ABSTRACT
On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in the cutting room on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which occupied the three uppermost floors of a ten-story Greenwich Village building. The City of Lawrence, in an attempt to break the union, charged Caruso with murdering Anna LoPizzo and Ettor and Giovannitti as accessories. It would be unusual for an Italian American not to have heard the names of Sacco and Vanzetti in connection with discrimination against Italian Americans. Sacco and Vanzetti, it seems, were guilty of anarchism-and a particularly vio-lent strain of anarchism. In fact, between the fascism of the prominenti and the radicalism of the labor movement, there was a growing middle ground of Italian Americans who found their political home in the traditional spheres of American politics: the Democratic and Republican parties. Despite such rightward lurching, the Democratic Party continued to take the majority of the Italian American vote through the 1960s and 1970s.
