Young People's Socialist League

Bruce Watson's "Bread and Roses" tells the captivating story of the 1912 textile stirke in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Now know as the "bread and roses strike", it united dozens of communities of immigrant workers under the leadership of the radical anti-capitalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to win a months-long struggle against all odds. One of the IWW's greatest victories, it also proved to be a short-lived one. In less than a year, the union in Lawrence had been all but exterminated, victim of a violent reaction the likes of which wouldn't be seen again until the jingoistic hysteria of the First World War and subsequent red scare.

Watson's telling of the story is a beautifully written, meticulously detailed and documented account. His fast-moving, journalistic history stretches beyond the strike itself in frequent tangents, to provide a glimpse at labor organizing and class conflict in early twentieth century America, starring Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, "Smiling Joe" Ettor and hometown organizer Angelo Rocco, with cameos from Gene Debs, Joe Hill, Clarence Darrow, "T-Bone Slim", Morris Hillquit, John Reed, Emma Goldman, Teddy Roosevelt, Nicola Sacco, and many others.

My chief criticism of Watson's account is actually that he makes it too much a story. He gets swept up in the romance and legend of the "Wobblies", which leads him to neglect a serious analysis of their program and goals. Watson never really comes to grips with the radical anti-capitalist agenda of the IWW and the strike itself, characterizing it merely as part of the "struggle for the American dream".

Although Watson tries to maintain journalistic neutrality, it becomes clear that his sympathies lie with the strikers, if not their self-proclaimed "historic mission... to do away with capitalism". This is especially the case when he discusses the aftermath of the strike, when the union was violently suppressed and equal violence was done to history. In the sanitized history of the strike that was then established, Lawrence was a peaceful, idyllic town, with no poverty, no slums, no hunger, no low wages, no oppression. Then a handful of outside agitators descended on the town, exploiting flighty and feeble-minded immigrants, to manufacture a labor dispute where none truly existed.

Nonsense, of course, and Watson does a good job of demolishing it, and an even better job of telling a more accurate tale. The story of the Lawrence strike is one we all should know, and even those already familiar with it are not likely to find a more engaging account of it than "Bread and Roses".