The Saylesville Massacre of 1934 and the American Tradition of Protest

At Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, rangers have worked with community members to explore the difficult legacies of violence in the region's landscapes. In this essay, Ranger Mark Mello looks at a 1934 killing in the Blackstone Valley — the Saylesville Massacre — and asks how it fits in a long American tradition of protest that sometimes ends in bloodshed.

Two massacres

On a mild June evening in 2022, about 50 people gathered in the Moshassuck Cemetery in Saylesville, Rhode Island, for one of the park's summer ranger walks. Over several days in September 1934, this quiet burial ground became a battleground, and when it was over two people were dead.

"Massacre" is a word with a long history in the United States. On a cold March evening in 1770, colonial protesters pelted British soldiers with snowballs, rocks and insults outside Boston's Old State House. The soldiers fired into the crowd, killing five. Branded a "Bloody Massacre" by Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, it became a rallying cry on the road to independence. John Rowe wrote in his diary that day that "the Inhabitants are greatly enraged and not without Reason."

The Boston Massacre, 1770. Image from the National Park Service's page.

The Saylesville Massacre came 164 years later. What links the two, Mello argues, is protest — as old as the nation itself, whether against colonial rule, racial injustice or unfair labor conditions. As the country marks its 250th anniversary, he suggests, it is worth understanding what sometimes drives Americans to start throwing stones.

The bleachery

Over Mello's desk hangs an aerial view of the Sayles' Bleacheries as they looked in the late 19th century. Founded as the Sayles Finishing Plant in 1847, the company was known for tight, efficient management in the style of scientific management, or Taylorism — and for labor unrest in 1905 and 1922.

The Sayles' Bleacheries around the 1890s. Image from the National Park Service's page.

The picture is idyllic: tidy buildings flying American flags among trees and shrubs, a mill pond and the Moshassuck River, well-dressed people strolling and riding in carriages. What it leaves out is telling. The workers' mill houses are replaced by greenery. There is no hint of the stench of bleaching — a chemical process in which boiled cotton was "soured" in a chlorine-based mixture, producing a smell like burnt vegetables, sugar and chlorine — or of the waste that fouled the pond and river. And on a knoll beside the main buildings, trees stand where the headstones of the Moshassuck Cemetery should be.

1934

The year 1934 was one of labor turmoil, with more than 1,800 strikes involving over 1.5 million workers. The textile industry was hit hard by the Great Depression, and layoffs brought "stretch-outs," in which fewer workers were made to do more for the same pay. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 legalized union organizing for the first time, and membership in the United Textile Workers soared from 15,000 in 1933 to nearly 250,000 the next year. At its August convention, the union voted 561 to 10 for a national strike.

Picketing began across Rhode Island on Tuesday, September 4, 1934, the day after Labor Day. At first it was peaceful, and many mills shut down. The Sayles' Bleacheries stayed open, and although few of its own workers belonged to the union, it drew attention. Governor Theodore Francis Green warned that at such a time passions ran high and violence was likely.

On Friday, September 7, it came. Security men and "deputy sheriffs" hired by the bleachery, with little or no law enforcement training, guarded the night-shift change. Strikers — often called "boys" in the newspapers — threw rocks. The security chief, Herman Paster, brandished a revolver and threatened to use it; the crowd shouted back that it could take it. Stones, riot sticks and a high-pressure fire hose followed, and four people were injured. State Police arrived and set up a line along Walker and Lonsdale Streets, with barbed wire and machine gun positions, and then the National Guard came.

The cemetery

Around 10 p.m. on September 11, Guardsmen pushed protesters from the grounds of St. Mathieu's Church (today Holy Ghost) into the Moshassuck Cemetery. By 2 a.m., some 300 picketers, described mostly as women and young people, held their ground among the graves. Newspapers singled out a "woman in green" for her shouting and defiance: 16-year-old Rita Brouillette.

Mello, with colleague Allison Horrocks, traced her life. The youngest of eight surviving children, she lived a few blocks from the bleachery, where her father worked; several older siblings worked in nearby textile mills, as did the older man, also a mill worker, who bailed her out and married her the next month. She told a local paper she had just been having fun. Mello suspects there was more to it: young people who watched parents worry about feeding their families, siblings and friends lose their jobs, or who, like 18-year-old Charles Goroynski, supported whole households themselves.

At dawn the situation turned deadly. Amid a hail of rocks, bricks and other missiles — one Guardsman, William Castaldi, was hit in the head by a flowerpot launched from a makeshift slingshot — nervous Guardsmen fired among the headstones, and protesters dove behind them for cover. Three were seriously wounded: Nicholas Gravello, 22, of Pawtucket, shot in the arm; Charles Goroynski, 18, of Central Falls, the sole breadwinner for his mother and eight siblings, shot in the stomach; and William Blackwood, 44, an unemployed weaver from Pawtucket, shot in the head. Goroynski and Blackwood died.

Bleachery leaders and Governor Green blamed "outside agitators" and the Rhode Island Communist Party. But the wounded and the dozens arrested were all local people who worked, or had worked, in textiles. Few worked at the bleachery itself, but they lived nearby and had suffered at the hands of the industry it was part of. Interviewed 39 years later, a Central Falls woman, Kathryn McGovern, remembered Saylesville as being like a war, with so much tear gas that no one could breathe.

The stone

In the cemetery's Jewish section, bought by the Congregation of the Sons of David in the 1870s, stands the headstone of Rabbi Yosef Shaul Rabinowit, a teacher. It carries two bullet holes from September 1934. Its inscription begins, as translated for the park, "Stone shall cry from a wall!" — most likely drawn from the book of Habakkuk, a prophet's condemnation of forced labor. Mello sees in it a cry that echoes across time: for the rabbi and his people, and for Goroynski and Blackwood.

What would make you throw a stone?

Crispus Attucks, a self-liberated man who was the first to die in the Boston Massacre, and Rita Brouillette of Saylesville both remind us that events given simple names are far more complex. Were the young strikers communists, or were they fighting to survive? Was Saylesville a massacre or a fight? Memory, Mello writes, can vilify or glorify, incite or pacify — and the events in Saylesville leave a question for each of us: what would we care about enough to risk our job, our freedom or our life?

Sources

• Mark Mello, National Park Service, "The Saylesville Massacre and American Tradition" (Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park): https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-saylesville-massacre-and-american-tradition.htm
• Words from 1930s and later participants and witnesses are paraphrased here. Newspaper images and photographs credited to individuals on the source page are not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.