Italian American Review WINTER 2015 • VOLUME 5 • NUMBER 1 Italian American Review John D. Calandra Italian American Institute The Italian American Review (IAR), a bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, publishes scholarly articles about the history and culture of Italian Americans, as well as other aspects of the Italian diaspora. The journal embraces a wide range of professional concerns and theoretical orientations in the social sciences and in cultural studies. The full text of IAR issues from Volume 1 (2011) to the present is available online through EBSCO’s “America: History and Life” database (http://www.ebscohost.com/public/america-history-and- life). The IAR is listed in the Modern Language Association Directory of Periodicals. Editorial Office Editor: Joseph Sciorra, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Associate Editor: Anthony Julian Tamburri, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Associate Editor: Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY Managing Editor: Rosangela Briscese, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Assistant Editor: Siân Gibby, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Design and Production Manager: Lisa Cicchetti, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Book Review Editor: Robert Oppedisano, Independent Scholar Film and Digital Media Review Editor: Laura E. Ruberto, Berkeley City College Exhibition Review Editor: Melissa E. Marinaro, Senator John Heinz History Center Subscription Manager: Rebecca Rizzo, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Copy Editor: Ernestine Franco, Pern Editorial Services Editorial Board Giorgio Bertellini, University of Michigan Donna Chirico, York College, CUNY Simone Cinotto, Università degli Studi di Torino Donna Gabaccia, University of Toronto Scarborough John Gennari, University of Vermont Jennifer Guglielmo, Smith College Nicholas Harney, Cassamarca Foundation, University of Western Australia Stefano Luconi, Università degli Studi di Padova Leonard Norman Primiano, Cabrini College Cover art by Joanne Mattera. Silk Road 106, 2008, encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 inches. John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Queens College, CUNY 25 West 43rd Street, 17th floor New York, NY 10036 ISSN 0535-9120 All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. © 2015 John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Italian American Review WINTER 2015 • VOLUME 5 • NUMBER 1 ARTICLES 1 Efrem Bartoletti in the Mesabi Range: A Wobbly’s Efforts to Mobilize Immigrant Italian Miners THIERRY RINALDETTI 27 The Afterlife of a Classical Text: Representing Ethnicity in the Stage Productions of Marty JONATHAN J. CAVALLERO BOOK REVIEWS 46 Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880–1943 (Francesco Durante, editor; Robert Viscusi, editor of American edition) BRUNO RAMIREZ 48 Il voto degli altri: Rappresentanza e scelte elettorali degli italiani all’estero (Guido Tintori, editor) BARBARA FAEDDA 50 The Sopranos: Born under a Bad Sign (Franco Ricci) MICHAEL R. FRONTANI 52 In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti: Double Lives, Troubled Times, and the Massachusetts Murder Case That Shook the World (Susan Tejada) MICHELE FAZIO FILM REVIEWS 55 The Mystery of San Nicandro (Roger Pyke) STUART KLAWANS 57 Texan Italian Stories (Sergio Carvajal-Leoni) GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO 60 Way Down in the Hole (Alex Johnston) CAROLINE MERITHEW EXHIBITION REVIEWS 63 It’s in Our Very Name: The Italian Heritage of Syracuse (Dennis Connors, curator) FELICIA R. MCMAHON Efrem Bartoletti in the Mesabi Range: A Wobbly’s Efforts to Mobilize Immigrant Italian Miners THIERRY RINALDETTI A number of creative works have focused on the intricate interplay of class consciousness and ethnic solidarity in the immigrant communities of the United States and among Italian immigrants in particular (Bezza 1983; Cannistraro and Meyer 2003; Gabaccia and Ottanelli 2001; Guglielmo 2010; Pernicone 2009; Topp 2001b; Vezzosi 1991), drawing attention to the difficulty of organizing workers of diverse ethnic backgrounds into class-conscious movements. In the early twentieth century, the issue was especially crucial for an industrial union like the Industrial Workers of the World (also known as the IWW, or Wobblies), whose goal was to organize all workers of an industry regardless of their skills and origins. While the trade unions of the American Federation of Labor, its major rival, were dominated by skilled, male, Anglo-Saxon workers, IWW locals primarily recruited the transient, the unskilled, the recent immigrants of all back- grounds, and they did not exclude blacks or women either. In particular, the massive presence of unskilled Italian immigrants in most industries, and in many IWW locals, made the task even more complicated for Wobbly orga- nizers. For while the success of mobilizations and strikes often depended largely upon the active participation of Italian workers (Cartosio 1983, 384; Topp 2001a, 139–142),1 Italian immigrants were divided not only ideologi- cally—like workers of other ethnic groups—but along regional lines as well. At the beginning of the twentieth century, most of them had no sense of national identity but rather viewed themselves and their fellow coun- trymen as natives of specific regions and provinces of Italy. This article addresses these issues, not from the perspective of Wobbly leadership but from that of an IWW local organizer, Efrem Bartoletti. In Italy, he had completed only a rudimentary education. Once in the United States, he alternated his work as a propagandist for the IWW with his job as a miner, while organizing his fellow Italian-American miners in the local community to which he fully belonged. A number of primary sources documenting Efrem Bartoletti’s life and work are available, which is not the case for his peers: his correspondence with prominent Italian-American (and non-Italian-American) radicals, several articles he published in the Italian-language radical press, his first poems collected in one volume by the IWW, and the drafts of some of his speeches.2 It is thus possible to hear ©2015 John D. Calandra Italian American Institute 2 • Italian American Review 5.1 • Winter 2015 a voice that is generally unheard. Drawing upon some of these sources, this article examines the role Bartoletti played as a local radical activist and IWW organizer among his fellow Italian-American miners of the Mesabi Range (Minnesota), mainly—though not exclusively—in the context of the miners’ strike of 1916 and the crackdown on radicals that followed the U.S. declaration of war in 1917. Bartoletti’s propaganda and organizing efforts, his speeches and poems in particular, contributed to uniting and mobi- lizing Italian-American workers divided along regional and ideological lines by appealing to their sense of Italianness during the strike in 1916. But his achievement was short-lived because of major, and well-known, obstacles to the Italian Americans’ (and non–Italian Americans’) long-term commitment to revolutionary industrial unionism, as his correspondence confirms. Indeed, with the fierce repression of the IWW, the disruption of its networks and the divisions among its leaders, the mission of a local organizer like Efrem Bartoletti became almost impossible. Efrem Bartoletti’s Major Challenge as an IWW Organizer When he first left Costacciaro, his native village in the Eugubino-Gualdese Apennines, Umbria, in 1907, Efrem Bartoletti was only eighteen years old. He worked for a while in Luxembourg and then traveled to Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1909, where he boarded with an Italian-American family on Cedar Street—together with a dozen other, mainly Umbrian migrants— and worked as an iron ore miner in the Mesabi Range underground pits. Actually, like the majority of young men from Costacciaro and the nearby Umbrian localities,3 he was following in the footsteps of other inhabitants from the four corners of the Eugubino-Gualdese Apennines who since the turn of the twentieth century had engaged in circular labor migrations between their native villages and specific localities in a number of mining areas of Europe and the United States: in the small iron-mining towns at the borders of Lorraine and Luxembourg, in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, in the coal basins of Illinois and southeastern Kansas, in the Mesabi Range of Minnesota, and in the iron ranges of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Together with Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County, the Mesabi Range happened to be the most popular destination in Costacciaro among migrants headed for the United States, as over 40 percent of them chose to go to Hibbing, Eveleth, or Virginia, three small towns located at a short distance from one another in Saint Louis County (Rinaldetti 2013, 69–70). It is not certain whether Bartoletti was already active in Italy or whether it was the American experience that radical- ized him, but his father Giuseppe had probably shared his socialist ideas Efrem Bartoletti in the Mesabi Range: A Wobbly’s Efforts to Mobilize Immigrant Italian Miners • 3 with him (“Efrem Bartoletti, emigrato ed esiliato politico” 2001). As early as 1911, that is to say just two years after he arrived in the United States, Bartoletti already had some articles published in L’Operaio Italiano (Letter, G. Cesare, November 20, 1911, AB), even though he had completed only the first three years of elementary education in Italy (Letter, P. de Amicis, January 12, 1911, AB). He soon became a dedicated labor activist. He was for a while the organizer of Local 490 of the IWW– affiliated Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union (MMWIU). He was a member of the strikers’ executive committee during the IWW-led strike that hit the whole Mesabi Range in 1916. And he also played an active part in the defense of the IWW activists arrested in 1917. When he returned to Italy in 1919, Bartoletti brought back more than 200 of the letters he had received during his ten years in Minnesota.4 The letters were hidden away during the Fascist period and then rediscovered by his descendants, and a local scholar I met in Umbria during my PhD research, Luigi Galassi, eventually gave me a digital version of the letters—which can now be accessed online at the Archivio Bartoletti (www.romanogu- erra.it/efrem.php).