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There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America
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About There Is Power In A Union: The Epic Story Of Labor
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONE: THE OPPRESSING HAND OF AVARICEIt seems fitting that one of the first renowned activistsin the titanic struggle between labor and capital on this continent, Sarah G.Bagley, was an unassuming young woman off the farm, initially no different fromany of the thousands who emerged from rural New England in the 1820s and 1830s to become "operatives" in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, the nation's earliest industrial city. This original population of American factory workers was, for a generation, the pride of the youthful United States, and Lowell a model of enlightened industrialism that visitors were drawn fromacross the country and around the world to behold with their own eyes.Bagley, like most of her peers, shared in the public's fascination; only after many years did she grow concerned about the system'sinjustices. In an era when few if any women spoke publicly she found her voice, first as a writer, then as a labor organizer, eventually leading the LowellFemale Labor Reform Association, which she helped create, in its historic fight for decent work conditions and a ten-hour day. At turns eloquent and caustic,her challenge to the status quo brought her into open conflict with Lowell'spowerful mill and banking interests, the legislature of the state ofMassachusetts, and even many of her cohorts and friends.Born in Candia, New Hampshire, in 1806, where her parents, two brothers, and a sister farmed and operated a sawmill, Bagley worked as a schoolteacher before moving to Lowell in 1837. Beyond those fewfacts not much is known of her early life, although there are what may be intriguing glimpses into her background in two stories she wrote for the Lowell Offering, the independent literary journal published by women mill workers and celebrated here and in Europe as evidence of the superiority of America's factory culture. In one tale Bagley describes a young farm girl unhappy withher fate as a household domestic, who, smitten by "Lowell fever,"dreams of being a worker in the booming mill city thirty miles distant. So poor she doesn't own a pair of shoes in which to travel, the little heroine nonetheless defies her cruel mistress and runs away. A kindly stage coach driver takes pity on the barefoot child he encounters walking along the road, her few possessions in a knotted bundle, and, asking no fare, delivers her to Lowell.There, within days, she is reborn, with new acquaintances, a job in a mill, and even the beginnings of a modest bank account. In the second story, a Lowell mill hand named Catherine B., suffering from dire homesickness, receives the terrible news that her mother and father have both died. Stricken by grief but determined to save her younger brother and sister from poverty, she rededicatesherself to the steady job she is fortunate to hold in a Lowell factory. For her brave display of "practical benevolence," Catherine is wooed formarriage by a desirable man."Lowell fever" the lure of the textile mills, of factory work at good wages, was remarked upon by many who flocked to the teeming little city. Not only did mill work pay better than the other jobs opento Yankee farm girls, chiefly those of teacher, nanny, or domestic, it offered escape from the other common alternative-grueling, unpaid labor on the family farm. The role of independent worker better suited the freeborn American women of Bagley's time. The first young people to come of age in the postrevolutionary era, they "expected to make something of themselves andof life," Lucy Larcom, a Lowell operative who entered the mills at age eleven, later remembered. Young women like Larcom and Bagley, no less than John Greenleaf Whittier, a Lowell resident, Henry W. Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson-who would write that "the children ofNew England between 1820 and 1840 were born with knives in their brains" were swept up in the intellectual ferment, heighte
