Steve Golin—The Fragile Bridge

Steve Golin
The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913
(1988)

[18] Paterson manufacturers suffered the cost of hiring experienced, skilled help, with all its attendant labor problems, because they had no good alternative. As the advertisement of a bankrupt manufacturer put it tactfully in 1913, "While this labor is more or less of an agitative character and at times unruly, yet this is due to the fact of its skilled character." ...the cost of training unskilled workers to weave even the plainer silks was very high because damage to the material was both frequent and expensive.

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[21] the battle strategy of the manufacturers in the years from 1894 to 1913 had a double focus: to try to gain political control over the Paterson police, and—wherever possible—to move their mills out of Paterson.

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By resisting with all their strength and wisdom the tendency of capitalism to turn improvements in machinery against them by lowering the value of their labor, the skilled male weavers inadvertently helped launch the flight of capital from Paterson. Whom we blame in a situation like this says more about us than about the people, on both sides of the class struggle, who lived through it.

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[27] In 1906 John Bimson became permanent chief of police, and in 1907 a business-sponsored reform of the city's government freed him from popular control. The aldermen were shorn of power, and a nonelected Board of Commissioners, appointed by the mayor, became responsible for the operation of the police force.

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[38] Killingbeck asked for a vote of thanks for Bimson, "the man who won our strike." Later, he explained that "when the constitution was abrogated by the authorities, in closing down the halls, arresting speakers, and clubbing citizens, such a feeling of disgust arose among the workers that it became a very simple matter to call out shop after shop." [Elizabeth Gurley] Flynn agreed with this analysis. The attempts at police repression, she told the strikers in March, had solidified their ranks; shops that originally had not wanted "agitators" to address them now called on the strike committee for speakers.

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[41] Local militants planned the general strike, organized it, began and controlled it. Most were not paid...nor were they officers of the local... During the 1914 hearings Zuersher surprised the commission by maintaining that local people possessed enough skill and practical knowledge to run the big strike; Haywood and the other national leaders had been needed, he added, only to address the mass meetings.

This was news in 1914—and is still news. Overemphasizing the importance of Haywood, most historians have overlooked the decisive role played in the strike by local silk workers. ... Eventually, when the strike became deadlocked and food scarce, the Paterson strikers would come to depend more heavily on the outside speakers for their eloquence and their ties to other sympathetic groups. But in the crucial formative weeks immediately preceding and following February 25, the contribution of the outsiders was minimal. In a sense, their greatest contribution was that they recognized and encouraged the abilities of the silk workers.

Golin places special emphasis on this general point and returns to it often.

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[50] Picketing was effective because even the minority of silk workers who wished to work during the strike feared to be identified and condemned as strikebreakers. This fear was not primarily one of violence... The deeper fear was of being publicly shamed. In Paterson, the word "scab" was the worst insult that could be flung at a silk worker. The forces of law and order, attempting to protect not only the body but the feelings of anyone returning to work, treated this insult as a crime. ... Throughout the strike, anyone caught in the act of calling someone else a scab could expect to go to jail.

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[52] The strikers...felt aggrieved: they believed they had a perfect right to picket and to choose their speakers without interference. ... The police were equally aggrieved: they believed that the out-of-town speakers and the pickets should not have been there in the first place. ... Yet the restraint was real on both sides. Warily, like two veteran boxers aware of each other's ability to inflict punishment, the strikers and the police danced around each other, jabbing but not going for the kill.

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[55] Flynn was what the IWW called an experienced "jawsmith." Addressing large meetings was a specialized job that required specialized training. It was not easy, before the days of microphones, to make oneself heard or understood by thousands, especially when their knowledge of English was rudimentary.

Let's tread lightly, but it's hard not to notice, right here, a root of the ostensible convergence between politics and theater (the convergence which makes the pageant imaginable) in the form of a trifling pragmatic contigency, the simplest material counterpart to the more exalted notion of mass address via aesthetic "accessibility:" namely material or technical accessibility, lizard-brain accessibility achieved by brute force, volume, projection, charisma, simplicity.

File away this point for later in the book, when the art-politics nexus is painted with the broadest of brushes. "Mass address" is not nearly so broad. It is an exceedingly narrow discipline, achieved by only a few artistic forms. It strongly favors the jawsmith, who in fact requires specialized training in navigating the lizard-brain level of discourse, though these hard-won skills may ultimately be deployed to condemn training and refinement broadly as artifacts of bourgeois decadence.

The general skepticism Golin detects among historians might, maybe, have something to do with their having noticed the dissonance between broad pretensions for political art and the narrow disciplinary and aesthetic purview which is the inevitable consequence.

Early in her career Flynn had learned from an old soapboxer how to bring her voice up from her diaphragm instead of trying to supply the power with her vocal chords, which would soon have become strained. From Haywood, in Lawrence, she had learned how to use simple words, short sentences, and repetition so that recent immigrants could follow what she said. She had also become expert at finding out details of local conditions and weaving them into her talk. Often staying overnight in Paterson, drawing on her relationships with silk workers (some of which went back to 1907...), Flynn rapidly educated herself in the issues affecting the strikers and their families. She could capture and hold the attention of the Turn Hall crowd in the morning for an hour or more, repeat the performance with appropriate variations at Helvetia Hall, appear at several shop meetings in the afternoon, and provide direction and humor to women or the Strike Committee in the evening. A professional agitator, a veteran at twenty-two years of age, idealistic and practical, equipped with a sharp sense of humor and a natural dramatic flair..., Flynn could simultaneously educate, entertain, and arouse.

Instrumental aims, these, the whole lot of 'em. This is part and parcel of radical politics. It does not come so easily to, say, poetry or the symphony.

She put her whole self into speaking, and her audiences responded.

This part is not instrumental in and of itself, and not coincidentally, it arises in discussion of all art forms, not just a few. Dare I say, though, that self-putting-in-ness is instrumentalized from time to time, in all art forms, and this is pretty obnoxious. Here is another reason why a harsh skepticism about political art has become more appropriate after the fact than it must have been in 1913. And nowadays, is it not just appropriate but necessary?

In Paterson she was in great demand; in one week she spoke seventeen separate times, often at great length.

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[58] Mass meetings served to bring people together and to soften tension over issues like picketing; at once educational gatherings and revival meetings, they tended to strengthen the ties between different traditions and peoples. When Koettgen or Lessig addressed a mixed audience in German, or Tresca in Italian, or Flynn and Haywood and Quinlan in English, the emphasis was on what everyone had in common. "You didn't have to understand Tresca," observes a Jew. "He was a fiery speaker. Of course I didn't understand him. But he was so fiery that you felt what he was saying." Not everyone reacted this way, however. Some American-born people became impatient when Tresca or another foreign speaker was talking; some would even leave the hall, particularly if the meeting ran into their lunch hour. Speeches might heal some conflicts but could exacerbate others. More than listening to speeches, singing helped the silk workers stay together despite the persistent tensions. In Paterson as in Lawrence, music became the universal language of the strikers.

Beautiful. But also, ugh.

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[76] Within the combined associations the large mill owners spoke for all the manufacturers and dominated their discussions. A number of small mills did indeed go bankrupt. They had no capital reserves and no annexes in Pennsylvania to sustain them. To avoid bankruptcy by ending the long strike, some small manufacturers would have agreed temporarily to anything, even an eight-hour day. But in addition to the pressure from the larger firms, there were two compelling reasons why these small manufacturers could not reach a settlement with their employees.

First, the strikers did not trust them. In 1912 seventeen smaller firms, with orders begging to be filled, agreed to the conditions of the Socialist Labor Party union; then, "as soon as the strike was settled and the slow season was on, these manufacturers repudiated their contracts." ... To many manufacturers there was nothing sacred about an agreement. Like the IWW itself, they regarded the breaking of an agreement as a legitimate tactic in labor conflicts. Therefore, the tentative overtures that some of them made in 1913 were not taken seriously by the strikers except as signs of weakness in the opposing camp. The second and more important reason why even those smaller firms that wanted to reach agreement could not have done so is that the silk workers were no longer making separate agreements with individual mills. ... This hostility to piecemeal shop settlements was intended to maintain unity in the strikers' camp—and it did; however, it also cemented the unity of the bosses. With nowhere to turn, the individual manufacturer was practically forced to fight on to the end.

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[79] No one, not even the detective, claimed that the pickets had fired or even possessed guns when Modestino was shot, and six witnesses in the Recorder's Court—while Modestino was dying in the hospital—identified Cutherton as the man who had shot him. Although Cutherton...was arrested after the shooting, he was never indicted. Amazed that Cutherton went free despite the evidence against him, State Supreme Justice James F. Minturn asked, "What power is there in this community that is greater than the power of law?" The answer, of course, was the power of the manufacturers.

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[80] The manufacturers also enjoyed the active support of the local courts. In New Jersey, where all judges were appointed, whoever controlled the local political authorities also controlled the courts. Recorder James Carroll had been chosen by municipal authorities who were open allies of the mill owners. On the day Adolph Lessig was sentenced by the recorder to six months in prison, he saw a silk manufacturer leaving the recorder's office. The Passaic County grand juries that indicted pickets and IWW speakers but refused to indict the man who shot Modestino had been appointed by the sheriff. Decision in the Recorder's Court and county court were so flagrantly partisan that conservative New York newspapers were frequently driven to protest against them. But again, what mattered to the manufacturers was that they received support when they needed it. Appeals to higher courts were slow and costly. For all practical purposes, during the period of the strike, the law belonged to the manufacturers.

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[110] Such rich cross-class ties [between "intellectuals" and "workers"] are unusual today. What made them possible in 1913 was the separate vitality of the Paterson workers' movement and the Greenwich Village cultural movement; neither was parasitic on the other.

The metaphor of parasitism is a favored one around here when discussing the relation of artists with...just about anyone else. Hence this point meets with our approval and emphasis.

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In May 1913,

[158] two Paterson weavers carrying an American flag literally begged all the way down Broadway, until they were arrested for using the flag for commercial purposes.

Well, you could arrest a lot of business executives for that nowadays. Especially where I work.

Apparently the flag code is a real thing. But the interpretation above seems like a stretch.

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[160] But the pageant lost money, says the chorus of historians. In making this charge, they flatten out the complex strategy of the Pageant's creators—to generate publicity, which would in turn lead to increased financial support—and reduce the Pageant to a simple fund-raiser. This misreading of the evidence has its roots in contemporary press accounts. Haywood, Reed, and Dodge were forced to use the press to advertise the Pageant. They needed willing workers in Paterson and New York, as well as an audience large enough to fill Madison Square Garden, and they had only three weeks to get it all done. Inevitably, the process of spreading the word about the Pageant resulted in distortions. Having begun as a way of letting potential supporters in New York see what was happening in Paterson, the Pageant sometimes appeared, in the same press whose influence it was meant to offset, as merely a fund-raiser.

Hapgood, responding to this confusion, insisted in the New York Globe that "the Pageant to be given by the silk workers of Paterson is not a money-making idea. . . . It is intended to give the whole of New York an idea of the meaning of the great industrial and social happenings which are taking place in
[161]
Paterson and all over the country." But as momentum developed in Paterson and New York, culminating in the standing-room-only crowd at the Garden on June 7, the hope of making money that very night became widely shared. When it finally became obvious, more than a week after the performance, that it had made no money..., the newspapers were quick to condemn the Pageant as a failure and even to accuse the IWW or New York intellectuals of stealing the profits. Historians who say the Pageant failed because it did not make money for the strikers on the day of the performance are perpetuating a confusion that developed in the press during the gestation of the Pageant idea.

Did the strikers themselves believe what they read in the papers? Did they come to expect the Pageant to raise a great deal of money directly, in addition to raising it indirectly through publicity? Under the pressure of hunger, many of them did. Solidarity, in an optimistic article on relief efforts written a few days before the Pageant, said that "the strikers hope to derive the largest lump sum of all from 'The Pageant of the Paterson Strike.'"

In New York those who were close to the financial details always knew better. ... The working committees finally decided to go ahead, not because they believed money could be made from a single performance—especially not one aimed primarily at working people—but because New York silk strikers who were present at the meeting insisted that the Pageant simply had to be put on and themselves lent money to offset production costs. The New York ribbon weavers knew what most historians have forgotten, that the real purpose of the Pageant was to publicize the dramatic class struggle then taking place in Paterson, in the hope of influencing the outcome.

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[175] A great contribution to the strike, to class struggle, and to the drama: this view of the Pageant was the dominant one not only among Wobblies but also among Villagers. ...Bernadine Kielty saw that the Pageant broke down abstractions of the working class: "No one who saw the Paterson strike pageant was likely ever again to think of the working class as an indefinable mass. It was the tragedies of individuals that were enacted before our eyes. It was a glimpse into another world, only a glimpse, it is true, but an important one for many. It opened our minds." Hapgood made a similar point, and carried it further. The Pageant overcame the stereotyped view of workers as incapable of managing their own affairs:

I think that many persons who saw that spectacle must have felt that workers who are capable of emotional organization must also be capable of practical and material organization. Many persons must have felt, in the presence of this gentle and intelligent mass, that there is here a possibility of social development, which need not be feared.

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[177] Historians..agree that the Pageant failed. The one important exception is Linda Nochlin, whose 1974 article emphasized the participatory nature of pageantry and the impact of the Pageant on the strikers themselves. ... Working at some distance from the practical questions that concern historians of the strike and of the IWW, Nochlin is able to distinguish the forest from the trees. The strength of her article is that it is informed by a commitment to radical art; its limit is that, insofar as it touches on immediate issues, it must yield to the experts. The Pageant, she says, "although it evidently failed in its fund-raising mission, was nevertheless a potent instrument in raising political consciousnes and forging a sense of working-class solidarity." ... Sidestepping Flynn's arguments and trusting her own sense that the Pageant was great politics because it was great art, Nochlin helps us remember why so many different people in Paterson and New York were moved by the Pageant and changed by it.

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to complete the argument [that the Pageant succeeded rather than failed], we need to explain why historians of the strike, the IWW, and the Villagers have followed Flynn on the Pageant. Part of the explanation lies in the current academic divisions of history. Social historians view the Pageant in the context of the organization of immigrant workers; cultural historians view it as an expression of the rebellion of New York intellectuals. But the Pageant defined the moment in which social history and cultural history became one. Its essence was both politics and art, a strike tactic and a cultural revolution. ...
[178]
Narrow specialization, however, can provide only a partial explanation for the failure to come to grips with the Pageant and may itself reflect a wider loss of connection. Inside and outside academia, very few people today—even among those of us who think of ourselves as radical—believe in the possibility of an equal and creative collaboration between intellectuals and workers.

I mean, it must be possible. Lots of things are possible. But just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Yet the Pageant demonstrated that possibility.

Right. In very specific circumstances.

Its power today is as an example of what can happen when workers who are moving left and intellectuals who are moving left come together. But powerful as it was, the Pageant cannot compel belief.

Nope. That would take a whole rash of Pageants, i.e. a preponderance of evidence.

Unable to change historians, it has been changed by them. Today we call Haywood and Reed romantic and naive because they relied on the bridge; we know that art is irrelevant to politics and radical politics largely irrelevant to the business of strikes. The connections have been lost, and we have grown up in a world that cannot admit that the Pageant actually happened. Hence, we maintain that the Pageant may have been great art but hurt the strike; it was fun for the intellectuals but a fiasco for the silk workers and the IWW. The deeper reason, perhaps, why historians have followed Flynn is that if they lack her passion, they share her cynicism.

... the great thing about the Pageant was that it enabled the strikers themselves to tell their story; the most modern theatrical sensibilities and techniques were put in the service of the working class. And the disappointing thing is that this great example has, so far, led to nothing. But "the action is continually being replayed, and it could be otherwise." We could yet learn to make the Pageant a success, not in its own terms alone but as precedent for the fusion of radical imagination with radical action.

A precedent certainly, but also a product of circumstances not likely to be repeated, on both the micro and macro levels.

Golin is convincing on many points here, but only (perhaps unavoidably) by presenting incomplete evidence. His thesis of separate vitality seeks to preempt Lasch's positing of "exploitation," e.g.; but this observation merely suggests that Paterson was the exception proving Lasch's rule. Similarly, Golin's pushback against historians' skepticism, while it does hit many targets, nonetheless misses by a wide distance the particular skepticism in Lasch's observation that "what was condemned as politics could be savored as theater," which is, again I would venture, demonstrably the rule rather than the exception, and ever more demonstrably so as history marches on and political theater is vulgarized to the point of farce. True to "radical" form, Golin would rather seek to exploit this dynamic rather than being, as Lasch is, extremely suspicious of it. It is fair enough to be on the lookout for new situations which indicate favorably for this line of action. Still, such overbroad reclamations as Golin attempts here do not so much refute Lasch's critiques of political theater as demonstrate their uncanny accuracy.

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[227] By March 1916 the bridge itself had long since collapsed, carrying with it the possibility of artists collaborating with workers, and the editors of The New Masses felt compelled to choose between art and politics. On behalf of art, John Sloan led the attack on Eastman's editorial direction; on behalf of socialism, Art Young led the counterattack on Sloan. Having failed to overthrow Eastman, Sloan and three of the other artists resigned. Later, Eastman recognized that "it was a quarrel, essentially between art and propaganda, poetry and practical effort—between the very two interests whose satisfaction within the same covers had made the magazine unique." Conflicts that had once been experienced as creative tensions had by 1916 become destructive divisions between people, and within people. Today we may "understand" these divisions too quickly; we may assume that art and politics cannot mix, that bohemian rebellion and working-class revolution must be enemies.

Enemies is a strawman here. "Enemies" is too strong even for me. I would say they are oblique to each other.

But Sloan and Eastman, who were good friends, appear to have been bewildered by their inability to contain the quarrel. ...

The Communist Party did not create the split on the left between art and politics but, rather, institutionalized it. The Masses died in 1917, killed by wartime repression. Its successor, the Liberator, remained under Eastman's direction until 1922, when the Communist Party took it over and created two separate groups of associate editors: "political editors," who were mostly Communists; and "art editors," most left over from The Masses or early Liberator days. "The realm of art, presumably less serious, was left for the artists," one of the two new chief editors reported. He recognized that Reed, Eastman, Giovannitti, and others had written for The Masses "on the assumption that nothing human was alien to them"; they had written as poets and as radicals.

These two things have nothing necessarily to do with each other. The question, rather, is whether differentiation or dedifferentiation indicates more favorably for the exigencies of the moment.

"Under the aegis of the Party this tradition was of necessity ended." Those artists in the 1920s who accepted the Communist position on the subordination of art to politics and those who, making the opposite choice, proclaimed art to be an end in itself were equally the victims of the perceived necessity to choose.

Well, direct involvement in either of these projects does tend to foster such a perception, no?

My in-the-moment note says:
Is it so hard to realize that art can be "subordinate" to politics in one sense and "an end to itself" in another sense? WHY the need for a merger?