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The Autobiography of Ann Washington CratonAuthor(s): Alice Kessler-Harris and Ann Washington CratonSource: Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 1019-1037Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173258 .

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The Autobiography of Ann Washington Craton'

Edited and with an Introduction by Alice Kessler-Harris

Ann Washington Craton worked as an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union in the early 1920s. She was one of a still com- paratively small number of female college graduates for whom educa- tion and the changing times opened up possibilities beyond traditional marriage. In college she had been an eager student of the social philan- thropy of Jane Addams and Florence Kelley. Partly through them, she had developed a critical vision of America and an urgent, idealistic de- sire for change.

After she graduated from George Washington University in 1915, Craton went to work in the social service agencies of wartime America. Between 1916 and 1918, she worked successively for the Board of Children's Guardians in Washington, D.C., as an adoption supervisor in rural Virginia, and as a girls' vocational guidance counselor under the auspices of the New York Child Labor Committee. In 1918 she was gathering statistics on the cost of living for the U.S. Department of Labor. By now she was convinced that she was, as she put it, "a born

1. The unpublished manuscript is in the Ann Craton Blankenhorn collection at the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Excerpts are re- printed here by the kind permission of Philip Mason, director of the Archives. Additional letters and records may be found in the research division of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in New York City. Articles written by Ann Craton include: "Rats: an Organizers Story," Nation 115 (August 30, 1922): 204-5; "Bertha, The Sewing Machine Girl," Nation 123 (December 29, 1926): 689-90; "Facing the Famine Line," Nation 126 (April 4, 1928): 373-74; and "Working the Women Workers," Nation 124 (March 23, 1927): 311-13.

[Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1976, vol. 1, no. 4] ? 1976 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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1020 Kessler-Harris Ann Washington Craton

reformer and crusader." Her work exposed her to striking steel workers, to Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers who were secretly organizing a union, and to the fear of the Red Scare. It introduced her to the ideas of such socialist and anarchist agitators as Kate Richards O'Hare and Emma Goldman. Confused and distressed about her own role in this difficult period, Craton floundered. Then, Julia O'Connor, leader of the Boston Telephone Workers Union, led her members off their jobs in support of striking Boston police. Craton recalls that she knew immediately what she wanted to do. She wanted, she said, "to organize working girls."

When her sympathy with unions got her fired, Craton went to Sid- ney Hillman's Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to look for work. The Amalgamated in 1919 was one of the so-called new unions-a maverick organization that chose to remain outside the cautious confines of the American Federation of Labor. Its leadership had rebelled against the job-consciousness, hierarchical structure, and craft organization of the older, much larger, and far more influential Federation. Instead, the Amalgamated, dominated by socialist influence, offered a vision of industrial democracy, a world in which workers would divide the profits of capital and exercise control over the work process as well. The union could, its leaders thought, achieve this vision by uniting all garment workers, by encouraging industry-wide cooperation to end strikes and lockouts, and by instituting such specific, and for 1919 startling, pro- grams as union banks and unemployment benefits. The Amalgamated shared with the remnants of the Industrial Workers of the World both a commitment to organize the unskilled and energy for the women and immigrants who fell within its province.

In the six years between its birth in 1914 and the end of 1919, when Sidney Hillman hired Ann Craton as an organizer, the Amalgamated had become an amazing success. By 1920, its organizers, focusing on big cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Rochester, had enrolled about 175,000 skilled and unskilled operators in the men's clothing industry. Their efforts helped to produce one of the most highly organized industries in the United States. From 75 to 80 percent of the workers in the trade were union members. This was an achievement in a highly competitive industry, still subdivided into small shops, in which 60-70 percent of the workers were unskilled women. From the begin- ning, Hillman had tried to select organizers who spoke the language of potential members. Nevertheless, though many of the industry's workers were Italian, union leadership remained predominantly Yiddish speaking.

Rapid success had not been accomplished without pain. Employers, seeking to escape the influence of the Amalgamated and of other unions in the clothing trade, moved their factories away from urban centers and into rural areas where they hoped to find cheaper and less militant labor sources. These "run-away" shops found homes in places like the beautiful Schuylkill valley of central Pennsylvania's Appalachian mountain re- gion. In the small anthracite coal mining towns that dotted this area, miners' wives and daughters seemed an ideal labor supply. Unskilled,



Summer 1976 1021

they were often Polish, Lithuanian, and Slavic immigrants whose men- folk earned wages low enough to make an extra income a welcome and necessary supplement. Miners' high rates of injury and death forced many women into the labor market. And, except for occasional domestic work, there was no other employment available.

Even before World War I, New York and Philadelphia manufacturers of men's clothing used skilled cutters to lay out patterns and cut garments and then shipped the cut goods to factories scattered in West Virginia and the Appalachians. They had not been the first to see the advantages of the available labor supply. Manufacturers of cotton and woolen textiles, men's underwear, and women's housedresses and kimonos had been setting up mills in the coal towns since the turn of the century. Militant trade union tactics in the big cities accelerated the process after the war. Soon every mine had its mill. Unskilled women and young girls sewed and finished clothing.

Though women at first welcomed the income generated by available jobs, they soon found themselves caught in a collective nightmare. Wages, initially high enough to attract workers, were continually reduced as families became dependent on the extra income. Employers, who paid by the piece, rotated their workers so that a person who acquired skill at one job and could earn reasonable pay was transferred to another where she had to learn a new process before her pay once again increased. To earn even a pittance required cruelly long hours of labor, and to support a family on mill wages meant sending every child to work. Occasionally a paternalistic manager released his married female workers an hour early so that they could prepare the evening meal. But wages, of course, dropped in proportion to the reduced hours of work. Most mill owners lived in faraway Philadelphia or New York and never saw their factories in operation.

Craton began organizing in the area in the winter of 1919-20. She had several advantages: women who were distressed and disgruntled by their working conditions; communities where a generation of miners' unions had made organization familiar; family and social pressure on the side of unionization; and the support and encouragement of a national organization convinced that low wages in the Schuylkill undercut the earning power and ultimately threatened the jobs of city workers. Her campaign also benefited from a year of harsh labor struggles that had encouraged the notion of striking to remedy grievances.

Craton took advantage of these conditions to conduct a successful organizing drive. Records of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in this period often refer to her as "one of our best organizers." The union responded to her success by granting her repeated pay raises within a few months after she had been sent to the Schuylkill. Afterward, the union sent her to New England, Akron, Binghamton, and Rochester.

In all these places the absence of a Yiddish accent stood Craton in good stead. She organized women whose cultural experiences threatened to isolate them from union leadership. Articles and short stories that she published in the Nation, and in the union journal, the Advance, frequently worried over these differences. Much of her

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unfinished autobiography, which is excerpted here, reflects the same concern. She speaks repeatedly of the close relationships that developed between organizers and organized, and of the frustration of potential members who could find no English speaker in the office. In a moving letter to the national office, written on January 26, 1920, shortly after her arrival in the Schuylkill, she described the sense of betrayal union members felt at the loss of a beloved organizer: ". .. it will make it very difficult without her, as they cannot understand why she should be will- ing to leave them in such an unsettled state, when they gave up everything for her and are now being deserted. That is their attitude, and it gives them a loss of faith in the Union .. ."

These glimpses of the fears, sensibilities, hurts, and joys of the organizing process are the focal points of the autobiography Craton began to write in 1944, after she had married and retired from the union. Although she seems to have worked at the task for the next ten years, the manuscript was never completed and it has never been published. Yet it is an invaluable historical document. It offers an authentic record of years spent organizing working women. It illuminates the places where problems of ethnicity and class meet and confront each other in the organizational process. While Craton's descriptions of families and of male, female, and child workers reveal the limits of Craton's middle-class values, they provide, concurrently, an honest vision of her perceptions. Out of the autobiography emerges a pattern of warmhearted, trusting, and negotiable tactics which withstood the tensions of class and culture. It remains a useful measure of feelings about trade unions in past time.

As long as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' constituency was largely Jewish, Yiddish was the language of the organizer. But the transi- tion from Jewish to non-Jewish workers demanded a new kind of organizer: one who could speak the language and transmit the requests of "American" workers. The change created tensions among the old guard. When Hillman assigned Craton to Philadelphia for training, he might have anticipated the rough reception that followed. She did not speak Yiddish, and she had never worked in a factory. Honest skepticism masked a deep gulf between immigrant sympathy for unionization and a distrust of what immigrants felt was American hostility to unions. Craton plunged into the chasm with a will that enabled her to organize workers who had remained unmoved by Jewish arguments and accents. Yet, as these excerpts indicate, she never lost contact with her own past.

* * *

Workers milled around a pretty, dark eyed girl called Isabel who was typist and bookkeeper. When there was a lull in the dues and as- sessment paying, I introduced myself to her, as she spoke passable En- glish.

Isabel called Mr. Silverman, the manager of the Shirtmaker's

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Union, from his small office. He shook hands silently with me, before bursting into voluble Russian.

I looked helplessly at Isabel. "You don't speak Russian?" she asked. I shook my head. She and

the manager talked together and he addressed me again. Once more I shook my head.

"You don't speak Yiddish?" Her shocked question made everybody stop talking and stare at me.

Some of the men gathered around Mr. Silverman, arguing loudly. I knew they were discussing me, in none too pleasant fashion. To hide my embarrassment, I asked Isabel what they were saying.

"They are saying what good are you, if you cannot speak Russian or Yiddish. They are saying for why has Brother Hillman not understood the desperate plight of the Philadelphia shirtmakers, when they ap- pealed to him for an organizer. For why has Brother Hillman insulted the Philadelphia shirtmakers by sending them a shiksa?"

"A shiksa .... For why am I a shiksa?" Isabel and Mr. Silverman shrugged their shoulders, spread out

their hands and made very distasteful faces. Then they began to laugh. Agnes, across the room, talking to a group, laughed, too. Before long everybody in the room was looking at me and laughing.

Agnes came over and shook hands with me. "Don't mind the dopes and dumbheads," she said. "They think it is funny because you are gentile. Are you really a native born American?"

She turned to the Manager and the shirtmakers, berating them in a mixture of Yiddish-English, the substance of which was: the new comrade speaks the English language and you laugh. She speaks the English language you study at Immigration classes. Why are you not glad that the comrade can help you improve your miserable English? But, no, you are so lazy that you only want to speak Yiddish. You are insulted because the sister is a shiksa. Are not the open shops full of shiksas, who take the bread out of your mouths? Forget your race prejudices and welcome the new sister as a comrade?

As the shirtmakers crowded around me, shaking hands, still looking at me as curiously as I looked at them, Agnes asked me, "What shop you work in, in New York? Do you bring greetings from I. Goldberg and Alex Cohen?"

I was forced to admit that I did not come from the industry and that I was not a shirtmaker.

Agnes threw up her arms and made a gesture like tearing out her hair. The shirtmakers imitated her, moaning what sounded like oey gavel, oey gavel, a bourgeois intellectual! For why did the Philadelphia shirtmakers deserve such an insult from the General Office?

The situation was saved by the dramatic entrance of a striking look-

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ing, dark eyed, olive skinned, black haired girl in a handsome fur coat and a tall Russian astrakan cap.

"I am Nina Samorodin," she said, shaking hands with me. "I am the organizer for the shirtmakers. I am sorry I was not here to greet you. Brother Hillman telephoned me about you. He wants to make an organizer out of you."

She turned away from me, dropping her precise English. To the others she spoke in excited Russian.

"Come with us," she said to me. "We must hurry to the picket line. Already we have had many arrests...."

I soon found out that the Philadelphia female, Gentile element were anti-union and anti-Jewish. They were "class conscious" with a vengence. "Workers of the world, unite?" They were sure they had everything to lose by joining the Union. They associate with "ignorant immigrants?" They work in unsanitary, fly-by-night "union shops?" They worked in clean, airy factories, with washrooms and restrooms. They worked with "their own kind," even if their hours were longer and their pay was less than in union shops.

Agnes was sad when I reported back what American girls said. Agnes knew that jobbing shops, opened for the war boom in Army shirts, though unionized, were dirty and airless. She argued daily with bosses about fire escapes, washrooms, restrooms. These jobbing shops would disappear when the postwar demand for civilian shirts ended; then Agnes said, immigrant workers would walk the streets, starving, unless the established open shop shirt factories were organized. It was my job, to organize American workers and to break down their disgraceful race prejudices!

My organizing the "native element" got results because of Postwar inflationary prices and the wave of union organization which swept the city. American girls, eager to make money, began joining the Union in a rush. Anonymous letters, telephone calls poured in begging for organizing committees, leaflets, home visits. We were so rushed that the Execu- tive Board voted to ask the General Office for another American woman organizer. I couldn't be in front of the shops and in the office at the same time. There had been disastrous results when American girls stormed up to the office, only to storm out again, because there was no officer there who could speak acceptable English.

President Hillman telephoned Nina he had an American woman in mind: Pauline Clark, a wartime Washington associate on the National War Labor Board. Pauline was also a friend of Nina's from suffrage days, when Pauline was editor of the National Woman's Party's "Suf- fragist."

The Executive Board took to Pauline, at once, fascinated by her ash blondness, her lavender tweed suit, her white gloves and her Bryn Mawr assurance. And Pauline liked Jewish food and dairy lunchrooms. But

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she did object to the shabby rooming house where Nina and I lived. Pauline moved into a pleasant roominghouse in a better neighborhood on the same Spruce street, where I joined her. Nina soon followed, although she pretended to sniff at the middleclass atmosphere.

Pauline wanted to learn the trade, so she got a job as learner on sleeve plackets, at $8.00 a week in Jacob Miller's large open shop. Learn- ing to operate a power machine and acquiring speed proved very ex- hausting. The next week she was fired because someone reported she was seen going to the Union office. After that, Pauline joined me in front of the shops.

Pauline introduced us to the Reading Terminal's famous Oyster Bar. Nina and Agnes looked on in deep distaste as we sprinkled lemon and tabasco on oysters on the half shell. They had broken with their orthodox upbringing but both admitted to inborn prejudice against shell fish. Nina ate unorthodox bacon and ham with gusto. Agnes, not to be outdone, ordered bacon, but when it arrived, she toyed with it, as I toyed with kosher pickled herring....

On Saturday afternoons, the shirtmakers rushed off to public bath houses, where they met their relatives and friends in the dressmaking and millinery shops. They shampooed their long hair together and splashed in the pool together, swapping stories about "what was what" in Philadelphia Jewish workingclass circles. They were accustomed to public bathhouses in Russia. Their cheap rooming houses possessed few, if any real bathrooms. While I promised to go to the 25 cent bathhouses with them and to $1.00 Turkish baths patronized by Agnes and Nina, I never did, partly because I was not used to so much female nakedness and partly because it was my chance to wander around Philadelphia alone.

It was my guilty secret that on Saturdays I lunched at upperclass tearooms, with damask table cloths, instead of red checked ones, where well dressed women spoke English. I was glad to be away, briefly, from the bullying shirtmakers in the world I'd escaped from.

* * *

Problems of manners, language, style, and propriety continued even after Craton left Philadelphia and began organizing in the anthracite coal country. In Tremont, Pennsylvania, she adjusted her own ex- pectations and living standards to prevailing conditions. It took her longer to recognize that similar problems of culture and style injected themselves into the organizational process among women workers of different ethnic backgrounds. These excerpts point up her growing awareness of competing demands from church and family, and the need to respond to male sexual advances in ways that would neither hurt her position as an organizer nor her own self-esteem. She seems to have been buoyed by the clear and repeated assurance from female workers that she and other organizers were needed and wanted.

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In the passage that follows, Craton recalls her first encounters with the language and culture of union members.

* * *

They tossed off steadily the most obscene language I had ever heard, mixed with profanity and with copious sprinklings of Holy Mother of Gods and appeals to the Blessed Saints. I soon found out that their appalling language was commonplace in Tremont; men, women and children hurled it at each other in casual fashion. I turned all colors at their four letter words, I had seen written on fences, but had never before heard spoken aloud. But no one noticed how startled I was. The first Sunday I was in Tremont I met the mine committee coming out of church. We shook hands and chatted a bit. One of the men said that he had heard I was having trouble disciplining my young strikers. His com- panions agreed that the girls in Tremont were a bunch of hoodlums, with no manners and no respect for their betters. One of them said, "Don't let them on you too much."

For a moment, I was afraid that I was about to faint in the snow at their feet.

Would I ever get used to that dreadful four letter word-their favorite.

My life in Tremont was miserable in every way. While I was invited to share a bed with one or two girls, I preferred to sleep in the cold, bare room over the smelly lunchroom, rented to unwary traveling men.

If only the Wetzels would take me for a boarder. The Wetzel Tavern, a substantial, brick corner house, had been closed for two years. The Wetzel saloon was the most genteel saloon in Tremont. It's linoleum was waxed, its tables scrubbed, its brass spittons polished. Behind the mahogany bar, glasses and beer mugs sparkled. Presiding over it all, was stolid Fritz Wetzel, the perfect picture of a German barkeep, with his iron grey hair cut German style, and his white apron.

Mrs. Wetzel was still a pretty woman, with pink cheeks, blue eyes and white hair. Her life had been so full of boarders! She feared if she relented and took me in, drummers would crowd in again, She agreed, however, that my plight was pitiful, so in a resigned fashion, she told me to come back for supper at 5:30. She would have a room ready for me.

So I became a member of the Wetzel household. I ate three or four hearty Pennsylvania Dutch meals a day and I slept in a large room, in a spool bed, with a featherbed, warm blankets and a crocheted coverlet. I had fresh white curtains in my windows, and my towels and bureau covers were edged with tatting. So were the padded covers of my slop jar and chamber, which matched my six piece washstand set ....

In addition to the 20 Bob and Baskind's strikers, there were now a dozen discharged boys and girls from the Fox's shirt factory on the back

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street. Strictly against orders, they wore their Union buttons to work, so that they would be fired. In order to get them back to work, I had a committee of older girls who had also joined the Union, to ask for the reinstatement of the discharged dozen. If Mr. Fox failed to reinstate, my instructions were that the shop was to walk out in protest.

To my consternation, Mr. Fox not only refused to take back the kids he'd previously fired but he promptly fired the negotiating committee. The shop failed to walk out. What was wrong? When I talked to Fox employees, hurrying home after work, they amazed me by insisting that they there sticking to Mr. Fox who had promised them wage increases. They didn't want to join the Union. Why didn't they want to join the Union? I asked them. Their sisters and cousins belonged to the Union. They giggled and brushed past me.

When I called at homes, mothers treated me coldly. Fathers got up and stalked out of the room. The action of the men made the girls titter but mothers remained aloof.

Something was terribly wrong. Was it a Protestant-Catholic issue? The Bob and Baskind strikers were largely Irish Catholic and the "big girls" were also Catholics. I was aware of a Methodist gentility in homes of many Fox workers; small organs with open hymn books, framed religious mottoes on parlor walls. But Catholic homes also had framed religious mottoes. They had plaster madonnas on their mantels instead of Victorian ornaments. Catholic homes were more apt to have player pianos than organs. There were the same plush family photograph al- bums on parlor tables in both homes. They both had the same dining room tables where children studied their lessons around an oil lamp, while mothers clipped threads on mounds of Mr. Fox's white shirts, now that grey shirts were "scab." There were the same kitchens. Off the kitchens were the same "shanties" heated by oil stoves, where men and boys had their nightly baths. I never saw a man or boy, bathing in the kitchen, before the family, in Tremont.

The question of Mr. Fox's employees not joining the union became an issue in the miners' union. One of the girls remaining aloof was the daughter of the President of the miners' local union. In desperation I asked the Wetzels what was back of it all. Mrs. Wetzel looked distressed. Mr. Wetzel blew his nose, long and loud when his wife signalled him to keep quiet. I knew the Wetzels were annoyed at the six boisterous loud mouthed Irish girls who barged into the saloon at all hours, allegedly looking for me, despite being told they were to come to the Tavern side door, when they wanted to see me.

How I disliked these tough girls, whose faces were smeared with cheap makeup which failed to hide their bad skin. Their soiled boudoir caps failed to hide their greasy, unwashed hair, wrapped in kid curlers, which never came off. Always ready the curlers proclaimed but there never was an occasion worthy of their removal. The ringleaders were the

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O'Dooley sisters, Mahala and Bridget, who were under 18. Mahala to my regret was elected President of the Tremont Branch of Local 164 by cheering Bob and Baskind girls.

Unexpectedly, I got my answer as to what was wrong, from a Bob and Baskind girl, running down the street. "Are we having a religious war in Tremont?" I asked her, as she affectionately took my arm, as we walked to the Kilkenny Hall. "Don't Methodist and Catholic girls mix?"

"It's because you let the 'whores' run the Union," she replied. "The Fox girls don't want to be in the Amalgamated because Mahala and Min- nie are the officers of our new local. People say they go 'whoring.' People say Rose has the 'bad disease.' People say Eileen is in the family way.... People say you should keep the bad girls out of the union and let the nice girls run it...."

I went back to Pottsville, eager to show the superior males that organizing in the anthracite regions was not going to be as complicated as they believed. That was the trouble with men: they like to talk while women like action!

The Estonian Hall was on top of an ice coated hill. When I reached the Hall, it was dark and locked. I stood in the snow drifts by the door, blowing on my fingers, holding my hands over my ears, stamping my feet, wondering why Irma hadn't sent a girl with the key.

At seven o'clock when no one came, I gave up in despair and slipped and slid down hill to the factory which was as dark and deserted as the Hall. What had gone wrong? On my way to Irma's I ran into Helga who said that she was looking for me to tell me that everybody had backed out and no one wanted to join the Union.

"Why don't they want to join the Union?" "The Boss told us it was a no good Union-a Bolshevik Union. He

talked to the priests about it and the priests told us not to join. Irma said that she was so ashamed of her shopmates' attitude that she had not wanted to face me. What could she do when the girls believed the priests."

I sat by the stove drinking tea, as pessimistic as Irma, until little Olga piped up: "The girls have to stay home to crack nuts for holiday sweets."

Helga and Irma agreed that there was a lot to be said for little Olga's reasoning. Girls did not want to risk being fired so near Christmas....

Word spread around town that an Amalgamated Clothing Workers' organizer was at the Pottsville Hotel. One evening an embarrassed delegation from the Carpenters' Union called on me. Another night the painters' and bricklayers' Committee for good and welfare came; a third night the barbers and meat cutters arrived. A school teacher, calling himself a Socialist, wrote, asking permission to call on me. He arrived before I could reply. He was a shrunken little man who talked long and earnestly to me in the lobby, while curious traveling salesmen looked on. The school teacher came back the next night to tell me that I was an inspiration to him. On Friday instead of talking about Socialism, he




Summer 1976 1029

insisted on taking me to the movies. When he got there he wanted to hold my hand. His hands were moist and clammy. I put up with the school teacher because I wanted to be invited to address the Central Labor Union. On Sunday night he came around to the hotel to say that he had arranged an invitation for me and that he would personally escort me to the meeting.

I was a great sensation at the Central Labor Union. The President who was also the chief of the Pottsville Fire Department hailed me as the new Mother Jones. No one asked if the Amalgamated Clothing Workers was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor.

I was a sensation in the Hotel lobby, too. The traveling salesmen, sourly looking at the unattractive little school teacher, finally tumbled to what made me the belle of the ball. With broad smiles they attempted what they considered a fast one: "Good evening, young lady, I have just blown into town. I am a walking delegate from Sandusky. How about taking in a show?"

A rival crashed in: "He's a fake but I am a Union brother from Jersey City. How about a little supper at the Necho-Allen?"

As if I would step my foot into the new modern yellow pressed brick Necho-Allen, the coal operators' hotel which was patronized by corpora- tion lawyers and superintendents of the Reading Coal Company and the luncheon clubs!

What pleased me as days went on were the steadily increasing badly spelled notes in childish handwriting from young shirtmakers in all the surroundings towns begging me to organize them. I answered them all, writing that after Christmas I would come to St. Clair, Shenandoah, Port Carbon, Mahonoy City, Ashland and Girardsville.

I spent my evening visiting the shirtmakers in Minersville, getting acquainted with the people from the Baltic provinces whose names were Bogopolsky, Radzwanoich, Tsetonowsky, Ramonmanarestoene and far more difficult names to spell or pronounce.

* * *

Even the best organizers faced continual problems in the field, and those who worked for the Amalgamated had more than their share. Like other unions, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers faced mill owners' hostility to unionism of any kind. But in addition, when they had a choice, employers often preferred to deal with affiliates of the more conservative American Federation of Labor whose behavior was pre- dictable and whose demands seemed more reasonable. Their preference often proved painful to the Amalgamated's hard-working organizers. When the Federation invaded fields already under the Amalgamated's sway, town officials supported the more conservative union.

Dual unionism could be a complex issue. In 1919 disaffected United Textile Workers split from the AF of L-affiliated union to create the

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Amalgamated Textile Workers. The dissidents took shelter with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, sharing its facilities and its organizers whenever possible. In the incident recounted below, Mary Heaton Vorse, a veteran supporter of the 1919 strikes, agreed to accompany Ann Craton to a Pottsville, Pennsylvania, silkworkers meeting. Both women were "on loan" to the Amalgamated Textile Workers. Vorse was replacing a sick colleague, Dora Lohse, the brilliant and temperamental architect of organizing strategy for the area. The meeting was sponsored by the Central Labor Union, an umbrella organization, headed by re- spectable townsmen. When AF of L representatives appeared at the last minute the following scene ensued:

* * *

In the second floor corridor, a delegation of Carpenters talked to a group of silkworkers. They all ignored me. The school teacher came along. The schoolteacher brushed past me to join the carpenters. Silk- mill girls who generally made a big fuss over me trooped past with barely a nod.

"Let's go into the hall," said Mary. The door was locked, on the inside. Upstairs came a policeman. Behind the policeman was a stout, red

faced man in a foreman's red hat. He carried a fireman's red axe. I recognized Mr. Stevenson, the President of the Central Labor Union, who was also Pottsville's Fire Chief. Mr. Stevenson shouted, "There they are, there are the wildcats. Throw them out. We won't have them here."

Mr. Stevenson pointed his red axe at Mary Vorse and at me! There was a scuffle. Inside the hall we heard shouts, loud talk, The

door was unlocked and disheveled Plotkin was shoved violently toward us.

"This man is a Russian, officer," bellowed the fire chief. "Throw him out, too. This meeting is under the auspices of the Pottsville Central Labor Union. We won't have these people here." He flung himself before the door, his fireman's hat over one eye, his axe over his shoulder.

"It is not Mr. Stevenson's meeting," I shouted, waving the $3.00 rent receipt. "I paid for this hall for the Amalgamated Textile Workers."

Silk mill girls, some in tears, now crowded around us. "We didn't want to change Unions. Mr. Stevenson made us do it. He said we had to belong to the American Federation of Labor."

More people were coming upstairs, escorted by another policeman. I recognized the silkmill organizing committee and the officers of Plotkin's new local union. With them were two heavy set middleaged men with their hats on the back of their heads, heavy gold watchchains across their vests and cigars in their mouths. Behind them was a portly red-haired Irish woman.

"AF of L organizers," gasped Mary Vorse.




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"Madam, you and this Russian represent wildcat unions," said Mr. Stevenson. He waved his axe at me, "You deceived the good people of Pottsville. The Central Labor Union stands with Samuel Gompers against dual unionism. As President, I have invited the representatives of the American Federation of Labor's United Textile Workers to take over this new local union."

Mary, Plotkin, and I followed the two policemen downstairs. They said they didn't know what it was all about.

As we walked through the Hotel lobby, a salesman said, "That's the goddam Union crowd who have all the bathrooms." Said another, "I hear all their money comes from Moscow." Said the hotel manager: "Gentlemen, this hotel will be glad to see the last of them. They have given us a bad name."

We knocked on Dora's door. Dora was in bed, looking at fashion magazines. "What's happened?" she demanded. "Why are you home so early?"

When we told her, Dora stood up in bed, in her long, white night gown. She hurled magazines and pillows at us. She flung her bedroom slippers at us. "You didn't force your way in the hall you had paid for? You didn't call the manager? You didn't tell your story to the people? You let that red haired Sarah Conboy and the United Textile Workers steal your $300.00 Treasury, your 300 members and your Charter? You parlor pinks, you intellectuals, what good are you in the labor move- ment? You innocents, why couldn't you be prepared for an AFL raid?"

* * *

Shortly after this incident a United Garment Workers Union organizer came to a near-by town, intending to set up a competing AF of L-affiliated local. By now the entire community was angry about the earlier raid. Male and female workers united to defend the "women's" union. Together the two groups were almost unbeatable.

Craton recognized their strength the moment she arrived in Pottsville. In a letter to her friend and mentor Nina Samorodin she quoted a town official to the effect that "if the miners give us permission to use their hall, 'no one could stop us.' " The excerpt that follows begins with a rumor that the enemy organizer is about to appear.

* * *

After our experience in Pottsville with the United Textile Workers stealing the silk workers union right under our noses, we were in no mood to have the U.G.W. attempt the same tactics. ... It would have been so easy to have agreed that he was a labor faker and to have left him to the tender mercies of the miners who could have been trusted to make a beautiful job of it. But we decided against it.

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The situation was very critical so we sent three small boys, who worked in the Shirt factories and who were loyal Union members, to announce through out the town that there would be a special meeting that night for everybody, girls, mothers and fathers. Strange rumors had been circulating all day, and everybody was curious and everybody came. The Amalgamated meeting made the Churches empty that Sun- day night.

The audience listened intently to the story that was told them of the two organizations, of the history of the United Garment Workers and of the history of the Amalgamated, of the membership, of the policy and standing of the two. They listened again to the story of the $100,000 check to the Steel Strikers. We told them about the stealing of the Silk Mill in Pottsville. And we said that this organizer was coming to Tre- mont, solely to make trouble and to force the Shirtmakers to enter the United Garment Workers, when the Amalgamated had been first in the field, had done the organization work, and had made the first effort to emancipate their daughters from their long hours and low wages.

The miners were fair and square. It was an underhand trick and they knew it and they expressed themselves freely. Again they offered to handle the visiting gentleman, as they thought that he should be han- dled. Then the secretary of the local spoke up. "You said that we were affiliated with the A.F. of L.;" he observed thoughtfully. "Well, we ain't; the United Miner Workers may be, but this local ain't. Our papers are in but they aren't signed. We don't have to let him in."

"Let him in, but let us in," said the organizers. "Give us the same opportunity to speak you give him. Let him speak, and let us speak. Decide yourselves the merits of the United Garment Workers and the Amalgamated." And so it was decided.

The locked out Amalgamated girls were intensely excited. They clamored for a description. They announced that they would meet every train with tin cans. One of them had been quietly and zealously collect- ing tin cans for the scabs, but she thought that this was an emergency where they could be sacrificed, and she would even lend some to her best friends.

Early the next morning, a crowd of excited girls dashed up to the house for the organizers. "Come quickly, he is here at the station. We haven't done anything to him yet but call him names, so do hurry."

"How do you know it is?" we asked. "Because he is fat and wears a light overcoat, and everything else

you said he looked like, and he asked us questions about the Union and he asked to see our Union buttons and Union books."

At the station surounded by an excited crowd was a very harmless, much perturbed, and rather scared saleman, explaining to one of the girls' father that all he wanted was to have a little joke with the girls, and he had not intended any harm, etc. and etc. Fortunately for him his train came, but not convinced that he was a saleman, two of the girls got on




Summer 1976 1033

the train with him. "We think that he is going to Donaldson to steal our Union girls there. He is afraid to stay in Tremont. If he does not get off at Donaldson, we will believe that he is not the organizer, but we are not taking any chances."

An embarrassed and huffy salesman had the discomfiture of having his every move watched by two determined little girls, seated opposite him. At Donaldson, however, he continued on his way, so reluctantly convinced, his guards left him and trudged back to Tremont through the snowy country.

At the next train in the afternoon there was more excitement. Two men arrived who were not salesmen. They gave fierce glances at the girls and went immediately to the two factories in the town. There they remained for some time, to emerge at lunch time with the bosses, engaged in the most friendly conversation. We were convinced that they were organizers from the United, invited by the bosses to sign up their shop from the inside rather than allow the girls to join the Amalgamated. At the meeting that night, the U.G.W. would simply announce that the Shops were his and there would be the end of it.

Such ajoyous relief it was when two self appointed little pickets, who had been faithfully shadowing the strangers came in to announce that the men were not organizers but sergeants from the State Constabulary, called in to "run the organizers out of town."

That night from miles around came the United Mine Workers from the little nearby towns; old miners who scarcely attended meetings came out; men working on the night shift gave up their work to fight for their Union daughters and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. And for miles around came every Union girl, with their Amalgamated button pinned in their little knitted tams, in imitation of their daddies working buttons. Beside, pinned on their coats were large, conspicuous signs, with Amalgamated, shoe blacked in large letters. We glowed with pride at our pickets. "We are going to that meeting," they announced deter- minedly. "It is all fixed. Mahala's pop is door keeper and he is going to sneak us in. We can sit on the floor."

Then two husky miners came to escort the organizers to the meeting. "He is here," they announced grimly. "We have got the largest miners meeting we have had in years. Nothing is going to be put over on us. The fellows are down in the hall telling him what they think of him."

In the ante room of the miners hall, in a far corner, looking acutely miserable and very nervous and most unhappy stood the U.G.W. organizer, Berkson, in whose honor this mammoth overflow meeting was held. A group of miners surrounding him were still saying a few things to him. "He said he does not want to speak," they greeted the Amalga- mated ladies. "He will speak," cried another, "he came here to speak, let him have his say."

The miserable Berkson continued to speak through a third party. "He says that he did not come here for any debate or argument, that he

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did not come here for any trouble. He says that he thinks that he will go."

"Hell, he won't go," someone answered, and the United Garment Workers' organizer was roughly pushed out of his little corner into the room and told: "Go ahead and say it."

He said that the intruders were the Amalgamated and that he was always welcome to an A.F. of L. meeting. He lauded the A.F. of L. He said that an organization which was not in the A.F. of L. was utterly worthless. He spoke of the fact that the Amalgamated was generally known as an I.W.W. Union. Where there was so much smoke he thought that there must be fire. Because of this he had come to Tremont. He wanted to save these innocent girls from such a Union, and he knew that their father loyal Mine Workers and A.F. of L. members would now see that he was rescuing the girls and would support fully the United Gar- ment Workers, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor.

Then the nice young miner who was secretary got up raging with indignation. "We ain't no A.F. of L. Union," he said. "All of you mine workers have heard how this fellow has been telling us how we ain't no good because we don't belong to the A.F. of L. Are we going to let him call our Local names, and tell us that our local and The Amalgamated ain't no good? You came to Tremont a little too soon Mister. You don't belong in this room yourself. We ain't affiliated with the A.F. of L.

Maybe we will affiliate but not while you are around." It was a sad moment for Berkson and it was ajoyful moment for the

Amalgamated members, who from the floor applauded vigorously. The miners applauded, too.

Brother Berkson got so excited over it all. He rose up and insisted

upon explaining. He went into such details of the tailoring trade and told so many things about cutters and pocket makers and vest makers that everybody was bored. And he knew it. They did not even listen. Some one asked if he had anything else to say. He had not. But his

questioner had. It was to announce that there was no train out of Tre- mont that night, but there was one early in the morning.

The situation was so favorable I decided we could risk a vote. I asked the Chairman of the meeting to call for a vote. The Union members must decide for themselves, as they were all present.

"What Union do you girls want to belong to?" he asked them, "this fellow's Union or Miss Craton's Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America?"

With a great cheer they all voted to remain with the Amalgamated.

* * *

Organizing immigrant daughters from England posed entirely different problems from those presented by the children of the Schuylkill




Summer 1976 1035

valley. In the winter of 1920-21, Boston, New York, and Baltimore manufacturers locked out union workers in an effort to break the union. Craton was sent to Weymouth, Massachusetts, to help out Italian organizers stymied by "Yankee" women who would neither talk with them nor cooperate in any way. Where earlier she had been too proper, too concerned with language and behavior, Craton discovered that she was not proper enough for genteel Massachusetts. She was carefully super- vised, went to church to learn what the women were up against, and bought new night clothes to avoid the slur of indecency. When the cause was just and the time ripe, women in the anthracite coal country went out on strike solidly and picketed enthusiastically. In contrast the Mas- sachusetts church women Craton encountered stayed out ot work reluctantly and risked their good reputations if they were seen with an organizer.

* * *

... Well off church women concerned with moral problems of factory hands banded ambitious girls who wanted to improve themselves into Prayer circles which were held in factories, homes or in churches. At Prayer circles they engaged in "genteel Christian conversation" [and] listened to inspirational talks about being content with their lot as "duti- ful daughters, kind sisters and fond aunts," in villages where there were six women to every man. Nevertheless the ungenteel girls who made fun of the Prayer circles had beaus on Wednesday nights and later acquired husbands.

I went to prayer meeting with them and heard the minister entreat them to be content with their lot and not be fooled by false gods and not to put their trust in deceivers, meaning me.

The minister was in a panic over the first industrial strife to disturb his church. His Sunday morning congregation of shoe factory superintendents, stockholders, retired industrialists, lawyers who commuted to Boston and well off town business men, were outraged at factory hands, who were church members, getting mixed up in a strike.

The women who now listened to me, rather than to the minister, were stalwarts of his dwindling Sunday evening congregation. They were also the obliging, dependable women who peeled potatoes, cooked over hot stoves and washed dishes for the minister's money raising church suppers ....

By the end of the first week, I telephoned Miller in Boston, I was making progress. Four women in North and South Weymouth stopped work on condition they would not picket or attend strike meetings. Four women in Cohasset and Weymouth Landing also stopped work. They remained in seclusion in their homes, secretly accepting weekly strike relief.

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Miller laughed at my adventures with the "native element" and asked when I was coming to Boston for a bath.

How I longed to escape from the prying eyes of Ma and Miss Lucre- tia in their Boston rockers, who so enjoyed their nightly diversion of watching me undress. They disapproved of my navy blue Italian silk knickers-my "revolt" from petticoats. They boasted they wore a grey flannel petticoat topped by several petticoats, white and dark. Their skirts came to the top of their high laced shoes, while I wore oxfords and French blue wool stockings with red clocks. Not that I ever saw an inch of their petticoats because they never even untied their shoes while I was present. Nor did they ever wash their hands or comb their hair in front of me.

Ma called my silk knickers "as disgraceful as 'tights' which wicked actresses wore." Ma loved to talk about "wicked actresses," who used cosmetics and smoked cigarettes. ... One night, Ma grabbed my pink crepe de chene nightgown off me to examine under the lamp. She had never seen a sleeveless, low neck nightgown like it and she called it "indecent." When my door was shut, I heard Ma say, "If she's a nice girl, why is she running around the country in the dead of winter, in a sinful nightgown?"

How I wished Ma could be rushed off to the Poor Farm! But I'd sleep like a log and the next day was another day. How could I take away my board money, now increased to $17.00 a week, from Ma and Miss Lucretia? How could I rob them of the prestige of boarding the organizer? Ma told the neighbors about me. I'd overheard a woman say, "I'm for Unions, but our girls have got to be careful of their reputations, running around with that short-haired organizer." And in the postoffice, I heard an old woman tell another old woman, that my nightgown was sinful.

Indignantly I had flounced out of the postoffice to a small mer- chandise shop run by two spinsters, gossipy village characters. I made them paw through their stock for an ugly, bulky, long sleeved, floor length, high necked cheap white outing flannel nightgown with china buttons down the front.

Whether the nightgown did it or not, I felt I was accepted, because neighbors now pressed a pie or crullers or a glass of jelly on me, "to help Lucretia out with my board." I was also invited for baked beans and fish cakes, on nights when Miss Lucretia solicited subscriptions for the Ladies Home Journal or took orders for tea and vanilla.

* * *

In the end, Ann Craton found the key to organizing these women by inviting them to do what they knew best. Since they would not picket, she encouraged them to set up food lines for striking workers. Drawing




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on years of experience at church suppers women broke out of their caution and united to support workers of all nationalities actively. The church fathers, of course, demanded that Ann Craton stop them. She could not and would not. And the manufacturers resorted to an injunction that broke the picket lines.

* * *

I returned to East Weymouth, for the last time, on Wednesday, for a farewell tea party at Miss Elvira's, after Prayer meeting. Miller had given me funds to pay them two weeks strike relief. Jobs would be found for them in Boston as soon as possible in small shops rapidly settling with the Union.

I found them flustered and excited because Miss Lucretia, Sis Jen- kins and Dorothea Brown were not at Prayer meeting!

A telephone call from the Hingham police station soon informed us that Miss Lucretia was there, arrested for assaulting and battering two loyal workers.

Miss Lucretia arrived to explain she had knocked off Dorothea's hat and had rubbed snow in Sis' face and down her neck-her last chance before the injunction went into effect the next day. She had told them both things she'd had on her mind for 20 years. It was worth the $2.00 fine.

As Miss Lucretia had her tea she announced she was through with Prayer meetings! She was through washing dishes and cup towels at church suppers! It was all the rich-off morning congregation women thought they were good enough for and it was time they faced it.

Silence, then applause. Suddenly Miss Elvira whipped up her skirts to her bony knees, displaying cheap, new fibre silk pink bloomers. "Look at me," she giggled. "I am a woman in revolt."

Sarah Lawrence College

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