Birth of Protest Songs
A few months ago I dipped my toes into the waters of a new blog but could never work up the nerve to dive right in. The blog was/is-to-be about socially minded folk songs of the 20th century and different ways these songs were circulated and propagated before commercialization became the primer mover. It seems no matter how much I read and how much I learned, I was always an arm's length from understanding the entire picture.
One must first realize that socially minded songs or protest songs grew out of songs about labor injustice. The 20th century brought unionization and the realization that injustices and exploitations in the workplace weren't acceptable and could be changed. Although we find most labor-related data post-WWI, I came not only came across labor songs in the 1890s, but found at least one of these songs, "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," written no later than 1897, was given credence as a folk song by Carl Sandburg by being published in his "American Songbag" in 1927. This clever Woody Guthrie-ish song tries to put a positive spin on being jobless and was picked up and used by the "Wobblies," a turn-of-the-century international labor union.
It's also important to keep in mind that these labor songs weren't considered folk songs at the time. Folk songs denoted national and cultural music passed down mainly orally usually with either no known author. During the 20th century, the idea of folk music expanded greatly.
1928
I love surprises and was indeed caught off-guard when I stumbled upon a work by Norm Cohen (no relation), called "American Folk Songs: a regional encyclopedia." This book introduce me to Francis Cabot Lowell and the ensuing fascinating story of the Lowell Girls.
This story begins in 1814.
Francis Lowell of Boston travelled to England in 1810 where he toured the cotton mills of Lancashire and Scotland. Returning to Massachusetts as the US and England went to war in 1812, he formed the Boston Manufacturing Company along with partners and investors and in 1814 built a textile mill in Waltham, about 30 miles from Boston. His wasn't the first textile mill in New England.
The Rhode Island abolitionist Moses Brown hired an textile-experienced Englishman named Samuel Slater to help built and run a spinning mill in Pawtucket in 1790. Slater hired mostly children, a practice that was common in England (where children served a 7 year apprenticeship, working from 6 am to 8:30 pm, for no pay. Instead they were given a place to live, minimal food, mainly bread with broth and oatmeal, and taught to read). Slater's mill concept imitated that of the British mill towns.
Lowell had different ideas.
Lowell wanted to be more than a spinning mill. His company was the first manufacturing corporation in America, selling shares at $1000 ea. His mill was the first factory that took raw cotton lint through every process resulting in finished cloth. Lowell and his engineer, Paul Moody, devised improvements to existing equipment that increased production significantly.
More germane to this exploration is the human side of the story -- which involved yet more innovations.
Lowell's mill had a high overhead. He came up with an idea to cut costs by hiring women (known as operatives) to run the machinery. His reasoning was that machine operators needed to be trainable, dexterous, and cheap. Farming required strength, making men the more capable farmers and farm girls more an expense than an economical benefit. Lowell recruited these girls, paying them more than they could earn otherwise but far less than men ($2.60 -$3.20/week). To assuage the minds of the girls' parents, he built dormitories to give them safe housing away from home and set very stringent moral rules they were expected to follow. The girls were paid in cash weekly or bi-weekly (other factories of the time liked to pay in vouchers redeemable only at the company store). The girls rose at 4 am and worked from 5 am to 7 pm with a half hour break for breakfast and lunch. Most of the girls only stayed a few years after which they married and returned to farm life.
It was a hard life but comparatively better than the one these women might have hoped for otherwise. After Lowell died in 1817, his company built several water-powered factories on the Charles River which overburdened the river. In 1823 they found a new site on the Merrimack River in which to expand their operations. The town that grew around the mill was incorporated as the city of Lowell.
Here is an excerpt from a rather critical account written by a visitor to Lowell Mills in 1836:
In Lowell live between seven and eight thousand young women, who are generally daughters of farmers of the different states of New England. Some of them are members of families that were rich in the generation before. . . .
The operatives work thirteen hours a day in the summer time, and from daylight to dark in the winter. At half past four in the morning the factory bell rings, and at five the girls must be in the mills. A clerk, placed as a watch, observes those who are a few minutes behind the time, and effectual means are taken to stimulate to punctuality. This is the morning commencement of the industrial discipline (should we not rather say industrial tyranny?) which is established in these associations of this moral and Christian community.
At seven the girls are allowed thirty minutes for breakfast, and at noon thirty minutes more for dinner, except during the first quarter of the year, when the time is extended to forty-five minutes. But within this time they must hurry to their boardinghouses and return to the factory, and that through the hot sun or the rain or the cold. A meal eaten under such circumstances must be quite unfavorable to digestion and health, as any medical man will inform us. At seven o'clock in the evening the factory bell sounds the close of the day's work.
Thus thirteen hours per day of close attention and monotonous labor are exacted from the young women in these manufactories. . . . So fatigued--we should say, exhausted and worn out, but we wish to speak of the system in the simplest language--are numbers of girls that they go to bed soon after their evening meal, and endeavor by a comparatively long sleep to resuscitate their weakened frames for the toil of the coming day.
When capital has got thirteen hours of labor daily out of a being, it can get nothing more. It would be a poor speculation in an industrial point of view to own the operative; for the trouble and expense of providing for times of sickness and old age would more than counterbalance the difference between the price of wages and the expense of board and clothing. The far greater number of fortunes accumulated by the North in comparison with the South shows that hireling labor is more profitable for capital than slave labor.
Now let us examine the nature of the labor itself, and the conditions under which it is performed. Enter with us into the large rooms, when the looms are at work. The largest that we saw is in the Amoskeag Mills at Manchester. . . . The din and clatter of these five hundred looms, under full operation, struck us on first entering as something frightful and infernal, for it seemed such an atrocious violation of one of the faculties of the human soul, the sense of hearing. After a while we became somewhat inured to it, and by speaking quite close to the ear of an operative and quite loud, we could hold a conversation and make the inquiries we wished.
The girls attend upon an average three looms; many attend four, but this requires a very active person, and the most unremitting care. However, a great many do it. Attention to two is as much as should be demanded of an operative. This gives us some idea of the application required during the thirteen hours of daily labor. The atmosphere of such a room cannot of course be pure; on the contrary, it is charged with cotton filaments and dust, which, we are told, are very injurious to the lungs.
On entering the room, although the day was warm, we remarked that the windows were down. We asked the reason, and a young woman answered very naïvely, and without seeming to be in the least aware that this privation of fresh air was anything else than perfectly natural, that "when the wind blew, the threads did not work well." After we had been in the room for fifteen or twenty minutes, we found ourselves, as did the persons who accompanied us, in quite a perspiration, produced by a certain moisture which we observed in the air, as well as by the heat. . . .
The young women sleep upon an average six in a room, three beds to a room. There is no privacy, no retirement, here. It is almost impossible to read or write alone, as the parlor is full and so many sleep in the same chamber. A young woman remarked to us that if she had a letter to write, she did it on the head of a bandbox, sitting on a trunk, as there was no space for a table.
So live and toil the young women of our country in the boardinghouses and manufactories which the rich and influential of our land have built for them.
[https://www.warrenhills.org/cms/lib/NJ01001092/Centricity/Domain/145/Lowell_Docs.pdf ]
The above criticism followed on the heels of a unique event. After Lowell Mills opened, other mills started popping up and after twenty years there was a production surplus that caused a drop in prices and in profits. To counter this set back, Lowell Mills cut wages in 1834. 1500-2000 girls walked off the job in what they called "turning out."
One might think this was one of the first strikes, but there had been earlier ones engineered by young girls and women. The first known factory strike was in one of Slater's mills. Slater had graduated from exploiting children to exploiting young women in his textile mills in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. An announced cut in pay coupled with longer hours (the women were paid in script, not cash) incited 102 females to "turn-out." The strike turned ugly with women and children breaking the windows of the owners' homes and one mill was set on fire. The strike was settled, though the specifics aren't known.
When the Cocheco Manufacturing Company reduced the pay and increased the production of its female workers only on the day after Christmas, 1828, 600 women walked off the job. The owners recruited replacements and fired the strike instigators, breaking the strike in just 4 days.
The factory owners had all the power and quickly crushed the Lowell strike but it had an chilling effect nonetheless. In 1836 wages were again cut and the girls again turned out. Now experienced in striking, the women were also better prepared. But again, the owners had the power and crushed the strike, but this time the effects were even greater.
In 1840s the Lowell Mills operatives published their own periodical called "the Lowell Offering" that printed articles and items of literary interest...
In 1844 one operative published a letter (it's unclear whether it was real or fabricated) from Susan to Mary describing the first week of her life at Lowell. In the letter she gave a song the girls would sing. This song, a parody on one titled "I Won't Be a Nun," is thought to have been written during the strike in 1836. It fits my definition of a "Protest Song."
I Won't be a Slave
Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I-
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh ! I cannot be a slave,
I will not be a slave,
For I’m so fond of liberty
That I cannot be a slave.
1823
Although Lowell wasn't the site for the first factory strike or the first women's strike in the U.S., it was the place where the first true women's labor union was created. The mill girls of Lowell created the Lowell Factory Girls’ Association in 1836 (there had been less formal unions prior to this: in 1833 the women shoe binders of Lynn and Saugus Mass. organized the "Female Society of Lynn and Vicinity for the Protection and Promotion of Female Industry" which attracted 1000 women to its first public meeting. The organization, however, was never formalized and didn't last a year.).
While this may be looked as a cradle of protest songs, "I Won't be a Slave" wasn't the first Factory Girl song.
An English broadside circa 1816
