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GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01068 1218
IMMIGRANT CITY Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921
Publication of this book was sponsored by the American Association for State and Local History, Madison, Wisconsin, under its continuing pro- gram to promote a better understanding of our national heritage at a local level.
IMMIGRANT CITY Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921
by DONALD B. COLE
Chapel Hill THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
COPYRIGHT C 1963 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
Manufactured in the United States of America
PRINTED BY THE SEEMAN PRINTERY, DURHAM, N. C.
1300519
For
Tootie
New Englandlawn # 3.50 5-10-65 #2824
Foreword
Lack of space has forced general accounts of American history to ignore most cities and mention the others only in connection with some specific event. Generations of Americans, therefore, have grown up thinking of cities in terms of labels and inaccurate stereotypes. Hartford is inevitably the site of the Hartford Con- vention, but readers are rarely aware of its more durable role as the insurance center of America. Although writers invariably con- nect Atlanta with Sherman's march to the sea, they almost never explain its great contribution to the rise of the new south after the Civil War. New Bedford is portrayed as a whaling city, while its vital part in American industrial and immigration history is neg- lected.
So it has been with Lawrence, which appears only because it was the scene of the I.W.W. textile strike of 1912. Terms such as immigrant, labor union, and radicalism have established the image of Lawrence as a slum-ridden city filled with poor immigrant revolutionaries. And since Lawrence is often one of the few im- migrant cities that are even mentioned, the reader's mind soon leaps to the more dangerous assumption that all immigrants were poverty- stricken and un-American. This work proposes to find the truth about Lawrence and in the process to discover much about the immigrant in urban America.
Until recently, immigrant studies approached the subject princi- pally from the point of view of this country. As early as the American Revolution, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur was describ- ing the effect of the melting pot on the formation of American nationality. Countless authors followed with glowing accounts
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FOREWORD
of the opportunities that America offered to the poor of Europe. Even when writers began to describe the terrible living conditions of the immigrants in eastern cities, they were more concerned with the impact of these slums on the United States than on what they meant to the new arrival. The work of Marcus Hansen and Oscar Handlin shifted the attention from this country to the immigrant and introduced the problem of immigrant acculturation. But
while there have been some recent studies of immigrant cities, none has been carried on down through the great middle period of Ameri- can immigration history from the Irish potato famine in 1846 to the quota law of 1921. Lawrence has proved an ideal city for such a project. Founded in 1845 as a textile city, its population was so heavily foreign-born that, by 1910, 90 per cent of its people were either first- or second-generation Americans, representing almost every country in the world.
Immigrant City begins with an account of the city as it ap- peared to most native Americans during the strike of 1912-a notorious, penniless, un-American slum. Then follows a narrative of the city's history from 1845 to 1912, which puts the strike in its proper perspective. Throughout this narrative one theme keeps recurring -- the immigrant's constant search for security in the new world-and consequently the next section is devoted to find- ing whether the immigrant, from his own point of view, was able to find security. Only after these steps have been taken, does the book return to 1912, and by that time the true meaning of the strike and the city is clear. In sum, Immigrant City attempts to determine whether or not the immigrant found the security for which he was looking and whether he was able to become an American. If he succeeded in these two quests, then life for the foreign-born in America was not as grim as some authors have suggested.
Originally the work was a doctoral dissertation at Harvard under Professor Handlin, but since then it has been completely revised and the documentation drastically reduced. Anyone interested in more tables and more statistics may consult the disser- tation copy in the archives of the Harvard College Library. The first two chapters of the dissertation appeared in the October, 1956, issue of the Essex Institute Historical Collections.
ix
FOREWORD
The study proved to the author's satisfaction that no immigrant was on his own in America and his research convinced him that no writer does anything alone either. I owe a debt to many, especially Phillips E. Wilson, John B. Heath, and David Tyack, who read portions of the manuscript, George Abdo, who translated issues for three years of an Arabic newspaper, and Edwin Fenton, who was more than generous with materials from Italian news- papers and interviews on the Lawrence strike. Two leaves of absence from the Phillips Exeter Academy made the research and writing possible. The librarians at Widener, Baker, and Littauer libraries at Harvard, the Massachusetts State Library, the Massa- chusetts Historical Society, the Boston Public Library, the Essex Institute, and the Lawrence Public Library were unstinting in their aid. Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the American Association for State and Local History, under the terms of its annual manuscript competition. I am much indebted to the staff of The University of North Carolina Press for its careful work in publishing the book. Like so many scholars in the field of immigration the author received most of his inspiration and guidance from Oscar Handlin.
The book is dedicated to my wife Tootie, who did the more im- portant job of bringing up a growing family while the research and writing went on.
Exeter, New Hampshire December, 1962
DONALD B. COLE
Contents
Foreword vii
I. The Notorious City, 1912 3
PART ONE MODEL TOWN TO IMMIGRANT CITY, 1845-1912
II. Model Town, 1845-1850 17
III. The Shanty Irish, 1850-1865 27
IV. Decades of Promise, 1865-1890 42
V. Decades of Despair, 1890-1912 68
PART TWO THE SEARCH FOR SECURITY, 1845-1912
VI. Security in the Family 99
VII. Security in the Mills 113
VIII. Security in Groups 138
IX. Security in Americanism 154
PART THREE IMMIGRANT CITY TO AMERICAN CITY, 1912-1921
X. The Lawrence Strike, 1912 177
XI. American City, 1912-1921 195
Tables 207
Selected Bibliography 232
Index 239
Maps
I. The Lower Merrimack River 18
II. Streets and Immigrant Centers in Lawrence 25
III. Lawrence Wards and Gerrymandering 50
IV. Ethnic Shifts in Lawrence and Ward Boundaries 110
V. Precinct Boundaries 148
IMMIGRANT CITY Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921
CHAPTER I
The Notorious City, 1912
"Victory is in sight. The working class will back you up to a finish in your fight against peonage and starvation. The slave pens of Lawrence, ... are a disgrace to American manhood." So wrote Eugene Debs as he sought to encourage the leaders of the Lawrence textile strike in the winter of 1912. "The civilization of the Old Bay State is on trial," contended the Brooklyn Eagle. Bill Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, who barely had been acquitted from implication in the murder of Gov- ernor Steunenberg of Idaho, came to take over the strike. Lincoln Steffens, Samuel Gompers, and Victor Berger watched closely from the sidelines, for "peaceful Lawrence" was "now riot-ridden." For two months the story of the Lawrence strike dominated the front page of The New York Times and all the Boston newspapers. When the I.W.W. newspaper Solidarity offered a special edition devoted to Lawrence, the public bought a record-breaking 12,000 copies. Faneuil Hall, long familiar with revolutionary gatherings, and Carnegie Hall both echoed to the shouts of strident meetings called to raise money for the Lawrence strikers. At Carnegie Hall, Haywood broke into a debate between the anarchist Emma Gold- man and the socialist Sol Fieldman to plead for funds. The audi- ence, deeply moved, hurled a torrent of coins and bills onto the floor of the stage. And after the strike was over, interest con- tinued. When the United States Labor Commission issued a re- port on the strike, copies were so much in demand that they were soon "hard to come by."1
1. "The Lawrence Strike: A Poll of the Press," The Outlook, C (1912), 357; The New York Times, Jan. 13-Mar. 31, 1912; Boston Evening Transcript, Jan. 12-Mar. 8, 1912, especially Jan. 12, Feb. 3, 13, 1912; Solidarity, Mar. 9, 1912;
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IMMIGRANT CITY
The Lawrence strike of January and February, 1912, took 30,000 workers away from their jobs in the cotton and woolen mills. Since Lawrence was the largest worsted center in the world and the headquarters of the enormous American Woolen Company, the strike was bound to affect the entire textile industry of the United States. The public saw it as a clash between the radical forces of labor and the reactionary agents of big business. Bill Haywood and Joe Ettor, the latter a board member of the I.W.W. and the original leader of the Lawrence strike, typified the labor agitators; Billy Wood, President of the American Woolen Com- pany, stood for the robber barons. The press confirmed these attitudes with lurid stories of the workers' brutal violence and descriptions of the horrible living conditions thrust on them by the mill owners. The Times deplored the destruction of mill equip- ment in a lead editorial titled "Smash the Machinery," but it sympa- thized with the pitiful life of the poor in an article called "High Rents behind Lawrence Strike." While the radical press defended the "exploited mill workers" and said "Soldiers Bayonet Hungry Strikers," the conservative publications called the "reign of terror" of the I.W.W. "our country's greatest danger."2
When Ettor and the socialist poet Arturo Giovannitti were indicted for murder, the story of Lawrence carried even across the sea. Italian newspapers gave it complete coverage. Italian socialists, led by Giovannitti's brother, Aristide, considered a gen- eral strike and sent a telegram to President Taft. After La Scintilla of Ferrara took up the case and meetings were held in Cerveteri and Spezia, the Italian Chamber of Deputies felt obliged to discuss it. All major cities had sections of the Ettor-Giovannitti Defense Committee, and special assemblies met in Florence and Rome. Demonstrations took place also in Trafalgar Square, Buda- pest, and Berne.3
Charles P. Neill, Report on Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Mass. in 1912, 62 Congress, 2 Session, Senate Doc. 870 (Washington, 1912).
2. Times, Jan. 26, 30, Feb. 1, 1912; The New York Call, Jan. 13, 16, 1912; Robert W. Beers, Our Country's Greatest Danger (Lawrence, 1912); Citizens' Association, Lawrence, Mass., A Reign of Terror in an American City (Lawrence, 1912).
3. L'Araldo Italiano, May 31, June 20, July 20, Sept. 12, Oct. 1-2, Dec. 8, 14, 30, 1912, kindness of Edwin Fenton. Professor Fenton has written his doc- toral dissertation on Italian immigrants in American labor organizations in north- eastern United States for Harvard.
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THE NOTORIOUS CITY, 1912
Coming at the height of the Progressive movement, the strike attracted all types of social workers, who came "by the carload" to see at first hand the conditions in the Lawrence tenements. While some merely looked, others raised money and set up soup kitchens, and many wrote and spoke. Among the clergy there was much disagreement. Harry Emerson Fosdick said the workers were treated like "dumb cattle" and lived in tenements "vile beyond description," while T. C. Cleveland, an Episcopal rector from Boston, condemned the great wealth of the owners. At the same time, two other Boston ministers preached sermons supporting the owners, and the Boston Ministers Association would not even vote on a resolution favoring the workers. But Reverend Adolf Berle of Tufts College summarized the attitude of most when he declaimed, "Somebody is doing a satanic wrong."4
Among the muckraking magazines The Survey and The Out- look were the most thorough and objective. Mary Heaton Vorse in Harper's Weekly pictured halls filled with garbage. Al Priddy in The Outlook compared the workers with harmless children. "Imagine," he said, "a group of children-who love pageantry and martial noise. They shouted as children would shout and sang. . .. It was just the outflow of children's spirits bent on nothing more than an afternoon's recreation-a parade."" One day alone brought four prominent liberals from Boston: Max Mitchell, President of Jewish Charities; Dudley Holman, secretary to Governor Foss; Vernon Briggs of the commission for alien in- sane; and Frank Carter, a banker. The arrival of Mrs. William Howard Taft and Mrs. Gifford Pinchot symbolized the hold the Lawrence strike had on those prominent in the Progressive era.6
But the conservatives did not sympathize with the workers. "Never in any American City," said John N. Cole, former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, "have I seen a better
4. Harry E. Fosdick, "After the Strike-in Lawrence," The Outlook, CI (1912), 343-44; Boston Evening Transcript, Jan. 22-23, Feb. 5, 1912.
5. Mary Heaton Vorse, "The Trouble in Lawrence," Harper's Weekly, LVI (1912), 10; Richard Child, "Who's Violent?" Collier's Weekly, XLIX (1912), 12-13; Al Priddy, "Controlling the Passions of Men-in Lawrence," The Out- look, CII (1912), 343; The Survey, XXVII (1912), 1, 771-72, 774; XXVIII (1912), 72-80, 693-94; The Outlook, C (1912), 151-52, 309-12, 356-58, 385-86, 405-6, 531-36; CI (1912), 340-46; CII (1912), 343-45; CIV (1913), 351-52.
6. Boston Evening Transcript, Jan. 17, Feb. 26, 1912.
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IMMIGRANT CITY
dressed gathering of operatives, men and women, than will be found in ... Lawrence." Even if the laborers' pay "was many times what it is they unquestionably would prefer to live as they do," announced another defender of the owners. William Wood and William Whitman, President of the Arlington Mill, asserted that they paid as much as they could-more than other industries -and that the immutable law of supply and demand decided such matters anyway. Winthrop L. Marvin expressed what the others thought when he denounced the strike as socialist-inspired. Such arguments were but a prelude to those uttered during the summer and fall by the candidates of the "New Freedom," the "New Na- tionalism," and the "Old Guard," in the presidential campaign.7
Equally intense was the fighting between the two major labor unions in Lawrence. After years of trying to organize the textile workers of the city, the American Federation of Labor was furious to see a strike led by its bitter rival, the Industrial Workers of the World. After some indecision, John Golden, President of the A.F.L. United Textile Workers of America, finally intervened in the strike, but only to bring about a compromise. Lincoln Steffens, who defended Golden, called him the "bête noire" of the I.W.W. In a flamboyant article entitled "Strawberries and Spa- ghetti," the A.F.L. journal The Textile Worker attacked Ettor and Giovannitti for eating better than the strikers and running up a bill of $42 for a dinner at Boehm's Cafe. Unaware that the I.W.W. was but a momentary phase in the American labor scene, the A.F.L. believed it was facing a serious challenge to its leadership among the workers.8
The I.W.W., equally shortsighted, considered the Lawrence strike an important step toward its eventual control of American labor. Haywood prompted the Industrial Workers of the World to abolish the wage system and build industrial unionism in the United States. The "Wobblies" for a time included socialists such as Eugene Debs, members of the Socialist Labor party of
7. John N. Cole, "The Issue at Lawrence," The Outlook, C (1912), 405; Walter M. Pratt, "The Lawrence Revolution," New England Magazine, XLVI (1912), 8; Boston Evening Transcript, Jan. 20, Feb. 1, 1912; William Whitman and others, "Why Are Wages Not Higher in the Textile Industries?" Boston Sunday Globe, Jan. 28, 1912.
8. Boston Evening Transcript, Jan. 16, Feb. 5-8, 1912; Solidarity, Mar. 30, 1912; "Strawberries and Spaghetti," The Textile Worker, I (1912), 17-18.
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THE NOTORIOUS CITY, 1912
Daniel DeLeon, and anarchists like Emma Goldman. Many feared that Haywood, having thrown the western mines into a turmoil, would now upset the textile world. No one realized that the Lawrence and Paterson strikes of 1912 would be his high water mark and that violence in these strikes would prompt the Socialist Executive Board to leave the I.W.W.
When a group of Italian workers sent for Joseph Ettor to head the Lawrence strike, it meant that the I.W.W. would not have to force its way into the city. It had been invited. During the strike the I.W.W. brought its case before the American people. Even though its weekly newspaper, Solidarity, circulated mostly among an already sympathetic audience, it did at least put the I.W.W. side of the strike in print. It accused the A.F.L. textile union, led by the "Golden Clique," of encouraging men not to strike and of engaging in "craft union scabbery." The workers' children, in this unorganized city, said Solidarity, were born undernourished, Mary K. O'Sullivan, who gave bail for Ettor and Giovannitti, brought the attack on the A.F.L. to a wider audience through her article in The Survey. Only a few months after the strike was over, Justus Ebert wrote the definitive I.W.W. account of the strike called The Trial of a New Society.9
Although the socialists cooperated with the I.W.W., they had different motives. Instead of trying to control the workers in an industry, they were intent on showing the failure of private owner- ship. In Lawrence, pale, courteous, trembling Arturo Giovannitti, poet-editor of the New York Italian Socialist newspaper Il Pro- letario and National Secretary of the Italian Socialist Federation, spread the doctrines of socialism in both Italian and English; while in New York, The Weekly People said the evil capitalists of Law- rence were using state troops to try to break up the strike. Selected for particular scorn were John Golden, "The militia-of-Christer strike-breaker"; Colonel Sweetser, "would-be dictator" of the state troops; and William Wood. Even more lurid was The New York Call, which proclaimed that the owners were "howling for more troops to shoot down hungry workers," in what Il Proletario labeled
9. Solidarity, Jan .- April, Sept .- Oct., 1912; Mary K. O'Sullivan, "The Labor War at Lawrence," The Survey, XXVIII (1912), 72-74; Justus Ebert, The Trial of a New Society (Cleveland, 1913).
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IMMIGRANT CITY
"Another Great Working Class Revolution." Also in New York, Walter E. Weyl, soon to be associate editor of the New Republic, called the owners' wage cut a "ruthless ill-advised proceeding" be- cause wages were already "indecently low." Victor Berger, the first Socialist Congressman, demanded a federal investigation of the strike as well as executive action from President Taft. And Lena Morrow Lewis, national organizer of the Socialist party, came all the way from San Francisco to see the troubles of capitalism first hand. Such Socialist vigor presaged the great success of Eugene Debs in November.10
The Democratic party also planned to turn the Lawrence strike to its advantage, not by attacking capitalists, but by condemning the lavish tariff protection granted them by the Republican party. Whitman, Wood, and Marvin were all protectionists. Whitman wrote the section of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff dealing with textiles, and Marvin maintained that wage increases depended upon higher tariffs. The Democrats, consequently, used the strike to show that the tariff might have fattened stockholders but had not raised the standard of living of the Lawrence workers. Aware of the tariff dispute within the Republican ranks, they were delighted when Progressive Republican Senator Poindexter of Washington pointed out the "fallacy of an excessive tariff" after visiting the slums of Lawrence. Democratic Governor Foss of Massachusetts, eager for his party's presidential nomination, called for investiga- tion of the strike to determine how much protection the workers received from tariff laws "designed, and only justified, on the ground that they protect[ed] and elevate[d] American labor." When John Martin of the New York City Board of Education came away from Lawrence, he said: "Truly, anybody who has seen the underfed, ill-clad stunted masses in Lawrence must laugh aloud at the argument that a high tariff protects labor in America against the pauper labor of Europe." The Lawrence strike helped lead
10. Boston Evening Transcript, Jan. 19, 26, 1912; "The Social Significance of Arturo Giovannitti," Current Opinion, LIV (1913), 24-26; The Weekly People (New York), Jan. 27, Feb. 3, 10, 17, 24, Mar. 2, 1912; The New York Call, Jan. 20, 27, 1912; Il Proletario, Jan. 19, 1912, kindness of Professor Fenton; Walter E. Weyl, "The Strikers in Lawrence," The Outlook, C (1912), 309; The Strike at Lawrence, Mass. Hearings before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives . . 1912, 62 Congress, 2 Session, House Doc. 671 (Washington, 1912).
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THE NOTORIOUS CITY, 1912
America from Payne-Aldrich protection in 1910 to Underwood- Simmons reduction in 1913.11
The strike was instrumental also in the adoption of the literacy test for restricting immigration. For many years the Immigration Restriction League, dominated by Brahmin Bostonians, had fought for a change in American immigration policy. Fearful that the United States could no longer assimilate the poor illiterates of southeastern Europe, the League urged severe restrictions. In 1907 it succeeded in getting Theodore Roosevelt to appoint an Immigration Commission to study the condition of immigrants in America. Since the commission included Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and William Paul Dillingham and industrial expert Jeremiah Jencks, all ardent restrictionists, the eventual tenor of the report was predictable. Dillingham went on from the commission to in- troduce the quota law of 1921. Jencks was the author of the forty- one-volume report of the Commission in 1911. Although it failed to prove that southeastern Europeans were any more criminal or impoverished than other immigrants, the report assumed their in- feriority and resorted to racist terminology. It ended by advocat- ing the literacy test. Jencks and Jett Lauck, who was in charge of the investigation of immigrants in industry for the commission, wrote a popular version of the report entitled The Immigration Problem, which further spread the ideas of the Immigration Re- striction League.12
The squalor of the Lawrence slums, the violence of the Italians, and the anarchistic leadership of the strike only a few months after the report naturally helped the league. Every time an immigrant threw ice at windows, displayed a dirk, or denounced capitalism, restriction was closer. Ironically enough, Lawrence had already done its part because it had been the worsted goods city studied for the report. Lauck himself in the North American Review tied the strike to the restriction movement. Since the American mill workers, according to Lauck, faced unfair competition from the
11. Whitman and others, "Why Are Wages Not Higher?"; "The Lawrence Strike Children," The Literary Digest, XLIV (1912), 472; Boston Evening Tran- script, Jan. 25, Feb. 14, 1912; John Martin, "The Industrial Revolt at Lawrence," The Independent, LXXII (1912), 491-95; Harper's Weekly, Feb. 10, 1912, p. 4.
12. Barbara Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 197-202; Immigration Commission, Reports, 41 vols., 61 Congress, 2 Ses- sion, Doc. 633 (Washington, 1911).
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IMMIGRANT CITY
"dumb, easily led, illiterate" southeastern Europeans, the govern- ment should keep the Europeans out. "We pauperize American labor," said D. M. Holman, secretary to Governor Foss, "by forcing it to work down to the level of the incompetent pauper labor which we bring in from Europe. .. . " Even men who had long stood for free immigration were scared by the strike, men such as John Graham Brooks, who asked: "What have we done that a pack of ignorant foreigners should hold us by the throat?" Only John N. Cole, staunch supporter of the American Woolen Company and close friend of Billy Wood, defended immigration. He argued that the woolen industry needed the labor and that assimilation was easy. It was ironic that Cole, representing nine generations in Essex County, should have favored immigration.13
As the close of the strike faded into World War I, prejudice ran even higher. Madison Grant in 1914 published the classic Passing of the Great Race, which denied that southeastern Europeans could be assimilated. A year later Jeremiah Jencks said that employers would never raise wages as long as immigrants with low living standards flooded into the country. By 1917 the combination of forces succeeded in securing the literacy test. Four years later the quota law froze American society. The Lawrence strike con- tributed to both laws.14
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