Camella teoli biography
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Teoli, Camella
Excerpt from U.S. Congressional Hearings, March 2–7,
Reproduced in Joyce Kornbluh'sRebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology,published in
When Camella Teoli was in the seventh grade, she did not go to school. She went to work in a factory.
Children had been employed in textile factories ever since textile factories were first built in Britain during the last part of the s. Children made ideal workers: they did not complain about low wages or long hours, they did not argue with overseers, and they were small and nimble—their tiny hands were ideal for operating textile machines.
As with adult workers, children were sometimes injured on the job. Sometimes their injuries resulted in death; other times, they were maimed or crippled for life. In both Britain and the United States, these incidents eventually led to laws barring very young children from working in factories. Most factory owners resisted such laws because it was highly profitable to employ childr
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Camella Teoli Testifies about the Lawrence Textile Strike
When 30, largely immigrant workers walked out of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills in January , they launched one of the epic confrontations between capital and labor. The strike began in part because of unsafe working conditions in the mills, which were described in graphic detail in the testimony that fourteen-year-old millworker Camella Teoli delivered before a U.S. Congressional hearing in March Her testimony (a portion of which was included here) about losing her hair when it got caught in a textile machine she was operating gained national headlines in &#;in part because Helen Herron Taft, the wife of the president, was in the audience when Teoli testified. The resulting publicity helped secure a strike victory.
CHAIRMAN. Camella, how old are you?
Miss TEOLI. Fourteen years and eight months.
CHAIRMAN. Fourteen years and eight months?
Miss TEOLI. Yes.
CHAIRMAN. How many children are there in your f
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Forging the American working class
Sometimes a film or a book fryst vatten released at a moment when it has an impact far beyond the original intent of its creators. Last fall, Gus Van Sant’s film Milk, about the early, militant days of the gay liberation movement in San Francisco, opened soon after the passage of Proposition 8 in California and the explosion of protest across the United States. Milk fit perfectly with this moment of anger and hope. We can only hope that the republishing of Sidney Lens’s The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit- Downs will have a similar impact on some of today’s new radicals.
Lens first wrote The Labor Wars as an appeal to the generation of radicals produced by the s mass movements against racism and the Vietnam War. He feared that the movement had “no strong attachment to the leftist movements or leftist leaders of yesteryear.
Few have heard of William Z. Foster or James P. Cannon, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or Vincent St. John, Norman efternamn