Bread and Roses: The 1912 Strike That United 51 Nationalities

On January 12, 1912, pay envelopes across Lawrence, Massachusetts came up thirty-two cents short, and by the end of the day the looms had gone silent in mill after mill. Within the week at least 20,000 workers, and by some counts more than 30,000, had walked off the job in a strike that ran nine weeks: a striker shot dead by police, two union organizers charged with a murder they hadn’t committed, dynamite planted in a mill-backed frame-up, and children shipped out of the city to keep them fed while the courts sorted out who had killed whom. It ended on March 12, 1912, with the city’s biggest employer agreeing to raise wages for tens of thousands of workers across New England. This is the strike that’s been called Bread and Roses ever since; the slogan itself has an older and more contested history, told at Symbols of the Left.

Fifty-four hours, thirty-two cents

The spark was almost bureaucratic. Massachusetts had just cut the maximum work week for women and children from 56 to 54 hours, effective January 1, 1912, a real reform meant to ease conditions in the mills. The mill owners’ answer was to cut pay to match the shorter week. On January 11, weavers at the Everett Mill, many of them Polish immigrants, opened pay envelopes thirty-two cents lighter than the week before and walked out on the spot. The walkout reached the Washington Mill the next day and spread through the city’s mills within days, including the plants of the American Woolen Company, Lawrence’s biggest employer. One historical society priced the missing thirty-two cents at about three loaves of bread.

Twenty thousand workers, fifty-one nations

No one ever nailed down an exact strike total. Estimates from the time and since run from about 20,000 to more than 30,000 workers idle at once. What isn’t in dispute is how many different countries they had come from: Bruce Watson’s Bread and Roses, the standard history of the strike, counts workers from as many as fifty-one nations on the picket lines, and organizers translated bulletins and rally speeches into two dozen or more languages so nobody was locked out of a meeting by grammar. The Industrial Workers of the World sent organizer Joseph Ettor to run the walkout, and on his first afternoon in Lawrence he told the crowd exactly how he wanted the strike to go:

All the blood that is spilled in a strike is your blood.

It was an instruction as much as a rallying line: give the mill owners nothing that looked like union violence to photograph. Ettor and fellow organizer Arturo Giovannitti, who came to help him run it, held that line for weeks against state militia sent to guard the mills with bayonets fixed.

A dead striker and a frame-up that failed

On January 29, in a clash between strikers and police at the corner of Union and Garden Streets, a shot killed a striker named Anna LoPizzo. Nineteen witnesses named a Lawrence police officer as the shooter; police countered that the fatal shot had come from an unnamed personal enemy of the officer’s, standing elsewhere in the crowd. No one was ever convicted of firing it. The following day, a soldier’s bayonet killed a second striker, seventeen-year-old John Ramey.

What the state did next was charge Ettor and Giovannitti, who had been speaking at a meeting miles away when LoPizzo died, as accessories before the fact to her murder, and charge a striker named Joseph Caruso as the actual gunman, despite witnesses who placed him at home. All three were held without bail for the better part of a year.

The mills’ other move against the strike leadership backfired. A Lawrence undertaker and school board member, John Breen, planted dynamite at several spots strikers used for meetings, in an apparent attempt to paint the union as a bombing plot. Investigators traced it back to him within days, and he was fined $500. It later surfaced that American Woolen Company president William Wood had paid Breen an unexplained sum shortly before the dynamite turned up. A building contractor, Ernest Pitman, told a district attorney he had sat in on the Boston meeting where mill officials planned the frame-up, then killed himself rather than testify further in court. Wood was indicted, stood trial in 1913, and was found not guilty by a jury.

The children go to New York

Feeding thousands of strikers’ families for weeks strained Lawrence’s relief committees past what they could manage, so organizers, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, began sending children to stay with sympathetic families in other cities. On February 10, 119 children reached New York, met at the station by supporters. A second group followed the next week.

On February 24, when strikers tried to send a further group of children to Philadelphia (accounts of the group’s size conflict, from 46 in one count to about 100 in others), city police and state militia moved in at the Lawrence train depot to stop them. Officers clubbed and dragged away mothers who tried to hold onto their children and arrested dozens of them; one pregnant woman in the crowd miscarried afterward. The scene made national newspapers within a day and turned a local strike into a national scandal.

Congress investigated. In March 1912, mill children testified before the U.S. House Committee on Rules in Washington, with the president’s wife, Helen Taft, in the audience. Fourteen-year-old Camella Teoli, who had lost part of her scalp to an unguarded machine at the Washington Mill the year before, described it in her own words:

The machine pulled the scalp off.

Afterward, the Tafts invited the Lawrence children to lunch at the White House and donated $1,000 to the strike relief fund. The hearing produced no new federal law, but it produced headlines the mill owners couldn’t outlast. Within weeks, American Woolen was negotiating.

The settlement, and the trial that followed

American Woolen agreed to terms on March 12, 1912: wage increases of 5 to 20 percent depending on the job, extra pay for overtime, and no retaliation against anyone who had walked out. Two days later, roughly 15,000 workers gathered on Lawrence Common to ratify the deal, and other New England mills raised wages of their own within weeks rather than risk a repeat strike.

Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso were still in jail when the mills settled. Their trial finally opened that September in Salem, before Judge Joseph F. Quinn, with all three defendants held in a cage inside the courtroom for its duration. On November 26, 1912, the jury acquitted all three. Ettor and Giovannitti had spent nearly ten months in prison over a shooting that nineteen witnesses said a police officer, not either of them, had fired.

The slogan and the record

The strike’s nickname comes from a poem published a month before the walkout began, and the detail most people know about it, a banner reading “We want bread, and roses too,” has never turned up in any photograph or newspaper account from Lawrence; that history belongs at Symbols of the Left, not here. What Lawrence actually produced needs no banner to carry it: workers who didn’t share a language held a picket line for nine weeks against a company that tried to frame them for a bombing and a murder in the same month, and beat both charges and the pay cut. Ettor and Giovannitti walked out of a Salem courtroom free men that November, and mills across New England raised wages within weeks, strike or no strike.