Labor history is too often told in one of two equally unsatisfactory ways—in the icy language of economics, or in the fiery rhetoric of ideologues. Either way, the real people get overlooked. The story of the mighty Amoskeag textile mills at Manchester, New Hampshire, for example, is most often seen simply as a textbook case of industrial paternalism trying to outlive its time. The bare facts are simple enough, certainly. In 1837 the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company bought a fifteen-thousand-acre plot along the canal that bypassed Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack and began to build an industrial town like the one its Boston-based founders had already established at Lowell, Massachusetts. The first workers were farm girls who eventually were displaced by successive generations of immigrants willing to work cheap—mostly Irish at first, then Germans, Swedes, Scots, French Canadians, and others. In the 1880’s the corporation began implementing a master plan to create a model industrial city, and by 1915 Amoskeag was the world’s largest textile center, with thirty major mills employing seventeen thousand men, women, and children. To keep their work force contented, the corporation provided a host of benefits—everything from a free cooking school to inexpensive housing. It all worked—so long as the textile business prospered.

But after World War I, the whole New England textile industry fell on hard times, thanks notably to competition from efficient, new plants located in the South, where labor came even cheaper. As profits fell, Amoskeag’s management cut wages, extended hours, imposed speed-ups, fired or laid off workers. Strikes followed—the first in 1922, others in 1933 and 1934. In 1935 the corporation filed for bankruptcy and shut most of the mills for good. Manchester never fully recovered. Nor did the thousands of workers and their families who had known nothing but the Amoskeag life for three generations. Many of the mills and tenements have since been “renewed” out of existence (see David McCullough, “Epitaph for an American Landmark,” AMERICAN HERITAGE, April, 1970), but some of the people who lived and worked in them survive, and now, thanks to Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (to be published in November by Pantheon Books), their memories have been preserved to give us a sense, finally, of the people behind the Amoskeag story. The brief excerpts on the following pages were gleaned from the book. Like all authentic witnesses to history, these survivors defy easy classification: some are still fiercely proud of having been part of a great enterprise; others remember only the toil and the din and the bitter strikes; most seem to have mixed memories. But they all remember.

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