Saylesville and Woonsocket

On September 10, 1934, thousands of strikers and sympathizers massed at the Sayles Finishing Plants in Saylesville, Rhode Island, one of the largest bleaching and finishing works in the country. Governor Theodore Francis Green sent the National Guard. After two days of clashes with tear gas and clubs, strikers who had been pushed off the grounds of nearby St. Mathieu's Church gathered in Moshassuck Cemetery, across from the plant. Around dawn on September 12, Guardsmen fired into the cemetery: Charles Gorcynski, eighteen, and William Blackwood, forty-four, were killed, and Nicholas Gravello was badly wounded. The same day, in Woonsocket, Guard fire killed nineteen-year-old Jude Courtemanche, and eighteen-year-old Leon Rouette died of his wounds ten days later. Green declared that a 'Communist uprising' was underway and asked President Roosevelt for federal troops; Roosevelt declined. The violence showed a Northern public that the bloodshed of 1934 was not only a Southern affliction, and that New Deal labor rights could be overridden by any governor willing to turn the Guard on his own workers.