Bread and Roses by Bruce Watson5/24/2023 He has consulted the academic accounts bearing directly on the strike and done exhaustive research in contemporary periodical literature. It was a period of burgeoning conflict between capital and labor, Social Darwinists and Progressives, and newer and older immigrants, and Watson embeds the strike in the broader picture, to good effect. Watson tells a thorough but lively story of the players and their times, an embodiment of early 20th-century America. In Radicals of the Worst Sort, Ardis Cameron examined gender and ethnicity and described a much more nuanced event in the 1990s. Cole treated it as a paradigm of melting pot America in his Cold War version of the tale, Immigrant City. There are popular treatments, academic accounts, movies, plays, and songs about it. It’s featured in accounts of the history of labor, industry, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, known as the Wobblies), and in textbooks. Bruce Watson, a journalist and author of The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made, turns an event, the 1912 “Bread and Roses” mill strike in Lawrence, into an opportunity to examine the times, the people, and the conflicts that precipitated and evolved from it.
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