CHAPTER XXVII Progress in Spite of Leaders
Other strikes come to my mind, strikes of less fire and flame and hence attracting less national notice. The papers proclaimed to stockholders and investors that there was peace, and there was no peace. The garment workers struck and won. In Roosevelt, New Jersey, the workingmen in the fertilizing plant of Williams and Clark struck.
Two strikers were shot dead—shot in the back by the hired gunmen. The guards were arraigned, let out on bail, and reported back on the job. The strikers were assembled in a vacant lot. Guards shot into their midst, firing low and filling the legs of the workers with bullets.
“Mother,” the strikers wrote to me, “come help us with our women!”
I went. “Women,” said I, “see that your husbands use no fire arms or violence no matter what the provocation. Don’t let your husbands scab. Help them stand firm and above all keep them from the saloons. No strike was ever won that did not have the support of the womenfolk.”
The street car men struck along in 1916 in New York City.
I spoke to a mass meeting of carmen’s wives and we certainly had those women fighting like wildcats. They threatened me with jail and I told the police I could raise as much hell in jail as out. The police said if anyone was killed I should be held responsible and hanged.
“If they want to hang me, let them,” I said. “And on the scaffold I will shout ‘Freedom for the working class!’ And when I meet God Almighty I will tell him to damn my accusers and the accusers of the working class, the people who tend and develop and beautify His world.”