RATTLE AND HUSH: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF BROCKTON, MASSACHUSETTS
© Mike Mellor, 2005
Main Street, 1921.
VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS
In 1921 Brockton celebrated its centennial. A pageant was held to reenact the valorous deeds of those Indian-swindling settlers, a book was written for posterity, and President Harding extended greetings from the White House, saying, "Brockton's celebration of its Centennial Anniversary beginning today, will remind the Nation of the wonderful industrial progress our Country has made in the past century." The news sounded good; from 1900 to 1920 Brockton was America's leading shoe-producing city, which was particularly lucrative during yet another war. Warren P. Landers boasted at the time in Brockton and Its Centennial,
Centennial re-enactment of the deed transfer from Chief Massasoit to Miles Standish. Stanley A. Bauman.
"The city has developed a great trading center. A writer on the shoe industry raises the question, 'Are we nearing the end of the growth which may safely be built on one great industry?' (Seth Bryant.) When one takes into account the commercial importance of Brockton, the problem assumes a different aspect. In addition to the factories for shoes and the thirty or more accessory shops, Brockton has expanded its life that it ministers largely to a cordon of surrounding towns. Ten banks are further vouchers for thrift."
What nearly everybody failed to notice was that a) an economy as narrowly specialized as Brockton's is doomed to failure, and b) New York overtook Brockton as America's shoe-producing leader in 1921. Beneath all of this celebratory dressing the city had gaping wounds, and nobody in the power structure was willing to do anything to stop the bleeding.
The only contemporary dissenting voice on record (Bryant posed his prophetic question in 1890) now lies buried in rows of file cabinets in Harvard's Loeb Design Library. In the annual reports of the Brockton, Massachusetts City Planning Board, chairman Willard F. Jackson made eloquent and cogent prose as early as 1914 out of his displeasure with Brockton's course, the unwillingness of the establishment to cooperate with necessary progress and his beautiful vision of a city living up to its reputation.
In his first earnest report-the fifty-plus page second annual-in 1915, Jackson presented a damning condemnation of the city leaders' inaction to keep pace with the needs of an ever-growing population.
"Brockton has a reputation for progressiveness. You should sustain this hard earned reputation by adopting a plan of civic development that will correct the errors of your short-sighted predecessors*You seemingly fail yet to realize that your position today is similar to that of large cities three decades ago*and that by taking thought you may avoid many of the difficulties and much of the expense that these cities must now meet*"
"The city has developed rapidly from its humble beginning, but simply from North Bridgewater to Bigger North Bridgewater. It has not radically changed its character. There are of course*advantages common to modern commercial cities. But there has been no realization yet of the great possibilities of city making, of the need to ameliorate city conditions, of the full requirements of social life*"
"Its history, its physical situation, the character of its population, the direction of its industry, all these should be appropriately reflected in the city plan. The lack of individuality is largely due to oversight, or to indifference to opportunities easily within your control. It is your failure; for example, more clearly to echo topography in your city plan. The rectangular street system, the colorless street names, which are repeated without end, regardless of natural features or local history, are illustrations of your neglect of easy and inexpensive opportunities to give individuality to your city. There is likewise a failure of the people to express themselves and their ideals. As your interest in the human life is in the distinctly personal, so is your interest in the city*"
"Strong, selfish, almost unchecked individualism still has its sway in your city, and many of the evils which city planning may help correct are due to this cause*The failure to link various agencies for transportation, the unsanitary and demoralizing influences of crowded tenements; these represent the neglect of any large planning authority to control and check any rank individualism and to exercise collective power in the name of the entire community."
His vision was simple but radically forward thinking. With the rapid proliferation of automobiles, much traffic needed diversion from Main Street, only one of two streets running north to south through the entire city.7 To accommodate this, Jackson proposed extending certain streets on the perimeter of downtown to traverse most, if not all, of the distance of the city. These streets would intersect with each other at all corners of downtown and provide numerous easy routes from one end of the city to the other, leaving Main Street traffic for only those conducting business there.
Adjacent to the primary business area on Main Street, he made plans for a civic centre concentrated in a few square blocks from the west side of the railroad out to Warren Avenue. It would encompass City Hall, a courthouse, a post office, a library, an auditorium, a registry of deeds and police headquarters, as well as other public and municipal buildings. Of course, businesses and diversions would crop up around this centre to accommodate its needs and the city would have a diversified and bustling addition to downtown life.
To counteract the congestion of adding a new concentrated population downtown, he proposed ceasing the termination of all transit lines downtown, in favor of extending the same route from one end of the city to the other. This way, instead of disembarking one trolley and boarding another to cross town, one could simply stay on the first. Fewer bottlenecks of transit riders mean the trains are more efficient and riders get to their destinations more quickly.
Finally, he cried out for building codes and new zoning ordinances. The first was in order to curb the dual problem of poor people building shoddy, dangerous structures and opportunists' attempts at "sweating the land and piling families in human warehouses." The second was to accommodate small, day-to-day business in the neighborhoods about to grow in reaction to all of the transit improvements. The cumulative effect would be to spread the population across the outskirts of downtown, connecting their personal lives to all aspects of public life through easily accessible transit paths, both public and private. That is, after all, the urban ideal; accommodating more people by maximizing land area, made feasible by more effective management of time and travel.
People were apparently too busy fashioning Indian regalia and tee-pees for the Centennial Pageant's reenactment of "Chief Massasoit gets gypped by Whitey" to give Jackson's plan any consideration. Very few of his plans ever saw realization and much of what he feared is still a problem today. A polar opposite to the "Massachusetts Miracle" of the 1980s was happening to the entire industrialized state. As the country grew increasingly prosperous in the roaring '20s, its economy staggered. Brockton's situation was especially dire because of economic factors unique to the city. The economy was based entirely on one industry. Even its double life as minister to the surrounding cow towns couldn't adequately diversify the funds. Making matters worse, Brockton specialized in upper-echelon shoes at a time when purchasing trends leaned heavily toward inexpensive shoes. Middle America and New York had the geographical advantages and a cheaper non-union employment base to exploit where Brockton did not, meaning they could make a cheaper shoe.
As a result of the hard times, there was civil unrest in the emerging immigrant population (twenty-six percent of the total population in 1926) and the city with "absolutely none of the wretched squalor" thirty years prior lost its love of the proletariat. Strikes of the now mostly immigrant unions were occurring ever more frequently, in reaction to such attempts by manufacturers as a twenty percent reduction of wages across the board. By the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Brockton had already lost one-third of its shoe jobs.
The publication A Report on the Economic Base of the Brockton Massachusetts Area, was blunt in stating that, "the community of Brockton, Massachusetts, in this year of 1948, faces a crisis. The long declining trend of its basic shoe industries from 1919 to 1940, which was temporarily checked by war orders and by post-war civilian demand, has resumed its downward course." The city-ordered study by leading urban sociologist Homer Hoyt outlined what should have been obvious, that the same confluence of technology, skill and politics which had built Brockton had now destroyed it. The ultra-specialized economy couldn't stand up to the combined forces of declining demand for all types of men's shoes, an improvement in machinery that allowed fewer people to produce more shoes, and other regions' abilities to produce shoes more cost-effectively. This created an excess productive capacity nationwide, and in that situation only the strong survive.
The numbers are startling. The per capita national demand for men's shoes dropped from 2.47 pairs annually in 1922 to just 1.63 pairs in 1946. The technology enhancement made it so that man hours needed per pair of shoes plummeted forty-four percent, from .337 man hours in 1926 to .188 man hours in 1946. In the same period, "two-thirds of all the shoes produced in Brockton were in the retail range in which there (was) only six percent of the national demand." Fewer people were needed to produce a product fewer people wanted, and virtually nobody wanted what Brockton was producing.
Responding to this triple threat, smart companies like W.L. Douglas (remember him?) left Brockton for the Midwest. From 1920 to 1947 ten shoe manufacturers that employed 659 people moved out and fifty-eight companies that employed 4,065 went out of business. They primarily cited the high cost of labor, due to successive decades of labor unionizing by the shoe workers. While a Brockton shoe worker earned $1.07 per hour, a shoe worker in Missouri made seventy-three cents.
W.L. Douglas Shoe Company. Robert A. Kane.
Brockton watched its predominance vanish. Their percentage of the nationwide industry dropped from 7.8% in 1919 to 2.9% in 1935. The World War II government orders allowed some growth and in 1942 Brockton claimed 3.4% of the industry, but by 1947 it was at a new low of 2.7%. The number of boots and shoes establishments concurrently decreased from fifty-one in 1921 to thirty-five in 1928 and twenty-two in 1939. All in all, fifty-one factories were demolished. The telltale and saddest statistic is that, after accounting for the immense amount of loss, the shoe industry still made up seventy percent of manufacturing in the city.
The difficulties and expenses Willard Jackson prophesied in 1915 became a deplorable reality. Population remained stagnant (62,680 people in 1950) while the rest of the country was experiencing a population boom. Young people were leaving in droves, so much so that Brockton had fewer people under thirty and more people over forty-five than both the state and national averages. The cost of families forced to "eke out an existence on the bare minimum standard of living afforded by relief payments" and the general public health costs of serving a growing elderly community strained the city's already dwindling budget. As the beginning of one war marked the beginning of a great industrial city, the end of another war eighty years later marked its end.
Notes:
7 There still remain only these two, the other being Pearl Street on the extreme west side of town.
