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. The answer to everything seemed to be Atlantic City. The Breakers Hotel was originally a five story hotel under the name Hotel Rudolf, in existence since 1895. After a few decades of operation, Joel and Julian Hillman purchased and renamed the hotel the Breakers. The hotel underwent an extensive renovation, adding 7 stories, a banquet hall, a bathhouse, a rooftop restaurant, a façade overlooking the beach, and a special dietary kitchen. In 1931, the hotel was repurchased by Emmanuel Katz who made it the first hotel in Atlantic City to observe Kosher dietary laws. It catered mainly to Jewish clientele and was known as the "Aristocrat of Kosher hotels".
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! The rich lady may not be aware that young girls in the slums are stolen everyday from their parents and sold into slavery. This quote from Tateh answers Evelyn Nesbit's question as to why he chooses to keep Little Girl on a leash in the slums of the Lower East Side. Child labor and child slavery has sadly always been in high demand because children could be paid less, could fix the small parts of machines that adults might not be able to reach, rarely formed unions, and were less likely to strike. The problem with employing children, according to E.L. Doctorow, "had to do only with their endurance". In the later hours of the day, children tended to lose their efficiency and were more likely to injure themselves.
Two factors increased child labor in the late 1800s. One, the influx of immigrants from Ireland in the 1840s and later southern and eastern Europe after 1880 brought a new supply of children who often came from rural communities in which child labor was a necessity. Two, the Industrial Revolution expanded the demand and opportunities for immigrant children. In 1900, 18 percent of American laborers were under 16 years old. In the southern cotton industry, the number rose to 25 percent under 15 years old, with half of these children under 12 years old. The National Child Labor Committee, formed in 1904, used mass political action, including pamphlets, mass mailing, and photography of factory conditions to lobby for political change. Despite measures of success with these actions, it largely depended on the political climate of America at the time. For example, during the Great Depression, child labor saw a steep decline primarily because workers wanted the few available jobs to go to adults, not children. Jacob Riis was born in 1849 in Denmark and immigrated to the United States in 1870 at 21 years old. He could not find steady work and had to live at a police lodging house, a hotbed for crime and typhus fever. After several months of unemployment and homelessness, Riis contemplated suicide. Soon after this, in 1873, Riis found work with a news bureau, and later was recruited by South Brooklyn News in 1874. He became a police reporter in 1877 for the New York Tribune and the Associated Press where he worked for 23 years.
Riis was one of the first photographers to use flash powder to capture the conditions of the same lodging houses in which he once was forced to live, as well as the tenements in the Lower East Side where Tateh and Little Girl lived. He became a photojournalist for the Evening Sun in 1888 where he advocated for the poor through his photography. His Danish accent and his radical commitment to revealing the truth of the poor in New York made him an outsider even among reporters. Riis earned the nickname "the Emancipator of the Slums", in part through the impact of his book How the Other Half Lives which illuminated the sordid conditions of the tenements. How the Other Half Lives was one of the first books to successfully employ halftone reproduction of his photographs. How the Other Half Lives was one of many of Riis's books, but this book in particular gained popularity with the New York Police Commissioner and future 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt accompanied Riis into the into the tenements of the city and even called Riis "the most useful citizen of New York." His photographs were largely forgotten after his death until the negatives were found and donated to the city of New York. Head over to Images for examples of his photography. 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. |
Dramaturgy for the Ragtime musical and novel.© Eliza Pillsbury, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eliza Pillsbury with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Categories
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