“I came to America because I heard the streets were paved 

with gold.  When I got here, I found out three things: first, 

the streets weren't paved with gold; second, they weren't paved 

at all; and third, I was expected to pave them."

-- Old Italian story

CHAPTER ONE

            The work day started with whistles.  It ended with bells.

            Shortly before six a.m., while the city slumbered, a factory whistle blasted through a blanket of arctic air.  Across a dark skyline silhouetted by big shouldered buildings and pierced by smokestacks, another whistle followed, and another and another.  Each was sharper than usual because the morning was brutally cold, even for Massachusetts in January.  A low front had settled over most of the nation.  Temperatures of forty and fifty below had hit the Midwest and there was snow on the beach in Galveston, Texas.  In New England, a mass of icy air was locked above the long, low Merrimack River twenty miles north of Boston.  A factory whistle slices through such air like a child’s cry cuts through the night, and from the mills -- the Pacific and the Ayer, the Everett and the Atlantic, the Washington and the Arlington, the small Kunhardt and the awesome Wood Mill -- the whistles screeched.

While streetcars rumbled through downtown, tepid bulbs and oil lamps lit up row after row of tenements.  Bleary-eyed people, shivering, stamping their feet, muttering their own peculiar curses, shuffled into dingy kitchens.  Water taps were turned on but emitted only the dull thud of frozen pipes.  Babies cried for no reason and parents knew exactly how they felt.  Finding what privacy they could, women squeezed into starched white shirtwaists while men elbowed for room at mirrors and began shaving with straight razors.  Breakfast was served -- molasses and bread in some homes, just bread in others.  Then, with the city still dark as midnight and the rest of its denizens asleep, the workers of Lawrence headed for the mills.

            From a warren of bleak alleys and decaying slums came Labor incarnate.  Clusters of women, their long skirts billowing, their hair piled on their heads, emerged from wooden hovels and walked with arms intertwined.  Whole families surfaced from homes that were little more than holes – eight, ten, twelve people stepping as if by magic from two rooms.  Men in cloth caps rattled down fire escapes.  Boys in knickers took shortcuts across flat roofs, dodging stovepipe chimneys, leaping the narrow gaps between buildings, hustling down rickety stairs and spilling onto the street.  And within minutes, twenty-eight thousand people-- a city within a city -- were on their way to work.They were as miscellaneous as any populace on earth.  Seven out of eight were foreign born or children of immigrants.  Half had been in America less than five years.  In the newly-coined metaphor of the time, this “melting pot” contained the seasonings of fifty-one different nations.  There were Poles from Galicia, Italians from Sicily, Syrians from the Ottoman Empire.  There were Jews from Riga, Odessa, and other exotic ports of call.  Beside them marched Scots, Armenians, Portuguese, Belgians, Germans, English, French-Canadians, Russians, Greeks, Irish, and dozens more nationalities.  Their faces were coffee colored, pale as the sky, and every shade in-between.  Dark bushy moustaches sprouted from the men, accentuating sad brown eyes, while women’s faces -- pretty, plump or skeletal -- were framed in shawls or crowned by flowery hats.  Their given names were as rooted in the earth as the families they had left back in the “old country.”  Maria and Giuseppe.  Hans and Helga.  Sadie and Otto.  Yet workers had many other labels.  Mill payrolls catalogued them by job titles – doffers, spinners, weavers, spoolers, yarn boys, carders, pickers.  Mill foremen called them Wops and Dagoes, Sheenies and Kikes, Canucks, Polacks, Huns, and Micks.  And to the upper crust of Lawrence, old Yankee families tracing their American heritage to colonial times, they were simply “those people.”

As “those people” headed for work, age was another measure of their miscellany.  They ranged from tall twelve-year-olds whose forged work papers claimed they were fourteen to men and women approaching fifty.  Some were slightly older, but not many lasted that long in the mills.  Inhaling fibers that floated through dank, humid mill rooms, a third died within a decade on the job.  Malnourished, they succumbed to tuberculosis, pneumonia, or anthrax, known as “the woolsorter’s disease.”  They were crushed by machinery, mangled by looms and spinners.  In a single five-year span, the Pacific Mill had a thousand accidents, two for every three days on the job.  Those who avoided accident or disease just wore out like an old suit.  Doctors and ministers in Lawrence lived an average of sixty-five years.  Mill bosses could expect to live fifty-eight years.  The typical mill worker died at thirty-nine.  Yet on this icy morning, defying the odds, Maria, Giussepe, Hans, Helga, and twenty-eight thousand others were marching to work.  In the eyes of the mill owners, this gave them a final generic name -- Labor.

Like the streams that flowed into the Merrimack, Labor trickled through the streets.  Passing alleys reeking of garbage, they followed grimy avenues with ironic names -- Oak and Elm, Valley and Park.  Then, emerging onto Essex Street, the workers flowed together into a torrent of heads, caps, and faces sweeping past the ornate five-story storefronts of downtown.  With the start whistle just minutes away, they picked up pace, powered, it seemed, by rumors.  The night before, the rumors had swept through alleys, up stairwells, into cramped tenements.  The rumors were ominous, inspiring, amazing:  two hundred Polish women had stopped work at the Everett mill on Thursday afternoon!  They did not shout or walk out, just stood like statues beside their looms.  Through an interpreter, they were asked why.  “Not enough pay,” they replied. When they refused to work and were ordered out, they began shouting, urging others to join them.  A thousand looms were shut down!  All night, the rumors had flown through the tenements.  Now they came into the dawning light and a single word circulated in dozens of tongues.  Sciopero in Italian.  GrÀve in French and Portuguese.  Strajkuja in Polish.  Streikokim in Lithuanian. Shtrayken in Yiddish.  Streik in German.  And in English – strike.