Liberalism: Power, Economic Crisis, Reform, War 69more intense. At one point, a group of Italian women attacked a policeman
and took his club and gun and were about to take his clothes off and throw
him in the river, but other police arrived to save him. The strike continued
for ten weeks, with the workers demanding bread, wages to pay for food, and
roses, a work environment that was not so dirty and unsafe so they could
enjoy the more beautiful parts of life. Finally, the bosses agreed to the
demands of the Lawrence strikers—higher wages, pay for overtime, and no
revenge against those workers who had gone on strike. It was clearly a great
victory for labor, and especially for the radicals who had gone to Lawrence
[the AFL refused to assist the workers there] to fight against the textile mill
owners. In February 1913, thousands of garment workers in Rochester,
New York, many Jewish women, went on strike and one local owner of a
sweatshop shot an 18 year old worker, Ida Breiman. Over 5,000 local citi-
zens joined in her funeral procession, and local businesses opened soup
kitchens and collected clothes for the strikers. The man who killed her, as
was usually the case, was not put on trial for the murder. In April, the strike
ended when the bosses and local politicians agreed to take no action against
the workers who had protested at the sweatshop. It would be several more
FIGuRE 2-4 IWW activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “The Rebel Girl”