City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research CUNY Graduate Center 2011 Italian Militants and Migrants and the Language of Solidarity in the Early- Twentieth-Century Western Coalfields Stephen Brier CUNY Graduate Center Ferdinando Fasce University of Genoa How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/202 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] Figure 1. A cartoon shows Utah Governor Heber Wells using the cliché “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” to implore UMWA District 15 organizer Carlo Demolli to get out of Utah. Demolli, who had come to the state from Colorado to encourage Utah miners to join the District 15 strike, holds a strike order with his name at the top. The cartoon’s publication followed a face- to- face meeting between Wells and Demolli. Unidentified artist, Salt Lake Herald, December 10, 1903, A1 Italian Militants and Migrants and the Language of Solidarity in the Early- Twentieth- Century Western Coalfields Stephen Brier and Ferdinando Fasce In April 1904, in the sixth month of a major strike in the western coalfields, Carlo Demolli, a paid organizer for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), along with two other union officials, was charged by a federal grand jury with two counts of sending “obscene, lewd and lascivious” materials through the U.S. mail. Demolli, who had immigrated to the United States from Lombardia in northern Italy in 1895, worked as a UMWA organizer and as editor and publisher of Il Lavoratore Italiano ( ILI ), an Italian- language newspaper published since 1902 in Trinidad, Colorado.