Flesh and Blood So Cheap

by Albert Marrin

  Demonstrators protesting child labor, 1909. The signs say “Abolish Child Slavery!” (picture credit 4.1)

  The new-model factory, however, did more than increase production; it made it easier to form unions. Firms like the Triangle Waist Company gathered hundreds of workers under their roof. With so many people so close together, they had the chance to share ideas, voice grievances, and discuss solutions.

  A big change took place in 1900, the same year the Triangle Waist Company opened its doors, with the formation of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). Open to all who made women’s clothing, the ILGWU had various “locals,” or branches, each specializing in certain tasks, throughout the country. In New York City, men alone—cutters and pressers—belonged to Local 10. Shirtwaist makers joined Local 25. While its members were nearly all women, men controlled the executive board and made the key decisions. But this seemed meaningless, since, in 1909, Local 25 barely survived, with about a hundred members and four dollars in its bank account. While factory owners opposed all unions, they had no respect for, let alone fear of, this one. They should have.

  In September 1909, workers’ anger boiled over. Led by Local 25 members, workers in several shirtwaist factories—including the Triangle Waist Company—voted to strike for higher wages and shorter hours. Each shop struck on its own, without a unified plan or organization. Owners, however, united behind Max Blanck and Isaac Harris of the Triangle Waist Company. Their aim: do whatever it took to crush the strike.

  The key to the owners’ plan was hiring “scabs,” slang for non-union workers who take strikers’ places. Scabs might be poor themselves, but strikers saw them as villains, stealing bread from others’ mouths. To get to work, scabs had to cross a union picket line—that is, a line of strikers called “pickets.” The pickets walked in front of factory entrances with signs telling of their grievances and demands. Scabs often lost heart, turning back when pickets looked them in the eye and asked, “How would you feel if we stole your jobs?”

  Owners decided to get rough. Nearby, the Bowery swarmed with “fancy ladies,” slang for prostitutes. These often-desperate women sold their bodies to escape what one called “the biting, grinding poverty” of the tenements. Owners hired them to break the picket lines, allowing scabs to enter without having to face strikers. Groups of fancy ladies stormed out of the Bowery. Screaming and cursing, they scratched pickets’ faces with their nails, jabbed them with hat pins, and clubbed them with lead-weighted umbrellas.1

  Women garment workers on picket duty, circa 1909. (picture credit 4.2)

  Some strikers, however, encouraged the others to stand fast. To raise their spirits, they led them in Russian folk songs about resistance to oppression. A favorite, “Ekh, Dubinushka” (“Hey, Little Club”), was about the club that landowners used to beat peasants and about the coming revolution.

  Hey, oaken club, come on!

  Hey, the green club moves by itself!

  Let’s pull, let’s pull together!

  But the time has come,

  and the people rose,

  and it straightened its mighty spine,

  and it shook off from its shoulders

  the heavy yoke that had been there

  the heavy yoke that had been there for centuries,

  and now it raised the club against its enemies.2

  Owners saw such people and such songs as dangerous, because they inspired resistance in others. So they turned to the shtarkers, Yiddish for “sluggers” or “tough guys,” gangsters who beat up anyone, even committed murder, for a few dollars. For example, they charged four dollars to blacken a person’s eyes, ten dollars for breaking a nose, twenty-five dollars for a stabbing, and one hundred dollars and up for murder.3

  Shtarkers lounging on a tenement stoop, 1909. (picture credit 4.3)

  One day, Clara Lemlich set out for home after picket duty at the Leiserson Company. Like many immigrant women, Lemlich, twenty-three, had quit school and gone to work to help support her family. At first glance, she did not seem like a threat to anyone. Short and slim, she was five feet tall, with a round face, curly hair, and dark eyes. Oh, those eyes! When she felt wronged, they blazed with fury, and then the words came like a firestorm. “Ah—then I had fire in my mouth!” she said many years later. A natural leader, she helped found Local 25. Lemlich, then, was what a sister worker called a “pint of trouble for the bosses.” They wanted to shut her up and set an example for other troublemakers.4

  Clara Lemlich helped to found Local 25. (picture credit 4.4)

  As Lemlich walked home, two shtarkers, one an ex-prizefighter, attacked her with their fists. “Like rain, the blows fell on me,” she recalled. When they finished, she lay on the sidewalk bleeding, with six broken ribs. “Clara was so badly hurt,” said a friend, “that she was laid up for several days.” Though bruised and aching for weeks afterward, she soon returned to the picket line but did not tell her parents, not wanting to worry them. Meanwhile, the fancy ladies and sluggers terrorized the strikers.5

  The police did nothing, for at this time the New York Police Department was riddled with corruption. Law enforcement, and much else in the city, was under the thumb of “the Hall.” This was the popular name for Tammany Hall, or Democratic Party headquarters. Each election district had a Tammany club run by a leader called a “boss.” A typical boss, like Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan of the Lower East Side, cared for his district as if it were his family. People counted on Big Tim for free coal in a blizzard, free shelter after a tenement fire, and free turkeys and shoes on holidays. Yet the boss was no Santa Claus. He expected repayment with votes on Election Day.

  Victory at the polls allowed Tammany bosses to turn city government into their private cash register. Contracts to build bridges, sewers, and elevated railroads went to the highest bidder. Want a job as a city clerk or judge, or a promotion from patrolman to sergeant or captain? Pay up! Street-smart tenement kids knew the score. “What’re pennies made of?” one would yell behind an officer’s back, referring to his copper badge. “Dirty copper,” the other shouted as they ran away laughing.

  Since Tammany sided with the factory owners, the police did, too. Despite their efforts, the strikers were getting nowhere. Clearly, shop-by-shop strikes were not the answer. The public hardly noticed, or cared, about their plight. Time was against them. For without public support, they must admit defeat soon, leaving the owners stronger than ever. What to do?

  A paddy wagon unloading strikers. (picture credit 4.5)

  “Big Tim” Sullivan (right), Tammany boss of the Lower East Side, 1913. (picture credit 4.6)

  Cooper Union

  Local 25 gave out thousands of circulars in Yiddish, Italian, and English announcing a meeting at Cooper Union to discuss the situation. This sprawling redbrick building had great historic and symbolic meaning. Located a few blocks east of the Triangle Waist Company, Cooper Union offered free courses in art, science, and engineering. Fifty years earlier, Abraham Lincoln had denounced slavery in its Great Hall, a vast basement auditorium. People were not property, the future president said. No one had the right to own another person. As president, in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. Garment workers identified with the old-time slaves, calling themselves “wage slaves.”

  On the evening of November 22, some three thousand union and non-union workers packed the Great Hall. While the weather was cold outside, the crowd made the hall hot and stuffy. Celebrities, nearly all well-dressed and well-groomed men, sat on the stage: ILGWU leaders, columnists from Yiddish newspapers, guest of honor AFL president Samuel Gompers. For two hours, they droned on in Yiddish. Instead of discussing practical answers, they came across as uncertain. Gompers seemed weak. On the one hand, he warned, strikes were costly and to be avoided if possible. On the other hand, not striking might “rivet the chains of slavery upon our wrists.” With each speech, the audience grew more restless.6

 
; American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, 1915. (picture credit 4.7)

  Suddenly a woman stood up. “I want to say a few words,” she cried. A buzz of excitement went through the audience; everyone knew, or knew of, Clara Lemlich. “Get up on the platform,” people shouted. When she got there, hands reached down to lift her.7

  Those in the crowd would always remember Lemlich’s few words. “I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions,” she said in Yiddish. “I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities.… I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared. Now!” A general strike was the riskiest move imaginable. For it would shut down not merely some shops, but the entire shirtwaist industry, raising the stakes for both sides. Surely, it would demand huge sacrifices, but might also win a huge victory.8

  Some Italians knew enough Yiddish to get Lemlich’s meaning; others had it explained by those who spoke broken Italian with a Yiddish accent. The effect was electrical. A wave of excitement swept the Great Hall. Everyone rose, cheering. Chairman Benjamin Feigenbaum, of the Jewish Daily Forward, got carried away, too. “Do you mean it in good faith? Will you take the old Jewish oath?” he cried, raising his right hand. Thousands of hands shot up: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I raise.” With that pledge, a strike became an uprising.9

  The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand

  Next morning, November 23, everyone came to work as usual. But this day was different. You could feel the tension in the air. Most had never been on strike. Last night’s enthusiasm had worn off and been replaced by fear. It was not the sluggers or the beatings; Clara Lemlich had come through all right. So would they—probably. These young women faced a harsher test. Although they might have saved a few dollars, these would not last through a long strike. How would they eat, or keep a roof over their heads, or help support their families without the weekly pay envelope? Did they have the inner stuff, the courage, to go on if things really got bad? Only time would tell.

  The women of Local 25 voting to strike. (picture credit 4.8)

  Many shared the experience of Natalya Urosova, a sewing machine operator. “We all sat at the machines with our hats and coats beside us, ready to leave,” she recalled. “Shall we wait like this?” they whispered, remembering the silence rule. “There is a general strike. Who will get up first?” It went like this for two hours, each debating with herself, each gathering her courage. Finally, Natalya got up. Just then, “we all got up together, in one second.”10

  The same scene was repeated in one factory after another. By evening, more than twenty thousand workers had left their sewing machines, thus the name “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand.” By week’s end, another ten thousand had walked off the job, including some of those princes, the cutters. So began the largest strike by women ever seen in the United States until then.

  The sheer number of strikers forced the public to take notice and choose sides. If the owners had Tammany bosses, the police, and sluggers in their corner, the strikers found allies, too. Around the year 1900, a reform movement called “progressivism” set out to change America. Progressives believed in progress, the idea that society could, and must, be improved. While drawn from the well-to-do, the movement did not have one set of leaders or program. Instead, progressives formed many groups that aimed to create a “good society” by, among other things, eradicating slums, ending child labor, and furthering women’s rights. To do that, however, they first had to fight political corruption and reduce the power of big business.

  The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) was a progressive group with branches in every major city. Composed largely of upper-middle-class and college-educated women, the WTUL aimed at bettering the lives of working women by helping them organize trade unions. When the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand began, Mary Dreier, a wealthy person in her own right and president of the organization’s New York chapter, offered to help.

  Local 25 and the WTUL divided their tasks. Local 25 officials negotiated with the owners for higher wages, a fifty-two-hour workweek, and a “closed shop.” The last demand meant that a worker must join the union to get a job, in effect giving it control of the labor supply. That way, the union could set uniform work rules rather than have each owner set them for himself.

  Local 25, on strike. (picture credit 4.9)

  Meanwhile, the WTUL helped with the strikers’ everyday problems. It rented meeting halls and set up telephone networks to keep strikers at various shops in touch. That was not as simple as it sounds, because many immigrant women did not know how to use a telephone. The WTUL also got reform-minded lawyers to defend, free of charge, arrested strikers in court. In these and other ways, as a striker put it, “the league women are the goodest of the good.”11

  Best of all, the WTUL helped strikers outsmart factory owners and Tammany bosses. Mary Dreier and her aides believed the strike could not succeed without the support of public opinion. In short, it was also a propaganda battle in which shame was as potent a weapon as picket lines and nightsticks. The idea was to win the public’s sympathy by embarrassing opponents. This, in turn, meant using the media to tell the strikers’ story in the most favorable ways. Today, there are many media outlets: radio, television, the Internet, Twitter, YouTube. In 1911, however, only newspapers could reach a large audience quickly. America’s leading newspapers were based in Manhattan. Stories in them flashed around the nation within hours by telegraph, then were picked up by countless other papers, which often printed them word for word.

  Mary Dreier, head of the New York Women’s Trade Union League. (picture credit 4.10)

  To gain a “good press,” the WTUL advised strikers to wear their best clothes on the picket lines. Always be polite. Never call anyone a “scab” or provoke them in any way. Acting like “ladies” would not only increase strikers’ own self-respect, but show the public that immigrant women were responsible people who wanted only fair treatment.

  To counter police brutality, WTUL members joined the picket lines, along with volunteers from the top women’s colleges: Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Wellesley. Police officers had a nasty habit. They would raise their nightsticks, promising to crack strikers’ skulls if they so much as looked at them the wrong way. Russian Jews cringed; they remembered the czar’s Cossacks. Knowing that WTUL members were on the picket lines and that pickets dressed very much alike made Tammany’s “Cossacks” think twice about using their nightsticks. For how could you tell a “lady” from a common worker?

  Going after the “wrong” woman could cause a scandal. One day, for example, a supervisor at the Triangle Waist Company heard Mary Dreier speak to a worker. “You are a dirty liar,” he shouted. She turned to an officer and said, “You heard the language that man addressed to me. Am I not entitled to your protection?” The officer arrested her for “disturbing the peace.” When the judge learned her identity, he freed her on the spot. The officer stammered, “Why didn’t you tell me you was a rich lady? I’d never have arrested you.” Too late! Local newspapers pounced on the story. Not only did it embarrass the police and shop owners, it aroused sympathy for the strikers nationwide.12

  A group of striking shirtwaist workers, 1909. (picture credit 4.11)

  Despite WTUL help, the workers bore the brunt of their strike. The police arrested dozens each day, hauling them away in horse-drawn vans. Usually, they took them to the Tombs, the city prison, a grimy building with tiny barred windows and thick walls. Later, police took the prisoners to night court. There, Tammany judges fined them either three dollars or five dollars, a large sum in the best of times, a fortune to a striker. Sometimes, a lecture went with the fine, free of charge. Judge Olmstead, for example, confused factory owners with the Almighty: “You are on strike against God and nature, whose firm law is that man shall earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God.”13

  Judges sentenced repeat offenders to the women’s workhouse on
Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) in the East River. They expected five days among prostitutes, thieves, and drug addicts to make strikers see the error of their ways. (For some unknown reason, though arrested seventeen times, Clara Lemlich was never sent to Blackwell’s Island.)

  One repeat offender, Rose Perr, was small and thin, with a child’s voice and her hair in a braid down her back. Rose looked ten years old, not sixteen, her true age. Like any workhouse prisoner, she did hard labor. Wearing a scratchy woolen dress and heavy shoes, she scrubbed floors on her knees, with a brush, and washed mounds of dirty clothes. Washing exhausted healthy, well-fed, adult housewives; prisoners ate moldy bread and watery soup. Washing involved scrubbing wet clothes on a washboard with lye soap, which burned Rose’s hands. Next, she placed the clothes in a vat of boiling water and stirred them with a wooden pole. Finally, she lifted them out with a stick, rinsed them (twice) in cold water, and hung them up to dry. Failure to finish on time, or breaking the silence rule, meant a sleepless night in the “dark room,” a pitch-black dungeon teeming with rats and cockroaches.14

  Sending strikers to the workhouse backfired, though. Instead of breaking their will, it toughened them. More, it made them martyrs, admired examples of people who would rather suffer than betray their cause. Having served their time, Rose Perr, Lena Lapido, and five other ex-prisoners were brought by boat to Manhattan. Upon their landing, WTUL greeters handed each a bouquet of American Beauty roses. The Lower East Side filled with pride. “Unzere vunderbare farbrente meydlekh,” people called them in Yiddish. “Our wonderful fiery little girls.”15