‘The World’s Greatest Labor Play: The Paterson Strike Pageant’ by Phillips Russell from The International Socialist Review. Vol. 14 No. 1. July, 1913.

JUNE 7, 1913, was a red letter day in New York. Literally, too. For when dusk fell on Madison Square, high up on the tower of Madison Square Garden, shone the giant letters “I.W.W.,” glowing red in the sky and sending scarlet beams through the smoke that drifts incessantly across the face of Manhattan Island.

It was the first time that those significant letters have ever been given so conspicuous a place. Their mission was to announce something new under the sun, a labor play in which laborers themselves were the actors, managers and sole proprietors, portraying by word and movement their own struggle for a better world.

Imagine a great auditorium, the largest in New York, filled with one of the hugest audiences that ever gathered in the metropolis, gazing on the largest amateur production ever staged, with the biggest cast—1,029 members—that ever took part in a play, enacting a life-drama calculated to raise to the highest pitch the most powerful human emotions—and one gets a faint idea of the event in Madison Square Garden on the evening of June 7.

In order to give the reader a mental picture of what happened that night on the stage—which alone cost $600 to build —it might be well to outline the six episodes composing the pageant as given in the official program, which itself made a good propaganda pamphlet of 32 pages with a lithographed cover:

SCENE: Paterson, N.J. Time: A. D. 1913. The Pageant represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), making use of the general strike as the chief weapon. It is a conflict between two social forces—the force of labor and the force of capital. While the workers are clubbed and shot by detectives and policemen, the mills remain dead. While the workers are sent to jail by hundreds, the mills remain dead.

While organizers are persecuted, the strike continues, and still the mills are dead. While the pulpit thunders denunciation and the press screams lies, the mills remain dead. No violence can make the mills alive—no legal process can resurrect them from the dead. Bayonets and clubs, injunctions and court orders are equally futile.

Only the return of the workers to the mills can give the dead things life. The mills re- main dead throughout the enactment of the following episodes.

EPISODE ONE. 1. The Mills Alive—The Workers Dead. 2. The Workers Begin to Think. Six o’clock on a February morning. The mill windows all aglow. The mill whistle sounds the signal to begin work. Men and women, old and young, come to work in the bitter cold of the dawn. The sound of looms. The beginning of the great silk strike. The striking workers sing the Marseillaise, the entire audience being invited to join in the song of revolt.

EPISODE TWO. The Mills Dead—The Workers Alive. Mass picketing. Every worker alert. The police interfere with peaceful picketing and treat the strikers with great brutality. The workers are provoked to anger. Fights be- tween police and strikers ensue. Many strikers are clubbed and arrested. Shots are fired by detectives hired by the manufacturers, and Valentino Modestino, who was not a striker or a silk mill worker, is hit by a bullet and killed as he stands on the porch of his house with one of his children in his arms.

EPISODE THREE. The Funeral of Modestino. The coffin containing the body of Modestino is followed by the strikers in funeral procession to the strains of the Dead March. The strikers passing drop red carnations and rib- bons upon the coffin until it is buried beneath the crimson symbol of the workers’ blood.

EPISODE FOUR. Mass Meeting at Haledon. Great mass meeting of 20,000 strikers. I.W.W. organizers speak. Songs by the strike composers are sung by the strikers. They also sing the International, the Marseillaise and the Red Flag, in which the audience is invited to join in.

EPISODE FIVE. 1. May Day. 2. Sending Away the Children. The May Day Parade. The workers of Paterson, with bands playing, flags flying, and women and children dressed in red, celebrate the international revolutionary labor day. The strikers give their children to the “strike mothers” from other cities. The strike mothers receive them to be cared for during the war in the silk industry. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn speaks to the strikers and the children, dwelling upon the solidarity of labor shown in this vividly human episode, and is followed by William D. Haywood.

EPISODE SIX. Strike Meeting in Turn Hall. The strikers, men and women, legislate for themselves. They pass a law for the eight-hour day. No court can declare the law thus made unconstitutional. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca and William D. Haywood make typical strike speeches.

The New York Press the next day said:

“The Garden has held many shows and many audiences, from Dowie to Taft to Buffalo Bill, but it is doubtful if there ever was such an assemblage either as an audience or as a show as was gathered under the huge rafters last night. In fact, it was a mixed grouping that at times they converged and actor became auditor and auditor turned suddenly into actor. When more than 10,000 sang and shouted within, 5,000 outside clamored for admittance and were willing to pay double the prices to get in.”

The New York Evening World said:

“Fifteen thousand spectators applauded with shouts and tears the great Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden. The big mill aglow with light in the dark hours of early winter morning, the shrieking whistles, the din of machinery—dying away to give place to the Marseillaise sung by a surging crowd of 1,200 operatives, the fierce battle with the police, the sombre funeral of the victim, the im- passioned speech of the agitator, the sending away of the children, the great meeting of desperate hollow-eyed strikers—these scenes unrolled with a poignant realism that no man who saw them will ever forget.”

No spectacle enacted in New York has ever made such an impression. Not the most sanguine member of the committee which made the preparations for the pageant believed that its success would be quite so overwhelming. It is still the talk of New York, most cynical and hardened of cities, and will remain so for many days.

There were times when the committee were assailed with oppressive doubts. When one sat down and thought it over in cold blood, the idea of arranging for and carrying through such a thing in two weeks’ time seemed almost grotesque. Outside of the mechanical difficulties involved, the multitudinous details to be attended to, the advance outlay of money that would be necessary seemed to present an insuperable obstacle. There was the single item of $1,000 to be put down for the rental of one night, the $750 needed for scenery, the huge sum for advertising, all to be provided.

After plunging in with enthusiasm for the first few days, a bad reaction seized the promoters. They called a meeting in which the most gloomy forebodings were indulged in. There were disturbing reports of the small advance sale of tickets and there were serious proposals to give the whole thing up.

It was the workers themselves who stepped into the breach. Delegates from the New York silk strikers, whose cause has almost been lost sight of in the more spectacular struggle of Paterson, arose indignantly.

“What?” they cried. “Give this thing up after our people have set their hearts upon it? Never! Is it money you need? Leave it to us—we’ll raise that! We are poor. We are on strike. But a lot of us still have a few dollars left in the savings bank that we’ve been putting by through many years. We’ll get it out and lump it together. We will go to our business men and say: “Here, we’ve been trading with you a long time. We have helped to make your profits. Now you help us or we won’t trade with you any more. Never mind. You leave it to us—we will raise the money.”

And they did. Other generous people, more richly upholstered with ready cash also came forward with contributions and in four days there was ample money with which to cover all deposits.

And it was found that the result was worth all the toil and trouble involved. The lives of most of us are sordid and grey. So tightly are we tied to the petty round of toil to which our galley-masters bind us, that most of us probably are born, live and die without experiencing one deep-springing, surging, devastating emotion. We are either afraid to feel or we have lost the capacity.

The Paterson pageant will be remembered for the sweeping emotions it shot through the atmosphere if for no other reason. Waves of almost painful emotion swept over that great audience as the summer wind converts a placid field of wheat into billowing waves. It was all real, living, and vital to them. There were veterans of many an industrial battle in that audience, though the cheeks of many still held the pink of youth.

Who could sit quietly in his seat when that mill, wonderfully portrayed on canvas in the first scene, suddenly ceased its grinding whirr and shot from its belly that mass of eddying, struggling human beings loudly chorusing their exultant war songs as they proclaimed themselves on strike? Stage managers annually spend months of toil on a “mob scene” that the Paterson strikers outclassed with a single rehearsal. As a spectacle it was perfect. Nowhere was there a suggestion of “acting,” of going through “a part.” The people on the stage had long ago forgotten the audience. The audience had long ago forgotten itself. It had become a part of the scene. All simply lived their battles over again.

Then in strong contrast came the death and burial of Modestino, killed by a detective’s bullet. There was no attempt at theatrical effect here. It was conducted with the utmost simplicity. And the Garden knew it. It held its breadth in utter silence for throbbing minutes, while Modestino’s widow, seated in a box nearby, buried her head in her hands.

There followed the reproduction of a Haledon open-air meeting, with its magic singing by the Germans and Italians. There was a chorus leader who sang in a clear, musical voice that reached the uttermost parts of the Garden, and how his people did respond to him with their lyric replies! Again and again the audience demanded repetitions of these strange, wonderfully musical chants, composed and sung by the strikers themselves. The words, meaningless without the voices, went as follows:

Another vivid contrast came in the sending away of the children, with Gurley Flynn holding children, mothers on the stage and audience alike hanging on her words as if the scene was real.

The pageant was the suggestion of William D. Haywood. The scenes were arranged and staged by Ernest Poole and Thompson Buchanan, playwrights both. The difficult work of rehearsal was done by Jack Reed, the young magazine writer, who got 20 days in Paterson jail because a policeman objected to the set of his ears. The people who deserve credit for putting the pageant through are without number.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v14n01-jul-1913-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf