Reid, James P.

REID, JAMES P. (1874-n.d.). Rhode Island was the first urbanized, industrialized state in the nation. The establishment of the factory system drew native-born workers and eventually immigrants to the teeming mills that dotted the landscape. Textile owners and managers often held political office and successfully kept the lid on labor strife until the 1880s. Some unions, mainly the building trades, managed to sustain early victories, but organizing “unskilled” labor proved difficult, especially for the high proportion of female operatives normal in large divisions of textile production. The sweeping Knights of Labor uprising of 1885-1886, highlighted by the first consolidated socialist movement in the state and the appearance of a socialistic weekly newspaper, were swept away by red-scares and management counter-offensives.

The General Assembly’s marginal Democratic minority, meanwhile, generally played "fiddle--faddle" for occasional favors from their GOP colleagues. These were truly inhospitable grounds for labor, never mind socialists, in a state where voting had long proceeded with varying qualifications calculated to reduce working-class participation.

Into this rancid mixture walked an erstwhile textile weaver, blackballed union official, and beloved neighborhood dentist. A child laborer working as a bobbin boy, James P. Reid entered Olneyville, the industrial center of Rhode Island's booming factories, during the financial Panic of the early 1890s. He soon joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and merged his newly-acquired socialist mindset with peripatetic energy in the short-lived National Union of Textile Workers, sometimes referred to as the Weaver's Union. He rose to prominence in the state’s small SLP, presided over meetings, made formal speeches, and introduced visiting leftwing dignitaries like Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor Aveling, in April, 1899. The state's leading Republican newspaper, in a moment of non-partisanship, called the gathering "one of the most successful rallies” of the day.

Following the repeated rise and fall record of the socialist movement in the state from the 1870s onward, the SLP of the 1890s ran candidates for many state and local offices. Reid got his shot a couple of times for state representative, state treasurer, governor, and congress. He made good showings, by modest socialist standards, before the national SLP fell into internecine warfare and lost most of its membership. By 1901, Reid had joined the Socialist Party, formed behind the leadership of Eugene V. Debs.

Reid took the moment to walk away from party politics and labor organizing, seeking a profession and livelihood. Even as the violent and tumultuous street railway strike erupted in 1902, Reid enrolled in the Philadelphia Dental College, specializing in oral surgery by the time he graduated in 1904, at age 30. Sounding more like a college student than the dangerous socialist his enemies would later label him, he gave speeches to his classmates, managed the baseball team, and served as class valedictorian.

Upon his return to Rhode Island, he ran again for state representative from his bailiwick, deepest blue-collar and largely Irish Olneyville. "The mildly Socialist dentist," as one source described him, told the press, "I am the only candidate that stands for democracy carried to its logical development." He promised to "raise Cain with a cellar full of rats" at the state house. He declared himself Labor's Watchman in 1909. Over the next two years, he also remade himself into a socialist strategist with an agenda of important legislative reforms, while advising a textile union union local.

In 1911, he once again sought the seat from Olneyville's ninth district, this time with a band of supporters, the Reid Rooters. They went virtually house to tenement in the district where the Democrats had a ten to one dominance. He won 415 to 401 as the first Socialist ever elected to office in Rhode Island.

The General Assembly opened in January, 1912. By the time the session ended in April, Representative Reid had introduced forty-three resolutions, almost none escaping a legislative committee. He startled his fellow politicians and the local newspapers when he refused the customary free pass from the New Haven Railroad. Now this was news. Reid went on to address important topics: unemployment insurance, pensions, aid to mothers and children, a Sunday work bill, and union label printing. He advocated free school meals for kids so as not to have them "starve along until they reach the age when the law says they may be exploited by capitalists." He also embraced cost of living raises, no night work for children and women, and the end of fines and forfeitures. He hit at the use of suction spindles that mill girls used to thread a bobbin, a major cause of tuberculosis. Reid described his a practical solution as the creation and use of "hygiene arsenals." He returned to his dental work in the neighborhood after the session's end in April.

This lone socialist crusader stirred up such a storm that overpowering forces formed to defeat him. The legislature, known proudly as "the House of Free Enterprise," seemed to enjoy the fruits of red baiting, heretofore lacking a guilty victim. In their eyes, Reid had proved to be a dangerous foe who might mobilize workers from his office, while encouraging others to run for office. Democrats and Republicans joined, as they did elsewhere in the United States, to run a fusion candidate in the district. They enlisted the Church, known to spread fear about a supposed "ungodly" atheist, even one actually Catholic, within a community approximately 80 percent Catholic. The 1912 election ended in a 590 to 388 loss. He would run twice more, unsuccessfully, once forcing an unsuccessful recount.
Not long after his political career in the state legislature had ended, Reid took on new roles. During the IWW’s brief but heroic Rhode Island phase, a handful of dramatic but unsuccessful strikes in 1913, Reid was naturally the leading orator and organizer. With a considerable section of the Socialist Party, during the following years, he watched events in Russia with sympathy, and was identified in 1919 by the new Bureau of Investigation as a state official of the Communist Party. Three years later, amid a mass strike in the Blackstone and Pawtuxet Valleys against post-war lengthening of hours beyond the forty-eight-hour limit won during wartime, he was again an admired and active speaker, remembered in a later oral history as skilled at talking on any subject.

Still the Olneyville dentist, he remained a public figure. As the Great Depression broke out nearly a decade later, Reid formed the Right To Live Club in his neighborhood, following others of its type across the country. Demanding relief and a suspension of evictions for non-payment of rent, Right to Live members supported and joined the famed Bonus March on Washington, assaulted violently by US troops under Douglas MacArthur.

Reid served for a time as president of the small but active “red” National Textile Workers Union (NTWU), struggling to organize but mostly offering leadership to strikes already underway in the early 1930s against drastic cuts in wages. His fellow NTWU officer, “Red” Anne Burlak, famed for her oratory, would later become a fixture in the Boston branch of the Communist Party. Reid ran for governor on Rhode Island’s Communist Party ticket in 1936, and there is no further available information on his life and activities. The NTWU itself dissolved after the national textile strike of 1934, and its remnants joined the CIO’s textile union, gaining strength in Rhode Island with the upswing of war production during the 1940s. Oral histories suggest that the Right to Live Club continued into the later 1930s as a discussion group, and that Reid may have abandoned Rhode Island for some years, taking employment at the Left-connected fraternal association, the International Workers Order, headquartered in New York. Reid remains the best-known leftwing figure in all Rhode Island history, along with Joe Caldwell, a long-time figure in the Socialist Party and a frequent if unsuccessful candidate for office.

Buhle, Paul. “The Knights of Labor in Rhode Island,” in “Labor and Community Militance in Rhode Island.” Radical History Review. #17 (Spring, 1978), pp. 39-74.

Clark, Richard. "The Struggle, Victory, and Defeat of James P. Reid: A Socialist in Rhode Island, 1893-1912." MA Thesis, Rhode Island College, 1975.

Nardella, Luigi. “‘Born Out of Strikes,’ an interview with Luigi Nardella.” Radical History Review. #17 (Spring 1968).