Largely immigrant workers, women and girls, in Little Falls, New York walked out of the Phoenix Knitting and Gilbert Knitting Mills in October, 1912. Nearby Schenectady, with its Socialist mayor and movement, sent help and in late October the workers established I.W.W. Local No. 801, the National Industrial Union of Textile Workers of Little Falls. An October 30 police riot and violent raids on strikers’ halls brought the struggle to national attention, and saw the arrival of William D. Haywood and Matilda Robbins. Below is an account of that day and the proclamation of the strikers in its aftermath.

‘Standing Like a Rock in Little Falls’ from Solidarity. Vol. 3 No. 48. November 23, 1912.

Little Falls Strikers Putting Up Magnificent Fight. A Stinging Proclamation.

(Special to Solidarity.) Little Falls, N.Y., Nov. 18. Despite “authoritative” reports that all the textile mill strikers would return to work this morning, the picket line was the largest that has turned out in several days and the total number of new scabs that obtained entry was two. The rumor factory was unusually busy yesterday and nearly all the news agencies sent out circumstantial stories to the effect that the strike was “settled” and that the big parade of strikers Saturday afternoon was in the nature of a celebration.

There was no truth whatever in these stories. No return to work was even contemplated, and the only thing even remotely resembling a settlement was a meeting between a committee of strikers and Judge Gilbert of the Gilbert knitting mills. This conference resulted in nothing, Judge Gilbert merely making an offer to allow 60 hours pay for 54 hours work, but as the strikers are holding out for a 10 per cent increase for day work and 15 per cent for night work, they got little satisfaction.

No word whatever has been received from Manager McLaughlin of the Phoenix mills, whose obstinacy continues to stand in the way of a complete settlement. A committee of businessmen, which recently visited him in the hope of bringing about an end to the strike, was received coldly, and public sentiment is now rapidly turning against him.

The merchants of the town are beginning to feel the pinch severely, trade having fallen off to a minimum. These gentry, who early in the strike saw fit to hold a public meeting which approved of the course of the police in their ferocity towards the strikers, are now waking up to the fact that the working people are not only the producers of the community but the consumers, and that if the strike is not ended soon the little savings of the workers will be exhausted and a dull winter for trade will be the dismal prospect.

The mass meeting held in the Lumberg theatre in Utica yesterday raised a total of $125 for the strikers.

Mayor Lunn of Schenectady and Wm. D. Haywood made addresses to an audience of about 600, which applauded almost continuously. Five girl strikers from Little Falls helped take up the collection and sold copies of the Schenectady Citizen, containing Robert A. Bakeman’s terrible story of what took place in the cells of the local police station after the arrest of the first batch of strikers, when helpless men and women bad their faces beaten into a pulp by blackjacks in hands of police and detectives.

Bakeman tells how one boy, who was shot through the back of the head; was left lying in his cell for several hours without any attention whatever. Bakeman tried to wash the blood off some of the prisoners and had to carry water to them in an envelope.

Mayor Lunn plainly charged that the riot of Oct. 30, for which more than 40 men and women have been arrested, was purposely started by the police. He told of having been accompanied to Herkimer jail Saturday by Valeria Vitaszek, the little Polish woman with a 2-year-old child, who is accused by a 214-pound detective of having committed a murderous assault on him with a 6-inch knife.

Haywood declared that the fight was by no means over, but was going to be extended, and that Utica might be discussing its own strike within a week. He pointed out that the strike in Little Falls was but a part of the general class struggle, and that will not be ended until “overalls are put on every capitalist in the country.” In the presence of the police and plain clothes men who were thickly planted in the rear of the theatre, he mercilessly arraigned the police and detectives of the master class. The Little Falls strike would be won, he said, and the rights of the working class would be fully established before the I.W.W. had finished with the town. Eight hundred members had already been taken into the organization, he said, and word had been received that 250 men were ready to come at a moment’s notice to establish free speech and assemblage.

Following is the proclamation issued by the Strike Committee of Little Falls the day after the police-made riots of Oct. 30. It “got the goats” of the police and respectable citizens. The Utica printer who got it out was arrested and brought to Little Falls, but later released. Three thousand copies were seized and confiscated by the police:

PROCLAMATION!

OCT. 30, 1912.

The bloodthirsty, murderous cossacks have shown their hand.

Police thugs of Little Falls throw off the mask and do the dirty work for the gang of bloodsuckers who own the mills in Little Falls.

Today in Little Falls was seen a spectacle which has not been witnessed before anywhere outside of Russia.

Today the gang of fiends in human form who wear the disgraceful uniform of the police in Little Falls deliberately went to work and started a riot.

It was the most brutal, cold-blooded act ever done in these parts. Nothing under heaven can ever justify it, and the soul of the degenerate brute who started it will shrivel in hell long, long before the workers will ever forget this day.

The workers in the mills of Little Falls have been on strike for four weeks against an inhuman oppression of the mill bosses. An incompetent law has been used by these mill owners to reduce the wages of the workers from 50c to $2 a week.

Hundreds of these workers were already existing on a starvation wage averaging about $1 per week.

They resisted this robbery by the mill owners.

They went on strike.

The police showed at the beginning that the filthy money of the mill owners can corrupt all authority by attempting to suppress free speech in Little Falls. Several speakers were arrested. Then the strikers organized in the Industrial Workers of the World.

They began peaceful picketing at the mills where many American workers, mostly girls, were playing the part of scabs.

The strikers, with a band, and banners bearing appeals for support, began to parade each morning before the mills to encourage other workers to come out. They did not interfere with the scabs in any way, and by this means of peaceful demonstration the strikers won over every day some of those who were working.

The mill bosses were baffled. They could not understand this new and peaceful mode of picketing. As the strikers kept moving at all times, the police could find no excuse to interfere. But today the craven brutes MADE AN EXCUSE.

Every day more workers joined the picket line. The first day one of these bloodthirsty police animals tried to start a riot by slugging a girl who stepped from the line to speak to a friend. He was number three who showed his cowardice and animal ferocity today by cruelly clubbing helpless prisoners and defenseless strikers.

On Friday the police struck the first blow when they tried to break up the picket line at the Rex mill and arrested one of the strikers’ organizers.

Police number two, who fired the first shot today, and whose aim was so bad that he hit one of the special bloodhounds instead of the striker he wanted to kill, was one who led the assault upon the strikers line at the Rex mill.

In spite of all this oppression and provocation the strikers stood firm, refrained from one single act of violence and gained many new supporters.

Yesterday many workers joined the ranks of the strikers and one mill was completely tied up.

Then the mill owners got desperate. Many girls in the Phoenix mill were forced to go home because there was no work left for them. A rumor spread that the Phoenix mill would have to close down today. The bosses, however, tried two more plans.

First, they brought in a herd of scabs from Utica.

Second, they set the stage for the tragedy this morning.

The picket line today was stronger than ever. Everyone was peaceable. No one called scab. All were singing as they marched.

When the line reached the Phoenix mill there were 30 or 40 thugs under the leadership of the mill-owner chief, the brutal, ignorant tool of the cowardly millionaire anarchists who use the police to beat the mill workers back into slavery. He started the riot. He did it deliberately and it was undoubtedly the result of a prearranged plot.

The picket line was absolutely peaceable and orderly. They were acting just as they always have, making way at all times for anyone wishing to cross the street. The strikers are absolutely blameless. But the chief did not want peace. He wanted a riot to help the bosses break the strike by breaking the heads of the defenseless paraders. So he picked out Antonio Prete, member of the strike committee, who was walking alone in the middle of the street, and hit him with his club. Strikers ran to defend him, and then his thugs began their murderous assault with clubs and guns upon the helpless women and men in the picket line. One policeman, number two, shooting at a striker who was running away, hit another policeman in the leg.

The strikers went for protection to their hall, but the murderous bloodhounds broke into the hall, drove everyone out, smashed everything in sight and fired several shots into the cellar in the hope of shooting I.W.W organizers whom they thought were hiding there.

This assault on the strike headquarters is the most high-handed outrage that has ever occurred in these parts.

The whole trouble today was very clearly a police plot to break up the strikers’ union.

The strikers were unarmed and helpless. The police are entirely responsible for everything that happened and will be held accountable.

The chief of police has been constantly threatening to “get” the strike leaders. Several other police officers have made vicious threats, one of them against the life of the chairman of the strike committee, Legere, who was rescued from the police today by the strikers.

Many of the friends and relatives of the police have made threats of organizing an “entertainment” committee to “run Legere and his crowd out of town,” as it was expressed by one of them.

The whole machinery of law in Little Falls has been set to work most viciously in the interest of the mill owners ever since the day when the prosecuting attorney began to “persecute” the organizers who spoke to the strikers because, as he said, “he didn’t like their looks.”

The strikers have never fired a shot, vet they are charged with the shooting done by a policeman.

The police have finished their foul and dirty work by “beating up” the prisoners in the police station.

Let every lover of freedom and justice hear the cry of the oppressed strikers of Little Falls. Can these inhuman brutalities be carried out with impunity in America?

A foul and slimy press has spread a lying story of today’s struggle throughout the land. The strikers cry for justice.

Let the truth be known. Let every voice and every hand of every liberty-loving worker in this land be raised in a thunderous protest against this attempt on the part of a band of murderous officials to turn an American city into a Russian shambles.

Let the workers in every mill and factory in the Mohawk Valley go on strike as a protest against this fiendish brutality.

And make demands upon your bosses for better conditions. Workers, take up this fight and help us win. Our fight is your fight.

Let us stand together and win.

Join the I.W.W. for One Big Union of all the workers and victory.

LITTLE FALLS STRIKE COMMITTEE, of the Industrial Workers of the World, P.O. Box 458, Little Falls, N.Y.

The most widely read of I.W.W. newspapers, Solidarity was published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 until 1917. First produced in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and born during the McKees Rocks strike, Solidarity later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until 1917 then spent its last months in Chicago. With a circulation of around 12,000 and a readership many times that, Solidarity was instrumental in defining the Wobbly world-view at the height of their influence in the working class. It was edited over its life by A.M. Stirton, H.A. Goff, Ben H. Williams, Ralph Chaplin who also provided much of the paper’s color, and others. Like nearly all the left press it fell victim to federal repression in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1912/v03n48-w152-nov-23-1912-Solidarity.pdf