This Day in Labor History: September 12, 1934

On September 12, 1934, the Rhode Island National Guard opened fire on a group of people loosely associated with striking textile workers in nearby mills who were throwing rocks and bricks at them in the Moshassuck Cemetery in Saylesville, Rhode Island. Two workers died and dozens were wounded in this confused action. It became perhaps the most notorious moment in Rhode Island labor history. A deeper dive into this event however suggests a far more complex and messy history than the kind of romantic story of sacrifice that labor folks often like to tell.

The 1934 textile strike was a mess from the get-go. The United Textile Workers were desperately trying to hold on to its last remaining mills in New England. Meanwhile, the apparel industry had fled big time to the South in the previous twenty years, escaping the immigrants and socialists that were pretty open to labor organizing. As early as the 1890s, northern firms had looked to move south, so long as southern states such as Alabama repealed their child labor laws. By the 1920s, in the aftermath of the Triangle Fire reforms and major strikes in places such as Lawrence and Paterson, this became a flood. The UTW was a pretty conservative union, hardly the IWW. But operators didn’t want unions of any kind. Meanwhile, southern workers were tremendously difficult to organize–like in southern auto today, apparel companies chose very specific parts of the South to place their factories–largely impoverished Piedmont towns with few outsiders, strong evangelical traditions, and strong feelings about white supremacy, allowing companies, the media, and politicians to paint unions as Black loving outsider Jews, which was sometimes true as many unionists did support civil rights and many organizers were Jewish.

But that reality did not stop organizing from taking place in the South. In 1929, a major strike in North Carolina led to massive violence and repression. In 1933, the Roosevelt administration created the National Industrial Recovery Act. Section 7(a) of the NIRA had words about the rights of unions. In truth, this was not that well-thought out and the administration didn’t expect this to lead to so much organizing, but between the Great Depression and the hopes the New Deal engendered in the working class, the NIRA led to a major wave of organizing.

That included the four gigantic strikes of 1934 that laid the groundwork for more comprehensive pro-labor legislation the next year in the National Labor Relations Act. All four of these strikes were marked by mass organizing and state violence. In three of them, workers more or less managed to win something that built toward further organizing–the west coast longshoremen, the Toledo auto workers, and the Minneapolis Trotskyite Teamsters. But with the textile strike, overwhelming state violence absolutely squashed it, as it had in 1929. In the southern states, it was a similar scenario to that year, where the entirety of the forces of order used all its power to kill as many workers as was necessary to end the uprising. And in fact, southern textile would never unionize in mass numbers.

In Rhode Island, like the rest of the industry, workers were really angry over the speeding up of machines. The speed up had been a problem for a long time and it just got worse and worse as operators found ways to make their employees ever more efficient and their lives ever worse. At one point, a worker would be responsible for four looms. Now, in the most modern looms, it was up to 50. The stress and the speed and the workload was unbelievable, and all for poverty wages on top of it. By May 1934, the UTW was threatening a national strike.

Now, you’d like to think that the struggle for workers rights in 1934 in Rhode Island could be told as the story of brave workers standing up against oppression and being mowed down by the evil forces of order. And for a long time, that’s how this was spun. But it’s not really true. The reality is that the whole thing was a huge mess. First, the UTW was totally overwhelmed by the wave of grassroots organizing seeking a home. It did not have the organizing capacity or vision to organize the southern strikers effectively. It didn’t even really have the capacity to organize the Rhode Island side of the strike well. So it actually called off its threat of a national strike. But at the local level, workers were so ready to go that they did, starting in Alabama. This forced UTW leaders back to actual leadership and they created new demands and said the strike would start on September 1. The Roosevelt administration didn’t get involved, the textile employers refused to move, and so the strike did happen.

The strike was peaceful for several days in Rhode Island. But by September 7, things began to fall apart. On that day, about 75 workers were standing outside of the Saylesville Bleachery, trying to get workers inside to join the strike. And basically, bored kids getting out of school joined them and started throwing stuff. The cops came and were rough, the kids started throwing stuff at the cops, and a huge brawl started. This bleachery became the center point of the strike from here. This was a Friday. On Monday the 10th, the strikers returned in larger numbers and it was a tense atmosphere. A series of thunderstorms got people off the streets that night and into the next morning. But then the crowds returned and the cops were much more the target for the many kids involved than the workers. There was a truckload of bricks nearby and they started throwing them at the cops. It was ugly.

Meanwhile, the Rhode Island Democratic Party was not reflexively anti-labor like in North Carolina or Georgia, but they handled the strike as it developed in Rhode Island quite poorly. Governor T.F. Green would solidify Rhode Island as a New Deal state. But he overreacted here and sent in the National Guard on September 12 to guard the bleachery. It became total chaos. The strike was hardly the point by this time. The crowds through stuff at the cops, including a famous picture of a cop taken to the ground by a flowerpot to the head. The National Guard started chasing people and opened fire. People ran into the nearby cemetery. The National Guard continued firing and two people were killed, Charles Gorcynski and William Blackwood.

The next day Saylesville Bleachery closed the factory to stop the violence outside of it. It was a super anti-union factory so that was a moderate win, but the strike itself was a failure especially in the South. However, despite the violence, it built ties between the labor movement and the Democratic Party that remain pretty strong in the state today.

Every year on Labor Day, the Rhode Island Labor History Society has an event and a speaker at the site of the killings. I was the speaker a few years ago.

In the end, the simple story of the massacre of brave innocent workers is often not the reality. This is a case when workers’ demands to strike actually did lead to disaster, especially on the national scale, and union leadership knew it. It was a case when irresponsible violence can beget more irresponsible violence. Things are complicated, much more so than fits into nice pat narratives about good and bad. The National Guard and Green really screwed up here, but so did the UTW, the bleachery owners, the rank and file workers, and the kids.

For more on this, see Patrick Crowley’s The Battle of the Gravestones & the Saylesville Massacre of 1934. This comes out of his master’s thesis that I directed. Crowley is also president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO and co-founder of Climate Jobs Rhode Island.

This is the 576th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.