When Gompers testified, he literally shook with rage, and it seemed to me he was about to have apoplexy. The mill owners charged that the whole affair had been staged solely for notoriety and that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children should step in.
Unfortunately, the witnesses for the strikers were not well-documented. When it was obvious that the Congressional Committee was not receiving the correct impression, Berger asked me to take the stand and describe the condition of the children as I had seen them. Writing up statistics on hospital reports had given me the habit of classification. I was able from my brief notes to answer every question as to their nationalities, their ages, their weights, the number of those without underclothes and without overcoats. Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding led the inquiry, and I could see he was in sympathy with my vehement replies.
The publicity had been so well managed by the Italians and their leaders that popular opinion turned in favor of the strikers, and they eventually won. At the end of March the little refugees, who had endeared themselves to their foster-parents, went back to the mill district. It was hard to recognize the same children of six weeks before, plumped up and dressed in new clothes. In November Ettor and Giovanitti were acquitted.
The Paterson silk strike of the next year, in which the workers were again predominantly Italian, may have been as important as the one at Lawrence, but it was by no means so obviously dramatic. Paterson was a gloomy city, and, as a river, the Passaic was sadder than the Merrimac. Though the leadership was far more cohesive, caution was evidenced on every hand. Its chief interest to me lay in Bill Haywood’s participation. At Lawrence he had only been one of the committee, whereas at Paterson he was in charge for the first time in the East. Always before he had advised strikers to “take it on the chin” and not be too gentle in hitting back. But here, before ten thousand crowding up to the rostrum, I heard him warn, “Keep your hands in your pockets, men, and nobody can say you are shooting.”
An American was apt to be at a disadvantage in handling foreigners, particularly when they felt aggrieved. They objected to his manner of going about things, so different from their own, and he, on the other hand, could not fully understand their psychology, and had the added obstacle of being compelled to work through an intermediary in language.
At Paterson the Italian groups were not behind Bill. As soon as he began to temper his language and sound a more wary note of advice, his once-faithful adherents repudiated him. His clarion call of “Hands in the Pockets,” which was intended to create favorable popular opinion by proving them “good boys,” had actually tied their hands, and detectives beat and bullied them just the same. The public was not impressed and they were resentful. They claimed he did not have the old fighting spirit he had shown when directing the miners of the West, he was getting soft, he was a sick man. Although he had actually progressed tactically and left them where they were, from that time on he lost his power of leadership.
Following the method which had been so successful at Lawrence, Jack Reed endeavored to dramatize direct action in an enormous pageant at Madison Square Garden. He even had pallbearers carry an actual coffin into the hall to pictorialize the funeral of a worker who had been shot at Paterson. I could feel a tremor go through the audience, but, on the whole, conviction was lacking.
The pageant was a fitting conclusion to one period of my life. I believe that we all had our parts to play. Some had important ones; some were there to lend support to a scene; some were merely voices off stage. Each, whatever his role, was essential. I only walked on, but it had its influence in my future.
No matter to what degree I might participate in strikes, I always came back to the idea which was beginning to obsess me—that something more was needed to assuage the condition of the very poor. It was both absurd and futile to struggle over pennies when fast-coming babies required dollars to feed them.
I was thoroughly despondent after the Paterson debacle, and had a sickening feeling that there was to be no end; it seemed to me the whole question of strikes for higher wages was based on man’s economic need of supporting his family, and that this was a shallow principle upon which to found a new civilization. Furthermore, I was enough of a Feminist to resent the fact that woman and her requirements were not being taken into account in reconstructing this new world about which all were talking. They were failing to consider the quality of life itself.