by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
A few weeks later, ninety-two more children arrived in New York City and, before going to their temporary foster homes, paraded with banners down Fifth Avenue. Alarmed at the publicity this exodus was receiving, the Lawrence authorities ordered that no more children could leave the city. On February 24 when a group of 150 more children made ready to leave for Philadelphia, fifty policemen and two militia companies surrounded the Lawrence railroad station. They tore children away from their parents, threw women and children into a waiting patrol wagon, and detained thirty of them in jail. A member of the Philadelphia Women’s Committee testified under oath:
When the time came to depart, the children, arranged in a long line, two by two in an orderly procession with the parents near at hand, were about to make their way to the train when the police … closed in on us with their clubs, beating right and left with no thought of the children who then were in desperate danger of being trampled to death. The mothers and the children were thus hurled in a mass and bodily dragged to a military truck and even then clubbed, irrespective of the cries of the panic-stricken mothers and children. We can scarcely find words with which to describe this display of brutality.18
This clash between the children and the police was the turning point of the Lawrence strike. Protests from every part of the country reached Congress as newspaper and magazine articles focused national attention on the conflict. Congressman Victor Berger, a Socialist from Milwaukee, and Congressman William Wilson from Pennsylvania, who became the first secretary of labor, called for a congressional investigation of the Lawrence situation.
In early March, the House Committee on Rules heard testimony from a group of Lawrence strikers including some teenagers under sixteen years of age. “As soon as I came home I had to go to sleep, I was so tired,” the congressmen were told by a fifteen-year-old girl.19 The young workers testified that the textile companies held back a week of their wages, that they were often required to do unpaid clean-up work on Saturdays, and that in order to get decent drinking water in the mills some of them had to pay five or ten cents a week. So great was national indignation, the President’s wife attended the hearings, and President Taft later ordered an investigation of industrial conditions throughout the nation.
Concerned over the public reaction to the hearings, and the possible threat to their own tariff protection, the American Woolen Company acceded to all the strikers’ demands on March 12, 1912. By the end of March, the rest of the Lawrence textile companies fell in line. Wages were raised for textile workers throughout all of New England. And on March 30 the children who had been living in foster homes in New York City were brought home.
Meanwhile, in the Lawrence prison, Ettor and Giovannitti had turned their jail cells into studies. They read through the warden’s library and then the books—Taine, Carlyle, Shelley, Byron, Kant-sent in by sympathizers. Ettor, interested in organization methods, requested Burke. Giovannitti had what he called his “afternoon matinees,” reading an annotated edition of Shakespeare which had been sent to him by a Harvard student.
As the months dragged on without a trial, the case of Giovannitti and Ettor became a cause célèbre. “Open the jail gates or we will close the mill gates,” threatened Haywood. Protest parades, demonstrations, and mass meetings in major cities throughout the country helped raise $60,000 needed for legal defense. In New York’s Union Square, 25,000 persons gathered to hear Haywood appeal for funds, then march up Fifth Avenue led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In Boston a great demonstration covered the Common. Massachusetts authorities indicted all the members of the Ettor-Giovannitti Defense Committee, then released them on bail.
Agitation mounted. A general strike was advocated by the I.W.W. In August, a new development in the dynamite plot made headlines. Ernest Pitman, a Lawrence contractor who had built the Wood mill of the American Woolen Company, confessed to a district attorney that the dynamite frame-up had been planned in the Boston offices of Lawrence textile corporations. Pitman committed suicide shortly after he was served papers ordering him to appear and testify before a grand jury. William Wood, who was implicated, was immediately exonerated in court.
Pitman’s confession created a surge of sentiment in favor of the liberation of Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso. I.W.W. publicity contrasted the case of the three men who had been detained for months in prison, with the case of Breen, the dynamite planter, who had been released without jail sentence on a $500 fine. Fifteen thousand Lawrence workers walked out again on September 30 for a twenty-four-hour demonstration strike. Textile workers in neighboring cities threatened similar strikes in support of the I.W.W. leaders. Police, detectives, and the state militia were again called out. Mayor Scanlon started a “God and Country” campaign to drive the I.W.W. out of Lawrence. A parade was organized down the Lawrence main street under a banner which read:
For God and Country!
The stars and stripes forever!
The red flag never!
Lawrence citizens were encouraged by the town leaders to wear little American flags in their button holes as proof of their patriotic opposition to the I.W.W.
The trial of Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso began in Salem, Massachusetts, at the end of September; it lasted for two months. The defendants were kept in metal cages in the courtroom while the trial was in session. Crowds of workers waited each day outside the courthouse to cheer them as they entered and left the building. In Sweden and France workers proposed a boycott of American woolen goods along with a strike against all ships bound for American ports. Numerous telegrams were sent from Italy, where Giovannitti’s family lobbied actively in his behalf. Italian sympathizers demonstrated in front of the American consulate in Rome, and three Italian districts nominated Giovannitti for the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Delegations visited President Taft at his summer home in Beverly, Massachusetts, to plead for the prisoners’ release.
The prosecution accused Ettor and Giovannitti of inciting the strikers to violence and murder, although witnesses proved that they were speaking to a meeting of workers several miles from the place where Anna LoPizzo was shot. Two hired detectives from a strike-breaking agency testified that Giovannitti had urged strikers to “sleep in the daytime and prowl around like wild beasts at night.”20 But the detectives admitted that the speech to which they referred was in Italian and that they had no written notes of the meeting from which to quote. Witnesses testified that Joseph Caruso was home eating supper at the time the woman striker was killed. Caruso said that he was not an I.W.W. member and had never heard Ettor or Giovannitti speak before he was imprisoned. He also said he planned to become a Wobbly as soon as he was released from jail.
Before the end of the trial, Ettor and Giovannitti asked permission to make closing statements. Joe Ettor said in part:
Does the District Attorney believe … that the gallows or guillotine ever settled an idea? If an idea can live, it lives because history adjudges it right. I ask only for justice…. The scaffold has never yet and never will destroy an idea or a movement…. An idea consisting of a social crime in one age becomes the very religion of humanity in the next…. Whatever my social views are, they are what they are. They cannot be tried in this courtroom.21
Giovannitti’s speech, the first he had ever made publicly in English, moved even the reporters who were covering the trial. On November 26, 1912, the men were acquitted and released from jail.
Public opinion as expressed by the Eastern daily newspapers was practically unanimous in support of the acquittal of Ettor and Giovannitti. But the threat of anarchy and class war raised the fear that “a win in the Lawrence mills means a start that will only end with the downfall of the wage system.” An editorial in the liberal Survey magazine questioned:
Are we to expect that instead of playing the game respectably … the laborers are to listen to subtle anarchistic philosophy which challenges the fundamental idea of law and order?22
Other publications around the country expressed alarm at the strange do
ctrines of “direct action,” “syndicalism,” “the general strike”—slogans of a new kind of revolution.
In the I.W.W. local in Lawrence, membership swelled to 10,000 in the year following the strike but dropped to 400 by 1914 as the depression of the preceding year cut into employment in the textile industry. In addition, textile employers initiated an espionage system in the mills to counter any further radical influence. A 50 percent speedup of the textile machines after 1912 led to additional unemployment and offset the wage increase gained by the strike settlement.
But the immediate effect of the Lawrence strike was to hearten textile workers in other Eastern areas and to prepare for the next large I.W.W. strike drama in the silk mills of Paterson within the year. The strike also made a profound impression on the public and the rest of the labor movement by dramatizing the living and working conditions of unorganized, foreign-born workers in crowded industrial areas, and communicating the spirit of their rebellion.
Following the Salem trial, literary critic Kenneth McGowan wrote in Forum Magazine:
Whatever its future, the LW.W. has accomplished one tremendously big thing, a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags and violence and sabotage, and that is the individual awakening of “illiterates” and “scum” to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and rights of their part in it. They have learned more than class consciousness; they have learned consciousness of self… ,23
This was a fitting interpretation of the spirit of the striking mill girls who carried picket signs which read:
WE WANT BREAD AND ROSES TOO.
1
Justus Ebert (1869–1946), the son of a former mayor of Mannheim, Germany, was in charge of publicity for the I.W.W. Lawrence Defense Committee. Ebert had worked as a newsboy, glass-blower, and lapidary assistant before starting a writing and editing career at age seventeen, when a series of his articles appeared in the New York Courier. He was a Socialist Labor Party member until 1908, and assistant editor of the Daily People, its newspaper. He resigned from the S.L.P. at that time to join the I.W.W.
The Trial of a New Society (Cleveland, 1913), from which this selection is taken, was Ebert’s first book. His other writings included the pamphlets, American Industrial Evolution from Frontier to Factory, Trade Unions in the United States, 1842–1905, and the popular I.W.W. pamphlet, The I.W.W. in Theory and Practice. He was one of the editors of the I.W.W. magazine, the Industrial Pioneer, and the I.W.W. paper, Solidarity.
For the last twenty years of his life, Ebert edited the journal of the Lithographers’ Union. He was active in the Socialist Party, the League for Mutual Aid, and the Workers’ Defense League.
Industrial Worker, August 15, 1912.
THE INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY ARRIVES
By JUSTUS EBERT
On the morning of the 12th of January, 1912, the riot call was sounded on the bells of the City Hall at Lawrence, Mass. It was the first time in nineteen years that the call had been heard; and then only as a test. The call required the presence of every police officer in the city; regular, special and reserved; plain-clothes men, nightmen, in fact, all the guardians of peace and property.
The call came like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. There had been no previous indication of any need for the entire police resources of the community. Lawrence was, apparently, a peaceful and prosperous city, too active to be riotous, and too contented to be destructive. All its classes were, to all appearances, living in mutual harmony and accord. Why then this riot call? Why this hurry and scurry, this rush from all directions, this reporting at headquarters, of all its police, armed and ready for every possible affray?
The answer is one typical of the times.
Lawrence is renowned as a textile center. It outranks any other city in the nation in the production of woolen and worsted goods. In addition, its cotton industry is important. Lawrence is situated on the Merrimac River, whose immense water power has made it a favorable location for big mills.
In Lawrence, the hand loom of the early New England farm and the small mill of the last century with its tens of thousands of capital, have both been replaced by the Woolen Trust, the Whitman-Morgan combination of cotton and woolen interests, and other powerful organizations of capital, with their tens, nay, hundreds of millions of financial backing. Lawrence is, accordingly, a city dependent on corporate wealth. The mill corporations are its chief tax-payers and the chief employers of its inhabitants. Of the 85,000 population of Lawrence, over 35,000 are enrolled in the army of mill employees. They have no property rights in the mills; and are, for the most part, mere tenders of machines, without skill, and principally of foreign birth, as were the Pilgrim fathers who preceded them; and who murdered the native Indians who opposed their coming. These armies toil for the enrichment of stockholders who do not live in Lawrence and who take no part in its production of textile goods; who, in brief, are far more foreign to Lawrence, than are the most recent arrivals from abroad. Under the benign protection of Schedule K of the tariff laws of this country, they exact exceptional dividends, with more ferocity than Shylock exacted his pound of flesh. In all of which, they do not differ from the capitalist class in general, whose riches and fame are primarily due to the surplus values, that is, the wealth stolen from Labor in the form of profits, interest and rent.1
Let us look at these mills, therefore, a little closer; for, in looking at them, we are looking at the real Lawrence. They are the basis of its prosperity, its heart and soul! Just as the shoe and electric industries are the material basis and the heart and soul of Lynn; or the industries of any place and time are the basis of the material, legal and moral institutions—the heart and soul—of that place and time.
The principal mills in Lawrence are those of the American Woolen Company. This company is the largest single corporation in the textile industry. It is a consolidation of 34 mills, located mostly in New England. For these reasons it is known as “the Woolen Trust.” The American Woolen Company does about one-ninth of the woolen and worsted manufacturing in the United States. Its 1911 output was valued at $45,000,000.
The Wood Mill of the American Woolen Co., located in Lawrence, is claimed by the company to be “the largest worsted mill in the world.” It is 1,900 feet long, 300 feet wide and contains 1,300,000 square feet of floor space. The output for 1911 is said to be valued at $9,000,000. The Washington and Ayer Mills adjoin the Wood Mill. They supply the raw material to the other mills of the company, located outside of Lawrence.
All three mills—Wood, Washington and Ayer—are situated on the South side of the Merrimac. They are modern brick structures, six stories high, almost a half-mile long altogether; and surmounted by an ornate clock-tower. A bridge at Union Street connects them with Lawrence proper. 16,500 persons, or almost one-half of the mill workers of Lawrence, are employed by the American Woolen Co. Its general offices are in Boston.
The American Woolen Co. always pays 7 per cent on its capitalization of $70,000,000. This is said to be largely water. It is alleged in some quarters that its entire plant can be replaced at a cost ranging from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000. It is a well-known fact that its leading officers and stock-holders are connected with mill machine and construction companies that batten on its resources. William Wood, the president, owns two palatial residences. When asked in court, “How many automobiles have you?” he replied, “I don’t know. I haven’t any time to count them.” Necessity doesn’t require that he should take time to count his wealth. He has so much of it, as to render the performance superfluous.
Another noteworthy corporation on the South side of the Merrimac is the Lawrence Dye Works. This is the leading corporation in the consolidation of four mills known as the United States Worsted Co., whose properties it owns, besides its own. This $2,500,000 corporation makes a speciality of dyeing and finishing worsted goods. From 1884 to 1900 over 100 per cent was paid from its profits. Since then, the average yearly dividend has been nearly 20 per cen
t. The stock-holders of the Lawrence Dye Works now receive in five years that for which they formerly had to wait seven. The United States Worsted Co. itself pays 7.37 per cent annually. It manufactures fancy worsted and woolen goods in a six-story modern brick and concrete weaving mill overlooking the power dam at Lawrence.
Next in rank to the Woolen Trust mills are the Pacific Mills, located on the North side of the Merrimac, in Lawrence proper. This company manufactures cotton and worsted dress goods. Its attorney, James R. Dunbar, is also attorney for the Morgan railroad interests in New England. Men conspicuous on the boards of directors of these railroad interests are also conspicuous on the board of directors of the Pacific Mills. The Pacific Mills is erecting new mills at South Lawrence, east of the Wood Mill, whose total capacity is said to exceed that of the latter. Its employes number 6,000.
The Pacific Mills has a capital stock of $3,000,-000; and a surplus of $5,141,817. Its assets in two years—1909–1911—increased from $11,015,281 to $12,838,279, or a total of $1,822,998. This corporation paid dividends: 1907, $320; 1908, $120; 1909, $160; 1910, $120; 1911, $120; this is on nontaxable shares with a par value of $1,000. The total return to investors, in ten years, was 148 per cent. This is an average yearly return of 15 per cent. In other words, in ten years, the share-holders of the Pacific Mills not only ate their cake more abundantly than they made it, but they also have it now more abundantly than ever before. This is due to the kindness of the present system of capitalism, which takes from labor all it produces; giving in return therefrom wages, that is, enough of labor’s product for labor to subsist on and reproduce more labor.2