BREAD AND ROSES, 100 HUNDRED YEARS ON
by Andy Piascik
One hundred years ago, in the dead of a New England winter, the great
Bread and Roses Strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts
began. Accounts differ as to whether a woman striker actually held a
sign that read “We Want Bread and We Want Roses, Too.” No matter. It’s a
wonderful phrase, as appropriate for the Lawrence strikers as for any
group at any time: the notion that, in addition to the necessities for
survival, people should have “a sharing of life’s glories,” as James
Oppenheim put it in his poem “Bread and Roses.”
Though 100 years have passed, the Lawrence strike resonates as one of
the most important in the history of the United States. Like many labor
conflicts of the 19th and early 20th centuries,
the strike was marked by obscene disparities in wealth and power, open
collusion between the state and business owners, large scale violence
against unarmed strikers, and great ingenuity and solidarity on the part
of workers. In important ways, though, the strike was also unique. It
was the first large-scale industrial strike, the overwhelming majority
of the strikers were immigrants, most were women and children, and the
strike was guided in large part by the revolutionary strategy and vision
of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
Beyond its historical significance, elements of this massive textile
strike may be instructive to building a radical working class movement
today. It is noteworthy that the Occupy movement shares many
philosophical and strategic characteristics with the Lawrence
strike—direct action, the prominent role of women, the centrality of
class, participatory decision-making, egalitarianism, an authentic
belief in the Wobbly principle that We Are All Leaders—to name just a
few. During the two months of the strike, the best parts of the
revolutionary movement the IWW aspired to build were expressed. The
Occupy movement carries that tradition forward, and as the attempts at a
general strike and the shutting of the ports in Oakland as well as
solidarity events such as in New York for striking Teamsters indicate,
many in Occupy understand that the working class is uniquely positioned
to challenge corporate power. While we deepen our understanding of what
that means and work to make it happen, there is much of value we can
learn from what happened in Lawrence a century ago.
A town on the brink of labor unrest
The
city of Lawrence was founded as a one-industry town along the Merrimack
River in the 1840s by magnates looking to expand the local textile
industry beyond the nearby city of Lowell. Immigrant labor was the
bedrock of the city’s development. Early on, French Canadians and Irish
predominated. By 1912, when Lawrence was the textile capitol of the
United States, its textile workforce was made up primarily of Southern
and Eastern Europeans—Poles, Italians and Lithuanians were the largest
groups, and there were also significant numbers of Russians, Portuguese,
and Armenians. Smaller immigrant communities from beyond Europe had
also been established, with Syrians being the largest. Though very small
in number, a high percentage of the city’s African-American population
also labored in textile.
Mill workers experienced most of the horrors that characterized 19th
century industrial labor. Six-day workweeks of 60 hours or more were
the norm, workers were regularly killed on the job, and many grew sick
and died slowly from breathing in toxic fibers and dust while others
were maimed or crippled in the frequent accidents in the mills. Death
and disability benefits were virtually nonexistent. Life expectancy for
textile workers was far less than other members of the working class and
20 years shorter than the population as a whole. It was a work
environment, in short, that poet William Blake, writing about similar hellholes in England, captured perfectly with the phrase “these dark Satanic mills.”
Living
conditions were similarly abominable: unsanitary drinking water,
overcrowded apartments, malnutrition and disease were widespread.
Thousands of children worked full time and were deprived of
schooling and any semblance of childhood because families could not
survive on the pay of two adult wage earners. Constituent unions of the
American Federation of Labor (AFL) had no interest in organizing workers
who were immigrants, “unskilled,” and overwhelmingly women and
children. The local of the United Textile Workers (UTW) had a small
number of members drawn, true to the AFL’s creed, exclusively from the
higher-skilled, higher-paid segment of the workforce.
The
IWW was also in Lawrence. The Wobblies led several job actions in 1911
and its radical philosophy resonated with mill hands far beyond the
several hundred who were members. Faced with lives of squalor and
brutally difficult work, despised by their employers, the political
sub-class, the press, and mainstream labor, textile workers, once
introduced to the IWW, came increasingly to see that militant direct
action was both viable and necessary. Many had experience with militant
working class traditions in their native lands—experience the IWW, in
contrast to the AFL, not only respected but cultivated. Though there was
an undeniable spontaneity to the Lawrence strike, the revolutionary
seeds the IWW planted in the years before 1912 were also a catalyst.
Workers walk out on strike
The
spark was lit on January 11, 1912, the first payday since a law
reducing the maximum hours per week from 56 to 54 went into effect on
January 1. Because mill owners speeded up the line to make up the
difference, workers expected their pay would remain the same. Upon
discovering that their pay had been reduced, a group of Polish women
employed at the Everett Cotton Mill walked off the job. By the following
morning, half of the city’s 30,000 mill hands were on strike. On
Monday, January 15, 20,000 workers were out on the picket line. Soon,
every mill in town was closed and the number of strikers had swelled to
25,000, including virtually all of the less-skilled workers. The owners,
contemptuous of the ability of uneducated, immigrant workers to do for
themselves, did not bother to recruit scabs, certain they would prevail
quickly. By the time they realized they had a fight on their hands, the
strikers were so well-organized that importing scabs was a far more
difficult proposition.
Several days after the strike began, workers in Lawrence contacted the
IWW’s national office for assistance, and Joe Ettor and Arturo
Giovannitti were dispatched from New York to help organize the strike.
Though Ettor would spend most of the two-month strike as well as the
rest of 1912 in a Lawrence prison, the work he did in the strike’s early
days was indispensable to victory. Radiating confidence and optimism,
Smilin’ Joe had the workers form nationality committees for every ethnic
group in the workforce. The strike committee consisted of elected reps
from each group, and meetings, printed strike updates and speeches were
thereafter translated into all of the major languages.
In addition to the democratic nuts and bolts, Ettor brought an
unshakable belief in the workers to the strike. The IWW had a faith in
the working class that is markedly different from the often self-serving
proclamations of union organizers of today who are mostly out to build
their organizations. In contrast to the all too common practice of
organizers “taking charge,” Ettor displayed a fundamental belief in the
ability of workers to do for themselves. He, Giovannitti, and, later,
Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, made every aspect of the strike
a learning experience. As the strikers worked to achieve greater power
in the short term by winning their demands, many came to see that the
society could not function without workers and that there was no job or
task that was beyond the collective skill of the working class.
Ettor,
Haywood, and Flynn also provided a vision of workers managing society,
underscoring that it was an achievable goal. Without ever downplaying
the particularities of the strike or of the strikers’ lives, they boldly
proclaimed their opposition to the capitalist system and encouraged the
Lawrence workers to explore what that meant. In practice, the vision of
a new world played out in the decision-making process, the support
services the strikers established with the help of contributions from
around the country (soup kitchens, food and fuel banks, medical clinics,
free winter clothing and blankets) and in direct action on picket
lines, in the courts, during the strike’s many rallies and parades, and
in the IWW’s insistence that all negotiating be done directly by rank
and filers.
Perhaps
the most important of the IWW’s contributions was its incessant emphasis
on solidarity. The only way to victory, they emphasized, was unity and
the only way to unity was to respect the language and culture of each
nationality group. Ettor, Haywood and the other Wobblies understood that
solidarity did not mean dissolving differences; it meant enriching the
experience of all by creating space for each to participate in their own
way. They encouraged the workers to view each other that way and
emphasized again and again that the only people in Lawrence who were
foreigners were the mill owners (none of whom lived in town). With each
passing day, the strikers’ solidarity increased. They came to understand
that solidarity was not just the only way they could win the strike; it
was also the only way to build a better world.
So inspired, the strikers rose to every challenge. They circumvented
injunctions against plant-gate picketing with roaming lines of thousands
that flowed through Lawrence’s streets and turned away would-be scabs.
After early incidents where some scabs were attacked, they embraced
Ettor’s emphasis on nonviolent direct action without ever diminishing
their militancy. When Massachusetts Governor Eugene Foss—himself a mill
owner—pleaded with them to return to work and accept arbitration, the
workers refused, recognizing the offer as a ploy that would leave their
demands unaddressed. Whenever strikers were arrested (as hundreds were),
supporters descended en masse to Lawrence’s courtroom to express their
outrage.
The
involvement of women was absolutely crucial to victory, beginning with
the rejection of the self-destructive violence of some male strikers.
Though the IWW’s record on promoting female leadership was spotty at
best, Ettor and the other Wobblies in Lawrence were sensible enough to
let the women’s initiative fly free. The presence of Flynn, the “Rebel
Girl,” was a factor, but the large-scale participation of women
resulted overwhelmingly from the efforts of the women themselves.
Knowing all too well that violence always reverberates hardest on those
on society’s lowest rungs, women strikers called the men on their
beatings of scabs and their fights with police and militia. It was women
who moved to the front of many of the marches in an effort to curtail
state violence against the strike (though the police and militia proved
not at all shy about beating women and children as well as men). It was
also the women who led the way in the constant singing and spontaneous
parading that was such a feature of the strike that Mary Heaton Vorse,
Margaret Sanger and numerous others remarked at length about it in their
accounts of Lawrence. And it was the women who made the decision to
ship children out of town to supportive families so they would be better
cared for. A common practice in Europe unknown in the United States,
the transporting of children drew much attention to the strike, first
because it revealed much to the world about living conditions in
Lawrence and later because of the stark violence of the police who
attacked a group of mothers attempting to put their children on an
outbound train.
State violence was so extreme that it may actually have aided the
strikers’ cause, as there were outcries from around the country over the
police killings of a young woman and a 16-year-old boy as well as the
large-scale beating of women and children. There were also national
howls of outrage when strikers were arrested for “possessing” dynamite
in what turned out to be a crude frame (it was later determined that a
prominent citizen close to the mill owners had planted it). Similarly,
the Stalin-esque jailing of Ettor and Giovannitti without bail as “accessories
before the act of murder” in the police killing of Annie LoPizzo, was
widely criticized and served only to spur the strikers on.
In the end, in the face of the state militia, U.S. Marines, Pinkerton
infiltrators and hundreds of local police, the strikers prevailed. They
achieved a settlement close to their original demands, including
significant pay raises and time-and-a-quarter for overtime, which
previously had been paid at the straight hourly rate. Workers in Lowell
and New Bedford struck successfully a short while later, and mill owners
throughout New England soon granted significant pay raises rather than
risk repeats of Lawrence. When the trials of Ettor, Giovannitti and a
third defendant commenced in the fall, workers in Lawrence’s mills
pulled a work stoppage to show that a miscarriage of justice would not
be tolerated (the three were subsequently acquitted).
Longer-term, the strike focused national attention on workplace safety,
minimum wage laws and child labor. Though change in these areas was
still too slow in coming, it did come and it came much sooner because of
Lawrence. Locally, patriotic forces campaigned vigorously against
“outside agitators” in the years after the strike and IWW membership
eventually slid back to pre-strike levels. Still, despite tremendous
repression, the IWW maintained a solid local chapter in Lawrence until
the state effectively destroyed the organization with a massive campaign
of jailings, deportations, lynchings and other violence after U.S.
entry into World War I.
But just as it was never the IWW’s objective to gain official
recognition from employers, its accomplishments should not be measured
by its membership rolls or the limited span of it organizational
presence. The goal was to build a revolutionary movement of the working
class and the Wobblies implemented the strategy for achieving that end
in Lawrence. This is not to say the IWW was without weaknesses in
building lasting organization; it was and there are lessons for Occupy
and all future movements to learn from those weaknesses. However, the
IWW’s weaknesses are ones that virtually every radical group from the
Knights of Labor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) share. These weaknesses
speak more to the difficulty of building a revolutionary movement than
to specific organizational flaws. The fact that the Wobblies were not
able to sustain the great work they did over a longer period does not
detract from the thoroughgoing way they imbued the Bread and Roses
strike with revolutionary values, strategy and vision.
Lessons from the Strike
There
are several aspects of the Lawrence strike that may be helpful to
building a radical working class movement today. One is the symbiotic
relationship between the strikers and the IWW. Since at least the
bureaucratization of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 70
years ago, unions have approached organizing workers with the goal of
building membership rolls, as opposed to building working-class power.
The type of organization workers may want, not to mention what they may
want beyond organization, has been largely irrelevant. The choices that
workers are presented with are quite limited: join one or another
top-down union, or else fight on alone. The best features of pre-union
formations—direct democracy, easy recall of representatives,
requirements that all officers remain in the workplace, widespread
rank-and-file initiatives, and so forth—are almost always killed quickly
after affiliation. Workers will reject top-down approaches and embrace
unionism that speaks to their needs if they are given the chance. The
fact that they are not presented such an option is neither accidental
nor inevitable; it is because the union bureaucracy is as threatened by
an independent rank and file as any employer.
Workers are not even really free to join the union of their choosing.
Once an exclusive bargaining representative is chosen, no matter how
that’s determined, the affected workers cannot easily join any other
labor organization and only do so at the risk of expulsion and loss of
employment. The IWW, rather than seeking to ensure itself a steady flow
of dues revenue, sought to challenge capitalism. Through direct action,
particularly strikes, the working class would learn how to fight capital
and in so doing would discover and develop its own potential until it
was strong enough to wrest control of work away on a massive scale. That
goal remains. To build such a movement today and on into the future, we
will either have to do away with many of organized labor’s entrenched
ways or increasingly circumvent mainstream unions altogether, much as is
happening so far with Occupy.
The flip side of the IWW/striker relationship in Lawrence is that the
workers did not strike to gain unionization or even to get a contract.
They struck over specific demands while understanding the need to change
the balance of their relationship with mill owners. Early on, they
sensed intuitively what they came to understand explicitly as the strike
lengthened: that politicians and the courts were against them almost as
completely as the bosses and Pinkertons were. When Governor Foss
offered arbitration in an attempt to end the strike without addressing
any of their demands, for example, the workers refused. Their distrust
extended not just to the owners but to the machinery of the state, not
to mention the top-down UTW—whose head attacked them relentlessly
throughout and whose members scabbed from the outset. The strikers
embraced the IWW philosophy of doing for themselves while utilizing its
highly developed solidarity network because their experience showed them
it was the only way they could win.
A second possible lesson from Lawrence is a feminist approach to
organizing. Though the IWW too often adopted an approach premised on
rugged (male) individualism that relegated women to secondary roles,
that was not the case in Lawrence. Rather, its radical approach
encouraged women strikers and supporters to act in highly creative ways.
Whenever women workers in Lawrence struggled with the men for full
participation, Flynn and the other Wobblies sided with them. It is
impossible to imagine the strikers winning otherwise, and though Ettor,
Haywood, and Flynn’s efforts on this score were not insignificant, it
was the tireless work of thousands of rank and filers that proved
decisive
The degree to
which women took to heart Ettor’s declarations that striker violence
would inevitably boomerang a hundredfold was also crucial. Few believed
that a non-violent approach would cause the state to reciprocate,
certainly not as the strike progressed and state violence escalated, nor
did it necessarily mean that an absolute principle of nonviolence was
appropriate in all situations. In Lawrence, however, it was clear early
on that the strikers would lose if the physical confrontations that have
been so prominent in the almost apocalyptic vision that many men
through history have brought to the class struggle continued. The women,
more than the men, understood that the complete withdrawal of their labor
was the strongest blow the workers could strike. In the end, it was the
ability to keep the mills almost completely non-functional for two
months that won the strike.
Women were also at the heart of the singing and parading that characterized
the
Bread and Roses strike. Surrounded by enemies, with death a very real
possibility, the Lawrence strikers, the women most of all (much like the
black liberation activists in the Deep South in the early 1960s, also
mostly women), sang to foster strength, courage and solidarity. Their
songs and that tradition echo as loud and true as a drum circle through
Occupy.
Lastly,
Lawrence was the first major strike along industrial lines. Not only did
the strike inspire other textile workers, it made real the IWW goal of
organizing wall-to-wall. The violent suppression of the IWW forestalled
capital’s day of reckoning, but the seed had been planted. When
industrial organizing exploded two decades later, it was thoroughly
Wobbly-esque, especially in the sit-down strike with its explicit
challenge to private ownership. Again, the degree to which Occupy
implicitly understands the importance of such approaches is one of its
great strengths. The massive withdrawal of labor, the large scale
Occupation of workplaces—these are lessons of Lawrence, direct and
indirect, that Occupy (as well as movements of the future) carry forward
and do well to consider more deeply. In so doing, we can perhaps begin
to create a world where everyone has both sufficient bread to eat and
“life’s glories” as vivid as the reddest roses.
Much has been written about the Lawrence strike. Here are just a few of the better accounts:
“Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology,” edited by Joyce Kornbluh
“The Rising of the Women,” by Meredith Tax
“The Bread and Roses Strike of 1912,” by Julie Baker
“Bread & Roses,” by Bruce Watson
Versions of this article appeared in the January 2012 issue of Z Magazine and the March 2012 issue of the Industrial Worker.
