A century
ago, 1916, Americans re-elected Woodrow Wilson, regarded as a progressive
Democrat, for a second term as President. In his first term he pushed some
significant legislation through Congress: a graduated income tax; the
anti-monopolistic Federal Trade Commission; a law prohibiting child labor; and
another law that established the 8-hour day for railroad workers.
This last achievement
had been a goal of the American labor movement for 40 years, an aim taken up on
the American example by the international labor movement. Eight hours for
railroad workers created an important precedent for establishing a standard for
all fulltime workers that still applies in many American workplaces. The
prohibition of child labor was a goal that social reformers had urged for a
century.
Wilson also
followed Theodore Roosevelt's example in asserting the right and duty of
American Presidents to act in the interests of the American people, even when
no "strict interpretation" of the Constitution gave his office that
power. But though he had pledged to keep American out of World War I, a year
after election (1917) he asked Congress to declare war against Germany,
following persistent attacks on American shipping.
But while
Wilson's Progressive agenda would ultimately improve working conditions,
American factory workers 100 years ago were finding it increasing hard to feed
their families.
1916 was the
year that workers at the Plymouth Cordage Company, the world's leading
ropemaker, went on strike for higher pay. At the time, according to the revered
Boston historian Samuel Elliot Morison, Cordage male workers earned $9 a week
(women earned less). Morrison also pointed out that "the Plymouth worker
of 1894 to 1900 with $8.10 a week had much better real wages" than his
counterpart in 1916. Real wages for American industrial workers had been
declining for 15 years, a condition made much worse after 1914 as wartime
demand in Europe for American goods inflated consumer prices, while wages
failed to keep up.
Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, one of two defendants in the famous Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the
central figure in my novel "Suosso's Lane," took part in 1916 Plymouth
Cordage strike although he had stopped working for the company and worked
instead as a "pick and shovel" laborer. After he had nearly died
from working in a pastry factory in his teens, Vanzetti believed that outdoor work was
healthier than working inside a factory.
But the
North Plymouth family he lived with, and the entire North Plymouth immigrant
community he was a part of for five years, depended largely on the Plymouth
Cordage Company for its sustenance. A committed anarchist who believed in both
the abolition of the state and the capitalist economic system, Vanzetti
envisioned strikes as necessary steps toward the recognition that workers
should cooperatively own and run the factories and all other enterprises that
depended upon their labor. So antagonistic was he to established authority
structures that he and other anarchists of his stripe also opposed the creation
of labor unions, seeing them as a new layer of "official" oppression.
In an
account of his life written while in jail, Vanzetti described his role in the
Cordage strike:
"This
company is one of the great money powers of this nation. The town of Plymouth
is its feudal tenure. Of all the local men took a prominent part in the strike,
I was the only one who did not yield or betray the workers... [and] I was the
only one who instead of being compensated was blacklisted by the company, and
subjected to a long, vain, and useless police vigilance..."
Not
surprisingly Morrison, an establishment figure who wrote a book about the
company in 1950 ("The Ropemakers of Plymouth"), has a different, more
circumstantial view of the strike. Despite his own calculation of how poorly
workers were being paid (about 16.6 cents an hour), Morrison writes that
ownership had no idea that wage dissatisfaction would lead workers to take
action: "Then suddenly, wihtout warning, a strike exploded in the Plymouth
plant Jan. 17, 1916."
Since there
was no Cordage union and would be none for decades, the strike developed, he
states, when "A self-constituted
committee, the membership of which was never disclosed [including] some
employees and some who were not .. went to workers homes during a general
strike the next day and making threats."
These are
events that I dramatize in "Suosso's Lane." I'm not sure about the
'making threats' piece of the account by a historian who tended to get his
information from ownership, but I tried to imagine how a group of increasingly
hungry, winter-strained factory workers began to think about and then plan a
general strike at a large industrial site.
Here's an
excerpt from a scene in "Suosso's Lane" that leads toward the drastic
decision to go on strike:
"In
Italia," Benno said, his words simmering with passion,
"in the North, there is a war with Austria for a mountain. A mountain of
ice and snow! Two years now the mountain consumes the men. Thousands on
thousands!"
"Si," said Joe, ordinarily a
harried-looking man, one of the fathers whom Vanzetti suspected of joining the
gathering less for the pleasure of the talk and the heat than to get away for a
while from the complaints of his younger children. Now his thin features
twisted. "But no matter how many die, the armies keep taking more from
their homes and families. It is the armies who are buying up flour and oil and
beans and macaroni."
Benno
looked angrily about him. "And this means that we must pay twice as much
for such needful things!”
Others
raised their voices in shared outrage.
Vanzetti
lifted his head. When the outrage ran its course, he pounced.
“If the
food costs twice as much to buy, does it not follow that the factory must pay
its workers twice as much?” he asked. He looked from face to face, holding the
glance of any man who would return his own.
“Can a man
or a woman eat half as much and still do the same amount of work making the
rope?”
No one
expected the factory to double their wages. Such a thing was unheard of. Still,
it was important to reason correctly. They must see their complaint is just, he
thought. It was a step. One must establish the true facts, before one
bargained. Of course, he did not even believe in the bargain. Still, again, it
was a step.
“Do I not
speak simple truth?”
No one
disagreed. Yet no one rushed in to support a calculation that might point in a
direction not yet made clear.
"It is
the rich men who make the war. It is the war that raises the prices. Now we
must pay the cost of the rich men's war. Can this be endured?"
Enough, he
told himself. You cannot drive people to a place where they do not wish to go.
"No,"
someone said.
He was not
sure who. One of those standing by the stove, perhaps. But the single word
raised the tension in the room, an air of half dread, half anticipation like
the moment before the yanking off of a bandage or the pulling up of a scab. A
good thing, he thought, a needed thing. Though surely painful.
"Everyone
knows Vanzetti," he said. "I do not have the wife, the children. I
work with the pick and the shovel. I do not work in the factory like the other
men in this room. But if the workers demand what they are entitled too, I will
support them every day. Someone must go to the other cities, to tell the story
of this place. To raise the donations for the strike fund."
Benno
returned his look. And the man Joe. Some of the others stared off. Some of
these squatting against the wall in the same room looked up at him in
confusion.
"I
promise this will be done." The averted faces held out against hope.
"By me."
"A
strike?" someone said, after these words. "You urge the strike?"
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