This same winter found Tateh and his daughter in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. They had come there the previous autumn, having heard there were jobs. Tate stood in front of a loom for fifty-six hours a week. His pay was just under six dollars. The family lived in a wooden tenement on a hill. They had no heat. They occupied one room overlooking an alley in which residents customarily dumped their garbage. He feared she would fall victim to the low-class elements of the neighborhood...The dismal wooden tenements lay in endless rows. Everyone from Europe was there--the Italians, the Poles, the Belgians, the Russian Jews. The feeling was not good between the different groups. In early 1912, a state law was introduced limiting the number of hours women could work to 54 hours per week. Instead of shortening the work week as instructed, the mill owners of the American Woolen Company shorted the paychecks of their women mill workers. Despite not belonging to any union, a few Polish women went on strike on January 11 when they noticed the shorted paychecks. On January 12, 10,000 workers walked off the job, with the number soon rising to 25,000, many of whom were immigrants. Nationalities represented in the Lawrence Textile Strike include Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, French-Canadian, Slavic, and Syrian. The city of Lawrence rang its riot bells in panic. Many strikers met the next day with an organizer from the I.W.W. to set their demands--15% pay increase, 54 hour work week, double pay for overtime, elimination of bonus pay. On January 29, Anna LoPizzo was shot, allegedly by police as they broke up a picket line. Police instead arrested strike organizers Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti for the murder of LoPizzo who were at a meeting three miles away at the time of her death. After this arrest, martial law was declared and all public meetings were declared illegal. Violence around town led many children of immigrants to be sent to New York, as Tateh attempted to do with Little Girl. Around 200 children were sent away on trains, with some 5,000 people showing up at the station to receive them in a demonstration of solidarity and to assist with finding them foster homes. The success of the so-called "children's crusade" in bringing awareness and sympathy to the Lawrence strikers led the authorities to send militia to intervene with the next attempt to send children to New York. Mothers and children were clubbed and arrested. Children were separated from their parents. The brutality of this event gained national coverage and led to an investigation by Congress. Seeing the national reaction and fearing further government involvement, the mill owners gave in on March 12 to the strikers's original demands at the American Woolen Company. The Lawrence Textile Strike is sometimes called the "Bread and Roses" strike because of a speech given by Rose Schneiderman invoking the slogan, "We want Bread and Roses, too": What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist--the right to life as the rich woman has it, the right to life, and the sun, and music, and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. This rallying cry signaled to the world that workers wanted more than just economic benefits, but for their basic humanity to be recognized.
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...he had therefore agreed that some sort of temporary accord between the socialists and the anarchists was advisable, if only for the evening, the funds raised for the occasion would go to support the shirtwaist makers, who were then on strike, and the steelworkers and McKeesport, Pennsylvania, who were on strike, and the anarchist Francisco Ferrer, who was going to be condemned and executed by the Spanish government for fomenting a general strike in Spain. Led by Clara Lemlich and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, or the Uprising of the 20,000, took place from November 1909 to March 1911. Women in the garment industry, New York's largest industry, were severely mistreated, working up to 75 hours a week, required to pay for their own equipment, their clothes lockers, and even the seats they sat upon. The toilets were outside of the building, separated from the workroom by padlocked steel doors so that the women must ask for permission to go to the bathroom.
Seventy percent of the shirtwaist factories was Jewish women. Many of these immigrant women had been a part of the Bund, the General Jewish Worker's Union in Russia and Poland, so they were no stranger to organized labor. After the ILGWU called for a strike to improve working conditions and unionize the shirtwaist factories, the one thousand who responded to the strike appeal paid bitterly. They were taunted, threatened, and even arrested. Morale weakened after five weeks of a feeble strike. In November the ILGWU called for an emergency meeting to raise morale and continue the strike, at which Clara Lemlich, a 19 year-old Jewish worker, outshone the male speakers by delivering an impromptu speech in Yiddish that appealed for united action against all shirtwaist manufacturers. "In an industry with some 32,000 workers..., over 20,000 shirtwaist workers--all women--joined the Triangle strikers in a citywide walkout." In the first month of the strike, 723 girls were arrested. The press, the clergy, women's suffrage leaders, and many upper-class New Yorkers lent support to the shirtwaist strikers. Many wealthy women provided bail money and even marched with the strikers on the picket lines. The shirtwaist management "had lost the war of public opinion". Finally, the management consented to negotiate. Under the new terms, the workweek was reduced to 52 hours, four paid holidays were provided, employees were no longer required to provide their own tools, and a joint grievance committee was created to negotiate any further issues. The successful strike was an important milestone for the American labor movement and especially for garment industry unions.
What does that actually mean? Socialism comprises a range of economic and social systems. The central ideas of socialism include social ownership, which places ownership of the means of production (facilities, machinery, tools, capital) with the public or with employees of a certain enterprise, and democratic control of the means of production, which places autonomy over working conditions, leadership in the workplace, and day-to-day operations back in the hands of the workers. Socialist political movements are primarily directed against the social and economic problems wrought by capitalism, problems that socialists such as Tateh would have felt on a regular basis.
Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies organized into voluntary institutions. Anarchism believes the state, as well as other authority or hierarchical organization, to be unnecessary and harmful. Like socialism, there are many strains of anarchism, the most common being social anarchism (or socialist anarchism), which shares a strong belief in community and social equality with socialism. Reitman is mentioned in Ragtime as being one of Emma Goldman's lovers. He was a well-known anarchist and physician to the poor. He was known as the "hobo doctor", offering services to hobos, prostitutes, the poor, and other outcast. He performed abortions, which were illegal at the time. This is what Goldman had to say about Reitman in her autobiography: He arrived in the afternoon, an exotic, picturesque figure with a large black cowboy hat, flowing silk tie, and huge cane. "So this is the little lady, Emma Goldman," he greeted me; "I have always wanted to know you." His voice was deep, soft, and ingratiating. I replied that I also wanted to meet the curiosity who believed enough in free speech to help Emma Goldman. My visitor was a tall man with a finely shaped head, covered with a mass of black curly hair, which evidently had not been washed for some time. His eyes were brown, large, and dreamy. His lips, disclosing beautiful teeth when he smiled, were full and passionate. He looked a handsome brute. His hands, narrow and white, exerted a peculiar fascination. His finger-nails, like his hair, seemed to be on strike against soap and brush. I could not take my eyes off his hands. A strange charm seemed to emanate from them, caressing and stirring... Goldman called her passionate love affair with Reitman the "Great Grand Passion" of her life. They lived and traveled together for almost eight years, campaigning in favor of birth control, free speech, women's rights, and anarchism. They traveled to San Diego for the free speech fight in 1912-1913. While Goldman spoke on free speech, Reitman was kidnapped, tarred and feathered, branded with "I.W.W", and his rectum and testicles were abused. Years later, the couple was arrested under the Comstock Act for advocating for birth control, and Reitman served six months in prison.
Both Goldman and Reitman believed in free love, but Goldman became jealous when one of Reitman's lovers became pregnant. Their relationship ended in 1917 after Reitman was released from prison. Carefully Tateh explained that although he was unalterably opposed to Goldman, she being an anarchist and he being a socialist, he had great respect for her personal courage and integrity; and that he had therefore agreed that some sort of temporary accord between the socialists and the anarchists was advisable, if only for the evening, because the funds raised for the occasion would go to support...the anarchist Francisco Ferrer, who was going to be condemned and executed for fomenting a general strike in Spain. Francisco Ferrer i Guàrdia was born in 1859 in a small town near Barcelona to Roman Catholic parents. Influenced at the early age of 15 by an anti-cleric employer, Ferrer went on to become an anarchist leader in Spain. He was exiled to Paris in 1885 with his wife and children, later returning in 1901 to open his infamous Escuela Moderna (The Modern School) to "teach middle class children radical social values".
The Modern School was a "rational, secular, and non-coercive" primary and secondary school, according to the stated goal of the school. The private goal was to raise up a generation of leaders for the working class when revolution eventually struck. In reality, high tuition fees prevented anyone other than the wealthier middle class from sending their children to Ferrer's school. The Modern School closed in 1906 after Ferrer was arrested for sedition. Ferrer would go on to be executed by firing squad three years after the closing of the school. He was "found guilty in a military trial in which no solid evidence was brought against him". Goldman was largely responsible for Ferrer's legacy living on, calling Ferrer a "rebel" whose "spirit would rise in just indignation" and forming the Ferrer Association. Many of Ferrer's ideas spread after his execution, leading to the establishment of a handful Modern Schools, or Ferrer Schools, in the United States. Read Goldman's essay, "Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School", here. Below is a link to the Speech Accent Archive developed by George Mason University's Linguistics Program. This is an accent database containing sample readings by people with a wide variety of accents.
Try entering details about where your character might come from under Search. For example, there is a sample of a female Latvian accent that might be helpful for Little Girl! As seen in the Ragtime novel when Evelyn Nesbit visits the poor, The I.W.W. was founded in Chicago in 1905. The goal of the organization was for all workers to be united as a class to abolish the wage system. The motto of the I.W.W. is "An Injury to One is an Injury to All". Leaders believed the most effective way to gain power was through strikes, propaganda, boycotts, and their controversial strategy of sabotage. Sabotage as defined by the I.W.W. does not mean the destruction of property or machinery. It is the collective withdrawal of efficiency by workers at the point of production, also called "direct action". When other leaders began to disagree with these strategies, the I.W.W. split in 1908. By 1912, the I.W.W. had over 50,000 members and was involved in over 150 strikes. They are sometimes known as the "singing union" because of their iconic Little Red Songbook. Another icon of the I.W.W. is a black cat called the "sabo-tabby" (from the word sabotage). This was one of many "silent agitator" graphics used as symbols for workers to communicate. Some have suggested that the adoption of the word "cat" by beat poets and jazz musicians comes from the I.W.W.'s use of the word. Members of the I.W.W. were called Wobblies. There are a few theories as to how they got their name:
Read a much more in depth history of the I.W.W. here. On page 112 of Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow credits Emma Goldman as the author of a pamphlet on family limitation that was actually authored by Margaret Sanger in 1914. The original pamphlet is linked on the Readings page of this website. On Goldman's national tour, she helped distribute copies of the pamphlet about contraceptives and other information Sanger felt women had the right to know. At this time, the distribution, publication, and possession of information about or devices or medications for "unlawful" abortion and contraception were punishable by law under the Comstock Act of 1873. Abortions themselves were illegal and morally condemned. It was thought to be the man's decision if and when to have a baby, a standard Sanger felt was ridiculous considering it would be the woman carrying the baby. Sanger went on to found the American Birth Control League which became Planned Parenthood. The working woman can use direct action by refusing to supply the market with children to be exploited, by refusing to populate the earth with slaves. Mother Earth was "A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature", edited by Emma Goldman. The magazine covered topics such as the labor movement, education, literature and the arts, state and government control, women's emancipation, sexual freedom, and birth control. Mother Earth advocated against conscription and called for men to disobey government laws concerning the military draft.
Under the Espionage Act of 1917, Goldman's Mother Earth offices were searched by Federal agents, and the names of contributors and subscribers numbering over 10,000 were confiscated. Notable authors include Alexander Berkman, Man Ray, Eugene O'Neill, and Leo Tolstoy. Alexander Berkman was an anarchist leader who emigrated to the US from Lithuania in 1888 when he was 18 years old. Soon after he arrived in America, he met Emma Goldman, a fellow Russian immigrant, in 1889 at Sach's Café in the Lower East Side, the headquarters of Yiddish-speaking anarchists in New York City. This was the beginning of a lifelong relationship (and often romance) with Goldman, despite many disagreements and separations. He became a member of the Pioneers of Liberty, the first Jewish anarchist group in the US. Berkman soon came under the tutelage of Johann Most, an anarchist who advocated violence carried out to encourage the masses to revolt.
Johann Most influenced Berkman's assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick on July 23, 1892. Goldman had a part in his plan--she was to explain his motives after he killed Frick and then himself. Berkman was unsuccessful and served 14 years in a Pennsylvania prison for his crime. While incarcerated, he edited the Prison Blossom, a secret journal, and later wrote his famous Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, describing his assassination attempt as the "first terrorist act in America". His time in prison did not do much to curb his violence; Berkman was later indicted for murder in association with the Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco. After his release from prison, there were reports that he married Goldman in New Jersey, but the marriage was never recorded, and at a later trial, they both testified as single. Berkman did serve as editor to Goldman's magazine Mother Earth, and later became editor of the Blast. Berkman and Goldman both served two years in jail for urging young men to refuse to register for the WWI draft. Under the 1918 Anarchist Exclusion Act, both were deported to Russia after they were released from prison. In the deportation documents, the government accused Berkman's and Goldman's teachings to have helped cause the assassination of President McKinley, for Czolgosz cited Goldman's writings in confession after assassination. Berkman left the Russia after three years of compiling material with Goldman for a proposed Museum of the [Bolshevik] Revolution. They even met with Lenin himself before leaving the country. Berkman would end his life in France, the struggles of his deteriorating health causing him to commit suicide in 1936. Goldman rushed to Nice, France to be at his side; he recognized her, but the bullet that he had aimed for his heart had lodged in his spinal column, paralyzing him. He died with Goldman at his side at 66 years old. |
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