The esteemed labor reporter is at her best writing here on the exuberance and promise of a workers’ movement in motion as she reports on the response to an employer’s lockout by 65,000 members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.

‘Locked Out’ by Mary Heaton Vorse from The Liberator. Vol. 4 No. 2. February, 1921.

EARLY in the lockout of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, I went to one of the shop meetings which ceaselessly succeed each other in many halls. A flood of men was pouring down the steps and spreading out in dark pools on the street where they stopped in the mild evening to talk together while children played gravely under their feet paying no attention to them. I asked one of the men–

“What’s the main issue of disagreement between you and the manufacturers?”

He said: “There’s only one. They want to smash the organization, all the rest is talk.”

I said: “Can they do it?”

He answered without excitement, “Not a chance.” He added as he moved to one of the groups of talking men: “We’ve suffered before we can now if we got to.”

This man is right. The lockout is about one thing only. The seven points of the employers have a single meaning. The demanded reduction of wages is not important nor even the pressing question of piece work. The meaning of these seven points which the manufacturers presented to the Amalgamated in December was this: “We manufacturers are going to give you terms which we know you cannot accept. When you don’t accept them we will lock you out. Our pockets are ‘bulging, your pockets are lean with five months of slack season. Winter is on us. When you refuse to accept our impossible conditions, we will break your organization. Hunger will be our ally. We will use hunger and the anxiety of your women to break you. When we drain the red from the faces of your children maybe you will see your way to doing without your organization.”

In their private meetings the employers have been predicting that before the winter is over they will “have labor eatting out of their hands.”

They mean by that phrase that labor will be at their mercy, that the organizations will have been broken and that the open shop shall have become a fact.

The Amalgamated’s answer to the Manufacturers was a mass meeting where 30,000 clothing workers shouted “No,” to the manufacturers’ terms.

The lockout followed–65,000 clothing workers stopped working.

The lockout is a situation new to me. I have never seen a big lockout before. I have seen plenty of strikes. I have seen masses of people–miners, steel workers, metal miners, railway men, rise up in thousands in long heaving waves of discontent. I have heard their clamorous demands for a chance to live. I have seen them sit down tight, dug in for months for a principle–for the recognition of their union.

Always these demonstrations were an advancing tide. I have never before seen workers fighting to keep from returning to the slave conditions of sweat shop days.

Five months ago–only a few months after the time when the cry “Produce! Produce!” was being dinned into labor’s ears, it began to be slack season in the clothing trade.

Men were laid off. Men worked three days a week, then two days a week. The lockout merely was an emphasis of conditions complete unemployment instead of partial unemployment.

At a slack and stale moment, the sluggish wheels of industry slowed down altogether. There was nothing dramatic about it. There was no thunderclap to make working people throughout the country realize that this had the importance of an historical moment, since it was the first time that combined greed was organized well enough to start a concerted battle on organized labor–combined greed with all its sinister forces at its command.

Now I will ask you to consider again the nature of the open shop and the weapons which it uses.

The Open Shop Campaign is a conspiracy on the part of the few to destroy the many. It is the first, direct, concerted attempt of the entrenched employers to destroy utterly the only weapon of the workers–their organization. It is mothered by panic and fathered by repression.

I know a cheerful young man who goes around organizing Chambers of Commerce. His place of business is a respectable one with a fine address to it of a well known firm, which undertakes organizing work of various kind. It has organized for the government. He is highly paid for his work. The idea is, of course, to organize the country one hundred percent into chambers of commerce and employers’ and manufacturers’ associations, whose purpose shall be to fight organized labor.

These chambers of commerce have no other object than fighting labor. They have lost all the other legitimate objects for which employers might band themselves together. When a town hasn’t enough white-terrorist feeling to do this of itself, some bright young man like my acquaintance is sent to organize the town.

“I go into a town,” he told me, “and throw a scare into it. If there is any employer who don’t want a shake-down and who thinks labor is all right, I talk red revolution to him. I tell him the red revolution is around the corner. Of course, I know it isn’t around the corner. But it’s great fun to see these birds fall for it, and get cold feet one after another.”

The first thing is to start a slush fund to finance weak brothers through lockouts.

The next thing is to start a spy system.

Like a growing cancer with obscure roots penetrating through the whole tissue of industrial life, is the spy system. Men are discharged for alleged union activities on the evidence of anonymous letters. Spotters are kept in every shop, in every factory. I have had a spy explain how it was done how he filled every day a list of questions, and reported every day the conversations of his fellow workers.

When I asked him how he could do it, he said: “Well, these fellows aren’t human anyway. They send their money home, which hurts the prosperity of the country.” These under-cover men link up with the crime-breeding detective agencies. In many of the industries like the textile, for instance, a union man is surrounded by a network of detectives and spies ready to report him. If he is an alien and an active union man they report him to the Department of Justice, which will try to deport him. If he goes on a strike, there is another type of agency to cope with him.

There are the strike-breakers–hired scabs and hired thugs. Thugs to beat up the pickets, and scabs to take the workers’ jobs. On top of this structure of filth, of violence and of espionage stand growths of the manufacturers’ and employers’ associations. The detective agencies, the provocateurs, and later if necessary, spies, thugs, scabs, the guards, the police, the constabulary, the militia, and the United States troops–all this based on the cultivated fear of revolution among the credulous, are the sinister weapons of the open shop campaign. To oppose their dark forces, the workers have only their collective courage, their collective genius, which goes by the name of solidarity. The clothing workers are especially knit together by powerful bonds. The suffering of sweatshop days is recent, though the organization left it behind in a few years.

They showed the mighty feeling of brotherhood by at once starting to raise a million dollar relief fund. The organization all over the country responded with what is known in the industry as the “Amalgamated Spirit.”

Last year I went to the Amalgamated convention in Boston. I never, in any public gathering, had so keen a sense of fellowship and of beauty. It was a liberated people that was there assembled a people recently emerged from bondage. It was different from any other convention that I had ever attended.

It was there that I first sensed the Amalgamated Spirit. The Amalgamated Spirit–you hear it all over when you go through the industry.

I take the Amalgamated Spirit to mean the creative force in the labor movement, force that knows where it is going, which has an ideal, which is constructive. A force that grows, educates, invents, is courageous and living. Yet in New York’s vast indifference this lockout is swallowed up. Sixty-five thousand people out of work do not secure a ripple on New York’s monstrous surface.

In Industrial towns, strikes flow up and down the main street. You see the sullen tide of men, of restless unoccupied men, an ordinary crowd on the street is a demonstration.

Labor is no longer confined within the factory walls. It overflows on to the streets. You feel the tension of the strike in the air. But New York swallows a strike as it swallows everything else. You know that the first gun has been fired at labor’s forces, yet you have to hunt to find the lockout. For four weeks I have been following the progress of the lockout through the many halls from the Bronx to Brownsville. More widely sundered than the halls, are the people in them.

How far removed is this impeccably dressed young American tailor from this Galician grandfather, powerful and deep-chested, with a long beard, a patriarch of Israel. How far apart in culture and ideals is this woman, a shawl over her patient head, her eyes submissive to sadness, waiting with her immemorial and unquestioning patience and this fiery girl from Milano, scornful of American labor, her eyes across the sea watching for a glare of the revolution. Such people come together at meetings. Women whose only influence outside their homes has been the priests, women who stand on tip-toe, watching Russia, the flame of a new vision in their eyes. I have made friends with many of the people whose organization the manufacturers are seeking to destroy. I pick at random, over in the slack back water of Brooklyn, a basement tailor shop. A woman with a gipsy face, coarse gipsy hair, smouldering dark eyes, gayety in her mobile mouth–quick to anger, quick to laughter.

“You ask why I don’t come to shop meeting–look one reason!” She pointed to a high chair where a gleaming-eyed baby bounced up and down. Its curls bobbed, its arms and legs never stopped. Hey, a good reason, and there on the floor another and there a little girl fed in the room a small boy in full pursuit. She shrieked, “Mama, mama!” “Wot you think o’ those devil reasons and two more beside,” she added as a complacent afterthought.

“W’en she work in shop,” her husband explained, “we get woman for look after ’em. Now can’t afford.” He was a splendid young fellow and he stooped down to pick up the little girl in the sure-handed fashion of a man used to innumerable babies. The room was littered, babies swarmed, but happiness and youth lived here.

If the manufacturers succeeded in breaking the Amalgamated and bringing wages down to a standard that only beaten and helpless people will accept, what would happen to this home? But the spirit in this home–the spirit of the Amalgamated–is a bulwark against the plans of capitalism.

Near this riotous, hospitable family lived a slender stoop- shouldered young man, with a sensitive intellectual face. He had been working, he said, in a little repair shop. He was sure that this was not a scab shop, but if it was found out that the employer had ever been hostile to labor he would leave immediately.

So it went, in house after house. Fine people making the most of drab surroundings, people who had the precious sense of unity with their unknown fellow workers. Call it solidarity, or the Amalgamated Spirit–it is the motor power for the transformation of society.

On such visits one learns over again the incorruptible soundness of the workers in contrast with the total bankruptcy and corruption of this system by which they are exploited.

One can follow the strike from the slack hand-me-down streets of tepid Brooklyn, around Atlantic avenue to the hot, human rapids of the East Side, to whose recent glory I never am quite accustomed, for the old East Side of twenty years ago is still with me a vivid memory. Today the squalid streets end at nightfall in vistas of glory. A swing of the car and the lofty-spanned Williamsburg bridge greets you, turn a corner, and New York’s insolent turrets defy heaven. There is beauty here and heart-break and despair. There are hard young faces here and young people with dreams in their eyes! The creative artists of the labor movement, the radicals, are bred here.

I was looking for one of the Amalgamated families. An organizer and I went into a tenement of the type I remember so well many years ago a converted house, with no conveniences of any kind. The halls were shockingly kept; rubbish stood in every corner; they were dark and they smelled bad. And then the door opened on a home of spotless cleanliness. A big, happy woman in a print house dress greeted us. She had the quality of a ripe coarse fruit. There was nothing to do but we must sit down and she would make us some coffee.

Her daughter would be in in a minute. And so we sat there under the pictures of a numerous family, the house pleasant with homely adornments and because of its cleanliness.

Presently the door opened and a little straight, lance-like Italian girl came in, the daughter. I wish I had a picture of her. This girl of seventeen or eighteen is the stuff which

wins industrial battles–composed, sleek, dark-haired, violet eyes under straight brows, with a concentrated hot anger, an anger held under control, an anger that could be used as a weapon. She had been born in this country, the noise of the East Side in her ears; she had been bred in the clothing trade, had seen it emerge from the sweatshop. So she was out to fight. You felt as you talked to her that the clothing manufacturers would not have much chance when the industry had mothered girls like this.

On New Year’s day I got a new vision of the meaning of the Amalgamated. It came to me clear as a stab of light–something evident, something I had always known. On New Year’s day I learned all over again that the strike was about children.

On that day the Amalgamated Clothing Workers gave a children’s party. They hired all the halls that they could. But the children swamped the halls. I struggled through a children’s mob to get into the hall where I was to go. I had never seen anything like the beauty of spirit of these children; they filled the hall with a sea of life.

In certain arid countries there grow flowers of flaming color; in the same way, the tenements of the East Side are a forcing ground for some of the most beautiful children in the world. They are lovely physically, but it is their flaming life which amazes one. They have a beauty of spirit, a quick response.

Crammed into this hall was the essence of life itself, the hope of the future, new born, fresh minted, a hall full of children ablaze in their love of beauty, thirsty for joy, famished for music.

What riches of mind and heart were crowded into this little hall! The good years of the organization, which has taken this industry from the sweatshop, has given these children strong bodies. They were bright of eye, red of cheek. Outside were the lurking forces of disaster; forces arrayed. against their fathers and mothers. The manufacturers were using the economic blockade of the lockout against their children in the attempt to break their fathers’ spirit. The manufacturers with their army of thugs and spies and strike breakers are plotting against these children’s future.

The Liberator was published monthly from 1918, first established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman continuing The Masses, was shut down by the US Government during World War One. Like The Masses, The Liberator contained some of the best radical journalism of its, or any, day. It combined political coverage with the arts, culture, and a commitment to revolutionary politics. Increasingly, The Liberator oriented to the Communist movement and by late 1922 was a de facto publication of the Party. In 1924, The Liberator merged with Labor Herald and Soviet Russia Pictorial into Workers Monthly. An essential magazine of the US left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1921/02/v04n02-w35-feb-1921-liberator-hr.pdf