Читать книгу Bellagrand - Paullina Simons - Страница 22

IN AN UNPRECEDENTED MOVE, Haywood arranged for six hundred children of the striking women to be publicly taken away from their mothers (he called it being taken out of “harm’s way”) and bussed south to New York City to stay with some well-to-do families for the duration of the strike. The women that agreed to this became even more violent after their children left them.

Crying children separated from their howling mothers was a public relations disaster for American Woolen and for Lawrence. Mayor Scanlon was urged to break the strike, and though he stated that his aim was “to break the strikers’ head,” it was nothing but grandstanding, for he did nothing. An incredulous Floyd Russell raged against the mayor’s impotent response. “How long are you going to let this continue? Your city is going bust! No one is working! No one is making any money. You’ve got millions of dollars’ worth of international contracts going unfulfilled because of what’s happening under your fucking windows. You’re destroying Lawrence with your inaction!”

“Not my inaction—their action!” Scanlon shouted back. “They won’t compromise! You heard Haywood. What am I supposed to do? Shoot the women?”

“Yes,” Floyd said instantly. “That’s how Napoleon did it.”

“He shot the women?”

“He ordered the strikers to be shot, yes.”

“Not women!”

“Listen,” the lawyer said defiantly, “they want to work like men, live like men, get paid like men? Fuck like men? Then they should accept being shot like men.”

American Woolen tried again to negotiate. With Gompers and his AFL long gone, William Wood came to the table with Haywood and offered 54 hours and $8.76 a week. Big Bill walked out. He loved the attention. He refused to let the women back down. Though he said the fight was about wages and hours, it was a well-known fact, which he didn’t attempt to hide, that his IWW held union-written contracts in disdain because they encouraged workers to become complacent and abandon the class struggle. He and Smiling Joe continued to advocate for violence as a means to an end, supporting not only a general strike, but the overthrow of American capitalism itself. “Let the workers own the textile mills and set their own wages and hours,” Joe yelled from the podium when Bill grew tired in the late afternoons and Harry stood and watched nearby. “Until that happens, nothing is going to do the trick!”

With Harry’s help, Haywood raised the funds to feed the strikers. Gina volunteered at the soup kitchen. As long as she didn’t leave the basement of the Corpus Christi Church where she prepared the food, Harry agreed to accept her mild contribution to the war effort. Not Angela. “What do you expect?” Mimoo said to Harry. “Two Sicilian women butting heads like mules. Cooler heads can’t prevail because no one in this town’s got one.”

Gina baked bread and cooked beans in molasses while the law enforcement and business heavyweights of Lawrence joined in daily condemnation of Big Bill.

Haywood kept his demands deliberately outrageous and William Wood continued to respond in kind: he said he would go broke before he was blackmailed.

“Behind raised wages, resumed work, vanished militia and the whirring looms is the most revolutionary organization in the history of American industry,” thundered the District Attorney on the pages of the Tribune. Floyd Russell, having given up, left town like Gompers.

The mayor was staying quiet. He was running for reelection the following November. He didn’t want to further incense the public.

“First in violence, deepest in dirt, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nation,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, a reporter, in The Shame of the Cities.

The town of Lawrence was crumbling—no work, no orders filled by American Woolen, no retail sales. The town was sliding into anarchy and bankruptcy, with no end to the impasse.

Something had to give. But what Gina felt as she cooked the beans, and begged Angela to stop marching in the streets, and accompanied Mimoo on the bus to clean their few remaining homes, was that nothing good could possibly come from this.