“No kidding,” said Gina. “Someone like me. Can I cave?”
Three
AFTER GINA LOST HER JOB, she went to work with her mother cleaning houses in Prospect Hill while Arturo and Joe organized rolling walkouts across the mills to disrupt operations as much as possible. They knew the looms needed (wo)manning, and without an adequate workforce, fabrics would not be made, and 600,000 pounds of sheep fleece would remain unspun.
Smiling Joe, no stranger to oratory, collected a thousand women right on the Common, hopped up on a soggy bench, and started shouting Harry-written bromides. “If one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, another man has a dollar he didn’t get!” One minute it was about two unpaid hours, the next it was about equality and economic freedom and brotherhood of man.
The ladies got revved up like little runarounds after hearing Joe yell for an hour. The next morning, two thousand women descended on Essex and Union. By the third morning, there were three thousand women on the streets. They interlocked arms and paraded on Merrimack and Water, across the bridges, and down Broadway. They hurled stones through mill windows, chanted and yelled, and exhorted all the workers to walk off their jobs.
Big Bill arrived for a brief visit. He praised Joe’s and Arturo’s efforts, commended Harry’s speechifying, approved of the protesting women, advised Joe and Arturo to urge them to be louder and more violent, and went on a speaking tour around the country lauding the IWW’s efforts in the Lawrence strike.
The walkouts rolled on through all eight mills in Lawrence. By the end of the second week, ten thousand people, mostly women and their children, were on the streets. The looms stopped spinning completely.
When Joe saw how many women were in his corner, he raised his demands, calling for a blanket fifteen percent increase in wages, double overtime pay, and a fifty-three-hour week. It wasn’t just about American Woolen anymore.
Harry built Joe a special platform, four feet off the ground, which he and Arturo set up on the Common. Arturo extravagantly praised Harry’s work. “You write speeches and build platforms? Where did you learn to do that, Harvard man? You’re like the future hero Engels was talking about. You can be architect for an hour, but also push a wheelbarrow, if need be. I’m looking at you, Harold Barrington, and the future is here.”
Onto Harry’s platform, Joe hopped every day and denounced the mill owners, shouting Harry’s penned words until he was hoarse.
“Labor produces all wealth! All wealth belongs to the producer thereof!”
The mills shuttered their doors. No one was reporting to work. Other businesses were forced to close. The unstoppable mobs frightened the shop owners. Now that the women weren’t working and weren’t getting paid, no one was buying things.
“Complete demolition of social and economic conditions is the only salvation of the working classes!”
In desperation, American Woolen and the Lawrence Association of Businesses called on Mayor Scanlon to resolve things. The mayor did the only thing he could think of: he brought in additional police protection. The chief of police himself showed up on Union Street and warned the women that if they didn’t get off the streets and stop loitering, they’d be arrested, “each and every bloody one of you,” and dispersed through the minimum-security prisons of Massachusetts. The women nearly trampled him to death. Afterward, Angela ran to City Hall’s research room to look up “loitering” in the legal code. It was defined as “standing still in the public square.” In defiance, the women began to march back and forth on Union Street in the reformed moving picket line. The police had to devise another way to get the ladies off the streets.
Lawrence brought in another reinforcement division from nearby Andover and arrested thousands of strikers, most of them kicking and screaming, for disturbing the peace. The city didn’t have the space to jail three hundred women, much less ten thousand livid women. The clogging up of the courts was prohibitively expensive and socially debilitating. As soon as they were released, the women returned to the picket lines, parading and chanting in a sing-song day in and day out, “We want bread, but we want roses too!”
All women, that is, but an anxious and defenseless Gina, who, wishing only for bread, bowed her head and walked the other way to St. Vincent de Paul’s to spin for pennies or up to Prospect Hill with Mimoo to dust for the affluent.
Emma Goldman, not to remain in the shadows of Mother Jones’s limelight, decided to come to Lawrence and weigh in on her nemesis’s well-publicized comments by giving her own impassioned speech atop Harry’s platform. Of course, she said, the most prominent woman socialist in the country wanted ever stronger chains of bondage for women. In the middle of freezing January, Goldman yelled that free love was the only way out for women because freedom and equality and justice for women were utterly incompatible with marriage. Goldman declared that unlike certain others she would not mention by name, she would gladly stand in the cold with the Lawrence strikers.
When Big Bill, over in Montana, heard what Emma Goldman was saying, he telegraphed Harry to inform him that if he ever saw Emma Goldman on the streets of Lawrence he would suffocate her with his bare hands. The last thing the IWW wanted was Goldman in the middle of a striking city advocating for freedom from state regulation! The IWW advocated total state control, not freedom from it. Like Mother Jones, though for different reasons, Emma Goldman was detrimental to the strikers’ cause.
“Gina, my faithful wife, tell me something,” Harry said after he related the day’s events. “Your beloved Emma Goldman was yelling in the freezing rain, yet I couldn’t help but notice that you were nowhere to be found.”
“You told me to stay inside,” she replied, arranging a white poster board on the dining table. “I’m being a good wife.” Lightly she smiled. “I have no time for free love in the freezing rain.”
“Very wise. What in the world are you doing?”
She had been making placards. EQUALITY NOW! JUSTICE NOW! FAIR WAGES NOW!
“I’m helping Angie.”
“I know why you’re doing it.” He took away her black paintbrush. “I don’t want you to appease her.”
“I told her I would.” She reached for the brush. “Make amends for before.”
“Tell her you’ll make amends by feeding her. Because it all starts with the placards. The next thing you know you’re marching to ‘The Marseillaise’ and defeating Britain. It’s dangerous out there.”
She took the brush from him. “I’m not going out, tesoro. I’m just making signs.”
“You’re going to St. Vincent’s, aren’t you?”
“It’s on Haverhill. The other way.” She didn’t want to remind him, as if he needed reminding, that their Victorian on Summer Street was just half a block from the Common where Joe Ettor shouted twice a day every day, and four blocks from Essex and Union, a long lobbed softball away from all the trouble. She had no business being out, and they both knew it. But what choice did she have? Mimoo’s seven houses to clean were not enough to cover their bills, and new cleaning work was scarce with so many women competing for the only viable employment. At least St. Vincent’s paid her a tiny wage for sewing, ironing, sorting donations, and spinning, and they gave her food from their pantry, as if she herself were now one of the people in desperate need of help.
Harry stood close, twisting the curls of her hair around his fingers. “I’m glad we don’t meet here anymore,” he said. “Now we go to talk nonsense at Arturo’s. It’s better. Our house is quieter.