The Company Town (4 page)

Today the poetry and many of the tales in the
Offering
seem formulaic, derivative, and sentimental, but a glimmer of journalistic truth peeks through in the reflections on life in the factory and boardinghouses. An 1845 piece by Josephine L. Baker titled “A Second Peep at Factory Life” complains about pay cuts and “the practice of sending agents through the country to decoy girls away from their homes with the promise of high wages, when the market is already stocked to overflowing.” In “Almira's” 1841 “The Spirit of Discontent,” two mill girls debate the virtues of life in Lowell versus that in the country—one asserts “I won't stay here and be a white slave”—before agreeing that “since we must work for a living, the mill, all things considered, is the most pleasant, and best calculated to promote our welfare.”

That magazine, which Dickens said “will compare advantageously with a great many English Annuals,” was the subject of favorable reviews in the
Times
of London and the
Edinburgh Review
. It also drew comment from Harriet Martineau, another English visitor and chronicler of 1830s American life, who effused about the boardinghouse arrangements and the operatives' ample earnings, and noted that “all look like well-dressed young ladies. The health is good.”
¹⁸

The paternalistic Waltham/Lowell system that drew such praise contained several key ingredients. Since workers were to be recruited from a wide area, few would be able to live at home and most would have to stay in boardinghouses, as at Waltham. But Lowell's hundreds
of boardinghouses had to provide more than shelter: After all, families needed to know that the young women—most of whom started work as mere teenagers—would not only be safe and well-looked-after, but that they would reside in an atmosphere of civility.

The older women who served as boardinghouse keepers provided supervision and made sure the girls were in by 10 p.m. The presence of such cultural totems as pianos and libraries reassured families that, as management often stated, they were not surrendering their daughters to a lifetime of toil. No, whatever time elapsed in Lowell was more akin to a period of preparation for later life, perhaps even for marriage. Lowell would not threaten middle-class aspirations: The girls could read and discuss the latest literature and poetry, even write their own compositions, continue their musical studies, and come of age in refined surroundings. Circulars that survive suggest a lively intellectual and cultural scene, with elevated amusements including lectures by such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a society given over to the headlong pursuit of wealth, nineteenth-century American women were required to become counterbalancing agents of culture and moral sensitivity. Lowell would help them fulfill those roles.

Operatives were required to attend church (paying a “pew fee” to support the institutions), and their morals were the object of close scrutiny by a “moral police” system in which the boardinghouse keepers and even the other operatives played a key part. Companies had the power to fire anyone charged with immoral conduct, including consuming alcoholic beverages or even attending dancing classes. Operatives' contracts required them to commit to one year of service and to give two weeks' notice before quitting. Anyone who fell afoul of the moral policing or failed to serve out her term of work would be denied an “honorable discharge” upon leaving—and would be blacklisted from employment in the area. (The corporations, of course, offered no guarantee regarding the length of employment or steadiness of wages.) Such in loco parentis, observed historian Norman Ware, was capable of “being turned into a very effective and harmful despotism.”
¹⁹

And despotism there was, in the form of still more regimentation: Bells, bells, bells rang all day. The factory bell woke workers at 4:30 a.m. and another summoned them to work at 4:50. A bell announced when
it was time to begin and end each meal, and another rang at 7 p.m. to signal the close of the workday. Finally, a 10 p.m. bell announced the curfew. The tocsin governed a twelve-hour working day, six days a week, with only three annual holidays.

Then there were the incentives: Unlike the Rhode Island system, where companies paid operatives with credit at company stores, in Lowell the operatives received their wages in cash. Workers there had no say over their wages or hours of work. But the pay—$12 to $14 a month in the 1830s—compared well with other alternatives, especially farm labor or domestic service, and it was six or seven times the average teacher's salary. Although some operatives doubtless sent money home, many saw Lowell as a way out—a means of escape from family dependency—and in time used their savings as a dowry or for college tuition. For older daughters, possibly encouraged to leave home to ease the burden on their fathers, emigration to Lowell was akin to the westward migration chosen by many young men.

Most of the operatives—75 percent in the 1830s—did live in boardinghouses. The food seems to have been plentiful and pretty good, with meat served twice a day and such treats as apple pie and plum cake regularly featured. But ventilation was poor and the places were crowded, with twenty-five women per house and as many as six per bedroom, two per bed. Privacy was unknown. Familiarity must have bred at least some discontent, with the women working and living together every hour of the day. Still, Lowell offered a lot that was unknown back on the farm, including the lectures, library books, and stylish clothing from the town's stores.
²⁰

The system had its critics: Some intellectuals likened factory labor to slavery, concentrating their fire on Waltham/Lowell rather than Rhode Island's laissez-faire system, which offered little care for its workers, including the “little half-clothed children” who made up a large part of that state's textile labor force. The Boston
Daily Times
—aligned with the Democratic Party as opposed to the factory-owner Whigs—staked out a position of opposing the entire factory system, which it saw as robbing operatives of their dignity and independence. The 1841 pamphlet
Corporations and Operatives
, written by a “Citizen of Lowell,” charged that workers had only fifteen minutes for meals, were made to
live in vermin-infested housing, were subjected to regular wage cuts, and even experienced outright theft of their time, as factories added more minutes to the working day each year. (Charges that management cheated workers of their free time arose regularly: Writing to the reformist
Voice of Labor
in 1846, one Lowell mechanic alleged that the mill clock was “fixed,” slowing down to add minutes to the working day, then speeding up at night to summon the operatives earlier. In Pawtucket, citizens raised $500 to purchase a town clock that would not be subject to the manipulation suspected of the factory clock. )
²¹

But Lowell operatives demonstrated that they were hardly slaves by engaging in two dramatic work stoppages, in 1834 and 1836. In the first of these, falling prices for textile products prompted management to announce a wage cut. In response, the workers circulated a petition “pledging not to enter the factory” on the day of the wage reduction, and eight hundred stayed out. One-sixth of the workforce paraded through the Lowell streets, expressing their independence as “daughters of freemen.” They saw the wage cuts as an attack on the independence of spirit that lay behind their very decisions to migrate to Lowell. Although shocked, the Boston directors refused to yield, and the walkout came to a quick end.

The 1836 actions were even more pronounced and, coming at a time of high demand for textiles and labor shortages, disrupted production considerably. When the companies raised the room and boarding fees, about 2,000 operatives, or one-third of the total workforce, “turned out.” Many may have left the city, as several mills were forced to run at less than full capacity for months. Some of the boardinghouse increases, at least, were revoked.
²²

In general, the late '30s and early '40s were hard times. As new mills in other towns ramped up production, oversupply followed. Lowell mills ran part time and hundreds were laid off. In an attempt to restore profits, the corporations sped up the machinery, assigned workers once responsible for two machines to as many as four machines, lengthened the workday to thirteen hours from eleven, and cut piecework rates. Moreover, supervisors who got the greatest production out of their workers got cash bonuses. Once again, the Yankee mill girls' bid for self-sufficiency and independence was threatened, and in response they pressured the Massachusetts legislature to enact statutes limiting the workday to ten
hours. Yearly petitions from Lowell received thousands of signatures from operatives. The
Voice of Industry
, a pro-worker Lowell newspaper whose editorial committee included former operative and
Offering
contributor Sarah Bagley, was a leading voice favoring reform. In contrast, the
Lowell Offering
, which had come into existence with the intent of bettering factory conditions, became a corporate defender, opposing reform and steering clear of criticizing the companies.
²³

In the 1850s, the Whig Party, strongly supported by the Boston Associates and hewing to management's side in the ten-hour agitation, lost electoral control of the statehouse to a coalition of Democrats and Free Soil Party members. While this may have seemed a positive sign for reform, dark clouds loomed on Lowell's horizon.

The companies' original paternalistic orientation was waning, reflecting a broader ownership of company stock and a generational shift in top management. And the labor force was changing. The Yankee girls had never stayed for long in Lowell: the average period of employment was around three years. Now, despite the best efforts of labor recruiting agents who patrolled Vermont and New Hampshire, such women increasingly were turning elsewhere—to westward migration and to other professions that offered better pay and more independence. Meanwhile, beginning with the potato-famine-inspired migration of the 1840s, immigrants, primarily from Ireland, were eager for mill employment and disinclined toward militancy despite three cuts in piece wages during the 1850s. Increasingly, Lowell was moving toward a family-labor system like that of old Rhode Island, employing adults and children alike. By 1850, the companies had abandoned requirements that workers live in company-owned housing and attend church. Ever more employees lived in private housing, especially since the construction of company housing had not kept pace with the expansion of mill capacity.
²⁴

The days of enormous profits were also coming slowly to an end. The Lowell companies tended to pay out much of their profits in the form of dividends to investors; during the 1820s, these generally ran around 10 percent of investment, increasing to nearly 15 percent in the 1830s. But in that decade, the cost of erecting new mills fell sharply, resulting in the appearance of more and more competitors—even as the Boston Associates expanded. Most new outfits were small. The Boston Associates themselves
built new factories in Chicopee, Massachusetts, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Saco, Maine. Then in 1845, they decided upon an ambitious new development at Lawrence, Massachusetts, making the Essex Mills the first to rival the scale at Lowell. In 1847, a similarly ambitious plan was announced for what became Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Even with the U.S. market growing in the West and South, there was too much production. By the late '40s, the country entered an economic depression. In 1857, five of the Associates' now numerous companies failed, including the Middlesex Co. And with the outbreak of the Civil War, the supply of cotton from the American South was cut off and most of the Lowell mills shut down. (The exception was Middlesex Mills, which produced woolen cloth used in Union troops' uniforms.) Ten thousand Lowell workers lost their jobs.

Nathan Appleton, a president or director of twenty-two textile companies, was active in management until his death in 1861. But much of the founding generation was long gone—Kirk Boott had died in 1837—and a third generation of management was in charge. Critics charged these new managers with nepotism and incompetence, even callousness toward the workers. In general, the later generations of the Associates were preoccupied with a wide range of businesses, including railroads, banking, and insurance. Philanthropic missions, including the Boston Athenaeum, Massachusetts General Hospital, the McLean Asylum, and educational foundation the Lowell Institute, also occupied their attention. It is fair to say that the idea of Lowell as a model town no longer held its original fascination for the businessmen.
²⁵

The original experiment was all but dead, even though Lowell mills continued to operate well into the twentieth century.

Enormous changes were apparent when the mills reopened after the Civil War. For one thing, steam power was slowly replacing hydraulics, and by 1880 the city of canals relied more on steam than on water power. This shift, which was being made all across the U.S. textile industry, benefited other textile centers more than Lowell, particularly Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts, which were located on the coast and could get
their coal shipments via oceangoing transport. Another profound change in Lowell: The transition to immigrant labor, begun in the 1850s, was now complete. No longer needed to house the Yankee mill girls, the companies gradually sold off their boardinghouses to private owners, who turned them into tenements.