There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

47 Testimony of Frank Sherman, Report on the Lawrence Strike, U.S. House, p. 39.

  48 Lawrence Evening Tribune, Jan. 12, 1912.

  49 Watson, Bread and Roses, pp. 23–24.

  50 It was not uncommon for parents in the Lawrence mills to procure false identity papers for their children, so that the underage could enter the mills and contribute to the family’s income.

  51 Trustees of the White Fund, The Report of the Lawrence Survey, 1912, pp. 111–13.

  52 Boston Globe, Jan. 19, 1912. Wood was an Americanized immigrant and a successful wool salesman. He had made a fortuitous marriage to Ellen Ayer, daughter of a prosperous Rhode Island factory owner.

  53 Watson, Bread and Roses, p. 53.

  54 Industrial Workers of the World, “Ettor and Giovannitti Before the Jury at Salem MA, Nov. 23, 1912” [booklet] (Chicago: IWW Publishing, 1913), p. 8.

  55 Lawrence Telegram, Jan. 16, 1912.

  56 Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, p. 120.

  57 Renshaw, Wobblies: Story of Syndicalism, pp. 99–100.

  58 Pawtucket Evening Times, Jan. 25, 1912.

  59 Boston Globe, Jan. 16, 1912.

  60 Lawrence Evening Tribune, Jan. 17, 1912.

  61 Boston Globe, Jan. 19, 1912.

  62 Lawrence Evening Tribune, Jan. 24, 1912.

  63 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 140.

  64 Ernest Pitman, a contractor who later confessed to supplying Breen with the dynamite, committed suicide in August 1912, but not before suggesting to investigators that Billy Wood was involved in the affair. Wood was indicted in the plot along with two other men, Frederick H. Atteaux and D. J. Collins, but was ultimately cleared, although Collins was found guilty. Breen got off with a $500 fine. Few observers believed Wood innocent of involvement in the scheme.

  65 American Mercury, Dec. 1926.

  66 Adamic, Dynamite! pp. 168–69.

  67 Watson, Bread and Roses, p. 132.

  68 New York Times, Feb. 11, 1912.

  69 Ibid.

  70 Ibid., Feb. 13, 1912.

  71 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 146.

  72 Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 249.

  73 Lawrence Evening Tribune, Feb. 24, 1912.

  74 New York Tribune, Feb. 26, 1912.

  75 New York Sun quoted in Literary Digest, March 9, 1912.

  76 New York Tribune quoted in Literary Digest, March 9, 1912.

  77 Industrial Worker, June 27, 1912, in Watson, Bread and Roses, p. 214.

  78 William Cahn, Lawrence 1912: The Bread and Roses Strike (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1980; originally published 1954), p. 2.

  79 Atlantic Monthly, May 1912.

  80 Watson, Bread and Roses, 205; Lawrence Tribune, March 14, 1912; New York Tribune, March 11, 1912; Boston Evening Transcript, March 11, 1912.

  81 Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, Feb. 1, 1912.

  82 Atlantic Monthly, May 1912.

  83 Donald B. Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 6.

  84 Renshaw, Wobblies: Story of Syndicalism, pp. 107–8.

  85 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 34.

  86 Ibid., p. 46.

  87 Ibid., p. 40.

  88 Indeed, when the next year someone tried to hang a similar banner during the IWW’s Paterson Strike Pageant, it was torn down and crumpled at once by Wobbly leader Patrick Quinlan, to cheers from the audience; Quinlan assured reporters the IWW considered the banner “an infernal outrage.” See New York Times, June 8, 1913.

  89 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 36.

  90 Watson, Bread and Roses, pp. 225–40.

  91 Boston Globe, Nov. 26, 1912.

  92 Hamilton and Coxe, acting through the government-sponsored Society for Useful Manufactures, engaged L’Enfant, who had designed the new capital city of Washington, to similarly craft at Paterson a stunning industrial town that would reflect an enlightened approach to industry. The endeavor was well capitalized but ran aground after L’Enfant fell out with the leaders of the society and Paterson locals began to have second thoughts. See Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 13–15.

  93 Renshaw, Wobblies: Story of Syndicalism, pp. 112–13.

  94 Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, p. 143.

  95 Dubofsky, When Workers Organize, p. 124.

  96 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, pp. 45–46.

  97 Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, p. 141; Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 40.

  98 American Mercury, Dec. 1926.

  99 Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 112.

  100 Ibid., p. 16.

  101 Robert Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 125.

  102 American Mercury, Dec. 1926; see Tripp, IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike, p. 118.

  103 Paterson Evening News, March 14, 1913, in Tripp, IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike, pp. 87–88.

  104 Tripp, IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike, p. 90.

  105 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 53.

  106 Ibid., quotation on frontispiece.

  107 Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), p. 128, in Tripp, IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike, p. 137.

  108 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. 48.

  109 New York Times, June 15, 1913.

  110 Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary, p. 129; Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 169.

  111 Tripp, IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike, p. 151.

  112 Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, p. 155.

  113 Ibid., p. 156.

  114 New York Times, June 24, 1913.

  115 Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 164.

  116 Ibid., pp. 209–11.

  117 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 166–67.

  118 Reprinted in Solidarity, Aug. 30, 1913, quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, pp. 210–11.

  119 Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary, p. 131.

  120 New York Times, June 24, 1913.

  121 Reed, “The Colorado War,” Metropolitan, July 1914.

  122 Ibid.

  123 Adamic, Dynamite! p. 258.

  124 Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary, pp. 172–73.

  125 Reed, “The Colorado War.”

  126 Ibid.

  127 New York Times, May 8, 1914.

  128 Ralph Chaplin, When the Leaves Come Out and Other Rebel Verses (self-published, 1917), p. 31; appears in Robert M. Smith, From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 26.

  129 In the First Balkan War (1912–1913), Greece joined with Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro to drive from Europe the remnants of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

  130 Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 202.

  131 Ibid., p. 203.

  132 Caleb Crain, “There Was Blood: The Ludlow Massacre Revisited,” The New Yorker, Jan. 19, 2009.

  133 Elias M. Ammons, “The Colorado Strike,” North American Review, July 1914.

  134 Ibid.

  135 Reed, “The Colorado War.”

  136 Gorn, Mother Jones, p. 177.

  137 New York Times, March 14 and 23, 1914.

  138 Scott Martelle, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 153–54; see also Reed, “The Colorado War.”

  139 Martelle, Blood Passion, p. 151; see also Crain, “There Was Blood: The Ludlow Massacre Revisited.”

  140 George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), pp. 213–14.

  141 Ibid., p. 229.

  142 New York Times, May 3, 1914; Martelle, Blood Passion, p. 181.

 
; 143 New York Times, April 23, 1914.

  144 Adamic, Dynamite! p. 260.

  145 New York Times, May 16, 1914.

  146 Ibid., May 8, 1914.

  147 Cited in McGovern and Guttridge, Great Coalfield War, p. 270.

  148 Ammons, “The Colorado Strike.”

  149 Martelle, Blood Passion, p. 2.

  150 Gorn, Mother Jones, p. 206.

  151 New York Times, May 17, 1914.

  152 Ibid., May 15, 1914; McGovern and Guttridge, Great Coalfield War, p. 284.

  153 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985; originally published 1936), p. 98.

  154 Mother Earth, July 1914.

  155 Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 112. After serving his time, Tannenbaum left the labor movement to pursue an academic career at Columbia University.

  156 Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 117.

  157 McGovern and Guttridge, Great Coalfield War, p. 277.

  158 Ibid., p. 278.

  159 New York Times, May 2, 1914.

  160 Mother Earth, June 1914.

  161 Report on the Colorado Strike Investigation, House of Representatives, 63rd Cong., 3rd sess., 1915, p. 42.

  162 McGovern and Guttridge, Great Coalfield War, pp. 289–91.

  163 Mother Earth, July 1914. A woman named Marie Chavez, who lived in the next apartment and apparently had no connection to the bomb factory, was also killed in the blast.

  164 Mother Earth, July 1914.

  165 Quoted by Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 43.

  166 De Caux, Living Spirit of the Wobblies, pp. 100–101.

  167 Joe Hill to Salt Lake City Telegram, August 15, 1915; appears in a bound scrapbook of letters titled “Joe Hill, 1879–1915: The Man Who Never Died: Letters, a Sampling” (S.I.; s.i.) 1990; New York Public Library.

  168 Appeal to Reason, Aug. 15, 1915.

  169 De Caux, Living Spirit of the Wobblies, p. 106.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: DYNAMITE

  1 Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, abridged ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 201.

  2 Mary Heaton Vorse, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935), pp. 73–74; also in Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 227.

  3 Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), p. 22.

  4 Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 93.

  5 Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor Wars in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 218.

  6 New York Times, July 13, 1917.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid.

  12 New York Times, July 14, 1917.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, p. 234. A civil suit against Phelps Dodge and the railroad that had provided the freight train used in the deportation also went nowhere. The federal inquiry found that of the 1,280 deported men (and three women), 426 were Wobblies, 351 belonged to the AFL, 360 were not in any union, 62 were military veterans, 205 owned Liberty Bonds, and 520 had donated to the Red Cross. See Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 188.

  15 William D. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood (New York: International Publishers, 1929), pp. 82–83.

  16 New York Times, Aug. 2, 1917.

  17 Renshaw, Wobblies: Story of Syndicalism, p. 163.

  18 New York Times, Aug. 3, 1917.

  19 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 227.

  20 Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 302.

  21 Ibid., p. 304.

  22 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 243.

  23 The Liberator, Sept. 1918.

  24 Brazier, “The Mass IWW Trial of 1918: A Retrospect,” Labor History, vol. 7, no. 2 (1966); see also Helen C. Camp, Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995), p. 74.

  25 Len De Caux, The Living Spirit of the Wobblies (New York: International Publishers, 1978), pp. 6–7. A related IWW tactic was known as “Hoosiering up,” playing dumb about how a job was to be done in order to slow the pace of work. See also De Caux, Living Spirit of the Wobblies, p. 121.

  26 Brazier, “The Mass IWW Trial of 1918: A Retrospect.”

  27 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 248–49.

  28 Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, pp. 321–22.

  29 Ibid., p. 322.

  30 New York Times, Aug. 31, 1918; Brazier, “The Mass IWW Trial of 1918: A Retrospect.”

  31 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 254.

  32 Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography, abridged ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 35.

  33 Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964; originally published 1955), pp. 10–11.

  34 Woodrow Wilson quoted in Murray, Red Scare, p. 9.

  35 Robert L. Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 170.

  36 Ibid., p. 169.

  37 Melvyn Dubofsky, “Abortive Reform: The Wilson Administration and Organized Labor, 1913–1920,” in Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925, ed. James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).

  38 New York Times, Feb. 9, 1919.

  39 Ibid., Feb. 7, 1919.

  40 Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Boston: South End Press, 1984; originally published 1972), p. 113. The attempted repression of the IWW in the Seattle area had a long history, having flared into a murderous scuffle in November 1916 when the sheriff and employer-backed vigilantes in the nearby lumber town of Everett opened fire on a boatload of Wobblies as they arrived for a free speech rally. Five IWW members were slain and many roughed up. When the boat, the Verona, turned back to Seattle to warn a second vessel, the Calista, not to embark for the rally, Seattle cops descended on the pier and arrested seventy-four men, accusing them of the murders of two vigilantes who had fallen in the fighting at Everett. At trial, the IWW emphasized the nonviolent nature of its members’ activities and won acquittal for the accused, suggesting the deputies killed were probably hit by stray gunfire from their own side’s chaotic discharge of weapons. See Renshaw, Wobblies: Story of Syndicalism, pp. 93–94.

  41 Friedheim, Seattle General Strike, p. 175.

  42 Howard Kimeldorf, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 14–15.

  43 New York Times, Nov. 9, 1919.

  44 Ibid., Feb. 11, 1919.

  45 Friedheim, Seattle General Strike, p. 174.

  46 New York Times, June 3, 1919.

  47 Manufacturers Record quoted in Literary Digest, Nov. 8, 1919.

  48 Literary Digest, Nov. 8, 1919.

  49 New York Times, June 5, 1919.

  50 Boston Globe, Sept. 9, 1919; an earlier effort at organization, the Boston Social Club, had been unable to gain the ear of management, as it was shunned by Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis.

  51 See Boston Globe, Sept. 6, 1919.

  52 Boston Globe, Sept. 3, 1919.

  53 Ibid., Sept. 8, 1919.

  54 Ibid., Sept. 9, 1919.

  55 Ibid., Sept. 10, 1919.

  56 Philadelphia Public Ledger, quoted in Literary Digest, Sept. 27, 1919.

  57 Murray, Red Scare, p. 130.

  58 Boston Globe, Sept. 12, 1919.

  59 Ibid., Sept. 13, 1919.

  60 Ibid., Sept. 14, 1919.

  61 Ibid., Sept. 15
, 1919; Murray, Red Scare, p. 132.

  62 Literary Digest, Nov. 15, 1919.

  63 Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America: A History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966), p. 233.

  64 Dubofsky, “Abortive Reform: The Wilson Administration and Organized Labor, 1913–1920.”

  65 Ibid.

  66 Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2006; originally published 1931), p. 338.

  67 Interchurch World Movement, Report on the Steel Strike of 1919 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970; originally published 1920), p. 148.

  68 New York Times, Oct. 2, 1919.

  69 Ibid., Oct. 4, 1919.

  70 For the Gary-Rockefeller exchange see Raymond B. Fostick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), pp. 174–75.

  71 Louis Adamic, Dynamite!: A Century of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Books, 1934), pp. 280–81; Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 260.

  72 Interchurch World Movement, Report on the Steel Strike of 1919, p. 155.

  73 Ibid., p. 39.

  74 New York Times, Oct. 4, 1919.

  75 Memphis Commercial Appeal and William Randolph Hearst quoted in Literary Digest, Nov. 8, 1919.

  76 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 237.

  77 Seattle Times quoted in Literary Digest, Nov. 8, 1919. The nation’s coalfields continued to produce the most violent labor confrontations. Shooting wars among miners, police, company detectives, and federal troops broke out in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Illinois in the early 1920s. In the West Virginia–Kentucky border town of Mattewan a gun battle in May 1920 killed the mayor, two miners, and seven Baldwin-Felts guards. In Mattewan in August a three-hour exchange of fire resulted in six more deaths. Finally tired of the bullying by mine owners and their enforcers, an “army” of four thousand miners, including many recent war veterans, marched from Mattewan into neighboring Logan County, where it was reported deputies had killed several miners. The marchers ignored a plea from President Warren Harding to turn back. In a scene reminiscent of the Colorado coalfield wars of 1914, fighting broke out over a two-mile front, as gunfire filled the hillsides and hollows. Only the arrival of federal troops with machine guns and airplanes brought the violence to a halt, with hundreds of the miners indicted (but never convicted) of treason. (In a similar open war between miners and strikebreakers in Illinois two years later, it was the miners who went airborne, renting a plane from which they heaved dynamite bombs out onto known strikebreaker defenses.) See Brecher, Strike! pp. 134–39.