Authors: David Downing
The workers at one mill had come out on strike the previous week, when the owner had demanded a speeding up of production. So far no other mills had come out in support, but there was a meeting at a nearby school that evening, which Caitlin could use to judge the local mood. Though she might find it depressing.
But not all the news was as bad. At the mill where Ruthie’s husband worked, there had been some changes for the better. “The bosses brought in fire alarms and put safety guards on one machine where a woman lost her arm last year—too late for her, of course, but better late than never. And Manny says that the foremen don’t shout as much as they used to.” She shrugged. “A small thing maybe, but he appreciates it. Makes him feel more like a person, less like an animal at the carnival.”
After agreeing to meet up at the rally next day, they walked down to the street and along past the school where that evening’s meeting was due to be held. A children’s choir was singing somewhere inside, but no smoke was rising from the boiler-house chimney despite the chill March air.
Gina’s family home was smaller than Ruthie’s, and she seemed less inclined to detect any silver linings in the overall situation. Her youngest was sick and looked it, but they already owed the doctor several weeks of her husband’s pitiful wages.
Her bitterness was palpable, and so was that of her sister, who dropped in while they were there. Unlike Gina, who had greeted Caitlin like a long-lost friend, the sister had obvious difficulty keeping her hostility under wraps. She ignored McColl but
stared at Caitlin with the weary air of someone thinking, How could anyone dressed like you are have any idea of what we’re going through?
“I’ll send her some money for the child,” Caitlin said when she and McColl were back outside. “Anonymously. I tried to give her ten dollars last year, and she refused to take it.”
“Where next?” McColl asked, peering down the street. There were several people on stoops, giving them curious looks.
“How would you feel about doing some work for me?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Just listening, really. A few hours in cafés and bars shouldn’t be too taxing. I’d like a better idea of what the men are thinking,” she explained. “When they talk to each other, I mean. I can’t ask them—I can’t—they just see a strange woman and look at my breasts.”
“Like Father Meagher,” he murmured.
“I doubt you’re immune,” she said tartly. “What is wrong with men?”
He could think of no answer to that, but she kissed him anyway and promised to see him back at the hotel. He watched her walk away up the desolate street and turned back toward the downtown area, where he’d noticed a row of suitable establishments. It seemed early for lunch, but he felt surprisingly hungry, and a plate of corned beef hash filled the spot for a minimal outlay. The only other customers in the café were nursing cups of coffee at a shared table, staring out the window, and murmuring occasional observations he was too far away to understand. They were all at the young end of middle age and looked like they could take care of themselves. Not to mention anyone who got in their way.
A tawdry bar three doors down was doing better business, but a similar group of hard-faced men had occupied one of its tables and set up an obvious no-man’s-land between themselves and the
workingmen who made up the rest of the clientele. McColl took up residence in the latter’s territory and used his English accent to disarm the suspicion his presence seemed to generate. He was an automobile salesman, he told the barman, loudly enough for others to hear, and he soon had several men straining to see the publicity shot of the Maia he carried in his wallet.
“You won’t find much demand for fancy cars round here,” one obviously Irish immigrant told him cheerfully.
“I think I will,” McColl disagreed, offering his cigarettes. “What town doesn’t have a handful of bastards with more money than sense?”
There was general agreement that Paterson had its share of rich bastards, and several meaningful glances at the table across no-man’s-land.
“Who are they?” McColl asked one of his new friends in a quiet voice.
“They call themselves ‘special deputies,’ ” the friend told him, “but they’re really hired thugs,” he added rather more loudly. “They say they work for the city, but Barlow pays their wages.” Barlow, it seemed, was the millowner keen to have his workers work faster. And the general feeling on this side of the bar was that Paterson’s silk workers were too weak to resist him.
McColl moved on to another establishment, and another after that. By dusk he had bought drinks in seven of them and left most of his glasses virtually full. The story was the same wherever he went, of angry workers hanging on to what little gains the previous strike had brought them, knowing they were still too weak to fight for something better. For the moment at least, the owners held most of the cards. Not all, or they wouldn’t need to flood the town with imported thugs. But most.
Paterson felt like an occupied city by day and something worse once dusk had fallen. It was probably just his imagination, but the downtown streets seemed to empty too soon, their lights much fainter than they should be. The passage of a streetcar
sounded preternaturally loud, and in the silence that followed, he could hear the distant roar of the town’s famous falls.
Back in the warmth of the hotel lobby, he read the city’s evening paper while waiting for Caitlin. There were reports of local society gatherings, an article on the restoration of a local church, and a preview of the forthcoming baseball season, but no mention whatever of trouble in the local mills.
He supposed there was little point in writing about such matters when those most concerned could not afford the newspaper.
Many more days in Paterson and he would end up a socialist.
Caitlin eventually appeared, looking more worn out that he’d ever seen her. “We have to get going,” she insisted. “The meeting starts in fifteen minutes.”
They walked through the dimly lit streets, swapping stories from the last few hours. She seemed drained by her interviews, but unalarmed by his news of the “deputies.”
“The owners brought hundreds of them in during last year’s strike,” she said. “And mostly they just stood there looking mean. All the real violence came from the police.”
They reached the school entrance. Just inside the door, a couple of men were controlling admission, and as Caitlin explained who she was, McColl noticed a long line of baseball bats leaned up against a wall. Journalists were not welcome, one man was saying in the tone of someone who had suffered at their hands, but the ensuing argument was cut short when a local woman insisted on vouching for Caitlin—“She was the only one who told the truth!”
Inside the auditorium the lines of chairs were mostly occupied. There were pictures of American presidents on the walls, and McColl wondered what Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were making of the IWW banner that stretched across the front of the stage.
Colm suddenly appeared, accompanied by Tiernan and a big man with dark, longish hair and a luxuriant mustache. He was
wearing a workingman’s cap and trousers and a long coat with leather lapels. “This is Aidan Brady,” Colm told them.
“Caitlin Hanley,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, in what sounded to McColl like a midwestern accent.
“Brady’s been in Oregon,” Colm said as McColl shook hands. “He was in the logging wars.”
“So what are you doing this far east?” Caitlin asked him.
Brady smiled. “Fighting the good fight,” he said.
“For the IWW?”
“That’s right. And this is a good turnout,” he added, looking around. Someone on the platform was waving at him, and he raised a hand in acknowledgment. “I have to go,” he apologized.
“He’s going to say a few words on the situation in Detroit,” Colm explained. “Things are going well there.”
They weren’t in Paterson, as the meeting made depressingly clear. Speaker after speaker from the strikebound Barlow Mill made impassioned pleas for others to follow their example, and speaker after speaker from those still in work explained why they couldn’t, shouldn’t, or wouldn’t. It wasn’t hard to sympathize with the opposing points of view, but that didn’t stop the meeting from becoming increasingly impassioned, and often acrimonious. This town had suffered too much, McColl thought; there was nothing left to give.
When Brady started to deliver his report from Detroit, McColl was expecting him to use developments there to bolster the Paterson strikers’ case. Up to a point he did, but there were no appeals to solidarity; he seemed more intent on stressing the importance of individuals and their actions—how they had furthered the Studebaker workers’ struggle in Detroit and how they might do so here. He never actually argued for violence, but a faith in its efficacy seemed to lie just beneath the surface of everything he said. His audience applauded when he finished,
but without any great conviction, as if they weren’t quite sure what they’d heard.
More appeals and rejections followed, but a worried-looking man with a message proved the harbinger of renewed solidarity. The chair’s announcement of “a couple of dozen deputies outside” had most of the men on their feet, several loudly proclaiming that if the bastards wanted a fight, then they could have one. Others countered by pointing out how many women were present, and a decision was taken to inquire what exactly the deputies had in mind. A volunteer was dispatched and arrived back a few minutes later with the answer: The deputies had come to keep the peace. The gale of hysterical laughter this provoked felt more like relief than humor.
After a short impromptu conference on the stage, several of the men involved walked back up the aisle, inviting others to join them. “The young men will hold the door, so to speak,” the chair announced. “But stick together as much as you can. And don’t do anything foolish.”
McColl and Caitlin joined the exodus, straining their ears for any clue as to what was transpiring outside. Nothing was the answer, if two lines of silent, grim-faced men on either side of a barely lit street could be so described. The deputies were armed with nightsticks, the silk workers and IWW men with the baseball bats from the wall inside. As far as McColl could see, the only man smiling was Aidan Brady.
Colm and Tiernan were there, too, Colm looking young and nervous, but most of those attending the meeting were hurrying away, and the deputies seemed ready to call it a night. “Your brother will be okay,” McColl assured Caitlin. “The deputies have made their point, and they’re outnumbered two to one.”
She hesitated, as if to check his arithmetic, then allowed him to lead her away. As neither of them had eaten, they stopped at a restaurant close to the hotel, but Caitlin just picked at her
food and seemed more depressed than McColl had ever seen her. “What a terrible day,” she said once they were in their room. “All those desperate women I talked to, and then that meeting.”
McColl sat down beside her, wondering what he could say.
“What sort of world is it,” she asked, “when a worker can feel that a foreman not shouting at him is some sort of progress?” She was crying now, and he put his arm around her. “You know what one woman said to me today?” she almost sobbed. “That you can’t afford to cry in this world.”
“My mother once told me that tears were the only sure sign that someone still had a heart.”
She laughed through hers. “I think I’d like your mother.”
The sky was clear on Sunday morning, but by the time they reached the riverside park, the clouds were swiftly gathering, the sun an intermittent presence. McColl reckoned there were more than two thousand people there, men outnumbering women by something like three to one. There was a scattering of youngsters, but most parents had opted for prudence and left their children at home.
The various organizations involved—unions, union branches, political parties—all had their beautifully embroidered banners on display, and there was no shortage of rough-and-ready placards demanding a nine-hour day. The overall mood seemed strangely muted to McColl, apprehensive rather than frightened, quietly defiant rather than angry.
Colm, Seán Tiernan, and their new friend Aidan Brady were there, awaiting a decision of the rally’s organizing committee. “The socialists are insisting that we leave these behind,” Colm explained, brandishing his baseball bat.
“I think they’re right,” Caitlin said bluntly. “The owners aren’t going to attack an unarmed march with so many women. They’d never live it down.”
“My sister the optimist.”
“Well, if there’s trouble and our people are carrying weapons, they’ll be able to blame us for starting it.”
“They’ll do that anyway,” Brady said with a smile.
He had a point, McColl thought. But so did Caitlin, and it was hers that eventually carried the day. The baseball bats were gathered up, loaded into a convenient cart, and driven back to where they were usually stored.
The unarmed march set off, snaking out of the park along Front Street and heading for the bridge across the river. Her brother and his friends were up near the head of the parade, along with most of the IWW contingent, but Caitlin hung back, hoping to find Ruthie. It was McColl who spotted her, carrying one of her children. The other two were also there, striding forward with resolute faces on either side of their mother.
Her husband, Manny, Ruthie told them, was somewhere up ahead. He had wanted her and the children to keep well back, just in case.
There was no sign of the enemy so far. The faces watching from the sidewalks as the march advanced along Front Street were full of curiosity and pity but lacking in hostility.
They crossed the wide bridge over the Passaic River. The famous falls were just out of sight downstream but well within earshot, and the clamor of the water seemed, paradoxically, to shroud the march in silence and lend it the air of an unaccompanied moving picture.
A sheet of gray cloud now covered the sun, and the street ahead was shadowed by the tall stone buildings of the downtown area. There was no traffic in evidence, as if the city were already under curfew.