by S. L. Stoner
Caroline paused to look earnestly into each face. “Our purpose in gathering and publishing this data is to use it to push the Oregon legislature into adopting legislation that sets minimum hourly wages and maximum working hours for women. Our proposed law will also create a state agency to oversee compliance. Once we accomplish that, we’ll move on to the task of enacting the same conditions for men.”
She turned toward Rachel saying, “I hope you understand that I couldn’t confide in you. We have to be extremely careful to ensure that the employers don’t learn what we’re doing and take steps to head us off at the pass.”
Rachel stood up, walked around the table to Caroline and hugged the young social worker around the shoulders. “Don’t you feel bad about it, Caroline. I would have done the same thing. Thank you so much for what you’re trying to accomplish,” she said before returning to her seat.
Caroline looked pleased and leaned forward to tell them something additional. “I have found the experience so enriching that I intend to continue working on labor issues for the rest of my life. After spending many hours talking to my priest advisor, Father O’Hara, I will be doing so as a nun in the order of the Sisters of the Holy Names Jesus and Mary.”
That announcement elicited gasps of surprise from everyone but Hanke. He just looked sad. Sage caught his eye and raised an eyebrow. Hanke nodded slightly and then shrugged. Obviously, Caroline had already shared that bit of information with the Sergeant. Sage could imagine why, given the man’s disappointed face.
The subject changed again when Mae looked at Fong and asked, “Whatever happened to Farley’s two operatives that you and Sage penned up down there in the underground?”
Fong’s normally impassive face looked stunned. Mae half rose from her chair, “Don’t tell me you forgot and left them there!” Then she caught the twinkle in Fong’s eyes. “Pshaw, you devil!”
Sage was sure she would have slugged Fong in the arm if he’d been closer.
Fong grinned at her. “Not to worry Mae Clemens. Next day, after we get back from Astoria boat rides, Mr. Adair gave them fifty dollars and train tickets. They left town lickety-split.”
Sage’s forehead wrinkled. First Fong was saying “upsy daisy” and now he was coming up with “lickety-split.” It was like he had suddenly decided to adopt American jargon with a vengeance. Sage studied his friend and concluded he wasn’t too sure he liked that idea.
Silence settled over the table until it was broken by Mae saying, “Well, I for one, intend to never, ever, set foot in a steam laundry again. Not even if its work hours drop to three. That’s definitely a young woman’s job.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Rachel jumped in. “You remember, Debbie, the woman whose hand was amputated after it she caught it in the mangle? Well, her sister said that some older fellow turned up at Debbie’s door and gave her three thousand dollars cash. He wouldn’t tell her why he was giving it to her or who it was coming from. She tried to give it back but he just shuffled away. She’s going to buy a big house so she can rent out rooms.”
Eich shifted uncomfortably in his chair and shot a quick glance at Sage who winked in return. Eich had reported that, when Debbie realized it wasn’t a mistake and she could keep the money, she just stood in her doorway and sobbed.
Mae swallowed wine and then said thoughtfully, “I’ve been thinking about how sometimes life works like one of those mangles. It squeezes us together into the same time and place and that always changes us. Here we are, sitting around this table laughing together like lifelong friends when just a few months ago most of us didn’t know each other existed. What we’ve gone through together has changed each one of us.”
Rebecca straightened and leaned forward eagerly. “I think I know exactly what you mean. Paul, I mean Mr. Sinclair,” her face again flushed crimson at the stumble, “he says he’s glad about what happened. He says he’s a different man.”
Rachel said, “I sure felt like I was being fed into a mangle. When Rebecca went missing, I would have given that contraption both my arms to have her back.” She reached over and patted her sister’s hand. “But, now, I guess I like the outcome of being squeezed like that. I have Rebecca, we have a win for the laundry workers, and I have a new job I am excited about.”
Eich apparently also wanted to follow-up on Mae’s mangle comment because he said, “Certainly, Paul Sinclair and the rest of us learned much this last month. We know now, just how far some bosses will go to retain power. We learned how important mutual aid and support is for those seeking economic justice. Just look at us, who would have thought such a diverse group of people, could accomplish so much?”
He raised his glass to Mae saying, “So, Mae is right. The mangle that is life has melded us together, tested us in unexpected ways, and has made us stronger.” His summation brought forth other raised glasses and “hear-hears.”
His mother’s mangle theory was right of course, Sage thought. Poor Debbie lost a hand and that for sure mangled her life. As for the rest of them, circumstances had, indeed, squished them together, bad with the good, innocent with the guilty, such that all their lives were permanently altered.
But, instead of speaking those thoughts, he said with a grin, “Sounds to me like you’ve all had a bit too much wine to drink what with all this late night philosophizing.”
Mae got a laugh from the group when she delivered the expected punch to his shoulder. It didn’t hurt as much as usual.
He looked across the table at Lucinda. She was smiling only at him, her eyes alight with a warmth he hadn’t seen in a long, long, time.
The End
Historical Notes
Story Background – Laundry Workers’ Dispute
The working conditions this story describes were taken directly from contemporaneous reports. Heat, steam, standing, exposure to chemicals and loss of limbs were the hardships faced by the steam laundries’ primarily female workforce.
A labor dispute, involving Portland’s steam laundry women in 1903, inspired this story. The women sought both the nine-hour, six-day workweek and a miniscule wage raise. For the sake of the storyline this book ends with a win for the steam laundry women. In actual fact, the employer association lockout of 1903 ended with the steam laundry workers caving in. So, to them it must have seemed to have been a loss. In the long run, however, it wasn’t. Their plight triggered public debate over what were reasonable working hours and wages for women working in steam laundries. Their fight set in motion a change that would significantly impact Oregon and other workers across the country. In 1913, the legislature mandated both nine-hour work days for steam laundry workers and a higher minimum wage.
There was a United States Laundry, managed by a man named James Finley. I used his name in the story because he deserves recognition for trying to do the right thing. He voluntarily agreed to reduce the work hours to nine. He also went one step further and wrote an opinion piece for the Labor Press in which he stated that he believed the reduction in hours was the humane and moral thing to do.
Finley also refused to join the Laundryman’s Association or lockout his steam laundry workers. In retaliation, the Association members put pressure on the local chemical supplier until that business refused to provide chemicals to the United States Laundry. As stated in the story, while that chemical business could afford to lose one laundry customer, it could not afford to lose all the laundries represented by the Association. Eventually, Finley succumbed to the association’s pressure and the United States Laundry reinstituted a ten-hour workday and joined the Association. That association had a strong leader. The character of Thaddeus Cobb is modeled after that real life scoundrel.
The Portland Federated Trade Council did, in fact, solicit funds for a cooperative laundry that eventually began operating the next year. They encountered a number of difficulties which could be attributed to the Association putting pressure on suppliers.
The laundry drivers union, led by its president, officially support
ed the employers. Nearly half of the union’s driver’s however, refused to cross the picket lines during the lockout. The union president was not involved in arson or murder. Nor is there evidence that he accepted bribes from the employers. His union was, however, expelled from the Federated Trades Council and assigned partial blame for the laundry workers’ failure to win the dispute.
The tale of Mae’s dastardly husband is based on the horrific labor disputes that took place in the Appalacian coal fields. Strikers and labor organizers were frequently jailed, transported to remote places and told never to return. Not infrequently, they were also killed. Subsequent to the time period in this story, a number of Portland’s female cannery strikers were jailed. Although there is no evidence that women strikers and organizers were murdered or transported out of Portland, it is not inconceivable that they could have been targeted for white slavery.
The character of James Farley is based on a real life person of the same time who was hired by the laundrymen’s association to end the labor dispute. The actions subscribed to him in the book, were based on stories told by a former management spy. He called himself GT-99 and wrote a book called Twenty Years a Labor Spy. He quoted his Farley-like boss of saying this about strike breakers:
“If your man is highly intelligent he will use discretion. But highly intelligent men are not working as strike-breakers. Highly intelligent men are . . . not loafing around waiting for a strike to start . . . All finks [another term for strikebreaker] are about the same, which means they are terrible. They’re worse than anyone outside the business has any idea of. No decent workman will take a job as a fink; so you get the other kind. He’ll cheat and steal and lie from the minute he comes to the job until he leaves.”
Also taken directly from history is the description of the international politics behind the U.S. taking over of the Panama canal, as well as the U.S. railroad corporations’ efforts to stop the canal construction. Also accurate is the description of the horrific toll that building the canal took on workers’ lives and health.
Union and Consumers League Efforts To Create Economic Justice
Oregon’s labor unions were quick to recognize the plight of the women who worked in the steam laundries. In 1902 the statewide union convention took place with 77 unions attending. The Shirt Waist and Laundry Workers union sent four representatives, two of whom were women. This first statewide union convention adopted a three-point platform to govern their activities in the coming years. The points were as follows: a) Stop bad legislation and support good legislation; b) Stop child labor for those under 15 years of age; and, c) Work for an 8-hour day.
Shortly after the first state union convention, the labor unions successfully lobbied for legislation limiting women’s hours of work to ten hours. This was the country’s first statute limiting work hours. The law, however, failed to include an effective enforcement component and so it largely went unenforced.
The Consumers’ League was a leader in advocating for better working conditions. That organization and labor unions made a deliberate choice to first seek better working conditions and wages for women before pursuing the same rights for all workers. It was reported that this decision was the result of meetings between the female head of the National Consumers’ League, Florence Kelley, and John L. Lewis, the then-powerful head of the Miners’ Union.
Some suffragettes at the time disagreed with the “women first” approach. This is because the initial and winning argument used was that women were the “weaker sex” and needed “protection.” Today, some of the suffragettes’ successors criticize the decision to employ this tactic on the ground that it created a legal difference between men and women that hurt the cause for women’s equal rights in the long term.
Legal Ramifications of Social Welfare Advocacy
In a 1903 test case, Mueller v. Oregon, a laundry owner challenged Oregon’s first minimum hours law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. His lawyers argued that Oregon lacked authority to interfere with the employers’ freedom of contract by dictating working conditions to employers. Louis Brandeis, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice, argued that states had the right to implement such laws based on research showing the law was necessary for the greater good of the community’s welfare.
Brandeis’s winning argument was precedence setting. It created a legal principle that endures to this day: We, the people, can enact laws for the good of the community even if those laws overrule an individual’s rights. This legal principle was subsequently relied upon by Thurgood Marshall when he successfully argued the landmark school desegregation case, Brown vs. the Board of Education.
After this book I discovered that, in 1902, the Oregon Supreme Court upheld a jury decision in favor of a woman whose hand had been severely burned and crushed in a Troy Laundry mangle. Stager v. Troy Laundry. In that case, the jury found that the employer had not provided properly installed safety equipment.
At some point after the events in this story, the Oregon legislators prohibited the use of strikebreakers with the current statute stating: “No employer shall knowingly utilize any professional strikebreaker to replace an employee involved in a strike or lockout, for the duration of that strike or lockout.”
Character Background- Caroline Gleason
The character of Caroline Stark is loosely based on Caroline Gleason, a young Catholic social worker who traveled from Minnesota to Portland. The real Caroline, however, came to Portland around 1908, five years after the setting of this story.
At the behest of the Oregon Consumers League, Gleason and other young women worked undercover collecting data on women’s working conditions in Portland. They found steam laundry work to be the most physically taxing and debilitating. They also noted the gross discrepancy in wages between the women and men working in the industry. Finally, their data exploded the myth that women laundry workers entered employment to earn “pin money”. Instead, their data established that most female workers were either supporting households or single women “adrift” without alternative support.
Caroline Gleason was representative of the young women who had the desire and means to attend college at the turn of the century. Social work was a new discipline that had its origin in the gross economic inequality created by the industrial revolution. It attracted young women who sought higher education in something other than teaching. In the United States, it manifested itself in the work of Jane Addams and the settlement house movement. Educationally, it focused on the gathering of data in a scientific manner. In the years that followed, this scientific data gathering, frequently carried out by women, resulted in numerous pieces of legislation intended to improve society.
Caroline Gleason completed her undercover work and generated a pamphlet setting forth the data she and her female colleagues compiled about working conditions for women. The pamphlet was presented to the Oregon legislature in 1913 and was so persuasive that the legislators unanimously passed laws setting forth wage minimums and hour maximums for women workers. Moreover, the legislation included the creation of an enforcement agency. Caroline Gleason was subsequently appointed its first director. It is not an exaggeration to state that a woman was responsible for the first enforceable wage and hour laws in the United States.
Shortly after achieving legislative success, Caroline Gleason became a nun in the order of Sisters of the Holy Names Jesus and Mary. As Sister Miriam Theresa, she worked as a university professor and lifelong national advocate in the field of labor management relations and workplace justice. She was highly regarded and respected throughout her life. Senator Wayne Morse said “Her work was the foundation ultimately for the development of a Federal Fair Labor Standards Act.”
Character Background – Rachel Levy, Paul Sinclair, Sergeant Hanke and Others
In this story Rachel Levy serves as a stand-in for the many Jewish American women who played a central role in the American labor movement even before the early 1900s. As stated by Alice Kessler-Harris in her article, The
American Labor Movement, Jewish American women:
“. . . [B]rought to trade unions their sensibilities about the organizing process and encouraged labor to support government regulation to protect women in the workforce. As Jews who emerged from a left-wing cultural tradition, they nurtured a commitment to social justice, which would develop into what is often called ‘social unionism’. From their position as an ethnic and religious minority, as well as from their position as women, they helped to shape the direction of the mainstream labor movement.”
Hanke’s frustration at the police department’s low wages and manpower shortage mirrors reports in news articles at the time. As a consequence, the raid on the saloon was lifted directly from the news of the day. This includes the fact that the police chief had to summon the officers in the middle of the night, keeping the target from them until it was too late for one of them to alert the saloon owners.
