In Gotham's Shadow: Globalization and Community Change in Central New York

Chapter 3 Loom to Boom

33 Chapter 3 Loom to Boom A period of history rarely begins when it says it does. The events of the 1950s were the direct result of the fact that “by 1919, two-thirds of Utica’s gainfully employed were working in clothing and textile factories ” (Bean 1994: 216). The fall of the industry was thus from a lofty height: At the time of the first world war the city of Utica was one of the richest per capita in the U.S. [But] after the war the tide turned sharply. . . the trek of the textile mills out of Utica to the south began. By 1924 there were only six (of 22 in 1910) working mills left in Utica, and some $15 million of capital was tied up in idle industrial properties. (Sheehan, Dec. 1949: 170). In 1910, Utica was home to two of the largest textile producers in the world. The Utica Knitting Company proudly wore the name of its home city, and the Utica and Mohawk Cotton Mills produced world famous “Utica Sheets” (Przybycien and Romanelli 1977). By 1960, neither firm had any operations in the city. The textile industry as a whole had begun its exodus from its stronghold in the northeast to the anti-union and anti-tax havens of the deep South, a trek it would continue as it moved out of the United States entirely later in the century. It is thus no surprise that in 1922, Utica Gas & Electric Company planned a massive expansion in service for the metropolitan area, but by 1928 had scaled back their plans (UGEC 1923; Williams 11 Nov. 1957). Although Utica had failed to keep pace with its neighbors to the west, the city was still accustomed to growth. For instance, in 1900, Syracuse had grown to nearly twice the size of Utica (108,374 vs. 56,383).1 Over the next two decades, Syracuse would add over seventy thousand residents, whereas Utica would gain only forty thousand. 34 In Gotham’s Shadow But even while lagging behind, Utica was accustomed to adding twenty thousand residents per decade, and at that rate the city should have contained almost 115 thousand people by 1930. It grew to only 101,740.2 Something was amiss. The Chamber of Commerce recognized the omens in the numbers. In the 1840s, city leaders responded to the threat of impending decline by sending a delegation to Massachusetts to study the possibility of reviving the city with textiles. In 1928, the Chamber of Commerce responded to the threat of impending decline by seeking something to replace textiles. They concluded that Utica’s salvation lay in the diversification of industry and that the change would be a tough job that would take a lot of doing. (Williams 11 Nov. 1957: 7) Members of the chamber had the vision to see that Utica needed change once again. The group needed a way of making it happen. Their first attempt involved hiring an executive director to bring about the desired changes with the notion that the “right man” could push the proper buttons and obtain immediate results, industrially or otherwise. It didn’t work that way in Utica. The $10,000 executive hired in June of 1928 was fired the next March. And the assistant who was supposed to be his good right hand wasn’t much better, either. (Williams 11 Nov. 1957: 8) The necessary coalition became apparent with the coming of the Great Depression. As the local Democrats brought votes to Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal helped to keep the city afloat. Seeking Respect It was during the 1880s that Utica politics were given over to the immigrant populations who struggled for respect and livelihood in the city’s mills. In the east side neighborhoods home to Irish and Italian immigrants, a coalition with politicians from the less populated west side solidified the influence of the city’s working class through the first political machine. Thriving on a system of patronage fueled by public funds and illicit profits, the machine acted as much as an inefficient means of social justice as a political entity.3 The machine controlled both political parties throughout the 1880s and early 1890s until rival Irish politicians wrestled the Democratic Party from machine control and ran a reform ticket, leaving the machine to the Republicans (Bean 1994). Loom to Boom 35 In the 1920s, however, a rival machine came to...