Rebel Voices
Page 35
After the Pacific Mills, in importance, come the Arlington Mills, owned by the Whitman interests, so-called after William Whitman, its president and principal stockholder, who is also a director in six textile corporations, closely allied to the one over which he presides. Whitman is credited on inside circles with being the father of Schedule K; also with having Morgan backing.
The Lumberjack, September 15, 1912.
The Arlington Mills is capitalized at $8,000,000. Its annual output reaches the total value of $15,-000,000. Its dividends were six per cent from 1877 to 1903, eight per cent from 1903 to 1912. In 1905, the Whitman Mills also declared a stock dividend of thirty-three and one-half per cent.3
Its mills in Lawrence employ over 5,000 operatives; and are continually expanding in size and importance. Like many other New England mills, the Arlington Mill is increasing its capacity out of its earnings. Dividends grow and so does the value of the property producing them; thanks to the productivity of Labor.
In addition to the Pacific and the Arlington Mills, there are in Lawrence proper, the Atlantic, Pemberton, Everett, Kuhnhardt, Duck and 13 other mills, whose combined capital runs well up above the Century mark. The brick buildings they own are mostly of an older type than those of the Woolen Trust, already described, and are built in close succession to one another, making them look as one. They are surmounted by belfries and smoke stacks. Fences and walls surround them. Entrance is through gates that are reached by bridges, which cross a power canal running parallel with the mills and feeding them. This canal cuts off the mills from the city, just as the moats of a medieval castle cut it off from the surrounding country.
The mills are on a private street called, very appropriately, Canal Street. A railroad runs right alongside of them and pierces them in order to get to a bridge crossing the river. All of which helps along the isolation and fortification.
All the mills on the north side of the Merri-mac, thus isolated and fortified, are good dividend payers. The point is well illustrated in a story gleaned from the press and told by William D. Haywood, about Mr. Turner, Prest. of the Duck Mill, as follows: “Mr. Turner is a man of many wives and some wards. He married the last ward after he got rid of his wives. She lived in Brooklyn. They took a honeymoon. It was to Chicago. They had a palace train. Two Pullman cars were reserved for the bride’s dogs. When those two carloads of dogs arrived in Chicago with their mistress, they were taken to a fashionable hotel, registered, assigned to private rooms and were fed on the choicest cuts of meat; porterhouse steak.”4
None but the extremely wealthy, like the Woods, Turner and the textile barons of Lawrence, can indulge in such wasteful extravagancies. To even the moderately wealthy middle class, it is not given to have more automobiles than one can count; or to provide Pullman cars, fashionable hotel suites and porterhouse steaks for the dogs belonging to one’s latest of many brides similarly indulged before. Such expenditures are only possible among those possessing multimillions, such as come out of the mills of Lawrence.
Contrast now the wealth, expansion and luxury of Lawrence’s corporation magnates with the poverty, degradation and misery of Lawrence’s wealth producers.
Despite consolidation, tariff, and perfected machinery, the wages and conditions of textile workers show a steady decline. According to the United States Census, from 1890 to 1905, textile wages had decreased 22.0 to 19.5 per cent of the value of the gross output. This is a difference of $53,686,-035; a stupendous sum to these poorly-paid workers, as will be shown further along.5
This decline is made possible by increasing the number of looms to the worker, while at the same time, reducing the pay, through the competition of those thus displaced. In August, 1911, a call was issued for a general organization of all the textile workers along the Merrimac River, in order to more effectively combat the tendency to reduce wages and intensify labor at one and the same time.
The appeal opens thus:
“One hundred cotton weavers are fighting against the following conditions which the Atlantic Mills are trying to impose upon them.
“Twelve looms instead of seven, at 49 cents per cut, instead of 79 cents; those are in a few words, the conditions against which the weavers are revolting.
“Seven looms producing two cuts a week at the rate of 79 cents per cut leaves a salary of $11.06 per week; 12 looms producing two cuts each per week at the rate of 49 cents per cut gives a salary of $11.76.
“Admitting that each weaver can make 24 cuts each on 12 looms, which is practically impossible, he will necessarily have to operate five looms, and produce 10 cuts more each week for the sum of 70 cents; so that it is really a theft of $7.20 per week which the corporation will make on each and every weaver, and at the same time throw two employees out of five on the streets.”6
This method of doing more work with less men at less wages than formerly, was also introduced into the Woolen Mills. Here also the employees fought the two loom system, which meant a doubling up of their toil and the cutting in half of their numbers, with the inevitable reduction of wages that the competition of the unemployed made possible. Numerous strikes were inaugurated to combat this tendency. But all of them failed, because they were partial and sporadic; fought by the craft directly involved alone, while the other crafts remained at work and scabbed on it, that is, assisted the corporations to victory.7 This tendency was further emphasized by the speeding up, encouraged by the premium system, which added to the nervous strain, while gradually lowering wages.
Accordingly, wages in the Lawrence mills have become mere pittances. The $11.76 per week for weavers, specified above, are exceptionally good wages. The report of Commissioner of Labor, Charles P. Neil, shows that, for the week ending Nov. 25, 1911, 22,000 textile workers in Lawrence averaged $8.76 in wages. This average is for a good week only; and is inclusive of the wages paid to all grades of labor. The commissioner reports that almost one-third of the 22,000 earned less than $7, while only 17.5 per cent earned $12 and over for the select week in which the pay-roll was averaged.8
It is pointed out in Lawrence that over 13,000 workers are not accounted for in the commissioner’s investigation. These certainly are numerous enough to be considered. It is also claimed that during the pay week preceding Jan. 12, 1912, the pay-roll for 25,000 employees amounted to $150,-000 or an average of $6 for the week. Thus the commissioner’s figures are to be taken with qualifications when put forth as representing actual conditions.
The actual wages paid in some of the mills make startling reading. They recall the time in the eighties when Henry Ward Beecher is alleged to have said: “A dollar a day is enough pay for any American laborer to live on”—a statement that aroused furious opposition. In the American Woolen Company’s spinning, winding and beaming departments and dye houses, wages were $5.10, $6.05, $6.55, $7.15, and $7.55 per week in 1911. This is for a full week only; often, when work is slack, such wages as $2.30 and $2.70 a week are the rule.9 The writer met in Lawrence weavers who informed him that they averaged $5.00 a week following the panic of 1907. And these were men with wives and families.
Custom often reveals conditions where all else may hide them. In Lawrence, it is the custom to demand weekly rents for tenements occupied by the working class. Where wages are small and employment unsteady, it is realized that monthly rents are difficult of accumulation and collection. The rents vary from $1 to $6 per week. They are higher on the average than in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Buffalo and Milwaukee. In addition, Lawrence offers none of the various social advantages of. these larger cities. Boarders or lodgers were found in 58 per cent of the homes visited by Federal investigators. They are necessary to the raising of rent.10
Instalment houses also do a thriving business in Lawrence. “Easy Payments” is the deceptive means by which extortionate prices are made possible of payment by the workers who are already badly fleeced in the mills.
Lawrence is also the scene of much experimenting in co-operative enterprise
s, several of which have been successful. Where wages are low, as in Belgium and England, the economies and thrift made possible by co-operative buying and selling, becomes imperative. Especially is this true, in view of the increasing cost of living. Lawrence is by no means exempt from the latter. For instance, anthracite coal was $10.50 a ton in Lawrence during the winter of 1911–1912. The cost of living is higher in Lawrence than elsewhere.
Congestion is worse in Lawrence than in any other city in New England, Boston excepted. Frame houses and rear houses are more numerous than in the congested districts of Manchester, N.H., Lowell, Salem, Fall River and New Bedford, Mass. A terrible conflagration is always possible; the construction being regarded as “extrahazardous. “11
In addition, the rear houses are entered by alleyways and long narrow passages leading from them which make deadly flues and fire traps. These alleyways and passages are also dirty and dark, mouldy and foul-smelling. They are the playgrounds of the children who inhabit them. Juvenile offenders are numerous in Lawrence.12 The cause is evident.
“Our valuation did not increase with our population,” said Commissioner of Public Safety, C. F. Lynch, addressing the Berger Congressional investigation of the Lawrence strike; “and consequently we were faced with a serious financial problem.” As a reflex of Lawrence’s poverty and squalor this needs no comment.
Malnutrition and premature death are common in Lawrence. The textile industry is a “family industry.” Its subdivision makes possible the employment of all of the members of the family. It also makes possible, consequently, the destruction of the textile family.
Of the 22,000 textile workers investigated by Commissioner Neil, 12,150 or 54 per cent are males, and 9,772 or 44.6 per cent are females; 11.5 per cent of all of them, being under 18 years of age. The mill workers claim that over 50 per cent of Lawrence’s operatives are women and children. As there are over 13,000 to be accounted for by the commissioner, and as his figures verge very closely on the claim made, the latter may be taken for granted without discussion.
It is plain that, under the above circumstances, family life outside of the mills must suffer. Women who arise at 5:30 A.M. in order to be enabled to do housework and labor in a dusty, noisy mill until 5:30 P.M., at starvation wages, are bound to bear and rear offspring who are underfed and badly cared for. Everyone of the 119 children sent to New York in February, 1912 was found on physical examination to be suffering from malnutrition, in some form. As Wm. D. Haywood most eloquently puts it, “Those children had been starving from birth. They had been starved in their mothers’ wombs. And their mothers had been starving before the children were conceived.”13
Malnutrition brings about a disease called Rachitis, or rickets. The writer has seen so many children with crooked and distorted limbs and bones in Lawrence as to be impressed with the fact. Likewise, has he observed the anemic and wizened expression, not only of infants, but also of adults. Underfeeding is common in Lawrence.
The infant death rate in Lawrence is very high. For every 1,000 births there are 172 deaths under one year of age. This is greater than 28 other cities with which Lawrence has been compared. The same is practically true of Lawrence’s general death rate, which is 17.7 per 1,000 population, a rate which surpasses that of 26 other cities,14 and is above the average for the United States.
In the matter of longevity, according to Lawrence’s mortuary records, its lawyers and clergymen lead, with an average length of life of 65.4 years. Manufacturers come next with 58.5 years; farmers follow with 57 years. Mill operatives have the shortest life span. From the mortality records of 1,010 operatives, the average length of life was found to be 39.6 years. The average longevity for spinners is three and two-fifths years less, or 36 years. On an average, the spinner’s life is 29 years less than that of the lawyer’s or clergyman’s and 22.5 years shorter than that of the manufacturer.15
Says Dr. Shapleigh, a Lawrence practitioner, who made a special study of the subject: “36 out of every 100 of all the men and women who work in the mill die before, or by the time, they are 25 years of age. That means that out of the long line which enters the mill you may strike out every third person as dying before reaching maturity. Every fourth person in the line is dying from tuberculosis. And further, every second person, that is one alternating with a healthy person, will die of some form of respiratory trouble.” The same authority states that “a considerable number of the boys and girls die within the first two or three years after beginning work.”16 So poorly are they nourished and developed, that they have not the stamina to withstand the strain.
Here then is the lot of the textile workers of Lawrence—steadily declining and low wages, intensified and unsteady employment, bad housing, underfeeding, no real family life, and premature death. The benefits of industrial evolution and national legislation go not to them, but to the Woods, Turners, et al., who live in wasteful extravagance upon their merciless exploitation, regardless of common decency and in defiance of the social spirit of the times.
This was the condition of affairs in Lawrence, Mass., on Jan. 12, 1912, when something extraordinary happened in the big mills there. About 9 A.M. on that date, the employes in one of the departments of the Everett Mill, swept through its long floors, wildly excited, carrying an American flag which they waved amid shouts of “Strike! Strike!! Strike!!! All out; come on; all out. Strike! Strike!!” From room to room they rushed, an enraged, indignant mass. Arming themselves with the picker sticks used in the mills, they went from loom to loom, persuading and driving away operatives; and stopping looms; tearing weaves, and smashing machines, where repeated attempts were made to run them despite their entreaties, which seldom failed of instant response. As they swept on, their numbers grew, and with them grew the contagion, the uproar and the tumult.
Out of the Everett Mill they rushed, these hundreds of peaceful workers, now aroused, passionate and tense. On the street, outside of the mill gates, they were met by excited crowds that were congregated there. All of them coalesced into one big mass, and, as such, moved over the Union Street bridge on to the Wood, Washington and Ayer Mills, where the same scenes were enacted once more. Men, women and children—Italians, Poles, Syrians—all races, all creeds, already aroused to action before the coming of the crowd outside (some of whom rushed the gates and entered), ran through the thousands of feet of floor space, shouting, “Strike! Strike!! Strike!!! All out! Strike! Strike!! Strike!!!” sweeping everything before them, and rendering operation in many departments so impossible as to cause their complete shut-down.
These thousands also poured out into the streets, and, with their fellow workers, already assembled there, choked up the highway, blocking cars and suspending traffic generally; while at the same time hooting and howling, raising speakers and leaders on their shoulders, throwing ice and snow, and bombarding the windows in the adjoining Kuhnhardt and Duck Mills, smashing every pane of glass there—a destructive, menacing mob. Where peace had reigned before, disorder and violence now seemed rampant.17
The something extraordinary that had happened in Lawrence, Mass., on January 12, 1912, was an industrial revolt. The mill workers had risen. In their rising they sounded, not only a riot call, but also the keynote to the revolution of all the workers in industry—to the industrial democracy. Peaceful Lawrence, like every American city, had a submerged Lawrence, a working class Lawrence—that had erupted and, in so doing, sprung all the social layers above that held it down into the air. So the riot call was sounded. And the police tried to force the submerged down to where they formerly had been. So did the militia! So did the State! So did all the repressive agencies of modern, that is, capitalist, society. But they failed. A new force had arisen—the workers democratically and industrially organized. The workers thus united are invincible. It is Labor alone that defeats Labor.
But this is running ahead of the story; to return.
The cause of the Lawrence industrial revolt was a common thing, to wit, a wage reduction. A bene
ficent state law had been passed reducing hours of labor for women and children from 56 to 54 per week. When this law went into effect the mill corporations reduced wages proportionately, without any previous notice whatever. At the same time, they speeded up the machines and so got in 54 hours at 54 hours’ pay, the same output that had been secured in 56 hours at 56 hours’ pay.
The operatives’ only notice of the reduction was the short pay in their envelopes. “Short pay! Short pay!” was the cry that had preceded the uprising. The more the workers reflected on that short pay the most resentful and unrestrainable they became. In many thousands of cases the reduction only amounted to 30 cents a week. Yet this apparently insignificant amount—the price of a good Havana cigar to a Wood or a Turner-was enough to turn Lawrence topsy-turvy and to alter the subsequent political history of the country; for the Lawrence strike destroyed the presidential prospects of Governor Foss and hastened the formation of the Progressive Party, with its program of industrial and social reform.
Industrial Worker, March 6, 1913
Left to right: Joseph Caruso, Joe Ettor, and Arturo Giovannitti.
United Press International, Inc., photo.
Though the wage reduction was small in amount, the textile workers of Lawrence realized from abundant experience that the wages they would receive under the 54 hours’ law would not be sufficient to live on. Their position, as already shown, was near enough to absolute starvation as to leave no doubt on that point. So rather than suffer the further weekly loss of six loaves of bread, so badly needed, a great part rose en masse in spontaneous revolt. Blind, instinctive, but primal, and, therefore, fundamental and far-reaching, was the uprising of these miserable workers.
None had expected such a violent outbreak. True, according to Commissioner Neil, a far-sighted mill official in Boston, had warned against the prospect of one. But his was a lone voice, crying out in the wilderness. On January 2nd, 1912, some of the workers organized in the Industrial Workers of the World, tried to confer on the 54 hour law with the mill-owners, but were snubbed for their pains. The weaving department of the Everett Mill and the spinning department of the Arlington Mill had struck on the afternoon of January 11th. A meeting of 1,000 Italians and Poles, held in Ford’s Hall on the evening of January 10, decided to walk out. Other outbursts had taken place.18