A local undertaker and a member of the Lawrence school board attempted to frame the strike leadership by planting dynamite in several locations in town a week after the strike began. He was fined $500 and released without jail time. Later, William M. Wood, the president of the American Woolen Company, was shown to have made an unexplained large payment to the defendant shortly before the dynamite was found

The authorities declared martial law,[33] banned all public meetings, and called out 22 more militia companies to patrol the streets. Harvard students were even given exemptions from their final exams if they agreed to go and try to break up the strike.

The IWW responded by sending Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and a number of other organizers to Lawrence. Haywood participated little in the daily affairs of the strike. Instead, he set out for other New England textile towns in an effort to raise funds for the strikers in Lawrence, which proved very successful. Other tactics established were an efficient system of relief committees, soup kitchens, and food distribution stations, and volunteer doctors provided medical care. The IWW raised funds on a nationwide basis to provide weekly benefits for strikers and dramatized the strikers' needs by arranging for several hundred children to go to supporters' homes in New York City for the duration of the strike. When city authorities tried to prevent another 100 children from going to Philadelphia on February 24 by sending police and the militia to the station to detain the children and arrest their parents, the police began clubbing both the children and their mothers and dragged them off to be taken away by truck; one pregnant mother miscarried.

The national attention had an effect: the owners offered a 5% pay raise on March 1, but the workers rejected it. American Woolen Company agreed to most of the strikers' demands on March 12, 1912. The strikers had demanded an end to the Premium System in which a portion of their earnings were subject to month-long production and attendance standards. The mill owners' concession was to change the award of the premium from once every four weeks to once every two weeks. The rest of the manufacturers followed by the end of the month; other textile companies throughout New England, anxious to avoid a similar confrontation, then followed suit.