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Business and Labor

The Working Man’s Friend Who Busted the Hartford Newsies Strike

The New York-based newsies strike, immortalized in the Disney film of the same name, succeeded in 1899. The Hartford newsies strike 10 years later did not — and all because of a former newsie.

Hartford Newsies

Hine’s caption: 9:00 P.M. March 4, 1909. Hartford, Conn. Group of newsies still selling although it was bitter cold and blizzardy. Smallest chap was 8 years old. The boys said he has been selling for 3 years. Boy next him (and) has been selling 4 years (called Bologna). Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Early in 1909, social reformer Lewis Hine brought his Graflex camera to Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven to record images of boys and girls on the streets. They worked as newsies, bootblacks and messenger boys.

Social reformers thought children shouldn’t work on the streets, where they learned about gambling, swearing and booze. They went into saloons to sell papers, knowing that drunks made good customers. The kids also worked long hours, sometimes starting out at 5 a.m., and returning home at midnight. They fought over territory, and people sometimes shortchanged the youngest newsboys who didn’t know how to make change.

Others, however, pointed out the children’s families, mostly poor immigrants, needed the pennies they earned to survive. Some young girls, for example, paid for school tuition with their earnings as newsies.

Two newsies about to do business in a saloon. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Herman Kopplemann

Herman Kopplemann had started out as a Hartford newsie in 1888 at the age of eight. He came to Hartford from Russia with his parents when he was two years old. He and his brother eventually formed a partnership to distribute Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers throughout Connecticut. They built it into the largest distributorship in the state.

At 24, Herman Kopplemann ran for city council and won, representing Hartford’s poor East Side. During his five terms in the council he brought improvements to the neighborhood: sewer upgrades, a public bath house and pay hikes for police officers and firefighters.

Toward the children who sold his newspapers, he showed less benevolence.

Hartford Newsies Strike

Hine’s caption: 7 year old twins. Been selling for 1 year. Sell sometimes until 8 P.M., Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

New York papers sold well in Connecticut, especially Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Heart’s Evening Journal. The two millionaires battled each other for more circulation and bigger profit.

Typically, newspaper publishers bought back unsold newspapers from their distributors. But in 1909, they refused to do it anymore.

In Connecticut, that meant Herman Kopplemann would be the one to stick the newsies with the papers they couldn’t sell.

The newsies went on strike against Pulitzer and Hearst. According to the Shoeleather History Project, on May 1 newsies from all over the city assembled at a hall at the corner of Winthrop and Pleasant Streets. They formed a parade and marched in the rain behind a drum and bugle corps with a banner that urged people to buy only local newspapers. The next day they formed a union, the Hartford Newsboys’ Association, and elected officers.

At first it went well. Drugstores stopped stocking the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers, people stopped buying them and supporters contributed to the strike fund. On May 17, the newsies marched through the streets again, wearing white hats and union pins and waving flags.

Scabs

Kopplemann, however, had no intention of backing down. He hired strikebreakers from out of town – at their peril, as it turned out, as the newsies beat them up. He spread rumors the strike had failed. And he enlisted his brother to form a rival ‘union.’

Hearst himself helped out. He sent an employee from New York to break the strike. A Hartford clothing store owner caught him buying a large quantity of boys clothing and shoes. Kopplemann had planned on offering the new clothes to the boys as a bribe to end the strike.

By the end of the third week, dissension spread among the strikers, probably instigated by the Kopplemanns and Hearst. Nineteen days after it began, the newsies voted to end the strike.

Some New Dealer

Herman Kopplemann

Herman Kopplemann then won election to the state Legislature. After lying, bullying and hiring scabs to break a children’s strike, he went on to get himself elected to Congress as a Democrat on a pro-labor ticket.

After serving five terms in Congress, he was defeated in 1946 and died 11 years later. Speaker of the House John McCormack memorialized him as a man who always extended a helping hand.

“There are many thousands of persons who are happier today because of Herman Kopplemann and his consideration of and his kindness to others,” McCormack said.

Tony Zazzaro

Paul and Tony Zazzaro. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Among the Hartford newsies photographed by Lewis Hine were Paul and Tony Zazzaro. Hine’s caption read,

8 A.M. A cold and windy day. Small boy, Paul Zozzaro, 9 years old, begins at 7 A.M. daily. Then goes to school. Sells after school until 6 P.M. and later. Older brother, Tony, gets up at 5 every morning and sells before school. Then after school again.

Historian Joe Manning did some sleuthing about Tony and Paul Zazzaro. The boys’ parents had immigrated from Italy. Their father worked as a street sweeper, their mother took care of seven children. When Paul grew up he started a successful restaurant called The Capitol Grille.

Tony became one of Hartford’s political bosses. For many years he delivered the Italian vote and served for a term on the city council. He also owned parking garages and a brewery. He had two aides who became well-known Connecticut political figures: John Bailey and Abraham Ribicoff.

Robert Chiles, in his book, The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal, wrote the triumvirate that ruled Hartford in 1928 consisted of Thomas J. Spellacy, Tony Zazzaro and Herman Kopplemann.

With thanks to Shoeleather History and Mornings on Maple Street.

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James Edgar Invents the Department Store Santa on a Whim in 1890

The world’s first known department store Santa Claus owned his own store and paid his employees good wages. He gave them shares in the business, and even closed early four nights a week so they could spend time with their families.

His name was James Edgar, and the people who knew him in 19^th-century Brockton, Mass., described him as big, jolly, generous – and a world-class show-off. He donned a Santa suit one December day in 1890 and greeted children in the aisles of his store. Soon he had to order a second Santa suit from his tailor and put his nephew in it to play Santa.

Years later, an old man remembered the magic of seeing James Edgar dressed up as the first department store Santa. Today, an actual department store might seem just as magical – especially if its employees were treated like James Edgar’s workers.

James Edgar

James Edgar had an old-fashioned business philosophy. “I have made a barrel of money, and I have spent it as freely as I have made it,” he once said. “Thousands of it goes back to the people from whom I made it, for I fully believe in that kind of an exchange.”

Department Store Santa

Though a shrewd and successful businessman, James Edgar probably had no idea what he started when he stepped onto the floor of The Boston Store wearing his new Santa Claus suit. He usually dressed up as a clown at Christmas and wandered the store after school let out. Sometimes he picked out a little girl to present with a new doll.

But he dressed in costume on the Fourth of July. He dressed up as George Washington or Uncle Sam or a Scottish Highlander for the thousands of children he invited to his annual Independence Day picnics.

He admitted he made himself ridiculous to many people. But he liked children and he thought they should have a chance to meet Santa.

Edgar got his idea for his Santa suit from a Thomas Nast cartoon.

Soon after his first gig as a department store Santa, parents and children lined up outside his store to see him. They came from Boston, from Providence, even from New York.

A small boy named Edward Lowery Pearson happened to visit The Boston Store on the day James Edgar dressed up as Santa. In 1976, then in his 90s, he described the experience to Modern Maturity magazine.

“You just can’t imagine what it was like,” Pearson said. “I remember walking down an aisle and, all of a sudden, I saw Santa Claus. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and then Santa came up and started talking to me.

“It was a dream come true.”

Within a decade, every major U.S. city had a department store Santa. Other department stores, like R.H. Macy’s and J.H. Parkinson’s, claimed they’d had a Santa earlier than 1890. But Santa historians note James Edgar was the first department store Santa with a known identity – and that he inspired major department stores to hire Santa next Christmas.

The Dry Goods Business

When James Edgar came up in business, the modern department store was just coming into existence.

Born in Scotland in 1843, he was apprenticed as a boy to a cloth merchant – then known as a linen draper. He worked long, grueling hours for $50 a year. He resolved that if he ever had ‘boys’ of his own, he’d treat them better than he’d been treated.

At the age of 22 he immigrated to St. John, New Brunswick, but didn’t think much of his prospects there. So he pawned his watch for a ticket to Boston and got a job for $12 a week – more than he’d ever made in his life. He decided to stay in America.

In Boston he worked at the Hogg, Brown & Taylor dry goods store. The term ‘dry goods’ comes from colonial New England merchants, many of whom were ship captains, who mainly imported calico and rum. They sold calico from one side of the store – the dry goods side – and rum from the wet goods side. “Wet goods” fell away, but dry goods stayed and evolved into the department store.

Edgar worked in Providence for several years, married a Canadian nurse named Annie McLeod. They had a daughter. In 1878 James Edgar and George W. Reynolds started The Boston Store (a common name back then) in the Town of Brockton.

Brockton, with a thriving shoe and leather industry would soon become a city. In 1883, Thomas Edison threw a switch in Brockton to have a three-wire underground electrical system, and the next year Brockton had the first electrically operated fire station.

James Edgar embraced the city’s spirit of progress, and put electric lights and cash registers into The Boston Store. He created the Edgar Layaway plan, in which money laid away earned 4 percent interest.

Before he dressed as Santa, Edgar put on a clown costume.

Edgar Plays Department Store Santa

It was an era of cutthroat competition, and Edgar believed in the power of advertising and promotion. He offered coupons, and he marked down dresses to 39 cents from $1.39. Once he threw pennies off the roof of the store.

Edgar insisted on treating the poorest customer with the same courtesy as the richest. He said he hired the best help available and paid them the best wages.

“I make it possible for them to own their own homes, even if I live in an upstairs tenement to save a few dollars,” he said.

He did live in a second-floor apartment in Brockton, but he also owned a summer home in nearby Lakeville. The Boston Store was doing well until it burned down in 1886. He rebuilt. When his partner died, he bought out his estate.

His employees didn’t leave until they died, and on Feb. 1, 1899 he made 25 of them stockholders in the store.

When he reached his 60s he still had plans to expand. He built a new, concrete department store in 1906. It had 149 clerks, 52,000 square feet and nearly 20,000 people came to shop on its busiest day. But he had suffered a stroke, which partially paralyzed him. Then in 1909 another stroke killed him.

A James Edgar promo piece

Remembering James Edgar

Eighty-seven years after that first Christmas, Edgar Pearson still remembered James Edgar.

“That was many, many Christmases ago,” Pearson said. “But I still say God bless James Edgar. He gave me a memory I have treasured all my life. … What a wonderful person he was.”

Today Brockton still remembers their first department store Santa. Children can still play in James Edgar Playground, donated to the city by his daughter Eva.

The city also celebrates the annual Santa Hat Challenge, where hundreds of people don red hats to pay tribute to Edgar.

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

With thanks to Department store Santas owe paychecks to Col. Jim Edgar, Bob Cubie, Brockton Enterprise and Santa Claus aka James Edgar by Robert A. Kane. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Dutch in New England: More Than Sinterklaas and Koekjes

Today the remnants of the colonial Dutch in New England are pretty much limited to the region’s outer rim: At Smith’s Castle in North Kingstown, R.I., in Vermont’s oldest house in Pownal, on Leyden Street in Plymouth, Mass. and on a historic sign in Castine, Maine.

But the Dutch had more of a presence in early New England than along the perimeter, and far more than commonly acknowledged. The Dutch claimed much of Connecticut, for example, before English settlers crowded them out. The early Plymouth and Massachusetts colonists might not have survived had the Dutch not brought trade goods like tools and cheese, cannon and livestock. Rhode Islanders had an especially cozy relationship with Dutch traders, and the Dutch claimed part of Downeast Maine.

Don’t forget King William III was also a Dutch staedtholder.

When thinking about the history of British North America It’s easy to forget that William of Orange seized the English throne in 1688 with the help of Dutch troops. King Williams was not only a French prince but also a staedtholder – a Dutch earl or a duke — of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic.

Decades later, the English Parliament decided to tax tea to discourage the Dutch from smuggling the stuff into the colonies – hence the Boston Tea Party. The Dutch were also the first to salute the American flag and, therefore, the first to acknowledge the independence of the United States on November 16, 1776.

The Dutch in New England

In early 17^th century New England, colonists depended on Dutch traders because they had to. England was still recovering from Henry VIII’s shenanigans and had some catching up to do. Amsterdam, not London, had grown into the European capital of shipping, banking and finance.

“The British government and the British commercial world had not yet got their colonial act together,” wrote Charlotte Wilcoxen. The country ‘was still inexperienced at coordinating the production and distribution of goods,’ she wrote. “Her American colonies, victims of this ineptitude, were forced to look to the Dutch for supplies.”

A Dutch trading vessel, known as a fluyt.

In the 16^th and first half of the 17^th centuries, the Dutch were leading traders in the world, with outposts in Thailand, Brazil, Africa, Indonesia and the Caribbean.

Dutch merchants may have traded on the coast of New England as early as 1598. And they didn’t differ from the other European powers in wanting to expand in North America. One big reason: soft gold, otherwise known as beaver.

Beavers

From about 1550, all the best people in Europe had to have a beaver hat. They were soft, attractive, durable and expensive. The beaver hat craze nearly drove the Eurasian beaver to extinction, and sent trappers and traders to North America from Europe.

Nice hat. The Laughing Cavalier by Franz Hals.

Dutch traders set up trading posts along the coast from Maryland to Maine, and up the Hudson, Connecticut and Delaware rivers. They bought beaver furs from Indians in exchange for trade goods. They learned from the Pequot how to use wampum, or zewant, and then taught the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony how to do it.

In 1621, the Dutch government chartered the West India Company to, among other things, exploit the beaver trade and colonize North America. Three years later the Netherlands sent colonists to try to settle a wide swath Northeast territory.

In addition to New Amsterdam (New York) and Fort Nassau (Albany) the Dutch in New England eventually had a fort in Hartford, called Fort Hope. They also built a fort called Roduins, or Red Dunes, at the mouth of the Housatonic River. They had a trading post on Quetenis, what is now Dutch Island in Jamestown, R.I., and briefly set up a fort and a warehouse in Old Saybrook, Conn. The Dutch may also have settled along the coast of Maine.

Traces of the Dutch presence in the eastern part of upper New York State can be found in the Mooar-Wright House. Built around 1762, it has a Dutch frame around a typically English layout.

Mooar-Wright House

Bye-Bye Beaver

If beaver mortality is any indication, New England and Europe kept up a brisk trade during the first half of the 17^th century.

Europe’s insatiable appetite for beaver fur kept New England’s Indians busy trapping the creatures. The Dutch in New England tried to keep up with their demand for knives, axes, glassware and wool. From 1626 to 1632, the Dutch sent 52,584 beaver pelts back to the Netherlands.

It only got worse for the beaver. By 1650, trappers and traders were sending 80,000 beaver pelts a year to England and the Netherlands. Fifty years later, the once-plentiful beaver had disappeared completely from Massachusetts, and soon after vanished from Vermont and Connecticut.

Massachusetts

In 1635, a Dutch vessel stopped in Marblehead with 140 tons of salt and 10,000 pounds of tobacco. They probably sold salt to Marblehead’s cod fishermen before sailing back to Europe to unload their tobacco.

Dutch merchants also bought tobacco from Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims, after all, had lived for about a dozen years in Leiden, about 30 miles southwest of Amsterdam, and undoubtedly spoke at least some Dutch. When they arrived in Plymouth they built houses on Leyden Street in 1620. It’s still there.

Leyden Street in the 1800s

Plymouth Gov. William Bradford reported ‘profitable commerce’ with the New Amsterdam Dutch for ‘diverse years.’ Plymouth colonist Isaac Allerton brokered the sale of a Dutch ship from two Dutchmen in New Amsterdam.

Next door in Massachusetts, Gov. John Winthrop noted in his journal that the two colonies often traded with the ‘Dutch at Hudson’s River’ for sheep, beaver, cannon, sugar, wine and linen. Massachusetts, in fact, did so much trade with the Dutch that the colony used Dutch currency and passed a law in 1643 regulating its use.

One reason Massachusetts had to use Dutch currency was that the English Civil War, which started in 1642, pretty much ended trade between England and the colonies for a while. Colonists who needed supplies had to go Dutch — or perhaps Venetian or Spanish.

Today The Dutch House in Brookline, Mass., serves as a memorial of sorts to the Dutch in New England. Built as a pavilion in the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Brookline resident Charles Brooks Appleton saw it, bought it and had it moved to his hometown.

Rhode Island, aka Roode Eylandt

On the shore of Mill Cove off Narragansett Bay stands a large, plain, wooden house in a clearing. A Rhode Island merchant named Richard Smith, Jr., built it in 1678, after Narragansett Indians burned down the previous house during King Philip’s War. Smith fortified the big old colonial with two small cannons, thus earning the name “Smith’s Castle.” Today it’s a house museum, which in 2019 scheduled a holiday event, Christmas at the Castle, celebrating ‘Dutch influence on colonial life.’

Rhode Islanders like Smith got rich trading with the Dutch in New England. Dutch explorer Adriaen Block had explored Rhode Island and the interior of Connecticut in 1614, naming Block Island after himself and probably naming Rhode Island “Roode Eylandt.” The Dutch even tried to claim Rhode Island as a colony.

Smith Castle

Trading With the Dutch in New England

Nevertheless, Rhode Island probably had the most sustained and cordial trade relations with the Dutch in New England, according to Charlotte Wilcoxen. Rhode Islanders who did business with the Dutch included William Coddington, William Brenton, John Underhill, John Throgmorton and the father and son pair of Richard Smith.

Richard Smith, Sr., had set up a trading post in a place they called Cocumscussoc, now North Kingstown, with his business partner, Roger Williams. In 1651, he built a house there, 20 miles from the nearest settlement. Smith also had trading posts in Taunton, Mass., and in New Amsterdam, where he lived part time. He sent fish, beaver and salt to Europe in exchange for manufactured goods. Slaves and sugar came from the Dutch in the West Indies.

After Richard Smith died in 1666, his son Richard took over the business. Today the Smith Castle docents will tell you his family incorporated Dutch holiday traditions – such as Sinterklaas and koekjes — into their daily life.

Anglo-Dutch Wars

In the mid-17^th century the English began to block Dutch shipping in the English Channel and along other trade routes. That caused three Anglo-Dutch Wars, fought primarily at sea. The first broke out in 1652 and ended in 1654. The second lasted from 1664-67, and the third from 1672-74.

The New England colonies kept up commerce and correspondence with the Dutch during the wars. Rhode Islanders especially honored bans on Dutch trade more in the breach than in the observance.

Huys de Hoop, Connecticut

Connecticut probably had the testiest relations with the Dutch in New England, perhaps because familiarity bred contempt. Connecticut, after all, was cheek-by-jowl with New Amsterdam, and the Dutch early on claimed both the Connecticut and New Haven colonies.

Dutch settlements

The Dutch called the Connecticut River the Versche, or Fresh, River, and the Dutch made good use of it in the early 17^th century. They traded beaver for trade goods with the Indians. In 1633, they built a fort called Huys de Hoop, or House of Hope, on a tributary of the Versche in what is now Hartford. Today Huyshope Avenue connects the Connecticut Probation Department at one end with Aetna Ambulance Services at the other.

The Dutch intended the House of Hope to serve as the capital of Dutch Connecticut, which had amounted to a few tiny, scattered settlements – in Branford, Old Saybrook and New Haven. But they couldn’t keep up with the influx of English immigrants fleeing the Puritans in Massachusetts.

Groenwits

One exception was Greenwich, in the far southwestern corner of Connecticut. Today it’s called the Entryway to New England. In 1640, the Dutch considered it the westernmost settlement of New Amsterdam.

That year, two Massachusetts families, the Feakes and the Patricks, bought land from the Indians and called it Elizabeth’s Neck. Massachusetts had banished them for their support of the heretical Anne Hutchinson. The Feakes later built a house, the Feake-Ferris House, in what is now Old Greenwich.

Three months after their arrival, armed Dutch soldiers from New Amsterdam showed up in Elizabeth’s Neck. They gave the Feakes and the Patricks a choice: submit to Dutch rule or leave. They submitted. The Dutch then changed the settlement’s name to Groenwits and held it for the next 16 years.

Coincidentally, Greenwich was one of the first Connecticut towns to suffer Dutch Elm Disease in 1934.

Squabbling

The Dutch and the ever-increasing English squabbled constantly over their borders in Connecticut. It didn’t take long for English settlers from Massachusetts to surround the House of Hope in Windsor, Wethersfield and Hartford. Finally in 1650 the English and Dutch settled their boundary 50 miles west of the Connecticut River. Greenwich stayed with the Dutch.

The Dutch relinquished those claims at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667. In exchange, they got concessions on the Indonesian spice trade including, ironically, nutmeg.

The Dutch eventually realized they couldn’t compete with the exploding English population in Connecticut. So they decided to consolidate their North American colony at the tip of Manhattan in New Amsterdam.

New Amsterdam

But even the retreat to New Amsterdam was fraught. The leadership in England, kings and Cromwell alike, dearly wanted to oust the Dutch from the North American colonies.

During the first Anglo-Dutch War, Oliver Cromwell outfitted an invasion force under Robert Sedgwick to take over New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam stayed in Dutch hands only because the two nations declared peace. Sedgwick turned north and captured Acadia instead.

Then after Charles II got his throne back he decided he wanted New Amsterdam for his brother, the Duke of York. On Aug. 27, 1664, four English frigates under the command of Richard Nicholl sailed into the harbor. The Dutch, with few supplies, quickly surrendered.

New Amsterdam in 1884

As a Dutch minister, Samuel Drisius, wrote, “No relief or assistance could be expected while daily great numbers of Englishmen arrived from New England both on foot and on horseback hotly bent upon plundering this place.”

The city, now New York, stayed in English hands until July 1673, when it reverted to the Dutch. The Dutch held it until the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, when they gave it up in exchange for Surinam.

The Dutch influence in the region can still be seen in the region, from architecture to place names to New York Mets uniforms. The blue, white and orange colors go back to the 17^th-century Prinsenvlag, or Prince’s Flag, the naval flag of the States-General of the Dutch Republic.

Maine

In 1857, a military historian named Maj. Gen. J. Watts De Peyster read a paper before the New York Historical Society about Dutch settlement and exploration 250 years earlier.

“There never was a good piece of land that the Devil did not open his bag and shake out some Dutchman upon it,” he said. That land included ‘the rich lumber districts of Maine.’ The Dutch, he said, made several attempts to settle Maine to ‘share the prolific fisheries; the unsurpassed masting and lumbering facilities; and, at that time, the rich fur trade.’

Though Maine was, in the early 17^th century, the Province of Acadie, the Dutch planted the flag at least on the shores of Muscongus Bay at what is now Bremen. De Peyster said the Dutch language was perpetrated in the town by a steady stream of Germans who followed in the footsteps of those early settlers.

He also claimed a Dutch settlement had existed at one time on the Sheepscot River a mile above Wiscasset, and at Pemaquid.

For a century, de Peysters argument was neither proven nor disproven. But by the end of the 20^th century, archaeologists found extensive Dutch artifacts along the coast from Maine to Maryland.

The Flying Horse

Historians have not disputed the Dutch conquest of Castine. In August of 1674, the Flying Horse, a Dutch frigate, sailed into Penobscot Bay. The fighting force of 110 men easily overtook the 30 French soldiers at the fort of Pentagoet.

Marker showing the Dutch in New England

The Dutch commander, Capt. Jurriaen Aernoutsz, viewed Pentagoet as fair game. The French had allied with the English during the third Anglo-Dutch War. Though the English had settled with the Dutch, the French had not.

Aernoutsz then captured another French fort at Jemseg, and in both places he buried a bottle with a message in it. The message said Acadia belonged to the Dutch and was to be known as ‘New Holland.’ But he sailed away, the Dutch couldn’t hang on to Acadia and soon the French recovered the territory. They gave Pentagoet a new name, Bagaduce, but today it is known as Castine.

Dutch-American Heritage Day

Fast forward a century. On Nov. 16, 1776, an American warship, the Andrew Doria, sailed into the harbor of the Dutch Caribbean island Sint Eustatius. The Dutch governor ordered a friendly cannon salute. That angered the British, and they took control of the island a few years later. The Dutch got it back in 1784. In 1990, that day was proclaimed “Dutch-American Heritage Day.”

The Andrew Doria in Sint Eustatius

With thanks to Dutch Trade and Ceramics in America in the Seventeenth Century by Charlotte Wilcoxen and The New Netherlands Institute.

Images: Castine sign By No machine-readable author provided. Masonbarge assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=696875. Smith’s Castle By Mlanni98 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77139260. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Ku Klux Klan Fights the Battle of Greenville, Maine

In 1924, dozens of Ku Klux Klan members paraded through the tiny logging town of Greenville, Maine, to bully some outsiders into leaving.

The outsiders refused to go. Instead, more than a hundred of their friends from the nearby logging camps descended on the town, and held their own march – all night long, in freezing weather.

The outsiders came to Greenville to organize the loggers into a union so they could improve their miserable working conditions. They were members of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The Wobblies had led the successful Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass., 12 years earlier, and now they were taking on the lumber barons.

The KKK didn’t like unions any more than it liked French-Canadians. They were more than happy to help the logging companies intimidate the Wobblies and any French Canadian logger thinking about joining a union.

The Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan grew explosively in 1924, after all but vanishing in Maine at the start of the 1920s. But a charlatan with a gift for public speaking moved to Maine to revive the Hooded Order.

Eugene Farnsworth had worked as a Salvation Army recruiter, a barber and a traveling magician – until an accident on stage killed his assistant. Not until 1923 did he find his true calling as the state’s King Kleagle.

That year, Farnsworth went on a speaking tour that drew thousands of enthusiastic listeners. His message of hate toward Catholics and foreigners appealed to Maine Yankees. Protestant ministers often joined Farnsworth on the podium to denounce the French-Canadian and Irish immigrants who worked in the textile mills and logging camps.

Farnsworth met with stunning success. In his first year he built the state’s Klan membership to 23,000. They marched in broad daylight wearing their white robes, and burned crosses at night. They even set off a bomb in the heavily French-Canadian city of Lewiston.

The Ku Klux Klan near the Canadian border, 1927

Maine, in fact, had the biggest KKK chapter outside the South in the 1920s. By 1925, more than 100,000 Mainers belonged to the bedsheet nightriders.

Maine’s Lumber Camps

The Klan, however, didn’t object when Yankee lumber barons brought French Canadians to work for them as near-slaves.

To harvest Maine’s great forests, the lumbermen needed tens of thousands of workers in their logging camps, sawmills and paper mills. They needed them to cut the trees, to build mills and camps and to drive the logs down Maine’s rivers.

The work in the logging camps required men to spend the long winter in the northern Maine woods. It was hard, dangerous and often deadly.

To find men willing to work under those conditions, lumber companies had to import foreigners. Employment agents found them in Boston, Bangor and Lewiston and tricked them into working in the woods. The camps, they said, were just a few miles from town where they could enjoy themselves during their time off.

The agents would drive the immigrants a short distance into the woods and drop them off. The workers sometimes had to walk 60 or 70 miles to the camp. Or they’d have to borrow money to hire a wagon to get there.

Peonage, Maine Style

Once at the camps, they didn’t leave until spring. They lived in primitive bunkhouses and bought necessities at the company store, usually at wildly inflated prices. Many couldn’t quit because of their debts to their employer. Sometimes they didn’t have the strength or the stamina to do the work, but that didn’t matter.

Winter in a logging camp, 1895

For an entire decade, they were virtual slaves. Maine lawmakers, pressured by the lumber barons, passed a law in 1907 that put loggers in jail if they quit their jobs. Before the Legislature repealed the law 10 years later, 342 men went to jail for walking away from the camps.

In 1911, the U.S. Immigration Commission reported on debt peonage in America. “Since the evils of involuntary servitude have been largely stamped out in the southern States, there has probably existed in Maine the most complete system of peonage in the entire country.”

Then in 1920, the Wobblies came to organize the mostly French-Canadian loggers into a union.

The Battle of Greenville

The Ku Klux Klan apparently didn’t want to kick out all of Maine’s Roman Catholics. Instead of confronting the lumber barons who brought French Canadians to the state, the KKK supported them.

Things came to a head between the KKK and the Wobblies during a cold winter weekend in Greenville, a small town on the shores of Moosehead Lake.

Bucolic Greenville, Maine.

Bob Pease, a Finn who headed the IWW in Maine, and two other Wobblies had moved into a boardinghouse in the town. From there they started to recruit loggers in the camps. Greenville’s selectmen ordered them to leave. They refused, saying they’d done nothing wrong.

A Portland Press-Herald reporter asked Pease why they stayed. “Because we want good wages, eight hours a day in the lumber camps and clean linen in our bunks,” he said. “The day of the old logging camp and the lumberjacks is about over with.”

One Saturday night in freezing weather, 40 members of the KKK came to Bob Pease’s boardinghouse and told him to leave. He called the county sheriff, who sent a deputy to protect them through the night.

On Sunday and Monday, some 175 members of the IWW streamed out of the logging camps to show solidarity for the organizers. Neither the boardinghouses nor the YMCA would put them up. Instead they marched up and down the streets all night long.

“We are going to stick,” said Pease, “and if the Klan starts anything, the IWW will finish it.” He called the Great Northern Paper Company “slave drivers,” but said the Wobblies were too strong for them.

The lumber interests had brought in the KKK, said Pease. And he pointed out most of their employees were the very people the Ku Klux Klan despised – French-Canadian Catholics.

The Wobblies wanted to organize all workers into one union.

A Whimper

In the end there was no violence, no trouble. Most of the Wobblies returned to the lumber camps, and the Klan melted away.

The lumber companies found other ways to squeeze out the Wobblies. They refused to hire anyone who’d joined the IWW. And the YMCA and the local merchants discriminated against them.

In response, Pease and the other Wobblies organized a boycott against four Greenville establishments.

For that, a grand jury in Bangor charged them with conspiracy.

On the day of their trial, 37 Wobblies came to the courtroom, only to find the court rescheduled.

Pease and the others received sentences of one to two years in jail. The Wobblies’ organizing collapsed.

But so did the Klan.

In 1926, the Klan membership fell by half. By the next year it had little more than 3,000 members. By 1930, fewer than 300.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Places Products Were Made

Back in the day, products were made in New England — a lot of products.

The early cod fishermen and Yankee traders made their fortunes and invested them in mills and factories and railroads. Those investments resulted in what we now call the Industrial Revolution in the United States.

Starting with the first water-powered cotton mill in Pawtucket, R.I., New England clothed a good part of the world for many, many years. New Englanders made clocks and can openers, steam engines and shoes, board games and battleships.

So many products were made in New England that people started attributing technical expertise and inventiveness to ‘Yankee ingenuity.’

Now, as you travel along the highways and railroad tracks you can see the crumbling brick remnants of New England’s industrial strength. If you want a glimpse of what it used to be like to make things, you can visit some restored mills that have been turned into historic parks. Or you can visit New England’s over-financialized downtowns, where once-productive factories and warehouses are now brew pubs, offices and condos.

Mickey Mouse Watch

Part of the Waterbury Clock complex. Photo courtesy Google Maps

Oh, could Mickey Mouse sell watches. He rescued a floundering clock company as well as Walt Disney studios during the Great Depression.

For years the Waterbury Clock Company was one of the biggest makers of clocks in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, known as the Switzerland of America. It also churned out wristwatches during World War I from its huge brick factory on North Elm and Cherry streets in Waterbury.

By the 1930s, the Waterbury Clock Company struggled financially. So did Disney. An ad salesman proposed making and selling the Mickey Mouse watch to save them both. Skeptical company executives – including Walt Disney – decided to try it anyway.

The cheap cheerful watch was just what a depressed public wanted. A Macy’s promotion sold 11,000 Mickey Mouse watches in one day. And by 1957, 25 million Mickey Mouse watches had sold.

In the 1950s, the company took the Mickey Mouse watch off the market and began selling a line of reliable and inexpensive watches. They called them Timex. Today, the Waterbury Clock Company has morphed into the Timex Group, its Waterbury factory buildings nothing but empty hulks. The company started a Timexpo Museum in Waterbury, which traced the company’s history, but that, too, closed.

Bates Bedspread

The old Bates mill, where products were made and people had jobs. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

For decades, the Bates Bedspread made an ideal wedding gift for a discriminating young couple like George and Barbara Bush. In fact, the Bushes posed in a 1948 magazine ad for the coverlet.

Bates for years was Maine’s largest employer. The giant textile mill complex in Lewiston, Maine, opened with one building in 1854 and grew to eleven. In 1940, the company hit on the idea of reproducing colonial-era candlewicked bedspreads like the one George Washington gave to Martha. It was a hit. By the 1960s, it seemed everyone had a Bates Bedspread.

By 1990, demand petered out and cheap imitators took a big piece of the market. The company closed in 2001, its mills now part of the Bates Mill Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places. You can still buy a Bates Bedspread at the Bates Mill Store (904 Main Street, Monmouth, Maine) from former employees who started Maine Heritage Weavers to carry on the tradition.

Monopoly

How ironic that the former Monopoly factory gave way to real estate development. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

In 1888, the Parker brothers started their eponymous company in Salem, Mass., making board games out of an old laundry building. First they made board games like Billy Bumps Goes to Boston, then they introduced ping pong and tiddly winks, and eventually they came up with Monopoly. They bought more land and built a 35,000-square-foot factory, employing 500 people.

Hasbro bought Parker Brothers and therefore Monopoly in 1991. The game is still actually manufactured in a 1960s-era plant in East Longmeadow. Hasbro bought the plant from Milton Bradley and then sold it to Belgium-based Cartamundi in 2015. Cartamundi agreed to make Monopoly in the East Longmeadow factory, at least until 2020.

Prophetically, perhaps, the Monopoly factory gave way to real estate development. The old Parker Brothers factory was torn down, replaced by the Jefferson Street apartment complex. The neighborhood now belongs to the Bridge Street Neck Historic District.

Levi’s Denim

Amoskeag Millyard, 1911, where many, many textile products were made

You can’t miss the Amoskeag Mill complex in the center of Manchester, New Hampshire. The city grew up around the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, founded in 1831. The mill yard it grew into the world’s largest cotton textile plant, with sixty-four mill buildings stretching a mile and a half along both banks of the Merrimack River.

Among the cloth it produced: denim for the first Levi Strauss ‘waist overalls.’ Strauss and his partner Jacob Davis invented the blue jean when they received a patent for the way they riveted their waist overalls in 1873. Amoskeag shipped its nine-ounce XX blue denim to San Francisco, where Levi’s workers sewed it into blue jeans. Until 1915, the Amoskeag mills supplied all the denim for Levi’s 501 jeans.

After World War I, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company suffered from recession, competition, aging technology and floods, finally closing in 1935. Some textile manufacturing continued in the old mills for a while, but many of the mills were torn down. Today offices, restaurants, college branches, and the Millyard Museum fill the old mill yard.

The Catamaran Sailboat

Products were made here for very wealthy people. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

One of the most talented naval architects in the world was Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, named after the Revolutionary general from his home state of Rhode Island.

After Nat Herreshoff graduated from MIT he opened a boatyard in 1878 with his blind brother, John, in Bristol, R.I. The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company started making steam-powered boats, but during most of its sixty-seven years designed and built yachts for wealthy Americans.

The Herresshoff boatyard built every yacht that won the America’s Cup race between 1893 and 1934. Nat Herreshoff built the U.S. Navy’s first torpedo boats, invented new and efficient marine hardware, developed methods to make light wooden hulls and patented the sailing catamaran.

The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company also built seven catamarans, including Amaryllis and Amaryllis II. The boatyard closed in 1945 after Nat Herreshoff died, but a museum now stands on the former site. There you can see the Amaryllis II, as well as some famous yachts, models and designs of the Herreshoff company.

Fairbanks Scales

Fairbanks scales, still made here on Portland Street in Saint Johnsbury. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

The town of Saint Johnsbury in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom once made Fairbanks platform scales and sold them around the world.

Today Fairbanks still makes scales in a long, low commercial building in scenic Saint Johnsbury. And the company still sells them around the world. You’ve probably stood on one in a doctor’s office.

In 1824, Thaddeus Fairbanks, a wheelwright by trade, opened an iron foundry with his brother in Saint Johnsbury. They made and sold heating stoves, plows, and farm implements. Around 1830 he got interested in growing hemp, but ran into trouble trying to weigh large amounts of the stuff from a balancing beam. So he came up with the idea of the platform scale, which used levers to counterbalance the weight. By digging a pit for his contraption and placing a platform on top of it, he could weigh an entire wagon accurately.

The Fairbanks brothers’ company has changed hands several times, its headquarters moved to Kansas City, Mo., and another plant built in Meridian, Miss. But they still make scales in Saint Johnsbury, and if you look around you’ll see the Fairbanks gave the town many of its public institutions.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Alfred Winslow Jones, The Unlikely Inventor of the Hedge Fund

Alfred Winslow Jones had been a spy, a sociologist, a magazine writer and a Communist before he invented the modern hedge fund in 1949.

He began investing $100,000 from a shabby office on Broad Street near the New York Stock Exchange. When he died at his home in Redding, Conn., he was worth many, many, many times that.

People who caught on to his methods and adopted them also made king’s ransoms. And after wresting their profit from their lightly regulated activities, they paid lower taxes than their secretaries did – another Alfred Winslow Jones innovation.

Financial journalist Sebastian Mallaby called him an ‘unlikely Wall Street patriarch.”

Alfred Winslow Jones

He was, noted Mallaby, “an erudite dandy, a onetime Marxist who hiked to the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War with the writer Dorothy Parker—where they shared a bottle of Scotch whisky with Ernest Hemingway.”

Alfred Winslow Jones was born Sept. 9, 1900, in Australia, the son of a General Electric executive. At four his family moved to Schenectady, N.Y., the home of a large GE manufacturing facility.

Like his father, he graduated from Harvard, but unlike his father he didn’t go into business. He got a job as a purser on a tramp steamer. He worked as a statistician for an investment house for a little while, but tired of it. Then he took the Foreign Service exam, and got posted to Berlin.

Alfred Winslow Jones, from his Harvard yearbook

From Berlin he reported to the State Department on the rise of Hitler, but he secretly married a left-wing Jewish socialite named Anna Block. Jones then quit the State Department, stayed in Germany under an assumed name and studied at the Marxist Workers School. He also spied for a left-wing group called the Leninist Organization. His clandestine activities may have trained him to operate under the radar on Wall Street.

Back in the USA

Alfred Winslow Jones’ marriage lasted only a few months. He returned to the United States and enrolled in Columbia University, where he studied for his PhD in sociology. He married again, this time to Mary Carter. The newlyweds took their honeymoon in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and Jones reported on civilian relief for representatives of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker peace group.

They hitchhiked across Spain, met up with Parker and Hemingway and, according to some sources, worked for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

They returned home so he could write his thesis, an analysis of labor unrest in an Akron, Ohio, rubber plant. Jones wanted to figure out if fascism could take hold in the United States. He had assistants conduct 1,700 field interviews, which he analyzed statistically. His thesis, Life, Liberty and Property, A Story of Conflict and a Measurement of Conflicting Rights, concluded it could not.

Fortune, a fledgling business magazine, printed part of the thesis and hired him as a staff writer. Eventually he wrote an essay for Fortune on forecasting the stock market, arguing that investor psychology drives the market’s rise and fall.

The article gave him an idea.

Wall Street

In 1949, the names ‘Fidelity’ and ‘Prudential’ embodied the virtues associated with money managers: sober, prim, formal and conservative. Certainly not a 48-year-old ex-communist who used to drink whiskey in a war zone with Ernest Hemingway.

But Alfred Winslow Jones founded A.W. Jones with $40,000 of his own money and $60,000 from friends. His investor friends included Louis Fischer, a former Communist who wrote a biography of Vladimir Lenin, and Sam Stayman, a textile executive and famous bridge player.

Jones described his fourth career choice as managing a ‘hedged fund.’ His big idea was to reduce risk by buying stocks he believed would rise and short selling stocks he believed would fall.

Alfred Winslow Jones had some other ideas as well.

Clandestine Operation

Drawing, perhaps, on his experience as a spy he created his firm as a partnership to avoid regulation. He didn’t register his fund, nor did he advertise it.

In his obituary, the New York Times wrote,

Mr. Jones preferred to remain almost invisible. ‘Hedging,’ he once said, ‘is a speculative tool used to conservative ends,’ but he did not as a rule discuss what he did, let alone how he did it.

He also borrowed money to leverage his bets that certain stocks would rise. And he invented the 20 percent plus two percent performance fee, in which fund managers received a share of profit rather than salary.

Jones claimed his fee structure had to do with the way Phoenician merchant ships kept 20 percent of profits from a successful voyage. The real reason: so the IRS would tax their profit at the capital gains rate of 25 percent, rather than at the top marginal rate (at the time) of 91 percent.

The New York Stock Exchange

Big Daddy

By 1966, a number of hedge funds imitated Jones’ methods on a small scale, according to Fortune. New York magazine in 1968 called him the “big daddy” of the hedge fund business in a story, The Jones Nobody Keeps Up With.

In 20 years he had a cumulative return of 5000 percent, and over 34 years his investors lost money in only three.

He had several homes, on tony Sutton Place in Manhattan and in Redding, Conn., where he liked to garden. International affairs lured him away from the office; at times he would take leave to work on summer projects for the Peace Corps.

Alfred Winslow Jones eventually untangled himself from the business and devoted himself to the Peace Corps. He tried to create a reverse Peace Corps in which people from poor countries would come to aid the poor in the United States. It would be a hedge against creating a sense of inferiority among poor nations.

Alfred Winslow Jones died at his home on Poverty Hollow Road in Redding on June 2, 1989. A.W. Jones is still in business.

With thanks to More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, by Sebastian Mallaby. This story was updated in 2022.

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