550 Broadway, Lawrence
Police on horseback attacked a picket line of thousands of strikers and their supporters in front of the Arlington Mills on February 26, 1919.
In the ensuing chaos, the crowd dispersed with the police in hot pursuit. Among the targets of the state violence was A.J. Muste, the head of the strike committee and a famed pacifist—he would later play important roles in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Catching him in a nearby alley, police clubbed Muste on his body and legs until he could no longer stand. They then arrested him, charging the Christian minister with disturbing the peace and loitering. Workers quickly raised money for bail so that he was back on the picket line the following day.
The 1919 strike grew out of a campaign by unions in Lawrence—part of a national and worldwide effort—to cut the work week from 54 to 48 hours. On February 1, in the face of worker agitation and declining demand for textiles at the end of World War I, mill owners throughout Lawrence announced they would accept the demand, but would not raise hourly wages. Given the conservative leadership of the national United Textile Workers, the vast majority of textile workers across the United States accepted similar offers. Lawrence textile unionists, however, did not, demanding “48-54”—54 hours of pay for 48 hours of work. This demand—along with deep concerns regarding poor housing, and heavy-handed discipline and discrimination in the workplace—underlay the launch of the strike, one involving about 20,000 of the city’s 30-35,000 workers, on February 3.
The strike was characterized by high levels of police violence: several weeks into it, the police even mounted machine guns at major intersections. Lasting more than three months, it did not end until May 20, when mill owners accepted most of the workers’ demands.
Muste’s presence in Lawrence, and that of fellow radical pastors (Cedric Long and Harold Rotzel) from the Boston-based Comradeship, was a manifestation of his leftwing politics—socialist and pacifist. It also spoke to the pragmatism of Lawrence’s radical labor activists and the 1912 strike’s enduring legacy. While many claim that Muste was needed to bring together the disparate elements of a polyglot, immigrant workforce and to have a strong English-speaker as the strike’s public face, there were numerous English-speakers and highly skilled organizers among the workers’ leadership. By allying themselves with prominent out-of-towners. Lawrence’s workers sought to build their support base.
The Arlington Mills Company began operating on the site in 1865. Eventually, it would grow to include 23 buildings on a 75-acre site, becoming one of New England’s largest textile production complexes. The great poet Robert Frost, after graduating from Lawrence High School, worked there in 1893 and 1894. The company closed its doors in 1952; Malden Mills subsequently took over the complex and later sold it to Polartec, which moved its operations to Tennessee in 2016. Now a smaller site called the Arlington Mills Historic District (it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places), it sits on the Lawrence-Methuen border and is home to loft apartments. An industrial innovation hub is also reportedly in the works.
Related sites:
99 Appleton Way, South End (Boston). Muste lived at this address during 1918 and 1919; the rented house served as the Comradeship’s headquarters. According to historian Leilah Danielson, the house “served as sort of alternative community for its members and for a hodgepodge of radicals who used it as a meeting place and safe haven.”
To learn more:
- Arnold, Dexter. “A Row of Bricks”: Worker Activism in the Merrimack Valley Textile Industry, 1912-1922, PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1985.
- Arnold, Dexter. “Beyond the Bread and Roses Strike: Worker Militancy, Working-Class Realism, and Popular Memory in Lawrence, 1912-1937,” unpublished working paper.
- Danielson, Leilah. American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.Snow, Ethan J. Strike City: An Oral History of the Legacy of Labor Militancy in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912—1931, unpublished M.A. thesis, Department of History, University of Massachusetts Lowell, 2012.
Image: Arlington Mills. Date unknown. Courtesy of the Lawrence History Center.