(wind howling softly) - [Christian] In 1906, an unidentified man spoke to "The Providence Journal".

- [Local Resident] Once the place was an ideal village, and I still remember the time, and it was not so very long ago either, when it was known for miles around as being one of the prettiest mill villages in New England.

I can remember when the church, which will seat about 300, would be filled over Sunday.

Now if we have 20, it's a large congregation.

Then the proprietor's children played with the children of the poor parents, and there was a democratic feeling, almost among comradeship between the owners and the working people.

There were any number of instances on the books of the old Slater firm where widows and the needy ones have been helped along through their generosity.

(light gentle music) We had a population of about 1900 until eight years ago, when the last strike took place, but that was the climax of a number of strikes, and it just killed the place.

Lots of tenements in the village are idle, and the mischief makers are beginning to destroy them by breaking windows, pulling off the doors, and the chimneys on some of them are falling to pieces.

Why, when this village was prosperous, you could not find a drunken person in the place, and now the town looks like the last act in the night in a barroom.

(soft melancholic music) - [Christian] That year, morale in Slatersville was so low that no one wanted to shell out $200 to put on a centennial celebration, and this man, whoever he was, could not see that nearly a century later, the mill in which he worked would be dealing with a few weeds of its own.

(soft melancholic music) (wind blowing softly) All he knew was that a very tall Boston banker named James R. Hooper had purchased the village for 500 grand, cut over half its workforce, demolished a bunch of buildings, and turned it into a finishing company just six years earlier.

On top of that, he knew Hooper was an absentee landlord who made no effort to know his workers at all, but eventually he would see his fellow villagers unite, and the town council would vote in favor of putting on a centennial gala celebration that July, with a flag raised atop the old Slater mansion and that not a single member of the Slater family would even show up.

(gentle dramatic music) But it's important to remember one thing, this man, who was never named, held a very clear bias that aligned with the reputation of the paper in which his words appeared.

- The voices of the workers were pretty much absent from the conversation in the pages of "The Providence Journal".

The editorial page was notoriously pro-management and anti-strike.

- [Christian] Despite the negligence of its previous owner, John Whipple Slater, or the absent disinterest of James Hooper that followed, this man, if he ever existed, could only blame one thing.

- [Local Resident] It all comes from the strikes.

The operators were better off while they lived here than they have been since they were driven away.

But they listened to the strangers who thought they knew more about the mill business than the proprietors over the moon, and now the place is as dead as a graveyard.

(suspenseful music) - [Christian] Two years later, a 30-year-old man from Walpole, Massachusetts, a town 40 miles north of Slatersville, was searching for a second mill, with the intention of expanding his company.

What he needed was a location with plenty of water and a good supply of labor.

What he would find was a place well into its eclipse, and the site of the second oldest cotton mill in America.

(suspenseful orchestral music) (dramatic instrumental music) (dramatic instrumental music) (dramatic instrumental music) (dramatic orchestral music) (dramatic theatrical music) (bright theatrical music) (dramatic orchestral music) (jaunty ragtime music) Henry Plimpton Kendall was born on January 15, 1878, in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

He was the son of Henry Lucian and Clara Idella Kendall, and spent his youth in Plimptonville, a village named after his mother's side of the family in Walpole, where they had been known for decades, from their creation of the Plimpton Press in the 1880s, to their generations of study at Amherst College.

- Father graduated from college in 1899 and went to work immediately for the Plimpton Press.

He had intended to become a professor of mathematics, but the family needed his help.

By 1903, he had gotten the company organized when the Lewis Batting company came along.

- [Henry] It was making a little absorbent cotton, and also cotton bats, stair pads, and carpet linings.

We disposed of the old lines, except the cotton, revamped the plant by putting in some secondhand machinery, added gauze as a new item, hired a salesman, and went into the absorbent cotton and gauze business in competition with bigger and stronger rivals.

- [John] From that, he built what later became known as The Kendall Company.

(jaunty ragtime music) - [Christian] Soon after, he approached James Hooper with an offer to buy the village, but Hooper wouldn't sell.

Later he said he might consider selling at a price of $750,000.

Kendall looked around at the poor state of the village and offered him 250.

- The offer was vigorously turned down.

- [Christian] For seven years, Kendall kept his eye on Slatersville.

With the arrival of World War I came a sudden surge in product sales.

Kendall quickly needed to double his operations, but he still needed to purchase a new mill in order to meet that demand.

Then in March of 1915, an accident in Wellesley, Massachusetts changed everything.

- Our great-grandfather was driving, but even though the chauffeur was there, he was in the backseat.

- Of course.

(James chuckling) - [James] James Hooper drove into a inner city trolley and badly smashed his arm.

Ended up in a hospital in Newton.

There were no beds in the hospital.

He ended up in the maternity ward.

(Fred chuckling) Had months of therapy.

- The owner changed his mind and approached my father to see if his offer was still good.

- "Early 60s, "badly injured, "can't travel to Slatersville.

"I'll bet he wants to sell."

- [Christian] Although Hooper was anxious to sell, he still could not be talked down from his $750,000 asking price, (wind blowing softly) but after lengthy and tedious negotiations, Henry Kendall, at the age of 37, purchased Slatersville, its mill, commercial blocks, and most of its houses for $383,000.

Its new owner made the trip South.

(train engine chugging) - They met in Slatersville on a cold, raw day, and the owner walked out of the plant offices, handed my father the keys and left.

He didn't even introduce the plant managers, and it was up to my father to make those introductions.

- [Christian] And the first person he met was Michael Coyle, a Church Street resident and mill supervisor.

Coyle was doubtful and suspicious of the new owner.

Kendall asked him to stay on, which he did, but he promised no commitment.

At the time the village's boarding house was falling to pieces, and no town hall existed.

Their grammar school, built by the Slater family, had no indoor plumbing and had fallen into disrepair.

But, of course, the change in ownership had just been sprung on him, when Hooper said... - "Sir, I have sold the plant to this gentleman.

Good day."

How do you say something in the least amount of words and fulfill your obligation?

(Fred chuckling) - [Christian] Until the end of his life, James Hooper remained an active businessman and served as the president of the New England Trust Company.

He died in the fall of 1934.

(light gentle music) - When he went through the Slatersville's plant, he noticed that the employees didn't look up, didn't smile, didn't wave.

He took that as a sign that morale was not at all good, (light gentle music) but he said to his companion that, "Within a year, they will all be my friends," and they were.

(light gentle music) In all the years I knew him, I never saw him lose his temper.

I never saw him visibly angry.

I never heard him raise his voice.

He had very, very rigid controls over his deportment and his behavior.

My father was such a slow reader.

If he hadn't adopted other techniques, he would have had real difficulty in mastering the fields that he did.

He wanted to be a musician, but he couldn't read music fast enough to read a quarter note.

In those days, there were grade crossings all over New England, and when a freight train came, you just stood at the grade crossing and watched the train go by.

His reading skills were such that he couldn't read the numbers on the box cars as they went by because he couldn't read fast enough, but what he could do was that he could listen, and he could ask questions, and he could remember.

So people presenting him with a thick report about anything would be invited to come and sit down and tell him what was in the report, and my father would pick up a great deal of what he knew by listening.

- [James] I also had decided that instead of buying our gray goods in the open market, we should own our own cotton mills.

Buy raw cotton in the bale, weave it ourselves, bleach and finish it in our northern plants, and sell it to users through our own salesman, an integrated operation.

(dramatic music) In 1916, we took the first step in this program by buying the first of our cotton mills, the Wateree Mill in Camden, South Carolina, followed in 1918 by the purchase of the Addison Mill at Edgefield, South Carolina.

- [Christian] In the 1930s, millions of Black and White farmers worked as sharecroppers to produce the cotton that fueled factories like Slatersville in the North, but the violent and racist reactions to the advancements of the Reconstruction following the Civil War meant that Black cotton workers still labored in brutal and oppressive poverty, and lawmakers, intent on preserving the order of the Jim Crow South, would also exclude them from future advancements.

(suspenseful music) By having a residence in Camden, he could keep an eye on his mills throughout the South.

(gentle music) He would build housing for his workers, and have a prominent role in the community, as this rediscovered film from 1930 shows us.

(gentle music) In the four decades that followed, the Kendall Company would build an international network of over two dozen mills across seven states and five countries, with most of them located in Toronto, Massachusetts, and South Carolina.

But their expansion was born by bringing Slatersville back to life.

From all of this experience, Kendall knew exactly the type of boss he needed to run Slatersville.

- Dad, please introduce yourself.

What is your name and where did you grow up?

- My name is Carlton Chamberlain Pipping, and I grew up in the village of Slatersville.

My father was Henry Hansen Pipping.

- [Christian] Much of what we can share about Henry Kendall's time in Slatersville was found in a biography written by George L. Moore.

To date, the work has never been completed nor published.

- This is about your dad.

"Harry brought in a man that he "had met in the Plimpton Press contacts, "Wilfred Bancroft, as Slatersville Manager."

Now this is what your father had to say about Mr.

Bancroft.

- [Both] "Bancroft called me in one day."

- [Henry] And said, "I want you to be personnel manager."

I said, "I know nothing about such things."

"You can learn, can't you?"

They liked the way he dressed, sort of careless, like a farmer.

His suit always looked as though he'd slept in it, and his tie always was up under one ear.

It wasn't long before he knew everybody in the village by their first names.

- [Christian] "By their first names," Henry Kendall might have been onto something.

- Next on the agenda, the Slatersville Mills Master Plan Informational Meeting, major land development project, 10 Railroad Street, Plat 4 Lot 41, slash.

- [Christian] Nearly a century after he bought Slatersville, many of the families of those workers he knew by their first names still lived in Slatersville.

- Yes, Ms.

Thibault.

- Well, you know, the thing is it was a busy, bustling place, and everybody in town worked there.

My dad worked there from the time... Well, my grandfather worked there, for heaven's sakes.

My name is Linda Thibault.

I'm here as the daughter of the late John Cabral, and the very much alive, Lillian Cabral.

I am a product of this village.

- And I too was a product of this village.

Is this is a thick enough book, you think, 1903?

Unlike the Slaters, who were long gone with the 19th century, many who worked for Kendall, or had family that once did, were still alive in the mid-2000s.

- We've got tons of stuff here, and a lot of things in these acid-free boxes.

- [Christian] So I started to interview people who could tell me all about it, while they were still here.

- I've been helping Christian de Rezendes here.

He's doing a field documentary on the mill, and assisting him with some of the interviews.

My own mother was one.

- Linda, get that spool of thread there.

I'll show you what I mean.

I lived here on Main Street all my life.

We moved from one house to another, Then got married, and I moved into this house.

So I'm here.

I've been here all my life.

I'm 91, and I've been here.

We didn't have no water.

Oh, they had like a little pump that they put there for washing, but every two houses they had a pump.

Not the drinking water though.

Not drinking water, yeah, no.

- I also spoke with Mr.

Clarence Arsenault, and he gave me permission to use his name tonight.

- [Christian] And that's how I got to know this man by his first name.

Okay, I was wondering if you could introduce yourself to me.

- Yes, my name is Clarence Arsenault.

I live at 61 Main Street in Slatersville.

I was still in school, but I was working here at Slatersville Finishing Company when I was 15 years old.

- My dad was kind of an interesting guy.

He got a grammar school education, and he took night courses for high school.

So he didn't really have that much of a background in education, but he did very well for himself.

- [Christian] Many would only have a preliminary education before they quit school to work in the mill, like Maria.

She remembered attending Slatersville Grammar School, and she remembered this guy.

- He was the school principal, too, and I hated his guts.

- [Christian] And being left-handed had something to do with that.

- Well, he'd come sneaking in back of you all the time.

I'd be writing, and he'd pull the ruler off the desk and crack me on the knuckle every damn time.

Then he'd take the pencil and stick it in my right hand.

(jaunty ragtime music) My father says, "You don't need no education.

"You're a farmer.

You don't need no education."

- Eighteen years old, I was promoted to the planning department.

I was able to get the sales job that covered New England, and I finally retired when I was 75, and that was it.

(lively ragtime music) - [Christian] And then there was Cecilia, who could still sharply recall a very different world.

- The day that I was born, my father worked on the trolley cars.

There was a blizzard, and he said they were marooned in Pasco for a while.

- The tracks were right on this side here, right in front of the house, and then in the summer, boy, that was nice, going from here to Woonsocket, open cars.

- Oh, yes, I remember the trolleys, all the way through Forestdale up Hamlin's Hill, right into Slatersville.

I can remember the horse and buggy days.

♪ Whoopee, hey, hey ♪ (lively jaunty music) - [Tom] Everything was all dirt roads.

They didn't have paved roads in those days.

There was no Victory Highway then.

There was no other street other than North Main Street.

- There were no cars either.

They had electricity in the village of Forestdale, but none where I lived.

(lively ragtime music) - You don't see that anymore.

- [Christian] Here's something else you don't see anymore.

In the mid 1990s, a man named Bob Harding began compiling some Slatersville Mill research of his own.

We'll get to the reason for this later, but what's important is who he captured on tape.

- Bob Harding heard about my grandfather, and he said, "Could I meet him and possibly interview him?"

- His name was Ben Heslin.

- Bernard Heslin, but he wanted to go by Ben.

(bright cheerful music) - He was blind.

He was a blind man, and he was still living in his late '90s, by the way.

- He absolutely welcomed the chance to have people come.

He couldn't wait to have people come and chat with him and so forth.

- We have interviewed him on tape, but not videotape.

- And so we took a little tape cassette.

(cassette clicks) This is Grandpa Heslin talking about the mill in Slatersville, with Bob Harding and Lisa Harlow, on July 9, 1994.

- [Ben] Now you start the questioning.

- [Bob] Tell me again about your first coming to Slatersville.

- [Ben] All right, when I came out to this country, I came out after the World War, 1914 to 1918.

(upbeat guitar music) My mother and three sisters living in Lowell, Massachusetts, which was the center of New England where all of cotton was, most of it.

I came there as a textile chemist.

- Dad's heart of hearts, if he could have had a choice, he would've loved to have been a merchant.

- An entrepreneur.

- Entrepreneur.

- Yeah.

- A people person.

- Oh, yeah.

- He really fell into being a dyer.

- [Ben] I mean when I came to Lowell, I found out the chemist got $25 a week, and the dyer got $50 a week.

That was the difference.

So I decided I was gonna be a dyer.

I mean it wasn't really hard.

I always wanted to work in a small village, if you could help it.

(upbeat guitar music) I went down to a crewing agency.

They called it Raymond's agency for executives in Boston.

I got this job, Slatersville.

- So dad was told, when he got the job in Slatersville, "You'll have to wait now until one of the white houses (indistinct) opens up.

- The next white house.

- The management homes.

- [Ben] And they moved me down there, and they got me a house.

I paid $20 a month for a 10-room house.

- Pipping had been a house painter.

Kendall put him in charge of the village, and for the mill houses on just one street Henry remembers buying $25,000 worth of new windows and doors.

- One of the advantages he has to play with is that he no longer needs to cram four families into those homes.

Because the workforce was cut in half, or about in half, he's able to turn those into single family homes.

- [Christian] To accomplish this, Kendall would have to tap his closest source for lumber, at a time that Mildred could still recall.

- Well, I'm 105 years old.

Mildred Ariola Lunn.

That was my maiden name.

I was born on North Main Street in Slatersville.

- [Christian] And her father was... - Amos F. Lunn.

That was his seat in the Senate, but I was young then.

- When I was a boy, Amos F. Lunn Lumber Company used to have a sign out front.

All his trucks had that on the side of it.

- You were in the carriage, and you were only a little baby.

- Yep, yep.

My mother said that he came in with a load of logs, and he wanted to take a picture.

He picked her up, plunked her on the side of the truck.

- [Mildred] He told me to sit on the log and not to move because it was dangerous.

- And he'd supply all the lumber for the town.

Now there's a picture of the log.

- He had men that worked for him.

He always fed his teamsters, because they had no home.

They lived in the barn.

- You helped your grandmother in the basement feed the teamsters.

- Yeah.

- Henry Kendall restored all these houses, brought them right down to the post and beams, and rebuilt the insides.

- He's the one who put the shutters on and the porticos, so that it became a very attractive area right along the green.

- It's exactly what you picture on the postcards.

You know, here's the white church on the common and the lovely row of houses.

That image was something that Kendall really creates.

- [Christian] With all the traveling he did from Walpole to Washington to South Carolina, Henry Kendall's presence was always felt in Slatersville whenever he dropped by.

- So he would come for dinner often.

- Oh, he made it a point to be there at dinnertime.

- Right, and if he wasn't at your house for dinner, whose home did he go to?

- Ed Wilks.

- [Christian] Henry Kendall and Ed Wilks became acquainted at a meeting of the Taylor Society in New York in 1915.

Taylor, as in Frederick Winslow Taylor, as in the man who wrote the book on Scientific Management, which, to this day, remains controversial, and this man would know.

- Scientific management was a management philosophy that came about around the turn of the century, and it was designed to break down the power of the bosses within the factory, but also to make sure that the workers had to perform their duties on a timed basis.

And what it did was it took away the skilled part of the jobs and made them routine, so that workers were turned into, really, part of the machinery.

(suspenseful music) - [Christian] Near the turn of the century, Taylor had determined that the mill working operations were inefficient and wasting of time.

So with stopwatch in hand, he set out to time the tasks of each worker down to the second.

Mill owners loved this form of time management because it maximized their profits, and Mr.

Kendall himself actually knew the man.

- [Henry] I read Taylor's book and was deeply impressed by it.

After correspondence, I went to Philadelphia to see him.

Taylor's fundamental thesis was that there is one best way to do things by reshuffling the elements of the job to eliminate waste of time, energy and materials.

- [Christian] In Taylor's system, which was implemented in thousands of mills throughout the United States, most workers felt abused and dehumanized.

(dramatic music) But with the experience Ed Wilks had teaching scientific management at Harvard Business School, Kendall hired him as operations manager.

- He was top dog.

(laughs) He'd roam around from one department to the other, constantly checking out on all departments to make sure that things were running smoothly.

(stopwatch ticking) - [Christian] During World War I, Wilks had served in the U.S.

Navy.

When stationed in France, Captain Frank Evans ordered him to paint white squares in the corners of the workrooms, for a very good reason.

- [James] He said, "It'll be a shame to dirty up "those corners with tobacco juice.

"If you keep the corners clean, "the center of the room will take care of itself."

- [Christian] Wilks painted white corners on the stairways and in the rooms of the Slatersville plant in 1919.

This was the first use of this cleanliness device, which ultimately was adopted throughout American industry.

Kendall also reduced work weeks from 60 hours down to 50 hours, and then to 48, with no reductions in pay.

In fact, pay rates went up, but his obsession with efficiency was matched with his passion for transforming mill villages, especially Slatersville.

- The bell tower rang every hour on the hour, (bell ringing) from morning till night.

- [Christian] Kendall truly had a soft heart for the village.

Even his own mother made a well-remembered trip down from Walpole just to see it.

And it was said that no tree anywhere under any condition would be cut down until HP had personally examined and ordered it.

All of this made a cheerier environment for his workers to live in, but he didn't do it alone.

In 1919, Kendall was introduced to a manager at the Phillips Brooks House at Harvard University.

(bright upbeat music) Standing six feet, five inches tall and bubbling with humor, the mill owner found this man to have a winning personality and thought he would be the perfect hire to play a role in molding Slatersville into a model village.

Arthur Beane accepted the job, and as one of the mill's supervisors, he would have a profound influence before his untimely death.

He began reluctantly, not wanting to leave his graduate management position at Harvard, where he was successful at building their endowment.

But the Canadian native, who had been raised as a farmer in dire poverty, with a very abusive father, had attained a natural gift for encouraging positive communication between the classes of labor and management.

(gentle piano music) It was no secret that Arthur and his wife Ruth, who had come from a family that was well off, were very much in love.

And with a growing family of their own, Arthur needed a higher paying job.

Before the move to Slatersville, they had two children, and during the four years they lived in the village, they would have two more.

Through his Harvard connections, Arthur Beane brought professors and social workers to the village, and their student athletes went on picnics with mill-working families.

He made friends, inspired confidence, and raised thousands of dollars to restore the congregational church.

By 1922, when the church had no separate space for their Sunday school or social events, Beane made a plan to excavate underneath it to create a basement, much to the objection of a few naysayers.

But the plan went through with the help of large donations he was able to raise, again, through Harvard.

- When they dug out the basement under the church, they used one horse with a scoop, and then they had many people with shovels, and they scooped out all of the basement.

Then they built big cement walls underneath to hold the church up.

- [Christian] Then in 1923, Beane would make another tremendous contribution.

A new minister was needed, but the church could only offer a salary of $500.

Beane said that for $2500, he could get his friend, an old classmate from the Mount Herman School, to leave his job in Temple, New Hampshire.

(wind blowing softly) The work of this minister would be remembered for generations to come.

- Well, Reverend Eastman came to us in the 1920s.

(bright trumpet music) - Well, he was born in Minnesota.

From there when he grew up, he went to the Moody Bible Institute and became a pastor.

I don't think he ever finished actually.

But then he came east.

- When they were looking for a pastor, they had a problem with the parsonage, and there was no flush toilets, and it was just an outhouse.

And they were having a very hard time finding a pastor who was willing to do this, but Mr.

Eastman said that, yes, he would come with an outhouse.

We don't know how his family felt about that, but he said he would come with the outhouse.

- [Christian] Well, with the 500% increase in pay promised by Mr.

Beane, an outhouse probably didn't sound so bad, but anyway.

- He had a job in Boston, and he used to ride around.

They'd call him Unkle Eph.

- Unkle Eph was an invention of my grandfather's.

Raymond's was one of these stores that sold discounted merchandise.

So my grandfather, using fractured English, wrote letters to Mr.

Dorr telling him that he had seven kids and he appreciated that these were discounted prices.

And he had signed all of these letters, "Unkle Eph."

Mr.

Dorr was intrigued, so he said, "How would you like to write the advertising for the store?"

He was Unkle Eph for a long time, and once a year they would have him come to the store to pass out bonus checks, and there would be a parade.

My grandmother would dress up and he would dress up, and they would make a whole big thing out of it.

(bright cheerful music) This is a bank.

The store gave them out at one time.

It was supposed to save money, like Unkle Eph, I guess.

His head has been broken off a couple of times and replaced, but there he is.

(bright cheerful music) - [Christian] In the years to follow, Kendall and Eastman would be seen as an odd team, with Kendall as Slatersville's owner, and Eastman more as its moderator.

Once Reverend Eastman had settled into Slatersville, Arthur Beane moved his family back to Cambridge, where he continued to work and travel for the Kendall Company.

(gentle piano music) One day, Arthur Beane traveled to New York City, where he contracted a horrible case of pneumonia.

Days later, he would die in a Manhattan hospital.

He was only 44.

The congregational church held his funeral, where Reverend Eastman called his old friend, "A young man of brilliant promise."

(somber piano music) His wife Ruth was so distraught that she took to bed for a year with her 2-year-old son Richards.

Unable to tell their young daughter Eleanor of his death, the six-year-old believed her father to be away on business, and so she sat by the door waiting (somber music) and waiting.

(somber music) (suspenseful music) The country fell into the Great Depression, and President Hoover did next to nothing.

As the most industrialized state in the country, Rhode Island was hit very hard, with unemployment skyrocketing to 32%.

Governor Norman Case, who at first refused federal aid, said that, "Rhode Island will provide for its own," and that made everyone's suffering a whole lot worse.

(dramatic melancholic music) - Every morning we would go down to the employment office and sit around in all these chairs.

In fact, we got some of these chairs here.

These are the chairs out of that room down in the mill.

- The boss would come out, Mr.

Pipping.

"I'll take you, and I'll take you, "and I'll take you."

- "You, you, you, you're go in the hot frames.

"You'll go to the--" - "Packer room, "because you're big and strong.

"You people are nimble.

"You're going up in the finishing room."

- Various places in the building were assigned to go and help out.

- For one day's work.

The rest would go home.

(machine humming) - [Christian] But others were not so fortunate.

Just downhill in the neighboring village of Forestdale, the situation had turned grim.

- [Reporter] Employees of the Forestdale Manufacturing Company Thursday were notified that the plant would suspend operations permanently, soon as stock on hand was run off.

The company manufacturers cotton yarn, and has been operating on a curtailed basis with about 125 employees.

Baylis G. Aldrich, treasurer of the corporation, was authorized to dispose of its remaining assets.

(bell chiming on radio) - [Announcer] The following program entitled "The Senate has Spoken" is presented in cooperation with the League of Women Voters.

- [Christian] Now unbeknownst to many in Slatersville, Henry Kendall had deep connections within the White House.

- [Announcer] I have the honor of introducing Mr.

Henry P. Kendall, President of the Kendall Company, Trustee of Mount Holyoke College, and lately chairman of THE Business Advisory Council for the United States Department of Commerce.

- [Christian] On which he served at the pleasure of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had defeated Hoover in a landslide.

Once in office, FDR immediately tackled the Depression head on by passing aggressive measures to reign in Wall Street and the banks, create federal job programs, and grant tons of relief money to the states.

These measures known as The New Deal began America's recovery, but working people still continued to suffer.

- Bob Harding wanted to do a story, and the "The Providence Journal" was gonna do a front-page story or two about the mill, and they were gonna speak to me and my oldest daughter who worked there during the summer, and my mother had retired, and they were gonna talk about the generations in the mill.

So Bob asked me to set up a interview with the journal with my mother, who was a French Canadian and would speak her mind.

So I called her at home, said, "Mom, they wanna do the story about you, "about the mill and the three generations working there."

She said, "Junior, you'll tell those bastards to call me.

"I started there when I was 15 at 26 cents an hour, "60 hours a week and no overtime pay."

So I called Bob Harding back, and I said, "My mother's not ready."

(chuckling) My mother was from a family of 16.

My father, a family of 12.

My mother's family was so large that she got farmed out to my Aunt Emma.

My Aunt Emma was called The Rich Gogans, because they had a job in the mill.

(dramatic reflective music) My aunt used to remind me that as you progressed in the mill, you could get better housing and better money, but she also warned me that if you didn't and you didn't toe the line, you could end up not just losing your job but losing your house.

If you were a manager, you were expected to be part of the town.

You were expected to pass the basket on a Sunday or be part of coaching in any of the leagues.

The mill had a great hold over the employees.

It didn't seem to her like they took advantage of it, but it was there.

(pensive dramatic music) - Alcohol was not available in Slatersville, but just outside the line, there were two bars.

Up Main Street there was The Red Front.

- Joe Germaine's Tavern up at the end of Main Street, which was far enough away so that the mill workers couldn't get hold of any liquor, to keep them sober at least for a week long until the weekends.

- The second one was... - The White Front, which was not considered in Slatersville.

It's Forestdale.

(pensive dramatic music) - The legal address of this place is the highway between Forestdale and Slatersville.

When I was behind the bar, I would serve the alcohol in Forestdale, and it would be given to the person sitting in Slatersville, because the line went directly through the bar, so.

- If my grandfather wanted beer, they would get into the baby carriage, go up with a bucket, and buy a bucket of beer and bring it back for my grandfather.

- [Christian] But seriously, why all the sneaking around?

Life wasn't like it was a century earlier under the Slaters, or was it?

- They would also look to see who would be in church on Sunday, and in the local taverns at night, so you had to keep the cards close to your chest.

- [Christian] But workers didn't always do that, and sometimes on weekends, they blew off a little too much steam.

- My husband's brothers, they bought that camp up there, and, boy, every Saturday night you hear that music come.

Well, Monday mornings, the boys hadn't got down to the mill to their jobs.

You know, Pipping, remember Pipping?

That was their boss.

- [Christian] As personnel manager, Pipping had such a tough reputation that even Mr.

Kendall would say.

- [Henry] And here's the man who keeps his foot on the necks of my people.

- [Christian] And why would his son Carlton agree with that?

- Because he was German.

Man, and he was just as tough at home as he was in the mill.

- [Christian] And if that's true, then this story will make a lot of sense.

- He'd come driving up Main Street here.

Holler across the canal to the camps, "Hey, you guys, get the hell down here.

"Your job is waiting.

"Get out of that bed."

And they'd come flying out of the camp and dive in the water and swim the pond (water splashing) down to the big dam right here, go flying to their house (footsteps tapping on gravel) at the end of the railroad street there and get back down to work.

Nearly every morning he'd have to come and holler, and you could hear him holler.

My husband and his brother, they thought that was a riot.

- [Christian] Well, they did have work to do, but what exactly did they do?

This leather-bound book of photographs, created by the Kendall Company in the 1930s, helped us to answer that question.

And how did we find it?

Well, someone needed to do a senior thesis in design back in 1984.

- I knew I wanted to change the Slatersville Mill into something, and my mother suggested Clarence Arsenault.

"Go see Clarence."

"He might be able to give you some information, "or know where you can get some."

And when I was telling Clarence what I want to do, he got very excited and he left the room, and he came back with this book, and he said, "This is all you're gonna need "to document your senior thesis."

- [Christian] This book was the only visual record inside the Slatersville Finishing Company, with every department labeled, and Clarence, well, he still knew his way through the place backwards.

- Fabrics were coming in from the south in these huge trailers, and we had a conveyor belt that would take every roll and bring it up to the second floor.

- [Ben] That's the way the old method was.

The bail's opened up, and then it went up into a ring.

- To start the process.

(dramatic music) - In the front of the mill, the races of water was being diverted from the river under the mill over a wheel, and there's an archway, and the water ran right under the mill.

- [Ben] It went into the big bleaching that way, you know.

- [Bob] Yeah, that was the first step, bleaching?

- [Ben] That was the first step, bleaching.

You bleach it with chlorine.

That was a very responsible job too, you know.

- [Bob] They used the water right out of the canal, right?

- Yes.

- Yeah.

- [Ben] We had to have pure water for to bleach the cloth white.

- [Bob] Yeah.

- [Christian] And that purifying would start with Kendall's new state-of-the-art filtration plant that processed 2 million gallons of water a day to extract waste coming in from other mills up river.

And at the time, it was considered the tallest smoke stack in all of Rhode Island.

- Cloth was transported from one mill to the other through something called poteyes.

Poteyes were made of porcelain.

- [Clarence] They sewed up all the pots of the cloth.

- The cloth was bunched up in ropes, and the cloth would be going between several of these things.

- So that they would be a continuous run.

- From building to building, floor to floor, through these tunnels.

All the buildings were connected with these tunnels.

All have been taken down now.

- [Christian] The cloth would run across the entire weave shed, landing in every department, from bleaching to the care room.

- They bring it into these casks, with the huge tanks under pressure of chemicals, to bleach out the fabric.

- [Ben] And then a guy would stand up there with a stick, and spread it out and around, you know.

- And downstairs in that brick building, that's where they did all the finishing of the cloth, the dying of it.

- Right across the street was a stone wall.

The 14th window up, they counted that was Dad's office, and that's where his desk was.

And in the summer, when he'd have the windows open, we thought it was real cool.

We could go and stand on the wall and wave to Dad, and he'd wave out at us.

(birds chirping) - [Christian] Other businesses in town worked with the mill, including the Sunnycroft Farm where Bill was raised.

- Well, I used to get up early in the morning before I started my house deliveries, and I'd go down to Primrose.

There was an ice house down there at the Primrose pond.

I'd take a whole truckload up, put it down in the dye house in the mill here.

They used that to cool the dye down.

- And, of course, the dye that didn't go in the cloth went down the river, and people who lived in the village always could tell which color was being used that day because the river would turn colors.

- [Ben] And then above me, the cloth came from the dye house when it wet, you know, in boxes, and up through the next floor onto the cans.

It was put up through there and dried out there, and that was part of my department.

- [Bob] Did they send it up through in ropes?

- [Ben] No, no, no, solid!

After getting it all ready for use, it was open wide.

They were part of the dye house under my supervision.

- The packing room was in the brick part of the building, and that moved from there on the second floor over a bridge into the shipping department, and everything was packed in wooden cases, and labeled and everything.

- To be transported to customers all over the United States, so that every piece of fabric that went out of the mill had a bell tower label.

The bell tower was a very important label for the company.

ú- My father-in-Law, who lived next door, he worked at the mill, and he was a boss down there.

The fabrics were very, very cheap, and he could bring some home.

They'd be like 10 cents a yard to make things, and so it was very handy back in those days because you did a lot of sewing.

- [Maria] Well, I made a good many sheets, pillow slips, underpants.

- The nice thing is we were almost all alike, so that didn't matter.

- Men's collars, just pull a collar off and sew another one on.

- When I married, my dear, I had to borrow my cousin's wedding gown.

We had no money.

(chuckles) We had no money, so my husband borrowed some money to get married.

It was sad, you know, those days.

So we went on a honeymoon.

When we come back, he was laid off.

That money had to be paid, (chuckles) so I never had it so good as I do now.

- You don't see that anymore.

We had to save everything.

- It was very important.

I mean these guys are working for little or nothing down here, you know.

(machines clattering) - The mill workers experienced something that was called the speed up.

Instead of being responsible for one machine first they were responsible for two, then 10, then up to 20.

- They were all slaves.

That's the size of it.

- [Patrick] For 12 hours a day, in working conditions that were dirty, hot and smelly and very dangerous.

The bleachery workers didn't have that experience.

Their job was equally as dangerous, but not quite as stressful as the textile workers in the production side of the supply chain.

- [Christian] Still, workers at bleacheries like Slatersville had their share of tragic accidents.

(birds chirping) Just ask Wanda.

- My father's name was Andrew Gurski.

(soft somber music) He worked at the Slatersville Finishing Company for a man who came from Europe.

He was a hard worker.

He had a good mind.

He had gone to work on a Monday morning, and he went to turn the pipe.

The pipe burst, and that's when he was sprayed with either acid or bleach.

(soft somber music) I remember him being in the hospital.

He was scarred, but he recuperated, and he went back to work.

And then he had problems with his arm.

It started to swell.

That's when he had to leave his work.

- [Christian] Eventually, he would lose the use of that arm and have to leave his home again for the Rhode Island State Sanatorium at Wallum Lake.

- And I remember going to see him, but I wasn't allowed to go into the building.

So he would look out the window, and we would wave.

He was there for a few years.

At the time that the accident happened, my brother was employed with the company, and I think that's why my family didn't press charges because of my brother's job, because my brother was married and he had a family.

(soft somber music) My father died at the age of 58.

(clock ticking) He was waked in this room at the corner right there.

(grandfather clock ticking) I had to leave school to help my family out.

At that time, it was Stamina Mill.

I worked there for my first summer after 16.

(soft melancholic music) I don't remember the Slatersville Finishing Company helping us.

If we had, I think our life would've been a little easier.

(thunder rumbling) (lightning crashing) (thunder rumbling) - In 1933, part of FDR's 100-day agenda was to create the National Recovery Act.

It gave working people the first federally guaranteed right to form a union.

- I know the union tried to come in several times, and they got beat out.

International Textile Union that was a union.

- The problem was is that there was no mechanism for those workers to have their union recognized by their bosses.

The only thing that they had at their disposal to create a union was to go out on strike.

- [Reporter] The great textile strike spreads.

Here are typical scenes in Gastonia, North Carolina.

(protesters cheering) - [Christian] The great textile strike of 1934 was organized by labor unions in the cities and towns throughout America.

- [Reporter] With the total on strike nearing half a million, over 200,000 are out in the Southern states where already lives have been lost and many wounded.

- The rage was real that the workers felt in the 1934 textile strike.

The working conditions were vicious.

First they laid off a number of workers, contributing to the unemployment that the Depression itself had already caused.

- [Reporter] A mile of mills lie idle in Lowell, Massachusetts, with the workers crowding the streets.

Police stand guard in dozens of cities throughout New England where over 100,000 have quit their loom.

- The workers that were left had to work twice, if not three times as hard.

- [Christian] On top of that, a huge portion of the striking mill workers were immigrants, many of whom did not speak English and were very poor.

- Every generation, once somebody's been here for a while, they realized they're being exploited, used.

They see other people come in, and they're treated even more shabbily.

(suspenseful music) The company owners would use one ethnic group against the other.

"Hey, let's show them whose boss.

"We'll bring in some Chinese.

"We'll bring in some French Canadians.

"Hey, how are those Italians coming?

"Oh, yeah, they're coming by the bucket load.

"Let's put them in there."

They would get them fighting each other and take their eye off the prize, which was the people who ran the place, and they would fight it out to see who could work for less.

As time went on, that union spirit would devolve into the lower-class and energize it tremendously.

- Thousands of workers everywhere up and down the East Coast joined the United Textile Workers Union.

In fact, in the summer of 1934, just before the strike, they had 250,000 members.

This was a small union with a small staff and no money.

They couldn't handle this influx of members.

- And I'm saying to you in Rhode Island, if you're hit, there is but one nose!

Hit back!

Hit as hard as you can, and I'll be with you!

(audience applauding) - The members looked upon the union with a great deal of hope, but the union itself did not have the infrastructure to take care of these workers.

- [Christian] By this time, Henry Kendall had faced the same grueling tests of every Depression era mill owner.

As he was struggling to keep the Kendall Company operating, he knew a strike was just around the corner, and what would happen in Rhode Island would be a recipe for disaster.

And that's why we need to talk about Saylesville.

(ominous music) - They had a strike down here.

The union tried to get in there, and it was bad.

I guess there was guns drawn and everything, you know.

(engine humming) - [Christian] But to drive through Saylesville today, you would never know anything tragic ever happened there.

(dramatic music) - [Patrick] On September 7th, three days into the general textile strike, there was a picket line that was established at the Saylesville bleachery.

It was at the turn of the shift, at three o'clock in the afternoon.

(tense dramatic music) 85,000 textile workers across the state of Rhode Island were out of work.

Because they didn't have any jobs to go to, there was a lot of people that were looking for things to do.

A bunch of workers gathered by the front gates of the factory, and they were met by deputy sheriffs.

The deputy sheriffs turned a water hose on the workers and started to attack them with clubs.

As a result, people in the neighborhood came to the workers' defense, in what turned into a rock-throwing incident right on the streets of Saylesville.

(soft dramatic music) Nearly 80% of the mills in Rhode Island had shut down.

It was because Saylesville tried to stay open and because they employed deputy sheriffs who engaged in thug-like tactics with the workers that created the conditions that led to the violence.

Those conditions weren't apparent in other places because the workers in their union were successful at making sure that the factories shut down.

- [Christian] And that brings us to T.F.

Green.

Rhode Islanders remember him as their democratic governor in the 1930s, and as one of their senators in the '60s during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but I first knew him as an airport.

(plane engine roaring) - [Patrick] Theodore Francis Green was elected governor in 1932, as part of the FDR wave of Democratic victories across the entire United States.

Up until that time, Rhode Island had been a firmly Republican Party stronghold.

- [Christian] Two days after the rioting in Saylesville had started, the governor gave a big speech over the radio, where he decided to label both sides.

- He described them as "The communists on one side, "and the reactionaries on the other."

What he meant by that was the communists were the workers and the organizers that were trying to get the strike underway, even though they were not even part of the action on the streets.

(crowd shouting) - They call it red-baiting today.

Somebody's come up with a tremendous argument on one thing or another and make a lot of sense, and somebody says, "You're a red!"

The audience suddenly goes south on you.

You've lost them.

- That way they would have a scapegoat if things continued to escalate.

Reactionaries were the mill owners, and T. F. Green, as a lawyer for many mill companies, knew exactly who these people were.

- [Christian] And it was the reactionaries who wanted Green to call in the National Guard.

- He didn't wanna see that happen, because Governor San Souci in 1922 called out the National Guard to suppress a textile strike.

And as a result of the violence, Governor San Souci lost his reelection.

Green did not wanna lose his election by calling out the National Guard.

- [Christian] But under pressure, he caved.

(bright music plays on film reel) - [Reporter] National Guardsman ordered out by Governor Green advanced with other troops stationed on rooftops.

- [Patrick] The National Guard set up barbed wire at one end of Lonsdale Avenue, and pushed all of the workers to the other end of Lonsdale Avenue, creating about a quarter-mile distance between the two sides.

Right in the middle of those two sides was the Moshassuck Cemetery.

(dramatic music) The workers would run into the cemetery and hide behind the gravestones, so that they wouldn't get shot or beat up by the National Guardsmen.

The National Guard would be shooting into the cemetery, (gunfire blasting) trying to force the striking workers out from their hiding places, so that they could arrest them.

(somber dramatic music) The KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, actually had a Klan Klavern in Rhode Island.

The Klan provided some of the muscle for the deputy sheriffs and the people that were patrolling the streets.

You had idle workers, young children, mostly high-school aged students.

(somber dramatic music) It's hot.

It's summertime.

There's thousands of people on the street.

They're looking down the barrels of guns.

It really was a scene of chaos.

(somber melodramatic music) (soft melancholic vocalizing) - [Reporter] The ambulance company of the Rhode Island National Guard set up a field hospital, which was quickly working to capacity.

(soft melancholic music) - The Slatersville Factory was, like Saylesville, a bleachery.

The bleachery workers were not initially part of it, because they didn't feel as if the conditions that prompted the strike nationwide affected them in their workplace.

But I believe that because of all of the activity in Saylesville, working people that were idle started to show up at other bleacheries like Slatersville to make sure that part of the supply chain was shut down so that the workers could shut down the entire industry as a way to win the strike.

(suspenseful music) - [Reporter] The Slatersville Finishing Company opened its gates this morning, but none of the 300 hands reported for work.

Long lines of pickets and mill employees paraded up and down the streets in Slatersville, and the UTW held a meeting to try to increase its membership.

- [Christian] And that's when the rage spilled over into the city of Woonsocket.

- [Patrick] The workers up in Woonsocket started to feel the same pressure to go out on strike to support their union brothers and sisters.

The National Guard, the state police, the deputy sheriffs overreacted to the striking workers, prompting the street violence that took place in Woonsocket social district.

(suspenseful music) - [Christian] The next day, this was reported in the "Woonsocket Call."

- [Reporter] Conditions at the plant of the Slatersville Finishing Company were very quiet yesterday, with no disturbance all day, with the exception of the early morning visit of the I.T.U delegation from Woonsocket.

- They didn't make much money down here.

And the minute the union got in, they got a little bit more, and... - [Reporter] Even the UTW of A pickets were withdrawn during most of the afternoon.

- [Christian] And it must be noted, according to the governor's political diary, whose administrative assistant he met with that very same evening.

When the violence ended in Rhode Island, four people were dead, two in Saylesville, and two from Woonsocket.

(somber dramatic music) The great textile strike was a massive failure for Rhode Island textile workers, and the tragic events of September 1934 would be known as the Saylesville Massacre, but not without a little spin.

- Governor Green could trace his family lineage all the way back to Roger Williams, the founder of the state of Rhode Island.

Also within his family tree was the Samuel Slater family.

(machines clattering) He was part of the Rhode Island aristocracy.

Only his version of the story got told, so he comes out as a hero.

Things were named after heroes.

(plane engine roaring) My research shows that, in reality, T.F.

Green bumbled his way through the strike, probably caused a lot of the violence to escalate beyond control.

- [Reporter] As fast as one mob is broken up, another gathers.

- [Patrick] And as a result of that power that came with his family name, it was his version of events that became the official history of what happened in 1934.

(protesters shouting indistinctly) (engine rumbling) (birds chirping) (wind blowing softly) (machine humming) - [Christian] While we don't know about the details of the strike in Slatersville, we do know that Henry Kendall, the supervisors, and the union, came to a peaceful resolution, and there were a few good reasons for that.

(gentle music) Eventually the strike pushed FDR to make more big changes.

The following year, he signed sweeping labor and social reforms, including the National Labor Relations Act, which created a legal process for workers to form unions.

Then the Primrose section of North Smithfield served as the location for one of seven Rhode Island-based Civilian Conservation Core Camps.

Hundreds of young men came to town, building roads and fire lanes through the woods of Northern Rhode Island.

This was done as part of FDR's New Deal to lift the nation's workforce out of unemployment.

Later, he would ban child labor, create overtime pay, and start another program that Mr.

Kendall was supposedly in on.

- My father told me he had, had long conversations with Roosevelt about a program that Roosevelt was very interested in, which ultimately became known as Social Security.

Father played no official role in this, just as an informal advisor.

History has not recorded my father's participation, but since he told me that, I have no reason to believe that it wasn't true.

- My father, Armand Sr., ran an aluminum mill.

That was all he did.

He was an extremely proud man.

Would leave 45 minutes before his shift started, pressed his pants and shirt each day.

He never talked about pay.

And when I saw what he earned when I worked with him for social security reasons, I was surprised at how little it was.

I don't think he ever made more than $5,000 in a single year, and I think that year, he'd worked a job and a half during the transition.

(light gentle music) - As they saw him improve their condition, institute more safety, better filtering of the air to keep the raw cotton fibers from circulating, all of this was appreciated.

(gentle music) - [Michael] September of 1931.

Dear Mr.

Kendall, about 15 years ago, I heard a man say that his chief aim in life was to try to smooth the rough places for those who have to labor.

At first I thought this was just another sale's talk.

Later I met the man's mother and was convinced that with such a mother, a man must be sincere.

(soft piano music) Fifteen years passed, and I was listening to that same man say that the only reward he wanted when he passed on was that he be allowed to look back and see that those he worked with had been made better, and the rough places they traveled had been made a little more smoother because of him.

- So that's how I went to Slatersville Grammar School, till I graduated from the eighth grade at the town hall.

- [Mildred] The only school they had.

- Grammar school?

Was it the grammar school?

- Well, you might as well say that.

(soft gentle music) - [Michael] I could only lift my mind and offer a prayer that when you pass, that you would hear those consoling words promised those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked.

In a word, to make the rough places smoother.

For these, the last of my brethren, very truly, Michael Coyle.

(soft gentle music) - [Henry] The essence of the Kendall Company and of all it has done, is in its people.

An office or factory is not just a place to work for a living.

It is rather an important part of the whole life of every worker.

- [Christian] And every life was about to be disrupted.

(tense distorted static) - [Reporter] Withdrawal by those.

(station changing on radio) - [Mrs.

Brown] Mr.

Kendall.

- [Henry] Mrs.

Brown and Dean Cronkite, I wonder if you'd agree that the questions that are before the House of Representatives and the country alike can be summed up about like this.

About 80% of the American people hope that the Allies will win the war.

And about half that number, as you know, already believe that we should enter the war if Germany showed real signs of smashing England and France.

(crowd saluting in foreign language) Selling arms and particularly planes to those countries will do more than anything else to guarantee against such a disaster that might really lead us to war, in which we may, sometime, have to fight to maintain our rights, perhaps even to defend our very life as a free people.

(plane engine rumbling) - [Christian] Kendall would need every worker, (light dramatic music) for another great change was on the horizon.

(somber dramatic music) (dramatic orchestral music) (suspenseful orchestral music) (dramatic orchestral music) (gentle instrumental music)