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

One day, Jacob Panken (now Judge Panken), who was counsel for the union, was speaking. Suddenly there was a commotion at the back of the hall. Someone shouted “Scabs” and the whole crowd rose up and left the hall. Some of us speakers, including Tresca and me, followed, hoping to persuade them to return. Then the police came. We were caught between them. I had my hand on a striker’s back and was struck when a cop brought a club down on it. Carlo was arrested and the strikers tried to take him away from the police, who drew their guns. His coat and vest were pulled apart in the tussle. We shouted “Let go! Let go!” Finally, cooler heads prevailed and the strikers let go.

But in the scuffle a little covered book, Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with an affectionate greeting from me to Carlo, had dropped on the street. What was my embarrassment the next day to see our picture, with copies of the book cover, marked sonnets, dedication and all, reproduced in the New York papers as a hidden IWW romance! The mighty chefs and cosmopolitan waiters thought nothing of it, however. In fact, one said: “Don’t you care. It helps to advertise our strike!”

One interesting situation developed during that strike. The sheriff of the county, usually a forgotten man, appeared with his deputies to help the police handle the crowds who gathered to see the battles. After one particularly brutal struggle between the police and the pickets, my father brought down over 50 canes he had whittled out of tree branches in Kentucky and various places where he had made maps. It was a hobby with him. The next day a group of pickets appeared with Pop’s canes and the crowds cheered. College boys who offered to take the waiters’ places were jeered, and customers objected to their inefficient service. The strike was soon over.

From this unusual and exciting short struggle in the heart of New York’s Broadway district, we were called to Paterson, New Jersey, then the silk-weaving center of America. We found our selves involved at once in a major battle of the class struggle of 1913—a long, hard and brutal strike.

Paterson was long known in labor history. Its first recorded strike of women and children was in 1828. In 1830, a Protective Association of the Working Class struck to reduce hours from 11 to 9 and against a fines system. It was known as the turbulent “Red City.” An Italian anarchist movement had long existed there around a small paper. Enrico Malatesta, famous anarchist leader of Italy, who toured this country, had been shot at during a speech in Paterson. Luigi Galleani, editor of an anarchist paper, had led a strike there a few years before. (He skipped bail, went to Barre, Vermont, and was deported in 1920.) But the event that blazoned the city of Paterson as a Red center was that the man named Bresci, who killed King Humbert I of Italy in 1900, hailed from Paterson. Neighbors told how he target practiced in the backyard till he could shoot the top off a bottle. Then he demanded that the anarchist paper return to him a substantial sum of money he had loaned it. His comrades were very indignant and denounced him as selfish and a disrupter. He told no one of his purpose. Years later I met his wife and children at a mass meeting in San Francisco. Life had not been easy for them with all the publicity and questioning that grew out of his deed, which was not understood or approved even by his closest associates. But it helped to label Paterson as “a hotbed of anarchy.”

In 1902, during a strike in the tempestuous city of Paterson, an Englishman named William McQueen had been arrested and sen

Paterson, called the “Lyons of America,” is the seat of Passaic County. It is about 15 miles from New York City on the Erie railroad. In 1913 it hummed with silk factories. The dye works were located in nearby Lodi. This was long before the development of rayon or nylon or any of the artificial substitutes for silk which abound today. Arthur Brisbane, editorial writer for the New York Hearst papers, once charged that Japanese raw silk importers had heavy interests in the Paterson mills. The IWW (Local 152) had a good sized organization there, a local membership and leadership known to the workers. There had already been one strike there in 1907 under IWW auspices, and a series of strikes in 1912 under the leadership of Rudolph Katz and the Detroit IWW (Local 25) against the 3- and 4-loom system. Before the 1913 strike I spoke there at Helvetia Hall to the Shirtmakers and 300 girls joined the IWW. Years before there had been silk weavers assemblies of the Knights of Labor and before that silk weavers were in the National Labor Union.

Coming as we did with the aura of the Lawrence victories and the publicity of the hotel workers strike, we were very welcome to the workers. But we were set upon by the city authorities with vicious fury. They attacked us as “outside agitators,” ordered us to leave town, and arrested Tresca, Patrick L. Quinlan of the Socialist Party, and myself on our very first appeamace at a mass meeting. This was on February 25, 1913. Tresca and I had spoken at the meeting but Quinlan was late and was arrested as he came down the aisle of the hall toward the platform. One advantage of having outside speakers was that they were immune from the local blacklist and could speak fearlessly about the conditions which the workers primed us about. We were released on heavy bail and rearrested shortly afterward at the Paterson railroad station as we came off the train from New York, after


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we were indicted for conspiracy to cause an unlawful assemblage of persons, as well as to raucously and riotously and tumultuously disturb the peace of New Jersey.” It was quite a charge. The station (not elevated as it is now) was then about level with the street, and thousands of workers who got wind of the arrests met us at the station and escorted us to the jail. We were again released on bail and continued our daily meetings for six months, while the strike lasted.

The strike was caused by the speedup system. It was precipitated by the attempts of the employers to increase the number of looms for the broad-silk weavers to three and four, which would increase output per loom weaver, decrease the number of workers employed, and not increase the pay. Further demands were made—for an eight-hour day for all—hard silk and ribbon weavers, dyers and dyers’ helpers, etc. —a minimum wage of $12 per week for dyers’ helpers; a flat increase of $1 for all hard silk weavers and the 1894 schedule for ribbon weavers. In addition, there was a demand of no discrimination because of union activities. It was estimated that 25,000 workers—men, women and children—were involved in this strike. There were Italians, Germans and other nationalities, though not as varied as at Lawrence. A general strike committee was set up and mass meetings were held in various halls, our usual procedure.

The city was a typical textile town with the same poor shabby fire- trap wooden houses for the workers, dreary old mills built along the canal. The people were poorly dressed, pale and undernourished. From pay envelopes collected at various strike meetings and in the possession of the strike committee, I gathered the following figures which I used in my speeches. Girl, 16 years old, employed at Ram- ford’s Ribbon Mill 32 weeks, average wage per week $1.85; girl employed same place, 42 weeks, average per week $1.25; woman employed at broad silk, 2 looms, 40 weeks, average per week $7.17; man weaver, 1 loom, 10 weeks, average $10.59; man weaver, 2 looms, $9.48; dyer’s helper, 52 weeks, $10.71; miscellaneous, 22 envelopes, average per week, $6.17. One little girl made 66,528 yards of ribbon at Bamford’s for $64.45. According to a series of statements which began in the Paterson press of March 11, 1913, by the “Press Committee representing the Silk Industry of Paterson,” 25,000 were employed in silk manufacture with a total weekly wage of $240,000 or one million a month, which sounded very impressive but averaged $9.60 a week or $38.40 a month. This average included highly-paid foremen,

Beloved comrade and friend, Carlo Tresca

They stated that the monthly output of the mills was four million dollars, of which wages were a million. It was easy for even the strikers to figure the surplus value there. The 25,000 workers produce $4 million. They get back one million and the bosses—a few hundred men at the most—get the three million. There was no four million a month in March or April or through August of 1913—because, as we said, the workers stopped being “hands” and became “heads.” Knotted color- stained hands came out of the dye boxes, women’s slender hands turned away from the looms, children’s little hands ceased to wind silk, and the mills were dead.

The bosses’ ads said that “the entire fabric of the city’s business interests and the Commonwealth itself is menaced to a point that should cause widespread alarm.” This was calculated to stir up the businessmen against the strikers, which was usually easily done. I have before me notes of a speech I made at the time directed to this problem, which was typical of our “agitation.” I said:

How do the employers spend their share of the three millions? Do they spend it in Paterson? Does the Silk Association have its banquets here? No, they dine in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Have they their spacious offices here? No, their address is 354 Fourth Avenue, New York City. Do their wives and daughters buy their gowns (silk or otherwise), their furs, jewels or automobiles in Paterson? Do they attend the opera in Paterson? Whenever were Caruso or Tetrazini in Paterson, though there are thousands of their countrymen who would go without food to hear them once. Do the employers build their homes, attend church or send their children to school here? How many grocery, clothing, shoe, drygoods or drug stores, meat markets, coal dealers or doctors and dentists could exist if they depended on the mill owners for patronage? We address these plain words to the businessmen of Paterson. The manufacturers and stockholders are not your customers. The workers are!

Pressure was brought to bear on the owners of both the Turn Hall and Helvetia Hall with warnings that their liquor licenses would be revoked if they continued to allow us to hold our strike meetings there. So we were compelled in the Spring to rent a house with a big lot around it to use for a headquarters.

The strikers were harrassed continually by police brutality, arrests and trials. Over 1,000 strikers were arrested, including all the leaders and several casual speakers, all charged with “unlawful assemblage” and “inciting to riot”—stock charges in American strikes. The first trial was of Patrick Quinlan. Here we saw a frame-up unfold before our eyes. Scores of strikers testified that he had not spoken, and 2,500 people present in Turn Hall knew he did not speak. They now heard a half dozen cops and detectives brazenly commit perjury and swear as to his “exact words.” They even pretended to have “notes” taken at the time. They were lurid liars indeed,

He was convicted at the heat of the strike by a businessmen’s jury. We should have fought for delay until the strike was over, or for a change of venue. But unfortunately, knowing the facts, everyone was confident of his release. Instead he was sentenced to two to seven years in Trenton State Prison. He was released on bail, pending appeal. The New Jersey Supreme Court upheld his convictioh and he was taken to prison. It was a striking lesson in capitalist law and order.

Another local New Jersey Socialist who was tried and convicted was Alexander Scott, editor of a Socialist paper, the Passaic Issue. His indictment was a clear violation of free press. He had written an editorial criticizing the Paterson police in his paper. Part of it read as follows:

For these words of protest against police brutality he was indicted under the New Jersey Criminal Anarchy Law for printing matter “with intent to incite, promote or encourage hostility or opposition to or the subversion or destruction of any or all government.”

Scott was also convicted by a small businessmen’s jury and sentenced to from one to 15 years in the State’s Prison in Trenton. In both of these trials it was evident that a fair trial was impossible in Paterson for anyone connected with the workers’ side of the silk strike. Grand


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juries and trial juries were carefully handpicked and loaded with men connected with the silk industry. After one more trial—that of another outside speaker, a Socialist and IWW from New York City, Frederick Sumner Boyd—our lawyers went to the New Jersey Supreme Court and moved in the cases of Tresca, Haywood and myself for what is called in that state a “foreign jury.” Instead of a change of venue to another county, which meant moving the whole trial, a panel is brought in from another county and a jury selected. Supreme Court Justice Minturn granted our motions. Tresca and I were tried later in the summer under this arrangement and the juries disagreed. In 1915, in subsequent trials, we were both acquitted by juries from Hudson County. Quinlan was released in December 1916.

Big Bill Haywood spent as much time as possible in Paterson. There was a large IWW strike going on at the same time in Akron, Ohio, and he shuttled back and forth between these two struggles. He was arrested several times in Paterson. As in Lawrence, he was idolized by the strikers of all nationalities. Chief of Police Bimson, who looked like a stupid moustached walrus, could not understand Haywood and me. He would shake his head and say: “What are you two doing with all these foreigners?” Once when Bill Haywood had been arrested, he found John Reed in jail. “Jack,” as everyone called him, was a young journalist not long out of Harvard, who had come to report the strike for the Metropolitan Magazine, of which Theodore Roosevelt was one of the editors. The police were extremely brutal that day. They beat pickets and spectators. Reed was ordered to move on by a cop. He stepped inside a yard and asked a woman standing on the porch if he could stay there. She said: “Yes.” The enraged cop arrested him.

When he landed in the jail, which was full of strikers, no one knew him, and they were suspicious of this handsome big American until Haywood was brought in and identified him. The strikers gladly made him one of them, shared the food and smokes their wives had brought and his role changed to an active participant not only in the strike but in the class struggle from then on. He wrote a scathing article about the jail in the Metropolitan Magazine called “Chief Bimson’s Hotel.” He taught the strikers to sing songs of the French Revolution and organized that extraordinary event called “The Pageant,” which I will describe later.

One of Haywood’s arrests was on the humorous side. He went to speak at a baseball park when the police interferred. The crowd shout