“Solidarity Forever”

“Solidarity Forever” is a labor song heard as textile workers gather on a picket line in New Jersey. Its brief appearance places a shared voice amid cold, exposed workers and police violence, making solidarity audible as both a practice of collective presence and a response to efforts to disperse the crowd.

The Picket-Line Scene

Before dawn, Anne Elizabeth Trent meets Webb Cruthers at a ferry station and travels with him to the mills. At the picket line, the early light falls on strikers in inadequate clothing: women have shawls over their heads, few men or boys wear overcoats, and young women shiver in thin fashionable coats. Some of the strikers sing “Solidarity Forever”; others yell “Scabs” and make long jeering hoots. The song belongs to a noisy, unsettled scene rather than a formal performance. Anne Elizabeth is confused and excited as the police begin breaking up the head of the line.

The crowd suddenly breaks and runs, leaving Anne Elizabeth in the street by the mill’s wire fence. When a young woman falls, Anne Elizabeth steps toward her, but a policeman kicks the woman in the face. Anne Elizabeth strikes at the policeman and is hit from behind, then pushed into a police wagon. The song’s appearance therefore precedes a sharp reversal: the gathering’s collective sound gives way to dispersal, assault, and arrest. The episode does not provide the song’s lyrics or identify who leads it; its significance lies in its presence among the strikers at the moment their organized line is under attack.

A Wider Labor Conflict

The picket line follows an earlier visit by Webb and Anne Elizabeth to the strike town. The mills dominate the place, while special deputies stand inside wire-mesh gates and police gather outside. At strike headquarters, workers and organizers fill a noisy office, handbills are distributed, and Ben Compton is asked to speak at a meeting. In the neighboring town, mounted police turn people away from a hall the strikers had hired. Ben addresses the crowd from a lamppost before police drag him off; Webb then climbs onto a hydrant to protest the exclusion. The singing at the picket line is part of this larger effort to organize and make workers’ grievances public, not an isolated display of sentiment.

Other episodes widen the book’s account of labor solidarity without depicting the song itself. On a Pennsylvania construction job, Ben Compton refuses his supervisor’s order after learning that workers are striking over allegedly falsified hours. His refusal costs him his job, and he goes to find Nick Gigli among the workers. Later, at Everett, members of the Industrial Workers of the World are arrested as they step off a boat to hold a public meeting; deputies beat them and take them away in trucks. These scenes show collective action taking different forms—work stoppage, public assembly, and picketing—while exposing it to employer retaliation and state-backed force.

Meaning and Limits of the Appearance

The song’s force in the New Jersey scene comes from its contrast with the conditions surrounding it. Workers stand in sleet and cold, the mills are fenced, and police are already breaking up the picket line. The singing supplies a common sound within that vulnerability, alongside the shouted denunciations of strikebreakers. Yet the scene does not turn solidarity into easy protection: the line breaks, a striker is left injured, and Anne Elizabeth is arrested when she intervenes.

Elsewhere, the book connects workers’ demands to material conditions: fair pay, control over working life, and safer or more decent places to labor. Its account of lumber workers, for example, describes organizers calling for real wages instead of company scrip, clean bunkhouses, wholesome food, and an eight-hour day. Read beside these details, “Solidarity Forever” resonates as an expression of a shared labor cause. The text’s single explicit scene of the song keeps that resonance grounded in a particular moment: workers singing together on a picket line while the forces arrayed against them begin to close in.