Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday July 2, 1913 “The Paterson Strike Pageant” by Phillips Russell, Part II
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
[Part II of II]
The New York Press the next day said:
“The Garden has held many shows and many audiences, from Dowie to Taft to Buffalo Bill, but it is doubtful if there ever was such an assemblage either as an audience or as a show as was gathered under the huge rafters last night. In fact, it was a mixed grouping that at times they converged and actor became auditor and auditor turned suddently into actor. When more than 10,000 sang and shouted within, 5,000 outside clamored for admittance and were willing to pay double the prices to get in.”
The New York Evening World said:
“Fifteen thousand specators applauded with shouts and tears the great Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden. The big mill aglow with light in the dark hours of early winter morning, the shrieking whistles, the din of machinery-dying away to give place to the Marseillaise sung by a surging crowd of 1,200 operatives, the fierce battle with the police, the sombre funeral of the victim, the impassioned speech of the agitator, the sending away of the children, the great meeting of desperate hollow-eyed strikers-these scenes unrolled with a poignant realism that no man who saw them will ever forget.”
No spectacle enacted in New York has ever made such an impression. Not the most sanguine member of the committee which made the preparations for the pageant believed that its success would be quite so overwhelming. It is still the talk of New York, most cynical and hardened of cities, and will remain so for many days.
There were times when the committee were assailed with oppressive doubts. When one sat down and thought it over in cold blood, the idea of arranging for and carrying through such a thing in two weeks’ time seemed almost grotesque. Outside of the mechanical difficulties involved, the multitudinous details to be attended to, the advance outlay of money that would be necessary seemed to present an insuperable obstacle. There was the single item of $1,000 to be put down for the rental of one night, the $750 needed for scenery, the huge sum for advertising, all to be provided.
After plunging in with enthusiasm for the first few days, a bad reaction seized the promoters. They called a meeting in which the most gloomy forebodings were indulged in. There were disturbing reports of the small advance sale of tickets and there wereserious proposals to give the whole thing up.
It was the workers themselves who stepped into the breach. Delegates from the New York silk strikers,whose cause has almost been lost sight of in the more spectacular struggle of Paterson, arose indignantly.
“What?” they cried. “Give this thing up after our people have set their hearts upon it? Never! Is it money you need? Leave it to us-we’ll raise that! We are poor. We are on strike. But a lot of us still have a few dollars left in the savings bank that we’ve been putting by through many years. We’ll get it out and lump it together. We will go to our business men and say: ‘Here, we’ve been trading with you a long time. We have helped to make your profits. Now you help us or we won’t trade with you any more.’ Never mind. You leave it to us-we will raise the money.”
And they did. Other generous people, more richly upholstered with ready cash, also came forward with contributions and in four days there was ample money with which to cover all deposits.
And it was found that the result was worth all the toil and trouble involved. The lives of most of us are sordid and grey. So tightly are we tied to the petty round of toil to which our galley-masters bind us, that most of us probably are born, live and die without experiencing one deep-springing, surging, devastating emotion. We are either afraid to feel or we have lost the capacity.
The Paterson pageant will be remembered for the sweeping emotions it shot through the atmosphere if for no other reason. Waves of almost painful emotion swept over that great audience as the summer wind converts a placid field of wheat into billowing waves. It was all real, living, and vital to them. There were veterans of many an industrial battle in that audience, though the cheeks of many still held the pink of youth.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday July 1, 1913 “The Paterson Strike Pageant” by Phillips Russell, Part I
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
[Part I of II]
JUNE 7, 1913, was a red letter day in New York. Literally, too. For when dusk fell on Madison Square, high up on the tower of Madison Square Garden, shone the giant letters “I. W. W.,” glowing red in the sky and sending scarlet beams through the smoke that drifts incessantly across the face of Manhattan Island.
It was the first time that those significant letters have ever been given so conspicuous a place. Their mission was to announce something new under the sun, a labor play in which laborers themselves were the actors, managers and sole proprietors, portraying by word and movement their own struggle for a better world.
Imagine a great auditorium, the largest in New York, filled with one of the hughest audiences that ever gathered in the metropolis, gazing on the largest amateur production ever staged, with the biggest cast-1,029 members-that ever took part in a play, enacting a life-drama calculated to raise to the highest pitch the most powerful human emotions-and one gets a faint idea of the event in Madison Square Garden on the evening of June 7.
In order to give the reader a mental picture of what happened that night on the stage-which alone cost $600 to build -it might be well to outline the six episodes composing the pageant as given in the official program, which itself made a good propaganda pamphlet of 32 pages with a lithographed cover:
Scene: Paterson, N.J. Time: A. D. 1913.
The Pageant represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World (I. W. W.), making use of the general strike as the chief weapon. It is a conflict between two social forces-the force of labor and the force of capital.
While the workers are clubbed and shot by detectives and policemen, the mills remain dead. While the workers are sent to jail by hundreds, the mills remain dead. While organizers are persecuted, the strike continues, and still the mills are dead. While the pulpit thunders denunciation and the press screams lies, the mills remain dead. No violence can make the mills alive-no legal process can resurrect them from the dead.Bayonets and clubs, injunctions and court orders are equally futile.
Only the return of the workers to the mills can give the dead things life. The mills remain dead throughout the enactment of the following episodes.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday June 27, 1913
Paterson, New Jersey – Hannah Silverman Threatened by Judge Klenert
From The New York Times of June 21, 1913:
The thirty-one strikers who were convicted of unlawful assemblage a few weeks ago appeared before Judge Klenert to-day. Each was sentenced to three months in the County Jail at hard labor, and then sentence was suspended during good behavior. Judge Klenert advised each of the defendants that he was at liberty to leave the country if he did not like its laws. When the case of Hannah Silvermann, the seventeen-year-old girl, who was styled the Joan d’Arc of the silk strike by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, was called, Judge Klenert addressed her separately, advising her that her conduct had caused great sorrow to her parents. Because of her youth, he said, he would excuse her this time. If she offended again, the Judge warned her, she would be sent to the State Home for Girls at Trenton.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday June 14, 1913
Paterson, New Jersey – Socialists Party Members Support Strike of Silk Weavers
From the International Socialist Review of June 1913:
What the Reds are Doing
in Paterson
By Alexander Scott
Editor of The Weekly Issue, Socialist Party Paper of Passaic County.
THE Socialists of Paterson have from the beginning of the silk strike taken an active part and have performed real service for the strikers. How could they help doing so? The fight of the 25,000 silk workers, organized in the I. W. W., was their fight. A majority of the party members are themselves silk workers.
When the general strike was called, the Socialists rolled up their sleeves, ready for any emergency. No question arose as to whether the workers were being organized by the I. W. W., the A. F. of L., or S. L. P. That did not matter then.
Had the strike been called by the A. F. of L.-much as some of us might doubt the sincerity of the organizers of that organization, and dubious as we might be of the outcome of the strike-there is no doubt but that the Paterson Socialists would have as readily jumped into the fray. In fact, when a year or so ago, the Detroit faction of the I. W. W. (S. L. P.) attempted, or pretended to organize the textile workers of the Passaic county, the Socialist Party members assisted, and when it was seen that the workers had been defeated through petty political trickery, they just as readily denounced them as traitors to the working class.
In the present strike, the two arms of the revolutionary labor movement have worked in unison. The Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party have demonstrated the tremendous power of their organizations when united to fight a common enemy. No force is powerful enough to overcome them.
It is the opinion of the writer that the strike would have been lost had we not all fought together, throwing the weight of our organization and press in with the I. W. W.
Let it here be understood that this article is not written with the purpose of showing the superiority of political action over direct action, but with the view of showing the necessity of both political and industrial union action in the struggle of the working class for emancipation.
The general strike was called for February 28. “Nip the strike in the bud,” ordered the mill owners.“Righto. At your service,” replied the city administration, the police, the press and some of the clergy.
The police gave orders that all halls be closed against the I. W. W., and got their clubs in readiness. The newspapers put their lying pens to work, and the clergy prepared sermons to suit the occasion. The strikers had already engaged Turn Hall as their headquarters, and the police had ordered this closed, too, and, moreover, intended to enforce the order by means of their clubs and guns, if necessary.
On the first day of the general strikea few hundred strikers filed out of Turn Hall and proceeded peacefully along the sidewalk in double file, when they were brutally attackedby a gang of blue-coated, brass-buttoned ruffians, headed by their Chief. Clubs were swung right and left, and no discrimination was made as to sex or age. One girl was struck and her cries could be heard two blocks distant.
“Well done!” said the silk bosses, and their editorial lackeys echoed, “Well done!” The bosses’ papers appeared with headlines announcing, “Rioting Strikers Suppressed by Timely Work of Chief of Police Bimson and his Squad of Men-Strike Being Nipped in the Bud.”
Hellraisers Journal – Friday June 13, 1913 Paterson, New Jersey – 15,000 Striking Silk Workers Cheer the I. W. W.
From the International Socialist Review of June 1913:
On the Paterson Picket Line
By William D. Haywood
[Part II of II]
Industrial Worker May 8, 1913
The night preceding this silent manifestation of protest against capitalist brutality the wildest demonstration of the strike took place in Armory Hall, where John Golden and Sarah Conboy, of the American Federation of Labor, escorted by manufacturers and policemen, came to try to repeat the infamous strikebreaking tactics they attempted a year ago in Lawrence. They came heralded by the local press, by the civil authorities, by the clergy, and the employers as the instruments through which the great silk strike would be settled. The armory had been obtained for them through state officials. The state militia had been called out and stood in the ante-rooms with guns loaded for action. Chief of Police Bimson and his entire force were on hand. The fire department had been ordered to hold themselves in readiness and had their hose attached to hydrants in the immediate vicinity.
The striking silk workers were invited to attend this meeting. It had been previously arranged that they would attend in a body and listen to what the A. F. of L. had to say, providing that they would be given a chance to reply to state the position of the strikers and the principles of the Industrial Workers of the World.
15,000 Cheer for I. W. W.
When organizers of the I. W. W. appeared in the hall, the 15,000 people present went wild. For minute after minute they yelled and cheered with ever-increasing -volume. The floor and gallery was a waving forest of the red membership books of the I. W. W. held aloft by what seemed to be countless thousands. After a time Organizer Ewald W. Koettgen of the I. W. W., appeared on the platform and announced that the I. W. W. speakers would not be allowed to present their side. Or rather, he intended to announce this, but he got no further than “I. W. W.”-when the audience leaped to its feet, and for perhaps fifteen minutes drowned every utterance with frantic cheers. Koettgen at last managed to make himself heard and said: ”Let’s all go home.” As one man the audience arose and began to file out. As these departed thousands on the outside who had not been able to enter, rushed in and soon the armory was again filled. Those who left went to their own halls where they greeted every utterance of their speakers with roars of applause.
For an hour and three-quarters Golden and Mrs. Conboy tried to speak, only to be drowned down by the unceasing cheers that the audience sent up for the I. W. W. In desperation Mrs. Conboy tried the appeal-to-home-mother-and-patriotism stunt and seizing an American flag, waved it from the stage, which act was greeted by another outburst of derisive cheers. When Golden finally made himself heard about 300 persons stayed to listen, the hall having been cleared by police clubs.
It was the funeral of the A. F. of L., so far as Paterson was concerned. It was remarked afterward that it was indeed fitting and appropriate that the A. F. of L. should choose an armory, the training quarters of the bayonet-carrying murderers of the capitalist class, as its own burying place.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday June 12, 1913
Paterson, New Jersey – Silk Workers on Picket Line, Braving Death, Standing Firm
From the International Socialist Review of June 1913:
On the Paterson Picket Line
By William D. Haywood
[Part I of II]
FIVE o’clock every morning finds thousands of Paterson silk workers on the picket line with spirits as dauntless as ever despite the fact that after twelve weeks of struggle, starvation is staring them in the face. Some of them have been out in front of the battle for sixteen weeks.
The picket line is the modern barricade. It is there that the strike will be either lost or won. It is the picket line that has taught the Paterson silk workers the meaning of the class struggle. Here men and women daily meet the guns of hired thugs and the clubs of policemen. Braving death, suffering indignity and humiliation, nearly 800 strikers have been arrested on trumped-up charges and thrown into jail. Some of them have been jailed a number of times.
It takes courage to face a term in the Paterson bastile. It was built in 1854, before the era of alleged prison reform began. In the cellhouse where most of the strikers have been thrown the cells are narrow, with two bunks, one above the other. The ventilation is bad and the sanitation worse. The food is on a par with the usual prison fare.
Before being transferred to this county jail, the prisoners are, as a rule, compelled to spend a night in the city jail before appearing before Recorder Carroll’s court. The conditions that have been imposed on the strikers in the city jail are beyond description, reminding one of accounts of the hell-holes of Russia. Here seven and eight men have been crowded into a single cell intended to be occupied by one. No bedding of any kind is provided and no food is furnished. One group of strikers reported they were held for nineteen hours without even water.
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