Hellraisers Journal – Friday March 1, 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts – Prominent Magazine Writers Visit Strike Zone
From Boston Evening Transcript of February 29, 1912:
MUCKRAKERS ON THE SCENT
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Party Including Russell, White, Baker, and Others
Spends Day Gathering Material at Lawrence
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Industrial Worker February 29, 1912
A group of prominent magazine writers visited Lawrence yesterday for the purpose of gathering material. Among those in the party were Charles Edward Russell and Mrs. Russell, William Allen White, Ray Stannard Baker, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mrs. Freemont [Cora] Older, wife of the San Francisco publisher, and Miss Frances Jolliffe, also of San Francisco. The party came in on the midnight train from New York and left last night after spending a busy day going over the city. They first visited the county jail, where Ettor and Giovannitti are confined, and though they tried hard to see the two men they were unsuccessful. They were however allowed to talk to the Polish women pickets who refused to pay their fines and are serving out their sentence.
The members of the party were held up by the military guard in their attempt to go to the mills through Canal street, as they were wearing the strikers card, “Don’t be a scab.” Then they visited some of tho homes of the strikers, and later dined at a Syrian restaurant as the guests of William D. Haywood. There were also present other strike leaders, several newspaper reporters, Miss Emma Goulain and two more Franco-Belgians.
Just as they reached the restaurant the guide happened to catch sight of patrolman Michael Moore, the Syrian policeman who was prominent in the Saturday morning incident at the station [see Hellraisers Journal of Feb. 26th]. He was pointed out to the visitors as the policeman who clubbed a woman. He was still nearby when the party cams out from the restaurant and stood for a moment on the sidewalk before starting downtown. They stopped, and Moore came up and ordered them to move.
“All right, well go,” said one man, but the women were not so complacent. Mrs. Older said to the patrolman: “So you’re the man who clubbed a woman, are you?”
“Now don’t stand talking to me,” replied the patrolman. “You’ve got to go along.”
Some of the men tried to argue that they were under no compulsion to move, and in the end the policeman all but arrested one of the young Franco-Belgians who was in the party.
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[Newsclip, emphasis and paragraph break added.]
From the Spokane Industrial Worker of February 29, 1912:
A week after the first group of the children of the Lawrence strikers arrived in New York, news was flashed that another group, being sent to Philadelphia, had been prevented from leaving town by the Lawrence police. There had been a riot at the railway station. Mothers had been clubbed and arrested. Children were actually separated from their parents and sent to the poorhouse. It was one of those senseless exhibitions of police violence common to the labor movement. A roar of indignation came from the workers of America.
I read the papers that morning and made up my mind I’d find out what was behind the keeping back of the children. In those days I was writing about the theater; I had a commission from the Metropolitan Magazine to write about the reunion of Weber and Fields. I had got to know Lou Weber and Joe Fields, Lillian Russell and Marie Tempest and all the rest of that distinguished cast. The strike deflected me violently from the world of the theater. As I read that the children had not been allowed to leave Lawrence, I thought to myself, “Before night someone is going to send me to Lawrence.”
Harper’s Weekly sent me, and my inadequate little article lost them the advertisement of the American Woolen Company. After that, when I’d go off to report something, Thomas Wells, the editor of Harper’s, would call after me in a deep bellow, “Don’t lose too much advertising!” Joe O’Brien got an assignment too, and we took the midnight for Lawrence. No one ever went more light-mindedly as well as lightheartedly toward a serious destination than I.
It was not yet full daylight when we got to Lawrence. The street lamps still threw circles of pale light on the snow. The streets were empty of people. We walked down to the ramparts of the mills and stood a moment uncertain. A soldier with his gun and bayonet over his shoulder said with the embarrassed harshness of a fellow who isn’t used to this sort of thing: “Move on, move on, keep moving.”
We stared at him, surprised. He stared back and looked away.
Down the street were more soldiers pacing back and forth. All the mills were guarded with troops. Young boys patrolling high brick walls with guns over their shoulders. We looked at each other and we did not speak, but walked on down the cold, pale street, which was so unnaturally quiet and which looked so menacing with the young, armed uniformed soldiers walking up and down.
It was the first time I’d seen a town where the troops had been called out against the workers; and suddenly Lawrence, a familiar New England town, seemed strange and alien.
We walked along rapidly, always through empty streets, one or two people scurrying furtively past. Everywhere stood the uniformed boys with their guns guarding streets, guarding mills. High brick walls and guns. We paused a moment to look at a street sign and a boy again told us to move on. All the force of the state was turned against the workers. We walked down one street, turned to the left and passed other mills, then back to the hotel. There were more people in the street now and the street lights were out. We got breakfast, not talking much, for our familiar New England world had become strange and sinister.
From the beginning the workers were determined, but there was so little actual violence that the government report of the strike, prepared for the Department of Labor, stated that “Few strikes involving so large a number of employees . . . have continued so long with so little actual violence or riot.”
Yet all New England was appalled by Lawrence. It was a new kind of strike. There had never been mass picketing in any New England textile town. Ten thousand workers paraded. They stoned mills and broke windows and, almost storming a factory to bring the workers out, were kept back only by streams of icy water from the fire hose.
[“Always Marching and Singing”]
It was the spirit of the workers that seemed dangerous. They were confident, gay, released, and they sang. They were always marching and singing. The gray tired crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their mouths to sing, the different nationalities all speaking one language when they sang together.
“Revolution!” screamed the conservative press.
Three young I.W.W. organizers appeared on the scene. They were all in their early twenties. Their names were Caruso, Joe Ettor, and Arturo Giovannitti. They were young, idealistic and of magnetic personality. Joe Ettor was one of the best organizers I ever knew. He had a sense, amounting to genius, of the movement when a strike may be settled. When he talked, he glowed like a beacon light. Yet his energy and his vitality were restrained by his solid Latin good sense. He never made windy speeches. He said things to the workers like this: “For a strike to be peaceful, for a strike to be successful, there must be solidarity in the ranks of the strikers. Division is the surest means to violence; violence necessarily means the loss of the strike. You can hope for no success on any policy of violence….
“Remember the property of the bosses is protected first by the police, then the militia. If these are not sufficient, by an entire army. Remember you, too, are also armed — ” he paused and smiled — “armed with your labor power which you can withhold and stop production. Provoking violence will serve as a pretext to start a blood bath in which the workers’ blood will be spilled.”
One day a shot was fired and a glancing bullet killed a woman striker, Annie Lo Pizzo. No one, to this day, knows whether the bullet was fired by a policeman or by a worker, though it was of the same caliber as those the police carried.
Immediately, Caruso, Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti were arrested for murder as “accessory before the fact.” It was a familiar enough trick, in a strike, to arrest the leaders, in spite of the fact that they had not been anywhere near the place where the shooting occurred and that they had preached against violence. But Ettor and Giovannitti were kept in a cage for a year before they were finally pronounced not guilty. It was after the shooting that the troops were called out, the town placed under martial law and all public meetings and assemblies forbidden. This was the situation we found in Lawrence that cold February morning.
Strike headquarters was in the Franco-Belgian Hall, a big shed-like building outside the city limits. A huge one-eyed man was half-sitting on the table near the platform talking to the reporters. It was Big Bill Haywood. He would have been anywhere a marked person. He could not heave himself through any crowd without people turning to look at him. He had the look which some notable men of his generation had in America: combined wisdom, shrewdness and power, a peculiarly American look. Clarence Darrow had such a look. Debs had it.
In the back of the hall was the commissary, shelves with canned goods, flour, beans and rice. More strikers were arriving every moment. An Italian woman was saying: “I gotta see Bigga Bill!”
“You can’t see him now. He’s talking to reporters.”
“I gotta see Bigga Bill! Gotta see him now!”
Haywood called out: “Who is it wants to see me? Of course, you can see me! You come right up here.” He turned to the too-zealous young man and said gently: “Brother, there’s no time I can’t see fellow workers.” So the reporters waited while this woman made some complaint that had to do with groceries.
Haywood always had time to hear the complaints of even the most obscure strikers. The labor movement to him wasn’t a vast faceless mass. He visualized the individual woman standing behind the loom. When he talked about the children shucking oysters or peeling shrimps, he made you see actual children, hands wrinkled with water and painful with salt-water sores. He made all of the working class of America see Lawrence textile workers through the Lawrence children.
Haywood spoke briefly. Workers spoke briefly. There were reports of relief committees, and Archie Adamson, a young Englishman, read aloud the children’s letters, letters that made you laugh and cry. Ed Reilly, the witty Irishman, spoke.
When Elizabeth Gurley Flynn spoke, the excitement of the crowd became a visible thing. She stood there, young, with her Irish blue eyes, her face magnolia white and her cloud of black hair, the picture of a youthful revolutionary girl leader. She stirred them, lifted them up in her appeal for solidarity. Then at the end of the meeting, they sang. It was though a spurt of flame had gone through this audience, something stirring and powerful, a feeling which has made the liberation of people possible; something beautiful and strong had swept through the people and welded them together, singing.
The strike meeting was over, and we went into town with Haywood. We found out quickly enough who had kept the second group of Lawrence children from being sent to Philadelphia. Father Reilly, a priest of the largest parish, hated workers’ children being sent into Socialist households, so he instigated Colonel Sweetser, the commanding officer of the militia, to stop them as they were leaving. It had all been done so very suddenly and with such unnecessary brutality that not only were the workers aroused, but the liberal press of the country was indignant.
We sat eating our sandwiches and coffee at a lunch counter, and Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Carlo Tresca told us about the conduct of the strike. There was a committee of fifty-sixand an alternate committee of fifty-six to take their places in case of arrest. There was a steering committee of different nationalities. I remember to this day, Bedard, who was chairman, Archie Adamson, Giannini and the witty Ed Reilly. It was Ed Reilly who said to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Elizabeth, me toe is bruk on me.”
“What’s the matter with your toe, Ed ?”
“I’ve been assistin’ at a spontanyus uprisin’ of the people. I’ve been kicking the Wops an’ Hunkies in my room in the pa-ants an’ they spontanyously arose an’ went out o’ th’ factory.
“The strike is run so democratically, so much by the workers themselves,” Haywood said, “that no matter who was arrested, it’d go on. You see, even when Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested, it only strengthened the strike.”
He told about the committee of women who had come to him and begged him to let them go on the picket line, since guards beat up the men. Later, when we went down the street, a striker came along and with him a tall farmer with piercing blue eyes, an old man. The worker was an undersized Jewish boy.
“He’s looking for Big Bill,” the boy said. The farmer and Haywood shook hands. The farmer was full of indignation.
“I been reading about this strike,” he said, “and I came one hundred twenty miles because I don’t think these folks know their constitutional rights. I read in the papers they’re most of them foreigners and they ain’t done a thing, yet they had their rights of free speech and free assembly taken away from ’em, so I came down from my hilltop to read aloud the Declaration of Independence on the Common of this town, and I thought maybe you could call the workers together to hear me read it.”
Haywood said gently, “Brother, if we called the workers together, they’d only be arrested and beaten up.”
“You mean to tell me that I can’t read the Declaration of Independence on a Common in my own state to working folks?”
Haywood answered, “I don’t advise you to. You might get arrested.”
“Well,” said the old fellow, “I got high blood pressure and I’m pretty old and I don’t know a cause I’d better like to die in than teaching folks their rights, so if this lad will show me the Common, I’m a going to read the Bill o’ Rights.” So off he went, tenderly guided by the undersized Jewish striker. We never knew what became of him. But it seemed to us that the old Revolutionary feeling of America had come down to Lawrence to confer with the new.
That afternoon I went around visiting with one of the strike relief investigators. We passed suddenly from a well-ordered New England town with its wide Common bordered by fine elms, where there were churches with steeples that might have been designed by Christopher Wren, fine residences, dignified public buildings and libraries, to squalor that no slum in a large city could equal. The city slum had, at least, color and life. Life roared through city streets. Here, in these back alleys of Lawrence, was gray stagnation. Large houses were built in back yards, completely shutting out light. The congestion was so great that 33,700 persons were concentrated on three hundred acres. A third of the population was living on a thirteenth of the area of the city.
We went through yards littered with rubbish, up stairs foul with the smell of bad toilets, into a sunless flat, whose floor was covered with boarders’ mattresses. The grandfather, father and mother and children were crowded into one room. Here life had got to so low an ebb that even the poor little calendar, a-flower-growing-in-a-tin attempts at adornment that were common among the steel workers and in the mining districts, were absent.
In this dreadful place was a beautiful, wide-faced Syrian girl who looked like someone out of the Arabian Nights. She stood gazing out the window toward the littered court and saying, and in what a tone of yearning homesickness. “How I wish we had never come away from Damascus!” and as the thought came to me of an Oriental city with its gardens and fountains and fig trees, and the swarm of colorful life through the street, as against this gray and dreadful prospect, I wondered what ill chance had brought them from the East.
Probably one of the posters that represented a handsome worker issuing from his vine-covered home. For on some walls the only adornments were the posters of the sort that were spread from the Balkans to the Baltic by American mill owners, that workers had brought from the Old Country. These posters represented neat workers’ homes, with well-clad workers going to work, or workers going from the mill to the bank. Actually, there were a few such model homes, as were pictured, and they were occupied by foremen. It was the policy of the big companies to keep what was called “a fringe of labor” so that the labor supply would always be too great and therefore could be cheap. Men competed for children’s jobs in Lawrence.
People who have never seen an industrial struggle think of a strike as a time of turmoil, disorder and riot. Nothing could be less true. A good strike is a college for the workers. When the workers listen to the speeches they are going to school. Their minds are being opened. They are learning history and economics translated into the terms of their own lives. Many of them suddenly find hitherto unsuspected powers. Men and women, until now dumb, get up on platforms and speak with fire and with the eloquence of sincerity to their fellow workers. Others write articles leaflets. New forms of demonstration are invented, and the workers set off singing the songs they themselves have made up under the pressure of the strike. Like new blood these new talents flow through the masses of the workers.
[…..]
Sing in Solidarity Virtual Choir: The Internationale
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