There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  As Spokane was winding down, another free speech struggle opened in Fresno. The town had long served as the labor source for the surrounding San Joaquin Valley, and ranchers and railroad operators were outraged when an IWW local under the guidance of the renowned western activist Frank Little, who described himself as “half Indian, half white man, all IWW,” began organizing workers. After one contractor had difficulty hiring for an irrigation dam project and complained to police, the town denied the IWW a permit to stage public gatherings and warned it would arrest for vagrancy anyone not gainfully employed. Basing their tactics on the success in Spokane, the IWW focused on filling the jails in order to bust the town’s resources. Wobblies flooded in from all over the country, bumming rides on freight trains, walking over mountains, trooping along rural byways singing Wobbly songs—or at least so went the legend within the ranks of an increasingly confident IWW. In February 1911, Fresno—like Spokane before it—agreed to meet the union’s terms.

  These victories, however, appeared to gird reactionary defenses at San Diego, where the next free speech battle was to be waged. All of Southern California was then on edge over radical speech-making due to a notorious case involving a deadly terrorist attack against the Los Angeles Times. On October 1, 1910, a mysterious explosion and fire had destroyed much of the Times building, killing twenty-one people, several of whom had been found buried beneath rubble at the rear of the partially collapsed structure. The paper’s owner was Harrison Gray Otis, a virulent anti-labor man and proud Civil War veteran who had named his own home “The Bivouac” and had designed the newspaper’s headquarters to resemble a medieval fortress. At the time of the assault, Otis and his newspaper were leading the fight against a closed shop movement among Los Angeles trade unions. Its first headline upon resuming publication after the fire read “Unionist Bombs Wreck the Times.”38

  The labor movement had come rushing to the defense of the men charged with the heinous crime, brothers John and James McNamara. Eugene Debs, who suspected another frame-up like the Steunenberg case, demanded that “the villainous plot shall not be consummated!”39 McNamara Defense Leagues sprang up all over the country. Even Sam Gompers extended support to the accused siblings, traveling to California and having his picture taken with them in their jail cell. Defenders of the brothers pointed out that prior to October 1 Times employees had complained of a gas leak in the building; some suggested the brothers were being set up so that the paper could evade responsibility for the gas explosion and subsequent loss of life, with the good name of labor to be sullied in the bargain.

  The supporters of such theories, and of the McNamara brothers themselves, were to be sorely disappointed. When the trial opened in October 1911 a man named Ortie McManigal, who claimed to be the brothers’ accomplice, agreed to testify for the state. James McNamara then admitted to planting the bomb, explaining that his intention was only to terrorize the newspaper owner and editors for their open shop advocacy; he had not foreseen that the bomb would ignite a fire, which may or may not have had something to do with the gas leak. “Well, if I swing, I’ll swing for a principle,” James conceded philosophically,40 but defense attorney Clarence Darrow dug in for the fight with his usual diligence, aided by muckraker and California native Lincoln Steffens. Their objective, once James admitted his guilt, was to save the brothers from a death sentence. Los Angeles and the state of California were also keen on not turning the McNamaras into martyrs, fearing that executions would exacerbate already fractious local labor relations. Steffens and Darrow arranged a compromise with the court wherein, in exchange for the men’s lives, they would provide full confessions; the McNamaras would admit that, as laboring men, they had been driven to violence by the oppressive nature of capitalism. James McNamara was sentenced to life in prison, John to fifteen years at hard labor.

  There was across the country a sense of a trust betrayed. The labor movement had united behind the brothers, pitying their plight and rallying in their defense. The sense of embarrassment was especially acute among those who had sworn publicly to the duo’s innocence and raised cash for their defense. And both Darrow and Steffens came in for criticism for having brokered a deal that left the state appearing triumphant over the murderous forces of labor radicalism.

  The IWW had been fully in the McNamaras’ corner, support that now looked ill-conceived, and this vulnerability likely emboldened the vicious reaction that met the Wobblies in San Diego. Authorities there had in December 1911 prohibited public speaking on a stretch of a downtown street traditionally designated for that purpose, and three months later put an even more comprehensive anti-soapboxing law into effect. For their mutual defense, the IWW and other leftists formed a two-thousand-member local Free Speech League, while the reactionary San Diego Tribune, setting the tone for the war that was to come, recommended that “all demonstrators should be shot down or hanged.”41

  First came a brutal nighttime ambush of IWWers riding the rails into San Diego by a small army of vigilantes; then the editor of the San Diego Herald, who had written sympathetically of the free speech cause, was abducted, driven out of town, and beaten within an inch of his life. As if local tensions weren’t sufficient, Emma Goldman and her business manager, Ben Reitman, arrived in May on a lecture tour. Goldman was by now a notorious radical celebrity, beloved by those sympathetic to her various causes, which included anarchy and birth control, but virulently despised by the rest of the country, partly due to the allegation that she had been an accomplice to Leon Czolgosz, the 1901 assassin of President McKinley.42

  Goldman was accustomed to drawing crowds, but there was no adulation intended by the mob that greeted Reitman and her at the train depot. “Give us that anarchist,” a vigilante mob demanded. “We will strip her naked; we will tear out her guts.” Goldman escaped harm with the help of local sympathizers and police, but Reitman was abducted from their hotel that night, stuffed in the back of a car, and taken to an isolated clearing in the woods where he was stripped, tortured with hot tar, and had his body branded with the letters IWW.43

  Not content to merely let some of its residents exact frontier justice on the IWW and other visiting “troublemakers,” the city of San Diego appealed to the federal government for help, making the absurd claim that the Wobblies were conspiring to take over Southern California. To appease the city’s concerns, President William Howard Taft publicly denounced the IWW but refused to involve the federal government in suppressing the group. Instead, local police allowed the vigilantes to continue and intensify their terrorist assaults; within weeks most of the IWW members had been jailed or chased away.

  At San Diego the Wobblies learned a hard lesson: violence trumped even the cleverest radicalism. It was possible to outfox authorities where the rule of law prevailed, where established powers-that-be could be made to appear inadequate and forced to countenance their own hypocrisy; but where vigilantism went unchecked and police were inclined to look the other way or even collaborate, the odds became insurmountable.

  THE FREE SPEECH CAMPAIGNS were a dramatic rite of passage for the IWW, but their disadvantage was that the larger goal of labor organizing often receded into the background as members’ attention was drawn to defense of the First Amendment and the legal plight of arrested colleagues.44 The resulting perception—that the Wobblies were scrappy but lacked follow-through—may explain America’s rather stunned reaction to the IWW’s next act: the successful coordination in 1912 at Lawrence, Massachusetts, of the famous “Bread and Roses” textile strike (named after a poem written the year before by James Oppenheim), one of the more disciplined labor actions in the nation’s history. In retrospect, probably no one but the Wobblies could have managed the feat.45

  Built in the mid-nineteenth century as a model manufacturing town, its numerous large mills hugging both sides of the Merrimack River, Lawrence by 1912 offered a kind of snapshot of urban industrial America. With almost 90 percent of the workers and residents immigrant Italians, Slavs, Belgians, Port
uguese, Germans, or French Canadians, the city was a “melting pot,” a term that had only recently entered the American vernacular. The strike was triggered by an announcement from the town’s largest employer, the American Woolen Company (AWC), that in response to a new state law shortening the workweek from fifty-six to fifty-four hours, all laborers would be forced to accept a weekly pay cut.

  Textile work already ranked among the lowest paid in the country. Mill employees at Lawrence earned between $3 and $6 a week; by comparison, steelworkers in Pennsylvania earned almost $14 and even Lawrence’s garbage men received $12.46 Still, the AWC defended the reduction as necessary. Since textile factories in other states were not affected by the new law, the company insisted, “the iron law of competition” meant that without the cut the Lawrence mills would be unfairly disadvantaged. But many workers recalled that a similar law, passed in 1909, had shortened hours without reducing pay. Concerned over American Woolen’s stance, a small Wobbly local in Lawrence began organizing outside the mills and asked for help from the IWW’s national office.

  The strike’s initial moments were characterized by outrage and anger. On the morning of Friday, January 12, the day when the first pay envelopes reflected the salary cut, workers marched out of the AWC’s Washington Mill, crying “short pay.” With “the most ungodly yelling and howling and blowing of horns,” they then headed to other mills nearby shouting “Strike!” and demanding that other workers “come out.”47 Some of the demonstrators stormed into mills to roust their fellow workers, then roamed the shop floors harming looms and other equipment. At the Wood Mill, one of the city’s largest, guards responded to the invasion by shutting off the power; someone then activated the emergency sprinklers, sending water down onto the untended machines. In front of the nearby Duck Mill, the massing strikers cheered impromptu speeches of defiance made by fellow workers, then hurled rocks, chunks of coal, and even their dinner pails at the mill’s windows.48

  The terrorizing of American Woolen’s machines and property reflected the workers’ long-simmering contempt for its president, William “Billy” Wood, who lived with his family in a mansion in a neighboring town. One of Wood’s innovations at Lawrence was a bonus system that paid employees extra for realizing manufacturing quotas. This increased production—the Wood Mill alone processed a million pounds of wool per week into fabric (forcing AWC to build a new facility across the street, the Ayer Mill, to assist with the Wood Mill’s output)—but such gains involved stricter rules for workers and the speeding up of the looms. The AWC also had a public relations problem with its own employees, for it was an article of faith among the mill hands that American Woolen had advertised in Europe with posters and even a short film, urging emigration to Lawrence—a place where “no one goes hungry, all can work”—and showing contented workers with satchels of money.49 The existence of such propaganda has never been substantiated, but the workers of Lawrence believed in it, and so they viewed the treatment they received at the hands of Billy Wood as a promise broken. Their opinion of the Lawrence town fathers was not much higher: in what was touted as a model industrial city, they subsisted in rickety wooden tenements, slums so crowded that on some blocks there were as many as six hundred people to an acre, enduring poor sanitation and lethal rates of diseases such as dysentery, measles, and scarlet fever among their children.50

  A philanthropic investigation of living conditions conducted just before the 1912 strike mourned the disappearance of the long-ago corporate paternalism that had attended the incorporation of Lawrence in the nineteenth century:

  The mill owners [who] founded the town … planned painstakingly for it and its welfare…. The industrial revolution had at that time … not yet spoiled the feelings of the employers. Boarding-houses were maintained or controlled by the companies at a low profit … for the purpose of preserving a proper supervision over the operatives. The attempt was made to safeguard not only the physical welfare of the tenants, but their moral and religious life … [but this] surveillance … proved too troublesome.51

  The town had been conceived in the same exemplary spirit as Lowell, but Lawrence’s vaunted mutual regard between employer and worker was by 1912 little more than historical legend. The disconnect between the town’s boosterish self-image and the reality as lived by the workers extended to Billy Wood, who chose to take his employees’ rebellion as a personal betrayal. Sounding, as historian Bruce Watson notes, “more like a jilted lover than a textile tycoon,” Wood notified the strikers:

  Last Friday many of you left our mills and have since remained away. This action was wholly a surprise to me. You sent me no notice of what you were intending to do and you stated no grievances and made no demands. I learned from the papers that the reason for your staying away is that the company paid you for only fifty-four hours work.

  He did not respond to the workers’ demands for a 15 percent pay increase, double pay for overtime, an end to the premium pay for sped-up production, and a promise that no strikers would be terminated for their actions.52

  Meanwhile, the call from Lawrence’s IWW had brought New York–based organizer Joseph Ettor to town. Ettor had visited Lawrence the year before, and was familiar with the basic issues separating workers from the mill owners; he duly arrived prepared for a lengthy stay, lugging his personal effects and a suitcase full of IWW literature. Like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Ettor, twenty-six, was something of a Wobbly natural, raised on radical lore. His father had been wounded in the Haymarket bombing, and the boy knew intimately the catechism of history’s labor martyrs. “While other children grew up on Alice in Wonderland or Little Lord Fauntleroy,” notes Watson, “Ettor’s father told his son bedtime tales from the triumvirate of infamous American strikes in the late nineteenth century—Haymarket, Homestead, and Pullman.”53 Soon Joe displayed his own rebellious nature, abandoning school to join the itinerant world of the bindle stiffs, migrant workers who traveled with their own bedding on their backs. Traversing the West, he toiled on railroads, in steel plants, and in lumber mills before becoming a full-time organizer for the IWW.

  Known as “Smiling Joe” for his round pleasant face, Ettor soon had the Lawrence textile workers in hand, his ease with language well suited to the multiethnic town. “His attire,” a colleague noted, “with his big soft hat worn jauntily on one side and his big flowing Windsor tie and natty blue suit is suggestive of the pompous bourgeoisie or the artistic Bohemian, although Ettor is neither of these, being sound and substantial in all aspects.”54 These sartorial flashes seemed to be his sole extravagance; as an organizer he was no-nonsense, carefully delegating authority and hearing out strikers’ grievances, maintaining detailed lists and charts, and even carrying his own gavel in an attaché case so as to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to hammer a meeting to order. In contrast to the brawling and vandalism that had characterized the strike’s first days, Ettor counseled discipline and nonviolence; simply staying out of work was the best weapon, he advised, particularly after militia arrived to guard the mills. “I want you all to understand that the cause cannot be won by spilling blood,” he told the workers. “Peaceful persuasion is the only weapon advocated from this platform.”55 Ettor saw that the mills exploited the workers’ ethnic divisions, so one of his first tasks was to assemble relief committees with representatives from all the city’s ethnic groups in order to keep strikers and their families fed.

  As Ettor worked, the authorities had also been busy—in ways that were bound to challenge his call for “peaceful persuasion” by the strikers. Massachusetts governor Eugene Foss had sent in the state militia almost at once, and soldiers and strikers faced off daily, often at a canal that separated the business district from the mills. When mounted troops swung their horses close in to the lines in an attempt to intimidate the protestors, one animal appeared reluctant. “You see,” an immigrant striker told a mounted soldier, “horse IWW.”56 But the confrontation was far from jocular on the freezing morning of January 15 outside the Prospect Mill
when militiamen turned a powerful fire hose on a crowd of thinly clad demonstrators; the strikers were furious at the tactic, one they believed was intended not to disperse them but to drench them and make them deathly ill.57 Later some soldiers jabbed at striking women and children with their bayonets.

  Governor Foss suggested strike negotiations and a monthlong labor truce, an idea the mill owners favored as it would at least get the looms moving again, but the IWW rejected the offer, fearing a loss of momentum. “We want no honeyed talk,”58 cautioned Ettor, although he agreed to sit for a brief chat with Billy Wood, which proved nonproductive. Lawrence mayor Michael Scanlon also tried to intervene. Newly elected on a reform ticket, Scanlon, while an alderman, had helped expose corruption involving his immediate mayoral predecessor, William White, and the town had recently adopted a leaner commission-style government that created several new oversight positions, including a Commissioner of Public Health and Charities to help deal with the poverty endured by the mill workers. For all his Progressive ideas, however, Scanlon was outflanked by Ettor, whose worldview was radical by contrast and more in sync with that of the textile workers. When, in one meeting, Scanlon accused Ettor of stirring up local antagonisms, the Wobbly replied, “I am not responsible for what men do when they have been downtrodden, when their faces have been ground into the dirt so that they no longer resemble human beings.” Scanlon conceded the workers deserved better treatment, but asked for less militancy and confrontation. “We have had strikes,” the mayor explained, “but we never had to call the police to suppress disorder, let alone send for the people of other cities to help us and employ the militia.” At one point he implored Ettor to “take the first train back to New York where you came from,” to which Ettor replied, “I shall stay here and do what I can for these people,”59 a sentiment echoed in a broadside issued by the strikers that declared: