This Day in Labor History: January 23, 1922
By 
On January 23, 1922, the United Textile Workers led between 70,000 and 85,000 workers out on strike, protesting the continued exploitative reality of work in the apparel factories. This was the last of the epic textile strikes in New England as the industry moved rapidly to the South. It led to some marginal victories, but did not halt the capital mobility that would effectively eliminate the industry in the Northeast in the next decades.
By the early 20s, there was a long history of unionization and strikes in the apparel industry. The Uprising of the 20,000, under the auspices of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union but really a bottom-up action led by young Jewish socialist women, was one famous challenge to the industry. The Industrial Workers of the World came in to support striking workers in the Lawrence, Massachusetts apparel factories in 1912 and won the biggest victory that union ever would, though in part because of its hostility to contracts, a year later, the union in Lawrence was dust. In 1913, the IWW went to Paterson, New Jersey and led a strike in those apparel factories, but its own desire to put on a big display at the Paterson Strike Pageant divided the workers, allowed scabs to enter the plants, and killed a strike that would have been hard to win with the best leadership.
The post-World War I period was a tough one for organized labor, with employers determined to roll back gains unions had made during the war. That was true in apparel as well. Employers had forced workers to take a 22 percent pay cut in December 1920, which made the lives of workers significantly worse and also started a new round of organizing.
Meanwhile, textile employers were incredibly greedy and the small profit margins of an industry that didn’t take that much capital to enter made them demand even more rollbacks from workers. In January 1922, employers announced another 20 percent pay cut, on top of the previous one. In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, employers went even farther, demanding the return of the 54 hour work week. They couldn’t really win that in Massachusetts, which had a state law for a 48 hour work week, but they hoped to defy state law.
The textile industry was loosely organized. There were union members, but it was far from a universal thing. But there was a general sympathy for unions among most of these workers. On January 23, the strike started at the Royal Mill in West Warwick, Rhode Island. Today, like a lot of these old mills in the area, it’s an apartment complex. They were organized with the United Textile Workers. The workers there headed up to nearby Pawtucket, home to a lot of mills, marched around, and convinced workers to go out on strike with them. Most did. Most of the unions along the Blackstone River, heading north toward Worcester, Massachusetts, also joined the strike, although almost none of these workers were union members.
By February, the strike had moved through Providence, up to Manchester, New Hampshire and to the old union center of Lawrence, Massachusetts. It was a big one. But it was hard for this union to run a strike with these workers. The UTW was pretty conservative. There were longer traditions of radicalism in some of the immigrant communities involved, Lawrence being the classic example. A lot of the workers in Lawrence had participated in the epic strike of a decade before and they wanted to relive some of those IWW tactics. UTW tried to be a respectable AFL union. It wasn’t always a great match. Workers often had little to no loyalty to the UTW. So that union was often doing as much repression of radicalism in the towns as it was fighting the companies. The IWW was not really a thing at this time, but then it didn’t really need to be. Workers could just announce they were Wobblies and organize under Wobbly principles. That’s what happened in Lawrence.
On February 21, police in Pawtucket, a town with a very nasty anti-union sentiment among its elites, struck back. Cops fired into a crowd of 1,000 strikers and supporters near the Jencks Spinning Company, at the time the largest factory in town. Juan D’Assumpcau, a grocery clerk who was there in solidarity, was shot in the back seven times and killed. Eight other people were wounded and a total of seventeen people were hurt that day between the shootings and the cops beating the living tar of people. The mayor was in complete support of killing workers. This led to a giant funeral procession, Martyrdom has often served as a rallying point for struggling strikes and upwards of 7,000 people attended. This all led the Rhode Island governor to call in the militia, both to serve as snipers based at the top of the factories, but to escort scabs into the mills.
By April, the Textile Worker, which was the UTW’s publication, claimed 85,000 workers out, with New Hampshire as the strongest sector at around 33,000 and Rhode Island with about 23,000. The weakness was in Maine, where few workers would join the strike. April also saw the employers get more serious about busting the strike. Company housing was still a big thing and in Rhode Island, companies started evicting people from their homes. That increased in June, though a judge intervened with an injunction against the companies. Some workers were evicted in any case.
It was the IWW workers in Lawrence that won the first real gains in the strike. In August, the mill owners there agreed to roll back the wage cut and quite a few mills soon followed suit. The strike ended in Rhode Island in September and slowly rolled down in most of these states with the reversal of the wage cut. However, the work week issue remained contentious.
What really happened in the aftermath of this though is what was already happening–the textile companies were seeking to bail on their prone to strike workers in New England and move to the South. That process was already well under way in 1922. It would continue rapidly. By 1934, when the UTW called the giant textile strike of that year, the union was desperately seeking to hold on to what it had left in New England while organizing the vast unorganized in the South. It failed and effectively disappeared in the aftermath.
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