Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream
By Bruce Watson
Viking, 337 pages, $24.95
Of the countless labor-management conflicts from the heyday of the American industrial revolution, only a few have managed to live on in our collective memory. Chicago’s Haymarket Riot (1886), the Homestead strike (1892), the Pullman Boycott (1894), the nationwide 1919 strike wave and the Memorial Day Massacre (1937) are recalled in scholarly and popular histories and the occasional public-TV documentary. Since a renewal of interest began in the 1970s, the 1912 revolt of textile workers in Lawrence, Mass., has joined their ranks as the “Bread and Roses” strike, popularized in folk song, paintings and posters, and labor and arts festivals after having slipped from the recollections of all but labor historians and die-hard activists. (Legend has it that the phrase “Bread and Roses” came from a never-found photo of a picket sign reading, “We want bread, but we want roses, too!”)
The Lawrence strike may not have been, as journalist Bruce Watson describes it in his new book, “Bread and Roses,” “the most dramatic strike in American history,” but it certainly deserves inclusion on the list of the greatest hits of American labor. Its cast of 20,000 included a multitude of immigrant groups and the most colorful and creative of American labor radicals, as well as minor industrial magnates, tough-minded constables and hundreds of unhappy–but trigger-happy–state militiamen. It occasioned sufficient violence, revolutionary and sporadically incendiary rhetoric, and police and judicial repression to capture national headlines for months.
Determined to present their side of the story, strikers, politicians and employers alike anxiously offered testimony to a state legislative committee in Boston and a congressional committee in Washington. Generating even further publicity was the convenient police discovery of hidden packages of dynamite and fuses in a Lawrence working-class neighborhood (although in this instance, the evidence of labor’s so-called terrorist plot apparently was planted by employers in the hopes of discrediting the strikers). Remarkably, easily replaceable and previously un-organized mill hands won tangible gains: modest wage increases, a reduction in scope of a disliked bonus system, and managers’ promises of no recriminations against strikers upon their return to work.
Watson dramatically and effectively brings back to life the 1912 Lawrence strike. With a keen eye for geographical and biographical detail, he captures the contours of industrial New England, recreates the gritty neighborhoods populated by various European immigrant groups, and carefully lays out the ideological beliefs and personal circumstances of the conflict’s many principal actors. Although the story he tells unfolds largely chronologically, he unobtrusively anchors the day-to-day events in the broader context of American politics and culture. “Bread and Roses” is a story well-told.
The significance of his story lies in more than the conflict’s sheer drama. For Watson, the strike also revealed in stark detail the particular fault lines in American society–between immigrant and native-born workers, radical visionaries and status-quo defenders, and celebrators and critics of industrial society–that are worth recalling nearly a century after the fact. To contemporaries, Lawrence “became the lightning rod of a `profoundly disenchanted’ nation,” portending that, “Something was happening in America and the strike was only its signal flare.”
An impending revolution may have been the fantasy of the American left, but it was one that capitalists (if not subsequent historians) took rather seriously. “Unless something is done,” warned steel baron Elbert Gary, “the spark will burst into a flame.” Lawrence Mayor Michael Scanlon viewed the conflict not as a strike but as “an incipient revolution,” the “beginning of a wage war which is to spread throughout the country.”
Whatever we may think of the overheated rhetoric on all sides of the ideological spectrum, Watson shows us that Progressive-era Americans took their social and economic divisions seriously. The Industrial Revolution may have gotten us to where we are today, but getting here was neither easy nor pretty. The Lawrence strike reminds us that progress was excruciatingly slow and staunchly resisted, coming at a high price in human suffering.
The strike’s immediate trigger was the implementation of a Massachusetts law reducing the workweek from 56 to 54 hours on Jan. 1, 1912. Confronted with the corresponding loss in pay of 32 cents per week, 200 Polish immigrant women spontaneously stopped work. But the issue of wages, Watson argues, was “only a pretense”; what had primed the textile workforce to rebel was gross overcrowding in Lawrence’s teaming tenement district, high mortality rates and dashed immigrant dreams of prosperity in the U.S. And rebel they did. During one of the most brutal New England winters in memory, the immigrant workforce of “The City That Weaves the World’s Worsteds” deserted the mills and took to the streets. In the months that followed, they held remarkably firm, attending mass meetings, parading and picketing, attacking strikebreakers, and occasionally rioting and clashing with police. In one of their most creative and effective public-relations maneuvers, they orchestrated a series of children’s exoduses, dispatching their cold, underfed offspring to the care of generous strike sympathizers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Barre, Vt.
For their part, textile magnates dug in their heels. Invoking cold economic principles, they refused to negotiate with what they saw as an ungrateful and unruly rabble. The laws of supply and demand, the sanctity of managerial prerogatives and stockholder intransigence dictated their course of action. Industrialist William Wood, a self-made man, workaholic owner of the huge American Woolen Co. and one of the country’s richest men, had “nothing but scorn for workers who griped about their hours.” Although clearly sympathetic to immigrant labor’s cause, Watson devotes considerable (and not unsympathetic) attention to Wood, portraying not just his hard-headed business persona but his human side as well.
Guaranteeing that the Lawrence strike would attract nationwide publicity and generate considerable popular anxiety was the participation of the country’s most radical, creative and colorful labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW.
Founded exactly one century ago, the IWW staunchly opposed American capitalism as an exploitative and inhuman system and preached the irreconcilability of the interests of labor and capital. To Wobblies (as the organization’s members were called), the narrow craft unionism of the then-dominant American Federation of Labor was anathema. Rejecting the AFL’s accommodation to capitalism and its dogged championing of the economic interests of its skilled, white, native-born and old-immigrant membership, they organized the downtrodden, the unskilled workers and the new immigrant masses that AFL members disdained as unorganizable and inferior.
In recent decades the IWW has often been “romanticized,” Watson observes, but “during its heyday, from 1905 to 1917, the IWW was the most feared organization in America.” Its presence on the Lawrence scene, and the involvement of such leading radicals as William “Big Bill” Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor, infused the struggle with an eloquence and moral power it would not otherwise have had. They also gave opponents the opportunity to blame outside agitators for fomenting unnecessary discontent and to crack down hard on strikers as a fundamental threat to the social order.
The Wobblies’ paramount contribution, though, lay less in their words or imagery–inflammatory or inspirational, depending on one’s position–than in the interethnic unity they promoted. The American labor force had long been divided by race, ethnicity, religion and gender, and the dominant AFL tended to reinforce, not undermine, those dividing lines. The IWW, in contrast, relentlessly preached the unity of labor. In Lawrence, Wobblies temporarily succeeded in melding immigrant mill hands from Italy, Russia, Greece, Armenia, Lithuania, Poland and Syria, among other places, into a single body. “`Never before has a strike of such magnitude succeeded in uniting in one unflinching, unyielding, determined and united army so large and diverse a number of human beings,'” one contemporary journalist observed. The IWW’s strike committee, with its “multitude of languages and interpreters, . . . resembled a precursor to the United Nations,” Watson concludes. Marveling at–more than explaining–how this “cosmopolitan collection of the world’s workers had become an American tapestry,” Watson only briefly recounts the resurfacing of “former animosities” that followed the strikers’ partial victory.
Indeed, what followed was far less than the IWW had dreamed of or its managerial adversaries had feared. Labor’s remarkable unity ultimately proved short-lived, and Lawrence turned out to be “a city of loyal immigrants whose cause was not revolution but two hours’ pay.” For all of the inspiration they generated, Wobblies were afflicted with organizational attention deficit disorder. Demonstrating no real staying power, they moved on to the next headline-grabbing battle elsewhere rather than engage in the tedious infrastructural development required to build on their earlier momentum. Over time, recollections of the 1912 strike faded, or events were reinterpreted into a sanitized version–with Wobblies cast in the role of “incendiary anarchists” and the militia as the “saviors of law and order”–proffered by municipal authorities and civic elites.
Decades later, after the textile industry had fled New England for cheaper labor and warmer climes in the South, local residents looked upon the strike as an unfortunate, disorderly period, if they bothered to remember it at all.
Watson insists that events in Lawrence should not be “relegated to history’s ghettos,” for the strike was a “quintessentially American event, one of which the entire nation can be proud.” In making such a claim, he is referring to the determination of the immigrant rank and file, which, despite the odds, briefly forged a tenuous unity over long-standing division and “became citizens–in name or only in spirit–demanding a living wage and a little respect.” But the strike did not quite produce that living wage or the respect the strikers’ sought.
A skilled storyteller, Watson offers a moving and compelling account of radical dreams, conservative nightmares and immigrant aspirations that informed the making of modern America. His greater contribution lies in his treatment of the Lawrence strike as a window into what he aptly terms “the Great American Divide” separating the haves from the have-nots, a divide that fueled widespread social conflict in the Progressive Era.
