Ethnic Catholicism and Craft Unionism in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1887-1920: A Mixed Story (2004)

Worcester, Massachusetts has been described time-and-again as a gritty blue-collar industrial city. But that description is more befitting of the late nineteenth and first-half of the twentieth century. Because of limited access, including limited waterways, hilly terrain, and conflicts with Indians, the community was not permanently settled until 1712, almost a century after Plymouth colony was settled. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the town was a pastoral and pre-industrial community of several thousand people. Although it was considered a shire town, other communities in Worcester County rivaled and even dwarfed it. Despite theoretical access to the sea by means of the Blackstone River, the reality was that Worcester lacked waterpower. The Blackstone was narrow, shallow, and dropped almost 500 feet between Worcester and Naragansett Bay. There was no other significant water source although North Pond, now known as Indian Lake, was expanded and other ponds were later constructed, such as Salisbury Pond. There was little growth or development of the community until the 1820's. In the decade of the twenties, an alternative to the Blackstone River, the Blackstone Canal, was created. But the canal, started by native labor and finished by Irish immigrants, was not the transportation mechanism people sought. While the canal was operative for two decades (1828-1848), it was too narrow, too shallow, and had too many locks to serve rapid transportation needs. The Irish immigrants who built the canal settled in Green Island, a flat area between the canal and the Millbrook. The canal workers attended the first Roman Catholic church in Worcester, Saint John's on Temple Street, which dates back to 1836. The community itself seemed to grow despite its water problems. Steam-powered manufactories, such as the Merrifield Building and the Court Mills, began to provide service between Worcester and Boston. However, the real take-off occurred in the 1840's when the Providence and Worcester Railroad, which opened in 1847, superseded the Blackstone Canal, forcing it to close in 1848. Worcester's population more than doubled from 7500 in 1840 to 17,000 in 1850. The community was incorporated as a city in 1848. By then it was becoming better known as an industrial center. Machine shops, boot and shoe manufactories, foundries, and textile mills were all established. The 1850s was a period of slower growth, marred by the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic nativism of the Know Nothings and the Depression of 1857, both contributing to a decline in immigration, leaving Worcester with a population of twenty-five thousand by 1860. The 1840s had brought the ten-hour movement to Worcester, and the 1850s brought the first trade/craft union, the Moulders' Union, to Worcester in the form of Local #5, which lasted only until 1866. After the Civil War, the city grew as first the boot and shoe industry and later the metal trades flourished. In the 1860s, the predominantly Massachusetts-based boot and shoe trade/craft union, The Knights of St. Crispin, pressed the shoe manufactories for better prices and arbitration of differences. After a successful tailors' strike in 1869, the Worcester shoe workers were locked out for three months over the issue of the length of the period that wages were to be reduced. The lockout was ended in March by an agreement between the Crispins and the manufacturers involving concessions on both sides: the KOSC on the size of the work force and the manufacturers on rates. The 1870 Worcester lockout/strike involved 1200 men and cost the workers $175,000 in wages.1 By 1870 the population of the city had grown to over forty thousand. Despite the fact that the Irish and French-Canadians belonged to the Roman Catholic faith, cultural, linguistic and social differences divided them early on in Worcester. In October, 1870, a strike took place at the Quinsigamond Wire Works (Washburn & Moen) over piece work. …