When these women were told they would have to work for starvation wages, they called BS
During the ‘Bread and Roses’ strike, American immigrants from 40 nations came together to fight the man
When Camella Teoli was in sixth grade, her father took her out of school and sent her to work in the textile mills. It was 1911 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and this was common practice in local families — worker pay was insufficient, and children’s labor helped put food on the table. The legal working age was 14, but Camella’s family had acquired forged documents from their native Italy claiming she’d been born earlier than she really had. The forgery wasn’t their idea; a man had come to the house and offered to do it for them. Turned out he was a shady recruiter who worked for the textile company itself.
It took only three weeks before Camella got her hair caught in a machine that was for transforming cotton into thread. A portion of her scalp was torn off and she had to be hospitalized for seven months. When she was released from the hospital in January 1912, she learned that one of the most influential, and soon-to-be victorious, strikes in American history was under way. Teoli joined 27,000 workers in what would later become known as the Bread and Roses Strike.
Lawrence was a mill town, and Italian immigrants weren’t the only people working the looms. People from across Europe and even the Middle East worked in the mills, often doing labor that was classified as “unskilled” and was therefore poorly paid, even though it required great caution and dexterity.
Working and living conditions were bleak. Half of all children born in Lawrence at the turn of the century died before age six. More than a third of adults who worked in the mills died before they were 25, and the average age of death for mill employees was 39. The cause of so much early death was a combination of accidents like Teoli’s and environmental health hazards, like air thick with smoke and lint. Lawrence had, as one memoir put it, “‘mile high’ chimneys that billowed out a dark fog of smoke along with sooty cinders that fell on your hair and eye lashes. Whitish yellow waste material poured out of the sides of the mills into the Merrimack River … yellowing the waters below.”
Of the roughly 82,000 people living in Lawrence in 1912, 60,000 were directly dependent on the textile mills for their survival, according to the federal government’s Report on Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912. Organized labor unions had a presence in the Lawrence mills, but primarily among the native-born workers. At the time, many union organizers felt that the labor and cultural barriers presented too great an obstacle to unionizing heterogenous immigrant groups of workers. There were more than 40 nationalities represented in Lawrence, and 90 percent of the city’s residents were first- or second-generation American.
But the relative absence of unions didn’t mean Lawrence lacked a strong working-class identity and militancy. Many of the workers came from countries with robust socialist and unionist traditions, and were no strangers to protesting and going on strike. Even at home, strikes and boycotts were roiling the nation at the dawn of the 20th century, causing employers to brutally crack down. This created one media sensation after another, increasingly dramatizing conflict between workers and employers nationwide. In particular, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, which killed 146 working women in New York City, had emboldened labor unions and given the working-class movement a sense of moral urgency.
Despite their oppressive working conditions, factory workers in 1912 were perhaps more aware of their power than at any point in the nation’s history. American factories were like tinderboxes for labor conflict: one match and they’d go up in flames.
The workers in Lawrence were already barely making survival wages. So when a new Massachusetts state law reduced the maximum number of weekly work hours for women, the female workers demanded that companies pay them more. They needed to bring home the same amount as before, they argued, or else their families would go hungry. The companies refused to comply. On January 11, upon discovering their pay decrease, a group of Polish weavers stopped working at once. Their machines fell silent, and when the overseer asked why, they responded that they would not work for starvation wages. Then they walked out.
As evening fell on the drab row houses and sooty tenements of Lawrence, news of the strike spread from door to door. People packed into kitchens and living rooms to discuss the situation well into the night. Pay cuts for all the women workers of Lawrence meant that every family would suffer. Something had to be done, en masse, immediately.
In the morning, thousands refused to go to work. Throughout the day, thousands more walked out. A pamphlet was circulated around town and in the mills that read:
Now that the combination of capitalists have shown the unity of all our adversaries, we call on you as brothers and sisters to join hands with us in this great movement … Workers quit your hammers, throw down your files, let the dynamos stop, the power cease to turn the wheels and the looms, leave the machinery, bank the fires, tie up the plants, tie up the town.
There had never been so much as a picket in a New England mill town, and now more than 25,000 people — men, women, and children — had elected to engage in a mass work stoppage overnight.
They immediately began to parade in the streets of Lawrence, up to 10,000 at a time. A columnist for Harper’s Weekly observed the scene with awe, writing, “The gray tired crowds perpetually ebbing and flowing into the mills had waked and opened their mouths to sing.”
The prevailing union in Lawrence at the time, the United Textile Workers, was linked up with the cautious and conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL). The union was taken aback by the strike, which it hadn’t planned, and tried to talk the workers out of their impulsive actions. But the workers were steadfast — and a new organized labor presence, the International Workers of the World (IWW), quickly stepped in and took responsibility for the strike.
The AFL was reluctant, at best, to embrace immigrant workers, and at times openly racist and nativist. On the other hand, the IWW, also known as the Wobblies, proclaimed that “the I.W.W. is not a white man’s union, not a black man’s union, not a red or yellow man’s union, but a working man’s union. All of the working class in one big union.”
It was in this spirit that Joseph “Smiling Joe” Ettor of the IWW joined with Arturo Giovannitti of the Socialist Party of America to establish a strike committee for the Lawrence strikers. The committee consisted of 56 people, men and women alike, from all different nationalities represented in the local textile industry. This meant they were able to speak to all the workers in their native languages, and thus overcome the obstacle of bringing immigrant workers from many nations into a single union.
The street scene was at once joyous and perilous. The strikers marched and chanted and sang. Meetings were raucous and vibrant, sometimes translated into 30 languages simultaneously. Young women paraded up and down the streets carrying signs that read, “We want bread and roses too.” The slogan came from a poem written by James Oppenheim about women in the labor movement, the first verse of which read almost like a premonition of the Lawrence strike:
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”
Bread represented the conviction that working people should make enough money to eat. Roses, meanwhile, were meant to symbolize that, as Oppenheim wrote, “hearts starve as well as bodies” — that is, people deserve not simply to survive, but to enjoy life’s pleasures. The worker deserved more than a life of drudgery; she deserved music, love, and beauty, too. Thereafter the poem became a cultural touchstone for the labor movement, particularly women’s organizing.
But dark clouds were gathering over the celebratory protests at street level. The police battled with the strikers in the streets. The largest of the Lawrence textile companies hired the local undertaker to place dynamite all over town and blame it on the Wobblies, but the plot was exposed. That wasn’t the end — a few days into the strike, a young woman named Anna LoPiozzo was killed, likely shot by the police. Authorities blamed it on Ettor and Giovannitti, who were promptly jailed, and remained imprisoned for the duration of the strike.
As the strike grew in intensity, the IWW sent in its big shots: organizers Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood. They worked on making the strike self-reliant so it could last longer, setting up soup kitchens, relief funds, and nurseries for the children, which enabled the strikers to continue marching at all hours of the day. They were relentless, and they gave the police a run for their money: one lone police officer, for instance, was surrounded by Italian women who stripped him of his badge and gun, took off his pants, and dangled him half-naked over the icy Merrimack River. The district attorney bemoaned tenacity of the immigrant women of Lawrence, saying, “One policeman can handle 10 men, while it takes 10 policemen to handle one woman.”
Dangling aside, the strike leadership instructed the workers to remain nonviolent. They knew that victory relied on the longevity of the strike, and longevity relied on donation funds, which in turn were dependent on the sympathies of the public. The strike leaders’ attention to public sentiment led them to perhaps their most ingenious and important decision of the strike. In late February, after six weeks of total work stoppage and endless protest, the IWW arranged for the children of the Lawrence workers to be transported by train to safer environs, where sympathizers would take them in until things had settled down in Lawrence.
Newspapers caught wind of the children’s evacuation, which was the point all along. The New York Times ran an article titled, “Strike Waifs Find Homes Here: Great Throng Waits in Cold to Give Warm Welcome to Children from Lawrence, Mass.” The children all ended up in the care of members of the Socialist Party, but even more conservative hearts were moved by the spectacle. The children poured into Grand Central Station in New York City, chanting, “Who are we, who are we, who are we? Yes we are, yes we are, yes we are! Strikers, strikers, strikers!”
A crowd of five thousand cheered their arrival. A leaflet was circulated that read, “The children arriving today come from a city held in the grip of armed terror. These children have seen the gleam of edged weapons on the streets. They have heard their parents tell of the terror of steel and lead.” Many people, particularly wealthier women, were softened to the strikers’ cause by the “strike waifs.” Among them was Helen Harron Taft, wife of President William Howard Taft.
The children’s evacuation turned the tide of public sympathy, and the companies saw that they had no choice but to concede something to the strikers. On March 1, they offered a 5 percent pay raise. But the workers understood that they had the upper hand and planned to make good use of that rare strategic advantage. They rejected the deal.
After the strike dragged on for two more weeks, the companies returned with another offer: a pay raise and a less restrictive attendance policy. It was a perfect embodiment of the Bread and Roses principle — money to eat, and more time to spend outside the workplace, enjoying their lives in whatever way they saw fit.
The changes went into effect immediately. The children came home in late March. Ettor and Giovannitti were subjected to a lengthy trial, but ultimately acquitted. The strikers were never punished for their two-month absence. By those measures, it was one of the most successful strikes in American history.
At least for a while. The IWW may have been one big union, but it was never a very official one, and it failed to secure a proper contract or to establish a robust institutional presence after the strike. The gains were lost over time, demonstrating that a labor victory, if not followed by appropriate vigilance, is often no victory at all. Still, the Bread and Roses Strike stands as a testament to the awesome strength of working-class consciousness and militancy in the early 20th century — and a stinging rebuke to the notion that cultural, linguistic, and ethnic differences are too difficult for a group with shared material interests to overcome.
