Hard Times

Sarah Orne Jewett was known for her portrayals of the lives of the farmers and fisher-folk of her native state, but she wrote at least one story that recognizes that nineteenth-century rural Maine, with its abundant water power in the form of rivers, was also a center of industrial production. "The Gray Mills of Farley," published in 1898, tells of events in a company town dominated by a cotton mill. The mill's labor force has arrived in successive waves: first, young people from neighboring farms, then experienced English millhands, poor Irish immigrants, and finally, the newcomers, French-Canadians who are willing to work cheaper and are viewed with suspicion by the older hands. The town is grim and poor, if not, when times are good, utterly desperate.

Jewett largely focuses on the mill's "agent," who is in charge of its day-to-day management and effectively mediates between labor and capital. No stereotypical brutish overseer, he was born in the town, was orphaned at a young age and grew up poor, but gained a commercial education and has returned to run the mills. Jewett describes him as "a single man, keen and businesslike, but quietly kind to the people under his charge." As the story begins, he meets with one of the mill's directors and reports that the mill has done well and will be able to issue a healthy dividend of nine percent to its investors. He adds, however, that he hopes the board will declare a dividend two or three points smaller than that and return some of the earnings to the labor force, whose wages had been cut during a previous downturn and never restored. He notes that the market is currently glutted and that it may be prudent to keep a reserve within the community. His proposal is politely but firmly dismissed; the directors feel no responsibility for the welfare of the workers, who, in their view, should consider themselves fortunate to be employed at all.

Sure enough, a downturn comes and the mill hands are laid off. Penurious to begin with, they are soon barely above starvation. As the months drag on the agent digs deep into his own pocket to help out as many families as he can, and provides an allotment of land and free seed potatoes so they can raise a bit of food. The local Catholic priest (again, portrayed sympathetically) dips into the takings of the collection plate and puts some men to work laying the foundation for a new church. The workers are resentful but have little recourse; many of the French-Canadians depart, returning home or seeking work elsewhere.

In the end, a reprieve comes. Business conditions improve and the workers are called back. But the positive note on which the story ends is tempered by a recognition of the harsh realities of industrial labor.

"Jolly-looking set this morning," said one of the clerks whose desk was close beside the window; he was a son of one of the directors, who had sent him to the agent to learn something about manufacturing.

"They've had a bitter hard summer that you know nothing about," said the agent slowly.

"The Gray Mills of Farley" can be found in the Library of America volume of Jewett's Novels and Stories.

News from Home

The Heald Machine Company no longer exists, but in its heyday it was a major employer in Worcester, Massachusetts and an important manufacturer of grinders and other machine tools for American industry. During World War II at least 1,000 of the company's employees served in the military, and the monthly newsletter shown here, the Heald Listening Post, was produced by the company and mailed to their servicemen and women wherever they happened to be stationed. Subtitled A Periodic Message to All Heald Employees in Uncle Sam's Armed Forces, the newsletter probably began in early 1942 and was still appearing in the fall of 1945. There was no masthead, but the editor, at least for the parts of its run that are in my possession (Nos. 15-25, 35-39, and 44) seems to have been one Lew Hastings; there were other regular contributors and staff members, including Larry Bacon, Maurice Brigham, and a woman referred to only as Blondie. It appears to have been produced by mimeograph, though some issues have a sheet or two of black-and-white photos on glossy paper.


The newsletter was intended to boost the morale of those in service and provide news and gossip about the company and their fellow employees. It included a regular quota of corny jokes, often mildly risqué and sometimes racist (judging from the photographs of men and women in uniform, there were few if any African-Americans in Heald's employ). Much space was devoted to the company's bowling leagues and other sponsored sports teams, and at least in later issues there is a fair amount of feedback from the recipients, who gave updates on where they were and how they were doing. An upbeat tone was called for (and the newsletter was no doubt subject to the approval of censors) but the Listening Post does note the deaths of at least nineteen employees who were in service, as well as a few who died at home. Sometimes it can be quite blunt about the circumstances:

No doubt some of you know Jack Pillings, who has been kicking around here for some 25 odd years. Of late he has been down to Prescott St. Jack didn't have a chick or a child - not a relative. He hasn't been too hot lately, and decided the next world might suit him better, so a couple of weeks ago he turned on the gas in his room at a boarding house, crawled into bed and went to sleep for the last time. (Issue 15, May 17, 1943)

Some of you fellows probably know Albert Pierson in the Unit Assembly department. Last week Al was feeling fine and was here all the week. Sunday, without warning, he collapsed and was gone before medical aid could reach him. (Issue 19, September 21, 1943)

In addition to female Heald employees who signed up as WAACs and WAVEs, there were also WOWs (Women Ordnance Workers) who stayed home and took factory jobs:

Haven't mentioned the WOWS in the last two or three issues since they have become part of the picture and it would seem strange to go back to a man's shop. Naturally some are more efficient than others but on a whole they rank high and for steady going they put the male to shame.

Some are running lathes like old timers, whetting up the tools, slapping on the dogs and leaning right in to check that tool cut.

Jim Symes has a bevy of them in the Screw Machine department, they snap the levers into position, correct flow of oil and Zip, a piece falls off. As for Inspection, why they handle a pair of mics with the dexterity and finness [sic] of Lady Astor fingering a teaspoon at one of Eleanor's "My Day" parties.

The V-E Day issue (below) was celebratory, naturally, though it noted the deaths of two more servicemen.


The only issue I have after that is No. 44, from October 15, 1945. By then the war was over, but the editor cites one additional name for the company's Honor Roll, a Sgt. Albert P. Belaki who was listed as missing in the Pacific theatre. Many of the Heald employees were now being discharged, though others were still writing in from places as far afield as France, India, Japan, and the Aleutians. One soldier sent in a brief, haunting note:

"I am now in Dachau, Germany, where the Nazis had one of their worst concentration camps," says S/SGT. FREDERIK HIRTLE. "It was sure a horrible mess over here."

I don't know when the Heald Listening Post ceased publication, nor have I turned up anything so far about its editor, Lew Hastings. The Heald Company published at least one other periodical, the Heald Herald, but this was more of a regular trade journal aimed at customers. According to published reports, Heald was acquired in 1974 by Milacron and liquidated by the parent company in 1992.

Feel free to contact me if you have any additional information or if you know someone who worked for Heald during the war and would like me to check to see whether he or she is mentioned in the newsletter.

Of cobblers and cameras

Anthony Lee's exemplary microhistory, centered on a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts, begins with a vivid recreation of a pivotal -- and unexpected -- moment in the town's history:

On the morning of June 13, 1870, an enormous crowd began assembling at the local train station. Reports tell us that men and women were elbow-to-elbow, lined the railroad tracks, and overflowed onto the streets outside the station. The people massed northward from the station for a quarter mile, on either side of Marshall Street, one of the main north-south thoroughfares of town. Thousands had turned out. Given that the census for that year counted about twelve thousand residents in and around town, at least a fifth of the locals, possibly a quarter, had gathered. Many were angry and primed for confrontation. All the region's papers put reporters on site; even the Boston papers, normally uninterested in the western half of the state, sent men to cover the events. A local shoe manufacturer, Calvin T. Sampson, was importing seventy-five strikebreakers to fill the workstations left empty by the local shoemakers' union, the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin. Although able-bodied men were available throughout New England, including many who were not formally associated with the Crispins and possessed considerable skills at shoemaking, strikebreakers were being brought on a two-week train journey from San Francisco and scheduled to arrive that day. What's more, they were Chinese.

The Chinese workers, we learn, had been brought in as strikebreakers to take the place of another migrant minority, for the local chapter of the Crispins was mostly composed of French Canadians, large numbers of whom crossed the border in the 19th century seeking refuge from legal discrimination and the grim economic prospects of rural Quebec.

We thus begin with three sets of actors: Yankee entrepreneurs, personified by Sampson, the Crispins, and the Chinese migrants (to call them immigrants seems a step too far, since few were to remain permanently). But as Lee quickly make clear, there was another group of key players at work, one around which he structures his entire absorbing tale, and that was the local photographers, who not only played a crucial role in documenting what happened in North Adams in the next few years but also, inadvertently or not, served as a means through which the other groups advanced their own interests and identities. No sooner had the Chinese arrived then Sampson arranged to have them photographed, en masse, against the backdrop of a wall of his factory. The resulting stereo card view was, in effect, a shot across the bow of the union and a declaration of the owner's dominion over both the building and his employees. Not long afterwards, a group of Crispins thumbed their noses at their former employer by commissioning their own photograph, modeled on the original, depicting a group of workers who had formed a co-operative standing together outside the very same building, still owned by Sampson.

Lee's narrative comprises four chapters, which examine in detail respectively the perspectives of Sampson, the photographers William Hurd and Henry Ward, the Crispins, and the Chinese. The amount of visual documentation he has uncovered, much of it from the personal collections of descendants of longtime North Adams families, is extraordinary, in particular for the Chinese shoemakers, who often sat for studio portraits and used them, variously, as a means of connecting themselves with or declaring their independence from their ancestral culture. Lee is particularly good at showing how, rather than submitting to the artistic conventions of the local "professors" who operated the studios, the Chinese took an active part in shaping how they would be portrayed, adopting poses based on traditional Chinese portraiture and, in one notable instance, mimicking a striking photograph of one of their countrymen taken across the continent in San Francisco.

There is much else in the book: the clashes between management and labor and between rival ethnicities, the hellish construction of of a railway tunnel through nearby Hoosac Mountain that dragged on for twenty-five years and took the lives of nearly two hundred workers, and in the end, as a sad coda, the eventual fate of the Chinese workers, whose presence in the country would eventually be forbidden by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Although a handful managed to settle down and remain in the US, some starting families, most apparently returned home, and the nascent Chinese-American presence in the Berkshires was extinguished.

A Shoemaker's Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town is available from Princeton University Press. The author, Anthony W. Lee, is Professor and Chair of Art History at Mount Holyoke College

Babel

According to historian Bruce Watson, when William Wood's massive textile mill on the Merrimack River in Lawrence, Massachusetts was completed, in the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, it was regarded, at least by the locals, as "the eighth wonder of the world":

The size of the building simply boggled the imagination. The mill had two parallel wings each 1,937 feet long, 500 feet longer than the Empire State Building if laid on its side. The mill's sprawling floors housed 1,470 power looms along sixteen miles of aisles... Enclosing thirty acres under one roof, employing a small city of six thousand workers, the Wood Mill was to textiles what Pittsburgh was to steel -- the very symbol of consolidation and power.

Its workforce, and the workforce of the city's other mills, included representatives from some 30 nationalities, among them Armenians, East European Jews, French Canadians, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, Portuguese, Russians, Scots, Syrians, and Turks. Many of the groups had their own newspapers, businesses, and places of worship.

On January 11, 1912, angered by a pay cut, workers at one of the city's mills walked out. The strike quickly spread, and over the next several months the city witnessed one of the most intense struggles between labor and management in 20th-century America, drawing in everyone from "Big Bill" Haywood and the Wobblies of the IWW to Harvard students assigned to serve in the local militia. (Watson's Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream tells the story in full.)


This postcard of the Wood Mill was mailed six years after the strike and four days after the signing of the armistice that ended the First World War. There are many other contemporary postcard views of the Lawrence mills; this one, published by L. L. Lester, a firm in nearby Lowell, is not the most aesthetically pleasing and in terms of lithographic technique it's pretty crude, but it does convey the vast scale of the mill. It was addressed to a Mrs. J. Liverman at "Suit 25," 888 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. The sender's name could be "Jos.," maybe her husband Joseph or Josef. He or she wasn't necessarily a mill worker, perhaps just a traveling salesman on business.


I have no idea even what language family this message belongs to (Slavic? Baltic?), but would love to hear from someone who does, and who could perhaps even transcribe and translate it. The only words I can pick out with reasonable certainty are "Malden Sq."

Update: I'm told that the language is Russian and that the message is something like:

Dear Shura,

I'm thankful to say I'm alive and well, and wish you the same. Go tomorrow to the station at Malden Sq. and wait for me, I'll be there half past six or a bit later. Be well. See you tomorrow[?]

Thanks to the good folks at WordReference.com for identifying and transcribing this.

Postscript: According to federal census records from 1920, the Joseph Liverman at 888 Massachusetts Avenue was a sign painter, aged 35, who lived with his wife, Anna. He was born in Russia and had immigrated to the US in 1910. By September 23, 1923, according to U.S. Naturalization Records indexes, he had moved to 30 Upham St. in Malden, Massachusetts; here his date and place of birth are listed as May 6th, 1885 in Odessa, and his occupation as "sign writer." According to the 1930 census he was still living in Malden and working as a house painter; his wife's name is given as Adelia but since her age matches Anna's she was probably the same woman. It's interesting that although the 1920 census lists the couple's native tongue as "Russian," the 1930 census instead indicates "Yiddish."

Ever Thus

The Equitable Monument

Aloft amidst the vapors
Of an early morning dew
Over old Manhattan Island
Comes the sunlight's golden hue.

Around me mammoth buildings.
Lift their peaks up to the sky
Far below the sea gulls
Seeking food, they swiftly fly.

Beneath me busy millions
Driven on by Destiny
Ride upon the wheels of Progress
To the call of Industry.

And upon this noble structure
Whereon whose heights I stand
Tolls three thousand odd mechanics
Skillful both of brain and hand.

From the day they sunk the caisons
To the day they laid the roof
They have built it forty stories
Cold, heat, fool, and fire proof.

And each one a Union member
Being paid the wage he sought
Have made it one of many
Of the monuments they've wrought.

M. P. Kearin
December 1914

The Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators, 1915

One Brotherhood

Editorial cartoons from Electrical Worker: Official Journal of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (1914 and 1915).