On a sunny but chilly day in early September 1917, Italian immigrant pastor August Giuliani led a band of Protestant evangelists from Milwaukee's heavily Italian Third Ward on a jaunt to the smaller Italian enclave of Bay View. Giuliani, a former priest, had hopped the Delaware Avenue streetcar with some of his flock on the previous two Sundays, too, setting up on the corner of Bishop (now Wentworth) and Potter Streets with an organist and two trumpeters. There, they sang patriotic songs and encouraged those in the neighborhood to do their duty and support the American war effort.

Each time, Giuliani met with resistance from people he deemed anti-war anarchists. But Giuliani was unwelcome, it was said in the neighborhood, not because he preached patriotism but because he defamed Catholicism in his attempts to convert the Italians.