Bread & Roses by Bruce Watson
This review originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of Z Magazine . I'd forgotten about it until somebody today mentioned that it's the anniversary of most of the striking workers' demands being met (12 March 1912), and so today seemed like a good one to post this: Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream by Bruce Watson New York, Viking, 2005, 337 pp. Lawrence, Massachusetts was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, what might be called one of the greatest mill towns in the United States, but "greatest" is a difficult term, and underneath it hide all the conditions that erupted during the frigid winter of 1912 into a strike that affected both the labor movement and the textile industry for decades afterward. Bruce Watson's compelling and deeply researched chronicle of the strike takes its name from a poem and song that have come to be associ...