ERIC EJ973227: Why Teach a 100-Year-Old Strike?: The "Bread and Roses" Centenary

2012·0.2 MB·English

by  ERIC

Why Teach a 100-Year-Old Strike?
The “Bread and Roses” Centenary
BY NORM DIAMOND attracted from surrounding farmsteads and they allocated work by ethnicity so that
rural communities. housing was to be airy particular jobs were given only to Lithu-
Today’s movement in support of the 99 and spacious, with grass yards and limits on anians, or to French canadians, or to the
percent is a reminder that throughout U.S. the number of tenants, and wages were to irish. Supervisors used ethnic and racial
history, a major engine of change has been be adequate for a healthy diet. slurs and sexual harassment as intentional
grass-roots organizing and solidarity. As an By 1912, the drive for profits had means of control.
old industrial Workers of the World song destroyed the vision. Workers lived in fetid, When individual states attempted
goes:* crowded tenements. Working nine- and regulation, companies threatened to move.
ten-hour days, six days a week, their main There was a race to the bottom (which is
“An injury to one, we say’s an injury to
meal was usually little more than bread and being repeated today on an international
all,
molasses. The drinking water inside the mills scale), with states competing to offer
United we’re unbeatable, divided, we
was foul; supervisors developed a lucrative companies the best deal, the least over-
must fall.”
sideline selling water that was actually sight. companies claimed they could not act
Major history textbooks, however, potable. Life expectancy for mill workers to improve conditions on their own; doing
downplay the role of ordinary people in was 22 years less than for non–mill worker so would put them at a competitive
shaping events—especially those who residents of Lawrence.
formed labor unions and used the strike to “if the women of this
assert their rights. One of the most country knew how the
significant strikes in U.S. history occurred cloth was made in
100 years ago, in the Lawrence, Massachu- Lawrence and at what
setts, textile mills, and yet it merits barely a price of human life they
mention in the most widely used U.S. would never buy another
history textbooks. yard,” said Vida dutton
it was known as the “Bread and Roses” Scudder, a professor at
strike because underlying the demand for Wellesley college who
adequate wages (“bread”) was a demand spoke at one of the
for dignity on the job and in life more strikers’ rallies.
generally (“roses”). The workforce was
Until this strike, the U.S. congress was one that unions and
indifferent to working conditions. The Wool bosses alike thought
Trust was as powerful as the Oil Trust and impossible to organize.
the Steel Trust. William Madison Wood, Mostly unskilled, a
chairman of the American Woolen com- majority of them women,
pany, was mentioned in the same breath as kept apart by more than
John d. Rockefeller, Andrew carnegie, and a dozen languages, mill
J. P. Morgan. With the largest and most workers were both
modern textile mills in the world and more vanguard and victims of
than 30,000 workers, Lawrence was the the new U.S. industrial-
epicenter and symbol of the new ization. The textile industry was the first to Above: When conditions became especially
industrialization. use new sources of power to drive its difficult, with food and heating fuel scarce
it had been founded only six decades machines. it led the way in subdividing jobs and attacks by hired thugs and the state
militia increasing, strikers sent some children
earlier, a planned city derived from a into limited, repetitive movements, making
to families of supporters in New York and
utopian vision. The mills themselves were to workers interchangeable and replaceable. Boston.
provide cultural opportunities and educa- hundreds of thousands were enticed
tion, refining the young women and men from poor areas of Europe by posters and
postcards showing happy mill hands leaving disadvantage. The responsibility, their
work with smiles and sacks of gold. But spokespeople said, was not theirs: it was
Norm Diamond, a labor historian, is the former president
of the Pacific Northwest Labor College and a former once mill owners had a surplus of workers that of the economic system that bound
professor at Antioch College. He has worked in steel desperate for jobs, they drove down wages them together and produced all the marvels
mills and a sawmill, and he is a coauthor of The Power in and sped up the work. of modern life.
Our Hands: A Curriculum on the History of Work and They also experimented with different
Workers in the United States, which has a full chapter on techniques to divide workers. in some mills, The Strike Begins
teaching the Bread and Roses strike, including they deliberately placed workers together On January 12, 1912, the owners of all the
day-by-day lesson plans. To learn more about the book,
who spoke different languages. in others, Lawrence companies suddenly cut workers’
go to http://bit.ly/HutZ8C. Portions of this article were
pay, and this seemingly docile workforce
drawn, with permission, from “One Hundred Years After
walked out. With no preparation and little
the Singing Strike,” an article he wrote for the website *“Dublin Dan” Liston, “The Portland Revolution.” See
Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People’s History. It is Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology prior organization, 23,000 workers went on
available online at http://bit.ly/wAc3h8. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1998), 34. strike. They set up communal kitchens and
For details, photos, biographies, and more, see
the Bread and Roses centennial Exhibit at
38 AMERicAN EdUcATOR | SUMMER 2012 www.exhibit.breadandrosescentennial.org.
created a committee structure responsible their old ways of under-
to daily mass meetings that took place in standing the world around
each of the ethnic constituencies. them no longer making
in the beginning, men led the strike sense. These are the times N,
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committees as well as the picketing and when people reach for ViSi
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solidarity. For those who couldn’t read, N,
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singing provided a political education, a ViSi Left: A woman spins yarn in a Lawrence
way of learning about the world and hS di mill. Above: The state militia guards the
putting their own struggles in a larger AP approach to Lawrence’s textile mills.
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ViSi repression, cold, and hunger, of one of those times. We should teach will win this strike by keeping our hands in
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GRESS, PRiNTS & PhN, Lc-B2- 2377-16 [P wocjoaveylecollru utaliasms tmaien a hagrin gcwhdha, e aogr fnerasa Mi.tr Aeea rffr tocseyhrrs wt1oe8nom etrhk flieaonysrgt dbthoeecmT achsuh etsaherlel aet thwn aegerrereees n a wdroueewe pfl aeiancnrgead ltnaleonaldrgsr aeaayrnt.eidvd el.e sA sdsnoudnr isn fgo r wlwmabiaatsonh kr— v iriltiolgewlhdeont— soc euefy .nt eAhdwene ridst ta nirttei tkwsaescea klsse. asaWadbieohdrue bsnt yw d aaee srfpteero nilkidceiern -g
Y OF cONOLLEcTiO wenTth ebya cwko tno bweocraku.se the mills tshtreik setrrsik fera, wmietdh isno mwea yosf f tahmei alitatra tcok su os na cthhoaruggehd t ahse a pcrcoosmecpulitcieosn i nac hkenro mwulerddgeer,d e tvheeny
BRARLiBAiN c cwoourlkdenr’st sfhuonwctiinogn nwoit shig snos m oaf ny hLauwndrerendce y ceiatrizs elantse’ rA. Asscoccoiardtiionng, tfoo rtmhee d hthaed tbimeeen. Aacdcdorredsisningg t oa trhalely p mroisleesc uatwoar,y i ta t
coming back. They won because during the strike and composed of the local was their militant pro-union speech that
they forced congressional hearings and business and political elite, outside incited the crime. When a Lawrence jury
focused national outrage on living and agitators were to blame for riling up the found those leaders not guilty, all who
working conditions and child labor. They otherwise docile and responsible work- value the First Amendment’s provisions for
won because wool industry profits were force. (Their actual words were “godless, free speech and freedom of assembly were
based on a tariff against foreign competi- unpatriotic outsiders.”) Somewhat in the beneficiaries.
tors, and mill owners feared that public contradiction with that characterization, We should teach Lawrence for its
outrage would prevent congress from they also faulted their own workers, calling victorious solidarity and for its contributions
renewing the tariff. Most of all, they won them “illegal immigrants” who had come to democracy. We should teach it because it
because of their own solidarity. to this country just to ship their rich wages is the gritty underpinning for topics that we
back to their families abroad. do teach: populism, the Progressive Era,
Lasting Lessons For the workers, the story was different. settlement houses, immigration, female
historic change is continuous but seldom it was about human solidarity across race, suffrage, movements for public health and
smooth. More often, it happens the way ethnicity, and gender. it was about civil rights, and naturalism and realism in
tectonic plates grind together, lock under community support and the possibility of literature. Most of all, we should teach
increasing tension into seeming stability, new forms of workplace organizing. The Lawrence because it was an exceptional
then spasm into a new configuration. it is in industrial-type unions we have today, historical event whose lessons still reverber-
these times of spasm when people find founded in the 1930s and ’40s, grew ate. in this time of renewed popular
directly out of the struggle in Lawrence. activism, we must revisit this country’s rich
†Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom Not only did later union activists take history of social movements, labor struggle,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 261. inspiration from the “singing strike,” some and solidarity. ☐
AMERicAN EdUcATOR | SUMMER 2012 39