"Almost everybody worked."

~Anthony Ramey, 1985

One-third of Lebanese immigrants who came to the United States between the 1870s and 1930s worked in America’s mills, factories, and mines. Yet, both scholarly and popular narratives silence these stories, hiding them beneath the peddler myth which suggests that most Lebanese immigrants took to mercantilism: selling goods out of a portable qashé (suitcase) or jizdan (handbag), then opening stores, and ascending quickly into the middle class.

This project reclaims these stories by shedding light on the rich history of the Lebanese immigrant working class and their struggles to become American, securing their families’ livelihoods amidst labor strife, economic turmoil and the fast changing urban landscape in America’s industrial cities.

Our story begins with thousands leaving their homes along the Eastern Mediterranean and traveling across the Atlantic.

"Martha cried all the way to Beirut where the boat was to leave from. She had hugged and kissed her mother for the last time never seeing her again."

~John Haddad

Starting in the 1890s nearly 3,000 Lebanese immigrants made their way to Lawrence, Massachusetts, an industrial city in New England’s textile region. This influx made Lawrence the second largest Lebanese community (or “Syrian” as they were called), outside of New York City, and one of the largest in the world. 

Immigrants chose Lawrence for two main reasons: the ease of getting a job in the city's mills, and chain migration. The Lebanese, like millions who migrated to the United States from Europe and the Middle East, were often looking to work for a short time, before returning home with funds assuring them an elevated social status and better life. Meanwhile, jobs in Lawrence were plentiful. 

Villagers and townspeople along the Eastern Mediterranean became aware of opportunities for work in Lawrence in many ways. Some were enticed through advertisements by American companies and industrial town recruiters. But, more commonly, word of mouth and chain migration brought Lebanese immigrants to Lawrence. As Victoria Kattar noted, “We had an uncle living in Lawrence and he asked us if we’d like to come and we did…”

Most Lebanese immigrants settled along Valley Street or in "The Plains," comprised of the upper blocks of Oak, Elm, and Chestnut Streets and wedged between Hampshire and Lawrence Streets. These neighborhoods were just a few blocks from the mills lining the Merrimack River where the majority of immigrants worked. According to Abe Bashara, the son of early immigrants, you could look across the street in the Lebanese section of the Plains and “no one looked any different than you did.”

Like the majority (52%) of Lawrence’s population, most Lebanese rented rooms in tenements. A survey taken in 1911 characterized living conditions as "Huddle Fever,” gesturing toward the congested neighborhoods and the disease and death experienced by immigrants living in them. Over time, landlords and real estate moguls (some of whom were Lebanese) built tenements taller and closer together in order to maximize profits, exacerbating already poorly lit and ventilated buildings. To save costs, builders constructed tenements almost entirely out of wood, making them particularly prone to fire which could spread quickly through the densely packed communities.

“I was born in a rat-infested six tenement house on Valley Street in Lawrence. My mother told me my father once killed seven rats in one night.”

~Rose

Due to terrible living and working conditions, 70% of mill operatives died from pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other respiratory infections. Among the Lebanese, the average age of death between 1895 and 1912 was just 25. Growing immigrant families were especially hard hit. 44% of deaths in Lawrence’s general population were infants under the age of two. During the 1910s and 1920s, Lebanese immigrant Adele Melhem, lost seven children before having two that survived. Her daughter recalled that “she lost her first child and got very very ill...two died from measles and diphtheria, one was a year old, and one was two and a half...then the subsequent children there were difficulties...she fell going to work in a blizzard...and she couldn’t deliver...it was stillborn.” 

“You couldn’t fool around. You had to keep your mind on the work, because some of the machinery was dangerous, you could lose your arm.”    

~Emeline Provost

The working environment of the mills matched the conditions of the tenements. Throughout the early 20th century, working in Lawrence’s textile mills was grueling and dangerous. Industrial accidents posed immediate threats, while poor sanitation and air quality contributed to high rates of respiratory illness and death among mill workers. Other circumstances compounded the spread of disease. As Kalil Ead told his children years later, every day in the mill, he had to hang his lunch bag “from the ceiling so that the rats would not get [it].”

“The racket that would come out of those mills, I thought, oh my God my mother’s working in there. I couldn’t even hear myself on the sidewalk, let alone being in there working.”

~Juliet Bistany

It was not uncommon for women, like Adele Melhem (Juliet's mother), to work in the mills. In fact, in Lawrence, female operatives outnumbered males in the early 1900s. Rising costs of living, on one hand, and wage cuts, on the other, meant that entire families had to work in order to survive. Among the Lebanese, for instance, 50% of women over 14 worked in the mills in 1910. For many women, the end of a mill shift was simply the beginning of other responsibilities looming at home. When Adele was not working at the mill, she was “down at [her husband's] store working in the morning…She’d get in about ten, and do the housework between ten and midnight. Go to bed then get up at five. She had to get up at five, because, besides doing more housework, she had to make a stew. Everyday we’d have stew, because she wouldn’t be home to make dinner... So she’d get that going very early in the morning and that would be on the stove.”

In the early 1900s, many Lebanese families sent their children to work and contribute to the family income as soon as they could pass for 14 (the minimum legal age to work). In the age of Progressive-era reforms, government officials restricted child labor by requiring workers to show paperwork that supposedly proved they were old enough to work. Papers, however, were easily forged. Government record keeping was still in its infancy in the early 1900s, and many records provided by Lebanese immigrants were in Arabic and were translated (falsely at times) by community members willing to lie for their friends. For example, in 1904, 13 year old Mitilda Arrag was compelled to get a job in the mills: “I went to the priest and told him how badly I needed the job and he helped me get it. I had to work for my food. My relatives could not support me.”

Lebanese newspapers in the United States considered this practice a social crisis. Al-Hoda (one of the most widely read), reported: “The most important thing we found in the city of Lawrence and we want to criticize is that the majority [of parents] substitutes work [in the mills] for education for their children. We do not want to mention how those children enter the factories or who is paid to lie about their ages…But we do want to show parents and the general public the harm of work for children especially those...in Lawrence many of whom are barely eight years old.” Moreover, the article depicted the factory floor as a dirty and immoral space full of bad influences corrupting the youth of the community.

While women and children worked in the mills to supplement family incomes, many Lebanese men tried to escape mill labor. In part, this was due to a gendered notion of work that immigrants carried with them from Lebanon. There, the karkhana (silk factory) was the main industry and its mostly female workers were derided as women of ill repute. In America, men’s work in the mills also carried with it stigma. As labor historians James Barrett and David Roediger show, factory work—driven, supervised, and alienating—“was often typed and despised” using racialized derogatory language disparaging darker skinned workers and specific ethnic immigrant groups, such as "Mediterraneans," and Eastern Europeans.

Juliet Bistany’s father “never liked the mills. He had no patience to work for anybody. A lot of Lebanese men are like that” his daughter recalled. More to the point they did not want to work in emasculating and racially degrading environments. Instead, he ran a grocery store that catered mostly to the Lebanese in the Plains while his wife worked every day in the mill to supplement family income. Another immigrant, George Beshara, left the mills in 1912 to pursue a number of failed business ventures. Ultimately, after struggling to support his wife and growing family he was forced to return to the Arcadia Mill and eventually take on an extra job at the Pacific Mill in Lawrence. 

Lebanese men, especially into the 1920s and 1930s struggled to find work outside of the mills, and some, like Beshara, were drawn back by the steady wages mill work supplied. Robert Hatem remarked that his father “worked in the mill...that’s what dads had to do in those days because [of] the economy.” Yet despite the need to work, many of these men struggled to identify as factory workers. Sally Alekel noted that her father never saw himself as a "mill worker" despite working in the mills over twenty years. In the face of cultures (both American and Lebanese) that stigmatized factory work as feminine or non-white, Lebanese men battled a tension between supporting their families with work, and finding work in which they could take pride. 

“People would get out of work and were tired. The only place...the men would socialize…[were] the old Coffee houses they had up in the plains...They’d play backgammon out there, ‘tavli’ as it was called in them days.” 

~Anthony Ramey

In Lawrence, people lived, worked, and socialized in close quarters. After long days working in the mills, or on Sundays, Solomon Hyatt recalled, “The entertainment was visiting. People would come and visit in the evening, they would bring their one or two children, members of the family, cousins, uncles, friends, priests...and there was no babysitting unless there were older children in the family.”

Beyond family and friends, church provided another venue for social life. The majority of Lebanese migrants to Lawrence practiced one of three Christian faiths: Melkite Greek Catholic at St. Joseph’s Church, Maronite Catholic at St. Anthony’s, and Antiochian Orthodox at St. George’s. A small percentage were Protestant and attended local Presbyterian churches. We have no records of Muslims or Druzes who worked in Lawrence, but it is highly likely that some did.

Within ten years of the community’s settlement in Lawrence, residents formed social and philanthropic clubs. Many clubs were originally derived out of religious affiliations and served as forms of social welfare with dues supporting members in times of sickness, unemployment, or family loss. The United Syrian Charitable Society, founded in 1907 by several elderly members of St. Joseph’s Melkite Church, provided a meeting place for Lebanese and established a cemetery to serve as a “decent place of burial for all Arabic speaking people of our community.” The club was located on Oak Street and its cemetery in nearby Andover was the first “Syrian” cemetery in the United States. Other clubs included the Syrian National Club, founded in 1912, and the Young Men of Deir El Kamar Club.

Communal bonds and tensions were magnified and mobilized during the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike, one of the largest labor conflicts in American history. 

On January 11, 1912, weavers from the Everett Mill in Lawrence went on strike to protest a sudden decrease in their already meager wages. The Massachusetts legislature had recently passed a bill decreasing the maximum hours in a standard workweek from 56 to 54 and textile mill owners reduced wages accordingly. Many of the workers, especially newly-arrived immigrants, were reliant on each week’s pay, and the reduction of even two hours of pay per week placed them in a precarious position, unable to meet their necessary food and lodging expenses.

The strike spread across the city’s textile mills and within days of finding lower pay envelopes, nearly 23,000 mill workers, a majority of them immigrants, abandoned their positions and joined the strike. Organizers from the International Workers of the World (I.W.W.) came in to lead the movement. Over 1,000 Lebanese mill workers participated in, or found themselves directly affected by the strike.

To organize efforts, local representatives from each major nationality in Lawrence formed a Strike Committee. Faris Marad, James Brox, and Dr. Iskandar Hajjar, a local dentist, represented the Lebanese strikers. Marad was ultimately implicated in one of the most well-known incidents of the strike when a citywide raid uncovered dynamite in his tailor shop. 

Police immediately arrested Marad, claiming that he was involved with the I.W.W.’s radical strike elements. The day before the police raid, Marad led the “Syrian Drum Corps” in a parade supporting the strike. During this time, local undertaker, John Breen, planted the dynamite in order to frame Marad and villainize the strikers, according to an investigation by the I.W.W. 

Marad's fellow Lebanese striker, James Brox, had represented the Lebanese community in the local I.W.W. chapter since 1911. At the beginning of the 1912 strike, Brox invited Joseph Ettor, an Italian immigrant instrumental in organizing the strike, to speak at one of the Lebanese churches, most likely St. Joseph’s Melkite Catholic church attended by his family.

Beyond the three strike committee representatives, the entire community, from shopkeepers to families at home, was embroiled in the strike and divided between supporters and detractors. Sadie Zamon supported strikers by taunting non-striking workers and preventing them from returning to work. According to some accounts, she threw garbage and scalding water at scabs (people breaking picket lines to work) as they passed by her home at 390 Elm Street. She yelled at them for returning to work and hindering the progress made by the strikers. Sadie's daughter Suzie, a young mill operative, joined the picket lines while her mother kept watch from the second story of their tenement.

One of the Lebanese churches established a soup kitchen in its basement where local women fed hungry protesters and their families and provided relief and shelter to strikers. The soup kitchen fed roughly 150 people meals consisting of bread, crushed wheat, coffee, and lima beans twice a day.

But not everyone in the Lebanese community, in Lawrence or beyond, supported the strikers. The strike, and its class politics, pitted neighbors and friends against each, and divided Lebanese-Americans into supporters and detractors. For example, among the people whom Sadie Zamon pelted with garbage was her fellow Lebanese immigrant and neighbor, Marie Nasser. And early on in the strike, Maronite priest, Father Bistany, was steadfastly opposed to the strike and gave at least one Sunday sermon exhorting his parishioners to stay home.

Beyond the confines of Lawrence, two widely distributed Arabic newspapers from New York, had opposing views of the strike. On January 23rd, Naoum Mokarzel, the editor of Al-Hoda (The Guidance), wrote an article attacking the strikers, admonishing them to be law-abiding and move away from “socialist” activities. He claimed that the handful of “Syrian” strikers were “fooled” into participating by outside agitators, and that these actions reflected badly on all “Syrians” across the country. In response, Al-Hoda’s longtime newspaper foe, Mira’at al-Gharb (Mirror of the West), founded by Najeeb Diab, published a scathing retort penned by the “Striking Syrians.” They dismissed Mokarzel's paternalistic tone and declared: “cease, oh you charlatan, the workers are men who can defend their rights and they know better than you, and they do not need you to defend them.” Mira'at al-Gharb insinuated that Mokarzel may very well be a paid stooge form William “Wool” Wood, the largest of the mill owners in Lawrence.

As the strike continued, groups of strikers demonstrated in the streets, gaining followers, and voicing their demands. Alarmed by the growing scope and impact of the strike, the governor of Massachusetts, in coordination with mill owners, mobilized local police and state militia. As both sides dug in, encounters between strikers and law enforcement became violent, ultimately leading to two deaths, one of which was Lebanese-born John (Hanna) Ramey.

Scholars and eyewitnesses have described Ramey's death differently over the years. Some described it as an accident, the result of a raucous crowd whose numbers pushed Ramey into the soldier’s bayonet. Others claim that he was stabbed in the back while running away from the soldiers. Either way, and as his headstone at St. Mary’s-Immaculate Conception Cemetery notes with its inscription, Ramey was “A Victim of the 1912 Textile Strike.”

On March 14th 1912, nearly two months after the strike began, mill workers and strike leaders met at the negotiation table and over 15,000 workers voted to end the strike. Employees were given a wage increase between 5% and 20%, a move that soon raised textile mill wages across New England. Six months later, Lawrence held its first “God and Country” parade emphasizing patriotism and obedience, erasing perceptions of radicalism evoked by the strike. By 1913, membership in the Lawrence I.W.W., which had swelled to roughly 14,000 during the strike, plummeted to only a few hundred. The local I.W.W.'s "Syrian Chapter" ceased to exist in 1913.

In the strike's aftermath, strong pressures emerged among immigrants to appear more American and less foreign. Anti-immigrant sentiments, heightened awareness of Lawrence’s recent labor rebellion, and immigrants' desires for their children to have different experiences than their own, ultimately created a generational shift.

For Lebanese immigrants, education was first and foremost about getting out of the mills, and English illiteracy limited job opportunities. Anthony Ramey, born in Lawrence in 1906, remembered that during his childhood, “very few people in that community knew English.” The tenement's density made it easy for the Lebanese to speak primarily in Arabic.

Nevertheless, some early immigrants strove to learn basic English. Anthony Ramey’s mother learned English so she could operate her husband’s store. Dr. Solomon Hyatt recalled his father “going to night school...Like many of the immigrants from the old country...to learn how to read and write English and understand the language better.”

In contrast, the children of these early immigrants saw it as imperative to master English and distance themselves from the Arabic language, because of the growing animosity among American nativists toward immigrants and their "different" ways. “I was always ashamed my mother couldn’t speak English,” recalled Rose. Juliet Bistany resisted learning Arabic in favor of English. “I didn’t want to be different…I wanted to be very American...I refused to speak Arabic, I hated it.”

“Juliet, you get an education, you never want to go in to the mills.”

~Adele Melhem to her daughter

However, social pressure and hostility were not the only forces driving assimilation. The American government saw labor movements, in general, as a threat instigated by “un-American” politics. In the aftermath of the 1912 strike, Lawrence became a potent symbol of the elusive, yet all-encompassing “communist” threat. Its vibrant multicultural immigrant community came to represent the antithesis of the white middle and upper-class vision of America. The Bolshevik Revolution  in 1917 and overthrow of the Russian monarchy further heightened the American ruling class’s fear that industrial workers would unite and overthrow the status quo.

Thus, in 1918, the Oliver School in Lawrence was adapted by the National Security League and the local school board under “The Lawrence Plan for Education” to test new teaching methods helping schools achieve “their most fundamental task, the making of good citizens in our American democracy.” Gabriel Joseph, James Kalil, and Julia Malouf were among the Lebanese children who attended the Oliver School during this period.

Children at the Oliver School were taught about “The menace of Bolshevism in Lawrence, The United States, and Europe...Its destructive principles were contrasted with the constructive principles of American democracy.” They learned that it was essential for immigrants (such as their parents) to learn English, and become naturalized citizens.

In 1919, when immigrant mill workers in Lawrence again went on strike to protest wage cuts, teachers at the Oliver school were able to “correct some wrong ideas” among their pupils discussing the event and their families' reactions. Through schools, the government effectively put children at odds with their immigrant parents, so much so, that one observer noted, “in very few cases did any of [the children] sympathize with any of the un-American doctrines which are being preached to their fathers and mothers.”

Education, breaching the language barriers, and an aversion to working in the mills, drove the next generation of Lawrence’s Lebanese to follow different paths than their mill working parents. Juliet Bistany, who grew up in the 1930s, remarked, “I can’t remember one of my generation that went into the mills, not one.”

In the 1920s, the Lebanese population in Lawrence began to decline for two main reasons: first, U.S. Federal immigration restrictions put strict quotas on the number of Lebanese allowed to enter the country each year. Second, Lawrence's textile industry began to decline, minimizing the appeal of living and working in the city. By the 1950s, urban redevelopment of the once vibrant "Plains" neighborhood caused many Lebanese to move away from Lawrence.

Throughout the 1920s, the ‘New South’ experienced a boom in the construction of textile mills, creating competition for the more well-established mills in New England. As competition increased and mills struggled to uphold deals with unions that had been set after years of strikes, some Lawrence factories began closing their doors, although many remained open through the 1940s.

"I had worked in the Pacific Mills...and previous to that I had worked in the Pilot Radio for the Everett Mills and they closed down. No matter where I worked, everything closed down."

~Rosaline Habeeb

Although many of the first generation immigrants stayed in the mills, they encouraged their children, born in the 1920s and 1930s, to go to school and pursue other careers. Juliet Bistany explained, “The one thing that all of the families stressed, was we don’t want you working in the mills like we are." Dr. Solomon Hyatt recalled, “like most of the Lebanese-Syrian people, we applied ourselves, as did our parents, and we improved ourselves, as did our parents, and we availed ourselves of what was available and went to school and applied ourselves.”

The Great Depression and World War II both saw increased demands for mill labor; but, following the war, most remaining mills in Lawrence closed their doors. In 1949, Lawrence’s unemployment rate had risen to 40% while the national average peaked at a little less than 8%. The loss of the textile industry negatively influenced Lawrence so heavily that the federal government declared it a ‘disaster area’ in the 1950s.

"I never knew I lived in the slums until somebody told me that."

~Anthony Difruscia

By this time, the Lawrence Redevelopment Authority declared "The Plains" to be “detrimental to safety, health, morals, welfare and the sound growth of Lawrence.” The city made plans to demolish and rebuild it along new lines. Residents expressed grief and loss as they were forced to move out of the neighborhood many of their families had inhabited for generations.

Robert Hatem’s parents were the last Lebanese to leave the Plains. His “recollections of living in that neighborhood, until 1956...were not that pleasant...All of a sudden if garbage was not collected it becomes a rat infested area.” To sleep at night, he had to clean cockroaches away from his bed. After living almost all his life on Auburn Street, his father, Faris Hatem, had to be forcibly evicted from the property by the police while exclaiming “A man’s home is his castle.” Most residents relocated to surrounding communities such as Methuen, Andover, and southern New Hampshire. Yet, they never again experienced the same type of community that had been enabled by the density of life, family, and kin in "The Plains."

The experience of early Lebanese immigrants in America varied a great deal depending on where they settled. In Lawrence, thousands went to work in the mills forming a significant portion of the one-third of Lebanese immigrants who were part of America's industrial workforce. Caught in a cycle of low wages and rising rent, many immigrant families--fathers, mothers, and children--worked in the mills. 

During the 1912 strike, their willingness to unite with fellow immigrants and take a stand in opposition to American mill owners coalesced with their desire to see their children move beyond the confines of mill work. Between the 1920s and 1940s, many Lawrence Lebanese were compelled to work in the mills for the same reasons their parents had--the ease of getting a job and the security of steady pay. Some became professionals such as doctors and lawyers while others opened small grocery stores and businesses. Ultimately, by the 1950s, the age of industrial mill work in Lawrence ended with the movement of textile mills to the South while urban redevelopment erased what remained of the Lebanese community's once vibrant enclave. But, even as many left their working class milieus, their stories shed a much needed light upon Lebanese immigration history that has been long neglected. Their stories speak of struggles and ideas, institutions and communities that stand in stark juxtaposition to the middle class driven narrative of the Lebanese merchant-peddler.