There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  About 50 percent of the workers were Russian Jews, another 35 percent Italian. The Lower East Side, where most of the garment business was concentrated, was by 1905 both the most crowded residential area in the United States and the world’s largest center of Jewish population; it was, not surprisingly, also a stewpot of intellectual and activist thought.63 For these immigrants—many of whom had some familiar connection with political or labor agitation in the Old World—the nascent labor movement in the garment industry was a vehicle for assimilation in their adopted land. “The trade union became to the Jews,” one historian has said, “what urban politics had long been for the Irish.”64

  In the warm summer of 1909 the young seamstresses, grown impatient with their subjugation in the garment shops, finally rebelled. The strike originated at Rosen Brothers, a company that “sweated” labor by hiring contractors to manufacture its clothes based on the firm’s designs and patterns. The contractors worked inside the factory, paying and supervising their own hires. This arrangement allowed Rosen Brothers to not only cut labor costs to the bone but distance themselves from those who sewed and stitched on their premises. The trouble started when negotiations soured on the basic piece rate between Rosen Brothers and its inside contractors, who had little difficulty convincing the workers that a declining piece rate was not in their interest either; both contractors and workers then walked out together. The ILGWU led a five-week stoppage that forced Rosen Brothers to recognize the union, establish a shop floor grievance committee, and grant a 20 percent rate increase. Encouraged by what had occurred, workers struck two of the city’s other large clothing factories, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and Leiserson’s.

  Triangle employees were upset because the firm had recently created a company union, or “association,” to thwart independent union organizing, and the association had been seen to play favorites with its distribution of bonuses to “worthy” employees. When a group of workers met off-premises after work to discuss their grievances, Triangle supervisors discovered who they were and fired many of them, using the excuse that fewer workers were needed as the result of a seasonal work shortage. But when it became known that the firm was making new hires to replace those who had been dismissed, the former workers declared they were being locked out and in late September announced a strike.

  As almost all the garment factories shared to an extent the problems that had appeared at Rosen Brothers and at Triangle Shirtwaist, interest in a larger strike became widespread throughout the fall of 1909. Many small operators, having witnessed the ILGWU’s resolve in breaking Rosen Brothers, settled almost at once; but Triangle was able to resist by shipping some of its work to its operations in Philadelphia and Westchester County, or farming it out to some of the smaller shops that had settled with the union.

  The ILGWU had a critical ally in the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), a group of middle- and upper-class reformers that Collier’s magazine described as “a foster mother to women’s unions.”65 Founded in 1903 under the auspices of the AFL by William English Walling, Jane Addams, and Mary Kenny (individuals also involved in the 1909 founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP]), the mission of the WTUL was to assist the organizing activities of female workers, especially by fund-raising, and to link labor activism to broader women’s issues such as suffrage, public education, and temperance. The alliance between the WTUL and the ILGWU united a diverse array of New Yorkers—immigrant garment workers, “uptown” Progressives, settlement house movement reformers like Addams, as well as college students from Barnard and Vassar who volunteered to stand with workers on picket lines outside garment factories.

  Picketing was made difficult by the neighborhood pugilists and down-on-their-luck streetwalkers hired by the companies to “protect” replacement workers. Strikers and their allies were often shoved, kicked, and intimidated, although the policy backfired on the factory owners once readers of the daily newspapers began seeing accounts of teen-aged seamstresses being harassed by “gangs of men” who “used their fists against girl strikers,” or, in one instance, “hurled a picket to the ground and then stamped on her.”66

  The WTUL tactic of placing college students and women of means on the picket line was intended to grant the strikers some protection; if arrests were made, the WTUL women could witness the workers’ treatment by police or perhaps intervene on their behalf in court. But it proved hard to remain above the fray. On November 4, Mary Dreier, president of the WTUL and “a wealthy champion of laboring women in this city,” was herself arrested on an assault charge after arguing with a policeman and a female scab named Anna Walla in front of the Triangle Shirtwaist building on Washington Street. Dreier explained that when she informed Walla, “There’s a strike in the Triangle,” Walla had struck her with her fist. To Dreier’s surprise, Walla then complained to policeman Joseph De Cantillon, who placed Dreier under arrest and took her to the Mercer Street station house, where Walla told a magistrate that Dreier had said, “I will split your head open if you try to go to work.” Dreier, who was released once authorities realized who she was, told a reporter that the police’s preferential treatment of the scabs made her suspect the cops had been “sugared” by the factory owners.67

  While the police denied Dreier’s accusation,68 detectives hired by the WTUL confirmed that the “roughs and toughs” were being provided by the employers to menace the strikers. Employers defended the practice, complaining that replacement workers were suffering abuse. Max Blanck, co-owner of Triangle Shirtwaist, invited reporters into the plant to meet several young replacements who claimed harassment at the hands of ILGWU pickets. One of the women told the newsmen that a male picketer “had thrown a potato which struck her … leaving a bruise that could still be seen if necessary.”69

  At the time, picketing was a fairly new labor tactic, and the WTUL and other sympathizers were pressed to defend its legality. It was in their eyes protected free speech, not trespassing, although employers insisted the strikers’ presence before their place of work was aggressive. “You are on strike against God!” one magistrate frustrated by the vagueness of the law bellowed at a young demonstrator hauled before his bench. But the newspapers continued to write sympathetically of the picket lines.70

  ON NOVEMBER 22, MEMBERS OF THE ILGWU and the WTUL and other city unionists gathered at Cooper Union to consider a broader garment industry strike. As the speechmaking wore on, Clara Lemlich, a young Socialist from the Ukraine and a member of Local 25 of the ILGWU who had helped lead the walkout at the large Leiserson’s factory, grew weary of the meeting’s “bureaucratic drone.” Suddenly she leaped onto the stage and exclaimed in Yiddish:

  I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am one who feels and suffers from the things pictured. What we are here for is to decide whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared—now.

  The young woman’s dramatic rush to the stage and her bold words had an electrifying effect. The hall rose to its feet, waving hats and handkerchiefs. A seconding motion was quickly passed, to more cheers. Meeting chairman B. Feigenbaum then asked if those present would take “the old Jewish oath,” and he intoned in a stern voice, as the assembly repeated each word, “If I forget thee oh Jerusalem, may my right hand wither, may my tongue forget speech.” The next morning fifteen thousand garment workers walked off their jobs in a crippling industry-wide strike,71 an uprising, according to the New York Times, “such as never [had] been known since woman entered the Garden of Eden.”72

  Now the street violence intensified. On November 26 “a cyclonic time” was observed before the J. M. Cohen & Co. factory at 189 Greene Street, as female pickets and female scabs tangled; a crowd of onlookers gathered as the girls pushed, tore, and scratched at one another. When police arrived to disperse “the Amazonian attack,” they had to rescue the s
ole male participant, picket organizer Morris Parillo, whose clothes were in a state of disarray and who, according to press accounts, was relieved to have been arrested. Sixteen other people were taken into custody and brought to the Jefferson Market Court.73 By Christmas 1909 nearly eight hundred arrests had been made, including two teenage girls caught attacking a factory owner with their hatpins; nineteen young women were dispatched to the city workhouse on Blackwell’s Island.

  These measures against the strikers led the WTUL to coordinate a public meeting at Carnegie Hall on January 2 that turned into a giant pageant, with hundreds of girls who had been arrested and released appearing onstage adorned in white sashes bearing the words ARRESTED or WORKHOUSE PRISONER. When ten-year-old Rosa Perr stood center stage to tell the audience about the police brutality she had seen, sobbing was heard in the audience. Such ILGWU-WTUL gatherings were full of passion and drama, but the alliance was not without some cultural tensions. The WTUL’s more socially prominent members, sometimes referred to as “the Mink Brigade” by the young immigrants, tended to see the workers’ problems through a feminist or suffragist lens, while the workers themselves remained focused on pay and conditions of work. No one could say the WTUL had failed to garner wider attention for the ILGWU’s cause, but some events, such as a lunch at the fashionable Colony Club at which sweatshop girls were brought to speak before society matrons, or a motorcade in large fancy touring cars down Fifth Avenue organized by Alva Belmont, could feel a bit incongruous. Mrs. Belmont, an abundantly wealthy widow who had once been married to William K. Vanderbilt, often came off as surprisingly radical, as when she publicly advocated a general strike in New York of all women workers to support the shirtwaist strikers, an idea that was swiftly squelched by the city’s thirteen thousand female teachers.74 The occasional tensions between the WTUL and the ILGWU were universal, in a sense, the same kinds of cultural differences that have historically hindered awkward reform alliances, but at the heart of the struggle the solidarity of the strikers remained intact. “I have observed many a Jewish girl with her arm around an Italian girl’s neck, not able to speak one to the other,” one contemporary reported, “but both understanding they are fighting the same fight for each other’s interest.”75

  The day after the Carnegie Hall gathering a spirited rally was held at Lipkin’s Theater on Bowery and Rivington, after which suffragettes joined garment workers in a march to city hall, a “monster indignation parade” led by the WTUL’s Mary Dreier, Helen Marot, and Rose Schneiderman, a former garment worker. Banners bobbed over the marchers’ heads declaring PEACEFUL PICKETING IS THE RIGHT OF EVERY WOMAN. While there remained some doubt among the ILGWU unionists as to the efficacy of the ballot, they were open to the pleadings of the suffragists, who argued that all female workers, unionized or not, would benefit when American women obtained the vote. “Our cause is your cause, and your cause is our cause,” Anna Shaw assured the workers. “You can’t strike a blow with one finger or two fingers, but when you want to strike you put all your fingers together, clinch them hard, and then let drive.”76 The march received extensive news coverage, as did the foray of a five-member committee into city hall for an audience with Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., son of the Civil War general. The women handed McClellan a petition protesting the police department’s “flagrant discrimination … in favor of the employers,” and demanded an immediate halt to the “insults, intimidations, and abuses,” to which lawful picketers had been subjected. The mayor listened and vowed an inquiry.

  Meanwhile, the roughing-up of young women textile workers continued to pay huge public relations dividends, for while the intricacies of the sweatshop system might remain obscure to the news-reading public, “word portraits” of eighteen-year-old girls manhandled by ex-convicts and police rarely failed to hit home.77

  Since December, the National Civic Federation had been offering to broker a resolution to the strike. NCF members Marcus M. Marks and John Mitchell suggested a board of arbitration with six members, two from each side as well as two members of the public to be selected by the other four. Additional pressure on the owners to settle came when Local 25 persuaded workers in Philadelphia garment shops to also go out on strike, thus boxing in the New York shirtwaist firms that were using out-of-town factories to avoid bargaining with the ILGWU. Negotiations commenced but broke down ultimately over the issue of union recognition. Both sides cited the cause of freedom. The seamstresses saw recognition of the ILGWU as key to their freedom to bargain with employers; the factory owners cited their fear of the closed shop as an undemocratic impingement on their right to freely conduct their business. Eventually the owners agreed to a fifty-two-hour workweek, some paid holidays, shop committees to help set rates and wages, and an end to employee charges for supplies. Because union recognition was not offered, however, the ILGWU turned the deal aside.

  But by late January, with their resources drying up, women began returning to work as individual shops cobbled together agreements, and on February 13 the ILGWU officially terminated the strike. Not all objectives had been obtained, but some of the most offensive employer practices had been curtailed and the workers’ stature improved overall.

  THE ILGWU, WHOSE MEMBERSHIP had grown from five hundred to twenty thousand in only six months,78 had successfully utilized public opinion, outside reformers, and the linking of workers’ rights with issues such as suffrage and urban poverty. But already there was talk of a second strike—one destined to introduce a far more intricate and groundbreaking form of industrial democracy. It would build on the alliances and experiences gained in the 1909 strike, yet prohibit workers from agreeing on separate contracts with smaller shops and insist upon industry-wide recognition of the ILGWU. This massive work stoppage, led by the ILGWU Cloak Makers, began on the morning of July 7, 1910, when seventy-five thousand clothing workers walked off their jobs, not only in New York City, but in upstate New York towns and large manufacturing centers such as Philadelphia and Cleveland.

  Filene’s Department Store in Boston was not threatened by the strike except indirectly as a purveyor of men’s and women’s clothes, but brothers Abraham Lincoln Filene and Edward Albert Filene, who had taken over operation of the store from their father, William, in 1901, were intrigued by the tenets of industrial democracy. They had often seemed as interested in the rights of their eight hundred employees as in running a successful business. Indeed, they saw the two objectives as one; only the year before the store had introduced its “Automatic Bargain Basement,” a revolutionary concept that would make Filene’s a retail legend, while workers at Filene’s enjoyed participatory innovations such as an arbitration board in which employees reviewed grievances filed by and against fellow employees, worker control of the lunchroom, and direction of relief and entertainment funds. When the 1910 stoppage in the garment industry occurred, Lincoln Filene reached out to the NCF and various reformers and Boston friends, including attorney Louis Brandeis, who had done some labor management work for the store, in the hope of influencing settlement talks with the New York factory owners.

  Brandeis, a Boston native who had attained the highest grades in the history of Harvard Law School, belonged to an emerging breed of lawyers who saw themselves not solely as advocates for their business clients but rather as advising counsel; it made better sense and was more cost-effective to keep companies free of potentially harmful legal problems rather than fight such matters out in court. When in 1910 Brandeis found himself and his family comfortable enough that he could give up paid legal work, he began devoting himself to causes that appealed to his sense of social justice and in which he could be not so much an effective litigant but “counsel to the situation,” as he put it, an honest broker between conflicting interests. He had tremendous faith in the idea that there was nothing that could not be resolved in open and constructive dialogue. “Nine-tenths of the serious controversies which arise in life,” he once said, “result from misunderstanding, result from one man not knowing the facts w
hich to the other man seem important, or otherwise failing to appreciate his point of view.”79 An article Brandeis would publish in 1911 about industrial democracy bore the apt title “The Spirit of Get-Together.”80

  Brandeis’s interest in labor issues dated to the 1892 Homestead strike. At the time he had been preparing lectures for a course he was to lead in business law at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Studying the news accounts of Homestead, he recalled, “I saw at once that the common law, built up under simpler conditions of living, gave an inadequate basis for the adjustment of the complex relations of the modern factory system. I threw away my notes and approached my theme from new angles.”81 For the next decade Brandeis’s thinking was guided by the concern that law would need to find ways “to keep pace with the new phenomenon of highly concentrated capital—at least if it was to be truly moral.”82 In 1905 he told an assembly of Filene’s employees:

  The civilized world today believes that we must adhere to the system we have known as the monarchial system, the system of master and servant, or, as [they] now [are] politely called, employer and employee. It rests with this century and perhaps with America to prove that as we have in the political world shown what self-government can do, we are to pursue the same lines in the industrial world.83