by Philip Dray
Our enemies are making an effort to blind the issue by making a cry of “foreigners,” “rioters,” to which we may reply we were not considered foreigners when we meekly consented to being robbed of our labors and opportunities; we were considered good citizens as long as we were traitors to our best interests.60
Ettor also brushed away rumors that the IWW would resort to the use of dynamite to win the strike. “Tell the people not to believe them till they hear the explosion,” he said.61 But the town elders were hardly reassured. They, like most Americans, equated the IWW with violence and the anarchist philosophy of bombing and assassination—the deadly assault on the Los Angeles Times was recent news—and on January 20 Lawrence police swept into the city’s tenements and seized three stashes of dynamite, together with various fuses and percussion caps. One was found in an Italian’s “cobbler shop”; another turned up in a house in the Syrian neighborhood; a third had been left out in plain view at a local cemetery. Several suspicious persons were arrested, including shoemaker Urbano da Prato; Faris Murad, a Syrian tailor prominent in the strike; and Trinidad Bushon, described as a “Porto Rican Negro.” Upon the sensational discovery of the explosives, new, frightful rumors spread. “Professional” dynamiters were said to be on the loose, intent on blowing up mills, the police station, the armory, even Billy Wood’s house. Rather than be alarmed by the dynamite scare, the striking workers savored the effect the threat had on the city and the mill owners; it was gratifying for once to see the authorities unnerved.
The sense of gathering momentum, the idea that the strike might actually be won, crested on January 24 when Big Bill Haywood arrived in Lawrence. The strikers and their families turned out in droves, lining the streets around the railroad depot in what one newspaper termed “probably the greatest demonstration ever accorded to a visitor to Lawrence.” The crowd raised a din at the first glimpse of Haywood,62 and as a band boomed out spirited tunes, the people swept up Big Bill and carried him through the narrow streets to the speakers’ stand in Lawrence Common. There, Haywood looked out over the crowd of expectant immigrant faces—men, women, and children of two dozen ethnicities, backgrounds, and dialects—and to a roar of approval from this new America, exclaimed, “There is no foreigner here except the capitalists.”63
WITHIN A WEEK THE LAWRENCE STRIKE was transformed by tragedy. The trouble began in the early morning hours of January 29, when workers used ice and rocks to smash windows on streetcars carrying scabs to the mills along Essex Street, the town’s main drag. Later that afternoon, as day turned to winter dusk, strikers renewed their protesting, engaging in a verbal scrimmage with police in the vicinity of the Everett Mill. Some workers began hurling snowballs, icicles, and chunks of coal toward the officers, who suddenly rushed the mob. In the tumult a gunshot was heard and Anna LoPizzo, a thirty-three-year-old mill worker, fell to the street dead, shot through the chest.
That same night John Breen, an undertaker who was an ex-alderman and the son of a popular former Irish mayor, was arrested, accused of planting the dynamite found days earlier in what now, it was evident, had been an attempt to frame the strikers and the IWW. It appeared Breen had wrapped one of the stashes of dynamite in a funeral trade magazine from which he had neglected to remove the mailing label for his own business.64
The next day, January 30, an eighteen-year-old Syrian named John Rami and his friends threw ice at a group of militiamen, who gave chase; one of the troops poked Rami with his bayonet, attempting only to halt the boy’s flight, but the wound proved fatal. When residents demanded the militiaman be detained by police, the city marshal was incredulous. “Arrest him? Why, you can’t arrest a soldier for doing his duty.”65
That evening Ettor was in his room at the Needham Hotel when police burst in, accusing him of involvement in the death of Anna LoPizzo. A short time later they also arrested, on the same charge, Arturo Giovannitti, a Socialist poet and editor of an Italian-language workers’ newspaper, Il Proletario. Although neither man had been present when LoPizzo was killed, both were held as “accessories before the fact” for having incited the demonstrators. Giovannitti, a former schoolteacher who had studied briefly at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, had joined the strike effort at Ettor’s behest only a few days earlier in order to assist with relief operations. A slender, classically handsome man, and an immigrant himself, Giovannitti had been an immediate hit with the town’s Italian strikers, speaking a calm and beautiful Italian from the podium and occasionally reading his poems. “Capitalism is the same here as in the Old Country,” he told the Lawrence workers. “Nobody cares for you. You are considered mere machines—less than machines. If any effort is made to improve your lot and to raise you to the dignity of manhood and womanhood that effort must come from yourselves alone.”66 A mill worker named Joseph Caruso was also soon taken into custody and charged with being part of the murder conspiracy, even as the police conceded it was unclear who had shot LoPizzo.
For Ettor, a man steeped in the Haymarket case, his and Giovannitti’s arrests offered a close parallel to the allegations made against Parsons and Spies et al in 1886, including the detail that the person suspected of committing the crime was unknown and nowhere to be found. The IWW lost no time in denouncing the arrests, which were an obvious attempt to remove Ettor from the strike leadership and keep Giovannitti from replacing him. For two days the town’s workers publicly mourned Anna LoPizzo and John Rami. As the two victims were laid to rest, one phase of the strike ended, with a pall over the struggle and its leaders sitting in the Essex County jail. Ettor, in a note smuggled out, consoled his followers that Bill Haywood would return soon to guide the strike.
Haywood, before leaving New York, had a chance to see firsthand the effect news stories out of Lawrence were having on labor sympathizers. He had stopped by unannounced at Carnegie Hall, where a public debate was under way between Emma Goldman and Sol Fieldman. Fieldman, a Socialist who favored engagement in electoral politics, cited the assassination of President McKinley as a troubling result of Goldman’s brand of anarchism. Despite the allegation linking Goldman to assassin Leon Czolgosz (which Goldman had always denied and had never been proven), the audience largely seemed to be in Goldman’s corner. “Scores of finely dressed women,” it was reported, “were every whit as enthusiastic as were the poorer people … in their applause” of Goldman’s “anarchistic utterances.” The program was halted so that Big Bill could speak, and no sooner had he uttered the words, “I am here tonight representing 22,000 textile workers who are on strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts,” than the hall erupted in cheers. “The men and women of Lawrence are fighting for their right to live,” he added. “They are the persons who clothe you and yet they are the persons who are naked.” Buckets were passed for strike donations, and when Haywood implored, “I don’t want a man or woman in this audience to go out of this place with more than carfare in his or her pocket,” a shower of additional coins and bills rained down onto the stage, Fieldman and Goldman stepping out from behind their podiums to help gather the money. Haywood then left to catch his train, bearing $750 in contributions for the Lawrence strikers.67
By the next day he had moved into Ettor’s room at the Needham Hotel and assumed many of “Smiling Joe’s” duties—meeting with strikers and urging them to avoid violence by keeping “their hands in their pockets.” Their strength of numbers alone, he promised, would suffice to win the struggle with the mills. At the same time, some Italian workers came forward with an interesting suggestion. In Italy, they explained, workers engaged in lengthy standoffs with employers had sometimes sent their children to another location in order to lessen the economic burden on their families. None of the Lawrence organizers were aware of this ever having been done in America, but they saw at once its potential usefulness; not only would a “children’s exodus” lighten the load on the striking mill workers, many of whom had four or five extra mouths to feed, it would command headlines, calling greater national attention to the
ir plight. The power of children to garner sympathy for labor had been convincingly demonstrated in 1903 by Mother Jones.
When notices appeared in several East Coast cities asking for households that would receive a child from Lawrence for the duration of the strike, the response was overwhelming. Homes were available in Boston, New York, and as far away as Philadelphia. On Saturday, February 10, the first train departed Lawrence for New York bearing 119 children between the ages of two and twelve, chaperoned by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Margaret Sanger, the Socialist reformer and birth-control advocate, among others. (Sanger had become impressed with Flynn after seeing her lead a laundry workers’ strike in New York in 1911; Flynn had developed an interest in birth control due to the hardships of poor, overly large working families she saw at places like Lawrence.) A directive released by a New York–based committee coordinating the February 10 exodus explained, “The children arriving today come from a city held in the grip of an armed terror. These children have seen the gleam of edged weapons on the streets…. [They] are fresh from the battlefield stained with the blood of your fellow-workers.”
Five thousand supporters turned up at Grand Central Station to make the Lawrence youngsters welcome. “At 6:50 the searchlight of the electric engine that pulled the train from Highbridge was sighted coming into the train shed,” it was reported. “Then the excitement started in earnest. Slowly the hum of ‘La Marseillaise’ started, gradually gathering in volume. It ended when the train came to a stop and then ensued a series of frantic shouts and yells in a dozen languages…. The children were formed in columns of twos, and at a signal from a young man … they announced their arrival with a yell:
Who are we, who are we, who are we!
Yes we are, yes we are, yes we are,
Strikers, strikers, strikers.”68
Sanger later told a congressional committee investigating the Lawrence strike that of the 119 children who arrived on February 10, many were sick and emaciated, only 20 had coats, no more than 4 wore underwear, and very few had hats, most having to protect their ears from the cold by wrapping a scarf around their heads. Volunteer doctors in New York declared many malnourished, noting that in some instances children of seven or eight years of age were so “under-grown” as to appear to be only four.
The youngsters were escorted out of the station to a union hall, where a warm meal awaited. “The hungry children did not need any instructions about disposing of that meal. They ate and ate until they couldn’t eat any more,” noted the Times,69 which also related:
They have never had so many warm, comfortable clothes. One hundred and twenty pairs of small hands have been covered with as many pairs of warm black mittens … and all the children who needed them have been given sweaters…. A four-year-old girl from a French family in Lawrence was particularly charming to her New York hosts, throwing her arms eagerly around the neck of anyone she met, declaring “I love you.”70
The IWW announced from Lawrence that an additional one thousand “strike waifs” were waiting to be sent away, but the exodus was already the subject of criticism from Lawrence’s elders, who were furious at the attention the children’s crusade was receiving and its implied insult to their town. They challenged the notion that it was really necessary to deport the young people and accused the IWW of using them to gain publicity. A local paper published an article headlined “Spineless,” quoting a militia leader to the effect that the Lawrence police had been lax in allowing the children to depart in the first place. All this belated concern for the mill workers’ children was hypocritical, of course. “When children quit school to work in the mills, no city official or local employer cried neglect,” historian Melvyn Dubofsky points out. “But now that the IWW sent these same children out of Lawrence to good homes with the guarantee of ample food, medical care, and supervision, the owners and the officials screamed neglect.”71
The printed rebuke of the police, however, had hit home. On the morning of Saturday, February 24, a group of forty-six children was assembled at the railroad depot to board the 7:11 a.m. train to Boston, from where they were to go on to Philadelphia. Town Marshal John J. Sullivan had insisted the previous day that no more children were to be sent from Lawrence, citing an order issued by the city government. The legality of the city’s edict was dubious, and the IWW had made sure to obtain the parents’ written permission for the children who’d be departing. Some parents had come along to the station, where they learned that Bill Haywood himself would be among the chaperones. As the train arrived, however, police suddenly filled the platform and attempted to corral the children. “When one of these big burleys would lay his hand on a child, of course it would scream,” Haywood recalled, “and its mother would fly to the rescue of her captive young.”72 The mothers tried to push the police away. “The hysterical screams of the crazed women and the piteous cries of the frightened children resounded through the train shed,” reported the Lawrence Evening Tribune. Several women were taken into custody, and were loaded with their children onto a truck for transport to jail. No children were allowed to board the train.
Word of the incident spread instantly, and a crowd swarmed to the jail. The scene there was manic, as children cried, mothers with babes in arms were led behind bars, and angry bystanders shouted at the police. Some who tried to intervene were put down with police truncheons. The officers appeared satisfied to have at last shown their mettle, and the hometown papers were duly impressed. “There were two companies of militia on hand to act if necessary but the police proved themselves equal to the task of handling the situation and the soldier boys were not needed,” crowed one afternoon edition.73
The Lawrence police had shown they were not “spineless,” but as public relations the arrest of little children and their mothers proved disastrous. The New York Tribune termed the cops’ interference “as chuckle-headed an exhibition of incompetence to deal with a strike situation as it is possible to recall,”74 while the New York Sun worried at the precedent of authority placing “an embargo on the movements of residents of an American community.”75 President Taft was moved to order the Justice Department to make inquiries, while Congressman Victor Berger of Wisconsin called for a congressional hearing and the Metropolitan Opera star Enrico Caruso announced a benefit concert for the Lawrence families.
With the strike about to enter its third month, and the negative publicity connected with the children’s exodus tilting public opinion decidedly in favor of the Lawrence mill workers, American Woolen agreed on March 12 to negotiate. Improvements in hours and benefits were granted, and wages were raised by between 5 and 25 percent. New adjustments were agreed to for overtime, and the mills consented to rehire the workers who had gone out. Immediately many other textile mills in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, eager to head off labor trouble and nervous about what had just played out in Lawrence, fell in line with AWC’s realignments.
The actions of the Lawrence strikers had, it was estimated, won millions of dollars in concessions for their fellow textile mill workers throughout New England. As Haywood assured a festive crowd on Lawrence Common:
You, the strikers of Lawrence, have won the most signal victory of any body of organized working men in the world. You have won the strike for yourselves…. You are the heart and soul of the working class…. You have won over the opposed power of the city, state, and national administrations, against the opposition of the combined forces of capitalism.76
The workers deserved Haywood’s praise, but so did the IWW, which now claimed sixteen thousand grateful members in Lawrence alone. The strike and relief efforts had been intelligently run and the participants had remained militantly devoted to their objective, a remarkable achievement given that the strikers were not a tight band of skilled trade unionists but tens of thousands of unskilled immigrants from diverse ethnic groups who barely shared a common language. As one mill hand assured a reporter who’d asked his nationality, “I have no country. I am IWW.”77
&
nbsp; CONSERVATIVE ELEMENTS IN LAWRENCE were as alarmed over what had happened in their town as the workers and IWW were exuberant, fearful that the victory over American Woolen by “the off-scourings of Southern Europe” would only embolden those who “will not be assimilated and have no sympathy for our institutions.”78 The Lawrence Citizens’ Association, organized during the strike, left no doubt as to its views with an explicitly titled pamphlet, Lawrence as It Really Is: Not as Syndicalists, Anarchists, Socialists, Suffragists, Pseudo Philanthropists, and Muckraking Yellow Journalists Have Painted It. The community had been invaded, the association said, by “The Sob Squad”—judgmental New York reformers predisposed to find fault wherever they went.
The Atlantic Monthly’s postmortem on the strike scolded the mill owners for their mishandling of the situation, but suggested the real problem was the immigrants themselves, who “collect in such compact masses as to make it impossible to … teach them American principles.” The growth of such dense foreign populations “in our industrial centers,” the magazine warned, “is preparing a very dark problem for the future.”79 The New York Tribune likewise voiced concern over “the ease with which an American city … may be seized by a gang of outside agitators,”80 while Winthrop L. Marvin, secretary of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, worried that with the influx of immigrants to America, “there are just enough of these excitable races to furnish the material for … mob law, carefully organized in the supposed interest of advanced socialism.”81 The Atlantic article ascribed dangerous motives to the Wobblies and compared them unfavorably with the AFL, “a responsible body.”82
Perhaps it was not surprising that the AFL-affiliated United Textile Workers of America (UTW) had been displeased with the IWW’s presence in Lawrence, for UTW chief John Golden had once entertained notions of organizing Lawrence’s skilled workers. The IWW had pitched a much larger and more inclusive tent, of course, leaving the UTW leadership outside; Golden, rather than walk away gracefully, had harassed the IWW throughout the strike, belittling the Wobblies’ tactics and even urging skilled workers to remain on the job. The Textile Worker, a UTW magazine, had gone so far as to publish a derogatory article titled “Strawberries and Spaghetti” that listed a number of IWW abuses, including the allegation that Ettor and Giovannitti had lived like royalty while the workers starved, even partaking of a lavish $42 dinner at a Lawrence restaurant.83