Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream - Hardcover

Watson, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670033979 ISBN 13: 9780670033973

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2005

Synopsis

An account of the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, draws on newspaper accounts, magazine reportage, and oral histories to identify the strike's key figures and events, from the walkout of 23,000 workers to the evacuations of their children to Manhattan. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Bruce Watson is an award-winning journalist whose articles have been published in Smithsonian, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Examiner, Yankee Magazine, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003.

From the Back Cover

"'Bread and Roses is packed with facts, but Watson. . . . makes it an exciting read." "A fast- paced, well-researched narrative. . . "
New York Times

"A skilled storyteller, Watson offers a moving and compelling account of radical dreams, conservative nightmares and immigrant aspirations that informed the making of modern America. Watson dramatically and effectively brings back to life the 1912 Lawrence strike. With a keen eye for geographical and biographical detail, he captures the contours of industrial New England, recreates the gritty neighborhoods populated by various European immigrant groups, and carefully lays out the ideological beliefs and personal circumstances of the conflict's many principal actors."
Chicago Tribune

"A spirited account."
Boston Globe

Reviews

Well sourced, evenhanded and briskly paced, Watson's account of the dramatic textile mill strike in Lawrence, Mass., during the icy winter of 1912 presents a panoramic glimpse of a half-forgotten America, one in which violent agitation and swift repression were often the order of the day. The story of how a polyglot mass of immigrants hailing from Syria to Scotland cohered into a powerful bargaining force is riveting in itself, and Watson (The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made) places that struggle within the larger currents of reform that were slowly reshaping America. The cast includes self-made mill owner William Wood, who simply couldn't understand how "his" workers could betray him; Joseph Ettor, the union organizer who slept in a different bed every night to avoid reprisals; fiery Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the IWW and muckracker Ida Tarbell. The bloody strike was repressed from public memory in the hyperpatriotic years of WWI, later idealized by the labor movement in ways that downplayed union violence. This book's subtitle, and its contents, suggest that the "American Dream" enjoyed by the nation's middle class had to be taken by force by the working class and is by no means a permanent entitlement. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

American labor history receives a stirring but studiously balanced narrative in Watson's recounting of the 1912 strike against the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts. What started as a spontaneous protest against a reduction in pay rapidly escalated into a battle between labor and capital. Coming a year after an infamous sweatshop fire in Manhattan (see David von Drehle's Triangle, 2003), the Lawrence strike drew press and congressional attention to the lot of the mill workers, whose low wages left them almost destitute. Watson, however, does not inveigh in simplistic fashion; rather, he explains Lawrence's mid-1800s industrial beginnings, its transformation by the immigrant influx in the two decades preceding the strike, and the economics of the industry. Also demurring from demonizing the mill owners (one was just as proletarian as any picketer), Watson wisely allows the strike's actors to orate, march, or stand trial through the ebb and flow of the strike. Effecting a realistic, street-level vision of the strike, Watson earns and deserves the attention of readers interested in labor and the Progressive Era. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670033979
• ISBN 13: 9780670033973
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352