Against the bludgeons of _Industrial Despotism_ bring the silent might of the _Industrial Democracy_!
The result of the strike was a decided victory for the strikers. The Federal government's investigators reported that
some 30,000 textile mill employees in Lawrence secured an increase in wages of from 5 to 20 per cent; increased compensation for overtime; and the reduction of the premium period from four weeks to two weeks. Also, as an indirect result of the Lawrence strike, material increases in wages were granted to thousands of employees in other textile mills throughout New England.[577]
It is a significant fact that the highest percentages of increases in wages were given to the unskilled employees. The General Executive Board of the I. W. W. reported the range of wage increases as being "from 5 per cent for the highly paid workers to 25 per cent for the lowest paid workers."[578] Moreover, there were other effects, no less important. This strike demonstrated that it was possible for the unskilled and unorganized workers (preponderantly immigrants of various nationalities) to carry on a successful struggle with their employers. It showed what latent power there is in the great masses of semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Moreover, it demonstrated the power of a new type of labor leaders over the ignorant and unskilled immigrant workers. A writer who has little sympathy for revolutionary unionism says concerning Joseph J. Ettor:
This man ... steeped in the literature of revolutionary socialism and anarchism, swayed the undisciplined mob as completely as any general ever controlled the disciplined troops ... [and was able] to organize these thousands of heterogeneous, heretofore unsympathetic and jealous nationalities, into a militant body of class-conscious workers. His followers firmly believed, as they were told, that success meant that they were about to enter a new era of brotherhood, in which there would be no more union of trades and no more departmental distinctions, but all workers would become the real bosses in the mills.[579]
The Lawrence Citizens' Association reports that Ettor
avowed himself an advocate of the doctrine of "direct action," of violence, as a believer in the philosophy of force, for he proclaimed time and again ... that "he who has force on his side has the law on his side." He also advocated destroying the machinery of employers who did not grant all the demands of the strikers.[580]