There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The city’s mill owners tried two strategic efforts of their own in mid-March. The first was to issue a joint statement calling workers to return to their jobs. It blamed the strike on “professional agitators,” suggested the adoption of an eight-hour day would “destroy Paterson industrially,” unless adopted nationwide, and defended the three- and four-loom system, warning that “no fight against improved machinery has ever been successful.”103 The other came as a response to a remark by Haywood that one day all the world’s flags would be red, “the color of the working man’s blood.” The owners and the Paterson town fathers responded by declaring March 17 Flag Day, flying the American flag from atop every mill. This attempt to offer their own patriotism as the antithesis of the Wobblies’ alien radicalism, and possibly divorce native from immigrant strikers, had been used successfully by employers at McKees Rocks and at Lawrence; in Paterson, however, it backfired, the strikers staging a dramatic march through town carrying their own stars and stripes as well as a banner that read:

  WE WEAVE THE FLAG.

  WE LIVE UNDER THE FLAG.

  WE DIE UNDER THE FLAG.

  BUT DAM’D IF WE’LL STARVE UNDER THE FLAG.104

  As much as local authorities wished to avoid Paterson becoming another Lawrence, an incident on April 19 offered a regrettable parallel. During a stone-throwing fracas between mill detectives and strikers, Valentino Modestino, a husband and father who was not a silk worker and was not involved in the strike, was struck by a bullet and killed. At the moment of his death Valentino had been in the act of shepherding his young daughter off the front porch of their home and out of harm’s way. Flynn, who went to the house to assure his family that the IWW would pay for the funeral, found Valentino’s grieving widow, in the late stages of pregnancy, lying distraught on a bed in the same room with her husband’s open casket.105

  “I spoke at the funerals of men and women shot down on the picket line and the iron entered my soul,” Flynn later wrote. “I became and remain a mortal enemy of capitalism. I will never rest contented until I see it replaced by a government of the people, led by the working class.”106

  IT IS THE CURIOUS FATE of the Paterson Silk Strike to most often be remembered not as an actual struggle for workers’ rights, but as a staged representation of one. The idea for what would become known as the Paterson Strike Pageant originated in spring 1913 among the clique of friends that included Mabel Dodge, John Reed, and Big Bill Haywood. Dodge, a wealthy American who had lived in Europe, was a patron of modern art who enjoyed cultivating stimulating friendships. Admitting her own ignorance about radical politics and referring to herself as a “student” of her numerous crusading and literary acquaintances, she hosted “evenings” in her lower Fifth Avenue apartment that brought together Village artists, writers, radicals, and intellectuals including Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Lincoln Steffens, Walter Lippmann, Max Eastman, and Hutchins Hapgood. Dodge “collected people and arranged them like flowers,” notes author Christopher Lasch. “She loved to combine people in startling new juxtapositions.”107 The ever-class-conscious Tresca took a harsher view, recalling Dodge as one of those “gentle, restless, well-intentioned, good-for-nothing ladies of the upper class.”108 Many of those, like Dodge, who were working for the silk strikers’ cause, were also involved in arrangements for the seminal Armory Show of 1913, which, with its thirteen hundred impressionist, postimpressionist, and cubist works, introduced modern art to America.

  As with the Women’s Trade Union League and the youthful immigrant seamstresses of the 1909 garment strike, there was always a current of tension accompanying the granting of money, food, and other acts of benevolence to those engaged in the more gritty realities of the labor struggle. The colorful characters Dodge attracted to her home didn’t always mix as well as their hostess might have liked. One soiree imploded when Haywood, who was briefly Dodge’s lover, became too drunk to explain what syndicalism was; on another occasion he offended the artists present by suggesting that in the “workers’ future” everyone would have the leisure to try their hand at painting. But it appears to have been Big Bill who asked what might be done to generate wider interest in the strike at Paterson, and Dodge who suggested the answer might be a “strike pageant,” although no one disputes it was Reed who was most taken with the idea and proceeded to act on it.

  A short time before, John Reed had undergone a moment of personal transformation at the Botto house in Haledon, when during one Sunday afternoon gathering Big Bill cajoled him out onto the speakers’ balcony. The former Harvard football cheerleader froze for a moment before the assembled workers and their families below; he was a journalist who covered other people’s speeches, not made them himself; but then, on impulse, he began singing, and the people joined in, first “La Marseillaise” and then “The Internationale,” as Haywood and others laughed approvingly. The director of the Paterson Strike Pageant had been born.

  The pageant idea had not emerged entirely out of the blue. Pageants—public spectacles usually based on historical motifs—were a popular form of mass participatory entertainment in the decade before the First World War. Pointedly democratic, they used citizen-actors rather than professionals, and featured processions or reenactments involving large numbers of men, women, and children in period dress. The trend was British in origin, but notable pageants had been staged recently in Philadelphia and Saratoga, prompting the New York Times society pages to declare that “America, Like England, Has Become Pageant Mad.”109 Reed grasped intuitively that the pageant idea fit perfectly into the cross-fertilization of art and proletariat revolution then in vogue among his artistic friends; it would be used by the Wobblies not as an act of civic remembrance but as a vehicle for social justice, in this case the rights of the Paterson silk workers.

  The entire enterprise came together in three weeks’ time. Reed enlisted John Sloan, artist and illustrator from The Masses, to paint the scenery, and other Village supporters to build sets, arrange publicity, and sell tickets; Mabel Dodge helped with fund-raising; planning sessions were held at Margaret Sanger’s apartment. Reed wrote the script and imagined the staging, commuting back and forth to Paterson to rehearse the “actors,” real silk workers who would portray themselves in the pageant along with selected IWW leaders.

  On June 7, Haywood and Tresca led twelve hundred strikers across the Hudson River by ferry to Madison Square Garden. After a buffet of coffee and sandwiches they were put through a hurried dress rehearsal, Reed in shirtsleeves yelling instructions through a bullhorn from atop a stepladder. Outside, at nightfall, electric lights spelled out “IWW” on all four sides of the Garden tower, as a crowd of fifteen thousand filed in to see the once-only performance.

  As the lights dimmed, viewers saw the Paterson looms at work, the strikers emerging from the mills singing “The Internationale.” Then came the strikers booing a scab, fights between cops and pickets, the death of Valentino Modestino, and the sending of some of the Paterson children to New York–based “strike mothers.” The audience was on its feet from the opening and remained standing throughout the show, joining in a reconstituted “May Day parade,” cheering the speeches of Haywood, Tresca, and Flynn, and witnessing the re-created funeral of Modestino, with members of his actual family seated front and center to reenact their grief. Four strikers carried the coffin, which was then opened so workers could file past to deposit red carnations, “the red badge of blood-brotherhood.” Sobbing was heard in the auditorium as IWW leaders repeated, word for word, the speeches they had given at Modestino’s graveside.

  Despite some favorable press reviews—“a poignant realism that no man … will ever forget”—and the faith among participants that the triumphant zeal of the show might be transferred to the strike itself, the bad news arrived with the financial accounting.110 After an initial rumor circulated that the event had earned $6,000, it was learned that the night’s actual take was only $348. In fact the show had lost $2,000, as many of the tickets had been sold che
aply or given away, and the high rent of the space prohibited the possibility of adding shows to generate income. The expenses had also been formidable; a special train to move the striker/actors to the embarkation point in New Jersey alone had drained the pageant’s funds of almost $700.111

  The silk workers were understandably disappointed. Likely with the encouragement of the IWW, they had allowed themselves to imagine that profits from the show would help carry their families through the summer while they remained out of the mills. Some New Jersey papers immediately compounded the letdown by suggesting that the pageant had indeed made money, but that the earnings had been fleeced by the Wobblies. The accusations were untrue but damning nonetheless; the IWW did look irresponsible as the strike itself lost momentum, its energy seemingly sucked dry by the massive distraction of the pageant’s promotion and staging. Elizabeth Flynn was correct in hailing the pageant as “a unique form of proletarian art,” probably the first dramatization anywhere of a labor struggle,112 but even her enthusiasm was dimmed by the messy aftermath. On top of the financial untidiness and charges of corruption, many strikers were upset that they had been left out of the pageant; most had not even had the chance to attend.113

  “That pageant did it!” exclaimed a Paterson policeman to a reporter. “After that measly $348 that was handed in for the strike relief fund, watch for a stampede back to the mills.”114 The officer’s words were prophetic. By late summer 1913 many of the twenty-five thousand silk workers who had defied the mills and Chief Bimson’s police for five months returned to work; having attained none of their demands, they resigned themselves to accommodating the new multiloom system.

  The nation’s conservative press alighted with talons extended, ripping the IWW as dreamy revolutionaries good at propaganda but incapable of providing the real leadership sought by the poor workers they professed to esteem. Largely unremarked upon at the time was the likelihood that the planners of the pageant had known full well that the event would be lucky to break even, but had plunged ahead anyway because they had become devoted to it as an artistic endeavor. For radicals relegated most often to speech-making and organizing on behalf of others, the pageant was a singular opportunity to invest themselves and their talents in the labor struggle directly.115 Mounting the pageant, however, meant that the IWW, no different from other elements in society, could appear to savor radicalism as theater and tabloid sensation, with the added potential for disgrace if, as had now occurred, the actual objective of aiding the silk workers was somehow fumbled and lost.

  Extensive finger-pointing ensued within the IWW. Flynn seemed to feel the Village artists and intellectuals had hijacked the strike with their pageant, while Sanger thought the IWW itself had been uncharacteristically timid, hiding from Chief Bimson in the safe haven of Haledon when it should have been fighting it out with his minions on the streets of Paterson and filling its jails if necessary.116 “We are to the labor movement what the high diver is to the circus,” wrote another disaffected Wobbly, Ben Williams. “A sensation, marvelous and ever thrilling, we attract the crowds. We give them thrills; we do hair-raising stunts … [but] as far as making Industrial Unionism fit the everyday life of the workers we have failed miserably.”117 Il Proletario, the Italian workers’ sheet, perhaps achieved the wisest overview, suggesting that “the Paterson strike … teaches one lesson … that there is no ‘cocksure’ method yet devised or devisable under the present system by which a strike can be won, when the workers are confronted by capitalists of unlimited wealth and viciousness.”118

  John Reed, the event’s driving force, writes a biographer, “eventually did come to understand that the battle of an industrial union to win recognition was too immense a problem to be solved by a theatrical performance.”119 For the moment, however, he simply felt unwell, and it was reported he intended to depart New York in order to convalesce.120 On June 19 he boarded a liner for Europe in the company of Mabel Dodge, with whom he was to spend the summer in Florence, Italy. Big Bill Haywood left soon after for Provincetown to recuperate from an ulcer, and then also went on to Europe. The appearance of a hasty exit by both men from the dissatisfying experience of Paterson was perhaps unavoidable, and would be remarked upon by many, including the silk workers now left to their own fate.

  THE LABOR WAR AT PATERSON and the pageant had been waged under the full gaze of the big-city press. But there were other workers’ battles being fought far from the nation’s view, in places where even the most dogged news reporter rarely went in search of a story. One such locale was the remote, underpopulated southeast corner of Colorado, where John D. Rockefeller Jr. operated the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CFI). Before 1913–1914 few if any outsiders let alone journalists came here, no one to notice the extent to which the CFI and several smaller mine owners—Rocky Mountain Fuel, Victor-American Fuel, and Primrose Coal, among others—exerted complete feudal control over the region’s coal miners, its communities, and its laws. This sense of a fiefdom-in-isolation had once prompted the WFM’s Charles Moyer to ask on the front page of a labor newspaper, “Is Colorado in America?” But the state and its hard-scrabble mining towns were about to lose their long-preserved anonymity.

  The United Mine Workers had dispatched organizers in 1913 to offer a “river of friendship” and support for the miners in southeast Colorado, most of whom were recent immigrants.121 The workers’ goals were straightforward—better wages and working conditions, regular payment of wages, the fair weighing of the coal they dug, and the right to buy dry goods where they chose rather than at the company store. What they and the UMW found frustrating was that the state of Colorado had mine reform laws on the books mandating an eight-hour day, semimonthly wages, and a prohibition against the use of company scrip, rules routinely ignored by the mine owners, who defended the policy of doling out miners’ pay as they saw fit as a means of keeping the workers from squandering the money in saloons and brothels. It was this total control exercised by the company over their lives that grated most on the miners and their families. John Reed, who toured the area in 1914, found no sweeping revolutionary dogma at work:

  [The strikers] do not want to … destroy the wage system; industrial democracy means nothing to them…. They had come to America eager for the things that the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor seemed to promise…. They wanted to obey the laws. But the first thing they discovered was that the boss, in whom they trusted, insolently broke the laws.122

  Rockefeller remained unbending in the attitude that he could ignore the UMW, couching his position as a defense of the open shop. He threatened to shutter the mine operations and “lose all the millions invested” before he would allow “American workmen [to] be deprived of their right, under the Constitution, to work for whom they please.”123 The only son of financier John D. Rockefeller, he had taken on the CFI assignment as a matter of family trust, and had never visited the site of the company’s Colorado operations. Knowing little about coal mining or labor-management issues, he was completely reliant for guidance on the executives stationed there, President L. M. Bowers and Superintendent E. H. Weizel, both firm antiunion men. Rockefeller’s allusion to the U.S. Constitution in the context of CFI was curious, insomuch as Colorado governor Elias M. Ammons had acknowledged publicly that that revered document was considered not to be in force in CFI’s mining domain, as CFI “owned all [the] houses, schools, saloons, churches and stores; hired all [the] teachers, doctors and ministers; [and] picked all [the] judges, coroners, sheriffs and marshals.”124 Corporate control in CFI territory went literally right to the lip of the grave, for the local coroner, who was in the employ of the mine owners, was also the undertaker, and the “coroner’s juries” he convened to examine on-the-job deaths were appointed by the companies. In five years of deadly cave-ins, explosions, and other mine catastrophes, he had in only one instance rendered a verdict casting blame on a mine operator.125

  As the UMW continued to build a presence in the region, the mining companies reaffirmed t
heir alliance with Rockefeller, who stood by his vow to forfeit his investment in the coal region before he would recognize any miners’ union. There would be no negotiation. The CFI and other employers also began importing crates of rifles, machine guns, and ammunition, and hired company guards, some of whom worked for the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, to intimidate union workers and serve as potential “scab-herders,” guarding any nonunion replacement workers who might be needed in case of a strike. The Baldwin-Felts men, who were infamous back east for antiunion “enforcement,” brought with them a heinous contraption known as “The Death Special,” an armored vehicle able to transport several detectives and customized with a searchlight and a mounted machine gun.126 These men, whom a Colorado state inquiry would later term “imported assassins,”127 were despised on sight by the workers, and indeed had been savaged in a poem titled “Mine Guard” by the Wobbly writer Ralph Chaplin:

  You psychopathic coward with a gun:

  The worms would scorn your carcass in the mud;

  A bitch would blush to hail you as a son—

  You loathsome outcast, red with fresh-spilled blood.128

  The UMW had done some hiring of its own, arranging for several organizers—Louis Tikas, known as “Louis the Greek”; Mike Livoda, of Eastern European heritage; and an Italian named Gerald Lippiatt—to work with the miners’ various ethnic constituencies. Tikas, who had once operated a coffeehouse in Denver, stood out among the miners for his natural leadership abilities; it was said he’d attended a university in Europe. Many of his Greek fellow-workers had been soldiers in the Greek army in the First Balkan War, and were recognized for their martial background and familiarity with weapons and military tactics.129