Joseph James Ettor

J.J. Ettor (center), flanked by Joseph Caruso and Arturo Giovannitti, his co-defendants in the 1912 Lawrence trial

Joseph James "Smiling Joe" Ettor (1885–1948) was an Italian-American trade union organizer who, in the middle-1910s, was 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 Ettor, known to his friends as "Joe" or "Smiling Joe," was born on October 6, 1885, in New York City, the son of a laborer who had emigrated to America from Italy. Ettor went to work at the age of 12 selling newspapers. He later worked as a waterboy on a railroad, as a saw-filer in a lumber mill, as a barrel-maker, as a shipyard worker, and in a cigar factory. He also had cut his teeth organizing foreign-born workers in the steel mills and shoe factories of the East. 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. Denouncing the mill owners, sympathizing with the toil of textile workers, Ettor called for an even larger walkout. "Monday morning you have got to close the mills that you have caused to shut down, tighter than you have them now." 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.

Ettor became a member of the executive council of the IWW. In 1916, he left the IWW along 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

Works . Debate with Arturo Caroti. Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, n.d. . Industrial Unionism: The Road to Freedom. Chicago : Industrial Workers of the World Pub. Bureau, 1913. —also translated into Swedish. Watson, Bruce, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and The Struggle for the American Dream, Viking, New York, 2005—The only full-length narrative of the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence.