"Tales from the Rock City" by Helen Schloss, 1913

Thanks to the efforts of Little Falls native Bill Simpson, a series of thirteen articles by the public health nurse and labor activist Helen Schloss is being made available at low cost, or free, to the public. Bill is the great-grandson of Irving Stacey who founded the Little Falls Felt Shoe Company in 1905.

Writing for The New York Call in 1913, Schloss describes the horrendous conditions then existing in the working class slums of the town. At that time Little Falls was home to at least twice its present population, with foreign-born immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe living in extremely crowded housing on the south side of the Mohawk River, which was itself literally an open sewer. Not only did industrial waste flow unchecked into the river but toilets were located directly over the water in many cases. Workers slept in shifts in the slums and small children did piece work for the mills in their living quarters. Schloss decries the wasteful spending of the rich mill owners on the new YMCA on Jackson Street while mothers died of untreated infections on the other side of town. She was particularly affected by the fate of a small girl who fell to her death in a terribly crowded tenement.

The Russian-born Schloss came to Little Falls in April of 1912, was hired by a group of wealthy women to address the ongoing tuberculosis epidemic among the poor. She soon developed a disdain for “the good ladies” when her struggle for better housing and safer working conditions met with obstruction from their husbands. She describes her discouragement as she realizes that the workers simply cannot follow her advice on how to avoid disease., and felt that she had become only “a fad for the ladies.” By the time strike spontaneously broke out that Fall, she was isolated from both her wealthy employers and the poor whom she was so desperate to help. Shocked by Police Chief Long’s observation that all of the strikers “ought to be shot,” she helps to organize a soup kitchen, only to be jailed for inciting to riot. After two weeks in the Herkimer County lock-up, she returns to the battle which finally ended in January, 1913 with modest pay increases for the strikers.

Helen Schloss and the Little Falls strikers in jail

The articles which the young nurse wrote for the socialist newspaper provide a very individual look at the life of factory workers of a century ago. Helen Schloss is quite candid about her own doubts and weaknesses while offering very vivid descriptions of the people and environments she encounters. She later went on to join the labor battles in Paterson, New Jersey and Ludlow, Colorado. The last record of her is from 1919 when she went to Bolshevik Russia as part of a Quaker medical mission.

The Helen Schloss who appears in her own words is, in my view, only slightly different from the version of her I imagined in my 1912 novel of the strike, The Red Nurse. Her stay in the Herkimer County jail was much longer – two weeks- than I described it in the novel. If anything, she downplays her leadership role in these pages, failing to mention her part in the speaking tour with Big Bill Haywood which is well documented elsewhere.

Interestingly, she also fails to mention the key role of the other female strike leader. Matilda Rabinowitz, who similarly did not mention Helen in her own narrative, included as an appendix to The Red Nurse. The two young women were the same age, were both Russian Jewish immigrants, shared similar politics, and both went on to other labor battles of the era – but perhaps they had some kind of rivalry or simply did not get along.

The paperback version of “Tales from the Rock City” is available at cost, $4.00, and the PDF is a free download. 

My fictional version of the same events in The Red Nurse  is available at Wilderness Hill Books and Amazon paperback and kindle.

A much more fictionalized version of Helen also appears  in Mr. Dolge's Money, published this month on Amazon kindle. After fighting in the IWW battles at Paterson, New Jersey and Ludlow, Colorado, Helen joined a Quaker medical mission to Russia in 1919 and there is no  record of her after that point - In this novel she is imagined as finding a new career as a Comintern agent whose humanity soon marks her as an enemy of the Bolsheviks who so quickly subverted the socialist dream.

Mr. Dolge's Money: a new historical novel

Mr.Dolge’s Money is a new novel loosely inspired by the final years of Alfred Dolge, the visionary founder of Dolgeville, New York. The historical Alfred Dolge was much influenced by his father, Christian, who was imprisoned for his part in the anti-monarchist uprisings of 1848. As a youth Alfred’s thinking was also guided by his father’s friend, Wilhelm Leibknecht, founder of the German Socialist Party. By the time he arrived in the United States in 1866, Alfred had already imbibed the stirring but contradictory ideas of Karl Marx and Adam Smith.

He came to what was then known as Brocketts Bridge in 1874, committed to building a utopian society that combined his highest ideals with a profitable business. Over the next twenty-four years, he build an industrial village founded primarily on the manufacture of pains and piano components but also including an autoharp factory and extensive lumber holdings. He also back Daniel Green in creating the shoe and slipper company that was a major employer in the area until 1999. Although Dolge provided a very good life for himself and his family, he never lost sight of his goal of improving the lives of his workers, many of whom he imported from Germany. The old age pensions he offered to his workers led him to credited as a forerunner of Social Security on that agency’s website. He also provided sick benefits, life insurance and profit-sharing far exceeded those available to American workers today, However, in 1898 his entire financial complex collapsed and he declared bankruptcy. For more on this intriguing history, see my short biography of Alfred Dolge or visit the Dolgeville-Manheim Historical society.

The novel takes up where this history ends and explores the implications of Dolge’ s ideas on a stage far larger than the small village at the edge of the Adirondack forests. One of the main characters is a fictional grandson who grows up in Venezuela where Dolge’s son Rudolf has gone after giving to his father’s enemies a power of attorney which they used to destroy everything he had built. Another leading character is Helen Schloss whom some readers may know from The Red Nurse or her own series of articles on the 1912 Little Falls strike, published recently as Tales from the Rock City.

Dolge’s grandson, known both as Jose and Joseph, is dispatched by the elderly Mr. Dolge to Europe as soon as the first world war ends in order to access funds secretly hidden during the debacle of 1898. In the resulting struggle for this money, Joseph becomes caught up in the beginnings of the Red Terror in Russia and fierce warfare between communist and fascist factions from Berlin to Barcelona. With the old monarchies in collapse, Joseph finds that the ideas of Karl Marx and Adam Smith which inspired his grandfather’s benevolent policies have become a pretext for unimaginable violence. Beset by treachery on every side, he sees Rosa Luxembourg murdered and is held prisoner by a crazed band of anti-Semites who will become the leaders of the Nazi party. His survival depends on women whose motivations he cannot understand, the Comintern agent and former I.W.W. agitator Helen Schloss and the Nazi mystic Maria Orsic.

Mr. Dolge’s Money is available exclusively on Kindle for $2.99.

Among the historical figures and events in the novel:

Teffi, the Russian humorist and writer

who helped Joseph flee from the Bolsheviks

Karl Leibknecht, murdered head of the German
Communist Party whom Joseph met at the height
of the Spartacist uprising

The Spartacist uprising in Berlin, 1919

Erich von Ludendorff, an early supporter of the Nazis

Maria Orsic, a fortune-teller and mystic

popular with the early Nazis

Prince Rupprecht and Princess Antonia of Bavaria,
whom both Joseph and Helen met at their castle

Neuschwanstein Castle where Joseph is imprisoned

 IWW activist Helen Schloss
who traveled to Russia with Joseph in 1919,
later a disillusioned Comintern agent

Anarchist fighter in Barcelona,
where Joseph Dolge arrived in 1937


Most recent article on Alfred Dolge appears at Utica Sojourner Post

The Red Nurse: Helen Schloss at the Ludlow Massacre

In my 2012 novel, I imagine a very old Helen Schloss telling her story in Moscow in the late 1960s. She meets a young American from Little Falls, New York and describes the great strike she helped to lead in his home town a half century earlier. ( The Red Nurse is available at Amazon Kindle for $2.99 and the paperback is $9.99 at Amazon.)

Additional posts on that strike can be found on this site at:

The Red Sweater Girls of 1912

How the Other Half Lives at Little Falls, 1912

Socialists, Anarchists and the Little Falls Strike of 1912

M. Helen Schloss

After Little Falls, Helen Schloss continued to join the labor battles and in 1918 went to Russia as part of an organized effort to provide medical relief to the millions suffering from war, famine and disease. Her trail ends there, and I have never been able to find any record of Helen Schloss after that time.

Strike supporters at Paterson 

After the Little Falls strike was settled by state mediators in January 1913, Helen evidently went directly to the silk workers strike in Paterson New Jersey, which began in March of that year. Her IWW comrades Big Bill Haywood and Carlo Tresca, who had been at Little Falls, were major organizers at Paterson, as was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with whom Helen had been arrested in 1904 in New York. At Paterson, Flynn was arrested for a speech in which she called for uniting workers across racial boundaries, and it is probable that Helen was among the 1800 workers and organizers arrested by the police.

Warren Beatty as John  Reed in "Reds"

A huge mass meeting of supporters was held at Madison Square Garden in nearby New York, featuring a pageant organized by John Reed and Mabel Dodge. The strike, and Reed's role in it, were dramatized in Warren Beatty's 1981 film, Reds. The strike, however, was a failure, and ended in July.

In 1914 Helen Schloss was at the strikers camp in Ludlow, Colorado when the Colorado National Guard attacked the tent colony, massacring two dozen men, women and children. The workers fired back over the next ten days, leading to more deaths on both sides.

The Guardsmen and hired thugs fought on behalf of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and two smaller mining firms. Although the miners lost the battle, subsequent federal laws on child labor and the eight hour day were probably due, in part, to the 1915 report on the strike by the House Committee on Mines and Mining.

Mother Jones with strikers' children at Ludlow

We know that Helen was a witness to these tragic events because a letter from her was read at a meeting in New York, hosted by the legendary Mother Jones. 

Excerpt from The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 14, 1914:

Helen Schloss Writes Colorado Strike Story

Miss Helen Schloss is a trained nurse who has been active as a suffrage organizer in this borough in behalf of the Woman Suffrage Party. She was sent to Colorado by the Brooklyn Committee for the Relief of Wives and Children of Colorado Strikers to organize a relief station at Trinidad. Mrs. Frank H. Cothren, Mrs. Herbert Warbasse and James P. Warbasse are especially active on this committee. This is the story of conditions as Miss Schloss heard it from the strikers:

by Helen Schloss

    There has been a strike in the State of Colorado, since last September, and if memory serves rightly, there have been strikes ever since the mines began operating.

    Mines are unsafe, and hundreds of men are being killed in them every year. Water is scare in this part of the country, and coal dust is very plentiful. When a sufficient amount of coal dust has gathered in the air there is an explosion and many lives are snuffed out. When the operators are asked why they do not sprinkle the mines, they answered that the country lacks sufficient water.

    The present strike has been in progress, in a peaceful manner, since September. There was no trouble of any moment till April 20. The militiamen were in the field to protect the mines, and incidentally to break the backbone of the strike.

    The militia men had nothing to do, but to have a good time. So for just a little pastime, they started with Ludlow. Ludlow had 1200 inhabitants, with over 100 tents. The Ludlow people were about twelve nationalities in that small colony. They had parties and feasts, the women had plenty of time to go visiting, and to gossip. The men hung around, laughed and sang. There was nothing to do but wait until the strike was settled. The militiamen had work to do, and that was to break the strike.

    Long before April 20, the tents of the strikers were searched. Trunks were ransacked, floors torn up, and there seemed to have been brooding a general feeling of hatred for the militia. While the militia searched the tents, they usually had a machine gun on top of the hill. Be it known that Ludlow is sitting in a valley. The militia were stationed on the hills. This gave them a good chance to watch the doings of the strikers.

Militia Fires on Camp of Women and Children.

    Monday morning, April 20, at 10 a. m. the Ludlow people heard an explosion, and rushing out to the tent doors, they saw the machine guns in full blast, firing down upon them. Under almost every tent was a large cave. The women and children scrambled into them, while the men grabbed their rifles and ammunition, and went up on the hill to fight.

    The women and children who were in the caves tell horrible stories. The firing from the hills kept up all day, until 3 o'clock the next morning. No one knew whether his companions were alive or not. No one knew whether they would ever see his friends again. The rumbling kept up on the hill. 

    One young woman [Pearl Jolly] who had some training as a nurse, put Red Cross on her breast, and carrying a white flag, went from cave to cave with food, and drink for the women and children. She was fired at from all directions, and it is a great wonder that she lives to tell the tale. The heel was shot off one of her shoes. One time when she ran into one of the tents, to get some food, so many shots followed her through the canvass that she had to lie still on the floor for hours. A dresser in the tent was shot to pieces.

    It is said that the explosive bullets that were used set the tents on fire. The tents began to burn towards evening, and the fires kept up all night. The women and children fled from the caves, to the nearest ranch, and as they were running , shots followed them. The firing became so insistent that the people had to flee from the ranch. The militia looted the house, and left a note on a blank check, saying "this will teach you a lesson not to harbor strikers next time," signed with the initials of the Baldwin gunmen.

   On going through the ruined tent colony, one was struck with the terrible amount f bullets lying everywhere. Everything had been riddled. The stoves that might have been used after going through the fire were full of holes, where the bullets struck. Barns, sheds and everything in sight was destroyed. It was a ghastly sight to walk through the ruined colony, with the frames of the bedsteads standing out like ghosts amid the ruins.

    We stopped near the cave, where eleven children and two women were smothered alive. Big, strong men stood at this cave, in silence, with bowed head. We slid down the gruesome hole, and I gave it a sort of rough measurements and found it 5 feet high, 7 feet wide and 9 feet long. A little high chair and a baby's gocart were still there.

     The Red Cross party that went to Ludlow to recover the dead were arrested and detained for a little while. At first they received permission to pass, but later on General Chase told them he had received word they could not pass. Later this same general became abusive and called the minister choice names. The Red Cross party recovered the eleven children and two women, but it is said that there are a great many bodies still missing, which are not accounted for.

Grocery Store Looted by the Militiamen

     About one mile away there is a grocery store, which is run in opposition to the company store. A visit to this store convinces one that destructive demons had been there. Flour and cereals were spilt all over the floor. The cash register was broken open, canned stuff opened and spilled, fixtures destroyed and windows broken. hundreds of dollars worth of damage was done.

    Upstairs there was a rooming house, and the woman who ran this has lost everything. Never in my life have I witnessed such a state of affairs. The floor was strewn with papers, drawers were ransacked, bureaus, tables and chairs broken, mattresses destroyed, glasses broken. All the good things had been taken away. The poor people did not even have a chair to sit on. Unmentionable outrages were committed in this house. The poor woman sits on the floor on the torn mattress, with her hands up to her head in a state of terror. The reason this house was destroyed was because one leader, who was the strikers' best fighter, used to room there at one time.

    Louis the Greek was killed. He fought at the front all day. When the moaning of the women and children became too terrible, this big strong man went on the hill through the storm of bullets to beg them to stop firing. He was hit with a gun over the head, and knocked senseless, and then shot through the head with an explosive bullet. He was found at the foot of the hill with an old pair of shoes on. Before he was shot he had new shoes. His gold watch and chain were gone. One of the militia boasted that he traded shoes with dead Louie.

    After the terrible Ludlow massacre, the fighting began. Women and children were brought to Trinidad by the wagon load, the children fairly naked. For five nights and days the work kept up. The men went to the firing line, and the women stayed up all night cooking and sending shifts of men into battle. What a bloody war it was for five days! Those Greek men fought wonderfully. They fought against hundreds of machine guns. The strikers had a small force. They had little ammunition, but they fought bravely. A great many are soldiers from the old countries. The mixture of nationalities proved a great help in time of war, for it seemed that each nationality had something to offer and suggest against the "Tin Wollies," as they called them.

    A few days later there was another battle. The strikers fought at Walsenburg. Fire was set to some houses, men were killed, and there was a bloody war; but the women and children were protected.

   Peace has been restored in the community, the strikers are looking forward to a settlement. All strikers have been disarmed, and all mines guards are supposed to be disarmed.

    The only solution of this problem is to close the mines, and as long as there will be strikebreakers in the mines there will be hatred, and hence more bloodshed.

     Conditions among the miners are very pitiful, indeed, especially the Ludlow survivors. They are being fitted out as fast as possible, but there is still a great need. The strike benefits are $3 a week. One dollar extra is allowed for the wife, and 50 cents for the children. Babies are coming very fast, too. Since I started the work we have had two newcomers, and a dozen more are expected.

     The strikers ask for their own check man. They wanted someone representing the workers to act a a check man to weigh the coal and offered to pay him. This was denied. If they became too persistent they were kicked out and blacklisted.

     Miners say that the scales of the owners differ from the standard scales of the United States.

    When the strike was declared, the company wagons came, went into homes and hauled out all furniture, leaving the people in the streets. They then sought shelter in tents with what results I have described above.

The Ludlow massacre shows the intention of the mine owners. It shows that Colorado does not belong to the free United States, and it show that because there are thousands and thousands of miles of empty space, that because life is crude and uncivilized in the great canyons, the greedy are taking advantage of this, and using every method to gain their end.

Strikers' children at Ludlow - possibly with Helen Schloss

Colorado National Guard en route to massacre

Armed Strikers

I can find no record of Helen's activities over the next three years. Perhaps, she was radicalized even further by what she saw at Ludlow. Or perhaps she was sickened by the violence, and turned toward pacifism. What is known is that the Socialist Party and the IWW, with whom she had fought at Little Falls and elsewhere, was targeted for destruction by the Wilson administration. The US declaration of war against Germany served as a cover for a nationwide crackdown on labor organizers. The 1917 Espionage Act (which has been employed so heavily by the Obama administration against whistle blowers) was the legal justification for the arrest of socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood and many others.

Whatever her political views after Ludlow, Helen joined with the Quakers in a mission to Russia while war still raged in Europe. The last record I can find of her is in the Friends Intelligencer of June, 1918:

"Robert R. Tatlock, leader of the Friends Mission in Russia, will sail July 5 for Yokohoma on his way back to Russia. He is taking back with him two nurses who are native born Russians naturalized in this country. Their names are Helen Schloss and Ruth Hoffman, both of New York City. Their speaking knowledge of Russian and their training and experience will make them a very valuable addition to our staff of workers."

I am hopeful that readers may be able to provide more information on Helen Schloss after she left the United States. Perhaps she lost her life to disease or violence in Russia. Perhaps she returned to the U.S. and gave up her early radicalism. Or perhaps, as I imagine in The Red Nurse, she fell in love with Leon Trotsky and managed to survive the purges of Stalin, and the Nazi holocaust. I can be contacted at wildernesshill@gmail.com.

Although Joe Hill is said to have written this song for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, it could as easily apply to the brave Helen Schloss. Here's a link to Hazel Dickens' version of the The Rebel Girl

and don't miss Woody Guthrie's "Ludlow Massacre"

Thanks to the researcher who posts as JayeRaye, who called my attention to the account of Helen Schloss in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. His ongoing series on labor history, Hellraisers Journal, can be found at Daily Kos.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/17/1300020/-Hellraisers-Journal-Red-Cross-Nurse-Sent-by-Brooklyn-Women-s-Relief-Committee-Reports-from-Colorado

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:

How The Other Half Lives at Little Falls, 1912

by M. Helen Schloss

New York World 1912

[ I only recently found this article published in The New World during the summer of 1912. Helen evidently wrote this before the strike ,after having worked five months as the tuberculois nurse, hired by the Fortnightly Club. I am not sure about all of the locations she describes but include a few recent photos of the general area about which she wrote. Helen's well-founded outrage at local conditions lends credence to  my view of her role in the great textile strike, i.e. that it might well not have occurred as it did, or in Little Falls, without her active presence in town at the time.  - MC]

The old New York Central Depot at Little Falls, now the Piccolo Cafe

 Let me tell you something about how the other half lives at Little Falls.

As the train rolls into the Little Falls station, one is confronted with a huge mill which foams and bustles all night. On the north side of the mill, crossing the railroad track is a street, with a car line running through it,  inhabited by foreigners, perhaps a little better than the streets and houses of the extreme south side of the town, where the slums are quite as bad as any in New York City. Social investigation, interest in “the other half,” was unknown prior to the tuberculosis exhibit that stirred the complacent people from their lethargy, and a club of well-meaning good ladies raised money and hired a visiting tuberculosis nurse.

View from depot past site of the huge Phoenix Mill toward South Side

The people on the south side are mill or factory hands, Italians, Poles, Slavs and Hungarian. Each nationality thinks that his particular creed and country is better than any other. They clan together, and one will find twenty-five or thirty living in one house. One room accommodates from five to ten people, and often as many as fifteen. The people working at night occupy the same beds as the people who work in the daytime; consequently the rooms are never aired. The landlord or agent who comes for the rent knows of this congestion, but when approached by the nurse on the subject the only answer is that those foreigners will crowd in, and nothing could be done with them.  If “those foreigners” did not crowd in one house as they do, it would be impossible for the factories to employ such cheap labor. The price for a sleeping bunk, with use of the kitchen is 3 dol. a month. The tenant gets nothing for his 3 dol. but just a place to throw his weary body upon. He never gets a bath nor any privacy where he or she may wash decently. In my rounds of visits I used to see weary men lying on the beds with their work clothes, as dirty as when they came from the mills.

Housing from 1912 era on the South Side of Little Falls

The cost of food is high, and there is no Board of Health to look after its purity. A short time ago there were about 50 cases of ptomaine poisoning from cheese.

Toilets are built in cellars, without ventilation and inadequate sewerage, and there are many open vaults- which is against the law. One row of house is on a creek, into which is discharged all the waste of the mills and all the sewerage of the town. In these houses the toilets are built over the creek.

When asked why they live in such filthy places, their answer is “No understand.”

Tuberculosis is very prevalent and the second-largest death rate in the state is here, the statistics show. It was not until very recently that the health officer took up the matter of fumigating houses; but these houses are so old that it would be impossible to kill the germs.

There are old houses along the Barge Canal which are absolutely uninhabitable, but which rent for about 10 dol. a month. The ceilings leak, the sharp wind blows through the cracks, the floors are broken, and only one or two rooms can be occupied. The landlord owns a textile mill, and also makes fleece-lined gloves, the work being done in some of the worst tenements. Not long ago there was scarlet fever in one of these tenements. The gloves were not allowed to leave the house until the quarantine was off, but they should have been destroyed instead. The woman took care of her husband suffering from scarlet fever, and sewed gloves in the room between. She did not even know how to wash her hands after attending the patient.

There is much open space on the once terribly crowded tenement areas

(Route 167 heading north toward river and canal)

This tenement was formerly a Methodist church. There were many deaths from tuberculosis in it; during the five months of my stay at Little Falls the nurse discovered three cases of tuberculosis.

The bedrooms in some of these tenements are mere boxes, unventilated, and so dark they have to burn a lamp night and day. There are three-storey and four-storey tenement houses without fire-escapes. Life is cheap in Little Falls. Apparently there is not enough Christianity and humanity in Little Falls to support a philanthropic movement.

Site of Sokol Hall next to the old Slovak Lutheran (now Assemblies of God) church

[Although Helen makes no mention in the above article  of the large building and gymnasium that stood here, it became a few months later the command center for the strikers and the IWW and Socialist activists who came to Little Falls in their support.]

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