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

The IWW textile strike in Lawrence was followed shortly afterwards by strikes in Lowell of 16,000 workers in its cottom mills and 25,000 in New Bedford. Their demands were higher wages and better working conditions. These strikes were less publicized. There were no state troopers and police interference was less. They were short in duration and spring weather was more favorable. But they were an aftermath of Lawrence and meant that thousands of workers had been encouraged and inspired by its example. Lowell was particularly noted in the history of New England’s textile industry. It had once been called “the

Thousands of apple-cheeked country girls had long ago flocked to the Spindle City from all the New England states to run looms and spindles. Their paper, the Lowell Offering, with stories and poems, attracted wide attention. Their “flare-ups” and “turn-outs,” as the first strikes are described, were against wage-cuts. They had met in the basement of a nearby church. One Boston paper described their leader as “a veritable Mary Wollstonecraft.” She had mounted a pump to speak to her sisters. One of the strikers, a Polish woman, Mary Koko- ski, had been a modem prototype. It had taken six policemen to put her in a patrol wagon, because she was “ashamed to be seen in it!” She was charged with obstructing an officer and fined $45.

The workers on strike in 1912 were not the descendants of these earlier women workers of a century before, who had long since gone West or moved into other occupations—in stores, offices, professions. The 1912 workers were foreign-born immigrant workers—in fact, only about eight per cent in the mills were native bom. Those earlier native women workers before the Civil War had been young and single, and at one time constituted 85 per cent of the city’s population. They were supplanted by the Irish, who predominated around 1875. They, in turn, had been displaced by other foreign-born groups— French Canadians, Polish, Portuguese, Armenian and Greeks. There had been a strike in 1903, I was told, when the millowners refused a raise in wages. These millowners were old New England families. When the small union of the skilled native workers called a strike, the employers locked out all the workers. But the unorganized foreign- born supported the nine-week strike, even though they received no aid from the union. It showed that the immigrant workers were militant, could be organized and were staunch fighters.

There was still a high percentage of women employes in Lowell, except among the Greeks, who had a large colony, mostly single or married men whose families were still in Greece. There were very few Greek women in the community. The men still clung to the hope of making enough money to return to their native land and live in prosperity. They made no attempt at that time to bring their families here, as they did later. A whole street was given over to Greek coffee houses. I stayed at a local hotel when I first went to Lowell. I asked the clerk the first morning for directions to go to the IWW hall, which was

The Greeks were slow to join the strike. Once it was called off and everyone returned to work. Suddenly it was on again when the bosses did not live up to what had been agreed. Now we were told the Greeks were to come out, too. We contacted leaders in their community. A meeting was arranged in the Greek Catholic Church. The bells were rung to call them to the meeting. A translator was ready to convey to them what the IWW had to say. Then we struck a snag. I was the only English-speaking organizer there and therefore the one designated to speak. The priest said: “A woman cannot speak in the church.” We finally convinced him that I spoke as an organizer, not as a women. So it was agreed. It was a unique experience. I can still see those young eager faces with clear-cut classical features like an Apollo or Hermes in a museum, with dark eyes and curly hair. The intensity with which they listened was touching. It was their first experience of an American taking the trouble to explain everything to them and asking for their support. They gave it with enthusiasm and became the backbone of the second strike, which was speedily won.

I recall an interesting experience while I was in Lowell. I went with some strike organizers to a Chinese restaurant. It was decorated with new flags which we had never seen before, and signs in Chinese. It looked like a very special occasion. The smiling Chinese workers there told us that the Republic of China had been proclaimed by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. This was late March or early April 1912. We rejoiced with them though we little knew the full significance of what was stirring in far-off Asia. But we were for freedom—everywhere—and their happiness looked good to us. They liked the IWW too. So we were all friends.


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THE LAWRENCE TEXTILE STRIKE

My sojourn in New Bedford was short, as the strike was over quickly. Originally it was a seaport town, chief center of the American whale fisheries. As many as 400 whaling vessels a year left this port and as many as 60,000 barrels of sperm and 120,000 barrels of whale oil were brought back in a year. This romantic and adventurous past was but a haunting memory, however. By 1912 it was a textile town, with giant cotton mills. There were many English weavers in New Bedford then, as well as many Portuguese. The town stretches like a long narrow ribbon along the water. It had the same typical barrackslike tenement houses built for workers, found in all textile towns. Fifteen thousand workers were out again in July, against a fining system which the state legislature had declared illegal. Their average wage was $6.50 a week at this time. I was very tired and anxious to get home after the first round of strikes finished. But Lawrence called again.

The Ettor-Giovannitti Trial

On May 1,1912, we held IWW mass meetings everywhere. But those of us who had been in Lawrence during the strike became very uneasy and conscience-stricken about the fate of the three men in jail. It was now the third month since the strike had ended. It was the fifth month since they had been arrested. There was no sign of a trial. As soon as the other textile strikes came to an end and Haywood’s current tour closed, we were summoned to Lawrence. A Defense Committee, consisting of Haywood, Trautman, Yates, Miller and myself, was set up. Fred Heslewood, who had run the defense office for the Spokane Free Speech Fight in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was brought in to take charge of the defense office here, so the rest of us could travel and speak for the defense. Mrs. Heslewood came with him. It was good to see these old friends again.

We hired several leading Massachusetts lawyers to supplement the local counsel and placed the IWW’s chief counsel, Fred H. Moore from Spokane, in charge of the legal defense team. During my stay in Spokane I had become well acquainted with this brilliant young lawyer. Our friendship endured for nearly 30 years. We worked together in Spokane, Lawrence, in Seattle in 1917, in the trial that grew out of the Everett massacre, and in several important IWW cases, such as Wichita and the Kreiger case in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and finally in the


THE ETTOR-GIOVANNITTI TRIAL

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Sacco-Vanzetti case. He was a real labor lawyer, taking no other cases and devoting himself exclusively to this field. His fees were comparatively low. He was a determined fighter, tireless and resourceful in his preparation of a case and with a bulldog tenacity to follow a clue from one end of the country to another. He died from cancer in the 1930s at a young age—a real loss.

At the suggestion of Giovannitti, we brought a friend of his to Lawrence, an editor of an Italian anarcho-syndicalist paper in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, called L’Avvenire (Tomorrow). He had just been released from Blawnox jail in Western Pennsylvania, where he had served a sentence for a so-called libelous article against a local politician. He had fled from Italy a few years before as a political refugee and was an eloquent and dynamic speaker in Italian and a powerful agitator. He was an anarcho-syndicalist, but never a member of the IWW, nor was Giovannitti. We needed him to build a mass movement for the defense. His name was Carlo Tresca. I met him on May Day, 1912, on the street in Lawrence, a very dramatic event for me then and one destined to have far-reaching consequences in my life.

I went on a tour that summer on behalf of our imprisoned comrades, but returned to Lawrence around Labor Day to help. Once again we held mass meetings of all the nationalities. On September 29 we organized a memorial parade. Delegations came from other places, which fell into an impromptu parade enrouie to the IWW hall. We had a permit for the planned parade from the hall to the cemetery to lay three wreaths on the grave of the dead woman striker, Anna La Pizza. A row of police lined up across the main street and tried to break up the march of the visiting delegations and the Lawrence workers who had welcomed them at the station, on the pretext that the permit did not cover this. Tresca was placed under arrest for refusing to order the people to disperse. A tussle ensued in which he was taken away from the police by the workers who formed a flying tackle as in a football game, and pushed him through the police line. Two policemen were injured. They never attempted to rearrest him. Tresca was very resourceful—a good strategist in struggles. He spoke very little English then. His favorite expression was “I fix!”

In the afternoon the memorial parade proceeded as per schedule except in one respect—it did not encircle the jail. The three prisoners, Ettor, Giovannitti and Caruso, had been secretly moved out of the Essex County Jail at 4 a.m. the day before by a heavily armed guard and

Agitation had been started in the summer by the Defense Committee, calling for a protest general strike on September 30, 1912, a demonstration of indignation at the delay and to demand their immediate release. On September 25 letters were received from both Ettor and Giovannitti, opposing the call to a general strike. It was a dangerous gamble they felt, never before attempted in this country as far as we knew—a political general strike with demands directed not to the employer but to the state. They felt that the risk of failure was too great on the one hand and the temper of the workers, particularly the Italians, too explosive on the other. We on the outside felt confident of success but tried to accede to their request at the eleventh hour. I read the letters to an overflow crowd gathered inside and outside of our hall. We had originally rented City Hall for this meeting, but were refused admission and were refunded the money. The workers as a whole apparently accepted the wishes of Ettor and Giovannitti. But the Italians, led by Tresca now, sent a committee to the jail to see them and check on the letters. Ettor gave them a second letter to the same effect. They (the Italians) rejected the advice and proceeded to action.

The strike broke out on September 27, when 3,000 men and women came out of the Washington Mill. By the next day 12,000 workers were out. “Strikers Refuse Pleas of IWW Leaders to Go Back,” was the headline that day in the Lawrence press. The Boston Telegram estimated there were 4,000 out of Ayer Mill; 4,000 out of Wood Mill;

1. 
   out at the Washington Mill; and lesser numbers at the Everett, Arlington, Pacific and Prospect. It was evident that the Italian workers believed since Ettor and Giovannitti were in prison they could not safely encourage a general strike, and it is likely that their foreign language orators managed to convey this idea to them. We all said that it was up to the workers to make the final decision, which they did in the action of striking by the thousands. The workers were logical. They had won their strike. They were back at work. They knew Ettor and Giovannitti were innocent. They should be free. It was really a demand for amnesty.
   

The Ettor-Giovannitti victory of 1912 paradoxically was like a swan song for the IWW in Lawrence. The local union had long faced a serious crisis. It was unable to hold the workers as dues-paying members. Most of us were wonderful agitators but poor union organizers. All the outsiders who had been active and dynamic leaders of the strike and defense struggles left Lawrence when they ended. Ettor went on a nation-wide speaking trip and to Tacoma to see his sick father. Haywood resumed his lectures for the International Socialist Review and I returned home. I had been away almost continuously during the year. I had brought my mother and two-year-old son, Fred, to Lawrence to stay for about two months. Mother was not well and worried less about me if she was there and saw me every night. Some days she sat in the sun on the Common with the baby, while a few blocks away a violent fracas occurred. He was fat and healthy and did not seem to mind the change. I was happy to see him daily.

One of the weaknesses of the IWW was the lack of any central authority to control situations, which made possible an incident in Lawrence fraught with far-reaching consequences. During one of the protest parades in connection with the Ettor-Giovannitti case a banner was unfurled by a group of Boston anarchists with the words: “No God! No Master!” It gave the Lawrence police a pretext to break up the parade. A few days later it caused a riot in Quincy. That banner was worth a million dollars to the employers and may have been a deliberate act of provocation. Some of us believed that it was.

The majority of the workers in Lawrence were Catholic. We had pursued a correct labor policy during the strike of confining our remarks to answering Father Reilly and others only on strike issues. We did not discuss religion and warned all speakers, regardless of their personal views, not to offend the religious feelings of the people. Now came this banner in an IWW parade, unsigned and with no reference to the IWW on its face. But the full impact of its appearance was used against the IWW in Lawrence. A committee in charge should have had the authority to yank it out of the line of march, as would happen

The churches, religious organizations, professional “patriots” and others, who had long awaited such an opportunity, seized upon it. They stretched a banner across Essex Street, the main street of Lawrence, which read: “For God and country! The Red flag never!” They organized a religious parade on Columbus Day, October 12, 1912, and the churches called on all their people to participate. It was a dangerous, divisive issue. Dissensions grew, threats were made against the IWW and one worker was killed in a fight that day. He was a Polish Catholic mill worker, a member of the IWW. We held a mass funeral for him, and his family succeeded in obtaining religious services at the church as well—after a struggle.

We fought back valiantly. We issued a leaflet called: “Under the Folds of Old Glory,” mentioning Mayor Scanlon, the chief clubber; John S. Breen, the dynamiter; William Wood, indicted for dynamite conspiracy; William Jewett, the local bank wrecker; and asking: “Working men and women, are you going to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for this bunch?” But disunity spread over the banner episode. It was a terrible climax to a great victory. The IWW slowly bled to death in Lawrence. In a comparatively short time practically nothing was left of it there as an organized union. Of course, the militancy and fighting spirit it engendered remained among the textile workers. At least three large strikes have taken place in the intervening years —all conducted by independent industrial union movements, such as the Amalgamated Textile Workers in 1919, the National Industrial Union of Textile Workers in the 30s, and later the Textile Union affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Today Lawrence, once a flourishing textile center, is practically a ghost town. The determination of the capitalists who own the industry to have cheap, plentiful, unorganized labor caused them, a half-century ago, to induce thousands to come from Europe. Now they are moving their mills to the South. Let us hope the modem labor movement will be as alert to follow them as was the IWW in 1912 with the foreign-born. “Be swift, my soul, to answer them and be jubilant, my feet,” could be truthfully said of us in the IWW of that long-ago day.