Members of the Massachusetts State Militia approach strikers during 1912 ‘Bread and Roses’ strike at the Lawrence textile mills. (Photo: Library of Congress)
The great Lawrence Textile Strike, a strike of some 25,000 mainly immigrant workers, took place from January to March of 1912. The strike spread rapidly, encompassing nearly every mill within a week. It defied popular assumptions that immigrant, largely female, and linguistically and ethnically divided workers could not be organized.
Blocked from standing in front of mill gates and canal bridges, strikers perfected the moving picket line. Every day upwards of 5,000 strikers occupied Lawrence’s commercial district, singing and chanting in many languages and challenging the militia and police to stop them. They maintained soup kitchens and opened nurseries for strikers’ children. Two members representing every nationality in Lawrence formed the strike’s leadership, and all strike meetings were simultaneously translated into nearly 30 languages.
In1912 textile mills made money hand over fist. William Wood, head of the American Woolen Co., was one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. Mill bosses showed great disdain for the families they hurt. When asked once how many cars he owned, Wood replied that he was just too busy to count them all. And, while claiming they were self-made who built their businesses themselves, mill bosses relied on an extremely high government tariff on foreign goods to protect their markets. Yet, while protected, their workers’ wages and living standards declined steadily. Lawrence was a place of sharp inequality.
A mark of the inequality across Lawrence is this from the Massachusetts State Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1911: “It is obvious that the full-time earnings of a large number of adult employees are entirely inadequate for a family.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Report on the Strike (1912), Lawrence had the country’s:
• Eighth highest death rate
• Seventh highest death rate for infants
• Fifth highest death rate for children under 5
As a result, according to Lawrence physician Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh “A considerable number of the boys and girls die within the first two or three years after beginning work. Thirty-six of every 100 of all men and women who work in the mills die before or by the time they are 25 years of age.”
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