page_title: 1912 Lawrence textile strike
section_title: Aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: 1912 Lawrence textile strike / Aftermath
context_page_description: The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World. Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence. On January 1, 1912, the Massachusetts government enforced a law that cut mill workers' hours in a single work week from 56 hours, to 54 hours. Ten days later, they found out that pay had been reduced along with the cut in hours.
  The strike united workers from more than 40 different nationalities. Carried on throughout a brutally cold winter, the strike lasted more than two months, from January to March, defying the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized.
context_section_description: Ettor and Giovanniti, both members of IWW, remained in prison for months after the strike was over. Haywood threatened a general strike to demand their freedom, with the cry "Open the jail gates or we will close the mill gates." The IWW raised $60,000 for their defense and held demonstrations and mass meetings throughout the country in their support; the Boston authorities arrested all of the members of the Ettor and Giovannitti Defense Committee. Then, 15,000 Lawrence workers went on strike for one day on September 30 to demand the release of Ettor and Giovannitti. Swedish and French workers proposed a boycott of woolen goods from the US and a refusal to load ships going there, and Italian supporters of the Giovannitti men rallied in front of the US consulate in Rome.
  In the meantime, Ernest Pitman—l, a Lawrence building contractor who had done extensive work for the American Woolen Company, confessed to a district attorney that he had attended a meeting in the Boston offices of Lawrence textile companies, where the plan to frame the union by planting dynamite had been made. Pitman committed suicide shortly thereafter when he was subpoenaed to testify. Wood, the American Woolen Company owner, was formally exonerated.
  When the trial of Ettor and Giovannitti, as well as a third defendant, Giuseppe Caruso, accused of firing the shot that killed the picketer, began in September 1912 in Salem before Judge Joseph F. Quinn, the three defendants were kept in steel cages in the courtroom. All witnesses testified that Ettor and Giovannitti were miles away and that Caruso, the third defendant, was at home and eating supper at the time of the killing.
  Ettor and Giovannitti both delivered closing statements at the end of the two-month trial. In Ettor's closing statement, he turned and faced the District Attorney:
  Does Mr. Ateill believe for a moment that... the cross or the gallows or the guillotine, the hangman's noose, ever settled an idea? It never did. If an idea can live, it lives because history adjudges it right. And what has been considered an idea constituting a social crime in one age has in the next age become the religion of humanity. Whatever my social views are, they are what they are. They cannot be tried in this courtroom.
  All three defendants were acquitted on November 26, 1912.
  The strikers, however, lost nearly all of the gains they had won in the next few years. The IWW, disdaining written contracts as encouraging workers to abandon the daily class struggle, thus left the mill owners to chisel away at the improvements in wages and working conditions, to fire union activists, and to install labor spies to keep an eye on workers. The more persistent owners laid off further employees during a depression in the industry.
  By then, the IWW had turned its attention to supporting the silk industry workers in Paterson, New Jersey. The Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 was defeated.
caption: Flyer distributed in Lawrence, Sept. 1912.
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