9

Lawrence, 1912

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,

For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,

For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;

Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead

Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.

Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.

Yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.

The rising of the women means the rising of the race.

No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes,

But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

James Oppenheim

“Bread and Roses”

written for the women of the Lawrence strike¹

The Lawrence strike was fought over a pay cut of thirty cents a week, the cost of five loaves of bread.² Massachusetts textile workers lived so close to the bone that thirty cents was the difference between bare survival and starvation for them and their children. “Better to starve fighting than to starve working,” they cried, and twenty thousand of them struck in the second week of January 1912.

To the newspapers and the mill owners, their outrage seemed to explode from nowhere. There were not even any unions to speak of in Lawrence: the AFL had a couple of hundred men and the IWW a few hundred more.³ Where did twenty thousand strikers come from?

In fact, there had been minor ripples for years, showing that the water was beginning to boil underneath the surface. As James P. Thompson, the IWW’s agitator in Lawrence, wrote in his report:

It is absolutely foolish to say “it happened without any apparent cause,” “that it was lightning out of clear sky,” etc.

As a matter of fact, it was a harvest; it was a result of seeds sown before; it was the ripened fruit of propaganda. The strike and the remarkable solidarity shown between the many nationalities and different crafts was simply the carrying out of ideas drilled into them before the strike began.⁴

Lawrence became an important textile center after the Civil War. At first the mills ran on the labor of native sons and farm girls, all skilled workers, but in the 1880s technical innovations made it possible for the Wool Trust (the alliance of large firms that monopolized the industry) to mechanize and turn what had once been skilled jobs for local workers into jobs anyone could do—even immigrants. The Wool Trust began to import its labor from Europe, first concentrating on English-speaking workers, then in the 1890s turning to workers from southern and eastern Europe. The employers made an effort to get workers from as many different language groups as possible in order to prevent them from uniting to make trouble; if they competed rather than combined, wages would be kept down. By 1912 there were twenty- five different ethnic groups in the Lawrence mills, although most of the workers were Italians, Poles, Russians, Syrians, or Lithuanians.⁵ More people came than the companies could use, but a surplus labor pool was part of the Wool Trust’s general plan.

The policy worked well. Wages and conditions in the mills declined steadily until a family could survive only if every member who was old enough worked. Although Massachusetts law stated that children could not work until they were fourteen, the companies had agents who could provide forged birth certificates from as far away as Italy.⁶ Ten-year-olds were often pulled out of school to help pay the rent. Sometimes they weren’t in school to begin with, since their parents couldn’t afford to buy them enough clothes to go. The employers even went so far as to declare this “family system” helped keep the family together, since they all worked at the same looms.

Immigrants were drawn to Lawrence by posters placed in towns throughout the Balkans and the Mediterranean showing happy workers carrying bags full of money from the factory gate to the bank. In many of the workers’ tenement rooms, these posters were the only decoration. Their dead hopes stared down from the wall. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the other IWW organizers drove this point home to the workers:

They had hopes of a new life in a new world, free from tyranny and oppression, from landlordism, from compulsory military service. They had hopes to educate their children, to be able to work, to save, to send for others to come to freedom. What freedom? Had they expected to be herded into great prison-like mills in New England, into slums in the big cities, into tenements in these milltowns? Was it to be called “Greenhorns” and “Hunkies” and treated as inferiors and intruders? Heads nodded and tears shone in the eyes of the women….

“What freedom?” we asked again. To be wage-slaves, hired and fired at the will of a soulless corporation, paid low wages for long hours, driven by the speed of a machine? What freedom? To be clubbed, jailed, shot down—and while we spoke, the hoofs of the troopers’ horses clattered by on the street…. We spoke of their power as workers, as the producers of all wealth, as the creators of profit…. We talked Marxism as we understood it—the class struggle, the exploitation of labor, the use of the state and armed forces of government against the workers. It was all there in Lawrence before our eyes. We did not need to go far for the lessons.⁷

About half of the Lawrence mill workers were women and children. Unable to take time out to give birth (occasionally a baby would be born between the looms)⁸ or take care of their children, the workers labored hard and died young. The average spinner died at the age of thirty-six—twenty-nine years less than the average lawyer or clergyman.⁹ Their children suffered as well: the infant mortality rate in Lawrence was 172 out of 1,000.¹⁰ When the strikers’ children were sent to New York to be cared for, they were all found to be suffering from malnutrition. As Bill Haywood noted, “It was a chronic condition. These children had been starving from birth. They had been starved in their mother’s wombs. And their mothers had been starving before the children were born.”¹¹

The IWW first came to Lawrence in September 1905 and organized a small mixed local, drawing from all occupations and language groups. It was shortlived: when J. P. Thompson went to Lawrence in 1907, he found it had not met in months. He contacted two activists, Gilbert Smith and Camille Detollonaire, and they put together a French-speaking branch which began slowly and systematically to agitate and distribute literature. By March 1911 they had formed both English and Italian branches.¹²

The previous year three small, independent craft unions had formed a coalition, the Alliance of Textile Workers Unions, and had invited the IWW local to affiliate with them. The IWW was opposed to craft unionism, but after some soul-searching it agreed to join, as long as it could continue to work at convincing the craft unionists to join the IWW. As the IWW paper noted: “The idea of meeting with the unions, even the conservatives, can only result in good, because through our contact with them we can lead them first of all in a more progressive direction, and finally to the revolutionary conception.”¹³ The IWW’s willingness to unite bore fruit: within a month it had convinced the craft unionists to join its national agitation for the eight-hour day and to cosponsor a mass meeting.

In April 1911 the workers at one of Lawrence’s largest mills, the Atlantic Cotton Mill, struck against the speedup system. The mill had announced that each weaver was to tend twelve looms at a piece rate of forty-nine cents rather than seven looms at seventynine cents. Forty percent of the weavers would become unnecessary.¹⁴ The weavers’ strike was small, but it lasted for months, and because of the IWW’s vigorous support campaign it came to the notice of a large number of workers in Lawrence. The union issued frequent leaflets and brought in some of their best speakers, like J. P. Thompson and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, to do street-speaking.

William Yates, national organizer for the IWW’s textile union and an experienced textile worker who had gone into the New Bedford mills at the age of ten, became excited about the spirit developing in Lawrence. He asked J. P. Thompson to come as soon as he could:

I am writing you to find out if you can come East for six weeks or two months, to start in Lawrence as soon as possible. I was over there yesterday and find conditions such that some one is wanted in that city at once. Conditions are rotten ripe for reaping the harvest that we have so diligently sown. There is a strike in the Atlantic Mills, … also one in the Arlington Mills…. The worm (textile workers) has turned at last. He has been stepped on in such a way that there was nothing left for him to do but kick over the traces. The IWW is to the front in Lawrence.¹⁵

J. P. Thompson arrived in Lawrence on November 2, 1911, and the IWW local stepped up its campaign. It printed stickers and ten thousand leaflets telling the workers that speedup was “murder on the installment plan” and that “overwork for some means out of work for others.”¹⁶ It held mass indoor meetings and open-air meetings at the mill gates every noon for three weeks. Enormous crowds came to these meetings, and the union’s membership grew. Even before J. P. Thompson arrived, the local had about three hundred members organized in English, Polish, Italian, and French language branches.¹⁷ The workers of Lawrence were clearly getting ready to move. William Yates and J. P. Thompson agreed that when the lid blew, the local would wire Joe Ettor, the IWW general organizer for the Northeast, who spoke six languages. Ettor got a telegram on January 11, 1912 and left for Lawrence the next morning.

On January I a reform law had gone into effect in Massachusetts making it illegal for women and children to work more than fifty- four hours a week (they had been working fifty-six in Lawrence). The reformers who fought for the law did not realize that the workers’ wages would be cut by two hours’ pay, and the law contained no defense against this. The mill owners first tried to replace women and children with men, but there weren’t nearly enough men.¹⁸ So they cut everyone’s work and pay by two hours.

Although none of the workers knew for sure that their pay would be cut until they got their pay envelopes on January 12, they feared the worst. Local 20, the Italian branch of the IWW, called a mass meeting for January 10 and a thousand workers showed up. They voted to call all the Italians out on strike on payday if there was a cut, and the next day a number of them circulated a petition asking people to pledge to strike if their envelopes were short. Two thousand weavers and spinners in a couple of the smaller mills were so excited, they jumped the gun and went out a day early; but most waited, like Fred Beal, who was fifteen at the time and worked in the Pacific Mills:

Just like any other Friday, the paymaster, with the usual armed guard, wheeled a truck containing hundreds of pay envelopes to the head of a long line of anxiously awaiting people…. The first ones nervously opened their envelopes and found that the company had deducted two hours’ pay. They looked silly, embarrassed and uncertain what to do. Milling around, they waited for someone to start something. They didn’t have long to wait, for one lively young Italian had his mind thoroughly made up and swung into action without even looking into his pay envelope.

“Strike! Strike!” he yelled. To lend strength to his words, he threw his hands in the air like a cheer-leader.

“Strike! Strike! Strike!”

He yelled these words as he ran, past our line, then down the room between spinning frames. The shop was alive with cries of “Strike!” after the paymaster left. … A tall Syrian worker pulled the switch and the powerful speed belts that gave life to the bobbins slackened to a stop.

There were cries: “All out!”

And hell broke loose in the spinning room. The silent, muted frames became an object of intense hatred, something against which to vent our stored-up feelings. Gears were smashed and belts cut. The Italians had long, sharp knives and with one zip the belts dangled helplessly on the pulleys.¹⁹

The strike began in subzero weather. It was snowing. The strikers poured out of the mills and roamed the streets in large, unorganized groups. Some formed a flying squad to go into other factories and bring the workers out. The mill owners had set up a group of men with hoses to guard the bridge over the canal leading to some of the factories. They turned streams of icy water on the strikers. Infuriated, the strikers took sticks from a nearby boxcar and went into one of the mills where they broke the machinery and windows and tore the fabric out of the looms.

In response to this violence—which Bill Haywood later estimated as a few hundred dollars’ worth of property damage²⁰—the mill owners demanded that the mayor call out the troops. The mayor in turn called the governor, who called out the National Guard—popularly known as the “gray wolves.” Soon the town was crowded with police and soldiers. A number of the guardsmen were Harvard students who had been given time off to “have their fling at these people.”²¹

The soldiers were prepared to crush the strikers at the slightest provocation, and the workers needed organization. The IWW leaders helped them restrain their anger and militance and form themselves into an organized mass rather than small, desperate groups. The strikers were “violent” (they damaged property) before the IWW took charge, but after that the violence was almost entirely on the side of the state. As Joe Ettor told them; “You can hope for no success on any policy of violence…. Remember the property of the bosses is protected first by the police, then the militia. If these are not sufficient, by an entire army. Remember, you are also armed … with your labor power which you can withold and stop production.”²² Or, as the IWW leaders pointed out continually, “Can they weave cloth with bayonets?”²³

The IWW emphasized both organization and Marxist political education, thus enabling the workers to put Lawrence in the context of a broader struggle between classes. The Wobblies also had experience in dealing with the press, in speaking, and in fundraising. They had a network of sympathizers, especially in the Socialist Party, who gave publicity to the strike and raised money. They knew how to bring people together, fill them with enthusiasm, and stir their emotions with the songs that were part of their fighting equipment. And they had a genius for tactical leadership.

But it was the strikers themselves who were responsible for the spirit of struggle, which came from their desperation and existed before the IWW came and after it left, and it was the rank-and-file strikers who were the source of most of the strike’s tactical innovations. It was they who thought of sending their children to comrades in other cities.²⁴ Historians say the IWW “invented” mass picketing, but they merely regularized what the strikers had begun spontaneously. The IWW summed up and popularized the best ideas of the rank and file, and then took them from Lawrence to other strike centers.

Mass picketing was the most important tactic developed in Lawrence. The strikers had been forbidden to picket in front of the mills because the sidewalk was declared private property, but they had to form some kind of barrier to keep out scabs, and because of the guardsmen they had to do this in a way that was both forceful and nonprovocative. They decided to use the full force of their numbers (at least twenty thousand) to form a moving belt of people who walked the public sidewalks surrounding the entire mill district. It was a dramatic contrast to the method of picketing used in the shirtwaist makers’ strike, in which isolated handfuls of strikers were easily picked off by the police. The mass picket line prevented scabs from getting anywhere near the plants, and at the same time became a political demonstration. In this “endless chain” the strikers, singing as they marched, affirmed their solidarity and demonstrated their collective power every day.

On Monday, January 29, the mill owners announced that they would make a special effort to keep the mills open. That day the strikers all turned out to picket, wearing IWW buttons and pieces of red cloth saying “I am not a scab.” They had virtual control of the streets. The police grew desperate and tried to halt the parade by firing into the crowd. One of their shots killed a young girl striker named Anna Lopezza. Two IWW leaders, Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, were later arrested, along with a striker named Joseph Caruso, and charged with this murder, although they were two miles away when it took place; they spent the next nine months in jail awaiting trial. The police argued that they had incited a mob to riot, thus causing Anna Lopezza’s death.

Many people, from congressmen to the Boston press to the local police force, were convinced that the strike was the work of outside agitators and could be broken by identifying and arresting a few leaders. After Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti were jailed, the Boston paper announced—in an anti-Italian spirit typical of the time—that violence would thenceforth cease and the struggle would become a routine craft union strike, because “the passing out of Ettor means the ascendancy of the whiteskinned races at Lawrence.”²⁵ Similarly, members of the congressional committee that investigated the strike held to a conspiracy theory of the struggle; they repeatedly asked the workers who had told them to go out on strike and seemed unable to understand when strikers said “the stomach” had told them to go, or that they had decided it “all together.”²⁶

After Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti were arrested, the strikers gave the police no opportunity to pick off the rest of the IWW leadership. Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and the rest were accompanied by anxious bodyguards wherever they went. The police were unable to figure out who was giving tactical leadership in street demonstrations, as the police chief. Captain Sullivan, confessed to the congressional committee:

I will tell you—there were no leaders in the streets…. The crowds on the street were usually led by women and children. The women and children were usually in the front rank, but when they came to the scene of the action they were brushed aside and the men did the work…. There were no recognized leaders except on that Monday morning when the cars were stoned. On that morning Ettor was going from place to place. He was the leader, and he was here, there, and at the other place. Wherever he was there was sure to be trouble to follow but at the time when the trouble actually occurred he was gone somewhere else.’²⁷

The police continually harassed the strikers. Hundreds were arrested and fined or jailed. Many were held for a while, then released without being charged. Others were charged with obstructing the sidewalk, and a number were given a year in jail for that.

The IWW sent all its top leaders to Lawrence: Joe Ettor came from a year of organizing in New York; Bill Trautman, an IWW founder, had just led a militant steel strike at McKees Rock, Pennsylvania; William Yates and Francis Miller were both active in the New England textile mills. J. P. Thompson, the IWW’s star educator, famous for his simple and direct exposition of Marxist economics, was almost killed in Lawrence when hired thugs broke into his bedroom, fired three shots at him, and blackjacked him so hard he got a concussion. But the acknowledged strike leader was “Big Bill” Haywood, a miner from the West, a labor hero who had become famous after being framed in a Colorado bombing,”²⁸ and a member of the Socialist Party’s executive board. When he came to Lawrence after Joe Ettor’s arrest, he was welcomed by a huge demonstration. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recalls:

Wherever Bill Haywood went, the workers followed him with glad greetings. They roared with laughter and applause when he said: “The A.F.L. organizes like this!”—separating his fingers as far apart as they would go, and naming them—“Weavers, loom-fixers, dyers, spinners.” Then he would say: “The I.W.W. organizes like this!”—“tightly, clenching his big fist, shaking it at the bosses.²⁹

Haywood was particularly idolized by the children, who saw him as a cowboy, with his ten-gallon hat and big boots. Mary Heaton Vorse tells about his sensitivity and openness to other workers. He was giving a press conference in the relief hall when an Italian woman came in and said, “I want to see Bigga Bill.” One of the other IWW officers told her that Haywood was busy, but he interrupted his press conference and said, “Brother, I’m never too busy to see any workers that want to see me. They come before reporters.” As Mary Heaton Vorse recalled him years later:

He was always accessible. He always felt the labor movement in terms of the individual worker—a little boy, shucking oysters and getting sores on his hands; the woman picking vegetables and cricking up her back. He knew how they lived. He felt what they needed. He knew their hunger. He saw the people dying of pellagra. He saw his own boy shunted around—these migratory workers. I’ve known very few labor leaders to feel continuously the actual human thing, especially in relation to women and children. He could hardly bear it.³⁰

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was amazed at Bill Haywood’s ability to communicate with the many different nationalities and at his grasp of the problems of the women and children, since before this he had worked mainly with English-speaking men. Many of the foreign-born workers had learned what little English they knew from their children. Haywood’s language was down-to-earth and unrhetorical, so that everyone could understand him. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was twenty-one at the time, said later that she had 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 a one or two could do. This is not vulgarising. Words are tools and everybody doesn’t have access to a whole tool chest.”³¹

Besides working with the women and children, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was responsible for fundraising and support work outside of Lawrence. She traveled endlessly, going to Milwaukee, to West Virginia, to Pittsburg, raising money at workers’ meetings and at Socialist Party locals. Off the platform, she was quiet and calm; she reserved her tremendous energy for speaking. Mary Heaton Vorse, who became her lifelong friend during the Lawrence strike, remembers:

When Elizabeth Gurley Flynn spoke, the excitement of the crowd became a visible thing. She stood there, young, with her Irish blue eyes, her face magnolia white and her cloud of black hair, the picture of a youthful revolutionary girl leader. She stirred them, lifted them up in her appeal for solidarity. Then, at the end of the meeting, they sang. It was as though a spurt of flame had gone through the audience, something stirring and powerful, a feeling which has made the liberation of people possible; something beautiful and strong had swept through the people and welded them together, singing.³²

Every weekend there were mass meetings where the strikers could come together in all their numbers to hear speeches, vote on the decisions of their strike committee, and feel their own strength. They concluded every meeting with “The Internationale,” the song of the Paris Commune and of workers around the world: “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation. Arise, ye wretched of the earth …”

Mass meetings were the ultimate vehicles of decision making during the strike. Day-to-day decisions were made by the strike committee, which had been set up by Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti when they first came to Lawrence. Observing that the strikers lived and socialized according to their language groups, the IWW decided to make this informal and practical division the basis of the strike organization. Each language group elected four representatives to the Central Strike Committee; very few of those elected belonged to the IWW at the beginning of the strike, although they accepted IWW advice and leadership. Since Ettor realized that strike committee members might well be arrested, each language group elected alternates as well. When Ettor himself was arrested, Haywood replaced him as leader of the committee , Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was in charge of subcommittees for relief, finances, publicity, welfare of strikers, and children.

One of the first actions of the committee was to make public the demands of the strike. These were

1.A fifteen percent increase in wages on the fifty-four hour basis.

2.Double pay for overtime work.

3.The abolition of all bonus and premium systems (the basis of speedup).

4.No discrimination against workers who were active during the strike.³³

After Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti were arrested, a demand was added for their release on bail.

The language groups, under the supervision of the strike committee, were responsible for organizing picketing and for keeping track of morale. Active strikers were assigned to keep tabs on certain people to see that they did their picket duty and went to meetings, and that they “were kept as quiet and sober and orderly as possible, which was due to the fact that there were over 1,200 militiamen in the city, and we were very much afraid of any kind of riot, knowing that the strikers would be worsted in it.”³⁴ The language groups were also responsible for keeping people from scabbing. Each nationality would get the names and addresses of its scabs and then use various forms of persuasion, ranging from informal visits to serenading them with calls of “scab” under their windows all night, to publishing their names in their home country. If persuasion failed, their houses would be splashed with red paint or pictures of the black hand; and a scab’s wife might be told she had better keep her husband home if she didn’t want him to get his throat cut. Not only were these methods extremely effective, but the strikers’ security was so good that the police were never able to convict anyone on charges of intimidation.

The business of running the strike was for the most part handled not by IWW leaders but by the strikers. They did the bookkeeping—and their books were open, one of many departures from AFL practice. They ran six commissaries and eleven soup kitchens. They formed a committee to investigate cases for relief. And, as Haywood stressed, all this organizational work was carried on by “material that in the mill was regarded as worth no more than $6 or $7 a week.”³⁵

The democratic character of the strike, its bottom-up structure, were based on IWW theory. The union believed that this was the way workers would learn how to run the society they would assuredly take over. Both they and the men who led the ILGWU were socialists, but their ideas about democracy and participation were strikingly different. The Central Strike Committee’s last statement, after the strike was won, shows that they had learned the IWW’s lesson thoroughly:

Until the workers themselves in the mass are sufficiently educated to demand and progressively secure these immediate advantages for themselves and to understand the necessity for control by ownership of the means of production and distribution as the only solution of the class struggle, their miserable condition is incapable of betterment. When the workers, or any number of them, do understand these principles, control of the organization is essentially democratic, each individual having an equal voice and vote with any other.³⁶

The IWW felt that the political education of strikers was one of its main accomplishments. It knew that a strike is like a school for workers, a space of time where they can develop their understanding and abilities in practice. Mary Heaton Vorse observed this process in Lawrence:

People who have never seen an industrial struggle think of a strike as a time of tumult, disorder and riot. Nothing could be less true. A good strike is a college for the workers. When the workers listen to the speeches they are going to school. Their minds are being opened. They are learning history and economics translated into the terms of their own lives. Many of them suddenly find hitherto unsuspected powers. Men and women, until now dumb, get up on platforms and speak with fire and with the eloquence of sincerity to their fellow workers. Others write articles and leaflets. New forms of demonstrations are invented, and the workers set off singing the songs they themselves have made up under the pressure of the strike. Like new blood these new talents flow through the masses of the workers.³⁷

No one developed more during the Lawrence strike or came forward faster than those who had been most underdeveloped, most in the background—the women of Lawrence. About half of the Lawrence strikers were women and, along with the wives and children of male strikers, their role in street actions was noticeable from the beginning. One of the first instances of striker “violence” occurred when a group of Italian women caught a policeman alone on the bridge. They took his gun, club, and star, and were beginning to remove his pants before throwing him into the river, when the cavalry charged and rescued him. Many of these women were arrested and sentenced to jail by Judge Mahoney, who explained to them in awful tones that the body of a policeman was sacred.’³⁸

In the course of the strike women became increasingly active; from February on clashes between the women and the police and militia grew more frequent. The police, mill owners, and press raised loud objections to the role women played in the street. The Lawrence district attorney said in court that the strike committee was made up of cowards who sent their women onto the picket line; he thought they should put men there instead, since “one policeman can handle ten men, while it takes ten policemen to handle one woman.”³⁹ The women spontaneously began to take leadership in street confrontations. Fred Beal describes one such occasion:

One day, after the militia was called, thousands of us strikers marched to Union Street again. In the front ranks a girl carried a large American flag. When we arrived at the junction of Canal and Union Streets, we were met by a formidable line of militia boys, with rifles and attached bayonets. They would not let us proceed.

An officer on horseback gave orders: “Port Arms! Disperse the crowd!”

Whereupon the militia, boys between the ages seventeen to twenty, guns leveled waist-high, moved toward the crowd. Their bayonets glistened in the sunlight. On and on they moved. The strikers in front could not move because of the pressing of the crowd behind them. It looked as if the murder of Anna LoPezza would be multiplied many times. And then the girl with the American flag stepped forward. With a quick motion she wrapped the Stars and Stripes around her body and defied the militia to make a hole in Old Glory.

The officer on horseback permitted us to proceed and there was no further trouble.⁴⁰

The IWW did special work with women to ensure that they were able to play a strong role in strike activities. Wobbly leaders struggled with the attitudes of husbands and priests, who wanted to hold women back. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn describes the way the IWW dealt with this problem:

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. 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.⁴¹

Flynn also told the women how to deal with shopkeepers’ complaints; they should try to get credit by pointing out that the people who used their stores were workers, not mill owners, and that when they got more pay they would spend more.

Organizing housewives was basic to the IWW’s strike strategy, just as using the opportunities generated by an intense struggle was the IWW’s fundamental method of organizing women. While AFL strikes often forced husbands and wives apart, IWW strikes united them. As Elizabeth Gurley Flynn described it:

The I.W.W. appeals to women to organize side by side with their men folks, in the union that shall increasingly determine its own rules of work and wages—until its solidarity and power shall the world command. It points out to the young girl that marriage is no escape from the labor problem, and to the mother, that the interest of herself and her children are woven in with the interests of the class….

Where a secluded home environment has produced a psychological attitude of “me and mine”—how is the I.W.W. to overcome conservatism and selfishness? By driving women into an active participation in union affairs, especially strikes, where the mass meetings, mass picketing, women’s meetings and children’s gatherings are a tremendous emotional stimulant. The old unions never have considered the women as part of the strike. They were expected to stay home and worry about the empty larder, the hungry kiddies and the growling landlord, easy prey to the agents of the company. But the strike was “a man’s business.” The men had the joy of the fight, the women not even an intelligent explanation of it….

Women can be the most militant or most conservative element in a strike, in proportion to their comprehension of its purposes. The I.W.W. has been accused of putting the women in the front. The truth is, the I.W.W. does not keep them in the back, and they go to the front.⁴²

As a result of the Wobblies’ encouragement, female leaders began to develop from the rank and file, and women were elected as delegates to the strike committee. Among them were Rose Cardullo, Josephine Liss, and Annie Welsenbach, probably the most remarkable. She was a highly skilled worker who did invisible reweaving, repairing tiny holes in the cloth. Her husband was also skilled and they were well off, as Lawrence workers went. But she had begun work at the age of fourteen and knew well what conditions were like for most of the workers. She told a reporter: “I have been getting madder and madder for years at the way they talked to these poor Italians and Lithuanians.”⁴³ She became utterly dedicated to the strike, leading the mass of strikers down Essex Street day after day, and was elected to the ten-person negotiating committee. It was said after the strike that if she lifted a finger, three of the mills would go out.

When Bill Haywood took over the leadership, the IWW began to hold special meetings not only for women but for children. The children of immigrants in Lawrence, as elsewhere, tended to become Americanized and grow away from their parents’ “old-country” culture. Those who were fortunate enough to be able to stay in school were taught to despise their parents for being immigrants and workers. After the strike began, they were taught that it was “un-American.” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn describes the situation and the way the Wobblies tried to deal with it:

The efforts of the church and schools were directed to driving a wedge between the school children and their striking parents. Often, children in such a town became ashamed of their foreign- born, foreign-speaking parents, their old-country ways, their accents, their foreign newspapers, and now it was their strike and mass picketing. The up-to-date, well-dressed, native-born teachers set a pattern. The working-class women were shabbily dressed, though they made the finest woolen fabrics. Only a few American-born women wore hats in Lawrence. The others wore shawls, kerchiefs, or worsted knitted caps made at home. Some teachers called the strikers lazy, said they should go back to work or “back where they came from.” We attempted to counteract all this at our children’s meetings. Big Bill, with his Western hat and stories about cowboys and Indians, became an ideal of the kids. The parents were pathetically grateful to us as their children began to show real respect for them and their struggles.⁴⁴

The strikers could not make their children stay indoors when so much was happening in the streets, but as more and more troops poured into the city they became increasingly worried about their children’s safety. Their fears increased after a sixteen-year-old Syrian striker named John Ramey was bayoneted in the back. The soldiers accosted teenage girls roughly, and the younger children were terrified and confused by the soldiers’ hostility to them and their parents. Samuel Lipson, a striker, told the congressional committee about his fears for his children:

Many children, you know, are hurt. While going along the street, ỉ have seen a soldier—a striker went along with a little dog with him, and the soldier wanted to start trouble and stabbed that dog with his bayonet. … I sent my child away because I did not want my child to see what is going on in that city ; because he opened his eyes and said to me: “Why do they hurt those people? Why do the soldiers try to hurt those people and put the bayonets against them?” … He is eight years old.⁴⁵

Fear for their children’s safety, together with the desire to have them securely fed, gave the strikers the idea of sending their children to sympathizers in other cities. It was a common practice in Italy to send children from a town on strike to relatives and comrades in other towns, and the Italians suggested the idea to the strike committee.⁴⁶ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn communicated with various Socialist organizations, and the New York Socialist Party and Italian Socialist Federation were very enthusiastic about the idea. They made plans for a giant reception for the children at Grand Central Station, after which the children would be given dinner and then taken to the homes they were to stay in, all of which were thoroughly investigated by a committee of New York socialist women. The IWW press reported proudly that only left-wing or labor homes would have the privilege of playing host. Margaret Sanger, a trained nurse, was to go and fetch the children from Lawrence.”⁴⁷

The exodus of the Lawrence children, which began in early February, gave all the sections of the New York labor movement a chance to demonstrate their support for the strike. Hundreds of people spent most of the day in Grand Central Station, since the IWW had neglected to inform anyone what time the train was due. Mary Heaton Vorse, who had not yet gone to Lawrence, wrote her friend Arthur Bullard about the goings-on:

The waiting part of the Grand Central was just crammed. The babies spoke between them something like forty-four languages and dialects, so there were all sorts of nationalities and people there, and every sort of a local was represented. Italians were very much in evidence. The Sergeant on duty was an Anarchist hater, and he intemperately remarked that “the red flag of anarchy shouldn’t fly in New York while he was a cop.” This irritated deeply the Comrades and the Brethren, and for a minute there was a curious little tenseness in the air,—that little mob growl, not the real growl yet, but the first whisper of a storm. The sergeant went out to send for more cops, and the mob got black in the brow.…

The whole situation was charmingly saved by some humorous, wide-faced gentleman who played a joke on the cops and Anarchists both, for he went out and got a blackboard and wrote on it:

“This is a free country. Harvard Students,” in red letters, and he placed this lovely device beneath the red flag of Anarchy. Of course the Italians didn’t know what it was all about while the cops grinned sheepishly. I think they had a lingering suspicion that there might be a little college nonsense back of it and it is of course so tactless to run in a student when you think you have got a Black-Hander.

Of course the Anarchists wouldn’t do anything they were asked to do, not feeling that they could be good Anarchists and take an order from anyone or be obliging, so the whole bunch surged up and down, and a nice, fine, heady mob feeling grew and grew until you felt that the slightest thing might touch it off. I love it. And after hours and hours of waiting the children at last came….

I followed them down to the Labor Temple and you could trace their progress down the road by the little mittens that had been provided by the reception commiteee.⁴⁸

The exodus of the children provided the Lawrence strike with its first good publicity. The press had a field day over the dreadful, starved, and sickly condition of the travelers. The radical papers pointed out that this condition was due to low wages as well as the strike, and the Lawrence authorities claimed that the strike committee had deliberately dressed the children in rags to fool the press. They even accused the strikers of deliberately exploiting the suffering of their own children.

This publicity enabled Victor Berger, the socialist congressman from Wisconsin, to arrange an inquiry by the House Rules Committee, where Margaret Sanger bore witness to the condition of the children:

All of these children were walking about apparently not noticing chicken pox or diptheria: one child had diptheria, and had been walking around, and no attention paid to it at all, and had been working up to the time of the strike. Out of the 119 children four of them had underwear on, and it was the most bitter weather; we had to run all the way from the hall to the station in order to keep warm…. They were very much emaciated; every child there showed the effects of malnutrition. … I have been brought up in a factory town where there were glassblowers and children of glassblowers, and I must say that I have never seen in any place children so ragged and so deplorable as these children were. I have never seen such children in my work in the Italian districts of New York City; in the slum districts, I must say, there are always a few of them who are fat and rugged, but these children were pale and thin.⁴⁹

Another group of 126 children left Lawrence on February 17, some for New York and some for Barre, Vermont. They also got considerable sympathetic publicity. The Lawrence mill owners and town fathers began to get alarmed, and the police decided that not only did they have to stop more children from leaving, but they also had to try to get back the ones who had already gone. Samuel Lipson reported to the congressional committee:

Many women, Polish women, came up to my house. They have children in New York, and they cried. I said, “What is the matter?” They said, “Two or three times the Policemen came over to my house and told me to send for my children to call them back”; I said, “What is the matter? I received letters daily from my children saying that they were happy; that they have new clothes, and they are eating there every day as they used to eat at home on Sunday; and they have so much to eat that if the parents have not enough they want them to come to New York, and they will give it to them.” And they were frightened by the police, and also they sent the landlord up, and the landlord said to these women: “If you are not going to call your children back we will put you out of the house.” They frightened the parents to make them call the children back; and the women said: “I received letters from my children saying that they are happy, and I don’t know what to do.”⁵⁰

On February 22 seven children were arrested at the station and told that if they were hungry they should go to the city poor farm. The chief of police told the press: “There will be no more children leaving Lawrence until we are satisfied that the police cannot stop their going.”⁵¹

A large group of children was supposed to go to Philadelphia two days later. Gertrude Marvin, a one-time reporter for a Boston daily who had quit when the editor refused to print her pro-strike stories, told the readers of the IWW paper Solidarity what happened at the station:

The police closed in on them. Mothers seized their children in their arms as the police charged down on them. Fathers and other men who had been waiting outside were dragged away and thrown to the ground as they tried to interfere. Children were dragged from their mothers and knocked down and trampled. The women, infuriated, sprang at the officers to rescue their little ones, and instantly the officers drew their clubs. Scratching, kicking, screaming, the mass of men and women and children vibrated back and forth across the platform…. Officers clubbed right and left with their heavy loaded sticks, steadily, persistently. Wails of the children as they were knocked down and kicked about, and the screams of maddened women made a terrifying noise. Details were lost. It became a confused hideous melee of brutality and suffering. Underneath was the sickening dread that some of these lives would be lost. One shot just then would have meant many more.”⁵²

The officers dragged the women and children to a wagon waiting at one end of the station, took the women to jail, and put the children in the city poor farm—it being against the law to keep minors in the same lockup as adults unless they were babes in arms.

The story of “cossacks” beating defenseless women and children who were merely trying to leave Lawrence made headlines across the country. The tide of public opinion began to turn in favor of the strikers. Some of the children from Lawrence later testified to great effect before the congressional committee in Washington.

The same day that the children were beaten and arrested at the railway station, the women strikers launched their first major independent offensive in the streets. It was probably their intention to draw most of the troops away from the railway station. The offensive had been organized the day before by a pregnant Italian woman, who gathered up some of her compatriots and went to the Polish meeting where Bill Haywood was to speak. He lifted her onto a table and she spoke in broken English:

“Men, woman: I come speak to you. I been speaking to others. Just now tomorrow morning all women come see me half past four at Syrian church. Tonight no sleep. You meet me at half past four, not sleep tonight.

“You all come with me. We go tell folks no go to work. Men all stay home, all men and boys stay home. Just now all woman and girl come with me. Soldier he hurt man. Soldier he no hurt woman. He no hurt me. Me got big belly. She too,” pointing to one of her friends, “she got big belly too. Soldier no hurt me…. Soldier he got mother.”

As Haywood lifted her from the table a scene of the wildest enthusiasm ensued in the packed hall, containing over 1,500 strikers. Men and women were in tears. Tears were streaming down the woman’s face, down Haywood’s face, down the face of everybody in the room. The woman kissed Haywood’s hands while Haywood kissed hers, and had to leave the hall without giving his speech.⁵³

The optimism of the pregnant woman proved unfounded. The troops attacked the picketers, beat them, and arrested them. Both Italian women miscarried.⁵⁴ When these events were described to the congressional committee, Mrs. Taft, wife of the president, is reported to have rushed from the room in distress. Chief of Police Sullivan gave his own version of events, emphasizing the “as-saults” the women made on the scabs:

There were times when we had difficulty in keeping these women from getting in the patrol wagon to be arrested; they were martyrs, heroines; they wanted to be held up, they wanted to be brought to the police station and charged with an assault and interfering with people; lots of them had money in their pockets, but they would not pay fines and would not accept bail; they wanted to be sent to jail. Now, on that Monday morning, a great many people were arrested—that is, these women, for assaulting workers who were going to the mills [i.e., talking to them]—and they were brought to the police station and locked up.⁵⁵

The strikers presented their point of view with equal vividness, as in a letter to Massachusetts Governor Foss describing similar events on March 1:

Since the federal investigation is on, women thought they were secure in walking on the streets and that their constitutional rights were guaranteed. Peaceful women went to a meeting on March first, on a Friday. Returning home, about 15 of them were suddenly surrounded by 50 or more Metropolitan police officers. There had been no provocation, no shouting even or any noise. These women were assaulted and clubbed, and an officer in blue, leaning out of a window of city hall, urged them on in their fiendish, savage attacks. Breaking into two divisions they would not allow the women to escape. … Not until one of the women, Bertha F. Carosse, 151 Elm Street, was beaten into insensibility did the thugs in uniform desist. The beaten woman was carried unconscious to a hospital and pregnant with new life; this was blown into eternity by the fiendish beating and was born dead, murdered in a mother’s womb by the clubs of hired murderers of the law that you have so recklessly overridden and abridged. … we will remember, we will never forget and never forgive.⁵⁶

The Lawrence strike was like a roadblock in history, stopping every person and organization involved, making them decide which way they were going and which side they were on. Mary Heaton Vorse and her future husband, Joe O’Brien, felt that way:

Something transforming had happened to both of us. We knew now where we belonged—on the side of the workers and not with the comfortable people among whom we were born…. Some synthesis had taken place between my life and that of the workers, some peculiar change which would never again permit me to look with indifference on the fact that riches for the few were made by the misery of the many…. The sense of indignation … was not the whole story…. It was seeing of what beauty human beings are capable.⁵⁷

After the strike had gone on for eight weeks, the mill owners began to meet with the strike committee. The pressure of public opinion was an important factor in inducing the mill owners to come to the negotiating table, as were the questions the congressmen began to raise at the inquiry about Tariff K, which had raised the price of imported woolen goods from 50 to 100 percent in order to protect the domestic manufacturers, but which, the investigators suggested, had failed to protect the workers and should therefore be reduced. The owners offered the strike committee a 5 percent increase; when this was rejected, they offered 7 percent, then 7.5 percent. Each offer was rejected. Finally, on March 12 the negotiating committee came back with an offer of 25 percent increases for the lowest-paid workers, who were making nine and a half cents an hour. The wage increases were arranged on a sliding scale, with the lowest-paid workers getting the highest increase. Everyone would get time and a quarter for overtime, and the companies promised no discrimination against strikers.’⁵⁸ The strike committee advised the strikers to accept the package.

At a mass meeting on March 14 on the Lawrence Common, twenty thousand strikers voted unanimously to accept the agreement and go back to work. They vowed to keep their organization intact and concluded, as always, by singing “The Internationale”: “The earth shall rise on new foundations, We have been naught, we shall be all.”

As a result of the strike’s success, there was a wave of strikes across New England. In Lowell, Massachussets, the mill owners rushed to offer a 5 percent raise as soon as the IWW organizers hit town. A quarter of a million textile workers in New England got wage increases as a result of the Lawrence strike.⁵⁹ The settlement was a great victory, not only for the Lawrence workers but for all U.S. textile workers.

The Lawrence strike was supported by a wide range of organizations, including the WTUL and the Socialist Party—though because of the explicitly revolutionary character of the IWW’s unionism, the range was less broad than it had been in the shirtwaist makers’ strike. The AFL’s contribution to the strike, however, was primarily negative. The AFL’s United Textile Workers had never organized more than a handful of skilled workers in the Lawrence mills, but when the strike began to show its strength, they came to town to see what they could get out of it. The UTW’s leader, John Golden, was second to none in his hatred for the IWW: as soon as the strike broke out, he wired the mayor of Lawrence to offer his support for the city’s efforts to suppress the strikers. He later praised the city fathers for calling out the National Guard. The AFL organizers in Lawrence repeatedly referred to the IWW as a violent bunch of anarchists, and to its immigrant members as a lawless rabble.

John Golden even went so far as to support the Lawrence police in their policy of beating up and arresting children at the Lawrence railroad station. He told the congressional committee as much:

MR. GOLDEN: … these children are not being sent away for any benefit to the children or their parents…. The motive, as I said before, was to draw sympathy of people by the advertising or exploiting of these children so that the propaganda of the industrial workers, which means the destruction of our movement, could be preached, and not in the interest of these children or their parents.

MR. STANLEY: You mean that that labor organization would absorb yours and you are kicking about that?

MR. GOLDEN: We do not consider it a labor organization.⁶⁰

Golden set up his own relief station, hoping to divert funds from the relief committee set up by the Central Strike Committee. He then attempted to negotiate not only for his few members, but for the masses of unskilled workers represented by the Committee. He failed, as the head of the Everett Mills told the press:s

In the deputation which came to see me the other day I was surprised to find not a single employee who either works or has worked at our mills. There was even one who does not live in Lawrence at all. The leader of the deputation admitted that the American Federaüon of Labor had not succeeded in getting enough of the Everett employes to their meetings to make up or form part of a committee.⁶¹

The tiny AFL craft unions negotiated as a bloc, separately from the other workers. They were offered a small increase and voted to return to work on March 5, a full two weeks before the rest of the workers settled. The AFL relief station subsequently gave food only to strikers who agreed to go back to work. This extraordinary example of AFL strikebreaking got an unusual amount of publicity and increased public sympathy for the IWW. Many AFL locals were completely disgusted with their leadership and sent their relief contributions to the IWW’s Central Strike Committee instead.

Despite the outrageous character of his actions, John Golden, as leader of the UTW in New England, had considerable influence with liberals who would ordinarily support a strike, as well as with the press, the labor movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, who went up to Lawrence to see what was happening for herself, spoke sharply of John Golden’s adverse effect on the strike:

There is in Boston a group of social workers who have not gone to Lawrence, who are believed to have been guided by the president of the Textile Workers of America, and who have fought the strikers from the beginning. Among them are some who have asserted that it would be better for the strike to be lost than to obtain a settlement through the general strike committee. These social workers know or should know that under the old regime, children, thousands of them, suffered from underfeeding, and that other children as old as nine years have never seen the inside of a schoolhouse because they have no clothes…. The influence of Mr. Golden with the power and prestige of the American Federation of Labor in the background, has proved astounding. Yet, judging from the relief funds that have continued to pour in to the general strike committee from unions in the American Federation, the organization as a whole could not have approved his acts.⁶²

Mary Kenney O’Sullivan played an important role in the strike, for she was the only one of the old-time AFL leaders who supported the “new unionism.” She did so on her own, not on behalf of the Women’s Trade Union League, whose support was compromised and equivocal at best. She even put up bail for Ettor and Giovannitti and on one occasion helped in negotiations. As her companion in the Boston League, Elizabeth Glendower Evans, wrote Margaret Dreier Robins, “She is the only one of us who had sense, and did anything better than muddle.”⁶³ Although half of the Lawrence strikers were women, the Boston branch of the League did not even visit Lawrence until almost three weeks after the strike began. John Golden had told them to stay home, and many members of the League felt that their AFL affiliation prevented them from giving-aid to a rival organization. The League dithered until the beginning of February, when Golden told them they could help the AFL with its relief station. But if the women had been expecting that their relief efforts would become as central to the Lawrence strikers as they had been to the shirtwaist strikers, they were disappointed. The AFL’s relief work was at best a sideshow; it helped few workers and was a front for Golden’s effort to sell out the strike, efforts in which the League became implicated. When Golden settled separately and ordered that anyone who came to the AFL relief station must be told to go back to work, the Boston WTUL withdrew from the situation in dismay. But since Sarah Conboy, a Boston textile worker who was working for the League but had previously been employed by Golden, stayed on at the relief station, the masses of strikers assumed the League supported the AFL’s efforts to break the strike.

Like Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a broad-minded rich woman who was the financial mainstay of the · Boston WTUL, was outraged by Golden’s conduct and the cooperation he got from the League. She wrote:

Well, I was such a fool that I accepted Mr. Golden’s and Miss Gillespie’s [Mabel Gillespie, secretary of the Boston League] say-so that the strike was legitimately ended and that those who refused to come in should be disciplined. I had not been on the spot, and I exercised no independent judgement, but accepted their say-so. It was later that I went to strike headquarters and I saw the real vital immense thing—the great body of many races and tongues dominated by a single purpose—and realized the absurdity of ever having thought of the tiny little C.L.U. [Central Labor Union of the AFL] headquarters as anything more than a travesty and a fake. It simply filled me with despair for our League as a live thing at all, that our secretary and Mrs. Conboy, vice-president and organizer, had been there continuously for weeks and had muddled along as remote from the real condition so it seems to me, as if they had been in Alaska—had maintained and indeed believed that “organized labor was in control” because of the petty relief work of the C.L.U. relief station and John Golden’s conferences up in Boston—had accepted his say-so that the vague concessions announced in the papers and a vote of four small locals was an “honorable settlement” that should bind all strikers—it fills me with despair, I say, that such preposterous claims should be accepted and still defended by Miss Gillespie and Mrs. Conboy and by the League as a whole.⁶⁴

There was considerable debate within the League following the debacle of their work in Lawrence. Was there any way they could retain their link to the AFL and not close off all possibility of working with this new, vital movement for industrial unionism? Sue Ainslie Clark, president of the Boston League, summarized the different opinions and added her own:

Certain members of the Boston League believe that its course was the only one open to it since it was affiliated with the A.F. of L. and aimed to propagate the principles of craft unionism endorsed by that organization. Certain others believe that we might have cooperated with the Strike Committee from the first, as individuals…. Still others think that our part has been a disgraceful one in this great struggle. Others regard the success of the Lawrence strike, through the I.W.W. methods, as an object lesson by which the League—and the A.F. of L.—must profit in order to play a vital part in the rapidly moving evolution of the labor movement today.

To me, many of those in power in the A.F. of L. today seem to be selfish, reactionary and remote from the struggle for bread and liberty of the unskilled workers. The danger confronted by the A.F. of L. is that immemorially confronted by organizations in church and government when creed and consideration of safety obscure the original spirit and aim. Are we, the Women’s Trade Union League, to ally ourselves inflexibly with the “standpatters” of the Labor Movement or are we to hold ourselves ready to aid the “insurgents,” those who are freely fighting the fight of the exploited, the oppressed and the weak among the workers?⁶⁵

Margaret Dreier Robins did not think the League had any choice. During the Hart, Schaffner and Marx strike in Chicago the year before, when the corrupt AFL leadership of the United Garment Workers were locked in a struggle with an insurgent IWW-led rank-and-file movement, she and the Chicago Federation of Labor had been caught in the middle. The IWW’s criticisms of her role in the Chicago strike probably made her even less receptive to cooperation with them than she would otherwise have been.⁶⁶ The League had a national executive board meeting in April 1912, and Lawrence was on the agenda. According to the minutes:

Miss Dreier asked what the future action of the League would be in a situation where the I.W.W. people were in and there was need for the organization of women as in the textile trade.

Mrs. Robins stated that owing to our affiliation we could not go into a strike where the I.W.W. was in control.⁶⁷

As usual, Margaret Dreier Robins prevailed. After 1912 the League stayed as far away as possible from any IWW strike, completely ignoring the enormous strike of female textile workers in Paterson, New Jersey, the next year. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Elizabeth Glendower Evans dropped out of the Boston League as a result of the Lawrence strike and what it revealed about the AFL and the League:

The A.F. of L. in Massachusetts, and perhaps pretty generally, is losing its hold. Its strict craft organization is not adapted to the assimilation of the unskilled foreign races. Perhaps it has got to be smashed, or purged, or reorganized. Just at present, I don’t see where a person in my position can lend a hand. And I don’t see how a League linked strictly to the disintegrating A.F. of L. can become real.⁶⁸

The only outside organization that unequivocally supported the Lawrence strike was the Socialist Party, and its aid was indispensable . Socialist locals sent about $40,000 in strike funds. (IWW locals sent about $16,000, and AFL locals about $11,000, despite their leadership’s opposition.) Victor Berger arranged the congressional hearing that brought the strikers their first favorable publicity, and Socialists put the real news of the strike in their own newspapers to counteract the lies of the regular press. When the Lawrence Common was barred to the strikers and they had nowhere to meet, the socialist Franco-Beige consumer cooperative gave them its hall, sold them bread at cost, and provided a soup kitchen. After the strike victory. Bill Haywood paid tribute to the help of the Socialist Party:

The success of the Lawrence strike was largely due to the support and the influence of the socialist movement of America. (Applause.) It was you who came to our relief. When we made an appeal for financial aid it was the socialists who sent nearly three-fourths of all the funds that were raised during that strike. It was the working class of New York City, of Philadelphia, of Manchester and Barre, many of whom were socialists, who took care of the children during the long period of the industrial war. Without the support of the socialists, the strike of Lawrence could never have been won. (Applause.)⁶⁹

Nevertheless, the Lawrence strike was the last waltz in an increasingly troubled romance between the IWW and the Socialist Party. Even as the strikers were celebrating their victory, the music ended in discord. The night before Joe Ettor went to Lawrence, two members of the party’s executive committee, Morris Hillquit, a New York lawyer, who represented the party’s reform elements, and Bill Haywood, who represented its left wing, held a debate on strategy at Cooper Union. So much factional feeling was in evidence that admission was restricted to party members. Haywood responded to a certain amount of baiting by waving the red flag repeatedly in Hillquit’s face, especially in his talk of sabotage (a favorite slogan in the IWW). Among other things, he said;

I am not here to waste time on the “immediate demanders” or the step-at-a-time people whose every step is just a little shorter than the preceding step. … I am going to speak on the class struggle, and I am going to make it so plain that even a lawyer can understand it…. we know the class struggle in the west. And realizing, having contended with all the bitter things that we have been called upon to drink to the dregs, do you blame me when I say that I despise the law (tremendous applause and shouts of “No!”) and I am not a law-abiding citizen. (Applause.) And more than that, no Socialist can be a law-abiding citizen. (Applause.) When we come together and are of a common mind, and the purpose of our minds is to overthrow the capitalist system, we become conspirators then against the United States government. And certainly it is our purpose to abolish this government (applause) and establish in its place an industrial democracy….

I again want to justify direct action and sabotage. … I don’t know of anything that can be applied that will bring as much satisfaction to you, as much anguish to the boss as a little sabotage in the right place at the proper time. Find out what it means. It won’t hurt you and it will cripple the boss.⁷⁰

This speech so infuriated the right wing of the party that some of them could not even wait until the Lawrence strike was over to attack Haywood publicly. One such was Lena Morrow Lewis, the lone female member of the party’s national executive committee, who stated emphatically in an interview that

the advice of Joseph J. Ettor to put emery dust into the machines precipitates an issue between those who believe in destructive tactics as against constructive methods….To advocate the destruction of property is a reversion to the brute instinct in men. Machinery is the stored-up labor of the producer, and any attempt to destroy the productive force is a menace to humanity…. The Lawrence strike is only a pebble…. The statement of some of our utopian friends that this is the beginning of the social revolution is, to say the least, evidence of their lack of knowledge as to what constitutes the social revolution. The social revolution takes place in society when a class having no political or economic power as a class organizes itself and becomes the dominant class, politically and economically. The social revolution may be accomplished without the shedding of a drop of blood, or the destruction of any property.⁷¹

The war between the party’s left and right wings broke out in full force at the Socialist Party convention in May 1912. The right wing made a motion to amend the party’s constitution to expel any member who opposed electoral work or advocated sabotage. In the ensuing struggle, they were clearly dominant. The left wing never controlled the party machinery or convention and in any case probably accounted for no more than a third of the party’s membership. During the floor debate, Victor Berger, who had served the strikers so well in Congress, distinguished himself :

Berger then got the floor and made his regular biennial threat of quitting the party and forming a new organization. “You will have a split yet,” he shouted, “and by God, I am ready to split right now! I am going back to Milwaukee and tell them to cut the cancer of anarchy from their body. There is a difference between revolution and organized murder. We, in Milwaukee, believe in revolutionary political action (laughter) but we are opposed to the bomb and the dagger. You know where sabotage leads to. It led to the Haymarket riots. … I can see anarchism under the cloak of the I.W.W. and it is trying to fasten itself on the Socialist party.⁷²

The anti-sabotage amendment passed in a party-wide referendum. The right wing then staged another referendum to recall Haywood from the national executive committee; it passed by two to one—but only 20 percent of the party membership bothered to vote.⁷³ As a result of these developments, most IWW members and sympathizers left the party. The coalition of forces that had helped the Lawrence strikers win such a resounding victory no longer existed, and both the Socialist Party and the IWW were weaker for the lack of it.

Encouraged by the failure of the Paterson strike in 1913, the New York Call launched a campaign to criticize the IWW’s strike conduct a year after the split. Its editor charged:

Lawrence was won by the I.W.W. There are at present over 12,000 people out of work in that city. It is not a strike. It is a shutdown…. Would it be just to demand an accounting from the I.W.W.? Here are so many promises made. How have they been carried out? Here are so many boasts of superior tactics. Where are the goods? It is about time to get down to earth and realize there is no short cut to the industrial republic, and that a theory does not stay a starving, belly…. The only capitalist map is still all black, and you can go to any battlefield and find out what the results have been.⁷⁴

Ben Williams, the editor of Solidarity, stoutly defended his organization and the workers in it:

That they failed to end the class struggle, or to permanently improve conditions by one manifestation thereof, seems to the genius of the Call, an unforgivable sin. If the Call were really a socialist paper, instead of berating the workers for their folly in struggling under the banner of the I.W.W., it would understand that only through such constant struggles can the working class finally be brought to sufficient unity to overthrow capitalism.⁷⁵

William’s rebuttal was correct, but so was the Call’s description of the way conditions had deteriorated in Lawrence. Immediately after the strike the mill owners began an offensive which included not only the prosecution of Ettor and Giovannitti, but the importation of new groups of workers, especially French Canadians, the massive use of spies, and the blacklisting of IWW militants. Most of the IWW’s national leadership left Lawrence as soon as the strike was over, and when they were blacklisted many of its militant workers left as well. Samuel Lipson, a member of the Central Strike Committee who had testified at the congressional hearings, wrote Victor Berger in April 1912:

All the people returned to work, and do pleasantly enjoy the increased wages, but me. There is really no chance for me to earn a living in this city. Because all are united against me, especially the manufacturers inside the mills and good citizens, business-men, police, clergymen, in brief all are trying to the best of their ability, to get such a dangerous man as I am, out of their dear old home town…. Therefore, I have decided to look for bread some where else.⁷⁶

Undeterred and still riding high from the strike, the IWW in Lawrence turned its attention to getting Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso freed from their trumped-up murder charges. The case became a national issue; there was a one-day general strike over it in Lawrence; and finally the jury, all working men, handed down a verdict of not guilty. It was a considerable victory.

When the demonstrations of rank-and-file militancy around the Ettor-Giovannitti trial led to a one-day general strike, the employers became convinced that their previous tactics had been inadequate, and that they needed a more concerted effort to redivide the working class along national and political lines. Using as their pretext a “No God! No Master!” banner flaunted by some Boston anarchists at an Ettor-Giovannitti rally in Lawrence, the mill owners began to rally the Lawrence middle class around the flag of patriotism. A huge banner reading “For God and Country! The Red Flag Never!” was stretched across Essex Street, the main shopping area. Merchants were urged to hang the Stars and Stripes outside their shops. The Lawrence Citizens’ Committee, made up of the mill owners and their friends, started a vigilante movement to terrorize foreigners, particularly Syrians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians, the national groups that had been most active in the strike.⁷⁷ One Polish worker was killed in a fight with vigilantes.⁷⁸

The IWW met the God-and-country offensive in various imaginative ways. Its members began to boycott the flag-waving shops on Essex Street, and made vivid speeches inside them to tell the shopkeepers why; “You gotta da flag outa, huh? Youa greata Americano? Say Italiano no gooda…. Ah, me no want youa shoesa!”⁷⁹ The Polish members of the IWW drew $50,000 in deposits out of the Lawrence banks, saying they would keep the money in Boston until Lawrence financial interests learned to treat foreigners with respect.⁸⁰

These measures had some effect on the small shopkeepers, but there can be little doubt that the God-and-country campaign disrupted the unity of the Lawrence working class. Even during the strike, some national groupings had sided with the employers. The French Canadians had almost all scabbed, and now hundreds more were being imported into the city. The Irish workers of Lawrence were almost a separate caste; they were favored over non-English speaking nationalities in the mills and had an entrée into the city’s political patronage machine. Many of them participated in the vigilante attacks.⁸¹ (The antistrike Judge Mahoney, Mayor Scanlon, Chief of Police Sullivan, and School Commissioner John Breen, who planted dynamite in an attempt to frame the IWW, were examples of the kind of reactionary leadership the Irish workers got from their politicians. Their priest. Father O’Reilly, was the major organizer of the patriotism campaign.)

The IWW responded to the vigilantes by threatening to move its workers out of Lawrence. The plan indicates how demoralized and fearful some of the IWW-led workers were becoming and how successful the mill owners’ campaign was, IWW bravado notwithstanding:

Plans are being made to move the Syrian, Polish, Lithuanian and Italian members of the I.W.W. out of Lawrence, if the outrages against them continue…. The I.W.W. has advice from Western Pennsylvania that several thousand positions may be secured in the steel and iron mills there. The threatened migration has frightened the mill corporations. They are pushed with orders and complain of a shortage of labor.⁸²

In fact, the corporations were advertising for workers—not because they were afraid the IWW members would leave, but because they wanted to replace them and create an atmosphere of fear due to an oversupply of labor. They also began to shut down their Lawrence mills, while running their mills in other cities full time, in order to create unemployment in Lawrence that could break the IWW.⁸³

The IWW was aware of what was going on. The Lawrence union wrote the national in February 1913:

It is apparent on every hand that the masters are laying plans for a wholesale reduction in wages; from present indications the tariff is to be monkeyed with, and this will give the bosses a pretext for taking back what they so reluctantly gave us last winter. Are we to permit another outrage upon the workers? … Here in Lawrence there are over 5,000 workers, idle, laid off, no work. The American Woolen Company, who never run all their machinery at one and the same time are, at this writing, shutting down their most modern machinery in Lawrence, while keeping their other mills running full and overtime. This would seem to the casual observer a suicidal policy, but the American Woolen Company are no fools. In shutting down in Lawrence they are trying to kill two birds with one stone—to curtail production on the one hand and kill the I.W.W. on the other.⁸⁴

Though they were aware of the problem, they could find no way to deal with the effects of the “runaway shop.” The induced depression in Lawrence was deepened by a national depression that began in the summer of 1913 and lasted until war orders started to pour in from Europe in 1915. There was massive unemployment in the winter of 1914–1915, and fifteen thousand textile workers walked the streets of Lawrence looking for work.⁸⁵ IWW militants tried to organize among the unemployed but were not very effective. IWW members became increasingly isolated, and their numbers began to decline: in September 1912, half a year after the strike, Local 20 still had over ten thousand paid-up members, but a month later when the God-and-country campaign was at its height, the IWW could rally only four thousand workers to a counterdemonstration.⁸⁶ By the summer of 1913 when the depression was in full force, Local 20 was down to seven hundred members, few of whom were active. Phillips Russell, an IWW sympathizer, described a meeting of Local 20 at that time:

There were 30 or 40 workingmen, comparative strangers to each other a short time before, more or less separated by differences in race, nationality, politics, religion and custom, who sat down in perfect amity to discuss their common interests as workers in an industry; to work out their problems as producers, to regulate as far as lay within their, as yet limited, power their conditions of toil and to provide for the good and welfare of all.

The Italian sat next to the German, the Syrian next the Frenchman, the Pole next the Portuguese, the Lithuanian next the American, and an Irishman was chairman over all!⁸⁷

He was right to be impressed by such internationalism, but the numbers were small and there were apparently no women present. As far as we can tell, the women of Lawrence sank back into household obscurity, childbearing, and endless labor in the mills when the strike was over. They had been able to rise when their whole class rose: in the crisis enough pressure was lifted from the backs of working mothers to give them room to think and move. But when their class went under in defeat, they were the most submerged, for their struggle for equality within the working- class movement could only succeed when the whole class was in motion.