It took the killing of one man in the prime of life, a strike
sympathizer—a small merchant and property holder, he was, of
Mamaroneck—and the wounding of half a dozen strikers by local police and
New York detective-agency men, to bring to public notice in New York not
only the low pay of the Italian “pick and shovel men” employed in the
suburban towns along the sound, but also the general violation of New
York state laws on jobs done under contract for the state and various
municipalities.
By a coincidence, one of the strikers who left the town hall of
Mamaroneck on April 16, after the Arbitration Bureau of the New York
State Labor Department had brought about a settlement, made much the
same comment as was made by the labor representatives before the
Massachusetts Board of Arbitration when the Lawrence strike was on.
“Why didn’t they investigate before we had to strike?” he asked. “Why
did we have to lose our brother to get what we have a right to anyway?”
The grievances which had led, two days before this settlement, to a
fight on a country road leading front Harrison to Mamaroneck were not
new.
Three months ago, wage and other demands were presented by the day
laborers on road and street work in this section of the state, who had
organized a year ago in the General Laborers’ International Union of
America. No response was made by the contractors. Thereupon several
thousand men throughout the region—which is the community zone of the
New York, New Haven & Hartford Railway, struck to enforce these demands.
On April 14 a couple of hundred strikers marched south from Harrison,
doubling their numbers as they went by calling out, some say by force,
the laborers on the estates they passed.
At the outskirts of Mamaroneck they were stopped by a score of town
officials on the ground that they had no permit to parade. In the fight
that followed, it was rock and fist—with a final appeal to
knives—against club and gun. One detective had a leg broken and was
otherwise seriously injured. The injuries of the strikers were bullet
wounds. One was killed. Following the conflict, the sheriff was appealed
to to swear in the detectives as his deputies, as vengeance for the
killing was feared; but he refused on the ground that that type of men
had proved, here and elsewhere, altogether too handy with the gun. They
had been brought out from a New York detective office by the mayor and
police of Mamaroneck, when the rumors of labor trouble in the contract
work grew thick. It apparently had not occurred to the town officials to
spend an equal amount of energy in finding out what the trouble was
about.
Road fights are not frequent occurrences in this region of gardens and
express trains and the alarm spread panic. Isolated households imagined
most anything at the hands of the “dagoes” who “must be kept down.”
There was a call for volunteer deputies, and citizens responded eagerly
with their hunting arms.
The strikers crowded in hundreds to the house of their dead comrade, but
after their first outbreak they were found to be so peaceably inclined
that all deputies, except the police department’s aides from New York,
were withdrawn, and the strikers were even given permission to follow
the hearse to the cemetery, the day after the strike settlement. This
cortege passed through many of the strike centers at Mamaroneck,
Larchmont, New Rochelle, Mt. Vernon, and other towns in which the
laborers’ union claims a membership of 10,000. It was the occasion for
no disorderly effort at vengeance.
The laborers’ demands of three months ago covered recognition of the
union, wage payments by the week, an eight-hour day, a wage minimum for
pick and shovel men of $2 a day with revised hour rates for others of
the lower grades of work. The eight-hour demand is essentially a demand
for compliance with the state law which all the contractors on these
public jobs have been breaking by working a nine hour day. The inquiry
brought out the fact that the superintendent of the biggest job of all,
the state road, was a brother of an official of the State Engineers’
Department, which is charged with the supervision of such work.