HARPER'S WEEKLY - 1912
A few weeks ago a company of about forty children of the Lawrence strikers, bound for
Philadelphia, were forcibly prevented from leaving Lawrence by the order of City
Marshal John J. Sullivan. He was led to this act by the belief that some of those children
were leaving town without the consent of their parents. Before this, several groups of
children, to the total of nearly three hundred, had been sent out of town to the strike
sympathizers in various cities, and public opinion against the departure of the children
had been aroused. As Congressman Ames said: "The people here feel that the sending
away of these children has hurt the fair name of Lawrence since it is a rich town and
capable of caring for all its needy children without the help of outsiders."
The forcible detention of these children had an extraordinary response throughout the
country. It was one of those things that cannot be done in America without stirring up
public opinion from north to south and east to west. There had been earlier aggressive
moves on the part of the authorities: ... for instance, the railroading of twenty-three men
to prison for one year each, during a single morning's police-court session, on the charge
of inciting to riot; but in the minds of the country at large these things have been simply
incidents. The abridgment of the right of people to move from one place to another freely
was at once a matter of national importance. It had for its immediate sequel the sending
of that touching little band of thirteen children of various nationalities to Washington to
state their grievances and to testify as to what occurred at the railway station on that
Saturday morning.
This was the culminating incident in a strike which has been an extraordinary one
throughout, and which, throughout, has been diversified with incidents of an unusual
kind.
It is an eloquent little commentary on the wage scale of Lawrence that the passing of the
beneficent fifty-four-hour bill should have been the indirect cause of the strike. This bill
limited the work of women and children in Massachusetts to that number of hours a
week, and the mills of Lawrence could not run fifty-six hours for their men alone.
Therefore they cut the hours to fifty-four as the laws demanded, and at the same time, cut
the pay by 3.57 percent. It is also claimed that the mills speeded up the work. January
13th was the last payday before the strike, and a few days later the mills were no longer
making cloth.
In the present-day labor situation, as every one knows, strikes are prearranged, and, on a
certain given day, the people walk out; but the strike of the textile workers in Lawrence
was the spontaneous expression of discontent of a people whose scant wages, averaging
between $5 and $6 a week, were cut below the living point. They went out, over 25,000
of them, of all crafts, without organization and without strike demands. They had no
leaders and they themselves were composed of all the peoples of the earth, and were of
warring nations and warring creeds. In this extraordinary fashion did the strike begin.
At the same time the mill hands went out, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had a
membership, according to John P. Golden, president of the Textile Union of New
England, of approximately 250, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) a
membership of about 280. The American Federation of Labor has not recognized the
strike. Apparently this organization was annoyed that the strikers had not played
according to the rules of Hoyle laid down by their organization. It was not their strike,
neither was it the strike of the Industrial Workers of the World. The strike was merely the
indignant expression of people who considered that their wages had been cut below the
living point.
The IWW took immediate steps to bring some order out of the chaos in which the
workers were plunged. William D. Haywood, Ettor, and Giovanitti began to organize all
of the textile workers into one great industrial union. They enrolled the majority of the
25,000 strikers, men, women, and children, in the IWW. They formulated demands for a
flat increase in wages of 15 percent, a fifty-four-hour week, double time for overtime, the
abolition of the premium or speeding-up system, and no discrimination against those who
were on strike. Arrayed against the strikers, along with the mill owners, the militia, and'
the police, were the officials of the Textile Union of New England and the Central Labor
Union of Lawrence. The American Federation of Labor at Washington was also hostile,
seeing in the ideal of labor solidarity that was being preached at Lawrence an attack on
craft unionism. But it was a message. which appealed strongly to the diverse mass of men
and women who made up the strikers, and it held them. After Ettor's arrest the task of
welding the alien groups into one fell upon the shoulders of Haywood, and the release of
Ettor and Giovanitti was added to the demands.
As a contrast to the action against Ettor, it is interesting to cite this incident. John Ramay,
a young Syrian of nineteen, went out on the morning of the 29th of January at six
o'clock. He joined a crowd of strikers which the militia moved along. He was at the back
of the crowd. At fifteen minutes past six he was brought into his mother's house with a
bayonet wound in the back and he died at seven that night. The name of the militiaman
who killed Ramay is unknown, nor has any action been taken against him. He was not
held for murder nor complicity of murder as it was decided that he was within his rights.
Lawrence is in atmosphere a New England city. It has about 88,000 inhabitants, of which
60,000 are mill workers and their families. Thirty thousand of these people work in the
mills, and it is said that over thirty-three dialects are spoken in this New England town
and that of full American stock there are not more than 8,000 while 45,000 alone are of
English-speaking nations.
The town sits in a basin surrounded by hills. Along one side of it runs the Merrimack
River, wide and shining. If you approach Lawrence from South Lawrence you must pass
through acre after acre of mill buildings and mill yards until you reach the wide waterway
whose sides are factory-bordered, whose surface mirrors the monotonous pale-red brick
of factory wall and factory chimney.
If you walk down Essex Street, the principal business street, and glance to your right and
then to your left, you will receive an impression of always seeing at the end of the street
on the one hand a little church steeple spring upward and on the other an imposing mill
chimney. The ever-recurring little church steeples of Lawrence give one the impression
of the children of a dying race; the big smokestacks are the young giants of a new, redblooded
generation.
From one end to the other of Lawrence run the mills, most of them situated on a piece of
made land between the Merrimack and the canal. The mills are Lawrence; you cannot
escape them; the smoke of them fills the sky. The great mills of Lawrence make the
Lawrence skyline; they dominate and dwarf the churches. From Union Street to Broadway
along the canal the mills stretch, a solid wall of brick and widepaned glass, imposing
by their vastness and almost beautiful, as anything is that without pretense is adapted
absolutely to its own end. The mills seem like some strange fortress of industry,
connected as they are by a series of bridges and separated by a canal from the town. In
the Syrian quarter, beautiful long-eyed Syrian women, their hair down their backs, sat
Oriental fashion on meager cushions on the floor nursing pale babies in rooms where it
was almost dark, although outside the day was bright and clear and snow sparkled on the
ground. A typical family of this sort is that of a certain woman in an alley tenement of
Oak Street. There were six in the family, which lived in three rooms. The halls were dirty
and full of ashes and unremoved garbage. The family was supported by the work of
children-a boy of sixteen and one-half years and a girl of seventeen, who earned between
them $12.50 a week. The rent was $10 a month. It was this girl who cried, in the tone of
one who would say-"Oh, that one would give me to drink of the water that flows! Oh,
that only we had never come away from Damascus!" And one had a picture of these
people who were so beautiful to look on in their own home, the sun at least about them.
As a Syrian said apropos of the killing of Ramay, when Haywood cautioned his
compatriots to moderation and patience, "If we have not much law in our country, at least
we have satisfaction!"
It is in homes like these that one would find the posters of the Wood mills, representing
long lines of the mills on the one hand and a happy band of workers with their full dinner
pails proceeding to work on the other. These posters and the representations of agents
caused many workers to come to this country.
It is only by chance that I have mentioned the Syrians; their case is of course that of all
the other workers.
The Jewish strike delegate, an impressive man with a worn face, said he had a wife and
eight children who were all too young to work in the mills. When he was asked how
much he averaged he replied, I'm ashamed to tell you!" They paid $2.25 a week for their
tenement, and when he was asked if he took lodgers he replied in a matter-of-fact tone,
"Why, of course, how else could I live?" Five of his children were among those who
were being taken care of in New York and other cities.
The different nationalities keep together and have their own meeting places, from the
substantial brick Turn Verein building of the Germans to the tiny Lithuanian church.
There are quarters of the town where you may not hear a word of English spoken. I have
been in Italian towns where I have heard more American-English spoken on the streets by
returned emigrants than I did in the narrow streets and alleys and Valley Street. The
picture show notices were in Italian; goats' cheese and salami hung up in the windows;
women with shawls on their heads went in to buy meager stores of their day's marketing;
and windows of the stores held colored posters which represented the glorious victories
of the Italians over the Turks.
This is the town, so New England in setting and surroundings, so mixed in its
nationalities-this town whose great mills are the latest expression of our tremendous
industrial development-a development which has created a situation which no one as yet
fully understands in all its complexity, with which our state government cannot cope, and
which has caught in its tangled web the people who are the very creators of the situation
itself.
The strike of Lawrence involves the questions of emigration and of the tariff, of the
ability of a state with a fifty-four-hour law to compete with a state whose workers have
two extra working hours: the effect on the country at large of a working community
which habitually lives under conditions which do not make for healthy children.
Lawrence is a small town: there are 20,000 people there who, whatever else happens, can
never again have the race hatreds and creed prejudices that they did before they had
learned what working together may mean. They have learned, too, the value of
organization and their one executive ability has been developed, for they have had to feed
a great company of people and administer the use of the strike funds. Young girls have
had executive positions. Men and women who have known nothing but work in the home
and mill have developed a larger social consciousness. A strike like this makes people
think. Almost every day for weeks people of every one of these nations have gone to their
crowded meetings and listened to the speakers and have discussed these questions
afterward, and in the morning the women have resumed their duty on the picket lines and
the working together for what they believed was a common good.
