There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Nothing damaged the IWW’s standing in Lawrence, however, as much as a gaffe committed by its own organizers. During a Labor Day parade in September 1912, months after the strike’s conclusion, a contingent of anarchist marchers had raised a banner that read ARISE! SLAVES OF THE WORLD! NO GOD! NO MASTER! ONE FOR ALL AND ALL FOR ONE. Immigrant workers, many of whom were devout, objected to the words “No God! No Master!” (the phrase dated from the French Revolution), but far more troubling was the swiftness with which local conservatives seized upon the offensive display and used it as leverage to destroy the IWW’s credibility. As Elizabeth Gurley Flynn observed, “That banner was worth a million dollars to the employers.”84

  The appearance of the slogan was traced to Flynn’s lover at the time, Carlo Tresca, an Italian-language journalist who had already managed to irritate local authorities by leading processions each Sunday to visit the grave of Anna LoPizzo. (“You can’t have a funeral every Sunday for that woman,” the chief of police had complained.85) There probably was no more provocative Wobbly than Tresca, whom Max Eastman of The Masses described as “the most pugnaciously hell-raising male rebel I could find in the United States.” With a speaking voice that “took possession of all outdoors as an organ does of a church,”86 Tresca aroused powerful sentiment among Italian American workers.87 But his personal recklessness worried his colleagues; fiercely anticlerical, he had once written letters to Catholic Church leaders in Philadelphia threatening to expose the sexual indiscretions of local priests, even though he’d been jailed in that city for misconduct involving an underage girl.

  The “No God! No Master!” uproar had handed the elders of Lawrence the opportunity to win back the allegiance of the town’s residents. Local minister James O’Reilly lost no time in organizing a “For God, For Country” parade on Columbus Day that drew fifty thousand people, including most of the community’s Italian population. For the event, Mayor Scanlon oversaw the free distribution of thirty thousand American flags and encouraged citizens to affix flag pins to their lapels. Father O’Reilly arranged for a banner to hang across Essex Street above the line of march, reading:

  FOR GOD AND COUNTRY

  THE STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER. THE RED FLAG NEVER!

  A PROTEST AGAINST THE IWW,

  ITS PRINCIPLES AND METHODS.88

  While the massive turnout certainly didn’t undo the IWW’s achievement in Lawrence, the sense that the Wobblies had shown their true colors as godless agitators had allowed the town to regain some of its former equilibrium. The police, the city, the mill owners, all those who’d come off poorly in the lengthy strike, were able to manipulate the public display of faith and patriotism to reassume their positions as the community’s arbiters of law and morality.

  At around the same time that Tresca was offending religious sensibilities in Lawrence, the fate of IWW leaders Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, along with mill hand Joseph Caruso, was set to be decided in nearby Salem. There, on September 30, 1912, the three went on trial for conspiracy in the murder of Anna LoPizzo. The state had never discovered who had fired the fatal shot, nor had it recovered a murder weapon, but it was convinced the accused men had created the volatile atmosphere in which the shooting had occurred. This of course was the prosecutorial strategy honed at the Haymarket trial; here it was if anything less valid, for neither Ettor nor Giovannitti had used rhetoric as heated as that spoken in Chicago in 1886. More inappropriate was the authorities’ insistence on keeping the defendants shackled in an iron cage in the center of the courtroom, an excessive measure the IWW vehemently protested.

  There was much that was absurd about the defendants’ situation, but the case had to be taken seriously and the IWW accordingly raised a large defense fund. The trial was taking place in a country yet unnerved by the assassination of President McKinley at the hands of an anarchist and the lethal bombing of the Los Angeles Times, among other acts of terrorism; the likelihood that radical words might be linked to conspiracy and murder did not seem far-fetched. Many states had been moved by McKinley’s death to pass criminal anarchy laws intended in part to muzzle incendiary speech, and courts had shown themselves willing to mete out convictions and harsh punishments in such cases.89

  Fortunately for Ettor and his codefendants, the holes in the prosecution’s case were substantial. The defense was able to establish that the state had used detectives to spy on the IWW, and in cross-examination exposed the fact that one of these detectives, a key prosecution witness, was unable to translate the most basic Italian, even though he had quoted Giovannitti, who barely spoke English, as having made threatening statements. In stark contrast, the defense witnesses—men, women, and even teenage mill hands who testified in a variety of accents—reported that far from urging destruction, Ettor and Giovannitti had consistently admonished the strikers to “keep your hands in your pockets,” and assured them their best hope for winning the strike lay in remaining nonviolent. It was also shown that Billy Wood, after meeting Ettor, had praised the Wobbly for advocating a peaceful strike.

  Caruso’s defense was the most prosaic, his wife, Rosa, displaying a handful of beans to the jury to bolster her testimony that her husband had been at home eating his dinner at the time of the LoPizzo shooting. Others corroborated Caruso’s alibi. Several witnesses said it had been a policeman, not a protestor, who had actually fired the shot that claimed LoPizzo’s life. Ettor and Giovannitti proved effective witnesses when they took the stand in their own defense. They cited specific events and even the exact words spoken at strike meetings, facts that tended to exonerate them and that could be corroborated by reporters present at the trial.

  After the defense rested, Ettor made a Darrow-like speech to the jury, appealing to local pride by recalling Massachusetts’s stirring example in the American Revolution and in the cause of abolition. Here again, in 1912, he insisted, decent men were being pilloried for a noble idea that was ahead of its time, one not yet accepted by society—the principle that workers should be treated fairly and were entitled to a fair portion of the profits of their labor. “As I have gone along I have raised my voice on behalf of men, women and children who work in the factories of this country, who daily offer their labor and their blood and even their lives in order to make the prosperity of this country. I have carried the flag along … I carry it here today, gentlemen; the flag of liberty is here.”90

  On November 26, after fifty-six days of testimony, all three defendants were acquitted. Onlookers wept and applauded as a court officer returned to Caruso the simple cap taken from his head at the time of his arrest and the relieved mill worker rushed into his wife’s arms. Ettor and Giovannitti were whisked outside to meet a crowd of cheering supporters who had nervously awaited the verdict. “There were constant ebullitions of emotion,” noted the Boston Globe of the celebration that ensued. “Never was there so much male kissing.”91

  News that the three men had been freed received a somewhat more subdued reaction in Lawrence. By now, after nearly a year of strikes, militia, parades, and counterdemonstrations, the town seemed to desire nothing more than an end to the turmoil and a return to daily life conducted out of the nation’s headlines. Over the coming decades it would be not the “bread and roses” version of the events of 1912 that the town necessarily recalled—the unity of men, women, and children of diverse immigrant backgrounds organized around basic human needs by a benevolent IWW—but the violence and disruption the Wobblies had brought. When, a few years after the strike, Joe Ettor returned to Lawrence on a visit, he was intercepted by cops and made to board the next outbound train, the community raising not a whimper of protest. Not until the time of the nation’s bicentennial in 1976 did younger town residents, curious about the community’s history, begin asking the few living survivors of the strike to tell of its meaning.

  LEAVING LAWRENCE AND ITS GRUMBLING Citizens’ Association behind, the IWW came out of New England after the Ettor-Giovannitti acquittals confident and much admired; in early 1913 it set
its sights on replicating the Massachusetts victory in its aid to a strike by immigrant silk workers at Paterson, New Jersey.

  Built around the powerful, seventy-seven-foot-high Great Falls of the Passaic River, Paterson was—perhaps with Lowell—the most historic mill town in America, having been designated a planned industrial village, or “national manufactory,” by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in 1792. Hamilton and his colleague Tench Coxe wanted the Paterson model, which was to be designed by Pierre L’Enfant, to serve as an example of how manufacturing could be integrated into American life without falling prey to the dehumanizing evils of the English factory system.92 Although the model town was never built, Hamilton’s sense that Paterson’s location made it an ideal site for industrial development proved correct. Textiles, milled paper, revolvers, and locomotives were among the products that flowed from the factories along the banks of the Passaic. Paterson was also an early center of organized labor; a strike of women and children textile workers there in 1828 had so distressed manufacturers throughout the Northeast that the expression “New Jersey feelings” became a euphemism for labor unrest. By the late nineteenth century it had even developed its own anarchist subculture; one of its native sons, Gaetano Bresci, after years of shooting empty beer bottles in his Paterson backyard, sailed to Europe and on July 29, 1900, assassinated Italy’s King Humbert I.93

  In 1913 the local silk industry employed nearly a quarter of the town’s 120,000 residents. Skilled mill workers were then receiving less than $12 per week, the unskilled about $7, and wages appeared at risk of being driven downward. More women and children (who could be paid less) were joining the workforce; some firms had decamped for Pennsylvania, diminishing the number of available jobs; and new loom technology had been introduced that called upon workers to manage more equipment for the same pay. Eight hundred workers walked out of the Doherty Mills on January 27 after their entire grievance committee was fired for protesting the attempted change from two looms to a three- and four-loom system. Management, arguing that the multiple loom setup was easier to operate, refused to abandon the plan. Walkouts continued, and by March 3 as many as twenty-five thousand were out, affecting three hundred mills. The workers demanded, in addition to modifications to their workload, an eight-hour day and $12 minimum weekly pay, as well as extra wages for overtime.

  The IWW joined the struggle. “We were very welcome to the [Paterson] workers,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn remembered. “But we were set upon by the city authorities with vicious fury.”94 Much as San Diego had determined in 1911 to halt the IWW’s free speech movement at any cost after it had racked up impressive victories elsewhere in the West, Paterson officials in spring 1913 appeared ready to do whatever was necessary to keep their city from becoming another Lawrence. And unfortunately Flynn and the Wobblies were not functioning at full strength, coming off a smaller labor campaign that had gone sour in New York City just that winter.

  It involved an International Hotel Workers Union local, which had broken away from the AFL and appealed to the IWW to lead them. The restraint and good sense the Wobblies had brought to Lawrence, however, seemed nowhere in evidence in New York, beginning with the usually cautious Joseph Ettor advising hotel restaurant workers to sabotage their employers by adulterating the food they served. “If you are compelled to go back to work,” he suggested to the waiters and chefs, “go back with the determination to stick together and with your minds made up it is the un-safest proposition in the world for the capitalists to eat food prepared by the members of your union.”95 He then departed, leaving IWW colleagues Flynn and Carlo Tresca to explain away his reckless comment. Flynn, whom the New York World cited as “The Girl Captain Who Is Leading a Host of Men in a Great Strike,” soon made an equally bizarre gaffe, announcing that the health standards at most hotel restaurants were already so lax, union members needn’t poison anybody; they could simply report on the establishments’ ordinary kitchen practices, which were unsanitary. Tresca, rather than urge nonviolence, as the IWW had in New England, directed marches of as many as two thousand striking waiters, busboys, and bellboys through the Broadway theater district in which the protestors heckled customers and threw projectiles, often at the doors and windows of their regular places of employ. All these aggressive methods proved detrimental, as outlandish remarks and hooliganism only legitimized police suppression and allowed employers to appear righteous in refusing to countenance workers’ demands. The only saving grace from the IWW’s perspective was that Tresca usually spoke in Italian, thus hindering reporters from quoting his harsher utterances.96

  On January 24, 1913, Tresca and Flynn were caught in a police riot that flared suddenly on a sidewalk in front of an IWW strike meeting at Bryant Hall, just off Times Square. Two police spies had been detected in the audience and Tresca, witnesses claimed, had shouted, “Kill the cops!” Outside a waiting squad of police fell on the strikers as they tried to leave the hall; both Flynn and Tresca were struck with police batons, and Tresca was taken into custody. Angered by his arrest, as many as three thousand strikers then swarmed through Times Square, shattering Delmonico’s plate glass window with umbrellas and besieging the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which, unfortunately for the protestors, turned out to be the residence of Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo. Adding embarrassment to injury, during his scuffle with the cops Tresca had dropped a book of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning—a recent gift from Flynn in which she had written an affectionate note that read “I love you, Carlo. Thine, Elizabeth”—and she was red-faced the next morning to find a newspaper had reproduced the inscription.97

  The hotel strike soon was given up as lost. Vague threats about poisoning customers and the smashing of lobby and restaurant windows alienated rather than won public sympathy, and most of the strikers drifted back to work having won no concessions once it became apparent hotel workers who’d remained on the job were simply covering their shifts.

  Paterson chief of police John Bimson had followed the saga of the hotel work stoppage in the New York papers and chose to emulate Commissioner Waldo’s no-nonsense approach, unleashing his police and raiding strike offices; he placed under arrest not only Wobbly organizers and troublesome mill workers but also reporters and other “anarchist” busybodies who came poking around. No warrants were necessary. “We may be compelled to do things which we would not have legal grounds for doing in normal times,” he declared, prompting a number of New Jersey newspapers to cheer that at last Paterson had in authority a man “who has not a cowardly hair in his head.” When accused by an irate Elizabeth Flynn of abusing the law, Bimson assured her, “You may have the rights, but we have the power.”98

  Journalist John Reed ventured across the Hudson from his home in Greenwich Village to cover the strike and was almost immediately seized by one of Bimson’s cops. He spent four days in lockup, where he encountered Big Bill Haywood, who urged the many imprisoned strikers there to entrust Reed with their stories. Reed then wrote about the experience, and at his behest other Village denizens went to Paterson, including the Masses editor Max Eastman, Margaret Sanger, newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann, and saloniste Mabel Dodge (who drove picketers around Paterson in her luxury automobile). Here the engagement of New York artists and intellectuals with the struggles of the immigrant working masses, evident in the Lawrence campaign, came fully into fruition. Because the Paterson silk workers were, as historian Christine Stansell writes, “the bearers of revolutionary purpose,” involvement in their cause offered a “kind of politics very different from the slow, methodical efforts of progressives, devoted to changing laws and policies.”99 Assisting the downtrodden workers was inherently meaningful, the workers’ strivings complementing the bohemians’ crystallizing ideas about the liberation of social relationships and expanded artistic expression.100 The prosaic features of the strikers’ lives—their simplicity, lack of affectation, and extreme poverty—combined with the nobility of their aspirations to create an authenticity so intense it bec
ame, with some effort of perception, avant garde.

  Chief Bimson refused to issue parade permits to the IWW and the silk strikers, so each Sunday afternoon they held their rallies in the adjacent, more welcoming town of Haledon, which had a Socialist mayor, William Brueckmann, himself a former Paterson silk worker. At Haledon, from the balcony of a farmhouse owned by strike sympathizer Pietro Botto overlooking a large meadow, “a natural platform and amphitheatre,” Tresca, Flynn, Haywood, and others preached the gospel of the IWW to as many as twenty thousand workers and their families, who picnicked on the “grassy slopes, eating bread and cheese and drinking wine.”101 Even after Chief Bimson’s cops provoked an incident at the Botto house and detained Mayor Brueckmann for “malfeasance and unlawful assembly,” the outdoor gatherings continued.

  Paterson’s mayor, Andrew F. McBride, was having problems of his own with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Taking a page from the Lawrence strike, she had complained publicly that the silk strikers’ children were going without meals and that they would need to be sent away for better care. Indignant, McBride insisted his city could look after its own, demanding, “Where are your hungry children? Bring them here.” Historian Anne Huber Tripp suggests the IWW dropped the plan to stage a children’s exodus when Paterson threatened to send the children to the almshouse, but the American Mercury, in a flattering profile of Flynn, reported that she did call McBride’s bluff, marching three hundred youngsters to the courthouse only to discover the mayor had been forewarned and left town.102 Whatever actually occurred, Paterson authorities managed to defeat the IWW’s goal of gaining publicity from the plight of strikers’ children by avoiding Lawrence’s mistake of having the police interfere. Some Paterson children were bundled off to sympathetic homes out of town, but with none of the uproar that had attended the process in Lawrence.