Too Old for Art? Pooh-Pooh on That Said Grandma Moses

 

Grandma Moses and a winter scene from her 1955 appearance on Edward R. Murrow's See It Now.

Anna Mary Robertson was born on September 7, in Greenwich, Washington County, New York, a rural community east of the Hudson River and not far from the Green Mountains of Vermont in 1860.  She was the third of ten children of a farmer and flax miller.  She was rudimentaly educated in a one room schoolhouse where she was first exposed to drawing and experimented with paints she created from berry juices, red clay, and natural herbal dyes.  

By the age of 12 she was put out as a chore girl and household help to a wealthier family—the beginning of decades of hard toil as a domestic, hired farm help, and then hardscrabble farmer’s wife and mother.  In her spare time, she supplemented her family’s income with needlework—pictorial embroidery and quilting—which she sold to neighbors for pittance and pin money.  It was not until she was 76 and arthritis made needlework too painful that she took up painting as an alternative.  Within two years she had multiple individual exhibitions in New York City and was becoming famous as Grandma Moses.

Anna Marie Robinson age about 6.

Anna worked for several families in her early years.  One of them, the Whitesides, kinder or at least more attentive than the others, noticed her fascination with the several Currier & Ives prints that decorated their home.  They gave their servant her first chalk, crayons, and sketch books to try her own hand at drawing.  The Currier & Ives pastoral scenes remained an inspiration for her throughout the rest of her life.

A spinster of 27, Mary met Thomas Salmon Moses, a hired man on the same farm where she worked.  They married and her new husband convinced her to relocate far from home to the lush Shenandoah Valley near the Civil War battlefield at Staughton, Virginia.  They hired out as a farm couple hoping to save money for their own place.  Despite their best efforts, it was hard to get ahead, especially as their family grew.   Anna gave birth ten times and five of the children survived infancy.  Through heartbreak and toil Anna supplemented her family income by selling the homemade potato chips she fried in a kettle and the butter she churned from her only cow’s milk.

Anna Mary Moses and two surviving daughters.

She loved the beautiful Shenandoah country, but land there was far too rich for the family to ever afford.  Thomas looked back to New York where stone and stump farms could be purchased relatively cheaply from those who were moving on to the more productive land in the Mid West.  In 1905 they established a farm in Eagle Bridge, Renssalaer County north of Washington County.

In 1918 Anna painted, using common house paint, her earliest surviving piece, a decorative fireboard of a wooded scene with a pond.  But most of her art was the samplers and farm life scenes she sewed in the handsome quilts she made by firelight and kerosene lantern after all of the cooking and chores were done and the children tucked in for the night.   

Thomas Moses died suddenly of a heart attack at age 67 in 1927.   Anna’s son Forrest stepped in to help manage the farm as her increasing age and arthritis forced her to reduce her own physical labor. By the early '30s she was spending more time on her needlework and selling it to neighbors and at local fairs.  About the time that she moved in with a daughter in 1936, she followed her sister’s advice and switch to painting, despite not having touched brush in nearly two decades. 

Returning to the Currier & Ives prints that had long inspired her, her first efforts were frank copies of well-known images.  From the beginning Anna was self-consciously primitive eschewing the conventions of perspective for an almost pictograph approach rendered in vivid colors.  She depicted farmscapes, small towns, and landscapes..  She especially favored snow scenes.  Her paintings were, in her own words, old timey, recalling the rural life of her own youth.  There were no signs of modern life—no automobiles, tractors, farm equipment, paved roads, or telephone poles.

Once she started painting, nothing could stop her.  She produced canvases at an astonishing rate.  And the more she painted, the more she refined her distinctive style and began composing original scenes, not just re-interpretations of the prints she had admired.  Many were panoramic in scope.   She later told an interviewer that she would “get an inspiration and start painting; then I’ll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.”

Grandma Moses's early work like Early Spring on the Farm were evocative of Currier 7 Ives prints. 

She sold the painting locally for $3 to $5 apiece depending on size.  They were locally popular and some were placed in shops around the region.  In 1938, just two years after she started painting New York art collector Louis J. Caldor spotted some on display in the window of a Hoosick Falls drug store.  He bought their entire stock at Anna’s going rate and then tracked down the artist at her daughter’s home in town where he acquired several more.  Back in the city he showed his discoveries widely in his circle of art loving friends. 

From there the painter who had sold her works as simply Mrs. Moses, experienced an astonishing meteoric rise to fame.  The next year, three Grandma Moses paintings were included in the Museum of Modern Art Contemporary Unknown American Painter show. Her first solo exhibition, What a Farm Wife Painted, October 1940 was at Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne. She came to the Big Apple for meet-and-greet with the press and public and an exhibition of 50 paintings at Gimbel’s Department Store on November 15. Her display included samples of her County Fair ribbon wining baked goods and preserves.   That charmed the pants off of the press, even the sometimes snooty art critic crowd who dubbed her Grandma Moses, a name that stuck and became a brand.  Her third solo show opened in December at the Whyte Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Norman Rockwell was Grandma Moses's friend and a neighbor just over the Vermont line.  In 1948 he included her in the welcoming crowd in this painting The Homecoming for a Saturday Evening Post Christmas cover.  Rockwell himself can be seen with the pipe.

By 1944 she was officially represented by the Galerie St. Etienne and the American British Art Center which successfully marketed her work to folks loaded with war time boom cash and precious few consumer items available on which to spend it.  With her painting now selling for hundreds of dollars, art dealer Kallir set up Grandma Moses Properties, Inc. for her to license her work as prints, calendars, cards and notepapers, and eventually a galaxy of products from coffee mugs to fabric prints.

By 1950 still active at age 90 Moses entered a decade in which she became a widely revered national cultural icon.  She had already been named as Mademoiselle magazine’s Young Woman of the Year at age 88 and was presented the National Press Club Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in Art in 1949 by President Harry S Truman himself.  Then in 1950 director Jerome Hill’s documentary profile Grandma Moses which was written and narrated by poet Archibald McLeish was nominated for an Academy Award.  In 1952 her autobiography My Life’s History was published, edited by her longtime friend, supporter, and exhibitor Otto Kallir.  Three years later America got to see the aging painter on Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now documentary series on CBS.

Grandma Moses's 1952 autobiography.

Through the decade honors piled on honors.  Reproductions of her work decorated many homes and all sorts of merchandise sold briskly in department stores, gift shops, and catalogues.  Several international exhibitions were a success and the State Department sponsored good will tours of her work as part of their program to use the arts to enhance American prestige.

Grandma Moses’s success was due to the breadth of her appeal—sometime to audiences that seemed mutually antagonistic.  Conservatives responded to her nostalgia for an earlier, simple America for the same reason they were drawn at the same time to things like Currier & Ives print reproductions and the early magazine cover work of Norman Rockwell before he became overtly supportive of liberal and progressive causes.  All of it seemed like a rejection of modernity, relativism, and what they viewed as the ugly and subversive chaos of modern art.

On the other hand, many liberals embraced her work as a folk expression and an authentic voice of the people.  They read stories of her life and recognized a woman who toiled, sacrificed, and often suffered and overcame those obstacles to find self-expression.  The same kinds of folks were also promoting folk music revivals and other expressions of people’s art.  A couple of decades later pioneering feminist art historians assessed her work as a breakthrough to popular acceptance by a woman artist.

At her best as in this panoramic scene of a village fair, Grandma Moses's paintings are alive with people, action, and color.

Surprisingly, Grandma Moses was even admired by much—but not all—of the arts establishment which was often hostile to work outside of anointed movements, especially Post-War abstract expressionism and other non-representative forms.  As soon as it became clear that her work was helping to create a whole new category—folk art—that did not lay claim to being fine art, they were ready to embrace it as décor.  Some critics even found that her vivid colors and sometime scattered compositions were almost abstract themselves.  Other compared her work to the peasant life and winter scenes of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the revered 16th Century Dutch/Flemish master.

Slowing down, but not yet done, Moses turned 100 years old in 1960 and was honored by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller who proclaimed Grandma Moses Day and by a Time magazine cover story.  A highly lauded children’s book, The Grandma Moses Story Book, was published the next year.

But even Grandma Moses was not immortal.  In the end she just wore out and died in a Hoosick Falls hospital on December 13, 1961 at the age of 101.  She was buried in a town cemetery where her simple grave has become a pilgrimage site.  On her death President John F. Kennedy who had acquired her art for the White House said;

The death of Grandma Moses removed a beloved figure from American life. The directness and vividness of her paintings restored a primitive freshness to our perception of the American scene. Both her work and her life helped our nation renew its pioneer heritage and recall its roots in the countryside and on the frontier. All Americans mourn her loss.

The Post Office's 1969 Grandma Moses commemorative featured Fourth of July from the White House art collection acquired during the Kennedy administration. 

In the wake of her death there was a spate of traveling exhibitions to major American and European museums.  In 1968 the Post Office issued a Grandma Moses stamp featuring the painting Fourth of July from the White House Collection.

Of course, decades have passed and tastes change.  A couple of generations are barely familiar with Grandma Moses.  Like those Currier & Ives prints and the faux country crafts décor movement of the 1990’s her rustic and rural art doesn’t fit with a techno-gadget lifestyle.  Still, she has her niche.  The folk art market she helped to create is still quite lively, at least for older collectors.  And despite having produced an astonishing 1,500 or more canvas over her career, individual paintings can still command high values.  Sugaring off sold at auction for $1.2 million.  Even though the folk art market has taken a significant hit since the 2008 Financial Crash, fine examples of her work can still command figures in the low 100 thousands.  Not bad considering some of them first sold for less than $5.

Labor Day is a Consolation Prize Working Class Holiday in the U.S.

Classic American Labor Day image--flag waving but inclusive.

Note—This is an updated version of an almost annual holiday blog post.

Today is officially Labor Day in the United States, a Federal Holiday celebrated on the first Monday of September since 1894.  For most people it is just the last hurrah of summer, an occasion for one last cookout and the gateway to Fall and football season.  In most cities and towns, the labor movement is not even perfunctorily acknowledged.  The media mostly uses the occasion to annually either write the obituary of unions or to denounce them as powerful and greedy bullies, depending on the political inclination of the outlet.

While most of us working schlumps are grateful for the day off (if we get one), I for one, wish I could officially celebrate Labor Day with virtually the whole rest of the world on May 1.  International Labor Day was proclaimed by the Second International in honor of the memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Martyrs at the suggestion of none other than American Federation of Labor (AFL) chief Samuel Gompers himself and which quickly spread around the world.  American unions celebrated it too.

But within just a few years Gompers was at the heart of a deal that substituted the September observance for May Day, a few crumbs from the Boss’s table, and a pat on the head by the Civic Federation in exchange for a promise to oppose labor radicalism and the growth of industrial style unionism in rapidly expanding basic heavy and the extractive industries—mining, forestry, agriculture, etc.

The Eight Hour Day was the main demand of both the New York 1882 parade and the mass strikes of 1886 that led to the establishment of May First as International Labor Day.  But the demand was much older as shown in this photo of what is believed to have been the first Eight Hour banner by working men in 1856.

It is true that a September Labor Day observance pre-dated the 1886 Haymarket Affair.  In 1882 the New York Central Labor Union, made up of skilled craft unions belonging to a prototype of the AFL and lodges of the rival Knights of Labor cooperated in a call for a giant parade followed by picnics, games and amusements, and educational talks.  It was designed to showcase the pride and power of the labor movement and also to press for the chief demand of labor reformers—the Eight Hour Day—the same cause that would be marked by an attempted nationwide General Strike on May 1, 1886, an event that led up the attack by police on a workers rally in Chicago’s Haymarket on May 4 and the bomb blast blamed on the mostly German and anarchist leaders of the local labor movement.

New York City officials, eager to appease workers after a number of local strikes were suppressed with violence, gave their official approval to the parade.  On September 5, 1882 an estimated 30,000 workers marched in military order behind elaborate banners representing local unions of all the trades, job shops, and Knights of Labor lodges.  It was an impressive display, but despite later claims by the AFL that observance of Labor Day spread quickly, only a few other cities, mostly in New York, began holding September celebrations. 

In the meantime, huge May Day parades and rallies spread across the country.  But the late 1880s and early 1890s were the beginning of a nearly 40-year period of virtual open class warfare with strikes being violently suppressed by local, state, and Federal authorities, and armies of private goons and strikebreakers.  And workers often fought back with equal violence.  Episodes like the Homestead Steel Strike with its running gun battles between Pinkertons and workers, the nationwide Pullman Strike of 1882, and virtually continuous battles in the coal fields and hard rock mines nationwide, made many fear for revolution or civil war.

Democratic President Grover Cleveland, who ordered the Army to crush the Pullman Strike, wanted a symbolic peace offering to Labor without actually granting the movement any of its demands.  

                                            Early Labor Day was wrapped in patriotic symbolism.

Republican king pin Ohio Senator Marc Hanna, soon to anoint William McKinley as the next President, was even more ambitious—he proposed a pact of cooperation between capital and “responsible labor.”  He offered Gompers, the Cigar Roller’s Union chief who headed the AFL, a seat in his new Civic Federation alongside the robber barons and captains of industry.  Hanna did not make the same offer to Grand Master Workman Terrance V. Powderly of the Knights of Labor, who personally opposed strikes and advocated arbitration of disputes, because the members of Knights lodges included unskilled workers clamoring for recognition in heavy industry.  Gompers’s AFL would be allowed to pursue organizing skilled workers strictly by trade but not organize the great mass of unskilled, largely immigrant workers.  Gompers would also be called on to use his unions to oppose labor radicalism, and even to break strikes led by unions outside the grand agreement.

With Gompers in his pocket, Hanna engineered enough Republican support in Congress to get Cleveland’s official Labor Day proposal passed.  Cleveland signed it in to law just six days after Eugene V. Debs’s industrial union of railroad workers was smashed in the end of the Pullman Strike. 

Within a few years all states either aligned their existing Labor celebrations with the Federal holiday or enacted state proclamations echoing the U.S. call.  

Butchers march in a 1914 Labor Day Parade in Valparaiso,  Indiana.

Meanwhile authorities everywhere tried to suppress May Day observances, which continued to be supported by militant unionists and radicals of every sort—social democrats, anarchists, and Marxists.  The Knights of Labor withered away, but aggressive industrial unions, especially in the mining industry, continued to fight both the bosses and the AFL’s attempt to divide the aristocracy of labor from the mass rank and file.  In little more than a decade the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) would be formed to intensify that battle.

During the Depression and the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrats became the party of labor.   Labor Day became the official kick-off of Democratic election campaigns. Labor Day parades and rallies often seemed more of a platform to launch candidacies than a labor union celebration.

Even that has faded as the percentage of Americans in unions continued to shrink year after year after a high tide in the early ‘60s.  By the Clinton era, Democrats continued to get support from labor, but seemed to try to disassociate themselves from it, shunning identification as the party for of labor in favor of being seen as the champion of the Middle Class.

A 2014 cartoon summed up the plight of American workers on Labor Day.  It has gotten worse.

As half-assed a holiday as Labor Day is, I hope we all will take a moment to thank the American Labor movement for largely creating that Middle Class.

Of late the organized labor movement has bestirred itself led by aggressive drives in the service industries including hospitality, fast food, and retail spurred by demands for a living minimum wage.  Public employees especially teachers and healthcare workers have also been militant and are extending their union representation.  Labor shortages in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic gave unions leverage not seen in decades.  

Despit Donald Trump's faux-populist appeal to White workers, his disastrous and erratic policies have battered their incomes, stability, and hope for security making unionism and class solidarity more appealing.  The energized labor movement has stepped up to becoming a vital part of the Resistance.

It seems there are good things to celebrate this year.

 

Labor's Lesson for Today's Resistance--The Working Class Virtue of Solidarity

 

Note:  It was my privilege to be asked to speak—and to host one year—from 2015 to 2019 at the annual Labor Day Event on Woodstock Square sponsored by McHenry County Progressives.  Today we will look back at the meat of my talk in 2016—a Presidential election year that turned out to have disastrous results.  Specifics about that race are now dated, but the themes they represent remain.  My remarks on the working class virtue of solidarity were adapted from earlier material, including one of my Labor Day sermons at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock.

The Old Man explaining the Working Class Virtue of Solidarity at the 2016 Labor Day event in Woodstock Square.

We gathered here last year [2015] for the first time, a small band of folks called together by some local fans of Bernie Sanders who wanted to celebrate his hero Eugene V. Debs and his connection to Woodstock.  As a fan of both, as well as an old Wobbly, and a soapboxer, I was thrilled to be asked to participate.

A lot has happened in the last year and here we are again.  Bernie Sanders, thanks to folks like those who organized the Labor Day event, went from being an obscure longshot, to the leader of a wide and deep political revolution, and came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic Party nomination.  When he didn’t some folks were heartbroken, other mad.  Some picked up their toys and went home in a sulk and huff.  Some picked up Bernie’s challenge to keep the Revolution going by going deep and wide—running for local office and trying to recapture Congress from troglodyte Republicans.  That’s what the folks here in McHenry County have done.

Some folks swore that no matter what they would never vote for Hillary Clinton, who apparently has horns and is the spawn of Satan, no matter what, no way, no how.  Others have either swallowed hard and followed Bernie’s appeal and decided to vote for Hillary, or with more enthusiasm vowed to actively work for her election along with the rest of the Democratic ticket.

People who were comrades in the campaign struggle a couple of months ago but are on opposite sides of the Hillary divide, are hurling invectives at one another, denouncing each other as traitors or saboteurs.  Relationships have been shattered.  That longed for political revolution is crippled by dissent.

Meanwhile genuine naked fascism has arisen as a mass movement and swallowed the traditional conservative party.  Ordinary Americans who have seen their lives and futures sacrificed time and again to corporate greed have been taught to blame their woes on a rotating cast of others—Mexicans and emigrants this week, Muslims and refugees next, women, gays, Black lives Matter protesters, scientists, the sick and the elderly.  Violence is in the air like the whiff of gunpowder.

Considering all this, on this Labor Day I want to commend to you the working class virtue of solidarity even if you have never considered yourself a worker.  

Solidarity by Käthe Kollwitz.

First, we need to consider what solidarity is not….

Solidarity is not sympathy.  Sympathy is a passive emotion.  It also implies a separation from the object of sympathy and can teeter on pity, which is just sympathy tinged with revulsion. Empathy might be closer to the meaning in that it implies a common understanding of the distress.  But empathy is also passive.  Solidarity demands action.

Solidarity is not charity.  Charity implies a power and privilege differential.  The more powerful and more privileged deign to give to the less fortunate who are expected to respond with appropriate gratitude and humility.  Solidarity is mutual aid among equals.

Solidarity is not altruism.  Altruism is supposedly selfless giving requiring sacrifice but expecting no reward—except perhaps praise for being saint-like.  Solidarity recognizes the commonality of our conditions and expects to receive support by right as well as give it.

Solidarity is not family.  Families—and by extension surrogate families like clans, nations, religions, races and others—are expected to support their members out of blood obligation.  Solidarity demands respect for commonality with the other.  Solidarity with the stranger dismantles walls and promotes peace instead of a mad scramble over scarce resources.

Solidarity is not utopian.  Utopians conjure up sweet dreams of the perfect.  Utopians may simply drift on in the opium cloud of that dream. More dangerously, some utopians construct rigid ideologies around their vision which eventually require the ruthless suppression of anything and anyone not in conformity to that ideology.  Solidarity is rooted in the common realities we face together and is interested in addressing the roots of the problems as well as ameliorating the immediate effects.

Solidarity is not all warm and fuzzy.  Warm and fuzzy denies oppression.  Solidarity recognizes that there are those whose own narrow self-interest causes them to exploit, subjugate, and abuse others.  And solidarity demands common action to defend against such depredations and—yes—boldly to ultimately defeat the oppressors.

Solidarity is a recognition of our place in humanity, an ethic, and an active response to our common interests.

Solidarity recognizes that justice requires cooperation and effort across all boundaries of separation.

Solidarity enlarges our communities, builds bridges of respect that can span differences.  It does not demand lock-step conformity to some ideological purity to act together in mutual support.  It requires listening, really listening and not just waiting our turn to deliver a lecture.  When generations of feminists support Hillary Clinton passionately it means not sneering that they are voting their vaginas, but understanding why and ultimately standing with them just as we hope that they will stand with us for the dismantlement of corporate power. 

Solidarity requires humility and taking the risk of having our fragile identities challenged.  We cannot give more than lip service to Black Lives Matter unless we understand and take ownership of the White privilege understanding it is not a moral flaw but a condition we are born to.  By breaking down our defenses we can collaborate in our mutual liberation with respect and understanding.

Solidarity recognizes that justice requires cooperation and effort across all boundaries of separation.

Most of all, solidarity requires commitment and action.  There are no sidelines, no room for mere cheerleaders.  Each and every one of us are called to put our bodies and our lives on the line again and again in some meaningful ways.  And we are buoyed by the knowledge that others are prepared to do the same for us.

Can we make a promise this Labor Day to commit to the working class virtue of solidarity?  Can we face the challenges not just of the coming elections, but in defending women’s bodies and choice, dismantlement the new slavery of mass incarceration, and standing in the Spirit Camp of the Standing Rock Sioux as they defend all of our water.  There is a lot to do.  No individual can do it all. But we can all do something. 

Solidarity recognizes that justice requires cooperation and effort across all boundaries of separation.
 

In the words of Ralph Chaplin in the great anthem of the Working Class:

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;

Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,

For the Union makes us strong!

 

Did Unitarians Murder Anna LoPizzo During the and and Roses Strike of 1912?

The Funeral of Anna LoPizzo, Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912.

I have always been proud of my active membership in the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—as a young man and my more mature identification as a Unitarian Universalist, a denomination justly identified for its commitment to social justice.  But sometimes modern UU’s are so proud of that reputation that they are loath to admit that not all of our Unitarian and Universalist forbearers were always on the side of the angels. 

We boast about early abolitionists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker and our very real martyrs in the Civil Rights Movement, but it was not until Black UUs held our collective feet to the fire to make us recognize our White privilege that we began to face the fact that Boston elite, who helped found and sustain Unitarianism, largely gained their wealth in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and then from the textile industry made possible by slave labor on Southern plantations.  Or that many Unitarians were violently opposed to abolitionism and shunned and isolated crusaders like Parker.  Or that post-Civil War Unitarians refused to recognize Black Unitarian congregations.  And in the 1960’s when push came to shove the UUA refused to stand by commitments made to Black members driving the majority of them from our faith.  Thankfully, we are finally coming to grips with that as we are with collective responsibility for settler colonialism and the suppression and near annihilation of our indigenous peoples.

But facing enduring class bias has been much harder.  We hate to admit that a deep streak of nativism and anti-Catholic prejudice and antisemitism made the Unitarian elite the often sworn enemy of unionism and that those same Brahmin families who made their fortunes on the backs of Blacks were among the most intransigent of capitalist bosses and their allies throughout the establishment.

The writer leading the annual Labor Day service at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock, Illinois back in 2012 during the pre-air conditioning days when hot weather services were held in the basement Religious Education room.

In 2012, the centennial year of the great IWW led Lawrence Textile Strike I addressed the issue in one of the annual Labor Day worship services I led for several years at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock, Illinois.  This is what I said.

It was cold on January 29, 1912.  Thousands of mill workers, mostly women and foreign-born, representing dozens of ethnicities and languages, had been on strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts since January 11.  Despite hardships and language barriers the strike had held firm through heavy police oppression and the mobilization of state militia units—the National Guard.  Leaders of the militant Industrial Workers of the World, including Big Bill Haywood, Carlo Tresca, Joseph Ettor, Arturo Giavannitti and 18-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had arrived to help organize the strike.

The strike, one of the most important labor struggles in American history, is remembered today as the Bread and Roses Strike for picket signs carried by the women.

The press coverage of the Lawrence Strike labeled this photo "immigrant worker types" purposely dehumanizing women strikers.

That morning Ettor led the largest mass march yet through the center of Lawrence’s business district.  Militia, with fixed bayonets, disbursed the march.  That afternoon while Ettor spoke to a mass meeting the regular pickets at the mill gates were attacked by police, who opened fire with pistols.  Twenty-three-year-old Anna LoPizzo was shot and killed.  Her funeral two days later was the largest event yet of the strike.

The policeman who fired the shot that killed her at short range was not punished.  Despite this, Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested and charged with LoPizzo’s murder.  They were held without bail.

Martial Law was declared and all public meetings and marches officially banned.  The governor called out 22 more Militia companies.  Two days later a 15-year-old Syrian boy was bayoneted to death.

This weekend, we look back on this as Unitarian Universalists not only as a reminder of decades of labor struggle, but to assess who we are and how our illustrious religious ancestors responded to manifest injustice.

If you think they flocked to the support of oppressed workers, you would be dead wrong.  On the contrary, the elite of American Unitarianism were united in its determination to do everything possible to crush the strike.  Not surprising in that among their numbers were most of the great families which made their fortunes in the New England textile industry, including the Lawrences and the Lowells and many of the leading ministers of Boston environs had married into or come from those families.  Almost to a man—and there were no women—they thundered condemnation from the pulpit, often using the most extreme language and advocating even more violence to suppress what they saw as a revolutionary uprising of unwashed foreigners, most of them despised Papists, Jews, and even Mohamadans.

 

No one could have been more respectable than Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell, scion of two Brahman families who made their wealth from the slave trade and then from New England textile mills.

The President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell—can you guess his familial connections—went further.  He encouraged the Governor to call up Harvard’s cavalry militia unit, mostly made up of the sons of New England’s wealthiest families, to active duty to smash the strike.  He also excused all students who answered the call from all class work and examinations.  The young men themselves could hardly contain their enthusiasm.  Several left behind letters expressing their hope to “make short work of the swine.”

 

National Guard cavalry, perhaps the Harvard unit, on duty during the Lawrence strike.

Of course, not every Unitarian in 1912 shared the intensity of the Boston Brahmin’s class hatred and xenophobia.  A few like rising young star John Haynes Holmes who would soon found the Community Church movement, advocated for a progressive stand on social justice, including support for working people.  In the Midwest where Jenkin Lloyd Jones had for decades presided over the quasi-independent Western Unitarian Conference and Unity movement, there was a good deal of pro-labor social gospel feeling.  But by in large, Unitarianism was still a tribal religion of the New England upper classes, and it showed.

Universalists of the period, who included many people of modest means and education in addition to small businesspeople and professionals, tended to support or oppose labor based on local circumstances and conditions.  Industrialist George Pullman is best remembered for being the cause of the great Pullman Strike of 1892 led by Eugene V. Debs of the American Railway Union, but he was a Universalist captain of industry and on a took a leading anti-labor role.

According to Bruce Watson, author of Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream, “If America had a Tomb of the Unknown immigrant paying tribute to the millions of immigrants known only to God and distant cousins compiling family trees, Anna LoPizzo would be a prime candidate to lie in it.”  She was so obscure that no known photo of her exists and there is even confusion over her age. Finally in 1990 a retired IBEW business agent worked to get a marker on her pauper's grave decorated with a Bread and Roses symbol.

It has taken decades for Unitarian Universalism to warm to the labor movement, despite progressive stands on other issues.  Most today are at least mildly supportive or neutral.  The old Brahmin class has long since abandoned Unitarianism for the respectability of Episcopalianism and Congregationalism.  Although we no longer have many super wealthy, we are among the highest income per-capita of all American religious organizations due the very large percentage of college graduates and professionals with advanced degrees.  Indeed, today the biggest barrier to more active solidarity with labor lies not in income prejudice, but in the refusal of many of us to acknowledge that we are, despite our degrees, by in large, wage earners ourselves.  We don’t like to think of ourselves as workers, which conjures in many minds images of dirty fingernails, bad teeth, and ignorance.

As we now strive to Side With Love and social justice, that is an attitude which we must abandon.