1912 Lawrence textile strike
The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence.[3] On January 1, 1912, the Massachusetts government enforced a law that cut mill workers' hours in a single work week from 56 hours, to 54 hours. Ten days later, they found out that pay had been reduced along with the cut in hours.[4]
The strike united workers from more than 51 different nationalities[5] many of whom knew little to no English. A large portion of the striking workers, including many of the leaders of the strike, were Italian immigrants. Carried on throughout a brutally cold winter, the strike lasted more than two months, from January to March, defying the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized. In late January, when a striker, Anna LoPizzo, was killed by police during a protest, IWW organizers Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti were framed and arrested on charges of being accessories to the murder.[6]
IWW leaders Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn came to Lawrence to run the strike. Together they masterminded its signature move, sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont. The move drew widespread sympathy, especially after police stopped a further exodus, leading to violence at the Lawrence train station.[6] Congressional hearings followed, resulting in exposure of shocking conditions in the Lawrence mills and calls for investigation of the "wool trust." Mill owners soon decided to settle the strike, giving workers in Lawrence and throughout New England raises of up to 20 percent. Within a year, however, the IWW had largely collapsed in Lawrence.[6]
The Lawrence strike is often referred to as the "Bread and Roses" strike. It has also been called the "strike for three loaves".[7] The phrase "bread and roses" actually preceded the strike, appearing in a poem by James Oppenheim published in The American Magazine in December 1911.[8] A 1915 labor anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest by Upton Sinclair, attributed the phrase to the Lawrence strike, and the association stuck.[9][10] A popular rallying cry from the poem was interwoven with the memory of the strike: "Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!"[4]
The strike had at least three casualties:[46]
Conclusion and legacy[edit]
After the strike concluded, workers received a few of the demands established between mill workers and owners. Some workers went back to work at the mills and "others came and went, trying to find other jobs, failing, returning again to the music of the power loom".[54] Even after the strike was finished, there were many other strikes that occurred in other states involving various mill factories. "On January 12, 1913, the IWW held anniversary celebration in Lawrence"[55] which was one of the last celebrations for a couple of years.
Eugene Debs said of the strike, "The Victory at Lawrence was the most decisive and far-reaching ever won by organized labor."[56] Author Peter Carlson saw this strike conducted by the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as a turning point. He wrote, "Wary of [a war with the anti-capitalist IWW], some mill owners swallowed their hatred of unions and actually invited the AFL to organize their workers.[56]
On February 9, 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren officially announced her candidacy for President of the United States at the site of the strike.[57][58]