Tales about the early 1930s in Lowell always seemed to me to be a contradiction to all the stories I later heard about how hard the Depression Years had been for all of us. The Lowell Sun was writing gripping stories about the financial upheaval, which faced so many desperate, local wage-earners, who were no longer employed in the city’s many textile mills. Back then, even part-time employment might have been considered a small blessing to parents, who had been forced to suddenly share a house or an apartment with relatives or friends.
For these folks, the Big Bad Wolf was clawing at their front door. Hand-me-down clothing, which usually did not fit properly, was passed down to the younger generation as a badge of courage that, somehow, there might be light at the end of the tunnel. Even hopes based on possible help from the Roosevelt government was being discussed in Washington, but, as rock-ribbed, working-class, New England Republicans, our relatives and friends – all true, Quebec, Catholic, Franco-Americans – naturally looked askance at accepting any assistance from others. Curiously, the famous, local expression that “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” might have been born during these tough times.
Surely, the Irish, textile laborers, also desperate wage-slaves, faced similar problems, but, somehow, the Irish wing of the Democratic party located in Boston, usually, had proffered a less harsh accommodation to crippling unemployment. These were the early days of a socioeconomic and psychological movement coming out of the New Deal institutions. Maybe, the fundamental rules of our social fabric needed some revamping? The many challenges offered by the crises and disasters of our Big Depression might teach us all a benign lesson in community and living together?
The Great Crash – October 24, 1929
In the spring of 1929, the good, working-class people of Lowell-town never anticipated that their shaky, daily, financial status as human appendages to constantly grinding, electro-mechanical machinery (looms, levers, spinning bobs, presses, etc.) producing textile fabrics might soon be placed in dire jeopardy by unfavorable investment decisions made in boardrooms scattered across the country. Such workers were called the “operatives” and they represented, for the most part, the easily replaceable, low-skilled, assembly-line laborers at the bottom-most status of an industrial hierarchy. Newly arrived, uneducated, peasant-class immigrants (Greeks, Irish, French-Canadian, Polish, etc.), all hungry for work, nicely filled these ranks.
which constituted the very basis of their lives as human extensions to grinding electro-mechanical machinery might suddenly be given a life and death test