Warren’s decision to launch campaign where striking works clashed violently with factory owners says a lot about what kind of campaign she wants to run.
LAWRENCE, Mass. — Elizabeth Warren formally launched her presidential campaign Saturday with a call for « fundamental change, » even if the « cowards and armchair critics » call it « extreme or radical. »
« Because the man in the White House is not the cause of what’s broken, he’s just the latest — and most extreme — symptom of what’s gone wrong in America, » Warren said of President Donald Trump at an outdoor rally on a chilly, but sunny winter day.
« It won’t be enough to just undo the terrible acts of this administration, » Warren continued. « We can’t afford to just tinker around the edges — a tax credit here, a regulation there. Our fight is for big, structural change. »
With the cat let out of the bag on her 2020 plans more than a month ago when she started her exploratory campaign, the Massachusetts senator had any number of symbolically appealing places in her how backyard for the formal rollout.
She could have chosen the battlefields of Lexington and Concord, right down the road, and invoked « the shot heard round the world » that started the American Revolution.
Or she could have chosen a location in downtown Boston or her hometown of Cambridge, where she might have been able to draw a crowd large enough to rival the 20,000 who turned out to see Kamala Harris launch her campaign in downtown Oakland last month.
But instead, she chose Lawrence, an old mill town about 30 miles outside Boston, with a more obscure, but very telling history: Just over 100 years ago in the factory buildings that served as a backdrop for Warren’s speech, women textile workers defied bosses and bayonets to start a strike, that as Warren said, « changed America. »
After realizing their pay was cut, the women stopped working and a political conflagration known as the Bread and Roses strike saw tens of thousands of workers clash with police and armed militiamen called out by political leaders aligned with the mill owners.
Related: Elizabeth Warren tweets about Donald Trump
« Nevertheless, they persisted! » Warren said of the workers, invoking her now-famous slogan.
The workers didn’t engage only in civil despondence, but in the bitter winter of 1912 vandalized factory buildings and machinery in protest of working conditions that saw one of out of every three mill workers die by the age of the 25.
