Hellraisers Journal: From The Coming Nation: “The Lawrence Strike” by John Sloan-Bayonets, Hunger, Misery

quote BBH Weave Cloth Bayonets, ISR p538 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Thursday March 7, 1912
“The Lawrence Strike” by John Sloan & Photographs from Scene of Revolt

From The Coming Nation of March 2, 1912:

-page 4: “The Lawrence Strike” by John Sloan

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-pages 5-6, 12: Rock Fenn on Unity, Class Solidarity and Revolt

Revolt of the Textile Workers

How the Working People of all Nationalities in Lawrence Have
United in Class Solidarity and Revolt Against Exploitation

By Rock Fenn

FROM the home of the striker at Lawrence to the office beyond the canal is a long step. On the one side are tenements reeking with the effluvia of families jammed into dispiriting rooms; on the other side a few well-fed bosses in great brick buildings a hundred yards long, with wide windows one above the other, three, four, five or six stories high.

[…..]

At best it is disconcerting to see the wake of the days, the months, and the years in the faces of the workers, in the dimming glow of the large eyes of the Italian girl, and in her paling cheek. Some persons in Lawrence speak of the dignity of labor, the laborers call it the drudgery of labor. There in the crowd, standing on two park benches, are six of them in a row. Perhaps the only object that has not changed during the sequence of the years are their hats-the plumed large hats they wore from the day they reached the wharf. The girl at the end has been four years in a mill; her Polish eyes are more deeply set than they were and she appears a little wearied. The girl in the middle with the child on her arm has worked but a year or two the little girl at the other end has hardly begun to show the change. They have to grow older some time, to be sure, but the consideration that their allotted forty years, fifteen thousand days, are aging them prematurely is not a pleasant one.

These thousands are not chanting the International, the Marseillaise or the Hymn of Garibaldi because they rejoice in being out of work. Probably they sing more from the joy of loyalty, for after all there is no example of loyalty to a cause and to one another in modern life comparable to the loyalty of the workers. One must go to the little world of the homes to realize what a strike means…..Their whole endeavor spells loyalty. They planned in the councils how to provide for one another and for their cause. There are communistic soups from the conglomerated scrapings of all the participating families, there are stores poured in from loyal supporters all over the country to a commissary whence the idle can draw food and clothes with a little order that an investigation committee will supply.

[…..]

When the strike broke, from the ranks of the Italians came the little Napoleon of Lawrence. He was a native-born Italian, a plump little man with black luxurious hair, a smile that is semi-divine, a sense of humor that makes the whole crowd still more closely kin, and a shrewd aggressive mind that was the faculty that engineered the strike till “Big Bill” Haywood came to Lawrence This little man, who is fairly loved by every striker, by every newspaper man in Lawrence, is named Joseph Ettor-Jo-Et for short–and now he stands behind the bar in the city hall on trial before a partial judge on the charge of being accessory to murder; innocent-faced Jo-Et who no more would participate in a murder than you or I……

There was a mass meeting and a parade, some one fired a revolver, a woman strike sympathizer [Anna LoPizzo], put up her arms and dropped to the sidewalk. For her death Jo-Et is on trial.

[…..]

[Emphasis added]

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