by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
In addition to the four-loom system, Paterson workers protested an oppressive “docking system” for female apprentices, kickbacks in wages to foremen, abuses in measuring the yardage of the finished product, and the existence of several wage scales in the same shop. They also agitated for an eight-hour day, since there had been no reduction in the number of working hours since 1904.
Solidarity, May 24, 1913.
The first mill that introduced the four-loom system in 1911 was one in which some of the workers were organized into the A.F.L. United Textile Workers. A group of protesting workers went out on strike, but returned to work when John Golden, United Textile Workers’ president, proposed arbitration to settle the dispute. The four-loom system continued, however, and the strikers claimed that Golden had delayed the settlement because he really felt that the four-loom system was a technological advance in the silk industry.
Repudiation of the U.T.W. by the anti-A.F.L. strikers enabled a local of De Leon’s Detroit faction of the I.W.W. to take over the strike. Several more sporadic walkouts protesting the four-loom system led to some wage increases by employers. But shortly after all the silk workers had returned to their jobs, the mill owners refused to abide by the new wage schedules. In addition, some of the active union men were arrested and jailed for starting the strikes.
On January 27, 1913, 800 employees of the Doherty Silk Mill quit work when four members of a workers’ committee were fired for trying to talk to the company’s management about eliminating the four-loom system. The strike became industry-wide on February 25 when several thousand workers left their looms and held a mass meeting, addressed by I.W.W. organizers Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and Patrick Quinlan. Within the week, 25,000 workers were on strike, virtually all the silk workers in Paterson. Close to 300 silk mills in Paterson shut down.
“Had John Golden of the U.T.W…. come to Paterson on February 25th, undoubtedly he could have organized the workers in his union,” wrote John Fitch in the June 7, 1913, issue of Survey magazine. “Instead came Haywood, Elizabeth Flynn, Quinlan, Tresca—empty-handed, with neither money nor credit nor with the prestige of a 2,000,000 membership, but willing to work and go to jail. They have put into the 25,000 strikers a spirit that has made them stand together with a united determination for a period that must have tried the souls of the strongest.”3
The I.W.W. leaders who had been invited by the Paterson workers to address the February 25 meeting were well known for their work in Lawrence, Little Falls, and in a recent hotel workers’ strike in New York City. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had joined the I.W.W. in 1906 at the age of sixteen and had been active in the Missoula and Spokane free speech fights, the Joe Hill defense campaign, and the Lawrence textile strike. Carlo Tresca, who came to the United States in 1904, had been a leader of the Federation of Railroad Workers in Italy. In America he headed the Italian Socialist Federation and had helped organize miners’ strikes in Pennsylvania, and textile strikes in Lawrence and Little Falls. Patrick Quinlan from Limerick, Ireland, had worked as a coal miner, steel worker, longshoreman, sailor, and union lecturer. A Socialist Party organizer, he joined the I.W.W. in 1912.
Tresca, Quinlan, and Elizabeth Flynn were arrested at the February 25 meeting. ‘We have no objection to our own people conducting a strike,” said Paterson Police Chief Bimson, “but the day of the out-of-town agitator carrying on his profession is past.”4 After spending the night in jail, the three I.W.W. leaders were told to leave town or be responsible for their actions. They chose the latter course. Paterson’s Mayor Andrew McBride declared that it was “the ancient right of cities to rid themselves of undesirables.”5
A few days later, Bill Haywood arrived in Paterson from a rubber strike in Akron, Ohio. After a conference with Police Chief Bimson, he advised the strikers to fold their arms or put their hands in their pockets and let the manufacturers do the worrying.
“There’s a red card in the home of every silk striker,” said Haywood.6 His claim, according to an article in Outlook magazine, was but little exaggerated. Although I.W.W. silk worker Adolph Lessig testified to the Commission on Industrial
Relations that there were only 9000 paid-up I.W.W. members in Paterson, “so hard is the grip of poverty on the workers,” reported writer Gregory Mason in Outlook, “that many have remained outside the organization that is conducting their fight simply to save the dues of thirty cents a month.”7
The Paterson strikers, however, included not only the I.W.W. followers, but Socialists, anarchists, De Leonites, and A.F.L. members as well. Most of the ribbon weavers were English-speaking American citizens; most of the dyers were recent arrivals from Italy. The broad silk weavers were usually non-English speaking Italian and Jewish immigrants. Wives and children of workers from every part of Europe and the Middle East handled most of the unskilled jobs. The I.W.W. leaders welded these diverse groups together.
A spirit of solidarity was kept at a high pitch during the strike by mass meetings held in the strikers’ halls each morning, and shop committee conferences planned for each afternoon. In addition, special meetings were scheduled for women and children.
When the Paterson school teachers spoke against the strike, the strikers’ children picketed the schools. Haywood met with the youngsters. He described a future society in which adults would not continually deny their wishes. He called this place, “Kids’ Town.” One little boy called out from the audience, “No homework, Bill. Put that in!”8 The children organized their own strike committee, appointed speakers, elected a treasurer, and collected money to be used for needy members. Many of them walked with their parents on the picket lines in front of the mills.
At one of the women’s meetings, Carlo Tresca illustrated his talk on the need for an eight-hour day by saying that couples would have more time to spend together if there were fewer working hours. “More babies,” he said jokingly. The audience of tired working wives did not cheer this suggestion. “No, Carlo,” interrupted Haywood who was at the meeting, ‘We believe in birth control…. Fewer babies, well cared for.” The women started to laugh and applaud.9
Strikers set up a finance committee and a relief board to collect and distribute funds raised by speeches and entertainments in neighboring cities and by advertisements in sympathetic journals. Two relief stations supplied food to families. A restaurant fed the single men. A grocery and a drugstore were opened and run by the workers. Arrangements were made with a sympathetic doctor and dentist to aid ailing workers at no cost. Most of the landlords in Paterson did not press for rent, and the Sons of Italy, a benevolent association, paid benefits to needy Italian workers.
Police records showed that close to 3000 pickets were arrested during the course of the strike. Arrests of strikers averaged about 100 a day throughout May and June. Most of them received a ten-day sentence in the overcrowded Paterson or Passaic County jails.
As the strike continued, the Paterson afternoon newspaper printed front-page editorials urging the formation of a vigilance committee to stop the picketing and drive out the agitators. “Los Angeles, Akron, Denver, Ottowa, and other cities kicked the I.W.W. out of town in short order,” stated one editorial. “What is Paterson doing to discourage this revolutionary horde?”10
Another editorial about Bill Haywood, appealed, “Akron, Ohio, could not find a law to banish this dangerous revolutionist and his cohorts, but a citizens’ committee of 1000 men did the trick in short order. Can Akron, Ohio, accomplish something that Paterson, N. J., cannot duplicate? The Paterson Press dislikes to believe it, but time will tell.”11
When mass rallies within the Paterson city limits were forbidden by city officials, the strikers walked to Haledon, a neighboring town with a friendly Socialist mayor. The strikers used a silk-worker’s two-story house which had a second floor porch, a convenient platform overlooking the street. Every Sunday throughout the spring, the strikers and their families gathered in Haledon to listen to long speeches. Often they were joined by delegations of stud
ents, workers, or journalists who commuted from New York City, some twenty miles away. As Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote about the Haledon meetings:
Our original reason for going to Haledon … goes deep into the psychology of a strike. Because Sunday is the day before Monday. Monday is the day that a break comes in every strike, if it is to come at all during the week. If you can bring the people safely over Monday they usually go along for the rest of the week. If on Sunday, however, you let those people stay at home, sit around the stove without any fire in it, sit down at the table where there isn’t much food, see the feet of the children with shoes getting thin and the bodies of children where the clothes are getting ragged, they begin to think in terms of “myself and lose the spirit of the mass and the realization that all are suffering as they are suffering…. And so our original reason for going to Haledon was to give them novelty, to give them variety, to take them en masse out of the city of Paterson some place else to a sort of picnic over Sunday that would stimulate them for the rest of the week.12
Haywood, who shuttled back and forth between Paterson and an I.W.W.-led strike of rubber workers in Akron, was arrested as he walked at the head of a long line of strikers going to Haledon for one of these Sunday meetings in March. He was released on that occasion, but arrests of strikers and organizers continued as the community made a concerted effort to break the strike and jail its leadership on charges of inciting to riot, unlawful assembly, and disturbing the peace. Under a New Jersey law, anything said from a strike platform amounted to “inciting a riot” or “preaching anarchy,” and made the speaker liable to arrest for having committed a criminal offense. Convicted on these charges I.W.W. organizer Pat Quinlan was jailed from 1913 to 1915.
In the May 29, 1913, issue of The Independent magazine, a Paterson rabbi paid tribute to the I.W.W. strike leaders. He wrote:
They have held in check and directed an army of 25,000 men and women. Had they been preaching anarchism and violence, there would have been anarchism and violence. But the record of this strike is a remarkable one. Between 1200 and 1300 strikers have been arrested and jailed. Not one had a weapon.13
Helping the Paterson police was an army of private detectives hired by the mill owners. They were responsible for killing two workers during the strike, one on the picket line and another as he sat with his child on the steps of his house across the street from one of the dye works. Three company detectives were arrested for this crime, but were never brought to trial. Fifteen thousand workers turned out for the funeral and marched in a ten-block-long procession that was watched by half of Paterson’s population. Strikers piled red carnations on top of the casket and Haywood, Gurley Flynn, and Tresca made stirring speeches at the grave.
Attempting to play on the patriotic feelings of the foreign-born workers, many who had recently become naturalized, the mill owners urged the strikers that it was their patriotic duty to return to work. They declared March 17 “Flag Day,” and draped flags over every mill gate with signs calling on the strikers to return to work. The I.W.W. strike leaders pointed out that many of the flags were weatherbeaten and torn, and that the employers should at least use new flags, since flag silk was woven in Paterson. The strikers stretched a huge American flag across Main Street under which a slogan read:
We wove the flag; we dyed the flag.
We live under the flag; but we won’t scab under the flag.14
Strikers pinned little flags to their lapels and carried signs on the picket lines bearing this message.
May Day, 1913, was celebrated by sending a group of strikers’ children to live temporarily with sympathetic families in New York City where they would be better fed and cared for than in the strife-torn Paterson.
A special feature of the Paterson strike was a pageant presented at the old Madison Square Garden. John Reed, fresh out of Harvard, learned about Paterson from Bill Haywood, whom he met at a soiree of artists and writers in Greenwich Village. Paterson was close enough to the Village for the New Intellectuals, attracted by the direct-action anarchists, to venture out to hear the fiery speeches of Gurley Flynn, Tresca, and Big Bill.
John Reed went to Paterson on a rainy April morning. He was arrested as he stood talking to some strikers on the porch of a worker’s house and thrown into a four by seven foot cell that held eight pickets who had been without food and water for twenty-four hours. His experience made picturesque copy. A New York newspaper featured the story of the Harvard boy jailed with the striking immigrants. “You gotta be careful they don’t get in your spoon,” the prisoners had warned Reed about dead insects in the watery soup.15 The New York papers made more fuss about one reporter, said the Paterson police chief, than about the hundreds of workers he had jailed. Reed was released on bail after four days.
“We were frightened when we went in, but we were singing when we went out,” a young girl striker had told Reed about the first day of the walk-out.16 Emotionally involved with the Paterson strikers, Reed dragged his friends Walter Lippmann, Hutchins Hapgood, Edmund Hunt, and Mabel Dodge to the Sunday meetings in Haledon. He conceived the idea of a gigantic pageant to publicize and raise money for the strikers’ defense. Reed corralled a group of people who met frequently in the Fifth Avenue home of Mabel Dodge, a wealthy divorcee who was interested in modern art, radicalism, and Reed. He lined up financial support from Mrs. Dodge and some of her New York contacts, but it was only enough to rent Madison Square Garden for one night. Robert Edmund Jones, a nonradical Harvard friend, was drafted to stage the production. Bobby Jones also designed the poster of a crouching workman which was to appear year after year on I.W.W. publications. John Sloan painted the scenery, a great backdrop representing a tremendous silk mill with smaller mills on either side.
In three weeks, Reed trained over 1000 textile workers to reenact scenes from their strike. He led them in rehearsing songs from the little red songbook. Mrs. Dodge, swept up in the project through Reed’s enthusiasm, remembered, “One of the gayest touches, I think, was teaching them to sing one of their lawless songs to ‘Harvard, Old Harvard.’ “17
On the afternoon of June 7, several thousand strikers from Paterson arrived in Hoboken by a fourteen-car train. Reaching New York City by ferries, they marched from Christopher Street up Fifth Avenue with red banners flying and an I.W.W. band playing “The Marseillaise” and the “Internationale.” Margaret Sanger, a member of the pageant committee, and a police escort led the way.
That night, the letters, I.W.W., ten feet high in bright red electric lights, blazed from each side of the Madison Square tower and could be seen from miles away. Fifteen thousand persons, many who had walked from their homes, crowded the streets on every side of the block-square building. When the cheaper seats were sold out, the committee hurriedly decided to let the crowd in at a quarter apiece. The floor seats, advertised at $1.50, were sold at the last minute for whatever they could bring, and hundreds of I.W.W. members were let in free when they showed their red membership cards. The performance was delayed an hour while the thousands found their seats.
“Just let anybody say one word of disrespect to the flag and I will stop the show so quickly it will take their breath away,” warned New York’s sheriff Julius Harburger who had previously spoken out against the “sedition, treasonable utterance, un-American doctrines, advocating sabotage, fulmination of paranoical ebullitions, inflammatory, hysterical, unsound doctrines.”18 Sheriff Harburger took a box seat near the stage to oversee and monitor the production.
Since he arrived early, Harburger must have had time to read the program which stated, “The pageant represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World…. It is a conflict between two social forces.”19 The program announced that the pageant would be in six scenes, starting with the mills at six A.M. on a chill February morning.
One newspaperman described the production this way:
Fifteen thousand spectators applauded with shouts and tears th
e great Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden. The big mill aglow with light in the dark hours of early winter morning, the shrieking whistles, the din of machinery—dying away to give place to the “Marseillaise” sung by surging crowd of 1,300 operatives, the fierce battle with the police, the somber funeral of the victim, the impassioned speech of the agitator, the sending away of the children, the great meeting of desperate, hollow-eyed strikers—these scenes unrolled with a poignant realism that no man who saw them will ever forget.20
At the enactment of Valentino Modestino’s funeral, pallbearers carried a coffin down the center aisle of the Garden through the audience. Over 1000 strikers followed, singing “The Funeral March of the Workers.” Sitting in a box seat, Mrs. Modestino became hysterical when the funeral procession reached the stage. The cast of strikers heaped red carnations and evergreen boughs on the bier and Haywood, Tresca, and Gurley Flynn repeated the speeches they had made at Modestino’s graveside. Many in the audience wept.
Mrs. Dodge remembered:
… for a few electric moments there was a terrible unity between all those people. They were one: the workers who had come to show their comrades what was happening across the river and the workers who had come to see it. I have never felt such a high pulsing vibration in any gathering before or since.21
Almost everyone was deeply moved by the earnestness and emotion of the strikers. At the end, the audience rose to sing the “Internationale” with the cast. Reviews in the next day’s newspapers spoke of the pageant as a great production and a new form of art. “Self-expression in industry and art among the masses may become a rich reality, spreading a human glow over the whole of humanity … from which we shall all be gainers—in real life, in justice, in art, in love,” enthused Hutchins Hapgood, a liberal writer who was one of the frequenters of Mrs. Dodge’s salon.22 Newspaper editorials pointed out, however, that the pageant was produced, as one paper stated, “under the direction of a destructive organization opposed in spirit and antagonistic in action to all the forces which have upbuilded this republic.”23