Lawrence Textile Strike

LAWRENCE TEXTILE STRIKE. Few people anticipated that the operatives in the numerous textile mills that filled Lawrence, Massachusetts, would strike when mill owners instituted a wage cut in January 1912. The working class in the city was composed of at least twenty-five (and estimates go as high as forty) different nationalities; these workers were mostly unskilled and had been beaten down by years of poverty and poor living conditions. But when 3,500 Italian and Jewish operatives, mostly women, marched out of Everett Mill to protest the wage cut, workers in the other mills quickly followed. By 13 January there were 25,000 mill workers out on strike, among them Italians, Jews, Germans, French Canadians, Poles, Lithuanians, Franco-Belgians, Syrians, Greeks, Letts (Latvians), and Turks.

Thus began the strike for “Bread and Roses.” The strikers’ demands quickly extended beyond restoration of their original wages. At a meeting on 14 January, they established demands for a 15 percent wage increase; a fifty-four-hour work week; abolition of the premium and bonus systems; double pay for overtime; and no discrimination against those who struck.

Several factors worked to keep this diverse group of strikers together. As historian Ardis Cameron has pointed out, working-class women in Lawrence had established solid family and community networks that provided an enormously important foundation for the strikers. Women who had befriended each other across ethnic lines before the strike joined together on the picket lines and at the “local centers of female activity” such as kitchens, stoops, and grocery stores to fight for their rights. The strikers were also drawn together by shared symbols such as the ever-present American flag and a wide range of songs they sang regularly. They sang standard songs of solidarity such as “The Marseillaise” and composed their own songs—“In the Good Old Picket Line,” for example, mentioned several different ethnic groups, either praising them for their steadfastness or goading them for their lack of class loyalty. The strikers also participated in numerous parades, which allowed them to witness their own strength in a festive setting.

The solidarity of the strikers would not have been what it was, however, were it not for the presence of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The strike at Lawrence, to which the IWW sent representatives almost immediately, constituted the radical union’s greatest success on the East Coast. In conducting the strike IWW organizers were wonderfully innovative. Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti established a strike committee composed of two delegates each from twenty-seven different ethnic groups. This ensured the democratic nature of the strike. The frequent parades were organized under IWW auspices. IWW organizers also instituted the moving picket line (to circumvent a court injunction) and the “children’s exodus,” which sent many of the strikers’ children to sympathizers in New York, Philadelphia, and other East Coast cities. Both tactics were unprecedented in American working-class history. These impressive organizing efforts clearly worried unsympathetic city officials. Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested on a trumped-up murder charge. Their places were taken, however, by IWW leaders Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who carried on the struggle ably.

The IWW and the strikers faced many opponents: a brutal police force that attacked men, women, and children picketers alike; judges who handed out injunctions and stiff sentences liberally; church leaders, the majority of whom spoke out against the strike and the strikers; the militia, whose presence turned Lawrence into an armed camp. The American Federation of Labor also voiced its bitter opposition to the strike. John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers, an affiliate of the federation, declared angrily, “This is a revolution, not a strike.”

The strikers held strong in the face of this opposition, however, and the mill owners were forced to settle late in February. The strikers won wage hikes of five to twenty two percent (those paid the least receiving the greatest increase); time and a quarter for overtime; premium payments every two weeks rather than once a month; and an agreement that the owners would not discriminate against them. The victory was an enormous achievement—Eugene Debs called it “the most decisive and far-reaching ever won by organized workers.” Moreover, concerned textile mill owners all over the East Coast reacted fearfully to the events in Lawrence. By 1 April, an estimated 275,000 textile workers in New England had received pay increases. The IWW and Lawrence workers continued to press for the release of the still-imprisoned Ettor and Giovannitti. On 27 September, ten thousand workers again filled the streets to protest the unjust treatment of the strike leaders. On 25 November both were acquitted.

Although the organization established in Lawrence could not sustain itself—union membership fell sharply shortly after the strike—there is no question that the tactics of the IWW and the tremendous unity of the diverse, largely unskilled working population constituted a landmark in American working-class history.

Cameron, Ardis. Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life (1906–1926). New York: International Publishers, 1955.

Forner, Philip S. The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917. New York: International Publishers, 1965.

Forrant, Robert and Jurg K. Siegenthaler, Charles Levenstein, John Wooding, eds. The Great Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912: New Scholarship on the Bread & Roses Strike. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Co., 1914.