Bread and Roses

 That's me, in the strong arms of my grandmothers.

Bread and Roses: The 1912 Lawrence textile Strike
By Joyce Kornbluh, edited for length and clarity

With some words by me in blue.

Early in January 1912 a dramatic ten-week strike of 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts became a widely publicized conflict, acquainting the nation with the plight of the unskilled, foreign-born worker. [Previous to this time, it was thought that unskilled, foreign workers, many of them young, could not be organized.]

My grandmothers grew up in the same small Italian village, played together as children, and probably listened as their fathers made plans to come to the new world to make a better life. 

Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 was a great textile center; its principal mills were those of the American Woolen Company, a consolidation of thirty-four factories whose yearly output was valued at $45,000,000. The mills employed over 40,000 persons, about half of Lawrence's population. Most of them were unskilled workers of many nationalities, who had come from Europe and the middle east after 1900. 

The I.W.W. (International Workers of the World or "Wobblies") had been organizing among the foreign born in Lawrence since 1907 and claimed over a thousand members, but it had only about 300 paid up members on its rolls. 

Despite a heavy, government tariff protection of the woolen industry, the wages and living standards of textile operatives had declined steadily since 1905. Just like today, the companies were making money but the workers weren't. The introduction of the two-loom system in the woolen mills and a speed-up in the cotton industry had resulted in lay-offs, unemployment, and a drop in wages. For the week ending November 25, 1911, textile employees averaged about $8.76 for a full week's work.

In addition, the cost of living was high in Lawrence. Rents ranged from $1.00 to $6.00 a week for small tenement apartments in frame buildings which the Neil Report found "extra hazardous" in construction and potential firetraps.

My grandmothers, still girls about 14, went to work in the mills in Lawrence as soon as they arrived in America. Their families lived together and the girls shared a bed with their sisters. In addition, my grandmother Teresa, on the left, took her younger siblings to the railroad yards after work and they brought home coal that had fallen off the cars.

Bread, pasta, molasses, and beans were the staple diet of most mill workers. "When we eat meat it seems like a holiday, especially for the children," testified one weaver before the March 1912 congressional hearings.

Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh, a Lawrence physician, wrote: "A considerable number of the boys and girls die within the first two or three years after beginning work . . . thirty-six out of every 100 of all the men and women who work in the mill die before or by the time they are twenty-five years of age. 

Responding in a small way to public pressure over the working conditions of textile employees, the Massachusetts state legislature passed a law, effective January 1, 1912, which reduced the weekly hours from fifty-six to fifty-four for working women and children. Workers feared that this would mean a corresponding wage cut; and they realized that a reduction of two-hours pay would mean three loaves of bread less each week.

Polish women weavers in the Everett Cotton Mills were the first to notice a shortage of thirty two cents in their pay envelopes on January 11. They stopped their looms and left the mill, shouting "short pay, short pay!" Other such outbursts took place throughout Lawrence. The next morning workers at the Washington and Wood mills joined the walkout. For the first time in the city's history, the bells of the Lawrence city ball rang the general riot alarm.

That afternoon a mass meeting was held at the Franco-Belgian Hall, and a telegram was sent to Joseph Ettor, an I.W.W. union board member, asking that he come from New York to assist and organize the strike. He was well known in the Italian community, could speak English, Italian, and Polish fluently and could understand Hungarian and Yiddish.

Mass picketing and arrests started the first week of the strike. It was the first time there had ever been mass picketing in any New England town. When crowds of workers demonstrated in front of the Atlantic and Pacific mills, they were drenched by water from fire hoses on adjoining roofs. The strikers retaliated by throwing chunks of ice. Thirty-six were arrested and most of them sentenced to a year in prison. As the judge stated, "The only way we can teach them is to deal out the severest sentences." 

The governor ordered out the state militia and state police. One officer remarked, "Our company of militia rather enjoyed going down there to have a fling at those people." Harry Emerson Fosdick quoted a Boston lawyer: "The strike should have been stopped in the first twenty-four hours. The militia should have been instructed to shoot. That is the way Napoleon did it."

My grandmothers marched arm-in-arm, singing or carrying banners with the rest of the girls. The banners said "We want bread and roses too." One day they heard screaming behind them and, looking, saw men on horseback, swinging clubs or poles. The men rode through the teenagers, swinging and hitting virtually everyone.  They were hurt but not badly. 

Lawrence was a new kind of strike, the first time such large numbers of unskilled, unorganized foreign-born workers had followed the leadership of the I.W.W.

"It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous," wrote labor reporter Mary Heaton Vorse. "They are always marching and singing. The tired, gray crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their months to sing." American Magazine reported:

It is not short of amazing, the power of a great idea to weld men and women together. . . . There was in it a peculiar, intense, vital spirit, a religious spirit if you will, that I have never felt before in any strike. . . . At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to bold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions comparatively few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little violence [on the part of the strikers].

One of the largest demonstrations of the strike took place on January 29 when Ettor addressed a mass meeting on the Lawrence Common, urged the strikers to be peaceful and orderly, and led them on a march through the business district. At one of the mills, a company of militiamen refused to let them pass. Ettor averted a conflict by waving the paraders up a side street. They followed, and cheered him for his good sense.

Two of the strike leaders were arrested and martial law was enforced. City officials declared all public meetings illegal, and Lawrence authorities called out more militia companies.

The arrests were aimed at disrupting the strike. However, the I.W.W. sent Bill Haywood to Lawrence. More than 15,000 strikers met Haywood at the railroad station and carried him down Essex Street to the Lawrence Common, where he addressed a group of 25,000.  Looking down from the speaker's stand and seeing the young strikers in the crowd, Haywood roared: "Those kids should be in school instead of slaving in the mills." Throughout the strike, Haywood urged strikers to maintain an attitude of passive resistance.

By far the most dramatic episode of the strike involved sending the strikers' children to sympathetic families in other cities. About 120 children left Lawrence on February 10. Margaret Sanger, later famous for her work in birth control, was one of the nurses who accompanied the children. She testified before a congressional committee in March: "Out of the 119 children, only four had underwear on ... their outerwear was almost in rags . . . their coats were simply torn to shreds ... and it was the bitterest weather we have had this winter."

When the time came to depart, the children, arranged in a long line, two by two in an orderly procession with the parents near at hand, were about to make their way to the train when the police . . . closed in on us with their clubs, beating right and left with no thought of the children who then were in desperate danger of being trampled to death. The mothers and the children were thus hurled in a mass and bodily dragged to a military truck and even then clubbed, irrespective of the cries of the panic-stricken mothers and children. We can scarcely find words with which to describe this display of brutality.

This clash between the children and the police was the turning point of the Lawrence strike. Protests from every part of the country reached Congress as newspaper and magazine articles focused attention on the strike. Congressmen Victor Berger and William Wilson from Pennsylvania called for an investigation.

In early March, the House Committee on Rules heard testimony from a group of teenage Lawrence strikers. "As soon as I came home I had to go to sleep, I was so tired," the congressmen were told by a fifteen-year-old girl. The young workers testified that the textile companies held back a week of their wages, that they were often required to do unpaid clean-up work on Saturdays, and that in order to get decent drinking water in the mills some of them had to pay five or ten cents a week.

Concerned over the public reaction to the hearings, and the possible threat to their own tariff protection, the American Woolen Company acceded to the strikers' demands on March 12, 1912. By the end of March, the rest of the Lawrence textile companies fell in line. Wages were raised for textile workers throughout all of New England, an average of $1.30 more a week.

But the immediate effect of the Lawrence strike was to hearten textile workers in other Eastern areas. The strike also made a profound impression on the public and the rest of the labor movement by dramatizing the living and working conditions of unorganized, foreign-born workers in crowded industrial areas, and communicating the spirit of their rebellion.

Literary critic Kenneth McGowan wrote in Forum Magazine:

Whatever its future, the I.W.W. has accomplished one tremendously big thing, a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags [they were supposedly communists] and violence and sabotage, and that is the individual awakening of "illiterates" and "scum" to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and rights of their part in it. They have learned more than class consciousness; they have learned consciousness of Self . . . .

Most of this family history was reported to me by my parents. The two girls, who shared childhood games and terrible poverty, who were beaten by men on horseback, remained lifelong friends. They both married; one had a boy, one had a girl and these children became my father and mother. Respect for unions was a family tradition and early on I was not only taught to respect the part that my grandmothers played in unionism, but also the place that unionism played in making this country what it is.  

Right now in my state of Michigan, there is a move to weaken unions and I fear it will take hold. That is what is impelling me to write this.

I took my first union job when I was 20, and from 1978 to 2008 I was a member of the National Education Association as a school social worker. I am proud of my grandmothers (and great-aunts and uncles) for what they went through to earn a living in a new country, and what they went through to be paid enough not just for bread but also for roses: a little left-over to have some dignity and joy in life.