Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

his or her mouth on the shuttle, and sucked the loose end of the thread through a small hole. The ad outlined the risks: “Weavers on all common looms choke their lungs with cotton fibre. When the filling is colored the effect is more or less poisonous, and in either case the health is undermined.” McGuirk decided to see whether the old method was still in use and whether it posed a danger.

The factories in Fall River were still running, unlike those in New Bedford, so McGuirk waited outside in the cold dawn. The lit mill glowed against the dark sky. It wasn’t that strange a scene; her family had been in Fall River for generations, and her grandfather had worked in the mills until late in his life. McGuirk asked one of the weavers streaming in with their lunch pails to take her inside and teach her the trade. She watched amid the clatter as a mother and two children tended sixteen looms. McGuirk tried threading the shuttle, inhaling, wondering about disease that might spread from equipment that touched multiple mouths each day. The resulting article in the Sunday World showed a lovely young woman, raising a shuttle to her lips, under the headline: “The Mill Weaver’s Kiss of Death.”

The local papers scorned the doomsday premise and the scaremongering. They warned readers, “One newspaper woman couldn’t find enough here to keep her busy, so she went to Fall River, and has secured employment in a mill where she is learning weaving.”

But actually, she was right. Many women in mill families in New Bedford suffered from tuberculosis. The disease ran through weaving communities at higher rates than elsewhere. Decades later lung problems that weavers suffered from inhaling cotton fiber would be given an official name—“byssinosis.” In 1911, Massachusetts banned the use of the “suction shuttle,” effectively putting an end to the “Kiss of Death.”

It’s easy to share the frustration of the local journalists, to dismiss the New York reports as bumbling fabrications from clueless out-of-towners. And there’s no doubt that New York editors sought out the angles most likely to infuriate their New England counterparts, to the point of saying the situation of textile workers in New Bedford, a city proud of its abolitionist history, was worse than plantation slavery. But the New Bedford reporters had their own reasons for wanting their town to look good. Perhaps they hadn’t fully embraced the shift in their city from one with a noble whaling tradition to one where factory workers lived in substandard conditions. To call a piece of writing “yellow journalism” could be a legitimate critique. It could also be the equivalent of deeming an unflattering report to be media bias or manipulation.

The World’s Minnie Rosen defended her writing to a doubtful reporter’s face. Against the accusations that those she profiled were perpetually drunk or lazy rather than strike victims, she said she hadn’t met anyone like that: “These good people claim New Bedford’s honor is smirched by its being known how bad off many operatives are. It is far worse to defame the hard-working women whom I have met by charging them with intemperance.” She hadn’t encountered lazy drunks; she had, however, met someone whose scalp had been badly torn by machinery and was unemployed as a result.

“There may be cases which have been exaggerated in the newspapers,” she added, “but those which came under my observation are no newspaper tales, but stern realities, and in each case they are sadly in need of help, not sympathy,” she added. Her articles aimed to trigger action, not emotion.

Though journalists were viewed as having clout, perhaps too much, women on the ground still struggled to marshal actual power. As the strike wore on, soup kitchen lines lengthening, daily rumors percolating either that the strike was spreading or about to collapse, Harriet Pickering’s control began to slip. She wanted to organize the women whose interests—like fining—she saw as divergent from the men’s. The union leaders were incompetent, she thought, to the point that mill owners refused to meet with them. She planned a meeting just for women, but on the chosen day, both sexes crowded the audience. And as she headed toward the front of the room, the janitor took her table away. She tried to talk over the yelling, catcalling, and hissing, but it was futile. The meeting was over in five minutes.

She tried again, this time at City Hall. Pickering had an idea about how to stop the fining. What if workers called the manufacturer’s bluff? If an employee was bad, fire her. If not, pay her the wages she earned.

Pickering stepped on the platform and faced the restless crowd of three hundred.

“I have called you together to act upon a proposition of appointing a committee of women to wait upon the mill-owners in reference to the abolition of the fining system. I move that a committee of five be appointed,” she started.

“I move we don’t do nothing of the sort! It’s the men’s business to attend to such things. We must act in harmony with the union, and I move your motion don’t be seconded, that’s what I do,” someone shouted from the audience.

“I am in harmony!” Pickering said. “None of you has worked so hard as me in the union. But I say if we women don’t get to work and do something the men will lead us into a ditch. If the mill owners are to be approached we must approach them!”

Then, once again, her hoped-for meeting descended into chaos. Cries of “Order” and “Stop fightin’” echoed through the room. Chocolate caramels, passed out by Pickering as appeasement, didn’t settle the crowd. Some threw them on the floor.

Eventually, unable to make herself heard, Pickering said, “If you don’t appoint a committee, I’ll go and wait upon the manufacturers myself!”

Outside the fractious meeting, a representative of silk-weaving mills in New Jersey waited. He was looking for weavers to train for positions that paid up to $20 a week, he