Editing Lawrence, Massachusetts (section)

====Bread and Roses Strike of 1912====
{{Main|1912 Lawrence textile strike}}
The [[Pemberton Mill]] collapse occurred on January 10, 1860, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The five-story textile mill, built in 1853, was a major employer, particularly for Irish immigrants, many of whom were women and children. At the time of the collapse, around 600–800 workers were inside, though exact numbers vary. The official death toll was 88, with estimates of 116–145 deaths and hundreds injured, many permanently disabled. The disaster was one of the deadliest industrial accidents in U.S. history.  Investigations pinned the collapse on substandard construction, specifically defective cast-iron columns that were too weak to support the mill’s weight. Poor oversight, cost-cutting by owners, and overloading the structure with heavy machinery exacerbated the issue. The mill was known to vibrate heavily during operation, a warning sign ignored.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9902E6DC1638E533A2575BC1A9629C94679FD7CF |title=The Fall of the Pemberton Mill |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |date=April 18, 1886 }}</ref> As immigrants flooded into the United States in the mid to late 19th century, the population of Lawrence abounded with skilled and unskilled workers from several countries. Protesting conditions, in 1912 they walked out of the mills. The action, sometimes celebrated as the [[Bread and Roses]] Strike, was one of the more important, widely reported, labor struggles in American history.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Klein|first=Christopher|title=The Strike That Shook America|url=https://www.history.com/news/the-strike-that-shook-america|access-date=2020-01-13|website=HISTORY|date=26 November 2019 |language=en}}</ref>

The [[Industrial Workers of the World]] (the "One Big Union", the "Wobblies") defied the common wisdom that a largely female and ethnically divided workforce could not be organized, and the strike held through two bitterly cold winter months. The young 15-year mill hand [[Fred Beal]], who was drawn by the experience into a lifetime of labor organizing, recalls that contrary to expectations, it was the most recent immigrant groups, "the Italians, Poles, Syrians [Lebanese] and [[Walloons|Franco-Belgians]]", who "kept it alive.<ref name=":2">{{Cite book|last=Beal|first=Fred Erwin|url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b332369&view=1up&seq=11&skin=2021|title=Proletarian journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow.|date=1937|publisher=Hillman-Curl|location=New York|pages=52}}</ref>

After hundreds of the strikers' hungry children had been sent to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, and the U.S. Congress was induced to hold hearings, the mill owners decided to settle, giving workers in Lawrence and throughout New England raises of up to 20 percent.<ref name="weir">{{cite book|last=Watson|first=Bruce|title=Bread & Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream|publisher=Penguin Group|year=2005|location=New York|page=12}}</ref> However, as a young Massachusetts Senator, [[John F. Kennedy]] was later to record, in the decades that followed the mill owners moved their capital and employment out of Lawrence and the region to the non-union South.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Kennedy|first=John F.|date=1954-01-01|title=New England and the South|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1954/01/new-england-and-the-south/376244/|access-date=2022-01-10|website=The Atlantic|language=en}}</ref>