by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
As was the case in Lawrence, nearly every nationality on earth is represented in the strike. The Italians and Germans are the most numerous, with thousands of Russians, Poles, Hungarians and Armenians besides. Shoulder to shoulder they have stood, with a spirit and loyalty that nothing could break or weaken. For seven long weeks they have held out and in place of food many of them have simply taken up another link in their belts and drunk a glass of water. Some relief money has come in but not enough to help any except the most needy cases.
Incidents without number could be given to show the spirit of self sacrifice and devotion among the Paterson workers. The jail has had no terrors for them, since accommodations there are hardly worse than in the “homes” they are compelled to live in. On occasions when the police have started wholesale arrests they have vied with each other in placing themselves in the hands of the “bulls.” One day when the police gathered in more than 200 of them, they refused to walk to jail but demanded the patrol wagon. When the police pleaded that the patrol wagon would hold only a few at a time, they said they would wait! And the patrol wagon the police were compelled to get, making trip after trip to the jail while the arrested strikers stood in a group and laughed and sang.
The meetings we have held have been wonders. Day after day strikers have crowded into Turner and Helvetia Halls with enthusiasm just as rampant as on the first day of the strike and on the Sundays when the Socialist city of Haledon is visited, at the invitation of Socialist Mayor William Brueckmann, for open air meetings, it has seemed as if the whole population of the northern part of New Jersey was present. To speak at such meetings is worth a whole lifetime of agitation.
3
Carlo Tresca (1873–1943), an Italian-born anarchist and writer, came to the United States in 1904 after being active in the left-wing Italian Railroad Workers’ Federation. He was elected secretary of the Italian Socialist Federation of North America, took part in strikes of Pennsylvania coal miners, of textile workers in Lawrence, Little Falls, and Paterson, and of metal miners in Michigan and Minnesota. In Italy he edited the journal II Germe, a socialist weekly. In the United States he edited L’Avvenire until it was suppressed under the federal Espionage Law, and then, for more than twenty years, edited and published II Martello (“The Hammer”), an anti-Fascist newspaper. A leader of the Anti-Fascist Alliance, Tresca was mysteriously assassinated in New York City in 1943. His memories of Bill Haywood in the 1913 Paterson strike were posthumously printed in II Martello (January 14, 1944).
WITH BIG BILL HAYWOOD ON THE BATTLEFIELDS OF LABOR
By CARLO TRESCA
I admired Bill greatly during those crucial weeks. I realized his influence over the masses, but wherein lay his real strength I recognized only a year later, when we were working together in the Paterson strike. At the beginning there were only Elizabeth Flynn and myself in the field. We were doing our best, but day in and day out we were confronted with the insistent question: “Where is Bill?” “When is he coming?” “Why is he not here?” It was upon the insistence of the strikers that we were compelled to invite him.
Those were days of epic struggles. We had several halls in Paterson proper: the Turnhalle, where the crowd was mostly Italian; the Helvetia Hall, with an overwhelming German attendance; we had many other halls; but our great gathering place was Haledon, New Jersey, which at that time had a socialist mayor. On Sundays, when due to the blue laws, no meetings could be held in the rest of New Jersey, we addressed between 30 and 40,000 workers from the roof of the Haledon city hall. It was into that crowd that Haywood threw himself with all the power of his unique individuality.
The number of persons involved in the strike, including strikers’ families, was no less than 125,000. All the strike relief collected for six months amounted to $72,000. The strike lasted from February to July, 1913. How could the strikers hold out? Through the spiritual power invoked in the masses by this huge, towering figure. He was not elegant. He had not much culture. He was just one of the mass. But he knew a few ideas perfectly—”class struggle,” “power of solidarity,” and he had an unusually clear vision of the goal of the labor movement. He was immediately convinced of the righteousness of his cause; he had a deep religious feeling regarding the I.W.W. labor movement, and his place among the workers. He was a simple man with a simple purpose, but he compressed into it all the gigantic powers of his soul. He never harangued a crowd. He “explained” things in the simplest, most beautiful, and still somehow imaginative words. It was remarkable that people like the Italians, who had a scant knowledge of English, understood his speeches. He had the unusual ability of reducing issues to their simplest realities, but these realities he knew how to present in a magically compelling way. Many speakers had talked to the workers about the necessity of holding together. Bill, however, would do this. He would lift over the crowd his huge, powerful hand. He would spread the fingers as far apart from each other as possible. He would seize one finger after the other with his other hand, saying to his audience: “Do you see that? Do you see that? Every finger by itself has no force. Now look.” He would then bring the fingers together, close them into a bulky, powerful fist, lift that fist in the face of the crowd, saying: “See that? That’s I.W.W.” The mass would go wild. Not the least factor in his successes was his physical vigor, the unusual amount of vitality that throbbed in every one of his gestures. One certainly could not repeat Bill’s demonstration with a puny fist.
I can still see him standing on that platform,—before him a sea of children’s heads. The platform is crowded with children, some clinging to his huge legs, some hanging on to his coat, all of them looking up at him with adoration. All faces are lit up with ecstatic joy. Bill had no difficulty in speaking to children. He spoke to them with the very same simplicity with which he addressed adults. There was something of the child in his own makeup. He told the crowd a simple story of how he worked in his own childhood, and what he went through; he explained the meaning of the I.W.W. He held every child’s heart throbbing in his big hands. The following day the picket line was crowded with children who proved to be the most faithful fighters. Subsequently Mr. Bimpton, the Paterson Chief of Police, asked me whether I could not withdraw the kids from the picket line. “For God’s sake,” he said, “remove those kids from the field. My men can’t fight children.” Later we began to place the strikers’ children in the homes of workers’ families in surrounding cities. This too was Big Bill’s idea.
He lived like one of the people. During the six months of the strike his salary was eighteen dollars a week. He was not only what you call a leader. He actually loved to spend time with the workers, to talk with their women and children. He went to supper with the strikers nearly every night.
Few knew that this hulking figure of a notorious fighter was kindness itself. His great craving was to possess a family, to be surrounded by little tots. He hated to stay alone of the evening. He begged me to take him somewhere, anywhere. He would sleep in the houses of Italians, Syrians, Irish, Poles, Letts. People were all brothers to him. Still, how he enjoyed those little Italian families full of genuine fondness, crowded with children, with numerous other possessions that give zest to life! How he would fondle the little ones rocking them on his huge knees!
After six months in Paterson his health was completely shattered. Even Bill, with his powerful constitution, could not stand the strain. He had a trying stomach ailment which made him feel miserable. As soon as the strike was over, friends took him to Europe. It was not before a year that he completely recovered.
Bill Haywood was not only a picturesque figure. He was the type of a practical idealist who never lost sight of the realities of life, while keeping a firm hold on the ultimate goal of the movement. He will live in the memory of the working class.
4
This program of the Paterson Pageant was taken from the booklet The Pageant of the Paterson Strike, edited by Frederick Boyd (New York, 1913).
THE PAGEANT OF THE PATERSON STR
IKE
PROGRAM
OF THE
PATERSON STRIKE PAGEANT
Scene: Paterson, N. J. Time: A.D. 1913.
The Pageant represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), making use of the General Strike as the chief weapon. It is a conflict between two social forces—the force of labor and the force of capital.
While the workers are clubbed and shot by detectives and policemen, the mills remain dead. While the workers are sent to jail by hundreds, the mills remain dead. While organizers are persecuted, the strike continues, and still the mills are dead. While the pulpit thunders denunciation and the press screams lies, the mills remain dead. No violence can make the mills alive—no legal process can resurrect them from the dead. Bayonets and clubs, injunctions and court orders are equally futile.
Only the return of the workers to the mills can give the dead things life. The mills remain dead throughout the enactment of the following episodes.
EPISODE ONE
1. The Mills Alive—The Workers Dead
2. The Workers Begin to Think
Six o’clock on a February morning. The mill windows all aglow. The mill whistle sounds the signal to begin work. Men and women, old and young, come to work in the bitter cold of the dawn. The sound of looms. The beginning of the great silk strike. The striking workers sing the Marseillaise, the entire audience being invited to join in the song of revolt.
EPISODE TWO
The Mills Dead—The Workers Alive
Mass picketing. Every worker alert. The police interfere with peaceful picketing and treat the strikers with great brutality. The workers are provoked to anger. Fights between police and strikers ensue. Many strikers are clubbed and arrested. Shots are fired by detectives hired by the manufacturers, and Valentino Modestino, who was not a striker or a silk mill worker, is hit by a bullet and killed as he stands on the porch of his house with one of his children in his arms.
EPISODE THREE
The Funeral of Modestino
The coffin containing the body of Modestino is followed by the strikers in funeral procession to the strains of the Dead March. The strikers passing drop red carnations and ribbons upon the coffin until it is buried beneath the crimson symbol of the workers’ blood.
EPISODE FOUR
Mass Meeting at Haledon
Great mass meeting of 20,000 strikers. I.W.W. organizers speak. Songs by the strike composers are sung by the strikers. They also sing the International, the Marseillaise and the Red Flag, in which the audience is invited to join.
EPISODE FIVE
1. May Day
2. Sending Away the Children
The May Day Parade. The workers of Paterson, with bands playing, flags flying, and women and children dressed in red, celebrate the international revolutionary labor day.
The strikers give their children to the “strike mothers” from other cities. The strike mothers receive them to be cared for during the war in the silk industry. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn speaks to the strikers and the children, dwelling upon the solidarity of labor shown in this vividly human episode, and is followed by William D. Haywood.
EPISODE SIX
Strike Meeting in Turner Hall
The strikers, men and women, legislate for themselves. They pass a law for the eight-hour day. No court can declare the law thus made unconstitutional. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca and William D. Haywood make typical strike speeches.
Program cover. The Pageant of the Paterson Strikers.
Courtesy of Tamiment Institute Library.
5
The Paterson Pageant focused the attention of newspaper reporters and drama reviewers on the story of the striking Paterson textile workers. Here are two reviews of the Pageant, taken from Current Opinion and Survey (June 1913).
THE PAGEANT AS A FORM OF PROPAGANDA
In the revival of one of the earliest forms of drama, the pageant, has been found one of the most “picturesquely vivid means of teaching a lesson or winning devotion to some particular cause.” So says Katharine Lord, writing on “The Pageant of the Idea” in the New York Evening Post. Altho this form of drama, Miss Lord points out, is supposed to be nothing but a vivid record of history, the tendency in America has been toward its use for propaganda purposes. The suffrage pageant, recently given in the Metropolitan Opera, was a symbolic pantomime rather than a pageant. The pantomime was weak, says Miss Lord, “in that it is too exclusively symbolic, and has no substructure or human action to carry the idea.” On the other hand, she continues, “it is suggestive of a strong, dramatic, forceful and vivid pageant, which would have the inculcation of an idea or the advancing of a cause for its distinct purpose.”
A pageant of this type was produced shortly after these words were written. So successful in depicting the cause of the striking silk workers of Paterson, N. J., was the “Pageant of the Paterson Strike,” presented in Madison Square Garden on the night of June 7, by one thousand of the strikers and their leaders, that the New York Times found in the performance a veritable menace to existing society. It says:
“Under the direction of a destructive organization opposed in spirit and antagonistic in action to all the forces which have upbuilded this republic, a series of pictures in action were shown with the design of stimulating mad passion against law and order and promulgating a gospel of discontent. The sordid and cruel incidents of an industrial strike were depicted by many of the poor strikers themselves, but with dominating and vociferous assistance from members of the I.W.W., who have at heart no more sympathy with laborers than they have with Judges and Government officers. Their aim is not to upbuild industry but to destroy the law…. The motive was to inspire hatred, to induce violence which may lead to the tearing down of the civil state and the institution of anarchy.”
On the other hand, the New York World found in the strike pageant something more poetic and less menacing. Speaking editorially it said: “It was not a drama, and hardly a pageant as the word is understood. It was little more than a repetition of a single scene. But need can speak without elocutionists, and unison of thought in a great mass of highly wrought-up people may swell emotion to the point of tears. Probably few witnessed the exhibition without sympathy with the sacrifices that made it possible and satisfaction in its material success.”
“It would have pleased any dramatic critic because of the sincerity with which the simple plot was carried out,” says the World, adding further: “As viewed by a spectator unbiased either from the labor or capital standpoint, their pageant was rather in the nature of a tragedy than anything else.” The New York Tribune partially described the strike pageant in this way:
“There was a startling touch of ultra modernity—or rather of futurism—in the Paterson strike pageant in Madison Square Garden. Certainly nothing like it had been known before in the history of labor agitation. The I.W.W. has not been highly regarded hereabouts as an organization endowed with brains or imagination. Yet the very effective appeal to public interest made by the spectacle at the Garden stamps the I.W.W. leaders as agitators of large resources and original talent. Lesser geniuses might have hired a hall and exhibited moving pictures of the Paterson strike. Saturday night’s pageant transported the strike itself bodily to New York….
“The first episode of the pageant, entitled ‘The Mills Alive—the Workers Dead,’ represented 6 o’clock one February morning. A great painted drop, two hundred feet wide, stretching across the hippodrome-like stage built for the show, represented a Paterson silk mill, the windows aglow with the artificial light in which the workers began their daily tasks. Then came the operatives, men, women and children; some mere tots, other decrepit old people, 1,200 of them, trooping sadly and reluctantly to the work the oppression of the bosses had made them hate. Their mutterings of discontent were soon merged in the whir of the looms as the whistles blew and the day’s work was on.
“But that day’s work did not
last long, for the smouldering spirit of revolt suddenly burst into the flame of the strike, and the operatives rushed pellmell out of the mills, shouting and dancing with the intoxication of freedom. The whir of the mills died down, and then rose the surging tones of the ‘Marseillaise’ as the strikers marched defiantly up and down before the silent mill. ‘The Mills Dead—the Workers Alive’—that was the name of the second episode, best described, perhaps, in the words of the scenario of the pageant—‘Mass picketing. Every worker alert. The police interfere with peaceful picketing and treat the strikers with great brutality. The workers are provoked to anger. Fights between the police and strikers ensue. Many strikers are clubbed and arrested. Shots are fired by detectives hired by the manufacturers, and Valentine Modestino, who was not a striker or a silk-mill worker, is hit by a bullet and killed as he stands on the porch of his house with one of his children in his arms.’
“Episode three represented the funeral of Modestino, a scene that, with all the accessories of sombre realism, worked the actors themselves and their thousands of sympathizers in the audience up to a high pitch of emotion, punctuated with moans and groans and sobs. A coffin, supposed to contain Modestino’s body, was borne across the stage, followed by the strikers in funeral procession to the heavy tones of the ‘Dead March.’ As they passed, the mourners dropped red carnations and ribbons upon the coffin, until it was buried ‘beneath the crimson symbol of the workers’ blood.’
“The next episode depicted a mass meeting of the strikers, with all the regulation incidents of fiery I.W.W. speeches, the singing of revolutionary songs, the waving of red flags, and the pledging of the workers never to go back to work until their boss knuckled under. Then came episode five, with its May Day parade through the streets of Paterson, and its big climax of sending away the children to be cared for in other cities, that their parents might go on and fight and starve and struggle unhampered by their little ones. With all the details of farewell embraces and tears, and finally shouts of enthusiasm breaking through the sadness of parting, the tots were handed over to the ‘strike mothers’ from other cities, and taken away, while Elizabeth Gurley Flynn made a consoling speech to the weeping mothers, and roused their spirits once more to the blind determination to fight on.”