by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
It was at the first Convention of M.T.W. I.U. #200 held in Cleveland that I first participated in a ceremony intended to carry out his last wishes. I was Chairman of that first convention and as I recall the bit of ashes were brought to the gathering by F. W. Ben Klein. It was a memorable scene, tarnished only by the fact that the meeting was addressed by one Harold Lord Varney of whom it is better to be charitable and say nothing.
I little imagined then that I was destined to receive and be custodian of another portion of his ashes for many long years. Often during those years I should have been more than glad to have some group of the wobblies dispose of them as Joe had willed, but I was disappointed. My possession of them was no secret. I had found the packet amid the ruins of the I.W.W. Hall in To ledo after the place had been wrecked by hoodlums after a so-called Palmer Raid. That must have been in 1919 or thereabouts. I was Secretary of Local Toledo at the time but there was no activity and nothing could be done at that time. Many times down thru the ensuing years I brought up the affair hoping that we could do as he desired but for some reason or another the I.W.W. would have none of it. Communists and Socialists both volunteered more than once to gain publicity thru him but I could see none of that. An anarchist woman pleaded with me to let her have them that she might have them in a ring “to wear forever.” My only retort was that she was unlikely to last forever.
It was on June 26, 1950, that I finally decided to try and carry out Joe’s last wish to the best of my ability and to make sure that no other group or individual would make capital out of his body. At that time I was living in a bungalow on the bank of Hollow Brook near Peekskill. It was just after the bitter clash of two hideous ideologies at that very spot. The so-called “Robeson Riots” had taken place within earshot of my home.
On this early June morning I awoke to one of the most beautiful June days that I have ever known anywhere. Nature seemed to have outdone herself that day when I awoke to the realization that I was grown old and that I had an obligation to carry out. The thought came to me. I was all alone. Why not do as he requested? Here was a spot. The grass was green, there was a yard covered with flowers and trees. Birds were singing all over the place. No place could be more fitting. I arose and walked out into the garden and with no more ceremony that a murmured “Good Bye, Joe,” I carefully scattered the contents of the little envelope over the soil. I felt at ease. My pledge had been kept. Never now would I have to fear that some individual or group not in sympathy with the ideals of the I.W.W. or of Joe himself would sanctify his mortal remains or make capital of his final disposal.
An enclosed letter from Bill Haywood requested the ones who disposed of them to send in a report of such proceedings to him for the Archives of the I.W.W. But Bill, also is gone these many years. I am sending a copy of this to the General Headquarters of the I.W.W. altho in my opinion they have strayed far from the ideals for which Joe Hill gave his life. The envelope and another copy of this letter will be given to the Labadie Collection, General Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan. (U of M)
GEORGE CAREY
Fellow Worker:
In compliance with the last will of Joe Hill, his body was cremated at Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois, Nov. 20, 1915.
It was his request, that his ashes be distributed.
This package has been confined to your care for the fullfilment of this last will.
You will kindly address a letter to Wm. D. Haywood, Room soy, 164 W. Washington St., Chicago, III., telling the circumstances and where the ashes were distributed.
WE NEVER FORGET
JOE HILL MEMORIAL COMMITTEE
(This message was printed on the empty envelope which had contained a portion of Joe Hill’s ashes. It was sent to Miss Inglis by George Carey.)
Chapter 6
Bread and Roses: The 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike
It is the first strike I ever saw which sang. I shall not soon forget the curious lift, the strange sudden fire of the mingled nationalities at the strike meetings when they broke into the universal language of song. And not only at the meetings did they sing, but in the soup houses and in the streets. I saw one group of women strikers who were peeling potatoes at a relief station suddenly break into the swing of the “Internationale.” They have a whole book of songs fitted to familiar tunes—”The Eight Hour Song,” “The Banner of Labor,” “Workers, Shall the Masters Rule Us?” But the favorite of all was the “Internationale.”
RAY STANNARD BAKER
in “The Revolutionary Strike,”
The American Magazine (May 1912), p. 24.
Early in January 1912 I.W.W. activities focused on a dramatic ten-week strike of 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It became the most widely publicized I.W.W. conflict, acquainting the nation with the plight of the unskilled, foreign-born worker as well as with the organization’s philosophy of radical unionism. “Lawrence was not an ordinary strike,” wrote Brissenden in 1919, “It was a social revolution in parvo.”1
Lawrence in 1912 was a great textile center, outranking all others in the production of woolen and worsted goods. Its principal mills were those of the American Woolen Company, a consolidation of thirty-four factories in New England whose yearly output was valued at $45,000,000. The woolen and cotton mills employed over 40,000 persons, about half of Lawrence’s population over age fourteen. Most of them were unskilled workers of many nationalities, who had come from Europe after 1900, attracted by the promises of labor contractors representing the expanding textile industry in Massachusetts.
But despite a heavy government tariff protection of the woolen industry, the wages and living standards of textile operatives had declined steadily since 1905. The introduction of the two-loom system in the woolen mills and a corresponding speed-up in the cotton industry had resulted in lay-offs, unemployment, and a drop in wages. A report of the U.S. Commissioner of Labor, Charles P. Neil, showed that for the week ending November 25, 1911, 22,000 textile employees, including foremen, supervisors, and office workers, averaged about $8.76 for a full week’s work.2
In addition, the cost of living was higher in Lawrence than elsewhere in New England. Rents, paid on a weekly basis, 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 fire-traps. Congestion was worse in Lawrence than in any other city in New England; mill families in 58 percent of the homes visited by federal investigators found it necessary to take in boarders to raise enough money for rent.3
Bread, 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 investigation of the Lawrence strike.4
Of the 22,000 textile workers investigated by Labor Commissioner Neil, well over half were women and children who found it financially imperative to work in the mills. Half of all the workers in the four Lawrence mills of the American Woolen Company were girls between ages fourteen and eighteen. 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.”5 Because of malnutrition, work strain, and occupational diseases, the average mill worker’s life in Lawrence was over twenty-two years shorter than that of the manufacturer, stated Dr. Shapleigh.6
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 their suspicions were sharpened when the mill corporations speeded up the machines and posted notices that, following January 1, the fifty-four-hour work week would be maximum for both men and women operatives.
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The I.W.W. 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. About 2500 English-speaking skilled workers were organized by craft into three local unions of the A.F.L.’s United Textile Workers, but only about 208 of these were in good standing in 1912. The small, English-speaking branch of the I.W.W. sent a letter to President Wood of the American Woolen Company asking how wages would be affected under the new law. There was no reply. Resentment grew as the textile workers realized that a reduction of two-hours pay from their marginal incomes would mean, as I.W.W. publicity pointed out, three loaves of bread less each week from their meager diet.
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 hall 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. Executive Board member, asking that he come from New York to assist the strike. Twenty-seven-year-old Ettor had visited Lawrence in the past to preach I.W.W. unionism. He was well known in the Italian community as a veteran I.W.W. organizer who had worked in the shipyards of San Francisco, traveled through West Coast mining and lumber camps, and led the foreign-born workers of the Pressed Steel Car Company in the 1909 McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, strike. Practical, pragmatic, and quick in decisionmaking, Ettor could speak English, Italian, and Polish fluently and could understand Hungarian and Yiddish.
Under his aggressive leadership, a strike committee was immediately formed of two representatives from each of the nationalities represented among the mill workers. They were to meet each morning and take complete charge of the strike. The workers’ demands called for a 15 percent increase in wages on a fifty-four-hour work week, double time for overtime work, and no discrimination against any workers for their strike participation. In response to the circulation of strike leaflets throughout the town, Lawrence Mayor Scanlon ordered a company of local militia to spend the night at the armory and patrol the streets around the mills.
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.”7 The governor ordered out the state militia and state police. One officer remarked to a writer for Outlook Magazine: “Our company of militia went down to Lawrence during the first days of the strike. Most of them had to leave Harvard to do it; but they rather enjoyed going down there to have a fling at those people.”8 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.”9
A few days after the strike began, Arturo Giovannitti, an Italian poet and orator, came to Lawrence from New York City to take charge of strike relief. He came in the interest of II Proletario, the newspaper which he edited for the Italian Social ist Federation. Relief committees, a network of soup kitchens, and food distribution stations were set up by each nationality group. The Franco-Belgian station alone took care of 1200 families weekly. Volunteer doctors gave medical care. Families received from $2.00 to $5.00 each week from the funds raised throughout the country in response to the strike committee’s appeal. “The problem of relief was so efficiently handled,” wrote labor historian Samuel Yellin, “that during the ten-week strike there was no wavering whatsoever in the strikers’ ranks.”10
Lawrence was a new kind of strike, the first time such large numbers of unskilled, unorganized foreign-born workers had followed the radical leadership of the I.W.W. John Golden, president of the A.F.L. United Textile Workers denounced it as “revolutionary” and “anarchistic” and attempted unsuccessfully to wrest the leadership of the strike away from the I.W.W. A.F.L. President Samuel Gompers defined the strike as a “class-conscious industrial revolution … a passing event that is not intended to be an organization for the protection of the immediate rights or promotion of the near future interests of the workers.” However, Gompers defended the lawful rights of the I.W.W. members to, “express themselves as their conscience dictates.”11
“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 mouths to sing.”12 And in the American Magazine, Ray Stannard Baker reported:
It is not short of amazing, the power of a great idea to weld men 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 hold 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.13
Less than a week after the strike started, the police found dynamite in three different places in Lawrence: in a tenement house, in an empty lot, and in a shoemaker’s shop next door to the print shop where Ettor received his mail. The press and the police were quick to assign guilt to the strikers. An editorial in the New York Times declared: “The strikers display a fiendish lack of humanity which ought to place them beyond the comfort of religion until they have repented.”14 The I.W.W. claimed, however, that the Boston-American, a Hearst paper, was off the press and on sale in Lawrence with the details of the dynamite discovery before the sticks of dynamite were actually found. Soon after, John Breen, a local undertaker and a member of the Lawrence school board, was arrested and charged with planting the explosives in a plot to discredit the workers. He was fined $500 and released on bail. President Wood of the American Woolen Company was implicated, but cleared by the court although he could not explain why he had recently made a cash payment to Breen.
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.
That evening, independent of the earlier demonstration, Anna LoPizzo, a woman striker, was killed when police tried to break up a picket line. The strikers said she was shot by a Lawrence police officer. Nevertheless, Ettor and Giovannitti, who were three miles away talking to a meeting of German workers, were arrested as “accessories to the murder” and charged with inciting and provoking the violence. They were refused bail and imprisoned for eight months without trial. In April, Joseph Caruso, an Italian striker, was arrested and jailed in an attempt by Lawrence police to find the man who had fired the fatal shot.
Martial law was enforced following the arrest of the two I.W.W. strike leaders. City officials declared all public meetings illegal, and Lawrence authorities called out twenty-two more militia companies to patrol the streets. A militiaman’s bayonet killed a fifteen-year old Syrian boy in another clash between strikers and police.
The arrest of Ettor and Giovannitti was aimed at disrupting the strike. However, the I.W.W. sent Bill Haywood to Lawrence, and with him came I.W.W. organizers William Trautmann, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and, later, Carlo Tresca, an Italian anarchist. More th
an 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 strikers. Group by group, they sang the “Internationale” for him in their various tongues. Looking down from the speaker’s stand and seeing the young strikers in the crowd, Haywood roared in his foghorn voice: “Those kids should be in school instead of slaving in the mills.”15
Industrial Worker, March 21, 1912.
Throughout the strike, Haywood urged strikers to maintain an attitude of passive resistance. But this took many forms. One innovation in strike technique was an endless chain picket line of thousands of strikers who marched through the mill districts wearing white arm bands which read, “Don’t be a scab.” Large groups locked arms on the sidewalks and passed along the business streets. When this tactic was disrupted by the police, huge crowds of mill workers would move in and out of stores, not buying anything. As the acting head of the police later testified in Washington, “They had our shopkeepers in a state of terror; it was a question whether or not they would shut up their shops.”16
By far the most dramatic episode of the strike involved sending the strikers’ children to sympathetic families in other cities, a measure of strike relief which had been used in Europe by French and Italian workers. About 120 children left Lawrence on February 10 and were met at the station in New York City by 5000 members of the Italian Socialist Federation and the Socialist Party singing the “Internationale” and “The Marseillaise.” The youngsters were placed in homes which had been selected by a women’s committee of New York sympathizers. Margaret Sanger, later famous for her work in birth control, was one of the nurses who accompanied the children on the train to New York City. 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.”17