"I guess it's time we was getting back to work, eh, Mr. Gerbati?"
The old man pulled out his watch. "
Si,
" he said. "Longa past time. You run ahead, Salva—Mr. Jake Beale. Tell those men I'm on the way."
And Jake Beale began to run. Even though his new boots sometimes slipped on the icy cobbles, he did not stumble. How strange, how wonderful it seemed to be running, not away from petty crime or deadly fear, but toward a new life where bread was never wanting and roses grew in stone.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the industrial revolution in the United States was at its height. But in order to keep profits high, owners needed increased numbers of laborers who would work for low wages. The owners of the enormous textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, sent agents to poverty-stricken areas of Europe to recruit whole families to come to their mills. Posters were displayed showing an immigrant man leaving a Lawrence factory carrying a bag of gold, heading toward a bank across the street. By 1912, there were workers in Lawrence from at least thirty different countries speaking forty-five languages. The earliest workers had been mostly native-born or Irish. The Irish quickly rose to positions of importance, not only in the mills but in the city itself. In 1881, John Breen, an Irish Catholic undertaker, was elected mayor. The John Breen involved in the abortive dynamite plot was his son.
Conditions in the mills were very difficult for the new immigrant workers. They usually had the lowest-paying jobs. In order for families to survive, everyone who was able had to go to work. If children were under the age of fourteen, parents often paid to have their birth certificates falsified so the children could work in the mill.
In 1911, the Massachusetts state legislature ordered mill owners to cut the working hours of women and children from fifty-six a week to fifty-four, beginning January 1, 1912. Since most men made higher wages than women, the mill owners cut everyone's hours to fifty-four, speeded up the machines, and cut pay to make up for any lost profits that might result from the shortened work week.
The Italian branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), led by Angelo Rocco, a twenty-five-year-old worker who went to high school at night, determined to strike if pay was cut. Rocco felt the workers, coming from so many countries and speaking so many languages, would need help if they were to organize an effective strike. He telegraphed Joseph Ettor, one of the IWW's professional organizers, and asked him to come to Lawrence. Ettor, who was Italian American, was a charismatic speaker in several languages. He arrived in the city soon after the massive walkout on January 12 and immediately established a local strike committee, which included a woman, Mrs. Annie Welzenbach, and represented a number of nationalities. Ettor also organized relief efforts for the strikers and their families, who had been living on the edge of starvation even when working full-time.
Aided by the organizing efforts of Ettor and his compatriot, the Italian poet Arturo Giovannitti, and then, after their imprisonment on false charges, by Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the strikers, especially the immigrant women, maintained an amazing solidarity throughout the two months of the strike. "The women won the strike," Haywood was quoted as saying.
Others said it was the songs that brought the strikers to victory. Little red books containing union songs were passed out. Although most of the women couldn't read English, somehow they learned to sing in a way that made the police and militia tremble. "Beware that movement," one observing journalist said, "that generates its own songs."
On September 28, 1912, Ettor, Giovannitti, and a local worker, Joseph Caruso, were put on trial for the murder of Annie Lopizzo. Crowds stood outside the courtroom, declaring that the strike would not be truly ended until these men were set free.
The trial dragged on until November 23, when Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso were found not guilty. On Thanksgiving Day thousands gathered to cheer them. Those cheers reverberated through the Socialist Labor Hall of Barre, Vermont, and in union halls across the country.
The city of Barre was also very much an immigrant city. The area was long known for its high-quality granite, but granite could not be profitably quarried until the advent of modern derricks and steam drills, and it could not be widely sold until 1888, when a railroad line was built to reach the hill quarries. Then, all at once, a large supply of labor was needed. Aberdeen, Scotland, was going through severe economic times, and the quarries there were shut down, so many Scottish quarriers immigrated to Barre. They were followed by Scandinavian, Spanish, English, Greek, Swiss, Austrian, and French Canadian workers, and, of course, the Italian sculptors who left the marble industry in northern Italy to carve Barre granite. Sadly, in the early 1900s, work in the granite sheds of Vermont, where windows were shuttered against the cold weather, caused many of them to die young of silicosis, a story told in the novel
Like Lesser Gods
by Mari Tomasi. Modern ventilating equipment has virtually eliminated this threat to the health of stonecutters, and the last recorded death from silicosis occurred in 1932.
The early Italian immigrants were very active politically, many of them having been socialists or anarchists in Italy. They lived in tight-knit families, mostly in the North End of the city, and were in the early years regarded with some prejudice by native Vermonters. The granite industry in Barre still flourishes, although only a fraction of the labor force of 1912 is at work in the industry today. The old Socialist Labor Hall has been restored and is the site of many community events. Barre's sculptors are still highly regarded. One, Frank Gaylord, was the creator of the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C., and although the granite for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not Barre gray, the black granite of the memorial was brought to Barre to be engraved and polished.
The people of Barre remember with pride the fact that they were able to help the mill workers of Lawrence during the 1912 strike. Not only did the Italian stonecutters take in children of strikers, they also raised hundreds of dollars for strike relief. After Ettor and Giovannitti were freed, Giovannitti came to Barre for ten days and spoke in the Labor Hall, where, according to
The Barre Daily Times,
he "avoided the subject of politics and stated his simple desire to let his audience know just how much their support had meant to the textile operatives."
There is considerable debate about the term "Bread and Roses," as applied to the 1912 strike. Folklore has it that there was a photograph of marchers taken during the strike that showed a placard reading, variously, "We want bread and roses, too" or "Give us bread, Give us roses" or "We want bread and we want roses, too." The actual photograph has never surfaced. Whether the Italian slogan "
Pane e Rose,
" was used by the Italian strikers in Lawrence is, at best, unsure. Nor do we know the date when Giovanitti wrote the Italian poem "
Pan' e Rose.
" The English poem "Bread and Roses" was not inspired by the strike, according to its author, James Oppenheim, but as it was set to music not long afterward, the song has generally been associated with the Lawrence strike. By making Mamma and Rosa responsible for the legendary slogan and making it part of this story, I have obviously placed the incident in the realm of fiction rather than verifiable fact.
I am particularly indebted to Dr. Richard F. Ciccarelli of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Karen Lane of Barre, Vermont, for reading the manuscript and making helpful suggestions and corrections, though any errors that remain are my own. Dr. Ciccarelli's father, like many young mill workers, was the son of Italian immigrants. He went to work with falsified papers at the age of eleven, got his education in night school extension courses, and became a pharmacist. Ms. Lane is the director of the Aldrich Public Library in Barre and cheerfully gathered together many sources for me. A student of Barre history, she has been instrumental in the restoration of the Socialist Labor Hall in Barre that appears in the novel and is now designated by the National Park Service as a National Historic Landmark. She also introduced me to Giuliano Cecchinelli, who came as a seventeen-year-old from Carrara, Italy, to the marble works in Proctor, Vermont, and migrated north to Barre to carve granite. Mr. Cecchinelli has been called the "last of the Italians," and, indeed, as he showed Karen and me around the granite shed where he is the chief sculptor, I felt as though he could have stepped out of the pages of this book.
I would also like to thank Russell Belding who is laboriously assembling every mention of the Socialist Labor Hall from
The Barre Daily Times, The Montpelier Evening Argus,
and other periodicals of the era, and whose knowledge of Main Street and the Barre city schools during this period I drew upon. Thanks, too, to Jim Beauchesne at the Lawrence Heritage State Park, who pointed me toward many helpful sources, including the rousing documentary film "Collective Voices: The Bread and Roses Strike" and a number of helpful booklets published by the Immigrant City Archives in Lawrence. Also, thanks are due to David Malone for tracking down facts about Italian immigration to Lawrence and to Jim Armstrong for his careful copyediting of the manuscript.
Among the books that I depended on are: Donald B. Cole,
Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845–1921
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Ardis Cameron,
Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); William Moran,
The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2002);
Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology,
edited, with introductions, by Joyce L. Kornbluh (Chicago: Charles W. Kerr Publishing Company, 1998); William Cahn,
Lawrence 1912: The Bread and Roses Strike
(New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1977); Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler,
The Italian American Family Album
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Fred E. Beal,
Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1971); Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,
The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography
(New York: International Publishers, 1973); Mari Tomasi,
Like Lesser Gods
(Shelburne, Vt.: New England Press, 1988); Mari Tomasi and Roaldus Richmond, writers and interviewers, and Alfred Rosa and Mark Wanner, editors,
Men Against Granite
(Shelburne, Vt.: New England Press, 2004); Rod Clarke,
Carved in Stone: A History of the Barre Granite Industry
(Barre, Vt.: The Rock of Ages Corporation, 1989).
I hope this book honors in part the debt I owe to my editor of thirty-five years, Virginia Buckley, whose parents were Italian immigrants. Her father, in time, earned a Ph.D. and became a professor of romance languages at The City College of New York, and her mother was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Hunter College in New York.
And, as always, this book would never have been finished without the support of my longtime and long-suffering husband, John Paterson.