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By Chris Brady
NEW BEDFORD – Visiting this city on Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts’s South Coast region, you might not expect that it was not just once, but twice the richest city per capita in North America — first from whaling, and then from textile production. The old whaling boats are remembered only by the city’s museum to that industry, although in its place now floats a vibrant fishing fleet. And although the many old textile mills still dominate the city scape, many have long ago been turned into condos, vintage shops, or trendy bakeries.
Settled in 1652 by the Plymouth Colony on historic Wampanoag lands, the region first gained prominence as an industrial hub from its near-total dominance of the whaling trade, with New Bedford whale oil illuminating lanterns across the globe. This prosperity earned the city the title of “the richest city in the world” and immortalized it as the setting of Herman Melville’s anti-capitalist monologue Moby Dick. However, as new methods of exploiting our natural world developed, petroleum made oil lanterns obsolete, and the whaling industry was left emaciated. Faced with a growing population of unemployed workers and new immigrants, the city’s ownership class recognized the need for a new direction. The textile industry became the obvious choice.
Not only New Bedford but the entire New England region is deeply intertwined with the textile industry, from Holyoke to Lowell and Lawrence, dominating our economic landscape from the early 1800s to the Great Depression. Yet, New Bedford stood apart, thanks to its unique combination of a huge population of cheap immigrant labor, the new steam engine, and convenient logistical location between its port and the financial centers Boston and New York. This convergence propelled New Bedford to become the largest mill town in the country, becoming the richest city in the world for a second time. The contradictions in this title was not lost on the working class, many of whom earned below-sustenance wages, while shareholders earned exorbitant dividend payouts. Alongside this industrial growth came a prodigious history of working-class struggle, epitomized by the 1928 textile strike—a six-month standoff that brought the city’s mills to a grinding halt. Although ultimately not successful, the 1928 strike provides valuable insights for organizers to learn from for current day application.
The Textile Mills
By 1928, textiles was the largest primary industry in the country, employing 1.1 million Americans and accounting for 13% of all manufacturing employment. Massachusetts was the single largest textile state with some 32 percent of all MA workers employed in the industry.
The American South remained a powerhouse for cotton production, and manufacturing the raw material into textiles domestically was cheaper than sending raw cotton overseas. Out of this paradigm geographic competition emerged between the Southern and New England mills. Both were predicated on cheap labor, the South exploiting the descendants of African slaves, and New England relying on the steady stream of unskilled and mostly European immigrants. The Southern mills were unmatched at producing coarse-cotton products, and the New England mills who tried to meet their production were forced to close, as the Southern industries paid around $12 a week for workers compared to Massachusetts’ $19. The reason behind the wage discrepancy is multi-faceted, but was likely a confluence of racism, less employment opportunities for Southern workers, and a significantly more antagonistic union sentiment than the Northern states had.
However, New Bedford, and much of New England’s mills reacted by producing fine-cotton products instead. For a long time this insulated New Bedford from Southern competition, and allowed it to be a major global hub for the industry. But by 1928 production was increasingly moving to the south.
The conditions were predictably horrible. Workers made on average about $1000 per year, when a subsistence wage in the 1920s was around $1400. Unsurprisingly, women made even less money, and children were regularly employed in the mills. The work was dangerous, and worker safety protections were basically non-existent. The work week was Monday to Saturday and from 60 to 80 hours per week. The mill owners constructed cramped, decrepit worker housing, and it was not atypical for three people to sleep in the same bed.
By 1928, mill workers had long played an important role in labor militancy. Mill workers in Lawrence Massachusetts shocked the nation with their successful ‘Bread and Roses’ strike in 1912. By 1926, the budding American Communist movement was intimately involved with organizing mill workers – successfully organizing the 15,000 strong Passaic New Jersey mill strike.
Launching The Strike
In April of 1928, in response to a sputtering economy and competition with the Southern mills, New Bedford mill owners to push through a 10 percent wage cut. Workers did not take this lying down. On April 16th, 1928 the workers in the mills voted to strike against the wage cut.
The New Bedford strike was a conflict between the old craft unions and the new industrial labor movement. Around 5,000 of the affected 30,000 workers were unionized, primarily for English speaking, non-immigrant skilled laborers, under the independent American Federation of Textile Operative (AFTO) and other craft unions. The AFTO leaders were well connected in New Bedford elite society, for example, the President was also the local police chief. As leaders of the local labor aristocracy, as AFTO leaders were connected to the ownership, government institutions, and social clubs – and the rank and file being composed of the skilled, better-compensated American born workers, translated to the AFTO being a reactionary organization. Still, the employers’ pay-cut was so provocative that it initially united both the skilled, native-born workers of the AFTO, and the larger numbers of semi-skilled, foreign born mill workers.
Enter The Communists
The brewing strike news made its way to American Communist organizers, who arrived prior to the strike vote. Albert Weisbord was integral in organizing the Passaic strike, Fred Beal had been a fifteen years old worker-activist during Lawrence’s Bread and Roses strike, and both of them headed to New Bedford to assist the striking workers. Describing the challenges ahead, Weisbord noted that the multi-ethnic coalition and language barriers would be difficult to organize around, as well as the crushing poverty the workers faced making sacrificing wages untenable, as well as, arguably primarily, the duplicitous craft union which neglected the needs of the unskilled workers being obstacles to liberation.
Weisboard, Beal, and other Communists distributed flyers to the unskilled immigrant workers at the mills, which contributed to the successful AFTO strike vote. They organized a group outside of the craft unions, called the Textile Mill Committee (TMC), which represented the left-wing of the mill workers. They targeted the unskilled immigrant workers. Namely, due to the AFTO not wanting to organize the unskilled workers, and because the TMC called for more radical demands: Abolishing the wage cut and increasing pay 20%, equal pay for women, a 40 hour work week, and more worker protections – for everyone, not just AFTO membership – they were more popular with the immigrant workers than was the AFTO.
The reaction to the newly organized left wing worker movement was not well received by AFTO leadership. They called the TMC ‘communists’, and claimed that the inter-union ideological struggle would negate any potential for worker gains. In reality, the real obstacle to the strike was the AFTO, who spent most of their resources publicly defaming the TMC, and trying to keep the non-unionized unskilled workers off of their picket line.
Tactics The TMC was incredibly innovative in maintaining the longevity of the strike, which lasted for six months. They picketted every workday, and leaned on the unskilled workers to join their lines. They created fliers, held demonstrations, sang songs, held mass meetings, and generally increased consciousness and militancy of the workers. Perhaps most notably, the Communists, in tandem with Workers International Relief, utilized almost all of their strike funds to help offset the poverty incurred by workers sacrificing their wages, creating soup kitchens and funding day-to-day necessities for the workers and their families. Some of the children were temporarily relocated to sympathetic families in New York City to ensure they were cared for.
Fred Beal, who had become one of the faces of the New Bedford strike, even tactically let himself get arrested to provide a moment for workers to rally around. The workers surrounded the police car he was in and tried to tip it over, although the cops eventually were able to bring him to jail for one month. Strikers routinely surrounded the prison. When released, he went back to the picket line.
The proof was in the organizing. The TMC was the lifeblood of the movement.
Capital Reacts
At the start of the strike, the poor conditions of the workers were so obvious, that even the bourgeois press responded with some sympathy, endorsing the AFTO demand to reverse the wage cut. Church leaders turned down bribes from mill owners to preach against the strike and instead sympathized with the workers. Social groups like the Rotary Club, American Legion, and Chamber of Commerce similarly expressed supportive sentiment.
However, as the red scare had been fermenting in the popular American psyche, and as the strike grew longer and more wearisome, popular sentiment shifted. AFTO leaders formally joined the American Federation of Labor Union’s subsidiary, the United Textile Workers, in order to try and wrest control away from the communist TMC faction. With the AFL on board, the Socialist Party sent in representatives from Boston and New York City to change the narrative. Indeed, the Socialist Party of the day seems to have been more concerned with consolidating power in labor institutions than with the plight of working people. Self-proclaimed socialists penned hit pieces in the local press, condemning the TMC as divisive, harmful to the workers’ cause, and claiming that organizing the unskilled workers was fruitless and counter productive. The Passiac strike was revised to be fractious, and not worth emulating in New Bedford. Socialism and the establishment union apparatus were weaponized to kneecap the true popular workers movement, to the benefit of the mill owners.
As the weeks passed, the police got more combative, targeting strike leaders with fabricated charges. Strikers grew increasingly destitute without wages. Mayor Ashley called for the national guard to support the overwhelmed police force, culminating in 256 arrests in a massive brawl with strikers on July 30th. A Department of Labor official was sent to New Bedford to help mediate, as the mills were hemorrhaging money, and demanded state intervention. The previously friendly civil society groups, the local churches, Rotary Club, and newspapers were predictably amicable no longer, and blasted the AFTO line: The TMC and the Communists are the problem!
These variables coalesced into an unrepresentative agreement between the AFTO’s skilled workers and mill owners – compromising on a 5% wage cut. Unskilled workers were not included in the mediation, nor included in the union’s one concession. Only 2,000 workers voted in the following referendum on continuing the strike after this agreement, and within this voting minority, ending the strike won out by a slim majority.
The TMC, understandably, did not accept this – and attempted to rally the workers to reject the agreement and keep striking. However, in part due to the tenuous economic conditions of the time, on October 8th, most of the strikers showed up to work, effectively ending one of the largest industrial labor actions in the history of the Commonwealth.
Lessons of the Strike
The Mills of New Bedford and the rest of the Commonwealth have since left, picking up and abandoning their workers to relocate to cheaper southern states with the advent of the Great Depression, an early premonition for the incoming neoliberal havoc of globalization. The Passaic, New Jersey mill ended up closing in 1929, in part due to owner retaliation for the workers supporting the New Bedford strikers. Beal, Weisbord, Murdoch and other American Communist organizers left town, but they were not discouraged. They understood that New Bedford was a small setback within the broader history of human class struggle. They did, however, glean some important lessons for labor organizers in the future.
The TMC built considerable power within the working masses. They were able to achieve legitimacy, despite being led by out of state Communists, which was an ideology even the unskilled immigrant workers were not necessarily aligned with, by being more effective than the corporate-minded AFTO. The textile committee was simply more effective. They activated the unorganized, provided direction to the movement, and took better care of the striking workers with their soup kitchens and resource allocation. They were militant and uncompromising.
Additionally, the TMC was particularly focused on immigrant workers. The strategy is clear. Immigrants and unskilled workers were the clear majority of the affected strikers, yet the AFTO had left them destitute for years, preferring to solely uplift their own in a selfish and nativist play. As socialists, we know that artificial divisions among the working class only benefit the boss. Craft and company unions are antithetical to our work. Even better, the textile committee would have benefitted from elevating the immigrant workers they represented into more prominent leadership roles. The authenticity is a critical variable – and allowed the press to vilify the whole movement as the work of a few nefarious out of state ideologues.
The strike came at a key inflection point for the American communist movement, at the height of a debate on whether and to what degree to launch new unions like the TMC, or to continue pressing unions like the AFTO to organize the unorganized despite their establishment, nativist, craft, and anti-communist inclinations. Although the TMC failed in New Bedford to win the unionization of the 23,000 or so semi-skilled workers excluded from the AFTO, the general approach would later make strong inroads in the great drives of the Congress of Industrial Unions.
The current landscape of American labor is similarly scourged with compradors and class traitors. Too many modern unions are shades of AFTO, fixated on their status as an institution, leaders getting invited to dinners, and the incestuous marriage between labor and bourgeois political swindlers. Reflecting on the debates of the Communist movement of old is worthwhile when considering how to proceed.
The New Bedford strike lasted twenty-three weeks, involved over 26,000 workers, and resulted in $600,000 in lost wages and millions of lost mill profits. New Bedford has been unceremoniously written-off as a ‘gateway city’ in conjunction with the other working class cities in the Commonwealth. Local organizations have been quick to cast-off the former mill town reputation.
But Beacon Hill nomenclature cannot rewrite the incredible history which happened on the South Coast, or the broader industrial history of the Commonwealth and its mills. The next time the working class of our cities organize, and when we are in the same streets in between the recently renovated mill buildings the old strikers used to walk, we will be ready.
Chris Brady is a member of Boston DSA.
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