The Red Sweater Girls of 1912

This article appeared in the Little Falls Evening Times on June 20, 2011 and served, in part, to generate local interest in last year’s series of events commemorating  the centennial of the  great textile strike. I was inspired to re-publish it on this site after finding several more photographs of the strikers in an article in the 1912 International Socialist Review.

The primary source for my article was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings on the strike kept by a teacher, Miss Hughes, who worked in the old Jefferson Street School. Miss Hughes scrapbook is now at the Herkimer County Historical Society. Other sources include Richard Buckley’s “Unique Place, Diverse People” (Little Falls Historical Society, 2008) and Robert Snyder’s “Women, Wobblies and Workers’Rights: The 1912 Textile Strike in Little Falls, NY (New York History LXI, 1979)

Nearly a hundred years ago, two thousand mostly female textile workers went on strike in Little Falls, and the leading radicals of the era soon arrived by train to urge them on to battle. And as they marched under the red banners of the International Workers of the World, some of the women also wore red sweaters or shawls, leading opponents to deride them as “the red sweater girls.” But in contrast to the many unsuccessful labor struggles of the years just before World War I, women took over the leadership of this strike and they won. 

Young women and children were the primary work force of the textile industry that had developed in Little Falls and similar northeastern towns during the latter part of the 19^th century. Many workers had a story like that of my grandmother, Jenny McTiernan, who left school for the Gilbert knitting mill  at 13 when her father died, leaving behind a pregnant wife and  six younger children. Working conditions were abysmal and my grandmother was not shy in describing the ear-splitting noise of the machines and the sexual harassment practiced by male foremen in the mills. 

It was the death of 146 women in the Triangle Factory Fire in New York City in 1911 that finally got the New York state legislature moving on these horrendous conditions , but the reforms had 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, 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 very possibly  brutality toward the strikers by the owners and by the local police ignited a much larger walk-out, eventually including perhaps as many as a thousand workers from Phoenix and another thousand from the nearby Gilbert’s Mill.

At that time the Socialist party was quite strong in Schenectady, and party activists came by train on October 13. A number of them were immediately arrested for making speeches in Clinton Park adjacent to the Phoenix Mill on what is now Canal Place. George Lunn, the Socialist mayor of Schenectady, was arrested by Police Chief James “Dusty” Long just as he launched into a quote from Abraham Lincoln.

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 who were probably unaware of her earlier work with the Socialists in Malone, NY. When the Factory Investigating Committee, set up in response to the Triangle tragedy under the leadership of Al Smith and Robert Wagner, 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.

Local authorities actively opposed the strikers, most of whom were immigrants from southern or eastern Europe. Police Chief Long 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.”

Chief 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.

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 continued until a major clash occurred on October 30. Patrolmen and privately hired deputies, some on horseback, charged the largely unarmed pickets and many were beaten unconscious. The strikers fought back. One police officer was shot in the leg and a hired deputy was stabbed in the neck.

A running battle ensued, with the police and hired deputies 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.

 

Poster circulated on behalf of imprisoned strike leaders

Even though Ben Legere and the other male members of the Strike Committee had been arrested on October 30, and some were held for over a year, the strike continued.  Matilda Rabinowitz, a Russian-born IWW organizer, soon arrived and joined forces with Helen Schloss. Together, the two women had a largely female picket line up within a day of the mass arrests.

“Big Bill” Haywood, a founder of the IWW, arrived a 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.

As Christmas neared, the IWW 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.

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 victory was a transient one. The Phoenix Mills closed seven years later 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 has been closed for years.

And what became of the organizers and those they led to victory?

The radical organizers moved on to the next industrial battle, and there were plenty just before World War I. However, the IWW’s attempt to replicate its success in the larger textile town of Paterson, New Jersey a year later met with failure when the silk mill workers were starved into submission.  Bill Haywood, Carlo Tresca, Matilda Rabinowitz and other leading radicals of the age all tried to rally the workers but to no avail. Unlike the Little Falls conflict, there was no state board to step in and impose terms.

Considering its success, it is not surprising that Haywood, who later fled to the USSR, described the Little Falls strike in glowing terms in the pages of the International Socialist Review, where he provides details on the roles of Helen Schloss and Matilda Rabinowitz, as well as on the support provided by Helen Keller. In her unpublished memoir, however, Matilda Rabinowitz discounted Haywood as an unreliable grandstander.

Matilda (aka Matilda Robbins) went on to play a role in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti and was a UAW organizer. Her papers, including her memoir, are preserved in the Labor History archives at Wayne State University in Detroit. She and Ben Legere later had a child and their granddaughter Robbin Legere Henderson has been helpful with this article.

Carlo Tresca became an outspoken opponent of Mussolini and was assassinated in New York in 1943 by a Mafia gunman associated with the Fascists. Fillippo Bocchino followed another path and became one of Mussolini’s most ardent defenders in the Italian-American community in the years before World War II.

George Lunn’s political career continued in both the Socialist and the Democratic Parties. As a Socialist he was elected mayor of Schenectady, twice as a Socialist and once as a Democrat. He was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1917 and Lieutenant Governor in 1923. He later became friends with Chief Long and spoke at his retirement dinner in 1940.

As for the strikers themselves, many were certainly still living in Little Falls when I was growing up, as were their children and grandchildren. However, the story of the strike seems to have been an episode that no one really wanted to talk about. Perhaps, the later closing of the textile mills, made the whole strike something people just wanted to forget. And the nationwide witch hunt in 1917-1920 known as “the Red Scare” certainly made any past associations with socialists or anarchists something most people did not want to be reminded of.

Although lost to history, the textile strike in Little Falls was a major victory that brought together the Socialist Party, the IWW and a progressive state administration. And even more importantly, it was a strike by women and led by women in an era when men dominated the left as well as the right sides of American political life.

My novel based on the strike, as told in the voice of Helen Schloss, can be purchased on kindle for $2.99 or in paperback for $9.99.  The book is also available at the Little Falls Historical Society.


 Drawings from 1912

Several drawings  made in October and November, 1912  have recently come into my possession: The drawings depict the riot of October 30, the attack that same day on the Slovak Hall, and an arraignment of arrested strikers on November 15:

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

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.

Recent view of the old Gilberts Knitting Mill

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.  

                                                                                                 

Sources:

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.


I am indebted to Robert Albrecht for biographical information on Helen Schloss, in particular her date and place of birth, the strikes in which she was involved after Little Falls,  and her disappearance around 1920. It was he who pointed out that Helen seems to have vanished after going to Soviet Russia around 1920, and this mystery became central to the structure of my novel.

The strike was covered by the local and national press. “The Strike at Little Falls” by Philips Russell in The International Socialist Review, December 1912, goes into more detail than other papers on the work of Helen Schloss and Matilida Rabinowitz, giving them equal credit as leaders.

The New York Times archives contains several letters which Helen wrote as a public health nurse in New York City. The letters, which appear to be her only writings to have survived, demonstrate Helen's 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 a 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.

There is also a 1968 college thesis on the strike composed by Little Falls native Schuyler Van Horn. I believe a copy of the thesis can be reviewed at the Little Falls Historical Society

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.