training as a Protestant minister, some of his poetry reflects religious overtones.

In prison, meanwhile, Giovannitti had composed “The Walker,” which appeared in 1912 in The Atlantic Monthly and which was compared favorably to Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Giovannitti, who became the director of Il Proletario in September 1909, was reconfirmed by the Utica, New York congress in April 1911. When the poet was arrested, the paper was temporarily run by Edmondo Rossoni, a colorful character who later returned to Italy under Mussolini and rose in the Fascist Party hierarchy.

Martino Marazzi's Voices of Italian America: a History of Early italian American Literature with a Critical Anthology (Madison, 2004) contains an excerpt from The Walker and other works of Giovannitti.

After he got out of jail, Giovannitti remained as director of Il Proletario until the summer of 1913, when he was replaced by Flavio Venanzi and later, once again, by Rossoni. Highly esteemed in the milieu of the political and intellectual left, and eminent proponent of the I.W.W., Giovannitti contributed to The Masses and The Liberator; founded and directed Il Fuoco; and was at the same time included in histories and anthologies of American poetry, for example, as compiled by Louis Untermeyer. After 1920, he was among the organizers of the committee for the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, one of the acknowledged leaders of the anti-fascist movement, in the leadership of AFANA (Antifascist Alliance of North America), and a member of the committee formed after the assassination of his friend Carlo Tresca (see in the Collection, Chi uccise Carlo Tresca?/ Who Killed Carlo Tresca?).

A complex intellectual figure, perennially astride two worlds, and equally comfortable in both English and Italian, Giovannitti is the rare case of an Italian American writer who, despite the extraordinary reception accorded him within the American literary culture, never abandoned the ambiance of the Italian community. His English-language poems were often translated into Italian, or even Sicilian dialect.

Giovannitti was as charismatic as Tresca, and had a similar capacity to cut through the divisions of the left. Because he was dear to both the anarchists and the more moderate trade-unionists, everybody tried after his death to claim him as one of their own. Giovannitti was not a fighter like Tresca. Rather, he was a poet, an orator, a man who knew how to confer a metapolitical, almost messianic depth to the fortunes of the labor movement.