In 1911, Schenectady became the second largest U.S. city, behind only Milwaukee, WI to vote Socialists into control of its city government. Initiating that Socialist political movement was a group of labor leaders who had also brought labor unions to General Electric's Schenectady Works. Their political allies were Schenectady's two most prominent Socialists. George Lunn would become the first (and, so far, only) Socialist to be Mayor of Schenectady. Charles Proteus Steinmetz was the first (and only) Socialist to be the Chief Consulting Engineer of the General Electric Company. (173)
There was much less to Schenectady Socialism, however, than the term suggests. Far from fomenting revolution, Schenectady's politically successful socialists were not radicals but pragmatists. Their capitalist bosses at GE were not union busting reactionaries, but also pragmatists. The Lunn-Steinmetz politically successful pragmatic variety of Socialism was condemned by more doctrinaire Socialists as mere "Sewer socialism." The mild and even sometimes approving response of GE managers to the Socialist takeover of Schenectady's city government and rise of unions was also a disappointment to established Schenectady politicians and more militantly anti-union corporate leaders.
The particular history of unions and socialists in 1910-1915 Schenectady casts light on a more general question. What might the experience with socialism and unions of GE and the the city of Schenectady suggest about the course of the nation's contentious politics and labor relations of the first two decades of the 20th century? That is the question this chapter answers.
The years 1900-1916 saw both a surge of labor union organization at the General Electric's Schenectady Works and a surge in Socialist politics in the city. Behind the leadership of the unions and Socialist Party stood, albeit only briefly, more than 6000 Schenectady residents who at least once voted Socialist, and more than 6000 Schenectady GE workers who, at least once, went on strike behind union leadership. Knowledge about this rank and file will here rest mainly, perhaps excessively and precariously, on censuses and organization directories, a voter registration book for the year 1912, and a transcript of the U.S. War Labor Board hearings held at Schenectady in 1918. One would, however, like also to encounter workers as they were living their daily lives — to see, for example, one of them rising from bed on a cold dark winter morning.
He threw a dressing gown over his shoulders and went to the window which the frost had rimmed with white fur. He thawed a spot with his breath, gave it a rub and peered out. Opposite was the yard of the gas works, and under the arc-lamp above the gate figures as rigid as icicles and with coat collars turned up moved past in hurrying silhouettes, then vanished into darkness like spectres. The carbon sputtered and threw capricious gleams and shadows upon the discolored snow. It was an hour before dawn, and Veeder Street was stirring to a realization of coffee and fried bacon and impending duty.
The description is taken from a 1929 novel entitled Steel Chips. Its author, Idwal Jones was born in Wales, the son of an engineer-geologist who came to the U.S. to work in the mining industry. Idwal worked as an apprentice machinist at General Electric's Schenectady Works not long after 1900, then as a machinist there briefly, before lighting out for California and a career as a writer. It is asserted here that though the plot and characters of Steel Chips are fictional, the descriptive passages are recollections — as indeed, in actual early 20th century Schenectady, Veeder Avenue (not Street) wound downhill on its arc lamp lit way from an area of workers' boarding houses to the large Works of General Electric. (174)
That works had, in 1886, moved from New York City to Schenectady to escape unions. By the 1890s, however, the unions were beginning to follow. Those unions of the 1890s differed from the one that the Edison Machine Works had left behind. That 1886 union, the Knights of Labor, had been, in modern terms, an industrial union. That is, all workers in a particular factory or works joined the same local of the one big union. The unions that reached Schenectady in the 1890s, in contrast, were craft unions. Members of each craft, such as machinists, carpenters, or blacksmiths, joined a separate local craft union.
Two national organizations on the craft union model had been created just as the Edison Machine Works was starting up in Schenectady. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886, was a national federation of craft unions. It was moderate in its policies, seeking to avoid strikes, gain the acceptance of politicians in the major national parties rather than start its own labor party, and negotiate labor agreements with the more progressive capitalists. The International Association of Machinists (IAM) was founded in 1888. It was part of the AFL and, in principle, endorsed the AFL's moderation. In practice, however, the IAM's activism earned it the nickname of the AFL's attack dog.
General Electric's labor policy permitted any worker who chose to do so to join a union. This provided an opening for AFL union organizers. What narrowed that opening was the company's refusal to give any official recognition to any kind of union.
Seizing on this narrow opening in 1895 was Henry V. Jackson. He was born in nearby Coeymans, NY and was employed in Schenectady in the 1880s as an engineer and co-owner of a machine shop. In the 1890s, as a Republican, he served a term as a Schenectady Alderman. Also in the 1890s, though nowhere listed as either machinist or a General Electric employee, he led the organization at the General Electric Schenectady Works of Local 204 of the IAM, known as the Dorpian Lodge ("Dorp", Dutch for village, is one of Schenectady's nicknames). Though destined to become the Works' leading union, the Dorpian Lodge got off to the slow start. Jackson later admitted that in the 1890s he sometimes put up dues money out of his own pocket to keep the paying membership numerous enough to retain official IAM recognition. (175)
A few other crafts, though less numerous than machinists at the Works, got organized sooner. The union organized by the patternmakers, sculptors of the precisely dimensioned full scale wooden models around which were formed the sand molds into which molten metal was poured, has already been described. GE kept quiet about this surprising, and not soon repeated, concession. After 1900, union membership, although still a minority of the now 10,000 employees of the Works, began to grow at an increasing rate. This was not merely due to the increasing persuasiveness of Jackson and other leaders. Rather, it benefited from the arrival at the Works of a new generation already converted to unionism, and in many cases also to socialism.
For example, Frank Dujay came to Schenectady from Melrose, Canada in 1900, already a member of the Brass Workers' Union. At Schenectady he became "one of the best known labor men in the city." British born Patternmaker Patrick McEwen landed in America in 1903 as already a union man, and joined the Patternmakers League of North America on his first day in the New World. William Turnbull had been trained as a machinist in the shipbuilding industry of Britain's Tyne River. He had already served as Secretary Treasurer of the Cranemen's Union at Schenectady's Locomotive Plant before he came to the GE Turbine Department in 1907. Scots-born John Bellingham arrived in Schenectady in 1905 and at Switchboard Department of the GE Works in 1908. He quickly established himself as both a leading Socialist and machinist union organizer.
Other new leaders were American born, Machinist Harvey Simmons, for example, had become a union leader while witnessing the exploitation of child labor in New England textile mills. Schenectadian Charles Noonan, a metal polisher, seemed to have a chip on his shoulder from the moment he emerged in Schenectady labor and politics just after 1900 until his last campaign on a Socialist ticket in 1934. By contrast soft spoken, scholarly Herbert Merrill, a New Hampshire born armature winder turned labor organizer, was more likely to be found in Schenectaday's new public library than in any of its 200 saloons. (176)
Many of the newly arrived union leaders were also already socialists. Socialism will here be defined as a political ideology advocating ownership of the means of production by the entire community, rather than as private property. Within that definition, socialist sects differed widely on how immediately that public ownership should happen, and on the means of achieving it. Those proposed means ranged from the political process to revolution. Schenectady socialism gained a convert in Henry V. Jackson. No longer a Republican, he ran in 1902, unsuccessfully, as a candidate for Schenectady local office on the Democratic Socialist Party ticket. (177)
By then Jackson's Dorpian Lodge of Machinists was the most prominent of Schenectady's unions. The new union with the most workers, however, represented the semiskilled. This was the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), for which Herbert Merrill was an early organizer and later bargaining agent. Its members mainly made parts for and assembled motors and generators. By 1903 the IBEW claimed a membership of over 2000. The most militant union was that of the Metal Polishers. Its leaders, Frank Dujay and Charles Noonan were among the most radical, committed, and controversial of Schenectady's Socialists. Joining them in the union's leadership was that former Republican committeeman from the Second Ward, Martin Clune. (178)
In April, 1902, the Metal Polishers began in a small way what would become the Schenectady Works' first big strike. They led out of the Works some 40 polishers and buffers. The immediate cause was a new piece work rate that the men claimed had reduced their average pay by $3.50 a week. (179)
Behind that, however, lurked a deeper grievance. One metal polisher described his trade as "deadly." He explained that "inhaling brass, copper, and iron dust from the [grinding] wheel causes lung disease." This worker did not mention, and probably did not know, that just three weeks earlier, General Electric, represented by a future prominent progressive federal judge and legal scholar, Billings Learned Hand, had opposed before the New York Legislature a proposed employer's liability bill that might have covered such workplace harms. (180)
Emmons initially refused to talk to the Metal Polishers Union strikers. They were, however, soon followed out by others: first the punch press operators, then the moulders, then many groups of machinists, including the Dorpian Lodge. On the strike's second day, a newspaper estimated that 2400 workers were out. (181)
Idwal Jones pictured a General Electric strike of that era.
The men pushed out in solid blocks into the aisle and the march was on. It wound down the stairs, joined the stream in the thoroughfare of the plant, and was augmented by the throngs gathered at the doors of the other shops. When the flood was abreast of them, intersecting masses merged into it… The flood was conscious of itself, egoistic, and if it had any regrets it was that it could not watch its own intimidating magnificence flow by…
Every window in the facade of the main office bristled with heads. The clerks were thankful for a moment's diversion from the ledgers. On the steps were the corporation officials, chiefly in double-breasted blue serge suits and with sleek hair and clipped whiskers. (182)
That 1902 strike saw a surprising intervention. Schenectady Mayor Horace Van Voast was a Republican and insurance executive whose electoral success was based on personal popularity, not partisanship or ideology. He was reputed to know more voters by name than any other Schenectady politician. Far from being a progressive reformer, he was criticized by the reformers for his friendships with saloonkeepers and operators of disorderly houses. It was Mayor Van Voast who invited both sides to a conference. That innovation is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Schenectady's later Socialist mayor, George Lunn, who actually followed Van Voast's precedent. (183)
The unions and George Emmons both accepted the mayor's invitation. Before the end of the strike's third day, the newspaper announced, "the first big strike the company has ever had is over." That ending was a union victory. The company statement read:
The difficulty with the employees of the company has been compromised… all employees are to return to work Monday morning… The dispute over piece work prices in the polishing department will be taken up and adjusted promptly on an equitable basis.
Announcement of that result was received with "cheer after cheer" from an "orderly" crowd estimated at 7000 striking workers from "all the organized trades". They thronged city streets, leaving the Works appearing "like a deserted city." Especially cheered both by the workers and by "hundreds of spectators" was the principal union negotiator, Edward Utting. (184)
Emmons appears to have kept to his agreement to adjust the metal polishers' piece rates. He did, however, retaliate on December 11, 1902, when he discharged strike leader Utting. Emmons denied this was union related, attributing it to nine days of unapproved absence. Utting claimed his absence was due to illness, but the discharge stuck. Staying in Schenectady, Utting redoubled his union organizing from outside the Works. He became a paid agent for the Schenectady Metal Trades Council, an AFL related umbrella organization founded in 1892. It coordinated the efforts of many local trades unions, not just General Electric's. (185)
At the Trades Assembly, Utting's arrival coincided with the departure of that Assembly's President, Henry V. Jackson. After his success at leading the IAM Dorpian Lodge to its influential position at the Works, Jackson had moved on to wider organizing efforts through the Metal Trades Council. There he met failure in a 1902 campaign against the Schenectady Street Railway Company, then a General Electric subsidiary. In February, 1903, he lost his bid for re-election to the Assembly's presidency. His rejection appears to reflect both his recent strike defeats, and his political turn to the Socialist party. His victorious opponent was both an AFL leader and a Democrat city alderman. (186)
Back at the Works, George Emmons stayed on a conciliatory path. "We have had some troubles in the past year," he admitted at the start of a January 1903 talk to the Foreman's Association. However, "difficulties have been amicably settled." The result, he said, had been a banner year in 1902. Production at the Works went up 30%. Two thousand men were added to the payroll. There was one small dark cloud, Emmons noted. "The company was about to build a large incandescent lamp factory here last year. When the strike occurred, the matter was then reconsidered," and the plan was scrapped.
This was followed by the longest pronouncement Emmons ever made on the subject of unions.
The time has come when the manufacturer must recognize the fact that the trades unions are here, and are here to stay, and they have rights that must be recognized… I have had extensive dealings with the representatives of the various local unions and I have found them honest and honorable in all their dealings… Their object is praiseworthy and they only become harmful when radical and unscrupulous men shape their policies. (187)
Organized labor in Schenectady agreed. A December, 1902, statement from the Schenectady Trades Council concluded that
As to conditions in the General Electric Works, it is safe to say that in no manufacturing plant employing the same number of men will you find the same harmony as exists here between the management and the employees. (188)
The 1902 strike and its aftermath set a pattern for almost all of the strikes that from followed, from 1903 to 1919. They typically were sparked by a small grievance, such as a disputed piece work rate, or the discharge of a few individuals. They quickly grew to massive scale, involving thousands of workers. Most were short, days rather than many weeks. Even the long ones were orderly. The typical conclusion involved a small company concession on wages or hours. Nothing that was agreed to, however, weakened the company's total control of the workplace, or officially recognized any union as the bargaining agent for any worker (barring that small, unofficial, and rarely mentioned Patternmakers exception). Emmons avoided using the provocative phrase "open shop", but the General Electric Works remained one.
The strikes were conducted in a strikingly disciplined and orderly manner. For example, in 1915, the Schenectady Works unions went on strike in support of a national movement seeking an eight hour day. The orderly march out of the Works of more than 6000 workers was led by 1000 women singing, to the tune of the recent hit song "Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet", the "8-hour battle hymn":
Put this in your bonnet
With eight hours on it
And don't mind what the bosses say
For when the fight is over
We'll all be in clover
We'll all work eight hours a day (189)
Two days later, those same workers marched back into the plant. This was not to surrender, but to collect the pre-strike pay owed to them, then march back out again. Watching from his office window, Emmons expressed to an accompanying reporter his "appreciation", saying
It was wonderful. Think of 10,000 strikers walking into a plant, receiving $240,000, and marching out again without a loud word being spoken, or a drunken man appearing among them. (190)
The strike lasted eight weeks. It ended, as had become usual, with a compromise. The workers got a reduction in the work day from 10 to 9-1/2 hours, and a 5% pay increase. (191)
Missing from this series of strikes are the standard tropes of the 1900-1920 era's labor strife. The company brought in no Pinkerton agents, no ranks of armed vigilantes or off duty police, and few company spies and strikebreakers. Union leaders neither urged or permitted physical attacks or sabotage much less assassination or bomb throwing. Schenectady city officials and courts issued no injunctions, encouraged no police intimidation of strikers, and did not call out national guard troops. Instead, at least on two occasions, Mayors hosted bargaining sessions. Company discharge of union leaders, either in calm times or in after-strike retaliation, was very selective, involving only a few individuals. Emmons always explained the discharges, albeit unconvincingly, as not union related. Instead he attributed them to routine causes such as absence, insubordination, or poor job performance.
Two strikes in this era, however, had unusual features. The first was a 1906 strike led by a union that had not even existed in 1900. In 1904, national union leaders dissatisfied with the conciliation and craft union policy of the AFL met to form a new industrial union. From this emerged in 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), popularly known as the Wobblies.The IWW is sometimes depicted as the creation of foreign born members of the Socialist Labor Party, the most revolutionary wing of socialism. Actually, the organization of the IWW drew from across the Socialist spectrum. For example, creators of the IWW included William "Big Bill" Haywood of the Western miners, and Indiana's Eugene V. Debs, former President of the Locomotive Engineers' Union and soon to be the most successful Socialist presidential candidate in U.S. history. In the East, Schenectady's Henry V. Jackson would help organize the IWW at the Schenectady Works and become its local union president.
The IWW declared itself One Big Union, welcoming all workers. It was less welcoming, however, to management overtures, preferring confrontation to conciliation. It would not settle for token wage and hour concessions. Its short run goal was recognition as the workers' bargaining agent. Its long term goal was workers' control of the workplace.
The IWW went on the attack across the nation in 1905. The 15 strikes it called that year were, however, overwhelmingly unsuccessful. There was no 1905 IWW strike in Schenectady. Instead, Henry Jackson recruited successfully from all parts and ranks of the Works. This included prestigious highly skilled trades such as tool and die making and machining, semi skilled crafts such as punch press operation and coremaking, and the less prestigious ranks of the insulation workers and metal polishers. The metal polishers' organizers Charles Noonan and Martin Clune joined Jackson as IWW leaders. By mid 1906 the IWW claimed 2500 members. (192)
As noted, the depiction of the IWW as a tool of foreign born radicals was an exaggeration. Nevertheless it is true that in Schenectady, Socialist Labor Party radicals and foreign born unionists, many of German descent, were more visible in the IWW's 1906 efforts than in any other Works organizing effort of the era. For example, a speaker at a 1904 Schenectady rally was the national leader of the Socialist Labor faction, Louis De Leon. He was born on the Caribbean island of Curaçao of Netherlands, Catholic and Jewish descent, and educated in Germany. He was a teacher at New York City's Columbia University when recruited into the Socialist Labor ranks.
At Schenectady, in 1904, he blasted "the capitalistic education and practice of the so called leaders of the craft unions in aping their masters." In that novel Steel Chips, Idwal Jones calls him Daniel LeTigre. In his fictional speech:
LeTigre leaned back and talked ex cathedra like a superior and disillusioned ecclesiastic. His head was an arsenal of terrible knowledge… Through the century his mind winged tirelessly over dreary and frost nipped tundras, swooping now and then over a roe's egg of facts that glittered to their fascination, then dropping it with indifference. He knew too much. (193)
Schenectady IWW leader Henry Jackson was identified as a De Leonite by some of the local newspapers. The actual DeLeonites in Brooklyn quickly, indignantly — and correctly — set the Schenectadians straight. Jackson was a mere Social Democrat, a "corruptionist" whom they accused of "betrayal of union trust" and "dickering with Schenectady politicians" (194)
In this way a leader who had been driven from city labor leadership because he was alleged to be too radical was then attacked by the real radicals for being not radical enough. This sort of infighting would prove to be a fatal flaw of both unions and Socialism in Schenectady. Despite this two sided criticism, Jackson held on to leadership of Schenectady's IWW. Working beside him was another Schenectady IWW leader, GE metal polisher, and former Republican Party committeeman Martin Clune. Speaking in 1905 on behalf of the new union Clune defied hecklers, who likely were AF of L members. "You will unseat us," he began
but the Industrial Workers of the World are ready to do it over again. The cause we have taken up is sacred to us and can never be torn from our lives. It is sincere, and not a graft affair like the Federation. (195)
In late November, 1906, Schenectady IWW agitation began. As a local newspaper reporter described it, "the draftsmen in the Switchboard Drafting Department, who are foreigners mostly, were to form a union to be affiliated with the IWW." Foreman J. W. Upp proceeded on Dec 9, 1906, to fire two draftsmen Heinz Schwabe and Louis Bosky, with a third, J. Weingreen quitting in anticipation of discharge. The alleged reasons were insubordination and incompetence. The suspected reason was union activity. The IWW immediately threatened to shut down the plant if the three were not reinstated. Behind that shutdown threat was the rumor that the IWW had organized the Works Power House. It was poised to turn off delivery of electric power not only to the Works but also to the city. (196)
Before any action was taken, on that morning of Dec 10, 1906, Emmons, and the Company's Chief Lawyer, Hinsdill Parsons, held a 3 hour meeting with the IWW leaders. Emmons offered to transfer the three draftsmen to another department, or give them 30 days severance pay. The IWW leaders would accept nothing less than full reinstatement. Here negotiations broke down. "It is not a question of unionism but of discipline," said Emmons. The newspapers added: "General Manager Emmons says strike will mean a fight to the finish." (197)
At 2 PM of that day, some 2000-3000 men, mainly from three of the Works's several dozen shops quit work. What they did next is unclear. A New York City labor newspaper would later report that they stayed in place. This caused some later historians to label this event the nation's first sitdown strike. No evidence, however, indicates how long the strikers stayed in the plant, or that they ever sat down at their benches or desks. Before the day ended they had walked out of the Works in the conventional manner. (198)
If the IWW did intend to shut down the Works, it failed. At the Power House, when the IWW strikers walked out, Superintendent A. L. Rohrer walked in with a team of Test Men and office workers who kept the power flowing. In addition, none of the major machine shops was affected by the strike. There was a reason for this ineffectiveness. The AFL unions, the majority of organized labor at the Works, rejected the IWW call. The president of Schenectady's Trades Assembly said that "the Federation locals have not been approached and… have not considered joining the IWW." The Trades Assembly would soon add that "we do not recognize the Industrial Workers of the World as a bona fide labor organization, or its members as union men." (199)
Though some workers trickled back to work from the strike's beginning, a hard core stayed out for two weeks before finally agreeing to terms. Emmons announced that he "cannot recede from the position on the three draughtsmen" [that, is, their discharge was final]. "Practically all" the strikers, however, could return to their jobs. Even a union newspaper depicted him as keeping this promise. "Some foremen tried to discriminate," that radical Brooklyn paper reported, "but Mr. Emmons, trying to be 'fair', rebuked them." (200)
Even for the IWW leaders, discharge was selective. One of them, Timothy W. Hunt was fired. Charles Noonan, however, was not only not fired, but not long afterward was promoted to foreman. Martin Clune also kept his job. A casualty of the strike was local IWW President Henry V. Jackson. He was reported as "deposed" by the IWW membership. Jackson and Hunt both stayed in Schenectady, working as insurance agents. Hunt would rise in Socialist politics. Jackson's political and union leadership days were over.
The second strike that broke from the usual pattern happened later, in 1917. The General Electric Works had by then taken on each year as summer employees several Union College students. One of the 1917 candidates seemed especially promising. Wendell King was a native of nearby Troy, NY. He was not only an engineering student at Union, but also an expert in a new field of technology General Electric had just entered, wireless telegraphy.
He was also Black. When sent in to run a drill press in Building 23, the machinists immediately rose up on strike. They were not, they said, opposed to the company employing a colored man. What they opposed was white men and colored men working together. "We ask no more than the U.S. government," explained striker Joseph Lefkowitz. "In the U.S. Army… colored soldiers are not allowed to mingle with the whites."
In this segregationist stand, the Building 23 machinists were supported by their union. Emmons, however, did not agree. General Electric, he proclaimed, "will tolerate no discrimination against any worthy individual on account of nationality or color." Under pressure from both the unions, and the U.S. Navy customer whose work was being delayed, however, Emmons backed down. King was moved out of the Building 23 machine shop to a job where no further issues arose. After that summer, he appears not to have returned to GE. He went on to a career, outside General Electric, as a pioneer in the new industry of radio. It would be some 20 years before the Works saw its first full time Black machinist. (201)
At the time of King's employment, a Schenectady Works spokesman estimated that six Black people worked in the Works' offices, two in its shops, and "a hundred or more in the yard," that is, in such outdoor jobs a loading trains or maintaining the grounds. The first Black person ever recorded as a GE professonal employee had been Lewis Latimer. In the 1890s he was the inventor of improvements in lamp filaments. He worked for Edison General Electric and GE mainly in the legal department as a draftsman and patent testimony adviser. He was transferred to the GE Westinghouse Patent Board, leaving that Board, and GE, when that Board was dissolved in 1911. (202)
By then the Schenectady Works had at least one other Black professional. Lawrence De Witt Simmons joined the company in 1906. He was a native of New Orleans. He graduated from Talladega College in 1903 and from Yale's Sheffield Scientific School in 1906. Light in color, his family later recalled that he was sometimes regarded as white. From 1906 to 1908 he worked in the General Electric Experimental Turbine Department at Schenectady, most likely as a Test Man. He continued with Turbine until 1911. His occupation is given in the city directory as draftsman. He joined the company's Consulting Engineering Department in 1911 and worked there at least until 1914. He would move to a farm in a Schenectady suburb, and live there the rest of his life. The only other Black professional found in the early GE records was King David Commack, a physician. The sole reference is the announcement, accompanied by a picture, of his winning first prize in a "How to Avoid Shop Accidents" essay contest. He may have been hired to provide segregated care to injured black workers. (203)
Of the hundred "yard workers", less is known. A few do appear in photographs in the company's Schenectady Works News. Six of them show up in the front row of a 1919 photo of the Transportation Department Team of the GE Baseball League. They all wear baseball uniform shirts of various origins, in contrast to the seven uniformless white men in the back row. Transportation Department work may have been a second job for players from Schenectady's recent entrant in the Negro League. With the aid of these possible ringers, the Transportation team achieved its best ever league finish in that year of 1919, barely beaten out for the championship by a team of Test engineers.
Four more young Black men appeared in a July 1919 Works News Photo. They were the Dixie Quartette from the Transportation Department. They offered "some good dancing as well as singing," the caption explained. "Anyone who wants to give their associates a real treat should get in touch with these Transportation boys." (204)
By contrast, in portraying White workers the emphasis in the company's Works News was not on unusual talents, but on cheerful, complacent job satisfaction. A typical example was the cover story featuring "Big Bill Riedy", a.k.a. Boiler Maker Bill, shown in a photo using his air hammer to chip off rough spots from a boiler casting. He was described as "a mighty man… a good worker… Good natured always, Bill never complains." (205)
Idwal Jones tried to dig a little deeper. He found among skilled workers workers both a pride of craftsmanship, and an awareness of insecurity. On the one hand,
they were mechanics who had served their apprenticeship… who wore celluloid collars, did their own figuring from blue prints, and managed, because of their tacit equality with bosses, to get home at least ten minutes before anyone else.
On the other hand,
To be thrown out was the probable fate of every one of them, but none, save the eccentric, brooded overmuch on it. They cherished their egoism, which was a sort of gyroscope that flexibly held them to the track. Living amid machines and in a routine in which the scale and the micrometer were the inevitable masters, and a false stroke of the file might mean deprivation for their families, something rebellious in their hearts made them love the perverse, the odd, and the laughter makers who jeered at their dead gods. (206)
The number of those ordinary workers who were also card carrying union members is unknown. It was probably in the thousands, but a minority. The description of the strikes suggest, however that the majority of workers were, on repeated occasions, willing to follow dedicated union leaders out of the Works. Many of the men who led them out, such as William Turnbull, Herbert Merrill, John Bellingham and Frank Dujay. were also leaders of Schenectady's Socialist Party. Yet while their unions could call several thousand workers out on strike, the Socialist leaders could, in the 1909 city election, convince only about one thousand of Schenectady's 13,000 voters to vote for their party. Yet in 1911 that Schenectady Socialist Party suddenly rocketed to control of the city government. What propelled this sudden rise? It was a dynamic Protestant minister turned muckraking newspaperman turned first time candidate named George Lunn. (207)
In 1901, Lunn, then 28 years old, had been called to the pulpit of Schenectady's oldest church, the First (Dutch) Reformed. He had grown up on a Nebraska farm, had volunteered for military service in the Spanish-American War, had finished his studies at the New York Theological Seminary, and had served briefly in a Brooklyn church. He started at Schenectady energetically, but conventionally. He was most noted for leading a city revivalist campaign. Only gradually did his attention drift leftward. In 1906 speaking at Lyceum in Schenectady he could still say that "socialism is not the cure", choosing instead "the principle of democracy". (208)
By 1909, however, a First Reformed Church faction was accusing him of spreading socialism from the pulpit, and was demanding his ouster. A vote of the full congregation supported him by 280-171. Then, however, the 20 member Consistory, the Church's ruling body, voted decisively, 18-2, that Lunn should go. (The two General Electric employees on that Consistory split on the issue, with engineer Maxwell Day supporting Lunn and accountant Ernst Berggren opposing him). (209)
Lunn resigned, and in 1910 redirected his charisma and energy at two new efforts: the pulpit of a newly created People's Church, and his own muckraking weekly newspaper, the Citizen. Here he made his first alliance with General Electric's union and socialist leaders. Harvey Simmons had both led that Dorpian Lodge of Machinists at the Works and run unsuccessfully for office on the Socialist Ticket. He now became one of the organizers and board members of the People's Church. Metal Polisher and IWW leader, and then General Electric foreman Charles Noonan had left the company in protest of the policies that, as foreman, he had been required to enforce. He was in 1910 chairman of Local Schenectady, the Socialist Party's small inner circle of leadership. He and IBEW bargaining agent Herbert Merrill now helped set up a company to support and manage Lunn's newspaper, the Citizen.
That newspaper's reforming fire was mainly aimed at local evils. This included corrupt County Supervisors siphoning off money from construction of a new County Office Building, and the monopolizing of the city's lucrative street paving business by a couple of politically connected contractors. Lunn did, however, occasionally take on General Electric. For example, he blasted company executive Hinsdill Parsons for seeking to make the city pay for a General Electric error. The company had supplied an electrically powered turbine pump to send water from the city's aquifer through the water supply pipes. When the pump proved inadequate, Parsons urged the city to build an expensive reservoir to remedy the situation. Under Lunn's protests General Electric eventually gave in and instead replaced the pump. (210)
Lunn and General Electric could also, however, take the same side. A prominent example was the six-for-a-quarter controversy. The Schenectady Street Railway Co. had been owned by General Electric. In 1904, however, it was sold to the Delaware & Hudson Railroad. At that time, riders could buy six fares for a quarter. In 1910, citing cost pressures, the fare was changed to a straight nickel a ride. Joining George Lunn in a demand for restoration of six for a quarter was General Electric's George Emmons. He said General Electric would not increase its work force in Schenectady without this transit fare relief. Addressing that six-for-a-quarter issue, Lunn proclaimed in early 1911 that "the City is in the throes of a panic which has been brought about by the thieves of BIG BUSINESS" He did not, however, mean General Electric. He meant the D&H and its Street Railway, which had "squeezed out GE and is now squeezing Schenectady." (211)
Lunn also allied with General Electric on a national issue. The year 1911 saw the culmination of the campaign by the Republican administration of President William Howard Taft to use the Sherman Antitrust Act to attack giant monopolistic corporations. Targets, as earlier mentioned, included Standard Oil, American Tobacco, and General Electric. Should trusts be busted? Lunn said no. Economic logic, he argued in an editorial, endorsed the efficiency of these giants. They should be left big, so their control could eventually be transferred from stockholders to society as a whole, in the form of socialism.
On this antitrust issue the views of Schenectady's newest Socialist met those of Schenectady 's most famous Socialist. Charles Proteus Steinmetz had long been making a argument similar to Lunn's. He would put the idea this way in his 1916 book America and the New Epoch:
The corporation may be considered as the first step toward socialism, and the industrial government of the nation by the united corporations as [a] preliminary and crude form of socialistic society. (212)
In his nearly 20 years working for a giant capitalist corporation, Steinmetz had not hidden his youthful Socialism. Nor, however, had he practiced it. As the manager of a dozen or so laboratory workers, he sought labor relations advice not from socialism's labor theory of value, but from his fellow capitalist bosses. When addressed in a letter as "Dear Comrade", he answered politely "Dear Sir." When he voted in local elections, he voted Republican.
A second hand but intriguing story suggests Steinmetz had departed even further from his youthful direction. GE employee Richard Arthur said he was told by Steinmetz's protégé and close friend Ernst Berg that in 1905 Steinmetz had applied his mathematical skills to the stock market. He made so much money that he was planning to retire and return to Germany. Then his winnings were suddenly wiped out by the crash of 1907. (213)
When, on April 7, 1911, Steinmetz spoke publicly for the first time on social and political matters, he did so not at a Socialist rally, but at the Schenectady Board of Trade. That was the meeting place of top city business men such as Willis Hanson and Henry DeForest, and General Electric leaders such as Albert Rohrer. Speaking to that Board of Trade's "largest assemblage of the year," Steinmetz chose as his topic The Vitality of Schenectady. "We have not kept step with the phenomenal growth of the city", he said. Though "we have an efficient board of health, board of education and police department," the street railway system poorly served the rapidly growing work force. Street lighting was patchy and of poor quality. The solution to all this, he concluded "is up to the citizens. You must be willing to contribute more money".
This program for a better Schenectady was not mere boosterism. It was a local version of a national trend called progressivism. Like Socialism, this program came in many flavors. Underlying them all was the concept of a constructive, professional approach to such urban problems as sanitation, schools, public transit, and health, education, policing, street railways and street lighting, all subjects highlighted in Steinmetz's speech.
Like streetlights and street railways, both of which GE sold, and on both of which Steinmetz had worked, progressivism was perfectly acceptable to GE. A short time after Steinmetz's speech, the Works Manager George Emmons, entertained a delegation led by Schenectady's Mayor, and including the leaders of the Board of Trade. They had come to protest the moving of one of GE's businesses, an Electric Transit Department, from Schenectady to Erie, PA. Not to worry, Emmons assured them. There was plenty of work for everyone. The key was progressivism. As the reporter covering the meeting put it, "Mr. Emmons, however, did strongly intimate that the company expected the city representatives to be at all times as progressive as the city desired the company to be."
Within two weeks, Steinmetz himself had accepted a second speaking engagement. This time his intended audience was a new group called the Progressive Republican Club of Schenectady. That club had a definite meaning for progressivism. It was a new way of organizing cities called the Commission Plan. It would replace the current system of electing Aldermen by Wards with five Councilmen all elected city wide, on a non-partisan basis. The council would hire experts, chosen from a nationwide pool on the basis of their expertise, to run city departments such as sanitation education, and public safety. (214)
Steinmetz stated his "agreement with the progressive aims of your organization" and begged it to "give us an organization, which will utilize the economic laws of the modern industrial development for the benefit of all the nation." The vision of a government run by professional experts operating according to laws of economics had an interesting electrical parallel. The reason Steinmetz could not attend the next meeting of the Progressive Club was that he had been called to an important meeting in Chicago. Commonwealth Edison, Chicago's major electric utility, was finding that attempts to operate simultaneously its two newest power plants were accompanied by system instabilities that were potentially dangerous. Since General Electric had supplied the equipment, General Electric experts were called in to solve the problem.
The attendees included major executives of Commonwealth Edison and GE. Dominating the meeting, however, were Steinmetz and his protégé Ernst Berg, then chairman of the electrical engineering department of the University of Illinois. Their leadership was not due their place in the corporate hierarchy, which was relatively low. It was due to their command of the mathematical laws of alternating current electricity. At the meeting, Steinmetz spoke scientific truth to corporate power. When asked by a Commonwealth Edison executive about the current safety of the system, Steinmetz replied that "the safe performance so far owed more to luck than to good design."
Steinmetz and Berg proceeded to analyze the problem and present an answer. It consisted of the specifications for and placement in circuits of electrical components called reactances. The result was a technical solution to the instability problem — and also another order for GE. This suggested an analogy. Because the problems of power systems were best solved by application of scientific laws a council of corporate executives must delegate to specialized electrical professionals the solution to electric power system problems. In the same way, because the problems of social systems were best solved by application of the "economic laws" mentioned by Steinmetz, a council of city leaders should delegate to specialized economic and social science professionals the solution to urban problems.
Lest one think that this analogy between electricity and progressive reform was unique to Steinmetz, or a figment of the imagination of a later historian, consider an nationally syndicated article that appeared in the Schenectady Daily Union just three days after those progressive club and Chicago utility meetings. In that article, a U.S. Senator from Iowa argued in favor of that Commission Plan. He illustrated his argument with his own version of the analogy. The old Alderman-ward system, he said, was inefficient and unwieldy, a product of unscientific tinkering like the old method of of powering factories with belts and pulleys driven by small steam engines. The Commission Plan by contrast, was scientific, streamlined and efficient, like the delivery of power via electricity in a modern factory.
George Lunn, not yet officially a Socialist, appears to have considered Progressive Republicanism. On 16 June 1911 a "Commission Government Association of Schenectady County" was created, with General Electric's A. L. Rohrer as President, and George Lunn as a member. When the Progressive Republicans tried to gain control of the Republican City Committee, however, the party's conservative wing easily vanquished them. It gave the Mayoral nod to "Billy" Herron, a GE Works machinist and former member of the Dorpian Lodge of the IAM — but one who had since taken a post as a General Electric foreman, and had his IAM card revoked by the Union. The Socialist Party now saw its chance. It had filled most of its 1911 electoral slate with party regulars. This included labor leaders Merrill, Turnbull, Noonan, Simmons and Hunt. With the collapse of Progressive Republicanism, Lunn was now available. Noonan and Simmons offered him the candidacy for mayor. Lunn accepted.
In the election campaign, Lunn's energy and oratory left his rivals, the Republican working man and a Democrat ward heeler, in the dust. Perhaps the only surprising thing about Lunn's decisive election day victory was how unsurprising it was to the city. On his coattails came in Herbert Merrill as New York State's first ever Socialist State Assemblyman, and a Socialist majority in the Schenectady Common Council, including Turnbull, Simmons, Noonan, and Hunt.
Who were the voters who multiplied the usual Socialist vote sixfold? A surviving 1911 Voter Registration Book records the party preferences of about three fourths of Schenectady's voters. Socialist registrants came preferentially from two groups: General Electric shop employees and voters of German and other eastern European descent. Socialism was strongly rejected by the main mid nineteenth century Catholic immigrant group, the Irish, who stuck almost unanimously with the Democrats, and by the small Jewish community, which stuck with the Republicans. The other major ethnic groups, the long time Dutch and the recent Italians, were average for the city in choosing Socialism. While expressing general tendencies, these results should not be taken as absolute. Among GE skilled workers, for example, previously encountered toolmaker Jacob Weller was no Socialist but rather one of the leading Prohibitionists of his Schenectady suburb of Scotia. Running for Overseer of the Poor in 1910, he promised "to attend to the needs of those who are deserving, while refusing those capable of supporting themselves." (215) Similarly, among those of Irish descent, James J. Madigan indeed stuck with the Democrats in 1911. However, the unrelated Turbine Department foreman Billy Madigan registered Republican, while Enos Madigan, unrelated to both, not only registered Socialist in 1911 but subsequently served in that party's city administration.
The socialist sympathy of progressive Republicans, was most evident in the voting pattern of Schenectady's 11th Ward. That was the location of the GE Realty plot. It was normally overwhelmingly Republican. In 1911, however, It had been the center of the Progressive Republican movement that has temporarily attracted Lunn and Steinmetz. Though few of those 11th Ward residents switched to Socialist registration, many of them voted Socialist on that 1911 election day. Enough of them did so to come within 17 votes of winning this normally overwhelmingly Republican ward for Lunn. Those 1911 Socialist voters included some of General Electric's best and brightest. This included not only the company 's greatest engineer, Steinmetz, but also its greatest scientist, Irving Langmuir. Langmuir was one of 29 General Electric Research Laboratory employees who, in a 1911 laboratory straw poll, voted Socialist, This was more than twice the vote for either of the other parties. In contrast to these scientists, however, and to "Supreme Court" Steinmetz, almost all the 11th Ward's engineers who registered with a party did so as Republicans. (216)
None of General Electric's top executives appear in the voter registration book. The statements they later made about their new Socialist mayor were, however, sympathetic. General Electric's President Charles Coffin described Lunn in 1912 as "the best man who has ever been Mayor of Schenectady" and said he planned "to work hand in glove with him." George Emmons said of Lunn "I think he will try very hard to give us a good administration." To Emmons, the Socialist government was a welcome change from the corrupt politics of the old parties. "There has long been a feeling in Schenectady," he said, "that the Republicans and the Democrats were playing together." (217)
More alarmed by Lunn's potential than those capitalists were Schenectady's most doctrinaire Socialists. On the very eve of his inauguration, Lunn had a Dickensian encounter with the ghost of Socialist future in the form of Charles Noonan. He was Chairman of Local Schenectady, the Socialist Party's central leadership. Noonan insisted on, and Lunn agreed to, the need for Local Schenectady to approve his administration's appointments.
Where possible, Lunn did hire capable Socialists. This included, as Commissioner of Charities, Walter Kruesi, the Socialist son of Edison associate John Kruesi, and a rising star in the field of social reform. As Corporate Counsel, Lunn chose Morris Hillquit, a successful lawyer and a national Socialist Party leader. As his Secretary, Lunn hired a recent Harvard graduate enjoying a brief Socialist phase before settling in as one of the 20th century's leading public intellectuals, Walter Lippman. When it came to a choice between competence and Socialism, however, Lunn chose competence. This was the case for the patronage-rich post of superintendent of street construction, for which Lunn hired a non-partisan expert from Milwaukee, Charles Mullen, instead of the local man proposed by Local Schenectady.
In office, Lunn continued to vex doctrinaire socialists. His emphasis was on traditional progressive causes such as better schools, public health, parks, and construction of a garbage processing plant. This gained him that derisive label "sewer socialist", an epithet applied to Socialists who acted too much like mere progressives. Even when Lunn took steps toward public ownership, they were not directed at the city's giant capitalist corporation. Instead, he targeted the smaller local companies supplying the city with two energy essentials, ice and coal.
On labor issues, Lunn indeed vigorously intervened on the workers' side in a bitter strike, even to the extent of being arrested. That strike, however, occurred 56 miles up the Mohawk River at a textile mill in Little Falls, New York. When General Electric's Schenectady workers went on strike, in 1913, over the discharge of a pair of union organizers, Lunn was markedly less militant. Nor did he need to be. During the strike, a local newspaper reported "not an arrest was made; there was absolutely no disorder." As Republican Mayor Van Voast had done in 1903, Lunn chaired a meeting in his office between Emmons and the Schenectady Metal Trades Council. A compromise was reached which returned the two organizers to the Works, along with a promise by Emmons of no future discrimination against union leaders.
At the end of Lunn's first term, in November, 1913, the panicked old parties united behind a Fusion ticket that briefly returned the mayoralty to traditional political hands. When three-party competition resumed in 1915, however, Lunn again decisively won the Mayor's office. His also victorious running mate, as President of the Common Council, was Charles Proteus Steinmetz. (218)
So, in conclusion, what might the experience with socialism and unions of GE and the the city of Schenectady suggest about the course of the nation's contentious politics and labor relations of the first two decades of the 20th century? The success of both socialism and unions in 1900-1916 Schenectady rested on the pragmatic approach of socialists, union leaders, and GE management. Indeed, the socialism might be viewed as a version of progressivism,, with the two leading figures Steinmetz and Lunn, nearly declaring for progressive Republicanism rather than socialism. In office, the Schenectady sewer socialists concentrated on the same small steps as their conventionally progressive predecessors. The majority of local union leaders stuck to craft unionism, rejecting more radical varieties. As for corporate managers, their need to keep production flowing led to a pragmatic acceptance of sewer socialist local government, and of craft unions, the least political and most pragmatic brand of unionism. This suggests that labor historians might look nationwide to see how often this pragmatic approach was chosen by workers and citizens over more radical versions of socialism and union organization.
The year George Lunn re-assumed office, 1916, marked a full generation, 30 years, for the General Electric Works at Schenectady. Edison's machine works had fled New York City to escape crowding, politics and unions. Now, in 1916, it appeared that all three had caught up with it. As for crowding, the Works had in 1886 employed 300, and in 1893 had forecast an expansion to 6000. Now, in 1916, it held 20,000 workers. The Works' more than 200 buildings filled to capacity the nearly square mile triangle of land between the recently deactivated original Erie Canal and the railroad tracks. Schenectady General Electric was one of the bigger, but not the biggest Works in the U.S. Some steel and auto works were bigger. It was, however, certainly the most versatile, making everything from tiny vacuum tubes that nobody had yet figured out what to do with, to the system controlling the locks of the new Panama Canal and giant turbine-generators producing an increasing share of the nation's electric power.
As for politics, as now a taxpaying corporate citizen of Schenectady, General Electric was now governed by a mayor dedicated, theoretically at least, to its ultimate expropriation. General Electric's giant size, explained General Electric Chief Consulting Engineer and Schenectady Common Council President Charles Proteus Steinmetz, was but a step toward the inevitable destination of Socialism. Finally, as for unions, the threat of radicals, such as the IWW, had been banished, but the presence of moderate AFL unions had been accepted. Works Manager George Emmons had proclaimed that "the trade unions are here and.they must be recognized and respected". Union leaders, in turn, accepted Emmons as a man with whom they could work.
In sum General Electric ran a bustling, crowded Works, surrounded by the anti-capitalist politics of Socialism, and infiltrated by the accepted presence of Unions. It had accepted the very trends it once had fled.
Or had it?
Notes
- Buell, William. 2019. George Lunn. Troy Book Makers.
- Jones, Idwal. 1929. Steel Chips. Knopf. p. 3. Idwal Jones biography, Online Archive of California. Schenectady Gazette, 2 May 1926, p. 6. Albany Times Union. 18 June 1929 p. 1. Alfred, NY Sun July 1936 p. 2. The New York Times review of Steel Chips is 14 July 1929. It concludes that "Steel Chips is an objective picture, often an objective study, of life among the machines."
- Jackson, a previously forgotten GE union pioneer, was rediscovered by Catherine Haag. He is the leading character in her 2022 U. Albany Ph.D. Thesis, Mainstream Radicalism, the principal source of information about him used in this book. Glimpses of Jackson's career can also be found in Albany Argus, 19 July 1900, 3 Oct 1904, Albany Times Union 3 Dec 1903.
- Dujay is discussed in Schenectady Gazette 23 July 1914. Turnbull's obituary is in Schenectady Gazette 10 April 1962. McEwen tells his life story in "Official Record of Proceedings before National Labor Relations Board. Case 11-R-1786, Oct 1940." U.S. National Archives RG-25 Items 250, 4385. A brief biography of Turnbull is in the Citizen 12 Nov 1911, p. 4. Bellingham's obituary is in the Schenectady Gazette 9 Mar 1950. Brief biographies of Simmons and Noonan are in the Citizen 12 Nov 1911. The New York Times 7 Mar 1956 has Merrill's obituary. Noonan is further described in Brooklyn Weekly People, 12 July 1903.
- Utica Herald-Dispatch 15 Nov 1902.
- Knickerbocker News 27 June 1915. Charles C. Ford, Secretary of the IBEW to C. N. Ripley of GE. 11 Jan 1924. Swope Papers. MiSci asserted that the IBEW had "thoroughly organized" GE by 1903. See also Stone Collection, Box 6, File 10, "Labor Unions" at the City Hall History Center, Schenectady, including statements by Herbert Merrill, and by representatives of IBEW locals 247 and 536.
- Schenectady Daily Union 17 Apr 1902.
- Schenectady Daily Union 9 Apr 1902.
- Schenectady Daily Union 18 Apr 1902.
- Jones, Idwal. 1929. Steel Chips. Knopf. p. 223.
- Schenectady Daily Union 19 Apr 1902. New York Daily Tribune 20 Apr 1902. Schenectady Evening Star Wed 6 Nov 1907.
- Schenectady Evening Star 19 Apr 1902.
- Schenectady Daily Union 11, 12, 14, 17 Dec 1902.
- Schenectady Evening Star 18 Dec 1902, 25 Feb 1903.
- Schenectady Evening Star 12 Jan 1903.
- Schenectady Evening Star 27 Dec 1902.
- Words to the 8 hour hymn are in the description of the Schenectady strike in Newark, NJ Evening Star 9 Oct 1915.
- Albany Argus 9 Oct 1915.
- Newark, NJ Evening Star 9 Oct 1915; Albany Argus 9 Oct 1915; 24 Oct 1915.
- Haag, Catherine. 2023. Mainstream Radicalism. Ph.D. Thesis. U. Albany, p. 312, Schenectady Evening Star 1 Dec 1906.
- Brooklyn Weekly People 18 Aug 1904; Jones, Idwal. 1929. Steel Chips. Knopf. p. 285
- Brooklyn Weekly People 7 Mar 1903.
- Brooklyn Weekly People 23 Dec 1905.
- The account here follows the more detailed treatment of the 1906 IWW strike at Schenectady in Haag, Catharine. 1923. Mainstream Radicals. U. Albany. See also Schenectady Evening Star 10 Dec 1906.
- Schenectady Evening Star 10, 12 Dec 1906.
- Schenectady Evening Star 11 Dec 1906. Dubofsky, Melvin. 1960. We Shall Be All. [free PDF viewer required] Quadrangle, p. 126 accepts, without citing evidence, the description of this strike as "the first sitdown strike in American history." This seems an exaggeration. Catharine Haag accepts the claim by contemporary IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn that this was one of the first sit down strikes in the U.S., but rejects as exaggerated historians claims that the sitting down lasted 65 hours (Philip Foner) or even overnight (Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murrin). Haag, Catherine. 2023. Mainstream Radicalism. Ph.D. Thesis, U. Albany. pp. 338-341.
- Schenectady Evening Star 11, 13 Dec 1906.
- Schenectady Evening Star 20 Dec 1906; Brooklyn Weekly People, "History of Schenectady Labor Movement," 12 July 1908.
- I thank James Caufield, who first told me about the 1917 strike. Details can be found in the Schenectady Gazette, 18 June 1917, p. 3; 19 June 1917, p. 1; 20 June 1917, p. 1; 27 June 1917, p. 1.
- Denver Star 20 June 1917 provides details both on the Wendell King incident and the role of Black workers at the GE Schenectady Works. A well researched summary of Latimer's career can be found in Fouché, Rayvon. 2003. Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation. Johns Hopkins. pp. 82-134.
- The Crisis (NAACP Magazine), 7 April 1914. Works News 14 Nov 1919. p. 19.
- Works News 25 July 1919 p. 14. Works News 25 July 1910, p. 10.
- Works News 2 Nov 1923. p. 1.
- Jones, Idwal. 1929. Steel Chips. Knopf. p. 6, 60.
- Buell, William. 2019. George Lunn. Troy Book Makers. esp. p. 47.
- Schenectady Gazette 16 Dec 1906.
- Lunn's ouster is described in detail in the newspaper Cold Spring (NY) Recorder, 4 Dec 1910.
- Citizen 1 July 1910, 17 Feb 1911.
- Citizen 3 June 1910, 20 Jan 1911, p. 1; 10 Mar 1911, 14 July 1911 p. 1.
- Steinmetz, Charles. 1916. America and the New Epoch. Harper. p. 166.
- Arthur, Richard Oral History, undated, General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci.
- The details of Steinmetz's 1911 venture into Progressivism are in Wise, George. 2021. Steinmetz Between Socialisms. [free PDF viewer required] Blog of the Library and Archives, Schenectady County Historical Society.
- Schenectady Gazette 9 Nov 1910.
- Rosenfeld, Irving. 1960. The Quintessence of Irving Langmuir. Col 12 of Collected Works of Irving Langmuir. Pergamon. p. 94.
- Coffin's remarks at in David I. Belle to Ralph Easley, Feb. 15, 1912. National Civic Foundation files. Quoted in James Weinstein. 1967. The Decline of Socialism in America. Monthly Review Press. p. 81. Emmons' statement is in New York Evening Post, 13 Nov 1911, quoted in Bassett, Michael. Municipal Reform and the Socialist Party, 1910-1914. 1969. Australian Journal of Politics and History. 21. p. 182. See also Jaffe, Julian F. 1972. Crusade Against Radicalism. Kennicott. p. 21.
- This election is covered in the Schenectady Union Star 27 Oct-3 Nov 1915.