Workers party

The Bread and Roses Heritage Festival

by Mark Edmonds

By all accounts, Lawrence, Massachusetts in early January, 1912, was one helluva place to be. The city's great woolen mills -- substantial worldwide textile makers -- were in trouble after working-hour restrictions forced owners to scale back their dawn-to-dusk workday. All complied but forgot to explain the change to the workers. Not surprisingly, the short paychecks that followed resulted in anger. In one mill, a riot began. In others, calls for walkouts filled the air. Machinery spun to a halt as one of the largest strikes of the century began.

"In one of the worst winters in years, eventually, every mill in Lawrence was shut down," says Lawrence native Phyllis Tyler. "Then it got pretty messy. People were fighting, the state militia came in and imposed martial law, and reporters started coming in from as far away as Europe to cover what was going on."

Although it seems like a dreadful chapter in the history of this old mill town, locals now commemorate the event every September. Since 1985, Tyler and a handful of volunteers have joined forces with the city to present the Bread and Roses Heritage Festival. Appropriately, the event takes place every Labor Day and, since its inception, is held in Lawrence's downtown at Campagnone Common -- the site of many spirited and bloody labor rallies at the turn of the century.

This year's free festival includes as wide an array of offerings as Lowell did in July at its three-day folk festival. Lawrence, however, is more compact. From 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. on five mini-stages, a long list of performers, including veteran social activist Si Kahn, singer/songwriters Patty Larkin and Bob Franke, Rhode Island Celtic phenoms Pendragon, and bluegrassers Southern Rail, is scheduled to share space with a wide array of storytellers, ethnic musical and performance groups, food vendors, and craftspeople.

As event treasure Tyler likes to point out, the Roses fest is a smaller version of Lowell. "The only real difference is that we do this one day, even though people would like us to do more -- and we do it on a $28,000 budget. Lowell," she points out with a touch of pride, "does theirs on hundreds of thousands."

If their budgets are different, so too are their agendas. Lowell presents musical variety only. The Roses takes that one step further by adding organized-labor activism to its list of offerings. Local unions -- many of which sponsor the event in some way -- normally send representatives to man booths and tables to quietly preach the gospel of organized labor.

Nobody applauds this louder than Si Kahn, who makes his second appearance at the fest this year. A veteran of the civil-rights movement, he's been a vocal workers' advocate for more than 30 years. "Certainly this UPS thing that just happened shows that business is heading back to the way it was in the days of the Roses strike," Kahn says. "[Business is] looking for ways everyday to avoid giving people a job that will allow them to live decently. That can't go on long without the quality of life being hurt in this country."

In the late 1880s, things were different. Union leaders like Terrance Vincent Powderly fought hard for measures such as the holiday we now enjoy every September. Calling for "a day set aside for those who from rude nature have developed and caused the grandeur we behold," Powderly lobbied Congress 12 years before Labor Day became a national holiday in 1894.

That meant little to the strikers in Lawrence, however. They just wanted better pay, and almost lost their strike until the International Workers of the World arrived. "They brought all the ethnic groups together," Tyler says. "It brought the mills to their knees."

A similar spirit plays a large part in the Roses festival. "It's one of the greatest things about this," Kahn says. "It teaches newer immigrant cultures to hold on to what they have. People need that as much today as they did then."

The 12th Bread and Roses Heritage Festival takes place rain or shine on Monday September 1 from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Campagnone Common, in Lawrence. Admission is free. Call 682-1863 for information.