"Mr. Sprague Did Not Believe the People Would Do It": The Sprague Electric Strike in North Adams, 1970

Abstract: The ten-week strike by Sprague Electric Company workers in 1970 in the small city of North Adams, Massachusetts, marked a turning point in labor-management relations at the capacitor plant. After decades of workplace paternalism, Sprague employees voted down their weak local unions, joined national AFL-CIO unions, and struck for better wages, union security, and greater power on the job. During the strike, the union perspective achieved wide public view as its leaders used handouts, the local press, and access to civic organizations to rebut the Companys public relations offensive. The union push, combined with strong picket line solidarity and local support, enabled the strikers to win some of their key objectives. This study draws on oral histories, union archives, and company records to examine perceptions of the strike during 1970 and afterwards. While the Sprague strike an important moment in Northeast labor history, its aftermath in North Adams also offers a capsule portrait of larger trends in deindustrialization, attacks on unions, and the rightward shift of the Democratic party. Maynard Seider, a professor emeritus of Sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA), recently completed his first film, Farewell to Factory Towns?, which traces the history of North Adams.INTRODUCTIONIn 1970 more than 2,000 blueand white-collar workers in North Adams engaged in a militant ten-week strike against Sprague Electric Company. Sprague had dominated employment in the northern Berkshires since World War II and had never before faced such a significant and lengthy strike. For much of its history in North Adams, the electronic component company held the upper hand in dealing with its weak labor unions, leaving the workforce low-paid and ill-protected on the shop floor. What precipitated the strike? And what created the strong sense of camaraderie among the production, office, and technical workers who came together to challenge the power of the world's largest capacitor company? And what would be the consequences of the mighty upsurge of 1970 to the community's memory, both immediately after the strike and years later?Tucked in a valley in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts, North Adams possesses an industrial history similar to numerous other New England mill towns, with immigrants from Ireland, Wales, French-Canada, and Italy finding work in the textile and shoe factories that sprang up alongside the Hoosac River in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1900, the city's population had grown to 24,200, and it surpassed Pittsfield to become the largest community in Berkshire County. In the 1920s, sixteen passenger trains a day moved into and out of North Adams, a city one writer described as nervous with the energy of twentieth-century America. No city [of its size] in New England has a greater variety of retail establishments: merchants must stock goods for workers of different nationalities and notions, and for a large farming population.1 With the ups and downs of the textile industry, however, hard times often meant that wages stayed low and, in many households, both adults labored in local factories. With textiles and shoe production still dominant as late as 1940, some 6,600 workers in a city of close to 23,000 worked in nine large mills.2Change came to the city in 1930 when Robert C. Sprague (1900-1991) moved his small capacitor company from Quincy, Massachusetts, to the Beaver Mill in North Adams. Sprague Specialties, as it was called then, had outgrown its manufacturing space in Quincy, and North Adams business owners traded cash for stock to entice the fledgling company to move into the 160,000 square foot abandoned textile mill. Sprague, an Annapolis graduate and naval officer, had invented a lightweight paper capacitor, a crucial component for the growing radio market. A capacitor is an electrical component, used to store a charge temporarily, consisting of two conducting surfaces separated by a nonconductor. …

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