|
|
|
Review
| Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream, by Bruce Watson. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 337 pages. $16.00, paper.
|
| In a time of the decreasing power of labor unions, reading about the strike of thousands of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 can remind us why unions are important. This compelling narrative by Bruce Watson reveals the gulf between the owners of industry trying to keep costs low, civic leaders trying to maintain order, and an immigrant workforce trying merely to survive. It is easy even now to sympathize with these workers, some as young as twelve, who worked six days a week, nine to ten hours a day, with no overtime pay, subject to periodic speed-ups of the looms. The average mill worker died at the age of thirty-nine. The strike began when the Massachusetts legislature reduced the maximum workweek from fifty-six to fifty-four hours. Mill-owners then reduced workers' pay accordingly, a cut of thirty-two cents, the price of four loaves of bread. Almost 20,000 of the 28,000 mill workers—Irish, Syrians, Italians, Poles, Russians, Scots, Armenians, Portuguese, Belgians, Germans, English, Greeks, French Canadians—walked off the job. Owners such as William Wood of American Woolen blamed the iron law of competition for the reduction in wages and argued that if Massachusetts improved labor conditions, companies would move to other states, forcing wages back down. Outside agitators, women agitators, and foreigners were also blamed for the strike. The Mayor of Lawrence blamed both sides but especially starvation wages, tremendous dividends and immense salaries paid to officials. |
1
|
|
Watson's book reveals the chicanery, rhetoric, self-righteousness, and fear that kept the strike going. In the sixty-three day saga of resistance, the reader is made to feel the misery and injustice, and consequently to side with the strikers. The great strikes of early American history are largely unknown to most Americans. If we have heard about Lawrence, it was probably from pamphlets that shaped the official version, featuring mobs, outside agitators, yellow journalists, theorizing college professors, shoals of socialists, and swarthy terrorists. Watson has discovered a more complex, nuanced story. He draws on taped interviews of strike veterans interviewed beginning in 1978 when a new historical society in Lawrence, the Immigrant City Archives, began an oral history project. Watson's research using these interviews re-recreates the daily democratic meetings of strikers, the orderly soup kitchens feeding thousands, the sending of children to homes in other cities, the use of militias with bayoneted rifles, the clubbing of women at the train station, the planting of dynamite to try to discredit the strikers, and the nine-month imprisonment of strike leaders Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, charged (and acquitted) with being accessories in the murder of a striker. |
2
|
|
Watson emphasizes the role of women, showing that their will drove the strike onward. He examines the strike leadership, both homegrown from the I.W.W., including Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Leaders were effective in keeping the strike largely nonviolent. "We strike with our hands in our pockets," Haywood said. "Pure strength lies in the overwhelming power of numbers." The strikers finally won and gained wage increases ranging from five to twenty percent (the latter for the lowest paid), time-and-a-quarter for overtime, their jobs back with no recriminations (a promise that was broken for the leaders), and a de-facto acknowledgment that people's work could not be accelerated as if they were machines. "We are a new people. We have hope," one striker said. "We will never stand again what we stood before." |
3
|
|
The strike at Lawrence revealed the paradoxes of a nation whose population was shifting from the countryside to crowded cities. Watson cites four "lessons" that people believed they had learned from the Lawrence strike: that immigration had reached "dangerous" levels; that Americans must learn more about labor conditions; that employers who stifled unionization were fueling class warfare; and, perhaps, that government might play a role in labor disputes. The strike soon did prompt the nation's first minimum wage law and an eight-hour workday for children in Massachusetts. This is a human narrative, with information and analysis packed into a good read. It would serve for a solid book report in a high school U.S. History course or required reading in a college-level labor history or immigrant history course. It is a case study in U.S. economic, political, and social history in the early 1900s, and thus can also provide the basis for a thought-provoking lecture. |
4
|
| | |
| South Seattle Community College, Seattle, Washington |
Judith Bentley |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|