Thread by @ErikLoomis

This Day in Labor History: February 24, 1912. Lawrence, Massachusetts police brutally beat a group of children and their mothers as the children attempted to board a train to stay with union supporters in Philadelphia. Let's talk about the epic IWW Bread and Roses strike!!!

Lawrence, Massachusetts was one of dozens of New England cities that had become textile centers by the early 20th century.

The region had pioneered the nation’s Industrial Revolution through textile factories; the nation’s first modern factory was in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in the 1790s and the first large-scale textile community was in nearby Lowell, Massachusetts.

While in the early years, manufacturers had recruited local Anglo-Saxon women to work, poor pay and degraded conditions soon pushed them out to be replaced by immigrants.

At first, these immigrants were mostly Irish but as the late 19th century immigration wave washed over America, migrants from southern and eastern Europe became the new labor force.

The bosses looked down on these new immigrants, seeing their needs and lives as not worth consideration.

As had been the case through the history of the textile industry, and still is today in developing world nations, young women provided much of the labor.

The factory owners have always justified this by talking about young women’s dexterous hands, but the far more important reason is the gendering of the work. Women get paid less. That’s the real issue.

Young women whose families were desperate for the paltry wages they brought were easily exploitable. Working conditions in the factories were deeply unpleasant.

Those factories, whose ruins litter the northeast, could get brutally hot and steamy, especially during the summer. Workers breathed in textile fibers, leading to lung disease.

On January 12, 1912, a new Massachusetts law went into effect that limited women’s working hours to fifty-four a week, a reduction of two hours. The Lawrence workers thought employers would not reduce their pay.

They were wrong, as they discovered with their reduced paycheck delivered the day before the new law went into effect. Within minutes, workers marched through the Washington Mill, shutting down the machines and announcing a strike. By the next day, the city shut down.

This began the Bread and Roses strike that captured national attention, demonstrated to the nation the deep injustices American workers faced, and clearly showed both the possibilities and limitations of IWW organizing.

The IWW had sent organizers to Lawrence beginning in 1907 but still had only 300 or so members in early 1912.

The AFL had a tiny United Textile Workers union presence but gave it no resources for organizing, only focused on the English-speaking skilled mill workers, avoided organizing any of the masses of immigrants, and had about 200 members. It would do nothing.

Neither union seemed ready to pounce on the strike. However, the local IWW members asked that Joseph Ettor come to Lawrence. Although only 27 years old, he was a veteran Wobbly organizer, was fluent in English, Italian, and Polish, and could understand Yiddish and Hungarian.

This made him an ideal person to speak to the many immigrants of Lawrence. He had visited Lawrence to organize for the IWW in 1910 and 1911 and was well-known about the community’s labor activists. His father, a radical Italian immigrant, had been injured in the Haymarket bombing

He was the one organizer who could speak to almost all the strikers. His commitment kept the workers’ spirits high in the strike’s early days.

He helped them develop concrete demands that included a 15 percent pay raise, overtime pay, and no punishment of strikers.

The mill owners and police responded with violence and manipulation. When agents from American Woolen told workers that the mills had accepted their demands and they should return to work—a lie intended to divide the workers—Ettor exploded in a righteous fury, telling a crowd.."

“If an overseer comes into your house and invites you to betray yourself into being either a scab or a blacklisted man, throw him down the stairs!” The next day, outraged workers held a mass march.

The police sprayed fire hoses from the top of the mills onto the strikers in the subfreezing temperatures. When strikers threw ice in return, thirty-six were arrested and sentenced to a year in prison.

A young Syrian immigrant named John Rami was bayoneted to death by a militia member. The region’s elite classes mobilized to suppress the strike.

Harvard students volunteered as part of the strikebreaking militia to help break the strike, a tradition at the college going back to the Great Railroad Strike in 1877, when they formed an armed militia to defend the railroads if the strike reached New England.

College students frequently volunteered to a common phenomenon among university students in this era when only the richest American children could go college. The school’s president allowed them to make up their final exams.

This was a critical moment for the IWW. Wobbly theorists hoped mass strikes could spur a revolution. Lawrence was the first time that workers under Wobbly leadership had engaged in a mass strike of thousands.

Perhaps this would be the beginning of a larger workers’ movement. Big Bill Haywood came to rally the workers. Fifteen thousand strikers met Haywood at the train station when he arrived. He spoke in very simple language to this largely immigrant crowd with limited English.

Avoiding the left’s theoretical language made him accessible to the average worker. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “Rebel Girl” who played a major role in Lawrence, remembered how watching him talk to workers shaped her organizing for the rest of her life.

Yet throughout the strike, it was the rank and file workers, especially women, who truly led the way, understanding the street politics, deciding strategy, starting confrontations with the police and militia, and humiliating scabs.

For all the IWW brought to Lawrence, it was the militancy of everyday workers, developed over a lifetime of toil and oppression, that made it happen.

Strikes divided communities between strikers and those who believed themselves committed to “law and order.” But the latter group commit most of the violent crimes in labor disputes.

John Breen, Lawrence school board member and son of the former mayor, framed the strikers by planting bombs around town. A week before this, William Madison Wood, owner of the American Woolen Company, paid Breen a large sum of money.

This “coincidence” was not seriously investigated and no charges were brought against Wood, while Breen was released without serving jail time

The ploy worked; when the bombs were found, it led to the typical overheated rhetoric from the media worried about revolution, especially after the Los Angeles Times bombing two years earlier.

The New York Times wrote, “The strikers display a fiendish lack of humanity which ought to place them beyond the comfort of religion until they have repented.”

On January 29, the police murdered an Italian striker named Anna LoPizzo while breaking up a picket line. They pinned the death on the strike leaders—Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, the editor of an Italian socialist newspaper in New York who was organizing the relief effort

They were three miles away at the time of the killing. They rotted in prison for the next eight months without bail or trial. Martial law followed. Once again, the authorities denied Wobblies their civil rights.

Strikers began challenging the militia to shoot them and it, rather than employers, became the top target of strikers’ wrath.

Ettor and Giovannitti hyped these challenges by using violent language themselves; the latter told workers to “prowl around like wild animals looking for blood” while Ettor threatened the use of firearms. For the militia and employers, this language justified the suppression.

With this strike gaining national headlines, the IWW sent its biggest names to Lawrence. Its best organizers, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and William Trautmann, gave impassioned speeches. Italian anarchist Carlos Tresca followed

Haywood returned to Lawrence and took over the day-to-day running of the strike, holding up to ten meetings a day.

He ate and socialized in workers’ homes to build connections with them and held mass meetings where strikers from every different language would deliver messages to their people.

The IWW also developed sophisticated propaganda to nationalize this conflict. Writers came to Lawrence to tell workers’ stories.

Haywood visited New England textile towns raising funds and gave a rousing speech at Carnegie Hall, telling attendees the Lawrence strikers’ victory “depends on you!” as ushers roamed the crowd for donations while coins and dollar bills rained down from the rafters.

With the strikers destitute, the IWW placed workers’ children with sympathizers in different cities. This spread the workers’ cause. On February 10, 119 children boarded a train to New York dressed in their rags, with the name, age, address, and nationality pinned to them.

The New York Call, a socialist paper, wrote:

"TAKE THE CHILDREN:

Children of the Lawrence strikers are hungry. Their fathers and mothers are fighting against hunger, and their hunger may break the strike.....

....The men and women are willing to suffer, but they cannot watch their children’s pain or hear their cries for food. Workers and strike sympathizers who can take a striker’s child until the struggle ends are urged to send their name and address to the Call. Do it at once."

They all found families when they arrived, as 5,000 socialists met them at the train station to celebrate their arrival

The children’s exodus was masterful propaganda. Newspaper reporters ate it up and it raised desperately needed funds. More children followed, to Boston, Philadelphia, Vermont, New York.

Another group of ninety-two children arrived in New York and paraded on Fifth Avenue before going to their temporary homes. In Lawrence, the attention led to more militia violence.

The militia harassed, beat, and even bayoneted workers on the street. When a militia member told a man walking a dog to hurry and the owner refused, he stabbed the dog.

On February 24, another 150 children were to board a train to Philadelphia. The police blocked their path at the Lawrence train station, threatening to arrest the mothers. As the train approached, one woman pushed ahead, desperate for her child to get out

The police grabbed her and that spark set off a frantic rush toward the train. The police began beating the women and children. Mothers were dragged from their children into police wagons. The train left without a single child aboard.

The brutality badly backfired. The media excoriated the violence. Said the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, a man not sympathetic to the IWW, “If I were living in one of those miserable tenements I should join any movement, however revolutionary, to put an end to such conditions.”

President William Howard Taft, reading about the attack, ordered the Attorney General to investigate. A congressional committee held a hearing on Lawrence, giving workers the chance to tell their stories to the most powerful people in the country.

President Taft’s wife attended. Workers testified about their poor living conditions, their poverty, how the companies docked their pay, employers charging them for clean drinking water. One girl testified about how a spinning frame wrenched her hair and scalped her.

The timing could not have been better for the IWW. The strike had begun to collapse under the weight of hunger and poverty. Nearly one-half of the workforce had returned to the job. But embarrassed by the publicity, on March 12, the owners of American Woolen Company gave in.

The other companies followed. The strike was over, a huge win for the workers and the IWW. Workers received a wage increase of between 5 and 20 percent, with more going to the lowest paid. They received overtime pay for the first time and all strikers could return to their jobs.

Yet, there was one more battle—the murder trial of Ettor, Giovannitti, and Joseph Caruso, an Italian immigrant and striker later added to the indictment who never understood why he was arrested. They languished in prison until September, when their trial began.

This became the IWW’s major cause in the months after the strike. On September 30, the workers engaged in one-day walkout in support of their jailed organizers. All three were acquitted on November 26. Another huge victory for the IWW!

Only twelve months later, the union created during the great Bread and Roses strike was dust. IWW membership in Lawrence fell from 10,000 after the strike to 400 by late 1914.

Layoffs due to a 1913 economic downturn explained some of it. But the IWW did not recognize the need for long-term organizing in individual workplaces if workers were to build power.

It refused to sign contracts with employers because it believed contracts limited worker action to incremental gains in a system that accepted capitalism. Maybe this could have worked had the IWW kept skilled organizers in Lawrence to continue the struggle.

But Haywood and other Wobbly leaders always moved on to the next big strike, in this case, Paterson, New Jersey. The mill owners eventually repealed what they had given up in the face of public pressure.

Unionization was new to the workers. They did not know how to maintain their power. Without the Wobbly leadership, the workers were divided by ethnicity—a split encouraged by the employers. Union leaders were fired and blacklisted.

Ettor returned in 1916 to try and restart the union, but a mob grabbed him and put him on a train to Boston. The strike had won the workers some material gains, but left them no union to keep up the fight.

In conclusion to this very long thread, Lawrence shows what the IWW did well and what they did poorly. Great at organizing and propaganda, but let ideology about revolution get in the way of building institutional structures to win long-term gains.

For those interested in the IWW today, it's extremely important not to romanticize this style of organizing, but rather to study it seriously in order to learn from both its wins and its losses, what it did well and what we should avoid today.

Lots of people have written about Lawrence, but the text here comes from my own book A History of America in Ten Strikes. If you liked this thread, consider buying a copy to read about lots more strikes, many more than 10 actually!

amazon.com/History-Americ…

Back tomorrow for a new thread on home health care workers joining SEIU