The Original "Occupy": Novel Was Written 100 Years Before Zuccotti Park

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The Original "Occupy": Novel Was Written 100 Years Before Zuccotti Park

Sunday, 10 November 2013 00:00
By John de Graaf, Truthout | News

Affluenza author John de Graaf investigates the origins of the slogan "Bread and Roses" and discovers a little-known American classic and a history that should repeat itself.

I still remember how inspired I was when I first took home folksinger Judy Collins' 1976 album, Bread and Roses, and played the title song. It was a stirring anthem, a triumphal march almost, the words of an old poem set to music by another folksinger, Mimi Farina.

As we go marching, marching
In the beauty of the day
A million darkened kitchens
A thousand mill lofts grey
Are touched with all the radiance
That a sudden sun discloses
For the people hear us singing
Bread and roses, bread and roses

As we go marching, marching
We battle too for men
For they are women's children
And we mother them again
Our lives shall not be sweated
From birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread, but give us roses

As we go marching, marching
Unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing
Their ancient call for bread
Small art and love and beauty
Their drudging spirits knew
Yes, it is bread we fight for
But we fight for roses too.

As we go marching, marching
We bring the greater days
The rising of the women
Means the rising of the race
No more the drudge and idler
Ten that toil where one reposes
But a sharing of life's glories
Bread and roses, bread and roses

For me, the message of Bread and Roses was that money is never enough. We need the non-material things of life - the "art and love and beauty," friends and nature - and the time to appreciate them, smelling the roses, if you will. Hearts starve as well as bodies.

The Lawrence Textile Strike

I loved the traditional story [see, for example, Meredith Tax’s The Rising of the Women] connected with the poem, how it was written to honor the women of Lawrence, Massachusetts, who walked out of their textile mills on a wintry day in 1912, demanding higher pay and shorter hours. Thousands of mill workers, most of them immigrants speaking a babble of more than 20 languages, filled the streets of Lawrence in January and February of that winter, facing bayonet-carrying national guardsmen, trigger-hungry local police and even a contingent of Harvard students, given extra credit to come to Lawrence as strikebreakers.

One of the strikers, a young woman named Annie Lo Pizzo, was killed by a policeman's bullets. Many were jailed and beaten for protesting. They sent their children away from Lawrence for safety's sake. The odds against them were overwhelming, but they persisted, aided by labor organizers sent to Lawrence by the Industrial Workers of the World and eventually by an outpouring of national public concern over their treatment and living conditions. In March, the mill owners capitulated, granting the essence of the strikers' demands. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19717-the-original-occupy-james-oppenheims-novel-the-nine-tenths-was-written-100-years-before-zucotti-park

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1. ...

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2. Awesome.