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Chapter 11 · 1880–1920

The Gilded Age of Wool

Massive Mills and Southern Migration

The New England woolen and worsted mills reached their zenith of size and power even as the cotton industry began its long migration south. The Gilded Age mill was among the largest industrial structures on earth—and among the most contested.

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Striking mill workers crowd a Lawrence street during the 1912 Bread and Roses strike.
Striking mill workers crowd a Lawrence street during the 1912 Bread and Roses strike.Bain News Service, "Crowd of strikers menacing strike-breakers, Lawrence," 1912. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection (LCCN 2014690134). Public domain.

Massive structures like the American Woolen Company's Wood Worsted Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, billed by its owners as the largest worsted mill in the world, embodied New England's industrial confidence. Meanwhile, Southern boosters built cotton mills across the Piedmont of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to employ cheap, rural, non-union white labor. The transition from water to steam to electric power restructured both regions. New England became a polyglot immigrant industrial society; the Piedmont became a network of segregated, company-owned mill villages. The two regions' labor histories would intersect violently in the strikes of 1912, 1929, and 1934.

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Classroom Kit

Were child workers in Gilded Age mills the victims of greedy employers, desperate families, or weak laws?

Primary source

Testimony of Camella Teoli, House Hearings on the Strike at Lawrence

Camella Teoli, before the House Committee on Rules, March 1912

Miss TEOLI. Well, I used to go to school, and then a man came up to my house and asked my father why I didn't go to work, so my father says I don't know whether she is 13 or 14 years old. So, the man say you give me $4 and I will make the papers come from the old country saying you are 14. So, my father gave him the $4, and in one month came the papers that I was 14. I went to work, and about two weeks got hurt in my head. ... CHAIRMAN. Well, how were you hurt? Miss TEOLI. The machine pulled the scalp off.

Context: Teoli, a teenage worker from Lawrence, Massachusetts, testified to Congress during the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike. Her testimony, given with First Lady Helen Taft in the audience, drew national attention to child labor and conditions in the woolen mills.

Source: Camella Teoli Testifies About the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike (House Document 671, 62nd Congress). American Social History Project, Who Built America?. 1912

Primary source

A Little Spinner in the Mollohan Mills, Newberry, S.C. (photograph caption)

Lewis Wickes Hine, National Child Labor Committee, December 3, 1908

A little spinner in the Mollohan Mills, Newberry, S.C. She was tending her "sides" like a veteran, but after I took the photo, the overseer came up and said in an apologetic tone that was pathetic, "She just happened in." Then a moment later he repeated the information. The mills appear to be full of youngsters that "just happened in," or "are helping sister." Dec. 3, 08. Witness Sara R. Hine.

Context: Hine photographed child workers across the country for the National Child Labor Committee, often posing as a salesman to get into mills. His captions recorded names, ages, and managers' excuses as evidence for reform campaigns.

Source: Lewis Wickes Hine. A little spinner in the Mollohan Mills, Newberry, S.C. Library of Congress, National Child Labor Committee Collection. 1908

Discussion questions

  1. How did Camella Teoli end up working at age thirteen, and what happened to her?
  2. Hine wrote his captions as an investigator for the National Child Labor Committee, which was campaigning for new laws. How does knowing his purpose affect how you read the overseer's words?
  3. Teoli's family arranged false papers; Hine's caption suggests mill managers hid child workers. Using both sources, explain why child labor laws were so hard to enforce in both New England and the South.
  4. Several states have recently loosened limits on teenagers' work hours, and federal investigators have found migrant children working in meatpacking plants. Do the arguments of 1912 still apply? Take a position.

Key terms

Spinner
A mill worker, often a child, who walked along rows of spinning frames repairing broken threads.
Doffer
A worker, usually a boy, who removed full bobbins of thread from spinning machines and replaced them with empty ones.
Mill village
A company-owned town where the mill controlled housing, stores, churches, and schools.
National Child Labor Committee
A reform group founded in 1904 to investigate child labor and push for laws to end it.
Bread and Roses strike
The 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike, led largely by immigrant women and the IWW, against a pay cut.

Sources

  1. ScholarshipBread and Roses Strike of 1912. The Samuel Gompers Papers, University of Maryland.
  2. Government recordWood Worsted Mill, National Register of Historic Places nomination. National Park Service.
  3. ScholarshipCotton Mills. NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina).

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