few weeks later, in October, a hundred thousand people watched and participated in the Columbus Day Parade to demonstrate Lawrence’s faith in democracy and the American way. Harry was conspicuously absent from these festivities, a fact that was also duly noted by the authorities.
Joe and Arturo remained locked up until November 1912, when their trial finally got underway, right after their old friend Eugene Debs kicked Big Bill Haywood out of the Socialist Party and received a million votes for president of the United States. “An elective office is only one step toward a revolution,” Debs said in his concession speech to Woodrow Wilson.
During the trial Joe and Arturo were locked in metal cages in the courtroom. With the stakes being execution, the two men had the temerity to represent themselves against the charge of murder.
Arturo protested his innocence eloquently as only a poet could. “I loved her,” he said of Angela. “I would never kill her. I would never put her in danger. She was my good and true friend. I love life, I would never risk life and my soul by committing murder. Ask my loved ones, ask my family. Out in the free world waits a fine woman whom I love and who loves me. I have parents who are praying for my release. My dear friend Joe Ettor and I, we are nothing more than foot soldiers in the mighty army we call the working class of the world.”
The prosecutor told him that he was deliberately misunderstanding the charges brought against him. He was on trial for murder, not his political beliefs.
“No! It is communism itself that is on trial,” cried Arturo in the courtroom, arguing for his very life. “It has nothing to do with that poor girl’s death. Does the District Attorney really believe that the gallows can settle an idea? If the idea lives, it’s because history judges it right. Joe and I, and our friend Harry too, ask only for justice. Whatever my social views are, they are. I am an immigrant. I came to this country for freedom. Like my religion, my politics cannot be tried in this courtroom.”
Smiling Joe, in his own impassioned plea to the jury, argued not only for the morality of a general strike, but for the very overthrow of capitalism because it was intrinsically immoral. “You cannot argue with immorality as if it has a voice, a reason, you cannot argue with it as with an equal partner in a discussion between men! It will not stand. We are not guilty. We are communists! And being a communist is not yet a crime in this country, is it?”
An electrified Harry sat in the courtroom and soaked it all in. Gina was deeply unimpressed with Harry’s demeanor. Mimoo was deeply unimpressed with Arturo’s oratory. “I told you, Gia,” she said, “that man was no good. Did you hear him say he had another woman waiting for him, another woman he loved? Poor Angela! Poor girl.”
“Mimoo, is that all you took away from their closing arguments?” Gina tried to suppress the anger Arturo’s revelation sparked in her.
“I took away the most important part,” Mimoo said. “He never loved our sainted, beautiful, martyred child, while she ran around after him like a schoolgirl, and for what? He left the entire jury in tears after that fine and fraudulent soliloquy! But where is our Angela? St. Mary’s Cemetery, that’s where. How many times did I tell her to listen to me? I know everything.” Mimoo cried and prayed.
“It wasn’t fraudulent, Mimoo.” Harry, who didn’t usually argue with Mimoo, argued that day. “It was a sincere effort to protest their innocence.”
“They do too much protesting if you ask me,” Mimoo said. “The protesting is what got them into this mess to begin with, and our Angela killed.”
“Mimoo, you and your daughter are immigrants,” said Harry. “They were fighting for your rights, her rights. They were on your side against the greed of capitalists, who care nothing for your well-being, only for making a dollar. How can you not respect what they did?”
Mimoo laughed. She said a few choice words in Italian, which she didn’t translate for him even when asked. “Harry, you are a learned man,” Mimoo said, “and a well-read man, I know that. You’re always buried in some book. Our electric bill is proof of how much you read. You have many fine qualities. But there are things you are completely ignorant about, and I don’t mind telling you what some of them are.”
“Please tell me, Mimoo, what I’m ignorant about.”
“One is how fathers feel about their sons.”
As soon as she said it, all three of them, sitting on a bench outside the courtroom while court was in recess, bowed their heads. August had come and gone, and with it Harry and Gina’s chance to find out how parents felt about their own children.
“What’s the second thing, Mimoo?” said Harry, hurrying on.
“Do you know who Guilherme Medeiros Silva is?”
“I don’t believe I do.”
“That’s why,” said Mimoo, “you are ignorant.”
Harry waited. He turned to Gina. “Do you know who that is?”
Gina sighed. “Mimoo, leave him alone. What do you hope to achieve?”
“Do I want to know who it is?”
“No,” said Gina. “You don’t.”
“Guilherme Jr. was born in this country,” Mimoo said, “in a hut off Martha’s Vineyard, but he was the son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. His father worked as a crewman on a whaling ship. He was killed when the boy was twelve.”
Harry opened his hands. “Okay.”
“That’s when Guilherme left school and went to work to support his mother and younger sisters. He took a job at the cotton mill in New Bedford. He worked very hard and was noticed by his employer. He got promoted. He learned everything about manufacturing and production and costs. When he was eighteen years old he went to Philadelphia to study stocks and bonds. After he came back he took a job at a factory, turned that factory around, saved it from bankruptcy, made it profitable. That’s when he was asked to save another mill in trouble. He not only saved it, but saved eight other nearly bankrupt mills around it. In 1899, the year your wife, her brother and I came to America, he started to build the largest textile mill in the world. The one that produces twenty percent of all the woolens and worsteds in the United States.”
“Wood Mill?” Harry said.
“Yes. He named it after himself. William Madison Wood is the American name of little Guilherme Silva, born in a shack, son of a deckhand. An immigrant like your wife. That’s your greedy capitalist whose business rebuilt this town and whose business you brought to its knees. Go picket against him.”
The jury delivered its verdict: the two Italian men were acquitted of all charges. Two weeks later, however, Harry, facing a lesser charge of felonious public disturbance, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, commuted to two months followed by two years probation.
While Harry served out his sentence in January and February of 1913, Big Bill stopped paying his wages. “But tell him that I’m organizing another project,” Bill said to Gina when she called to collect, “even bigger than Lawrence, and as soon as he gets out, he’s right back on the payroll because I need his help. This one is at the silk factories in Paterson, New Jersey. We’re mobilizing now.”
When Gina protested the lack of wages, Bill patiently explained to her that a man could not be paid for hours he didn’t work. “That way anarchy lies,” Bill said. “And we are not anarchists, are we? Well, maybe you are. I know most women are. No, we are communists.”
A year after the Lawrence strike, the agreements Big Bill had hastily set up with Wood Mill had all but collapsed and most of the gains the women paid for with Angela’s blood and Gina’s baby’s blood had all but vanished. It took the town many years to recover from the damaging effects of the strike. Some say it never recovered. When the textile mills in the Carolinas started to make the worsteds and woolens at a fraction of the northern price, American Woolen went out of business and Lawrence