The Poetry of Syndicalism

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THE rhapsody in this issue of The Atlantic, entitled ‘The Cage,’ will not pass without challenge. A rebel wrote it, and thought and form alike proclaim rebellion. There will be a few to sympathize and many to contemn, while to some it will seem clear that if there is a poetry of anarchy, this is it. ‘The Cage’ will call out plenty of literary criticism, plenty of expressions of social sympathy or lack of it, but the simple point which needs emphasis is that whether the poem repels or attracts the reader, he will find in it, if he cares to look, more of the heart and soul of the Syndicalist movement than all the papers of all the economists can teach him. It is ever wise to listen to the serious voices of mankind, and the sinister mutterings of our own day make the farsighted pause to think. Some details concerning author and poem will give point to these remarks.

Arturo M. Giovannitti was born in the Abruzzi, Italy, in 1883. His father was a physician and chemist, and he himself received the fundamentals of a literary education in the public schools. At eighteen Giovannitti emigrated to America, and, after encountering many varied experiences of an immigrant in search of a livelihood, he entered the Union Theological Seminary in New York, with the purpose of becoming a minister of the Presbyterian Church. Although he never graduated, Giovannitti saw actual service in conducting Presbyterian missions in more than one city, and interested himself in the work of the Church, until socialism came to impersonate religion in his life and led him through the vanishing stages of unbelief into atheism.

During the Lawrence strike, Giovannitti preached with missionary intensity the doctrine of Syndicalism. On June 20, on the charge of inciting a riot, which resulted in the death of a woman, he was arrested with Joseph Ettor and another leader, and held without bail for trial under a statute which had not been invoked since the conscription riots of the Civil War. Through the unreadiness or policy of their lawyers the prisoners spent nearly seven months in jail. Then came the trial which dragged on for nearly two months longer. During this period of enforced idleness, Giovannitti had access to a library. Before his imprisonment he had written poems for the Italian papers; now English poetry was revealed to him. He read it with insatiate eagerness and found in Byron and Shelley the heady wine which his rebellious nature craved. It was during the trial that W. D. Haywood, the notorious Syndicalist, asked Giovannitti to write something about ‘Sixteenth-Century courts trying to solve Twentieth-Century problems.’ ‘The Cage’ was the result. It was written one evening while Giovannitti was still greatly moved by news of the protest strike in Lawrence, and by messages of sympathy from his fellow citizens, who in three separate districts of Italy had nominated him for the Chamber of Deputies.

We are not prepared to debate the question whether Syndicalism has a soul, but if it has, ’The Cage’ gives a picture of it. The philosophy of the poem sounds harshly materialistic, yet we must not forget that to the very poor, bread, bed, and sunshine may suggest something very different from materialism. They are helps — almost essential helps — to spiritual freedom. Moreover, many readers will discern some vague outline of a spiritual principle in ‘the fatherly justice of the sun.’ But even if the poem offers no suggestion of some evolution toward an idealism still to come, if sunshine and a chance to feel its warmth are really all these revolutionists desire, then to be shut away from it is to them at least an utter calamity.

It was the law which freed Giovannitti. This law, read by ‘dead men’ out of ‘dead books,’ had in it the spark of the eternal life of justice. The logic of facts is against the poet’s repudiation of the past. So thinks the conservative, and rightly. Even the radical may maintain that evolution itself is against him. His ‘singing cage’ is a part of the past continuing into the present. It is not yet retransformed and remade into the ‘sword of justice’ of the future, but in the fullness of time that new sword of justice will be made out of the old cage. This is not death. This is transfiguration.

Thus the radical. But most of us commonplace folk, after pondering the matter, will remark with Mr. Asquith in his discussion of Parliamentary manners, ‘We are getting on!’