 It's now 1202, according to our clock. And I think we can get started with the introduction. My name is George Norton. I'm president of the Amherst History Society. And this is our Friday noon lecture series, History Bites. Today, we are hosting Dr. Maynard Cedar, who is a Connecticut native raised in a pro-union family and with a background in labor activism. He spent a year in California in the 1970s working in a factory when he was unable to get a job after completing his doctorate. Take note, all you people who are going into academia. That experience was the basis for his book, A Year in the Life of a Factory. But he arrived in North Adams in 1977 for a job interview at North Adams State College, which is now the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. And in 1984, he devised a course covering the area's labor history in honor of the 50th anniversary of the New Deal. And that blossomed into a research class that Dr. Cedar taught until he retired in 2010. He worked with students to compile oral histories that were part of their class requirements, going through a newspaper archives and town records to uncover a forgotten labor history. At one point, he and his students collaborated with former local labor leader, Renee Ouellette, who led a strike at the Greylock Mill in the 1930s. Cedar's research led to a local history play that he produced at the college in 1995. It was titled The Sprig Years after the Sprig Electric Company plant that once dominated the city's economy. And it featured actors whose performances were based on adapted transcripts of interviews, as well as actual minutes from union meetings during the times the play portrayed. In 2012, Cedar produced a documentary film partnering with Amherst Media, A Farewell to Factory Towns, which is now on archive.org. And the Amherst History Society links to it. And it focused on North Adams and the closing of Sprig Electric in the context of the wider course of deindustrialization in America. And in 2019, he published his book, The Gritty Berkshires. And this is from the blurb on the back. Moving from the early 1800s to the present, Cedar weaves a narrative that details the area's vibrant immigrant history, slavery's role in its textile industry, the battle for national unions, and the ideological struggles with corporate elites over who best speaks for the community. Illustrated by dozens of photographs, these stories focus on the voices of ordinary people as they often do extraordinary things. So please welcome Dr. Maynard Cedar. Okay. Thank you, George. It's a pleasure to be here. A pleasure to be back in Amherst, even if it is virtually. And I also want to thank the people at Amherst Media for helping to make this happen. So what I'm going to do is basically present a PowerPoint. So I'm going to start sharing the screen now and carry on from there. Okay, did that work? Yes, it did. Okay, so this is the cover for the book. And just a few words about Gritty and the different meanings of it. Gritty in the sense that if you look at the history of North Berkshire, not just North Adams, but that whole area called North Berkshire, the people who work there did get their hands dirty. No question about it. We're talking about over 1,000 men who built the Housick Tunnel, which is almost five miles long in Northwestern Massachusetts. We're talking about the thousands and thousands of men and women who worked in the cotton mills filled with cotton dust as they worked. And going on beyond that, even till towards the end of the 20th century, people who worked in other kinds of mills and had to deal with toxic chemicals and all of that along the way. So it's Gritty in that sense and in a way that a lot of people, particularly from the outside, don't think about the Berkshires. But the other meaning of Gritty is resilient, resourceful, courageous. And one of the things that I found is the people who lived and worked in particularly the Northern Berkshires, which I focus on, were that kind of Gritty. And George earlier, when he introduced me, talked about the kind of research and access that I had to materials. And that's the way that we found out a lot of those quote, Gritty stories. And I suspect for anyone who might do some history on their local community, particularly in the Rust Belt, they would find similar kinds of stories. So this is a map, which basically of Southern New England. And look at the two rivers on the west side of the map. The river that's important in terms of North Adams and North Berkshire is the Housick River, which flows from the South through the town of Adams into North Adams. The North branch goes into Clarksburg towards Vermont. And the main branch goes through Williamstown into New York state and ultimately flows into the Hudson River. The river to the South, which you may be more familiar with is the Housatonic River, which flows beginning just north of Pittsfield through Great Barrington and empties into Long Island Sound. And if you read W.E.B. Du Bois' autobiography, he talks about growing up by the Golden River. And by that he meant the Housatonic River. And he'll tell you that it was filled with all kinds of toxins and pollutants, which made it golden. But that river, the Housick River, getting back to the Housick River, which was very strong, much stronger than certainly than it is now in the 1800s was obviously one of the main reasons for that area becoming industrialized. And there again are the towns and communities in North Berkshire, including Southwestern Vermont, Reedsboro, Stanford and Pownall. And North Adams was sort of the main market community in that area. Up until 1878, the town of Adams included what you see now as Adams and also North Adams. But the community split in 1878, North Adams being more industrial, Adams being more farming. And in 1896, North Adams became a city. So it's one of the two cities in Berkshire County, the other one being significantly bigger city, Pittsfield. So in doing this research, most of my focus was really on the 20th century and the history of industrialization in the 20th century. But when I wanted to sort of put it all together in some kind of book framework, I needed to go back into the 19th century. And I certainly knew about some of the main events of that period of time, the building, the digging of the Huzik Tunnel, the importation of 75 Chinese workers to break a strike in North Adams in 1870. But I also learned a lot about the role that slavery and racism and the Native Americans played as well. And I wanna just talk a little bit about that now at the beginning of this presentation. And that goes to two of the most famous people in 18th and 19th century, Berkshire history, one being Ephraim Williams Jr., who was the founder of Williams College and the other being William C. Plunkett, who was the founder of a dynasty that produced a whole series of mills in Northwestern, Massachusetts, into Vermont and ultimately merged with Hathaway and now we have Berkshire Hathaway that you may have heard of. So Ephraim Williams Sr. came from the Boston area and he was encouraged to move to Stockbridge in the 1770s in order to become part of what was called a mission community. It was a community set up basically to missionize the natives that were living in that area. And it turned out that Ephraim Williams did probably more trying to grab hold of the lands of the Native Americans than he did in actually missionizing them. His son, the founder of Williams College, Ephraim Williams Jr. is much more connected with the northern part of the county, excuse me, Ephraim Williams Sr. was in Stockbridge. He managed to get his son some good jobs working for the army and he was the commander of Fort Williams in what was then, what now would be North Adams. In August, 1751, H. Chakoti Chiefs came to Ephraim Williams Jr. saying that he had actually settled upon their land. When they named a price, Captain Williams is said to have replied that the price was too high and that the English now held the land by right of conquest. Power rules then as it certainly rules to a great extent now. A recent book by Craig Stephen Wilder called Ebony and Ivy about the racist slave history of American colleges and universities profiles Ephraim Williams Jr. As I said, the founder of Williams College. At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Williams redrew his will to provide for his mother and siblings. His peace of mind was purchased by his land and slave holdings. He gave a hundred pounds to each of his three sisters and he instructed his brothers to provide their mother an annual stipend from their inheritance. And the inheritance included slaves, monie and adult women, a boy named London and a girl called Chloe. And part of his will said that the money from his will, which included the money from selling the slaves could be used or should be used to start a college. However, the conditions for starting the college were that the college would be named after him and the town in which it was located would also be named after him. He had what you might say is a very strong ego. This is William C. Plunkett who was the originator of the Plunkett fortune and a lot of the mills. You still, if you go through Adams, you'll still see remnants of those mills in town. As you drive north on the right-hand side, you'll see the mills. On the left-hand side, you'll see worker housing. Plunkett, besides being a very good businessman and with connections to getting cotton from the slave south also was a very important political figure during that period of time. And in the 1850s, he was Lieutenant Governor of the state of Massachusetts, which led to a very, very famous case. In 1850, the act which commanded northerners the Fugitive Slave Act to return slaves to their quote owners in the south got strengthened. And in 1854, Anthony Burns in one of the most celebrated cases of the Fugitive Slave Act was captured in Boston after many years of working there and really being integrated in the Boston community. The governor of Massachusetts, Ann Plunkett decided to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Burns was captured. There was an attempt to free him. One man was killed. Finally, the troops were brought in and he was sent back to Virginia. Ultimately, his freedom was purchased. This became a great stain on Plunkett's name and also the state of Massachusetts during that time. And it actually helped to lead to the demise of the Wake Party. So Plunkett was never able to be reelected after that and the Wake Party, which was already split between the cotton wigs and the anti-slave wigs soon became history. But Plunkett continued with his mills and atoms which kept growing and growing and growing. The two big events that soon take place in Northwestern Massachusetts that I mentioned before are the building of the Huzik Tunnel and the importation of Chinese workers to break a strike. These are some of the shanties that were built on the hills of Huzik Mountain. And from 1850 to the mid-1870s, there was really for that time, the big dig comparable to the big dig in Boston a century and more later, an attempt to open up Massachusetts really to the Midwest by digging a tunnel through the mountain, allowing the trains to go outside of Massachusetts into New York state and into the Midwest. It was a very controversial endeavor. It cost a lot of money for the state of Massachusetts. It was kind of what we call a public-private partnership. Over 1,000 men, Irish, Italian, French, Canadian immigrants worked on it under very, very difficult, unsafe conditions. Close to 200 men were killed. We don't know all the names of the men. Sometimes the newspapers might just say an Irishman died yesterday. The president of the local historical society in North Adams, Chuck Kahoon, is working on a long project to try to find the names of each of those men that was killed, at least to honor them in that particular way. This is one of the stones on Florida Mountain, which talks about or gives memory to a very terrible accident that took place in 1867. There's a lot that's been written about the history of the tunnel. Much of it, financial history, technological history, political history, we still could use a really good social history. We have bits and pieces of it, but much more could be done in terms of the actual working conditions, home lives, and so on of the workers in that tunnel. These are not the builders of the tunnel, but these are railroad workers around 1810 going through the tunnel. Through the tunnel, there was passenger service in North Adams up until the mid 1950s. And since that time, there's no longer any passenger service at all to North Adams. Though as I'll mention later on, there's plans to build a huge model train museum in North Adams. The model trains miles and miles of track in a huge hangar, but still no real passenger service to North Adams. In 1870, there was a strike at Calvin Samson shoe factory, the biggest shoe factory in North Adams. And the major union at that time, the Knights of St. Crispin, it was a union throughout Massachusetts in New England that organized a shoe and boot factory workers, mostly French Canadian. They would go on strike periodically with Samson. They were concerned about the machines that Samson was bringing in, not that they were against the machines, but they wanted to have access to running it and some certainly power over how fast they would be run. Anyway, they went on strike, Samson would try to bring in more workers. The Crispins would work on them not to go in and they were successful. So in 1870, Samson sent his foreman to San Francisco. He came back by train with 75 Chinese workers, many of them late teens, early 20s, and we don't really even know if they knew that they were being brought in as a strike breakers. It was a huge event. The newspapers in Boston and New York knew about it. They were there at the train station, as were many of the North Adams residents. For many of them, they'd never seen a quote Asian face before, let alone 75 Chinese workers. There was very little violence that took place. The Chinese workers went down to the factory. Samson had dorms set up for them in the factory. The Crispins actually tried to organize them if they could. When they were unsuccessful, the Crispins started their own shoe factory. And here's a picture of the Crispins, men and women who worked in the factory and some of their families in front of a factory building. And they started their own shoe factory in 1870. It lasted for three years until there was a Great Depression. They called it a panic at that time in 1873. And starting their own factory, starting their own work or owned enterprise was a very popular thing that was done at that time by the Crispins. This is statue of William McKinley. If you've ever been through the center of Adams, he'll greet you there. And I remember driving through there in 1977 and kind of being stunned, what is the statue of William McKinley doing here? I mean, I've heard of statues to Washington and Lincoln, but why McKinley? I mean, I finally stopped the car and walked over and you could see there are some engravings along the side. And it's not so much for what McKinley did as president, but for what McKinley did when he was in Congress from Ohio earlier on, when he was a strong advocate of a very, very powerful tariff. And that tariff put a price on British goods and allowed industrialists in New England and elsewhere to be able to sell their textiles much cheaper than any kind of British competition. So he was a favorite son of the Plunkets, which was the dominant family in Adams. And he came to stay with the Plunkets for at least three times while he was there. There you can see a Plunket, I mean, you can see McKinley over on the right and to his left, his wife, two of the Plunkets on the left. And the gentleman on the sort of center back is a government official and there are some young women are relatives of either the family or the government officials. Here's McKinley on the porch and McKinley addressing a huge crowd in North Adams. And the Plunkets continue to develop their mills. They really develop a good example of vertical integration. They actually bought two plantations in the South in 1912. So they own the cotton. They owned the cotton mills throughout the area and they were able to sell them through a variety of sources that would allow them to continue to grow and prosper. They owned mills throughout North Berkshire and into Vermont and ultimately it was called Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates. These are some pictures of the early mills in North Adams. This is a picture famous to me anyway, Lewis Hine, who many of you probably would recognize his name, who did a lot of photography of images of child labor, many of them taking place in New England. And he went through Vermont and also North Adams. And this is a photo that he took in 1910 of teenagers working in the Union Mill on Union Street in North Adams. And the figure that you're most drawn to, of course, is the young boy with a pipe. That's Albert Duquette, 15 years old. His dad worked in the mill as well. We know through some great work that Joe Manning, who lives in Northampton, has done with the Lewis Hine photos. Not only publishing the photos, but also doing research, what has happened to the children, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of the people who were in those photos. Anyway, Albert Duquette served in the military in World War I, was a price fighter, went back to working in the mills and died at a young age when he was only, I think, 39 years old. This is a very iconic photo of Addie Card who worked in one of the Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates mills in North Poundall, Vermont, just across the border from Williamstown. And Joe Manning also did a lot of research on Annie Card and he was able to find her descendants. And there was actually a postage stamp with that image on it published a number of years ago by the United States Post Office. Some very famous people visited Adams and North Adams. This is Eugene Debs. This is not when he was in North Adams. He came to Adams in 1898 and he spoke to a group of German socialist labor party men and women who were gathered there to meet him. It was a very sort of tight group, a very activist group and Debs on one of his speaking tours came there in 1898. This photo was from 1918 in Canton, Ohio when Debs spoke out against World War I and was later arrested and served time in prison. This is Clarence Darrow who came to North Adams and Williamstown in 1922, spoke about the criminal justice system, argued that poverty was one of the major causes of crime and also talked about the death penalty and the need to overturn it. Moving to the depression years, a really important period of time obviously throughout the entire country and in North Adams, North Berkshire, that whole region very important for union organizing, important for the New Deal and also showing the extent of poverty that was taking place during that period of time that the New Deal was attempting to overturn. This is one of the places that I found that I was able to get a lot of information on history and I guess you could do it for any community is to go to the annual reports and the annual reports during that period of time were very, very complete. Could be 150, 170 pages. Each particular segment of the city or the town would do their report. And this just sort of gives you a sense of what people were dealing with during that period of time. Just to focus on the last item, total number of second grade children with permanent teeth extracted. This is permanent teeth extracted 79 out of 414 children. So nearly 20% of second grade children, their teeth weren't such difficulty that they actually got their permanent teeth extracted during that period of time. This is just from the annual report where someone from the Public Works Department is just writing about the fact that he's sort of writing against the image that many people had that New Deal programs or even before the New Deal, there were sort of New Deal kinds of programs that the state of Massachusetts supported but moving against sort of the stereotype that men are just leaning on their shovels and not really doing much work. And here he's talking about blistered and bleeding hands, sore and aching muscles, tired and disparate minds and bodies going on day after day, week after week and talking about really being encouraged by all of the work that they were doing during that New Deal period. This I thought was interesting North Adams had relatively conservative mayors during that period of time, but Archie Pratt in 1934 used part of his address to quote from the Boston Herald, which again, I assume was a fairly conservative paper during that time. But in 1934, they had an editorial talking about the importance of the New Deal. And this is like the best Christmas we've had since Appomattox. So Archie Pratt and the paper are basically saying some really good things have happened during that time and we're really glad that it's there. So you can sort of see a shift away again sort of from Hoover to FDR during this period of time. There was a lot of organizing going on during that time period. This is in Adams. Most of the rallies were outdoors. There was music. Adams had a very significant Polish population working in the mills. Some of the unions themselves were totally Polish speaking. So when they had these rallies, there would somebody be speaking in Polish and somebody who would be translating. And the Adams Unionists were probably the strongest in the area. And when there was a strike like in 1934, there was a national textile strike. The strike in North Berkshire started in Adams. The Adams workers went out on strike. Then they took part in what was called flying squadrons where they would walk or drive from mill to mill throughout the area, from Adams to the French speaking Greylock section of North Adams to Williamstown and to North Poundall, all part of the Plunkett Empire encouraging those workers to go out on strike also. And many of the workers you can see here in the textile mills were women. This is from the Greylock section of North Adams, which as neighborhoods go during that time, this was basically a French speaking neighborhood. There was a French church there, a French parochial school there as well. Williamstown mill workers walked out as well. This is talking about the flying squadrons going throughout the area. Part of the New Deal, one of the most powerful and important New Deal programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps. And this is a group of young men who were stationed outside of North Adams. Unfortunately, as you probably know, a lot of the New Deal programs were segregated. The CCC was a segregated program. And here you could see men, some of them from the North Adams area, some of them from outside the area. This is a photo of young men working on building the Bascom Lodge on top of Mount Greylock. If you ever get a chance, once the COVID thing is over of just driving up or hiking up to the top of Mount Greylock, used to be the case that you could get a meal and sleep in the Bascom Lodge. And it's great getting up early in the morning and watching the sunrise. So that was another New Deal program that took place during that period of time. In late 1929, a Sprig electric company was called Sprig Specialties, decided to move to North Adams. And that was obviously a big deal because of the need for employment during that period of time. And they took over one of the defunct cotton mill plants in the northern section of North Adams, the Beaver Mill. And they got a very good deal in buying it. They got loans from the business community in North Adams who wanted to see more employment brought to the area. R.C. Sprig, who had started his operation in Quincy, Massachusetts, outgrew what he had there. They were building capacitors, which were useful in radios. And radios had become popular during that period of time. So it was a growing kind of business. This is a statement that was published in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts by a woman named Mabel Lewett on starting the first union at Sprig Electric Company. The way it turned out when they first started working there, they'd be called into work. And if there wasn't work there, they'd be sent home without any pay at all. So they started the union and they got four hours of guaranteed work if we reported to work, which was no more than right. And we got rid of gravy jobs. Work had to be divided equally, good and bad. So that's Mabel Lewett in 1937. Little bit later on, we'll talk more about Mabel Lewett. She and her husband were active participants in a big strike at Sprig Electric in 1970. This is a picture of a guy named Jerry Steinberg. And Jerry Steinberg was an organizer for a major CIO union, United Electrical Company. I'm sorry, United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers Union, which was one of the founders founding unions in the CIO. And when I first got to North Adams, I didn't know much about the pre 1970 history of Sprig Electric Company. And this sort of goes to community memory. After the 1970 strike and into the 1980s when Sprig left the community, by that time a lot of people were sort of going along with the Sprig corporate story that if they didn't have the strike, maybe the company would still be there. And maybe if the unions weren't so militant, everything would be okay. And the other part of that story was up until 1970, everybody just was good workers, nobody really complained. And until 1970, that's the situation. Anyway, in talking to old timers, they started telling about this guy named Jerry Steinberg. They say Jerry was a really nice guy. He'd buy you a drink. He was a communist, but he was an okay guy. We liked Jerry. And somebody mentioned United Electrical Workers. And so I ended up calling the archivist for the United Electrical Workers in Pittsburgh. If there was any material on Jerry Steinberg and he said there was a lot. So I ended up going to that archive. This is before the stuff's online. And just reading a lot about organizing at Sprig in 1937 and 1944, 1944 Jerry was already a paid staff worker for it. And I found out that there was a lot of disagreement with some of the local independent unions. And there wasn't an attempt to bring in these bigger CIO unions. But community memory over time had sort of pushed that aside and that was forgotten. In part because the company basically was arguing that if everybody had been quote, good workers, sort of a very patriarchal kind of thing, R.C. Sprig being the good father, then everything would have been okay. And the company would still be there. This is just part of what I found in the archives of the director of research and education for UE being able actually to do some financial analysis of what's going on at Sprig. And that's one of the things that the national unions were able to do. They were able to help with doing that kind of financial analysis and to help the local workers know what's going on rather than just accepting what the company is saying. UE, when they were organizing in North Adams at Sprig, they put out a newspaper, the UE news, and they had this cartoon basically saying that R.C. Sprig was really the puppet master behind the independent unions that were at Sprig. And a lot of people basically saw those unions for blue-collar and white-collar workers as really being controlled by the company and being relatively weak. It's not until the late 60s that you get national unions covering most of the workers at Sprig Electric Company. Sprig, as was kind of typical during that time, engage with what people called welfare capitalism. So for example, to show that you don't need a union, they would fund a lot of extracurricular activities, baseball teams, hear people playing outdoors, taking people to Fenway Park, sponsoring a symphony orchestra, also having Christmas bonuses. So if you don't go on strike before Christmas, you get your Christmas bonus. And for people who weren't that well paid, the Christmas bonus was a very big deal. In 1940, for the first time, the residents of North Adams elected a laboring man as their mayor. And what happened was this guy, Fax and Bowen, who was a millwright and someone who wrote into the newspaper a lot, complaining about corruption in the city, decided, and he was a member of city council for a couple of times, he also worked for the WPA. Since he decided to run for mayor, and the mayor at the time, Francis O'Hara, an ophthalmologist, made a comment that he shouldn't have made, since Fax and Bowen was just a common laborer, he's not fit for public office. And that comment really stung Fax and Bowen and the working people of North Adams. And Fax and Bowen ultimately became mayor in 1940. Here's a photo on the top. He's already at least 60 years old, riding on the side of the car on a parade through North Adams. A sprague grew through World War II. The capacitors that they developed and the other electronic equipment they developed was used for the war effort. They say that their capacitor was used in the bombing of Nagasaki. Here are women who are working, making gas masks during that period of time in collaboration with a shoe company. And here are women working at the Brown Street plant, which is one of three or four plants that Sprague Electric had. By this time in the 1940s, Sprague Electric Company is in the building where Mass Mocha is right now. Prior to that time, that building was housed Arnold Printworks, a big textile printing company which didn't have access to the materials they needed during World War II. So they ended up leaving that site and moving to a smaller site in Adams. So Spray grows and grows during World War II and they continue to grow after World War II. There's a great demand for consumer items. Capacitors are used in phonographs. They're used in TVs. They're used in the aerospace industry. So Spray grows and grows and grows. And by 1966, it has more than 4,000 workers in North Adams, which is a town, a city of just about 19,000. Many of them are blue-collar and white-collar unionized workers, but Spray, even though it has more than 20 plants around the country, has kept its corporate headquarters in North Adams. So there's a lot of management in North Adams. There's a big R&D center in North Adams and that's part of over the 4,000 workers. By the late 1960s, a new generation of workers comes to be employed in North Adams. Some of them are army veterans. They're more educated, women who are more independent and they begin to demand better representation from their local unions. And before long, the two independent local unions are overthrown and two national unions come in to represent the blue and white-collar workers. And one example of those people who are now part of that new generation, a man named Walter Wood, who becomes head of the IUE local at Spray, Wood took labor classes at Rutgers. He took labor classes at UMass. When he became president of the union, one of the first things he did is he connected with the labor center at UMass and asked them to bring in people who would teach them about collective bargaining, teach them about the grievance procedure, arbitration and all of that. And he tried to, one of the other things he did, he actually rented off the space downtown. Before that, the unions all met in Spray's buildings, which would raise certain kinds of questions about who's in control. And by 1970, it was clear to the workers there that they needed to really improve their wages, working conditions and to get a good arbitration clause. R.C. Sprague, the paternalistic founder never thought the workers, his workers would go out on strike, but they did. So in 1970, there's a 10-week strike. They picketed, as they say, belly to backside. As few as maybe 5% of the workers actually scabbed. The strike went on for 10 weeks during a difficult Berkshire winter. And as an end result, there was mediation in Washington and the workers got significant raises, improvements in various working conditions and they got arbitration. So at the end of the grievance procedure, there would be a third-party neutral arbitrator who would make decisions as to which side needs to win the case. Before that, the company made the final decision. And so this is 1970, which I think is a really important period of time. And during the strike, the company would use the newspapers, the airwaves, go to various civic groups to make their case. But the union would do the same thing. They would go to the newspaper. Walter Wood would go to the Rotary Club of Lions, go places like that and just point-by-point rebut what the company had to say. They put out flyers constantly about what was going on, what the issues that were being raised, what wages were like in other parts of Massachusetts. And so it was kind of a countervailing sort of attempt for the union to rebut what the company was saying. And so it was an educational campaign and it was a way to sort of bring both points of view out in the open instead of just having the company being the dominant force. 1970 and the 1970s might have been the high point of worker strikes after World War II. 1970 was a huge rank and file strike by the post office. There was a strike soon after in Lordstown, Ohio, a very famous one. And it turns out that that period of time, as I said, was probably the high point. That's Walter Wood on the right during the strike. Picture of workers stopping a truck coming into Sprig Electric. And here's a graph of unionization in the United States from 1930 going up into the 21st century. And if you see in 1970, it's sort of plateauing in the 1960s. And from 1970 on, a fairly significant decline. And we're moving into a period by 1980 that many people have called neoliberalism. A period of time in which the Democratic Party moves more to the right. Unions are attacked. You think of Ronald Reagan in 1981. You've got NAFTA under Bill Clinton. And it's very, very, it becomes more and more difficult to organize. Workers are afraid to strike and things become very hard for ordinary working people. So that period of 1970, when there was the strike at Sprig, in a sense was the beginning of a significant, or the end of one period of time and really a shift to another period of time. Not only in North Adams, but also nationwide. And I should say, by the late 1980s, there's a very important research project taking place in North Adams called the Shifting Gears Research Project. And it was taking place in every community in Massachusetts that had a heritage state park. So Holyoke had a research project going on, North Adams, Lawrence, and others as well. And the focus of the research project was the changing nature of work in Massachusetts. And so a lot of Sprig workers were interviewed. And maybe Louis, you remember, 1937, she helped to start the First Union. She and her husband were on the picket line in 1970. They went out into the woods. They gathered mushrooms in order to sell to restaurants to improve their strike benefits. But by the late 1980s, maybe Louis is obviously much older. She looks around North Adams, the factories have closed, life is hard. And when she's interviewed, she says, maybe unions are of much use now. This is from someone who started the First Union in 1937. And I think she could only say that because you don't at this time have that sort of countervailing news, media or other kind of support that would go against the kinds of things that were being said by Ronald Reagan and more conservative democratic administrations. Unions are in decline. The Democratic Party is not so much pro-union anymore. So if she's told that unions are the reason for de-industrialization, she looks around and well, maybe that's the case. So that's sort of interesting in trying to figure out community memory. Spray, despite the fact that it does well, even after the strike, is sold to a couple of other corporations, including Penn Central. Penn Central basically milks it dry and it closes around 1985, 1986. Workers in the area do their best to survive. There are a number of different factories that are established around that period of time. Some of them might remind us of sweatshops. This is one on Union Street, Extile Corporation that just left on a weekend with a lot of workers, salaries, checks bouncing. A labor coalition got started during that time, North Berkshire Labor Coalition. They worked with the Extile Workers to try to stop the auction. The hope was to keep the machines in North Adams so the workers would be able to buy them and start their own corporation. They were unsuccessful in that. Civil disobedience took place and about a dozen workers were arrested along with members of the coalition. A new grocery store opened in North Adams. They wouldn't hire former unionists so those workers picketed it. And rather than just continue to pick it, they worked with others in starting a new supermarket, going back to what the Crispins were doing in the 19th century. There were two or three, there were a couple of other attempts for worker ownership in various industries that were not successful. Heritage supermarket was successful but it was only able to last about three years because of the very stiff competition that took place during that period of time. Now we move to the current period of time where we begin to get the development of Mass Mocha in 1986, again, roughly around the period of time of deindustrialization. So the buildings that you see here, this is already Mass Mocha with the downside uptrees in the courtyard that some of you may have seen if you visited Mass Mocha. And it's an interesting building. It was like 27, 28 or so, a bunch of buildings, it's maybe two dozen buildings that at one time held the largest printworks in the world, Arnold Printworks held the largest capacitor producing company in the world, Sprig Electric, and now holds the largest museum of contemporary art in the world in those same buildings. Mocha got started with a $35 million grant from the state government. The promise that Mocha made that it would produce not only in the museum, but indirectly 600 full-time jobs in North Adams hasn't come to fruition. Organizations got started in North Adams, including something called the April 4th Coalition, which talked about the need for more jobs in North Adams, more decent wages in North Adams. And this is part of a demonstration in support of Wisconsin workers in 2011 who wanted to keep their collective bargaining rights. The largest employer, the largest employer in North Adams at the time were some 530 workers who worked at the regional hospital. And this is a bulletin board for the North Adams Regional Hospital nurses, a billboard in town. In 2014, March of 2014, with three days notice, the hospital said it was closing. And it did close. People went to the hospital, they tried to sit in at the hospital, they tried to get help from the government in stopping the closing. Governor Deval Patrick refused to use his emergency powers to keep the hospital from closing. And it closed. These are some examples of some of the demonstrators who went to the hospital to try to keep it from closing. Meeting after meeting, week after week, took place in the community. The government said that they would bring in a consulting group to try to figure out what the area really needed in terms of a hospital. For a while after the hospital closed, there was no emergency room in North Adams. So if people were sick, they'd have to call the ambulance or if they can get down to the ambulance garage, they would just go there and ask to be taken to Pittsfield or to Southern Vermont where there was another hospital. Finally, the biggest hospital in the region, Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield bought the hospital at a very, very low cost during bankruptcy, but they refused to make it a full service hospital. These are, this is a demonstration at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield. The, a new group that got started called North County Cures Coalition, which has continued to advocate for a full service hospital was down in Pittsfield to try to convince Berkshire Medical Center to make the hospital in North Adams a full service one. Right now, it just has an emergency room and some outpatient offices. This is North County Cures Coalition speaking in Pittsfield in probably 2014, the year that it closed, calling on them to reopen the hospital. And this is Dick DeSotti, one of the activists for that group. This is not about the closing of a factory or a business. It's not that the state closed our employment office, closed our welfare office. We draw the line here. We cannot accept our elected officials' lack of leadership and commitment to serve our community. If the government can bail out the banks because they're too big to fail, we have to let our government officials know that hospitals are too big to fail. Now, what DeSotti is referring to is most of the Berkshire delegation and the mayor at the time basically said, if this is the reality, you're not gonna get a full service hospital, you just have to learn to live with it. Very few were really pushing for the opening of a full service hospital. And it was kind of like, that's the past, let's look to the future. An example of that is the current state senator from Berkshire County, Adam Hines. A few years ago, he was asked in an interview through Commonwealth Magazine about the hospital. And it turns out around the same time the hospital closed, the state of Massachusetts gave $25.4 million to Mass Mocha to rehab another building on that campus so the museum could grow at the same time that $2 or $3 million might have been enough to keep the hospital going. And Hines was asked about that. What about the money that was given to Mocha and the money that was not given to the hospital? This is what he said, when it comes to making the decision of what the state is going to invest in, we are going to invest in what seems to be demonstrating the most promise. Mocha in its supportive cultural attractions have created the buzz. You see that in other new projects and new investments coming in from outside Massachusetts, every project has a critical juncture and Mass Mocha has reached that juncture. So it's very much within the context of neoliberalism of supporting big institutions, whether they're corporate or nonprofit. And the assumption is that the benefits will go down to ordinary people. But as I've said, those 600 jobs have still not come to fruition. This is a woman at one of the vigils that North County Cares Coalition has put on at the anniversary of each of the, really memorializing the closing of the hospital. They call it Berkshire Medical Center North. That's what Berkshire Medical Center. And so Berkshire Health Systems is the biggest employer in Berkshire County. They employ close to 4,000 people, not just at the hospital, but in nursing homes and rehab centers, not just in Berkshire County, but throughout the country. And one in Leeds, one in Holyoke, Cape Cod, the Boston area and so on. So it's a fairly big empire. It's the GE of the 21st century. GE being the dominant employer in Pittsfield during an earlier period of time. One of the things local people are trying to do in North Adams is to rehabilitate the Housik River. The Housik River, we started this conversation a while ago by talking about the Housik River being the power that started all the factories. It also would overflow periodically. There were some really bad floods in North Adams. So they brought in the Army Board of Engineers in order to put cement walls along parts of the river to keep it from overflowing. They've been successful in that regard, but in a sense, we've, quote, lost the river. So now there's an attempt to bring back the Housik River and there are ways apparently in other cities have done this to bring back the river without the fear of a flood loss. This is an example of what part of the river looks like through North Adams. It's an example of what one of the floods was back in the earlier part of the 20th century. And this is a rebuilt or rehabbed river in Denver, Colorado. And the hope is that with the right resources, they might be able to do something like that. Sort of nature walks along to bring back the fish in the Housik River in North Adams. That's Governor, former Governor William Weld in North Adams at the State Historical Park. And behind him is the mayor of North Adams at the time, a mayor, Alcambright, and sitting next to Alcambright with the baseball hat is Thomas Crens. You may remember it was Thomas Crens in 1985, who came from the Williams College Museum of Art to convince the mayor of North Adams at the time that Mocha would be a good idea. After that, when Mocha got started, Crens went on to work for the Guggenheim Museum in New York and he started to build many Guggenheims all over the world, including the most famous one in Bilbao, Spain. Crens is no longer with the Guggenheim. He lives in Williamstown. And a few years ago, he came into North Adams with plans for more and more museums. He admitted that Mocha really hadn't done it in terms of economic development. If only we have more museums, more and more museums, that will bring more and more people to North Adams that wanna stay overnight, two, three, four nights, restaurants, hotels will develop and everything will be fine. So there is Weld, as the former governor, but what he didn't say, he also was employed by Thomas Crens for his legal work with his legal firm in Boston, talking about the merits of these new museums. Next to Crens is Joe Thompson in the blue shirt who just retired as director of the museum. Next to him with the bow tie is the president of MCLA and next to the president of MCLA is Frank Gary, the world renowned architect who was to be, or is to be the designer of that huge model railway museum that Crens would like to build in North Adams. There are about a dozen or so museums that Crens has in mind building. A museum of motorcycles, 3D movie venues, the Mount Greylock Distillery, the Massachusetts Museum of Time, a parking garage, a 110 luxury hotel spa and wellness center, and he also wants to take advantage of two quote, opportunity zones, which would give him tax breaks. Since the COVID, he's been totally quiet because it's obviously not a period of time of economic development, but it does raise the question of the problems that a tourist economy has during a period of time of the COVID. That's a model of, I think of the Empire State Building. The massive model railway museum will also have famous buildings from around the world around which the trains will go. I wanna just end by saying a couple of things that have come to pass recently. Mass MoCA workers are attempting to unionize and they're joining museum workers around the country. There've been a flood of museum organizing attempts over the past year, including a successful one at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. And this was just mentioned publicly a few days ago. So that resilience that we've seen before has come to that same building that hosted the Arnold Print Works and Sprague Electrical Workers and now it's museum workers who are attempting to unionize. And along with that, there's been an Instagram campaign of members of various cultural institutions throughout Berkshire County. They haven't come out publicly. They're still anonymous, criticizing some of the cultural places they work for for their pay, their working conditions and hours and they're organizing on Instagram. So I'll just conclude by just saying there's a certain kind of resilience that we're seeing now in 2021 that we saw during the 19th century and much of the 20th century. And I've probably spent too much time already but I'll stop screen sharing. Well, thank you for that. Are there questions? Do we have time for a question or two? I think I would have a question of are you working on anything now? Well, I'm just looking to see that I went 20 minutes over. I'm sorry for that. Well, I still continue to pay a lot of attention to Berkshire County by speaking to friends up there and following things in the media. I haven't been up there in a while. I've been trying to do more and more research on what people have called deaths of despair and what's been happening with middle age, working class people, not only in this country but outside of this country as well. So that's kind of the thing that I've been focusing on. Thank you. Irv, did you have a question? Will you talk a little bit about the closing of the hospital? Well, it closed, as I said, in 2014 and it was a shock to a lot of the people working there. But in the broader context, I think some 170 hospitals, rural hospitals have closed throughout the United States over the past couple of decades. And most of them have been in rural areas in the United States, which means areas where people have to drive long distances to go to another hospital and their poorer areas and many wouldn't have the resources, the resources to get there. The hospital ran into trouble in part not just because it was running a hospital but because it tried to build an empire. So earlier on, the hospital purchased two significant buildings in Williamstown. One a retirement community and one sort of a nursing home kind of community. And then when 2008 happened with the financial crash, they took an awfully long, awfully big loss on those two properties. So that was part of the reason that they closed. And then there's the question, why hasn't Brookshire Medical Center made it a full service hospital? Now, Brookshire Medical Center controls a hospital in South County in Great Barrington called Fearview Hospital. And that hospital services a smaller community, less number of births than in North Adams, but it's a wealthier area. So they're not just getting medicare and Medicaid money from them, which is probably why they're keeping it open. Though, you know, there's a hospital in Palmer, which is owned by Bay State, and that hospital loses money in Palmer, but Bay State keeps it open. So there's some question given the profits that Brookshire Medical Center has, why not take a 1 million or $1.5 million loss in the hospital in North Adams? By the way, the fact that people from North Adams now have to go to Pittsfield has meant much more crowded conditions in Pittsfield and the nurses there complaining about staff patient ratio. So I guess to answer your question, I think it's part of what's been going on nationally and it's part of our broken healthcare system. But even with that, there's, you know, again, the possibility of its owner, Brookshire Health Systems, keeping it going. Other questions? Anyone? Well, we are over time. So I'll thank you for your time. And everyone tune in two weeks from now for Dr. Curtis Hoffman of Bridgewater State. We'll talk to us about Native American stone structures and history in New England. But Dr. Cedar, thank you very much. This was really informative for those of us who didn't know about the union history out in the Berkshires. Okay, thanks for having me. And it's good to be back in Amherst. Bye-bye. Good to have you.