American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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in indoctrinating the revolutionary philosophy of syndicalism among Lawrence’s workers. At the same time, its failure bequeathed a sense that organization, when it came, would need to have a more practical orientation by signing contracts and paying close attention to bread-and-butter issues.15
The 1912 strike has obtained almost mythic status in the annals of radical history, no doubt in part because of the involvement of IWW luminaries Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, Arturo Giovannitti, and ‘‘Big’’ Bill Haywood. But the 1919 strike was equally dramatic. Like other industries, textiles had experienced wartime prosperity, enjoying record-breaking profits from 1916 to 1918. The greatest beneficiary of all was William Wood’s American Woolen Company, the largest company in the entire textile industry, which had extensive operations in Lawrence. For the first time, mill workers enjoyed year-round employment. Recognizing their advantage, they broke traditional patterns of deference on the shop floor and staged a number of small strikes to gain wage increases. Textile workers were eager to hold on to their gains as the war ended. Mill owners, on the other hand, sought to maintain their high level of profitability, and they began to lay off workers and to reduce their hours as soon as wartime orders dropped off.16
It was in the context of this tense and volatile situation that the UTW, under its conservative president John Golden, launched a nationwide campaign for the eight-hour day, passing a resolution calling on the textile mills to begin the new schedule on February 3, 1919. When it became clear that Golden was content to leave wage adjustments to the future, a movement emerged throughout New England textile centers to change the demand to 48/54—fifty-four hours’ pay for forty-eight hours’ work. As workers prepared to strike, the American Woolen Company announced it would honor the forty-eight-hour week but without the wage increase. The tactic succeeded in ending the UTW’s involvement and in undercutting the strike movement everywhere except in Lawrence and, to a lesser extent, Passaic and Paterson, New Jersey, which were also major textile centers.17
With memories of the violent 1912 strike still fresh, the imminent standoff in Lawrence was front-page news in Boston. Eager to translate their ideals of nonviolence and brotherhood into reality, the Comradeship sent Muste, Harold Rotzel, and Cedric Long to Lawrence to investigate the situation. When the three ministers arrived on a bleak winter day in January, they found a city tense with excitement and fear. In true pacifist fashion, they immediately set about researching the situation from all points of view, interviewing workers, ministers, professionals, and industrialists, including William Wood Jr. They quickly concluded that the strike was justified; the pay was ‘‘miserable’’ even as the mills enjoyed windfall profits, yet the mill owners were utterly opposed to compromise and the native-born public was ‘‘paralyzed with fear,’’ viewing the movement as part of a plot to Bolshevize the United States. To show their support, the ministers began passing out leaflets explaining the ‘‘facts’’ to the wider public and raising relief funds for the impending strike.18
The strike leaders welcomed the ministers’ support. Many of them had been involved in the 1912 strike and knew the importance of outside support and publicity. As Muste recalled, ‘‘we were hailed as angels in these circumstances. They had virtually nobody who could talk English straight, nobody who could write English,’’ and they recognized the value of ‘‘our connections’’ in Boston.19 Strike leaders had already set up a provisional strike committee composed of representatives from the various national and language groups. Under its auspices, for the first week of the strike, the ministers continued to focus their energies on obtaining relief funds and favorable publicity.20
Having earned the trust of the strike’s leaders, when a general strike committee was formed a week later, the ministers assumed key positions. For his part, Muste was elected executive secretary of the general strike committee, in effect making him the leader of the strike. Though he lacked experience, he had proven a charismatic and inspiring speaker whose ability to reconcile different points of view and construct a cohesive vision out of the strike’s ‘‘kaleidoscopic’’ ethnic and ideological diversity quickly endeared him to the workers. At his very first speaking appearance in Lawrence he told the assembled crowd: ‘‘You should learn all you can about the textile industry because very soon you are going to take it over for your own.’’21
Muste also ‘‘demonstrated an ability to learn on the job’’ and to adapt his principles to fit the situation.22 Without a background in labor unions or industrial conflicts, he drew upon the pragmatic method and looked to experience and practice as guides to truth. As he explained of his approach to labor organizing, ‘‘there are no absolute roles, formulas. . . . You have, on the one hand, a ‘social situation’; [and] on the other hand, an individual. But neither of these terms is set and static; they are fluid and dynamic.’’ Ultimately the ‘‘rebel must submit himself to the test of results’’ and ‘‘the test of group discussion . . . in spite of all the risks of compromise involved.’’ Ideals ultimately must not be ‘‘petrified dogmas mechanically applied to living situations, but hypotheses fearlessly lived by so long as [no] better are in sight, but constantly made to meet (not evade) situations and thus enriched and corrected.’’ ‘‘The moral life’’ was indeed ‘‘an adventure!’’23
His response to the violence that characterized the strike illustrates his ability to be flexible and adaptable while maintaining his principles. The first day of the strike, on the first Monday in February, provided a harbinger of what was to come; as the strikers gathered at dawn outside the mills, the police attacked the picket lines, clubbing strikers, and even entered their homes, pulling women out of bed and beating them.24 The repressive, brutal treatment of the striking workers continued throughout the strike and reflected the conviction, held by the city elite, that that the strike represented ‘‘Bolshevism, the enemy of democracy, the destroyer of property rights, the breeder of anarchy.’’ They were determined that ‘‘Bolshevism’’ would ‘‘get no grip-hold in Lawrence’’ as it had in Seattle, Winnipeg, and other cities, and they granted the police free rein in handling the strikers.25
Police brutality placed the problem of violence squarely before Muste and his fellow pacifist clergy. Though the FOR favored socialism, many of its members opposed strikes, viewing their coercive character as a form of violence. The organization held that ‘‘true reconciliation’’ came from identifying with ‘‘both sides of the quarrel’’ and then drafting a solution ‘‘in which the true interest of every party can be satisfied.’’ In the case that one party to a dispute was unwilling to ‘‘be converted,’’ they suggested that it was better to let evil triumph than to violate their fundamental principles of nonviolence and love.26 When Cedric Long defended the right of workers to strike at an FOR conference, he was publicly chastised by John Haynes Holmes who, with the hearty approval of the audience, pointed out that strikes violated the ‘‘moral law.’’27
In Lawrence, however, law enforcement was the ‘‘creator of violence,’’ and the experience taught Muste, Long, Rotzel, and other left-wing pacifists that the language of peace could function to maintain the status quo. As Muste wrote in the New Textile Worker, the organization and agitation of workers may appear to disrupt the ‘‘social peace,’’ but in fact brings attention to the class struggle that already exists. Quoting the English economist and historian G. D. H. Cole, he insisted that ‘‘the interests of Capital and Labour are diametrically opposed and although it may be necessary for Labour sometimes to acquiesce in ‘social peace,’ such peace is only the lull before the storm’’ that must come if a fundamental restructuring of power and privilege is ever to occur.28 While Muste certainly hoped that the final victory in the class struggle would occur nonviolently, he refused to abandon the Lawrence strike on the grounds that striking workers were not pacifists.
Philosophical questions aside, as the leader of the strike, the problem of violence was also a practical one, for it seemed self-evident that the police were being deliberately provocative in the hopes of undermining the strikers and their cause. Police violence also undermined morale; several weeks into the strike, pessimism set in in the ranks ‘‘because of this business that every morning so many people got beat up.’’