Chapter Content
Okay, so like, you know, chapter seven... This is where things, um, really start to heat up. So, the mayor, like, *immediately* calls in the local militia. And, oh yeah, the governor? He's ordering out the state police, no question. I mean, things are getting serious.
So, a few weeks into the strike, a parade of strikers, gets, like, you know, *attacked* by the police. What the heck? Riots break out *all* day. And, get this, that evening, a striker, Anna LoPizzo, is shot and killed. Yeah, it's awful. Witnesses say it was a cop, right? But the authorities, of course, they arrest Joseph Ettor – he was the head of the strike committee and some other IWW organizer. Um, this other organizer, this poet...Arturo Giovannitti.
Now, *neither* of them were even *at* the scene, but they charged them with, get this, "inciting, procuring, and counseling or commanding the said person whose name is not known to commit the said murder..." It's ridiculous, right?
With Ettor in jail, they call in Big Bill Haywood to take over the strike, and other IWW organizers, like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, start arriving. So now you have, like, twenty-two companies of militia and *two* troops of cavalry in the city, you know? It's basically a war zone. They declare martial law, and can you imagine, they forbid people from talking on the street. I mean, just try to have a chat with your neighbor, can't do it. Thirty-six strikers get arrested. Many of them are sentenced to a *year* in prison.
And, on, uh, one particular Tuesday, some young Syrian striker, John Ramy, gets bayoneted to death. By the military? I don't know. But, like, despite all this, the strikers, man, they're still out there, the mills still aren't working. And Ettor, from *jail*, says "Bayonets cannot weave cloth." You gotta admit, kinda powerful, right?
Then, in February, these strikers start mass picketing. Like seven thousand to *ten* thousand pickets, in this endless chain, marching through the mill districts, with these white armbands that say, "Don't be a scab." But, you know, they're running out of food. The kids are hungry.
Then, the New York Call, which is a Socialist newspaper, suggests they send the strikers' kids to sympathetic families in other cities to take care of them while the strike lasts. It's wild, I know. They'd done it in Europe, but never, like, *ever* in the United States. But in three days, the Call gets *four hundred* letters, offering to take these kids. People want to help. The IWW and the Socialist Party, they start organizing, you know, the children's exodus. Taking applications from families, doing medical exams for all the kids.
On one February day, *over a hundred* kids, aged four to fourteen, leave Lawrence for New York City, can you imagine? They get to Grand Central Station, and there's, like, *five thousand* Italian Socialists singing "The Marseillaise" and "The International." It's nuts! The next week, another hundred children go to New York, and thirty-five go to Barre, Vermont. It's getting clear now. If the kids are taken care of, then the strikers can, you know, *stay* out. Their spirit is still good.
But the city officials in Lawrence, you guessed it, *citing a statute on child neglect*, say no more kids can leave. They aren't having any of it. But even with this edict, a group of forty children gets together to go to Philadelphia. When they arrive at the railroad station, it's filled with police. And what happens next, a member of the Women's Committee of Philadelphia describes it to Congress:
You know when the time came to leave, the children, they're all arranged in a long line, two by two, in an orderly procession, their parents right there, right? And they're, like, about to go to the train, when bam! The police close in with clubs, and they're just beating *everyone* right and left. They don't care who they hit. Children, they're trampling each other, like, trying to escape. Mothers and children are all getting hurled into one huge mass, then dragged to a military truck. They're still getting beat! The cries, I can't imagine... "Panic-stricken women and children..." is how it was described. Pretty awful.
A week later, women returning from a meeting are surrounded by police and *clubbed*. Oh my gosh! One pregnant woman is carried, unconscious, to a hospital, and she gives birth to a *dead* child. Wow.
But, you know what? The strikers are *still* holding out, like they're always singing and marching, you know? The crowd is tired, gray, but they woke up, they opened their mouths to sing and were willing to continue for what they thought was best. The American Woolen Company decides to give in. Yep, they offer raises of five to eleven percent. The strikers, they're insistent that the biggest increases go to the *lowest-paid*, they think everyone deserves it, time and a quarter for overtime, and no discrimination against strikers.
So, like, on one particular day, ten thousand strikers gather on the Lawrence Common, and Big Bill Haywood, he's presiding, you know, in charge? And they vote to end the strike.
Ettor and Giovannitti, you remember them?, they go on trial. Support for them is mounting all over the country. They have parades in New York and Boston. And, I think it was one particular September, fifteen thousand Lawrence workers strike for twenty-four hours to show their support for the two men. After that, they fire two thousand of the most active strikers. But the IWW threatens another strike. Right after the threat, they put them all back on the job.
Then, a jury finally finds Ettor and Giovannitti *not guilty*. And that afternoon, ten thousand people assemble in Lawrence to celebrate. Awesome, right? And so that's the end of that chapter.