A HAPPINESS CENTENNIAL

The slogan “Bread and Roses” is commonplace in progressive rhetoric.  And for those with a little background in labor history, it’s a reminder of a famous strike whose centennial arrives on January 11.  On that day in 1912, a group of women walked out of a textile mill to march in the streets of Lawrence, Massachusetts.  During the following days and weeks, thousands of workers, most of them immigrant women, joined them in the streets.

Led by the radical Industrial Workers of the World, the strike lasted for two months. The workers faced clubs, bayonets, and frequent arrests.  Many were hauled off to jail, children in tow.  But national sympathy for the impoverished strikers grew. American newspapers were moved to support the workers’ cause.  Finally, in March, the mill owners cried uncle, conceding to the strike demands.

The strike is commonly referred to as the “Bread and Roses” strike because a story about the strike, whose accuracy remains unconfirmed, tells of a group of women who held up a banner declaring, “We want bread, and roses, too!”

In 1980, Judy Collins popularized a song about the strike:  http://www.blight.com/~scarlett/traditions/songbook/breadandroses.html).  Many other versions can be found on You Tube.

Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew,

Yes, it is bread we fight for but we fight for roses too! 

The final line:

Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses. 

Hearts starve as well as bodies.   It’s an old message from our religious traditions, and one with important implications for the well-being movement.

For half a century after the Lawrence strike, Americans fought for both higher wages—bread—and shorter hours—roses. Time to smell the roses.  Time for non-material sources of happiness.  Time for “art and love and beauty,” time for families, for nature, for learning, for friends and community, for reflection, rest and regeneration, time to meet non-material needs that deliver happiness, time to love and be loved.  Yet somehow, we came to believe we could live on “bread” (stuff) alone, and the roses were left to wilt.

One reason is that “bread”—money in colloquial terms is really all that matters in our current measurements of economic success. Our prime economic indicator—the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—measures only what we spend on final products and services. If it is bought and sold it counts; otherwise, it’s worth nothing.  Robert Kennedy got it right back in 1968. He observed that the Gross National Product (as the GDP was called then) “measures, in short, everything but that which makes life worthwhile.”

We need new measurements to tell us if our economic activities are adding benefits or costs, whether they are delivering or destroying bread and roses. Around the world, new indicators of success are emerging that measure the roses as well as the bread.

One such measurement is a survey of well-being recently introduced by The Happiness Initiative, (www.happycounts.org).  The survey measures how well we are doing in ten areas of life:  material well-being; physical health; mental health; access to arts, education, recreation and culture; time balance; confidence in government; environmental quality; work satisfaction; community participation and social support.

The modern science of happiness has shown that each of these conditions plays an important role in our well-being.  When you take the survey, you get a score comparing your results to the American average.  Communities—from Seattle to Eau Claire, Wisconsin and Nevada City, California—are now using the survey to assess their well-being as are nearly a hundred colleges and universities.

The centennial of the Lawrence textile strike reminds us to ask “What’s the economy for, anyway?  (full disclosure: that’s the title of my new book).  It calls us to be gardeners of happiness, awakening our senses and watering the roses again.