Experience in a hard-fought strike, in a real struggle, is the occasion for innumerable local, and personal, revolutions–sometimes counter-revolutions–in the places and people involved. The nation-wide Uprising of ’34 involving a million ‘unskilled’ textile workers certainly was such an experience. Waldo Frank with a series of scenes from the field of battle around New Bedford, Massachusetts.

‘Behind the Textile Strike: Notes on New England’ by Waldo Frank from New Masses. Vol. 12 No. 12. September 18, 1934.

I.

NEW BEDFORD, MASS. AT DAWN, they are all outside the mills: men, girls, mothers with children. The huge structure submerged in mist, leaps suddenly with lights; the gates swing open; nobody goes in. The men talk in lively groups, the mothers smile, the girls have put on their glad rags and there is song in their throats. At the doors stand a few guards, glumly: in half an hour, they swing the gates shut and the lights snap out. The crowd of strikers, sure of its strength, strolls up the long flank of the mill; stretches in the morning sun; idles down to the next mill where stands another crowd before the shut doors.

The strike has begun gaily. Men and women have joy of themselves in their common purpose, like a young animal discovering the beauty and health and potency of its body.

Over on the North Side, before the open gates of a mill stands another crowd of strikers. Half a dozen girls pass forward, their heads a little low, their shoulders hunched. They are going to work. As the guards let them in, women call after them: “Ain’t you ashamed!”; men mutter angry and then ugly words. The thousand strikers understand the six disloyal girls; a sharp doubt stirs in them all, particularly in the women. “We need the money too…maybe they’re right. Maybe we’ll lose and only those girls will win…Rent…milk…coal…winter coats for the children.” The strikers are murmuring against their own fears the faithful presence of poverty and cold. which they see personified in the six girls. They are at work, now. The mill has become the form of betrayal and of the fear of the strikers. Already the holiday mood is gone.

II.

Fall River moulders in the ruins of an industrial era. Small mills, built like castles with colonial windows and ivy on the brick, a half century ago, have been abandoned to the sweatshop rats. And the wood houses of the workers have died into festering shanties, the streets are rank as rotten teeth. A man climbs the outside stair of one of the houses and enters a room, at dawn. A mother stands already at the stove; three men bend over a mimeograph machine in the far corner; and from two cots four children eagerly look up at the comrade.

He takes a leaflet, reads it, and nods. “Here’s another we need at once.” The children hear the words: “…the independent unions…because they hate the U.T.W. [United Textile Workers’ Union] they won’t come out. We got to show ’em that they must come out. We got to make ’em see, even if the A.F. of L. did doublecross ’em, we must stick together Show ’em Make ’em see.”

The men huddle again over the mimeograph machine. One of them is Portuguese, and the first shaft of sun lights his fine hard mouth; another is a French Canadian, lumberly, musical, as if a Northern spruce were walking the world. The man who has come in with the stencil of the new leaflet is a Yankee with the lantern-jaw and gangling limbs of his Puritan forefathers.

“Here, you drink coffee first,” sings the mother.

“No time–“

“You drink coffee first,” she insists.

III.

Back in the South Side of New Bedford, five thousand strikers gather around the bandstand of a park to hear their leaders. Nearby, the harbor waters dance in the morning sun, dance up to the shadow of the silent mills. But a little farther there is a line of mills a-throb with labor: the great tire-fabric plants called the Fisk and the Devon, which recognize no union and worked clear through the six-months strike of 1928.

William Batty, chairman of the strike committee of the U.T.W., gets to his feet. He is a burly fellow with a sharp nose on his red face, and piercing eyes. He praises the strikers, he praises the President, he hurls his contempt and hate at the “Reds who are trying to make trouble.” One gets the impression, as he talks, that the strike is his–and the other leaders’–and the workers are accessories and servants. “Leave it all to us,” is the burden of his message. “Washington” a sacrosanct word; “Strike headquarters in the Carpenters Building”–a Temple which only U.T.W. leaders are good enough to enter. The man has power, and has shrewdness. No doubt of that. Look at the heavy shoulders, the thin-lipped mouth. But where does he belong? He is standing on the bandstand a bit above the workers, he is talking a good deal down to them: one hears, in the rumble of his hatred for Communists and shop-committees, the echo of other voices, more shrewd, more potent: voices of politics and Money.

After Batty comes Ferdinand Sylvia, U.T.W. organizer and local favorite, who is running for State representative on the Democratic ticket. A little, passionate Portuguese he is, and clever. The hard black eyes are nobody’s fool. How he praises the workers! “I am proud of you. You are making history today. We got a great friend in the White House who will help us against the bosses…All you got to do is stick together. We’ll go back to Washington and do the rest.” There is no personal enthusiasm in the crowd for these leaders. But there is devotion to the cause which these men lead; and above all there is the will, tense and a little wistful, to believe that they are truly leaders.

Sylvia speaks of the tire-fabric mills that are still working and holding New Bedford from a 100 percent tie-up. “Go down and picket,” he cries. “Get them all out!” And the mass, five thousand strong, moves quietly down the harbor.

IV.

A youth with the high forehead of a poet starts the picket line before the Fisk and the Devon. Batty waves the crowd on the opposite side of the street, to join; and soon a couple of hundred men, women, girls, are patrolling the plant. They are having a good time. They sing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” and, in lesser number, the old I.W.W. “Solidarity” song.

I slip into the office and ask for the manger. He says he’ll talk to me, provided I do not disclose his name for publication. (I do not blame him.) The same stale line about his “happy family of workers,” and the conscientious refusal to let “outside and alien organizers interfere in our affairs.”

“But,” I ask, “aside from the issue of wages, don’t you recognize a democratic, an American, a human issue? Labor is struggling to organize, like the bosses and business and science. Aren’t you working against the American spirit by discouraging your men to get together? You admit conditions are bad in other mills. Why don’t you encourage these workers to help their brothers by joining the same union?”

The managerial eyes grow cold and blank; the hands twitch. Then, obliquely: “I don’t get you. What good would it do if these men went out on strike with the others? If one is starving, is it better that two starve?”

I expected no better. But as I return to the town center (while the pickets march) for a bite to eat, I find that the waitress is on the side of the strikers: the barkeep opposite the best hotel, mixing me an excellent Tom Collins, says: “Sure the tire fabric mills should strike!” and the garage-mechanic who fills my tank is warmly and openly with the textile workers. This was not the case a few years ago. Even a cop on the corner confidentially leans to me and says: “I guess the boys have got it!”

Up in the Labor Temple a little Scot, Abraham Binns, sits at a desk and runs the works. Dispatches pickets to hesitant outlying mills; ‘phones Washington, puffs his pipe, and wonders where the funds will come from to feed the strikers, if Federal Relief backs down. A sincere old-timer he is, with a good eye for the detail of the battle and no vaguest notion of what, really, the battle is about. A 30-hour week, a minimum wage? Sure! But that a world is breaking? A new world shall be born, lest the heart and body of mankind perish?…I ask him about the National Textile Workers’ Union.

“They’re Communists,” he burrs, as if to say: “They’ve got smallpox and yellow fever.”

The workers think they can make the bosses abolish the stretchout. Binns sees that, he’ll fight for it, too. But he does not guess that what the workers really want is to live and that they must create a new world to live in. What chance has such a leader of labor against the shrewdly conscious Capital, which knows, indeed, that it is fighting to live and to preserve for itself a world to live in?

V.

Yonder in Hazelwood Park, a young woman is talking, who knows what Binns and Batty have never dreamed of.

It is dusk of the first day. Seventeen thousand five hundred of the 20,000 textile workers of New Bedford have come out; the exceptions being those of the tire-fabric mills. The talker is Ann Burlak, organizer of the National Textile Workers’ Union, herself a weaver and the child of Ukrainian workers of Northern Pennsylvania. The Boston and local papers have put the spotlight on Ann. She is the “red flame”; she is reputed to be “in hiding in the tenements of the South Side,” and the police announce that they will run her in “on the slightest provocation.”

Ann is a tall blond girl in her early twenties. Her body bespeaks tenderness and grace; you feel that, were it not for a stronger love, she’d spend a lot of her time dancing. The firm jaw, the clear eye, the intelligent brow, make you understand why there’s so little time for dancing. On the bandstand, all around her, is a bunch of kids. They frolic about none too silent, in the way of children; and I wonder how she manages, with all this distraction, to keep her mind, and her hearers’ minds, on her subject. The local N.T.W. organizer, Walter Burke, has the same concern; and he tries to shoo away the children. But he is far too gentle about it; the kids refuse to go; and when Burke observes that they are not troubling Ann, he gives up. Then it comes to me, that far from disturbing this reputed “fire-eater,” the gathering of children, while Ann Burlak speaks, is the appropriate setting. For truly she is speaking for them, of the gay young world they can inherit, and will inherit, only if their parent-workers know what they want, and fight for it, and learn how to fight. For this “sensational agitator” is, in truth, simple, womanly, and tender: a girl whose motherliness has gone out, in canny earnest sense, to her people.

How different her tone from the U.T.W. leaders who harangued their crowd from the same stand. Ann Burlak appears to have faith in the workers and to be pleading with them to fight…to let no one else fight…their own battle. She has to go easy. If she tells them straight what their leaders are up to, dickering with politicians and capitalists, they will take fright. If she tells them straight the truth her heart is full of: they will turn pale, and glance about them with scared eyes, and cease to listen. It is a subtle task, this leading of the ignorant American workers to the realization of their own needs, of their own powers, of their own nature. Ann Burlak does it well: there is magnificence in her tact, and there is pathos. Gradually, unobtrusively, she leads her hearers to the facts about “arbitration,” to the shortcomings of the U.T.W., to the single devotedness of the slandered “reds.” And the men and women listen. They have come, many of them, to have a look at the “red flame,” to have a good show for nothing. “They say she’s hot stuff,” explained the boys on the bench before me. Curiosity and frivolity fade, as the tall young woman gives her sensible heart and her motherly mind to her hearers. Mothers find themselves face to face with the truth: the bare cupboards of their homes, the bare bodies, the bare futures, of their children. Men see with their eyes what for long their hearts, despite the palaver of journal and politician, have known: that they, the workers, live in an enemy country! Latin, Slav or Yankee, they live in a land possessed and ruled by foes who are sworn to exploit and degrade them.

At the close of her pleading to the workers to know themselves, to respect themselves, to be themselves, Ann Burlak tries to make them sing. The men and women pitifully follow. And I am minded of the singing at a camp-meeting which I recently attended. How the words rang for Christ’s second coming! Surely, had Christ been in the heaven, he must have answered these splendid ringing voices. And the thought came to me: When the workers of America learn to sing for the coming of their Revolution, as their fathers, the Christians, sang for their own pitiful and impossible magic, then the Revolution will not tarry.

VI.

It is midnight, after the first day. Around the Fisk and Devon mills, gravid with lights and labor, stand battalions of police: the comparatively kindly town cops with clubs, and the sinister khaki-clad motor-cops with guns in their visible holsters and tear-gas in reserve. On the park side are massed the strikers a good ten thousand. Glenn Trimble, Socialist minister and editor of the U.T.W. Voice of Labor harangues them: “They won’t let us picket? We’ll see about that. All of you meet here at the crack of dawn. And when the workers file in to work, we’ll have a picket line for them to pass through.”

A Negro in the crowd says, in a quiet penetrant voice: “Why wait till tomorrow? Why not picket now?”

The crowd turns toward the mill; Trimble accepts the challenge, and walks down to head it. The police clubs stop them. The picket line halts, wavers, turns. And its repressed energy gathers in hands behind. Stones fly from the park side, and smash the mill windows. The police press forward.

Seven hours later, huge shut vans roll up to the red buildings and disgorge officers. Far off, beyond an empty lot, fully a fifth-mile from the mills, stands the crowd and boos as the tire-fabric workers pass through to their jobs. Near the gates, they stand in hesitant knots. A man stays behind, while his wife enters. A girl looks up at a bevy of her sisters beckoning from a top mill window, grasps her bag, and joins them. The police, guns swinging, slide across the empty lot and the workers fade in the grey harbor background. “There’ll be no picket line,” shouts the police chief at Batty and Sylvia. “We had enough last night. Look at them windows. If your men come we’ll take care of ’em.”

But while the clubs and the guns mass at the Devon side of the huge block, and the crowds die, before them, another corps of workers comes to birth on the farther slope of the mills; a line forms…marches.

The sun rises, the mill throbs. The clusters of hesitant workers have vanished, either inside to work, or away. Suddenly, a gate swings open. The crowd rises in one voice: “THEY’RE COMING OUT!” And forward, four abreast, march the Fisk workers to join their brothers and sisters.

Sylvia crows like a cock. “I’m proud of you!” And to Mary Vorse and me: “Tell ’em in Washington and New York that New Bedford has the world’s best workers.” Even the cops smile. The walk-out is 100 percent.

I think of the heroic tiny groups of revolutionary organizers throughout the nation: individuals, isolate, threatened, resourceless save for their own luminous spirit. Pleading with the workers, to know themselves, to be themselves, to fight the good fight; while the official leaders and the pack of papers and the towns and the churches vomit their fear of the new world, in the form of insults and lies.

I think of the great show of strength that the Textile Strike–like San Francisco yesterday–has summoned. And of the inevitable betrayal, while Ignorance is in the saddle. When the American workers know what they are, there’ll be a different story.

The Body of American labor is hale, strong, ready. Ready to learn.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

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