Part IV

Two Strikes

The following chapters consider two key strikes in detail: the New York shirtwaist makers’ strike of 1909–1910, and the Lawrence textile workers strike of 1912. The shirtwaist makers’ strike was the first massive uprising of women workers in the United States, and was a breakthrough in organizing the garment industry. It was known as the “women’s movement strike” because of the unusual extent to which women of all classes participated. It is an important place to look at a broad united front of women in action, and the contradictions within it.

The Lawrence strike was a great, militant, even (it was thought at the time) revolutionary uprising of the U.S. working class. Because of the radicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World who led it, and their encouragement of the participation of women, the strike is a good place to look at the way women came to the fore when they had the chance to do so, and the way housewives were encouraged to participate in an industrial struggle.

8

The Uprising of the Thirty Thousand

A lull in the struggle,

A truce in the fight,

The whirr of machines

And the dearly bought right,

Just to labor for bread,

Just to work and be fed.

For this we have marched

Through the snow-covered street,

Have borne our dead comrades

While muffled drums beat.

For this we have fought,

For this boon dearly-bought.

We measure our gain

By the price we have paid.

Call the victory great

As the struggle we made;

For we struggled to grow,

And we won. And we know.

Ah, we know, as we hear

Once again the loud hum

Of machines all in motion,

Commanding we come

In our newly-won powers,

To this labor of ours.

Together we suffered

The weary weeks past,

Together we won and

Together at last

As we learn our own might,

We will win the great fight.

Mary O’Reilly

“After the Strike”¹

On November 22, 1909, the tiny waistmakers’ local of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union called a general strike of all the shirtwaist makers in New York. The strike became known as the Uprising of the Thirty Thousand (or, depending on the source, the Twenty Thousand) because that was the approximate number of strikers who rose spontaneously in answer to the union’s call. The strike also came to be thought of as the “woman’s movement strike,” because, under the leadership of the Women’s Trade Union League, the whole of the women’s movement, from the society matrons of the Colony Club to the socialists of the Lower East Side, joined with the strikers, most of whom were teenage girls.

Local 25 of the ILGWU, the shirtwaist makers’ local, had rented Cooper Union for the November 22 meeting. Three shirtwaist shops were already on strike—Leiserson’s, Rosen Brothers, and the Triangle Waist Company—but union leaders had no idea how many workers outside those three shops would come to the meeting. The crowd began to pour into the hall hours early. People waited patiently, talking mainly in Yiddish. Most of them were teenage girls, nervous and excited at being at their first union meeting. The Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish socialist paper, reported some of their conversations: “What if a general strike is decided upon? Who knows how many will join in it? Who can tell how long it may last? And what if a motion for a strike will be voted down? When will there be another chance to improve the conditions? Are we to suffer forever?”² Soon there was not even standing room in the hall, and the union officers began to scurry around, renting other halls in the neighborhood for the overflow, until Beethoven Hall, the Manhattan Lyceum, and Astoria Hall were full and people were still lining up in the street.

In Cooper Union, the speakers arranged themselves on the platform. Unlike the audience, they were well dressed, prosperous, respectable looking, and almost all men. Chief among them was Samuel Gompers of the AFL; it was considered a coup to have gotten him to come. Then there were other union officials, socialist lawyers, and Mary Dreier of the Women’s Trade Union League—an endless series of speakers, none of whom worked in the shirtwaist shops. The speeches went on for two hours. Finally, as the union has described the events in its Souvenir History of the Strike:

Then came the dramatic climax of the evening. At Cooper Union, down in the body of the hall, arose a working girl, a striker, an unknown, who asked the chairman for the privilege of the floor. Many grumbling dissensions came her way, some excitement was visible on the platform, but the chairman held that as she was a striker she had as good a right there as himself, so Clara Lemlich made her way to the platform. She was a striker from the Leiserson shop; she had been assaulted while picketing; she knew from actual experience what her sisters were up against, and that they were tired of oratory; she knew they had come there for business; she knew they were seething with discontent and hatred of their bondage; that they were pulsing with sympathy for their fellow workers and that each was ready, aye, anxious, for the charge into the camp of the common oppressor, and, as has been well said, after an impromptu phillipic in Yiddish, eloquent even to American ears, she put the motion for a general strike, and was unanimously endorsed.

The chairman then cried, “Do you mean faith? Will you take the old Jewish oath?” and up came two thousand right hands, with the prayer, “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise,” and thus started this historic general strike, probably the greatest struggle for unionism among women the world has ever seen.³

Clara Lemlich may have been an “unknown” to the public, but to the Lower East Side labor movement she was already a heroine: she was a founder of the shirtwaist local, had led the walkout in Leiserson’s shop, and had been beaten by hired thugs while picketing. During the two weeks she was laid up, her health was the subject of almost daily comment in the New York Call.

Clara Lemlich had had to fight since the day she was born in the Ukraine in 1888, so she had become good at it. Her father was an Orthodox Jewish scholar, and as tradition dictated, he did not permit his daughter to learn to read; in particular the study of Russian (as opposed to Yiddish) was forbidden. Clara Lemlich would sneak down to the village to make buttonholes for the little tailor shops, and use the money she earned to pay students to teach her to read Russian. Although her father burned her Russian books, she had already become literate by the time her family fled Russia in 1903—she had even read revolutionary literature.⁴

Clara Lemlich wanted to go to school in New York, but instead she had to go to work to help support her family. She got work in a shirtwaist shop, making the elaborate blouses that were virtually the uniform of working women in this period. She continued to study, however, and hoped to become a doctor. She would work for eleven hours, then walk to the public library, stopping only for a glass of milk, and study until it closed. She would not get home for supper until late at night. She recalled later; “All week long I wouldn’t see the daylight. I remember once, when things were slow, they let us out in the middle of the day. ‘What!’ I said, ‘Are all the people on strike?’ I had never realized that there were so many out during the daytime.”⁵

In 1906 Clara Lemlich joined a group of shirtwaist makers who went to the office of the Jewish Daily Forward to find out how to form a union. She was one of seven young women and six young men who formed Local 25, at a time when the ILGWU was small and its members mainly comprised of male cloakmakers. She was by then a skilled draper, still saving money to go to school, but she seemed unable to work in a shop without trying to organize it. Even when she vowed to be a “good girl,” she found herself talking union two days later. She began to look for work in the smaller shops where she could have more influence. The oppressive conditions in the trade kept her at the boiling point: the forewoman following a girl to the toilet, nagging her to hurry; the new girls being cheated of their pay; the fines; the charges for electricity and needles and thread; the “mistakes” in the pay envelopes that were so difficult to get fixed; the time clock that was fixed so that lunch was twenty minutes short, or was set back an hour so the workers didn’t know that they were working overtime.⁶

In 1907 she took part in her first strike, a ten-week strike against speedup in the small shop where she worked at the time. At one of the union meetings she heard strikers arguing about Gompers and his “pure-and-simple trade unionism.” She asked one of them what that meant. He asked her to go for a walk, and they walked forty blocks while he gave her her first lesson in Marxism:

He started with a bottle of milk—how it was made, who made the money from it at every stage of its production. Not only did the boss take the profits, he said, but not a drop of milk did you drink unless he allowed you to. It was funny, you know, because I’d been saying things like that to the girls before. But now I understood it better and I began to use it more often—only with shirtwaists.⁷

She also began taking classes in Marxist theory at the Socialist Party’s school, the Rand School.

In 1908 the young women at the Gotham shop, where Clara Lemlich was then working, struck in sympathy when the boss fired men to make room for women, because he could pay them less. The strike failed and the other girls went back to work, but Clara Lemlich stayed outside the shop, distributing boycott leaflets until the boss finally had her arrested for disorderly conduct. This was the first of many such arrests.

She then went to work at Leiserson’s. The male operators, who were in a different ILGWU local than the shirtwaist makers, planned a strike without even informing the other workers, many of whom were women. When Clara Lemlich found out about it, she went to their strike meeting and, asking for the floor, gave them a piece of her mind, telling them that if they went out on strike alone they would surely lose, but if they organized, they could take the whole shop with them. They followed her advice and the whole factory struck. Clara Lemlich’s leadership was decisive in keeping the Leiserson strike together—certainly the boss thought so, for during the eleven weeks the picket line was outside the shop she was singled out numerous times by his hired thugs. In one battle six of her ribs were broken. In later years she recalled her fearlessness: “Ah—then I had fire in my mouth…. What did I know about trade unionism? Audacity—that was all I had—audacity!”⁸

Her militance was an appropriate response to conditions in the shirtwaist industry, which was notorious for irregularity, inefficiency, and severe exploitation. The industry was divided into hundreds of tiny shops, each employing between five and twenty girls and each competing with the others to drive down labor costs and sell more cheaply, but it was dominated by a group of larger shops, each employing between two hundred and three hundred workers. The work was seasonal; all of the workers toiled long hours during the busy season—fifty-six a week with overtime—but were laid off when things were slow. Wages varied greatly, depending on whether the workers were paid on a time or a piecework basis, and whether they were skilled or not. All workers were charged for the equipment they used, and many firms made a 20 percent profit on electricity for sewing machines, and 25 percent on needles and thread. Workers were docked an hour’s pay for being five minutes late, and were made to pay for a whole length of cloth if they spoiled a corner.⁹

Within the work force there were further inequities, the greatest of which was between women and men. Most of the men were either skilled workers (cutters and pressers)¹⁰ or subcontractors who were given orders by larger bosses and hired female assistants to do the work. The union believed that the subcontracting system had grown up as a result of the disorganization and lack of management skills that characterized the entire garment industry:

It must first be understood that an overwhelming majority of the proprietors in this trade were laborers themselves but a few years ago, and not being endowed with a superabundance of executive ability or knowledge of modern business methods, especially those belonging to organization, they soon found the details of their business growing too numerous to be handled by personal attention.

Therefore, instead of dividing their factory into departments and employing a foreman to supervise the same, they called in a workman and made a contract with him for a period of three or four months, agreeing to pay him so much a week for so much work turned out. They rented or loaned him the machines and encouraged him to get as much work out of a young girl for as little money as he could, and actually classified it as the speeding up system. By this means the girls’ bosses were doubled, the inspection and criticism of her work was doubled, the incessant supervision of her every move was doubled, and two profits to one were taken out of her labor.¹¹

In the shirtwaist industry, subcontracting went on inside large factories, where the subcontractors were responsible to a foreman. A subcontractor could pay his female employees what he pleased and usually paid them as little as possible. He had two categories of employees; women who had two or three years of experience and “learners” or apprentices. The union estimated that 37 percent of the workers in the shirtwaist trade were learners, young girls who made from $2.50 to $4.00 a week, while about 50 percent were more experienced young women, who made an average of $9.00 a week. The skilled male workers, on the other hand, who made up the remaining 15 percent of the workforce, made $15.00 to $23.00 a week.¹²

It was the skilled male workers and the subcontractors who led the ILGWU and Local 25, and who negotiated for it during the strike. The women workers, the most exploited section of the work force, had their bosses as their union leaders.¹³ It is only in the light of this basic structural fact that developments in the union, which became increasingly clear in the years after the strike, can be understood: the absence of women from leadership or even staff positions; the leadership’s tendency to look at the women workers as so many cattle who needed a strong leader to look up to, and their desire to run the union like a business. This view of the world stemmed from the leadership’s position as employers of the other workers, privileged, skilled, and upwardly mobile. Needless to say, their attitude also rose from the male supremacy of the society as a whole, for they held their positions because of their sex—women did not become subcontractors, cutters, or paid union officials.¹⁴

If the sexual contradiction was built into the structure of the industry, ethnic differences also made uniting the work force difficult. Russian Jews, Italians, and native-born Americans formed 55 percent, 35 percent, and 7 percent respectively of the women in the trade. The men in the industry were mainly Russian Jews. Of those who actually went out on strike, however, 70 percent were Russian Jewish women, 20 percent were Russian Jewish men, 6 percent were Italian women, and 3 percent native-born women. The strikers were thus 90 percent Russian Jewish.¹⁵ The Italians were particularly underrepresented among the strikers, partly, no doubt, because very few of them spoke English and none of the union leaders spoke their language. In fact, they mainly spoke Yiddish. Not only were the Italians and Jews separated by language and cultural barriers, but the Italians were also newcomers to the industry, brought in to undercut the wages of the Jews. The employers consciously used national differences to divide the work force; according to the union, “they placed an Italian girl beside a Jewess, so that they might not understand each other, and then started stories to arouse race prejudice.”¹⁶ There were also problems with the native-born American women, who considered themselves superior to the others. They usually earned more, they worked in different shops, further uptown and they were unwilling to accept the leadership of “foreigners.”

Local 25 did not attempt to deal with these ethnic differences. Overwhelmingly Russian Jewish in membership, it made few efforts to reach the Italians and the “American girls.” It was small and weak, and its organizing techniques were primitive. Its usual strategy was to wait until there was a spontaneous movement such as a walkout in a shop. The union would quickly go there and try to sign the workers up, and then negotiate with the boss for union recognition. As described by B. Witashkin, secretary of the local in its early days, this method seldom worked:

Our organizing work we generally carried on in a stereotyped way. We would issue a circular reading somewhat as follows: “Murder! The exploiters, the blood-suckers, the manufacturers…. Pay your dues…. Down with the capitalists! Hurrah!” The employers would be somewhat frightened and concede the demands of the union. After the demands would be granted, the workers would drop out of the organization. We would thus gain “recognition” and lose the workers.¹⁷

By 1909 the number of spontaneous actions indicated that conditions were changing and that it might be possible to use different methods. More workers started to seek out and join the union, and then a small strike wave began in the East Side shops. The first of these was a walkout at the Triangle Waist Company in the fall of 1908. Just before the Jewish holidays, a protesting subcontractor announced that he was sick of being a slave driver and was going to quit. As the foreman began to drag him out, he appealed to his fellow workers: “Brothers and sisters, are you going to sit by your machines and see a fellow workman used this way?” That was all it took; they laid down their work and walked out. The strike lasted only three days, for without an organization or benefits, the workers were quickly driven back.¹⁸ The Triangle management then organized a company union or benefit society whose officers were all relatives of the owners. After a few months some of the workers began to realize what a travesty this “union” was and went to Local 25 for advice. They began to hold small meetings in secret.

Another strike at about this time, also initiated by male subcontractors, was at Rosen Brothers. Two hundred workers went out when the boss refused to pay the price the subcontractors demanded. This strike lasted five weeks; the union was called in to negotiate, and the subcontractors won.

A third strike began in September 1909 at Leiserson’s, where Clara Lemlich worked. Leiserson had begun to lay off his experienced workers on the pretext that he had no work to give them. They learned that he was sending their work to a cheaper shop he had started downtown and even giving it on the sly to the learners in their own shop. Outraged, one hundred workers walked out. After the walkout Leiserson immediately advertised for scabs. He also hired thugs—“sluggers,” as they were called, led by the “notorious Dominick”—to beat up the picketers.

At this time mass picketing, involving large numbers of workers, was not yet common. Instead, a handful of strikers would walk up and down in front of their shops, wearing placards or carrying signs and trying to persuade the scabs not to go in. The union bent over backwards not to be offensive. It issued rules for the picketers, which it hoped would save them from arrest—a vain hope:

Rules for Pickets

Don’t walk in groups of more than two or three.

Don’t stand in front of the shop; walk up and down the block.

Don’t stop the person you wish to talk to; walk alongside of him.

Don’t get excited and shout when you are talking.

Don’t put your hand on the person you are speaking to. Don’t touch his sleeve or button. This may be construed as a “technical assault.”

Don’t call anyone “scab” or use abusive language of any kind.

Plead, persuade, appeal, but do not threaten.

If a policeman arrests you and you are sure that you have committed no offense, take down his number and give it to your union officers.¹⁹

These ladylike instructions did not prevent strikers from being enthusiastically set upon by hired thugs, beaten, and then arrested by the police. If a picketer spoke to a scab, she was arrested and charged with assault or intimidation; the scab was then bribed to swear in court that the striker had grabbed or threatened her. Such daily dramas in front of the Leiserson shop had an unforeseen effect, however: increasingly distressed by this treatment of their fellow workers, a second group of workers walked out, including some Italians. This was the first sign of the labor solidarity that was to become such a remarkable element in the general strike; it certainly amazed the employers, who had succeeded in pitting Italians against Jew for so long.

Three days later, on September 28, 1909, the workers at the nearby Triangle Waist Company, a number of whom had secretly joined Local 25, also went on strike. Management called a meeting of the company union, and one boss quoted the company union’s bylaws, which said “no member of this society shall belong to any other organization.” He went on to say that those who had joined Local 25 had broken this rule and unless they immediately left the union they would lose their jobs. After the workers held a union meeting and decided to fight back, the company locked them out and advertised for scabs.²⁰

The Triangle management went one better on Louis Leiserson’s tactic of hiring local gangsters: they hired Broadway prostitutes and their pimps, guessing that the strikers would feel more intimidated that way. The prostitutes beat up ten women in one day.²¹ After a striker was beaten, she was charged with assault and fined. On October 14, for instance, twenty-eight strikers were arrested and fined $3 each—a week’s wage for a learner. The drain on the union treasury began to be insupportable, while the male workers lost heart and stopped picketing, not wanting to be beaten up. The women carried on, suffering assault and arrest day after day.²² Clara Lemlich was arrested seventeen times.

On October 19, a group of policemen broke into the union hall during a meeting. They stared at those present, so they would be able to recognize them on the picket line, then left. Such open intimidation was the last straw: some of the women strikers went to the Women’s Trade Union League and appealed for protection against false arrest. The League “allies” began to come down to the picket line to observe and then act as witnesses in court.

Union officials were meanwhile trying to work out a strategy for dealing with the police repression and the unwillingness of the companies to negotiate. The strikers were getting no publicity, except in the Jewish and radical press, and the manufacturers found it easy to subcontract their work to other shops. The union still had few members, little money for strike benefits, and no influence. Nevertheless, it seemed to the officers of Local 25 that the industry was beginning to move and that it might pay to take a chance, particularly since they had neither a treasury nor prestige to risk. So they decided to call a general strike of the whole shirtwaist industry and hope it would catch on. The ILGWU, their own International, thought the plan had no chance of working. Most trade unionists agreed.

Once the members of the Local 25’s executive board had decided to call the strike, they had to convince the rest of the union’s one hundred members. They called a general meeting on October 21, and used a “strategic ruse”: various executive board members and Leiserson strikers sat scattered around the hall and described the dreadful conditions in the trade as if they were representing different shops. They then called for a general strike.²³ They swung the meeting, and the next day the New York Call carried the banner headline “25,000 Waist Makers Declare for Strike!” By the day after, the Call had realized this joyful news did not correspond to reality and printed a bewildered retraction: “For reasons which the union leaders refuse to divulge, the time for calling the big strike will be kept secret until the blow is ready to fall upon the bosses who are backing up Louis Leiserson … and the Triangle Waist Company.”²⁴

The executive board waited to see how the workers would respond to their call. In the next four weeks, before the general strike was finally declared, about two thousand workers joined the union. Meanwhile, on November 4 the strike got the necessary publicity boost. Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women’s Trade Union League, socialite, and resident of Beekman Place, was arrested while observing police brutality on the picket line. As the New York Call reported the incident:

Mary Dreier … was covered with insults and arrested without cause yesterday while doing picket duty in the strike of the Ladies’ Waistmakers against the Triangle Waist Company. … A member of the Triangle firm heard her speak to one of the girls as she came from work and in the presence of an officer he turned on Miss Dreier and shouted: “You are a liar. You are a dirty liar.” Miss Dreier turned to the officer and said, “You heard the language that man addressed to me. Am I not entitled to your protection.” The officer replied, “How do I know you are not a dirty liar?”²⁵

She was arrested, then discharged by the judge, who apologized for having mistaken her for a working girl. But the publicity given the arrest was crucial in arousing the interest of the press and the public in both the strike and police brutality, and the union used the occasion to intensify its shop propaganda. When it called a mass meeting for November 22 at Cooper Union, the response was overwhelming. Fifteen thousand workers, mostly young girls, walked out on their jobs the morning after the Cooper Union meeting. By nightfall there were twenty-five thousand on strike, and more joined in the next few days. Only a handful had been union members before the strike, and no one had expected such a huge response—75 percent of the workers in the trade were out on strike.

Most of the women who had been at the meeting and voted to strike went to work the next morning excited but uncertain what they were supposed to do. What happened in Natalya Urosova’s shop is typical of the kind of chain reaction that took place:

“But I did not know how many workers in my shop had taken that oath at the meeting. I could not tell how many would go on strike in our factory the next day,” said Natalya afterward. “When we came back the next morning to the factory, though, no one went to the dressing-room. We all sat at the machines with our hats and coats beside us, ready to leave. The foreman had no work for us when we got there. But, just as always, he did not tell when there would be any, or if there would be any at all that day. And there was whispering and talking softly all around the room among the machines: ‘Shall we wait like this?’ ‘There is a general strike.’ ‘Who will get up first?’ ‘It would be better to be the last to get up, and then the company might remember it of you afterward, and do well for you.’ But I told them,” observed Natalya with a little shrug, “‘What difference does it make which one is first and which one is last?’ Well, so we stayed whispering, and no one knowing what the other would do, not making up our minds for two hours. Then I started to get up.” Her lips trembled. “And just at the same minute all—we all got up together, in one second. No one after the other; no one before. And when I saw it—that time—oh, it excites me so yet. I can hardly talk about it. So we all stood up, and all walked out together. And already out on the sidewalk in front, the policemen stood with the clubs. One of them said, ‘If you don’t behave, you’ll get this on your head.’ And he shook his club at me.

“We hardly knew where to go—what to do next. But one of the American girls, who knew how to telephone, called up the Women’s Trade Union League, and they told us all to come to a big hall a few blocks away.”²⁶

All through the day the girls streamed out of their shops toward Clinton Hall, the union headquarters. The situation was chaotic. The officers of Local 25 were virtually prisoners in their tiny office, hemmed in by hordes of young women trying to join the union. Thousands of strikers milled about in the streets, unable to find their shop meetings—about twenty different halls were in use—or unable to get into them because of the crowds. Some people wandered around without help for a day or two and then went back to work, demoralized.

It was the WTUL that brought order out of this chaos, though the women of the Socialist Party were of notable service as well. WTUL women did secretarial and organizational work and were responsible for most of the publicity. The strike was run out of twenty halls, each of which had a woman in charge, sometimes a League member, usually a rank-and-file striker. The male staff of Local 25 was not large enough to do this and to give interviews and conduct negotiations as well, and it was due to this weakness that the women were able to run their own strike and to gain experience doing so. It was they who arranged picketing schedules, made reports on scab and police brutality, wrote leaflets, spoke at other unions, visited rich women to raise money, went to court to bail out strikers or act as witnesses, kept track of the shops that settled, gave out strike benefits to needy workers, organized new women into the union, kept up spirits, and persuaded people not to go back to work.

Local 25 had called a general strike in order to organize the whole industry at one time. This approach put it somewhere between the traditional AFL unions, with their narrow craft orientation and methods, and the IWW’s revolutionary industrial unionism. The ILGWU attempted to combine the spirit of industrial unionism with the tactics of craft organization. Had the union been organized on a purely craft basis, for instance, the cutters and the dressmakers might have struck at different times, thus setting up divisions between the workers in the same shop. It was this approach that Clara Lemlich had had to combat when she organized the strike at Leiserson’s. In a normal AFL situation, the cutters would have crossed the dressmakers’ picket lines and kept on working, even if the company brought in scabs.

The strikers were thus generally grouped by shop, instead of craft, though there were a few language groupings, and each shop formulated its own particular list of demands. The main issue was “union recognition”—which meant a union shop, where a worker would have to join the union to get a job—but the strikers also demanded the abolition of subcontracting, payment every week instead of every two, a fifty-two hour week, no more than two hours a day overtime, and an end to making the workers pay for materials and electricity.”²⁷

The workers felt the demand for the union shop was critical. In an industry where most work was paid by the piece, and the piece-rate varied wildly from season to season and shop to shop, the only way to set uniform wages and standards was to have the union do so—the employers would always try to undercut each other by cheating the workers. The union would not have the power to standardize the industry unless it could control the supply of labor through the union shop. Needless to say, this demand was extremely controversial. Despite the fact that an arbitration board was established, made up of two representatives of the manufacturers and two of labor (Morris Hillquit, a socialist lawyer, and John Mitchell of the United Mine Workers, then a vice-president of the AFL), the employers would not even discuss the issue of recognition.

Meanwhile the picketing continued through a bitter winter. As before, the pickets were almost entirely women, because it was assumed that they would be handled less roughly than the men.²⁸ In many cases the women voluntarily gave up their strike benefits so that the married men could get more. The heroism of these shirtwaist strikers was remarked by all observers:

In spite of being underfed and often thinly clad, the girls took upon themselves the duty of picketing, believing that the men would be more severely handled. Picketing is a physical and nervous strain under the best conditions, but it is the spirit of martyrdom that sends young girls of their own volition, often insufficiently clad and fed, to patrol the streets in midwinter with the temperature low and with snow on the ground, some days freezing and some days melting. After two or three hours of such exposure, often ill from the cold, they returned to headquarters, which were held for the majority in rooms dark and unheated, to await further orders.

It takes uncommon courage to endure such physical exposure, but these striking girls underwent as well the nervous strain of imminent arrest, the harsh treatment of the police, insults, threats and even actual assaults from the rough men who stood around the factory doors. During the thirteen weeks over six hundred girls were arrested; thirteen were sentenced to five days in the workhouse and several were detained a week or ten days in the Tombs.²⁹

Helen Marot thought it was the spirit of the strikers that distinguished this strike from others. She felt it came from the fact that they were women, turning all the cliches about why women couldn’t be organized upside down:

The same temper displayed in the shirtwaist strike is found in other strikes of women, until we have now a trade-union truism, that “women make the best strikers.” Women’s economic position furnishes two reasons for their being the best strikers; one is their less permanent attitude toward their trade, and the other their lighter financial burdens. While these economic factors help to make women good strikers, the genius for sacrifice and the ability to sustain, over prolonged periods, response to emotional appeals are also important causes. Working women have been less ready than men to make the initial sacrifice that trade-union membership calls for, but when they reach the point of striking they give themselves as fully and instinctively to the cause as they give themselves in their personal relationships. It is important, therefore, in following the action of the shirtwaist makers, to remember that eighty per cent were women.³⁰

The judges who sentenced the women showed extreme prejudice against the union, strikers, and women who stepped out of their assigned position in the scheme of things. Judge Cornell sentenced strikers to the workhouse—for the offense of picketing—with the words, “I find the girls guilty. It would be perfectly futile for me to fine them. Some charitable woman would pay their fines or they could get a bond. I am going to commit them to the workhouse under the Cumulative Sentence Act, and there they will have an opportunity of thinking over what they have done.”³¹ Magistrate Olmstead sentenced another girl with the message: “You are on strike against God and Nature, whose firm law is that man shall earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God.”³² “Those who were sent to the workhouse were often only fifteen or sixteen years old. Two WTUL women went to remonstrate with a judge who had sentenced a sixteen- year-old to thirty days, and “tried to make him understand that she had done nothing wrong. We asked if he realized what it would mean to a girl her age to be locked up with prostitutes, theives, and narcotics addicts. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘It will be good for her. It will be a vacation.”³³

The police and courts went out of their way to classify the strikers as prostitutes as an attempt to break their spirit. Prostitution was never very far from the lives of working women who tried to live on $6 a week; they had seen women they had grown up with fall into the life of the streets, and the thin barrier between themselves and that life meant a great deal to them. The memoirs of jailed women strikers and radicals in the early part of the century focus rather obsessively on the prostitutes they met. The police and employers called the strikers whores because they were walking the streets shamelessly; they tried to insult them sexually, as if the way to stop them from rebelling as workers was to put them back in their places as sexual objects. At a meeting protesting police butality, Yetta Ruth, a seventeen-year-old, described her treatment:

“I acted as spokesman for my shop and when the boss, Beekman, told me that he would not accept the terms of the union, walked out and others followed. He then had me arrested for taking out his workers.

“While I was at the station house, on 20th street, the officers treated me in such a manner that a girl is ashamed to talk about. I am only seventeen and many of the insinuations escaped me. But what I did understand was bad enough….

“The policeman asked me with how many men I was living. One officer told me that I was a dirty Socialist and Anarchist. One man said, ‘Here is a nice fellow, Yetta, hook onto him.’ One policeman showed me a torn pair of pants and asked me to mend them.”

The little girl stopped abruptly and her voice failed her. She was urged again to continue and after some hesitation, said “One man went to some place and winking to me, said: ‘Come along, Yetta!”’³⁴

The WTUL and socialist women made police repression one of their main issues. On December 3, the League organized a parade down to the mayor’s office, led by three League members and three girls who had been arrested. Ten thousand women strikers marched behind. The mayor received their petition politely and promised to read it, and things went on as before.

Despite the forces arrayed against them, these young strikers fought on in an extraordinary fashion. One sixteen-year-old girl came into the union office covered with bruises from head to foot: her father and brothers had beaten her to try to make her go back to work, but she had refused. She begged Helen Marot to find her another place to stay. Another striker swore she’d go to the workhouse the next time she was arrested rather than have the union use its funds to pay her fine³⁵ There were women who were arrested time and time again, who seemed able to do without food or sleep, and who spent all their time at meetings or on the picket line. Several observers noted that the most militant strikers were often the most highly paid and skilled workers, though it would seem that they had least to gain from the strike. These were often the women who, as pacesetters or forewomen, organized the work process in the shop; it was a natural transition for them to become leaders in the strike:

“It’s because there are so many girls who can’t make decent living wages that we had to strike,” said one. “I can work unusually fast, and I make $12 a week during the busy season; but there are many who make only $4.” All the strikers take it as a matter of course that they shall feel for each other, and act unselfishly on that feeling, too.³⁶

The solidarity the strikers built was their greatest achievement, and it is this that makes their strike memorable. They showed the world that the slow entry of millions of women into the U.S. industrial work force had set new conditions for woman’s struggle and had liberated women from the privacy of household drudgery in sufficient numbers for them to be able to act together. A number of observers saw them as a working-class analogue to the suffragists, showing what the women’s movement could be like when the issues included survival. With the shirtwaist makers’ strike, the U.S. working woman showed what she was made of, and even Samuel Gompers had to acknowledge that here was a force to be reckoned with:

The strike … brought to the consciousness of the nation a recognition of certain features looming up in its social development. These are the extent to which women are taking up with industrial life, their consequent tendency to stand together in the struggle to protect their common interests as wage earners, the readiness of people of all classes to approve of trade-union methods in behalf of working women, and the capacity of women as strikers to suffer, to do, and to dare in support of their rights.³⁷

Looking back on the strike, Helen Marot of the League thought the general-strike gamble had succeeded only because of the unusual history and temperament of the Russian Jewish workers: “The Russian workers who filled New York factories are ever ready to rebel against the suggestion of oppression and are of all people the most responsive to an idea to which is attached an ideal. The union officers understood this and … answered, ‘Wait and see,’ when their friends urged caution before calling a general strike in an unorganized industry.”³⁸

The Italian and the native-born American women played a less forceful role in the strike than did their Russian Jewish sisters. Although the Americans came out on strike initially, they went back to work after a few weeks. According to Marot, their working conditions and pay were so much better than the Russians’ that they did not strike on their own behalf, but because they felt sorry for the rest:

They acknowledged no interest in common with the others, but if necessary they were prepared to sacrifice a week or two of work. Unfortunately the sacrifice required of them was greater than they had counted on … the Russians failed to be grateful, took for granted a common cause and demanded that all shirtwaist makers, regardless of race or creed, continue the strike until they were recognized by the employers as a part of the union. This difference in attitude and understanding was a heavy strain on the generosity of the American girls. It is believed, however, that the latter would have been equal to what their fellow workers expected, if their meetings had been left to the guidance of American men and women who understood their prejudices. … It was the daily, almost hourly, tutelage which the Russian men insisted on the American girls’ accepting, rather than the prolongation of the strike beyond the time they had expected, that sent the American girls back as “scabs.”³⁹

Marot and the other women of the League believed that they could have handled the American-born women better than the union did. Their broadmindedness did not extend to the Italian workers. The patronizing tone of the League’s analysis of the Italians is common to reform and even labor descriptions of them during a period when they were the most recent immigrants;

The Italian girls and women … are the oppressed of the race, absolutely under the dominance of the men of their family and heavily shackled by old customs and traditions. They are very much afraid of trade unions and everything that involves danger to their job either through strikers or discharge. In the shirtwaist strike they joined the strike, but failed to hold out, and were used successfully as strike breakers, following the instructions of their priest. This was, however, largely due to the fact that they were mostly Sicilians…. They have no collective vision. They follow willingly and devotedly a leader whom they trust and the all-important thing therefore is to get the right kind of leader.”⁴⁰

Two years later the Italian women of Lawrence proved that they could be as militant as any other strikers, provided they were organized by people who spoke their language and understood their culture and their special needs as women.

If the American-born and Italian women had an ambiguous relationship to the union during the strike, the black women in the shirtwaist industry had none at all. They were few in number—the 1900 census put the total number of black working women in New York at 16,114, and 90 percent of these were domestic workers?⁴¹ Black women were by and large kept out of the factories, and only 803 were listed as dressmakers in New York. Mary White Ovington, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, described the situation of black women in the garment industry in 1903:

Colored women have always been known as good sewers, and recently they have studied at their trade in some of the best schools. From 1904 to 1910, the Manhattan Trade School [where Leonora O’Reilly, a member of the NAACP as well as the League, taught sewing] graduated thirty-four girls in dress-making, hand sewing, and novelty making. The public night school on West Forty-Sixth Street … has educated hundreds of women in sewing, dressmaking, millinery, and artificial flower-making…. Occasionally an employer objects to colored girls, but the Manhattan Trade School repeatedly, in trying to place its graduates, has found that opposition to the Negro has come largely from working girls. Race prejudice has even gone so far as to prevent a colored woman from receiving home work when it entailed her waiting in the same sitting-room with white women. Of course, this is not a universal attitude, in friendly talks with hundreds of New York’s white women workers, I have found the majority ready to accept the colored worker. Jewish girls are especially tolerant. They believe that good character and decent manners should count, not color; but an aggressive, combative minority is quite sure that no matter how well-educated or virtuous she may be, no black woman is as good as a white one.⁴²

As in many other strike situations, the garment manufacturers made a special effort to keep their few black workers on during the strike and to recruit other black women as scabs. This led to a full-scale debate within the black community: should black women take jobs as scabs if this was the only way they could break into the industry? or should they put pressure on the union to enroll them as members, knowing that in the long run their future as workers lay on the side of the labor movement and not the employers?

On January 10, 1910, the New York Age, a black weekly, editorialized on the subject: “Why should Negro working girls pull white working girls’ chestnuts out of the fire?” The Age had been asked to refuse to print advertisements for strikebreakers and to “help induce these colored girls to join the union”; it had not only refused this request but had recruited black women as ironers for firms that were on strike. The reason; before the strike “Negro girls were not asked to join the union,” and it was safe to assume that the union would discriminate against them after the strike, whether they scabbed or not.⁴³

The day after the editorial was published, a crisis meeting was called by the Cosmopolitan Club, an organization of black and white progressives and radicals which Mary White Ovington had helped pull together during her seven years’ sociological investigation of the conditions of Afro-American people in New York. The club met in various homes, usually those of black society leaders in Brooklyn (the Petersons, Mars, Wilbecans) to discuss “various phases of the race question.”⁴⁴ The meeting was held at the black community church in Brooklyn on January 21 and passed a historic if little known resolution, which was reprinted in the New York Call:

Resolved, That the citizens of Brooklyn in mass meeting assembled, protest and urge the women of color to refrain from acting in the capacity of strikebreakers in the shirtwaist making concerns of New York, because we regard their action as antagonistic to the best interests of labor.

We further urge that, in the event of the successful termination of the strike, organized labor exercise a proper consideration of the claims and demands of the men and women of color who desire to enter the various trades in the way of employment and the protection of the various labor unions….

Those familiar with negro opinion will feel the significance of this appeal from the leaders of the race. The colored girl is urged, not to enter the market and underbid, accepting any chance to learn a trade, but to refrain from injuring other working women, and whenever possible, to ally herself with the cause of union labor.⁴⁵

If the shirtwaist strikers won their demand for a closed shop, the future of black workers in the industry would depend on the union’s willingness to recruit them. A Brooklyn reader of the Survey, a social work magazine, argued that black women were already excluded from Local 25: “I happened to read your editorial just after I had been talking with a social worker who is much interested in work among the colored people…. She told me that colored shirtwaist makers could not get into the union and were likewise not permitted by the union to work in the shops.”⁴⁶ The Women’s Trade Union League attempted to rebut these accusations of racism within the union, but the numbers cited in their defense are so small as to cast doubt upon the question. Margaret Dreier Robins wrote the Survey to say that the union did have black members—one in New York and two in Philadelphia.⁴⁷ And Elizabeth Dutcher, an officer of the New York League, wrote in W. E. B. DuBois’s magazine, the Horizon:

In New York, colored girls are not only members of the union, but they have been prominent in the union. One colored girl has been secretary of her shop organization all through the strike and has been very frequently at union headquarters doing responsible work. The editor should also know that meetings were held during the strike at the Fleet Street Methodist Memorial Church (colored) in Brooklyn and the St. Marks Methodist Church in Manhattan and that in both, members of the Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union said definitely and publicly that colored girls were not only eligible but welcome to membership.⁴⁸

The Cosmopolitan Club urged that the union make an effort to organize black workers after the strike, “both for their own protection against the rapacity of their employers, and that they may not be used to take the place of other strikers,”⁴⁹ and at its poststrike executive board meeting, the Women’s Trade Union League passed a resolution to “offer its services to the National Association for the Protection of Colored Women stating the very great desire of the League to cooperate with them in their efforts to protect the colored women workers through organization.”⁵⁰ There is no indication that either the League or the union made any further effort.⁵¹ The League does not seem to have actively organized black women workers until 1919, when their Southern organizer, Mildred Rankin, organized unions of black teachers and service workers in Virginia, and their first black organizer, Irene Goins, worked with some success in the Chicago stockyards.⁵²

The weaknesses in the work of the ILGWU and the WTUL with black and Italian workers were only one of the problems they had to confront as the strike wore on. Equally important was the contradiction between those strikers whose shops settled in the early days of the strike and those whose shops held out until the end or never settled at all. Local 25 allowed its member shops to settle and go back to work one by one, like a craft union, rather than holding out for a single settlment, like an industrial one. The shops that settled then took work on a subcontract basis from companies that were still on strike. By November 27, one-third of the strikers had gone back to work. This drastically weakened the economic base of the strike and undermined its collective strength, even though the union treasury benefited from the dues of those who had gone back to work.⁵³

Early in the strike, the biggest employers joined together in an Association of Waist and Dress Manufacturers which negotiated with the union at the same time as they pledged never to officially recognize it. On December 27, the arbitrators came out with a proposed compromise. The employers said they would “welcome conferences” about contract violations; they would only reinstate former employees “as far as practicable”; and they would not hire new workers until the strikers were back at work. (This clearly left loopholes for blacklisting union militants.) The agreement also stipulated a fifty-two hour week, no discrimination against union members, equal division of work between workers in the slack season, four paid holidays a year, shop negotiations for wages and prices, and an end to making employees pay for equipment.⁵⁴ These were substantial concessions, considering conditions in the trade prior to the strike, but they avoided the key question of union recognition. The Association was obdurate in its refusal to agree to this, and the strikers were furious that the union leadership had offered to compromise on this question. When the proposal was explained, “‘Send it back, we will not consider it!’ ‘We refuse to vote on it!’ ‘We want recognition of the union!’ ‘We will go to jail again and win!’ and similar exclamations uttered in the highest pitch by 2,000 men and women made further reading impossible.”⁵⁵

At this point the united front of workers, AFL, League, suffragists, and women of the Socialist Party that had come together to support the strike began to disintegrate. As Helen Marot noted, the AFL and many of the suffragists deserted the strike because it was becoming too radical.

An uncompromising attitude is good trade-union tactics up to a certain point, but the shirtwaist makers were violating all traditions. Their refusal to accept anything short of the closed shop indicated to many a state of mind which was as irresponsible as it was reckless. Their position may have been reckless, but it was not irresponsible. Their sometime sympathizers did not realize the endurance of the women or the force of their enthusiasm, but insisted on the twenty to thirty thousand raw recruits becoming sophisticated unionists in thirteen short weeks.⁵⁶

The League and the Socialist Party stuck by the strikers, despite their intransigence. A closer look at the strike support work of the League, the Socialist Party, and the wealthy suffragist “allies” shows how diverse were the elements in this united front, and how unstable was their unity.

The WTUL’s list of their activities during the strike shows what an enormous contribution they made:

(1) We organized a volunteer picket force of allies of 75 League members. This is the first time in our knowledge in the history of trade unions where a volunteer picket corps was organized.

(2) Organized volunteer legal services, 9 lawyers.

(3) Furnished bail amounting to $29,000.

(4) Protested against illegal action on part of police, and interceded for strikers with the City authorities.

(5) Organized shops.

(6) Organized parade of 10,000 strikers over night.

(7) Took part in Arbitration Confererence.

(8) Arranged large meetings where arbitrators representing the Union explained situation to strikers.

(9) Took active part in shop meetings and paid benefits to those meeting at League headquarters.

(10) Made publicity for strike through the press, through meetings of all descriptions, edited two special strike editions of the New York Call and New York Evening Journal.

(11) Appealed for funds.⁵⁷

They also sent organizers to help a related strike in Philadelphia, and to raise funds by touring New York State and New England.

Despite all this work, League members did not attempt either to claim credit for more than their due, or to impose caution on the workers who resisted the arbitrated agreement. Although privately they recognized that Local 25 could never have managed to organize such a vast strike without their help, in their public report on the strike they were unequivocal about the union’s role: “It is untrue to state, as has been stated, that the League financed and led the strike. The strike was organized and led by the union. Perhaps it is more correct to say that it was organized by the union and led up to a certain point: the point of compromise. When that point was reached the strikers themselves turned leaders, continuing the strike to one of the most remarkable victories in the history of trade unions.”⁵⁸

The League emphasized those aspects of the strike that linked the labor and suffrage movements. One of their aims was to help feminists understand the struggles of working-class women, and they felt the strike was a major advance in that respect, even though some of the forms this female solidarity took were slightly bizarre. Borrowing a tactic from the suffragists, the League organized a car caravan to publicize the strike. The cars, lent by various millionaire women, honked their way through the narrow streets of the Lower East Side, “taking on and leaving off pickets…. Within the autos rich, fashionable women and poor frail striking girls … were making merry over this exceptional affair. It was amusing to see rich women carrying cards on which was proclaimed the need for organization for labor and which demanded shorter hours and increased pay.”⁵⁹ The cars were no doubt chauffered.

No aspect of the strike attracted as much attention in the press as the support given it by certain wealthy women, notably Alva Belmont and Anne Morgan. Alva Belmont was the daughter of an Alabama plantation owner and one of New York’s most prominent society matrons. She married William K. Vanderbilt and embarked on a lavish campaign to break into New York society’s “Four Hundred.” After building a $3 million chateau on Fifth Avenue and a $2 million mansion in Newport, she finally achieved her goal, after which she divorced Vanderbilt and married Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, heir to the New York subway system. She became an ardent suffragist, active first in NAWSA and then in the National Woman’s Party.⁶⁰

During the strike she personally financed a mass meeting that was sponsored by the suffragist Political Equality Association and held at the Hippodrome on December 5. Speakers included Dr. Anna Howard Shaw for NAWSA, Leonora O’Reilly for the Women’s Trade Union League, and Rose Pastor Stokes for the Socialist Party. Alva Belmont never lost an opportunity to note that the strike showed the need for woman suffrage. After observing at the trials of some of the strikers, she told the press:

During the six hours I spent in that police court I saw enough to convince me and all who were with me beyond the smallest doubt of the absolute necessity for woman’s suffrage—for the direct influence of women over judges, jury and policemen, over everything and everybody connected with the so-called course of justice…. Every woman who sits complacently amid the comforts of her home, or who moves with perfect ease and independence in her own protected social circle, and says, “I have all the rights I want,” should spend one night at the Jefferson Market Court. She would then know that there are other women who have no rights which man or law or society recognizes.⁶¹

The press was almost as enthralled by Alva Belmont’s strike support work as they were with that of Anne Morgan, daughter of robber baron J. P. Morgan (“Mr. Morgan,” said a very intimate friend of the family, “naturally has very different views from Anne, but he is a broad-minded man and respects his daughter for thinking and acting for herself…. The story that he had angrily sworn to disinherit her for her avowed sympathy with the strikers is absolutely false.”).⁶² The Morgan financial interests were not involved in the garment industry.

The support of the “millionaire women” climaxed in a fundraising meeting at the exclusive Colony Club on December 15, when a group of strikers, including Clara Lemlich, told their life stories to the women of the “Four Hundred.” Theresa Malkiel, a socialist activist who wrote a fictionalized first-person account of the strike, drew the moral for her readers:

They’ve brought me to their fashionable clubhouse to hear about our misery. To tell the truth, I’ve no appetite to tell it to them, for I’ve almost come to the conclusion that the gulf between us girls and these rich ladies is too deep to be smoothed over by a few paltry dollars; the girls would probably be the better off in the long run if they did not take their money. They would the sooner realize the great contrast and division of classes; this would teach them to stick to their own…. The women gave us a thousand dollars, but what does this amount to? Not even a quarter apiece for each striker.⁶³

And in fact, when the strikers voted down the arbitrated agreement, some of their rich supporters began to change their minds. On January 3, the Socialist Party and the League, together with various other organizations, called a meeting at Carnegie Hall to protest police brutality. The 370 arrested strikers sat on the stage, and speakers included Leonora O’Reilly and Morris Hillquit, the Socialist Party lawyer who was one of the arbitrators. At a special press conference the next morning, Anne Morgan deplored the undue influence of the socialists who, she said, were taking advantage of the strike situation to stir up trouble:

I attended the meeting at Carnegie Hall last night. There was no doubt that some of the girls have been badly treated, both by some of the manufacturers, some of the police, and some of the magistrates. But I deplore the fanatical statements of Morris Hillquit, Leonora O’Reilly and others at such times as these. … In these times of stress such meetings should be an appeal to reason and sound judgement, and it is extremely dangerous to allow these Socialist appeals to emotionalism. It is very reprehensible for Socialists to take advantage of these poor girls in these times, and when the working people are in such dire straits, to teach their fanatical doctrines.⁶⁴

Anne Morgan was joined in her attack by her friend Eva McDonald Valesh, a close associate of Samuel Gompers, who had left her job as managing editor of the American Federationist to come to New York. When she became involved in the shirtwaist makers’ strike, most people were under the impression that she was acting as Gompers’ emissary, and she even referred to herself as “general organizer of the AFL.”⁶⁵ In fact, she was on her own.

Eva McDonald Valesh was peripherally involved in the arbitration agreement that had been rejected by the strikers on December 27, and, like Anne Morgan, she thought it had been voted down because of excessive Socialist Party influence. In a speech at the Woman’s Civic Forum a few weeks later she attacked the Socialist Party and included the Women’s Trade Union League in her offensive, on the theory that it was a socialist “front” organization. She tried to use the contradiction between men and women in the union as a basis for undermining the strike, telling the New York Daily Tribune:

“The strikers’ committee refused to consider any overture but one agreeing to the closed shop. What is that strikers’ committee? Eighteen men and two girls were present the day I saw them—the men all socialists, connected with the trade perhaps, but ignorant of what the girls want. And to show you the feminine viewpoint, those girl strikers are actually grateful to the men who are using them for their own purposes. ‘It’s so nice of the men, who know so much more than we, to serve on our committees,’ they say.

“I propose,” Mrs. Valesh went on, “to start a campaign against socialism. This strike may be used to pave the way for forming clean, sensible labor unions, and I want to enroll every woman of leisure, every clubwoman, in the movement. The existing unions aren’t doing what they ought to stem the tide of socialism in this country. The Women’s Trade Union League is dominated by socialists, though I won’t deny that they have helped the shirtwaist strikers some.

“Socialism is a menace, and it is alarming to some one who has been, as I have, away from New York for some years, to come back and see how socialism has grown here. I’ve been down to Clinton Hall [the union office], and I am terrified at the spirit that fills the people who congregate there. There’s nothing constructive about socialism. It just makes those ignorant foreigners discontented, sets them against the government, makes them want to tear down. And the socialists are using the strikers.”

“How about the suffragists?” demanded Mrs. William H. McCartney.

“That’s different,” said Mrs. Valesh. “The suffragists have used the strikers, but they’ve helped them, given them spiritual vision, and, besides, the suffragists say frankly to the strikers, ‘We want votes for women,’ while the socialists veil their purposes under all sorts of pretences.”⁶⁶

The papers printed Eva McDonald Valesh’s comments with great enthusiasm, announcing that she and Anne Morgan were starting a rival organization to the Women’s Trade Union League, of which both happened to be members. The League feared that Gompers was behind the attack, and a controversy erupted over whether to expel Eva McDonald Valesh. The socialists in the New York League wanted a public denunciation. Margaret Dreier Robins, the national president, rushed to New York to try to dampen the fire before it got out of control; she and her husband Raymond felt that Eva McDonald Valesh wanted publicity and that if she were openly expelled she would “herald forth how the ‘reds’ could not stand her great arguments and her mighty influence and had to expel her.”⁶⁷ Meanwhile Eva McDonald Valesh kept sending in resignations, and the League had to table each one in order to go on with expulsion proceedings. In the end, the New York League—as usual—yielded to Margaret Dreier Robins’ persuasion, and kept the expulsion a confidential matter. Reflecting upon this episode, Raymond Robins wrote to his wife, “What an old Pup the Hon. Samuel Gompers really is. It seems that Gompers is worthy of all the Socialists say about him and that the Socialists are worthy of all that Gompers says about them. We shall let these ill tempered and low natured people scrap among themselves. Each knows the smut of the other and they can wash their dirty linen to their souls delight.”⁶⁸

In fact, the women of the Socialist Party had played an important role in the united front that supported the strike but had received no public recognition for it. They had come from all over the New York area and, according to their own reports, had been “clerks, organizers, speakers, pickets, watchers, newsies, human sandwiches, solicitors for relief funds, took an active part in the Hippodrome meeting, for which Mrs. Belmont alone received the credit, and helped arrange the demonstration and parade to City Hall.”⁶⁹ They had initiated the Carnegie Hall meeting, and, once the strikers rejected the arbitrated agreement and other support began to fall away, they collected most of the strike funds.’⁷⁰ Bitter and hurt by the attacks on them and by the League’s unwillingness to defend them publicly, several of the most active socialist women made their own defense:

If large advertising in the capitalist dailies, so generously given the “society” ladies during the strike, helped, the well-to-do women certainly did everything for them; for the Socialist women’s activity was never mentioned by the newspapers until Mr. Gompers and his assistant, Mrs. Valesh, chose to open war on the Socialists.

There has never been a more humiliating position in the history of the labor movement than that occupied by the Socialist women in the shirtwaist strike. So long as they did the work of the black man “Friday” they were tolerated and permitted to go on; but no sooner did they attempt to do anything that would count officially then they were put in the background.

The result was, however, well worth the price; the Socialist women have become a power with the girls themselves.

No wonder Mr. Gompers raises his hands in alarm. The girls have found out by experience who their friends are. They will not allow themselves to be fooled, as did the workingmen.⁷¹

The strike dragged on through January with less and less hope of a finale as splendid as its opening chords. After December 27, the employers’ association refused to arbitrate further; support fell away; some large shops were allowed to settle without mentioning the issues of union shop and recognition, and the union began to settle on whatever basis it could with the remaining firms. On February 15, 1910, the strike was declared over despite the fact that thirteen shops were still on strike and between one thousand and three thousand workers went back with no gains and no guarantee against blacklisting.⁷²

The Triangle Waist Company was one of those in which there was only a partial settlement. One demand that was not met was for adequate fire escapes and open doors—the foremen used to lock the doors for fear the girls might sneak out for a minute’s break or steal a few needles or a little thread.⁷³ Shortly before closing time a year later, on March 25, 1911, the fire alarms began to shrill. Like most garment factories, Triangle was a firetrap, with piles of material lying about, and so much lint that the air itself could catch fire. The factory went up in minutes. There was no sprinkler system. One exit was blocked by fire, the other door was locked, and the workers could not get out. The fire escape let down onto an iron spike fence, impaling the girls trying to jump to the ground. It was a holocaust. Of the 500 people who worked there, 146 died in the fire and many more were injured. A League member who was passing by described the scene:

I was coming down Fifth Avenue on the Saturday afternoon when a great, swirling, billowing cloud of smoke swept like a giant streamer out of Washington Square and down upon the beautiful houses in Lower Fifth Avenue. Just as I was turning into the Square two young girls whom I knew to be working in the vicinity came rushing toward me, tears were running from their eyes and they were white and shaking as they caught me by the arm.

“Oh,” shrieked one of them, “they are jumping.”

“Jumping from ten stories up! They are going through the air like bundles of clothes, and the firemen can’t stop them and the policemen can’t stop them and nobody can help them at all.”

“Fifty of them’s jumped already and just think how many there must be left inside yet”—and the girls started crying afresh and rushed away up Fifth Avenue.

A little old tailor whom I knew came shrieking across the Square, tossing his arms and crying, “Horrible, horrible.” He did not recognize me, nor know where he was; he had gone mad with the sight.⁷⁴

Rose Schneiderman of the WTUL made a bitter speech at the memorial meeting held a week later at the Metropolitan Opera House, rented for the occasion by Anne Morgan. She threw out a challenge to the liberal public:

I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the “fire-proof” structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 143 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you, citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and daughters and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us. … I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. … by a strong working-class movement.⁷⁵

The owners of the Triangle firm were tried for negligence but not convicted. The press blamed the fire on a worker who had been smoking. The League embarked on a crusade for stronger legislation for fire protection and better enforcement of existing laws. They printed leaflets informing the workers of the laws and their rights, and did soapboxing on fire protection; Clara Lemlich, blacklisted after the strike, was one of the speakers. League members also helped organize relief and legal aid for the families of the victims. The IWW, which was beginning to be active in the Lower East Side garment industry, sneered at this palliative approach:

A stirring commentary upon the policy of the league is to be found in the conduct of the Triangle Company. Compelled to seek new quarters, what did they do in the face of “public opinion” and the “vigorous action” of the unions? Go and seek out, with scrupulous care, a real fire-proof building? Not these butchers for profit, THEY RENTED A CONDEMNED BUILDING AND PROCEEDED TO AGAIN DEFY THE LAW TO WHICH THE WOMEN’S TRADE UNION LEAGUE APPEALS TO REMEDY THESE CONDITIONS. The Capitalists know that the law is on their side every time, hence they have no fear of it.⁷⁶

Everyone in the labor movement knew that the best way to protect the Lower East Side workers was to have a union strong enough on the shop level to enforce the law and to agitate around safety issues. But although Local 25 had gained enormously from the strike, enrolling twenty thousand members, it quickly went into a decline and by the fall of 1911 it had only thirty-eight hundred members and little influence.⁷⁷ The women of the New York League became increasingly critical of its general strike approach, unless it could be followed up by “effective leadership which instructs the rank and file in the principles of trade unionism and the best method of getting practical results, so that a permanent advance may be established after such a magnificent struggle.”⁷⁸ “The League felt that its responsibility was to the women in the trade, whose interests were not being served by male leadership of Local 25. Helen Marot became disturbed when the idea began to circulate after the fire that another general strike would be necessary to recoup the union’s membership. She recommended that the League oppose this and instead endorse candidates for union office who had “constructive” ideas. The League, however, refused to interfere in the union’s internal policies, and Marot then wrote a letter to the Jewish Daily Forward about the inadequacies of the union’s leadership: “It is becoming clear to the League that it is a betrayal of the faith and fine spirit of the girls to encourage them to organize into trade unions if their union is to be dominated by men without business sense or executive ability and by men competent to talk but not to act.”⁷⁹

The lack of democracy inherent in an all-male leadership over a female rank and file was exacerbated by a new movement for “protocols”—pacts signed with the garment manufacturers to set up compulsory arbitration boards that would settle conflicts between labor and management as they arose, without strikes. In other words, the ILGWU leadership was prepared to bargain away the power to strike (the only real power the workers had) in order to consolidate its control over the trade. When the idea met with initial success among the male cloakmakers, the ILGWU wanted to extend it to the female waistmakers. The conservatives in Local 25 were strongly in favor of the experiment, as was the AFL leadership; Gompers himself came to the 1912 negotiations that set up the shirtwaist protocol. Some radicals opposed the idea. The rank and file of the union was divided, as was the Women’s Trade Union League, which did not publicly endorse the campaign.⁸⁰

The manipulative attitude of the union leadership toward the women workers became clear in these contract negotiations. The protocol was based on the union’s ability to keep its members in line; it ruled out any displays of spontaneous militance such as the rejection of the arbitrated agreement in the shirtwaist strike. The manufacturers’ association made it clear that they expected the union to “control” the workers.⁸¹ Since there was widespread unrest in the industry, the union decided to stage a theatrical event in January 1913 to give the workers a sense that there was more of a struggle with management than was in fact the case. The workers would vote for another general strike, only this time everything would have been settled beforehand, the strike would last only a few days, and the industry would not be disrupted. As the union’s historian described the events:

Such a strike would give the workers a chance to express “their protest against the bad conditions in the trade” and also create in them a sense that each and all had helped to “uplift the trade.” The plan was to issue a call for a general strike; then at the very inception of the strike call a mass meeting of the workers and inform them of the standards agreed upon between the manufacturers’ association and the union, and then direct the workers in the shops of the association to return to work … the union promised not to sign individual agreements with individual firms, but to refer all employers to the association, which they would be asked to join. It was also understood that the agreement between the association and the union would become effective only if the union succeeded in bringing into its membership the majority of the workers in the trade…. The manufacturers agreed to give the union a list of their workers in order to facilitate the work of organization….

The course of the strike was smooth and peaceful. The “girls” accepted the protocol as a fait accompli, with some surprise but without much animation. A few thousand Italian “girls” under the leadership of Nicholas Lauretano and other I.W.W.’s expressed some dissatisfaction, but were easily pacified.⁸²

Under this happy arrangement the membership of Local 25 quickly rose to about twenty-five thousand.⁸³ But although in theory union and management would now meet to settle the problems of the trade without any disruption from below, in practice it soon became clear that the protocol’s machinery didn’t work. It took forever to settle grievances, and although the “impartial” arbitration board was supposed to give the workers wage increases and other awards, its decisions never seemed to lead to improvements in wages or working conditions.⁸⁴ The employers soon began to introduce speedup measures to gain an edge on competitors, and they refused to give the arbitrators the information necessary to set wages in advance, because that would have entailed releasing information about the next season’s styles and they were afraid rival firms would steal their ideas. They acted in general like benign dictators and refused to meet with the union officials on an equal footing.⁸⁵

So the protocol broke down. One of its early casualties was the employers’ promise to hire union members first. The membership of Local 25 began to decline as a result, until by November 1913, eight months after the protocol was initiated, it was down to about sixteen thousand; it lost three thousand by the end of 1915.⁸⁶

At this point both the manufacturers and union officials agreed that a new protocol was necessary, and in January 1916 they announced an agreement. But when the union called another “general strike” for February 9, 1916—meant to be merely a “demonstration of unity”—they got more than they had bargained for.⁸⁷ Rank-and-file women, dissatisfied both with protocolism and with the undemocratic way the union was run, led an open revolt. The ILGWU had made no progress in integrating women into the leadership since the first criticisms made by the Women’s Trade Union League, and as a result relations between them had become strained. Late in 1912, Helen Marot informed an ILGWU official in her usual forthright manner that

the business of the League was to bring women into places of responsibility in the organization of their trade; that we know and he knew if we should now work even with representatives in a general strike that the union would be carried on and controlled by the men, and the women would have no place and power, and probably mostly no voice.⁸⁸

And she summarized the situation in her book American Labor Unions published in 1914:

It was the strike of the Shirt Waist Makers which gave the first great impetus to the organization of the workers making women’s clothing and which placed at last the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in its present position—the third largest union affiliated with the American Federation. This union has jurisdiction over one of the largest fields in which women work. It is officered by men who believe that women make good strikers, but who have no confidence in their ability to handle union affairs. They have gone further than any other union in building up organization by protocol agreements with manufacturers without a conscious sentiment or understanding among the workers. They claim that the workers as a whole have no real conception of organization.⁸⁹

In 1916 some of these women not only found a voice but found fists as well:

A meeting of shop chairmen at No. 175 East Broadway, ended last night in a general fight. Women became hysterical, and Charles Jacobson, a union official, was injured. The fight began because Jacobson, who had charge of the door, refused admission to a crowd who were without tickets.

It was announced that 5,000 of the strikers would return to work this morning. Miss Ida Grabinski, who has been named chairman of one of the dozen committees of women in the new “equal voice” movement, said today that she intends to lay the whole matter before Saumel Gompers, President of the Federation. She and her followers are not satisfied with the way mere man had conducted the affairs of the union until now.

“The officers of the union boss us worse than the bosses,” she said. “Now they tell us to go to work. The next minute they withdraw that order. The women workers comprise more than 65 per cent of the union members throughout the country. The association shops have a woman general manager. Why shouldn’t we have something to say about what concerns us most?”⁹⁰

Although a large number of dissident workers refused to go back to work at the union’s command, they did not succeed in staying out for long, and the strike was over by the end of February.⁹¹

The ILGWU leadership in this period initiated policies that were to become its general practice: it put stability in the industry first, followed by good fringe benefits and services to its members, who were expected to show their desire for a job and their appreciation of their union benefits by remaining in their place. The separation of men from women in the trade, and the more privileged position of the men—reinforced by the social inequality of women in general—created a strike situation in which the generals were men and the soldiers were women. Only certain kinds of wars can be won by such an army, and a war for women’s liberation is not among them. When women fill all the most exploited categories in an industry, a fight for economic justice is inseparable from a struggle for women’s liberation. This struggle has yet to take place in the U.S. garment industry.⁹² Yet, despite its limitations, the Uprising of the Thirty Thousand brought great gains to women garment workers, gains in self-respect as well as wages. As Clara Lemlich summed it up: “They used to say that you couldn’t even organize women. They wouldn’t come to union meetings. They were ‘temporary’ workers. Well, we showed them!”⁹³