Bread and Roses Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream

by Watson, Bruce

• ISBN13: 9780670033973
• ISBN10: 0670033979
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-08-18
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

The 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts was a watershed moment in labor history as significant as the Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the Triangle fire in New York. In Bread and Roses, veteran journalist Bruce Watson provides a long-overdue account of the strike that began when textile workers stormed out of the mills in Lawrence on a frigid January day. Despite owners’ predictions to the contrary, the walkout soon became a protracted Dickensian drama that included twenty-three thousand strikers from fifty-one nations singing as they paraded through Lawrence, bayonet-toting militiamen patrolling the streets, and the daring evacuation of the strikers’ tattered and hungry children to Manhattan, where they lived with strangers and wrote loving letters to their parents on the picket line.Based on newspaper accounts, magazine reportage, and oral histories, Bread and Rosesis vividly narrated and teeming with colorful characters—including rags-to-riches mill owner William Wood and radical labor leader Big Bill” Haywood. A rousing history with the narrative drive of a novel, Bread and Rosesis the true-to-life tale of a strike that became the fabric of a community and an inspiration to workers around the world.

Author Biography

Bruce Watson is an award-winning journalist whose articles have been published in Smithsonian, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Examiner, Yankee Magazine, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(6)
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER ONE: For Two Hours' Pay	7	(22)
CHAPTER TWO: Immigrant City	29	(14)
CHAPTER THREE: The Battle of the Merrimack	43	(19)
CHAPTER FOUR: Stars, Stripes, and Bayonets	62	(20)
CHAPTER FIVE: Dynamite	82	(20)
CHAPTER SIX: Spinning Out of Control	102	(19)
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN: A Nation Divided	121	(20)
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Children's Exodus	141	(21)
CHAPTER NINE: Crackdown	162	(18)
CHAPTER TEN: In Congress, 1912	180	(19)
CHAPTER ELEVEN: An American Tapestry	199	(18)
CHAPTER TWELVE: "The Flag of Liberty Is Here"	217	(24)
Epilogue	241	(18)
Acknowledgments	259	(2)
Notes	261	(50)
Bibliography	311	(10)
Index	321