Tales from the Rock City

Writing for The New York Call in 1913, the pubic health nurse and activist, Helen Schloss describes the horrendous conditions then existing in the working class slums of Little Falls, New York. The Russian-born Schloss came to Little Falls in April of 1912, hired by a group of wealthy women to address the ongoing tuberculosis epidemic among the poor. By the time a strike spontaneously broke out in the town's textile factories, she was isolated from both her wealthy employers and the poor whom she was so desperate to help. Shocked by the police chief's observation that all of the strikers “ought to be shot,” she helps to organize a soup kitchen, only to be jailed for inciting to riot. After two weeks in the Herkimer County lock-up, she returns to the battle which finally ended in January, 1913 with modest pay increases for the strikers.