Returning to New York, Gurley hired the Forward Hall on East Broadway for a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting. She, the president of the Free Speech League, and the veteran anarchist Harry Kelly, were the speakers. So few people showed up that the caretaker of the hall insisted on immediate payment. “You’ll never get it in a collection,” he explained. Shortly afterward Mrs. Emerson organized a similarly uneventful meeting in the rickety Grand Opera House in Boston’s South End. It was through Tresca and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, both of whom had known him and worked with him over the years, that Fred Moore now entered the case. It was a fateful entry. At this point, while Sacco and Vanzetti were still inconspicuous foreigners whose names meant nothing, a capable conservative lawyer like their later counsel William Thompson might have secured their acquittal. Moore, the radical labor lawyer, was to make them internationally famous, to link their names indissolubly, but he may well have signed their death warrants in the process. Tresca had met Moore eight years earlier during the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912 and the murder trial that was its by-product. Lawrence, Massachusetts, an industrial city of unrelieved drabness on the banks of the Merrimack, was in 1912 a polyglot company town owned by the Lawrences and the Lowells, and worked by Italians, Germans, French-Canadians, Poles, Lithuanians, Belgians, and Syrians, with a scattering of Russians, Jews, and Greeks. When the Massachusetts legislature in its 1911 autumn session reduced the work week from fifty-six to fifty-four hours, the Lawrence textile mills countered by reducing wages correspondingly. Weekly pay then averaged $8.76 a week for adults, $5 or less for the many child workers. The calculated meanness of the reduction, amounting only to about twenty-five cents, so infuriated the workers that on January 12, 1912, they spontaneously downed tools, in some cases smashing the looms. There followed a bitter struggle that brought twenty-three thousand workers onto the streets. After a number of riots between strikers and police, Governor Eugene Foss called out the militia. The strike was taken over and managed by the I.W.W. with anarchist assistance. From New York came Joe Ettor of the I.W.W. executive board, and Arturo Giovannitti. Ettor was an organizer, Giovannitti a persuasive speaker who kept up the strikers’ courage through the bitter winter. In finally winning the strike the I.W.W. reached the peak of its influence in the East. One afternoon while police and militia were charging a picket line, a girl worker, Annie Lopizza, was shot dead. No one knew who fired the shot, but the police at once arrested “the troublemakers” Ettor and Giovannitti as accessories to murder. They were held without bail until the end of the strike.