An industrial heritage revived

Lawrence honors laborer slain in 1912 textile strike

(Evan Richman/Globe Staff)

LAWRENCE - Under other circumstances, John Ramey could have been remembered as a martyr, an immigrant mill worker speared by a militiaman's bayonet. He was killed in a strike that started over a wage cut of a few pennies a week to laborers who toiled in unsafe conditions and earned barely enough to survive.

But Ramey is hardly remembered at all. No memorial marks the site where the young man was struck down; little is known about him, and even his age is a question mark. For half a century, Lawrence buried the story of Ramey and the textile strike of 1912, one of the most significant in the country's history. Those old enough to have participated spoke little about it, the fear of being branded anti-American lingering even after the textile industry had vanished.

"They stopped talking, and history was being covered over," said Jonas Stundzia, a 54-year-old Lawrence native and local historian who has led a movement to recognize and revive the city's industrial-labor heritage and the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912.

That effort includes establishing an annual Labor Day festival, now in its 24th year, and creating memorials for the three mill workers killed during the strike. Ramey, the third victim to be remembered, will be recognized this morn ing with the dedication of a granite marker at his grave at the city's St. Mary's-Immaculate Conception Cemetery.

In the afternoon, Stundzia will lead a discussion about Ramey at the downtown Lawrence festival, which commemorates the strike and its gains and features folk music, dancing, and family entertainment.

Stundzia's grandmother was a young millworker who was clubbed during the strike by a Harvard student, part of a group of undergraduates who helped the state militia turn back the crowds.

But Stundzia's family scarcely talked about the strike, and in school he learned only that the workers - tens of thousands of whom had taken to the streets in the winter of 1912 to demand better wages and working conditions - were socialists and communists intent on causing upheaval.

"People were intimidated to even talk about it years later," said Stundzia, who is president of the Lawrence Historical Commission and a founding member of the Bread and Roses festival.

There are many reasons for the reticence, he said, including historic ethnic and ruling-class tensions and lingering memories of retribution against striking workers even in the years that followed.

The movement to honor the strikers came partly from a younger generation in Lawrence and partly from outside. In a column in The New York Times in 1980, Paul Cowan, a journalist and social activist, hailed the strike as the "Appomattox" of the industrial labor movement and was struck by the local silence about it.

Cowan tracked down descendants of Camella Teoli, who knew nothing about her - an adolescent girl who made front-page headlines when she testified to Congress after the strike about unsafe working conditions, including a loom that snared her hair, tore her scalp, and left her hospitalized for months.

In the past decade, locals intent on telling the story have unveiled graveside monuments to Anna Lopizzo, a 34-year-old Italian millworker who was struck by a police bullet on Jan. 29, 1912, and Jonas Smolskas, a Lithuanian immigrant who was killed half a year after the strike by a group of men who objected to his labor pin.

Like them, Ramey was among the thousands of immigrants from dozens of countries who had been drawn to Lawrence at the turn of the century to work in the booming textile mills that made the city the worsted-wool capital of the world.

What they found were meager wages, dank and crowded tenements, and hazardous working conditions.

In 1911, the Legislature granted a concession to laborers by cutting the work week for women and children, then earning about 10 cents an hour, from 56 to 54 hours, starting Jan. 1, 1912. The owners in Lawrence responded by cutting two hours of pay but demanding the same output, according to a history of the strike prepared by the Lawrence Heritage State Park. After the first payday, thousands of workers at the American Woolen Co. walked out.

Ramey, who came from land that is now Lebanon, was killed in the third week of the strike, six weeks before workers won landmark concessions and inspired labor movements in other mill cities across Massachusetts.

According to Stundzia, Ramey had gathered at a street corner to play his cornet with a Syrian band when the state militia surged; a soldier speared him as he fled. An account in that day's Evening Tribune, a Lawrence paper, offered a different picture, saying the group sought to "make trouble for the militiamen" and incited violence when they "began to poke fun at the soldier boys."

Ramey - who was between 17 and 21 years old, according to varying accounts - initially believed the wound was minor and walked home. His mother flagged a doctor, who got him to a hospital, according to the next day's Globe.

"I try to picture myself being in his shoes, a 17-year-old kid, and you see the militia coming," said Steven Kfoury, a board member of the American Lebanese Awareness Association, the Lawrence organization that paid for the majority of the cost of the new monument. "I can't even imagine."

Ramey was a parishioner at St. Anthony Maronite Church, an Eastern Rite Catholic church founded in 1903. Then a fledgling parish, it now has 900 families and a modern facility a block and a half from the intersection where Ramey was speared. Its pastor, Monsignor Peter F. Azar, will lead today's dedication ceremony.

"I'm very proud and honored to be invited," said Azar, in an interview yesterday during the church's annual Mahrajan festival.

Many who gathered for the outdoor fair were white-collar suburbanites from across the Merrimack Valley, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrant millworkers like Ramey.

"It's not honoring him as much as honoring the living," and the legacy left by those involved in the strike, Azar said.

Azar's predecessor, the Rev. Gabriel Bastany, eulogized Ramey at a service in the midst of the strike.

He called Ramey a martyr, and he urged the community to take up a collection for a monument, Stundzia said.

But the monument never became a reality, said Stundzia, partly because of fear of retribution.

The new marker, 96 years in the making, is simple. Engraved with a rose and sheafs of wheat, it identifies Ramey as a Lebanese immigrant and a victim of the textile strike.

"It's a long overdue thing," said Kfoury, whose grandfather came to Lawrence from the same village. "It's a good thing."