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

On the occasion of one of these arrests, I believe it was the first, a very provocative act was committed by the police. A Negro policeman, and there were very few at that time, was thrust forward by the white cops to make the arrest and face the jeers and catcalls of over a thousand workers, predominantly Irish. The contemptible meanness of forcing him to arrest a white woman—and an Irish one at that—was clear to me. I felt the man trembling when he grasped my arm. “Don’t worry, I’ll see that they don’t hurt you!” I assured him. He smiled down at me, at my naivete and size, too, I presume. I was greatly relieved when we reached the local police station, followed by hundreds of workers. I felt I had delivered him safely. Usually I had scant sympathy for a policeman, but from this instance I began to realize that a special persecution of the Negro people extended to all walks of life, and no Negro was exempt, not even a policeman.

My mother and the whole family took care of my son while I was away. I had previously received $19 a week salary from the IWW plus railroad fares and expenses, which were very little. This was raised to $21 after Fred was bom. Our rent at home was $18 a month. Anyone of the family who worked chipped in to help out. My sister Kathie worked in Macy’s in the summer vacation months to keep herself in college. She was determined to be a teacher. It was hard sailing, but we were no different from hundreds of families around us in the South Bronx and those whom I met in my travels. I stayed in homes wherever I went. I knew the lives of working people at first hand. In those days no traveling Socialist or IWW speaker went to a hotel. It was customary to stay at a local comrade’s house. This was partly a matter of economy, to save expenses for the local people, and partly a matter of security for the speaker in many outright strongholds of reaction, like one-plant company towns.

But, more than all else, it was a comradeship, even if you slept with one of the children or on a couch in the dining room. It would have been considered cold and unfriendly to allow a speaker to go off alone to a hotel. It was a great event when a speaker came to town. They wanted to see you as much as possible. People came from all around to socialize at the house where the speaker stayed. They heard about other parts of the country while the speaker could learn all about the conditions in that area. It was hard on the older speakers, but while I

In October 1910 the building of the open-shop anti-labor Los Angeles Times was blown up and 21 nonunion workers employed there were killed. At first it was believed that a gas explosion had occurred but later evidence indicated dynamite. Organized labor was accused of the crime by Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher. In April 1911, J. J. McNamara, secretary of the Structural Iron Workers Union was arrested at the headquarters in Indianapolis with his brother, J. B. McNamara. They were charged with murder and rushed to the Los Angeles jail, in a manner reminiscent of the Colorado kidnapping of the labor leaders in 1907.

Clarence Darrow became chief counsel in their defense. Debs and Haywood, who were speaking around the country, and the entire Socialist and labor press came to their defense. The Socialist Party nominated one of its lawyers, Job Harriman, as its candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, making their case the central issue of his campaign. The AFL helped defray the legal expenses of the defense. The IWW paper, the Industrial Worker, called for a general strike of protest. Like a bolt out of the blue, after a lot of secret negotiation between the prominent businessmen of the city, the lawyers on both sides, and Lincoln Steffens, then well-known as “a muckraking” newspaper man, the trial of J. B. McNamara was suddenly halted. Both prisoners were brought into court and changed their pleas from “Not Guilty” to “Guilty.” It was a stunning blow to the labor movement of the country.

They had been prompted to take this action by the advice of their lawyers, labor officials, a Catholic priest and misguided friends like Lincoln Steffens, who had a notion he could settle the class struggle by the “Golden Rule.” It was a selfless, courageous action on the McNamaras’ part. They did not confess, they gave no information involving others, they named no names. Each brother was anxious to save the other and both to save the labor movement from further attack. J. B. McNamara was willing to accept hanging, if necessary, to win the conditions agreed upon, which were: a short sentence for his brother, J. J., no more arrests, a labor-capital conference to be held in

This agreement was treated like a scrap of paper. Three years later two more unionists were sentenced in Los Angeles as dynamiters— Matthew Schmidt to life imprisonment and David Kaplan to 15 years. A large group of trade unionists, including Olaf Tweitmoe of the San Francisco Building Trades Council, served terms in Leavenworth for complicity in dynamiting. No conference was ever held. The employing class was out for blood! Steffens spent years trying to secure the release of the McNamaras, but to no avail.

The unexpected turn of events shattered the Socialist campaign for mayor. The gutters of Los Angeles were full of Harriman buttons. Darrow was tried twice in Los Angeles on the charge of attempted bribery of a juror. The prosecutor said it was his life’s ambition “to put Darrow where the McNamaras now are” and he nearly succeeded. The hostility to organized labor increased. The AFL was under heavy attack. Some newspapers commented: “The IWW talks direct action but the AFL practiced it.” There was a great deal of criticism of both Darrow and Steffens for the “Guilty” plea, but not of the McNamaras. They were the tragic victims of this chapter of American labor history. J. B. McNamara was considered, as Foster says: “One of the bravest and most loyal fighters developed by the American lahor movement.”

While all this was happening on the Pacific Coast, we of the IWW held meetings to discuss labor problems in the East. One night, I recall, we arranged a debate on the organization of the clothing workers —should they go into the AFL or the IWW? The speakers were Joe Ettor and August Bellanca, later an official of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. It was held on the lower East Side. As we came out of the hall, we saw a strange sight, a uniformed policeman stumbling along the street weeping. We gathered around him to ask what was wrong. He said he had just come from a most horrible sight—a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, high up in a loft building off Washington Square. The doors were locked and jammed. Young girls leaped from the windows, their bodies aflame like torches, and were dashed to death on the pavement below. One hundred and forty-six workers, mostly women and girls, died that day—March 25, 1911—in the

The Los Angeles Times never did become a union shop—and to this day is an open shop. It manages to hold out by paying more on all jobs than the union scale requires.

William Yates of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Francis Miller of Providence, Rhode Island, both textile workers and IWW leaders, took charge of the strike in place of Ettor and Giovannitti. They sent for Haywood and for me to come to Lawrence at once. The militiamen were mostly native-born “white-collar” workers and professionals from other parts of the state who openly showed their contempt for the foreign-born strikers. Colonel Sweetzer, their commander, banned a mass funeral for Anna La Pizza. He ordered the militia not to salute the American flag when it was carried by strikers. His orders were “Shoot to kill. We are not looking for peace now.” Many acts of brutal violence were committed by these arrogant youths on horseback, such as riding into crowds and clubbing the people on foot. When they marched afoot, they carried rifles with long bayonets. On the same day Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested, an 18 year-old Syrian boy striker, John Rami, was bayonetted through the lung, from the back, and died. In the course of the strike several persons were injured with bayonets. The orders were to strike the women on the arms and breasts and the men on the head. This was actually reported in a Boston paper.

January 29, 1912, was also marked by the sensational arrest of John J. Breen, a member of the local school board and son of a former mayor, for planting dynamite in three different places, one next- door to where Ettor received his mail. The charge was conspiracy “to mar, deface and destroy property.” Nothing was said of the lives placed in danger. He was released on $1,000 bail and subsequently fined $500. This was a dastardly plot to discredit the strikers and frame Ettor. The Ministers Association and the Central Labor Union


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started a recall movement against Breen which resulted in his replacement in October 1912. William N. Wood, head of the American Woolen Company, son of a poor Portuguese immigrant who climbed out of poverty by marrying the boss’ daughter, along with Frederick H. Atteaux, a Boston businessman, and two others, were later indicted for complicity in the dynamite conspiracy. The jury disagreed on Atteaux when a trial finally took place in June 1913. William Wood was exonerated, but D. J. Collins, the man accused of transporting the dynamite, and Breen, were convicted. The Outlook of June 21, 1913, commented on the proceedings:

Two things are perfectly plain, first in this strike there was an attempt to discredit the strikers by making it appear that they and their sympathizers were harboring dynamite; second, it was made clear that large sums of money were paid by the mill owners to Atteaux without an accounting to show for what purposes that money would be spent.

Bill Haywood in Lawrence

When Haywood came to Lawrence in February 1912 to assume the leadership of the textile strike it created a national sensation. Ettor and Giovannitti, who had been the leaders up to then, had just been jailed, charged with murder. Haywood had been tried for murder five years before, due to his labor activities. His whole life had been identified with the hard-fought battles of the rough and ready miners in the copper, silver and gold mines of the far West. Now he had become “a menace” in the East. “That two-fisted thug!” a Boston editor called him as he hurled a story about Bill into the waste basket. It was written by a young woman reporter, Gertrude Marvin, who resigned as a result of the editor’s action and came to do publicity work for the strike. The press pounced upon and distorted every detail of Haywood’s life and work. Articles were written about “Haywoodism,” which was defined as violence.

But the more he was attacked the more the strikers loved “Big Bill.” The strike committee elected him its chairman in place of Ettor. The strikers were denied the use of the Common, after the arrest of Ettor and Giovannitti, and we had to trudge from one hall to another in various parts of the city to address as many as ten meetings in a day. We brought them the reports from the strike committee, the news of outside support and protests, and we spoke on the American labor


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movement and what the strike meant. We were followed from place to place by the troopers. Sometimes they rode their horses right up on the steps of the hall, shoving the strikers through the narrow doors. The horses would try not to step on people and became very unruly. The people would laugh at the arrogant riders and say: “You see—horse IWW.”

In addition to these daily meetings, Haywood introduced special meetings of women and children. It was amazing how this native-born American, who had worked primarily among English-speaking men, quickly adapted his way of speaking to the foreign-born, to the women and to the children. They all understood his down-to-earth language, which was a lesson to all of us. I was then 21 years old and I learned how to speak to workers from Bill Haywood in Lawrence, to use short words and short sentences, to repeat the same thought in different words if I saw that the audience did not understand. I learned never to reach for a three-syllable word if one or two would do. This is not vulgarizing. Words are tools and not everybody has access to a whole tool chest. The foreign-born usually learned English from their children who finished school after the lower grades. Many workers began to learn English during these strike meetings. The average Ameri- can-bom worker does not go to college, in fact the majority do not even finish high school. Therefore the vocabulary they have at their command is limited. Unfortunately many read very little after they leave school. The spread of pictorial newspapers, the radio and TV has accentuated this. Workers know scientific terms connected with their occupations in industry and are more and more scientifically minded. I have met many American workers who are highly intelligent, better thinkers by far than the average Congressman, but they are handicapped by their meager vocabularies from communicating their thoughts to others in speech and are even more limited in writing. I have tried all my life to write simply enough to be understood by the average American. If I have succeeded I can thank my early strike experience. I noticed that writers of advertisements and radio and television programs follow much the same approach to language. Our content differs, however, which bars me from their mediums.

Wherever Bill Haywood went, the workers followed him with glad greetings. They roared with laughter and applause when he said: “The AFL organizes like this!”—separating his fingers, as far apart as they would go, and naming them—“Weavers, loom-fixers, dyers, spinners.”


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Then he would say: “The IWW organizes like this!”—tightly clenching his big fist, shaking it at the bosses. Workers invited him to their houses and shared their simple food with him—Italian spaghetti and Syrian shashlik. Once, when his life was threatened, the Syrians took him to a tenement house built around a courtyard. They said they had every family alerted an could muster 100 men if need be, by a signal in the yard. They kept him there for several nights. They brought out their national pipe—a hookah, I believe it is called. It stood on the floor, like a tall flower vase, with long tubes for several smokers. The smoke passed through water and was cooled. Suddenly, after a few puffs, Bill turned green and rushed out sick. “You’re lucky, Gurley, they don’t expect ladies to smoke!” he said when he returned. They laughed and joked with Bill about it. “Big man and little pipe!”

Bill was very particular about having all the reports and the gist of our speeches translated into all languages. It was a slow process, but it guaranteed understanding on the part of everybody present. He had the translators carefully checked by others, to be sure they did it correctly. Some who were not strikers were unceremoniously kicked out when it was discovered that they were deceiving the-people—and some were provocateurs, who were advocating violence and stirring up dissension.

We held special meetings for the women at which Haywood and I spoke. The women worked in the mills for lower pay and in addition had all the housework and care of the children. The old-world attitude of man as the “lord and master” was strong. At the end of the day’s work —or, now, of strike duty—the man went home and sat at ease while his wife did all the work preparing the meal, cleaning the house, etc. There was considerable male opposition to women going to meetings and marching on the picket line. We resolutely set out to combat these notions. The women wanted to picket. They were strikers as well as wives and were valiant fighters. We knew that to leave them at home alone, isolated from the strike activity, a prey to worry, affected by the complaints of tradespeople, landlords, priests and ministers, was dangerous to the strike. We brought several Socialist women in as speakers, and a girl organizer, Pearl McGill, who had helped organize the button workers of Muscatine, Iowa. The AFL revoked her credentials for coming to Lawrence. We did not attack their religious ideas in any way, but we said boldly that priests and ministers should stick to their religion and not interfere in a workers’ struggle for better condi


“THE MELTING POT BOILS OVER”