Bread and roses : mills, migrants, and the struggle for the American dream / Bruce Watson.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [261]-337) and index.

For two hours' pay -- Immigrant city -- The battle of the Merrimack -- Stars, stripes, and bayonets -- Dynamite -- Spinning out of control -- A nation divided -- The children's exodus -- Crackdown -- In Congress, 1912 -- An American tapestry -- "The flag of liberty is here".

The 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts was a watershed moment in labor history as significant as the Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the Triangle fire in New York. In a history with the narrative drive of a novel, journalist Watson provides the first full-length account of the strike that began when textile workers stormed out of the mills on a frigid January day. Despite owners' predictions to the contrary, the walkout soon became a protracted Dickensian drama that included 23,000 strikers from fifty-one nations singing as they paraded through Lawrence, bayonet-toting militiamen patrolling the streets, and the daring evacuation of the strikers' tattered and hungry children to Manhattan, where they lived with strangers and wrote loving letters to their parents on the picket line.--From publisher description.