Joseph Ettor; Arturo Giovannitti; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; Bill Haywood; Angelo G. Rocco William M. Wood; Gov.

Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence.

Carried on throughout a brutally cold winter, the strike lasted more than two months, from January to March, defying the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized.

In late January, when a striker, Anna LoPizzo, was killed by police during a protest, IWW organizers Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti were framed and arrested on charges of being accessories to the murder.

Together they masterminded its signature move, sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont.

The move drew widespread sympathy, especially after police stopped a further exodus, leading to violence at the Lawrence train station.

[7] The phrase "bread and roses" actually preceded the strike, appearing in a poem by James Oppenheim published in The American Magazine in December 1911.

[13] Lawrence had the 5th highest child mortality rate of any city in the country at the time, behind four other mill towns in Massachusetts (Lowell, Fall River, Worcester, and Holyoke).

Many families survived on bread, molasses, and beans; as one worker testified before the March 1912 congressional investigation of the Lawrence strike, "When we eat meat it seems like a holiday, especially for the children."

[17][18][19][12] The mills and the community were divided along ethnic lines: most of the skilled jobs were held by native-born workers of English, Irish, and German descent, whereas French-Canadian, Italian, Jewish, Slavic, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Syrian immigrants made up most of the unskilled workforce.

[6] On January 11, a group of Polish women textile workers in Lawrence discovered that their employer at the Everett Mill had reduced about $0.32 from their total wages and walked out.

[citation needed] That statement and missteps by William Madison Wood quickly shifted public sentiment to favor the strikers.

Later, William M. Wood, the president of the American Woolen Company, was shown to have made an unexplained large payment to the defendant shortly before the dynamite was found.

[29][30][31] The authorities later charged Ettor and Giovannitti as accomplices to murder for the death of striker Anna LoPizzo,[32] who was likely shot by the police.

[33] The authorities declared martial law,[34] banned all public meetings, and called out 22 more militia companies to patrol the streets.

Other tactics established were an efficient system of relief committees, soup kitchens, and food distribution stations, and volunteer doctors provided medical care.

Moreover, when the women and children were taken to the Police Court, most of them refused to pay the fines levied and opted for a jail cell, some with babies in arms.

In the early days of March, a special House Committee heard testimony from some of the strikers' children, as well as various city, state and union officials.

Embarrassed by the bad publicity, the city marshal tried to deter the next group of children that were being sent to Philadelphia on February 24, with disastrous results.

In addition, the children began to form strike rallies to demonstrate the hardship and struggle occurring in the Lawrence mill factories.

The strikers had demanded an end to the Premium System in which a portion of their earnings were subject to month-long production and attendance standards.

The rest of the manufacturers followed by the end of the month; other textile companies throughout New England, anxious to avoid a similar confrontation, then followed suit.

Swedish and French workers proposed a boycott of woolen goods from the US and a refusal to load ships going there, and Italian supporters of the Giovannitti men rallied in front of the US consulate in Rome.

All witnesses testified that Ettor and Giovannitti were miles away and that Caruso, the third defendant, was at home and eating supper at the time of the killing.

In Ettor's closing statement, he turned and faced the District Attorney: Does Mr. Ateill believe for a moment that... the cross or the gallows or the guillotine, the hangman's noose, ever settled an idea?

He wrote, "Wary of [a war with the anti-capitalist IWW], some mill owners swallowed their hatred of unions and actually invited the AFL to organize their workers.

[56] On February 9, 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren officially announced her candidacy for President of the United States at the site of the strike.