Amoskeag

              One hundred fifty years after the twenty-year golden era of the Yankee Mill Girls who found freedom and a paycheck of their own in the mills of Waltham and later Lowell, Massachusetts, the lives of the mill workers in the biggest textile factory in the world were far from liberated. The names of the workers whose lives were expended tending the spinning frames or fixing the machines – Mary Cunion, Mary Dancause, Antonia Bergeron, Omer and Marie Proulx, of the first generation, and later names with Polish and other European endings  -  tell the story of waves of immigrant workers making their way through these massive brick factories.  From 1814, when the Boston Manufacturing Company opened the first vertically integrated operation on the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts and discovered the huge profit potential in faster machine speeds and bigger dams, to the sad and tumultuous events that closed the Manchester site in 1936, the story of the U.S. textile industry has been one of first female, and then entire families’ way of life.

It is hard to read these oral histories without feeling great sympathies for the workers, and a certain suspicion of the mill owners, despite their acts of largesse or beneficent community interest.  Having been on both sides of the mill gate, I cannot help but wonder if the golden era of the Yankee Mills girls could somehow have been extended to include immigrant families in the 20th century?

Nevertheless, the real recollections and observations of the actual workers captured in this book speak more truth than any of us outsiders could ever construct.  At its height the Amoskeag complex employed up to seventeen thousand workers in thirty major mills.  The facility was essentially independent, having its own power plants, machine shops, sports leagues, playgrounds and worker housing.  According to Hareven, more than 2/3 of Manchester’s employment opportunities were dependent on the Amoskeag, and until the 1930’s no new industry was permitted in the city without their permission!  In fact from 1837 to 1936 Manchester was a mill town.

Marie Anne Senechal started as a spinner in 1910 and worked her entire life in the mills.  After her mother died when Marie was twenty leaving behind an apartment filled with kids, the oldest daughter took over the care of the children as she continued to work in the mill.  “We were working for $6.00 per week to pay that rent,” she recalled.  “We always needed a big place because we were so many.  With eleven people…”

Escape

Marie’s father disappeared into the woods for long periods where he earned only $3.00 or $4.00 per week as a wood cutter; in the woods, Marie recalls, the men lived on salt pork.  As soon as the children were old enough they went to work and contributed to the rent.  Although Marie was asked to marry, her family responsibilities intervened.  “I couldn’t get married because I had to bring up a family, and he had to take care of his mother…He kept taking care of his mother, and I kept on bringing up my family.  I thought I’d never marry.  I was sixty-seven years old when I got married….”  Although marriage may have seemed an escape for some female mill workers, apparently not every girl was eager to immerse her life in it.

During the strike of 1922, workers stayed out for over year.  Conditions had changed and many, but not all workers joined the union.  Marie was chosen to deliver management’s new reduced wage plan - $11.00 or $15.00 per week. Although she was fired for union activity, when she went back looking for a job, the downstairs workers stopped all their looms, and demanded that the boss hire her!  She was given another set of looms. 

“But I liked weaving, she said, “and it was better than going out and working somewhere else, so I did the best I could…. At Arms Textile, where I worked from 1939 till 1962, I had to promise that I would never bother with the union. .. When you’re put out of a job, you think twice.  If you want

to work, you don’t say anything.”

Betty Skrzyszowski worked in the Chicopee Mill until its shutdown in 1975.  When the Chicopee shutdown came workers in the weave room were told they would be “working just another week…   everything’s  been picked up and trucked away.  The other day they had ten trailers backed up in there, taking cards (carding machines)… They’re sold.  But the looms – I don’t know where they could sell them.  But they have to be out of the mill.  All the machinery is going.  You can’t get parts for some of the looms anymore because they’re so old, so I imagine they’ll junk them or maybe sell them to a small mill which can use them for spare parts.  .. When I first started, all the looms were run on belts… There were two thousand looms in one weave room, about four or five thousand looms altogether.  

People don’t say very much when they’re leaving. They’re sad and a lot of them cry.  It’s a bad thing when there are no jobs to be had.  If only you could say, “Well, the heck with it.  I’ll go out and get another job.” But there’s just no place to go.  After you put that many years into a place, it’s like a second home.  You go every day, you know how much time it’s going to take you, and you come home at a certain time.  Just a nice routine.  You know what to do and how to do it, and you know how long it would take you.  Nobody bothered you.

You knew you had a job to go to.  It was a good feeling.  Now you know your time has come, and you feel lost.  You just have no place to turn.  I’ve spent half my life in the mill, really. Because I’m fifty years old, and I’m going on twenty-three years in the mill.  If there were other mills, you could say, “I’ll go to another mill.  That mill is just as good.”  But there are no other mills to go to.

There’s no more weaving.  There are no more old looms any more.  Everything today is modern.  I don’t know how to explain it, but you’re connected with the machinery.  It’s a part of you; it’s your life.  I love the mills.  I love to work.  I loved being a battery hand.

If you gave me my choice, if you said today, “Which would you rather have, a thousand dollars right here or the mills starting up tomorrow?”  I’d rather have the mills start up.  I’d feel secure then; I’d have a job.  I’d know what I was going to do.  I’d know that I could handle it.  This way, I’ve got to go out and start over.”

Betty and Marie’s stories are no longer only the stories of blue-collar workers in a shrinking textile – or shoe, or high tech – industry trying to feed their families and pay the rent.  The same sadness and stupefying loss Betty describes at the closing of Manchester’s last mill is echoed now in middleclass and professional venues.  The same sudden and shockingly terrible deletion of their futures struck Enron workers.  As hundreds of small businesses slipped away during this recession, thousands of American workers struggled with their own upscale losses – their savings, their homes, their kids’ college funds, even their retirement nest eggs.

And I have to ask, when we look back on these tough ten+ years when so many of our companies closed, was all the outsourcing worth it?  The equation that justified so many shut-downs and transfers to the Far East was missing one single big factor – shipping and handling costs.  Someone said that executive bonuses were paid out based on gross revenues, rather than actual profits that included these “overlooked” charges.  I dismissed that statement as a corporate myth, but later I asked myself…. Could it be true?  Did we really ship out the machines and dismiss millions of workers because it was possible to make a single bottom line number tell an inflated revenue story?  Isn’t that what Enron did?  And Tyco?

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