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Big Bill Haywood, one-eyed, powerfully built,
he was a mountain of a man who had come out
of the silver mines in the West to become a well-known labor leader,
as miners struggled to organize themselves
against the large interests of the East.
In the West, there was a movement for industrial mining organizations
different from that of the East, in which
craft unions, especially the ones of the AFL, predominated.
These unions were crushed by the reasons why unions lost again and again
and again in the late 19th century-- the overwhelming use of force by the state,
the lack of organization and resources by the workers.
But Big Bill Haywood didn't take this, as Gompers did,
as a reason to give up on industrial organizing and organizing
the unskilled, or even opposing the state.
In fact, he thought they should go even further.
After the mine workers are crushed in 1904,
there arises a new movement representing a more radical vision of class
politics, the International Workers of the World, the IWW, the Wobblies.
And Big Bill Haywood is at the center of this new movement.
Compare this speech at the inaugural meeting of the IWW
with what you know about craft unionism and Gompers and the AFL, in Chicago.
As Big Bill Haywood took the stage in 1905 in Chicago,
he took a new vision of unionism with him.
"Fellow workers, this is the Continental Congress of the working class.
We are here to confederate the workers of this country
into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose
the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism."
They wanted bread.
They wanted the good things of capitalism.
But they also wanted revolution.
And not revolution tempered with the small businessmen
like the Knights of Labor, but a revolution against capitalism itself.
The preamble to its constitution read, quote, "The working class
and the employing class have nothing in common.
There can be no peace as long as hunger and want
are found among the millions of working people
and the few who make up the employing class
have all the good things in life."
All the good things.
The very nature of capitalism kept those good things
which it produced away from the workers.
This is the central tenet of the Wobblies.
The best way to express the radicalism of the Wobblies
is through a pamphlet released by a guy named William Foster around 1911, 1910.
And he came out of the Wobblies.
He spoke on their behalf.
It was a pamphlet called "Syndicalism."
Now, syndicalism emerges in France, but in America it
gets a new tongue, a tongue spoken by the Wobblies.
Their vision of the economy left no middle ground.
There was no way to work with capital.
In this syndicalist vision, it would be a new workers' paradise, when
all the workers would rise up in a general strike across the country,
shut everything down.
Now, this vision of the general strike was like any other strike, only bigger.
But it was what came next that truly made syndicalism different.
In their vision, the workers would then form committees
and reopen all the factories and hospitals and restaurants
under worker control.
This radical vision espoused by people like William Z. Foster
was something far outside the bounds of conventional unionism,
and certainly far outside everyday worker demands.
Meanwhile, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the textile mills
were grinding the life out of their workers.
Now, the hours were long, and the wages were low,
but the best way to express this is not in terms of money or time,
but in terms of life and death.
Workers, on average, did not live to be 40 years old.
Whereas doctors and lawyers regularly lived to be 70.
Weakened by work, by housing, by poor diet,
it sapped the very life out of people.
Consider tuberculosis, a widespread disease of the period.
When 70% percent of millworkers who got tuberculosis died,
this wasn't a consequence of the medical knowledge at the time.
Only 6% of farmers who got tuberculosis died.
That's how weakened millworkers were.
And so reformers in Massachusetts desired to reduce the amount of time
that people worked from 56 to 54 hours.
Now, this wouldn't be a bad thing, except there
was no provision in the reform bills to actually maintain the same wage levels.
So workers saw their paychecks being cut.
It's out of this that emerges the most important strike of the teens, perhaps,
the Lawrence strike of 1912, also known as the Bread and Roses strike.
While the wages were being cut, the perspective
of the shareholders in the companies of Lawrence were very clear.
One stockholder, a man named Harry Emerson Fosdick, remarked, quote,
"There is no question of right and wrong.
The whole matter is a case of supply and demand.
Any man who pays more for labor than the lowest sum he can get men for
is robbing the shareholders.
If he can secure men for $6 and pays more, he is stealing from the company."
The old moral order of Boston in the early 19th century was completely gone.
There was no longer a sense of noblesse oblige by a few holders of stock.
And since there was just a distributed sense of stockholders
who just wanted to maximize their profits
and had no obligation to the workers other than market relationships,
the conflict was inevitable.
Into this explosive mixture came the IWW.
Now, the workers went off strike in the middle of winter, in January of 1912.
And the IWW, who believed in organizing the workers, went quickly to Lawrence.
It was both Big Bill Haywood and a guy named
Joseph Ettor, who had cut his teeth in the Chicago labor movement, who
went there to try and organize the workers to extract concessions
from the management of, especially, the biggest employer, the American Woolen
Company, as well as to radicalize the workers,
to help them understand the syndicalist vision of the economy.
There was a strike on a Friday, and things were relatively disorganized.
And then the next day, there is a meeting in the middle of town.
In the middle of the afternoon, after a succession of alternately denouncing
William Wood, who is the CEO of American Woolen Company,
and calling for peace, after all these speakers came to the stage, finally
Joseph Ettor of the IWW comes to the stage.
He spoke to the crowd directly, and told them
something that they had never heard before,
that they were the most important people in the world,
that their hands built the mills, that their hands ran
the mills, that their work had made Billy Wood rich.
He called on the workers to stop random violence, but also to stop the mills.
"Monday morning," quote, "you have to go close the mills that you've
caused to shut down tighter than you have them now."
By stopping work, workers would avoid injury.
Ettor reminded them, quote, "You cannot win by fighting with your fists against
men armed or the militia.
But you have a weapon they have not got.
You have the weapon of labor.
And with that, you can beat them down if you stick together."
This is the first message of peaceful resistance to capital.
Rather than destroying, simply picketing, simply not working.
So this radical organization is espousing peaceful resistance.
And then they do something else that is, in fact,
the most radical different thing about this moment.
Speaking to this crowd of ethnically diverse people
in Lawrence who had frequently been pushed against one another
by employers, he repeated the exact same speech in six other languages.
Joseph Ettor spoke seven languages.
He's a polyglot.
And so as he spoke to the crowd, not in English the second time, but Italian,
he truly connected with them.
As the strikers picketed the outside of the mills,
they stop workers from going in, stopping anyone with a pail.
And in that cold winter day, men with hoses began to spray water
all over them, freezing them in the single-digit winter air.
And as Ettor wandered in the crowd that day and through the week,
he made speeches, and encouraged unity between ethnic groups
in all the languages that he spoke.
He said, "Forget that you are Hebrews.
Forget that you are Poles, Germans, or Russians.
Among workers, there is only one nationality, one race, one creed.
He told native workers, quote, "Not to play the aristocrat because you
speak English, are habituated to the country, have a trade,
and are better paid.
Throw in your lot with the low-paid.
You must either reach down and lift them up,
or they will reach up and pull you down."
This is a message of unity, of tolerance, of difference.
This is something that is really novel and very different
from that of the AFL.
And the AFL leaders were not happy with this.
As they began to organize the workers in Lawrence,
they reached out among these communities.
Angelo Rocco organized the Italians.
Samuel Lipson organized the Jews.
Joseph Bedard, the Quebecois, Cyrille De Tollenaere
of the Belgians, and so on, they began to bring these disparate communities
together.
Relief organization was organized along ethnic lines.
Nearly 4,000 meals a day were being served.
But workers and kids of workers could cross those ethnic lines.
One orthodox Jewish man remembered that as a boy,
he had, at a Belgian soup kitchen, his very first ham sandwich.
He had never had ham or a hot dog before.
And when he came home, his mother offered him
some bread, which he turned down because he had already eaten.
So you can imagine his mother.
She scrubbed his mouth out with soap.
And presumably, it was kosher soap, to be sure.
But it's hard to get that delicious taste of bacon out of your mouth.
And it's out of these moments that new kinds of connections
are formed between ethnic groups, whether Jew and Belgian,
German and Pole, or any of the other polyglot immigrants
who now were the textile workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts.
But it was not just these kinds of connections
between workers and ethnic groups that made the strike successful.
It wasn't even really the picketing at the factories.
It was the way in which, now, in the era of mass media,
that it's possible to represent these strikes.
The parents of the strikers sent their children to New York
so that they could rely on resources there.
And in New York, there were vast celebrations.
Children with signs walking down Fifth Avenue.
But the people who owned the factories in Lawrence
knew that this was a terrible PR move for them.
It represented them badly that poor, ragged children were walking down
the streets of New York City in view of everyone, having their photos taken.
And so they told the local sheriffs to stop the children
from getting on the trains.
Well, the sheriff was perhaps a little too overanxious.
Because what happened, in seven to eight seconds,
was the clubbing of women and children to prevent them
from getting on the train.
And this clubbing of children, this clubbing of women,
no matter what you think about the relationship of labor and capital,
did not go over OK in the popular media.
And so there was a capitulation of the American Woolen Company to the workers.
In the aftermath of this, the IWW arranged
through negotiations for raises not just for the highest paid workers, but also
the lowest paid workers, a reduction in and totally
no blacklisting of the workers who had gone out on strike.
So this took two months.
And there was a radical element organizing it.
But in the end, the IWW didn't really do anything
that was very different from the AFL.
They negotiated for better pay.
They negotiated for protection for striking.
And so even though they had a radical agenda, the actual results
of the Wobblies strike, of this Bread and Roses strike, this strike
not just for bread, but for roses too, meant
that the Wobblies had been successful.
But again, workers themselves did not care about this larger
political radicalism, just as they had not cared for the Knights of Labor.