Upstate Earth

George R. Lunn and The Socialists of Schenectady

2012-01-14T10:31:00.003-05:00

George R. Lunn

As part of the research for The Red Nurse, I visited Schenectady to learn more about George R. Lunn, the Socialist mayor who was such a strong supporter of the Little Falls textile workers. Shortly after the workers at the Gilbert and Phoenix mills walked out, Lunn came to Little Falls to speak on their behalf. The encounter in the novel between Lunn and Little Falls Police Chief James “Dusty’ Long is based on contemporary newspaper accounts:

“This is my last warning,” said Long. “I don’t care if you’re the mayor of Schenectady. This ain’t Schenectady and you got no right to speak in this park without a permit. I am going to take you in if you don’t shut your yap and get back on that train.”

“Chief, I have to tell you that your municipal law would not stand up in any court in the land. It is clearly a violation of the First Amendment which states, and I quote: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“I don’t know anything about that. I don’t make the laws. I just enforce them. And you and your friends are breaking the law.”

“Do you know,” the mayor replied very calmly, “what Abraham Lincoln said about tampering with the Constitution?”

“Put the cuffs on him, Allie,” said Long to one of his men.

“He said,” continued Lunn as Officer Baker twisted his arms behind him and clamped on the handcuffs, “and I quote: Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. It is the only safeguard of our liberties.”

“Tom, grab that woman over there.” Long pointed at me but I ducked down and retreated behind some large men who had come from the hammer factory. “Get all those socialists!” Long was shouting but I couldn’t see him. “We’ll see how smart they are after they’ve cooled their heels in the lock-up.”

The crowd surged back and forth, making it very difficult for the cops to seize everyone Long was pointing out. But the men and women who came from Schenectady didn’t try to get away. They kept moving forward and I even heard one woman asking why she wasn’t being arrested.

The site of Clinton Park and the Phoenix Mill today

Lunn and his comrades repeatedly stood up to speak in Clinton Park and were repeatedly arrested, overwhelming the city and county’s capacity to jail them. The Socialists employed a form of civil disobedience not so different from that of the Occupy movement, claiming their first amendment rights to assemble and speak in a public park. Invoking a plainly unconstitutional city ordinance banning any congregation of more than twenty people, Long and his men kept making arrests until the city officials finally had to concede defeat.

This was the first contribution of the Schenectady Socialists to the embattled workers of Little Falls. The second was a successful humanitarian and publicity campaign, also described in The Red Nurse:

I made another trip to Schenectady to get Lunn’s people moving and met with a large group of women who were ready to welcome children into their homes. Meanwhile, I had enlisted Susie Klimacek and her friends to persuade strikers’ families to let their children go to live in Schenectady or Albany for the worst of the winter months. I knew this was not going to be an easy task and I thought Susie would be better at it than I. Fred Moore was busy getting together the right paperwork to allow the children to leave their parents.

On December 17 the first group of twenty children left Little Falls under the care of the Women Socialists of Schenectady. The bosses and their thugs provided all the publicity we could have wanted by constantly harassing the women and children as they made their way to the depot. First they ordered them not to walk in the street. Then they ordered them not to walk on the sidewalk. Supporters were accompanying the children with placards which the cops said were illegal.

Truant officers showed up and demanded legal documentation that the parents had approved the exodus. Chief Long threatened to arrest the Schenectady women for kidnapping. But thanks to Moore, we had all the necessary legal papers and the authorities were made to look petty and stupid.

The next day more children left and their photographs appeared in the Rochester and Utica papers. Sentimentalists of all stripes were touched by the sad picture of poor children being sent away from their families at Christmas. Sympathy was growing for the strikers and the A.F.L. sell-outs were increasingly ignored. Mayor Lunn wrote that he had spoken with Governor Dix and was hopeful that the state would step in to mediate the strike.

Many of the attacks on the strikers and their supporters in the conservative press of 1912 echo the same themes that can be heard today, directed against union workers in Wisconsin or free speech protestors in Oakland and scores of other American cities. And when the Republicans want to use the worst possible word for President Obama, they call him “a socialist.”

Eugene V. Debs, campaigning in 1912

A hundred years ago Democrats and Republicans were as united in their hatred for socialism as they are today. Unlike today, however, socialism was not simply a mythical bogeyman in 1912. There was a real Socialist Party led by politicians every bit as American as George Lunn. In the same year as the great strike, the party was growing and it was a threat to the two major parties. This was true on a national level where Eugene V. Debs was barnstorming the country in his own “Red Special” train and it was true on a local level where Socialists came to power not only in Schenectady but in Milwaukee and other cities.

The Socialist Party’s 1912 platform called for the collective ownership of all large scale industries, public employment for the unemployed, shortening the work day, and safety inspection of all workplaces. Politically, the party called for, among other things, absolute freedom of speech and assembly, graduated income and inheritance taxes, women suffrage, direct election of the President, abolition of the Senate, and abolition of the Supreme Court’s power to overrule Congress. In an echo of the current “We are the 99%” slogan, the platform proclaimed: “The boasted prosperity of this nation is for the owning class alone. To the rest it means only greater hardship and misery.” Radical, yes, but all quite democratic and non-violent.

Within five years, the party had been destroyed, its leaders jailed or exiled, and the United States had embarked on those foreign wars and entanglements that Washington so strongly warned against. And although the destruction of the Socialist Party was clearly a bipartisan mission, it was the Democratic Wilson administration which used the Espionage Act of 1917 and the 1919 Palmer Raids to suppress every kind of radical dissenter.

It was with all this history I mind that I visited Schenectady where George Lunn dominated city politics for a decade before eventually cutting his losses and becoming a Democrat. Few in the city know anything about Lunn and he has been largely forgotten except among those who value local history. He has no noticeable internet presence and the one book on his life (George R. Lunn and the Socialist Era in Schenectady, 1909-1916 by Kenneth Hendrickson) is long out of print.

However, the Schenectady Historical Society does preserve his memory along with quite a trove of materials, including clipping files, audio and video tapes of talks on Lunn, and files on the city’s political history. The Efner History Center and Archives on the top floor of the city hall contains two large scrapbooks composed by one of Lunn’s fellow Socialists, the City Cleark Hawley Van Vechten. The scrapbooks contain a chronological series of newspaper articles covering the whole Lunn era and provided much of the information on this page. The books are fragile but can be made available to researchers to use on site.

Schenectady Socialist women welcoming the children of Little Falls,

from the Van Vechten scrapbook collection

The Van Vechten books provide a glimpse into a much livelier era in the small city’s history. In 1910 24,000 people worked for GE or the American Locomotive Company, and 55% of the city’s 73,000 residents were foreign-born. Rapid growth had led to housing shortages, poor and overcrowded schools, a faltering sewer system, bad roadways – all aggravated by graft and no-bid contracts presided over by a bipartisan series of crooked city officials.

Lunn had arrived in 1904 as minister of the Dutch Reformed Church and was soon hammering away from the pulpit at corrupt politicians and he did not hesitate to name names. Soon enough, his congregation asked him to move on. He responded by founding his own Peoples Church and carrying on the fight. In 1910 he founded a weekly paper, The Citizen, and joined the local Socialist Party.

Steinmetz and Einstein

The Schenectady Socialists had been led by Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a German-born engineer for GE whose genius at developing new patents for the company earned him the right to indulge in radical politics. Steinmetz developed key theories for the improvement of electrical motors and attracted great attention by his experiments in the production of man-made lightning. A hunchback and dwarf, he had adopted the middle name Proteus after a dwarf in the Odyssey.

A socialist from his youth who had fled Germany because of his politics, Steinmetz was a brilliant individual but not the kind to make a good candidate for mayor. Lunn, however, was slender and handsome, an eloquent speaker and a veteran of the Spanish-American War. The engineer was overjoyed to have the 38 year old minister carry the party’s standard in the 1911 municipal elections.

Lunn’s oratory was said to be remarkable and he swept into office with a full slate of aldermen. He moved quickly to reform the city, raising the pay for municipal workers, appointing Steinmtez to head the School Board and introducing the novelty of accepting bids for city contracts. He reassessed property, raising the business district’s taxes by $2 million and cutting taxes on workers homes by $300,000. He started free trash collection, free dental care and bought tracts of lands to create the city’s still-existing parks. For his part, Steinmetz built new schools, hired school doctors and nurses and launched programs for deaf, developmentally delayed and tubercular children.

Walter Lippman was one of the first

Socialists to break with Lunn

Lunn and his comrades did spread themselves a little thin, it appears. The party was involved for much of October, 1912 in the Little Falls battle and much of November and December was consumed by the project of providing a temporary home for the strikers' children. Some projects faltered, such as plans to sell coal and ice at cost to city residents and to run a municipal grocery store. His secretary Walter Lippmann quit, claiming Lunn was not radical enough to be a real socialist, foreshadowing th ideological split that would soon doom the party locally. At this point Lippmann was just 22, a youthful idealist just out of Harvard, and not yet the world famous journalist and critic of every administration from Wilson to Johnson.

In 1913 the Republicans and Democrats joined with the Progressives to form a Fusion ticket hat defeated Lunn, but in 1915 he was re-elected against all three establishment parties.

A study of Schenectady newspapers from that era reveals the usual shortcoming of Leftist parties: internal doctrinal wrangling turned personal and purists began to attack the pragmatists, and vice-versa. The party's own The Citizen, available on microfilm at the State Library, is the best guide to this process of political dissolution. The end result is that Lunn was ousted from his own party in 1916, though he remained on as mayor.

Fed up, Lunn became a Democrat and was elected to Congress just in time to become an ardent supporter of Mr. Wilson’s war. While Eugene Debs and other national party leaders went to jail for speaking against the war, Lunn grew close to the more liberal wing of New York’s Democratic party. Defeated for Congress in 1918, he was elected as a Democrat to two more terms as Schenectady’s mayor in 1919 and 1921. In 1922 was elected Lieutenant Governor. In 1925 Governor Al Smith appointed him to the state’s Public Service Commission where he served until poor health forced him to retire in 1942.

Walter Rauschenbusch was an inspiration to Lunn

Lunn’s is a fascinating American story, echoing themes that are still very contemporary. He was a Christian minister obsessed with politics, but unlike many preachers then and now who serve as shills for the rich, he was influenced by the Social Gospel promoted by Walter Rauschenbusch, a best-selling religious writer of those years.

His pragmatism is also very much in the American tradition and it was not surprising that his more doctrinaire followers broke with Lunn. He preferred to quote Lincoln and the Constitution rather than Marx and he shifted from Republican to Socialist to Democrat over the years. He was always a patriot, fought against Spain in 1898, and said in Congress that U.S. national honor required entry into World War I. His long commitment to the state’s Public Service Commission was useful but distinctly unglamorous work.

Given this record it is no surprise that George Lunn never became the figure of either legend or infamy that was the fate of so many radicals of his generation: Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill, Eugene V. Debs. But fame was never on Lunn's agenda, despite his considerable personal magnetism. He believed in government and wanted to make it work for the public good and my own view is that he did more to improve the lives of working people than those who never made the compromises necessary to attain political power.

Schenectady's beautiful Central Park

is one of Lunn's lasting achievements

The Red Nurse is available in print for $9.95 and on Kindle at $2.99.

New book marks centennial of the great Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912

2012-01-09T07:24:00.009-05:00

Over the past year I have been working on a novel set during the nearly forgotten strike which made a small upstate New York factory town the center of national attention a hundred years ago.

The book, The Red Nurse, is now available for $9.95 in paperback and as a download for $2.99 at Kindle and Smashwords.

The story is told by Helen Schloss, a public health nurse and already an active Socialist when she came to Little Falls in May of 1912. The death of 146 garment workers in the Triangle Fire a year earlier had led to a number of reforms in New York state, but none had yet taken effect. A radical spirit was in the air that year and a wave of strikes rolled across the country.

A new law was passed that summer in Albany, cutting the hourly maximum for women and children workers from 60 to 54 led to wage cuts. When garment workers at the Phoenix and Gilbert mills in Little Falls struck against these cuts, Helen was the first to step up in their support. Over the next three months, Socialist and IWW activists from around the country flocked to join the latest battle against the capitalist system. But it was not the radical celebrities of the era who won the strike. It was the largely female, immigrant workers and the two women who led them: Helen Schloss and Matilda Rabinowitz.

Helen Schloss, at center, with arrested strikers in the Herkimer

County jail, from the Int'l Socialist Review, 1913

Matilda went on to lead strikes across the country and was an active writer until very late in life. Helen, who organized medical care at the great Paterson and Ludlow strikes, vanishes from history after she went to Russia in 1921 to provide medical care for the Bolshevik army. In the novel I imagine her still in the USSR in 1969 and eager to tell her story to a young man from Little Falls.

Matilda Rabinowitz,

courtesy Robbin Legere Henderson

The rivalry which I depict between Helen and Matilda cannot be proven, but was suggested to me by Matilda’s failure to mention Helen at all in her own memoir, despite the equal credit given to both women by Socialist and IWW leaders. Helen’s feelings for the IWW organizer Ben Legere, by whom Matilda later had a child, is purely fictional, as are her relationships with the nationally known radicals Bill Haywood and Carlo Tresca.

Bill Bill Haywood

The real heroes of the story are the strikers, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who were forced to work for starvation wages and to live in the unsanitary slums that once filled the South Side. I have created composite characters, like Susie Klimacek and Sam Malavasic, to represent the many unnamed and forgotten workers who risked so much for a better life.

The Phoenix Mill,circa 1912

In the novel, Helen testifies that a third of the youngest workers would die before the age of 25, which is supported by the known facts of that era. The overcrowding and poor sanitation on the South Side of Little Falls had led to a frightening rise in tuberculosis cases in the years leading up to 1912, and the well-to-do classes were clearly alarmed. The Fortnightly Club, a group of wealthy women, hired Helen to address the public health issues, little realizing that she would lead a strike against the economic system from which they profited.

Chief James Long at right,

from the Sesquicentennial History of Little Falls

In factory towns like Little Falls there was a gap, not just between the rich industrialists and their desperately poor workers, but also between the poorest of the workers and those just a little higher on the social ladder. Many in the emerging middle class were products of the Irish and German immigrations of the 1840s and 1850s. They held the better and more skilled factory jobs and dominated the civil service. Police Chief James Long, who was much vilified in the socialist press at the time, was from this background, as was his lifelong friend, and my grandfather, the Fire Chief Edward Cooney.

George Lunn, Socialist mayor of Schenectady

The Socialist Party, which came to power in Schenectady in 1911, was just as supportive in reality as they are depicted in my book. George Lunn, the charismatic party leader and mayor, led a free speech battle that should be far better known in America’s annals of civil liberty. His fundamentally pragmatic nature, however, separated him from radicals like Helen, Matilda and certainly Big Bill Haywood. While Big Bill and Helen ended up in the Soviet Union, Lunn became lieutenant governor as a Democrat and spoke at Chief Long’s retirement dinner in 1940.

Al Smith

The resolution of the strike by a state board, in response to a well-planned publicity campaign by strike leaders, made the Little Falls struggle a true milestone in American labor history. Early progressives like Al Smith and Robert Wagner understood that the Triangle Fire of the previous year had changed the public mood, and that voters and their representatives were now ready to support the rights of workers to safe and healthy working conditions. The proactive role of the state made this strike very different from the two more famous IWW-led textile industry battles that preceded and followed it. In early 1912 the struggle in Lawrence was resolved only after a number of deaths and threats of even greater violence. The Paterson strike of 1913 led to defeat when the owners managed to starve the workers into submission, and the state of New Jersey failed to intervene.

But life for working people in Little Falls changed for the better in the decades following the strike. Manufacturing remained strong into the 1960s and a thriving middle class came to include the children and grandchildren of the once-despised immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Strong AFL-CIO unions assured a good life for working people and the great industrial families like the Burrells, the Snyders and the Gilberts remained pillars of the community.

The Historical Record:

Red Nurse is based very closely on the day-to-day record of the strike.

The most complete record of the strike is in unpublished material at the Herkimer County Historical Society. The Red Phoenix is a Boston College Senior Thesis composed by Patrick Bennison while he was an intern at the Society in 1986. Bennison based his work on a scrapbook of newspaper articles kept by Miss Hughes, a teacher at the Jefferson Street School during the strike. A copy of the scrapbook was made with the permission of its owner, Elizabeth Bower of Ilion, and is kept at the Society.

There is also a 1968 senior thesis on the strike at Hobart College, composed by Little Falls native Schuyler Van Horn.

The labor and radical press of the day covered the strike, as did regional and national papers. “The Strike at Little Falls” by Philips Russell in The International Socialist Review, December 1912, goes into some detail on the work of Helen Schloss and Matilida Rabinowitz.

The New York Times archives contains several letters which Helen wrote as a public health nurse in New York City. The letters demonstrate her advanced thinking not only in medicine but in women’s rights. There is also a 1906 article detailing her first arrest in the company of Elisabeth Gurley Flynn, the “rebel girl” of Joe Hill’s famous song and later leader of the Communist Party.

Richard Buckley’s history of Little Falls, Unique Place, Diverse People (Little Falls Historical Society, 2008) contains a very through description of the strike, drawing on numerous sources, including the Journal & Courier and The Evening Times. Buckley points out that the newspaper record has major gaps for the period of the strike and this is true of the microfilm collections both at the Little Falls Public Library and at the State Library in Albany.

The New York State Library at Albany contains copies of the multi-volume report of the Factory Investigating Committee and the 1913 State Labor Department Report, “The Little Falls Textile Workers’ Dispute.”

The strike has been badly neglected by historians and I have found only a single scholarly study: “Women, Wobblies, and Workers’ Rights: The 1912 Textile Strike in Little Falls, New York" by Robert E. Snyder (New York History, January 1979)

The excerpt from the unpublished memoir of Matilda Rabinowitz, included in Red Nurse courtesy of her granddaughter Robbin Legere Henderson, is a rare first person look at the strike. Robbin has been a valuable source of insights on the strike leaders and is currently preparing the entire memoir for publication. A copy is in the Matilda Robbins collection in the Labor History Archives at Wayne State University, Detroit. The papers of Ben Legere are also at Wayne State.

An excerpt from Red Nurse can be found at the upper right corner of this page.

The 99% in Albany and on Wall Street

2011-10-25T09:50:00.050-04:00

Occupy Albany on the State Capitol grounds

Last week we visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan and on Friday the movement spread to Albany, as it has to many cities across the country. Although the movement has no leaders or official demands, it's pretty clear that people are fed up with an economic system run for the benefit of the few.

Morning clean-up at Occupy Wall Street

The movement might have gone nowhere if NYC's Mayor Bloomberg had not chosen to respond with police brutality and mass arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge on October. It appears that Governor Cuomo was pushing to follow Bloomberg's example but was unable to get his way with more level-headed officials in Albany. Although Cuomo did employ state troopers to move protesters out of the state-owned half of the park, the city police chose not to enforce the park's 11pm curfew, according to the Times Union:

"We don't have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble," (an Albany police official) said. "The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor."

A city police source said his department also was reluctant to damage what he considers to be good community relations that have taken years to rebuild. In addition, the crowd included elderly people and many others who brought their children with them.

"There was a lot of discussion about how it would look if we started pulling people away from their kids and arresting them ... and then what do we do with the children?" one officer said.

Albany County DA David Soares also expressed a very reasonable approach:

"Our official policy with peaceful protesters is that unless there is property damage or injuries to law enforcement, we don't prosecute people protesting," Soares said. "If law enforcement engaged in a pre-emptive strike and started arresting people I believe it would lead to calamitous results, and the people protesting so far are peaceful."

Soares said another concern discussed by law enforcement officials was whether arrests could trigger an influx of young adults from Albany's significant college community.

Those holding out near Wall Street were huddled under tarpaulins and not permitted the relative comfort of tents, which makes the Albany’s encampment seem like a cozy campsite in comparison - even with the low temperatures of recent nights.

The commissary at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan

The information center at Academy Park in Albany

Both sites feature an outdoor meals center, supplied by generous donations from local supporters. And information desks at both sites attracted plenty of well-wishers. If anything, the campers in Albany were even more diverse in age and race than those at Zuccotti Park. I spoke with both SUNY grad students and long-term unemployed people when I was there.

I found many points of view among people at both sites. Predictably, those concerned with the wars and environment were well represented. A few panhandlers had their own agenda at wall Street and one older man who is sleeping at the Albany park blames everything on "foreigners." However, one central message was clear for all participants: 99% of the people are sick and tired of vast wealth and profits being directed to the very tiny minority of the ultra-wealthy.

The vegan point of view at Academy Park

Bicycle-powered electric generator at Zuccotti Park

Union members are a significant presence on Wall Street and community activists are plentiful in Albany. Media people are closely following both sites, although obviously Manhattan is drawing national media, tourists and celebrities.

Internet talk radio host Cenk Uygur

School children meet the media at Zuccotti Park

Occupy Albany protesters and supporters held a march and rally on October 27 in support of extending the state "millionaire's tax" past December 31. Democratic lawmakers, led by Speaker Sheldon Silver, are in favor but the governor, backed by Republicans, wants to give the wealthy what amounts to a tax cut while public workers are being laid off and state services are being cut.

At entrance to State Capitol

About 150 demonstrators arrived at the entrance to the state capitol and were admitted without a problem. New York State Police were low-key and professional, in welcome contrast to the recent police overreaction in Oakland.

Rally at rotunda in the State Capitol

A rally was held for about 45 minutes at the rotunda on the second floor and speakers included students, the unemployed, religious leaders and retirees. A class trip from one of the Brighter Horizon charter schools happened on the rally and the sixth graders were attentive and curious.

Demonstrators picketing Verizon on behalf of CWA strikers

Following the rally, some demonstrators moved on to picket the nearby Verizon building in support of CSA strikers while others returned to the still lively but increasingly damp campground in Academy Park.

This is not the first time history was made in this spot.

It remains to be seen how well the encampment will manage the coming winter but the protesters have already made history. The very peaceful and cooperative nature of events here, and the great respect shown to First Amendment rights by local officials and police, has already attracted much positive national attention.

Update November 20, 2011

As mayors from New York to Oakland unleashed their police forces against the Occupy movement, Upstate New York once again demonstrated its commitment to the peaceful right of assembly. The tents remain in Academy Park and protestors continue to call for an extension to the state’s millionaires tax.

Since November 12 folks from Occupy Albany have deliberately sought to be arrested each night by remaining in state-owned Lafayette Park after the 11 pm curfew. Troopers have obliged them and, by all accounts, the arrests were handled professionally and without the kind of brutality seen recently in too many other American cities.

And on November 17 supporters from other upstate cities came to Albany in solidarity with the Nationwide Day of Action and joined in a march to the Business Council of New York State on Washington Avenue, and then on to the Capitol. In contrast to Oakland, Denver or New York, police presence was very low-key and supportive. No need for pepper spray and plastic handcuffs here.

As Fred LeBrun said in the Nov 19 Times Union:

“ Albany is not New York City; in this case, that's a good thing. What cleared out Zuccotti Park was Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s s inability to negotiate terms for remaining in the park with the leaderless occupiers. When those attempts broke down, the police came in.

Even before Occupy Albany had tents up a month ago, attorney Mark Mishler and a group of like-minded lawyers were in discussions with Mayor Jerry Jennings, his staff and legal department, and Police Chief Steve Krokoff.Lines of communication were always open, and in turn the occupiers and the city continued to respond to each other's needs. Everybody was reasonable, stayed cool, and that continues to this day. Remember, Mishler, the mayor, demonstrators -- this is nothing new to Albany.

"If they keep working with us, I don't foresee problems," Jennings said. Occupy Albany is encamped only a couple hundred yards from his office.

About the mayor. He hasn't gotten the credit he deserves for how splendidly the city is handling this unusual bit of street theater. Albany County District Attorney David Soares and Chief Krokoff have gotten heaps of deserved praise, but I think the mayor has been shortchanged. As if the police chief could actually maintain the city's position regardless of how the mayor felt. That's not the way it works in any city, but especially Albany. So of course the mayor has been part of it all along.

Jennings is particularly to be commended because he's the one in the governor's cross hairs. At some point Soares may be, but not now. The mayor desperately needs the state to keep his little ship of state afloat now and for years to come, so it's a gutsy move for him to be independent on the Occupy business. You can be sure it steams the governor”.

Albany D.A. Soares

Albany Mayor Jennings

Crime in Austerlitz and a Death in Colonie

2011-07-27T15:48:00.029-04:00

Austerlitz is known for its annual Blueberry Festival

and as the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay

People in the bucolic hamlets and villages of Columbia and Berkshire Counties learned last week that“a rolling drug factory” had been busted by police in Austerlitz, a region of second homes and organic farms only a few miles from Tanglewood, Jacobs Pillow and other cultural attractions. The operation to manufacture methamphetamine (lab reports are ongoing) had been set up in a family campground in a township where any kind of crime is almost non-existent. And a young man linked to the drug lab, Agostino Jubrey, was killed in a gun battle with the police outside his home in Colonie.

As I pieced together the first reports on this incident, it occurred to me that the drug-makers had been quickly identified and stopped due to alert local people who did not hesitate to notify authorities of suspicious activities. However, after talking with many people in the area, I am not so sure it was that simple.

People at the Fox Hill Campground were unwilling to say anything for the record about an incident that can only bring bad publicity to a very attractive family-oriented site. However, chats with a few campers made it clear that the drug gang would certainly stand out in this location – yet no one reported anything until someone called in a report of Jubrey driving “erratically” on the day he died. It is not clear yet if he was already making drugs in the tents, but the smell of the chemicals should have raised a red flag.

St. Peter's Presbyterian Church in Spencertown was built in 1771

and is undergoing repair thanks to local fund-raising

When I visited Spencertown, the nearest village of any size, I found a surprising lack of knowledge of the drug lab bust a few days earlier. Some people in the village with whom I spoke had never heard of the incident and others knew only what they saw on WNYT. ( I tend to think that when the hardy Massachusetts folk first came over the Taconic Mountains to settle here in 1760, they were a lot more aware of everything everybody was doing.)

Spencertown Academy, now an art center, was built in 1847

as a institute to train teachers

Instead ofa land filled with the aroused yeomanry of my imagination, this part of upstate may be singularly vulnerable to criminal drug labs of the kind busted on July 14 in Schoharie., A couple, who had apparently learned their trade in Kentucky, returned from that state with all they needed to set up a meth lab in the heart of the village. In that case, officials said that the arrests would not have been possible "without information provided to them by concerned citizens."

Although neighbors did not detect the drug-making operation operation at the Fox Hill campground, NYSP Senior Investigator Gary Mazzacano described to me how a tip to police was crucial in the chain reaction of events that led to young Jubrey's death.

Jubrey, 21, rented two campsites at the far end of the campground, up against the woods, on Monday July 19 and set up two tents. On Wednesday July 22 at 4 pm he was apparently driving to the campground in his Plymouth Reliant when he struck a 60 year old motorcyclist at the intersection of Route 9 and Keegan Road in the town of Kinderhook and sped off. This is a busy area near the Hannaford shopping center and he probably feared that he had killed the man, or that someone had noted his license plate. However, no license tag was reported at that time.

Speeding away from the injured motorcyclist, Jubrey evidently drove straight to the campground, about 18 miles to the east, in order to break down the drug-making operation. There may have been one man already at the site, but the only car at that point was Jubrey’s. He called the other two or three men and told them to come out from Albany and to take the drug equipment and chemicals and dispose of it.

The four men in the second car stopped in Ghent where they put the drug paraphernalia in a dumpster of an apartment building. The owner thereupon called the police to report illegal use of his rented dumpster. The four then continued south on 66 where they were spotted near Konig Road by a state trooper on regular patrol. According to a Times Union report by Tim O’Brien:

Trooper James Lydon noticed a strong chemical smell and observed chemicals and paraphernalia associated with making illegal drugs in the car. The four were taken to the Livingston Barracks to be interviewed and were released pending further investigation and laboratory results.

Scene of gun battle between police and Agostino Jubrey,

courtesy Albany Times Union

Apparently, the trooper did not immediately connect the materials from the dumpster with drug-making, nor did the four implicate Jubrey. It was his own highly emotional state that brought him to the attention of authorities and that ultimately led to his death.

When Jubrey returned to his home in Colonie, he became involved in a quarrel with his mother and stepfather and shot his stepfather in the hand. Meanwhile, however, someone had seen him driving erratically as he left the Fox Hill Campground and called in a car description and plate number.

It was this tip that brought Columbia County Sheriff's Deputy Toby Van Alstyne and Colonie Police Officer David Belles to Jubrey's home just before 7 p.m. to investigate the motorcycle accident. They apparently did not know of the shooting when they arrived . But Jubrey, having already shot his stepfather, was in the family’s driveway and highly agitated:

As police arrived, Jubrey turned and fired two shots at the deputy's car. One bullet lodged in front of the driver's side door.

Belles exited his car, assumed a firing position and traded gunfire with Jubrey. At the police station Thursday, investigators showed off Jubrey's Plymouth Reliant. Three of its four side windows were shattered, and five bullet holes marked its passenger side. At the passenger front end, a dent and scrapped paint showed where police say Jubrey struck the motorcyclist.

As Belles fired at Jubrey, the sheriff's deputy drove away down Leach Avenue, turned around and exited his vehicle with an assault weapon in hand. By that time, the incident was over and Jubrey was critically wounded.

Agostino Jubrey died two days later at Albany Medical Center without regaining consciousness.

The Ancient Flint Mines of Coxsackie

2011-06-08T15:34:00.006-04:00

The pre-contact Mohawk village site which we recently explored was quite self-contained and focused primarily on defense. Hunting and agriculture would have supplied basic needs and since the site was hidden away from canoe routes along the major rivers, any trade would have been necessarily limited. However, there is evidence that life before European contact for the numerically superior Algonquin peoples along the Hudson River was far less harried and much more open to indigenous trading networks.

According to Marist College Professor Thomas Wermuth, the Mohicans often engaged in warfare against the Mohawks for territorial hunting rights, However, they were not in competition with other Algonquin-speaking tribes such as the Wappinger who lived between Manhattan Island and Poughkeepsie, and the Delaware (or Lenni Lenape) whose domains stretched southward past what is now Philadelphia. The three tribes, and their many subgroups, did not make war on each other, apparently shared similar religious beliefs, and traded goods among each other.

Leeds Flat near Catskill was once a prosperous Mohican village

Although many people know the Mohicans only from the title of James Fenimore Cooper’s misnamed novel, The Last of the Mohicans, the tribe does survive to this day, although in far fewer numbers than the Mohawks. Their tragic fate was a direct consequence of the friendly relationships they established with Henry Hudson on his appearance in 1609 and with the Dutch who followed, bringing with them waves of pestilence in the form of measles, influenza and small pox. As their numbers fell, the Mohicans were defeated in battles with the Mohawks, the final one according to legend at RogersIsland in the Hudson River near Catskill.

The Rip Van Winkle Bridge crosses Rogers Island,

where the Mohicans were defeated by the Mohawks

Evidence of the rich economic life of the Mohicans and those who came even before them, however, has not disappeared. In the town of Coxsackie, only a few miles downriver from Albany, is one of the most important flint deposits in the North East. For centuries this ridge was mined by indigenous peoples for the high quality stone known as Deepkill flint that was essential to indigenous technology. An expedition led by Dr. Arthur C. Parker for the New York State Museum of Natural History mapped the site in 1921, finding 200-300 flint pits and three large quarries. They also identified stations where chunks of flint were sorted and chipped to form arrowheads, spear points and other tools.

According to Dr. Parker’s The Great Algonkin Flint Mines at Coxsackie:

A view of Flint Mine Hill leads to the conclusion that it is one of the most important Indian localities in the entire state. To the Indians it was a great discovery and it remains today the outstanding monument to aboriginal endeavor. Flint to the red man was a vital necessity; it was as necessary to the aborigines as steel is to the present age. Here on Flint Mine Hill was a vast aboriginal industry. Here Indians from far and wide obtained flint for their chipped implements and from these quarries flint was sent to distant regions. It seems quite probable from an examination of the hill that from 50 to 100 Indians worked upon it for a period of at least 1,000 years during seasons when work was possible, necessary and profitable.

The site is indeed vast enough to have been worked for centuries, and a total of 1835 acres were placed within the Historic District when it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, thanks largely to the efforts of Mabel Parker Smith.

Clearly, we needed to visit this site, and finding it required far less effort than locating the lost village of Otstungo, thanks to a helpful article in the Hudson Register Star by Greene County Historian David Dorpfeld. Following Dorpfeld’s directions, we located a steep wooded ridge just south of the Coxsackie Correctional Facility.

Although not marked by any signs, the site is owned by the Long Island Chapter of the NY Archeological Association in Southold, NY, according to their 1994 press release. Of course, visitors should not remove any pieces of flint or artifacts they may come across. Also, the ground is very uneven and potentially hazardous.

Fragments of discarded flint and chert cover the forest floor

As soon as we set foot into the woods, we found evidence of ancient flint work literally everywhere. The forest floor was covered in fragments of flint, large and small, and the trees had pushed up amid layers of broken flint. Initially working our way up a short ravine, we found so much flint debris that it appeared that the ancient workers must have been sorting flint at the head of the ravine and throwing discards down the slope.

An old cart road on Flint Mine Hill

Only a hundred feet into the woods we found a long unused cart road, and realized that this might well be the farm road of Colonel Jacob Dunaef mentioned by Dr. Parker as the way into the mines. From all appearances, the road had seen no use in many decades.

One of the larger of several hundred flint pits

Possible flint-working station

Following the road uphill, we passed what had to be numerous flint pits, as evidenced by the layers of broken flint surrounding each depression. We also saw sites where non-flint boulders had been arranged, possibly to serve as workshops or fire pits for cracking the rocks.

We then came downhill, following Dr. Parker’s map, and walked south along the ridge in search of the large quarries he described. Once again there were signs of a long unused cart road. After passing some flint pits not too different from those on the brow of the hill, we startled a deer and then saw what was unmistakably a large prehistoric quarry, about 150 by 50 feet, and up to thirty feet deep. The piles of discarded flint that littered the area appeared to be the bluish high quality stone for which the mine was known. Just to the south was another, somewhat smaller quarry.

The large quarry

ancient excavation on the quarry wall

How could prehistoric men, equipped with tools of wood or stone, have performed such wonders, even if succeeding generations and cultures returned to this hill? According to an article by Charlie Brown in the Greenville Press (1/28/99), the ancient workers used a fire and water method to extract the flint, a practice dating back 12,000 years to the very first human hunting bands in the region:

“A fire was built on the rock to get it as hot as possible. Then water was poured over it to crack the rock so it could be removed. This process, repeated over and over, created huge quarry holes – over 300 at this site, some of them 40 feet deep and 60 feet wide. Waste chip piles are still there, including partially completed or broken tools.

Walking in the old flint quarry

An article in the Albany Times Union (4/8/62) by John Douglas also expressed the view that the site had been used for 12,000 years, back to a time when the first nomadic hunters reached this area in pursuit of mammoth and other large game of the late Glacial period. These “paleo-Indic” people, as Douglas called them, may have had similarities to the Eskimo or Inuit:

“No one knows how the paleo-Indic men discovered the flinty hill at Coxsackie. But there is no question they did. The fluted projectile points – called Clovis points – characteristic of the breed and unquestionably of Coxsackie flint have been found in at least two locations, one in Pennsylvania and the other at Bull Brook hard by the Massachusetts shore.”

According to Douglas, the area was free of human inhabitants for 5000 years following the departure of the paleo-Indic people. Possibly, they were ancestral Inuit who followed the retreating ice to the polar regions where they lived at the time of European contact – and that only later did a new wave of migrants originating in Asia reach the East coast, becoming ancestors of the people who encountered Europeans in the early 17^th century. And the newcomers were soon mining flint here. (A projectile point made with Deepkill flint was found in 1967 at an Archaic site near Lake George, and carbon-dated to 1700 B.C )

Rock Shelters dating back to Archaic times have been

excavated on Kalkberg Ridge west of the flint mines

Deepkill flint points have also been found at this rock shelter on

the Taghanic Creek several miles to the east in Columbia County

Whoever the very first inhabitants may have been, the identification of Deepkill flint from Coxsackie with Clovis points from the very earliest period of human settlement in this part of the continent has been supported by scholarly work at the Bull Brook and the Wapanucket sites in Massachusetts, indicating that this site is among the most ancient flint works in the Americas.

Possibly an ancient hammer stone?

Given that flint was taken from this ridge for thousands of years, it is fascinating to speculate on how the work was organized. Clearly, much work was done on site and numerous arrow and spear points were recovered by the 1921 expedition, as well as by souvenir hunters. Both Dr. Parker and John Douglas noted that flint cores can be found in abundance at this site. In all likelihood, choice pieces were taken back to home villages for working during the long winters. And given the abundance at the site of such easily portable cores, weighing no more than 20 pounds each, it is probable that that they became objects of trade.

Flint cores of this size are plentiful throughout the site

Lost to us are the myths and rituals that undoubtedly surrounded such essential work, but they must have formed a major part of coming here. Also lost is any record of conflict over the site, or treaties that may have fostered sharing of the resource. Dr. Parker offered a theory that a guild of flint craftsman lived near the hill and controlled access, but there is no solid evidence for his theory.

Indigenous people camped in this meadow just east of the ridge.

There is, however, evidence of extensive camping on the flat fields between the ridge and the railroad. According to an article by Diane Galusha (publication and date unknown) local farmers had been uncovering arrow heads and other implements for years from these fields surrounding the hill and it was one of their number, Jefferson Ray, who brought the site to the attention of Dr. Parker, who postulated that large groups camped temporarily on the fields while they worked the flint. The ground, according to Parker was “so filled with flint chips that they might have been shoveled out by the bushel full.”

Although his group was only funded to stay for a single month in 1921, Parker quickly grasped the vast size and scope of the site. Following the visit, he donated over three thousand flint implements, as well as stone hammers and mauls, to the New York State Museum of Natural History. (now the New York State Museum)

We lingered in the woods for a long time, imagining the busy scenes that once took place here. Then, looking down, we saw the feather of a red-shouldered hawk, a sign perhaps that the spirits of this place welcomed us?

Sources without an internet link are from the files of the Greene County HistoricalSociety

Finding the ancient Mohawk village of Otstungo

2011-05-27T17:21:00.011-04:00

A version of this post was published as In Search of Sacred Ground in the Albany Times Union June 12, 2011.

Paul Keesler

The late Paul Keesler was one of the great chroniclers of the Mohawk Valley and his descriptions of rambles and fishing expeditions are well worth reading. In his final work, Discovering the Valleyof the Crystals, he tells of one of his classic expeditions, this time up the Otsquago Creek, a tributary that joins the Mohawk at Fort Plain, in search of a prehistoric Mohawk Village. Paul and Ron Gugnacki meandered “along the bottom of a steep-wooded bank, past a small tributary, around a sharp bend and along the bottom of an 80-foot high shale cliff. Looking up at the top of the cliff, Paul says he knew “this had to be the site of the long ago Indian village. Located at this sharp bend in the creek---slate cliff on one side, steep gully on the other---it was a high-ground peninsula, defensible on three sides.” Respectful of the ancient people, Paul had no desire to disturb the ground, and reports a real sense of awe as he thought about the lives that were lived here. But he and his friend did find some evidence that they were at the village site:

We had no interest in digging where so many others had cut away the topsoil, but it would be nice to find some evidence that this was indeed a village site. So, we climbed down into the gully on the side opposite the cliff. There was only a trickle of water in the bottom of the gully, but we found a pool that had collected water and sediment. Here we discovered some mussel shells and a tiny piece of pottery.

Amish newcomers have revitalized farming

near Hallsville and Freys Bush

But after an initial visit to tiny Hallsville and the Otsquago gorge, we could not find the topography Paul described. The Amish farm folk with whom I spoke are newly arrived in the area and knew nothing of “Indian Hill,” as local people once called the village site. So we left, disappointed but not discouraged in our search, and turned to an often reliable old source, the 1925 History of the Mohawk Valley:Gateway to the West, edited by Nelson Greene, which contains this intriguing comment from Douglas Ayers:

Otstungo was one of the first Indian village sites to be investigated and, while it has been dug over for a century, it still yields an occasional relic of interest. Some very fine stone axes, pestles, arrowheads, spears and bone implements have been excavated from this Mohawk fort. The castle site is remarkably well adapted for defense and is one of the most picturesque and interesting of the Mohawk locations. It is situated on a beautiful winding stream and the gorge of the Otstungo is well worth a visit.

The Otstungo prehistoric site embraces about six acres situated on the top of a high perpendicular cliff of Utica shale, overlooking the Otstungo Creek. The primeval forest on Otstungo was pine, as is the second growth today. We work around the virgin pine stumps and strike shallow trenches six feet wide and six inches deep between them. We cut a root. Out from under it tumbles a decoration of a pipe. It is an imitation of a great horned owl. There are the large round eyes, the facial disks, the ear tufts, the beak — crude, but easily recognizable as the silent-winged forest hunter whose hunting-cry must have often boomed through the Otstungo woodland.

Then I turned to the professional archeologists, whom Paul said had studied the site in 1985-87. After decades of ransacking by souvenir hunters, it might seem that the Otstungo site would have little to offer to serious research, but Dean Snow, a leading authority on Iroquois pre-history now at Penn State after many years at SUNY Albany, thought differently. When his team carefully excavated the site, a variety of fragments of ceramic and stone fragments was found, as well as evidence of cook fires. He found this surprising after a century and a half of looting, but notes that the hilly ground was never plowed. Those artifacts from the site which have not vanished can be found at the Smithsonian, the University at Albany, the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum and other locations.

Snow placed the site in the Chance Phase of the Late Woodland Period, well before the ultimately devastating contact with Europeans. Radiocarbon dating indicates the site was first settled around 1450 and abandoned around 1525. He says that, “The single excavated longhouse here is probably understood in greater detail than any other Iroquois longhouse.” The well-defended location, distant from the rich soil and transportation of the river, is a clear indication of the insecurity of the Iroquoian-speaking Mohawk people at that stage, surrounded as they were by hostile Algonquin-speaking tribes.

Dean Snow

After studying the map provided in Snow’s report, we set out for a second try at finding the ancient village of Otstungo. As it happened, his map was more than two miles off. Perhaps this was deliberate, to prevent more souvenir-hunters from ravaging the site.

After more fruitless searching along the Otsquago Creek north of the hamlet of Hallsville, we encountered an old-timer named Pete who told us we were on the wrong creek. “Go back to the bridge,” he said, “and you can follow the creek straight down to Indian Hill.”

Plunging into the woods full of poison ivy and ticks, we soon decided to switch to wading along the Otstungo Creek.

Navigating with care along the slippery shale that formed the creek bottom, we saw ahead a cliff that exactly matched the photograph from Paul’s book, and the even older one from Nelson Green’s history. The geography matched the description in Joseph Bruhac's October 1991 National Geographic article, "A Mohawk Village in 1491:"

This village at Otstungo is sited on a neck of land whose walls of shale fall away to a creek on three sides. A trench and a stockade protect the landward entrance.

This cliff, about eighty feet high, would certainly have presented an impassable barrier to the enemies of the village, and it took us a while to locate what may have been the landward entrance, across a tiny stream. A trench and stockade at this point would complete the village’s defenses, and if they were penetrated, the steep slope was a final barrier to enemies, who would have faced a fusillade of arrows and rocks as they struggled upward.

The slope was steep but could be climbed. Somewhat winded, we reached the level space on top of this impressive mount, just about six acres in extent, as Greene had described it. There was ample space here for the longhouses studied by the SUNY Albany expedition 24 years ago, as well as for crop land.

The village site was densely overgrown and it required imagination to see it peopled with the 400 to 600 people believed to have lived here five centuries ago.

Imagined aerial view of the village, courtesy National Geographic

We pictured the village life, particularly the life of the women, as Bruhacs had described it:

Inside the turtle Clan Longhouse in, Otstungo, more than 120feet long and 20 feet wide with six central hearths is home to 12 families. The women do not have many children, usually three. Infant mortality is far lower than in Europe where childhood diseases yet unknown in America take a dread toll and nutrition is excellent. Maize, the Indian corn, is a food close to ideal for both young and old. The women valuing their freedom would not like to be tied down with more children than they have, with help of other clanswomen, can conveniently care for. So they practice abstinence while nursing and take medicinal birth -control herbs.

Good archeologists that they were, the SUNY team had left no trace of their work. Their notes reveal a painstaking study of the ground. They located longhouse sites and evidence of cooking fires, but found few artifacts. The 19^th century souvenir-hunters had done too much damage to the site to allow an even more comprehensive analysis of the way these people had lived.

Artist's depiction of longhouse, courtesy National Geographic

Like Paul Keesler eleven years ago, we could not help but experience a sense of awe in this sacred place. Descending from the village, we briefly searched in the stream directly below, as he did, and found a couple small fragments that may be a piece of pottery and a sinker for an ancient fishing net. Or perhaps they were simply pebbles.

A fragment of ancient pottery? Or not.

So much is lost in the mists of time, but the village site does reveal some facts about life a century before Henry Hudson’s Half Moon sailed up the river that now bears his name. Clearly, the people who lived here were in great fear of enemies. The site is far from the rich soil and easy transportation afforded by the Mohawk River, and would be invisible to all but the most determined enemy. Perhaps villagers even waded to and from the village to avoid footprints. Although safe, the site was inconvenient in many ways. Many villagers, from the elderly to children and new mothers, would have been confined to the hilltop most of the time. Water would have to be carried from the stream up the steep slope. (An enemy raid was to be feared but a long siege was not, so the lack of water on the hilltop would not present a major risk.)

A storyteller at Otstungo, courtesy National Geographic

Who were the enemies who drove the villagers to take so much care for their own safety? In all probability, the Algonquin-speaking tribes who surrounded on all sides the small Iroquoian-speaking cultural island in what is now central New York state. It was not until the 17^th century, when the Mohawks gained firearms from the Dutch that they were able to extend their sway in all directions, even into Ontario and the Ohio valley. By then they had moved to the banks of the river and established the string of powerful villages first visited by Harmen van den Bogaert in 1634. But they may also have lived in fear of their own related tribes, the Onondaga, the Oneida, the Seneca, and the Cayuga.

It was not just the possession of European technology that transformed the fearful villagers of Otstungo into a virtual empire, whose friendship the Dutch and then the English eagerly sought. It was their own creation of the continent’s first republic, the Iroquois Confederacy, which took place near the time that Otstungo was inhabited. Bruhacs describes the genius of the leader known to whites as Hiawatha, and it is intriguing to imagine the Peacemaker’s visit to this very hilltop:

The Great League began, Haudenosaunee tradition explains, with the coming of the Peacemaker . He was a human messenger sent by Tharonhiawakon, the Creator, at a time when the five nations were engaged in blood feuds, cousin killing cousin, worse than the man eating monsters in stories. The Peacemaker joined forces with a woman named Tsikonsaseh an elder who always tried to counsel her people toward peace, and the man Aiontwatha, known to later generations as Hiawatha. Together they went from nation to nation bearing the Creator's message of peace.

Tsikonsaseh and Hiawatha, courtesy US History Images

Women of Little Falls, a century ago

2011-05-09T12:42:00.005-04:00

A couple years ago my brother gave me a scrapbook of family photographs from the late 19^th and early 20th centuries, composed by my grandfather. The photographs were pasted into a large ledger book and those of family were identified. The book also contains many pages of people whom I cannot identify. They appear to be from a collection of studio portraits, probably from the Bucklin or Abbot studios which were in business in Little Falls at that time. The great majority are of young women, and only a few are of children, couples or weddings. This selection may be due to a specialization by the photographer or simply to the appreciation of my grandfather for feminine pulchritude. In the same section of the book are several photographs of street scenes, but these are of poorer quality, perhaps due to the limitations of outdoor photography in that era.

Main Street of Little Falls with trolley tracks visible

In only a few cases is a name noted in pencil:

Mae Watley

Bessie Shults

Nolan Sisters

"Frank Meade's sister"

Portraits of couples are rare in this collection:

And wedding portraits, usually a staple for studio photographers, are also rare, as in this photograph of three bridesmaids:

Portraits of children, or mothers with children, are beautifully done, but not common in the collection:

Group portraits of friends or sisters can be found:

Some ladies chose to be photographed in outdoor costume, including fashionable hats:

Pages of what may be proofs or perhaps the equivalent of inexpensive photobooth snapshots, reveal a sense of fun in the subjects not present in formal portraits.

Although there are plenty of pictures of men in the proofs, formal male portraits of any age group are not featured in this collection, except for this of an elegant older gentleman. (I like to think of him as the photographer)

But whoever the photographer was, there can be little doubt that his customers must have been pleased with his flattering portraits:

And then there is the photograph of this very mysterious woman, so different from the other portraits.

Perhaps visitors to this site will find an ancestor among this group of beautiful women, and if they do, I would appreciate hearing from them.

From Winter into Spring, by a Mohawk Valley Artist

2011-05-05T11:12:00.003-04:00

Ezra Pound, who found his calling as a poet at Hamilton College, rejected his native land as unfit for true artists and gloried in a self-imposed exile, writing:

O helpless few in my country,
O remnant enslaved!

Artist broken against her,
A-stray, lost in the villages,
Mistrusted, spoken-against.

Lovers of beauty, starved,
Thwarted with systems,
Helpless against the control

But there have been, and are, many artists in this region who were not broken nor lost in our villages, lovers of beauty who have been inspired by their native land to create works that may not be known to the wider world, but which are highly valued among us. Such a person was Mary Louise Ryan, whose watercolors and oil paintings of the Mohawk Valley we celebrate in this post.

Roxy Druse, Female Fiend or a Woman Wronged?

2011-04-25T16:16:00.009-04:00

Roxy Druse in her cell at the Herkimer County Jail

Roxy Druse was not just the only woman ever to be hung in Herkimer County. She was also, in the long history of the county’s murders up to 1885, the only person to suffer capital punishment. In an era when a national mass media had only begun, her trial and death were the subject of sensationalized attention across the country in America’s first national newsmagazine, The Saturday Globe.

Hops pickers in the 1880s. Roxy met her husband
while picking hops in Schoharie County,

Like so many of the murders that have attracted the public’s morbid attention in the subsequent 125 years, Roxy’s case was a domestic one. She was accused of killing her husband Bill with an axe and a revolver as the poor old farmer sat down one cold winter morning to enjoy his breakfast. Even worse, she was said to have chopped up his body, burning some of it and feeding the remainder to the family’s pigs. And she was accused of coercing her teenage daughter Mary and her young nephew Frank to participate in both the murder and the dismemberment of the farmer’s body.

The old Herkimer County Jail, where Roxy and

Mary Druse were held for two years

Although the neighbors had noticed dark, foul-smelling smoke pouring from the chimney of the family’s isolated farmhouse just before Christmas, 1884, folks over near Jordanville tended to mind their own business. Still, people did find it odd that Roxy had covered the windows with newspaper and seemed very nervous. About a month later, officials at the county seat in Herkimer took notice of the unexplained disappearance of William Druse. When county prosecutor A.B. Steele finally came out to speak with Roxy and the children, it didn’t take long for him to make up his mind about Roxy’s guilt. She spent the next two years in the old limestone jail, through her trial and series of appeals, until the state’s itinerant hangman arrived in early 1887 with his portable gallows. Her daughter was given a life sentence, later commuted to ten years, and the twelve year old nephew and was set free in return for providing damning testimony against his aunt. Her son George, only ten at the time of the murder, was adjudged too feeble-minded to be of much help in either the murder or the trial.

Artist's depiction of Mary Druse being cross-examined

I have been familiar with Roxy’s story since childhood and long believed that her true story, was very different from the court’s judgment. Old tales of boyhood meetings between my grandfather and the Druses had been passed down in our family, preserving among us a sympathy for a woman once universally reviled and then quickly forgotten. And a distrust of her prosecutors was also a family tradition. “Let’s just say Roxy was a woman more sinned against than sinning” was the most my father would say. And this, of course, suggested to my youthful imagination some deep and dark sexual secret which I was too young to understand.

The Herkimer County Courthouse, where Roxy Druse

was sentenced to death in 1885.

A modern defense attorney would immediately consider the possibility of abuse in Roxy’s case. He or she would seek evidence that Mrs. Druse had acted out of fear for her own life. And the eager participation of young Mary in her father’s murder would certainly raise the question that he had been abusing her sexually. (She allegedly threw a noose around his neck just as her mother gave Pa the first whack of the axe.) And young Frank’s willingness to fire three bullets into his uncle after the revolver misfired in Roxy’s hands raises the possibility that he, too, was being molested by the old farmer. But this trial was in 1885 when such questions were far too indecent to be asked in open court. Or perhaps even considered.

The courtroom where Roxy Druse was tried still has some features

from 1885, including the railing and entrance to judge's chamber

No one will ever really know if Roxy Druse was the heartless murderess depicted in the newspapers of the 1880s, but I found proof of her innocence three years ago when a long forgotten sheaf of papers came mysteriously into my hands. Some will doubt that this manuscript even exists, but the book that I subsequently wrote about Roxy Druse is presented as the unpublished manuscript of a certain W.H.Tippetts.

While Roxy and Mary languished in the county jail, the young journalist Tippetts came from Syracuse to interview the pair. W.H. Tippetts in his own time expressed in print no sympathy for the murderess, characterizing her as a “female fiend.” Her daughter Mary he saw as the listless pawn of an evil mother. Capitalizing on the frenzied public appetite for details of this murder, and wishing to place the Druse murder in the context of many such gory occurrences in the rural county, Tippetts quickly produced a small volume entitled Herkimer County Murders, which was soon out of print. And Tippetts himself vanished after this one appearance in history.

The mansion of Dr. Suiter, whose forensic testimony

helped to convict Roxy. The property was left in his will

to the Herkimer County Historical Society

I first saw a copy of Tippets’ one published book many decades ago when I accompanied my father to the historical society’s museum in Herkimer, across from the old jail and courthouse. Only many years later, while sifting through some musty documents in nearby Little Falls, did I suddenly find the proof I had long sought! There in my own hands was a faded manuscript covered with a tiny, almost indecipherable script. The apparently unsympathetic journalist was, in fact, Roxy’s most ardent, and almost her only, defender as the entire county clamored for her death. And Eliza Ward, wife of the Middleville murderer Dr. Richter and sometime inmate of the Utica Insane Asylum, about whom Tippetts wrote with apparent disinterest, was his lover!

The State Lunatic Asylum in Utica. Roxy's lawyers sought to

have her sanity evaluated, but their appeals were rejected.

At last, the truth was revealed. Roxy was the most loving of mothers. In an age when words such as incest and child rape could not be spoken aloud, she took the only course of action possible to her. But Tippetts? He was another story, and a deeply unsettling one at that.

Or perhaps there is no long-lost manuscript. Perhaps I invented an entire historical novel simply to prove the innocence of a woman who could never tell the world of how a mother’s love made her commit the most unthinkable and unnatural of crimes in the history of Herkimer County. Some readers might even call me a liar for claiming that this is a true story. But as Kurt Vonnegut once said, writers are champion liars, aren't they?

It will be up to the reader to judge the veracity of Tippetts’ tale, and of mine.

The true story of Roxy Druse is available at $19.95 in print and $9.95 as a download. The volume also contains the complete text of Tippetts' The Murders of Herkimer County, the only work which published in his lifetime (A preview of selected chapters from the book can be read at this site.)

Roxy Druse & The Murders of Herkimer County is also available for $2.99 on Kindle in other digital formats at Smashwords.

Roxy Druse was executed in the courtyard behind
the Herkimer County Jail on February 28, 1887

Sources and suggestions for further reading:

The Herkimer County Historical Society maintains extensive files on the Druse case, as well as on the even more notorious case of Chester Gillette, who was executed for the murder of Grace Brown in 1908. The Society also owns the old jail which is occasionally opened for public visits. It is a grim place and after Roxy’s death her spirit was said to haunt its dark corridors.

The Little Falls Historical Society holds a vast scrapbook collection compiled by my grandfather, which includes numerous articles on the Druse case.

The Murder by Gaslight blog has a recent description of the Druse case.

The March 2011 newsletter of the Marshall Historical Society in Deansboro, NY featured an article on Roxy Druse, containing interesting details of Roxy’s early life before she went to work in Schoharie County as a hops picker and her fateful meeting there with William Druse. Her personality and intelligence as described in this article correspond to Tippett’s purported manuscript.

The author of The Forgotten Central New York Murder Case maintains that the botched nature of Roxy's hanging led to the invention of the electric as a more "humane" method for taking a life. That instrument made its debut at the state prison in Auburn, NY in 1889, and Chester Gillette was one of its most famous occupants. Gillette was tried at Herkimer for the murder of Grace Brown and held in the same jail occupied by Roxy a few years earlier.

A search of the New York Times archive under Roxalana Druse will yield several articles from the period of the trial.

The New York State Library has a comprehensive collection of local newspapers from the years of the trail and appeals.The case attracted many opponents of capital punishment.

The Downfall of Alfred Dolge

2011-02-01T10:45:00.004-05:00

For over a century leading American capitalists have recognized a responsibility to give back to the public a portion of the vast wealth they have accrued. Andrew Carnegie made his fortune in steel and set the tone for subsequent philanthropists by endowing libraries and universities. His foundations, like those of the Fords and Rockefellers, have continued to be a source of good works down to the present day. In this same spirit Bill Gates and Warren Buffett launched a campaign last summer to persuade their fellow billionaires to donate half their wealth to charitable causes.

Alfred Dolge was in some ways a very early example of this philanthropic spirit, but there was a singular difference, and I suspect that this difference is what eventually set in motion the plot that destroyed his dreams for Dolgeville. His goal was never just to make money, and he did not see the distribution of his personal wealth as an act of charity, something to be reserved as a worthy retirement project. Throughout his life he was an intellectual, fascinated by political and economic ideas. He read very widely and wrote continuously and was always eager to put in place economic systems that he believed could be a model for the entire country.

Wilhelm Liebknecht, Dolge's "preceptor"

and founder of the German Socialist Party

He was very much his father’s son. Christian Dolge was a close friend of Wilhelm Liebknecht, the founder of the German Socialist Party, and was imprisoned for five years for his role in the uprisings of 1848. Alfred Dolge wrote of Liebknecht as his “preceptor” from whom he learned the teachings of Karl Marx. He also refers to his youthful reading of David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, the great apostle of the free market. From such apparently contradictory ideas, he wove the theories of a just and equitable economic system which he put in place in Dolgeville.

Eleanor Franz, in the only biography of this remarkable man, describes Dolge’s vision very succinctly:

What Dolge built grew out of his determination that children should no longer scavenge coal, or old men end up in paupers’ graves. It was his belief that a workman should be able to retire at sixty with a pension paid for by his employer as part of the cost of production. The security of such a plan, he wrote, “would allow the laborer to live better and be more healthy, keep his wife at home and his children in school. He could live up to his income and thus develop a higher manhood and superior citizenship.” Dolge saw employees eventually becoming partners in a business, so that a capitalist would no longer be enriched at the expense of his laborers. Even though he believed in hard work as a way out of poverty, it was never his belief that the poor remained poor because of laziness. What he aimed for was, in effect, a leveling of the economy to benefit everyone rather than solely the man at the top. (Franz, p. 23)

This was this vision that Dolge brought with him when he first saw the hamlet of Brocketts Bridge in April, 1874. It is true that the East Canada Creek provided both the water quality and the power that he sought for his felt-making industry, but I am sure that he also was struck by its relative emptiness. This was a place where he could bring the skilled, mostly German, workers he needed to form a new village of his own design. He may also have been influenced by the nearby area’s large German-American population, descendants of 18^th century refugees from the Palatinate, a fact to which he referred in later speeches.

Alfred and Anna Dolge, c. 1868, from Dolge by Eleanor Franz

For 24 years Alfred Dolge pursued numerous business ventures with great success, never losing sight of his guiding vision. He bought the abandoned tannery where his great limestone factory soon rose, and began to produce high quality felt, piano hammers and sounding boards. By 1879, he had installed Edison’s second electric turbine, the first to run on water power, and equipped the factory with automatic sprinklers and electric lighting. By 1881 he was manufacturing the first felt shoes and slippers.

Thomas Edison, inventor of the world's first hydroelectric

turbine, installed at Dolgeville in 1879

As the need for lumber expanded, he built two sawmills and acquired 18,000 acres of the Adirondack forest. Complete pianos were being built by 1890 and a woolen factory was opened. A unique musical instrument, the autoharp, was another industry in the growing village now known as Dolgeville.

The 500 ft. Ransom Creek trestle on the Dolgeville & LF railroad

Courtesy,Gino’s Railpage

And in 1892 a railroad, largely financed by Dolge, linked the village with the main line at Little Falls, replacing the 50 teams of horses that had previously been the only means to move raw materials and finished products.

Each business success led him to introduce another step in his social and economic plan. Within two years of arrival in Brocketts Bridge, Dolge had set up a pension plan, the first of its kind, for his employees. Benefits ranged from 50% of wages for disability after ten years to 100% after ten years. If disability was work-related, fifty percent would be paid even without ten years of service. He provided life insurance, also unknown for working people at that time, on a prorated scale based on years of service. Sick pay and death benefits were part of the plan. In 1890 he introduced his “Earning-Sharing” Plan under which employees received a percentage of the company’s profits, to be reinvested back into the company until retirement. Losses were also charged against employee accounts. (Franz, chapter 3)

Dolge spoke frequently on the major social and economic issues of his day. When the Knights of Labor agitated for an eight hour day in 1886, he reduced work hours from ten to nine, explaining that further reductions would be possible with increased productivity. He worked hard for the Republican party and was among the strongest voices for a protective tariff, arguing that his well-paid workers should not be expected to compete against Germans or Frenchmen earning far less.

He was an advocate for public education, endowing a new school and later becoming deeply embroiled in controversies over such issues as the mandated teaching of German as a foreign language. At the school’s dedication in 1887, he spoke of public education as essential to democracy and the only sure bulwark against radical agitation:

The future of this great country, the inviolability of our free and liberal institutions, can be guarded only by a rising generation, which by means of an excellent education, will not only keep the unruly element in check, but raise it up, elevate it, so that it will generate good and worthy citizens able to analyze and understandingly resist the false teachings of adventurous agitators and revolutionists.

He was far ahead of his time in calling for better education of teachers, at a time when many were teenage girls only a bit ahead of their pupils:

To build school houses, equip them properly, to hire the very best teachers at such a liberal salary that it is worth their while to spend their lives in this arduous and most responsible of all professions, is the duty of every community, may it be ever so small or poor .

Dolge was also ahead of his time in advocating physical education in the school curriculum and did much to promote a form of gymnastics popular in Germany, known as turnverein. He built a gymnasium and clubhouse for the workers and their families. Many athletic competitions and celebrations, known as turnfests, were held in High Falls Park, which Dolge developed and donated to the village. At such festivities, Dolge made sure that plenty of beer was on hand, but was against saloons and stronger drink.

Commemorative stein from a Dolgeville Turnverein

(His many writings on economic and social issues were published by him in two, somewhat overlapping collections, now available via google books: The Just Distribution of Earnings and The Practical Application of Economic Theory. The books reveal his desire to spread his ideas, evidenced by the many speeches he made in the US and in Europe, as well as by the letters he wrote to numerous newspapers.)

And yet within the space of a week, in April 1898, all of Dolge’s enterprises collapsed. He was branded as a bankrupt and a fraud, compelled to hand over his thriving industries to strangers, and to leave Dolgeville forever.

Richard Buckley, in his history of Little Falls, describes an incident from exactly one year before his forced bankruptcy that may have made Dolge a marked man. Speaking at a meeting of the University Club, chaired by D.H. Burrell, Dolge stated that “almost every conflict between capital and labor originates in the demand of laborers for a betterment of their condition.” He said that too many manufacturers subscribed to the notion that “profits rise as wages fall,” and argued that the recession of 1892 was due to a collapse in demand caused by the failure of Congress to pass a protective tariff that would safeguard high wages for workers. In a remarkably prescient observation, Dolge said that “Capitalists must learn that wage earners of today are of greater importance to the community as consumers than as producers.” (Buckley, p. 114)

One can imagine the shocked countenances of the wealthy gentlemen of Little Falls as Dolge made these pronouncements. And their mouths must have dropped even further when he went on to suggest a national industrial/labor senate, which would serve to arbitrate all disputes between workers and owners.

One year later the Herkimer County Bank, on whose board D.H. Burrell sat, forced Dolge to declare insolvency and to place his assets into receivership. The factories were closed for several months, a fraud suit was initiated against Dolge, and all the contracts with his workers were declared void. The promised pensions vanished and those already being paid stopped suddenly.

Although The Little Falls Evening Times initially described the failure as a temporary adjustment, reflecting uncertainty in the money markets due to the Spanish-American War, the key role of Judge George A. Hardin as the named plaintiff for the Herkimer County Bank against Dolge & Son points to a conspiracy to bring down the one local capitalist who seemed to be an enemy of his class.

Judge George A. Hardin, Courtesy New York Courts,

Appellate Division Law Library, Rochester

In a farewell address to his workers Dolge explicitly accused Hardin and Schuyler Ingham, another member of the bank’s board, of causing the bankruptcy for their own profit. The rapid selling off of the properties, including the 18,000 Adirondack acres, for pennies on the dollar and the appointment of Ingham as director of a newly constructed felt trust suggests that it was more than Dolge’s anger speaking. And the venom of Hardin’s unguarded comment to the Little Falls Journal & Courier reveals a deep personal and political motivation: “Dolge is an anarchist, an atheist and a communist.” He also attacked Dolge personally for backing the village newspaper, the Dolgeville Herald, and for building an expensive mansion. And when Hardin died three years later, Dolge wrote from California that the man was clearly a thief since he left a fortune of $800,000 although during the last 28 years of his life he never earned more than $10,000 a year as a judge. (Buckley, chapter 7)

Dolge gave his version of the events in a self-published book, The Story of a Crime, which Eleanor Franz quotes in her biography. The book is very rare and, according to Franz, most copies were destroyed. In the book Dolge blamed himself for trusting Ingham and Hardin, with whom he had been in business since the very costly Dolgeville railroad was first proposed in 1882. He maintained that the two told him they would handle the cash flow problem, and then foreclosed on him, even though his assets were twice what he owed. He said that he soon obtained loans from New York backers that would satisfy the Herkimer County Bank and the American Exchange Bank in New York, but when he told Ingham he had the funding, Ingham told him he was too late.

Dozens of attorneys were soon handling the mass of suits and countersuits that followed the collapse. A case of fraud against Dolge was dismissed, but not before a very revealing hearing was held in March, 1899. At that hearing Schuyler Ingham was questioned about a power of attorney that Dolge’s son Rudolf had given, at the urging of Hardin and Ingham, to a mysterious figure by the name of Robinson, associated with the American Exchange Bank. It appears that the default was triggered by a joint action of the Herkimer County Bank, on whose board Ingham and Hardin sat, and the New York bank where Hardin and Ingham’s man Robinson had a major interest.

A report in the April 12, 1898 New York Times stated that that while Rudolf was in South America, “his representative made application at Utica for dissolution of the firm and the appointment of a receiver.” This was evidently the mysterious Robinson. The Times writer voiced the general surprise at the proceeding, citing Dolge’s assets which far exceeded his liabilities.

It is not clear how the Dolge enterprises were structured but it may have been a simple partnership between Alfred and Rudolph, the oldest of his five sons, who was then 29. Why Rudolf would give Robinson the power to initiate a suit against his father’s firm is not known. Perhaps there was a falling out between Rudolf and Alfred that led the son to go to Venezuela. Or perhaps he was simply naive. Or perhaps Rudolf had some secret which allowed the two men to blackmail him.

At the heart of the collapse is a family drama which may never really be known. Rudolf was clearly a beloved son, given major business responsibilities in his early 20s, and his wedding in 1893 was celebrated in grand style. At the wedding, grandfather Christian Dolge called Rudolf “the crown prince of Dolgeville.” Strangely, however, he left the US for Venezuela four years later, claiming poor health, yet lived in apparent good health for many years, becoming active in Venezuelan industry, science and literature. Rudolf signed the fateful power of attorney on a quick visit back to the US in 1897, at which time he met with Ingham and Hardin, probably in New York, but whether he saw his parents is unknown.

The question of what happened was a source of intense controversy in Dolgeville for decades, and although some citizens turned against Dolge, his loyalists, such as the volunteer firemen of the Alfred Dolge Hose Co., would not hear a word against him. Whether the plot to destroy him was motivated by greed or personal hatred, or a mix, will probably never be clear. He may well have been over-extended in terms of loans, but it was the actions of the Herkimer County and the American Express banks, both under the influence of Ingham and Hardin, that brought him down – and profited both men.

D.H. Burrell, from Nelson Green's

History of the Mohawk Valley

There is no evidence that D.H. Burrell, the founder of Cherry-Burrell, was involved in the plot although, in fairness, he was on the bank’s board and obviously had huge influence over the bank’s decisions. He was himself a more classic philanthropist, known as a fair employer, and his choice of charities were conservative. He endowed the local YMCA, the Presbyterian Church and funded the building of the Little Falls City Hall in 1916. But he is reported to have sharply questioned Dolge during his rather radical presentation at the University Club in 1897.

As to Dolge’s immediate reaction to the plot, he had no choice but surrender his holdings Although he called Wilhlem Liebknecht his mentor, he never really shared in Marx’s revolutionary dream of placing the means of production (and defense) in the hands of the workers. On the contrary, he took pride in keeping labor agitators out of Dolgeville. Unlike Wilhelm’s son Karl, who proclaimed the 1919 communist revolution in Berlin with Rosa Luxembourg and ended up assassinated by rightist gunmen, violence was not part of Alfred Dolge’s make-up.

For all his love for German culture and his annual trips back to Europe, he was truly an American and believed that hard work would lead to prosperity for all. But he never had a mindless faith in the free market and knew that the raw pursuit of profit had to be restrained or it would drive the working class into poverty. Thus, he would not have fit comfortably into either of today’s political parties.

The destruction of his dream had much to do with his own faith in human nature, in that he trusted dishonest men who took advantage of him and his son. And although he left Dolgeville in sorrow and never returned, his sunny spirit has, I am convinced, remained in the village he created. Hard-working people continued to lead productive lives and the kinds of bitter strife that afflicted Little Falls and other industrial towns never came to Dolgeville. He did not, despite Hardin’s bitter prediction, commit suicide. He went on to California where he founded a second Dolgeville in what is now greater Los Angeles, continued to write, and made a sufficient financial recovery to live comfortably, dying in 1922 on a round-the-world trip with his beloved Anna.

Anna and Alfred Dolge with friends, hiking in the Harz Mountains

of Germany in 1921, from Dolge by Eleanor Franz

And as for Judge Hardin?

I grew up in Little Falls a few blocks from where Hardin had built a lavish mansion on Gansevoort Street facing the Western (now Burke) Park. By the time I was a boy, all that remained of the mansion was a wall and a lone gazebo in a vast empty lot. And when I asked my father what was once here, he told me that a bad man used to live there but he had died in great terror over his many sins.

SOURCES:

Eleanor Franz, Dolge, available from the Herkimer County Historical Society

Richard Buckley, Unique Place, Diverse People, a history of Little Falls available from the Little Falls Historical Society

Works by Alfred Dolge, available on google books

The Just Distribution of Earnings, So-called Profit Sharing (1889)

The Practical Application of Economic Theories in the Factories of Alfred Dolge & Son (1895)

Pianos and Their Makers (1911)

FOR ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE ON JUDGE HARDIN:

See my novel, Roxy Druse & The Murders of Herkimer County, in which the judge makes several appearances. Available at Wilderness Hill Books.

The enlightened capitalism of Alfred Dolge

2011-01-12T08:51:00.001-05:00

Bust of Alfred Dolge at the Dolgeville Village Hall

Clearly, the socialists and anarchists who led the Little Falls strike in 1912 cannot offer a model for restoring prosperity to our region. The Russian revolution of 1917 forever branded socialism as a dangerous form of tyranny in the minds of most Americans. And even now, a century later, calling the current president’s health care policy “socialist” is a sure way to discredit it in the minds of many citizens. Even if a more rational and cooperative organization of the economy could help us, a majority of the people will simply not accept this possibility.

But unrestrained free market capitalism has spelled economic disaster for Upstate New York, and the current bipartisan enthusiasm for cutting taxes on the wealthy is only a recipe for ever-greater inequity. Perhaps, then, it is time to look to our past for solutions that combine a for-profit system with a reasonable concern for the well-being of working people. And that brings to mind the long forgotten Alfred Dolge.

Dolge was no socialist, but he believed that the health and well-being of his workers was the necessary foundation for his own prosperity. An industrialist and founder of the village that bears his name, he had read both Karl Marx and Adam Smith as a young man in Germany, and combined those two apparently contradictory thinkers in his own unique vision.

1890 view of Dolge's mill, courtesy Village website

The same view, 120 years later

The industrialist came to New York City as a young man, having apprenticed as a piano-maker in Germany. At first specializing in the import of felts and wires for the manufacture of pianos, he decided to create his own industrial village for the production of the piano components he had been importing. After an extensive search though the north east, he settled in 1875 on what was then the tiny hamlet of Brocketts Bridge because the East Canada Creek offered both water power for his machinery and the water quality needed for washing felt.

He kept his large shop on 13th street in Manhattan and commuted by the night train each week, walking the final six miles from the depot in Little Falls before he built his own railway in 1892. Starting operations in an old tannery, he was soon at work on the beautiful limestone factory that is still the heart of the village, drawing skilled craftsmen and their families, many from Germany.

As his work force grew into the hundreds, Dolge initiated a profit-sharing system for his employees, providing for disability payments, life insurance and an old age pension in 1876. Bismarck sought his advice when Germany developed the world’s first social security plan, and the Social Security Administration recognizes Dolge’s role as a forerunner of today’s system.

Intake for recently restored hydroelectric generator

at the Dolgeville Mill

He was an admirer of Thomas Edison and put into operation the first electric dynamo run by waterpower in 1879, which provided electric lighting for his mills, later extending it to the entire village. Dolge also bought land for a park which he gave to the village, and donated a school and community club house.

The Dolge Mansion

Alfred Dolge enjoyed his wealth and built a mansion just across the East Canada Creek from his factories. He was always a workman at heart and spent much of the day on the factory floor, but he was also a great reader and writer. He spoke widely and wrote on subjects ranging from education and physical fitness to socialism and the protective tariff. (He saw the tariff as an absolutely essential way to protect his workers from unfair competition by low wage workers overseas – a position that no modern politician is willing to take.)

old postcard of the Dolgeville & Little Falls RR

view of the same section of the abandoned railway today

Curious about traces of the utopian society created by Dolge, we followed the wintry roads north from Little Falls to Dolgeville, roughly parallel to the route of the Little Falls & Dolgeville Railroad, which was sold for scrap in 1964.

Arriving in Dolgeville, we located the Founder’s bust in front of the Village Hall and headed for the complex of factories built by Dolge in 1882, and later home to Daniel Green Felt Shoe Company until it shifted production out of town in 1999. There we found Charlie Soukup, hard at work sanding the floors of the old mill.

Charlie Soukup at work

Charlie came from Florida to buy the 23 mill buildings several years ago. After experimenting with an antiques center and a furniture store at the site, Charlie is now committed to creating at least 40 very original condominium apartments in the main mill building. I couldn’t help but compare him to that other entrepreneur who came here inspired by his own unique vision 140 years ago.

40 condos are planned for the main mill

Charlie interrupted his work to take us on a tour of the structure. He pointed out many examples of the great craftsmanship shown in the construction of the mill as evidence of Dolge’s extreme attention to the details of quality control. He told us that Dolge kept very detailed records of every aspect of the mill’s construction and operation.

Layout for condo apartments on the mill's third floor

Model condo unit features original beams, flooring and limestone wall

Charlie Soukup has made major investment in this project, hiring local people to clean out the old mill and ready it for renovation. The model condo which he recently completed is a remarkable example of creative use of vintage materials. The shelving and walk-in closet is constructed from lumber used at the mill. The handcrafted furniture also makes very effective use of old machine parts. And the view of the rushing creek is impressive. Although he plans to offer the one-bedroom unit for about $200,000, it would command well over a million dollars in New York or Boston.

Charlie said that he often wonders about what Dolge saw here so many years ago. Although I was eager to explore the issue, he didn’t want to speculate about whether it was Dolge’s own misjudgment or a conspiracy by his fellow capitalists that finally brought him down. The risks of any great venture, then or now, are always high.

However, I do think that Dolgeville may well thrive in coming years, and I have high hopes for Mr. Soukups’ ambitious project. In contrast to most of the region, this village has not suffered excessively in the current economic downturn. Much of the local economy centers on the renewable resources of the Adirondack forest, and lumberyards and woodcraft industries remain strong. The family-owned Rawlings company continues to produce the high quality Adirondack bats favored by so many major league baseball players. And just north of the village, a $200 million wind farm has recently gone into operation generating clean energy.

Adirondack bats are still made in Dolgeville

Dolgeville native Hal Schumacher pitched for the New York Giants

and was an executive for the Rawlings company,

baseball card courtesy Village website

As to the nature of the society created by Alfred Dolge, its lessons for our own time, and the mysterious events surrounding his downfall in 1898, that will be the subject of a future posting on this site.

Sources:

Village of Dolgeville website

Richard Buckley, Unique Place, Diverse People

Available from Little Falls Historical Society Museum

Eleanor Franz , Dolge

Available from Herkimer County Historical Society

Socialists, Anarchists & the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912

2011-01-05T14:49:00.023-05:00

Redco strikers at Hansen Island bridge, 2007

courtesy the Union Review

On November 1, 2007 fifty-one workers at the Redco plant in Little Falls went on strike in response to a company decision to deny new workers the kind of health and pension benefits that had made Redco, and its predecessor companies, desirable places for lifelong employment. Located on the tiny island where Christian Hansen first began to manufacture Junket custard in 1891, the plant was sold to Salada in 1958, then to Kellogg in 1969, and in 1988 to a German-based transnational, the Teekanne Group

Hansen's Island, site of Redco plant

Despite the multiple owners, Hansen’s Island continued to be a good place to work for over a century, and the workers evidently felt their value to the company would make a strike winnable. However, their attempt to assure a middle class living for those who came after them was no longer the way the American dream worked. With only fifty-one workers locally and a parent union of only a couple thousand, the strikers had no effective weapons at hand. The BCTGM union did file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board and Homeland Security alleging illegal use by Redco of German nationals as scabs, but this charge was quickly dismissed.

My impression is that the strike dragged on for over a year, but I am not sure what happened to the 50 strikers, if they eventually went back to work, or lost their jobs. Efforts to get any kind of statement from Redco or the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco and Grain Millers union have been unsuccessful, but perhaps readers of this blog can provide an update.

The strike by longtime Little Falls residents against a giant, foreign-owned corporation was the latest, and perhaps the last, echo of the fierce struggles that once dominated the economy of the Mohawk Valley. Nearly a hundred years ago, 2000 largely female textile workers went on strike in Little Falls under the banner of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, attracting national attention and winning a significant,if transitory, victory. In contrast to the "bread-and-butter" unions that gained respectability in the 1940s, the IWW favored mass organization of all workers into "one big union" as a prelude to taking over the entire economy and establishing a utopian society.

The most complete and easily accessed source for information on the 1912 strike is Richard Buckley’s history of Little Falls, Unique Place, Diverse People, which is for sale at the Little Falls Historical Society Museum. Richard spent years poring over old records and newspapers and his book is very well sourced. Copies can be purchased by mail order.

Young women and children were the primary work force of the textile industry that developed in Little Falls during the later 1800s. Many workers had a story like that of my grandmother, Jennie McTiernan, who left school for the Gilbert knitting mill at 13 when her father died, leaving behind a pregnant wife and six young children. Working conditions were abysmal and my grandmother was not shy in describing the horrendous noise of the machines, and the sexual abuse practiced by mill owners and their managers. The only time reforms were considered was in response to tragedy.

It was the death of 146 women in the Triangle Factory Fire in New York City in 1911 that finally got the state legislature moving, although some reforms tended to have unforeseen results. As soon as a law reducing the work week for women from 60 to 54 hours was enacted, the owners of the Gilbert and Phoenix knitting mills reduced the pay of women to match the shorter hours. Since the workers were already living at a near- starvation level, as documented in a recent visit by the state’s Factory Investigating Committee, the women were outraged. On October 9, 1912 eighty of them spontaneously walked out of the Phoenix Mill in protest. At this point there was no organized strike, but it is possible that brutality toward the strikers by the owners and by the local police may have ignited a much larger walk-out, eventually including all 1000 workers from Phoenix and another 1000 from Gilbert’s.

Socialist organizers came by train from Schenectady on October 13 and the next day a number of them were arrested for making speeches in Clinton Park adjacent to the Phoenix Mill. On October 15 George Lunn, the Socialist mayor of Schenectady, was arrested by Police Chief James “Dusty” Long for making a speech in support of the strikers.

Chief "Dusty" Long, at right,

courtesy LF Museum

The rapid appearance in Little Falls of the Socialists, who were at that point becoming a major political party nationally, may have been in response to a call for help from Helen Schloss, a nurse specializing in the treatment of tuberculosis. She had been hired by the “Fortnightly Club,” an organization of wealthy women including the Gilberts and the Burrells, who were probably unaware of her earlier work with the Socialists in Malone, NY. When the Factory Investigating Committee came to Little Falls that August, Miss Schloss had provided investigators with graphic evidence of unsanitary conditions in the factories and tenements on the South Side. Once the strike began, she was very active in its support and was later arrested.

Women textile workers, circa 1912, unknown location

According to Richard Buckley, local press and clergy actively opposed the strikers, most of whom were immigrants from southern or eastern Europe. Police Chief Long, a friend of my grandfather, made no excuses for his attempts to deny free speech and assembly rights to strikers and their supporters: “ We have a strike on our hands and a foreign element to deal with. We have in the past kept them in subjugation and mean to hold them where they belong.”

Long’s efforts to silence free speech failed as socialists sent hundreds of supporters to town, leading to mass arrests beyond what the city could manage. At the same time the first organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World arrived and established committees for each factory and subcommittees for each ethnic group. By October 22 a Strike Committee was up and running, relying on democratic procedures of motions, amendments and vote counts. By the 24^th the strikers voted to affiliate with the IWW and were awarded with a charter as Local 801, the National Industrial Union of Textile Workers of Little Falls.

The IWW were far more radical than the Socialists but the two organizations often made common cause at this time. Although the Socialists favored an electoral path to power, the “wobblies” were anarcho-syndicalists, and envisioned a new society formed by direct expropriation of the means of production by worker organizations. But they knew how to organize, especially among groups who spoke many languages.

Gilberts Mill employed 1000 workers at the time of the strike

Marching under the banner of the IWW on October 25, the strikers paraded in a great circle around the Gilbert and Phoenix Mills. The better-paid male “American” workers of the Snyder bicycle plant attempted to attack the largely female and foreign-born strikers, but newly hired police deputies managed to keep the two sides apart.

The daily parades under the IWW banner continued until a major clash occurred on October 30. According to Robert Snyder’s “Women, Wobblies and Workers Rights; the 1912 Textile Strike in Little Falls NY,” as quoted by Richard Buckley: "As Chief Long and his deputies clashed with the strikers, special police and patrolmen mounted on horses closed in on the largely unarmed pickets with their clubs. During the riot, a local police officer was shot in the leg, a special policeman furnished by the Humphrey Detective Agency of Albany was stabbed several times, and numerous strikers were beaten, some into unconsciousness."

Mill and South Ann Streets today, looking south from the site of Clinton Park.

The Phoenix Mill was located at what is now the parking lot in the foreground

A running battle ensued, with the police pursuing strikers across the river into the south side, where most of them lived. The police then broke into the strike headquarters at the Slovak Hall, smashed the place up, and proceeded to make mass arrests. Helen Schloss, by now considered a ringleader, was arrested a mile away. The police brought in three doctors to “examine her sanity” but she had a lawyer who soon secured her release.

Jailed strikers, from The International Socialist review

Even though all 24 members of the Strike Committee, including Ben Legere, had been arrested on October 30, and some were held for over a year, the strike continued. Matilda Rabinowitz, a diminutive Russian-born IWW organizer, joined forces with Helen Schloss and the two young women kept the strikers united in the face of this setback.

Women and girls from the Gilbert Mill, 1911

Together, the two women had an entirely female picket line up within a day of the mass arrests. “Big Bill” Haywood, a founder of the IWW arrived few days later to organize the “Little Falls Defense League” to provide living expenses and legal support for the strikers. Haywood, Schloss and Rabinowitz set off on a speaking tour of the north east that month to raise the funds that kept the strike going into the winter months. The anarchists Carlo Tresca and Filippo Bocchino also came to Little Falls to help organize the Italian-speaking strikers.

Carlo Tresca, anarchist and later opponent of Mussolini,

rallied the Italian-speaking strikers in Little Falls

As Christmas neared, Matilda Rabinowitz and Helen Schloss won a public relations victory by announcing that the children of strikers would be sent away for the holidays to join Socialist families in Schenectady. With the newspapers publishing reports of the embattled mothers and their children, Albany politicians were moved to act. Just after Christmas, the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration held three days of public hearings in Little Falls.

Big Bill Haywood (in derby hat) leading IWW

marchers in Lowell MA in 1912

courtesy, Library of Congress

The strike ended on January 3, 1912 on terms set by the Board that were favorable to the strikers: (1) The companies were to reinstate all workers (2) There was to be no discrimination against strikers (3) All men and women working 54 hours are to receive pay formerly paid for 60 hours.

However, the long decline of Little Falls began only seven years later when the Phoenix Mills closed and moved its operations to North Carolina, and by 1930, city population had dropped by 2000. The Phoenix building, later occupied by the Allegro shoe factory, was eventually replaced by a parking lot, and Gilberts was closed decades ago.

The victory of the women of Little Falls in 1912 was a transient one, and within five years the democratic American Left had been silenced in "The Red Scare" campaign led by both mainstream parties. In subsequent decades, the manufacturing base of the country was systematically dismantled by capitalists lacking in any loyalty to the United States and its people, while both parties celebrated the "free trade"policies that made it all possible.

And by 2011, as the self-described socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders ,recently noted, 90% of America’s wealth is owned by 1% of the population.

And what became of the strikers and their leaders?

Certainly, many of the strikers remained in Little Falls, and possibly their descendants have family stories of the stirring days of 1912. Richard Buckley mentions the names of a few of the strikers whose family names were familiar ones in Little Falls in subsequent years: Susie Mucica and Tena Klc were arrested for throwing pepper at the police.: Annie Slavik and John Matis lodged a complaint about police vandalism at Slovak Hall; Louis Marosek spoke for the strikers at a public meeting.

The radical organizers moved on to the next industrial battle, and there were plenty just before World War I, and there is a record of their journeys.

Bill Haywood described the Little Fall strike in The International Socialist Review, and provides details on the roles of Helen Schloss and Matilda Rabinowitz, as well as on the support provided by Helen Keller. Haywood was one of the many Socialists and Wobblies targeted in the 1917-1919 Red Scare and fled the country, ending his days unhappily in the USSR. Interestingly, the 1917 Espionage Act used to silence the socialists and anarcho-syndicalists is the same law being considered by the Obama administration for the prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Helen Schloss' rationality and feminism is evident in letters to the New York Times, published four years before her arrival in Little Falls. A correspondent informed us that the following information on Helen Schloss had been posted by Bob Albrecht of Little Falls on Ancestry.com.

“Helen Schloss was born in Vilna, Russia, was the daughter of a rabbi, attended the Rand School (NYC), was a public health nurse in NYC, Malone, and Little Falls, NY. She was a Socialist, friend of Helen Keller. She was a union supporter and worked with Matilda Rabinowicz and Big Bill Haywood. Her arrest record follows her across the country. She also was a speaker at a NYC Suffrage Rally in NYC. She set up medic tents at strikes in Colorado and traveled to Russia with the Friends Service Committee around 1920. There she served as a nurse to those in the midst of the civil war. And then… her trail fades until her death in 1965. I can connect her to no one. Any help out there?”

Matilda Rabinowitz (later known as Matilda Robbins) went on to play a role in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti and was a UAW organizer.

Matilda Rabinowitz

After publishing this article I heard from Matilda's granddaughter Robbin Legere Henderson who shared the above photo of Matilda and told me the following:

I think this photograph is fairly contemporaneous with the period of the strike, but I think it might have been taken as much as 5 years later, because she writes that one of the reasons she was not identified as an organizer by the police and the private detectives when she entered Little Falls, was because she was taken for a child. She was only 25 when she organized the strike, and she appears older in this photo. My mother, Vita, was born in 1919, and I think this photo was taken well before that, because by then my grandmother had even shorter hair. You can see that she was quite beautiful, and not the least dowdy. She was also very small, only 4'10".

One of the few mementos I inherited from my grandmother is a golden locket presented to her on her birthday, January 9, 1913. It is inscribed "To Matilda from Little Falls Strikers, 1-9-13". Inside is a baby photo of my mother and a lock of her hair--very Victorian.

Little Falls was her organizing debut, and she doesn't say so, but I think she may have accepted the role, in order to be closer to Ben, with whom she was in love. There were love letters between them that were intercepted and printed in the local newspaper. My grandfather was very pleased with the exposure of his affair with Matilda and gave me copies of those letters nearly 50 years ago.

Robbin also told me that her grandmother's memoir, photographs and papers are in the archives of the Walter P. Reuther Library of labor history at Wayne State University in Detroit. The papers of her grandfather Ben Legere are also in the Reuther Library.

Ben Legere remained in jail until 1913

from The International Socialist Review

As for Carlo Tresca, he remained an ardent radical but unlike Bill Haywood and some of the other IWW activists, he opposed Russian communism. He also became an outspoken opponent of Mussolini and was assassinated in New York in 1943. Both communists and fascists were suspected and Dorothy Gallagher does a good job in unraveling the mystery in her 1989 book, Who Killed Carlo Tresca?

And George Lunn’s political career continued in both the Socialist and the Democratic Parties. As a Socialist he was twice elected mayor of Schenectady , and then to a third term as a Democrat. He was also elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1917 and Lieutenant Governor in 1923. He later became friends with Chief Long and with my grandfather Edward Cooney , the town Fire Chief from 1900-1947, and spoke at Long's retirement dinner in 1940. (According to a family legend, my grandfather set free on his own authority several of the jailed strikers of 1912)

A version of this article was published in the Little Falls Times June 20, 2011.
(Print edition only)

New research into the Ziguang Shang Shi Sect by Ah Ming

2010-12-12T15:32:00.000-05:00

Introduction

A native speaker of Chinese identified only by the pseudonym Ah Ming did a Chinese language internet search and discovered some new information on the Ziguang sect, without coming up with any definitive explanation for its move to Amsterdam. Ah Ming has no connection with the Ziguang sect and has never met any of its members. Since the report has an objective and even-handed tone and does not express any hostility to the group, I decided to publish it here without any editing or abridgment.

Background on Ziguang Shang Shi

Guang Huan Mi Zong has both an English and Chinese website. The Chinese version does not limit access to members, and provides some biographical information on Ziguang:

He is said to have become a Buddhist at the age of 5. At 7, Ziguang was forced to flee with his mother (unclear from where, to where, and why). Five years later, he was "enlightened" and decided to devote his life to spreading the teachings of Buddhism . He started learning from various masters. In 1986, he began touring the world and treating the sick.

I was surprised I could not find his Chinese name. Most of the time, a Shang Shi (holy master) has a Chinese name they go by in addition to this title. "Shang" means "holy" and "Shi" means "master." In any Buddhist group, a Shang Shi is the highest authority. "Ziguang" translates literally to "purple light." Usually, when a person obtains a religious title, he/she also picks up a name with religious significance. I didn't find any reference to purple light in Buddhist sects, but it appears his name suggests he shines a light on the inner soul and clears the body of illnesses.

There is no evidence of use of the name "Lucas Wang" before he arrives in US. There is also no mention of this name in Chinese media. It is really unusual for a Shang Shi to hold an English name like "Lucas." If for nothing else, such a common name detracts from a Shang Shi's claim of religious authority.

Connection to Hong Kong Federation of Education Centers

Based on a search of Chinese-language sites, it appears Guang Huan Mi Zong has some sort of connection with Hong Kong Federation of Education Centers. The HKFEC is a non-profit organization based in Hong Kong, and according to its website its mission is to promote education and provide professional training. However, the HKFEC is also "Angel-sound Newspaper Office." Nearly all of the educational links on its website deal with physical and spiritual health, and in many cases Ziguang's quotes are used. The HKFEC says it recognizes the Guang Huan Mi Zong's commitment to improving human health.

What seems strange is that the HKFEC's director Sita Mak and its board members Dr. Raymond Wong, Franki Law, and Stella Choi are all educators. Most notably, Dr. Wong writes for several reputable Hong Kong publications. His articles focus on teaching children financial skills. I haven't found anything that linked any of these four people to religious teachings, so it seems odd they would start an organization that promotes Guang Huan Mi Zong.

Similarities with Other Buddhist Sects

Based on my own experience, I would see the Ziguang group as similar to a number of Buddhist sects that exist in the US, China and Taiwan. Faith healing is certainly common among Buddhist sects, many of them which are relatively new. They are mostly seem as scams by those who do not belong to the sects. People often turn to these sects when they get an illness for which there is no cure or the cure is too expensive. A lot of people probably would have live longer by receiving the proper medical treatments. But there are cases in which treatments offered by these sects "work." Whether or not it is coincidental, such instances certainly help the sects attract a group of devoted followers who feel they owe their lives to the sect and its leader.

Guang Huan Mi Zong

"Guang Huan" means "ring of light." "Mi Zong" means "secretive religious order." Mi Zong actually can be adopted by any religious group whose teachings are based on secretive connections with the divine. The term originates from religious groups in India. Today there are many religious sects that call themselves Mi Zong in India, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan, although most people would associate Mi Zong with Tibet.

"Guang Huan" is a popular Chinese phrase; many stores and business uses the name. There isn't really a reason to suspect these businesses have a a connection with Guang Huan Mi Zong, which does not seem to refer to any other group.

I haven't found any teachings of Guang Huan Mi Zong that are associated with property-owning, but some Buddhist sects do preach owning property as essential to establishing power. As for funding, it is puzzling, but some sects do attract a tremendous amount of money.

Similarities to the Ching Hai sect

A well known example which might interest you is the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association. The group has been deemed a cult by the Chinese government and by many respected Buddhist organizations. Ching Hai was born in Vietnam into a Catholic family, and she later formed a Buddhist group (whose teachings are not Buddhist at all). Her case is pretty fascinating. She sells expensive memorabilia to her followers and charges highly for various services and programs. She even once claimed her bathwater can cure illnesses and had her followers drink it. There are numerous accusations of her organization being a scam. In fact, charges has forced her to fled many places. Some say she has gotten at least hundreds of millions of dollars through scams. Nevertheless, she continues to have a huge, devoted following around the world among Asian communities. Her followers continue to donate to her in large amounts and argue charges against her are false. You can find a lot of information and videos about her by searching "Supreme Master Ching Hai," though many English sources seem to portray her in a much better light than Chinese ones. Perhaps the way her group operates can give insights on Guang Huan Mi Zong (the "contact us" page on her website puts the sheer size of her organization in perspective).

Some thoughts

Guang Huan Mi Zong can be seen as part of a larger trend of a rise of new Buddhist sects that have gotten wealthy through donations. But this doesn't seem to explain why Ziguang would choose to go into a non-Asian community. He does not seem to have a bad reputation among the Chinese-speaking community. And if his primarily interest is to make money, his choice of investments seems bizarre.

One last note on Guang Huan Mi Zong. It is entirely possible that it has the largest following in Hong Kong. When I typed in Ziguang Shang Shi, the first few pages are mostly blog and forum pages, mostly on Hong Kong websites. The blogs all detail miraculous stories of how Ziguang has saved lives. Whenever there is a post questioning the legitimacy of Guang Huan Mi Zong, the post is almost always replied by Ziguang's followers arguing otherwise. Also, his website is in traditional rather than simplified Chinese. Only Taiwan and Hong Kong still use traditional Chinese, and Guang Huan Mi Zong does not appear to have a following in Taiwan. (Though of course many religions are still practiced in secret in China.)

The Forgotten African-American Burial Ground in Kinderhook

2010-12-09T13:59:00.004-05:00

Columbia County is a very rural area between the upper Hudson River and the Berkshire Hills, and most of its population is concentrated in pleasant country villages resembling nearby New England. The northwestern corner is within easy commuting range of the state capital in Albany, and the southern and eastern sections contain the second homes of many prosperous residents of New York City. Agriculture is one of the primary industries.

And a drive through the county’s bucolic countryside would leave the impression that nearly everyone is of European ancestry.

Only in the city of Hudson is there a sizable number of citizens of African descent, and many of them are concentrated in the city’s public housing . For most who live, or visit, it might seem that the rest of Columbia County is like a 1940s Hollywood film, a small town and entirely white America. This was not always so.

Sojourner Truth was born near Kingston

Ignoring our multi-racial past has its price, and racial tensions are bound to erupt from time to time among young people unaware of their common history and humanity. On December 5 Stephanie Lee of the Albany Times Union reported on one such incident. An African-American father, Michael Moore, was outraged by the bigotry which his son reported experiencing from fellow students in the Hudson public schools, and his outcry quickly led to his own ostracism by school authorities:

Then, on a bus in spring 2008, a Hispanic student handed shoeshine brush to the 14-year-old special education student and told him to use it as a hairbrush, Moore said.

Outraged, Moore marched to the microphone at a school board meeting, insisted he'd learned that his son's experience was not isolated and bluntly declared he knew of a white student who called blacks "niggers." He said that hateful word -- repeating it over and over, as if to splatter its shame on everyone.

Weeks later, then-Superintendent Fern Aefsky responded to Moore, whom she had recently commended for volunteerism: He was barred from school grounds.

"There's so much racism that happens at the Hudson City School District," said Moore, 56, "it's morally incompetent."

The article goes on to describe the two sides of Hudson revealed by this incident:

Warren Street, a classy main street lined with cafes and antiques stores, greets visitors to the city. But in many ways, it is like a movie back-lot facade. A block or two away lies a cloister of high-rise towers filled with black and other low-income occupants. Some 24 percent of the city's roughly 7,500 residents are black, and a quarter live below the poverty level, according to the latest available census data.

Judging by the present residential pattern in the county, young people of European descent are likely to see their African-American peers as interlopers, while young African-Americans probably have little awareness of how deep their roots are in this county, or how much of it was built long ago by their ancestors.

In the 18th century this state had the largest slave population of any colony north of Maryland. Slavery in New York State, where it was gradually abolished beginning in 1799, was the most widespread here in the Hudson Valley, where the huge estates of wealthy Anglo-Dutch families rivaled Southern plantations in their reliance on slavery.

Robert Livingston on right, with Jefferson and Franklin,

working on the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence

Robert Livingston, renowned for being part of the small group who drafted the Declaration of Independence, was, like Jefferson and Washinton, a slavemaster. Clermont, the elegant manor home of the Livingstons south of Hudson NY, depended in part on slave labor, as well as on that of tenant farmers of European origin. The official Clermont website reports that some wealthy landowners may have disposed of their human property in a way that avoided the financial loss imposed by statewide emancipation:

Some authors have also suggested that once the Gradual Manumission law was passed, Northern slave holders were beginning to sell their slaves to Southern owners to protect their financial investment. In 1827, manumission was completed, and all remaining enslaved peoples were legally free.

Clermont, manor home of the slave- owning Livingston family

As the great semi-feudal estates were replaced by family farms following the Anti-Rent War of the 1840s, there was little room for the remaining African Americans who had done so much to create the prosperity in which they never shared. Their memory was forgotten, and even the graves of generations of hard-working people were forgotten and lost.

In the quaint village of Kinderhook, a scant dozen miles from the housing projects of Hudson, is one such burial ground, now so completely vanished that only the oldest residents of the village have a memory of its existence. And I believe that the unmarked burial ground is located on land owned by the county’s historical society.

The Center for Columbia County History at the Vanderpoel house.

Probable site of African burial ground is in woods to right rear of house.

According to Edward Collier’s History of Kinderhook (1914) land was set aside for the internment of African-Americans on the property of the Vanderpoel house, which was owned by a man whom Rev. Collier calls "somewhat erratic." Evidently, John Rogers was more tolerant than his contemporaries and felt sympathetic to families unable to bury their loved ones in cemeteries like that of the nearby Kinderhook Reformed Church, reserved for families of Dutch and English descent, including that of our 8th president:

“While the Vanderpoel place was owned by the somewhat erratic John Rogers, he set apart a portion of his land for the free burial of our colored people. It was thus used until every available inch was taken up; in some cases, it is stated, with coffin piled upon coffin. It was then, as it now long has been, closed against additional burials."

Captain Franklin, in his 1878 history of Kinderhook calls John Rogers “an Irishman of convivial habits, but withal a good business man” and says that he built a store and was on the board of a village bank in 1853, which would place the origin of the burial ground in the years between about 1821 and the Civil War.

When I first visited the Vanderpoel house several years ago, it was not hard to locate the most probable site for the forgotten burial ground in a wooded quadrangle on the northwest corner of the property. The area presents an anomaly among the yards and gardens characteristic of the block, due most probably to a respect accorded to the small parcel of land by earlier property-owners of the neighborhood. Neighbors of the parcel say that they had heard stories of the old graveyard, and an older resident of adjacent Albany Avenue, Mrs. Snyder, told me that when she was a child, the stones were still there. At some point they were just taken away, she said, and the graves were forgotten.

Possible site of an unmarked grave in the parcel of land

near the Vanderpohl house

I thought about the unmarked final resting places of so many people who worked to build this county, and was saddened to find no reminder of their lives. Doubtless, many of the simple markers were of wood and vanished even before the last gravestones were carried away, although it is clear that as late as 1914 the site was still recognized as a cemetery.

When I shared my discovery with the historical society’s executive director, Ann-Eliza Lewis recently, she said that she thought that the African burial ground was farther west, where the Little League field now exists, and directed me to the grave stones on the edge of that field. She did agree that the wooded parcel of land on the Vanderpoel site was probably a burial ground, but she thought that it was that of the Pomeroy family. I thought this an unlikely possibility, considering the respect shown to English and Dutch forebears in this region.

The grave of the 8th president, Martin Van Buren, is set amid

stones honoring the memory of many of Kinderhook's early

settlers of European origin.

However, Ann-Eliza was open to the possibility that such an African burial ground might exist on property owned by the historical society and hoped that , if verified, a suitable recognition of the site could become a central part of next year’s sesquicentennial remembrance of the Civil War.

UMass archeologists at work near the Vanderpoel house, June 2009

In June 2009 a group of archeologists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst did some careful excavations near the Vanderpoel house, and uncovered number of interesting small artifacts. Doubtless, the expertise of the U Mass team could be consulted again to evaluate the probable burial ground.

Grave markers have been moved to this location near

the Little League field on Rothermel Lane

One marker, that of "Sylvestes," may be that of a freed slave.

As to the gravestones near the ball field on Rothermel Avenue, to which Ann-Eliza referred me, they have clearly been moved from the actual location of the resting places they once marked. The very neatness of the quadrangle and the arrangement of the 13 headstones and four footstones in size order, without regard for family names, is clear evidence that they have been moved and rearranged. Also, they are not the markers of slaves or freedmen, but of local families of European descent such as Van Valkenburgh and Leggett. Only one stone, bearing the single name “Sylvestes,” who died in 1860, suggests an individual who was born as a slave.

Confirming the location of the village’s African Burial Ground, and providing appropriate recognition to these forgotten builders of the county, would be a small but significant step toward increasing an awareness among young people of our shared heritage, and might even contribute a to a greater understanding.

NOTE: I first presented these findings, or perhaps I should say this theory, in a letter published in the Hudson Register-Star in 2008.

Immigrants in the Hudson Valley and the Secure Communities Initiative

2010-12-08T17:09:00.096-05:00

UPDATE 8/7/11- GOOD NEWS

Immigration authority terminates Secure Communities agreements

"A key immigration enforcement program that has drawn criticism from some state and local governments will terminate all existing agreements with jurisdictions over the program, federal authorities announced Friday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said its director, John Morton, had sent a letter to state governors terminating the agreements “to avoid further confusion.” - Washington Post

Hard work by immigrant advocacy groups and countless individuals across the country has had its effect, but ICE still needs to be monitored closely.

In contrast to the welcome shown to the Ziguang Shang Shi sect in Amsterdam, Latino migrants have not found our area particularly friendly. “It’s not just the weather that’s cold upstate,” according to Luz Marquez of Troy, who works with abused Spanish-speaking women. “It’s the people, too. Many of the women I work with are afraid to go to the police.”

Amsterdam Mayor Ann Thane with

members of the Ziguang Shang Shiu sect

The Ziguang sect has no such fear, and did not hesitate to demand more police action when their temple was vandalized, nor were they shy about calling in the state Department of Environmental Conservation to harass Art Popp, a maple syrup farmer whose occasional presence on their land in Ephrata was objectionable to them.

Even somewhat prejudiced local people do speak well of the Ziguang sect, implying that they are more desirable than other recent non-Anglo arrivals. “They’re not out there committing crimes,” one man told me last month. And although the ample and unexplained financial resources of the sect do raise red flags, members of this group are not seeking employment that might go to citizens and retailers are happy to take their money.

Migrants from Latin America frequently walk

long distances to work or shopping

In contrast, Latino people new to the area generally maintain a low profile and are not known for seeking attention. Too many English-speakers only hear of them when a crime is committed. Here in Columbia County, two incidents over the past year confirmed the unfortunate stereotype. In October, an illegal alien from Mexico named Luis Gomez Cruz stabbed his wife and a male friend in Valatie, and evaded arrest for two days. A year earlier Manuel Ramirez, an illegal alien from Guatemala, raped a woman jogging along a country road near Kinderhook, and was apprehended in Westchester county.

Luis Gomez-Cruz , an illegal immigrant
from Mexico,was arrested for
stabbing two people in Valatie

Manuel Ramirez, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala,

was arrested for raping a local woman jogging

along this quiet country road in Stuyvesant

No one wants people like these two in this country. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities Initiative is apt to be greeted with enthusiasm locally, although the collaboration envisioned in the MOA signed by Governor Paterson has not yet taken effect.

Calls to the police departments in Troy, Albany, and Hudson last week revealed that officers in those departments had not yet received directives from the state for implementing the MOA. But a few Hudson Valley law enforcement agencies have already made a major commitment to immigration enforcement, and their experience needs to be evaluated before the entire state commits to “Secure Communities.” The Putnam County Sheriff’s Department proudly announces its collaboration with ICE on its website.

According to the Immigrants for America Foundation, based in a Schenectady law office, the Colonie Police Department has made immigration enforcement a top priority. They report that this prioritization is evident in a pattern of profiling in traffic stops and is resulting in many crimes going unreported by a fearful Latino community. Since Colonie has been named for two years running as the safest community for its size in the US, I wanted to get the department’s take on this.

I spoke with Lieutenant Robert Winn, who is in charge of criminal investigations. for the Colonie Police Department He said that the department did not make immigration enforcement a priority but that they addressed it as a secondary matter in the course of other investigations. He was familiar with Secure Communities and said they were filling out the paperwork for that program, so apparently the state has, as of December 8, sent out instructions for the implementation of Paterson's MOA. He felt that the federal initiative would not change the way Colonie PD operates in such cases.

I then asked Lt. Winn about a case reported to me by the Immigrants for America Foundation of a man who was defrauding vulnerable immigrants by means of bogus immigration documents. Lt. Winn said that the man in question was arrested in January of this year for that charge and that there was currently a warrant out on him for failure to appear.

Kuen Ling Chen, at the time of her first arrest

In February Colonie police arrested a ring of immigrant women from China for prostitution. In the course of the investigation into two storefront massage parlors, the Jasmine Beauty and Massage at 1741 Central Ave. and the Red Rose Massage Parlor, 644 Loudon Road, police apprehended the owner Kuen Ling Cheng and five other women . Kuen, who was already facing charges from a previous prostitution bust four months earlier, reportedly recruited women through advertisements in Chinese-language newspapers in New York City. (a media source also popular with the Ziguang sect, and often invisible to US law enforcement)

ICE was called in to determine immigration status. Although no minors were involved this time, there is always a strong possibility of coercion when women of uncertain immigration status are found in this kind of situation. Evidently, the case has been handled without any peremptory deportations, since Kuen and her crew were arrested today for the third time and on the same charges.

I spoke with the Workers Rights Law Center in Kingston and was told of a raid at Stewart Airport a year ago in which 15 people from several Latin American countries were rounded up, based on a bogus terrorism tip, and held incommunicado by ICE and Orange County law enforcement officers. However news reports at the time indicated that the 15 were using forged identification. Even so, they have still not been deported. According to the legal offices of Catholic Charities in New York City which is handling the defense, their cases are about to go before immigration court. Thus, it appears that ICE has not acted with the haste and disregard for individual rights suggested by the Workers Rights Law Center and the Hudson Valley Community Coalition.

After considerable inquiry, I had no conclusive answers about the Secure Communities Initiative. However, incoming Governor Cuomo needs to carefully re-assess Governor Paterson’s agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make sure that all appropriate safeguards are in place so that this latest federal involvement in local law enforcement is done right and does not violate the rights of people we ought to welcome to our communities.

Jurisdictions where collaboration with ICE has already begun, such as Putnam and Orange Counties, should be studied closely to develop a model for partnership statewide. And the evidently successful work of the Colonie PD also needs to be documented if only to refute the allegations of profiling by the Immigrants for America Foundation. Very possibly, that department's work could serve as a model for successful federal/local collaboration under the new initiative.

Email and phone contact during the transition between governors can be problematic, and a written letter is, in my experience, most apt to be taken seriously:

Andrew Cuomo

Governor-Elect
State Capitol
Albany, NY 12224

New Federal Mandate and Our Region's Most Vulnerable Newcomers

2010-11-30T19:04:00.014-05:00

Irish immigrant family in early 20th century

(courtesy Albany Times Union)

A recent series of postings on this site has focused on the World Peace and Health Organization, a native Chinese sect which has settled in Amsterdam. When I learned of the arrival of this group, I was hoping that they were the kind of immigrants who could revitalize our region, which has suffered depopulation for decades as manufacturing jobs were outsourced and our once thriving factories and farms were abandoned to decay. However, a close study of the WPHO group revealed that, whatever their intentions, they do not intend to permanently settle and raise families here. - unless their holy master Ziguang tells them to do so.

Following publication in the November 28 Schenectady Gazette of a summary of my findings on the WPHO, I became more concerned that some local people are hostile to any newcomers who do not speak English, and feel free to express the kind of anti-immigrant bias encouraged by media demagogues like Lou Dobbs. Such people choose to forget the previous waves of immigrants, almost always facing a similar hostility, who have contributed so much to the flourishing of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys. Except for the Mohicans and the Mohawks, we are all immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Mohicans viewing the arrival of Henry

Hudson's Half Moon in 1609

(courtesy Library of Congress)

When the first immigrants arrived, the people who had lived here for thousands of years welcomed them, but according the website of the N'DahAhki people, the result was not a happy one for them:

On September 15th, 1609 Henry Hudson and the crew of the Half Moon first sailed up the Mohicanituk in search of Cathay and the Indies. One of the ship's officers, Robert Juet, described them on that first meeting as a "loving people". They were also the first Native people in the Northeast recorded as having been made deliberately drunk by the Europeans. Fur trading with the Dutch began the next year. Within a few years, 90% of the Mohicans had died of epidemic disease. The middle 17th century Mohican-Mohawk conflicts for control of the lucrative fur trade (the so-called 'Beaver Wars')

Sojourner Truth was born near KIngston
(courtesy Library of Congress)

The next group to arrive were Africans imported as slaves by the Dutch starting in 1626, and their history in this valley has been ignored for far too long. Too few of our schoolchildren even know that Sojourner Truth was born near Kingston and grew up speaking Dutch. One can't help but wonder what contemporary bigots would make of her: illiterate, hostile to authority, no way to earn her own living. She'd end up on a no-fly list for sure.

German immigrants prior to the Revolution were more readily accepted by the English and Dutch, and militia commander Nicholas Herkimer is renowned for his heroism at Oriskany in 1777. Irish and German Catholic immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s met with religious prejudice, but as they buillt their own school and political systems, they compelled Protestants to accept them. Immigrants from Italy, Poland and other parts of eastern Europe readily found work in the expanding economy of the early 20th century and rose with the growth of the middle class fostred by the labor movement of the last century.

All these waves of immigrants, with the shameful exception of those who were enslaved, were from Europe. Only in recent decades have people from Latin America begun to arrive upstate in significant numbers. Susan Lang of Cornell University explored the growing presence of this group in a 2006 article:

Mexican farmworkers and their families are settling in rural upstate New York communities in record numbers, often offsetting recent decades of population loss and making upstate much more diverse. However, two-thirds of the newcomers can't speak or understand English, and most are marginalized in their communities. Seasonal farmworkers in New York used to be primarily African-Americans, but 95 percent of the farmworkers now are Latino, primarily Mexican, and they are increasingly settling down with their families in the farm communities rather than returning to their home countries.

Although these new migrants tend to keep a low profile, their labor is in demand. A farmer in Columbia county told me that he simply couldn’t afford to stay in business were it not for the labor of Spanish-speaking farm workers, and he did not care if they were documented or undocumented. “Americans don’t want to spend all day picking in the hot sun, or if they did, they wouldn’t work for what I can afford to pay them.” He held up a pint of strawberries and asked me, “Do you want to pay eight dollars for this? That’s what I’d have to charge if I didn’t have the Mexicans.”

It is interesting to speculate about how much such working people could contribute if they had a chance to own land and raise their own crops. Our countryside is littered with abandoned farms that might be restored to life by newcomers from Latin Americas. Certainly, there are few others except for the Amish who are drawn to such a hard life.

Instead, the Spanish-speaking families who could revitalize our agricultural economy may well become the innocent victims of a new federal program designed to deport truly dangerous people, called the “Secure Communities Initiative.” The program’s executive director David Venturella described the program's joint national security/community security mission: "Secure Communities is a comprehensive effort to increase national security and community safety by identifying, processing, and removing deportable criminal aliens, beginning with those who pose the greatest known risk to public safety."

No one could quarrel with such goals, but the key words are “beginning with those who pose the greatest known risk to public safety." And knowing something of how bureaucracies operate, I am sure there will be considerable pressure to produce results, and if no truly “criminal aliens” turn up, the temptation to deport those with minor charges, or whose charges were dismissed, will be inevitable.

The program requires that anyone who is booked for any charge, whether felony or misdemeanor or even if the charges are quickly dismissed, should have his/her fingerprints transmitted electronically to Immigration and Customs Enforcement Once ICE identifies an eligible individual through a database match, it will issue an “immigration detainer” requiring that the individual should be held in the local jail until a decision is made regarding deportation. No federal funds will be provided for local communities to pay for the additional incarceration.

Governor David Patterson signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Department of Homeland Security/Immigration and Customs Enforcement on May 10, committing every locality in the state to participation in this program. An earlier provision from ICE allowing localities to opt out was changed in August and the program is now mandatory, thus extending the policy of Arizona’s draconian SB-1070 anti-immigration statute nationwide.

The possibility that “Secure Communities” will interfere with good police work by tying down law enforcement officers in the pursuit of harmless migrants, or that it will damage necessary relations between the police and the Spanish-speaking community, must be taken seriously. The Police Foundation has voiced these same concerns, making a strong case that “Secure Communities” is disruptive of good police work.

I was eager to uncover the effects of this new policy in our region, and I began by contacting police departments to learn if, or how, this initiative was being implemented. At the same time I decided to reach out to the designated targets of this latest federal mandate, and to immigrant rights organizations in our area.

As I set about my research, I kept in mind the example of an Irish immigrant who was most certainly considered a dangerous alien in his own time. James Connolly lived in Troy a hundred years ago, and was a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World before returning to his homeland. By contemporary standards, he might well be put on a government list for extra scrutiny and possible deportation.

Connolly is revered today as one of the founding fathers of the Irish republic He led the Irish forces in the Easter Rebellion of 1916, the first battle in the bitter war for independence from British tyranny and was executed by the foreign occupiers of his country at Kilmainham Jail.

James Connolly is honored in Troy's Riverside Park

Update December 29, 2010:

As of this date it is still unclear if communities can opt out of the Secure Communities Initiative. A judge has given Immigration and Customs Enforcement until January 17 to release the documents that will clarify this issue. The evident stalling by ICE would suggest that the bureaucrats know they can't legally impose this diktat on every police department but are hoping to do so anyway. Thus far, most states states are falling into line, despite the lack of clarity from the feds:

Update May 22, 2011

Good news. The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security has announced an investigation of the abuses of the Secure Communities Program, specifically the damage it has done to innocent immigrants vs. actual felons deserving of deportation.

U.S. to investigate Secure Communities deportation program

Ziguang's Claims of Healing Powers Raise Questions

2010-11-28T09:39:00.006-05:00

Published in today's Schenectady Gazette

When I met Ziguang Shang Shi at the former St. Casimir’s Church in Amsterdam on October 21, he gave me his self-published book, “Holy Master Ziguang Shang Shi in U.S.A; Miraculous Stories of Salvation.” I have always had an interest in various religions, and was eager to learn what he had to say.

I didn’t get to read the book until after I came back to St. Casimir’s a second time on October 26, for its re-dedication as the Five Buddhas Temple. But when I opened his book and started to read it, I didn’t know what to make of it.

The book consists almost entirely of 161 personal statements from Chinese-speaking people who came to the healing sessions Ziguang has been conducting in American cities for several years. And the world pictured in the book is a scary place. Ziguang writes that “devils are raging all over the world. The demons of illness rampantly endanger the physical and spiritual healthiness over the world. It causes the decline of human health.”

And according to the book, he is the savior in this world full of devils: “During the Dharma Vanishing Era, Holy Master Ziguang Shang Shi descends to this mortal world for rescuing people with his divine power and his great mercy of Buddha.” Zhi Bei saw him control the ocean’s waves and Xiang-rong Ma even says she saw him rise into the air: “This moment I suddenly saw Holy Master Ziguang Shang Shi’s body raised in the air and I saw golden light emitted from his body. They shined on all audiences.”

Such visions are not unusual for people who have come to Ziguang’s healing sessions. Lin Fan-Yuan “felt there was an opening at the top of my head. I could feel a spark entering my head. I could feel the door of my wisdom was opened when the Buddha light was entering my head.” Dong Min Mo “smelled a nice scent and saw a violet light on top of my head” and afterwards was happy to lose 12 pounds and reduce her waist size two inches.

But there does seem to be something like exorcism going on for many of these people, particularly when the ailments are of a more serious nature. Ziguang tells Yuan-Zhu Liao: “Don’t worry. You will be fine after the evil spirits in your body were driven away.” He tells Dai-Shi Huang that “Satan has already left your body. Your abdomen wouldn’t be swollen again.”

What really worried me was the story told by Xiaoling Lu, who had been hearing voices telling her to kill herself, but Ziguang told her: “You are not insane. You are haunted by something evil. If nothing is done, you will be in bigger troubles.” What if she avoids psychiatric treatment based on what he told her, and then kills herself?

Although some of the illnesses are relatively minor, people with Parkinson’s disease and cancer also came to be healed by Ziguang. I know that a positive attitude is important to health, but it strikes me as terribly irresponsible if you make somebody feel so positive that they give up life-saving medical treatment.

For example, Qiong-fang Lin had an operation for breast cancer: “I just believed in science, medication and surgical operation to remove tumors. Holy Master Ziguang Shang Shi said it did not need injection, medicine and surgery, cancer cells can be controlled. Holy Master Ziguang Shang Shi told me not to worry as the esoteric dharma would prevent the spread and transfer of cancer only if I practiced sincerely and did merit wholeheartedly.”

On that first day when I went to St. Casimir’s, there were things that were puzzling, even though I didn’t know anything yet about the group’s belief in miraculous healing. I was made to feel welcome right away and Jenny Wong invited me to join a lecture being given by Ziguang, who was speaking in Chinese to a group of 28 women and five men.

Ziguang soon began talking directly to me and asked me if I had any questions, so I asked him these four: How many people will be coming from China to live in Amsterdam? Will the people from China settle and raise families here like previous immigrants? Is it their goal to become American citizens? And, why is the group buying so many properties so quickly? Ziguang answered none of these questions but simply repeated much of what was quoted in earlier news reports: he has come to bring health to the people of Amsterdam; he will bring prosperity by opening new factories and other businesses.

At one point in that meeting, Ziguang started talking about the burglary at St. Casimir’s in September, and he said he might go to France if people here did not want him. I turned and asked the group if they would stay in that case or if they would follow their master. They cried out in almost one voice that they would follow the master wherever he went. I guess whether they stay or go depends entirely on what he says.

And another odd thing happened after the meeting was over. I asked Jenny Wong how many people had come with Ziguang from China, but she wouldn’t give me a definite number, or even a ballpark range. She said that the people were here on a “voluntary” basis and that the numbers keep changing because people come and go from China.

When I finally finished Ziguang’s book a couple weeks later, I felt that I needed to know more about Buddhism if I was going to be fair. I went to see Monshin Paul Naamon, abbot of the Tendai Buddhist Temple in Canaan, which is affiliated with an ancient Japanese religious institution. “Claiming healing powers like this is not sanctioned by any recognized Buddhist tradition,” Naamon told me. “Buddhism is a search for the nature of reality. If you do something to feed people’s delusions, that is not Buddhism.”

I don’t know much about Buddhism, but I’m inclined to agree with him.