When 20,000 textile workers went on strike in the 1928 New Bedford Textile Workers Strike, 18-year-old factory worker Eulalia “Eula” Mendes (1910-2004) became a leader in her mill and community by encouraging Portuguese industrial migrant workers to participate in the strike. Later, she traveled nationwide to support other fights for justice and equality.

Eula left Portugal with her working-class family in 1912 and settled in New Bedford, a textile city with a large Portuguese-speaking community. At the young age of 14, Eula became her family’s primary breadwinner as a bobbin worker in a textile factory. In 1928, when the city’s textile workers went on strike in opposition to a 10% wage cut planned by the factory owners, Eula began attending meetings run by regional and national labor organizers.

She became a leader at her mill and in her community by promoting Portuguese worker participation in the strike. Eula translated the speeches of labor leaders into Portuguese and gave speeches herself. She became an organizer for the communist-influenced Textile Mill Committee (TMC), which demanded a wage increase, a 40-hour workweek, and an end to child labor. Eventually, Eula became a member of the TMC’s executive committee serving in a leadership role as secretary.

The TMC organized thousands of workers into pickets, rallies, and parades that attracted the attention of law enforcement and city officials. The National Guard and local police used force and arrested many strikers, including Eula. She noted that she “was arrested a number of times... We sometimes stayed [in jail] for just a few hours, sometimes overnight or sometimes even days or weeks, but we were usually let out on bail. And a few days later maybe we were arrested again.”

After six months, the strikers accepted a smaller pay cut and returned to work. For Eula, the 1928 strike sparked a life of union organizing. She traveled nationwide with the International Ladies Garment Workers and other unions to support other uprisings in the fight for justice and equality. Eula’s activism continued with her Communist Party affiliation in New Bedford and the region, and she refused to sign a Loyalty Pledge to promise that she was not a Communist.

The strike did not accomplish all the goals the TMC hoped for, but it did change the relationship between textile workers and mill owners in the city and New England for decades to come. After years of being ignored by the established mill craft unions, ethnic communities found a voice through the TMC and developed a new interest in unions, which encouraged them to come together to advocate for greater representation.

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The Federal Hill Riots of 1914, often called the “Macaroni Riots,” epitomize the struggle of immigrant communities in Rhode Island. As World War I was breaking out, food prices spiked. Laborers gathered on street corners to listen to “agitators” blame business owners. A mob formed that attacked wholesale grocer Frank P. Ventrone’s business block here. They smashed windows and hurled macaroni into the street. Police intervention quelled the disturbance, but the next day new confrontations sparked an even bloodier riot in which eighteen were injured, including 15-year-old Quinnio Oddi, shot by police. Over two weeks, there were five violent confrontations between Federal Hill residents and the police. The violence manifested the desperation of Providence’s immigrant working poor. Child labor was the norm; long hours earned little pay; laborers were easily replaced and had no assurance of work; they had no voice in government. In the midst of this poverty and social unrest, radicals like Luigi Nimini agitated for change. Nimini published his Italian-language newspaper Il Ragione Nuova from his shop at 206 Atwells and founded the Karl Marx Club at the corner of Atwells and Dean, the same corner where radical speakers riled up the crowd in August 1914.

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In 1842, this Federal-style house was the headquarters of a political revolution. The owner Burrington Anthony was a supporter of Thomas Wilson Dorr and his effort to expand voting rights. At that time, only white men of property could vote, disenfranchising much of the state, particularly the growing numbers of mill workers in this part of the city. In May 1842, Dorr came to this house a pretender-governor. Brandishing a sword and threatening bloodshed, he gave a fiery speech to the armed men that had gathered there. A pair of raided cannon was positioned in the middle of the avenue, facing down the hill into the city. In the early hours of May 18th, surrounded by dense fog, two hundred men marched from this house through winding streets to a small arsenal on the Dexter Training Grounds. Bells across the city tolled the alarm, but Dorr's cannon fizzled, and so did his revolution. Dorr was tried for treason and imprisoned, but ultimately pardoned. Anthony survived unscathed, living in this house until his death in 1853. A new state constitution expanded the franchise but retained restrictions, particularly targeting foreign-born citizens. Notably, most racial qualifications were removed, making voting rights in Rhode Island more color-blind in 1843 than gender- and class-blind.

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Strike! Strike! Strike!

It was a warm summer day in July of 1904, and tensions were running high in Fall River, Massachusetts. Earlier in the month, the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association had announced a 12.5% wage cut in all of the conglomerate’s mills. Now, after two weeks of unsuccessful negotiations between the Association and union locals, a city-wide strike was looming on the horizon. The question dominating everyone’s thoughts -- would the operatives across the border in Tiverton’s Bourne Mill join their Massachusetts colleagues in the strike or prove loyal to their employer?

Founded by a group of Fall River textile magnates in 1881, the Bourne Mill complex was constructed at the southern end of Cook’s Pond, joining several other mills already using the pond as a source of water for the mills’ steam engines. This location, however, placed the mill just over the state border into Rhode Island, resulting in the peculiar situation where several of the mill’s structures physically bridged the border. Beginning modestly with a single, five-story granite mill finished in 1883, the Bourne Mill complex eventually expanded to include more than twenty buildings of brick and granite.

Unlike all of the other mills in Fall River, Bourne Mill operated on a unique financial model where employees were involved in a profit-sharing initiative. Under this plan, if the mill made a profit and paid dividends to investors, “faithful” employees also received a biannual dividend that was calculated as a percentage of their wages. The impetus for this innovative strategy came from Jonathan Bourne -- the namesake of the mill and one of the founding investors. Bourne made his fortune in the whaling industry and was accustomed to the “lay” system used on whalers where all of the crew received a percentage of the profit at the end of a successful voyage. At Bourne Mill, this initiative was intended to both increase productivity and bolster employer-employee rapport.

As the New England textile industry began to face increasing pressure in the early twentieth century from southern mills, the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, like other northern mill conglomerates, confronted the challenge of cutting costs in order to continue turning a profit. Introducing more efficient, Northrop automatic power looms that required less supervision was one way that many mills began to adjust to the increasingly competitive environment. In 1898, Bourne Mill purchased a number of Northrop looms, allowing the mill management to reduce the number of weavers in half. Despite the mill operatives’ opposition, the Northrop looms were an inevitable part of progress in the textile industry. Two years after Bourne Mill purchased its first automatic looms, it embarked on a major expansion of its weaving facilities, constructing a new, sawtooth-roofed, granite weave shed that allowed it to double the number of Northrop looms in operation.

In addition to the introduction of the Northrop automatic looms, relationships between the mill corporations and the mill operatives were further strained by a general “slowdown” in the northern textile industry in first years of the twentieth century. In this charged environment, the 12.5% decrease in wages proposed by the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association was a flashpoint. On July 25th, over 25,000 Fall River textile workers -- and most of the employees of Tiverton’s Bourne Mill -- walked out of the mills. Despite its fifteen years of successful operation, the Bourne Mill’s profit-sharing initiative had not generated enough employee goodwill to keep the mill in operation. Like the mills across the border in Fall River, Tiverton’s Bourne Mill would remain closed for the next six months. It was not reopened until after the union locals successfully negotiated for only a 7.5% wage decrease in January of 1905.

Although the Fall River textile industry seemed to recover rapidly from the effects of the 1904 strike, this conflict prefigured the eventual end of the New England cotton manufacturing industry. Northern mills simply could not compete with southern mills’ lower labor costs, newer equipment, and better access to raw cotton. Bourne Mill continued to operate though the 1940s, with World War II providing the mill with a major production boost.

In 1953, the mill was sold to Berkshire-Hathaway, a textile conglomerate formed by Warren Buffett in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, Berkshire-Hathaway, realizing that the textile industry was abandoning New England, decided to divest themselves from the mills they had recently acquired . Bourne Mill, along with six other Berkshire-Hathaway mills, closed in 1961.

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Thomas Tew gained such renown for his exploits from 1692 until 1695 that he was nicknamed the Rhode Island Pirate. Tew, a privateer from Newport who turned to piracy, led two major voyages, and accrued more treasure than he could spend before he met a violent death. Due to his colorful role in the city’s history, the Newport Distilling Company named their first product after him--Thomas Tew Rum. Tew’s namesake is not the first rum to be made in these parts. Before the nineteenth century, Newport was the “rum capital of the world.” Today’s rum distillers use a process similar to that employed in the eighteenth century, mixing blackstrap molasses with local water and fermenting it in tanks using yeast from the adjacent brewery. This process yields a liquid called a “wash” that is then distilled twice. The resulting spirit is aged for several years in oak barrels before water is added to lower the proof. Finally, the rum is individually bottled, corked, and sealed with wax. Rum played a central role in “the triangle trade,” a term used to describe the selling of rum, sugar, goods, and enslaved Africans among the nations of Europe, Western Africa, the Caribbean, and the Eastern United States. Rum-making and the triangle trade historically provided much of Newport’s wealth, and depended on the labor and selling of enslaved Africans and African Americans whose contributions are too often ignored. In addition, African Americans contributed a great deal to the culinary heritage of the Ocean State, such as the oysters and other foods offered by restaurateur George T. Downing at the Sea Girt Hotel in Newport, another stop on this tour and on the Rhode Island Black Heritage Tour. Today, visitors to the Newport Distilling Company can go on free tours of the facility, also home to Newport Storm Brewery, and reflect on the shifting social and political climates of the past three centuries that have led to the revival of this once-ubiquitous spirit.

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Imagine the Fox Point waterfront in the 1940s. Cargo ships lined up to get into crowded docks. Longshoremen bustled along the busy quays. Crowds waited to welcome packet ships bringing new immigrants and news from Cape Verde.

Many of the longshoremen who worked the docks had themselves come into this port on the packet boats.  Until the 1950s, most of the packet boats were repurposed schooners and aging whalers. Crewed by skilled seamen, these vessels made regular trips between American ports and the islands of Cape Verde off the African coast, transporting people, letters, food, and freight.

Cape Verdean immigration to Providence, and greater New England, began the early nineteenth century, when men from the islands were recruited by whaling companies looking for good seamen and inexpensive labor. By the early twentieth century, Portugal’s oppressive colonial rule of the islands, combined with drought and starvation, forced families to consider leaving Cape Verde. Many immigrants moved to Providence and New Bedford, joining family members and friends already in the United States.

The waterfront neighborhood of Fox Point, bounded to the north by Power Street, became the heart of Cape Verdean Rhode Island until the late twentieth century. Today, some Cape Verdeans still live in the area, but most were forced to relocate as urban renewal projects dramatically changed the neighborhood. Beginning in the 1950s, Brown University also bought and developed land in the neighborhood; the ensuing gentrification made it prohibitively expensive for working class families to live there.

At the same time that longtime Fox Point residents were being forced to move elsewhere, the Fox Point docks were also changing. After World War II, “containerization,” the increasing use of shipping containers, drastically decreased the numbers of jobs available on the docks. Many longshoremen actively resisted the changes. In 1971, a historic strike on the west coast shut down the ports for 130 days. The Cape Verdean longshoremen who worked in Fox Point were members of Local 1329 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, the first labor union in the United States founded by Cape Verdeans. Local 1329 played an important role in the national labor union and in the lives of the Cape Verdean longshoremen and their families. Ultimately, resistance to automation was not successful and by the end of the twentieth century almost ninety percent of longshoremen jobs had been lost to automation.

These docks are filled with the memories of work, change and resistance, and the journeys of people and things from Cape Verde to Providence. Though the Cape Verdean community is no longer concentrated in Fox Point, more Cape Verdeans still live in Massachusetts and Rhode Island than anywhere else except Cape Verde. Many of them still gather each year in India Point Park to celebrate the islands’ independence from Portugal on July 5th, a day filled with festivities, educational events, and food.

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Sam Patch swung his hat and leapt off the cliff, cutting through the mist towards the seething whirlpool below. A roar rose up from the massive crowd of over 8,000 people. The outcome of this feat – at High Falls in upstate New York – would send reverberations across the nation.

Sam Patch's jumping career began several decades earlier at Slater Mill in Pawtucket. From the age of seven, Patch worked in the mill, scuttling between looms, clearing bobbins of cotton, and replacing them with empty ones. Eventually, he was promoted to a coveted weaving position. He toiled for fourteen hours a day, six days a week, starting at five in the morning. In the summer the mill was hot and humid, and during lunch breaks Patch would join other boys in jumping off the mill dam or nearby bridges into the cool tidal pool at the foot of the Pawtucket Falls. Soon this leisurely activity turned into a competition, with each boy jumping from higher and higher-still factory windows.

In 1824, mill owners demanded that workers accept steep wage cuts and a shortened lunch break. Patch, along with his fellow workers, protested against these unfair practices. Continuing conflict with mill management may have been one factor that precipitated Patch's subsequent move to Paterson, New Jersey, where he found work at another mill. Upon hearing that a bridge was to be built over the Passaic Falls, Patch declared that – once built – he would jump from it. On September 30, 1827, he jumped as promised from Clinton Bridge, drawing a large, incredulous crowd.  The press went wild, dubbing him the “New Jersey Jumper” and launching his career as a daredevil stuntman.

Patch's career hit a high point in October of 1829, when, as part of his east coast “Jumping Tour” he became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls. Waving to crowds assembled on both the American and Canadian sides of the Niagara River, he kissed the American flag before hurling himself one hundred and thirty feet down into the churning river.

One month later, Patch found himself poised above High Falls in upstate New York. However, this leap went terribly wrong.

Patch's body dropped like an arrow, when suddenly his legs separated and set his body spinning. As he struck the water, a terrible thwack echoed through the air. Audience members held their breath – one minute – two minutes – three minutes – but there was no sign of the daredevil. Rumors rippled through the crowd: could he be hiding in a cave at the base of the falls, poised for a triumphant reappearance? It took four months to find his corpse, frozen in a block of ice six miles downstream.

Sam Patch lived on in the American imagination as hero to a budding proletariat culture: democratic, hard-drinking, sports-obsessed, and loving of melodrama. Amidst a rapidly changing social structure, Patch's trademark phrase – "Some things can be done as well as others” – hinted at what we now call the American dream: a belief that human ingenuity can generate endless, perhaps even extravagant, possibilities.

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