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The Extraordinary Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan

In 1916, a 72-year-old sea captain named Benjamin Cleveland decided to take a 75-year-old wooden vessel on one last voyage. So Cleveland, of Martha’s Vineyard, bought the Charles W. Morgan, a square-rigged whaleship laid up in dry dock for the past three years.

Cleveland was a skillful whaler, according to his New York Times obituary on June 22, 1925. He set records for the amounts of whale oil he brought to port. Cleveland had also sailed to Antarctica for the American Museum of Natural History to collect flora and fauna.

Whaling had pretty much ended by the time Cleveland decided to take his victory lap. But instead of whales, Cleveland said he would hunt elephant seals on the edge of the Antarctic Sea.

Mariners knew the Charles W. Morgan as a lucky ship. Nevertheless, Cleveland had a hard time convincing investors that her luck would hold.

Cleveland’s story turned out to be a good one. But it was just one chapter in the amazing saga of the Charles W. Morgan.

Charles W. Morgan

In 1841, the Charles W. Morgan began prowling nearly every watery corner of the world for whales. She sailed to the Indian Ocean, the Western Pacific, the China Seas, the Sea of Okhotsk, the South Atlantic, the shores of Africa and South America, the ports of Valparaíso, Honolulu, Rio de Janeiro.

But she also traveled through time, playing a part in the Golden Age of Whaling, the growth of railroads, the rise of organized labor and the colonial revival. She sailed, unscathed, through two wars, and sat by a cradle of radar development during a third. She even starred in several Hollywood films.

Today it’s hard to imagine the size and impact of the U.S. whaling industry when the Morgan set out to sea. At its peak, the business of hunting whales went on mostly in two Massachusetts towns, Nantucket and New Bedford. Together they created the fifth-largest sector of the U.S. economy. In 1846, the U.S. whaling fleet numbered 640 ships, more than the rest of the world put together and tripled.

From whale carcasses came oil for illuminants and lubricants, ambergris for perfumes and baleen for umbrellas and corset stays. Even the whale’s teeth were used for chess pieces and piano keys.

Whale products

Over 80 years the Charles W. Morgan crew killed more than 1,500 whales. They brought in at least 50,000 barrels of oil and 150,000 pounds of whalebone. The Morgan earned about $2 million for her owners, and only two of her 37 voyages failed to make a profit.

The Birth of the Charles W. Morgan

Jethro and Zachariah Hillman made ships that never leaked, people said. They were descendants of Peter Folger, an important early settler of Nantucket and Benjamin Franklin’s grandfather. In 1841, the brothers had taken over their family’s shipyard at the bottom of Maxfield Street in New Bedford.

They built the Charles W. Morgan of live oak and yellow pine and sheathed her in copper. She was a typical whaler with a round bow and square rigging. To scare off pirates, she had false gunports painted in black on her side. She cost $48,849.85, or about $282 million in today’s money.

A strike delayed her launch. Shipyard workers walked off the job because they wanted a 10-hour day. The strike lasted nearly a month, and in the end the workers got a 10-1/2 hour day.

Launch of the Charles W. Morgan

On July 21, 1841, half the town of New Bedford (population 12,000) watched the Charles W. Morgan slip down the ways into the harbor, at least according to her owner.

All went well with the Morgan’s launch. “This morning at 10 o’clock my elegant new ship was launched beautifully from Messrs. Hillman’s yard – and in the presence of about half the town and a great show of ladies,” wrote the real Charles W. Morgan.

The real Charles W. Morgan

Charles Wain Morgan, then a 45-year-old Quaker from Philadelphia, moved to New Bedford as a young man. He landed a job in his father-in-law’s whaling firm and made a fortune. Morgan and his family lived in a large mansion where the New Bedford High School now stands.

A fierce abolitionist, he apparently hired dozens of former slaves over two decades to give them a foothold in the thriving, multiracial seaport. One of his employees, Polly Johnson, married, bought a house and turned it into a stop on the Underground Railroad. The Johnsons boarded Frederick Douglass and his wife when they arrived in New Bedford.

Nathan and Mary (Polly_ Johnson houses, where Frederick and Anna Douglass first stayed in New Bedford.

The Charles W. Morgan Sets Sail

She set sail on Sept. 6, 1841, the dawn of the most profitable decade for whaling. Capt. Thomas Norton, 34, commanded the ship and its crew of 30 mariners—12 still teenagers, the youngest 15. Norton taught them sailing and navigation during the three-plus-year voyage. She returned on New Year’s Day, 1845, loaded with oil. Each crew member got a share of the profit. Cabin boys generally earned the least, around 1/300th. The captain got the most, 1/12 to 1/16. Norton earned nearly $11,000, so he retired from the sea, not yet 40.

Along with great wealth, whaling offered the thrill of the hunt and exotic islands to explore. But it was a disgusting, dangerous business. Someone usually died on a voyage and sometimes everyone perished.

Attacking a whale

Killing a whale meant months of cutting up the greasy carcass and boiling it in huge try pots on deck, setting off an inescapable stench.

“Everything is drenched with oil,” wrote a whaler named Charles Nordhoff in 1856. “Shirts and trowsers are dripping with the loathsome stuff. The pores of the skin seem to be filled with it. Feet, hands and hair, all are full. The biscuit you eat glistens with oil, and tastes as though just out of the blubber room….From this smell and taste of blubber, raw, boiling and burning, there is no relief or place of refuge.”

In 1864, Thomas Landers, one of the Morgan’s 21 captains, tried to persuade his young wife, Lydia, to join him on the voyage. He ordered a gimballed swinging berth in his sleeping quarters as an inducement. She actually went, perhaps because he promised her a trip to Hawaii.

Riches and Rags

In 1849, Morgan sold his interest in the whaleship to Edward Mott Robinson, a Quaker from Rhode Island who had also married into the whaling business.

Robinson foresaw the demise of the whaling industry and sold all his firm’s whaleships after the Civil War broke out. When he died, he left a fortune worth as much as $7.5 million to his only child, Hetty Green.

Hetty Green, The Witch of Wall Street

Hetty, known as the Witch of Wall Street, parlayed her inheritance into an estimated $100 million to $200 million. She invested in railroads, mines and mortgages. Though her fortune rivaled that of the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, she lived in a series of small apartments near New York City with her two children. Hetty always wore an old black dress, bought broken cookies in bulk and once spent hours looking for a two-cent stamp. She said she lived liked that because of her Quaker upbringing.

The Wings Buy the Morgan

Hetty’s father sold the Charles W. Morgan around 1862 to the J. & W.R. Wing & Company, who made more money off whalemen than whales.

Joseph and William Ricketson Wing, another set of brothers from Southeastern Massachusetts, had started out in the dry goods business in New Bedford.

The Wing building in New Bedford

They outfitted sailors with clothing and supplies for their upcoming voyages and boarded them while they waited for the ship to leave. They typically sold on credit and charged exorbitant interest that the mariners would repay on their return. Some seamen lost money on their voyage if their share of the profit didn’t cover their debt.

Some of the Charles W. Morgan whalemen could barely repay the Wing brothers after one-five year voyage that ended in the summer of 1886. So even though the Wings didn’t make much from whale oil and baleen on that expedition, they made money on the sailors’ debts.

The Wing brothers increased their fleet even as whaling began to fade. They became the largest – and one of the last – whaling concerns, their last voyage ending in 1914.

Charles W. Morgan drying sails in dock, ca. 1927

The Morgan made 27 voyages for the Wings, her last in 1921 with an all-Cape Verdean crew and captain. The Wings then abandoned her in Fairhaven Harbor.

She rotted in there until 1924, when a one-legged playboy millionaire bought her.

Abandoned Ship

Hetty Green’s son, Edward Howland Robinson “Ned” Green, had agreed to head a group called “Whaling Enshrined,” which included Sally Bullard, a descendant of Charles W. Morgan. Green then bought the ship his grandfather once owned and brought the derelict vessel to his Round Hill estate in South Dartmouth, Mass. He also hung a whale penis in his entry hall.

Round Hill

Ned Green lost his leg after breaking it in a sledding accident. It had to be amputated because his mother waited to take him to a free clinic and gangrene set in.

Unlike his mother, he lived large and spent lavishly. Ned married a prostitute and had a fetish for collecting – coins, stamps, pornography, yachts, women. But he also had a passion for science and technology. He turned the Charles W. Morgan into a tourist attraction even as experiments in radar, radio transmission and atomic energy went on within a few hundred yards of her.

Ned Green (wearing glasses)

Ned Green built an airfield at Round Hill and let Charles Lindbergh land on it in 1932. He put MIT scientist Robert Van de Graaff into one of his airship hangars so he could build one of the first atom smashers. Green built an experimental radio station at Round Hill and allowed MIT researchers to conduct experiments in radar technology with it. The transmitters had so much power they followed Adm. Richard Byrd’s expedition to the Antarctic.

All the while tourists by the thousands visited the old whaleship. Green built a wharf and a replica whaling village on it. An old sea captain, George Fred Tilton, entertained visitors with stories of his seafaring adventures. He had once walked 3,000 miles to summon help for a whaling fleet caught in an ice pack off Point Barrow in Alaska.

When Ned Green died in 1936 , the Morgan faced an uncertain future. Then she almost faced no future at all when the 1938 hurricane nearly took her apart.

Mystic

On Nov. 8, 1941, crowds lined the streets and docks of New London, Conn., much as they had 100 years earlier with the launch of the Morgan in New Bedford. A large banner proclaimed, “Mystic is the proud new home of the Charles W. Morgan — the last whaleship in the world.”

The Marine Historical Association had rescued the Morgan. Caulkers in South Dartmouth had plugged the leaks in the derelict whaleship, making her seaworthy enough to be towed to Connecticut. It was the tail end of the Colonial Revival era – and a month before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. It would take years before the Morgan would return to her former glory.

Even during the war years, visitors came to see the Morgan. Over time, the Marine Historical Association acquired more waterfront structures and ships. In 1948, people started calling it the Mystic Seaport Museum.

The Morgan undergoing restoration

Preservationists at the museum’s shipyard caulked, painted and resheathed The Charles W. Morgan and then relaunched her in 1974. Then in 2008 another round of renovations began. It took five years to restore the ship originally built in the Hillman brothers’ shipyard in seven months.

In the summer of 2014, the Charles W. Morgan made her 38^th voyage to the ports of New England: Boston, New Bedford, Newport, R.I., and New London, Conn.

Cleveland’s Last Voyage

In 1916, Benjamin Cleveland of West Tisbury, Mass., brought the Charles W. Morgan back into service for his own final voyage. But he had a hard time finding investors to back his plan to hunt elephant seals on Desolation Island.

He lucked out: A movie company wanted a ship it could use for a silent film called Miss Petticoats. Cleveland made the deal and enough money to outfit the Morgan for the voyage. (She made another film, Java Head, in Salem.)

Elephant seals

On Sept. 7, 1916, Cleveland set sail from New Bedford. Five months later, the Morgan completed its 11,000-mile journey to Desolation Island. For four months her crew killed elephant seals. One of her whaleboats capsized and four of its crew drowned.

The Morgan left the island loaded with 1,100 barrels of oil on May 12, 1917. But World War I had broken out, and a fleet of German U-boats was targeting merchant vessels. Cleveland decided to avoid the shipping lanes and headed for the West Indies, where he just missed a floating mine.

When the Charles W. Morgan finally sailed into New Bedford Harbor, 11 former whaling captains greeted her to a heroine’s welcome.

The Charles W. Morgan at the Mystic Seaport Museum.

End Notes

Images: Round Hill CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=219875. Elephant seals By user:CillanXC – Edit for WP: FPC., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3265623. Charles W. Morgan restoration By Rhvanwinkle at en.wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15032245. Charles W. Morgan at Mystic Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. Charles W. Morgan whaling ship, Mystic Seaport, Connecticut. [Between 1980 and 2006] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2011630234/>. Nathan and Mary Johnson Properties By English Wikipedia user Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4384044. Charles W. Morgan drying sails, Drying sails, whaler CHARLES W. MORGAN in dock. , ca. 1927. Dec. 12. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002715974/.

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The Working Girls of Boston: Immoral Floozies or Honest Toilers?

During the Gilded Age, the working girls of Boston had to contend not just with low pay but with reputations as immoral tramps. In the parlance of the day, they had “forsaken the path of virtue.” Or they “fell” by succumbing to the “temptations” and “perils” of the city.

It wasn’t true, at least for the great majority of the working girls of Boston. But that didn’t stop people from believing it.

From the Civil War to World War I, people accepted that , “Working class women — and especially black women — were freely available for sexual use by upper-class males,” according to Gerda Lerner in The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History.

Carroll Wright.

And so a statistician named Carroll Wright in 1884 took it upon himself to investigate the slut shamers’ allegations. As head of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, he assigned his small army of field agents to interview 1,032 of the 38,881 working girls of Boston.

Applicants for working papers at the Department of Education Building in Boston, Mass., in 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Two decades later, Lewis Wickes Hine picked up on Wright’s work in a different way. He photographed young people, teenagers and children, working in factories, on the waterfront, in fields and on the street. In the process, he captured many images of the working girls — and they were girls — of Boston.

Together, Wright and Hine reveal in detail what the lives of the working girls of Boston were all about – hard work and low pay.

Fallen Women

After the Civil War, one of the founders of the Boston Young Women’s Christian Association, Lucretia Boyd, had a list of the city’s working girls. She told a friend that “she was warranted in saying that nearly one half of the girls on the lists would be led astray unless something could be done to place some additional protection about them.”

And in 1866, the Ladies Christian Association sent out a flier saying, “Intelligent Christians among us have long deplored the dangers that beset this class of persons.”

Sadie Singer, 15, racking flowers at the Beston Floral Supply Co., in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine

By 1884, men were coming to the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics office to complain the streets were crowded with working girls in the evening. They ‘were in the habit of soliciting men to accompany them home,’ wrote bureau chief Carroll Wright. “These gentlemen have expressed themselves as greatly astonished that in a city as well regulated as Boston, girls should come out of stores and shops and ply their vocation as night walkers on the streets in the evening.”

And so Wright had the BLS investigate the working girls of Boston ‘to determine whether the ranks of prostitution are recruited from the manufactory.’

The Working Girls of Boston

Boston in 1884 had a thriving manufacturing base that employed working girls in bookbinderies, shoe and boot factories, bakeries, distilleries, print shops and, most of all, clothing manufacturers.

Textile and clothing manufacture was a huge industry in New England, and by far the biggest in Boston. In 1855, the clothing industry generated $8.5 million in annual sales, more than twice as much as the next biggest, distilleries. Many Boston girls found employment as coat makers, custom tailoresses, coat basters, pantaloon stitchers, machine pressers, dressmakers, milliners and bustle makers.

The Pay Is Too Low

But they didn’t earn enough to live on. Most of the working girls of Boston earned less than $5 a week (about $133 in today’s dollars), according to Wright’s Fifteenth Annual Report about the working girls of Boston.

“The pay is too low,” complained the girls, who earned between $3 and $6 a week making men’s clothing, the report said. A 13-1/2 year old working as a canvas baster reported earning $1.25 a week.

The clothing industry nearly doubled in Boston over the next 50 years. In 1909, Hine’s photographs show young girls learning the skills needed in the needle trades.

Working Girls learning dressmaking in the Free Evening School in 1909. Photo By Lewis Wickes Hine

But wages didn’t grow with the clothing industry. In 1884, the working girls were complaining that employers suppressed their already meager pay. One reason: they faced competition from piece workers.

Piece Work

“Girls used to make better pay before the [piece workers] came,” one worker told the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The girls who did piece work, like the hourly employees, also faced declining wages. Bustle makers used to get 65, 75 and 85 cents a dozen, but price cuts reduced their earnings by 15 cents, reported the BLS. Then demand for bustles slackened off and bustle makers earned only 25 cents for 12 bustles – as much as a girl could make in a nine-hour day.

A nine-year-old girl carrying garments down Blackstone Street in 1912, to a Hanover Street home. She finishes eight pairs of trousers a day and gets eight cents a piece. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Men did piecework, too, but they got paid more for it. In printing, work that paid male compositors 35 cents paid females only 25 cents. A girl compositor, noted the BLS, ‘by over-exertion in trying to make good wags at 25 cents per 1000 brought on paralysis of one-half of the body resulting in permanent injury.’

No New Clothes

Because of the low pay, many working girls lived at home. But in some cases, reported the BLS, mothers made their daughters quit. It cost more to feed and clothe them than they earned.

Restaurant workers, for example, earned an average of $4.06 a week.

A 14-year-old waitress, Delia Kane, at the Exchange Luncheon in South Boston in 1912. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Clerks earned an average of $5.02 a week, bookkeepers $6.12.

Malvina Amundsen, 15, working as an office girl at the Eastern Talking Machine Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

“It is said that many of the girls get discouraged, as they hardly earn enough to pay running expenses, and are obliged to practise the most rigid economy,” the BLS reported. “One girl says she ‘turns her clothes upside down, inside out, and outside in, not being able to make enough over living expenses to buy new clothes’.”

Shop Girls

Mary Creed, 14, selling cigars in the store of Mrs. Breslin in 1917. Lewis Wickes Hine

People especially viewed shop girls as floozies likely to turn to prostitution, according to Wright.

They made the “vile charge” that a saleswoman or shop girl has to become the ‘intimate friend’ of the proprietor or department head to get a job, he wrote.

People commonly wondered, “How can they dress well when they earn so little?” he continued. Many live at home, he argued. And he observed that a girl working all day for $3 or $4 a week couldn’t fall into evil.

A 15-year-old girl punching sheets at the Boston Index Card Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

“Girls cannot work hard all day and be prostitutes too,” wrote Wright.

A Boston police captain endorsed that argument. “He said that people, who charge the working women with walking the streets at night for evil purposes, do not know what they are talking about,” wrote Wright. “Night walkers are all of them hardened convicts or prostitutes; some of them may have been hard working women, but no working woman ever walks the streets as a prostitute.”

The Honest Working Girls of Boston

Wright then concluded the working girls of Boston were making “an heroic, an honest, and a virtuous struggle to earn an honorable livelihood.” Rarely did they live a life “other than one of integrity,” he concluded.

“It is easy to be good on a sure and generous income; it requires the strongest character to enable one to be good and respectable on an unstable income of five dollars per week,” he wrote.

And about those men who complained about the working girls of Boston walking the streets?

Wright had a tart response:

“It does not speak well for them and indicates to our mind that the first offence was on their part,” he wrote.

With thanks to The Atlas of Boston History, edited by Nancy Seasholes, and Jennifer Cote, “Class and the Ideology of Womanhood: The Early Years of the Boston Young Women’s Christian Association.” You can read the Massachusetts BLS Fifteenth Annual Report, The Working Girls of Boston, here.

Lewis Hine photo credits: National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

This story last updated in 2023.

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A. Philip Randolph Heads the 1963 March on Washington

Of the thousands of people who go in and out of Boston’s Back Bay commuter rail station every day, how many pass the bronze statue of A. Philip Randolph with no idea that the 1963 March on Washington was his idea?

Randolph was both a great labor leader and a great civil rights leader, not coincidental when you consider racial justice means nothing without economic justice. At least that’s what Randolph – and his protégé Martin Luther King, Jr., thought. The 1963 March on Washington was, after all, the March for Jobs and Freedom.

Leaders of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A. Philip Randolph is seated in the center; John Lewis is second from right. Photo courtesy National Archives.

King called Randolph the “truly the dean of the Negro leaders.”

Randolph is credited with pushing President Franklin Roosevelt to ban discrimination in the defense industry and President Harry Truman to integrate the military. Considered the most important black leader in the 1930s and 1940s, he helped bring thousands of railroad sleeping car porters into the middle class.

Though Randolph grew up in Jacksonville, lived in New York City and made his mark on Washington, he also had an impact in Boston’s African-American community. Even today, his nine-foot sculpture in the train station may inspire commuters who take the time to read his words at the base: “Freedom is never granted; It is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted.”

A. Philip Randolph

Randolph was born in Crescent City, Fla., on April 15, 1889, to a poor minister and a seamstress. He grew up in Jacksonville, where he and his brother graduated from an academic high school for African Americans.

He moved to New York in 1911, where he got involved in the labor movement and started a magazine called The Messenger. People considered it radical because it opposed lynching, the military draft and segregation.

A. Philip Randolph in 1942

Randolph got a taste of organizing in 1914, when he took a job as a waiter aboard a steamboat, the Paul Revere, which ran between Fall River and New York. He lied about his experience, and then he messed up one of his orders. He was reprimanded and put on probation.

Waiters and kitchen help had to sleep in a cramped, foul space below deck– the so-called “glory hole.” Randolph tried to organize the kitchen staff and waiters to demand improved sleeping conditions. Instead, he got fired on his return to New York.

A Fall River Line steamer, The Pilgrim

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

In 1925, a group of Pullman porters approached Randolph in Harlem and asked them to help form the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The porters worked for the Pullman Company, which had a virtual monopoly on running railroad sleeping cars. The company, which only hired black men as porters, had more black employees than any other U.S. company.

Randolph accepted the challenge, with the motto, “Fight or Be Slaves.”

A Pullman porter, Chicago, 1943. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

George Walker of Marlboro, Mass., a porter, joined that first year, risking dismissal by the company. He earned $67 a month for 400 hours. “You ain’t supposed to get any sleep,” one Pullman porter testified before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915.

Within a year, 3,000 Pullman porters — 51 percent — joined the union, but the company refused to negotiate or even recognize it. Federal mediators ignored the Brotherhood’s complaints. In 1926, Randolph planned a strike, but when he heard the company had 5,000 strikebreakers on hand, he called it off.

That cost the union half of its members. Then came the Great Depression, and membership fell to 658 in 1933.

Organizing Boston

Randolph realized he needed community support, because, he said, the company “cannot stand up against the Brotherhood and the Community too.” In Boston, he enlisted the help of the black churches and local civic organizations.

A. Phillip Randolph in 1963

A music professor, John Orth, helped organize a citizen’s committee of black and white New Englanders to support Randolph’s cause. They included Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard professor, and journalist William Monroe Trotter. The committee put out pamphlets proclaiming their faith in the justice of the cause of the Pullman porters, including one that linked Randolph’s cause with New England’s ‘glorious and illustrious’ abolitionist heritage.

Randolph also needed President Franklin Roosevelt, who signed a fair labor law in 1934 that gave the Brotherhood more legal protection. Membership grew to 7,000 and forced the Pullman Company to the bargaining table.

William Monroe Trotter

Finally, A Contract

By 1937, the union negotiated its first contract with the Pullman Company. George Walker got a raise to $89.50 a month. By the end of World War II, porters earned $175 a week.

“Working on the trains was what helped me educate my children,” said Bennie Bullock of Mattapan in a 1980s interview. Bullock echoed the experience of other Boston porters. His three children all had college educations and went on to professional careers.

A. Philip Randolph statue in Boston Back Bay’s train station.

1941 March on Washington

On Jan. 25, 1941, Randolph began to organize a march on Washington to demand an end to segregation in defense industries. Using his contacts in the labor movement, the black media and the black churches, March on Washington Movement chapters formed throughout the country. By spring, Randolph estimated the July 1 march would attract 100,000 people.

President Franklin Roosevelt caved. A week before the scheduled march, he issued Executive Order 8802, which banned “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or Government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”

Flyer from the 1941 March on Washington. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Randolph called off the march, but vowed to fight on.

“Unless this war sound the death knell to the old Anglo-American empire systems, the hapless story of which is one of exploitation for the profit and power of a monopoly-capitalist economy, it will have been fought in vain,” he said.

A. Philip Randolph Leads the 1963 March

Randolph organized more protest marches over the next few decades. In 1948 he called for young black men to resist the draft, reestablished then as the Selective Service System. President Harry Truman, needing black votes to win election, issued Executive Order 9981, which integrated the military.

Randolph led several other protests during the 1950s. In 1960 he helped organize the Negro American Labor Council and served as its president. Along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NALC initiated the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Randolph, by then in his mid-70s, served as the titular head of the march. He recruited a 51-year-old labor activist, Bayard Rustin, to organize the event. Rustin and his team of 200 activists publicized the march, recruited marchers and scheduled platform speakers. They planned logistics down to the last detail: how many toilets would 250,000 people need, how many first aid stations, how much they should bring to eat.

On Aug. 28, 1963, 250,000 people, black and white, showed up in Washington, D.C. Many celebrities came, too, including Jackie Robinson, Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, Lena Horne, Paul Newman and Sammy Davis, Jr. Marian Anderson sang He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez sang Blowin’ in the Wind.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew 250,000 people on Aug. 28, 1963.

A. Philip Randolph delivered the opening and closing remarks, calling the marchers “the advanced guard of a massive, moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”

Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech as the last speaker. It has overshadowed much of what happened that day, including the purpose of the march: economic equality.

Aftermath

President Lyndon Johnson awarded Randolph the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

A. Philip Randolph receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Johnson.

After decades of leading the civil rights movement, Randolph died in his apartment on May 16, 1979. On Oct. 8, 1988, retired Pullman car operators and dining car waiters attended the unveiling of the statue of A. Philip Randolph in Boston’s Back Bay train station.

The Library of Congress created an online exhibit. ‘A Day Like No Other,’ commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Click here.

Photo of A. Philip Randolph statue courtesy Boston MBTA under Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 2.0.

With thanks to A. Philip Randolph and Boston’s African-American Railroad Workers by James R. Green and Robert C. Haydn. This story was updated in 2022.

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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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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 2024.

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Mario Buda, The Other Boston Bomber

On Sept. 16, 1920, an Italian immigrant named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon across from J.P. Morgan and Co. and down the street from the New York Stock Exchange.

Few noticed as the balding little man left his old horse and rusty wagon amid the lunchtime street bustle. Then the bells of Trinity Church chimed noon, and a deafening blast sent scores of people to the pavement. Windows shattered, shrapnel flew and a ball of flame and smoke rose to the sky.

Aftermath of the Wall Street bombing.

As victims lay bleeding in the street, Mario Buda melted into the crowd.

At least that’s what law enforcement officers – and since then, historians — surmised. Mario Buda made a likely suspect after four years of anarchist terror bombings eventually linked to him. He probably blew up Wall Street because his closest friends, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been charged with murder just five days earlier.

Anarchist Terror

World War I had ended nearly two years before the Wall Street bombings, but the anarchist violence it spawned didn’t stop with the Armistice.

Well before the war, anarchists had allied themselves with the radical labor unions, the Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies.

Inflation ate into workers’ earnings as war approached, and tens of thousands walked off the job for higher pay and shorter hours. Some of the biggest strikes in history had taken place just before the United States intervened in World War I, including the 1914 Ludlow massacre in Colorado and the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass.

Labor unrest had spread throughout New England in such actions as the 1912 American Woolen Mill strike in Willimantic, Conn., the 1913 Ipswich Hosiery Mill strike and the 1915 Bridgeport munitions workers strike.

As the United States edged closer to World War I, anarchists battled the capitalists who, they believed, made huge wartime profits off their downtrodden workers. Anarchists rejected all authority and embraced violence in the war against capitalism.

Beginning in 1912, an Italian immigrant named Luigi Galleani led the anarchists from his newspaper office in Lynn, Mass. The Justice Department called his newspaper, the Subversive Chronicle, the ‘most rabid, seditious and anarchistic sheet ever published in this country.’ Though small, the newspaper had subscribers all over the world.

Galleani found a receptive audience in some of the 30,000 Italians who lived in Boston—including a 30-something immigrant named Mario Buda.

Mario Buda

He was born in Sicily on Oct. 13, 1884, the son of a gardener. In 1907, then in his early 20s, he immigrated to the United States and worked as a gardener, in construction and in factories He returned to Italy in 1911, then came back to Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood two years later.

People described him as quiet, serious and proud; friends gave him the nickname Nasone, or Big Nose. Police considered him elusive and dangerous.

At first he commuted to his job in a Framingham hat factory. Then he and his brother started a cleaning store selling to Wellesley College students. All the while he went to anarchist meetings and anarchist picnics, took part in anarchist theater recitals and started an anarchist school.

As an anarchist, he supported labor strikes, and he met Nicola Sacco during the 1913 Hopedale, Mass., textile strike. Police shot and killed a worker during the 12-week strike, which failed in the end.

Three years later, in 1916, he met Bartolomeo Vanzetti at the Cordage strike in Plymouth, Mass.

Violence Begins in 1916

By 1916, the United States began to prepare for the war then raging in Europe. On New Year’s Day, a security guard discovered a wicker suitcase filled with dynamite in the Massachusetts Statehouse. It failed to go off.

But the next day, a bomb went off in Woburn, Mass., ripping apart a New England Manufacturing Co. factory. Rumor had it the company received threatening letters telling it to stop shipping goods to Europe.

Across the country, communities began to hold Preparedness Days to celebrate the military buildup for the U.S. entry into war. On July 22, 1916, an anarchist bomb went off in San Francisco during a Preparedness Day parade, killing 10 and wounding 40. Police suspected Mario Buda of setting off the bomb, but they never closed the case.

Luigi Galleani

Then in early December of 1916, an antiwar riot turned violent in Boston’s North End. Police arrested 10 people, including Mario Buda. In the courtroom he refused to take an oath on the Bible, and he received a five-month prison sentence.

A few weeks after the riot, a bomb rocked the North End, blowing up the Salutation Street police station. It didn’t hurt anyone, as it exploded on a quiet Sunday morning. But the bomb blew a hole through the three-foot brick wall and broke every window for blocks.

Mario Buda Bombs Milwaukee

When Mario Buda left prison, he went to Monterrey, Mexico, with Sacco, Vanzetti and another Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoci. Monterrey had an active community of Italian anarchists, and some historians suspect Buda and his friends honed their bomb making techniques while there.

On April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. Boston’s district attorney warned of more anarchist violence. Though most of the city’s 30,000 Italians supported the war, police described the North End as ‘anarchist headquarters.’

Two months later, police arrested the three leading anarchists in the United States. In New York, they arrested Emma Goldman, who’d once run an ice cream parlor in Worcester, Mass., and her lover Alexander Berkman. They arrested Luigi Galleani at his home in Wrentham, Mass., for an editorial he’d written opposing the draft.

Some Italian community leaders tried to distance themselves from the anarchists. In November, the pastor of the Italian Evangelical Church in Milwaukee held a loyalty rally in front of local anarchist headquarters. A riot broke out, and police shot and killed two anarchists and arrested 11.

An anti-anarchist cartoon

The Milwaukee killings propelled Mario Buda out of Mexico. Shortly after police shot the anarchists, someone discovered a package in the evangelical church basement. The janitor took it to the police station, where it exploded, killing nine police officers and a civilian.

Police never caught the culprit. Years later, though, anarchists revealed who made the bomb: Mario Buda.

The 1919 Anarchist Bombings

The year 1919 brought a wave of anarchist bombings. They started when Luigi Galleani delivered an inflammatory speech in Taunton, Mass., just prior to his deportation. The next day, four anarchists blew themselves up trying to plant a bomb in the American Woolen Co. in Franklin, Mass

The new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, vowed to crack down on ‘aliens and Bolsheviks, radicals, and anarchists.’

On April 28, mail bombs arrived at the homes and offices of 36 prominent men, including John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Jr., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,– and A. Mitchell Palmer. Only one exploded, blowing off the hands of a housekeeper.

Then in June 1919, large bombs went off within 90 minutes of each other in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Washington, D.C., and Paterson, N.J. A night watchman died in the New York explosion.

The bomb in Washington, D.C. blew up on the front porch of A. Mitchell Palmer. It exploded in the hands of the Italian anarchist who’d carried it, Carlo Valdinoci – one of Buda’s traveling companions in Mexico. Valdinoci was picked up in little pieces on the front lawn of Palmer’s neighbors, Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor.

Did Mario Buda have anything to do with the 1919 bombings? Probably.

Palmer Raids

Palmer immediately blamed anarchists and radicals for the bombings he termed ‘terrorism.’ Beginning on Nov. 7, 1919, the FBI started rounding up suspects in what became known as the Palmer raids. Led by J. Edgar Hoover, they were notorious for violating people’s rights. The FBI threw suspects into filthy, crowded prisons without telling them why. They arrested people just for visiting prisoners in Hartford’s notorious Seyms Street Jail.

All in all, the FBI caught up 10,000 people in its dragnet, many of them Italian or Jewish from Eastern Europe. In Connecticut they raided Ansonia, Bridgeport, Hartford, Meriden, New Haven, New London, South Manchester and Waterbury. In Massachusetts they raided Boston, Chelsea, Brockton, Bridgewater, Norwood, Worcester, Springfield, Chicopee Falls, Holyoke, Gardner, Fitchburg, Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill. And in New Hampshire, they rounded up people in Clarement, Derry, Lincoln, Manchester, Nashua and Portsmouth.

Francis Fisher Kane, U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania, resigned in protest. By such methods, he said, “we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.” His words proved prophetic.

Mario Buda Bombs Wall Street

Mario Buda called Sacco and Vanzetti ‘the best friends I had in America.’ Police arrested them in connection with the murder of two men during a robbery of the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company. Police had also questioned Buda, who escaped.

Prosecutors charged Sacco and Vanzetti with murder on Sept. 11, 1920. Five days later, a dilapidated wagon carrying 100 pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of sash weights blew up on Wall Street.

The Associated Press reported,

Office workers were just hurrying into the street for their noonday meal when a jet of black smoke and flame rose from the center of the world’s greatest street of finance.

Then came a blast and a moment later scores of men, women and children were lying, blood covered, on the pavement.

The explosion killed 38 people and injured 143, including J.P. Morgan’s son Junius. Joseph P. Kennedy, who’d been walking by, was badly shaken but unhurt. Most of the victims were clerks, stenographers and office boys.

American Anarchist Fighters

A letter carrier discovered several leaflets in a nearby mailbox. In crude letters, it read,

Free the Political Prisoners or it Will Be Sure Death for All of You! American Anarchist Fighters.

Federal investigators settled on Mario Buda as the perpetrator, as he had rented the horse that pulled the wagon bomb. But they never questioned him, and Buda slipped out of the country. The Wall Street Bombing case was never closed.

Mike Buda would resurface in Italy as Mike Boda and carry on his anarchist activities. He died in Italy on June 1, 1963.

The limestone walls at 23 Wall Street still bear the pockmarks of the 1920 bombing.

With thanks to The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day by Steve Puleo and Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background By Paul Avrich. This story was updated in 2024.

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Anarchist Terror

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Violence Begins in 1916

Mario Buda Bombs Milwaukee

The 1919 Anarchist Bombings

Palmer Raids

Mario Buda Bombs Wall Street

American Anarchist Fighters

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