The IWW fought hundreds of strikes in the years before and during the First World War. The first sit-down strike in US history was staged at the General Electric plant in Schenectady in December 1906. After the sacking of three union men, some 3,000 workers, led by the IWW, occupied the plant for nearly three days. And there were many more often bitterly fought strikes, not least at McKees Rocks in 1909.
Without any doubt, however, the two most famous were the great strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, and in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913. The first of these class battles seemed to open the way for IWW organising in the east while the second seemed to close that door.
Lawrence was a textile town, dominated by J P Morgan’s American Woollen Company. The town’s 12 mills provided employment for over 30,000 men, women and children. The workers, many of them immigrants (45 different languages were spoken in the mills), worked long hours in appalling conditions for low wages in what was an extremely profitable industry.
What provoked the great strike was the implementation of a state law cutting the working hours of women and children to 54 hours a week, but without any increase in wages to compensate for the resulting loss of earnings. For workers already on the breadline, this meant literal starvation.
On 11 January 1912 nearly 2,000 workers at the Everett mill walked out in protest and the strike quickly spread. On 12 January workers at the Washington mill walked out and proceeded to march through the town, shutting down the other mills. “Better to starve fighting than to starve working” was their slogan. By the end of the 13 January there were 20,000 workers on strike, rising to 25,000 by the end of the month. The strikers turned to the IWW. The “Bread and Roses” strike, as it has become known, had begun.
Whereas in the west the IWW had often retaliated against employer and police violence with a policy of an eye for an eye, in Lawrence they adopted the tactic of passive resistance. While this did not prevent police brutality, it helped rally support for the strikers. To counter this, the employers tried to discredit the union by planting a dynamite cache, but it was successfully proven that this was the work of a city official.
On 29 January there were serious clashes between police and strikers when the strikers began stopping trams to search for imported scabs. Later that day a peaceful rally was attacked by the police and a striker, Annie LoPezza, was shot dead. The following day John Ramey, a Syrian immigrant, was bayoneted to death on the picket line.
The authorities attempted to defeat the strike by removing its leadership. They charged a striker, Joseph Caruso, with having fired the shot that killed Annie LoPezza and then arrested the two Italian IWW organisers running the strike, Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, as well. They were charged with being accessories to murder for encouraging violence, even though they had not even been on the demonstration but were speaking at meetings elsewhere. And on top of that, the private detectives who gave perjured evidence of their encouraging violence were shown not to speak Italian!
The authorities intended carrying out a judicial lynching. The IWW launched a nationwide campaign to ensure the three men were not killed, with demonstrations and meetings throughout the country raising a defence fund of US$60,000.
Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn arrived in Lawrence to take over the strike leadership. The strike held solid, with an attempt at disruption by John Golden of the American Federation of Labour (AFL) being successfully beaten off. He denounced the IWW as “an outlaw organisation” and condemned the strike as “a revolution”. Indeed, many rank and file AFL members increasingly rallied in support of the strikers.
The streets of Lawrence were filled with troops and the courts handed down savage sentences. On one day alone, 34 pickets were each jailed for a year. Outside the Arlington mill on 21 February, thousands of women fought with police and state militia to keep out scabs.
The IWW organised a children’s holiday scheme, sending the strikers’ children out of town to stay with the families of union and Socialist Party sympathisers. Margaret Sanger was one of the organisers of this holiday scheme. The police intervened to prevent this, publicly beating both women and children. The children were thrown into trucks by the police and sent to the poor farm. Angry parents attempted to storm city hall in protest. This caused a national outcry with opinion turning decisively against the employers.
After nine weeks the strike was won. According to one account, some 250,000 workers in the New England textile mills won wage increases because of the Lawrence strike. Employers conceded the workers’ demands to avoid action and where they didn’t, workers, inspired by the example of the Lawrence strikers, walked out.
While the strike was won, the campaign to save Ettor and Giovannitti continued. They were finally put on trial at the end of September, with the Lawrence mills coming out in sympathy and massive demonstrations taking place. The IWW threatened to call a nationwide general strike if they were convicted. After a 58-day trial, they were acquitted. Caruso, the striker who was in the frame for the actual shooting, was also found not guilty.
The following year, the IWW was involved in a bitter silk weavers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey. Some 25,000 workers walked out at the end of February. Here the employers stood firm for over six months before the union went down to defeat. The workers were effectively starved back to work.
At the suggestion of the socialist journalist John Reed, the IWW attempted to raise relief funds by holding a great strike pageant at Madison Square Garden in New York. The event took place on 7 June, involving over 1,000 strikers. Even though 15,000 people saw the performance, it did not lead to any boost in the strike fund.
As far as Gurley Flynn was concerned, the strike could have been won if only they had had the resources to stay out a while longer, but as it was the dispute had drained the IWW treasury.
By the time the strike ended, 1,473 strikers had been arrested, hundreds had been beaten and five killed by police and armed scabs. In the aftermath thousands of workers were blacklisted. This was a tremendous blow. It was compounded by the fact that the IWW had also failed to consolidate its position after the strikes that it had won. Membership rose dramatically during the struggle but fell afterwards. This failure became the subject of considerable debate within the organisation. By the end of 1913, the IWW was in serious trouble.