The Celestials Read online

  He was no stranger to the flexibility of certitude, as he had claimed for some time to be connected by direct descent to the Pilgrim colonists, even to one of the company who crossed in the Mayflower. The absence of his ancestor’s name on the compact had, he often explained, to do with his ancestor’s not having attained his majority.

  His grandfather had played a small but sure role in Shays’ Rebellion, avoiding arrest by fleeing to the wilderness of Stamford, Vermont, and making the hard life of a farmer for himself and his family. Before transforming himself from farmer to businessman, Sampson had often found himself in one argument or another with the land, wondering what inducement this place could have offered, and always returning to his own troubled worrying that, though the rebellion had been worthy, hadn’t there been something cowardly in his grandfather’s avoidance of the consequences of his actions? Sampson believed in the value of making one’s own way but he believed equally strongly that one’s pigheadedness was one’s own, not to be, at day’s close, foisted upon someone else.

  It was the trait of which he was the most proud and which he held most responsible for his current situation. For although he knew the newspapers and the politicians from West to East could argue that there were many logs that made up this particular labor bonfire, he had held the match to the pyre. What else could one do in the face of the bullying of a surplus of men professing to be shoemakers who knew nothing about it?

  The disharmony between Sampson and his workers had existed for some time, and he kept a catalog of their offenses against him, which he took personally, as justification for his current course of action. In 1861, he had been the first in town to introduce the newly patented Wells pegging machine. His workers had left the shop, walked out in protest, declaring that skilled labor would be replaced by inhuman machines and unskilled operatives to man them. He had, he tried to assure his workers, their best interests at heart. Indeed, his interests and theirs were coupled. Labor and manufacturing were two parts of one scissors, useless without the other. Machinery would not reduce the need for labor, but increase it. The workers returned to their benches, but Sampson no longer regarded them as allies. He felt as he had during the first week of his one term at Drury Academy, when he had stood in the school cloakroom unbeknownst to the classmates whose conversation he overheard: “But did you see his jacket?” “I did,” assured the other, “but I hear it is unlikely he will be here long.” When he’d made his presence known, both young men had inclined their heads slightly, stepping back to let him pass. He found himself wondering if this was perhaps a version of what his mother and brother must have experienced when he’d announced he would not be continuing on the family farm. To alleviate his discomfort at the comparison, he took note of the fact that two-thirds of the workers who had struck had been French Canadians, foreigners not to be relied on to uphold or even understand the Christian American values by which he endeavored to live.

  By 1863, Sampson had established his own store in Boston. By 1868, he no longer rented, but had purchased, the old tannery on Eagle Street and had added an eighty-square-foot addition, making the entire building 16,400 square feet, able to employ two hundred fifty hands. Sampson footwear was sold in Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Boston, and New York. On the fifth of March 1868, he became treasurer of the Baptist church; he would serve for ten years. Whatever talk there had been concerning his choices not to go to war and not to change his product from ladies’ shoes and boots to brogans for solider and slave had ceased.

  In April of 1868, the Knights of St. Crispin held their first annual meeting. By that May, all of Sampson’s employees in the bottoming room, save two, were Crispins.

  In mid-May, the foreman of the bottoming room made his way down to Sampson’s office to inform his boss that there was a man upstairs whom the help did not like to have there.

  Sampson stiffened slightly as if in preparation for an unpleasant medical examination. He knew already of which man the Crispins had complaint: St. John, an excellent man, who could make a very nice shoe. Sampson chose not to remember that St. John had worked for him previously, over a year ago, and had already been turned off once.

  The foreman chose not to remind his boss that at that time, Sampson had sworn, in front of the other men, never to employ the man again, given as he was to drinking, gambling, and dissipation. So treacherous and deceitful was St. John that when the workers told the foreman they didn’t want to work with him, the foreman had said he didn’t know as he could blame them.

  “What are the particulars of their complaints?” Sampson asked.

  “He is a little light-fingered,” the foreman answered. “He takes kit.”

  Sampson said nothing, and the foreman’s nerves grew for no reason he could identify.

  “The boys do not like to work with him,” he finally added weakly.

  Sampson made as to return to the papers on his desk. “I’m sure I don’t know why that is of concern to me,” he said.

  The foreman did not like being in the office. Recognizing Sampson’s tricks of intimidation as tricks did nothing to lessen their effect. Growing resentment, at his employer and at himself, was impossible to avoid.

  “I believe the boys have an order called the Knights of St. Crispin, and that it was so constituted that they could not work with a man not belonging to it. I believe that St. John does not belong to it.”

  “That is nothing to me,” Sampson replied. “I employ him, and I employ them. It is no matter to me what sort of alliances they do or do not make; what is of matter to me is that they remind themselves—that you remind them—of the larger roof under which they all huddle.”

  This particular comment, when reported verbatim to the bottomers, caused, not surprisingly, some ire. Sampson had intended it to do so, and he enjoyed therefore more delight than despair when the foreman assured him late that day that the Crispin workers would not return until St. John was turned off. Indeed, that evening over a late dinner out, Julia found her husband’s high energy in recounting how he had bade them hustle their benches and kits out and pile them in front of the building somewhat alarming, and she shushed him so as not to attract the attention of the other diners.

  He ran the factory for three weeks with only the feckless and morally troubled St. John staffing the bottoming room. The conclusion to Sampson’s version of events was that, upon his absence from town one day, the Crispins whipped St. John while the man was on his way to dinner. Sampson and Chase had the persons who committed the violence bound over, and after the man got well he went missing, not to be seen or heard of since.

  Thomas Healy, a cordwainer but not a Crispin, insisted to anyone who asked that St. John had no idea who whipped him and that where he had disappeared to was Albany, on his way to Montreal, with fifty of Sampson’s dollars in his pocket, sent on a mission to find new hands to replace the still-striking Crispins. Healy didn’t have any reason to doubt the tale St. John himself had told him, though he had every reason to doubt Sampson’s, as the reason he himself had left Sampson’s employ was on account of unfair treatment. In Healy’s humble workingman’s opinion, Sampson had never kept a single bargain he’d ever made.

  On what happened next, there was little disagreement. Mr. Chase went to Maine, the foreman of the sewing rooms to Canada, the foreman of the bottoming room to Worcester County, all to find help that did not belong to the Order, extracting their pledges that they would not join.

  And after some time, when they all did indeed join, Sampson had them sign another pledge, that they would ignore, this time in the presence of a justice of the peace. “This is to certify that I, __________ , have belonged to the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, and have become satisfied that said order is of no practical benefit to its members, but a damage to them and their employers; and, also, that I have withdrawn from said order, and will not, in any way, directly or indirectly, aid in its support. To all of the above statement I do solemnly swear.”

  In February 1869,
the Workingman’s Advocate printed warnings about the possible recruitment of Chinese labor to the East from the West.

  In May of the same year, the Hide and Leather Interest, a paper that spoke for industrial leaders, printed an article concerning the rash of Crispin strikes. An editorial called for a national organization of employers to fight the Crispins by importing Chinese and other strikebreakers.

  In July, during a convention of Southern industrialists in Memphis, the possibility of importing Chinese as an alternative to slave labor was discussed. Most notable of the speakers was Mr. Cornelius Koopmanschap. Dutch-born and strong-willed, Koopmanschap specialized in procuring Chinese labor for interested industrialists. He fancied himself an expert on the Asiatics, and indeed, compared to the industrialists he addressed, he was. “Avoid the Chinese raised in the cities of the Orient,” he cautioned them. “They are most vicious and degraded. Procure instead the peasants only recently migrated to the cities. They are easily managed, being patient, industrious, docile, tractable, and obedient.”

  Throughout the summer of 1869, editorials on John Chinaman, the Coming Man, ran in the New York Times, Sun, Herald, and Tribune, the Springfield Republican, and the Boston Daily Evening Transcript, all readily available in North Adams: “So fast do events move for America, in these latter days, that before the affairs of ‘white man’ and ‘black man’ are well settled, a new color comes upon the loom, to be woven into the mighty national fabric, and the ‘yellow man’ becomes the figure of the hour.” “Accepted as a freeman, John Chinaman must eventually become a vote. Sambo must make up his mind to work or starve.”

  On October 2, 1869, Sampson signed the deed for a three-story brick building at the corner of Marshall Street and the north branch of the Hoosac River. Known as W. W. Freeman and Co., it was originally designed as a cutlery works, but the enterprise had fallen through, and Sampson made the building his for the reduced price of $17,000. Julia, who had lost her thirteenth pregnancy the week before, had had some concern about profiting off the misfortunes of others, but Sampson had told her that she was succumbing to superstition, which could do no good to anyone. He had left her in the parlor, closing the door to his study as a child would’ve done.

  The renovated creation was the largest shoe factory in North Adams, producing over fourteen thousand shoes per week, employing one hundred fifty full-time workers, and producing almost one hundred cases more per month than the three nearest competitors.

  But despite this growth, by spring of 1870, Sampson was forced to call the bottomers into the receiving room, tell them he had just come from market, which was rather dull, and that he needed to pay them a dollar less per case, perhaps for six or eight weeks, and then he would put them back to full pay. The Crispin lodge had then met and a committee was chosen to tell Mr. Sampson that if he did not want to make shoes and would rather shut down, they were perfectly willing to work again when business revived and he could pay the old wages. He seemed very well pleased, and the workers thought the situation settled. It was but a few days before they heard of the recruited workers.

  According to Sampson, the local Crispin louts waited only for the recruits to step off the train before intimidating them back from whence they had come. According to Frederick L. Wood, a cordwainer and Crispin who had never worked for Sampson, the recruits were sober Crispins all who stayed near a week, the local Crispins making a statement of the affair to them during four apparently very lively meetings over the course of four successive evenings, after which they went home.

  With their anger and righteousness fueled, the local Crispins put aside their lapstones and their reason once again, asking for shorter hours (an eight-hour day), higher wages (a raise from $1.70 a day to $2.00), the right to dismiss workers who were delinquent on union dues, and access to the company books to inspect for profits in order to adjust wages to profits.

  Sampson found the final demand the most outrageous and, when relating it to his wife, had needed to be reminded repeatedly to stop pacing in those idiotic little circles wearing out the rug she had recently placed on their bedroom floor. He had wondered again at the curiosity of his wife’s inability to assert herself with anyone, it seemed, but her own husband. However, he had heeded her advice until she had suggested some understanding, some charity, on his part. God had been kind to the two of them; others were not as fortunate, and what was the good of having fortune unless one was willing to do good with it?

  “I’m willing, indeed eager, to do good to those who do the same to me,” he said, resuming his pacing, and then added, “And I would argue that in at least one arena, God has been anything but kind to us.”

  Julia’s neck and face reddened as if struck. “That you can address these words to me, I cannot realize it. I am stupefied by it.” Her voice was low and strong. “You humiliate me and injure the both of us,” she went on, and his sister coughed lightly from the sitting room on the other side of the closed bedroom door. It was a comment he would always regret having uttered.

  He wired Boston. New workers arrived. The Crispins dissuaded them from working. The new men returned to Boston. A committee of three Crispins met with Sampson, reiterating their demands, assuring him that they were looking forward to coming back to work for him.

  “Boys, if you continue your idleness, you will never again work for me,” he responded.

  The youngest of the three, Alfred Robinson, said, “Why? Are you quittin’ business?”

  Alfred was a Southerner and had come to the Crispins only recently from tunnel work—two reasons to make his fellow brothers wary of him. But his sister was the recent victim of an unknown assailant on Pearl Street, and so when one of his companions told him not to be bird-brained, he did so more gently than he might have.

  Sampson regarded Alfred, took note of the broken and reknotted laces on his boots, and then said, “If I am to fight an enemy, my batteries are masked and I keep them masked. It is for you to stay and work. I have made my last proposition, and shall do no more.”

  The Crispins had presented their ultimatum at ten in the morning. At quarter past, Sampson called Chase into his office, showed him a newspaper clipping from his desk drawer describing the successful use of Chinese labor in a San Francisco shoe factory, and asked if he could be ready for the afternoon train to the West. George W. Chase had joined the firm in 1865 as a bookkeeper and would retire from it as president when the Sampson company closed in 1901, perhaps the only colleague for whom Sampson had nothing but admiring words. If he was to send anyone west, it would be Chase.

  Sampson swore to annihilate the Crispins in five years. He would do it in three, and there wouldn’t be another union strike in North Adams in any industry for ten.

  Chapter Two

  The town’s elite watched from the stationmaster’s office above the depot. The eternally unmarried Fannie Burlingame, a distant cousin of Sampson’s, was there in a frock of plain but well-cut black silk. Her uncle Anson had been the architect of the Burlingame Treaty, signed into effect a mere two years previous, admitting China to “the family of civilized nations.” Pneumonia had claimed him in St. Petersburg, Russia, and his death had struck her such a blow that four months later it still seemed to her that her own lungs were constricted, never to operate as they had. She had woken before light, sure that she had heard his voice urging her to set an example as to how these Celestials deserved to be treated. She continued to find her father and her uncle the two men whom it was most important to impress, and she passed some of the time waiting in the overcrowded office by imagining how she might have described this day to her uncle. As it happened, she would describe this day not to him but to one of the Celestials. Lue Gim Gong would become her student, friend, surrogate son, and, some suggested, an intimate beyond the platonic, and when she died quietly at the age of seventy-four on a bright May Tuesday, the wall of her mind would be spread with an image of him. He enjoyed the story she told, and would often request it of her. “Tell me again,” he would sa
y. “Tell me again of my arrival.”

  The spectators below filled the passenger and freight platforms. They lined State Street and Main, blocking the doorways and first-floor windows of the Richmond House. They filled the street frontage of the H. Arnold & Co. Print Works and gathered at the newly built eight-foot fence around the C. T. Sampson Manufacturing Company.

  They were ministers and farmers, mill workers and shopkeepers, cartmen and dentists, bank officers and reporters. Two well-dressed women in a buggy, their silks and cambrics lapping at each other like floodwater. The logger who had lost three toes to an ineptly wielded axe, his dog at his side. A traveling surgeon, short, dressed in a suit coat of light blue, black pants, and buffalo-hide boots, his saddlebag draped over his arm, a pipe in his mouth. A blacksmith, detected by the disproportionate size of his right hand over his left. A man gathering subscriptions for a religious newspaper in New York. A negro, well dressed and well mounted, drinking a glass of water like any other Christian. An inordinate number of children and dogs.