Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Duluth, Minnesota 1908 4- ir + £ jL 5K«a p&ftt'Ss ILL sw*UH»

We talked especially to the women about the high cost of living here —how they had been fooled when they first came here when they figured the dollars in their home money. They thought they were rich till they had to pay rent, buy groceries, clothes and shoes. Then they knew they were poor. We pointed out that the mill owners did not live in Lawrence. They did not spend their money in the local stores. All that the businessmen received came from the workers. If the workers get more, they will get more. The women conveyed these ideas to the small shopkeepers with emphasis, and we heard no more protest from them about the strike after that.

That’s how one writer, Richard Washburn Childs, described Lawrence in 1912. (Later he was editor of Colliers, and American Ambassador to Italy in 1912, representing the United States at the Lausanne Conference.) Nobody knew or cared before the IWW came to lead the strike what happened to these ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed foreign workers. The mills were owned by absentee capitalists, well protected against foreign competition by Schedule K of the tariff, which applied to woolen fabrics. The heat had been put under this melting pot, not by the IWW, but by the mill owners’ cut in the starvation wages. The IWW was held up to scorn by John Golden, head of the United Textile Workers of America, because “it had only 287 members there” when the strike began. He had made no attempt to organize and defend the foreign workers against the wage cut of January 11, 1912. In fact, he had ordered the skilled workers to stay at work. A song had come out of the West, written by Joe Hill, called “A little talk with Golden makes it right—all right!” But Golden had not been able to hold the highly skilled weavers and loom-fixers in the mills. They came out with the others. They could not work alone even if they had wanted to, and they did not want to do so.

We talked to the strikers about One Big Union, regardless of skill or lack of it, foreign-born or native-born, color, religion or sex. We showed how all differences are used by the bosses to keep workers di


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vided and pitted against each other. We spoke to nationalities who had been traditionally enemies for centuries in hostile European countries, like the Greeks and Turks and Armenians, yet they marched arm-in- arm on the picket line. There were Slavs and Italians, French and German, English and Irish. We said firmly: “You work together for the boss. You can stand together to fight for yourselves!” This was more than a union. It was a crusade for a united people—for “Bread and Roses.”

Many of the foreign-born workers, especially Belgian, Italian, German and English, had been members of unions in the old countries. The message of socialism was not new to them either. We quoted the Bible: “He that doth not work, neither let him eat!” Our concepts as to how socialism would come about, were syndicalist to the core. There would be a general strike, the workers would lock out the bosses, take possession of the industries and declare the abolition of the capitalist system. It sounded very simple. Our attitude toward the state was sort of Thoreau-like—the right to ignore the state, civil disobedience to a bosses’ state. For instance, Bill Haywood threatened to bum the books of the strike committee rather than turn them over to an investigation committee. He was arrested for contempt of court. However much or little the workers absorbed our syndicalist philosophy, they cheered Bill’s defiance to the skies.

Mainly we carried on simple agitation. We talked of their own experiences, how they had come from Europe, leaving their native villages and fields, their old parents, sometimes wives and children. Why had they come to a faraway strange land where a different language was spoken and where all the ways of life were different? They had hopes of a new life in a new world, free from tyranny and oppression, from landlordism, from compulsory military service. They had hopes to educate their children, to be able to work, to save, to send for others to come to freedom. What freedom? Had they expected to be herded into great prison-like mills in New England, into slums in big cities, into tenements in these mill towns? Was it to be called “Greenhorns” and “Hunkies” and treated as inferiors and intruders? Heads nodded and tears shone in the eyes of the women. We reminded them of posters distributed by the woolen companies of Lawrence in small towns in Europe, with the picture of a mill on one side of the street and a bank on the other—and workers trooping from one to the other with bags of money under their arms. This was greeted with laughter and shouts


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of “YeslYes!” from those who had seen just such alluring travel ads.

“What freedom?” we asked again. To be wage-slaves, hired and fired at the will of a soulless corporation, paid low wages for long hours, driven by the speed of a machine? What freedom? To be clubbed, jailed, shot down—and while we spoke, the hoofs of the troopers’ horses clattered by on the street. We spoke of how the American politicians had ignored their plight because they could not vote. “Just a bunch of foreigners,” the politicians said. We reminded them how a legislative committee, headed by Calvin Coolidge, had walked into the strike committee with their hats on. “Take off your hats!” Ettor had ordered, and they cheered for Ettor and Giovannitti, their loved and lost leaders.

We spoke of their power, as workers, as the producers of all wealth, as the creators of profit. Here they could see it in Lawrence. Down tools, fold arms, stop the machinery, and production is dead—profits no longer flow. We ridiculed the police and militia in this situation. “Can they weave cloth with soldiers’ bayonets or policemen’s clubs?” we asked. “No,” replied the confident workers. “Did they dig coal with bayonets in the miners’ strikes or make steel or run trains with bayonets?” Again the crowds roared “No.” We talked Marxism as we understood it—the class struggle, the exploitation of labor, the use of the state and armed forces of government against the workers. It was all there in Lawrence before our eyes. We did not need to go far for the lessons.

We talked of “Solidarity,” a beautiful word in all the languages. Stick together! Workers, unite! One for all and all for one! An injury to one is an injury to all! The workers are all one family! It was internationalism. It was also real Americanism—the first they had heard. “One nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” They hadn’t found it here, but they were willingly fighting to create it.

The children’s meetings, at which Haywood and I spoke, showed us mainly that there were two groups of workers’ children in Lawrence, those who went to school and those who worked in the mills. The efforts of the church and schools were directed to driving a wedge between the school children and their striking parents. Often children in such towns become ashamed of their foreign-born, foreign-speaking

As the terrible New England winter dragged along the terror and violence increased. On February 19, 200 policemen with drawn clubs routed 100 women pickets. A Boston newspaper described the scene: “A woman would be seen to shout from the crowd and run into a side street. Instantly two or three police would be after her. Usually a night-stick well aimed brought the woman to the groyyjd like a shot and instantly the police would be on her, pulling her in as many ways as there were police.” U.S. Senator Miles Poindexter made a personal investigated. He talked to a ten-year-old girl who had a black eye and many bruises. He saw women with nursing babies in jail. He made a strong statement to the United Press against the brutality.

Suffering increased among the strikers. They had no financial reserves. They needed fuel and food. Their houses, dilapidated wood- frame barracks, were hard to heat. Committees of strikers went to nearby cities to appeal for support. Labor unions, Socialist locals, and workers in Boston, Manchester, Nashua, Haverhill and other places responded generously. Eleven soup kitchens were opened. The workers of Lowell, a nearby textile town, led a cow garlanded with leaves, to the strikers of Lawrence. I felt sorry for her with her festive appearance and her mild eyes. But she had to be slaughtered to feed hungry children. Her head was mounted and hung up in the Franco- Belgian Hall.

All the strike leaders made weekend trips to tell the story of Lawrence and solicit funds in other places. I recall a trip I made to Pittsburgh. It took the local committee there hours to count the collection of several thousand dollars in small coins. I went to substitute for Bill Haywood at Wheeling, West Virginia. Fortunately the secretary of the

A proposal was made by some of the strikers that we adopt a method used successfully in Europe—to send the children out of Lawrence to be cared for in other cities. The parents accepted the idea and the children were wild to go. On February 17,1912, the first group of 150 children were taken to New York City. A small group also left for Barre, Vermont. A New York committee, headed by Mrs. Margaret Sanger, then a trained nurse and chairman of the Women’s Committee of the Socialist Party, came to Lawrence to escort them. (She has since become world renowned for her advocacy of birth control.) Five thousand people met them at Grand Central Station. People wept when they saw the poor clothes and thin shoes of these wide-eyed little children. They picked them up and carried them on their shoulders to the “El” Station. They were taken to the Labor Temple on East 84th Street, where they were fed, and examined by 15 volunteer doctors, then turned over to their eager hosts, all of whom had been carefully checked by the committee. There were not enough children and many New Yorkers left disappointed not to be able to have a Lawrence child. There was a long waiting list, until another group came later. One child was taken to a beautiful studio apartment. She looked it all over wide-eyed and then said: “I’ve seen it all now. Hadn’t we better go home?”

The New York Sun described the children as follows:

The committee had no trouble looking after suitcases and extra parcels for the reason that the travelers wore all the personal belongings they had brought along. There were few overcoats in die crowd. For the most part the girls wore cotton dresses partly covered with jackets or shawls, and worsted caps. Fancy hair-ribbons and millinery were at a discount. It had been a long time since more than a few of the boys and girls had got a new pair of shoes.

The reporter described how the children looked a few days later, when, the committeeman said, he hardly knew them.

The letters the children wrote home glowed with accounts of their new warm clothes and how well they were treated. The Lawrence children were sent to school in New York, including those who had worked in the mills. Two homesick ones were sent back but most of them wanted to send for their families and stay in New York. When they finally returned to Lawrence at the end of the strike they were loaded down with clothing, toys, presents and clothes for their families from their New York friends. Correspondence went on for many years afterward between the children and “their New York families.” It was a happy episode in a series of somber, tragic situations in the Lawrence strike of 1912.

On February 24, 1912, a group of 40 strikers’ children were to go from Lawrence to Philadelphia. A committee came from there to escort them, including a young Sunday School teacher, Miss Tina Com- mitta. At the railroad station in Lawrence, where the children were assembled accompanied by their fathers and mothers, just as they were ready to board the train they were surrounded by police. Troopers surrounded the station outside to keep others out. Children were clubbed and tom away from their parents and a wild scene of brutal disorder took place. Thirty-five frantic women and children were arrested, thrown screaming and fighting into patrol wagons. They were beaten into submission and taken to the police station. There the women were charged with “neglect” and improper guardianship and ten frightened children were taken to the Lawrence Poor Farm. The police station was besieged by enraged strikers. Members of the Philadelphia committee were arrested and fined. It was a day without parallel in American labor history. A reign of terror prevailed in Lawrence, which literally shook America.

Statements were made by public-spirited, well-known Americans from coast to coast. Outstanding was one by William Dean Howells,


During the 1912 Lawrence, Mass. textile strike, the author (right) leads a group of strikers’ children to New York City where they were cared for in workers’ homes.

Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovanitti (center figures, left and right) leaving court. Lawrence October, 1912


The Lowell strikers march in 1912.


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then 75 years old, dean of American writers, who said: “It is an outrage—could anyone think it was anything else?” Senator William E. Borah of Idaho branded the act of the police in preventing the children from leaving Lawrence “an invasion of constitutional privileges.” Judge Ben Lindsey of Colorado said it “shows the depravity of greed and the inhumanity of our industrial system.” Samuel Gompers denounced the action of the police as “a crime,” and Mayor Baker of Cleveland said: “America will not countenance such warfare against labor.” Ed Nockels of the Chicago Federation of Labor said it was “military anarchy.” Reverend Percy Stickney Grant of New York challenged the authority of Colonel Sweetzer to control the free travel of children he had personally offered to care for. Sweetzer had said the children were taken away for the purpose of raising funds. Frederick W. Lehman, who was solicitor-general of the U.S. government and legal advisor to President Taft made this statement: “What right did they have to do that? . . . It is the right of any parent to send his children anywhere if he is guided by parental forethought and is acting for their welfare. The action of the marshal in preventing them from being sent away from Lawrence was in violation of their constitutional rights.” One of the few who criticized the strikers was John Golden, who said: “it was a desperate means to raise money for an unjustifiable strike.”

Famous newspaper reporters and writers flocked to Lawrence. A searchlight of publicity was fixed on this desperately poor and struggling city. They were shocked at what they found in the heart of New England. Ray Stannard Baker, Mary Heaton Vorse, Joe O’Brien, George West, Marlen Pew, Mrs. Fremont Older and many others wrote scathingly of conditions in Lawrence. William Allen White said: “The demands were justified and there was no excuse for the violence by police and military.” Years later, I visited him at Emporia, Kansas. He said in all his life he never saw more heart-rending sights than in that mill city. Demands were made for a Congressional investigation as an example, as the Cleveland News put it, of “an industry enjoying tariffs of 40 to 150% as a protection against the pauper labor of Europe, which pays only $6 to $8 per week for skilled American workers.” Professors Vida Scudder and Ellen Hayes, of Wellesley College, spoke at a protest meeting in Lawrence and were threatened with loss of their posts, which they retained, however. Mrs. Glendower Evans of Boston, a stockholder of the American Woolen Company, went to one

At the insistent demand of Socialist Congressman Victor Berger of Milwaukee the House Rules Committee held a hearing in Washington, D.C. in March 1912. Senator Poindexter attempted to secure action by a similar Senate committee but was blocked by Senator Lodge of Massachusetts, father of the present ambassador. Congressman William B. Wilson, a member of the United Mine Workers of America, Chairman of the House Committee, made a strong statement to the press on the Lawrence conditions, particularly in reference to the 16 children who came to Washington to testify. All of these children were strikers. A 16-year-old boy testified that he worked for the American Woolen Company for $5.10 a week. He was the oldest of five children. A 15-year-old testified that he liked to go to school and got as far as the seventh grade. “Why did you leave?” a Congressman asked. “Well, we had to have bread and it was hard to get,” the child answered. One striker explained the strike to the Congressman as follows: “The stomach telephoned to the head: I cannot stand molasses any longer for butter, and bananas for meat!”

Mrs. Sanger testified about the two groups of children who previously had been taken to New York City. Out of 119 children, only four wore underwear in bitter cold weather. “There was not a stitch of wool on their bodies,” she said. “They were pale, emaciated, dejected children. They grabbed the food from the table in a way to bring tears to your eyes.” An interested spectator at this hearing was Mrs. Taft, the wife of the President, who gasped at the testimony of pregnant women beaten by Lawrence cops. One of the witnesses was a striker, little Josephine Liss, who had been arrested for “assaulting a soldier.” He had pushed her and swore at her. She hit him in the face with her muff, he lost his balance, fell over and dropped his gun. She helped him up. But two companies of soldiers came to his “rescue” and arrested her. On their way home to Lawrence, these children workers were guests of the New York World, and were taken to the Zoo, the Museum of Natural History and to a show at the Hippodrome.

More than 50 striker witnesses came from Lawrence to tell their stories and show their pay envelopes. The cause of the strike, extent of their poverty, the conditions of their lives, the violence of the authorities, were all revealed by them to the American people in this Congressional hearing. One child worker had been partially scalped in the

On March 1, 1912, the American Woolen Company announced a 7.5 per cent increase in 33 cities. On March 6, 125,000 workers in cotton and woolen mills of six states were raised 5 to 7 per cent. On March 14, the Lawrence strike was settled with the American Woolen Company, the Atlantic Mill and other main mills. Twenty thousand workers assembled on the Common to hear the report of their committee. It was the first time in six weeks they were allowed to use the Common. Haywood presided at the meeting and introduced the delegates of all the nationalities. The demands which they had won secured an increase in wages from five to 20 per cent; increased compensation for overtime; the reduction of the premium period from four weeks to two weeks and no discrimination against any worker who had taken part in the strike. Telegrams of thanks were sent to the Socialist Party and to Congressman Victor Berger. The Arbitration Committee promised to help get Ettor and Giovannitti speedily released. The workers pledged to strike again if they were not freed. They had wrested millions from their employers. Yet their leaders, Ettor and Giovannitti, were still in danger of death, so they did not go back to work happy.