Bread & Roses

Mary Heaton Vorse takes the midnight train.

When police stopped striking workers’ children from leaving Lawrence, Mary Heaton Vorse took the midnight train. It was 1912. Massachusetts had shortened the working week for women and children; the textile mills shortened their pay. Families already scraping by were expected to scrape harder. Instead, thousands of immigrant workers walked out. Vorse and Joe O’Brien had helped arrange temporary homes for strikers’ children in New York. Now mothers and children were being confronted by police for trying to send another group to safety. Vorse secured an assignment from Harper’s Weekly and went to see the city behind the headlines. Waiting for her were hungry families, guarded mills and Harvard students serving in the militia. America’s future leaders were getting an education on the other side of the picket line.

Lawrence changed her life. Vorse watched Elizabeth Gurley Flynn rally workers and heard singing in meetings, soup kitchens and on the picket lines. People separated by language found ways to feed one another and hold out together. Her report, “The Trouble at Lawrence,” put their lives before readers who could usually afford to ignore them. The words “Bread and Roses” fit: enough to eat, and something worth living for. James Oppenheim’s poem had appeared before the strike, drawing on a slogan Helen M. Todd had championed for working women. The famous Lawrence banner story is disputed; the hunger behind it needs no embroidery. Todd and Vorse had even shared a Greenwich Village cooperative household at 3 Fifth Avenue. Follow the people, and the poem, the politics and the kitchen table begin to meet.

Then follow Vorse to Provincetown , where the wharf she owned became a stage for the Provincetown Players and Eugene O’Neill. The labor reporter also helped give experimental theatre somewhere to happen. Decades later, Mimi Fariña gave Bread & Roses another life, founding an organization that brought live music to people isolated in institutions; Judy Collins carried Fariña’s setting of Oppenheim’s poem to record listeners. A mill town, a Village household, a Provincetown wharf, a concert for people who couldn’t get out to hear one. Food kept people alive. Songs, books, friendship and the freedom to make something gave them more to live for. Vorse followed that story wherever it took her. We’re still following.