USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Lawrence > Immigrant city: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 > Part 16
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IMMIGRANT CITY
This naturalization drive made many eligible to vote. The state census reports showed the following percentages of legal voters of all males of voting age:
Born in
1875
1885
Canada*
22%
20%
England*
47%
53%
Germany
41%
54%
Ireland
59%
64%
All Foreign-born
49%
55%
* French Canadians only in 1885
All British in 1875
The ethnic groups that had been in Lawrence longest had the highest proportion of eligible voters, but the high Irish percentage may also be attributed to the naturalization activity of the Demo- cratic party.
Though it is not possible to determine exactly how many of the immigrants actually voted, the figures for the city as a whole give a good approximation since such a large proportion of the residents were foreign-born. In 1875 and 1885 about 40 per cent of the males of voting age turned out to vote; the percentage rose to 60 per cent in 1900 but returned to 40 per cent in 1910. Such percentages were high: the figure for 1885, for example, meant that 55 per cent of the legal voters went to the polls, the second highest percentage in the state.14 The voting records of the im-
Census of the United States ... 1910. Abstract of the Census ... with Supple- ment for Massachusetts ... (Washington, 1913), p. 597. Of the total number of citizens in 1885, 45 per cent were naturalized. Carroll D. Wright, The Census of Massachusetts: 1885, I, Part 1 (Boston, 1887), 105. Lawrence was second of twenty-three Massachusetts cities. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Nineteenth Annual Report ... 1888, Mass. Pub. Doc. 15, pp. 196, 211.
14. Ibid., pp. 147, 196, 206; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Thirteenth An- nual Report . .. 1882, Mass. Pub. Doc. 15, p. 113; Immigration Commission, "Woolen and Worsted Goods in Representative Community A," Immigrants in Industries, Part 4: Woolen and Worsted Goods Manufacturing, II, Immigration Commission, Reports, X, 61 Congress, 2 Session, Doc. 633 (Washington, 1911), p. 788. The Commission report for 1909 showed 68 per cent of the Irish workers eligible and less than 15 per cent of the southeastern Europeans. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Thirteenth Annual Report ... 1882, pp. 170, 177; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Nineteenth Annual Report . .. 1888, pp. 196, 223; Secretary of the Commonwealth [of Masachusetts], Number of Assessed Polls, Registered Voters, and Persons who Voted . .. 1890, Mass. Pub. Doc. 43, p. 23; ibid., 1900, p. 22; ibid., 1910, p. 23.
169
SECURITY IN AMERICANISM
migrant precincts also showed that the foreign-born were exercising their political rights.
Percentage of Males of Voting Age Who Voted
1900
Lawrence
59 Precinct 10 (French
Precinct 3 (German)
66 Canadian ) 34
Precinct 5 (Irish)
71
Precinct 14 (English) 75
1910
Lawrence
39
Precinct 10 (French
Precinct 3 (German)
49
Canadian) 18
Precinct 5 (Irish
Precinct 15 (English) 45
and Italian)
33 Precinct 2 (Italian) 15
The Irish and English were more active politically than the city taken as a whole; the French Canadians and Italians less.15
A summary for Lawrence in 1885 showed that: 45 per cent of the citizens were naturalized citizens (second in the state); 55 per cent of the foreign-born males of voting age were legal voters (first in the state); 39 per cent of the total males of voting age actually voted; 55 per cent of the legal voters actually voted (second in the state). Immigrant Lawrence had a better voting record than most cities in the state and its immigration participation was high. During the 1912 strike many asserted that immigrants did not take advantage of their political rights and were basically un-American. The Lawrence record tells another story. The foreign-born were eager to become Americans politically because in that way they found security.
Another idea expressed in 1912 was that most immigrants were anarchists or socialists and posed a great threat to the United States. Radicalism in Lawrence was predominantly a German affair. Shortly after their arrival the Germans were discussing socialism at Turn Hall, and in the late 1870's and early 1880's they supported Benjamin Butler because of his labor and Green- back views. The more violently radical Germans flirted with anarchism. When Johann Most, the German anarchist, spoke to 200 of them in 1886, he tried to unite the Knights of Labor, the 15. Ibid., 1890, pp. 22-23; ibid., 1900, p. 22; ibid., 1910, pp. 22-23.
170
IMMIGRANT CITY
Socialists, and the Communists of the city into a section of his International. A vigorous atheist, he declared that "wherever a priest or minister puts his feet, there no grass grows for ten years." Such statements as this and "a rifle in the house is better than a thousand ballots ... " so frightened the Lawrence Germans that only six joined his movement and Most was never mentioned again in the Lawrence newspapers.
Meanwhile the German Socialist Labor party, which repre- sented the views of many anarchists, was flourishing in Lawrence. Starting in 1874, ten years later it had 900 members parading and in 1886 its members hung flags from Turn Hall during the Haymarket Riot. In 1891 the Tribune reported that traditional- ly Republican Germans would strongly support the Socialist Labor candidate for the state legislature and thereby help the Democrats. The Socialist Laborites were the most violent of the German radicals. In 1897 their posters read: "Workingmen of the World Unite! You have Nothing to Lose but Your Chains and a World to Gain."
Most of the German Socialists, however, were only mildly radi- cal, interested more, for example, in an income tax than in a revolution. A visiting Socialist speaking before a serious and respectable gathering of the most prominent Germans in Law- rence was careful to distinguish between socialism and anarchism. The Anzeiger maintained that socialism was not trying to spread free love and anarchism but was only striving for the good of mankind.16
Not all Lawrence radicals were Germans. The first non- German Socialist meeting occurred in 1891. Then in 1893 an Irishman, Maurice Hennessey, introduced a Socialist who declared that workers were "slaves not freemen," because "the law of wages" was "inexorable." The same speaker later roused the crowd by saying: "The laboring men have just enough to sustain them. They generally receive about $300 a year. . . I heard of a dinner that cost $150 the other day in Boston." Herbert Casson, a
16. Lawrence Journal, Oct. 26, 1878, Sept. 30, Oct. 21, 1882, Nov. 3, 1883, Nov. 19, 1887; Lawrence American, April 9, 1886. There was a German Labor party in 1884. Lawrence Morning News, May 19, 1884; Lawrence American, Oct. 22, 1886; The Evening Tribune, Feb. 23, Sept. 26, Oct. 20, 1891, Nov. 3, 1893, Oct. 2, 1897, Jan. 2, 1899; Anzeiger und Post, Sept. 22, 1906, Jan. 16, 1911.
171
SECURITY IN AMERICANISM
Socialist from Lynn, spoke in Armenian in 1894. John Ogilvie, who was either Scotch or English, was called "the original Socialist" of Lawrence. The Anzeiger und Post in 1900 commented on the strong Jewish support given an address by Job Harriman, the Socialist candidate for president. There was an Italian branch of the Socialist Labor party in 1906 and in 1910 the Italian anarchists organized a tiny Circolo di Studi Sociali.17
The Socialist parties did well in Lawrence in the 1890's and early twentieth century. In 1895 Lawrence ran behind only Boston and Holyoke in votes for the Socialist party candidate for governor. In 1899 the more revolutionary Socialist Labor party had serious hopes of electing a mayor. When the Socialists lost ground in the state election of 1903, Lawrence was one of the few cities to remain a Socialist center. Even there the movement encountered hostility. A crowd drove Socialist speakers from Appleton Street on a Sunday afternoon in 1903 and the next week bombarded others with rotten eggs.
The vote for the Socialist and Socialist Labor presidential candidates in Lawrence between 1896 and 1912 demonstrated that socialism in Lawrence was primarily German and mild. The Socialist Labor group was far more revolutionary and violent than the Socialist party, but it never did as well.
Redistricting between 1896 and 1900 added the German part of old Precinct Two to a section of old Precinct One and created a new Precinct Three, which was strongly German. Consequently the vote for the two Socialist parties in 1900 in Precinct Three went up and their vote in Precinct Two dropped. When the line sepa- rating Precincts Two and Three was altered in 1906, some of the Germans found themselves back in Precinct Two again. As a result the Socialist vote in Precinct Two went back up at the expense of Precinct Three. The formation of Precinct Six in 1906 took German sections away from Precinct Five with the result that Six began to show an interest in socialism and Five lost Socialist votes. In every case but one the Socialist areas coincided with German sectors, and every German center, furthermore, showed
17. The Evening Tribune, Feb. 23, 1891, Sept. 14, 1893. For Italian socialists and anarchists see Il Proletario, Nov. 11, 25, 1906, Feb. 23, 1908, and L'Era Nuova, Dec. 10, 1910, Sept. 9, 30, 1911, Sept. 21, 1912. Kindness of Professor Fenton.
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IMMIGRANT CITY
VOTE FOR SOCIALIST LABOR AND SOCIALIST PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES BY PRECINCTS
Precinct
Party and Year
Other
Total
1
2
3
4
5
6
1896 Socialist Labor
37
30
9
25
4
15
19
139
1900 Socialist Labor Socialist
7 22
6 8
9 59
5 3
8 38
*
74 89
109 219
1904 Socialist Labor Socialist
4
4 5
5 79
4 9
5 34
*
48 165
70 337
1908 Socialist Labor Socialist
2
2
0
2
0
41
24
48
4
14
4 29
9 138
19 298
1912 Socialist Labor Socialist
3
1
1
0
107
24
93
10
0 26
3 47
35 213
43 520
Socialist strength. When the Socialist movement divided into the militant Socialist Labor party and the milder Socialist party, Law- rence followed the lead of the Germans in choosing the less revolu- tionary party.18
The immigrant city did give some support to the radical move- ment and most of this support came from its immigrants. The large majority of its immigrants, however, ignored socialism and most of those who adopted it chose its mildest form. There was never more than a handful of anarchists. Up to 1912 nothing in Lawrence supported the thesis that most immigrants were vicious un-American radicals. Throughout the United States there were many people interested in socialism; almost a million voted for Eugene Debs for president in 1912 and 30,000 more supported the Socialist Labor candidate that year. So even the city's mild flirtation with socialism was part of the way in which the immigrant city be- came American. Both native and immigrant thought and voted alike in Lawrence. In the newspapers, in the churches, and at the polls there was little to distinguish between the native and immigrant
18. The Evening Tribune, Nov. 11, 1895, Jan. 24, Oct. 7, 1899, Oct. 16, 1903; Anzeiger und Post, Oct. 10, Nov. 7, 1903; Record of Elections in the City of Lawrence, MSS, City Clerk's Office, Lawrence, Mass., II (1880-1923), passim.
*
*
45
173
SECURITY IN AMERICANISM
interpretation of Americanism. In short the immigrants had be- come Americans; they felt that they belonged to the new country; they had achieved the deepest form of security. But the 1912 strike lay just ahead, and since it was led by anarchists and social- ists, it would deeply challenge the Americanism of the immigrants.
While the narrative of Lawrence seems to confirm the 1912 strike observers' opinion that Lawrence was a city of despair, the foregoing study of the immigrants' search for security shows that writers have never understood Lawrence. The twentieth-century despair was only superficial because the immigrant had always been able to find some kind of security through either his family, his job, his club, or simply in being an American. With such security the immigrants entered the strike year of 1912. Dis- satisfied with their wages and their living conditions, they were willing to accept anarchist and Socialist leadership to gain a better life. But they knew that they would never be anarchists or Socialists and they knew that conditions would soon be better. Lacking such insight, those who described the strike could not comprehend it. We shall now see what happened and what it meant.
Part Three
Immigrant City to American City, 1912-1921
CHAPTER X
The Lawrence Strike, 1912
The year 1912 was to be the start of a new era for Lawrence, with a revised city charter and the publication of the depressing White Fund survey of living conditions in the city. The charter established a form of government that was typical of those set up throughout the United States during the Progressive period. A commission of five men, which replaced a cumbersome twenty- five-man body, was to run the city with the help of such new officials as a purchasing agent and a Commissioner of Public Health and Charities. Public contracts and the initiative, referen- dum, and recall were to make the government more democratic. The White Fund survey was to provide information on the basis of which the new government could act.
In spite of the sluggish year of 1911 there was optimism among the city's business men. The greatest worsted center in the world, with such large concerns as the American Woolen Company, the Arlington Mill, and the Pacific Mill, was expected to stage a come- back as it had after the depression years of 1857, 1873, and 1893. Management believed it had nothing to fear from unions and con- sidered Lawrence a peaceful labor city. Unions in Lawrence had never been able to organize more than a tenth of the city's workers at any one time before 1912. The very absence of unionism was one of the reasons why William Wood, President of the American Woolen Company, built the Wood Mill in Lawrence in 1905.1
1. An Act to Revise the Charter of the City of Lawrence, 1911, Massa- chusetts Acts 1911, Ch. 621, pp. 9-22; Le Progrès, Jan. 11, 1906; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Thirty-ninth Annual Report ... 1909, Mass. Pub. Doc. 15, p. 191; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Forty-second Annual Report . . . 1912, Mass. Pub. Doc. 15, p. 108; Charles P. Neill, Report on Strike of Textile Workers
178
IMMIGRANT CITY
Wood was one of the self-made industrial giants who made Horatio Alger's tales plausible. The son of an Azores seaman, he was born on Martha's Vineyard in 1858, but soon migrated to southern Massachusetts where he grew up in the textile mills. He came to Lawrence while still in his twenties to be assistant manager of the Washington Mills and later became treasurer. He was made treasurer of the American Woolen Company when it was organized in 1899; by 1912 he was its president. Next to John Breen and Father O'Reilly, Wood was probably the most important first- or second-generation American in Lawrence down to 1912.
From his meteoric rise to business success until his suicide, William Wood's career was continually bizarre. Although he owned a Commonwealth Avenue city residence in Boston and a North Shore estate, home for Billy Wood was the Elizabethan house with Victorian trimmings which adorned his eighty-acre Arden in Shawsheen Village, Andover. The village became the headquarters of the American Woolen Company, and scrutinizing every move from his mansion on the hill was Billy Wood, an eastern George Pullman and supposedly the "most important man in the woolen industry in the world." Wood found it difficult to re- member that he was himself a second-generation American. Once he congratulated Judge Stone for a particularly harsh attack on some Armenian criminals. He was always a conservative Re- publican of the Mckinley vintage. To get backing for the protective tariff he warned that foreign manufacturers were pre- paring to flood the American market with cheap goods. As a delegate to the Republican Convention of 1896 he wanted Mc- Kinley to speak out in favor of hard money. During the strike of 1902 he blamed Annie Herzog, one of the strike leaders, in- stead of the company for the suffering of the workers. When Roosevelt was ready to step down in 1908, Wood wanted Joe Cannon to be the next president as the spokesman for a business- men's administration.2
in Lawrence, Mass. in 1912, 62 Congress, 2 Session, Senate Doc. 870 (Washing- ton, 1912), p. 11; 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), p. 59.
2. Life of Wm. M. Wood, Typewritten MS at Baker Library, Harvard, pp. 1-7; The Evening Tribune, Feb. 26, 1894; The Lawrence Sun, Oct. 1, 1906;
179
THE LAWRENCE STRIKE, 1912
The weather in January, 1912, was cold, damp, and dark. In the Merrimack Valley the first four months of the year were usually a period of endless rain, sleet, and snow, with only oc- casional glimpses of the sun. It was always a bad time of year in Lawrence: the Pemberton disaster, the typhoid fever epidemic of 1891, and all the strikes-1882, 1894, 1902-had occurred be- tween the New Year and April. The strike of 1912 was to be no exception.
It started with a mass meeting on Wednesday evening, January 10, held by the Italian Branch of I.W.W. Local 20. Presiding over the meeting was Angelo Rocco, a twenty-five-year-old high school student who was one of the founders of the I.W.W. in Lawrence. When the union decided that all Italian textile opera- tives should strike because of a pay reduction, Rocco sent a telegram to Joseph Ettor, the professional I.W.W. strike organizer, asking him to come to Lawrence. There had been no actual lowering of the wage rate, but when the state put its new fifty-four- hour law into effect at the start of 1912, the mills not only reduced the hours but cut pay proportionately. Since the owners had previously kept wages at the same weekly level when reducing hours and since the loss of twenty or thirty cents a week meant a great deal to the workers, they were worried and angry. The absence of adequate advance notice made them even more ugly.
The outbreak came on Friday, January 12. During the morn- ing immigrant workers in the Wood plant suddenly left their ma- chines, picked up clubs and other weapons, and ran through the mill cutting belts, damaging machines, ordering all to quit, and threatening those who demurred. After repeating the process at the Washington, the mob rushed the police and received a few broken heads for its audacity. While nothing else happened that morning, the initial violence, the threats of blowing up the mill, and the prominence of the Italians, formed a picture the strike ob- servers could not forget.
Although Saturday was quiet and it seemed as though the strike would collapse, Ettor was busy organizing the city. Joe
Sunday Sun, Dec. 17, 1910; American Woolen Company, Shawsheen (Providence, R.I., 1924); "Dynamite in the Lawrence Strike," The Literary Digest, XLV (1912), 407.
180
IMMIGRANT CITY
Ettor, a swarthy heavy-set man in his twenties, had been running strikes for several years. He knew how to arouse workers and how to keep them working in harmony. To arouse the Italians he made vicious attacks on the natives. The natives, he said, thought an Italian was "all right so long as he wants to live next door to a dog and work for $4.20 a week. But when they want a little more ... they are foreigners, then Socialists, and anarch- ists ... . " To get the strikers to work together he greatly expanded Local 20 and by so doing pushed the I.W.W. ahead of the A.F.L. He also established a strike committee and a relief organization with members from almost every nationality in the city. Aware that immigrants dominated the labor force in Lawrence, Ettor oriented his union, strike committee, and relief group along ethnic lines.3
Monday, January 15, was the key to the strike. It was fairly easy to get men out, but after a weekend to talk it over with their families and priests, they usually trooped back to work. But early this Monday morning in a bitterly cold snowstorm swirling about them, somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 strikers formed picket lines around the gates of the Washington and Wood Mills and kept all others from entering. In a disorderly parade some 15,000 agitated workers then swarmed over to the Prospect Mill, where they threw stones at the windows, and on to the Atlantic and Pacific, where the militia, on hand to relieve the tired police, met them with fire hoses. Although the New York Times spoke of a "Bayonet Charge on Lawrence Strikers," there was no serious injury except the accidental stabbing of a Syrian boy, but thousands of immigrants never forgot the icy shock of the water from the hoses.4
3. Justus Ebert, The Trial of a New Society (Cleveland, 1913), pp. 33, 36, 49; The Evening Tribune, Jan. 1, 11, 12, 16, 1912. For a strike chronology see Table XXIII. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Forty-third Annual Report . . . 1912, Pub. Doc. 15, p. 61. There had been a small announcement of the wage reduc- tion on page 14 of The Evening Tribune, Jan. 1, 1912. Strike at Lawrence, p. 266; Boston Evening Transcript, Jan. 18, 1912; Interview with Angelo Rocco by Professor Edwin Fenton, kindness of Professor Fenton. Material in this chapter from La Gazzetta del Massachusetts [Boston], L'Era Nuova, Il Proletario, and L'Araldo Italiano also by kindness of Professor Fenton. Professor Fenton's doctoral dissertation at Harvard is on Italian immigrants in American labor organizations in northeastern United States.
4. The New York Times, Jan. 16, 1912, p. 1.
181
THE LAWRENCE STRIKE, 1912
There were three great I.W.W. parades on Tuesday, Wednes- day, and Thursday but surprisingly little violence. Ettor led the first on Union Street on Tuesday. On Wednesday 3,000 workers started toward the Common, where they picked up another 7,000 and then ran into the militia at the foot of Hampshire Street near the mills. Here the strikers threw ice and the militia officers used the backs of their swords. Farris Marad and the Syrian Drum Corps led the Thursday parade, when once again orderly troops kept several thousand strikers at bay in the mill district.
Then as parades were suspended for ten days, other events kept up the tempo of the strike. The committee met daily with representatives of each nationality bringing in reports on his fellow countrymen. On Friday, the day after Marad's parade, the police discovered a cache of dynamite in his dye shop after getting a tip from John Breen, son of the old party boss. Put on the defensive by this discovery, the strikers disclaimed responsibility and argued that Breen and the mill owners had planted it. The police found dynamite also in a cemetery lot and in a shoe store next to Colombo's printing office, where Ettor got his mail. The arrival of the poet Socialist Arturo Giovannitti and Big Bill Hay- wood also kept excitement high. A crowd of 10,000 listened to the Italian, Franco-Belgian, and German bands playing their national anthems as they waited at the railroad station to greet Haywood. A roster of radical agitators, including the "red flame" Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, got off the train with him. Management, meanwhile, was doing everything possible to quell the strike. Rumors of scabs and Pinkerton detectives filled the city.5
After the tactical lull and exactly two weeks after the start of the strike, the two main participants, Joe Ettor and Billy Wood, met in Boston, where the former demanded a 15 per cent raise for all operatives and the latter turned him down. The weekend passed and then on Monday, January 29, a fortnight after the first picket- ing, strikers attacked trolley cars on Broadway carrying people to
5. The Evening Tribune, Jan. 18-25, 1912; Ebert, Trial, pp. 62-63, 69, 75; The Leader, Jan. 28, 1912; "The Social Significance of Arturo Giovannitti," Current Opinion, LIV (1913), 24-26; Boston Evening Transcript, Jan. 24, 1912; Transcript of the Trial of Commonwealth vs. Joseph Caruso, Joseph J. Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti, alias, Superior Court, Essex County, Massachusetts, Sept .- Oct., 1912, p. 262.
182
IMMIGRANT CITY
work at about seven in the morning. Armed with stones and ice 500 strikers broke 188 trolley car windows in an effort to prevent operatives from returning to work. On the same day a crowd gathered on Union Street, where someone stabbed a policeman named Benoit and a shot killed one of the strikers, Annie LoPezzi. On that same day Bill Haywood gave his first speech in Lawrence. No wonder the shocked New York Times returned the strike to the front page, giving it the lead headline and announcing, "Real Labor War Now in Lawrence."
Actually the strike was not unusually violent with only one death in two weeks, but the city authorities were acting vigorously. Foreigners with concealed weapons got terms in jail of one or two years. Many immigrants were arrested on the vague charge of intimidation or loitering. On Tuesday and Wednesday, January 30 and 31, immediately after the shooting, the police arrested Joseph Caruso for the murder of Annie LoPezzi and arrested Ettor and Giovannitti for inciting him. After a hearing the three Italians were held for the grand jury and eventually indicted. The imprisonment of Ettor was such a blow to the strikers that the Transcript proclaimed: "The passing out of Ettor means [the] ascendancy of the white-skinned races at Lawrence."
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