Labor activist and artist Ralph Fasanella's painting shows a column of Militia marching to confront a mass march during the 1912 Lawrence Strike.
The Lawrence Textile Strike began when thousands of skilled and unskilled workers alike walked off their jobs on January 11,
1912. Two months later one of the largest employers in the city caved
into the demands of mere women, children, and immigrants. One by one over
the next couple of weeks the others fell into line. Something astonishing had happened,
something, dare we say it, revolutionary.
Lawrence was founded in 1845 to take
advantage of water power of the Merrimack River in Massachusetts by Abbott
Lawrence, a wealthy Unitarian from
Boston who built the first woolen textile mill there. He was soon
joined by others of his class. Within decades the river was lined with
massive mills which produced much of the nation’s cloth.
Originally Lawrence and the others
imported skilled craftsmen from England and
Scotland to build, maintain and set
up the complex machines. But cheap, unskilled hands were needed to tend them and keep them operating. That labor at first was recruited from the
young women of New England, mostly
the daughters of famers and working men. They were
housed in clean dormitories and
their “moral character” was well
attended to. The wages were considered
fair—enough to send home to help the family and still save for a self-earned dowry to start off a married life. Most of the girls—they usually entered the
mills at 16—worked for five years or so and then left to start families.
But beginning with the Civil War, this system was unable to
supply enough workers for burgeoning demand.
Mill owners also found the altruism
of uplifting young women less appealing than maximizing profits by seeking cheaper sources of labor. That labor would soon be found in the flood
of immigrants in the later 19th Century,
mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe.
By 1900 the Town of Lawrence and its neighbors was teeming with Italian, Slavic, Hungarian, Portuguese and Syrian immigrants who made up most of the unskilled workforce. The mills employed not only the men, but
their children, as young as eight,
and their women. Half of the workers at
the four giant American Textile
mills were girls between 14 and 18.
Children at the loom in an early 20th Century textile mill.
Gone were the tidy dorms of
old. In their place were tenements and virtual shanty towns. Twelve and fourteen hour days, six days a
week in lint filled air around
dangerous moving machinery meant that 36% of mill workers died by the time they
were 25 years old.
If there was a hell on earth, Lawrence may have been it. The bosses knew they were sitting on a powder keg, but depended on keeping
their workers divided by nationality,
religion, and sex to prevent wide spread labor
trouble.
Native Yankees, English, Scottish, Irish
(mostly Scots-Irish Protestants),
and Germans dominated the skilled
trades. Many of them belonged to three local unions of the A.F.L.'s United Textile Workers, but
only about 208 of these were in good standing in 1912. Various unskilled jobs were divided by
ethnicity.
The American Woolen Company's Washington Mill was one of the largest in Lawrence.
By 1905 the mills employed over
40,000 workers. The introduction of the two loom system in the cotton mills, in which a single worker
had to attend two machines, sped up work, made it more dangerous and held costs
down. Real wages began to be cut. The average wage in the industry by 1911, including
skilled workers, foremen, and office workers was only $8.76 for a work week of
up to 56 hours a week. The vast majority
of unskilled workers made barely half of that.
Conditions were becoming a public scandal. Do-gooders were demanding reform. Responding to public pressure,
the Massachusetts legislature passed
a law limiting the work week to 54 hours for women and children effective on
January 1, 1912. But the law did not
guarantee the same wages as the longer work week, which were barely enough to
live on as it was.
Beginning in December, mill
operators began to speed up the machines to make sure production remained at
the same levels as before. Then they
unilaterally decreed that male workers would also be limited to the 52 hour
week.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had been organizing
among the unskilled workers of Lawrence since 1907. Like the AFL locals, it had relatively few
dues paying members in 1912—maybe 800 or so.
Most workers simply could not afford even the modest dues charged by the
IWW Textile Workers Union. But unlike the AFL, the IWW had organized
with language sections for each
major ethnic group. Newspapers, pamphlets,
and leaflets were circulated by the
IWW in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Hungarian. Some material was available in Arabic for the Syrians and in Yiddish for the relatively small
numbers of Eastern European Jews.
Meetings conducted in these languages included not only paid up members,
but all who were interested.
The small English language section
of the IWW often represented all language groups in communicating with the
bosses and authorities. It drafted a
letter to the President of American
Woolen Company demanding to know if wages would be reduced when the reduced
hours went into effect. When they got no
response, all IWW language groups were alerted to be prepared for cuts.
When Polish women workers at the Everett Company mills discovered their
pay packets short by 32 cents on
January 11, they dropped their tools
and walked out with shouts of “Short
Pay! Short Pay!” Other workers
followed. The next day the strike spread
to the most of the other mills.
Women and Children on the picket line in the snow earl in the strike.
Late in the afternoon a mass meeting was held in the Franco-Belgian hall. Although the strike
had not been called by the IWW, most
of the workers were aware of the radical
union and sympathetic to
it. They knew they could not count on
the support of the AFL, which had instructed
its members to stay on the job. The
meeting resolved to send a telegram
to Joseph Ettor, an IWW organizer,
editor, General Executive Board member
in New York. Ettor had earned a
reputation leading one of the first great IWW strikes, the 1909 strike against
the Pressed Steel Car Company in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. Most importantly, Ettor had experience working with
foreign born workers and could speak Italian and Polish fluently and get by in
Hungarian and Yiddish.
Upon speedy arrival, Ettor quickly
helped organize the chaotic walk-out into a well-disciplined strike.
Mass meetings were held in the morning and late afternoon to plot
strategy and formulate demands. Those
demands eventually included a 15 percent wages boost for a 54 hour work week, double time for overtime work, and no
discrimination against any workers for their strike participation. Mass
pickets, the first ever seen in Lawrence, began in front of all of the
mills. Even most of the AFL men now came
out.
Despite an AFL attempt to wrest
leadership from the IWW, the strikers had confidence only in Ettor and the One Big Union.
A labor cartoon protested the police brutality in Lawrence.
The mayor of Lawrence called out a local Militia company to support police
against the picketers. The Fire Department turned their hoses on strikers in the sub-freezing January temperatures. 33 picketers were promptly arrested and quickly sentenced by a
local magistrate to a year in jail.
From the beginning, the Boston press
raged against the strikers and called for severe measures against them. The leading clergymen of Boston, Unitarian and Congregationalist alike echoed the sentiments. The Governor
ordered out the State Police and
more units of Militia. That included a
company of Harvard students,
including the sons of the Unitarian Brahmin
elite, who were among the most eager to “have at” the strikers.
Another leading Italian, Arturo Giovannitti, editor of the Italian Socialist Federation paper Il
Prolitorio arrived to bolster IWW strike leadership. Giovannitti went
to work organizing strike kitchens
and relief and sending off furious
letters pleading for support and money to Socialist ethnic federations and IWW
locals alike.
In the early weeks of the strike, it
held firm against daily assaults on the picket lines and harassment by troops
and police. Giovannitti’s relief efforts
set up medical clinics staffed by
sympathetic doctors, minimal strike pay,
and food rations.
Observers like labor reporter Mary Heaton Vorse noted that the
strikers seemed almost gay, “always marching and singing. The tired, gray
crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their
months to sing.”
Early in the strike local police
found dynamite in three locations,
including a shoemakers shop next to
the print shop Ettor used as his mailing address. The Boston American actually
reported the story before the explosives were supposedly located. Despite efforts to tie Ettor and strike
leaders to it, a local school board
member was eventually arrested and charged with planting the dynamite in an
effort to discredit the strikers.
The funeral of Anna LoPizzo, shot by police on January 29.
On January 29 Ettor led one of the
largest marches yet through the center of the Lawrence business district. Before
the march he addressed the workers and urged them to avoid violence at any cost.
When the Militia blocked a main road, Ettor simply steered the marchers
onto side streets to avoid a confrontation. Later that afternoon as Ettor and Giovannitti
addressed a regular strike meeting, a young woman, Anna LoPizzo, was shot and
killed during a police charge on a regular picket line. Witnesses saw a police officer fire the shot.
Despite this Ettor and Giovannitti
were arrested and charged in LoPizzo’s murder.
They were held without bail. In April they were joined by a local striker,
Joseph Caruso, who police alleged
actually fired the shot that killed her.
Strike leaders Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giavaniti were addressing a mass march when Anna LoPizzo was shot and killed on a picket line blocks away, but both were charged with her murder.
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.
If Authorities thought jailing the
leaders would end the strike, they were mistaken. The IWW General
Secretary Treasurer, the legendary Big
Bill Heywood himself, arrived. He
brought with him veteran unionist William
Trautman and a slip of an 18 year old Irish
girl, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn
already noted for her fiery oratory. Her work in Lawrence would catapult her to
fame. She would be memorialized by IWW troubadour Joe Hill himself as the original Rebel Girl. A few days later
the Italian anarcho-syndicalist Carlo Tresca arrived to bolster the IWW
team.
15,000 strikers met Heywood and
company at the railway station and conducted illegal parade to Lawrence Common where they all gave
rousing speeches. In all of his
addresses Heywood counseled peaceful resistance and against violence. He also determined to demonstrate the
strikers’ patriotism for their
adopted nation by making sure that they carried plenty of American Flags. The most
widely circulated photograph of the strike shows Militia with leveled bayonets
at massed flag carrying strikers.
Massachusetts Militia met a flag carrying mass march of strikers with leveled bayonets.
Women and girls represented more
than half of all of the strikers. They
often took the lead on picket lines and were creative in their actions. One parade of women was led by a large
placard reading, “We Want Bread but We Want Roses Too!” The women probably were inspired by the poem
by James Oppenheim that was
published in December 1911 in The American Magazine, although
popular mythology has it that the strike inspired the poem which was set to
music by Caroline Kohlsaat a few
years later and became an IWW and later feminist
classic.
The turning point of the strike came when strike leaders decided to
send children of strikers to be
safely cared for by IWW members and supporters in New York. Margaret Sanger, a
volunteer nurse, accompanied the
first 120 children to the city on February 10.
Their train was met by
thousands of members of the Italian
Socialist Federation and the Socialist
Party who escorted them through the streets singing The Internationale and Les
Marsaillaise. A second group of 90 children received a
similar welcome a few weeks later. The
image of the half-starved children
dressed in tatters against the
winter chill helped swing public sentiment away from the mill owners and to the
strikers. Alarmed, Lawrence officials
announced that no more children would be allowed to leave town.
Children evacuated from Lawrence were escorted by Elizabeth Gurly Flynn and Big Bill Haywood to union foster homes in New York City. The publicity and sympathy generated by the move drove employers into a frenzy.
On February 24 150 children escorted
by their mothers attempted to board a train to take them to supporters in Philadelphia. Local police and three companies of
Militia charged the orderly line beating the women and children
indiscriminately. They tried to tear
children from their mothers. Dozens of
women and many children were thrown into the backs of Militia trucks where they
continued to be beaten. Thirty of the
women, most of them seriously injured were jailed. Children were removed from the custody of
their parents. The attack was observed
by several reporters and was soon widely publicized.
Public outrage at the brutality
erased most support for the bosses. Wisconsin Socialist Congressman Victor Berger and Democrat William Wilson from Pennsylvania
demanded a Congressional investigation,
which got under way in March. Public
testimony by child workers to the inhumane conditions of the mills stirred the
conscience of the Country.
At the urging of his wife, who
attended the hearings, President William
Howard Taft announced a nationwide investigation into conditions at
industrial plants across the country.
There was talk of stripping the mills of the heavy tariff protections that kept the companies competitive with
European producers.
On March 12 the American Woolen
Company acceded to all of the strikers’ demands. By the end of the month even the most
recalcitrant owners had fallen into line.
The great Lawrence Strike ended with an unprecedented total victory for
the strikers and huge prestige for the IWW.
The Striker's victory parade on March 13, 1912.
There were still loose ends. Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso remained in
jail and no trial date seemed to be coming.
Ettor read voraciously, making a study of the philosophy of organization. The theatrical Giovannitti staged daily
readings from Shakespeare and European poets for the entertainment
of fellow prisoners and guards alike.
Heywood threatened a general strike unless they were released and the
IWW organized its General Defense
Committee to raise funds for their legal team and to support their
families.
A Giovanitti and Ettor pin sold to raise money for their defense.
$600,000 was raised, mostly in
nickels and dime donations and inexpensive dues and assessment stamps in GDC
membership books. Mass rallies in New
York City and Boston addressed by Heywood and Flynn drew thousands.
In August Ernest Pitman, a Lawrence contractor who had built the Wood mill of
the American Woolen Company, confessed
to a district attorney that the dynamite frame-up
had been planned in the Boston offices of Lawrence textile corporations. Pitman
committed suicide shortly after he
was served papers ordering him to appear and testify before a grand jury. American Wool Chairman William Wood was eventually cleared of charges against him—only
because Pitman was dead.
On September 30 Lawrence workers
went out on a one day demonstration
strike after John Breen, the local
man who tried to frame union leadership by planting dynamite was released with
just a $500 fine. Thousands of other
workers at mills in nearby towns joined them.
An attempt to organize a counter
demonstration by “Loyal Americans” wearing little American flags as boutonnieres largely fizzled. But it was memorialized as heroic by the
Lawrence establishment and “re-enacted by schools and civic organization during
the 50th and 75th anniversaries of the strike during which the IWW was
denounced as “the Red blight.” In 2013
for the centennial, however, with much new research published on the strike,
the workers and even the IWW got the attention and respect they deserved.
Despite this authorities pressed on
with the murder trial of the Italians, which began in Salem at the end of the month.
It dragged on for two months. The
highlight of the trial was a long speech by Giovannitti, the first he ever gave
in English that was so eloquent that
it drove hardened reporters to
tears.
On November 12, to almost no one’s
surprise all three defendants were acquitted and released.
By the end of the year the IWW local
in Lawrence had grown to 10,000 members.
But the union had a hard time sustaining
that over the long haul. A depression later in the decade threw
many out of work and experienced IWW unionists turned their attention to other
battle grounds. Within four years only 400 dues payers remained, although the
influence of the union continued to extend well beyond its reduced membership.
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