“Complete demolition of social and economic conditions is the only salvation of the working classes!”
In desperation, American Woolen and the Lawrence Association of Businesses called on Mayor Scanlon to resolve things. The mayor did the only thing he could think of: he brought in additional police protection. The chief of police himself showed up on Union Street and warned the women that if they didn’t get off the streets and stop loitering, they’d be arrested, “each and every bloody one of you,” and dispersed through the minimum-security prisons of Massachusetts. The women nearly trampled him to death. Afterward, Angela ran to City Hall’s research room to look up “loitering” in the legal code. It was defined as “standing still in the public square.” In defiance, the women began to march back and forth on Union Street in the reformed moving picket line. The police had to devise another way to get the ladies off the streets.
Lawrence brought in another reinforcement division from nearby Andover and arrested thousands of strikers, most of them kicking and screaming, for disturbing the peace. The city didn’t have the space to jail three hundred women, much less ten thousand livid women. The clogging up of the courts was prohibitively expensive and socially debilitating. As soon as they were released, the women returned to the picket lines, parading and chanting in a sing-song day in and day out, “We want bread, but we want roses too!”
All women, that is, but an anxious and defenseless Gina, who, wishing only for bread, bowed her head and walked the other way to St. Vincent de Paul’s to spin for pennies or up to Prospect Hill with Mimoo to dust for the affluent.
Emma Goldman, not to remain in the shadows of Mother Jones’s limelight, decided to come to Lawrence and weigh in on her nemesis’s well-publicized comments by giving her own impassioned speech atop Harry’s platform. Of course, she said, the most prominent woman socialist in the country wanted ever stronger chains of bondage for women. In the middle of freezing January, Goldman yelled that free love was the only way out for women because freedom and equality and justice for women were utterly incompatible with marriage. Goldman declared that unlike certain others she would not mention by name, she would gladly stand in the cold with the Lawrence strikers.
When Big Bill, over in Montana, heard what Emma Goldman was saying, he telegraphed Harry to inform him that if he ever saw Emma Goldman on the streets of Lawrence he would suffocate her with his bare hands. The last thing the IWW wanted was Goldman in the middle of a striking city advocating for freedom from state regulation! The IWW advocated total state control, not freedom from it. Like Mother Jones, though for different reasons, Emma Goldman was detrimental to the strikers’ cause.
“Gina, my faithful wife, tell me something,” Harry said after he related the day’s events. “Your beloved Emma Goldman was yelling in the freezing rain, yet I couldn’t help but notice that you were nowhere to be found.”
“You told me to stay inside,” she replied, arranging a white poster board on the dining table. “I’m being a good wife.” Lightly she smiled. “I have no time for free love in the freezing rain.”
“Very wise. What in the world are you doing?”
She had been making placards. EQUALITY NOW! JUSTICE NOW! FAIR WAGES NOW!
“I’m helping Angie.”
“I know why you’re doing it.” He took away her black paintbrush. “I don’t want you to appease her.”
“I told her I would.” She reached for the brush. “Make amends for before.”
“Tell her you’ll make amends by feeding her. Because it all starts with the placards. The next thing you know you’re marching to ‘The Marseillaise’ and defeating Britain. It’s dangerous out there.”
She took the brush from him. “I’m not going out, tesoro. I’m just making signs.”
“You’re going to St. Vincent’s, aren’t you?”
“It’s on Haverhill. The other way.” She didn’t want to remind him, as if he needed reminding, that their Victorian on Summer Street was just half a block from the Common where Joe Ettor shouted twice a day every day, and four blocks from Essex and Union, a long lobbed softball away from all the trouble. She had no business being out, and they both knew it. But what choice did she have? Mimoo’s seven houses to clean were not enough to cover their bills, and new cleaning work was scarce with so many women competing for the only viable employment. At least St. Vincent’s paid her a tiny wage for sewing, ironing, sorting donations, and spinning, and they gave her food from their pantry, as if she herself were now one of the people in desperate need of help.
Harry stood close, twisting the curls of her hair around his fingers. “I’m glad we don’t meet here anymore,” he said. “Now we go to talk nonsense at Arturo’s. It’s better. Our house is quieter. Nicer.”
“Yes, here is quieter. Because you’re never here. You’re always there, on Lowell, in that boiling cauldron of plotting. How is that better?”
“We have to keep planning. But when I come home, it’s quiet.” He bent to her cheek.
She raised her face to him. “If you’re just planning, I’m just making art.”
Harry watched her paint in block letters. “I have to go out there,” he said. “I’m on the strike committee. And Bill’s paying me. I have to go out there so you don’t have to. Just like Mother Jones said.”
“Oh, so now we listen to her. Some feminist I am.”
“Some feminist indeed.” Leaning down, he patted her belly.
She kissed him. “I won’t go out there, mio amore. Only to clean and spin.”
“Promise?” He blinked anxiously.
“Of course.” She blinked anxiously back.
She prayed for her child, for her husband, for her mother, for the strike to be over. Sometimes not in that order. Angela barely spoke to her. The placards weren’t sufficient atonement.
Gina hated being broke, hated having no money. The bills piled up. Rent was coming due in February, the light bill. Food needed to be bought. They could eat her stewed tomatoes for only so long. Eventually they’d need bread, pasta. Harry might not care about mundane things like food on the table, but Gina did. She was too poor for idealism.
Four
THE LAWRENCE TEXTILE BOARD of directors brought in Floyd Russell, a whip-smart lawyer from Boston, to defend themselves against an association with police brutality. Apparently it was bad publicity to spray women with fire hoses to disperse them. A no-nonsense man, Floyd said, “Brutality? But they’re still on the street! This ridiculous mess should’ve been stopped weeks ago. The police should’ve been instructed to shoot. That’s how successful leaders handle things.”
But the police didn’t shoot. They only threatened to shoot. The state militia arrived to boost their numbers because the striking crowds kept swelling, to fifteen thousand, to twenty.
“Twenty thousand angry screaming women,” Harry said to Gina over one tense dinner of boiled beans and
