The Hannacroix and Lewis A. Swyer Preserves: Wetlands, a Waterfall and an Old Paper Mill

Recent hikes along the Hudson south of Albany....

Lewis A. Swyer Preserve

The Lewis A. Swyer Preserve consists of a freshwater tidal marsh along Mill Creek onthe east shore of the river. The trailhead  is on Route 9J between Schodack Landing and Stuyvesant.  A half-mile long boardwalk across the marsh has been seriously damaged by recent floods and is officially closed.  River access is blocked by the Amtrak line.

The preserve was chosen as a  project of the Nature Conservancy because of the unusual marsh environment:

A freshwater tidal swamp is formed only rarely, requiring a river bed close to sea level for a long distance from the mouth of the river. At the Lewis A. Swyer Preserve, 120 miles up the Hudson River, the daily tides change the fresh water level in Mill Creek by more than four feet. Frequent flooding of the adjacent flat land has created the freshwater tidal swamp that is one of only five in New York State.

Hannacroix Preserve

The Hannacroix Preserve consists of 120 acres along Route 144  north of the beautiful village of New Baltimore on the river's west bank.  This area is a project of the Open Space Institute in collaboration with the New Baltimore Conservancy and described on the OSI site as “an undeveloped and wooded landscape with a half-mile frontage on Hannacroix Creek, a DEC trout stream.”

Two trails lead from a parking area just below the Albany-Greene county line. The Hudson River Interpretive Trail crosses back over route 144 and goes about a mile to wetlands bordering the river.
The LaVern Irving Trail is a little longer and goes uphill from the parking area , then follows Hannacroix Creek to the waterfall and the ruins of a 19^th century paper mill

Hudson River Interpretive Trail

Ruins of an old ice house

"World's First Recycled Plastic Bridge"

LaVern E. Irving Trail

 

The foundations of  the Croswell-Bowen water powered mill which operated from 1826-1897. It was first used as a saw and grist mill by Nathaniel Bruce, and later operated by James Croswell and Stephen Parsons. Burned three times and rebuilt twice, the mill specialized in converting straw pulp into rough wrapping paper.

This mill race carried water from above Hannacroix Falls to power the mill. In the 19th century a timber dam created a mill pond behind the falls.

 Views of Hannacroix Falls from near the mill

Harvey Mountain and the Tale of the Lost Gold Mine

The Harvey Mountain State Forest  in Austerlitz, NY, was created in 1999 through a purchase from the Millay Society, and  lies along the Taconic Ridge on the New York-Massachusetts line near Steepletop, the country home of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The 2065 foot  summit of Harvey Mountain, easily accessible by a 1.5 mile trail from East Hill Road off route 22, affords beautiful views of the Green Mountains to the north and the Catskill Mountains to the west. But this woodland was once far more populous and the scene of considerable commercial activity. And one particularly notorious murder.

The connecting trail from East Hill Road,  reaches the main trail from the fire tower on  Beebe Hill, 4.5 miles to the west, which then continues through gradually ascending forest. 

Meadows border the trail

Walking eastward, an open meadow is to your right and stone walls  can be seen marking old roads and enclosures, clear indications that this now forested  area was once heavily farmed.

The trail passes through gaps in old stone walls

Such walls – for those unfamiliar with them – go back to early New England farmers and are at least 150 years old. 

Mine, quarry or charcoal pit?

After about ¾ mile, a mine or possibly charcoal pit can be seen.  This seems to have been a fairly small operation and may not be related to what was once a major bridge across a ravine.  Why such a strong bridge abutment was needed is unclear but it seems that fairly heavy loads must have been anticipated, perhaps lumber or ore.

Foundation for a bridge over a steep ravine

After the trail crosses the stream near the old bridge site, the grade gradually increases. 

The stream can easily be crossed on stepping stones

Stone walls can still be seen, but it is hard to believe any farming could occur on such slopes. Perhaps these walls mark old pastures more than cultivated fields.

Stone walls date back at least 150 years

Views from the summit are ample reward for an hour’s climb.  And it appears that a roadway from the north offers another way to access the summit. (Although ATVs are prohibited in the state forest)

Blueberry meadow at summit of Harvey Mountain

View from summit north toward  Mass. & Vermont

This remarkably peaceful country, however, was the scene of a murder that attracted national and international attention in the 1880s – and which raises the intriguing possibility of a secret gold mine in these hills.

From Hudson Evening Register, March 1, 1888

On January 10, 1882 Simon Vandercook went to the shanty of 71 year old Oscar Beckwith, who had recently returned to these hills from years of wandering and prospecting in the West.  Although the various newspaper reports of the time differ somewhat, it does seem clear that the two men were partners in a gold mine company. According to Nick Bigg, who wrote a 2003 article for the Columbia County History and Heritage magazine, Beckwith believed there was gold on land he owned in this forest. He sold the land to a newly formed corporation in return for a third interest, while Vandercook became manager of mining operations. 1900 tons of rock were mined and carried out by wagon to the Chatham rail station, where they were sent out for assay. The ore was reportedly not rich enough to justify mining, thereby rendering Beckwith’s stock worthless – and Vandercook proceeded to sell off timber on the land and to pocket the proceeds. Then came the murder.

When Vandercook failed to come back from his morning visit, his landlord Harrison Calkins came  up from Alford, on the  Massachusetts side, inquiring and thought he smelled burning flesh. When old Oscar disappeared that night, neighbors broke into his cabin and found Vandercook’s remains, minus a hand, two feet and a head. Although cannibalism was not mentioned in the initial newspaper account in the Hudson Evening Register of January 13, the legend of “the Austerlitz Cannibal” soon became part of local folklore.

Amazingly, Beckwith remained free for three years and was finally arrested in 1885 some 200 miles north of Toronto. How a man of his age and apparent poverty managed what the newspapers reported as a flight across the continent and back is not clear. Nor is the role of a mysterious figure identified in reports of the time as the detective J.P. Gildersleeve of Kinderhook who is said to have pursued Beckwith. (What could have motivated this Gildersleeve or who would have paid for such a lengthy pursuit is not clear. Could gold have somehow been the driving force for both men?)

Identical descriptions of  the detective’s success  appeared in the Long Island Star and other papers when Beckwith was apprehended:

Bracebridge, Ont. February 25, 1885: Detective J.P. Gildersleeve, of Kinderhook, Columbia county, N.Y., went to work on the case and followed the criminal to the Pacific ocean, and thence through Canada along the Canadian Pacific railway. He put himself in communication with Detective Rodgers, of Barrie, and D.F. McDonald, a government woodranger, and these, with the assistance of Chief Constable Perkins, of Gravenhurst, accompanied by Detective Gildersleeve and Sherif Hamor, of Columbia county, N.Y., succeeded in arresting the murderer Beckwith at South River, in the district of Parry Sound. The party passed through here with the murderer, en route to Toronto.

The conviction of Beckwith was no easy matter for prosecutors in Hudson. According to Biggs’ article, the records of the first trial  and appeals are missing, possibly destroyed in the 1907 fire at the Columbia County Courthouse.  A new witness testified during the motion hearings for a second trial: a Dr. Giles S. Hulett of Great Barrington said that Vandercook and his landlord had spoken of “getting rid of Beckwith” as an obstacle to their mining plans.  Beckwith himself testified that he only killed Vandercook in self-defense after the man attacked him.

The transcripts of the second trial are also incomplete and no record has been found of defense testimony. Beckwith was again convicted and again sentenced to death. A sanity hearing reported some delusional thinking but he was ruled sane enough to be executed.  On March 1, 1888 he was finally hung in Hudson, reportedly the last public execution in New York state.

Could this have been Oscar Beckwith's cabin?

And now, amid the state forest lands where mines and farms once flourished, a hiker may come upon an old stone foundation here and there, and wonder if this is the place where Simon Vandercook was struck down.

And the same hiker may wonder if there is any truth at all to the secret of a lost goldmine that old Oscar Beckwith took with him to the grave:

While awaiting the sentence to be carried out, he told some of his visitors about the discovery of a new gold vein, much richer than the first, which he discovered just before he eliminated his partner. No coaxing would get him to reveal the location of the new site, for he hoped the governor of New York would commute his sentence.

 

 

This 1962 historical novel by David Buckman was inspired the Beckwith case, but names and details have been changed. Even so, it offers an interesting imaginative look at life in the Taconic Hills in the 1880s. The book is long out of print but there is a reference copy at the Roeliff-Jansen Library in Hillsdale.

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.]

On Kindle and in paperback

Press Release from Little Falls Historical Society

            Little Falls native Michael Cooney will discuss his book “The Red Nurse” at the Tuesday April 24 meeting of the Little Falls HistoricalSociety. Cooney’s book is a timely work of historical fiction centered on the role of public health nurse Helen Schloss in the months before and during the 1912 Little Falls Textile Strike.

            The book also contains an excerpt from the unpublished memoir of Madilda Rabinowitz who came to Little Falls as a member of the IWW labor union to help coordinate the efforts of striking mill workers.

            Cooney’s presentation is the first in a series of local events to take place between April and October as the city commemorates the centennial of the historic labor strike. Other strike-related events being planned are an August  roundtable discussion at Canal Place, a July presentation by local resident Bob Albrecht at the MVCA and an October living history day.

            Contacted about his upcoming lecture, Cooney said:  “One of the most fascinating things about the 1912 Textile Strike is how controversial many of these issues still are today. A hundred years ago both the nation and Little Falls were struggling with a flood of immigration and as the poorly paid factory workers went on strike, many residents of Little Falls were alarmed.”

            2012 is the 100^th anniversary of the three-month long strike that drew national attention to the city. Cooney also said:  “As the strike wore on, both sides played to the media of the day and when it was over, the results probably did not make anyone happy. This may be why the strike was forgotten for so many years.”

            The 1912 Textile Strike contained elements of a number of issues competing for attention in turn-of-the-century America. The broader issues of worker and women’s rights, the relationship between factory owners and workers and the nature of government and public response to labor issues all played out on the streets of Little Falls during the strike.

            Taking place in the year following the tragic 1911 Triangle fire in NYC and sandwiched between bigger labor strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts and Paterson, New Jersey, the 1912 Little Falls Textile Strike drew the attention of both the AFL and the IWW labor unions.

            Copies of Cooney’s 117-page “The Red Nurse” will be available for sale for $10  following the meeting. The author’s presentation will be preceded by a short Historical Society business meeting.

            The general public is cordially invited to attend this and all meetings of the Little Falls Historical Society.

Thanks to all for turning out on Tuesday and for waiting so patiently to have your copy of "The Red Nurse" signed. Barbara and I will be in Little Falls again during Canal Days and participating in panel discussion on the 1912 strike on August 9 along with Dick Buckley, Bob Albrecht, Dennis Dineen and Schuyler Van Horn.  Time and place to be announced .Further recognition of the strike is planned for the weekend of October  5-7, the anniversary of the walk-out.

A walking tour of the scenes of the 1912 strike is scheduled for October 6 and promises to be quite interesting.  A Readers Theater production of “Strike Story,” an original production by Angela Harris about the 1912 strike will be held in the Black Box Theater in the Stone Mill on the following evening, October 7.  And on September 8, 7 PM in the  Masonic Temple, Bob Albrecht will reprise his talk on the life of Helen Schloss, the protagonist of my novel. Bob, however, will confine himself to a purely factual approach.

 

Monitor the Historical Society website for more details in coming months.

George R. Lunn and The Socialists of Schenectady

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

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.