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DESCRIPTION:1/8 Bread And Roses Commemoration Art Show In SF Begins With Reception At 
 ILWU Local 34\n\n100th Year Commemoration of the Bread and Roses 
 Strike\nPress Release\n\nJanuary 12, 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of 
 the Bread and Roses garment mill workers strike in Lawrence, MA.  And just 
 as today’s Occupy Wall Street movement focuses on the 99% and 1%, the 
 truth of 1912 was that 1% of the richest Americans owned 50% of the 
 country’s wealth.  Conducting a difficult eight-week struggle during the 
 dead of winter against “Textile Trust” mill owners, banks, state 
 militia, police, clergy and local government, this strike involved 
 thousands of immigrants, nearly half women, fighting for justice and human 
 rights, a watershed moment in the history of American labor struggles.  
 LaborFest commemorates this event with a cultural and arts event at ILWU 
 Local 34 at 801 2nd Street, San Francisco, next to AT&T 
 stadium.\n\nPainting, photography, drawing and graphic art will be on 
 display from Sunday, January 8th through Wednesday, January 11th, 2012.  A 
 reception will be held for the nine artists participating in this 
 exhibition on Sunday from noon to 3 PM.  Free parking is available in the 
 ILWU parking lot adjacent to the corner of 2nd and King Streets.  Viewing 
 hours will be from noon to 5 PM, Sunday through Tuesday, and noon to 
 evening closing, Wednesday.\n\nA potluck will be held on Wednesday, 
 beginning at 6:30 PM with a presentation on the Bread and Roses Strike at 
 7:15 PM.  Bring a dish and your voice.  All are welcome.  A $10.00 donation 
 will go to Occupy San Francisco and ILWU Local 21 EGT Fighting Fund, 
 Longview, WA.  No one will be turned away due to lack of funds.  Artists 
 and poets include David Rovics, Renee Gibbons, Alice Rogoff, The Rocking 
 Solidarity Chorus, Hali Hammer, Mary Rudge and others.  LaborFest organizes 
 events on labor and culture for the month of July every year, 2012 markng 
 the nineteenth year of July events sponsored by the organization.  Events 
 for January 2012 will be posted at laborfest.net.\n\nJesus Barraza and 
 Melanie Cervantes are graphic arts collaborators in their project Dignidad 
 Rebelde.  The poster products from this teamwork reflect community 
 struggles, visions of hope and assertions of dignity.  Their subject matter 
 embraces a wide humanity, recognizing that “the history of the majority 
 of people worldwide is a history of colonialism, genocide, and 
 exploitation.”  Barraza, an activist printmaker based in San Leandro, CA, 
 is co-founder of ten12, a collective of ditigal artists, and Taller Tupac 
 Amaru, a studio devoted to screen printing. Barraza has taught and 
 exhibited widely, including Chicago, El Paso, New York, San Francisco, 
 Santa Fe, Tokyo, Bolivia and Mexico.  Cervantes, who holds a BA in Ethnic 
 Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, is an Xicana 
 activist-artist who serves justice movements with her artistic vision.  She 
 has exhibited in Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and her 
 art has reached audiences worldwide.\n\nThe muralist Mike Conner is a 
 former member of IBEW as an electrician and is now a member of IATSE Local 
 1 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.  His art has been focused on 
 labor themes for decades, where it has been displayed at labor festivals 
 and art exhibitions, including a continuing series called Boss Greed.  He 
 is a continuing contributor to LaborFest, participating in the 
 commemoration of the 1934 San Francisco general strike in 2009 and the 
 100th Year Commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire this 
 year.\n\nJan Cook has always made art in the context of social issues.  Her 
 early work developed first during the rising awareness of women's issues in 
 the 1970s and gradually broadened to include labor, race and class 
 perspectives.  Cook studied at the University of Illinois and California 
 State University, Los Angeles, obtaining irrelevant BFA and MFA degrees.  
 After a few years of experimentation as an illustrator in the movie 
 industry, Cook became involved with the Los Angeles Mural Movement, working 
 with Judy Baca and others.  Moving to San Francisco, the artist continued 
 painting murals and making prints.  Recently Cook has been combining 
 printmaking with digital painting, altering hand-drawn images with found 
 pictures of historical and contemporary news events from the 
 Internet.\n\nDavid Duckworth employs drawing to comment on the social 
 conditions of cities and political states.  He has exhibited at Bluedahlias 
 and Underglass in San Francisco, Works/San José, and with Collaborative 
 Concepts at Saunders Farm, Garrison, NY.  As a performance artist, 
 Duckworth has organized and presented Detainee at Roger Smith Hotel, New 
 York, and collaborative work at Jonathan Schorr Gallery, New York.  As a 
 curator, he has organized Body Commodities / Queer Packaging and American 
 Seven at Works/San José, Detainee Wear at Bluedahlias, and several 
 exhibitions for LaborFest.\n\nGloria Frym’s family connects the artist to 
 the textile industry for over three generations.  Her immigrant father, 
 grandparents and other relatives all worked in the Manhattan textile 
 industry. Her maternal grandparents are buried in Workman’s Circle in a 
 Long Island cemetery.  An associate professor in the MFA and BA Writing and 
 Literature Programs at California College of the Arts, Frym has been 
 photographing handmade protest signage for the last ten years.  Primarily a 
 writer, Frym is the author of two short story collections, Distance No 
 Object (City Lights Books) and How I Learned (Coffee House Press), as well 
 as several volumes of poetry, including Mind Over Matter (BlazeVOX), Any 
 Time Soon (Little Red Leaves), and The Lost Sappho Poems (Effing Press).  
 She also has a book of interviews with women artists and published numerous 
 essays, articles and reviews.\n\nA San Francisco-based painter, Amelia 
 Lewis has exhibited in Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco since 2001 and 
 curated exhibitions since 2004.  All images are from the Do I Look Illegal 
 series, which first opened at the former Timezone Gallery, San 
 Francisco.\n\nGraphic artist Doug Minkler has designed posters for several 
 decades that address social inequalities and oppression, war, and corporate 
 profiteering and plutocracy.  The artist was recently honored by the Center 
 for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles.  Minkler is a past 
 contributor to LaborFest, most recently exhibited at SOMArts Cultural 
 Center and Expressions Gallery, Berkeley.\n\nIn artist Rachel Schreiber’s 
 specific work for this exhibition, the portraits of early twentieth-century 
 textile workers’ immigrant women leaders and contemporary labor activists 
 of Mexico bridge the time span between then and now, American labor 
 activism of the past and global labor activism of the present.    Presently 
 Associate Professor and Director of Humanities at The California College of 
 the Arts, Oakland and SF, Schreiber has exhibited at the Contemporary 
 Jewish Museum, San Francisco, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, 
 SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, and Art in General, New York.  The 
 artist is also active as a instructor, lecturer and cultural 
 historian.\n\nLaborFest\nwww.laborfest.net\n(415)642-8066\n\n\nBread and 
 Roses: The 1912 Lawrence textile Strike And The IWW\nBy Joyce 
 Kornbluh\n\nhttp://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/iww/kornbluh_bread_roses.html\n\nEarly 
 in January 1912 I.W.W. activities focused on a dramatic ten-week strike of 
 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It became the most 
 widely publicized I.W.W. conflict, acquainting the nation with the plight 
 of the unskilled, foreign-born worker as well as with the organization's 
 philosophy of radical unionism. "Lawrence was not an ordinary strike," 
 wrote Brissenden in 1919, "It was a social revolution in 
 parvo."\n\nLawrence in 1912 was a great textile center, outranking all 
 others in the production of woolen and worsted goods. Its principal mills 
 were those of the American Woolen Company, a consolidation of thirty-four 
 factories in New England whose yearly output was valued at $45,000,000. The 
 woolen and cotton mills employed over 40,000 persons, about half of 
 Lawrence's population over age fourteen. Most of them were unskilled 
 workers of many nationalities, who had come from Europe after 1900, 
 attracted by the promises of labor Contractors representing the expanding 
 textile industry in Massachusetts.\n\nBut despite a heavy, government 
 tariff protection of the woolen industry, the wages and living standards of 
 textile operatives had declined steadily since 1905. The introduction of 
 the two-loom system in the woolen mills and a corresponding speed-up in the 
 cotton industry had resulted in lay-offs, unemployment, and a drop in 
 wages. A report of the U. S. Commissioner of Labor, Charles P. Neil, showed 
 that for the week ending November 25, 1911, 22,000 textile employees, 
 including foremen, supervisors, and office workers, averaged about $8.76 
 for a full week's work.\n\nIn addition, the cost of living was higher in 
 Lawrence than elsewhere in New England. Rents, paid on a weekly basis, 
 ranged from $1.00 to $6.00 a week for small tenement apartments in frame 
 buildings which the Neil Report found "extra hazardous" in construction and 
 potential firetraps. Congestion was worse in Lawrence than in any other 
 city in New England; mill families in 58 percent of the homes visited by 
 federal investigators found it necessary to take in boarders to raise 
 enough money for rent.\n\nBread, molasses, and beans were the staple diet 
 of most mill workers. "When we eat meat it seems like a holiday, especially 
 for the children," testified one weaver before the March 1912 congressional 
 investigation of the Lawrence strike.\n\nOf the 22,000 textile workers 
 investigated by Labor Commissioner Neil, well over half were women and 
 children who found it financially imperative to work in the mills. Half of 
 all the workers in the four Lawrence mills of the American Woolen Company 
 were girls between ages fourteen and eighteen. Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh, a 
 Lawrence physician, wrote: "A considerable number of the boys and girls die 
 within the first two or three years after beginning work . . . thirty-six 
 out of every 100 of all the men and women who work in the mill die before 
 or by the time they are twenty-five years of age. Because of malnutrition, 
 work strain, and occupational diseases, the average mill worker's life in 
 Lawrence was over twenty-two years shorter than that of the manufacturer, 
 stated Dr. Shapleigh.\n\nResponding in a small way to public pressure over 
 the working conditions of textile employees, the Massachusetts state 
 legislature passed a law, effective January 1, 1912, which reduced the 
 weekly hours from fifty-six to fifty-four for working women and children. 
 Workers feared that this would mean a corresponding wage cut, and their 
 suspicions were sharpened when the mill corporations speeded up the 
 machines and posted notices that, following January 1, the fifty-four-hour 
 work week would be maximum for both men and women operatives.\n\nThe I.W.W. 
 had been organizing among the foreign born in Lawrence since 1907 and 
 claimed over a thousand members, but it had only about 300 paid up members 
 on its rolls. About 2500 English-speaking skilled workers were organized by 
 craft into three local unions of the A.F.L.'s United Textile Workers, but 
 only about 208 of these were in good standing in 1912. The small, 
 English-speaking branch of the I.W.W. sent a letter to President Wood of 
 the American Woolen Company asking how wages would be affected under the 
 new law. There was no reply. Resenment grew as the textile workers realized 
 that a reduction of two-hours pay from their marginal incomes would mean, 
 as I.W.W. publicity pointed out, three loaves of bread less each week from 
 their meager diet.\n\nPolish women weavers in the Everett Cotton Mills were 
 the first to notice a shortage of thirty two cents in their pay envelopes 
 on January 11. They stopped their looms and left the mill, shouting "short 
 pay, short pay!" Other such outbursts took place throughout Lawrence. The 
 next morning workers at the Washington and Wood mills joined the walkout. 
 For the first time in the city's history, the bells of the Lawrence city 
 ball rang the general riot alarm.\n\nThat afternoon a mass meeting was held 
 at the Franco-Belgian Hall, and a telegram was sent to Joseph Ettor, an 
 I.W.W. Executive Board member, asking that be come from New York to assist 
 the strike. Twenty-seven-year-old Ettor had visited Lawrence in the past to 
 preach I.W.W. unionism. He was well known in the Italian community as a 
 veteran I.W.W. organizer who had worked in the shipyards of San Francisco, 
 traveled through West Coast mining and lumber camps, and led the 
 foreign-born workers of the Pressed Steel Car Company in the 1909 McKees 
 Rocks, Pennsylvania, strike. Practical, pragmatic, and quick in decision 
 making Ettor could speak English, Italian, and Polish fluently and could 
 understand Hungarian and Yiddish.\n\nUnder his aggressive leadership, a 
 strike committee was immediately formed of two representatives from each of 
 the nationalities represented among the mill workers. They were to meet 
 each morning and take complete charge of the strike. The workers' demands 
 called for a 15 percent increase in wages on a fifty-four-hour work week, 
 double time for overtime work, and no discrimination against any workers 
 for their strike participation. In response to the circulation of strike 
 leaflets throughout the town, Lawrence Mayor Scanlon ordered a company of 
 local militia to spend the night at the armory and patrol the streets 
 around the mills.\n\nMass picketing and arrests started the first week of 
 the strike. It was the first time there had ever been mass picketing in any 
 New England town. When crowds of workers demonstrated in front of the 
 Atlantic and Pacific mills, they were drenched by water from fire hoses on 
 adjoining roofs. The strikers retaliated by throwing chunks of ice. 
 Thirty-six were arrested and most of them sentenced to a year in prison. As 
 the judge stated, "The Only way we can teach them is to deal out the 
 severest sentences." The governor ordered out the state militia and state 
 police. One officer remarked to a writer for Outlook Magazine: "Our company 
 of militia went down to Lawrence during the first days of the strike. Most 
 of them had to leave Harvard to do it; but they rather enjoyed going down 
 there to have a fling at those people." Harry Emerson Fosdick quoted a 
 Boston lawyer: "The strike should have been stopped in the first 
 twenty-four hours. The militia should have been instructed to shoot. That 
 is the way Napoleon did it."\n\nA few days after the strike began, Arturo 
 Giovannitti, an Italian poet and orator, came to Lawrence from New York 
 City to take charge of strike relief. He came in the interest of Il 
 Proletario, the newspaper which he edited for the Italian Socialist 
 Federation. Relief committees, a network of soup kitchens, and food 
 distribution stations were set up by each nationality group. The 
 Franco-Belgian station alone took care of 1200 families weekly. Volunteer 
 doctors gave medical care. Families received from $2.00 to $5.00 each week 
 from the funds raised throughout the country in response to the strike 
 committee's appeal. "The problem of relief was so efficiently handled," 
 wrote labor historian Samuel Yellin, "that during the ten week strike there 
 was no wavering whatsoever in the strikers' ranks."\n\nLawrence was a new 
 kind of strike, the first time such large numbers of unskilled, unorganized 
 foreign-born workers had followed the radical leadership of the I.W.W. John 
 Golden, president of the A.F.L. United Textile Workers denounced it as 
 "revolutionary" and "anarchistic" and attempted unsuccessfully to wrest the 
 leadership of the strike away from the I.W.W. A.F.L. President Samuel 
 Gompers defined the strike as a "class conscious industrial revolution ... 
 a passing event that is not intended to be an organization for the 
 protection of the immediate rights or promotion of the near future 
 interests of the workers." However, Gompers defended the lawful rights of 
 the I.W.W. members to, "express themselves as their conscience 
 dictates."\n\n"It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous," wrote 
 labor reporter Mary Heaton Vorse. "They are always marching and singing. 
 The tired, gray crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had 
 waked and opened their months to sing." And in the American Magazine, Ray 
 Stannard Baker reported:\n\nIt is not short of amazing, the power of a 
 great idea to weld men together. . . . There was in it a peculiar, intense, 
 vital spirit, a religious spirit if you will, that I have never felt before 
 in any strike. . . . At first everyone predicted that it would be 
 impossible to bold these divergent people together, but aside from the 
 skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions comparatively few went 
 back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little 
 violence.\n\nLess than a week after the strike started, the police found 
 dynamite in three different places in Lawrence: in a tenement house, in an 
 empty lot, and in a shoemaker's shop next door to the print shop where 
 Ettor received his mail. The press and the police were quick to assign 
 guilt to the strikers. An editorial in the New York Times declared: "The 
 strikers display a fiendish lack of humanity which ought to place them 
 beyond the comfort of religion until they have repented." The I.W.W. 
 claimed, however, that the BostonAmerican, a Hearst paper, was off the 
 press and on sale in Lawrence with the details of the dynamite discovery 
 before the sticks of dynamite were actually found. Soon after, John Breen, 
 a local undertaker and a member of the Lawrence school board, was arrested 
 and charged with planting the explosives in a plot to discredit the 
 workers. He was fined $500 and released on bail. President Wood of the 
 American Woolen Company was implicated, but cleared by the court although 
 he could not explain why he bad recently made a cash payment to 
 Breen.\n\nOne of the largest demonstrations of the strike took place on 
 January 29 when Ettor addressed a mass meeting on the Lawrence Common, 
 urged the strikers to be peaceful and orderly, and led them on a march 
 through the business district. At one of the mills, a company of militiamen 
 refused to let them pass. Ettor averted a conflict by waving the paraders 
 up a side street. They followed, and cheered him for his good 
 sense.\n\nThat evening, independent of the earlier demonstration, Anna 
 LoPizzo, a woman striker, was killed when police tried to break up a picket 
 line. The strikers said she was shot by a Lawrence police officer. 
 Nevertheless, Ettor and Giovannitti, who were three miles away talking to a 
 meeting of German workers, were arrested as "accessories to the murder" and 
 charged with inciting and provoking the violence. They were refused bail 
 and imprisoned for eight months without trial. In April, Joseph Caruso, an 
 Italian striker, was arrested and jailed in an attempt by Lawrence police 
 to find the man who had fire the fatal shot.\n\nMartial law was enforced 
 following the arrest of the two I.W.W. strike leaders. City officials 
 declared all public meetings illegal, and Lawrence authorities called out 
 twenty-two more militia companies to patrol the streets. A militiaman's 
 bayonet killed a fifteen-year old Syrian boy in another clash between 
 strikers and police.\n\nThe arrest of Ettor and Ciovannitti was aimed at 
 disrupting the strike. However, the I.W.W. sent Bill Haywood to Lawrence, 
 and with him came I.W.W. organizers William Trautmann, Elizabeth Gurley 
 Flynn, and, later, Carlo Tresca, an Italian anarchist. More than 15,000 
 strikers met Haywood at the railroad station and carried him down Essex 
 Street to the Lawrence Common, where he addressed a group of 25,000 
 strikers. Group by group, they sang the "Internationale" for him in their 
 various tongues. Looking down from the speaker's stand and seeing the young 
 strikers in the crowd, Haywood roared in his foghorn voice: "Those kids 
 should be in school instead of slaving in the mills."\n\nThroughout the 
 strike, Haywood urged strikers to maintain an attitude of passive 
 resistance. But this took many forms. One innovation in strike technique 
 was an endless chain picket line of thousands of strikers who marched 
 through the mill districts wearing white arm bands which read, "Don't be a 
 scab." Large groups locked arms on the sidewalks and passed along the 
 business streets. When this tactic was disrupted by the police, huge crowds 
 of mill workers would move in and out of stores, not buying anything. As 
 the acting head of the police later testified in Washington, "They had our 
 shopkeepers in a state of terror; it was a question whether or not they 
 would shut up their shops."\n\nBy far the most dramatic episode of the 
 strike involved sending the strikers' children to sympathetic families in 
 other cities, a measure of strike relief which bad been used in Europe by 
 French and Italian workers. About 120 children left Lawrence on February 10 
 and were met at the station in New York City by 5000 members of the Italian 
 Socialist Federation and the Socialist Party singing the "Internationale" 
 and "The Marsaillaise." The youngsters were placed in homes which had been 
 selected by a women's committee of New York sympathizers. Margaret Sanger, 
 later famous for her work in birth control, was one of the nurses who 
 accompanied the children on the train to New York City. She testified 
 before a congressional committee in March: "Out of the 119 children, only 
 four had underwear on ... their outerwear was almost in rags . . . their 
 coats were simply torn to shreds ... and it was the bitterest weather we 
 have had this winter."\n\nA few weeks later, ninety-two more children 
 arrived in New York City and, before going to their temporary foster homes, 
 paraded with banners down Fifth Avenue. Alarmed at the publicity this 
 exodus was receiving, the Lawrence authorities ordered that no more 
 children could leave the city. On February 24 when a group of 150 more 
 children made ready to leave for Philadelphia, fifty policemen and two 
 militia companies surrounded the Lawrence railroad station. They tore 
 children away from their parents, threw women and children into a waiting 
 patrol wagon, and detained thirty of them in jail. A member of the 
 Philadelphia Women's Committee testified under oath:\n\nWhen the time came 
 to depart, the children, arranged in a long line, two by two in an orderly 
 procession with the parents near at hand, were about to make their way to 
 the train when the police . . . closed in on us with their clubs, beating 
 right and left with no thought of the children who then were in desperate 
 danger of being trampled to death. The mothers and the children were thus 
 hurled in a mass and bodily dragged to a military truck and even then 
 clubbed, irrespective of the cries of the panic-stricken mothers and 
 children. We can scarcely find words with which to describe this display of 
 brutality.\n\nThis clash between the children and the police was the 
 turning point of the Lawrence strike. Protests from every part of the 
 country reached Congress as newspaper and magazine articles focused 
 national attention on the conflict. Congressman Victor Berger, a Socialist 
 front Milwaukee, and Congressman William Wilson from Pennsylvania, who 
 became the first secretary of labor, called for a congressional 
 investigation of the Lawrence situation.\n\nIn early March, the House 
 Committee on Rules heard testimony from a group of Lawrence strikers 
 including some teenagers under sixteen years of age. "As soon as I came 
 home I had to go to sleep, I was so tired," the congressmen were told by a 
 fifteen-year-old girl. The young workers testified that the textile 
 companies held back a week of their wages, that they were often required to 
 do unpaid clean-up work on Saturdays, and that in order to get decent 
 drinking water in the mills some of them had to pay five or ten cents a 
 week. So great was national indignation, the President's wife attended the 
 hearings, and President Taft later ordered an investigation of industrial 
 conditions throughout the nation.\n\nConcerned over the public reaction to 
 the hearings, and the possible threat to their own tariff protection, the 
 American Woolen Company acceded to all the strikers' demands on March 12, 
 1912. By the end of March, the rest of the Lawrence textile companies fell 
 in line. Wages were raised for textile workers throughout all of New 
 England. And on March 30 the children who had been living in foster homes 
 in New York City were brought home.\n\nMeanwhile, in the Lawrence prison, 
 Ettor and Giovannitti had turned their jail cells into studies. They read 
 through the warden's library and then the books-Taine, Carlyle, Shelley, 
 Byron, Kantsent in by sympathizers. Ettor, interested in organization 
 methods, requested Burke. Giovannitti had what he called his "afternoon 
 matinees," reading an annotated edition of Shakespeare which had been sent 
 to him by a Harvard student.\n\nAs the months dragged on without a trial, 
 the case of Giovannitti and Ettor became a cause celebre. "Open the jail 
 gates or we will close the mill gates," threatened Haywood. Protest 
 parades, demonstrations, and mass meetings in major cities throughout the 
 country helped raise $60,000 needed for legal defense. In New York's Union 
 Square, 25,000 persons gathered to hear Haywood appeal for funds, then 
 march up Fifth avenue led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In Boston a great 
 demonstration covered the Common. Massachusetts authorities indicted all 
 the members of the Ettor-Giovannitti Defense Committee, then released them 
 on bail.\n\nAgitation mounted. A general strike was advocated by the IWW. 
 In August, a new development in the dynamite plot made headlines. Ernest 
 Pitman, a Lawrence contractor who had built the Wood mill of the American 
 Woolen Company, confessed to a district attorney that the dynamite frame-up 
 had been planned in the Boston offices of Lawrence textile corporations. 
 Pitman committed suicide shortly after he was served papers ordering him to 
 appear and testify before a grand jury. William Wood, who was implicated, 
 was immediately exonerated in court.\n\nPitinan's confession created a 
 surge of sentiment in favor of the liberation of Ettor, Giovannitti, and 
 Caruso. Publicity contrasted the case of the three men who had been 
 detained for months in prison, with the case of Breen, the dynamite 
 planter, who bad been released without jail sentence on a $500 fine. 
 Fifteen thousand Lawrence workers walked out again on September 30 for a 
 twenty-four-hour demonstration strike. Textile workers in neighboring 
 cities threatened similar strikes in support of the I.W.W. leaders. Police, 
 detectives, and the state militia were again called out. Mayor Scanlon 
 started a "God and Country' campaign to drive the I.W.W. out of Lawrence. A 
 parade was organized down the Lawrence main street under a banner which 
 read:\n\nFor God and Country! The stars and stripes forever! The red flag 
 never!\n\nLawrence citizens were encouraged by the town leaders to wear 
 little American flags in their button holes as proof of their patriotic 
 opposition to the I.W.W.\n\nThe trial of Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso 
 began in Salem, Massachusetts, at the end of September; it lasted for two 
 months. The defendants were kept in metal cages in the courtroom while the 
 trial was in session. Crowds of workers waited each day outside the 
 courthouse to cheer them as they entered and left the building. In Sweden 
 and France workers proposed a boycott of American woolen goods along with a 
 strike against all ships bound for American ports. Numerous telegrams were 
 sent from Italy, where Giovannitti's family lobbied actively in his behalf. 
 Italian sympathizers demonstrated in front of the American consulate in 
 Rome, and three Italian districts nominated Giovannitti for the Italian 
 Chamber of Deputies. Delegations visited President Taft at his summer home 
 in Beverly, Massachusetts, to plead for the prisoners' release.\n\nThe 
 prosecution accused Ettor and Giovannitti of inciting the strikers to 
 violence and murder, although witnesses proved that they were speaking to a 
 meeting of workers several miles from the place where Anna LoPizzo was 
 shot. Two hired detectives from a strike-breaking agency testified that 
 Giovannitti had urged strikers to sleep in the daytime and prowl around 
 like wild beasts at night." But the detectives admitted that the speech to 
 which they referred was in Italian and that they had no written notes of 
 the meeting from which to quote. Witnesses testified that Joseph Caruso was 
 home eating supper at the time the woman striker was killed. Caruso said 
 that he was not an I.W.W. member and had never heard Ettor or Giovannitti 
 speak before he was imprisoned. He also said he planned to become a Wobbly 
 as soon as be was released from jail.\n\nBefore the end of the trial, Ettor 
 and Giovannitti asked permission to make closing statements. Joe Ettor said 
 in part:\n\nDoes the District Attorney believe . . . that the gallows or 
 guillotine ever settled an idea? If an idea can live, it lives because 
 history adjudges it right. I ask only for justice. . . . The scaffold has 
 never yet and never will destroy an idea or a movement. . . . An idea 
 consisting of a social crime in one age becomes the very religion of 
 humanity in the next.... Whatever my social views are, they are what they 
 are. They cannot be tried in this courtroom.\n\nGiovannitti's speech, the 
 first he had ever made publicly in English, moved even the reporters who 
 were covering the trial. On November 26, 1912, the men were acquitted and 
 released from jail.\n\nPublic opinion as expressed by the Eastern daily 
 newspapers was practically unanimous in support of the acquittal of Ettor 
 and Giovannitti. But the threat of anarchy and class war raised the fear 
 that "a win in the Lawrence mills means a start that will only end with the 
 downfall of the wage system." An editorial in the liberal Survey magazine 
 questioned:\n\n"Are we to expect that instead of playing the game 
 respectably ... the laborers are to listen to subtle anarchistic philosophy 
 which challenges the fundamental idea of law and order?"\n\nOther 
 publications around the country expressed alarm at the strange doctrines of 
 "direct action," syndicalism," "the general strike"-slogans of a new kind 
 of revolution.\n\nIn the IWW local in Lawrence, membership swelled to 
 10,000 in the year following the strike but dropped to 400 by 1914 as the 
 depression of the preceding year cut into employment in the textile 
 industry. In addition, textile employers initiated an espionage system in 
 the mills to counter any further radical influence. A 50 percent speedup of 
 the textile machines after 1912 led to additional unemployment and offset 
 the wage increase gained by the strike settlement.\n\nBut the immediate 
 effect of the Lawrence strike was to hearten textile workers in other 
 Eastern areas and to prepare for the next large strike drama in the silk 
 mills of Paterson within the year. The strike also made a profound 
 impression on the public and the rest of the labor movement by dramatizing 
 the living and working conditions of unorganized, foreign-born workers in 
 crowded industrial areas, and communicating the spirit of their 
 rebellion.\n\nFollowing the Salem trial, literary critic Kenneth McGowan 
 wrote in Forum Magazine:\n\nWhatever its future, the I.W.W. has 
 accomplished one tremendously big thing, a thing that sweeps away all 
 twaddle over red flags and violence and sabotage, and that is the 
 individual awakening of "illiterates" and "scum" to an original, personal 
 conception of society and the realization of the dignity and rights of 
 their part in it. They have learned more than class consciousness; they 
 have learned consciousness of Self . . . .\n\nThis was a fitting 
 interpretation of the spirit of the striking mill girls who carried picket 
 signs which read:\n\nWE WANT BEAD AND ROSES TOO.\n\n\nSource:\nKornbluh, 
 Joyce, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, Charles H. Kerr Publishing, Chicago, 
 1988\n\n\n1/11/2012 SF 100th Anniversary of Bread Roses 
 Strike\n\nCommemorate The 100th Anniversary of\nThe Bread And Roses 
 Strike\nJanuary 11 (Wednesday) 2012\nPotluck 6:30 PM\nPresentation 7:15 
 PM\nAt: ILWU Local 34\n801 2nd St. next to AT&T Stadium\nSan 
 Francisco\n(Free parking in union parking lot)\n\n$10.00 Donation-Bring A 
 Dish And Your\nVoice-No One Turned Away Due To Lack of\nFunds\nDonation to 
 go to Occupy San Francisco and\nILWU Local 21\nEGT Fighting Fund\n617 14th 
 St.\nLongview, WA 98632\n\nArtists And Poets:\nDavid Rovics, Renee Gibbons, 
 Alice Rogoff, The Rocking Solidarity Chorus, Hali Hammer, Mary Rudge\nand 
 others\nJanuary 12, 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the Bread and 
 Roses\ntextile mill workers strike in Lawrence, MA. And just as today’s 
 Occupy\nWall Street movement focuses on the 99% and 1%, the truth of 1912 
 was\nthat 1% of the richest Americans owned 50% of the country’s 
 wealth.\nConducting a difficult eight-week struggle during the dead of 
 winter\nagainst “Textile Trust” mill owners, banks, state militia, 
 police, clergy\nand local government, this strike involved thousands of 
 immigrants,\nnearly half women, fighting for justice and human rights, a 
 watershed\nmoment in the history of American labor struggles.\nLaborFest 
 will be commemorating this event with a cultural and arts\nevent at ILWU 
 Local 34 at 801 2nd Street, San Francisco, next to AT&T\nstadium. We will 
 be contributing to Occupy SF and the ILWU Local 21\nDefense 
 Fund.\nhttp://www.breadandrosescentennial.org/node/77\nSponsored by 
 LaborFest\nP.O. Box 40983 San Francisco, CA 94140\n(415) 642-8066, 
 laborfest [at] laborfest.net, http://www.laborfest.net\nThere will also be 
 a curated art show at ILWU Local 34, and a reception with refreshments will 
 be held\non Sunday, January 8th, from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM at ILWU Local 
 34. (Show: 1/8/12 - 1/11/12)\nArtists: Jesus Barraza, Melanie Cervantes, 
 Jan Cook, David Duckworth, Gloria Frym, Amelia Lewis,\nDoug Minkler, Rachel 
 Schreiber, Mike Conner\n\n\n\n\nLasting legacy: City to celebrate 
 centennial of Bread and Roses strike of 1912 & James Oppenheim 
 Song\n\n\n\nJanuary 16, 2011\nLasting legacy: City to celebrate centennial 
 of Bread and Roses strike of 1912\nBy Yadira Betances\nybetances [at] 
 eagletribune.com\n\nhttp://www.eagletribune.com/local/x1221291788/Lasting-legacy-City-to-celebrate-centennial-of-Bread-and-Roses-strike-of-1912\n\n\nLAWRENCE 
 — Ninety-nine years ago, the city gained international attention when 
 30,000 mill workers took to the streets after their wages were cut.\n\nThe 
 strike began on Jan. 12, 1912, and lasted more than two months. Over the 
 years, it became known as the "Bread and Roses" strike after the songs that 
 contained the words "We want bread and roses, too!"\n\nTo commemorate the 
 historic event, members from several city organizations formed the Bread 
 and Roses Centennial Committee, which has worked for the past two years to 
 plan next year's big anniversary.\n\n"For the time in 1912, it was the 
 largest labor strike that the United States had ever seen," said committee 
 Chairman Robert Forrant, who teaches labor history at the University of 
 Massachusetts Lowell. "It was also significant because so many of the 
 strikers were women and immigrants. It was something unique because of 
 that."\n\nYesterday, the centennial committee held a kickoff event at 
 Lawrence Heritage State Park where it announced its plans for 2012 and 
 invited the community to participate.\n\nDuring the program, attendants 
 heard an overview of the history of the strike and saw presentations on 
 some of the events planned, as well as slide shows of rare photographs of 
 the strike and Lawrence workers.\n\nMary Kate Small, a member of the 
 People's Music Network for Freedom and Struggle, sang, "We Were There," a 
 song written by Bev Grant about women through history and the labor 
 movement. The song mentions Lawrence's Bread and Roses strike.\n\n"She 
 really captured in that verse what happed at the time of the strike," Small 
 said. "It was considered a singing strike, and music was used to lift their 
 spirits and brought them along."\n\nForrant grew up in Beverly and said he 
 first learned of the Strike of 1912 while an undergraduate student at 
 Northeastern University. He identifies with the story, having worked as a 
 machinist for 20 years in Western Massachusetts. After losing his job, he 
 went on to study for his doctorate degree in history at University of 
 Massachusetts Amherst.\n\nHe said the Lawrence strike became an 
 international story because it affected people from around the globe. 
 Reporters from Germany, France, Italy and Britain came to Lawrence to write 
 about how the strike affected people from those countries.\n\n"It created 
 an awareness of class conflict," Forrant said. "Here you had working class 
 families who could barely feed their kids and industrial giants. It was a 
 David and Goliath story."\n\nHe said it is important to commemorate the 
 historical event.\n\n"Most people take for granted programs we have today, 
 like social security, unemployment benefits," Forrant said. "Looking back 
 in history and the social progress we've made, it shows what can be done 
 when workers and communities organize."\n\nLouise Sandberg, archivist at 
 Lawrence Public Library, agrees.\n\n"It's always important to remember 
 where you come from and what people had to deal with, both good and bad," 
 she said.\n\nThe library has a collection of newspapers from 1912, as well 
 as newspaper and magazine articles about the strike, from 1912 to present. 
 The library also owns several books written about the historical event, 
 both fiction and nonfiction.\n\nOne unique item is a newsletter printed by 
 the militia sent to Lawrence to quell the strikers.\n\n"It's very 
 tongue-in-cheek, but it's quite unique because I've not seen it before," 
 Sandberg said.\n\nSmall hopes to have a musical program monthly involving 
 students from the city's schools. Other events planned for 2012 include a 
 citywide reading of "Bread and Roses, Too," written by Katherine Paterson 
 in 2005. The book tells the story of two Italian girls who are sent to 
 Barre, Vt., during the mill strike.\n\nThe celebration begins next January 
 with an exhibit of items from the strike hosted by the Lawrence History 
 Center. Other events include a public art show related to strike themes 
 sponsored by the Essex Art Center, and an exhibit of paintings by Ralph 
 Fasanella at Lawrence Heritage State Park.\n\nThe Lawrence History Center 
 is also looking for residents to write essays and create artwork and video 
 presentations on the strike for a symposium to be held next April. Selected 
 works will be published in the Baywood Publishing Series, "Work, Health and 
 Environment."\n\nThe highlight of the centennial celebration will be the 
 27th annual Bread and Roses Festival at Campagnone Common, appropriately 
 held on Labor Day weekend.\n\n"We're trying to educate Lawrencians today, 
 giving them something to take pride in their history and accomplishments of 
 the past," said Jim Beauchesne, visitor services supervisor at Lawrence 
 Heritage State Park.\n\nSmall said she still recalls when the People's 
 Music Network for Freedom and Struggle sponsored folk singer Pete Seeger at 
 the Bread and Roses Festival several years ago.\n\n"He said that by 2012, 
 everyone in this country should know the name of Lawrence, Massachusetts, 
 because he knew how important the Bread and Roses Strike was," Small said. 
 "We're going to do our best to make this year's festival the biggest and 
 best ever."\n\nFor information on the Bread and Roses Centennial Committee, 
 contact chairman Robert Forrant at 978-934-2904 or e-mail him at rforrant 
 [at] external.umass.edu\n\nThe Bread and Roses strike\n\nOn Jan. 12, 1912, 
 workers at Lawrence mills walked out of their jobs after a federal law cut 
 their weekly hours from 56 to 54, yet mill owners sped production and cut 
 workers' pay. Polish women were said to be the first ones to shut down 
 their looms and leave the factories. They were joined by other women, men 
 and children from other mills who had immigrated to the city from various 
 countries in Eastern Europe.\n\nWorkers clashed with local police, and 
 federal militia were sent to the city to quell the protestors. Among the 
 victims of the strike was Anna LoPizzo, who was shot and killed at Union 
 and Garden streets on Jan. 29, 1912.\n\nThe strike ended March 14, 1912, 
 with workers receiving wage increases as well as pay for working 
 overtime.\n\nFollowing the strike, workers and mill owners testified at 
 U.S. Congressional hearings in Washington, D.C. One of them was Camella 
 Teoli, 14, who talked about losing her hair after it was caught in one of 
 the machines she was working on. The testimony led to changes in child 
 labor laws in the United States.\n\n\n\n\nBread and Roses, by James 
 Oppenheim\n\n\nhttp://chawedrosin.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/bread-and-roses-by-james-oppenheim/\n\n\n\n\nthe 
 chawed rosin\n\n\n\n\nBread and Roses, by James Oppenheim\n\n\n\n\n\nBread 
 and Roses\n\nby James Oppenheim\n\nAs we come marching, marching in the 
 beauty of the day,\nA million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts 
 gray,\nAre touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,\nFor 
 the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”\n\nAs 
 we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,\nFor they are women’s 
 children, and we mother them again.\nOur lives shall not be sweated from 
 birth until life closes;\nHearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, 
 but give us roses!\n\nAs we come marching, marching, unnumbered women 
 dead\nGo crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.\nSmall art 
 and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.\nYes, it is bread we fight 
 for — but we fight for roses, too!\n\nAs we come marching, marching, we 
 bring the greater days.\nThe rising of the women means the rising of the 
 race.\nNo more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one 
 reposes,\nBut a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and 
 roses!\n\n-1911\n\nThis poem, written by James Oppenheim to celebrate the 
 movement for women’s rights and published in American Magazine in 1911, 
 is closely associated with the Lawrence textile mill strike of 1912. During 
 the strike, which was in protest of a reduction in pay, the women mill 
 workers carried signs that quoted the poem, reading “We want bread, and 
 roses, too”. The photo above was taken during the strike.\n\nBread and 
 Roses was set to music by Mimi Fariña in the 1970s, and has become an 
 anthem for labor rights, and especially the rights of working women, in the 
 United States and elsewhere.\n\nHere is a recording of the song by Judy 
 Collins.\n\n https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/12/31/18703787.php
SUMMARY:Bread And Roses Commemoration Art Show In SF Begins With Reception At ILWU Local 34
LOCATION:801 2nd St/Embarcadero next to AT&T Stadium\nSan Francisco
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/12/31/18703787.php
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