Rebel Voices
Page 44
Judged from the artistic standards and ideals defined by Miss Lord in her article in the Evening Post, the “Pageant of the Paterson Strike” seems to be truly an artistic achievement, even tho it may be, as the Times has pointed out, a dangerous weapon for subversive propaganda. Here is what “the pageant of the idea” must accomplish, according to Miss Lord:
“The pageant of the idea, like any other, must be judged from the viewpoint of beauty and of dramatic values; and, more than that, it must be judged by its effect upon the performers as well as its effect upon the audience. Has any other art form so complicated a criterion? At first thought it is as confusing as if the palette or the brushes, or the clay, should turn upon the critic and demand consideration, demand that the effect upon themselves individually should be placed before the effect on those who look upon the result….
Considered as an art form the pageant of the idea must meet the same tests as any other form of drama. Has it continuity, has it sustained interest, has it climax? Do its pictures appeal to the eye in forms of well-ordered beauty? And is that beauty instinct with meaning that justifies its being? The pageant of the idea carries the added task of developing a graphically presented symbolism. How to represent ideas as basic facts in terms of picture and action, with idealism, and yet without undue strain upon the imagination or over-subtlety of characterization, is a problem not easy of solution, but fascinating in the extreme, and, when successfully solved, most grateful to all concerned.”
PAGEANT OF THE PATERSON STRIKE
… The average man who went to look [at the Paterson strike pageant] and the social observer familiar with labor struggles left Madison Square Garden with a vivid new sense of the reality of the silk strike and of industrial conflict in general for that matter,
The pageant, in which a thousand strikers participated, went the “human document” one better; it gave a real acquaintance with the spirit, point of view and earnestness of those who live what a “human document” tells; it conveyed what speech and pamphlet, picture and cartoon, fiction and drama fall short of telling. The simple movements of this mass of silk workers were inarticulate eloquence. And the words of “Big Bill” Haywood, or Elizabeth Flynn or Carlo Tresca or Pat Quinlan, in their efforts to give typical strike speeches, added nothing to the effect which the workers themselves spontaneously gave. Even the speakers seemed to feel this, for what they said seemed calm in substance and delivery compared with the whole-hearted simple vigor and earnestness of the thousand.
Yet it was an earnestness that had little of the vindictive. Grimness was not the dominant note in this characterization of industrial warfare-even when the workers surrounded the coffin of Modestino, the non-silk worker who was killed on the porch of his home when the detectives fired on the strikers. There was almost a note of gayety when an Italian striker sang, to the music of one of his native folk songs, some words concerning the strike, and the refrain was taken up with much gusto by the group around him. When the strike was called, and the throng rushed from the door of the mill to the front of the stage and down the center aisle, there was dash and enthusiasm.
Perhaps the thing that struck the observer most forcibly was the sort of people the strikers seemed to be and the absence of race prejudice. A large proportion were substantial, wholesome appearing German-Americans who seemed utterly to lack the hot-headed emotionalism which most people think characterizes I.W.W. adherents. One German striker, when asked how those of his nationality got along with the Italians, said, “We’re all brothers and sisters”—and it certainly seemed so, for the Italian singer was reinforced by a hearty chorus of German women.
The pageant was without staginess or apparent striving for theatrical effect. In fact, the offer of theatrical producers to help in “putting it on” was declined by those who wanted the workers’ own simple action to impress the crowd. There was no complicated detail. The “episodes”—all with the same scenery, a great painted canvas mill building—showed: the workers dully going to work, entering the mill, and then rushing out a little later when the strike was called; picketing and police clubbing in front of the mill; the funeral of Modestino; the strikers giving their children for temporary keeping to “strike mothers” from other cities; and a typical strike meeting addressed by I.W.W. leaders.
The hall was decorated with great signs to enlist sympathy for the strikers and stimulate the reading of I.W.W. literature. This was sold almost by the ton. Every seat was occupied at prices ranging from ten cents to $2. This alone made it a financial help to the strikers’ cause, but a large collection was taken also. That the whole occasion was most inspiriting to the strikers was very evident, surely, to any one who heard the mighty volume of sound when the audience joined in thundering out the Marseillaise.
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On January 31, 1914, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn analyzed the Paterson strike in a speech before the New York Civic Club Forum. The manuscript of her talk is in the Labadie Collection. Born in 1890 in New Hampshire, Gurley Flynn joined the I.W.W. in 1906 at the age of sixteen and for the next ten years was a leading organizer, soapboxer, and lecturer for the organization. She was arrested in the Missoula and Spokane free speech fights in 1908 and 1909, was a strike leader in the Lawrence and Paterson textile strikes and the 1912 strike of New York City hotel workers, and was active in the defense of Joe Hill, Ettor, and Giovannitti, and the I.W.W. prisoners arrested under the wartime Espionage Law. After leaving the I.W.W. about 1916, she helped launch the Workers’ Liberty Defense League, was active in the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and, from 1927–30, was chaiman of the International Labor Defense. In 1937, she joined the Communist Party and in 1961 became chairman of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. Her autobiography, I Speak My Own Piece (New York, 1955), contains a great deal of interesting material on the early organizing and free speech activities of the I.W.W.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PATERSON STRIKE
By ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN
Comrades and Friends:
The reason why I undertake to give this talk at this moment, one year after the Paterson strike was called, is that the flood of criticism about the strike is unabated, becoming more vicious all the time, drifting continually from the actual facts, and involving as a matter of course the policies and strike tactics of the I.W.W. To insure future success in the city of Paterson it is necessary for the past failure to be understood, and not to be clouded over by a mass of outside criticism. It is rather difficult for me to separate myself from my feelings about the Paterson strike, to speak dispassionately. I feel that many of our critics are people who stayed at home in bed while we were doing the hard work of the strike. Many of our critics are people who never went to Paterson, or who went on a holiday; who did not study the strike as a day-by-day process. Therefore it’s rather hard for me to overcome my impatience with them and speak purely theoretically.
What is a labor victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to have achieved a temporary gain and not a lasting victory. For workers to go back with a class-conscious spirit, with an organized and a determined attitude toward society means that even if they have made no economic gain they have the possibility of gaining in the future. In other words, a labor victory must be economic and it must be revolutionizing. Otherwise it is not complete. The difference between a strike like Lawrence and a garment workers’ strike in New York is that both of them gained certain material advantages, but in Lawrence there has been born such a spirit that even when 10,000 workers were out of employment, the employers did not dare reduce the wages of a single man still in the mills. When the hours were reduced by law in New Hampshire and Connecticut in the midst of the industrial panic prevailing throughout the textile industry it was impossible for those manufacture
rs to reduce the wages at the same time, knowing full well that to do so would create a spontaneous war. Among the garment workers in New York there has unfortunately been developed an instrument known as the protocol, whereby this spirit is completely crushed, is completely diverted from its main object against the employers. This spirit has now to assert itself against the protocol.
So a labor victory must be twofold, but if it can only be one it is better to gain in spirit than to gain economic advantage. The I.W.W. attitude in conducting a strike, one might say, is pragmatic. We have certain general principles; their application differs as the people, the industry, the time and the place indicate. It is impossible to conduct a strike among English-speaking people in the same way that you conduct a strike among foreigners, it is impossible to conduct a strike in the steel industry in the same manner you conduct a strike among the textile workers where women and children are involved in large numbers. So we have no ironclad rules. We realize that we are dealing with human beings and not with chemicals. And we realize that our fundamental principles of solidarity and class revolt must be applied in as flexible a manner as the science of pedagogy. The teacher may have as her ultimate ideal to make the child a proficient master of English, but he begins with the alphabet. So in an I.W.W. strike many times we have to begin with the alphabet, where our own ideal would be the mastery of the whole.
The Paterson strike divides itself into two periods. From the 25th of February, when the strike started, to the 7th of June, the date of the pageant in New York City, marks the first period. The second period is from the pageant to the 29th of July, when every man and woman was back at work. But the preparation for the strike had its roots in the past, the development of a four-loom system in a union mill organized by the American Federation of Labor. This four-loom irritated the workers and precipitated many small outbreaks. At any rate they sent to Mr. John Golden, the president of the United Textile Workers of America, for relief, and his reply was substantially, “The four-loom system is in progress. You have no right to rebel against it.” They sought some other channel of expressing their revolt, and a year before the historic strike the Lawrence strike occurred. It stimulated their spirit and it focused their attention on the I.W.W. But unfortunately there came into the city a little group of Socialist Labor Party people who conducted a strike ending in disaster under what they were pleased to call the auspices of the “Detroit I.W.W.” That put back the entire movement for a year.
But in the beginning of last year, 1913, there was a strike in the Doherty mill against the four-loom system. There had been agitation for three months by the Eight-Hour League of the I.W.W. for the eight-hour day, and it had stimulated a general response from the disheartened workers. So we held a series of mass meetings calling for a general strike, and that strike broke on the 25th of February, 1913. It was responded to mostly by the unorganized workers. We had three elements to deal with in the Paterson strike; the broad silk weavers and the dyers, who were unorganized and who were as you might say, almost virgin material, easily brought forth and easily stimulated to aggressive activity. But on the other hand we had the ribbon weavers, the English-speaking conservative people, who had behind them craft antecedents, individual craft unions that they had worked through for thirty years. These people responded only after three weeks, and then they formed the complicating element in the strike, continually pulling back on the mass through their influence as the English-speaking and their attitude as conservatives. The police action precipitated the strike of many workers. They came out because of the brutal persecution of the strike leaders and not because they themselves were so full of the strike feeling that they could not stay in any longer. This was the calling of the strike.
The administering of the strike was in the hands of a strike committee formed of two delegates from each shop. If the strike committee had been full-force there would have been 600 members. The majority of them were not I.W.W.; were nonunion strikers. The I.W.W. arranged the meetings, conducted the agitation work. But the policies of the strike were determined by that strike committee of the strikers themselves. And with the strike committee dictating all the policies of the strike, placing the speakers in a purely advisory capacity, there was a continual danger of a break between the conservative element who were in the strike committee and the mass who were being stimulated by the speakers. The socialist element in the strike committee largely represented the ribbon weavers, this conservative element making another complication in the strike. I want if possible to make that clear before leaving it, that the preparation and declaration as well as the stimulation of the strike was all done by the I.W.W., by the militant minority among the silk workers; the administering of the strike was done democratically by the silk workers themselves. We were in the position of generals on a battlefield who had to organize their forces, who had to organize their commissary department while they were in battle but who were being financed and directed by people in the capital. Our plan of battle was very often nullified by the democratic administration of the strike committee.
The industrial outlook in Paterson presented its difficulties and its advantages. No one realized them quicker than we did. There was the difficulty of 300 mills, no trustification, no company that had the balance of power upon whom we could concentrate our attack. In Lawrence we had the American Woolen Company. Once having forced the American Woolen Company to settle, it was an easy matter to gather in the threads of the other mills. No such situation existed in Paterson. 300 manufacturers, but many of them having annexes in Pennsylvania, meant that they had a means whereby they could fill a large percentage of their orders unless we were able to strike Pennsylvania simultaneously. And those mills employed women and children, wives and children of union weavers, who didn’t need actually to work for a living wage, but worked simply to add to the family income. We had the difficulty that silk is not an actual necessity. In the strike among coal miners you reached the point eventually where you had the public by the throat, and through the public you were able to bring pressure on the employers. Not so in the silk industry. Silk is a luxury. We had the condition in Paterson, however, that this was the first silk year in about thirty years. In 1913 fortunately silk was stylish. Every woman wanted a silk gown, and the more flimsy it was the more she wanted it. Silk being stylish meant that the employers were mighty anxious to take advantage of this exceptional opportunity. And the fact that there were over 300 of them gave us on the other hand the advantage that some of them were very small, they had great liabilities and not very much reserve capital. Therefore we were sort of playing a game between how much they could get done in Pennsylvania balanced off with how great the demand for silk was and how close they were to bankruptcy. We had no means of telling that, except by guesswork. They could always tell when our side was weakening.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn addressing strikers in Paterson, 1913.
Brown Brothers photo.
The first period of the strike meant for us persecution and propaganda, those two things. Our work was to educate and stimulate. Education is not a conversion, it is a process. One speech to a body of workers does not overcome their prejudices of a lifetime. We had prejudices on the national issues, prejudices between crafts, prejudices between competing men and women,—all these to overcome. We had the influence of the minister on the one side, and the respect that they had for government on the other side. We had to stimulate them. Stimulation, in a strike, means to make that strike and through it the class struggle their religion; to make them forget all about the fact that it’s for a few cents or a few hours, but to make them feel it is a “religious duty” for them to win that strike. Those two things constituted our work, to create in them a feeling of solidarity and a feeling of class-consciousness,—a rather old term, very threadbare among certain elements in the city of New York, but meaning a great deal in a strike. It means, to illustrate, this: the first day of the strike a photographer came on the stage to take a picture, and all over
the hall there was a quiver of excitement: “No, no, no. Don’t let him take a picture.” “Why not?” “Why, our faces might show in the picture. The boss might see it.” ‘Well,” I said, “doesn’t he know you are here? If he doesn’t know now, he will know tomorrow.”
From that day, when the strikers were afraid to have their pictures taken for fear they might be spotted, to the day when a thousand of them came to New York to take part in a pageant, with a friendly rivalry among themselves as to which one would get their picture in the paper, was a long process of stimulation, a long process of creating in them class spirit, class respect, class consciousness. That was the work of the agitator. Around this propaganda our critics center their volleys: the kind of propaganda we gave the strikers, the kind of stimulation and education we gave them. Many of our critics presume that the strikers were perfect and the leaders only were human; that we didn’t have to deal with their imperfections as well as with our own. And the first big criticism that has been made—(of course they all criticize: for the socialists we were too radical, for the anarchists we were too conservative, for everybody else we were impossible) is that we didn’t advocate violence. Strange as it may seem, this is the criticism that has come from more sources than any other.
I contend that there was no use for violence in the Paterson strike; that only where violence is necessary should violence be used. This is not a moral or legal objection but a utilitarian one. I don’t say that violence should not be used, but where there is no call for it, there is no reason why we should resort to it. In the Paterson strike, for the first four months there wasn’t a single scab in the mills. The mills were shut down as tight as a vacuum. They were like empty junk boats along the banks of the river. Now, where any violence could be used against non-existent scabs, passes my understanding. Mass action is far more up-to-date than personal or physical violence. Mass action means that the workers withdraw their labor power, and paralyze the wealth production of the city, cut off the means of life, the breath of life of the employers. Violence may mean just weakness on the part of those workers. Violence occurs in almost every American Federation of Labor strike, because the workers are desperate, because they are losing their strike. In the street car strikes, for instance, every one of them is marked with violence, because the men in the power-house are at work, the power is going through the rails and the scabs are able to run the cars. The men and women in desperation, seeing that the work is being done, turn the cars off the track, cut the wires, throw stones, and so on. But the I.W.W. believes that it is far more up to date to call the men in the power house out on strike. Then there won’t be any cars running, any scabs to throw stones at or any wires that are worth cutting. Physical violence is dramatic. It’s especially dramatic when you talk about it and don’t resort to it. But actual violence is an old-fashioned method of conducting a strike. And mass action, paralyzing all industry, is a new-fashioned and a much more feared method of conducting a strike. That does not mean that violence shouldn’t be used in self-defense. Everybody believes in violence for self-defense. Strikers don’t need to be told that. But the actual fact is that in spite of our theory that the way to win a strike is to put your hands in your pocket and refuse to work, it was only in the Paterson strike of all the strikes in 1913 that a strike leader said what Haywood said: “If the police do not let up in the use of violence against the strikers the strikers are going to arm themselves and fight back.” That has, however, not been advertised as extensively as was the “hands in your pockets” theory. Nor has it been advertised by either our enemies or our friends: that in the Paterson strike police persecution did drop off considerably after the open declaration of self-defense was made by the strikers. In that contingency violence is of course a necessity and one would be stupid to say that in either Michigan or West Virginia or Colorado the miners have not a right to take their guns and defend their wives and their babies and themselves.