![]() ![]() Naturally, the violence was blamed on the workers. The textile makers, organizing under the banner of radical labor unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (which, Watson writes, “seemed to show up whenever labor unrest began to smolder”), complained about wages and working conditions, eliciting the response of another institution: when the workers went on strike in the winter of 1912, the mill owners prevailed upon the state to send in the militia, as if to lend credence to Jay Gould’s observation, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Violence ensued, and workers died, including one Italian woman whom Watson nominates for residence in a Tomb of the Unknown Immigrant. will not be assimilated have no sympathy with our institutions.” Apparently, journalist Watson records, one of those institutions was poor pay. Lawrence, Mass., was a major center of textile manufacture in the early 1900s, and most of the work was done by immigrants-Italians, Portuguese, Greeks and others whom a nativist magazine called “the off-scourings of Southern Europe. A vivid work of labor history, recounting a famed textile workers’ strike of 1912. ![]()
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