1912 Lawrence Textile Strike Essay

Unions and Strikes

Most of the post-World War I strikes in the United States were not only unsuccessful, they also ushered in a decade of declining union membership. Mounting public fears about radicalism resulted in the so-called Red Scare of 1919–20. Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge used force and intimidation to settle the 1919 Boston police strike. The 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike demonstrated how violent measures can result from extreme wage reductions. Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 was a major textile center, a leader in the production of woolen and worsted goods. By 1900, mechanization in the textile industry had allowed factory owners to eliminate or reduce the number of skilled workers and to substitute large numbers of unskilled

To counteract fierce competition, the industry introduced the two-loom system in the woolen mills and instituted a speed-up that resulted in lay-offs and a drop in wages. Conditions were ripe for the 1912 labor dispute that occurred. Massachusetts passed a law on January 1, 1912, which reduced weekly work hours for women and children from fifty-six to fifty-four. When one mill owner decided to lower wages by 3.5 percent, more than twenty thousand workers struck within a week. They were led by the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies). The City of Lawrence responded by having the local militia patrol the streets. Mill owners turned fire hoses on the picketers, leading the picketers to throw ice at the plants, breaking a number of windows. As one judge stated later, “The only way we can teach them is to deal out severest sentences.” The police also overreacted; they swung their clubs in all directions without thinking of the children who were clinging to their mothers. Parents and children alike were beaten. After striker Anna LoPizzo was shot and killed during a march on January 29, IWW strike leaders Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti were jailed on trumped up murder charges. They were acquitted in November 1912 following a six-week

About 120 children left Lawrence on February 10 and were met at the station in New York City by 5,000 members of the Italian Socialist Federation and the Socialist Party, singing the “The Internationale” and “The Marseillaise.” Margaret Sanger, who later gained fame for her work on birth control, was one of the nurses who accompanied the children on the train to New York City. She testified before a congressional committee in March: “Out of the 119 children, only four had underwear . . . their outerwear was almost in rags . . . their coats were in shreds.” All of this in one of the bitterest winters on record. This clash between the children and the police was the turning point of the Lawrence strike. Protests reached Congress from all parts of the country as newspaper and magazine articles focused on the