(1) Bread and Roses Strike: One of the Great Silences in the School Curriculum
One of the great silences in the mainstream school curriculum is the role that social movements have played in making this a more fair, more peaceful, more democratic world. Students learn little about the collective efforts and strategies involved in the movements to abolish slavery, to demand womenâs rights, to end unjust wars, to fight for civil rightsâor for workers to bargain collectively for a living wage and workplace dignity. One of the most significant struggles for workersâ rights began exactly one hundred years ago, on January 12th in Lawrence, Mass., when thousands of textile workers began a walkout that would come to be known as the Bread and Roses Strike, as well as the Singing Strike. Youâre unlikely to find much more than a mention of this important strike in a typical high school history textbook, if that. But as Norm Diamond points out in his article for the Zinn Education Project, One Hundred Years After the Singing Strike [below], this was a remarkable struggle that united mostly young women workers speaking dozens of languages in a dead-of-winter contest with some of the richest men in the United States. And the workers won. The Zinn Education Project includes valuable teaching materials about the strike. See the role play, Lawrence, 1912: The Singing Strike, by Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond, which is excerpted from their book The Power in Our Hands: A Curriculum on the History of Work and Workers in the United States. See also Bill Bigelowâs The Singing Strike and the Rebel Students: Learning from the Industrial Workers of the World. Bread and Roses, Too is Katherine Patersonâs moving young adult novel about the 1912 strike. Events for the anniversary year are being coordinated by the Bread and Roses Centennial Committee. Their website offers a comprehensive list of anniversary programs, history, news, and a list of supporters including the Zinn Education Project. They also have launched an online gallery for those that cannot visit the Bread and Roses Centennial Exhibit in person. (2) One Hundred Years After the Singing Strike By Norm Diamond http://zinnedproject.org/posts/15660 Todayâs Occupy movement is a reminder that throughout U.S. history a major engine of change has been grassroots organizing and solidarity. As an old Industrial Workers of the World song goes: An injury to one, we sayâs an injury to all, United weâre unbeatable, divided we must fall. ââDublin Danâ Liston, The Portland Revolution Major history textbooks, however, downplay the role of ordinary people in shaping events, especially those who formed labor unions and used the strike to assert their rights. One of the most significant strikes in U.S. history occurred exactly 100 years ago, in the Lawrence, Mass. textile mills, and yet it merits barely a mention in the most widely used U.S. history textbooks. It was known as the Bread and Roses strike because underlying the demand for adequate wages (bread) was a demand for dignity on the job and in life more generally (roses). People sang: No more the drudge and idler â ten that toil where one reposes, But a sharing of lifeâs glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses! âJames Oppenheim, Bread and Roses Unions and bosses alike thought the workers impossible to organize. Mostly unskilled, a majority of them young women, kept apart by more than a dozen languages, millworkers were both vanguard and victims of the new U.S. industrialization. Lawrence, with the largest and most modern textile mills in the world and more than 30,000 workers, was the epicenter and symbol of the system. The textile industry was the first to use new sources of power to drive its machines. It was the leader in subdividing jobs into limited, repetitive movements, making workers interchangeable and replaceable. Workers would no longer have specialized crafts or even know all the processes that went into a product. Posters and postcards showing happy mill hands leaving work with smiles and sacks of gold enticed hundreds of thousands from poor areas of Europe. With a surplus of workers desperate for jobs, the mills drove down wages and sped up the work. Textile millowners deliberately kept workers divided. In some mills, they placed workers together who spoke different languages and were unable to communicate. In others they allocated work by ethnicities and gave particular jobs only to Lithuanians, others to French-Canadians, others exclusively to Irish. Supervisors used ethnic and racial slurs and sexual harassment as intentional means of control. Workers lived in fetid, crowded tenements. Working nine- and ten-hour days, six days a week, their usual main meal was little more than bread and molasses. The drinking water inside the mills was foul; supervisors developed a lucrative sideline selling water that could actually be drunk. Life expectancy for millworkers was 22 years less than for non-millworker residents of Lawrence. Vida Dutton Scudder, professor at Wellesley College who spoke at one of the strikersâ rallies, said, âIf the women of this country knew how cloth was made in Lawrence and at what price of human life they would never buy another yard.â Until this strike, Congress was indifferent to working conditions. When individual states attempted regulation, companies threatened to move. There was a race to the bottom reminiscent of the twenty first century, with competition between states for which would offer companies the best deal, the least oversight. Companies claimed they could not act to improve conditions on their own. Any such action would put them at a competitive disadvantage. The responsibility, their spokespeople said, was not theirs. It was that of the economic system that bound them together and that produced all the marvels of modern life. The strike begins On January 12, 1912 the owners in all the companies suddenly cut workersâ pay. To the surprise of the mill owners, 23,000 workers went on strike. They set up communal kitchens and created a committee structure responsible to daily mass meetings that took place in each of the ethnic constituencies. They also put out a call for help and the Industrial Workers of the World responded. Unlike the American Federation of Labor which organized only skilled, white, male workers and divided them into different unions by craft (spinners, weavers, loom repairmen), the IWW was all-inclusive. They organized all workers, female and male, skilled and unskilled, all races together. The AFL called this vision un-American and made common cause with the owners in trying to undermine the strike. The IWW had contacts across the country and were able to mobilize support that kept the soup kitchens going and encouraged sympathetic press coverage outside Lawrence. Their leaders, Joe Ettor, Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, chaired the mass meetings. Recognizing the importance of public sympathy, they urged non-violence among the strikers. âWeâll win this strike by keeping our hands in our pocketsâ was one of their oft-repeated slogans. When conditions became especially difficult, with food and heating fuel scarce and attacks by thugs and the state militia increasing, the IWW sent some of the most vulnerable children temporarily to families in New York and other cities. The first two childrenâs brigades generated so much publicity and support that the next time an exodus was planned, Lawrence police assaulted both children and mothers in the train station. In the beginning, men led the strike committees as well as the picketing and demonstrations. As the strike wore on, some of that early leadership faltered while womenâs participation and confidence grew. Sometimes having to overcome resistance from their own husbands and fathers, women came out of the kitchens and joined strategy discussions, chaired committees and took the lead in picketing. Songs became a common language And they sang, women and men alike. Songs became a common language, the means of uplifting their spirits and forging solidarity. For those who couldnât read, singing was political education, a way of learning about the world and putting their own struggles in a larger context. They took familiar melodies and rewrote the words to reflect the broadest themes: âSolidarity Forever,â âWe Have Fed You All For A Thousand Years.â They opened and closed their meetings with songs and marched through the streets singing. Bernice Johnson Reagon called songs of the Civil Rights Movement âthe language that focused the energy of the people who filled the streets,â and it was true in Lawrence also. Fully half the workforce, about 14,000 mill workers, held firm for nine and a half weeks of repression, cold and hunger, and won their demands. They gained a raise in pay, with the largest increases for the lowest paid workers; a higher rate for working overtime; and a fairer system for calculating wages. After one last joyous march, they went back to work on March 18. They won because the mills couldnât function with so many workers showing no signs of coming back. The bosses had been running the machines loudly to give the impression that work was back to normal, but it was all for show. The strike had stopped production flat. They won also because they forced Congressional hearings and focused national outrage on living and working conditions and child labor. And they won because wool industry profits were based on a tariff against foreign competitors, and the renewal of the tariff was vulnerable to that public outrage. Most of all, they won because of their own solidarity. Their victory led to a new union in Lawrence, dedicated to organizing all textile workers, whatever their gender, skill level or country of origin. It also led to strikes and victories in textile towns all over the country and a new sense of mission in the labor movement. As T-Bone Slim, an IWW member later said, âWherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.â Legacy today Unfortunately, there is a final lesson the Bread and Roses strike teaches: Corporate producers of school curricula are not interested in the collective efforts of ordinary people to better their lives. A recent survey of middle and high school American history textbooks conducted by the Zinn Education Project turned up barely any that even mention Lawrence. Those few that do have major distortions. One text, for instance, highlights the role of the Mass. governor in ending the strike, but fails to mention that the governor was a big millowner himself, and makes no mention of the strikersâ organization, sacrifices and perseverance. In this time of renewed activism, it is important to revisit this countryâs rich history of social movements, labor struggle and solidarity. Norm Diamond is an Oregon Trustee of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association. He was President of Pacific Northwest Labor College. He is co-author of The Power In Our Hands: A Curriculum On the History of Work and Workers in the United States, which includes a chapter on teaching the Bread and Roses strike. (3) 100 Years After Lawrence Strike, the Cry for `Bread & Roses' Still Resonates By Steve Early Submitted by the author to Portside In These Times January 10, 2012 http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12504/one_hundred_years_after_lawrence_str ike_the_cry_for_bread_roses_still_reson/ http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12504/one_hundred_years_after_lawrence_strike_the_cry_for_bread_roses_still_reson/ LAWRENCE, MASS.--One hundred years ago this month, thousands of angry textile workers abandoned their looms and poured into the frigid streets of Lawrence, Mass. Like Occupy Wall Street in our own gilded age, this unexpected grassroots protest cast a dramatic spotlight on the problem of social and economic inequality. In all of American labor history, there are few better examples of the synergy between radical activism and indigenous militancy. The work stoppage now celebrated as the "Bread and Roses Strike" was triggered, ironically, by a Progressive-era reform that backfired. Well-meaning state legislators had just reduced the maximum allowable working hours for women and children from 56 to 54 hours per week. When this reduction went into effect, workers quickly discovered that their pay had been cut proportionately, and their jobs speeded up by the American Woolen Company and other firms. The strike that started on January 12, 1912, created political tremors far beyond the Merrimack Valley. The shutdown of mills in Lawrence forced a national debate about factory conditions, child labor, the exploitation of immigrants and the free exercise of First Amendment rights during labor disputes. The strikers' appeals for solidarity and financial support also created a stark "Which Side Are You On?" moment for mainstream unions and middle-class reformers, both of whom were nervous about the role played by "outside agitators" in Lawrence. An immigrant uprising On one side of the class divide in Lawrence were rich, arrogant and out-of-touch WASP manufacturers. Their "1%" sense of entitlement led them to spurn negotiations with "the offscourings of Southern Europe," as New England Magazine disdainfully called the strikers. Instead, mill owners relied on rough policing by 50 state and local militia units (including a company composed of Harvard students who were offered course credit for their attempted strike breaking). Two workers were shot or bayonetted to death, while many others were clubbed and jailed. Three union organizers were falsely accused of conspiracy to murder and faced the electric chair before their post-strike acquittal. Arrayed against American Woolen and its heavily armed defenders was a rainbow coalition of recently arrived immigrants - low-paid workers from 30 countries, who spoke 45 different languages. They were welded together into a militant, disciplined, and largely nonviolent force, through their own efforts and the extraordinary organizing skills of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which began recruiting in Lawrence many months before the nine-week walkout. Unlike the elitist and conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), the IWW championed the working poor, both native- and foreign-born. "There is no foreigner here except the capitalists," thundered IWW leader "Big Bill" Haywood, in a speech to the Lawrence strikers. "Do not let them divide you by sex, color, creed or nationality." Many on the picket-lines in Lawrence were teenagers or women. Their mistreatment at work, miserable living conditions, malnutrition, and other health problems soon became a national scandal. When a delegation of 16 young strikers appeared before a House Committee hearing in Washington D.C, the wife of Republican President William Howard Taft was among those attending who were shocked by their account of factory life in Lawrence. These child laborers put a human face on the strikers' now famous demand for "bread and roses." They wanted more than just a living wage; they sought dignity, respect and opportunities for personal fulfillment denied to those employed in the mills at age 14 or even younger. IWW vs. AFL Today, the "Bread and Roses Strike" is feted by all of organized labor. But at the time, the work stoppage upstaged and embarrassed the American Federation of Labor, because Lawrence workers rallied under the banner of an organizational rival. IWW members fiercely criticized the AFL for keeping workers divided in different unions, based on occupation. Women, nonwhites, and recent immigrants - particularly those deemed to be "un-skilled" - were largely excluded from the alliance of craft unions derided by the IWW as "the American Separation of Labor." The AFL, in turn, dismissed the IWW's quest for "One Big Union" and worker control of industry as a left-wing fantasy. AFL President Samuel Gompers was particularly grumpy about the Lawrence strike. Like some of those skeptical of Occupy Wall Street last fall, Gompers claimed the protest activity was just "a passing event" - the work of people more concerned with promoting a "class conscious industrial revolution" than advancing "the near future interests of the workers." When the mill owners finally capitulated, however, strikers won most of their immediate demands - an outcome that vindicated their embrace of the IWW rather than the feeble AFL-affiliated United Textile Workers. The strike settlement, reached in March 1912, provided wage increases, overtime pay, and amnesty for all strikers. On the other hand, as many labor historians have noted, the IWW's political influence in Lawrence proved to be short- lived. Industrial unionism didn't gain a firmer footing in the Merrimack Valley until the 1930s and the great wave of Depression-inspired organizing by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But even that later labor movement success was eroded over time by capital flight - mill closings and the relocation of textile manufacturing from New England to the non-union south. The Merrimack Valley entered a period of steady decline. Lawrence, then and now In recent years, however, Lawrence's long depressed neighbor to the west, the city of Lowell, has experienced an economic revival, due to public investment in higher education there, a convention center, and other facilities; it's now widely hailed as a model of mill town re-invention and cultural diversity. Tourists flock to its museum of industrial history, run by the National Park Service. Lawrence remains a city of the working poor, better known for its sub-standard housing, high unemployment, political corruption, and troublesome street crime. Ninety percent of its public school students are Hispanic and few speak English as a first language. Although not condemned to factory work at an early age, these children struggle to learn under tenement-like conditions. A recent report by the teachers' union describes "crowded classrooms and physical infrastructure in distress: leaking roofs, poor air quality, persistent mold problems, crumbling walls and rodent infestation." Demoralized teachers have been working without a new contract for two years; student performance is so dismal that a state take-over the school system has been actively considered. When worker solidarity prevailed over corporate power in the icy streets of Lawrence a century ago, it made the promise of a better life real for many. The Bread and Roses strike became a consciousness-raising experience, not only for textile workers and their families, but the nation as a whole. Nevertheless, at centennial events in Lawrence over the next several months, it will be hard not to notice that many immigrant workers there still lack "bread and roses" - in the form of living wage jobs, affordable housing, and better schools. But that injustice will not be cured until U.S. workers and their allies, in Lawrence and elsewhere, find a way to make history again, not just celebrate it. [Steve Early has been a union organizer, strike coordinator and labor journalist in Massachusetts for the last 30 years. He is the author, most recently, of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor.] ___________________________________________ Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. (4) Great Recession Friday, Jan 13, 2012 10:53 AM Eastern Standard Time Woody Guthrie, more relevant than ever When conservative Oklahoma finally accepts its lefty prodigal son, it bodes well for a nation steeped in inequality By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina. Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year. Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand; his own family came unraveled in the worst hard times. And he wrote tough yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep. He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich. What professional success he had during his own lifetime, singing in concerts and on the radio, was often undone by politics and the restless urge to keep moving on. âSo long, itâs been good to know you,â he sang, and off he would go. What he wrote and sang about caused the oil potentates and preachers who ran Oklahoma to consider him radical and disreputable. For many years he was the stateâs prodigal son, but times change, and thatâs the big news. Woody Guthrie has been rediscovered, even though Oklahomaâs more conservative than ever â one of the reddest of our red states with a governor whoâs a favorite of the Tea Party. The George Kaiser Family Foundation has bought Guthrieâs archives â his manuscripts, letters and journals. A center is being built in Tulsa that will make them available to scholars and visitors from all over the world. Among its treasures is the original, handwritten copy of this song, Woody Guthrieâs most famous â âThis Land Is Your Land.â The song extols the beauty of the country Guthrie traveled across again and again; its endless skyways and golden valleys, the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts. Yet his eye was clear, unclouded and unobstructed by sentimentality, for he also wrote in its lyrics: In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is this land made for you and me? âIs this land made for you and me?â A mighty good question. The biggest domestic story of our time is the collapse of the middle class, a sharp increase in the poor, and the huge transfer of wealth to the already rich. In an era of gross inequality thereâs both irony and relevance in Woody Guthrieâs song. That âribbon of highwayâ he made famous? Itâs faded and fraying in disrepair, the nationâs infrastructure of roads and bridges, once one of our glories, now a shambles because fixing them would require spending money, raising taxes and pulling together. This land is mostly owned not by you and me but by the winner-take-all super rich who have bought up open spaces, built mega-mansions, turned vast acres into private vistas, and distanced themselves as far as they can from the common lot of working people â- the people Woody wrote and sang about. True, Barack Obama asked Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrieâs longtime friend Pete Seeger to sing âThis Land is Your Landâ at that big, pre-inaugural concert the Sunday before he was sworn in. And sing they did, in the spirit of hope and change that President Obama had spun as the heart of his campaign rhetoric. Today, whatever was real about that spirit has been bludgeoned by severe economic hardship for everyday Americans and by the cynical expedience of politicians who wear the red-white-and-blue in their lapels and sing âAmerica the Beautifulâ while serving the interests of crony capitalists stuffing SuperPACs with millions of dollars harvested from the gross inequality destroying us from within. But maybe â just maybe â the news that Woody Guthrie, once a pariah in his home state, has become a local hero is the harbinger of things to come, and that all the people who still believe this land is our land will begin to take it back. Bill Moyers is managing editor of the new weekly public affairs program, "Moyers & Company," airing on public television. Check local airtimes or comment at www.BillMoyers.com.More Bill Moyers Michael Winship is senior writing fellow at Demos and a senior writer of the new series, Moyers & Company, airing on public television. 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