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enjoy this writing from Michael Ceraolo in the cc&d free 2014 PDF file chapbook: an Almost-Lost World (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)

Order this writing in the book a New Pen the cc&d Jan. - June 2014 collection book		get the 394 page Jan. - June 2014 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Two Adolescent Activists: Camella Teoli

Michael Ceraolo

Though the frontier had officially been declared closed
in 1890, the industrial frontier
was still wide open twenty years later: unofficial sheriffs
of the mill would illegally recruit members of their own ethnicity
to work in the mills for wages of a few dollars a week,
supplying the necessary papers if, as was usually the case,
the child was under the state of Massachusetts’
minimum employment age of fourteen,
and Camella Teoli was one of those so conscripted;
her formal education ended at the sixth grade
And she would have remained one of the anonymous millions
with similar ignored stories, but for two things:
she had been scalped by one of the mill’s machines,
spending seven months in the hospital
(at the company’s oh-so-generous expense),
and she testified before Congress in March 1912,
two months into the strike in Lawrence
that rang in the new year;
the shock of her and others’ matter-of-fact testimony
about the the conditions they daily labored under
helped to end the strike on March 12, 1912
on terms satisfactory to the strikers:
wage increases and no retaliation
(at least for the short term)
Then, she would return to the immigrant’s anonymity,
not mentioning her heroic past even to her family
They would become aware of it only after her death:
her radicalism would be resurrected
with the re-discovery of her Congressional testimony,
and she would even receive that most American of honors,
that of having a street named after her

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