“Amoskeag Did All This to Keep Harmony . . .”

Background: The Amoskeag Corporation in Manchester, New Hampshire, operated the world’s largest textile mill, employing some 14,000 workers. Like a number of large companies during this period, it ran a series of welfare programs for workers and their families. Joseph Debski, who began working at Amoskeag in 1910 when he was fourteen years old, described one company benefit.

The Amoskeag had a textile club; anybody over eighteen who worked there could belong to it. It had a reading room, canteen, billiard and pool tables, and card tables; and they used to have dances, probably once a month in the wintertime. They had a golf course with a clubhouse; and in 1927 they took over the Intervale Country Club. . . . Then they had the Amoskeag Textile Field, which was a baseball field.

            There was a general fund to operate things like a Christmas party for employees’ children. They’d take all the equipment out of the garage—it was all bare floor—and prepare it for fifteen to twenty-five hundred children from five to fifteen, free of charge. They would try to take the hard cases, people who probably couldn’t afford a good Christmas party of their own.

            The textile club had an annual meeting at the Jolliet Hall . . . and there’d be fifteen hundred to two thousand people there. They’d have a big dinner and entertainment. We had committees on bowling, athletics, photography. . . . They had about twenty different committees. . . .

            Amoskeag did all this to keep harmony amongst its employees. The board of directors established the textile club. . . . During the strike of 1922, the textile club functioned the most because people didn’t have anywhere else to go. They would go play cards, play pool. They didn’t draw any lines and say people couldn’t come in because of the strike. . . . The club kept going . . . until the mid-thirties. . . . It was when the mill was shut down [in 1936] that everything was demolished.

Source: Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Lagenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (1978).