1928: The Strike

On Monday, 9 April 1928, the New Bedford Cotton Manufacturers' Association announced a ten per cent cut in wages, to take effect the following Monday. ^[1] The mills said the cut was needed to keep running against competition, and that mills across New England had already made it. ^[1] The Textile Council, the city's seven craft unions, voted to strike, 2,571 to 188. ^[3] On 16 April some twenty-seven thousand workers in fifty-six mills walked out. ^{[2] [1]}

The strikers

The craft unions were old in New Bedford, but most mill hands belonged to none: when the strike came, only about a fifth of the cotton workers were union members, and the strike brought out everyone. ^[5] Labor Age, a union monthly, put the average wage at about nineteen dollars a week before the cut, and cited a study claiming the mills had made fifty million dollars in ten years. ^[4] Two organizations led the strike. The Textile Council kept to limited picketing and was ready to arbitrate. The Textile Mill Committees, led by Communist organizers including Fred Beal and Albert Weisbord, organized the unskilled, mostly Portuguese and Polish workers, and ran mass picket lines and parades in defiance of the police. ^{[4] [5]}

Not every owner agreed with the association. Walter Langshaw of the Dartmouth Mill stayed outside it, did not cut wages, and criticized its "interlocking control" in a letter to the New Bedford Standard. ^[5]

The Guard in July

By July the mills meant to reopen. When only a handful of National Guardsmen volunteered for duty as special police, Mayor Charles S. Ashley ordered the 2d Battalion of the 101st Field Artillery, Major Harold Winslow commanding, to the State Armory by municipal precept. ^[6] Captain Charles F. Perry Jr. commanded its Battery D.

Many of the guardsmen were strikers themselves, or strikers' sons. Major Winslow said they were willing to keep order but "preferred to be ordered to duty for fear their attitude might be misunderstood by fellow workers if they volunteered." ^[6] The Daily Worker, the Communist paper, told the same moment from the other side: at the Saturday drill "Captain Charles Perry, Jr., and Lieutenant Charles Stanley" called for volunteers for strike duty, and "not a single man stepped forward." ^[7] The New York Times reported that "the ninety youths called on to do guard duty are either directly connected with the strike or are children of strikers." ^[8]

The mills opened their gates on 9 July. Almost no one went in, and there was no disorder. The battalion was released the next day. ^{[8] [9]}

The bayonets

Late in July the Textile Mill Committees planned a parade without a permit. On 28 July Battery E of the 241st Coast Artillery was held at the armory under a new precept, issued with the governor's permission; Perry's Battery D, "which did strike duty recently," was away at summer camp at Camp Devens. ^[10]

On Monday, 30 July, police arrested 256 pickets at the Whitman and Kilburn mills. That night a crowd of about ten thousand surrounded the central police station. The riot act was read, and Battery E, about 120 men, cleared the streets with fixed bayonets. ^{[11] [12]} The Associated Press called a report that someone had been stabbed "erroneous"; the United Press reported that one man was said to have been wounded. ^{[12] [13]}

On 4 August Battery D came back from Camp Devens and relieved Battery E, which left for its own summer camp. A few hours later the mayor released the military altogether, giving his order to Captain Perry as commander of the unit then on duty: "The time or occasion for the services of the military has expired." ^[14] Battery D had stood by in July and returned in August; on the record, it was never used against a crowd.

The end of the strike

Arrests went on through the summer; Labor Age counted more than a thousand. ^[15] On 6 October the Textile Council's unions narrowly accepted a five per cent cut instead of ten, with thirty days' notice of any future general cut, and the mills reopened on 8 October. The Textile Mill Committees called it a sell-out. ^[16] The strike had lasted twenty-five weeks. Seymour Wolfbein, writing in 1944, found that New Bedford's cotton mills employed half as many workers in 1928 as in 1927, and that "the disastrous strike of 1928 and the unemployment which followed it had broken the militant labor spirit in the city." ^[5]

The other side of the family

Across the bay, the Long family lived in Ward 6 of Fall River, the other great cotton city, where the 1920 census found Thomas Long and eight of his children. ^[17] What work they did in 1928, and whether any of them worked in the mills, is not yet in the archive's records.