RATTLE AND HUSH: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF BROCKTON, MASSACHUSETTS
© Mike Mellor, 2005
Section of Centre Street now Legion Parkway. Robert A. Kane.
PURITAN TENDECIES IN PROGRESSIVE POLICY
Alongside nearly every declaration of Brockton's superior work ethic and resultant prosperity went the beaming statement that Brockton was a dry-or "no-license"- town, as if it were an elementary case of cause and effect. The Bryant Brothers wrote in their 1891 book,
"The city is well policed, and for three years the no-license law has been vigorously and successfully enforced. The absence of bar rooms in a manufacturing city is quite remarkable, and points to the temperance character as well as the thrift of the working people."
Although the idea of a town's forbidding alcohol being a measure of the working class's moral compunction is absurd to contemporary thought, one can't blame nineteenth-century thought for misunderstanding a set of circumstances it had never before encountered. Although Brockton's structural innovations were decidedly ahead of the times, the personal ethics of its prominent citizens were still stuck with more than just remnants of the Puritan lifestyle.
The Keith family's ancestral patriarch is James Keith, a Scottish-born reverend and disciple of the famous zealot Increase Mather. Keith presided over Bridgewater in the middle of the seventeenth century and his son moved to the North Parish with Zaccheus Packard and Henry Kingman. They proceeded to form the First Congregational Church and a branch of the American Temperance Society.
The Keith Walk-Over Factory
When one congregational church couldn't meet the needs of the community, Josiah Kingman, Jason Keith, Azor Packard and their families formed the South Congregational Society. The Keiths, Packards and Kingmans became the principal businessmen, philanthropists and politicians of the city and maintained their predominance well into the twentieth century. This brought their family background of strict adherence to Puritan principles into the social fabric of the city at large.
This lifestyle persisted with little incident as long as the population was at least Protestant and largely Anglo-Saxon, as it was during the first two waves of economic expansion. The Swedes were the first non-WASPS to enter the community in sizable numbers, in the 1840s, but they were largely Protestant and notoriously reserved. It wasn't until the approach of the twentieth century that the Catholic, and eventually Eastern European, communities grew roots in Brockton. The clash was inevitable.
The first two strikes in Brockton factories occurred in 1885. The first was at the M.A. Packard plant, where female workers were in a dispute with a foreman. The women were members of the Knights of Labor, which ultimately struck over the dispute. The other strike, much larger in scope, came as a reaction to a manifesto signed by forty-two shoe manufacturers to uphold their rights of undisputed firing and hiring. The Knights of Labor, this time with the Laster's Protective Union, again struck.
It is nearly impossible to prove, but the labor strife almost certainly involved non-native born laborers. Both the Irish and Italian communities had footholds in Brockton by 1885, and the idea of women working in factories was not a possibility until there were women who were not of the chosen Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock available to exploit. Is it also merely a coincidence that alcohol was not formally outlawed until 1888, coinciding with the large-scale settling of working-class, Catholic and historically heavy drinking nationalities?
Robert A. Kane
Labor strife more or less abated for some decades as the country's recession of the 1870s and 80s faded and Brockton underwent another economic expansion, again related to shoes. It wasn't until after another war-World War I-that the bubble burst and caused more labor unrest, this time with higher risks. A fantastic case in point illustrating the relationship between the Catholic, European working class and the xenophobic WASPy elite is that of Anthony Bimba, which William Wolkovich says in his book, Bay State "Blue Laws" and Bimba, "triggered one of the most colorful episodes in American history."
Anthony Bimba was a Lithuanian-born itinerant lecturer based out of Brooklyn, New York. Touring the network of Lithuanian enclaves in the Northeast, he stopped in the Montello section of Brockton, largely Baltic at the time, to speak to a crowd amassed at the Lithuanian National Hall in January of 1926. Widely known for his socialist views, Bimba had recently grown more outspokenly communistic and militant towards capitalism and religion. He represented one side of a bitter argument between Baltic people, the other side being devoutly Catholic and wishing to assimilate into America.
Allegedly on that evening, "blasphemous and seditious remarks were expressed." The general public knew of this only because two fellow Lithuanians on the opposing side to Bimba were present in the crowd and brought a charge of each crime against him. The unusual aspect of this situation is the lack of use these state laws got prior to Bimba. The blasphemy law stems from a 1614 law in the hellfire and brimstone Massachusetts Bay Colony that was amended in 1697 to say,
"Whoever willfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing, or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judgment of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost...shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars...(5)
The sedition law, on the other hand, was a new law enacted just six years earlier to protect against the rising threat of Bolshevik-style revolution in Ye Olde Commonwealth. It read,
"Whoever by speech or by exhibition, distribution or promulgation or any written or printed document, paper or pictorial representation advocates, advises, counsels or incites assault upon any public official, or the killing of any person, or the unlawful destruction of real or personal property or the overthrow of the commonwealth or of the United States, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than three years, or in jail for not more than two and a half years, or by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars*"
The leaders of Brockton found these to be causes worth advocating. The Brockton Police (the same unit that arrested Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti six years earlier) acted on an anonymous tip to have Bimba arrested at another speaking engagement in Worcester, one week after his visit to Brockton. Bimba was then extradited and gained the unfortunate distinction of being both the first person to be tried under the new law and only the second person in over three hundred years tried under the old one.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts alleged that Bimba, in Lithuanian, said what translates to:
"Here we are organizing Lithuanians among Lithuanians, and the Jews among the Jews, etc., to overthrow the American Capitalist Government by a revolution in the same kind of Government that they now have in Russia. Workers are out of employment. They are persecuted here in America and now is the time to organize."6
Though there is no Bill of Particulars in any court pertaining to the blasphemy trial, one local newspaper included this account of what Bimba allegedly said:
"People have built churches for the last 2,000 years and we have sweated under Christian rule for 2,000 years, and what have we got? The government is in control of the priests and bishops, clerics, and capitalists. They tell us there is a God, Where is he? There is no such thing. Who can prove it? There are still fools who believe in God. The priests tell us there is a soul. Why I have a sole, but that sole is on my shoe."
Understanding that the alleged statement was in Lithuanian, it is highly doubtful that soul and sole are homonyms in that language. The only account detailing that trial is obviously fabricated. The court acquitted Bimba on the blasphemy charge and found him guilty on the sedition charge, fining him $100. That conviction was later overturned in an appeals court.
The arrest and subsequent trial made international news. The press outside of Brockton lambasted the city for its invocation of blue laws and the fact that one of his accusers collected funds from prominent Brocktonians (including a Douglas, a Keith and an officer of the YMCA) to fight Bimba in court. As Wolkovich tells it, an International News Service story began with the sentence, "The shades of New England's puritan ancestors rose here today to defend the Gods against the onslaught of atheism." The story was so big that even the New York Times ran stories ("Bimba trial starts under puritan law") and editorials on the affair, ending their coverage with the scolding, "Brockton cannot be particularly proud of what it has done."
Though this era can be seen as the beginning of the end of Brockton's role as the herald of progress, it is sadly the other way around. Two of the most ill-conceived phenomena of modern American history-Temperance and McCarthyism-were foreshadowed there by three decades. Bimba himself went before the House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1957, thirty-one years after standing trial in Brockton for basically the same charge; asserting his First Amendment right to free speech by criticizing the ruling class's subjugation of poor people. Unfortunately consistent, as Brockton was ahead of the curve in societal progress and conservative social backlash, so too would it be for the demise of manufacturing in the United States.
Notes:
5 In case you are wondering, the only difference between the original law and the 1697 edit was that the original was punishable by death.
6 Let's hope, for Bimba's sake as professional lecturer, that he was a little more eloquent in his native tongue than the translator was in English.
