Textile Mills Quotes

Twenty thousand textile workers in Lawrence had walked out against a wage cut. It was a sudden, unplanned uprising. A fifty-four-hour week for women and children had been put into effect in Massachusetts, and the textile industry employed so many women and children that it meant a fifty-four-hour week for everyone. Consequently, there was a wage cut. It was a small cut, but it meant "four loaves of bread" to the workers.

Here live women, the mothers of many children, who work at night. These women have never rested. They do not know what an unburdened hour is. Five nights a week for ten hours they work for a quarter an hour at midnight.

In almost every case, whenever a tariff or quota is imposed on imports, that tax is strongly supported by the domestic industry getting the protective shield from lower-priced foreign competition. The sugar industry supports sugar tariffs; textile mills lobby for tariffs on foreign clothing.

To permit ourselves to be provoked into violence would mean defeating ourselves; our real power is in our solidarity and our capacity to endure suffering rather than to give up the fight for the right to organize; no one can weave wool with machine guns; that cheerfulness was better for morale than bitterness and that therefore we would smile as we passed the machine guns and the police on the way from the hall to the picket lines around the mills.

Design is a series of creative choices - it's a collaborative effort, an evolutionary process. You choose your fabrics depending upon what you want to say, then you work with mills to get those fabrics. Through the process, you realize what you want it to be.

It was their orderly mass picketing and parading that swung the strike into public notice. No strike of this size ever had such parades. No strike of this size had ever had such picket lines. They sweep out the three strike halls two by two. They stream down the streets gathering volume as they go until there are thousands of people in the parade. As they go they sing and shout. Flags go with them. Women and children, young girls, old ladies, grandmothers, all shouting and singing together. Who will ever forget them who has seen them out on the picket line early in the morning in dark groups that look like swarming bees? The lines of pickets, the constant file of people was an exciting thing. It became contagious. Picketing became Passaic's favorite game. Children played at picketing. They picketed their schools. They picketed their homes. Children came out after school to go on the picket line.

Textile mills are not a very high-margin business and have fixed overheads, so it was challenging. But I think it is only in challenges that you get opportunities.

It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous. They are always marching and singing. The tired, gray crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their months to sing.

Years ago, I was asked to come up to do a store signing in Vermont. The short version is the two younger guys who own the store pick me up at the airport and start driving me around Vermont, showing me the sights and the textile mills and the restaurants, and the punchline is there's no store. There is no store!