Rhode Island History Journal: Volume 79 No. 1

Rhode Island History T HE JOUR NA L O F T H E R H O D E I S LAN D HISTORICA L SOC IETY fall 2021 · volume 79 · number 1

Rhode Island History

fall 2021 · volume 79 · number 1

3 Editor’s Note Published by The Rhode Island Historical Society 110 Benevolent Street Providence, Rhode Island 02906–3152 Robert H. Sloan, Jr., chair Anthony Calendrelli, vice chair Peter J. Miniati, treasurer Winifred E. Brownell, secretary C. Morgan Grefe, executive director Publications Committee Marcus Nevius, chair Charlotte Carrington-­Farmer J. Stanley Lemons Craig Marin Lisa Melton Seth Rockman Luther Spoehr Evelyn Sterne Staff Richard J. Ring, editor J. D. Kay, digital imaging specialist Silvia Rees, publications assistant opposite: The reading room of the Rhode Island Historical Society in 1884 (now Mencoff Hall at Brown University, 68 Waterman Street). RIHS collection RHiX37222. The Cabinet Building was built in 1844, expanded in 1891, and sold to Brown University in 1942 when the RIHS acquired the John Brown House. cover: An imaginary view of the Walsh-­Kaiser shipyard at Fields Point showing the 63 ships built by the yard while it operated, from 1943 to 1945. Sketched by the Providence painter and illustrator J. Banigan Sullivan (1905–1974), who gave it to the donor’s father. Gift of John Walsh in 2019. RIHS collection RHiX174409.

5 Roger Williams and the Origins of the Native Americans Richard W. Cogley 15 African American-­Led Worker Solidarity in World War II Providence Patrick Crowley 33 Disorderly House Keepers and the Struggle for Respectability in Early Nineteenth-­Century Providence Andrew Polta 55 “A Bewildering Variety”: The Beginning of Libraries in Providence Patricia Raub Rhode Island History is a peer-­reviewed journal published two times a year by the Rhode Island Historical Society at 110 Benevolent Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02906-­3152.

Postage is paid at Providence, Rhode Island. Society members receive each issue as a membership benefit. Institutional subscriptions to Rhode Island History are $25.00 annually.

Individual copies of current and back issues are available from the Society for $12.50 (price includes postage and handling).

Our articles are discoverable on ebscohost research databases.

Manuscripts and other correspondence should be sent to editor@rihs.org.

The Rhode Island Historical Society assumes no responsibility for the opinions of contributors. © The Rhode Island Historical Society Rhode Island History (issn 0035–4619)

Editor’s Note

Welcome to a rather hefty issue of Rhode Island History! As the RIHS prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2022, we are delighted to present this issue with gratitude for the generous support of three local institutions that have a vested interest in its contents—­the Providence Community Library, the Rhode Island Labor History Society, and the Providence Public Library. The spirit of collaboration pervades every aspect of the RIHS’s work as it enters its third century, exemplified by the next issue of this journal, which will be another edition of The Bridge (co-­published with the Newport Historical Society).

Its thematic focus will be on re-­contextualizing the Gaspee Affair within the broader imperial crisis of its era.

Without further ado, I will introduce the authors featured in this issue.

Richard W. Cogley is emeritus professor of religious studies in Dedman College at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War. Patrick Crowley is the secretary-­treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-­CIO. Originally from Marshfield, Massachusetts, he earned master’s degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in labor studies and the University of Rhode Island in history.

His research interest in is Rhode Island labor history.

Andrew Polta is an archaeologist at the Public Archaeology Laboratory in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Originally from Minnesota, he earned his bachelor’s

degree in classics at Grinnell College, and then a master’s degree in history at the University of Rhode Island. His main research interests are maritime history, the intersecting histories of gender and race, and the Early Republic period, particularly in Rhode Island.

Patricia Raub, a faculty member at the School of Continuing Education at Providence College, teaches courses on Rhode Island history, the history of U.S. photography, and Providence architectural history.

She earned a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University with concentrations in popular culture and urban studies. One of the founders of Providence Community Library, she is a past president of its Board of Directors.

Richard J. Ring Editor

Providence Community Library is pleased to support the publication of the fall 2021 issue of Rhode Island History in honor of library founder and former board president, Patricia Raub.

Cheryl Space PCL Library Director

The Cabinet Building in 1909, home of the Rhode Island Historical Society from 1844 to 1942. RIHS Collection RHiX34783.

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RICHARD W. COGLEY

Roger Williams and the Origins of the Native Americans

In 1650, English Presbyterian minister Thomas Thorowgood published an argument that the Native Americans were the ten lost tribes of Israel, the Hebrew people who disappeared from the biblical record shortly after their subjugation and deportation by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E. Misleadingly titled Iewes in America, the work claimed that remnants of the Mosaic law survived in indigenous New World cultures even though the Native Americans had no conscious recollection of their distant Israelite past.1 In 1651 Sir Hamon l’Estrange, a former Member of Parliament, contended in Americans No Iewes that putative Mosaic vestiges among the Native Americans were indigenous practices and not markers of lost Israelite ancestry.2 Though focusing on Thorowgood, l’Estrange also attacked Menasseh ben Israel, the Amsterdam–based rabbi whose discussion of the Native Americans in Esperanza de Israel (1650) he misconstrued as an argument for the lost tribes ancestry theory.3 Then in 1660, partly in response to l’Estrange’s polemic, Thorowgood published Jews in America, an entirely new work with the same overall point.4 Thorowgood, l’Estrange, and Menasseh were the principal figures in Roger Williams’s discussions of the origins of the Native Americans. In 1635, Thorowgood wrote to Williams, then residing in Salem, Massachusetts, to ask “if hee found any thing Judaicall among them [the Native Americans].” The two men had no known previous association: they were from different parts of England, and they attended Cambridge at difOpposite: Title-­page for A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643). RIHS collection, RHiX171410.

ferent times and resided in different colleges. Thorowgood explained that he wrote the letter because Williams was “one of the first, if not the first of our Nation in New England that learned the Language, and so prepared towards the Conversion of the Natives.”

He probably learned about Williams’s early language study by reading William Wood’s recent New Englands Prospect (1634) and then discovering that Williams was the unidentified minister who “in a speciall good intent of doing good to their soules, hath spent much time in attaining to their Language.”5 Williams replied in December 1635, several weeks before his banishment from Massachusetts and subsequent flight to the shores of Narragansett Bay.6 “Three things make me yet suspect that the poore natives . . . are Jewes or Jewish quodammodo [‘in a certain measure’],” he told Thorowgood, instancing the sequestration of women “in their feminine seasons,” a belief in a creator god, and unspecified similarities between the natives’ speech and the Hebrew language.7 Thorowgood’s letter evidently included a question about logistics, an issue because contemporary Europeans assumed that the natives’ ancestors originated in the Old World and thus needed to find a route into the Americas.8 This request Williams misinterpreted as an inquiry about the Native Americans’ point of entry into New England. The local natives, he explained, “constantly affirme that their Ancestors came from the southwest, and thither they all goe dying.”9 In 1643, while Thorowgood was drafting Iewes in America, Williams published A Key into the Language of America, his interpretation of the language and culture of the Narragansetts.10 In the preface to the work, 5

Rhode Island History

Title-page for Iewes in America by Thomas Thorowgood (London, 1650). Courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Bridwell Library, Special Collections.

Williams returned to the lost tribes theory. Here he identified four Mosaic remnants in local culture (linguistic evidence, again unspecified; monthly sequestration; the use of dowries; and the anointment of heads) and repeated his observation about the importance of the Southwest.11 In the body of the work, he noted two more cultural similarities between the ancient Israelites and the Narragansetts: praying at night and blackening faces during mourning.12 The brevity of this list of examples puzzled Thorowgood, who wondered how a firsthand observer like Williams could identify only six Mosaic vestiges among the Narragansetts. Convinced that something was amiss, Thorowgood went through the body of Key and pinpointed various native customs, such as the practice of levirate marriage and the use of a lunar calendar, which Williams had described but failed to characterize as Mosaic in origin. Thorowgood then included these customs in Iewes in America. Some ten years later, when preparing Jews in America for publication, he sifted through Key again and found a few more native practices “savouring of Judaism.”13 Despite Thorowgood’s best efforts to make it into one, Williams’s Key was no brief for the lost tribes theory. Williams pointedly offered his list of Mosaic vestiges “not [as] mine opinion but my Observations to the judgement of the Wise.” Moreover, he no sooner offered this list than he raised two objections to it: the Narragansetts speak a language that more resembles Greek than Hebrew, and they construe the constellation of Ursa Major as a bear, a Greco–Roman rather than a biblical convention.14 These two counterexamples suggest that he had developed reservations about

the practice of deducing Israelite ancestry from indigenous cultural evidence. Williams also said that the Narragansetts have a legend about a miracle worker who walked on water, a “broken Resemblance to the Sonne of God.” He did not cite this detail as evidence that the apostles had visited the New World, an occasional teaching in the seventeenth century, but as a problem for supporters of the lost tribes theory, who needed to explain how lost Israelites could recollect the ministry of Jesus, an event that took place centuries after their dispersal from the Promised Land.15 Finally, Williams referred to the natives as “these Gentiles of America,” phrasing inconsistent with the Israelite origins view. In early modern English sources, the word “gentiles” meant “non-­Jews” or “non-­ Israelites” rather than “heathens” or “pagans,” the normal connotations of the term in ecclesiastical Latin and in the Romance languages. Boston’s John Cotton, for example, distinguished between “Pagan Gentiles” and “Christian Gentiles, for such are we.”16 On balance, then, Williams’s Key more resembled a rejection of the lost tribes theory than an endorsement of it. Williams’s post-­1643 sources reveal a deepening estrangement from the theory. In 1645 and again in 1652, he included the Native Americans among the gentile peoples.17 Then in 1655, in a passage that indicates that he misread Menasseh ben Israel’s Hope of Israel as an argument for the natives’ Israelite ancestry, he observed that l’Estrange’s book “proving Americans no Jewes” was “another touch” against Menasseh. Williams’s statement that l’Estrange had “prov[ed] Americans no Jewes” amounts to an abandonment of the lost tribes theory.18 This statement

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proved to be the last occasion when Williams discussed the Native Americans’ ancestry, and he never disclosed where he thought the lost tribes were living now that he had ruled out America.

The erosion of Williams’s support for the lost tribes theory raises two interpretive problems. The first is what origins view, if any, he substituted for the Israelite one. His sources contain references to two other ancestry theories in circulation in the early modern European world. One was the Norse. In Key’s preface, he noted that the governor of New Netherland, William Kieft, had told him in March 1643 that the natives came from Iceland.19 Hugo Grotius, whom Williams did not mention, recently had advanced this argument in De Origine Gentium Americanarum Dissertatio (Paris, 1642). Grotius, better known for his pioneering contributions to the development of international law, was writing before the Vinland Sagas and other Icelandic sources, the textual basis for inferring that Leif Erikson and others had reached northeastern America around the year 1000, became available in Latin translation.20 Grotius proposed that Norse families had sailed from Iceland to Greenland and from there to extreme northeastern America, and that nearly all Native Americans were descended from these pioneers. The only exceptions were the natives living on the Yucatán peninsula and in Peru. The former were the lapsed descendants of Abyssinian Christians who had been storm tossed across the Atlantic; the latter were the progeny of Chinese voyagers. Williams did not evaluate the Norse theory, but given its unpopularity in the Anglo–American world, he probably rejected it.21 No New Englander seemed to have endorsed this 8

Title-page for Americans No Iewes by Sir Hamon l’Estrange (London, 1652). Courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Bridwell Library, Special Collections.

theory until Samuel Mather, Cotton Mather’s son, did so in 1773, and he confined the Norse natives to the distant north, a far more modest claim than Grotius’s nearly hemispheric one.22 The other was the Scythian theory, anachronistically termed the “Tartar” theory in early modern English sources.23 This perspective held that the Native Americans were descended from the Scythians, the semi-­ nomadic inhabitants of the ancient Eurasian Steppe and, for Greco–Roman authors, an uncivilized people.24 Unlike the Norse alternative, the Scythian theory attracted many supporters in the Anglo-­American world. The earliest English endorsements appeared in the late 1570s in sources written by Michael Lok, a principal investor in Martin Frobisher’s three expeditions to Baffin Island in 1576–1578, and by George Best, who accompanied Frobisher on the second and

Roger Williams and the Origins of the Native Americans

third voyages.25 Then in the 1610s and 1620s, Edward Brerewood, Nicholas Fuller, Samuel Purchas, and Peter Heylyn embraced the Scythian theory.26 New Englanders Thomas Shepard, John Oxenbridge, and William Hubbard later supported it as well.27 So too did Menasseh.28 The Scythian theory rested on two foundations.

The first was the practice of seasonal migration.

“The Scythians never had any fixed Place of Settlement or Abode, but changed their Camps as the Season of the Year, Game, Water, or Woods invited them, never staying long in a Place,” John Harris, secretary of the Royal Society, explained in 1705. Proponents of the Scythian ancestry theory thought that the Native Americans preserved this ancient way of life. To underscore this point, they often compared the natives to wild beasts, an analogy meant to suggest that native peoples ran wild like untamed animals, not that they were subhuman creatures lacking souls and the faculty of reason.29 The second was the natives’ supposed lack of civility. “In their grosse ignorance of letters, and of arts, . . . in their incivilitie, and many barbarous properties,” Brerewood wrote, the Native Americans “resemble the olde and rude Tartars, above all the nations of the Earth.” Phrasing like Brerewood’s appeared in English sources throughout the seventeenth century.30 Supporters of the theory, moreover, believed that the first characteristic explained the second, for only with stability of residence could humans develop the institutions of civilized society (e.g., cities, schools, codes of law, market economies, stable forms of government, systems of currency, and temples, churches, and other edifices for worship) as well

as nurture the literate professional classes needed to manage these institutions. Like the ancient Scythians, or so the English thought, the Native Americans were uncivilized because they were seasonally nomadic.

Williams twice referred to the Scythian theory but did not attribute it to any specific individual or explicitly assess its strengths and weaknesses. In the 1635 letter to Thorowgood, he observed that “some imagine” that the Native Americans were descended from “the Northern barbarous,” that is, from the “Tartars,” and in the preface to Key, he explained that “Wise and Judicious men . . . maintaine their Originall to be Northward from Tartaria.”31 Williams probably rejected the Scythian theory even though he recognized its contemporary popularity. In Key’s preface, he took his two counterexamples to the lost tribes theory from the Greco-­Roman world, not the Eurasian one, and in the verse sections of the work, he rejected the cultural foundations of the Scythian theory, Native American mobility and “barbarism.” There he likened the English, not the Narragansetts, to wild animals (“The courteous Pagan shall condemne/ Uncourteous Englishmen,/ Who live like Foxes, Beares and Wolves,/ Or Lyon in his Den”); pricked the cultural pride of the colonists (“Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood,/ Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good”); and, through native personae, identified the English as the local barbarians (“We weare no Cloaths, have many Gods,/ And yet our sinnes are lesse:/ You are Barbarians, Pagans wild,/ Your Land’s the Wildernesse”).32 The other problem created by Williams’s rejection of the lost tribes theory is explaining why he supported 9

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the theory in the 1635 letter to Thorowgood, assuming that he was not simply telling Thorowgood what he wanted to hear. Williams probably intended to give the Native Americans a better identity than as uncouth Scythians, for he pointedly juxtaposed the “Jewes” and the “Northern barbarous” in the 1635 letter (“[t]hree things make me yet suspect that the poore natives . . . are Jewes or Jewish quodammodo, and not . . . the Northern barbarous as some imagine”). The higher status of the lost tribes was a function of millennial theology. Like many Puritans of the day, Williams held that the original chosen people, the two tribes of Judah and the ten lost tribes of Israel, would be miraculously converted during the millennium and recover their ancient status as “a people above all the peoples and Nations in the World.”33 The available evidence thus suggests that, at first, Williams endorsed the lost tribes theory in 1635 because it provided a better identity for Native Americans than the Scythian counterpart. He later retreated from the theory, hesitantly in 1643 when he authored Key, and conclusively in 1655 when he observed that l’Estrange’s polemic against Thorowgood and Menasseh had “prov[ed] Americans no Jewes.” Williams rejected the theory because it rested on a dubious use of native cultural evidence; he did not surrender it because he came to think less highly of the Native Americans, as if they somehow had forfeited the right to be respected. He continued to believe in the lost tribes’ preservation, but he did not speculate about where outside America they were living. Once he had left the lost tribes theory behind, he viewed the natives as gentiles without further specification, 10

except they were not descended from the Norse or from the Scythians.

For Williams there were two nonnegotiable points about the Native Americans’ ancestry. First, the natives were descended from Adam, and after the flood, from Noah.34 Only later in the seventeenth century did New Englanders have to defend these twin biblical truisms from pre–Adamists, that is, from freethinkers who supposed that the Native Americans, the sub–Saharan Africans, and possibly the East Asians were not descended from Adam and Noah but had been divinely created before Adam and then placed in geographical locations that later escaped the flood.35 Second, the Native Americans, whatever their specific gentile ancestry, would be converted during the millennium, when new apostles, perhaps aided by the gift of speaking in tongues, spread the faith throughout the world.36 Thus Williams wrote in Key, paraphrasing Malachi 1:11, that he longed for the day when “these Gentiles of America [would] partake of the mercies of Europe, and then shall bee fulfilled what is written by the Prophet Malachi, from the rising of the Sunne (in Europe) to the going down of the same (in America) my name shall be great among the Gentiles.”37 The case of Roger Williams reveals the weakness of the lost tribes theory as a frame of reference for understanding Puritan opinion about the ancestry of the Native Americans. Some scholars maintain that this theory was the standard perspective in New England.

Yet Williams, the Plymouth magistrate Edward Winslow, and the diarist Samuel Sewall were perhaps the only seventeenth-­century American Puritan authors who endorsed the theory, and only Sewall did so on multi-

Roger Williams and the Origins of the Native Americans

ple occasions.38 In this respect, New England differed little from seventeenth-­century England, where there were probably few supporters besides Thorowgood.39 Only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did the lost tribes theory permeate the Anglo-­ American world, attracting support from James Adair, Elias Boudinot, Edward King or Viscount Kingsborough, Israel Worsley, Ethan Smith, William Apess, and others, including (with an important qualification) the author of the Book of Mormon (1830), who traced the genealogy of Lehi, a non-­scriptural figure who along with his family migrated to America in the sixth century B.C.E., back to an Israelite refugee who had escaped deportation by the Assyrians two centuries earlier by fleeing to Judah.40 Other scholars rightly recognize the limited appeal of the lost tribes theory in New England but nevertheless continue to use the theory as a framing device. These scholars have minimal interest in the positive content of alternative views about the Native Americans’ origins. They divide American Puritans into opponents and proponents of the Israelite ancestry theory, and they consider the opponents noteworthy only for rejecting the theory.41 Williams called attention to two of the non-­Israelite ancestry theories, the Norse and the Scythian, that were under evaluation in English sources.42 “Other [European] opinions I could number up,” he wrote in

Key.43 But at the same time, he added something to the discussion that few English contemporaries bothered to include, and that was Native-­American opinion. He twice observed that the Narragansetts believed that their ancestors came from the Southwest, and that the souls of the dead resided there as well.44 He also explained that the Narragansetts venerated the Southwest because “the Court of their great God Cautantowwit” was located there,45 and that they believed that Cautantowwit “made one man and woman of a stone, which disliking, he broke them in pieces, and made another man and woman of a Tree, which were the Fountaines of all mankind.”46 Moreover, he intimated that the Narragansetts did not hold that they had been born in the Southwest, only that their ancestors had originated there. They “say themselves that they have sprung and growne up in that very place [Narragansett Bay], like the very trees of the wildernesse.”47 Whether he recognized it or not, Williams was his own best critic. He insisted that the Native Americans’ descent from Adam and then from Noah was a matter of common consent. “From Adam and Noah that they spring, it is granted on all hands,” he wrote in Key.48 Yet his discussion of the Narragansetts’ views about their origins exposed the inaccuracy of this Eurocentric commonplace.

Notes 1. Thomas Thorowgood, Iewes in America, Or Probabilities that the Americans Are of that Race (London, 1650). Thorowgood did not explain why he called the Native Americans “Jews” instead of “Israelites,” a more biblically accurate term. As the

Congregational minister John Oxenbridge observed, “I could wish that instead of Jews he had said Hebrews, or Israelites, meaning, the Ten tribes, for so he doth . . . pursue it.” Oxenbridge, “A Plea for the Dumb Indian” (1662–1667), Massachusetts Historical

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Society, ms. SBd–56, fol. 79. Thorowgood apparently used the term in a religious and not a genealogical sense: “Jews” were people who self-­consciously practiced Judaism (the observant Jews of Europe and the Middle East) or who had once self-­consciously practiced it (the Native Americans in their distant past). This is an anachronistic usage, for the religion known as “Judaism” emerged centuries after the lost Israelites’ disappearance from the Bible.

2. Sir Hamon l’Estrange, Americans No Iewes, Or Improbabilities that Americans Are of that Race (London, 1652). Despite the 1652 date on the title page, the work appeared in October 1651.

3. Menasseh ben Israel, Esperanza de Israel (Amsterdam, 1650; Latin trans. Amsterdam, 1650; English trans. London, 1650, 1651, 1652). Menasseh argued that the lost tribes survived as unassimilated ethnic minorities in Abyssinia, Persia, Tartary, China, and America. He thought that there were Mosaic cultural elements in Native America, but in contrast to Thorowgood, he did not believe that the natives were descended from lost Israelites, only that they had been culturally influenced by their lost Israelite neighbors. The English translation of Menasseh’s Esperanza de Israel, as well as the Latin translation from which the English translation was made, distorted a crucial sentence in the original. According to the English translation, Menasseh said that persons who saw the Native Americans as lost Israelites were “not altogether mistaken”; however, he wrote in Spanish that these persons were “clearly wrong” (“erran manifiestamente”). Henry Méchoulan and Gérard Nahon, eds., The Hope of Israel: The English Translation by Moses Wall, 1652, trans. Richenda George (1979; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 115n43.

4. Thomas Thorowgood, Jews in America, or Probabilities that Those Indians Are Judaical, Made More Probable by Some Additionals to the Former Conjectures (London, 1660). For the two editions of Thorowgood’s book, see Richard W. Cogley, “The Ancestry of the American Indians: Thomas Thorowgood’s Iewes in America (1650) and Jews in America (1660),” English Literary Renaissance 35 (2005): 304–30.

5. Thorowgood, Iewes in America, 5–6; William Wood, New Englands Prospect (London, 1634), 92. Thorowgood, from Norfolk, studied at St. John’s in the early 1610s; Williams, a Londoner, was at Pembroke in the mid-­1620s.

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6. Williams’s reply, dated December 20, 1635, survives only in the excerpts preserved in Thorowgood’s Iewes in America, 6, and later reprinted in Glenn W. LaFantasie et al., eds., The Correspondence of Roger Williams (Providence: Brown University Press for the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1988), 30.

7. One well-­publicized linguistic similarity came from John White: “Some conceive, their [the natives’] Predecessors might have had some commerce with the Iewes in times past, by what meanes I know not: Howsoever it bee, it fals out that the name of the place, which our late Colony hath chosen for their seat, prooves to bee perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike, by interpretation, The bosome of consolation: which it were pitty that those which observed it not, should change into the name of Salem.” The Planters Plea (London, 1630), 13–14.

8. Thorowgood later proposed that the lost tribes had entered America via the Strait of Anián, which was located on Gerardus Mercator’s famous sixteenth-­century map in the vicinity of the modern Bering Strait. Iewes in America, 3, 44.

9. Williams to Thorowgood, December 20, 1635, in Williams, Correspondence, 30.

10. For a critical evaluation of the work, see Jennifer Reid, “Roger Williams’s Key: Ethnography or Mythology?” Rhode Island History 56 (1998): 77–86.

11. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643), sigs. A4v–[A5r].

12. Ibid., 19–20, 193; Reid, “Roger Williams’s Key,” 83, 86nn46–47.

13. Thorowgood, Iewes in America, 7–8; Thorowgood, Jews in America, 31–32 (separate pagination); Williams, Key, 28–29, 40, 66, 120–21, 136, 138–39.

14. Williams, Key, sigs. [A4v]–[A5r].

15. Ibid., sig. [A5r]. Several contemporary English authors thought that unidentified apostles had visited America. Thomas Draxe, The Worldes Resurrection (London, 1608), 87–88; Draxe, An Alarum to the Last Judgement (London, 1615), 27–28; and Thomas Beard, Antichrist the Pope of Rome (London, 1625), 47–48, 243–44.

Roger Williams and the Origins of the Native Americans

16. Williams, Key, sig. [A7v]; John Cotton, An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (London, 1655), 209.

17. Williams, Christenings Make Not Christians (London, 1645), 20; Williams, The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (London, 1652), 218– 19. In these two passages, Williams called the Native Americans “Nations,” i.e., pagan gentile peoples.

18. Williams to John Winthrop Jr., ca. February 15, 1655, in Williams, Correspondence, 429. The “other touch” against Menasseh was a work that “expound[ed] all which he takes literally, in a Spirituall way,” a probable reference to Edward Spencer’s Breife [sic] Epistle to the Learned Manasseh Ben Israel (London, 1650).

19. Williams, Key, sig. [A4v].

20. The Icelandic sources were translated into Latin in the 1660s and into English in 1770. For the textual and archaeological record of Norse exploration of the North Atlantic, including a discussion of the excavated medieval settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, see Alan G. Macpherson, “Pre-­Columbian Discoveries and Exploration of North America,” in John Logan Allen, ed., North American Exploration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 1:24–61 (especially 25).

21. Herbert F. Wright, “Origin of American Aborigines: A Famous Controversy,” Catholic Historical Review 3 (1917): 257–75; and Joan-­Pau Rubiés, “Hugo Grotius’s Dissertation on the Origin of the American Peoples and the Use of the Comparative Method,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991): 221–44.

22. [Samuel Mather], An Attempt to Shew that America Must Be Known to the Ancients (Boston, 1773), 13–14. Ezra Stiles, Newport minister and Yale president, thought that some Norse adventurers had reached Newfoundland and Labrador, and that these locations were already populated by actual Native Americans. The Norse, however, were soon “absorbed & obliterated among the Aboriginals.” Stiles to [?], December 14, 1792, Ezra Stiles Papers, Yale University, microfilm reel 5, fols. 23, 25–26 (quotation on 23). Cotton Mather hypothesized that the Norse were capable of reaching the New World but stopped short of saying that they had done so. Biblia Americana: America’s First Bible Commentary, vol.

1: Genesis, ed. Reiner Smolinksi (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 826.

23. English authors loosely equated early modern Tartary with classical Scythia. [George Abbot], A Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde (London, 1599), sig. B1r; Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage (3rd. ed. London, 1617), 315, 446–53; Thomas Coryate, Thomas Coryate, Traveller (London, 1616), 14, 51; Peter Heylyn, Microcosmus (London, 1625), 659; and Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1986), 3:191.

24. E.g., Herodotus, The Histories, ed. Carolyn Dewald, trans.

Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 235–82; Diodorus Siculus, “Library of History,” vol. 2, ed. and trans. Charles Henry Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 27–37; Strabo, Geography, ed. and trans. Horace Leonard Jones (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917–33), 3:195– 209, 241–49, 5:245–71; Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, vol.

2, bks. 3–7, ed. and trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 179–89, 375–79; and Ammianus Marcellinus, “The Roman History,” ed. and trans. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935–39), 3:381–401.

25. [Michael Lok], “East India by the Northwest,” [George Best], “A True Reporte of . . . the Second Voyage of Captayne Frobysher,” and [Best], “The Thirde Voyage of Captaine Frobisher” all in Richard Collinson, ed., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher (London, 1868), 87, 138, 281–82.

26. Edward Brerewood, Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages and Religions (London, 1614), 95–99; Nicholas Fuller, Miscellaneorum Theologicorum (London, 1617), 180–83; Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, 904; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625; Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905–1907), 1:80–82, 159–66; and Heylyn, Microcosmus, 778–79.

27. [Thomas Shepard], The Day–Breaking . . . of the Gospell with the Indians (London, 1647), 14; Oxenbridge, “Plea,” fols. 78–79; William Hubbard, A General History of New England (ca. 1680), in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections 2:5–6 (1815): 26–27.

28. Menasseh, Esperanza de Israel, 120. Here Menasseh called the Native Americans “antigos rudos y barbarismos Tartaros,” early

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modern European phrasing for “Scythians.” The English translation identified the natives’ ancestors simply as “Tartars.” The Hope of Israel (London, 1650), 86.

ton, 1676), 350–51. For tongues, see [Williams], Bloudy Tenent, 174; Williams, George Fox, 389.

29. John Harris, “Of the Origination of Mankind,” in Harris, Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca (London, 1705), 1: xiii; [Best], “Second Voyage,” 138; Thomas Shepard, The Clear Sun-­ shine of the Gospel (London, 1648), 32; and Oxenbridge, “Plea,” fol. 79. English authors often exaggerated Native American mobility. For a corrective, see Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 31, 37–39, 76–79, 123–29.

38. Constance Post, “Old World Order in the New: John Eliot and ‘Praying Indians’ in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana,” New England Quarterly 66 (1993): 419–20; David S. Lovejoy, “Satanizing the American Indian,” New England Quarterly 67 (1994): 604; Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-­ Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 194; Edward Winslow, The Glorious Progress of the Gospel (London, 1649), sigs. [A3v–A4r]; and Richard W. Cogley, “Millenarianism in Puritan New England, 1630–1730: The Exceptional Case of Samuel Sewall and the Mexican Millennium,” forthcoming, Harvard Theological Review. Post, Lovejoy, and McDermott (and the earlier scholars whom they cite) variously listed the following New England figures as supporters of the Israelite ancestry theory: Williams, Winslow, and Sewall; John Eliot (see n. 42 below); John White, whose discussion in The Planters Plea was hardly an endorsement of the theory (see n. 7 above); Henry Whitfield, confused with Edward Winslow (each man edited one or more of the missionary progress reports now known as “the Eliot Tracts”); and John Davenport, mistaken for the non-­New Englander John Dury (the “J.D.” of n. 39 below).

30. Brerewood, Enquiries, 97; Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, 904; Heylyn, Microcosmus, 778–79; and Hubbard, General History, 27.

31. Williams to Thorowgood, December 20, 1635, in Williams, Correspondence, 30; Williams, Key, sig. A4v. English authors of the day sometimes called the Tartars the “northern barbarous” because early modern Tartary included modern Siberia.

32. Williams, Key, 10, 53, 137.

33. Williams, The Fourth Paper, Presented by Major Butler (London, 1652), 18. For a wider discussion of the millennial theology in question, sometimes termed “Judeo–centric millenarianism,” see Andrew Crome, The Restoration of the Jews: Early Modern Hermeneutics, Eschatology, and National Identity in the Works of Thomas Brightman (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2014); and Crome, Christian Zionism and English National Identity, 1600–1850 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave–Macmillan, 2018), chaps. 1–3.

37. Williams, Key, sig. [A7v].

35. For pre-­Adamism, see Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1987). For New English challenges to it, see Mather, Biblia Americana, 1:369, 501, 651, 825; and Nicholas Noyes, New-­ Englands Duty and Interest (Boston, 1698), 69.

39. J[ohn] D[ury], “Appendix” to Winslow, Glorious Progress, 22–28; Dury, “Epistolicall Discourse” in Thorowgood, Iewes in America, sigs. d3v–e2r; [Edmund Hall], Lingua Testium (London, 1651), 8–9; Thomas Gage to Thorowgood, July 26, 1654, in Thorowgood, Jews in America, 14–15 (separate pagination), 34–36 (separate pagination); and “Letter of William Penn” (1683), in Albert Cook Myers, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630–1707 (New York: Scribner, 1912), 236–37. Gage supported the Scythian theory in his earlier The English-­American (London, 1648), 73–74.

36. For millennial apostles, see Williams, Christenings, 20; [Williams], The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (London, 1644), 166–67; Williams, The Hireling Ministry None of Christs (London, 1652), 16–17; and Williams, George Fox Digg’d out of His Burrowes (Bos-

40. James Adair, The History of the American Indians (1775; Johnson City, TN: Watauga Press, 1930), 11–230; Charles Crawford, An Essay on the Propagation of the Gospel (Philadelphia, 1799), 16–35; Elias Boudinot, A Star in the West (Trenton, NJ, 1816); Ethan

34. Williams, Key, sig. A4r.

14

Roger Williams and the Origins of the Native Americans

Smith, View of the Hebrews (Poultney, VT., 1823), 81–129; Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough, Antiquities of Mexico (London, 1830–1848), vols. 6–7; Israel Worsley, A View of the American Indians (London, 1828); Barry O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 53, 72–76, 84–86, 92–93, 106, 111–13; Barbara Anne Simon, The Hope of Israel (London, 1829); James Finley, History of the Wyandott Mission (Cincinnati, 1840), 13–42; and 1 Nephi 5:14–16 in The Book of Mormon (1830; Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints, 1974).

The qualification is that Lehi was an Israelite (that is, a resident of the northern kingdom of Israel destroyed by the Assyrians) but not a lost Israelite because he escaped the Assyrians and found refuge in the southern kingdom of Judah.

41. Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 109–11; Alden T. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 50–53; and Reiner Smolinski, introduction to Smolinski, ed., The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of “Triparadisus” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 23–25.

Morton, New English Canaan (Amsterdam, 1637), 19–21; and “The Learned Conjectures of Reverend John Eliot Touching the Americans” (1653), in Thorowgood, Jews in America, 1–28 (separate pagination). Eliot also held, but only for a time, that some lost Israelites had settled in America but remained distinct from the Native Americans. “Learned Conjectures,” 1, 18–19; and Eliot to Thorowgood, October 16, 1656, in Thorowgood, Jews in America, 34 (separate pagination).

43. Williams, Key, sig. [A7v].

44. Notes 9, 11 above.

45. Williams, Key, sig. [A5v].

46. Ibid., p. 127. For more on Cautantowwit, see William Scranton Simmons, Cautantowwit’s House: An Indian Burial Ground on the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970), especially chap. 4; and Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 188–89, 194–95.

47. Williams, Key, sig. A4r.

48. Ibid.

42. Williams’s contemporary John Oxenbridge, a supporter of the Scythian theory (see n. 27 above), surveyed a broader range of opinion, adding to the mix the Chinese and the Carthaginian alternatives. English authors sometimes called the Carthaginians “Phoenicians” because Carthage was a Phoenician colony. Oxenbridge believed that the Welsh had reached medieval America, but he considered them ethnically distinct from the Native Americans and supposed that they had “sunk and drowned” among the Native Americans. “Plea,” fols. 58 (Welsh), 78 (Chinese), 80 (Carthaginians). Ezra Stiles likewise surmised that the Welsh had settled in medieval America, but in contrast to Oxenbridge, he thought that their descendants still survived, perhaps along the Mississippi and elsewhere in the North American interior. Stiles to [?], December 14, 1792, in Ezra Stiles Papers, microfilm reel 5, fols. 23–24, 26–29. Oxenbridge’s survey of opinion omitted Thomas Morton, who thought that the Native Americans were Trojans, and John Eliot, who saw them as Joktanites, a biblical people from a different Hebrew lineage than the twelve tribes.

15

PATRICK CROWLEY

African American-­Led Worker Solidarity in World War II Providence: The Story of Boilermakers Local 308

On August 3,1943, an African American man named George Schmoke walked into the National Urban League offices on Broadway in New York City with a story to tell.1 Schmoke worked as a laborer at the Walsh-­Kaiser shipyard in Providence, Rhode Island, making ships for the United States Navy. He was the lead man in his department, tasked by his co-­ workers with trying to get help for the African American shipyard workers. Schmoke told the head of the Urban League’s Industrial Relations Department, Julius Thomas, that the workers were represented by Local 308 of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers (IBB), but because they were people of color, they were not granted full membership in the local union.2 Instead, the IBB was trying to force the African American boilermakers into an auxiliary union without equal union rights.

The story of Boilermakers Local 308 is one of rank-­ and-­file workers, led by individuals of color, fighting injustice on the World War II home front while they were building ships to fight fascism. To date, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to this episode in Rhode Island labor history, and what does exist virtually excludes the role everyday workers played in the fight against discriminatory unionism in Providence.

Excluding the voices of these rank-­and-­file activists relegates the story of Local 308 to a mere footnote in the established historiography of the struggle for civil rights in the World War II era. The struggle in Local 308 was crucial in the eventual smashing of auxiliary 16

unionism in this country, but ignoring the agency of the rank and file in this struggle can make the end of formal racial discrimination within the ranks of organized labor appear to be an evil simply fading away with time, or worse, the result of federal intervention.

Instead, thanks to the heroic organizing work of the rank-­and-­file union members, both Black and White, formal racial discrimination was exposed as Jim Crow unionism and defeated on the shop floor.

Background In early 1942, the United States Maritime Commission (USMC) designated an undeveloped Providence waterfront area called Field’s Point as a United States Navy shipbuilding port. Initially, the Rheem Manufacturing company was awarded a $26-­million contract to build navy and merchant marine ships. Construction began in the spring of 1942 with the goal of having the first keel laid by the Fourth of July.3 Rheem, a company not familiar with shipbuilding, quickly ran into construction delays, which led the USMC to cancel its contract and turn over construction responsibilities to the more experienced shipbuilding firm of Walsh-­Kaiser Shipbuilding.4 It was California-­based Walsh-­Kaiser’s only East Coast operation during the war, and under its management, production got back on schedule.5 The Walsh-­Kaiser yard at Field’s Point was responsible for building three kinds of ships: Liberty ships, escort ships or frigates, and combat-­loaded cargo ships6. After the yard opened, unions from both the

Aerial photograph of the Walsh-­Kaiser shipyard, July 1, 1943. RIHS collection, RHiX37131.

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) competed for the right to represent the workers, with the AFL unions eventually prevailing in a union election during the summer of 1942.7 On February 22, 1943, Walsh-­Kaiser signed a collective bargaining agreement with the Metal Trades Department of the AFL, and by March 1943, 11,000 workers had been hired for the Field’s Point location with the ultimate goal of employing 15,000–20,000 workers. Christopher Hopkins, president of the Providence Building Trades & Construction Council, told The Providence Journal, “As I understand the labor requirements of the shipyard, we will be able to supply men under all classifications from within our membership.”8 The unions with members at Walsh-­Kaiser represented a broad spectrum of the labor movement, with

at least thirteen local unions, including the Teamsters, Machinists, Laborers, Painters, and Office Employee local unions representing people at the shipyard, but it was the IBB representing the bulk of the people working in the yard.9 In addition to the card-­carrying male members of local labor unions, at least 3,000 women and approximately 500 African American workers also were employed at the shipyard.10 Despite some initial standoffishness between the White and Black workers, once the union election between the AFL and CIO was settled, it was reported the White workers were comfortable accepting their African American brothers into the union movement.11 The Providence Urban League was intimately involved with the hiring of minority workers at the Walsh-­Kaiser shipyard. Providence Urban League Executive Secretary James Williams established 17

Rhode Island History

strong ties with the burgeoning wartime production companies in the Providence area and was even given access to the shipyard hiring shack to ensure minority workers got a shot at relatively lucrative production jobs.12 Consistent with the Urban League’s mission of “self-­reliance” for people of color, Williams sought to prepare African American workers for the grueling manufacturing work by circulating a flyer titled “Making Good,” giving African American workers advice on how to succeed in their new jobs. 13

Trouble Starts In July 1943, despite the Providence Urban League’s involvement, reports started surfacing that African American workers were becoming victims of discrimination. Minority workers were being issued a different kind of union dues book (used to record membership payments) than White workers. Some African American workers were offered the role of work-­gang foreman but only for crews of other Black workers. The Providence Urban League reported the offers were rejected “because of the fear of increased segregation and because it may mean the freezing of Negro workers in the unskilled and lower wage positions.” Most troubling to Williams and others were the stories that the IBB was trying to establish an auxiliary local union for African American members, which the Providence Urban League referred to as a “Jim Crow labor organization.”14 Williams had good cause to be concerned. Providence remained a segregated city in the years leading up to World War II. In 1930, only 5,500 African Amer18

ican’s lived within the city limits, mostly confined to two neighborhoods, the West End and the lower East Side, and by 1940, Blacks constituted no more than 15 percent of any one city census tract. Even though official segregation was outlawed in public accommodations by ordinance in 1885, theater owners would sell only balcony tickets to African Americans. It was reported that in at least one local restaurant, the White staff would break the glasses used by Black patrons after the glasses had been collected from the tables rather than wash and reuse them.15 Discrimination also was an unfortunate fact of life in the labor movement. In the 1940s, at least fifteen AFL unions, mostly in the railroad industry, refused to admit African American members, while nine others restricted their membership to auxiliary unions.16 Across the country, when African American workers were hired into wartime shipyards, racist discrimination quickly appeared. In Newport News, Virginia, Blacks received only 50 percent of the wages of White workers, and in Tampa, Florida, the Ku Klux Klan visited workers’ houses after African Americans protested working conditions.17 In the same summer of 1943, 300 African Americans were fired from the Kaiser shipyard in Portland and another 165 were fired in San Francisco.18 The official organ of the IBB, The Boilermaker’s Journal, even ran a regular column called “Uncle Twiz Sez,” offering advice in a racist, minstrel-­show-­like dialect.19 One government official was quoted as describing the IBB’s discrimination as “not only a source of embarrassment to fairminded labor leaders and businessmen alike, but also a challenge to the authority and to the principles of democratic government.”20

The Story of Boilermakers Local 308

In the Rhode Island labor movement, Blacks also were only a small percentage of unionized workers.

Only one predominately African American union, Longshoremen’s Local 1329, represented workers loading and unloading cargo ships in the Port of Providence. Founded in 1933, Local 1329 drew its membership from the Cape Verdean community in Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood, and according to A History of Rhode Island Working People, its members performed work considered “undesirable” by the White working class.21 In response to the growing racism in government-­ sponsored workplaces, socialist union organizer A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened to march tens of thousands of African American workers to the White House if President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t take action to curb discrimination in war-­related production facilities.22 As a result of this radical threat, and because of similar organizing work Randolph and others led in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York in July 1941, FDR signed Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry. The order states that it is: the policy of the United States that there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin, and I do hereby declare that it is the duty of employers and of labor organizations, in furtherance of said policy and of this order, to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin;23

FDR went on to issue Executive Order 9346, establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), which was intended to enforce the federal government’s new policy of nondiscrimination.24 In response to the reports of discrimination, Williams contacted the Wartime Manpower Commission with the US Employment Service to see if it could offer any assistance.25 The agency told Williams, while sympathetic, it could only investigate the complaints if written affidavits were submitted formally by affected workers. It was around this time that Schmoke paid his visit to the national office of the Urban League in New York City. He clearly made an impression on Julius Thomas because Thomas’s letter to Williams of August 4, 1943, is direct about what he thinks the Urban League and Williams must do. After telling Williams to expect a visit from Schmoke, he writes, “It is time for us to stop fooling around with this union relationship problem.” 26 Schmoke was the just the person to help the Providence Urban League “stop fooling around.” In addition to being a leader among his fellow workers, Schmoke was an activist within the African American community, serving as the secretary of the Colored American Club, a member organization of the NAACP, in his hometown of nearby Fall River, Massachusetts.27 Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1907, Schmoke graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in South Carolina and the Durham State Normal School in North Carolina. He eventually made his way north, becoming a teacher at the Mount Vernon School in Lincoln, Rhode Island.28 He went to work at the shipyard in 1942 and emerged over the next year as 19

Rhode Island History

the key rank-­and-­file leader in the fight for equality at Walsh-­Kaiser.

It is unclear when Williams and Schmoke first met, but shortly after getting word from the national offices, Williams sprang into action. On August 19, 1943, he wrote a letter about the segregation of African American workers into the auxiliary union to the US congressman for the 2nd Rhode Island District, John E. Fogarty. Fogarty responded to Williams on August 21, acknowledging Williams’s letter and reporting that he had received a visit from an unnamed representative of the group of workers impacted by the discrimination at Walsh-­Kaiser. Fogarty told Williams “that I would do everything I possibly could in this matter.”29 However, Williams would later report that Fogarty, like the other government officials he tried to work with, seemed “powerless” to do anything.30 While Williams was vexed about the lack of response from government and agency officials, the IBB moved ahead with its plans to establish an auxiliary union for the African American workers at Field’s Point. On orders from the IBB headquarters in Kansas City, in September 1943, Local 308 Business Agent John Maguire started distributing new membership cards to African American workers.31 After the AFL won the union election, all workers filled out the same “Application for Membership” form.

Now, however, African American workers were told to fill out new pink cards, and, to make matters worse, they were told they would have to pay a reinstatement fee.32 Given the increasing pressure to segregate and the lack of support from government agencies, if the workers were going fight the discrimination in the 20

union, they would have to fight from within the local union.

Their first opportunity to confront the union was at a September 1943 Local 308 membership meeting.

Schmoke took to the floor and asked pointed questions of the union leadership. He asked why African American workers were forced to wait an unreasonable amount of time for their union books and why, when they did get them, they were forced to pay a $13 reinstatement fee despite the fact they hadn’t received their membership books in the first place. He asked about the status of the auxiliary union and whether it did in fact exist. If it did, he asked, “Who formed it?

Where was it formed? Who from this local voted for it?” The answer he received from an unnamed international representative of the IBB was simply that the Boilermakers convention of 1937 directed the union to create the auxiliary unions for African Americans.33 This didn’t satisfy the members of Local 308, White or Black, because at the same meeting, White boilermaker Jack Norton made a motion to admit all workers into Local 308 regardless of their skin color, until such a time as the African American workers voted themselves to form an auxiliary union.34 The motion passed unanimously with “a great deal of applause.”35 This interracial solidarity, in defiance of the IBB, was an important example of African Americans leading the way and their White union brothers following. Without Schmoke first challenging the imposition of the auxiliary, Norton would not have had cause to submit his motion for consideration.

After the September union meeting, Williams sent a letter to the African American workers commending

The Story of Boilermakers Local 308

Local 308 for their efforts fighting against the auxiliary union.36 Describing the action as “thoroughly democratic and American,” he said to the workers, “You ought to take great pride in belonging to a Local that is willing to take such action, when it is known that the International Union feels otherwise about the matter.” He exhorted the African American workers to attend union meetings, to “sell the idea” of blocking the auxiliary “to all the workers at the yard” and to “talk it up strong!”37 In late October or early November, Williams met with Local 308 Italian-­American President Americo “Joe” Petrini to talk about the auxiliary issue and was pleased to find him opposed to the creation of the Jim Crow union. Williams told Petrini that he intended to send a letter to all the African American boilermakers, asking them to support Petrini’s reelection to local union president in upcoming elections, and that he was for a “strong strong #308, and with no unfair, un-­American auxiliary” [emphasis in original].38 Schmoke also continued to agitate against the Jim Crow auxiliary within the ranks of Local 308. At a November local union meeting, Schmoke stood for nomination to the IBB convention scheduled for January 1944, only to be told by International Representative William Buckley (who would later serve at the IBB general secretary treasurer) that as a member of the auxiliary, Schmoke was not eligible to be a candidate.39 Schmoke later reported that Buckley “made it quite clear that because I was colored and a member of the auxiliary,” he could not stand for election, despite being nominated from the floor.40 Although his nomination was thwarted, Schmoke wrote a passionate letter to Williams that Williams in turn used as the foundation for his subsequent letter to the African American boilermakers

about the upcoming election. In his letter, Schmoke magnanimously wrote, “[R]ecent developments indicate that we should present our solid support, to ensure election of those men who were nominated for office in your union, at the last meeting of November 3. We are convinced that these men if elected will sincerely cooperate with the Urban League to preserve our status in the Union as full and equal members.”41 True to his word, Williams produced an election letter he mailed to the African American workers for the local union election set for December 14.42 Williams retroactively received permission from the board of the Providence Urban League on December 6 to officially use Providence Urban League office supplies for the campaign, producing an “Appeal to Colored Shipyard workers.”43 Tying the fight for equality to the fight against fascism, he opened his letter by telling workers, “Our nation today is fighting for its very life.

Whether the nation survives as a democracy, and as a land of full opportunity for all people, may be determined in some measure by what we do here in Providence next week.” Ignoring the potential risk of being characterized as an outside agitator, he included in the mailing an election leaflet for the Petrini slate of candidates. He encouraged the workers to vote, writing “DO YOUR SHARE! Help make democracy real.

Join the fight on the home front for fairness, justice and equality.”44

The Local 308 Election Election day was December 14, 1943, and the atmosphere around the shipyard was intense. Williams 21

Rhode Island History

enlisted the support of John Lopez from the Providence NAACP to join him outside of the local union office in case there was any trouble.45 African American members cast ballots throughout the day, but as voting ended, events became troublesome. International Representative Paul Hovey told the African American members that they were not allowed in the union hall for the ballot counting and that they would have to leave. The African American workers initially refused.

With tensions running high, Williams and Lopez conferred with Petrini about what to do next. After being assured the local union had enough support to overturn the decision of the international representatives on hand, the African American boilermakers left the union hall and joined Williams and Lopez outside.46 Sure enough, inside the union hall, after a debate, the White workers voted to overrule the international union officials and once again treat the African American workers as full members. Williams later reported that if the vote had been against full rights, he was concerned about “immediate civil disturbances.”47 Despite the vote of the local union, the international union officials ordered all of the votes of African American union members to be marked with a “C” and segregated the ballots in a separate envelope and refused to count them. With about 2,700 votes counted and a reported 400 “C” ballots uncounted, the Petrini slate lost by 120 votes.48 Devastated, Williams and Lopez immediately plotted their next move. Lopez contacted Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP legal department, who agreed to take the matter to court. He rushed to Providence to meet with Petrini and local NAACP attorney Joseph 22

LeCount. Statements were taken from four of the African American union members, including Schmoke, Gerald Hill, Allan Bonay, and Carleton Blunt, and a request for an emergency restraining order was filed in Superior Court on December 16. On December 17, 1943, Superior Court Judge Charles Walsh granted a temporary restraining order that stopped the IBB from destroying the contested ballots. Judge Walsh set a hearing date on the matter for January 3, 1944, giving both sides time to prepare their arguments.49 The members of Local 308 met again, on December 29, to debate what to do with the contested ballots of their African American union brothers before the Superior Court hearing. Jack Norton, who was a candidate for financial secretary on the Petrini slate, submitted a resolution to the membership that called for “ . . . all votes, considered as being under protest, but duly cast and accepted into the ballot boxes by all parties concerned, at the regular election for officers to preside over local 308, said election held on December 14, 1943, should be counted and credit for same given to the respective candidates.”50 The motion passed, but the appeal of the Local 308 members was denied

by International Representative Buckley, setting the stage for a court battle in the new year.

Court Battle On January 3, 1944, the workers and the union appeared before Judge Alexander Churchill in Providence Superior Court. Both White and African American workers testified on behalf of the complaint, which was now amended from demanding the court order a new elec-

The Story of Boilermakers Local 308

tion to asking the court to declare African American boilermakers “entitled to vote at all elections without a designation or restriction as to or because of race, creed or color.”51 Jack Norton alerted the court to the December 29 union meeting where once again the local union members voted for equal rights for their African American brothers. Norton also testified that Samuel Parillo, John Jeremiah, and Louis Werner, members of the local union election committee, were willing to count all the ballots but were barred from doing so by Buckley. According to Norton, even though the wishes of the local union members were clear, Buckley told the workers he needed to seek instructions from the IBB about what to do with the contested ballots.52 On the issue of the contested ballots themselves, Carleton Blunt was asked by Attorney Aram Arabian, representing Buckley, about what he knew about the “C” appearing on the ballots. “Nobody ever told you what that ‘C’ stood for,” Arabian said. Blunt, true to his name, replied, “I had a pretty good idea.”53 When Buckley took the stand, he testified that he did not order the ballots of black workers to be marked with a “C” and that his only instructions were only members of the official union, not the auxiliary, could vote. When pressed by Marshall, Buckley offered that if the candidates on the two competing slates had agreed to count the “C” ballots, he would have agreed to do so. Pressed again by Marshall about whether he had called the meeting of the local union on December 29 to consider the question of the ballots, Buckley parried and told Marshall, “ . . . I called the meeting to attempt to straighten out a muddled situation. No resolution was requested by me.” Marshall, keeping the

pressure on Buckley, asked, “Wasn’t a resolution put to the body as result of your statement why you had called the meeting and didn’t the lodge recommend that these ballots be counted?” Buckley responded, “That was their recommendation to me.”54 Buckley was saved from further damage to his credibility by an objection raised by local union attorney Harold Arcaro and sustained by Churchill, thus stymying Marshall’s advance. Undaunted, Marshall changed course, asking Buckley that if a member of the Providence auxiliary union didn’t like the supervising officers from the White local, what could these workers do about it. Buckley answered that they could attend the IBB convention and make a protest. Marshall pounced. “But didn’t you say yesterday that auxiliary members were not eligible to attend conventions of the International Brotherhood?” he asked. “That’s right,” Buckley answered, “but their friends could go.”55 Churchill obviously was not impressed with Buckley’s testimony because on January 13 he issued a ruling in favor of the African American workers. In a key victory for Schmoke and the others, Churchill’s decisive ruling said: I rule that the conduct at the election of December 14, 1943 and that the by-­laws and constitution of the so-­called ‘auxiliary,’ insofar as they discriminate between members of the colored race, Negroes, and persons of all other races, as compared with the by-­ laws and constitution of the Brotherhood, are illegal and void.

Churchill added: 23

Rhode Island History

I rule that colored members of the so-­called auxiliary are members of the so-­called auxiliary are members [sic] of Local 308, and that their dues ought to be kept in Rhode Island.56 Marshall and the others were ecstatic about Churchill’s “epoch-­making decision.”57 However, Churchill’s ruling was only on the request for a temporary restraining order, not a permanent injunction. Another hearing would be needed to decide the matter on a permanent basis, so another trial was scheduled for later in the spring.

Getting Organized The workers faced an immediate problem after the Churchill hearings: how to fund the continued fight.

It appears while the Providence Urban League and Providence NAACP were willing to offer what support they could in the form of office supplies and moral support, financing the campaign would fall to the workers themselves. This wouldn’t be easy, given the wartime needs of families. According to attorney LeCount, the transcripts alone from the two days of hearings before Churchill cost $350, a staggering amount considering the workers at Field’s Point made only eighty-­eight cents per hour as laborers and a dollar twenty per hour as boilermakers.58 LeCount also made it clear that while he was supportive of the cause of the Local 308 members, he would need to get paid to continue representing them in court.59 In response to the workers’ financial needs, Schmoke and his comrades formed the Allied Victory Commit24

tee. Schmoke served as chairperson, Lopez from the NAACP was treasurer, Williams acted as publicity director, and at least 25 other members of Local 308 were committee members.60 Schmoke took on both fundraising responsibilities as well as drafting communication material for Williams. In a leaflet titled A Statement from the Allied Victory Committee, Schmoke laid out the philosophy of the organization.61 “Unionism,” he wrote, “has become such a vital factor in our daily lives that no one is immune to it.” But lest anyone think he and his comrades were looking to start a “civil war” within the labor movement, he made it clear that they were, in fact, fighting for the very principles labor organized around: We have a profound belief in the future of organized labor, but that belief can only be sustained by the right to work and earn a living on an equal and impartial basis . . . Our contention is not against organized labor and its proclaimed principles. It is against a small and vanishing, but powerful and yet existing element of labor which is fighting a desperate and losing battle to maintain an anti-­American barrier between white and colored workers. They would prevent a real alliance of the democratic elements of American Labor if they could.62 It is uncertain from the record to what extent, if any, the Allied Victory Committee was inspired by the national Double V campaign. Soon after the war began, African American newspapers, led by The Pittsburgh Courier, began talking about the war effort happening on two fronts. The first was the war in Europe

The Story of Boilermakers Local 308

against the fascists, but the second was the war at home against segregation and a “Jim Crow military.”

Despite the lack of official linkages, the rhetoric used by the Allied Victory Committee is similar and innovative, applying the same argument to the civilian war-­ effort workforce, not just to African American military service people.63 White and African American workers contributed what they could to the fundraising effort.64 Williams reached out to local clergy about holding fundraising events at their churches, and Schmoke began a letter-­ writing campaign.65 While everyone to whom he wrote is not known, it is known that he contacted Vera and Albert List, whom he described to Williams as former employers who also just happened to be wealthy philanthropists.66 The impassioned letter is written with intimacy, indicating a closeness to the family of more than just an employer/employee relationship.

Schmoke tells the Lists, “My association with you permits me to know that whenever you feel that a matter or cause is of a sincere and worthwhile nature, you have not in the past hesitated to give what ever help you could reasonably afford, and which you felt was compatible with the circumstances as you see them.”

Mrs. List sent him a check for ten dollars.67 Schmoke also sent a fundraiser letter to Marshall Field, newspaper publisher and heir to a department store fortune. It is unclear what prompted Schmoke to write to Field, nor do we have his letter, but in May, on the eve of the trial’s next phase, Schmoke got a response from John P. Lewis, managing editor of the New York daily newspaper PM, which Field funded.

Lewis told Schmoke, “We believe the issues which

your group has raised are most important and that the welfare of all union men will be advanced if the case can be pushed through to a proper decision.” Enclosed with Lewis’s letter was a check for $350, the entire amount needed to pay for the transcripts.68 In mid-­May 1943, the trial on the final status of the auxiliary union reconvened in Providence Superior Court. This time Judge Patrick Curran served as the presiding justice. The lawyers for the IBB attempted to discredit the plaintiffs by calling the judge’s attention to the financial backing they were getting from “outside groups” such as the Providence Urban League, NAACP, and the Allied Victory Committee.69 Williams was singled out as an “agitator” engaged in “inflammatory” activities undermining the war effort. The IBB lawyers moved to compel the lawyers for the African American workers to ask the court to decide if they wanted the judge to decide on the matter of the election results from December 14 or on the larger issue of whether African American workers were to be equal members of the union.70 Curran seemed keenly aware of the implications of a potential ruling, musing out loud to the court that the case was the most important that had come before him.71 He denied the IBB lawyers’ motions, and the trial proceeded.

Many of the same witnesses covered similar territory as in their previous testimony, but some key new insights were added into the record. Union steward for Local 308 John Geremia, another member of the election committee, testified that Paul Hovey told him, “Johnny, these colored fellows cannot vote in the election.”72 African American boilermaker Gerald Hill told the court that although his ballot was marked with 25

Rhode Island History

a “C,” he was able to rub off the marking before he slipped the paper into the ballot box.73 Schmoke testified that when he joined Local 308 in September 1942, he filled out a “White” application that was accepted without question.74 Anna Cavallaro, an office staff person for Local 308, contradicted Schmoke, telling the court that each of the African American workers named in the complaint had indeed filled out auxiliary membership cards. Charles Lawrence, the corresponding secretary for Local 308, read the letter he received from the International Union in response to the questions Schmoke had raised at the September 1943 union meeting.75 This letter told the local union that the bylaws adopted by the international convention “compelled Negroes to join auxiliaries rather than full union lodges.”76 Buckley returned to the stand, this time telling the court the African American workers could have formed an auxiliary union but declined the opportunity. He admitted to denying the African American workers access to the December 29, 1943, union meeting but noted that the “C” on the ballots simply stood for “contested.” He added that at the January 1944 convention of the IBB, rules concerning African Americans were “liberalized” in order for three African American members to attend. Additionally, he told the court the insurance company providing member benefits would no longer charge Black workers higher premiums.77 In an interesting twist, one that until now has not been part of the story of Local 308, Pauline Leblanc, an office clerk hired by Local 308 to work for the union, testified that it was she who marked the 26

disputed ballots with a “C.” While she was unable to remember who it was that told her to mark the ballots, she counted only 73 “C” ballots after the election.78 This bombshell piece of testimony raises all sorts of complications for the complainants. Recalling that the original claim by the workers was that as many as 400 African American workers had their ballots segregated and that the Petrini slate only lost by 120 votes, if LeBlanc was correct, even if all the “C” ballots were votes for Petrini, his slate still would have lost the election.

What impact LeBlanc’s testimony had on the case goes unremarked on in the source material available, but very shortly thereafter, the hearing concluded without a decision. The attorneys for both sides entered into a consent decree that called for part of the dues of African American boilermakers to be transmitted to the union headquarters in Kansas City and for Black workers to get the same insurance coverage as their White counterparts. Churchill’s ruling on full equality for Black union members stayed in effect. Curran told both sides they had a week to submit briefs, at which time he would take the case under advisement pending a final decision.79 A final decision never came. While the case before Curran was unfolding, similar cases in California were being heard and eventually decided against the Boilermaker’s Jim Crow auxiliary scheme. Also, as D-­Day came and went and the Allied victory in the war seemed inevitable, shipbuilding operations started to scale down. Within months of the Curran hearing, rumors of layoffs, initially denied by the company, began swirling in the shipyard, and in July the follow-

The Story of Boilermakers Local 308

ing year, the Wartime Commission formally announced the Field’s Point location would be decommissioned.

Local 308 was dissolved in October 1946, and the case before Curran was formally dismissed on February 3, 1956.80

Post-­Trial Drama The end of the trial was not the end of the drama involving the members of Local 308. In September 1945, Petrini was still fighting with the IBB about the status of Local 308’s autonomy. On September 6, at a local meeting, Petrini questioned Hovey about the status of dues money collected by the local and then transferred from the local treasury to the international headquarters in Kansas City. In response, Hovey physically attacked Petrini, punching him in the eye and bloodying his face.81 Petrini filed charges, but the investigation went nowhere as witnesses were reluctant to talk to the police. Petrini filed a $5,000 suit against Hovey for damages, but the record is unclear if the suit ever proceeded because Hovey was later arrested on an unrelated gun charge in Boston and sentenced to six months in the House of Corrections.

The judge in the case remarked during sentencing that “defendants with guns without authority are potential murderers.”82 After Petrini was assaulted, the Allied Victory Committee made one last effort to organize its members to get the benefits they were promised and to try to recover some of their dues payments. Schmoke and Allan Bonay, along with Williams and Lopez, placed an ad in The Providence Chronicle, a local Afri-

can American newspaper, calling for a meeting of former shipyard workers to talk about their continued efforts.83 The archive material of the Providence Urban League ends there, without any acknowledgment of the success or failure of these efforts.

Even as Local 308 faded away, Schmoke continued his activism. He was a participant on a panel with IBB Vice President William Calvin on the subject of “The Post War Industrial Outlook for Negroes” during an October 1944 symposium at Howard University in Washington, DC. He remained steadfast in his opposition to Jim Crow unionism, demanding Calvin explain why the IBB still refused to allow Black boilermakers equal status in the union. He defiantly told the assembled academics and dignitaries: Any serious look into the coming post-­war era poses some very provocative questions for the colored American ship worker. The chief question concerns the continuance of the tacit agreements between management and certain elements of organized labor which by writ or ritual discriminate against colored mechanics and unskilled ship workers. While such practices are not general throughout the structure of organized labor, they are nevertheless used, and in many cases are condoned by management.84 After the war, Schmoke moved on from the shipyard, taking a job at the Newport, Rhode Island, torpedo factory. He turned his activist energies more toward his Fall River home, staying active in Urban League and NAACP issues, even serving for six years on the local port authority board. He died in 1972 at the age of 65.85 27

Rhode Island History

Conclusion The seemingly quiet end to the Local 308 effort to end Jim Crow unionism raises more questions than it answers. For one, what was the actual status of the contested ballots? Were there as many as 400 of them as George Schmoke and his comrades alleged, or were there only 73 as Pauline LeBlanc testified to. Her assertion seems to have gone unchallenged, calling into question the claim that there were hundreds of contested ballots. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that racist officials from the IBB “lost,” “misplaced,” or outright stole another 300 ballots, but it is hard to imagine an attorney with the reputation of Thurgood Marshall not pressing this point if he thought there was even a hint of impropriety. But it is equally plausible that there were only 73 “C” ballots. After all, if there were more than 10,000 members of Local 308, and the election of December 14, 1943, had about a 30 percent turnout, is it really likely that nearly 100 percent of the Black members showed up to cast a vote, especially given the contested nature of the election?

Perhaps they were more motivated than the 70 percent of their co-­workers, but it would mark a dramatic voter turnout differential, and even with heroic get-­out-­the-­ vote efforts, seems improbable.

The question remains, why would Petrini lose the election? Why would the election even be that close?

Unlike other places around the country, such as Portland, Oregon, where local union officials were decidedly against integration, and Bethlehem Steel’s Baltimore Shipyard, where White workers went out on a “race strike” rather than welcome Black workers into the ranks, Local 308 seemed committed to inte28

gration on principle.86 It repeatedly passed resolutions of support for a single interracial union and was willing to stand up to enormous pressure from its international union to segregate into White and Black locals.

The local leadership was willing to work with outside organizations such as the Providence Urban League and the NAACP to fight for what it saw was right, and White members were willing to follow the lead of their African American union brothers. However, in the end, the members voted for local officers who took the side of the international union in favor of Jim Crow unionism.

Despite the inconclusive results in Rhode Island, a similar court case was heard in 1944 in California, and there, the state supreme court decisively ruled against the IBB auxiliary system. As a result, the union abolished all of its auxiliary unions and by1948 fully integrated its local unions.87 Throughout the post war years, the AFL gradually improved is stance on race relations, and by 1964, AFL-­CIO President George Meany stood side by side with Martin Luther King Jr. as President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 2006, the IBB published a history of the union titled Grace Under Pressure.88 The story of Local 308 does not appear in the text, and according to a staff member in the union headquarters, records for the local are nonexistent.89 The Judicial Records Center for the Rhode Island Judiciary in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, also reports that the court records from the 1944 Boilermaker case no longer exist in its archive.90 The story of Local 308 could very well disappear into

The Story of Boilermakers Local 308

the historical ether, relegated to footnotes in better studies of more important events. That would be a shame because, for a moment during one of this country’s most trying times, rank-­and-­file African

American workers led their White union brothers in a struggle for unity that yielded important and tangible benefits for the entire working class.

Notes 1. Julius Thomas, letter to James Williams, New York: Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library, August 4, 1943.

2. Officially, the shop-­level organizations for the IBB are referred to as “Lodges,” not “Locals.” In practice, the words are interchangeable. Most often in the archival material used for this paper, the shop-­level organization is referred to as a “Local” but not exclusively. For the sake of consistency, I will use the designation of “Local” except when used in a direct quotation.

3. C. Roger Wallin, Ships From Field’s Point: Providence RI 1942– 1945 (Pittsburgh: Dorrance Publishing, 2017): 6.

4. Ibid, 8.

5. Tim Colton, “Walsh-­Kaiser, Providence RI,” October 13, 2010, accessed October 1, 2017, http://shipbuildinghistory.com/ship yards/emergencylarge/kwalsh.htm.

6. Wallin, Ships from Field’s Point, 6–8.

7. School, Graduate, “The Howard University Studies in the Social Sciences: The Post-­War Industrial Outlook for Negroes Papers and Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the Division of the Social Sciences.” Co-­Sponsor: The A. Philip Randolph Fund October 18–20, 1944 (1945). Graduate School Publications. 5. http://dh.howard.edu/gs_pub/5. P.58 Hereafter, The Howard conference.

Electrical Workers Local 1327, Guards and Firemen Local 23515, Office Employees Local 23259, Hoisting Engineers Local 57-­C, Glaziers Local 1333, Sign Painters Local 729, and Blacksmiths Local 643.

10. Wallin, Ships from Field’s Point, 5.

11. The Howard Conference, 55–56.

12. Richard F. Irving, Toward Equal Opportunity: The Story of the Providence Urban League in the 1940s (Master’s thesis, Brown University, 1974): 22.

13. James Williams, “Making Good: Twelve Points for Colored Workers in Industry and New War Jobs.” n.d., Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library. Williams’s “Making Good” flyer was warmly received by the Rhode Island business community, even drawing a letter of praise from Henry B. Sharpe, president of the Browne & Sharpe manufacturing company.

14. Unattributed, “Union Bias Reported at Shipyard,” Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library, July 7, 1943.

15. Norma LaSalle Daoust, “Building the Democratic Party: Black Voting in Providence in the 1930s,” Rhode Island History, vol. 44, no. 3 (1985): 81–88.

8. “AFL Able to Fill All Labor Needs at Walsh-­Kaiser.” The Providence Journal, March 20, 1943.

16. Thurgood Marshall, Supreme Justice: Speeches and Writings, ed.

J. Clay Smith Jr. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003): 77.

9. Ibid. The local unions were Boilermakers Local 308, Machinists Local 1597, Carpenters Local 1192 and 94, Laborers Local 271, Painters Local 195, Teamsters Local 251, Plumbers Local 238,

17. Andrew E. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006): 79–81.

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Rhode Island History

18. Willliam H. Harris, “Federal Intervention in Union Discrimination: FEPC and West Coast Shipyards during World War II,” Labor History, 22:3 (1981): 325–347.

19. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, 79.

20. Harris, “Federal Intervention in Union Discrimination,” 335–336.

21. Buhle, P., Molloy, S., & Sansbury, G. (Eds.) 1983. A History of Rhode Island Working People. Kingston, RI. Rhode Island Labor History Society.

22. Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 429.

23. Executive Order 8802 dated June 25, 1941, General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=72.

24. Franklin D. Roosevelt: Executive Order 9346 Establishing a Committee on Fair Employment Practice, May 27, 1943. Online

by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/210091.

25. Unattributed, “Union Bias Reported at Shipyard,” Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library, July 7, 1943.

26. Julius Thomas, letter to James Williams.

27. George Schmoke, handwritten letter to James Williams, n.d., Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

28. George Schmoke obituary, The Fall River Herald (Fall River, MA), February 1972.

29. Congressman John Fogarty letter to James Williams, August 21, 1943, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

30. Unattributed, “Timeline,” n.d., Urban League of Rhode Island, Providence College Library.

31. Unattributed, “Statement,” December 4, 1943, Urban League of Rhode Island, Providence College Library.

30

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid. Irving names the IBB representative as Paul Hovey, and it is likely the case that it was him. However, the statement document he uses as a source does not in fact name Hovey.

34. On the issue of Norton’s race, while I point out above that Kersten misidentifies him as Black, the documents within the PUL archive clearly show that he was White. This includes the December 4, 1943 statement document and multiple handwritten statements in the Urban League of Rhode Island Collection identifying Norton as White.

35. Ibid.

36. James Williams, “Dear Friend Letter,” September 15, 1943, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

37. Ibid.

38. James Williams letter to Americo Petrini, November 4, 1943, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

39. “Negroes Press Injunction Plea.” The Providence Journal (Providence), May 16, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

40. Ibid.

41. George Schmoke letter to James Williams, November 9, 1943, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

42. James Williams, “An Appeal to Colored Shipyard Workers,” n.d., Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

43. Irving, Towards Equal Opportunity, 28.

44. James Williams, “An Appeal to Colored Shipyard Workers.”

45. Irving, Towards Equal Opportunity, 29.

46. Ibid, 29.

47. Ibid, 28–29.

48. Ibid, 29.

The Story of Boilermakers Local 308

49. “Union Election Taken to Court.” The Providence Journal (Providence), December 17, 1943, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College.

65. James Williams, “Dear Reverend letter,” n.d., Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

50. John Norton, “Resolution,” December 29, 1943, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

67. George Schmoke handwritten letter to James Williams, March 1, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

51. “Union Election Protests Heard.” The Providence Journal (Providence, Rhode Island), January 4, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island, Providence College Library.

66. Ibid.

68. John Lewis letter to George Schmoke, May 15, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

52. Ibid.

69. Irving, Towards Equal Opportunity, 32.

53. Ibid.

70. Ibid, 32.

54. “Buckley Denies Ordering Marks.” The Providence Evening Bulletin (Providence), January 6, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

71. “Pink Union Card Signed By Worker,” The Providence Journal (Providence), May 23, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

55. Ibid.

72. “Negro Ban Laid to Parent Union,” The Providence Evening Bulletin (Providence), May 29, 1944), Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

56. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, 97–98, and Marshall, Supreme Justice, 19–20.

57. Marshall, Supreme Justice, 19–20.

58. Collective bargaining agreement between the Walsh-­Kaiser Company, Inc., and the Metal Trades Division of the American Federation of Labor, February 23, 1943, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

59. Joseph LeCount, letter to John Lopez, February 28, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

60. List of Allied Victory Committee Members, n.d., Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

73. “Negroes Protest Election Action,” The Providence Evening Bulletin (Providence), May 17, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

74. “Negroes Press Injunction Plea,” The Providence Evening Bulletin (Providence), May 16, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

75. “Final Summation Set In Next Week,” The Providence Journal (Providence), May 7, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

76. Ibid.

61. George Schmoke, “Statement from Allied Victory Committee,” handwritten notes and unattributed newspaper clipping, n.d., Urban League of Rhode Island, Providence College Library.

77. “Union Auxiliary Offered Negroes,” The Providence Journal (Providence), May 16, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

62. Ibid.

78. “Union Hits Race Case Testimony,” The Providence Journal (Providence), June 6, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

63. Kimberley L. Phillips Boehm, War! What Is It Good For?: Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from WWII to Iraq (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012): 24–25.

64. George Schmoke letter to Vera and Albert List, February 25, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island, Providence College Library.

79. “Shipyard Negro Testimony Ended,” The Providence Journal (Providence), May 15, 1944, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

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80. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, 98, and Irving, Towards Equal Opportunity, 26.

86. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, 81–91, and Irving, Towards Equal Opportunity, 25.

81. “Local President of Boilermakers Charges Assault,” The Providence Journal (Providence), September 7, 1945, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

87. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, 98.

82. Unattributed newspaper clipping, “Paul Hovey, Unionist, Held,” n.d., Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

83. “Attention! Former Shipyard Workers,” The Providence Chronicle (Providence), September 15, 1945, Urban League of Rhode Island Collection, Providence College Library.

84. The Howard Conference, 55–62.

85. Schmoke obituary, February 1972.

32

88. International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Archives, Grace Under Pressure: A History of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmiths, Forgers, and Helpers, AFL-­ CIO (Kansas City: International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Archives, 2006).

89. Many thanks to Mallory Smith of the IBB in Kansas City for help with this project. According to Smith, the international union’s retention policies make it likely the records of Local 308, if they were ever collected, were destroyed some time ago.

90. Phone call to Judicial Records Center on 10/30/17.

ANDREW POLTA

Disorderly House Keepers and the Struggle for Respectability in Early Nineteenth-­Century Providence

In the early nineteenth century, the town of Providence seemed to be sliding into chaos. It saw two destructive riots in 1824 and 1831. Complaints of disorder, vice, and immorality deluged the town council, and atempts to stem the tide yielded only more complaints. However, with an assist from the local courts and a step-­up in the enforcement of Rhode Island’s vagrancy laws, the council made a show of cracking down on social disorder in the late 1810s and 1820s. The primary targets were several neighborhoods in Providence’s North End, where sailors between voyages sought out the grog shops, dance halls, and brothels and where many of the town’s Black and poor residents made their homes.

Susan Parr Gardner and Rosanna Jones—­the former White, the latter Black1—­lived and worked next door to each other in this notorious section of Providence.

Their names appear throughout Providence town council and court documents of the early nineteenth century, often in connection with social disorder in their neighborhood. Historians of eighteenth-­century Rhode Island have used similar records to assemble fine-­grained portraits of colonial society and culture, providing a window into the lives of people who did not or could not write themselves into the historical record.2 Nineteenth-­century records reveal that Jones and Gardner tried to distance themselves from the disorder associated with their surroundings and to avoid the backlash of popular anger and government crackdown. Despite representing significantly different levels of threat to Providence’s social and moral order,

both women pursued a strategy of cultivating good relations with the kinds of men trying to stem the disorder. The successes and failures of these two women’s efforts to maintain their livelihoods present a picture of early nineteenth-­century Providence where the distinctions between orderly and disorderly, and between reputable and disreputable, blur.

Providence’s Recorder of Deeds demonstrates that both Jones and Gardner were substantial property owners and businesswomen. By 1821, Jones, a single Black woman, owned land worth more than $1,000 on the “street leading from Stevens Bridge to Jabez Whipple’s [house],” on modern-­day Hewes Street, in a small neighborhood then known as Stampers Hill.3 In 1824, she purchased a second house in another infamous quarter of Providence, on the south side of Olney’s Lane near where it ran into North Main Street.4 By 1820, Jones had a new neighbor, Gardner, a single White woman. Gardner’s property, worth $1,700 in 1821, also was on “the street leading over Stephens [sic] Bridge,” right next to Jones.5 Like Jones, she also owned a house on the south side of Olney’s Lane.6 Despite their similar property holdings and location, Jones and Gardner ran very different establishments.

Jones kept a boardinghouse catering to poor White and Black families at her Hewes Street house. Census records from 1820 and 1830 show that Jones’s tenants were a mix of Black and White men and women of various ages, including children under ten, with what look like several established couples—­pairs of men and women around the same age.7 William Greene was 33

Rhode Island History

typical, a Black man living with his wife and child on Hewes Street who ran a fruit and cake stand in Hardscrabble, another poor quarter of Providence clustered around Charles and Orms Streets.8 It appears that Jones rented her house in Olney’s Lane to business tenants. John Lewis, a former sailor of color accused in 1826 of selling beer on Sundays, told the council that he “hir[ed] his house from Rosanna Jones.”9 The location on Olney’s Lane would have been perfect for catering to fellow seamen. The town council never censured Jones for renting to a person of “bad fame” like Lewis; indeed the only complaint it ever lodged against her was in 1827, when she built a wall around her Hewes Street house that “encroached on a public highway.”10 Overall, despite living and working in neighborhoods known for disreputable behavior and social disorder, Jones kept relatively respectable houses.

In contrast, Gardner—­who sometimes went by Sukey and had tacked Gardner onto her original last name, Parr—­was one of the most notorious brothel keepers in Providence. Census information from 1820 and 1830 shows that her tenants were almost all White women in their late teens or early twenties.11 One of the women captured in the 1830 census may have been Henritt Washburn, a White eighteen-­year-­old whose testimony before the council that year had all the plot beats of a Victorian morality tale. Having been “enticed” from her home in North Carolina and later abandoned by a ship’s captain, Washburn encountered Gardner while “poor and destitute” on the streets of Boston and agreed to come live with her. Once in Providence, Gardner charged Washburn a high rent and then, when Washburn could not pay, confiscated 34

what little property she had as collateral, so that when Washburn fled seven weeks later, she had to leave her spare clothing behind.12 Washburn’s subsequent testimony strongly implied that, lacking money of her own and unable to leave, prostitution in Gardner’s house had been the only way to pay the exorbitant rent.

The Hewes Street house was also not Gardner’s only brothel. During the 1844 trial for the murder of Cranston mill owner Amasa Sprague, one witness, Susan Field, revealed that she lived with Gardner in a brothel the latter had established on Benefit Street, close to the respectable members of Providence society, and in 1821, a blacksmith named Moses Haskel complained to the town council about four “houses of ill fame” in Olney’s Lane, including one “ocupyed By Sucky Par.”13 Gardner’s reputation for sexual impropriety stretched back to December 1819, when an anonymous woman demanded that “Sucky Parr [and her] two sisters” be “removed from town” by the council.14 Apparently the woman’s husband was spending all his wages carousing with the Parr sisters at the house of a Mr. Tripp in Olney’s Lane.

The north Providence neighborhoods where Jones and Gardner lived, and which stoked Providence’s fears of social disorder, were the products of the town’s economic expansion following the Revolutionary War. In the early years of the American republic, the town’s maritime commerce rapidly expanded as merchants like the Brown family pursued new trade connections in the Baltic Sea and the East Indies. Their success drew in sailors and dock laborers while also generating peripheral businesses in shipbuilding, blacksmithing, tavern keeping, marine insurance, banking, freight

Above: Facsimile of Daniel Anthony’s “Map of the Town of Providence from Actual Survey” (1823). The dotted rule indicates the area in the detail at right. RIHS collection, RHiX173952.

Right: Detail of the facsimile of Daniel Anthony’s “Map of the Town of Providence from Actual Survey” (1823). RIHS collection, RHiX173952.

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Rhode Island History

Providence Town Papers, MSS 214, Series 1, Vol. 6, p. 150, #2746, July 23, 1782. RIHS collection RHiX174454A. “Gentlemen: You cannot be uninformed of the Riot of last Night and that a Dwelling House in the compact part of this Town was intirely Destroy’d. However bad the Inhabitants of the said House might have been, that is by no means an Excuse for the perpetrators of the Act.”

hauling, and retail. A growing urban lower class performed domestic tasks—­such as clothes washing, food production, and housecleaning—­that previously had been done by middle-­class wives or apprentices. The overall effect of Providence’s postwar economic boom was a rise in population. From a prewar population of 4,321, the town grew to 7,614 by 1800 and continued rapidly thereafter.15 An especially sharp increase occurred between 1820 and 1830, when the population rose from 11,767 to 16,836.16 A significant part of this population growth came from in-­migration, including Black men and women recently freed from slavery. During the war, many enslaved Blacks in New England had escaped or gained their freedom by serving in the Continental Army.17 Seeing the writing on the wall, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed the Manumission Act in 1784.

This law freed children born to enslaved parents after March 1 of that year, though girls had to serve their parents’ enslavers until age eighteen and boys until twenty-­one. A growing port like Providence was especially attractive to these emancipated families because in Rhode Island, enslaved men often had served as skilled artisans or shopkeepers in commercial hubs like Newport, while others had been hired as sailors to ship captains when there was less need for agricultural labor.18 A career at sea was a tempting prospect for a newly freed Black man with the necessary skills, since a ship was one of the few places he had both a chance of earning equal pay to Whites and the rare opportunity for promotion based on merit and experience.19 These Black migrants, along with plenty of poor Whites, soon filled the densely packed tenements and 36

boarding houses of Olney’s Lane, Hardscrabble, and Stampers Hill. A fourth neighborhood called Snowtown grew up south of Smith Street, on the shore where the Moshassuck River and the Great Salt Cove met.20 These neighborhoods all sported numerous grog shops, brothels, boardinghouses, dance halls, and food stands that catered to sailors ashore between voyages. William Brown, a prominent member of Providence’s Black community, grew up next to a sailor boardinghouse near the south waterfront and recalled in a memoir that whenever the tenants lacked entertainment, “Olney street was their next port of call.”21 These sailors and other pleasure-­seekers provided North Providence residents the chance of easy money, especially women whose other options were meager wages from taking in washing or performing other domestic labor. As property-­owning businesswomen, Jones and Gardner were at the upper end of this often informal and illicit economy. Other women, such as Black resident Mary Caesar, ran small food stands selling cakes and fruit or, like White resident Eliza Granger, sold liquor without a license.22 Still others earned money through prostitution, either casually or at one of the local brothels. Over time, these sections of Providence developed reputations for poverty, disorder, and vice. Respectable residents and the local newspapers also looked down on them as Black neighborhoods, though in reality Black and White residents lived and worked side by side, with Jones and Gardner being one literal example.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, complaints about these neighborhoods, and especially about disorderly houses, began reaching the town

37

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council. An eighteenth-­century Rhode Island law “for breaking up disorderly Houses kept by free Negroes and Mulattoes,” defined a disorderly house as one where “gaming, drinking, and other vicious practices” took place or where the proprietor entertained customers “at unseasonable hours, or in an extravagant manner.”23 In practice, the term “disorderly house” also signaled a threat to the racial and sexual status quo. In July 1782, a Providence mob destroyed the brothel run by a Black woman named Margaret Fairchild. Her tenants included two White women, Phebe Bowen and her daughter Betsey, “a Negro Woman called Black Bets . . . and a Molatto Girl about Eighteen or Nineteen Years.”24 It is likely this racial mixing in the house provoked the mob almost as much as the illicit sex. Anxiety over sexual impropriety also was apparent in the 1803 complaint against Luthania Lealand and Freelove Ballou, two White women who kept “disorderly and bawdy houses . . .wherein riotous, tumultuous and lewd conduct [was] continually practiced.”25 Three years previously, Lealand also had been accused of “entice[ing] away the female help of many of the good Citizens of this Town” at night.26 While not all disorderly house keepers were women, the narrowing cultural definitions of female respectability left them especially vulnerable to accusations of disorder and disrepute in the early nineteenth century.

While eighteenth-­century rural wives were expected to keep shop or conduct legal transactions during their husbands’ absence in addition to engaging in domestic labor, by the nineteenth century married women were supposed to devote themselves wholly to cultivating a home in which to raise moral, Christian children as 38

well as a refuge for their husbands after a hard day’s work.27 In many families, however, wives and daughters still needed to contribute to the family income, but women who took in washing for wages or ran a small shop now fell outside the ideals of true womanhood.28 Middle-­class advocates of the cult of domesticity reserved particular scorn for female boardinghouse keepers like Gardner and Jones. A woman who took in strangers and performed domestic labor for money was the exact opposite of an ideal wife who did the same work out of love for and devotion to her family. In the minds of these middle-­class moralists, if a woman took money from strangers to do domestic tasks like laundry or cooking, what else would she do if somebody paid her enough? By this logic, it could be a short, slippery slope from a boardinghouse to a brothel.29 In addition to falling on the wrong side of the rift between reputable and disreputable women, Black boardinghouse keepers like Jones fell afoul of hardening racial boundaries. After the Revolution and emancipation, White New Englanders had to decide whether freed Blacks should be full citizens in the new, ostensibly egalitarian republic. According to one historian, by 1820, the answer was a “resounding ‘No!’”30 In the intervening years, characteristics Whites had once associated with enslaved Blacks’ social and legal status, such as poverty or economic dependence, came to be seen as evidence of inherent inferiority and reasons to exclude free Blacks from civic life.31 New England Whites also worried about the loss of control over free Blacks, who now could socialize and enjoy themselves as they saw fit. Typical of this anxiety was an 1803 report by the Providence town

Disorderly House Keepers and the Struggle for Respectability

watch that “almost every Night one or Two frolicks or Dances is held in Some part of the Town which do not Break up till a very late Hour of the Night thereby filling our streets with Black people at all Hours of the Night.”32 That same year, the watch also reported on two disorderly houses run by Black men: Samuel Spywood entertained “Servants and other Black People to the Great detriment of their masters & employers,” while Harry Taber operated a so-­called dancing school where “Servants [were] encouraged to Carry Stolen Goods.”33 This anxiety over unsupervised free Blacks and servants—­around the same time as the complaints against Ballou and Lealand—­roughly coincided with the maturation of the first freeborn generation after Rhode Island’s Manumission Act. Girls born in 1784 reached eighteen in 1802, and boys turned twenty-­one in 1805—­the ages set down in the Rhode Island Manumission Act for when boys and girls finished their so-­called apprenticeships to their parents’ enslavers.

White authorities concerned with disorderly Blacks reserved additional suspicion for Black women, whose bodies represented the potential for racial mixing and the blurring of the line between ideal White citizens of the Republic and Blacks deemed unfit for citizenship.34 As a result, middle-­class Whites associated Black women with sexual depravity and confirmed in their minds the association of Providence’s Black community and the northern red-­light districts.

The early flare-­ups of concern for disorderly houses and unruly servants around the turn of the century were minor in comparison with what had become a near panic by the 1820s. Between 1821 and 1830, the town council heard as many disorderly house com-

plaints as in the previous two decades combined.35 Public concern already was growing in the late 1810s, and it reached a peak in June 1817, when the town council received a petition with around sixty signatories, including leading citizens such as Moses and Obadiah Brown, Thomas Ives, and the Reverend Stephen Gano, minister of the First Baptist Church. The petition warned of “divers Houses of Bad fame not only among the Coloured People but Even among the Whites who come here from Neighbouring States.”

Such houses had the “Infamous and Degrading purpose of Seducing our Youth and Others to the Ruining of their Morrals and debacing their manners to their. . . parents Grief, and the Grief of all Good Citizens, and [especially] the Professors of all Denominations of Christians, and if continued unrestrained to the Ruin of the Morral Character of Our Town & State, and highly Injurious to their Civil & Religious Interests and the best feelings of our fellow Citizens who regard the Virtue of the Ripening youth as well as the Morrals of those in Riper years.”36 In addition to this and similar petitions, the council also received complaints from individuals such as Moses Haskel, whose December 1821 letter informed the council of four houses of ill fame operating near Olney’s Lane and of several tavern keepers who sold liquor on Sundays in violation of their licenses.37 The next year, in an even testier mood, Haskel complained that the “Houses of Ill fame which your Honors have been informed of do Continue their entertainment of Both sexes of bad Company.”38 The two riots in 1824 and 1831 confirmed Providence’s fears of disorder and directed them at the northern Black neighborhoods. The Hardscrabble Riot 39

40

Disorderly House Keepers and the Struggle for Respectability

of October 17, 1824, began as an altercation between groups of White and Black men over the right of way on a sidewalk. Stung by a challenge to their supremacy, a White mob pulled down seven houses and damaged others in Hardscrabble. A perfunctory trial, which failed to convict any of the rioters, revealed that one of the primary targets had been a dance hall run by a Black man, Henry Wheeler.39 Dance halls—­probably similar to Harry Taber’s “dancing school”—­commonly were blamed for disorder in other ports such as New York and Boston, where they disgorged crowds of noisy, drunken revelers into the streets on a nightly basis and sometimes doubled as brothels.40 The Olney’s Lane Riot of September 21 to 24, 1831, began as a sailors’ brawl—­not uncommon in that neighborhood—­that turned deadly when a Black sailor produced a gun and shot a White sailor. The fight occurred outside a building identified in court documents as a “brothel for black and white prostitutes” where the Black sailors were living while in port.41 Enraged by the killing, local White artisans attacked homes and businesses in Olney’s Lane, then turned their attention to nearby Snowtown over the next three nights. In the end, the state militia quelled the mob, killing four rioters in the process.42 In its report, a committee appointed to investigate the unrest spared Opposite: Providence Town Papers, MSS 214, Series 3, Vol. 52, p. 125, #005539, April 22, 1803. RIHS collection RHiX174455A. A complaint to the town council “that Harry Taber, living Eastward of the first Congregational Meeting House in S. Providence, & Sam[uel] Spywood, occupying the Chambers of the first House southerly of said Meeting House, Black men each, keep disorderly Houses.”

little thought for the victims and described Snowtown and Olney’s Lane as full of “houses tenanted chiefly by idle blacks of the lowest stamp.”43 One Providence newspaper went a step further in blaming the victims: it portrayed the rioters as performing a civic duty “to protect the town from houses of ill fame” and admonished them only that “the removing of improper inhabitants belonged to the Town Council and not the mob.”44 Such sentiments reflected those of many Providence residents, and the aftermath of the Olney’s Lane Riot saw an ultimately successful push to form a city government with a powerful mayor and a professional police force to more effectively enforce order and crack down on vice.45 Jones and Gardner were caught up in these concerns about disorder in the 1820s. Along with five other men and women, both were charged with running disorderly houses in the December 1823 session of the Providence County Court of General Sessions of the Peace.

The indictments alleged that they allowed “men [and] women of evil name, fame, and dishonest conversation” to partake in “drinking, tippling, whoreing, & misbehaving themselves.”46 More frequently, though, Jones and Gardner dealt with the Providence town council’s attempts to remove their tenants. Like those in contemporary city governments from Baltimore to Boston, Providence’s councilmen tried to quell vice and disorder using laws against vagrants and the nonresident poor. These laws allowed the council to remove from town those who were poor or disturbers of the peace, with the threat of a whipping or fine if they returned.47 This was the process set in motion when they received a complaint, signed by 41

Rhode Island History

Providence Town Papers, MSS 214, Series 3, Vol. 93, p. 13, #0027950, July 25, 1817. RIHS collection RHiX174456A. This complaint states that such houses had the “Infamous and Degrading purpose of Seducing our Youth and Others to the Ruining of their Morrals.”

Relief Thurber and eighteen others, that Gardner’s “house of Ill Fame” was “corrupting the morals of the youth of the Town as well as children in the neighborhood” and disturbing them all hours with “the Quarreling, the Fighting, and filthy conversation.”48 The inciting incident may have been a particularly raucous celebration of the marriage of Gardner’s sister Phebe to an English sailor named Griffith Davis.49 Thurber wrote the complaint on August 6, 1821, and two days later, the council called in four young White women found living with Gardner: Louisa Stoddard, Emeline Bliss, Phebe Davis, and Gardner’s other sister, the widow Betsey Lee. The council referred to all four as women “of bad fame” and ordered them to leave town.50 The council removed Jones’s tenants less frequently, but she did lose her Olney’s Lane house as a result of the 1831 riot. The committee set to investigate the riot included her in a list of property owners who suffered damage and noted that they had “not been able to ascertain that any houses occupied by respectable inhabitants” had “been injured.”51 Like these disreputable inhabitants, Jones also fell under the newspapers’ blanket conclusion that the riot was an expression of popular anger at the disorder emanating from Olney’s Lane.

Despite the differences between them, Jones and Gardner were lumped together as disorderly house keepers because of where they lived and worked. At least one modern historian has assumed Jones was a brothel keeper like Gardner based on her location and her involvement in the Olney’s Lane Riot.52 If such assumptions are still possible today, how much more 42

so in the 1820s? The merchants, shopkeepers, and professional men who governed early nineteenth-­century Providence were fully invested in the cult of female domesticity and concepts of inherent racial divides.

Such men saw the ideals of womanhood manifested in their and their peers’ wives and sisters, who could afford to spend the bulk of their time managing a large home or taking care of their children. Women who earned money or ran businesses like Gardner and Jones fell outside this model of respectability and were suspect in these men’s eyes. In addition to cultural class distinctions, Providence’s respectable middle-­class men also were physically separated from the town’s poorer and less reputable residents. By the 1820s, working-­class laborers and servants no longer lived in or next to their employers’ homes but had congregated in new neighborhoods of their own, in what one historian calls a shift from vertical to horizontal zoning.53 As a Black woman, Jones faced an extra set of racist assumptions, and when these were added to the fuzzy distinction between brothels and boardinghouses as well as the stigma of living in what respectable Providence saw as a red-­light district, it is no wonder she faced accusations of “bad fame.”

And yet, despite being on the wrong side of various cultural and social dividing lines, Jones and Gardner prospered for quite some time. In 1823, Jones’s case never went to trial, and in the court ledger, next to the State of Rhode Island v. Rosanna Jones, there is only the short notation: “Not Pros[ecuted].”54 Gardner also faced no long-­term consequences from her run-­ins with the Providence authorities. Despite calling her in for questioning about Washburn in 1830, the council

43

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never followed through on its threat to prosecute Gardner for bringing a pauper into Providence without permission.55 After the council’s 1821 attempt to clear out her tenants, Gardner got the removal of her sisters, Davis and Lee, overturned. She also bounced back from any business disruption caused by these threats of removal. When she faced the Providence County courts in 1823, she simply pleaded guilty, paid a fifty-­ dollar fine that she could easily afford, and then, as later records show, went right back to running a house of prostitution. Finally, unlike Jones, she suffered no damage from the two riots.

So how did these two women survive in Providence as long as they did? One key advantage was their wealth. As property owners, Jones and Gardner were legal residents of Providence, and so, unlike their tenants, they could not be removed under the vagrancy laws.56 Wealth also served as a cushion when suffering setbacks like Gardner’s fines or the loss of business after the removal of her boarders. Before and immediately after her run-­in with the council in 1821—­perhaps sensing trouble brewing—­Gardner mortgaged some lots of land and sold others to generate cash quickly.57 Certainly, poorer disorderly house keepers were not so lucky. Mary Johnson and Sally Andrews, two other women who pleaded guilty in 1823 and received lower fines than Gardner, were driven out of business. The latter had previously bought Gardner’s house in Olney’s Lane but owned no property when the council removed her in 1824.58 Jones also had substantial value stored up in her Providence real estate: in 1837, at which point she had moved to Cranston, she took out a $2,166 mortgage on the parcels she still owned in Providence.59 44

In addition to the advantages of wealth and property, both women also used connections with neighboring White businessmen to cross the line between a good or a bad reputation. Jones maintained an intricate network of financial and business ties that can be reconstructed from the records of the Providence County Court of Common Pleas, which handled civil suits, including those for debt. Creditors sued Jones nine times between 1824 and 1837, more than any other woman accused of keeping a disorderly house during that period.60 The amounts ranged from the $22.35 she owed to shoemaker Charles Hadwin in 1827 to the $124.33 to lottery broker Moses Baker in 1831.61 While she usually defaulted to avoid paying court fees, Jones was never in genuine financial trouble, since court records always note the payment of whatever she owed after the fact. Jones’s other business activities during this period suggest she maintained a healthy disposable income, so she likely asked for credit not because she lacked money, but for convenience or for a short-­ term expansion of her liquid assets.

In addition to the financial advantages, Jones’s relationships with her creditors gained her something more important: acceptance within Providence’s business community. Of course, these men’s readiness to sue her may have come down to racism, but it is striking that they continued to extend credit to her year after year, suggesting she had built up a level of trust.

Many of them owned businesses in the north end of Providence and must have known Jones for years as a customer or a neighbor, so she clearly was not using subterfuge or the anonymity of a growing city to take advantage of businessmen unaware that she had failed

Disorderly House Keepers and the Struggle for Respectability

to pay previous debts on time. Hadwin’s shoe store was on North Main Street, near Jones’s Hewes Street boardinghouse, and George R. A. Olney and Caleb Mosher Jr., who sued Jones the same years as Hadwin, kept a grocery store nearby on Canal Street.62 In addition to Baker, at least three other lottery brokers sued Jones in the early 1830s.63 Almost all of them maintained offices near one another on the Market Square, and they could have recognized Jones from her visits to their peers or had heard from them about her credit history.64 In all likelihood, they also knew that she was good for the money eventually and felt comfortable extending credit to her anyway.

If all of these businessmen knew about Jones’s reputation as a tardy re-­payer of debts, it is also very likely they knew that she owned and operated businesses in Olney’s Lane and Stampers Hill. Probably some of them even knew she had been indicted for running a disorderly house in 1823. As middle-­class White men, they deplored the social disorder sweeping through Providence and the nightly carousing in the town’s working-­class neighborhoods. One of them, George Olney, went so far as to sign a petition to the town council in 1825, complaining “of the evils arising from disorderly houses . . . in Olney’s Lane.”65 However, perhaps these men also knew Jones well enough to realize that she contributed little to the disorder in northern Providence and that she was no brothel keeper like her neighbor Gardner. When complaints arose about disorderly houses in Olney’s Lane and Snowtown, maybe her contacts put in a good word for her with the council or the town watch or steered them toward houses where vice and disorder actually occurred. Her good

reputation also may explain why she was not prosecuted in 1823, with enough people knowing that she stood apart from the other defendants. On the other hand, it also is possible her business contacts only cared that they got their money back and overlooked any doubts about Jones’s character.

In the end, Jones’s efforts to establish a good reputation in Providence achieved mixed results. While she avoided running afoul of the courts and council for more than a decade, she fell victim to the popular anger unleashed in the Olney’s Lane Riot. Yet she did not lose everything, and two civil cases, in 1833 and 1837, show she still had the wherewithal to purchase property and establish a new legal residency in Cranston.66 While the large mortgages she took out in 1837 suggest Jones fell on hard times, she recovered eventually, and when she finally cut ties with Providence and sold her remaining property in 1864, she received $2,700.67 Like Jones, Gardner turned to the respectable members of Providence society, though rather than the general goodwill of her neighbors, she cultivated a close relationship with a single family to advance her interests. In the 1820s, Samuel Staples Jr. and his father were both successful house carpenters living among the other prosperous families of Benefit Street.68 Staples’s brother William, who lived nearby, later became a Rhode Island Supreme Court justice and wrote a history of Providence, so the family moved among the political and cultural elite of Providence society.69 As early as 1817, Samuel Staples Jr.’s name appeared as a witness on a deed of property to Gardner, and later, in 1825, he sold her the house on Benefit Street.70 His 45

Rhode Island History

help went further, and in 1821, Staples proved instrumental in reversing the council’s removal of Gardner’s sister Phebe Davis for “bad fame” by arranging a quick sale of property to Davis’s sailor husband right before he went to sea.71 It is easy to see Gardner’s guiding hand behind this intervention, which secured legal residency in Providence for her sister and brother-­in-­ law. Beyond buying and selling property, Staples and Gardner also conducted other business together: in 1824, a woman named Elizabeth Hines told the council that she hired a house from Staples near or in Olney’s Lane and furniture from Gardner.72 The council did not label Hines of “bad fame,” suggesting that Gardner maintained legitimate business interests in addition to her brothels. An association with a respectable, upper-­class man like Staples in a legitimate business arrangement may have provided Gardner with a sheen of respectability similar to Jones’s reputation with her creditors. Acquiring a house on Benefit Street put some distance between her and the bad reputation of Olney’s Lane and the other neighborhoods of northern Providence. Further evidence that Gardner projected the image of a respectable—­i.e., married—­ woman comes from the 1844 testimony of Susan Field, who insisted on calling her landlady “Mrs. Gar[d]ner” rather than “Susan Parr” when the prosecution tried to undercut Field’s own reputation by pointing out she lived in a brothel.73 Staples and Gardner put on a good show of respectability, but the former was involved in the less respectable aspects of the latter’s business as well. In her 1830 testimony, Henritt Washburn claimed that “Samuel Staples, Jr. and Susan Parr were in Boston and agreed 46

with her to come to Providence.”74 Thus, it appears that Staples played an active role in convincing Washburn to live with Gardner and was complicit in the operation of her brothel.

Staples’s actions in Boston raise several questions about his relationship with Gardner. We can assume he understood that he was luring a vulnerable young woman into a brothel since he was very familiar with Providence’s disorderly neighborhoods. The Staples family did not just build houses, they also owned and rented them out; the 1831 riot destroyed five that they owned in Olney’s Lane.75 These houses also had been the subjects of frequent complaints, with the council repeatedly asking Samuel Staples Jr. to evict unruly tenants. In a move reminiscent of its attempt to clear out Gardner’s brothel five years before, the council ordered Staples to evict six women from one tenement in 1826.76 Haskel also included “a red Haus on the Wright hand side of the Street . . . owned By Samuel Staples” in “Owlnay’s Laying” in his complaint of 1821.77 Still, traveling all the way to Boston and helping Gardner procure a young woman implies a much closer relationship between Staples and Gardner than the otherwise dry and legalistic property and municipal records have implied so far. Did they simply have a strong personal connection that is otherwise absent in these records? Evidence from later in Gardner’s life suggests this is the case: in 1832 and 1836, she gave birth to daughters named Mary and Isabella Staples.

While it is unclear to what extent his business and sexual relationships with Gardner were intertwined in the 1820s, Staples had financial motives enough to overcome any affronts to the moral and social stric-

Disorderly House Keepers and the Struggle for Respectability

tures of middle-­class respectability.78 Since both Staples and Gardner relied on income from Olney’s Lane, steady business for her drew in potential tenants for him and vice versa. William Brown also noticed this interdependence among disorderly houses and wrote that Olney’s Lane “had a correspondence with all the sailor boarding houses in town, and was sustained by their patronage.”79 Likewise, in 1802 the town watch described an arrangement between two houses that entertained a “Riotous and Disorderly Company” and a third that fueled the festivities with liquor—­without a license, of course.80 While the full implications of Staples’s trip to Boston with Gardner cannot be fully known, it dramatically shows how deeply enmeshed Providence’s respectable upper classes could become in the illicit and disorderly world of Providence’s northern neighborhoods.

Samuel Staples Jr. was not the only outwardly respectable middle-­class man with ties to disorder in northern Providence. Gardner sold her house in Olney’s Lane to his brother William in 1821, when it was occupied by a Black sailor named Peter Reynolds, whom the council was accusing of running a disorderly dance hall.81 George W. Bowen, a grocer with a shop on North Main Street, also cultivated a relationship with Gardner, to whom he once extended a mortgage on her Olney’s Lane house. He eventually bought her Hewes Street property in 1832.82 Presumably she used the money from this sale to set herself up permanently in the house she had bought from Staples on Benefit Street. Many of her neighbors there also had invested in Olney’s Lane, including jeweler Ezekiel Burr, who owned the building—­then serving as a brothel—­

outside which the riot began in 1831. When the rioters reached the neighborhood of Snowtown, they also damaged or destroyed three houses owned by Nicholas Brown of the prominent mercantile firm Brown and Ives.83 These connections between the reputable and disreputable residents of Providence were well known at the time, and in the aftermath of the riot, the local newspapers grumbled that a man like Burr, Staples, or Brown had “a right to invest his money as he chooses, but it is well for him occasionally to consult the morals and peace of the community of which he is a member.”84 By whatever combination of business savvy and contacts with respectable men like Samuel Staples Jr., Gardner avoided Jones’s fate. Despite occasional setbacks, Gardner remained in business for the rest of her life in Providence. In 1844, despite the scrutiny brought on by her tenant Field’s testimony in the Amasa Sprague murder trial, she still purchased, for $2,050, three lots of land at the corner of Olney’s Lane and North Main Street from Samuel Staples Jr.85 Just before her death in June 1846, she bequeathed this land “for the love & affection which I have toward my children” to her two daughters.86 Furthermore, unlike Jones, Gardner came out of the Olney’s Lane Riot completely unscathed.

The question remains why Jones’s good reputation failed to protect her from the backlash against disorder in Providence, while Gardner prospered there for another decade. The confounding factor is that, by all accounts, it was Gardner, not Jones, who represented the disorder Providence was trying to stamp out. Some possible answers can be found by taking a wider view 47

Rhode Island History

of the social changes and political unrest gripping America’s Atlantic seaboard in the early nineteenth century.

The Providence town government’s crackdown and the later mob violence against perceived social disorder was a local outgrowth of a nationwide push for a politics and society centered on White men. Town authorities enforced new cultural norms dictating the withdrawal of women into the private domestic sphere by targeting the most visible examples of deviance: women working as prostitutes. Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy launched a series of raids in 1823 to eradicate houses of ill fame in the city’s West End.87 Around the same time, Philadelphia saw a concerted effort by citizen reformers and the city government to enforce “rigid morality and punitive sexual discipline” on lower class—­especially Black—­women.88 These government efforts to enforce social and cultural norms dovetailed with the popular demand—­commonly associated with figures like Andrew Jackson—­for universal White manhood suffrage by urban wage laborers and small-­scale artisans, who in many states were excluded from the franchise by property qualifications. Frustrated by a lack of political power, these men doubled down on asserting their social dominance via violence against White women and free Blacks. In New York City, between 1825 and 1857, a rash of so-­called brothel riots represented, according to one historian, a “misogynist attitude toward prostitutes and women in public life.”89 Combining the push for White male egalitarianism with the rising cult of domesticity, these attacks also sent a clear message that women were to “get off the streets, stay in the home.”90 In addition to 48

male violence against women, historians have noted a nationwide uptick in White mob violence against Blacks between roughly 1820 to 1850.91 White supremacy manifested itself in other ways as well, from economic discrimination to increased calls for the removal of free Blacks to Africa.92 In Rhode Island, calls for universal White manhood suffrage meshed easily with state authorities’ desire to isolate and control the free Black community. The General Assembly forbade interracial marriage in 1789, and on the local level, Providence enacted a curfew in 1808 that applied only to Black residents.93 In 1823, the town council increased its powers of surveillance and enforcement by ordering constable Henry Alexander to conduct a census of just Providence’s Black households.94 However, despite taking some steps to ensure White political supremacy, like disenfranchising Black men in 1822, Rhode Island lagged behind other states, only easing property qualifications for White male voters after the Dorr Rebellion of 1841—­1842.95 The frustration of this desire among landless Whites for political representation probably contributed to the violence in Providence. An attempt to reapportion the state legislature had failed in the months leading up to the Hardscrabble Riot of 1824, and there were similarities between the attacks on vice in Olney’s Lane and the New York brothel riots.96 Both Providence riots can also be construed as violent demonstrations of White supremacy, assertions that Black freedom in the Early Republic did not mean equality with Whites.97 This focus of White anger on Providence’s Black community—­both at the popular and governmental level—­helps explain Jones’s fate. While the riot-

Disorderly House Keepers and the Struggle for Respectability

ers were clearly sending a message to the tenants of the buildings they destroyed, they also knew who collected the rent. Ezekiel Burr’s ownership of the brothel where the riot started was so well known that he took out a notice in a local newspaper to dispel rumors that he had given guns to his Black tenants.98 The rioters put thought into their targets, and they were organized enough to post notices advertising their actions planned for subsequent nights and collectively to resist the sheriff’s and constables’ attempts to stop them.99 While the destruction of Jones’s house in Olney’s Lane appears to prove simply that the racist association between Black women and sexual immorality trumped Jones’s individual reputation, closer inspection reveals some nuances within the views of Providence Whites concerning race. First, we do not know whether Jones’s creditors or neighbors participated in the destruction of her property. If they did, their actions indeed speak to the power of racism to turn Whites against their Black neighbors. If they did not and were instead among the many bystanders who neither raised a hand to help nor hinder the destruction, their identification with (or fear of) the rioters clearly was stronger than the connections formed with Jones over the years.

This lack of active participation in the destruction, though it did not rise to actively protecting Jones from the mob, also hints at class divisions within the White community: Jones was no threat to the middling shopkeepers who extended her credit or the wealthy members of the council who ignored her in favor of bigger problems. However, White men lower down the social scale who were angered by their political powerlessness could have perceived her as a threat. Did Jones

become a target because, in the eyes of people who did not interact with her day in and day out, she embodied their anxieties about Black women and sexuality and personified the fears surrounding Providence’s North End? Or was it because, through careful investment and savvy networking, Jones had become a well-­known and successful Black businesswoman and thus a galling reminder that the rioters were not at the top of the social and economic hierarchy?

Does Gardner’s Whiteness fully explain why the rioters left her alone? Not quite. The mob attacked plenty of buildings owned by Whites, including Gardner’s friend Staples and the luckless Burr. The simplest explanation for Gardner’s fate is that by the time the riot occurred, she no longer owned a house in Olney’s Lane. However, a major factor in her long-­term survival through all the turmoil of the 1820s and 1830s had to be, as with Jones, the strength of her relationships with respectable men like Samuel Staples Jr. and George Bowen. Partnership with wealthy White men allowed Gardner to pursue legitimate activities and imparted a veneer of respectability. Her wealth and air of respectability may have allowed the rest of the town to ignore or downplay her success as a brothel owner and how far she really deviated from the ideal of White female domesticity. Though Gardner did not always avoid the council’s scrutiny, her connections saved her sisters from removal in 1821. A mostly positive reputation and her closeness to men like Staples and Bowen does a lot to explain the council’s lack of reaction to Haskel’s letter later that year. It could also explain why, after Gardner pleaded guilty and paid her fine in 1823, the council left her alone for seven years and 49

Rhode Island History

then let her involvement with Washburn quietly drop.

The best symbol of Gardner’s success in cultivating an image of respectability was her shift from Olney’s Lane to a more reputable location on Benefit Street—­ despite continuing to operate the brothel in her old neighborhood.

The available archival evidence reveals much about the lives of Jones and Gardner and their place in local and national history, yet mysteries still remain. The greatest is the relationship between the two women.

They lived next to each other for years, but the only hint of a connection is some tantalizing evidence from the period after Jones moved to Cranston. Gardner’s partner Staples paid Jones’s bail when she was again arrested for debt in 1833, and he also extended a long-­ term loan to her when she took out the six-­year, $2,166 mortgage on her remaining Providence real estate in 1837.100 If nothing else, these fragments of evidence further confirm just how little distance there was between reputable boardinghouse keeper and disreputable brothel owner.

Despite these remaining questions, we can reconstruct a remarkably rich picture of Jones’s and Gard-

ner’s time in Providence. In a time when fears of social and sexual disorder and an ideology of White male supremacy constrained the options of free Blacks and White women, these two made a place for themselves and achieved prosperity in Providence. Part of their staying power clearly stemmed from their own financial successes as business owners and investors.

However, their relations with wealthy men also were a major factor financially, legally, and reputationally.

The stories of both women reveal how deeply complicit the wealthy and elite of Providence were in the disorder so many of them decried. However, the contrast between Gardner’s long-­term, successful operation of a brothel and Jones’s eventual departure from Providence also reveals the power of racist associations among Blackness, sexual disorder, and the town’s northern neighborhoods to negate any attempts to attain social respectability. Rosanna Jones and Susan Parr Gardner were unique individuals, but studying their lives reveals a struggle to stay on the right side of the boundary between order and disorder shared by poor and marginal residents in cities up and down nineteenth-­century America’s Atlantic seaboard.

Notes 1. In this article, I use the term “Black” when referring to Providence residents of African descent. The few exceptions are when the records refer to someone as a “person of color,” which by the nineteenth century was a catch-­all term that authorities used for any non-­White person. Since “of color” could imply Native American or African descent, I do not assume such persons identified as Black. For in-­depth analyses of racial categorization in Rhode

50

Island history, see John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 9; and Christy Clark-­Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 160–161 n8.

2. See Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwanted Americans: Living on the Margins in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Penn-

Disorderly House Keepers and the Struggle for Respectability

sylvania Press, 2001) and Elaine Forman Crane, Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), both of which draw heavily on records from Rhode Island.

States, 1800: Rhode Island, vol. 1, Bristol, Providence Town and Washington Counties (Washington, DC, 1954), RIHS microfilm collection.

3. Recorder of Deeds, 40:78, 43:169, 44:296, Providence City Archives. I also wish to thank the members of the Research Team of the Snowtown Project, recently begun by the Rhode Island State House Restoration Committee, for sharing their research into the precise locations of the neighborhoods in northern Providence.

17. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 206–209; cf. Clark-­Pujara, Dark Work, 70–76.

4. Deeds, 47:144, 56:259.

19. Bolster, Black Jacks, 75–77, 159–170.

5. Deeds, 41:38, 44:344, 351.

20. My thanks again to the Snowtown Project Research Team for providing this information.

6. Deeds, 41:302.

7. US Census Bureau, Population Schedules of the Fourth Census of the United States, Rhode Island, vol. 3, Providence Co. (Washington, DC, 1956); US Census Bureau, Fifth Census of the United States, 1830: Population Schedules, Rhode Island, vol. 2, Providence and Washington Counties (Washington, DC, 1949), both in the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS) microfilm collection.

8. Providence Town Council Records, 11:279, Providence City Archives.

9. Town Council Records, 11:515–­516, 525, 528.

10. Town Council Records, 12:113.

11. Federal Census of 1820; Federal Census of 1830.

12. Town Council Records, 12:324–­325.

13. Providence Town Papers, 111 doc. #0038544, RIHS MSS 214 sg 1; Edward [Edwin] C. Larned and William Knowles, The Trial of John Gordon and William Gordon, charged with the Murder of Amasa Sprague, Before the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, March Term 1844 (Providence: Sidney S. Rider, 1884), 43–47.

14. Town Papers, 103 doc. #0033879.

15. John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, vol. 7, 1770–1776 (Providence: A. C. Greene and Brothers, 1862), 299; US Census Bureau, Population Schedules of the Second Census of the United

16. Federal Census of 1820; Federal Census of 1830.

18. Clark-­Pujara, Dark Work, 46–55; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 27–28.

21. William J. Brown, The Life of William J. Brown of Providence, R. I. with Personal Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island (1883), in From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New England, ed. Robert J. Cottrol (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 124.

22. Town Council Records, 8:71; Providence County Court of Common Pleas and General Sessions of the Peace Records, 31:175, John Howland v. Eliza Granger, May 1830, Rhode Island Supreme Court Judicial Records Center; these record books contain summaries of court cases and are cited when original trial documents are unavailable.

23. The Public Laws of the State of Rhode-­Island and Providence Plantations (Providence: Carter and Wilkinson, 1798), 612–613.

24. Town Papers, 6 doc. #2746.

25. Town Council Records, 8:258.

26. Town Council Records, 8:28.

27. On colonial women’s economic activities, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 36–50; Lisa Norling, “‘How Frought With Sorrow and Heartpangs’: Mariners’ Wives and the Ideology of Domesticity in New England, 1790–1880,” New England Quarterly 65 (September 1992): 42–429; and Sara T. Damiano, “Agents at

51

Rhode Island History

Home: Wives, Lawyers, and Financial Competence in Eighteenth-­ Century New England Port Cities,” Early American Studies 4 (Fall 2015): 808–835; on the ideology of separate spheres, see Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), and Carroll Smith-­Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America,” Signs 1 (Autumn 1975): 1–29.

28. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987) 46–54, 73–75; cf. Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 21–30.

41. Deposition of Richard Johnson, State of Rhode Island v. Richard Johnson and Augustus Williams, Albert C. Greene Papers, RIHS. 42. “Committee’s Report,” Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 30, 1831; see also Joseph Sullivan, “Reconstructing the Olney’s Lane Riot: Another Look at Race and Class in Jacksonian Rhode Island,” Rhode Island History 65, no. 7 (2007): 52–54.

43. “Committee’s Report,” Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 30, 1831.

44. “Riot,” The Providence Daily Journal, September 26, 1831.

45. Howard P. Chudacoff and Theodore C. Hirt, “Social Turmoil and Governmental Reform in Providence, 1820–1832,” Rhode Island History 31, no. 1 (1971), 20–33.

29. Wendy Gamber, “Tarnished Labor: The Home, The Market, and The Boardinghouse in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (Summer 2002): 194–196.

46. Providence County Court Records, 25:253–254, State of Rhode Island v. Rosanna Jones, December 1823; State of Rhode Island v.

Susan Parr, December 1823.

30. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 2.

47. The Public Laws of the State of Rhode-­Island and Providence Plantations (Providence: Miller and Hutchins, 1822), 271–279; cf. Clare A. Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 339–340; Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 223.

31. Melish, Disowning Slavery, 2–3, 37–41; Sweet, Bodies Politic, 9–11; Robert J. Cottrol, The Afro-­Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 147–151.

32. Town Papers, 52 doc. #005553.

33. Town Papers, 52 doc. #005539.

34. Melish, Disowning Slavery, 30–31, 122–123.

35. Calculated from Town Council Records, vols. 8–12.

48. Town Papers, 109 doc. #0038069.

49. Town Council Records, 10:485.

50. Town Council Records, 10:481–500.

36. Town Papers, 93 doc. #0027950.

51. “Committee’s Report,” Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 30, 1831.

37. Town Papers, 111 docs. #0038544 and #0038546.

52. Sullivan, “Olney’s Lane Riot,” 54.

38. Town Papers, 112 doc. #0039147.

53. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 359–360.

39. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 353–356.

54. Providence County Court Records, 25:253, State v. Jones.

40. Stansell, City of Women, 175, 187; Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13–17.

55. Public Laws [1822], 278.

56. Public Laws [1822], 271–272.

57. Deeds, 44:248, 267, 344, 351.

52

Disorderly House Keepers and the Struggle for Respectability

58. Deeds, 44:92; Town Council Records, 11:232.

67. Deeds, 168:28; 171:191.

59. Deeds, 71:214.

68. The Providence Directory, Containing the Names of the Inhabitants, Their Occupations, Places of Business and Dwelling-­Houses, with Lists of the Streets, Lanes, Wharves, &c. (Providence: Brown and Danforth, 1824), 38.

60. Of these nine cases, files exist for five of them: Providence County Court of Common Pleas, Philip W. Martin v. Rosannah Jones, May 1824; Charles Hadwin v. Rosanna Jones, May 1827; George R. A. Olney and Caleb Mosher Jr. v. Rosannah Jones, November 1827; Moses Baker v. Rosanna Jones, May 1831; William Dinneford v. Rosanna Jones, May 1833. For the rest, see Providence County Court Records, 31:31, John Pellion & John B. Dexter v.

Rosanna Jones, May 1830; 31:536, John Paine, Daniel Burgess, and Philip Case v. Rosannah Jones, November 1830; 31:565, Asa Pierce and Walter Paine Jr. v. Rosanna Jones, November 1830; 35:285, Parks & Lippitt v. Rosanna Jones, December 1837.

69. Providence Directory [1828], 91; William R. Staples, Annals of the Town of Providence: From Its First Settlement to the Organization of the City Government (Providence: Knowles and Vose, 1843).

70. Deeds, 41:244; 59:74.

71. Town Council Records 10:485, 500.

72. Town Council Records, 11:185–186.

73. Larned and Knowles, Trial, 44.

61. Court of Common Pleas, Hadwin v. Jones; Baker v. Jones.

74. Town Council Records, 12:324–325.

62. The Providence Directory, Containing the Names of the Inhabitants, Their Occupations, Places of Business and Dwelling-­Houses, with Lists of the Streets, Lanes, Wharves, &c. (Providence: Carlile and Brown, 1826) 59; The Providence Directory, Containing the Names of the Inhabitants, Their Occupations, Places of Business and Dwelling-­Houses, with Lists of the Streets, Lanes, Wharves, &c.

(Providence: H. H. Brown, 1828), 74, all directories from RIHS collection; Court of Common Pleas, Olney and Mosher. v. Jones.

75. “Committee’s Report,” Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 30, 1831.

63. Court of Common Pleas, Paine, Burgess, and Case v. Jones; Dinneford v. Jones; William Dinneford sued Jones on behalf of a third lottery brokerage, E. W. Clark and Bro., run by Enoch and Joseph Clark.

64. Providence Directory [1828], 25, 31; The Providence Directory, Containing the Names of the Inhabitants, Their Occupations, Places of Business and Dwelling-­Houses, with Lists of the Streets, Lanes, Wharves, &c. (Providence: H. H. Brown, 1830), 39, 62, 57, 103; The Providence Directory, Containing the Names of the Inhabitants, Their Occupations, Places of Business and Dwelling-­Houses, with Lists of the Streets, Lanes, Wharves, &c. (Providence: H. H. Brown, 1832), 47.

76. Town Council Records, 12:5.

77. Town Papers, 111 doc. #0038544.

78. Cf. Toby Ditz, “Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-­Century Philadelphia,” The Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (1994): 51–80.

79. Brown, Life of Brown, 123.

80. Town Papers, 47 doc. #003265.

81. Deeds, 44:267; Town Council Records, 10:428.

82. Deeds, 44:77; 62:71; The Providence Directory, Containing the Names of the Inhabitants, Their Occupations, Places of Business and Dwelling-­Houses, with Lists of the Streets, Lanes, Wharves, &c.

(Providence: H. H. Brown, 1836], 20.

83. “Committee’s Report,” Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 30, 1831.

65. Town Council Records, 11:415.

84. “Another Riot,” Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 27, 1831.

66. Court of Common Pleas, Dinneford v. Jones; Providence County Court Records, 35:285 Parks & Lippitt v. Jones.

85. Deeds, 92:38.

53

Rhode Island History

86. Deeds, 101:119.

87. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, 11–27.

88. Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 309–311, 321–392.

89. Timothy Gilfoyle, “Strumpets and Misogynists: Brothel ‘Riots’ and the Transformation of Prostitution in Antebellum New York City,” New York History 68, no. 1 (1987): 65.

90. Gilfoyle, “Brothel Riots,” 58.

91. See John M. Werner, Reaping the Bloody Harvest: Race Riots in the United States during the Age of Jackson, 1824–1849 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1986); cf. Melish, Disowning Slavery, 201–204.

92. Rockman, Scraping By, 246–252; Sweet, Bodies Politic, 349–352.

93. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 371.

54

94. Town Council Records, 10:601; see also Town Papers, 112 doc. #0039155.

95. Patrick T. Conley, Democracy in Decline: Rhode Island’s Constitutional Development, 1776–1841 (Providence: RIHS, 1977), 290–371.

96. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 361–364; Sullivan, “Olney’s Lane Riot,” 51.

97. Sullivan, “Olney’s Lane Riot,” 51, 53; Clark-­Pujara, Dark Work, 109.

98. “To the Public,” Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 27, 1831.

99. “Committee’s Report,” Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 30, 1831; the Hardscrabble Riot was similarly well-­ organized, see Sweet, Bodies Politic, 353–354.

100. Providence County Court Records, Dinneford v. Jones, May 1833; Deeds, 71:214.

PATRICIA RAUB

“A Bewildering Variety” The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

In 1753, eighty-­six “prominent citizens” in the town of Providence agreed to contribute twenty-­five pounds or more toward the purchase of a collection of books to be borrowed among them.1 Among this group of men were Stephen Hopkins, later a Rhode Island governor, a Superior Court chief justice, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence; and several members of the Brown family, the leading merchants in Providence.

Other public officials, merchants, and early manufacturers joined the Browns and Hopkins as founding members of the Providence Library Company.2 They ordered books from London that arrived the following year and were housed in the Town House council chamber on what is now Meeting Street.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the Providence Library Company is that it was founded at all. In 1753, the year of its formation, Providence had a population of only about 3,000 people—­less than half the number of Newport residents.3 By the mid-­eighteenth century, Providence’s wealthy neighbor to the south had become a cultural center, supported by a thriving trade in rum, molasses, slaves, and privateering. While Newport ranked with New York and Boston as one of the “commercial leaders of the New World,” Providence remained a provincial backwater.4 Nevertheless, Providence, too, had its successful merchants engaged in much the same activities as were those in Newport.

These men supported the formation of the Providence Library Company, which began less than a decade after Newport’s Redwood Library was formed and lasted for more than eight decades, surviving a fire and relocating several times. It shared its books not only among the shareholders, or proprietors, but also free of charge

to Protestant ministers, members of the Rhode Island General Assembly, and, for a time, the officers and students at Rhode Island College, now Brown University, “until a library could be procured sufficient for that respectable establishment.”5 Like most libraries begun prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, the Providence Library Company was not a public library as we know it today, although at the time it often was referred to as such.

Instead, it was a social library, funded and operated by “a voluntary association of individuals who had contributed money toward a common fund to be used for the purchase of books.”6 Library historian Jesse Shera divides social libraries into two main groups: the “proprietary library,” in which one bought shares in the property of the group, and the “subscription library,” in which one paid an annual fee for the privilege of borrowing books from the collection. The Providence Library Company was an example of a proprietary library: with the exceptions of those persons listed above, no one had borrowing privileges unless they had paid to become shareholders, or proprietors.

The Providence Library Company was incorporated by the State of Rhode Island in 1798, a half century after Newport’s Redwood Library was granted this status. Incorporation gave the organization the legal right to charge members for overdue books, tax shareholders, permit the selling or transfer of library shares, provide a salary to the librarian, and confer “such further powers as might be necessary to carry into effect the purposes of the company. . .”7 State governments at first passed specific acts of incorporation with provisions tailored for each library. However, as social 55

Rhode Island History

Butler Exchange Building, ca. 1915. The first quarters of the Providence Public Library were on the second floor facing Exchange Place from 1878–1880. RIHS collection RHiX39412.

libraries increased in number by the early nineteenth century, New England states enacted more streamlined legislation setting forth general provisions that could apply to any library, with Rhode Island the last to do so in 1839.8

Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers, which offered a library and reading room beginning in the 1820s. In 1831, John Russell Bartlett, then a bookkeeper and cashier in Cyrus Butler’s Bank of America—­no relation to today’s financial corporation of the same name—­took the lead in founding a new library, the Providence Athenaeum, leasing two rooms in Butler’s new Arcade building.11 It did not take long for the founders to realize that Providence could not support two libraries so similar in nature, and by 1832, members of a series of the Providence Library Company committees began to meet with their counterparts from the newly formed Providence Athenaeum to discuss a merger. Among those active in these negotiations were industrialist Zachariah Allen Jr., members of the Brown and Ives families, Butler, and the ever-­energetic Bartlett, but they were unable to reach agreement. Instead, the two library corporations dissolved, and on January 25, 1836, “a public meeting of citizens generally and of the proprietors of the Providence Library and the Athenaeum companies in particular” formed a new library.12 They applied to the General Assembly for a charter, which was granted that year, and the shareholders purchased the books of the two older library companies. The newly incorporated library was known simply as The Athenaeum until 1850, when it was renamed the Providence Athenaeum.

While the library initially was located in the Arcade, members soon were able to erect an imposing Greek Revival structure at Benefit and College Streets.

By 1836, Providence was a very different place than it had been when the Providence Library Company opened in 1753. The British blockade of New-

Social Libraries and the Expansion of Public Literacy Early social libraries such as the Providence Library Company assembled general collections, filling the shelves with works providing “‘useful knowledge’ and ‘virtue’” and eschewing books that offered only “light amusement.”9 Many libraries printed catalogues of their holdings from time to time, and these lists indicate that such libraries primarily purchased history and biography, geography and travel, science, serious literature, and religion—­with religious books frequently staying on the shelves rather than borrowed.

While libraries avoided popular novels well into the nineteenth century, librarians eventually would feel compelled to offer such books to compete with the growing popularity of for-­profit circulation libraries.10 Like many proprietary libraries of the day, the Providence Library Company could not sustain its early momentum. Membership declined, and, with it, income from the sale of shares. Likewise, yearly membership fees dwindled. Consequently, the library was unable to maintain its stock of books, resulting in a further drop in membership. While the Providence Library Company had attracted master craftsmen in addition to merchants and professional men in its early years, many artisans shifted their membership to the 56

port during the Revolution had wreaked havoc upon that town’s economy, and, although Providence also suffered economically from the war, it had nevertheless been able to take advantage of its sister town’s ill fortunes. Maritime trade had expanded, including the lucrative China trade; industry was on the rise; the financial sector was growing; and population was increasing rapidly. While the business center of Providence was clustered around Market Square on the East Side of town, it was beginning its shift west of the Providence River, as symbolized by the completion of the Arcade in 1828. And in 1832, four years before the Athenaeum’s incorporation, the town of Providence was incorporated as a city.

Unlike the Providence Library Company, the Providence Athenaeum grew and prospered over the next seventy-­five years, increasing its number of shareholders from 293 in 1836 to 1,000 in 1911, its book holdings from 4,162 to 75,000 volumes, and its endowment from $5,000 to $51,669.13 Women often visited the Athenaeum, and female readers borrowed a substantial proportion of the library’s books. By 1861, women made up more than fifty percent of the library’s users.

By that time, about ten percent of the shareholders as well were women.14 The Providence Athenaeum has continued to make adjustments as times change, retaining its place in the cultural life of the city up to the present day.

57

Rhode Island History

Libraries and More Libraries The Providence Library Company and the Providence Athenaeum were not the only libraries in the city prior to February 4, 1878, the date on which the Providence Public Library began operations in the Butler Exchange Building in downtown Providence.

According to print-­culture scholar Ronald J. Zboray, there was a “bewildering variety” of libraries in Providence during these years, as there was throughout much of the United States, and the number of libraries here and elsewhere grew rapidly after the Revolutionary War era.15 There were only four social libraries in all of Rhode Island in the half century from 1731 to 1780, counting the Providence Library Company; an astounding 63 opened in the state between 1776 and 1850, and many of them in Providence.16 What precipitated the flourishing of libraries at this time? Library historians point to several factors. Apart from several economic downturns, this was a period of prosperity and growth. The country was expanding and, with it, the market for manufactured goods produced in Providence and its environs, enriching many merchants, industrialists, and professional men who had the financial resources to found and sustain social libraries, while their younger counterparts had sufficient disposable income to pay the dues or other fees to use the reading rooms and libraries.

In eighteenth-­century New England, “as in England, press runs were small, prices high, and distribution a matter of catch-­as-­catch-­can.”17 Printers focused on a limited number of steady sellers that didn’t vary much from one year to the next, with the Bible at the top of the list. Households typically owned only a few 58

books besides the Bible, and people read and reread them until they could recite many passages by heart.18 By the first part of the nineteenth century, however, improvements in technology led to books and newspapers being produced in more abundance and in the expansion and greater efficiency of distribution networks. With more reading material available, readers spent less time poring over the same household texts again and again, and the production of steady sellers dwindled by the 1830s.19 Instead, the rising popularity of novels and newspapers ushered in a different style of literacy, one characterized by an emphasis upon the new, where “people moved ‘hastily’ from one day’s paper to the next, and from one novel to another.”20 Instead of purchasing a handful of books for their own use, readers borrowed or rented a succession of books from the various libraries available to them and frequented reading rooms to consult the latest newspapers and magazines.21 The proliferation of libraries also presupposes widespread literacy. While statistical evidence of literacy is not definitive, as people self-­reported their ability to read and write when asked by census takers,22 the data nevertheless points to widespread ability to read and write by 1850, even when taking into account the lower rates among immigrants and Blacks.23 Many scholars have asserted that most native-­born White New Englanders, both men and women, were literate by the mid-­eighteenth century.24 Although children primarily were taught to read by their parents throughout most of the colonial era, the responsibility had shifted to schools by the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1800, Providence had four schoolhouses; by 1871, there

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

were more than fifty, including a high school, as well as several private schools, evening schools, and, starting in 1871, summer or “vacation” schools.25 Sunday schools taught reading and writing early in the century but focused more heavily on religious instruction once public schools were available to teach these basic skills.26 However, as we shall see later, Sunday schools throughout the city provided libraries whose collections often rivaled most social libraries in number of volumes.

Scholars also point to prevailing beliefs in republicanism, progress, and self-­improvement in accounting for the increase in library formation at this time.

The successful outcome of the Revolutionary War, the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and establishment of a new government, the expansion to the west made possible by the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, and the triumphant conclusion of the War of 1812 reinforced a belief in progress and a faith in republicanism. Americans regarded reading, education, and libraries as essential to public and individual welfare. The supporters of social libraries believed that “reading was a fundamental good. For one thing, it provided the basis for an informed, self-­reliant citizenry, capable of defending its rights.” It also was “the key to social mobility.”27 Many young men were attracted to reading to attain “useful knowledge” that would contribute to their self-­improvement.28 Furthermore, as the century wore on, libraries increasingly would be regarded by many as a wholesome alternative to less reputable environs. Young men who spent their leisure in the respectable confines of a library were diverted from wasting their time in saloons and pool halls, activi-

ties frowned upon by middle-­class citizenry, especially their employers.

Clarence E. Sherman, librarian of the Providence Public Library from 1930 to 1957, states that in the nineteenth century in addition to several private library collections “notable in size and also as to intrinsic value” as well as more modest household collections of books purchased in the city’s bookshops, dozens of social libraries and reading rooms were opened during this period. In every case, Sherman notes, these collections were “neither public nor free.”29 We will be tracing the development of those libraries that were not purely private in nature, which can loosely be defined as social libraries.30 While some libraries—­such as the Providence Library Company and the Providence Athenaeum—­were founded by men for the specific purpose of acquiring books to share among their members, many of Providence’s libraries prior to the opening of the Providence Public Library in 1878 were maintained as a supplementary benefit for members of professional societies and occupational groups. Others were provided by philanthropic or religious associations; by organizations seeking to broaden members’ cultural, educational, and professional horizons through lectures and debates; and by factory owners for the use of their workers. Many lasted for decades, while others appeared and then disappeared much more rapidly.

Most of these libraries had general collections of books, but others were narrower in scope, particularly those associated with organizations by and for men in specific professions or with specialized interests. The Rhode Island Medical Society was founded in 1812 59

Rhode Island History

by Amos Throop, “Providence’s first male obstetrician” and a three-­term member of the Rhode Island General Assembly.31 The Rhode Island Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Industry, chartered in 1820, maintained a modest collection of donated periodicals, government reports, and other books relating to its membership of farmers and fishermen.32 Two years later, John Howland, an early advocate of public schools, was the driving force behind the founding of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Access to the Providence Bar Library, which opened in 1833, was “confined to gentlemen of the legal profession”33 and stocked its shelves accordingly, while the Rhode Island Horticultural Society, incorporated in 1840, had on hand a small library of books on garden cultivation and management.34 In 1850, women’s rights advocate Paulina Davis began the Providence Physiological Society, with a library offering members “nearly or quite one hundred well-­selected volumes, with a neat bookcase.”

Many of the health-­related books in this collection were donated by area physicians.35 The Rhode Island Dental Society, formed in 1878, offered a library of current books of specific interest to its members, while the Engineers Association of Rhode Island, organized the following year, could boast a “well-­selected library of mechanical and scientific works.”36 As was the case in most cities, only a few of these early organizations had library buildings of their own. Most facilities were rented rooms, or materials were kept the home of the society’s librarian.37 Among the earliest social libraries were those founded by young men for their own edification. In his doctoral dissertation submitted to the Depart60

ment of History at the University of Chicago, Thomas S. Harding notes, “In the history of almost every college, even the most poverty-­stricken and primitive, two rival literary societies sprang up almost as soon as the first classes began.”38 These societies were primarily debating societies, and they began to collect books as background material for debates. At Brown University, students founded the United Brothers’ Society and the Philermerian Society, with libraries containing approximately 4,000 volumes each by the mid-­nineteenth century.39 While the size of these collections by this time was considerably smaller than that of the university’s official library, which numbered 23,000 volumes by 1848, such had not been the case only fifteen years earlier when the college library’s holdings were only “slightly larger” than those of the two societies.40 According to Harding, student literary organizations established their own libraries in the late-­eighteenth and first few decades of the nineteenth century because the college libraries typically were small, difficult to access, and excluded contemporary works, thus making it nearly impossible for students to use these libraries as a resource in preparing for the debates that were the main activity of these societies.41 These college literary societies were not the only Providence organizations providing members with debating experience supported by book collections.

The Franklin Society was founded in 1823 “to cultivate and disseminate scientific knowledge by means of lectures and discussions” and offered members a small library of scientific works. A similar organization was the Franklin Lyceum, formed in 1831 as the Providence Lyceum (its name changed in 1832) and

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

Franklin Lyceum Building, ca. 1904 on Westminster Street, demolished in 1926. RIHS collection RHiX35876.

incorporated about a decade later. Founded by students of G. A. DeWitt, who ran a small private school on Waterman Street, the Franklin Lyceum was typical of many similar “Societies for Mutual Education” that opened in the antebellum period. Members paid an initiation or admission fee and yearly taxes; in the 1860s, the admission fee was two dollars, and the annual assessment was three dollars.42 It held weekly debates and sponsored an annual public lecture series in Lyceum Hall at 19 Westminster Street that attracted large audiences who paid admission to hear prominent speakers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Daniel Webster, Henry Ward Beecher, and Sam Houston.

A star of the lecture circuit was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who delivered the first in a series of lectures on “Human Life” “to a large and respectable audience, whose silent attention attested their deep interest.”43

As Shera notes, “The lyceum, like the school, was book centered,” and most lyceums established libraries for the “continuous study and reading of the members.”44 Franklin Lyceum was no exception. By the 1860s, it had more than 700 members, both male and female, and a library of nearly 4,000 volumes.45 According to its 1857 catalogue, members could borrow books on geography and travel, history and biography, science and medicine, law and mathematics, poetry and literature, and contemporary novels—­including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jane Eyre, and Moby Dick. In addition, it offered periodicals such as The Knickerbocker and Illustrated London News.46 Although its collection had grown to 6,775 by 1890, the organization had declined in popularity by then, and it sold its furniture and books to the new Providence Public Library.47 “The Lyceum has served a useful purpose,” according to one contemporary writer, “in fitting young men for public life, its discipline in parliamentary practice alone being of sufficient value to enlist many young men in its membership.”48

Libraries for Workers The Franklin Lyceum was founded by upwardly mobile young men who utilized the knowledge and rhetorical skills they acquired as members of the Lyceum to establish successful careers. Those who established this organization included a future U.S. Army surgeon, minister, physician, manufacturer, and secretary of the U.S. Treasury.49 The Franklin Lyceum can be categorized as a “mercantile library,” defined as being for the use of merchants’ clerks, salesmen, bank tellers, and 61

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bookkeepers; in contrast, the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers, established in 1789 and first opening at 19 Market Square, primarily was for tradesmen, artisans, and their apprentices.50 As its name suggests, the association attracted mechanics, or, in today’s parlance, “artisans,” as well as “manufacturers,” which also had a different meaning when the organization was formed than it does today. In the eighteenth century, a “manufacturer” referred to an “artisan, a craftsperson; a worker in a factory or workshop,”51 the latter employing only a handful of workers in the late-­eighteenth century. The members of this organization “shared a common identity as small-­scale producers operating in a town dominated economically by a coterie of merchant princes and in a state dominated politically by a multitude of farmers. By banding together, the members hoped to affirm their social worth, provide mutual assistance in times of need, and gain leverage over public policy.”52 According to an 1853 newspaper notice, members paid $2.50 in dues annually, as well as a reduced fee for the various courses offered.53 Members honed their public speaking skills by discussing “matters of mutual interest and concern.”54 It was Henry Cushing, who had formerly operated a circulating library and currently sold wallpaper at his Westminster Street shop, who introduced the motion at the association’s January 8, 1821 meeting to establish a library for the use of members and their apprentices. The vote was carried unanimously, and the library began operation the same year. Subsequently the association also opened a reading room.55 The library attracted ambitious artisans and trades62

men of limited means as it was “broader in scope, less exclusive, and cheaper than the proprietary libraries” such as the Providence Library Company, the principal alternative at the time.56 It grew rapidly, with a collection of 1,000 books by 1832,57 increasing to 3,500 volumes by 185358 and swelling to 6,000 volumes when the organization ultimately transferred its library holdings to the Providence Public Library in 1877.59 The association was explicit about the advantages for young men as members of the organization. One 1847 newspaper advertisement for the “Mechanics and Apprentices Library” noted that time spent among the association’s books would be highly beneficial to readers, as it “may ultimately raise them to the highest posts of respectability and usefulness.” As proof, the advertisement pointed to a bookbinder’s apprentice in New Hampshire who recently had risen to judicial office in Maine. It seems that the “secret of his success is, that he devoted that leisure to books, which most young men give to frivolous or criminal amusement.” 60 One might observe that it was this American dream with its ideology of material and social success that had inspired Benjamin Franklin in 1727 to form the Junto, the organization upon which subsequent social libraries were loosely based, especially mechanics and mercantile libraries such as those associated with the Franklin Lyceum and the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers. In fact, many social libraries underscored their connection to Franklin through their names, such as Providence’s Franklin Society and Franklin Lyceum.

Library supporters also claimed that employers utilized these libraries as “reference bureaus,” turning to

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

working men’s libraries such as those maintained by the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers and the Franklin Lyceum to determine whether to hire or promote an employee.61 Library membership provided useful—­if dubious—­evidence of a prospective employee’s probable worth on the job, as “‘none who are frequenters of the dram-­shop, none who seek the society of the vicious and profane, and few, if any, who are devoted to the theatre’” were likely to be found among those furthering their knowledge among the books and periodicals provided in these libraries.62 In addition to those organizations established early on by members of various working groups themselves, other libraries available to workers could be found by the late-­nineteenth century in the many large factories in New England industrial centers. A notable early example was the one established by Pacific Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In his 1876 overview of libraries in manufacturing communities, William I. Fletcher, who later would serve as president of the American Library Association, commented approvingly, “No one familiar with the workings of this great mill can fail to see the benefit of the library in cultivating among the operatives literary tastes and ambitions, and an esprit du corps of great value to all the interests of the corporation.”63 Several factory owners in the Providence area also provided libraries for their employees. King’s Pocketbook of Providence (1882) points to the Woonasquatucket Library at Atwells and Harris Avenues, which was the property of the Richmond Manufacturing Company and offered operatives “a collection of over 1,600 well-­

selected vols., and a reading-­room supplied with the leading periodicals.” The company extended library privileges to neighborhood residents, although it reserved the right to forbid its use by “objectionable persons.”64 A library also was available at the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company on Promenade Street, “free of charge, to all persons connected with the Works.”65 A rough estimate of the size of the holdings based upon the library’s printed catalogue from 1882 indicates that employees could choose among approximately 1,000 to 1,400 books to select the one volume they were entitled to borrow for two weeks.66 The collection included books with general appeal, such as travel, biography, history, science, self-­help, literature, and popular novels, as well as more specialized works on engineering and mechanics tailored to the firm’s machine-­ tool trade. It appears that workers were encouraged to bring books home for the rest of the family, as, for instance, the collection included the popular Rollo children’s books by Jacob Abbott, who authored the first series of popular children’s books in the United States with a child as the main character.67 And for female readers, the collection included Live, and Let Live; or, Domestic Service Illustrated by novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novels; Why Not? A Book for Every Woman by Horatio R. Storer, M.D., and similar books.68 Yet another manufacturing company providing reading material for its operatives was the Wanskuck Company, a woolen manufacturer on the outskirts of Providence. In the late 1870s, the company built Wanskuck Hall across from the main factory complex on 63

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Branch Avenue as a multifunction space for the use of factory employees, and the wife of mill co-­owner Jesse Metcalf invited the nearby Roger Williams Baptist Church to hold its Sunday school classes in the building since the classes had outgrown their home in the chapel.69 In 1903, the factory opened a library in Wanskuck Hall for mill workers.70 The collection remained small; by the time the company turned the library and its contents over to the Providence Public Library in 1910 as its second neighborhood branch, its collection totaled 1,117 volumes. The branch library stayed in Wanskuck Hall until it moved in 1928 into a new purpose-­built home around the corner on Veazie Street.71

Libraries for Moral Improvement Still other nineteenth-­century libraries were associated with organizations aiming to improve society.

The Second Great Awakening ushered in the temperance, women’s rights, and abolitionist movements, and organizations were formed to achieve their goals.

The founders of these organizations were mostly Protestant, middle-­class men. Temperance was the cause around which many reformers initially mobilized, spearheaded by the Baptist and Congregational churches. In 1830, the Providence Association for the Promotion of Temperance was the first temperance organization in the city and was joined by several more before the end of the decade. Alongside the temperance movement, abolitionists also marshaled their forces, forming Providence’s Anti-­Slavery Society in 1833 and founding other associations soon afterward.72 64

The mission of the Providence’s Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), begun in 1853 at 56 Broad Street, was a charitable one, informed by its Christian identity. It aimed to “promote the social, mental, and moral good of young men who come to the city as strangers, to seek them out, introduce them to suitable companions, open to them a pleasant Reading Room and a well-­furnished library, aid them in getting accommodations in suitable boarding houses or families, and also in obtaining seats in such churches as they wish to attend.”73 Furthermore, it sought to remove young men from the temptations of liquor.

As the Providence Daily Journal noted in an 1886 article, “There are in the city about six hundred places where liquor is sold . . . Licentiousness is rife amongst them, and the streets of the city too often of an evening are scenes of temptation and schools of vice.”74 The YMCA provided a counterbalance to these pernicious forces for its more than 1,000 members who had access to its 4,000-­volume library,75 reading room, gymnasium, lecture hall, and parlor by the early 1880s.

Members could take classes in literature, music, and photography as well as in relevant job skills such as elocution and penmanship. Religious services and temperance meetings, lectures, musical programs, and other entertainments were available. Those young men in need of suitable accommodation could consult the YMCA’s list of available rooms with private families.76 While women (“ladies”) as well as men were admitted as members upon payment of the annual fee of one dollar, a government study of YMCA libraries across the country in 1876 found that YMCAs “were almost wholly composed of young men, the majority

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

of whom are clerks and artisans,”77 and most directed their attention primarily toward young middle-­class men, while “little was offered for the young factory and industrial worker.”78 After several decades of operating out of rented rooms, Providence “gentlemen prominent in business and professional circles” met in 1886 to discuss the building of a permanent home for the city’s YMCA. They emphasized the need to provide for the welfare of the growing number of young men in the city, who were the “least cared for and the most exposed to temptation.” Providence needed a permanent place “to meet the wants of the ever-­increasing number of young men in the city.” Erecting such a building would not only benefit the young men themselves but also would be “of great importance to the employer,” as young men living in dismal lodgings and attracted to the temptations of the streets were a threat to sound business operations. In addition to the lure of the city’s saloons, these gentlemen warned, “Many a young bank clerk has found it convenient to alter his balance at the end of the night to secure funds to pay a gambling debt.”79 The Providence YMCA did, in fact, construct a new building, which opened in 1890 one block east of Grace Church on Westminster Street. As in its earlier location, the organization again included a library and reading room.80 As the YMCA was an evangelical organization, its libraries included Bibles and other religious books on their shelves, but librarians were advised to avoid acquiring too many with “pietistic” themes. “Do not be misled with the idea that because yours is a Christian Association, therefore all your books should be

religious,” counseled Cephas Brainerd, chairman of the YMCA’s Executive Committee, in 1881.81 An overabundance of such books was likely to turn young men away. Even though the library’s priority was to support the Bible-­study classes offered, it also was important to offer books on business that would help young men get ahead in their work. In addition, the library should provide basic reference books, as well as books of general interest to readers—­works on government, politics and law, biography and history, travel, the arts and sciences, literature, and some judiciously chosen novels.82 While the YMCA provided for the welfare of young men, a sister organization ministering to young women was founded in the early 1880s and incorporated in 1887. Providence’s Young Women’s Christian Temperance Union was an affiliate of the city’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), itself part of a worldwide organization with chapters primarily in North America. The WCTU chapters had a membership of about 150,000 by 1892, with 50,000 young women in its auxiliary programs.83 Providence’s branch of the WCTU was one of several Christian women’s organizations in the city in the second half of the nineteenth century.84 The group recognized a need in the city to provide a respectable location where working women could spend their lunch hour eating and relaxing, sheltered from “corrupting influences,” particularly the temptations exerted by city establishments serving liquor.85 Therefore, the WCTU formed the Young Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and this auxiliary group opened the Young Women’s Tea Room in 1883 behind the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul then under construction.

65

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The tea room was intended to provide inexpensive, wholesome lunches in pleasant surroundings for the city’s female workers. Although union members’ primary motivation had been to reform those “bad girls” who already had been drawn to the liquid temptations of the streets, it turned out that few of these women crossed the tea room’s threshold; instead, “a nicer class” of shopgirls and bookkeepers was attracted to the establishment, and they became the primary clientele of the new facility. Having finished a reasonably priced dinner of meat and potatoes, coffee or tea, and a piece of pie, the women spent the rest of their lunch hour resting in rocking chairs, chatting, and perusing the assortment of newspapers and magazines, as well as temperance literature. Gradually, the union provided more books as well: One journalist reported in 1889 that a “cosy [sic] little library, daintily furnished, has supplanted the two or three little bookcases on the wall, and a librarian’s services are now in demand to supply its patrons with literature at the price of 3 cents a volume.”86 The following year, the Providence Daily Journal noted that the library held about 500 volumes, “varied in character, yet all instructive.”87 Members of the Union for Christian Work, organized in 1868 by representatives of the ”higher social and intellectual class” of the city, committed themselves to the organization’s “self-­imposed mission of benefiting and helping the boys and girls of the streets, and in other ways extending the influence of Christian charity”88 by delivering donated fruit and flowers to the sick, aged, or poverty-­stricken and by providing health outings for invalids.89 To supplement its education-­outreach goals, the organization opened a 66

library and reading room; over time, the library’s holdings increased from approximately 700 volumes in 1868 to 3,000 by the early 1880s, the result of steady purchases and book donations from members and others.90 The library and reading room offered “books, games, and kind influences” to street boys on weekday and Saturday nights during the winter, and the union also maintained “three branch-­rooms for this purpose in other sections of the city” by 1882.91 The union’s members aimed to improve the manners and morals of the working-­class children by enticing them to spend their evenings playing checkers and jackstraws, leafing through Youth’s Companion or St. Nicholas Magazine, or selecting a book to borrow for a week.92 It takes “comfort, care and intelligent sympathy, as well as kindliness,” the Providence Daily Journal concluded in an 1883 article on the Union for Christian Work, to have “success in attracting the youth from the streets.”

And by using this method, the “ladies and gentlemen who give their time to helping the poor children . . . accomplish a most valuable as well as charitable work in countering the evil influences of the streets.”93 Like many of the other evangelical organizations of the era, the Union for Christian Work opposed the use of alcohol.94 Despite the praise lavished upon the organization’s activities in the Providence Daily Journal, historian John S. Gilkeson Jr. concludes that the Union for Christian Work may have sought “to teach the boys self-­control and ‘instill in their minds the germs of manly being and upright living’ [but] they were not particularly successful.”95 The union eventually turned the task of socializing boys over to the Prov-

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

idence Boys Club, founded in 1898.96 The following year, the Boys Club opened in the first of several temporary quarters before it settled into a more permanent home in 1916 on South Main Street in the Fox Point district.97 In addition to a game room containing a “library with good books and magazines,” pool tables, and two bowling alleys, the club also featured a gymnasium, facilities for showing motion pictures, and a large washroom and bathing room. Unlike the Union for Christian Work, which was open only one evening a week, the Providence Boys Club was open all day and two hours in the evenings. Despite a posed photograph of children intently reading books and magazines that was published in a Providence Boys Club booklet announcing the opening of its Fox Point home, one doubts that the club’s library was the organization’s main attraction for youngsters.98 Larger than any of the libraries discussed so far in this section were those formed by Sunday schools. The earliest Sunday schools in this country were established by the first generation of textile factory owners and were intended to teach working children reading and writing and the basics of religion on their only day off from work. Sunday schools soon added Bible instruction to their curriculum and relocated in the basements of church buildings.99 Although Sunday schools at first were not run by the churches themselves, after a decade or so, churches of all denominations took them over: Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Catholics all maintained Sunday schools. The importance of the Sunday school to the church could not be overemphasized, according to the Reverend J. G.

Vose in 1888. The pastor of the Beneficent Congregational Church asserted, “If the church is to be self-­ perpetuating . . . in part, it must have young blood in its veins for from the young only can come ardent workers.”100 Thus, the Sunday school came to be regarded as the ”nursery of the church.”101 Given the emphasis upon reading and scriptural instruction, Sunday schools soon established libraries to reinforce the lessons in piety taught by the instructors.

As early as 1827, speakers at the Eleventh Anniversary of the New York Sunday School Union Society “earnestly recommend[ed] every School the establishment of a Sunday School Library.”102 There were nearly 2,000 Sunday Schools in the United States by 1850, and by 1870 that number had risen to almost 34,000.103 It did not take long for publishers to begin to offer books, tracts, and pamphlets for the Sunday school market.

The American Tract Society produced periodicals to be distributed in Sunday school classes, while the New York Sunday School Union Society focused upon supplying books for Sunday school libraries as well as tracts and pamphlets for Sunday school classes.104 The Westminster Street Sunday School Depository, which opened in 1834 at 12½ Westminster Street, was the primary Sunday school depository in nineteenth-­ century Providence.105 In 1846, it was appointed the general agent and depository for the Rhode Island Sunday School Union, with a “good assortment of Theological and Miscellaneous publications, suitable for S[unday] school, church, ministerial and maternal association libraries, constantly on hand.”106 Given the plethora of books for Sunday schools on the market, librarians were admonished to make selec67

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tions carefully. Collections need not contain only religious volumes; works of biography, geography, history, poetry, travel, and the like also should be available for young readers, so long as the offerings were “good, sound, sensible books . . . [and not] trash and nonsense. ”107 Librarians were warned that they should purchase books that actually will be read and not languish on the shelves;108 at the same time, they should avoid “highly seasoned food,” such as fairy tales.109 Although some might be tempted to avoid missteps in selection by ordering full sets of books such as the American Tract Society’s ten-­dollar library of one hundred preselected Sunday school books published in 1847, even this apparently safe alternative might be the wrong choice.110 In 1878, the Reverend F. E. Davison of Pawtucket counseled the Free Baptist Association that Sunday school librarians should avoid buying books “by the cubic foot, or the box library.

Let them all pass through the hands of some judicious persons for examination before placing them on the shelves.”111 Sunday school library collections rivaled many contemporary social library collections in size. The secretary of the Rhode Island Baptist Sunday School Convention announced at its fifteenth anniversary meeting in 1855 that thirty-­one Sunday school libraries held a total of 12,000 volumes for an average of 387 volumes per library.112 Thirteen years later, the average number of books among Rhode Island’s forty-­ five libraries was just over 700 volumes per library.113 According to its catalog, the Sunday school library at Providence’s First Baptist Church held 897 volumes in 1864.114 By 1875, the Providence Evening Press reported 68

that the First Baptist Church in Valley Falls, a mill village along the Blackstone River, had the largest Sunday school library in the state, with 1,300 volumes.115 With Sunday school libraries across Providence providing reading material to members of their congregations, these libraries are of great importance in the history of the nineteenth-­century library. Although adults patronized many of these Sunday school libraries, the primary patrons were youngsters, making these libraries among the first in Providence to open their doors to children. As former University of Minnesota librarian Frank Keller Walter points out in his 1942 study of the Sunday school library, “The path from Sunday school library to the modern children’s and school library is practically continuous.”116

Blacks and Providence’s Early Libraries Although some social libraries and literary societies were open to women and working-­class patrons and, with the increase in immigration throughout the century, to the foreign-­born as well, little evidence exists that these organizations also welcomed Blacks. Providence provided two schools in 1838 for the education of Black children, but it was not until 1866 that the Rhode Island General Assembly passed legislation opening admission of “any [public] school in the state” to any student regardless of the “race or color of the applicant.”117 The reluctance of white residents to share their schools with non-­whites attests to the widespread racism that would continue well beyond the formal integration of the school system. For this reason, the Black community built its own institu-

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

tions. At a time of white animosity toward free Black populations, these “societies formed by people of color tended to emphasize providing for mutual support and defense, strengthening community identity, and demonstrating sound moral values—­strategies to combat white hostility.”118 In Providence, these organizations included the African Union Meeting House, which was formed in 1789 and revived in 1819 ; a school for Black children that opened in 1821 and that met whenever the congregation was able to pay a schoolmaster119; the Mutual Relief Society, founded in 1826 to aid elderly members; temperance societies; and anti-­slavery groups.120 An estimated half of the city’s small Black population of more than 1,000 was literate by 1840, and the Black community also formed literary societies.121 One scholar maintains that the city was host to at least two such organizations in the 1830s and 1840s: the Literary Society (1833), perhaps called the Female Literary Society, and the Debating Society (before 1837). Prior to the Civil War, members of the community formed a debating and dramatic organization named the Rachel Club.122 The early literary societies often were short-­ lived, lasting only a few years before being replaced by others, and it appears that few of the records of these organizations have survived.

These literary societies, sometimes called debating societies or reading rooms, often offered their members access to small libraries of books, periodicals, printed speeches, globes, and maps. Rhode Island historian Keith Stokes writes that his family “still owns reams of literary works from the early 19th century and later that were obtained and passed on through church

and literary memberships.”123 Through their activities, these societies endeavored to spread knowledge, enable members to gain practice in public speaking, and provide young men with a wholesome alternative to the “baneful attractions” of the public house.124 With their focus on personal improvement, these objectives paralleled those of the white literary organizations. However, Black associations had additional goals resulting from their members’ inferior and often precarious status in nineteenth-­century American society. With fewer opportunities for public education, Black literary societies often sought to strengthen their members’ reading and writing skills. As Elizabeth McHenry, author of Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, writes, “For African Americans in the early nineteenth century, these societies offered a protected, collective environment in which to develop a literary background as well as the oral and written skills needed to express and represent themselves with confidence.”125 McHenry suggests that these organizations served as “vehicles of empowerment” in the early nineteenth century: Black literary societies aimed to “shape their membership into educated individuals who would be considered exemplary, respected citizens,” thus demonstrating that Black persons deserved admission as equal citizens within the American democracy.126 These benefits were as important to women as they were to men, and for essentially the same reasons.

Literary societies were gender-­based, and women’s reading groups, as Black literature and culture scholar Jeannine Marie DeLombard remarks, provided their members with a “socially acceptable forum in which 69

Rhode Island History

Advertisement. Providence Evening Press, July 13, 1860, page 1.

to pursue educational opportunities, cultivate literary and political skills, and even on rare occasions address a public audience through the medium of print.”127 These societies were especially important for Black women, whose lives were constrained by sexism as well as racism.

The need for separate literary associations lasted into the early twentieth century. Arthur Elmore Bostwick, head librarian of the St. Louis Public Library at the time, acknowledged in 1917 that, while there was no overt discrimination against Black patrons, nevertheless, the “Negro in the North does not use the public library as much as would be expected . . . It would seem that the race feels instinctively, whether with justice or not, that it is not wanted.”128

Circulating Libraries Most of the libraries we have discussed so far have been social libraries. Throughout their history, social libraries were weighted with social and cultural expectations. They were, variously, a means to economic advancement, an avenue by which the country’s residents could obtain the information and insight to become responsible citizens, an opportunity for patrons to further their education and to gain cultural capital, a bulwark against the dangers of the city, or, in the case of Sunday school libraries, a means to inculcate a set of values—­to engender of love of literature while fostering a “[s]pirit of divine obligation and human service.”129 Circulating libraries, however, carried less of the ideological baggage associated with these other 70

types of libraries.130 Circulating libraries first appeared in colonial towns and cities by the mid-­ eighteenth century and grew in number and popularity over the next century. These libraries provided access to books either by payment of membership dues or by a per-­book charge. Since membership dues also were the cost of admission to many social libraries associated with community or professional organizations, one cannot distinguish between the two types of libraries purely based on payment mechanisms. The basic difference was that most social libraries or their parent organizations were incorporated as nonprofits presumably providing a social good, while circulating libraries were profit-­oriented commercial enterprises. They operated out of bookstores, millinery shops, printers’ establishments, and other businesses. Books were regarded by most proprietors simply as another commodity, little different from hats or envelopes. According to Shera, many merchants saw circulating libraries as a sound business venture, requiring a considerably lower outlay of money to build and maintain a collection than did most social libraries. Furthermore, “returns on investment were immediate and large in proportion to the original expenditure.”131 The customers, too, might find circulating libraries more attractive since they usually could borrow books from such libraries more economically than they could maintain membership in a social library.

According to David Kaser, in A Book for a Sixpence: The Circulating Library in America, Providence’s first

Interior of the Providence Athenaeum (the art room) ca. 1925. RIHS collection RHiX171286.

library of this type appeared in 1789 and was operated by Foster, Drown & Company, who were primarily druggists.132 As Kaser points out, because these libraries generally were linked to businesses, they provided daily access to their customers rather than the couple hours a week that many social libraries were at first open.133 When the Providence Library Company was organized in 1754, for example, its founders stipulated that it would be open one afternoon a week,134 unlike Foster, Drown & Company, which presumably was open every workday.

Circulating libraries, a writer for the Providence Journal wrote in 1853, catered to “readers who are prevented either by inclination or circumstances from

using the more select public libraries of the city.”135 Shera has found that patrons of typical circulating libraries could choose among yearly, six-­month, or quarterly subscription rates, for $7.00, $4.50, or $2.00, respectively. Or, if they were unwilling or financially unable to make a commitment for three months or more, they could pay a weekly rental for each book borrowed, with the cost dependent upon the size of the book.136 By 1853, on the other hand, those purchasing shares in the Providence Athenaeum were charged $15, with an annual tax of $5.137 Because the proprietors of circulating libraries were in business to make money, they stocked those books and pamphlets most likely to appeal to their 71

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clientele. While both social libraries and circulating libraries might offer “improving” fare characterized by works of theology, history, and serious literature, circulating libraries also offered popular novels and romances, with fiction eventually becoming their main stock in trade.138 Perrin’s Circulating Library, one of the city’s largest circulating libraries, had an estimated 4,000 volumes by mid-­century, nearly a quarter of the 18,000 volumes held by the Providence Athenaeum.139 In its 1852 newspaper advertisements, it touted its up-­to-­date offerings, claiming “new books added as soon as published.”140 An 1865 notice listed novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Lydia M. Child, and Charles Dickens, as well as other popular writers of the day.141 As we see from some of the authors on this list, many circulating library renters were female.

Kaser suggests that it was the willingness of circulating libraries to cater to women readers that was a major factor contributing to the success of these enterprises.142 The circulating library run by Daniel Perrin appears to have been the longest-­lasting rental library in the city. In 1849, Perrin got his start by taking over another circulating library, one that had been in business for twenty-­nine years under the proprietorship of George Dana.143 In 1883, Perrin’s book and stationery business, including the circulating library, passed to his nephew Albert F. Davis, who eventually would sell his stock to the Shepard Company Department Store, one of Providence’s leading stores, in 1905.144 Most of Providence’s circulating libraries were more short-­lived than Perrin’s. The various enterprises 72

often moved from place to place, mostly in the Market Square area and later in the vicinity of lower Westminster Street. Proprietors sold their stock to one another, dissolved partnerships to form new ones, or operated alone. Most lasted only a few years. Besides Perrin’s Circulating Library, those that stayed in business for a decade or more included circulating libraries operated by Jacob Frieze (1828–42), George O. Arnold (1850–65), and John Wilcox (also 1850–65).145 While it is difficult to make an exact count, it appears that about forty circulating libraries operated in Providence between 1789, when Foster, Drown & Company opened its library business, and the decade or so after the establishment of the Providence Public Library in 1878.146 Public libraries and circulating libraries for a time coexisted harmoniously, with the circulating libraries providing the novels that most public libraries refused to supply. Eventually, public libraries gave in to patron pressure and began to stock popular novels, often establishing rental collections of those titles most in demand. Because public libraries were subsidized by tax monies, they could rent books at a lower rate than could circulating libraries, and the proprietors of most circulating libraries concluded it was not cost-­effective to continue to compete with public libraries.147 Although diminished in number and influence from their mid-­nineteenth-­century heyday, commercial circulating libraries survived well into the twentieth century. Increasingly, however, the circulating libraries located in the center of the city and offering a large stock of books to customers were replaced by small selections for rental in train stations, soda foun-

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

tains, and department stores,148 a development highlighted in Providence by the sale of Perrin’s Circulating Library in 1905 to Shepard Company Department Store.

While some social libraries also remained in operation into the twentieth century—­with the Providence Athenaeum still thriving today—­their shareholders eventually found that voluntary support was “not a sufficiently solid foundation upon which to build a universal library service.”149 State legislatures in New England paved the way for the formation of truly public libraries by the 1830s and 1840s by enacting legislation “permitting school districts to raise and expend funds for the purchase of libraries selected by the school committee,” with Rhode Island doing so in 1840. It was not until 1867, however, that the Rhode Island legislature gave cities and towns the right to levy taxes to establish and support public libraries in their municipalities.150 Eight years later, the General Assembly enacted legislation to aid local free libraries by providing funds for the purchase of books. In Rhode Island, however, most libraries that were free and open to the public by the turn of the century were privately incorporated but supported in part by local taxes and to a lesser extent by state funding. Only seven out of forty-­nine free libraries receiving state funding by 1898 were under public ownership and operation and were therefore truly public libraries.151 As Shera notes, “Though the tax-­supported free public library eventually overshadowed the social library, the corporate library form was far from obsolete,” especially in New England.152 One such corporate library is the Providence Public Library.

The Early Years of Providence Public Library Although the early libraries in Providence often were referred to as public libraries by contemporaries, this term merely meant that they were not personal, or private, collections in individuals’ homes. As discussed earlier, none of the social libraries in mid-­nineteenth-­ century Providence qualified as public libraries, defined as one that is “‘established by state laws, is supported by local taxation or voluntary gifts, is managed as a public trust, and every citizen of the city or town which maintains it has an equal share in its privileges of reference and circulation.’”153 Lancaster comments in her history of the Providence Athenaeum that the YMCA and the Union for Christian Work considered their libraries to be public, but Providence was “no longer a homogeneous, Protestant society” and therefore discouraged many residents from using the collections. Likewise, the Providence Athenaeum primarily was open to members and their guests, and by the 1870s, it had been quite a while “since the board actively welcomed the general public.”154 By the 1870s, the public library movement was well underway, beginning with the formation of the Peterborough (NH) Town Library in 1834, followed by the establishment of public libraries in many other New England towns and cities, including Boston Public Library in 1854 and Worcester Public Library five years later. Providence took notice and, by the early 1870s, a Providence Daily Journal writer reflected that “the lack of a free public library became rather a reproach to the civic pride of many Providence residents. Cities of one-­third her size possessed stately library buildings, well-­stored with books and containing, besides 73

Rhode Island History

books, collections of curiosities or specimens of natural history.”155 Providence political leaders could indeed boast of the city’s population growth, its vibrant industrial base, and its cultural institutions. According to the U.S. Census, Providence’s population climbed from some 7,600 residents in 1800 to nearly 69,000 by 1870.

As the number of residents grew, building construction spread far out from the original settlement area hugging both sides of the Providence River, and by the 1870s, the city was bursting at the seams. Between 1868 and 1919, Providence grew from 5.4 to 18.5 square miles by annexing sections of Cranston, North Providence, and Johnston, setting the stage for further development beyond the city center. Meanwhile, Providence was becoming an industrial powerhouse. Textile factories lined its rivers, along with companies producing tools, steam engines, railroad cars, silverware, rubber goods, and jewelry. Banks and insurance companies moved into tall and ornate office buildings in the city’s financial district. Huge department stores attracted customers on Westminster and Weybosset Streets. The imposing Second Empire City Hall was completed in 1876, joining the Romanesque train depot at Exchange Place. It was no wonder that the Providence Daily Journal would bemoan the absence of a public library in a city that was otherwise fast becoming a major metropolis.

Several local organizations were particularly anxious for Providence to open a public library. In 1869, representatives of the Union of Christian Work made it clear that they regarded their library as a transitional one, which they hoped would grow in size “so as to meet the 74

wants of the people until the project now in agitation for a large free library, under the control of the city, shall be truly established and opened to the public.”156 Like the Union of Christian Work, the officers of the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers also believed the time had come for Providence to open a public library. According to a speech given in 1889 by association president Samuel H. Tingley, “The want of a Public Library for the people of Providence was a matter in which the Association between the years 1865 and 1870 felt a deep attitude.”157 Tingley and other proponents presented a mixture of reasons for establishing the city’s free library, motives similar to those espoused by the founders of the earlier social libraries in Providence. In their original 1871 rationale, Zachariah Allen, Edwin M. Stone, and Welcome O. Brown began with the lofty sentiment that the “continued well being [sic] of any community, and especially of one under a free government, can only be secured by elevating the condition of the people—­by inducing in them healthy, intellectual, moral and physical culture” through books, art, and lectures. Should Providence not extend the opportunity for education and self-­improvement to all community members, they warned, the city might well rue the consequences, as “otherwise, a short-­sighted ignorance, guided by selfish, brute animal instincts, becomes ‘Communism,’—­ subversive of all ‘the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’” Thus, they concluded, “Self preservation [sic], as well as philanthropic principles” should convince Providence to establish a “Free Library, in connection with a Museum of Natural History, and the products of the Mechanic and Ornamen-

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

tal Arts.” Tacking on one more argument for moving forward with the project, the authors reminded their readers that smaller cities such as New Haven and Hartford already had established institutions to uplift their citizens. Would Providence permit itself to stay behind?158 The issue was put to the city’s voters in May 1770, calling for a tax of five cents per hundred dollars of ratable property to support a public library, but the measure was rejected.159 Thus, as former University of Massachusetts Boston economics professor Mary Huff Stevenson wrote in her unpublished study in 1981 of the founding of Providence Public Library, “By the middle of 1870, it was clear that if Providence was to acquire a free library, it would have to be established through private philanthropy rather than public taxation.”160 According Tingley, “The subject was discussed at the Mechanics Association meetings and in [late] 1870, largely through the influence of their President, Zachariah Allen, a movement was made toward the establishment of such an Institution.”161 As Tingley later recalled, representatives from the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers, the Union of Christian Work, the Rhode Island Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Industry, the Providence Franklin Society, and the Rhode Island Horticultural Society met in 1871.162 With Allen taking a leading role, supported by, among others, Unitarian minister Stone and Quaker physician Brown from the Providence Franklin Society, the group formed the Friends of the Free Library and discussed how best to proceed. Their initial plan was an ambitious one. They drafted a charter, granted by the state, for

the formation of a library, art gallery, and natural history museum to be financed by donations from trustees and contributions of either land or money from the city. After three years of fundraising, they concluded that their proposal was too complex—­and too costly.

Therefore, they lowered their sights and submitted an amended charter in 1874 for the organization of a library only, financed entirely by trustees.

The organizers’ first task was to find a space for the construction of a new library. They asked the city for help, but none was forthcoming. Eventually, the Friends of the Free Library decided to open the library in a rented room rather than delay any longer.163 The members of the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers voted to transfer the approximately 6,200 volumes in their library to form the beginning of the new public library’s collection.164 On February 4, 1878, the Providence Public Library opened in room 9 on the second floor of the Butler Exchange, facing Exchange Plaza and near the new Providence City Hall, which would be dedicated in November of the same year. The library opening was well attended, according to a report in the Providence Daily Journal, with a “swift current of people coming and going” and “many of the best people in the city” dropping by. Overall, “there was general interest and admiration.”165 “And so,” in the words of Clarence E. Sherman, Librarian from 1930 to 1957, “the Providence Public Library, a puny, toddling infant, was brought into the bibliothecal world.”166 Quickly, its patron base grew. A year after the public library opened, William E. Foster, the library’s first director, reported that 10,400 people had registered for a card, 75

Rhode Island History

representing about 14 percent of the eligible population of Providence over the age of 14.167 In contrast, the Providence Athenaeum had only 679 shareholders in the year ending August 1877.168 Quickly, the library outgrew its first home and moved to street-­level rooms on Snow Street in 1880, and by the close of the library’s first year at the new location, it had 15,000 registered borrowers.169 It soon was clear that this location was too small as well. The trustees began to search for land on which to erect their own building and purchased property along Washington Street several blocks to the west. With bequests and other gifts, augmented by a substantial donation from John Nicholas Brown, the building was completed and opened on March 15, 1900, by which time the collection had swelled to 88,723 volumes from the 10,307 books owned by the library when it began in 1878.170 In these early years, the Providence Public Library largely was supported by private gifts rather than by public taxation. It was not until 1889, eleven years after the library’s founding, that the city began to provide some financial support, allocating $3,500 to the library and gradually increasing the amount to $10,000 by 1895.171 Although the city’s payments to the library would continue to rise in the decades to follow, library officials frequently had to grapple with lower revenue than could adequately fund operations, observing as early as 1900172 that Providence’s per capita expenditure for libraries was significantly less than that provided for public libraries in other New England cities of comparable size, a complaint the library director would continue to make for years to come. This situation was in part a function of the Providence Public 76

Library’s status as a private nonprofit organization rather than a full-­fledged city department.

Conclusion By the time the Providence Public Library moved into its new building on Empire Street in 1900, it had become an urban institution of which residents could be proud. But even as it took its place as the city’s preeminent library, it simultaneously was finding it more and more difficult to serve everyone in Providence.

When the Providence Public Library opened in 1878, Providence was a walking city of about 100,000, with most people living no more than a mile or so from Exchange Place. By 1920, only 55 percent were within a mile-­and-­a-­half radius of the city center.173 Although the Providence Public Library had the capacity to serve the city’s burgeoning population, its remoteness discouraged many from using it. In addition, potential patrons were daunted by traffic congestion and hazards that seemed to worsen year by year.

By the mid-­teens and through the 1920s, the Providence Journal and the Evening Bulletin regularly published articles and letters to the editor decrying gridlock in the center of the city. With the introduction of the motorcar onto Providence’s narrow streets, sharing the poorly regulated roads with streetcars, wagons, bicycles, and pedestrians, traffic problems were inevitable.

The Evening Bulletin reported in the summer of 1922 that “Acute Congestion of Cars, Autos, Trucks, and Horse-­Drawn Vehicles Chokes Arteries of Business Daily,” in part the result of a steep rise in auto registrations in Rhode Island that had more than doubled over

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

Above: Interior of the Providence Athenaeum (the card catalogue room) ca. 1925.

RIHS collections RHiX171288. right: Providence Public Library, ca. 1901. RIHS collection RHiA33185.

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Rhode Island History

the past five years.174 The press also covered automobile collisions with other cars, crashes with streetcars, and accidents involving pedestrians. For the month of July 1922, the Evening Bulletin counted 302 “traffic mishaps,” with two people killed and 83 others injured, half of them children.175 Across the country the previous year, there were more than 12,000 auto-­related deaths, averaging one every thirty minutes.176 Given these problems, members of neighborhood associations established libraries beyond downtown that would enable those in their communities to walk safely to a library near their homes. Thus, a reporter for the Providence Sunday Journal welcomed the opening of the

new Knight Memorial Library in 1924, observing, “The distance from the centre of the city, the congested traffic conditions, make the use of the Providence Public Library impossible to many of the residents of the Elmwood section.”177 Most of these neighborhood facilities began as independent entities, but over time the Providence Public Library would adopt them as branches in an urban library system that could serve residents throughout the city. The founding of Providence Public Library was the culmination of the first phase in Providence library history. The formation of community libraries between 1874 and 1923 constitutes the second phase. It is this story we shall trace next.

Notes 1. Kenneth E. Carpenter observes that the founders of early libraries were “often identified in local histories as ‘prominent citizens’—­usually, doctors, judges, or businessmen.” “Libraries” in A History of the Book in America: Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, edited

by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley. (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 274. Joseph Le Roy Harrison, “The Providence Athenaeum,” New England Magazine, n.s. 45:1 (September 1911): 52.

Providence’s population in the early 1750s at 3,000. Foundations of the Public Library: The Origins of the Public Library Movement in New England, 1629–1855 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1949), 117.

2. Jane Lancaster, Inquire Within: A Social History of the Providence Athenaeum since 1753 (Providence: The Providence Athenaeum, 2003), 6–10.

8. Shera, 62–63. Shera notes that “in the laws of Rhode Island the social library received only brief treatment in but one section of a larger act codifying the general legislation for the public school system.” 63.

3. For statistics on Newport’s population from 1708 to 1790, see “I. Population in the Colonial and Continental Periods” https:// www.census.gov/history/pdf/colonialbostonpops.pdf, which puts Newport’s population in 1755 as 6,753. Jesse Shera estimates

78

4. Shera, 35.

5. Harrison, 55.

6. Shera, 57.

7. Harrison, 57.

9. Robert A. Gross, “‘Much Instruction from Little Reading’: Books and Libraries in Thoreau’s Concord,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 97:1 (April 1987): 39.

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

10. As scholars have attempted to determine the collection range of early social libraries such as the Providence Library Company, they have been fortunate that the library made a list of its holdings prior to a fire that destroyed all the books remaining on the shelves. Combined with the list of the items saved from a fiery fate because they had been signed out by borrowers, it is possible to see not only the types and proportions of books on various subjects that the library had purchased but also the types of books that members actually were reading. According to Shera, “History, biography, and travel were prevailing interests, the classics of English literature were a library staple, concern with scientific inquiry was on the march, and theology was more revered on the library shelf than in the reader’s hand.” 117–118.

11. Bartlett later became a dealer in foreign and British books. As literary adviser to John Carter Brown, he helped to assemble the books that would become the nucleus of the John Carter Brown Library collection.

12. Quoted in Harrison, “The Providence Athenaeum II,” New England Magazine, n.s. 45:2 (October 1911): 190. For a discussion of the composition of the founders and early proprietors, see Lancaster, 48–50.

13. Harrison II, 197.

14. Lancaster, 7–73, 104, 15. Ronald J. Zboray, Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University, 1993) 106. ProQuest E-­book.

16. Shera, 69.

17. David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 59, 60.

18. Hall, 61–70.

19. In his detailed study of reading patterns at this time in the Connecticut Valley, William J. Gilmore traces a similar pattern: In rural northwestern New England, almanacs, broadsides, books, and pamphlets, including the Bible, prayer books, hymnals, psalm books, devotional works, and schoolbooks, were the print vehicles most frequently read in the 1780s. By the late 1790s novels, travel

narratives, geographies, and histories had been added to the list.

Within another decade rural weekly newspapers had become central in Upper Valley reading.

Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 26.

20. Hall, 76.

21. See David D. Hall, “Introduction: The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William L. Joyce, David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 1–47. Among those wealthy men who amassed large libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were John Carter Brown, C. Fiske Harris, and Royal C. Taft. Harry Lyman Koopman, “Library Progress in Rhode Island,” Library Journal 31 (August 1906): 12–13.

22. See Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, “Schools,” in A History of the Book in America, Volume 2. ProQuest E-­book.

23. J. D. B. DeBow, Statistical View of the United States . . . Being: a Compendium of the Seventh Census (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Office, 1854), 153. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications /decennial/1850/1850c/1850c-­01.pdf.

24. Hall, “Readers and Reading in America: Historical and Critical Perspectives” in Cultures of Print, 172.

25. Thomas D. Stockwell, History of Public Education in Rhode Island from 1836 to 1876. Comp. by Authority of the Board of Education (Providence: Providence Press Company, 1876), 200–202.

Apart from the Friends School, which had a collection of about 15,000 books in its library by the mid-­nineteenth century, Providence’s public schools had only a few reference books available.

“Report of the Commissioner of Public Schools,” Rhode Island Educational Magazine 1:2, 3 (February and March 1852): 213. In 1853, the Providence Daily Journal cited the Brown University Librarian’s count of 500 reference books in use at Providence’s public schools, not a large number when divided among more than forty schools. “The Public Libraries of Providence,” Providence Daily Journal (October 25, 1853): 2. NewsBank, accessed June 4,

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2020. Not all children had equal access to school facilities. Black students were limited to the two segregated and substandard primary schools until 1866, when the General Assembly finally voted to abolish segregation. Bartlett, 59. And girls, regardless of race, attended school in substantially lower numbers. In 1846, Henry Barnard, Rhode Island Commissioner of Education, decried the “early and extensive withdrawal of females from schools, and their employment in large masses away from home and home occupations.” Report and Documents Relating to the Public Schools of Rhode Island. 1848, (Providence: General Assembly, 1849), 37.

26. Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 24. Nevertheless, for the many children working in textile mills and other factories rather than attending public schools, Sunday schools provided these youngsters with a rudimentary education.

27. Gross, “Much Instruction from Little Reading,” 162.

28. Gross, “Much Instruction from Little Reading,” 167.

29. C. Sherman, The Providence Public Library: An Experiment in Enlightenment (Providence, 1937), 12.

30. In his history of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century public libraries in New York City, Tom Glynn characterizes the early notion of public libraries as being libraries that were “public in the same sense that a public house or public conveyance was public.

The term meant not that the collection was free but simply that it was available ostensibly to any member of the public, as opposed to one belonging to an individual or a closed, private organization such as a school.” Reading Publics: New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754–1911 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 18.

ProQuest Ebook.

31. Rhode Island Medical Society, “Dr. Amos Throop (1736–1814),” https://www.rimedicalsociety.org/about-­our-­first-­president.html.

32. The Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Industry listed all books, pamphlets, and periodicals donated during the year in its annual report. For example, see Transactions of the Rhode Island Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Industry in the Year 1858 (Providence: Knowles, Anthony & Co., 1859), 139–

80

41. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433007610029 &view=1up&seq=9.

33. Providence Daily Journal (October 25, 1853), 2. NewsBank.

Accessed November 5, 2019.

34. According to C. Sherman, the Rhode Island Horticultural Society possessed about 300 volumes in its library in 1878, the year the Providence Public Library opened. 12.

35. Paulina W. Davis, “The Providence Physiological Society,” The Water-­Cure Journal, 12:2 (August 1851), 41. https://babel .hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015014700143&view=1up&seq =1. Accessed January 5, 2021.

36. Moses King, King’s Pocketbook of Providence. (Boston: Franklin Press, 1882), 36.

37. Carpenter, “Libraries” in The History of the Book in America : Volume 2, 278.

38. Thomas S. Harding, “College Literary Societies: Their Contribution to the Development of Academic Libraries, 1815–76: I. The Golden Age of College Society Libraries, 1815–40,” The Library Quarterly 29:1 (January 1959): 1.

39. Barnard, 27. This was about 1,700 more volumes than the society recorded in the late 1820s. See “Philermenian Society Records, Minute Books.” (Unpublished manuscript, September 1, 1829), handwritten. Hay Archives Manuscripts.

40. Harding, 10.

41. Harding, 5. As Harding points out in Part II of his account of college literary societies, they began to disappear after the Civil War, as college and university libraries increased in size and established more accessible hours and more liberal circulation policies. By 1876, the editors of “College Libraries” in the Public Libraries of the United States reported that the Brown University Library held some 45,000 volumes, while none were listed for college societies. Harding, “College Literary Societies: Their Contribution to the Development of Academic Libraries,1815–76: II. The Decline of College Society Libraries, 184–76,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 29:2 (April 1959), 104– 108. Also, see “College Libraries” in Public Libraries in the United

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

States of America Part I (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1876), 126.

42. Christine Lamar, “The Franklin Lyceum: A Century of Ideas, in Preparation for the 350th Anniversary of the City of Providence” (Providence, RIHS, 1985), 8. Photocopy of typescript.

Journal (November 6, 1854), 3. NewsBank. Accessed November 6, 2019. Yearly dues in 1867 were $2.50. “Mechanics Association Tax,” Providence Daily Journal (June 1, 1867), 3. NewsBank.

Accessed November 7, 2019.

54. Kornblith, 384.

43. “Mr. Emerson’s Lectures,” Providence Daily Journal (March 25, 1840), 2. NewsBank. Accessed December 23, 2019. Members of the public paid $1.00 per person for his series of lectures, while couples were charged $1.50. Lamar, 5–6. Emerson had delivered these lectures in Boston in 1838. For more on Emerson’s role as a public lecturer, see Mary Kupiec Cayton, “The Making of an American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth-­Century America,” American Historical Review 92:3 (June 1987): 597–620. https://www.jstor.org /stable/1869911. Accessed December 30, 2019.

55. “Rules and By-­Laws of the Library,” Catalogue of the Mechanics and Apprentices’ Library, Established by the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers, in the Year 1821. 1866. See also “Minutes from the Quarterly Meeting of the Association, Held in Blake’s Hall, January 8, 1821.” (Unpublished manuscript, January 8, 1821). MSS 635, Box 5, RIHS.

44. Shera, 227.

58. Providence Daily Journal (October 25, 1853), 2. NewsBank.

Accessed November 7, 2019.; King, 84.

45. Lamar, 8.

46. Catalogue of the Library of the Franklin Lyceum, Providence (Providence: A. Crawford Green & Brother, 1857).

47. Lamar, 6–8.

48. King, 43.

49. Lamar, 5.

50. For further discussion of the characteristics of mercantile libraries, see F. B. Perkins, “Young Men’s Mercantile Libraries,” Public Libraries in the United States of America, 379.

51. Oxford English Dictionary (September 2000). https://www-­oed -­com.providence.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/113772?redirected From=manufacturer#eid.

52. Gary J. Kornblith, “‘Cementing the Mechanic Interest’: Origins of the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers,” Journal of the Early Republic 8 (Winter 1988): 372. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/3123177. Accessed: December 30, 2019.

53. In 1854, for instance, the Mechanics Association advertised a series of twenty-­four drawing lessons, costing member five dollars and eight dollars for others, while a member’s sons and apprentices were charged at the membership level. Providence Daily

56. Lancaster, 10, 29.

57. Providence Daily Journal (April 14, 1830), 2. NewsBank.

Accessed November 7, 2019.

59. C. Sherman, 12.

60. Advertisement, Providence Daily Journal (October 7, 1847), 2.

NewsBank. Accessed November 7, 2020.

61. Carpenter, “Libraries” in The History of the Book in America, Volume 2, 283.

62. Sidney Ditzion, “Mechanics’ and Mercantile Libraries,” Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy. 10:2 (April 1940): 211–12.

63. William I. Fletcher, “Public Libraries in Manufacturing Communities,” in Public Libraries in the United States of America, 403–404.

64. King, 123. In 1888, the library was merged into the Olneyville Free Library. “Temperance Cadets,” Providence Daily Journal (June 8, 1889), 3. NewsBank. Accessed May 29, 2020.

65. Catalogue of the Library of the Brown & Sharpe Manf’g Co. (Providence: Rhode Island Printing Company, 1882).

66. This is a rough estimate based upon counting random pages from the 1882 Brown & Sharpe library catalogue.

67. Boles, John B. “Jack Abbott and the Rollo Books: New

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England Culture for Children.” Journal of Popular Culture 6: 3 (December 1972): 507–528.

68. Catalogue of the Library of the Brown & Sharpe Manf’g Co. 69. Robert O. Jones indicates that Wanskuck Hall was built in 1884. “Wanskuck Historic District,” National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, Providence, RI (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1983), Continuation Sheet 7, Item Number 7, Page 7. However, the Providence Daily Journal began to print announcements for upcoming Sunday school classes in Wanskuck Hall as early as 1881.

70. Jean Douglas, “Wanskuck Branch, Providence Public Library,” National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, Providence, RI (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, April 1997, Section 8, Page 8.

71. Providence Public Library, “News and Notes: Dedication on the New Wanskuck Branch Building,” Books for All 3:10 (December 1928): 402.

72. See chapter 1 in John S. Gilkeson Jr., Middle-­Class Providence, 1830–1940, 12–54.

73. Providence Daily Journal (15 June 1853), 2. NewsBank.

Accessed May 30, 2020.

74. “Providence and Vicinity. A Permanent Home. Movement to Secure the Erection of a Building for the Young Men’s Christian Association,” Providence Daily Journal (April 3, 1886), 8. NewsBank. Accessed December 27, 2019.

75. The size of the collection seems to have remained static over the years, as the number of volumes reported in the 1863 Providence Directory was 4,000, Moses King again reported its library contained approximately 4,000 volumes in 1882, and the YMCA Yearbook for 1891 continued to give the same number. (Directory, 205; King, 124; Joe W. Kraus, “Libraries of the Young Men’s Christian Associations in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Library History, 10:1 (January 1976): 8.

76. “Wanted,” Providence Daily Journal (November 16, 1881), 5.

NewsBank. Accessed December 28, 2019.

77. Cephas Brainerd, “Libraries of Young Men’s Christian Associations,” in Public Libraries in the United States of America, 386.

82

78. Kraus, 10.

79. “A Permanent Home,” Providence Daily Journal (April 3, 1886), 8. NewsBank. Accessed December 27, 2019.

80. Cynthia Gomery Ferguson, “The History of the YMCA of Greater Providence, 1853–2003,” 28. (Unpublished manuscript, 2003). Typescript. Rhode Island Collection, Providence Public Library.

81. Kraus, 13. Brainerd, a lawyer, was instrumental in bringing Abraham Lincoln to speak at Cooper Union in 1860; he also is known for representing Blacks whose property was destroyed during the New York Draft Riots of 1863. “Overview of the Cephas Brainerd Collection,” Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College.

82. Brainerd, 387.

83. Alison M. Parker, “‘Hearts Uplifted and Minds Refreshed’: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Production of Pure Culture in the United States, 1880–1930.” Journal of Women’s History 11:2 (1999): 137. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ jowh.1999.0010.

84. The Young Women’s Christian Association was begun in 1867 and originally was named the Providence Women’s Christian Association, and the Providence Evangelical Young Women’s Christian association was founded in 1888. These two organizations merged in 1902. Mary McKone, “A Guide to the Young Women’s Christian Association of Rhode Island Records in the Rhode Island Historical Society Library,” December 1991.

85. “Young Women’s Tea Room: A Charitable Organization Laboring among Working Girls to Promote Temperance,” Providence Sunday Journal (March 30, 1890), 16. NewsBank. Accessed April 27, 2020.

86. “The Young Women’s Tea Room,” Providence Daily Journal (April 28, 1889), 8. NewsBank. Accessed April 27, 2020.

87. “Young Women’s Tea Room: A Charitable Organization Laboring among Working Girls to Promote Temperance,” Providence Sunday Journal (March 30, 1890), 16. NewsBank: Accessed April 27, 2020.

88. “The Flower Queen,” Providence Daily Journal (June 11, 1883),

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

8. NewsBank. Accessed May 29, 2020; “The Union for Christian Charity,” Providence Daily Journal (November 9, 1883), 4. NewsBank. Accessed May 29, 2020.

89. The organization would become Union Settlement in 1908.

John S. Gilkeson Jr., Middle-­Class Providence, 1820–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986): 268. According to the Providence Daily Journal in 1911, the Union Settlement had transitioned away from maintaining a library to starting an immigration bureau by 1911. “Starts Immigrant Bureau,” Providence Daily Journal (October 23, 1911), 5. NewsBank. Accessed January 6, 2020.

90. “Union for Christian Work: Proceedings at the Annual Meeting,” Providence Sunday Journal (October 7, 1870), 1. NewsBank.

Accessed January 6, 2020; King, 113.

ber 1908) included a “Letter to the Boys” written by Providence Public Library Director William E. Foster, encouraging youngsters to visit the Children’s Room at the Providence Public Library, where they would find the type of book that “takes a boy where it finds him, but [also] that which will help him to get to a more advanced stage” and enable him to rise from newsboy or errand boy to “positions of influence.” 1–2.

99. See J. Stanley Lemons, The First Baptist Church in America (East Greenwich, RI: Charitable Baptist Society, 1988), 55–58.

100. Providence Daily Journal (November 5, 1888), 3. NewsBank.

Accessed December 29, 2020.

101. Ibid.

91. King, 113.

102. Independent Inquirer (May 17, 1827), 4. NewsBank. Accessed December 28, 2020.

92. “Street Gamins. Reading, Studying and Recreation at the Union for Christian Work. President Crandall Explains How the Lads Spend Their Evenings Profitability,” Providence Sunday Journal (February 12, 1888), 10. NewsBank. Accessed April 26, 2020.

103. Kenneth E. Carpenter, “Sites of Reading: Libraries” in History of the Book in America, Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 184– 1880, edited by Scott E. Casper, et al. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 308. ProQuest Ebook.

93. “The Union for Christian Work,” Providence Daily Journal (November 9, 1883), 4. NewsBank. Accessed April 26, 2020.

104. Frank Keller Walter, “A Poor but Respectable Relation—­The Sunday School Library,” Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 12:3 (July 1942): 731–739.

94. “Street Gamins,” 10.

95. Gilkeson, 241.

96. In 1905, the Union for Christian Work would open the first settlement house in Providence at 31 Chestnut Street. It offered evening entertainment, a reading club, a reading room and library, and various classes. The facility was intended “to reach the adult poorly paid workers, the workingmen and workingwomen receiving from $9 to $20 a week, with few pleasures in life.” According to a 1905 Providence Daily Journal article, the library was integral to the work of the settlement house. “‘Every settlement,’ said one worker, ‘should have a central point of interest, and the library here brings all classes together.’” (December 24, 1905), 23. NewsBank. Accessed March 21, 2020.

97. Within the next decade or so, two more Boys Clubs opened in Providence, one in Olneyville and the other in Wanskuck.

98. A Brief History of the Providence Boys Club (Providence: The Club, 1916). In fact, the Providence Boys’ Club Bulletin 1:2 (Novem-

105. In 1847, the depository moved to 48 Westminster, where it would stay until 1856, when it moved again to 17 Westminster. At this point, there seems to have been a division of bookstore business, with the depository opening in 1857 at 21 Westminster and run by Snow & Greene, while 17 Westminster became the location of an antiquarian bookstore opened by Sidney S. Rider in partnership with G. Stewart, who previously had partnered with William Coggeshall when the depository was at this address. (See various advertisements in the Providence newspapers of the period.)

106. Providence Daily Journal (May 20, 1846), 1. NewsBank.

Accessed January 16, 2021.

107. Providence Daily Journal (May 24, 1878), 1. NewsBank.

Accessed December 27, 2020.

108. Evening Bulletin, First ed. (May 16, 1866), 2. NewsBank.

Accessed December 28, 2020.

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Rhode Island History

109. Providence Daily Journal (February 16, 1850), 2. NewsBank.

Accessed December 28, 2020.

110. See advertisement. Providence Daily Journal (June 1, 1847), 4.

NewsBank. Accessed December 28, 2020.

111. Quoted in Providence Daily Journal (May 24, 1878), 1. Accessed December 27, 2020.

112. Providence Daily Journal (June 15, 1855), 2. NewsBank: Accessed January 16, 2021.

113. Providence Daily Journal (June 4, 1868), 1. NewsBank.

Accessed December 27, 2020.

114. First: The First Baptist Church in America (Providence: Charitable Baptist Society, 2001), 121 n. 17.

115. “By Telegraph to the Press. Later Foreign News. England.”

Providence Evening Press 34:120 (February 4, 1876), 3. NewsBank.

Accessed December 27, 2020.

116. Walter, 734.

117. Irving Bartlett, Slave to Citizen: The Story of the Negro in Rhode Island (Providence: Urban League of Greater Providence, 1954), 50.

118. Joanne Pope Melish, “Introduction,” The Life of William J. Brown of Providence, R.I., with Personal Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2006), xxxi. Originally published in 1883.

119. The Providence African Union House began in 1789 as a chapter of the Newport African Society and became the Union African Society by 1820. See Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, Creative Survival: The Providence Black Community in the 19th Century (Providence, 1985), 52, 55.

120. Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, 56, 61.

121. Bartlett, 37. According to the Rhode Island census of 1835, 1,223 Providence residents were Black.

122. Email message to author from Robb Dimmick, co-­founder of Stages of Freedom, November 8, 2020. Dorothy B. Porter, long-­ time librarian at Howard University who assembled a world-­class collection of Black library materials and published bibliographies on various aspects of African and African American history and

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culture, provides a list by city and state of Black literary societies in the 1830s and 1840s in “The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies, 182–1846,” Journal of Negro History 5 (1936). She identifies two societies in Providence in this period—­ the Literary Society (1833) and the Debating Society (before 1837). Porter, 558. These generic names seem more like place markers than the names of actual organizations. If there were, indeed, literary societies with these names in Providence at that time, their records have not yet been found.

123. Email message to author, October 19, 2020.

124. William Whipper, “An Address Delivered in Wesley Church on the Evening of June 12, before the Colored Reading Society of Philadelphia, for Mental Improvement, 1828,” in Dorothy Porter, ed. Early Negro Writing, 1760–1837, Selected and Introduced by Dorothy Porter (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 109.

125. “Dreaded Eloquence: The Origins and Rise of African American Literary Societies and Libraries,” Harvard Library Bulletin 6:2 (Summer 1995), 47. Reprinted in Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2002), 23–83. Jeannine Marie DeLombard also discusses Black women’s literary groups in “African American Cultures of Print,” in History of the Book in America, Volume 2, 36–373.

126. Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 79, 82. See also A History of the Book in America : Volume 3, 364.

127. DeLombard, “African-­American Cultures of Print,” 364. See also Elizabeth McHenry, “Reading and Race Pride: The Literary Activism of Black Clubwomen,” in A History of the Book in America: Volume 4: Print in Motion: the Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 188–1940, edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 49–510. ProQuest E-­book.

128. The American Public Library (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1917), 52.

129. Providence Daily Journal (May 24, 1878), 1. NewsBank.

Accessed December 27, 2020.

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

130. Shera makes much the same point. 127–128.

131. Shera, 140.

132. Based upon the fact that advertisements for the circulating library appeared only in May and June of 1789, this first circulating library seems to have been remarkably short-­lived. The proprietors probably were Theodore Foster and Solomon Drown (also spelled Drowne in the press), who had been classmates at Brown.

Drown was a physician, while Foster was active in politics and served in the U.S. Senate. He also established a library in Foster Rhode Island, amassed a collection of early Rhode Island works, and helped found the RIHS. 133. David Kaser, A Book for a Sixpence: The Circulating Library in America (Mu Chapbook no. 14. Pittsburgh, Beta Phi Mu, 1980).

134. Harrison, 53.

135. “The Public Libraries of Providence,” Providence Daily Journal (October 25, 1853), 2. NewsBank. Accessed November 5, 2019.

136. Shera, 128.

137. “The Public Libraries of Providence,” Providence Daily Journal (October 25, 1853), 2.

138. Shera, 149.

139. E.R. Potter, Report upon Public Schools and Education, in the State of Rhode Island; Made to the Legislature, January, 1854 (Providence: Sales, Miller & Simons, 1854), 102.

140. See, for example, “Perrin’s Circulating Library,” Providence Daily Journal (November 9, 1852), 4. NewsBank. Accessed December 8, 2019.

141. “Advertisement,” Providence Evening Press (December 15, 1865), 3. NewsBank. Accessed December 23, 2019.

142. Kaser, 117.

143. Kaser, 152.

144. “Forty Years a Bookseller. A. F. Davis Has Sold Out and Will Enter Real Estate Business,” Providence Daily Journal (March 22, 1905), 8. NewsBank. Accessed December 8, 2019.

145. These dates are based upon advertisements placed in contemporary newspapers; however, the businesses may well have

remained in operation longer than these time spans. See listings in Kaser and in H. Glenn Brown and Maude O. Brown, A Directory of Printing, Publishing, Bookselling & Allied Trades in Rhode Island to 1865 (New York: New York Public Library, 1958) for approximate dates of circulating libraries in Providence.

146. Kaser, 127–163. See also Brown and Brown. Searching the Providence Journal database for circulating library advertisements and news articles provides a supplementary listing that mostly corroborates the Kaser and Brown and Brown lists.

147. Kaser, 86–111.

148. See Kaser, 108.

149. Shera, 78.

150. Shera, 184–85. Harry Lyman Koopman, “Library Progress in Rhode Island,” Library Journal 31 (August 1906): 11. The Rhode Island legislature took a further step in 1875 when it passed a law approving the allocation of state funds to public libraries across the state; the state continues to do so today.

151. Thirtieth Annual Report of the State Board of Education, Together with the Fifty-­Fifth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Public Schools of Rhode Island. January 1900 (Providence: E. L. Freeman & Sons, 1900). https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi /pt?id=uc1.a0005241799&view=1up&seq=36. Accessed Feb. 1, 2021.

152. Shera, 125–26. He adds, “Though in such cases the body politic may lack representation in the government and administration of the library, as the agency retains full autonomy in operation, the library does become a municipal service so far as the patrons are concerned.”

153. Statement by prominent nineteenth-­century librarian William F. Poole in the 1876 Report of the United States Bureau of Education and quoted by Shera, 157. Horace Mann surveyed the counties of Massachusetts in 1839 and reported that only one-­ seventh of the state’s population was being served by the several social libraries and lyceums of the period. While Providence’s proportion of residents served was undoubtedly higher by the 1870s, it hardly would have risen to the degree that a public library would have attained. See Shera, 222.

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Rhode Island History

154. Lancaster, 106. The Union for Christian Work possessed one of the characteristics of a public library: its collection was open to patrons free of charge. Consequently, the organization maintained in 1870 that its library was the “only free public library in the city.”

Nevertheless, with its emphasis upon Protestants, its lack of public funding, and the fact that only 296 persons borrowed books in 1870, it hardly qualified as public library by most standards.

Providence Daily Journal (October 7, 1870), 1. NewsBank. Accessed December 7, 2019. Likewise, in her unpublished history of the association, Ferguson asserts that the YMCA and the YWCA were the only libraries in Providence open to the public prior to the establishment of the Providence Public Library in 1878.

Although the YMCA’s reading room was available to the public free of charge, there was a membership fee to join the organization, and among the members’ privileges was access to the library.

This, in conjunction with the YMCA’s private funding, disqualifies its library from meeting the criteria used to define a public library.

See Kraus, “Libraries of the Men’s Christian Associations in the Nineteenth Century, Journal of Library History 10:1 (January 1975): 16. The YWCA also mostly attracted Protestant users.

155. “Our Free Library,” Providence Daily Journal (February 4, 1878), 5. NewsBank. Accessed January 12, 2020.

156. Providence Daily Journal (February 6, 1869), 1. NewsBank.

Accessed December 30, 2019.

157. Samuel H. Tingley, Historical Address at Centennial Festival of the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers, February 27, 1889, 23. MSS 635, Series 3, Box 6, Folder 10, RIHS. 158. Allen, Stone, Brown, 15, 19–20, and 21.

159. Providence Daily Journal (May 12, 1870), 2. NewsBank.

Accessed December 30, 2019. While more than 5,000 citizens voted for the mayoral candidates, only around 2,000 voted for or against the library question. The smaller figure reflects Rhode Island’s exclusion of non-­property holders from voting on tax questions. In a city of nearly 70,000, the fact that only native-­ born male property owners made the decision not to fund a public library meant that most people had no say in this matter.

160. Stevenson, “‘For the Benefit of the Laboring Classes’: The

86

Founding of the Providence Public Library” (April 1981), 27. Draft manuscript donated to the RIHS. 161. Tingley, 23.

162. For a complete list of the committee members from each organization, see Zachariah Allen, Edwin M. Stone, and Welcome O. Brown, Free Public Library, Art-­Gallery, and Museum in the City of Providence R.I. (Providence: Hammond, Angell & Co., 1871), 10–11.

163. An overview of the early history of Providence Public Library is presented in William E. Foster, The First Fifty Years of the Providence Public Library, 1878–1928 (Providence: Providence Public Library, 1928); Clarence E. Sherman, The Providence Public Library: An Experiment in Enlightenment (Providence: Privately printed, 1937); Stuart C. Sherman, The Providence Public Library: A Century of Service, 1878–1978 (Providence: Providence Public Library), 1978.

164. According to Tingley, “The Association voted to donate their Library to the Public Library and raised by subscription nearly $5000 which they presented in cash. In February 1878 they had the satisfaction of seeing the Library opened freely to the public with upwards of ten thousand volumes, about two-­thirds of which were the gift of this association.” 23.

165. “The Opening of the Public Library,” Providence Daily Journal (February 5, 1878), 1.

166. C. Sherman, 25.

167. Children could not use the library in its first few years; however, the public library began to allow any city of Providence schoolchild below the age of fourteen who could read and write to do so “under the judicious guidance of his teacher” by the mid-­1890s. See Seventeenth Annual Report of the Providence Public Library for the Year Ending December 31, 1894 (Providence: Providence Press, 1895), 6.

168. Stevenson, 44–45. Since a shareholder’s spouse, children, and friends often borrowed books as well, the Providence Athenaeum had considerably more than 670 users in 1871, but nowhere near the 10,400 cardholders registered at the Providence Public Library at this time. Lancaster, 110.

The Beginning of Libraries in Providence

169. C. Sherman, 28.

170. Collection numbers as reported in the Providence Daily Journal (March 16, 1900), 9.

171. C. Sherman, 29.

172. In the address given at the dedication of the new library building in 1900, the Honorable Thomas Durfee, president of the Providence Public Library Board of Trustees and former chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, noted that “unless the city increases its appropriation, we shall have to look to our capital or elsewhere for means to supply the deficit . . .The library must not, for the good name of the city, be left to languish or decline without assistance,” Providence Daily Journal (March 16, 1900), 9.

173. George D. Strayer, Report of the Survey of Certain Aspects of the Public School System of Providence, Rhode Island (Oxford Press: Providence RI, [1924]), quoted in Stephenson, 40–45.

174. Evening Bulletin (July 24, 1922), 1. NewsBank. Accessed March 1, 2021.

175. “Motor Accidents in City Average Eleven Every Day,” Evening Bulletin (August 1, 1922), 2. NewsBank. Accessed March 1, 2021.

176. “One Life Every Half-­Hour,” Providence Journal (August 28, 1922), 12. NewsBank. Accessed March 2, 2021.

177. “New Knight Memorial Library on Elmwood,” Providence Sunday Journal, Three Star ed. (March 30, 1924), 45. NewsBank.

Accessed January 6, 2020.

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