[The Trouble at Lawrence](https://syndicalism.org/texts/473/the-trouble-at-lawrence)
====================================================================================

By [Mary Heaton
Vorse](https://syndicalism.org/authors/239/mary-heaton-vorse)

Published March 16, 1912 in Harper\'s Weekly

Topics: [manufacturing](https://syndicalism.org/topics/manufacturing),
[craft and industrial
unionism](https://syndicalism.org/topics/craft%20and%20industrial%20unionism),
[USA](https://syndicalism.org/topics/USA),
[IWW](https://syndicalism.org/topics/IWW),
[AFL](https://syndicalism.org/topics/AFL), [strike tactics and
analysis](https://syndicalism.org/topics/strike%20tactics%20and%20analysis)

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A few weeks ago a company of about forty children of the Lawrence
strikers, bound for Philadelphia, were forcibly prevented from leaving
Lawrence by the order of City Marshal John J. Sullivan. He was led to
this act by the belief that some of these children were leaving town
without the consent of their parents. Before this several groups of
children, to the total of nearly three hundred, had been sent out of
town to the strike sympathizers in various cities, and public opinion
against the departure of the children had been aroused. As Congressman
Ames said: "The people here feel that the sending away of these children
has hurt the fair name of Lawrence, since it is a rich town and capable
of caring for all its needy children without the help of outsiders."

The forcible detention of these children had an extraordinary response
throughout the country. It was one of those things that cannot be done
in America without stirring up public opinion from north to south and
east to west. There had been earlier aggressive moves on the part of the
authorities: Joseph J. Ettor, one of the first to take charge of the
strike on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World, and Arturo
Giovannitti, his chief lieutenant, were arrested and committed to jail
without bail, as accessories to the murder of a woman, shot by a
deflected bullet during a clash between the strikers and the police.
Both men were two miles away during the conflict. Their imprisonment
caused comment in the press, as did other episodes of the strike --- for
instance, the railroading of twenty-three men to prison for one year
each, during a single morning's police-court session, on the charge of
inciting to riot; but in the minds of the country at large these things
have been simply incidents. The abridgment of the right of people to
move from one place to another freely was at once a matter of national
importance. It had for its immediate sequel the sending of that touching
little band of thirteen children of various nationalities to Washington
to state their grievances and to testify as to what occurred at the
railway station on that Saturday morning.

This was the culminating incident in a strike which has been an
extraordinary one throughout, and which, throughout, has been
diversified with incidents of an unusual kind.

It is an eloquent little commentary on the wage scale of Lawrence that
the passing of the beneficent fifty-four-hour bill should have been the
indirect cause of the strike. This bill limited the work of women and
children in Massachusetts to that number of hours a week, and the mills
of Lawrence could not run fifty-six hours for their men alone. Therefore
they cut the hours to fifty-four, as the law demanded, and, at the same
time, cut the pay by 3.57 per cent. It is also claimed that the mills
speeded up the work. January 13th was the last pay-day before the
strike, and a few days later the mills were no longer making cloth.

In the present-day labor situation, as every one knows, strikes are
prearranged, and, on a certain given day, the people walk out; but the
strike of the textile workers in Lawrence was the spontaneous expression
of discontent of a people whose scant wages, averaging between \$5 and
\$6 a week, were cut below the living point. They went out, over 25,000
of them, of all crafts, without organization and without strike funds.
They had no leaders and they themselves were composed of all the peoples
of the earth, and were of warring nations and warring creeds. In this
extraordinary fashion did the strike begin.

At the time the mill-hands went out, the American Federation of Labor
had a membership, according to John P. Golden, president of the Textile
Union of New England, of approximately 250, and the Industrial Workers
of the World a membership of about 280. The American Federation of Labor
has not recognized the strike. Apparently this organization was annoyed
that the strikers had not played according to the rules of Hoyle laid
down by their organization. It was not their strike, neither was it the
strike of the Industrial Workers of the World. The strike was merely the
indignant expression of people who considered that their wages had been
cut below the living point.

The I.W.W. took immediate steps to bring some order out of the chaos in
which the workers were plunged. William D. Haywood, Ettor, and
Giovannitti began to organize all of the textile workers into one great
industrial union. They enrolled the majority of the 25,000 strikers,
men, women, and children, in the I.W.W. They formulated demands for a
flat increase in wages of 15 per cent., a fifty-four-hour week, double
time for overtime, the abolition of the premium, or speeding-up system,
and no discrimination against those who were on strike. Arrayed against
the strikers, along with the mill-owners, the militia, and the police,
were the officials of the Textile Union of New England and the Central
Labor Union of Lawrence. The American Federation of Labor at Washington
was also hostile, seeing in the ideal of labor solidarity that was being
preached at Lawrence an attack on craft unionism. But it was a message
which appealed strongly to the diverse mass of men and women who made up
the strikers, and it held them. After Ettor's arrest the task of welding
the alien groups into one fell upon the shoulders of Haywood, and the
release of Ettor and Giovannitti was added to the demands.

As a contrast to the action against Ettor it is interesting to cite this
incident: John Ramay, a young Syrian of nineteen, went out on the
morning of the 29th of January at six o'clock. He joined a crowd of
strikers which the militia moved along. He was at the back of the crowd.
At fifteen minutes past six he was brought into his mother's house with
a bayonet wound in the back, and he died at seven that night. The name
of the militiaman who killed Ramay is unknown, nor has any action been
taken against him. He was not held for murder nor complicity of murder,
as it was decided that he was within his rights.

Lawrence is in atmosphere a New England city. It has about 88,000
inhabitants, of which 60,000 are mill-workers and their families. Thirty
thousand of these people work in the mills, and it is said that over
thirty-three dialects are spoken in this New England town and that of
full American stock there are not more than 8,000 while 45,000 alone are
of English-speaking nations.

The town sits in a basin surrounded by hills. Along one side of it runs
the Merrimack River, wide and shining. If you approach Lawrence from
South Lawrence, you must pass through acre after acre of mill buildings
and mill yards until you reach the wide water-way whose sides are
factory-bordered, whose surface mirrors the monotonous pale-red brick of
factory wall and factory chimney.

If you walk down Essex Street, the principal business street, and glance
to your right and then to your left, you will receive an impression of
always seeing at the end of the street on the one hand a little church
steeple spiring upward and on the other an imposing mill chimney. The
ever-recurring little church steeples of Lawrence give one the
impression of the children of a dying race; the big smoke-stacks are the
young giants of a new, red-blooded generation.

From one end to the other of Lawrence run the mills, most of them
situated on a piece of made land between the Merrimack and the canal.
The mills *are* Lawrence; you cannot escape them; the smoke of them
fills the sky. The great mills of Lawrence make the Lawrence sky-line,
they dominate and dwarf the churches. From Union Street to Broadway
along the canal the mills stretch, a solid wall of brick and wide-paned
glass, imposing by their vastness and almost beautiful, as anything is
that without pretense is adapted absolutely to its own end. The mills
seem like some strange fortress of industry, connected as they are by a
series of bridges and separated by a canal from the town.

In the Syrian quarter, beautiful, long-eyed Syrian women, their hair
down their backs, sat Oriental fashion on meager cushions on the floor
nursing pale babies in rooms where it was almost dark, although outside
the day was bright and clear and snow sparkled on the ground. A typical
family of this sort is that of a certain woman in an alley tenement off
Oak Street. There were six in the family, which lived in three rooms.
The halls were dirty and full of ashes and unremoved garbage. The family
\[was\] supported by the work of children --- a boy of sixteen and
one-half years and a girl of seventeen, who earned between them \$12.50
a week. The rent was \$10 a month. It was this girl who cried, in the
tone of one who would say --- "Oh, that one would give me to drink of
the water that flows!": "Oh, that only we had never come away from
Damascus!" And one had a picture of these people who were so beautiful
to look on in their own home, the sun at least about them. As a Syrian
said apropos of the killing of Ramay, when Haywood cautioned his
compatriots to moderation and patience: "If we have not much law in our
country, at least we have satisfaction!"

It is in homes like these that one would find the posters of the Wood
mills, representing long lines of the mills on the one hand and a happy
band of workers, with their full dinner-pails, proceeding to work on the
other. These posters and the representations of agents caused many
workers to come to this country.

It is only by chance that I have mentioned the Syrians; their case is of
course that of all the other workers.

The Jewish strike delegate, an impressive man with a worn face, said he
had a wife and eight children who were all too young to work in the
mills. When he was asked how much he averaged he replied, "I'm ashamed
to tell you." They paid \$2.25 a week for their tenement, and when he
was asked if he took lodgers he replied in a matter-of-fact tone, "Why,
of course, how else could I live?" Five of his children were among those
who were being taken care of in New York and other cities.

The different nationalities keep together and have their own
meeting-places, from the substantial brick Turn Verein building of the
Germans to the tiny Lithuanian church.

There are quarters of the town where you may not hear a word of English
spoken. I have been in Italian towns where I have heard more
American-English spoken on the streets by returned emigrants than I did
in the narrow streets and alleys and Valley Street. The picture-show
notices were in Italian; goats' cheese and salami hung up in the
windows; women with shawls on their heads went in to buy meager stores
of their day's marketing, and windows of the stores held colored posters
which represented the glorious victories of the Italians over the Turks.

This is the town, so New England in setting and surroundings, so mixed
in its nationalities --- this town whose great mills are the latest
expression of our tremendous industrial development --- a development
which has created a situation which no one as yet fully understands in
all its complexity, with which our State government cannot cope, and
which has caught in its tangled web the people who are the very creators
of the situation itself.      

The strike of Lawrence involves the questions of emigration and of the
tariff, of the ability of a State with a fifty-four-hour law to compete
with a State whose workers have two extra working hours; the effect on
the country at large of a working community which habitually lives under
conditions which do not make for healthy children.

Lawrence is a small town; there are 20,000 people there who, whatever
else happens, can never again have the race hatreds and creed prejudices
that they did before they had learned what working together may mean.
They have learned, too, the value of organization and their one
executive ability has been developed, for they have had to feed a great
company of people and administer the use of the strike funds. Young
girls have had executive positions. Men and women who have known nothing
but work in the home and mill have developed a larger social
consciousness. A strike like this makes people think. Almost every day
for weeks people of every one of these nations have gone to their
crowded meetings and listened to the speakers and have discussed these
questions afterward, and in the morning the women have resumed their
duty on the picket lines and the working together for what they believed
was the common good.

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**Additional Information**

Taken from
[HathiTrust](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015033848121&view=1up&seq=296).

Also see \"[Syndicalist Tendencies in the American Labor
Movement](https://syndicalism.org/texts/508/syndicalist-tendencies-in-the-american-labor-movement)\"
by Max Baginski for additional contemporary commentary on the strike.