ABSTRACT
Municipal and religious authorities in Lawrence, Massachusetts, used the
God-and-Country parades of 1912 and 1962 to repudiate the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW) and what they stood for as a threat to the peace and security
of Lawrence (see Figures 3 and 4, p. 115). The preamble to the IWW Constitution
declared the fundamental rift to mill owners in Lawrence: “The working class and
the employing class have nothing in common.” For industrialists unmoved by
a statement they probably also believed, the third sentence spells out the conse-
quences: “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of
the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of
production, and abolish the wage system.” But one did not have to be versed in
the historic text from the founding convention in Chicago in 1905 to know
what the IWW and its red card-holding members were about. The IWW had
already organized textile workers at Marston Mills in Skowhegan, Maine, in April
1906 to reinstate fired workers, organize a shop committee, and secure more
equitable pay. Even in March 1907, the IWW organized a strike in Paterson,
New Jersey, against silk dye-houses which had fired IWW workers. As a result,
6,000 dye-house workers gained a dollar a week increase in pay. By 1908, also
in Paterson, the General Executive Board of the IWW founded the National
Industrial Union of Textile Workers. Other textile industry actions occurred in
Chicago, St. Louis, and New York. In 1906, the IWW organized Lawrence Local
20. By 1910, they had their own union hall and hosted the third convention of
the National Industrial Union on Labor Day later that year. In the summer of
1911, they conducted a successful strike against Atlantic Mills. The story of
Lawrence in 1912 has this extensive preface and authorities there already had
many reasons to dislike the IWW.2
