USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 16
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for increased rates. Early in July about 150 men, followed the next week by some 100 women in the tennis depart- ment, walked out on strike over the company's refusal to raise wages. It was not a particularly ominous gesture, as the whole plant was to be shut down for two weeks at the end of July for the annual "vacation," vacation, needless to say, without pay save for salaried personnel. Everyone as- sumed that the difficulty would be smoothed out before the shops reopened in August. Comment in the local press was confined to the back pages of the paper, as befitted a trivial episode. But in the interim the striking "tennis makers" strengthened their position. An organizer from the Interna- tional Boot and Shoe Workers' Union had arrived on the scene and before the end of July reported that 860 people in Naugatuck had applied for membership in the new local. Within two days of the reopening of the mills in August this number had increased to 2,500, and the chairman of the recently elected strike committee announced that unless the company agreed to a 20 per cent general wage increase and an equitable readjustment of particular piece tariffs, the union would call a general strike. Management, proclaiming its generosity in having already reduced the working week to forty-eight hours without corresponding wage cuts, refused to be moved. The response was prompt; at a mass-meeting held in Linden Park on the night of August 12 the rubber workers by an overwhelming vote declared in favor of a walk-out. Twenty-eight hundred employees, 75 per cent of all Naugatuck's workers, went on strike. As the first and only prolonged strike the borough ever experienced, it is worth examination.
The weeks that followed were anxious ones for everyone interested in Naugatuck's welfare. The strike soon spread to the regenerating plant. Picket lines were formed around each of the company buildings, and union members an- nounced at intervals that they would never return until the company gave in. Encouraged by A. F. of L. officials from
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Boston, Providence, and Hartford, the local's demands were increased; a 25 to 35 per cent general pay raise, a 40¢ an hour minimum wage, an eight-hour day, and time-and-a-half for overtime. The men from the regenerating plant, where op- erations ran round the clock, asked for a three-shift instead of the existing two-shift schedule. Management's protests that wages were not out of line the strikers countered with figures of their own. At the foundry, they declared, men were receiving 50¢ an hour, whereas god was the usual rate for rubber workers. The Bristol Company had recently raised wages 34 per cent. The bootmakers ignored the fact that the work was not comparable either in the skill or brawn re- quired. In other plants of the United States Rubber Com- pany, they asserted, wages were higher than in Naugatuck, where to keep body and soul together every member of a family must work.
At the beginning of the strike Charles T. McCarthy, the factory manager, had been ill, and in his absence representa- tives of management had adopted an undiplomatic attitude of aloofness. Toward the end of August McCarthy returned, took steps to declare the company's readiness to discuss wage problems, but only with committees of its own employees, the implication being of course that the strike was the work of outside trouble-makers. The strikers repudiated the sug- gestion that their committee was not composed exclusively from their own ranks and rejected flatly the company's pro- posal to return to work first and argue pay rates later. Speeches at union mass meetings had always to be translated into Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian for the sake of the non- English speaking members.
The weeks dragged on. Merchants extending credit be- came more and more uneasy. Men congratulated themselves rather mournfully only upon the absence of violence and rowdyism. Benefit ball games and other entertainments helped finance the strikers, but by September many a family was feeling the pinch. In spite of the bravely voiced defiance
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of union officers, the unanimity of the workers began to evaporate. Every day a few more slid in through the mill gates to return to work, until by mid-September it was ob- vious that the union could not hold out much longer. At this point the company renewed its offer to take back every- one, meet with shop committees to discuss wages, and- lone triumph for the union-submit to arbitration any issue not settled satisfactorily between shop committees and man- agement. Representatives of the International attempted to cheer the local people by insisting that they had made no- table progress, for not only had they won the promise of arbitration from the company but they now had a strong union ready to wield the cudgels in any future controversy.
So Naugatuck's most extended strike ended. Wages were raised somewhat, though they were again reduced in the de- pression of 1921. The vaunted strength of the Boot and Shoe Workers' local proved ephemeral. The union disappeared, and no second attempt at unionization occurred for many years. But there was one definite advantage gained. Company officials, unwilling again to risk interference from outside labor organizers, inaugurated a Factory Council made up of one representative from each department in the shops. In weekly meetings these representatives discussed griev- ances, recommended action to company officials, and re- ceived decisions of management in response to employee re- quests. For over a decade the Council served the invaluable purpose of adjusting to mutual satisfaction the interests of employees and employers. Still the strike left its mark. In spite of the pension plan, work for the rubber company ceased to be coveted as it had been a generation earlier. Boot- makers discovered that they were simply industrial em- ployees holding factory jobs of no particular distinctive im- portance. They were no longer a special caste.
Meanwhile other forms of rubber manufacture had found a place here. First of these was rubber reclamation. The feasibility of reclaiming rubber for re-use was well known
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before the nineties; a reclaiming plant had been opened in Philadelphia in the eighties. But not until the price of natu- ral rubber began to mount sharply and the amount of used rubber to be salvaged had increased in quantity did anyone in Naugatuck give close attention to the scheme. It was in November 1892 that a few men connected with the shoe company undertook to open a reclaiming plant on Rubber Avenue. When fire wiped out this building, known in those days as the "Shoddy Shop," operations were moved to a build- ing on the west bank of the river south of the Ward shop. In the winter of 1898 this plant also burned, causing a loss of half a million dollars. The company officials thereupon an- nounced that they intended to move elsewhere in order to escape Naugatuck's heavy taxation. But freemen of the bor- ough were by then so convinced of the importance of the factory to the community that they agreed to reduce taxes upon the property for five years, provided the plant be re- built here. So Naugatuck continued to be a center of rubber reclamation.
At first old rubber shoes supplied most of the material, but in the course of a few years tires, accumulating rapidly with the wider use of automobiles, were the main source. For twenty years reclamation was carried on exclusively by the sulphuric acid process, but after 1912 by the newer alkaline method as well. The slabs of regenerated rubber shipped to the shoe or glove shop for combination with natural rubber or marketed as reclaimed rubber to manufacturers else- where soon proved essential. By 1900 industry had discovered that combination of reclaimed with natural rubber im- proved most products, as loss in elasticity was more than off- set by gain in strength. Thereafter 90 per cent of the rub- ber goods made in this country contained some regenerated rubber. The enormous growth of the reclamation plant in Naugatuck naturally followed, and in 1913 the United States Rubber Company absorbed the enterprise. Indeed, inas- much as the stockholders of the reclamation company were
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identical with some of the owners of the United States Rub- ber, the transfer was a paper transaction only.
Work in the regenerating plant was in general well paid. In the first place it was heavy, much of it required some judg- ment on the part of the operator, and all of it was unavoid- ably disagreeable. The fumes of the acid and the hot rubber and the debilitating heat were sometimes nearly overpower- ing. The participation of some of the men from the reclaim- ing unit in the 1919 strike was born both of sympathy with the boot-makers and of determination to have three eight- hour shifts replace the existing eleven- and thirteen-hour ones. Three shifts were not established, however, until 1930.
Meanwhile, as a consequence of the expansion of rubber reclaiming, the demand for sulphuric acid also grew. Sul- phuric acid became more difficult to obtain in quantity and higher and higher priced. Accordingly in 1904 a group of men interested in rubber manufacture started in Naugatuck a plant for making this essential chemical. Adjacent to the regenerating plant they erected the first building of the Naugatuck Chemical Company and began manufacture of heavy acids. In 1910 the United States Rubber Company took it over as an integral part of the great corporation. By then the plant was having a struggle to beat off the killing competition of the larger chemical companies. In spite of large purchases from the local rubber shops and the brass foundries in Waterbury, the output of sulphuric acid was proving greater than demand. Greater diversification was clearly necessary if the chemical company was to survive. So research chemists undertook a new program to find ad- ditional products needed either by the rubber industry or others. In time they were to give America a long list of chemicals, varnishes, aromatics, and a series of compounds that revolutionized rubber manufacture.
The first very important contribution of the Naugatuck chemists, however, arose from the dilemma created by the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. American scientists had
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already discovered that adding aniline to rubber reduced the amount of time needed for vulcanization, that, in short, aniline was an accelerator. But Germany at that time was the only producer of aniline, an intermediate for coal-tar dyes, and by 1915 the British blockade had completely cut off the German supply from users in this country. There was no aniline available in the whole United States. Determined to overcome this obstacle, a group of young chemists in Nauga- tuck, guiding themselves by a German text book, undertook to produce aniline here. On one of the hottest July days ever recorded in Naugatuck, they finished a first batch, run off without redistillation into a drum which was at once shipped to tire-makers in Detroit. The American process was soon greatly improved, but from that day onward American manufacturers were freed from dependence on the German dye-trust.
For Naugatuck as a community the chemical company came to be of greater importance than anyone could have anticipated when the plant opened in 1904. As its operations broadened it gave employment to a larger and larger num- ber of people. But its chief significance lay in the prestige it brought to the town. In considerable measure because of the chemical company, by 1921 Naugatuck was no longer an ordinary New England manufacturing city but rather on a small scale a center of scientific industrial research. Though population did not grow markedly, the coming to Naugatuck of a steady stream of young men interested in chemical research created an atmosphere different from that of the usual mill town. Future developments were to stress this difference.
In spite of the added activity that the rubber reclamation and the chemical plants brought to Naugatuck, in the first decade of the twentieth century the drawbacks of being a rubber town remained. For there was no change in the rub- ber shops' system of seasonal employment. As the number of employees increased, in busy seasons the problem of lay-
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offs in winter grew proportionately. Public-spirited citizens became more and more concerned. Diversification of in- dustry in the community appeared to be the only answer. In 1909 men at the foundry financed a new company to make ball-bearing shade rollers, and during the fourteen years of its existence in Naugatuck the company provided steady em- ployment to about twenty-five men. But that was not enough. The Board of Trade therefore in 1910 began a new campaign to induce other manufacturers to locate here. At this junc- ture the city planners learned that the assets of the Risdon Tool Works of Waterbury could be bought and the plant moved to Naugatuck; so one hundred Naugatuck residents raised $10,000 and made the purchase. In the spring of 1913 the company moved into a new building erected on land given by George Andrew where, with fifteen employees and twenty-five machines, operations began.
To avoid the uncertainties inherent in the making of tools for other manufacturers, the company now decided to give itself over to manufacture of metal components. But it had no line and no customers. Troubles mounted, partial fi- nancial reorganization ensued, and prospects were not rosy. In these straits company engineers conceived the idea of making by a simplified process the metal clasps for Paris garters. From the day that Lewis A. Dibble, then manager and later president of the company, secured that order, the Risdon enterprise gained momentum. Paris garters saved the company. World War I brought a great increase of business in component parts for other industries, for naval vessels, and for ordnance. An automatic multiple plunger press, installed in 1916, turned out millions of cartridge clips at a big saving over former methods of manufacture. Accurate and efficient tools and equipment also enabled the company to make Colt Automatic .45 caliber pistol maga- zines in quantity. Plant facilities, increased by new wings to the original factory and by a second building in 1918, were improved year by year with additions of new automatic
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machines. Designers and engineers planned and supervised the construction of the tools, dies, and fixtures that produced components within .00025 inch tolerances. After the war, profiting from the lessons learned in fabrication of sheet metal into a great variety of items previously produced only from forgings or bar steel, the Risdon Manufacturing Com- pany built up a steady market for articles varying from safety-pins to fuse sockets.
It is worthy of comment that for all its modernity of pro- duction methods, the company for twenty years, as late as 1933, resorted to one device usually associated with a much earlier day in industry. Stringing the safety-pins onto wires was farmed out to women in the neighborhood to do at home, much as the makers of Yankee notions nearly a hundred years before had let out buttons and hooks and eyes to be fastened to cards by women and children working at home in the evenings. All through the 1920's passers-by were famil- iar with the sight of small boys homeward-bound, drawing through the streets toy express wagons full of loose safety- pins. About 1932, however, teachers and other citizens pro- tested this system, because children, set to industrial home- work at night by their parents, came to school too tired to study the next day. The company thereupon installed ma- chines to do the job.
Company policy, always carefully adhered to, limited or- ders to established items needed in volume, and the result was steady employment for the skilled workmen. Thus the primary purpose of the citizens who brought the enterprise into Naugatuck was fulfilled. Layoffs were infrequent and brief. Turnover was nil. Unemployment that might have resulted from increasing mechanization was offset by corre- sponding expansion of operations. Furthermore, the degree of skill required of considerable part of the working force grew rather than diminished with the constant introduction of new automatic machines. Intelligence was necessary to keep the machine tools in perfect running order, and in-
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spection demanded vigilant attention and care. So most em- ployees at the Risdon plant were highly paid. And in addi- tion to good pay, tool- and diemakers and technicians of all kinds could look forward at once to interesting assignments and to possible promotions. For investors of capital the venture was equally satisfactory; after 1916 the company never failed to declare regular dividends.
Measured in terms of distinction of product, scarcely less noteworthy was the Naugatuck Manufacturing Company. The process by which the seamless copper floats, the com- pany's mainstay, were manufactured was the fruit of the labors of Erastus W. Whitlock, long general manager for the company. The secret lay in using galvanic action to coat with copper two hand-spun copper shells which had been soldered into a sphere. Ball floats for open tanks or nickel- plated for use under high steam pressure, all must be fabri- cated with the most exacting care to guarantee durability. The company never employed more than a handful of men, but their skill turned out floats of a flawlessness that made the line famous without other advertising. Within the or- ganization there existed the kind of intimacy possible only in a very small plant.
A somewhat similar situation obtained in the John M. Russell Manufacturing Company, makers of sash and plumb- ers' chains. In 1907 John Russell had moved into the old factory in Millville previously used by the Naugatuck Manu- facturing Company. For some fifteen years before this time the old shops in Millville had been occupied off and on by a series of small manufacturing businesses. Joel Webster's shear shop of the nineties was followed by a cut glass factory run by his son, while nearby in other old buildings a variety of enterprises appeared and disappeared. But the Russell venture was more permanent. Using an ancient overshot waterwheel for part of the mill power, the family built up a solid business, expanding gradually as their reputation for quality wares grew. With improved facilities the company
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in time added new items of manufacture, notably buckles for arctics and other special fasteners. Like the Naugatuck Manufacturing Company, the Russells before World War II never had more than twenty employees. But concerns like these preserved for the borough in the twentieth century many of the pleasanter aspects of the small shops of the pre- ceding era.
The Dunham Hosiery Company, successor to Thomas Lewis' satinet mill, in a somewhat different way also served as a link between Naugatuck's manufacturing in the nine- teenth century and in the twentieth. The woolen mill had the longest history of any factory in town, and, with little alteration in mill layout, down through World War I card and knitting machines clattered away within the plant much as they had a generation before. But notwithstanding its employment of nearly 300 people, the company controlled from Hartford was less vital to Naugatuck than other enter- prises. Wages were relatively low, set by the current rate in other New England textile mills, and curtailment of opera- tions after 1919 occasioned some dismay but little surprise.
To keep pace with the industrial growth of these years, utility companies in Naugatuck had also to expand. Tele- phone lines were extended and the Naugatuck Electric Lighting Company improved its facilities in order to supply streets, factories, stores, and homes with electricity. Whereas kerosene lamps had been common in 1893, nearly thirty years later these had all but disappeared. This change at once reduced fire hazards and added greatly to householders' convenience and comfort. Even more essential to the bor- ough's welfare was the enlargement of the water works. The Naugatuck Water Company, an incorporated group of local citizens who had refused to be balked in 1887 by the town's rejection of responsibility for a public water system, had had many difficulties in financing the undertaking. But under the auspices of Eli C. Barnum, General Manager from 1889 to 1918, the company gradually strengthened its
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position and before 1915 was able to add six new reservoirs to the original 7,000,000 gallon storage pond in Straitsville. The company paid its stockholders dividends regularly from 1893 onward, but the beneficiaries of the company's services included practically every family in Naugatuck as well as some in Beacon Falls and the Platts Mills section of Water- bury. Water piped into houses meant the installation of bath- tubs and inside toilets, not only a convenience but, with the elimination of out-door privies, a safeguard to public health. Chlorination of the water in the reservoirs prevented contamination.
In general, apart from the special features of its manufac- turing program, business life in Naugatuck ran true to the form established in similar small industrial cities. The build- ing contractors flourished; each new mill, every new store or office building, every new home gave them opportunities. Since practically every house erected was frame, lumber deal- ers also prospered. Local loyalty to familiar firms gave a specially large clientele to the Naugatuck Lumber Com- pany, incorporated in 1899 but an outgrowth of the old enterprise started by Hial Stevens before the Civil War. Adjacent to its own mill-work shop the company ran a cider mill every fall for some years, thereby contriving incidentally to remind customers of ties with the past. Most Naugatuck contractors confined themselves to Naugatuck itself, but oc- casionally a well-established firm secured contracts in other places. After World War I, W. J. Megin, in particular, began to extend his operations and in time was to win a reputation for fine work all up and down the valley. The general intro- duction of central heating and inside plumbing into houses, and installation of electric wiring for lighting also opened up new business for suppliers of household equipment and utilities.
Retailers, however, as formerly, were handicapped by the proximity of Waterbury, and in fact the opening of the Nau- gatuck-Waterbury street railway in 1895 made shopping
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trips to the bigger city so easy that Naugatuck merchants were more restricted than ever. Until his retirement John M. Page succeeded in maintaining a line of some distinction to his store selling household goods. But this was unusual, and in most local stores the variety and quality of merchan- dise was limited. People with money spent it elsewhere, partly because growing wealth brought automobiles which, while still not priced within the reach of many factory work- ers, were already making marked inroads on the comparative geographical isolation of the Naugatuck of 1890. Horse- drawn drays and delivery wagons in 1921 were no longer the rule but the exception, and the harness-maker, the black- smith, the feed-dealer, and the livery stableman were largely transformed into the garage mechanic and gasoline dealer. Extension of telephone lines also brought Naugatuck into closer communication with the world beyond its limits.
While Naugatuck was now too closely tied into the busi- ness structure of the whole region to aspire to becoming either a commercial or a financial center, the local banks held their own. The Savings Bank was of decided benefit to a small army of depositors, many of them humble people who placed all their savings here. By 1911 it had outgrown its headquarters in the Town Hall and put up its own build- ing on North Church Street. The simple dignified lines of its architecture suggested the unostentatious solidity of the institution itself. The Naugatuck National Bank had erected its own building as early as 1893. Like the Savings Bank it grew steadily and had a substantial surplus by 1921.
Nearly twenty-five years of rising prices and industrial expansion before 1921 thus brought some changes peculiar to this particular manufacturing city and others that were characteristic of American industrial communities in gen- eral. One practically universal change is worth especially noting: the greater impersonality in manufacturing con- cerns. People talked in terms of company policies, company earnings, company expansion, rather than individuals' activi-
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ties and achievements. The corporations largely superseded in men's thinking the living persons who made up the com- panies. In 1890 employees knew their employers as persons with whom they might exchange a few friendly words in the course of any ordinary day's work; in 1921 employees sometimes scarcely knew company officers by sight.
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