People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [138]
In a few days, shoeworkers throughout New England joined the strike—in Natick, Newburyport, Haverhill, Marblehead, and other Massachusetts towns, as well as towns in New Hampshire and Maine. In a week, strikes had begun in all the shoe towns of New England, with Mechanics Associations in twenty-five towns and twenty thousand shoe-workers on strike. Newspapers called it “The Revolution at the North,” “The Rebellion Among the Workmen of New England,” “Beginning of the Conflict Between Capital and Labor.”
One thousand women and five thousand men marched through the streets of Lynn in a blizzard, carrying banners and American flags. Women shoebinders and stitchers joined the strike and held their own mass meeting. A New York Herald reporter wrote of them: “They assail the bosses in a style which reminds one of the amiable females who participated in the first French Revolution.” A huge Ladies’ Procession was organized, the women marching through streets high with snowdrifts, carrying signs: “American Ladies Will Not Be Slaves . . . Weak in Physical Strength but Strong in Moral Courage, We Dare Battle for the Right, Shoulder to Shoulder with our Fathers, Husbands, and Brothers.” Ten days after that, a procession of ten thousand striking workers, including delegations from Salem, Marblehead, and other towns, men and women, marched through Lynn, in what was the greatest demonstration of labor to take place in New England up to that time.
Police from Boston and militia were sent in to make sure strikers did not interfere with shipments of shoes to be finished out of the state. The strike processions went on, while city grocers and provisions dealers provided food for the strikers. The strike continued through March with morale high, but by April it was losing force. The manufacturers offered higher wages to bring the strikers back into the factories, but without recognizing the unions, so that workers still had to face the employer as individuals.
Most of the shoeworkers were native-born Americans, Alan Dawley says in his study of the Lynn strike (Class and Community). They did not accept the social and political order that kept them in poverty, however much it was praised in American schools, churches, newspapers. In Lynn, he says, “articulate, activist Irish shoe and leather workers joined Yankees in flatly rejecting the myth of success. Irish and Yankee workers jointly . . . looked for labor candidates when they went to the polls, and resisted strikebreaking by local police.” Trying to understand why this fierce class spirit did not lead to independent revolutionary political action, Dawley concludes that the main reason is that electoral politics drained the energies of the resisters into the channels of the system.
Dawley disputes some historians who have said the high rate of mobility of workers prevented them from organizing in revolutionary ways. He says that while there was a high turnover in Lynn too, this “masked the existence of a virtually permanent minority who played the key role in organizing discontent.” He also suggests that mobility helps people see that others are in similar conditions. He thinks the struggle of European workers for political democracy, even while they sought economic equality, made them class-conscious. American workers, however, had already gained political democracy by the 1830s, and so their economic battles could be taken over by political parties that blurred class lines.
Even this might not have stopped labor militancy and the rise of class consciousness, Dawley says, if not for the fact that “an entire generation was sidetracked in the 1860’s because of the Civil War.” Northern wage earners