Across social strata, across racial lines, state lines, and even across party lines, our people- and therefore our movement- are suffering. a senile pedophilic god-king hunches over the United States’ hospital bed (no insurance doesn’t cover it) like a vulture, crowing about whatever tasteless nationalist eyesore or human rights violation he just shat into the world with our tax dollars while pocketing anything left over. Meanwhile, conservatives, corporate Democrats, and bought judges all join arm-in-arm to give the earthly embodiment of their greed and hate the greenlight. For what? For whatever. In our moment of pain, there is a temptation to use this anniversary to look back on our history and see an endless parade of mistakes that led us to where we are. However, mourning the fall from some glorious past into a degenerate present is fascism’s thing, and we don’t do cultural appropriation in this house. Instead, in commemoration of our 250th Independence Day, I want to look back on a piece of New England’s history of class struggle that I think has parallels to our current “character building arc”. My intention is to reflect on the lessons this moment offers us as Socialists, and through it, to show that we as a movement and as a nation have not only survived but progressed through worse times. They say that everything old is new again, that all the injustices and failures of the past are coming back in the 21st century to be repeated as cruel parodies of themselves- it is the New Gilded Age, after all. I say fuck that. I say that our history is more than just a source of regret and shame. It is where we come from, it is a source of strength, and it is us. Now let’s talk about whaling.
Setting Sail
In the first half of the 19th century, New Bedford MA was a great hub for the American whaling industry. From its natural harbor along the mouth of the Acushnet River, laborers sailed out with harpoons and rations and traded them in for thousands of tons of valuable meat, oil, ambergris, and whale bone. Today of course, we know that the whaling industry has major environmental and ethical problems, on the grounds of which many socialists oppose its modern incarnations. This article does not discuss the morality of the practice, but does acknowledge its role in making New Bedford one of the wealthiest cities in the country while giving rise to a maritime culture of shanties, scrimshaw, and literature that marks the location to this day. And then the market happened.
With the industrial revolution, cheaper and easier to produce alternatives to many whale products were being discovered. North America’s huge crude oil deposits were being tapped out West, and as it turned out, pumping liquified dinosaur up from the ground was slightly less dangerous than hunting massive sea creatures that could sometimes turn the ships chasing them into driftwood. The fossil fuel industry of course went on to be a boon to humanity as a whole, with no catastrophic long-term downsides. In its wake, New Bedford pivoted toward textile work in order to remain economically relevant. Aside from its working class sailors, the city had plenty of wealth and plenty of wealthy residents who were willing to reinvest into a new industry, if only out of local pride. The first plant to spring up, the Wamsutta Mill, only found its home in New Bedford because one of its main investors, Massachusetts Senator Joseph Grinnell, insisted it be built in his birthplace. Unlike with so many boomtowns, this shift was largely successful. The whaling ships disappeared, and in their place several enormous mills were constructed along the riverbank, worked by weavers, spinners, and loom-fixers represented through their respective craft unions by the American Federation of Textile Operatives. The city was poised to survive and thrive in the modern world, with a modernized relation between labor and capital.
This arrangement, however, came with its own problems; immigrant mill workers were still unorganized and deliberately kept out of more skilled crafts by trade union rules meant to protect the English-speaking (read: “white”) American craftsmen from competition. This division of labor power along racial and cultural lines extended to which sorts of immigrant populations were favored for textile jobs, as William Mello, who had been a New Bedford mill worker from age 15, testifies: “The Portuguese, the Polish people, and the Greeks, they were the bottom of the pole. They would get jobs if there were any jobs left. The Irish and the French and the English, they’d get all the jobs they had available.” By the First World War, the city’s new economic order was established. Though already, cracks in its foundations were apparent that left the labor movement less prepared than it could have been when the market happened. Again.
The Coming Storm
As it had been with the whaling trade, New Bedford became one of the great textile centers of America by the post-WWI period. But there were other such mills operating in the post-Reconstruction American South, staffed by largely black workforces who- thanks to slavery’s afterlife in the form of Jim Crow- were prevented from organizing and forced to accept far lower wages than similar jobs in the North. For a time, the mills in New Bedford survived this competition by focusing on quality over quantity in their product. Yet the devastation and rebuilding of large swaths of Europe demanded quantity in cloth production, not quality. Economic pressures eventually grew to the point that the mill owners announced a 10% pay cut.
Unionized or not, the weaver’s working conditions were already far from anything acceptable by modern standards. Most lived with their families in company-provided tenement housing, worked in vast and poorly ventilated mills amidst constant noise and dangerous machinery, and in some cases labored alongside their own children. Decreasing pay to below subsistence level was a rain of straws breaking thousands of backs across the political spectrum. The Communist Party of America’s Textile Mill Committee, who had already been campaigning amongst the unorganized immigrant workers, began pressuring the less radical craft unions for a work freeze. On April 16, 1928, the American Federation of Textile Operatives granted their wish with a landslide vote in favor.
I want us now to zoom in on the human impact these decisions had. I want you to think of Mary Law, an English woman who crossed the Atlantic for New Bedford with her family in 1912, leaving behind her first child who had died in infancy. For over a decade after, she worked in the textile mills alongside her husband and thousands of other immigrants, sometimes as a weaver and sometimes as a recruiter of new weavers. Despite the harsh conditions, Mary would later have fond memories of the community built by so many working for so long in close proximity. Mill workers would have communal meals, festivals, and even compete with other mills in recreational sports teams. Then the strike brought everything to a halt. Forced to find some new way to support her expansive family and with another child on the way, Mary reapplied her recruiting skills and solicited pledges of money and material aid from local store owners on behalf of the craft unions. Her mother and sister, meanwhile, organized part of those donations into a communal kitchen and food bank to supply the picketers and their families.
Initially, the strike enjoyed broad local support. Petit bourgeoise like the merchants Mrs. Law solicited for support were willing to supply the strikers because pay cuts in the mills would damage their own revenue downstream. Clergy were supposedly rebuffing bribes from agents of the mill owners to preach against the strike. The strikers received favorable press coverage, and the TMC was able to sponsor a twelve-part report by national economist Dr. Norman Ware on why the pay cuts were unnecessary. Feeding off the momentum, their demands outstripped those of the AFTO: To hell with a 10% cut, there would be a 20% pay raise. There would be equal pay for women, institution of the 40-hour work week, and an end to child labor in the mills. Even “mainstream” groups like the American Legion, the Rotary Club, and the town’s own Chamber of Commerce threw in with labor, drawn by the easy publicity of siding with humans against the inhuman demands of a global textile market.
Meeting early success at the street level, Mary volunteered for larger donation drives in surrounding towns called “tag days.” She was then tasked with drumming up support from unions in farther locations like Providence, and while she had little experience with public speaking, the expectant mother actually found her gender had a disarming effect on many of the male workers when addressing their assembly. Mary soon had so many pledges coming in she had to insist they be spread out over several recurring donations so that she would not have to worry about being mugged on her way back to New Bedford.
Her time as an activist was not an unbroken string of successes. Mary discovered too late that some of her fellow solicitors had been regularly raiding the donation box to get drunk with the proceeds. Her exasperation combined with the demands of her progressing pregnancy led her to quit working for the unions while the strike was still in progress. Instead she took an offer to recruit solicitors for a Governor Councilman’s campaign, whose election won her a friend in local politics after the birth of her baby. She was soon appointed to a job in the New Bedford jail, where she waited out the remainder of the strike taking care of the prisoners (many of whom were TMC members) and the facilities.
Rising Waters
There was much still left to wait out. Midway through the strike, the AFTO that had been representing the organized textile workers of New Bedford alongside its different craft unions, joined the United Textile Workers- itself an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. This could be interpreted as an effort to win greater political and material support from a vaster organization, only that support was then turned against the labor movement’s farther left factions at least as much as the owner class. Communism, already vilified in the American press, was blamed for the strike’s economic damage. The TMC and its affiliates were seen as outside agitators who thrived on prolonging strife while local working people suffered. Not at all like the UTW, those blessed, reasonable moderates. Mill owners meanwhile instigated a more intensive police crackdown on the strikers by having a series of articles published bemoaning the destruction of property (everything old is new again) and inability of law enforcement to quell public disorder. Escalation was met with escalation was met with escalation on the picketing line, with strikers brawling with each other as well as with police, until eventually the Massachusetts National Guard was deployed to defend capit- I mean restore order.
Now I would like you to think of another woman of that time, Nora Duprey, who described herself as being born under the union label. As the oldest daughter of a textile factory worker in New Bedford, she started her career in the mills at age 14, back when child labor was still legal. Several years later, she and thousands of other workers lost their source of income in the 1928 strike. Nora was never explicitly called upon by her family to find new work, but as the eldest child, she felt an obligation to support her family. That instinct got her into trouble when she and her younger sister got jobs in the same location- what she later described as a sweatshop. One of the managers there kept trying to flirt with her sister. Soon that flirting turned into harassment, and after it was clear her ‘no’ was never going to mean ‘no,’ Nora’s sister one day broke down into tears on the shop floor. That was when Nora punched the man’s lights out. Both Duprey sisters were immediately fired.
Nora soon found on-and-off work in a different non-unionized “sweatshop” manufacturing pocketbooks. When she was not working, the young woman spent most of her time standing with other hopefuls in a sort of factory waiting deck, wishing for another laborer on the floor to get sick, injured, or fired so that they could be the one to fill the gap. Even for a lifelong factory worker, these conditions were intolerable, so she tried organizing for the first time. Now, assaulting management would get you fired, sure, but unionizing or even discussing unionizing was a greater sin still. Nora was terminated, blacklisted from the surrounding worksites, and suddenly her textile career was over. No social security, no unemployment, no diploma or degree to translate into other industries, the capital class had found her unfit for exploitation and so she was discarded. Ironically, this allowed Nora to organize full time.
With her textile career cut short, Mrs. Duprey became involved in the amalgamation of unions behind the AFTO- now UTW, supporting actions in Massachusetts towns whose names we recognize today: Fall River, Fitchburg, Springfield, and Chicopee. Over the years her oratory and what we would now call networking skills grew, and she went from organizer to speaker. Nora rallied political and material support for the trade unions as far afield as Maine and New Jersey. Throughout that time, she never stayed satisfied with the grade school education factory life had allowed her. She took night classes, underwent training programs, and eventually left for California for work as an industrial engineer after the strike’s conclusion.
The Ship Goes Down
The New Bedford strike lasted six months, hardly any time historically speaking but a grueling marathon for communities that had had to endure it. Despite the persistence of organizers like Nora, despite the tireless work of solicitors like Mary, despite the bravery of the picketers, the perseverance of striking families, the support of the town, of the local press, of surrounding trade unions, and of multiple nationwide labor organizations, the will of capital overcame all obstacles on October 8th, 1928. A compromise, mediated by the Department of Labor, stipulated a 5% wage cut with a promised 30-day notice before any further cuts. The TMC attempted to continue the strike in defiance of what they saw as an agreement unrepresentative of the will of the workers, but by then financial support had waned to the point the worker’s loss of income could no longer be supplemented. People needed their jobs back. Those workers who could not flee to better prospects returned to work and suffered steadily increasing work demands, while the overhanging threat of outsourcing kept union representatives in line. The strike’s failure was blamed in the minds of workers on Communist radicals and the foreign-born workers that had clearly “needed some help, but not from these outsider agitators [referencing the TMC]. All they needed was to get organized like the weavers,” and stay reasonable with their demands.
This continued until the bust New Bedford had avoided at the end of the age of whaling came back for them with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Still, the sentiment prevailed in survivors of that time that “the strike killed New Bedford as far as economic things… the majority of the mills, they went down South where they could operate a lot easier.” Death doesn’t like to be cheated. By the middle of the twentieth century, the textile mills fell silent on the shores of Massachusetts, the communities that had once thrived around them snuffed out like candles in a flood. Yet for all the vitriol directed at the Communists, the necessity of the labor movement was never abandoned ideologically by William: “Unions are good and unions are bad. Sometimes they demand too much. But we did need a union at that time, because we had no say at all on the job when we get laid off. They fire you at will. They lay you off at will.” In many states and American industries, they lay you off at will to this day.
The Calm After
What can be learned from this? What strength could one bygone defeat, not the first, the last, or even the most disastrous suffered by our people, offer a generation struggling against things like for-profit internment camps and the automated surveillance state? All stories, even sad ones and especially sad historical ones, contain messages both intended and accidental. History rhymes. You cannot predict where the poem will go- there are too many different possible words- but you can learn which rhyme schemes are pleasant to hear and which are auditory sulfur. New Bedford’s story has the setup for poetry, good and bad. Learn to listen for both, and you can stop the rotten ones from completing.
The Rhyme of Solidarity
One of capitalists’ greatest tools against groups of workers heading in directions they don’t like is to hitch another larger pool of labor in the opposite direction until the former becomes exhausted with little to no ground covered. Southern black mill workers were not the enemies of or class traitors against the New Bedford strikers. They were fellow proletarians in a much worse position socially and economically who were having their own exploitation weaponized against people they had never met. Pulling alongside them were the factory workers who equipped the Massachusetts National Guardsmen, even and unionists like Mary who worked under and for the police to support her family as they arrested and jailed labor leaders. In her interviews, Nora Duprey sees this situation with some bittersweetness in her own professional development, remarking how “this happens very often in the labor movement; if you get someone who is capable, usually they will go to the other side. Not because you think the other side is right, but it’s an advancement. It’s a chance to earn a living.” This strategy of pitting labor against itself works, one, because it feeds into the natural human tendency to otherize and antagonize outside groups you feel no connection with. Two, because it plays off of another natural impulse to look after your own “advancement” even at the expense of others. Only we have the power to kick our own ass. That is why the capitalist class needs us to kick in opposite directions.
At the time of writing, Box Elder County in Utah organizes against the same global market that once crushed New Bedford- in the form of a gargantuan data center project that would drain their water supply, skyrocket their energy prices, and devastate their ecosystem. Struggling against them will be engineers, construction workers, and other “capable” workers earning a living by being harnessed in the opposite direction. One side in this tug-of-war has billions of dollars of venture capital and a trillion-dollar defense industry attached to it, and one side does not. I wonder who will win if no solidarity is shown and we take the project’s financial backers seriously when they complain about outside interlopers or paid protesters.
The Rhyme of Rising Up (to the Occasion)
One of the reasons I bring up Nora Duprey and Mary Law in this article is to illustrate the humanity of the actors in New Bedford’s history. That is something that is easy to forget when talking about history- how everyone involved was, at least at one point, flesh and blood not very different from you. These women, two of our many foremothers in the work, did not have a magical unionist organ that activated on the day of the strike and turned them into super-organizers. They were working women with their own families to look after and their own obligations to uphold. They had moments of fear and confusion as they tried to support the strikers without any webinars, articles, or toolkits to tell them how. They had limits on the bullshit they could tolerate and got out of the conflict before they burnt out or broke down. But it is because they tried and kept trying despite those limitations that we remember them now. Did you read the above paragraphs and ever catch yourself thinking “the strike failed because one or both of these workers sold out / didn’t show up / didn’t work hard enough or often enough?” Both women were human beings moved by societal forces far larger than either of them could ever control, faced with injustices overwhelming in their scale, and still they did what they could with the knowledge and tools they had. They rose to the occasion not by being perfect but by being there. That is an example worth aspiring to.
Swimming to Shore
This July marks 250 years of American class war- a conflict that began as muskets thundering against an empire and continues now as tear gas grenades bursting outside of Delaney Hall. Let us commemorate the occasion by moving beyond our movement’s past, not by forgetting or distorting it but by internalizing the messages our predecessors left for us. The predecessors of New Bedford’s textile strike remind us of the need for widespread solidarity and of the beauty of human persistence no matter the setback. Like sailors hauling a whale toward the ship, we unite as they did in the name of defeating forces thousands of times stronger than any one of us. Remember those who came before, and haul away for those who will remember you.
Sources:
Duprey, N. (1981). Oral history interview with Nora Duprey, December 1, 1981 (D. Georgianna & T. Stove). Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections.
Law, M. (1980). Follow up oral history interview with Mary Law, November 13, 1980 (G. Schultz). Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections.
Law, M. (1980). Oral history interview with Mary Law, May 7, 1980 (G. Schultz). Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections.
Mello, W. (1980). Oral history interview with William Mello, December 7, 1980 (B. Pacheco). Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_New_Bedford_textile_strike
