The history of the labor movement in the Mohawk Valley is an extremely rich yet untapped field. This is not to say that there’s no labor historiography of the region, but it seems lacking compared to other areas of New York. Utica itself has experienced or been adjacently involved with a number of strikes since at least the mid-19th century. The textile strike of 1919, the newspaper strike of 1967, the teachers strike of 1971, these are only a few of the likely dozens if not hundreds of strikes that have occurred in this city, let alone the whole of the Mohawk Valley. I’ve made it my mission as a historian to highlight the hidden radical kernels of the Mohawk Valley, including community action, politics, and of course, the labor movement. One piece of labor history that’s gone unseen is the 1934 strike held by workers employed by the Civil Works Administration program.
On March 12, 1934, employees of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), a New Deal project designed for job creation to alleviate symptoms of the Great Depression, initiated a strike after facing a reduction in wages. Projects involving the CWA around Utica were put to a screeching halt when a reported 2,000 workers out of 2,500 organized to protest their wages being cut from fifty cents an hour to forty cents, in addition to a reduction of their weekly hours from thirty hours a week to twenty-four. The following day, between 600 and 700 workers representing the strike embarked on a march through the city headed for the office the city’s CWA director’s office. The goal of this march was simply to speak with the program’s director, one Howard Graburn, and demand “a square deal.” Seven workers, part of a “grievance committee,” met with Graburn. As stated at this meeting:
They told him they could not live on $9.60 a week, the amount to be provided on the basis of an order last week from Washington. Until that order came, the men hard earned $15 a week.
The CWA strike shares similarities with several other strikes before, during, and after it in that the police immediately labeled the workers as agitators and demonized their fight as one based on violent tactics. Then-Police Chief Timothy D. McCarthy even believed the idea that the workers were going to the director’s office to “tear the building down.” McCarthy even went as far as sending an emergency squad to the CWA office where one Captain Denis Jankiewicz urged the office to dismiss clerical staff and put the building under lockdown. Jankiewicz’s suggestion was rejected by Chester Smith, the associate director of the Utica office. Of course, this wasn’t the case. The march went off without a single reported incident of violence or use of inflammatory, agitative rhetoric. Patrick McCabe, one of the leaders of this strike, asserted that there would be no violence on the part of him or his fellow workers.
McCabe was integral in providing a voice for his disgruntled comrades. As one of the leaders he signed highly important telegrams sent out to the heads of the CWA in both Washington and New York State. According to one paper, the telegrams go as follows:
The several hundred employees of the CWA here in Utica have quietly left their work and have protested the cut in wages and hours because the same is not keeping up with the spirit of this work as directed by our noble president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
We ask that we be given thirty hours a week and fifty cents an hour which was paid at the beginning of this work.
Accusations of violence from the police here parallel the experiences of striking workers during the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912-1913. Despite assertions from figures in the strike such as George R. Lunn, Helen Schloss, and several others for the strikers to utilize non-violent tactics in their fight, the police continuously painted the strikers and their supporters in the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as agitators who would only bring violence to Little Falls. The strikers faced constant accusations of violence and disruptiveness, but several accounts show that any violence was instigated by the police and the privately hired deputies brought in by the mill owners.
CWA workers in Utica held further grievances with the fact that the white-collar sector of the CWA offices were spared from the cuts that the blue-collar sector faced. A textbook example of classism, leaders of the Utica protests presented a demand for the publication of the names and salaries of the clerical staff who for some reason weren’t thrown into the same perils that they were.
Part of what makes the CWA strikers’ plight so intriguing is that it held valley-wide and national implications. According to one paper, when the strikers presented their issues to Graburn, the director announced that: “…all the strikers might return to work in the morning with the exception of 200 who had been working on protecting walls in a creek project.”
Though they reportedly were spared from these cuts branches of the CWA in the nearby towns of New York Mills, Whitesboro, and Yorkville told McCabe that there was serious consideration to initiate a “sympathy strike” in solidarity with their fellow workingmen. This proposed sympathy strike wouldn’t end up materializing, but the threat of a mass uprising of workers in the Mohawk Valley was present even if only for a very brief period. In the same vein, workers in numerous other cities throughout the country went on strike due to these cuts coming from the federal level. One article highlights strikes in Boston, Massachusetts, in addition to both Bristol and Allenton, Pennsylvania with various motivations, ranging from demanding a return to their previous wages to the reinstating of laid off workers.
Just two days after flooding the streets of Utica, the CWA workers’ demands were officially met on Wednesday the 14th, at least partially. One article from The Daily Sentinel in Rome states that the Utica workers would be regaining both their fifty cents an hour and their thirty-hour workweek, however this is only mentioned in part of the article’s title. Two pieces from The Glens Falls Times point only to the return to the fifty cents. One piece from the paper has no mention of a return to thirty hours, and one published on March 15 states that although the pay would return to normal, the hours would not. Despite the apparent compromise basically thrusted upon the workers, McCabe was met with a roaring applause when he announced to his comrades that they would be able to return to work on Thursday with their original wages.
The Civil Works Administration program would be retired at the end of March, meaning that in retrospect the fight of those in Utica only seemed to delay the inevitable. That being said though, the strike is still of great significance in that it exemplifies the power of organized labor in defending the interests of the working class, in addition to shedding light on the radical history of the Mohawk Valley. May we be inspired by history and use this history of struggle to help us understand how to approach the problems of our day.