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The Dutch, the Churches, and the Grand Rapids Furniture Strike of 1911 Robert Schoone-Jongen

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The Dutch, the Churches, and the Grand Rapids Furniture Strike of 1911 Robert Schoone-Jongen Origins Lost in Translation: the Dutch, the Churches, and the Grand Rapids Furniture Strike of 1911 Robert Schoone-Jongen n the morning of 19 April 1911, for the nineteen firms that formed the Osome seven thousand furniture Grand Rapids Furniture Manufacturers workers walked from their Grand Rap• Association. The owners were almost ids homes to dozens of factories, ready exclusively local men with family trees to spend ten hours amid the noise, rooted in New England and upstate vapors, and sawdust. These productive New York. They lived on the bluff to people annually carved and assembled the east of downtown; the workers about one-third of all the chairs, resided closer to the mills, near the tables, bedsteads, sideboards, cabinets, Grand River and its tributaries.1 Grand Rapids prospered and grew from the furniture business. The city's ten banks testified to the profits the factories earned. Five of the furniture companies were knot• ted into the tangled web of directors who controlled the banks and savings and loan associations. The furniture makers could finance their businesses through the local banks, independent from the larger banks in Chicago, or Detroit, or New York. The furniture men/bank directors sat alongside prominent department store owners, lawyers, and newspaper publishers. Stow & Davis Furniture: 86 Front Ave., S.W., Image courtesy of Assessor's Department Real Property Appraisal Card Collection. City of Grand Rapids Archives Come noon, they all lunched together and Records Center, Grand Rapids, Michigan. at the exclusive Peninsula Club at the corner of Fountain and Ionia and, if and display cases produced in the the weather permitted, spent a pleas• United States. Grand Rapids, Michi• ant afternoon on the links at either the gan, indeed, deserved the nickname alliterative Kent County Country Club "Furniture City of America." One half along Plainfield Avenue or the High• Robert Schoone-Jongen recently retired of those furniture workers were Dutch• land Club at Giddings and 5th Street, as Associate Professor of History Americans; the balance largely Poles, beyond the eastern boundary.2 at Calvin University. He has been Transportation costs had forced the researching and writing about Dutch• Lithuanians, Germans, and Swedes. American immigrant experiences for Eight firms formed the core of the manufacturers to cooperate with each many years, with special emphasis on Grand Rapids furniture industry, each other, beginning in 1881. The major communities in Minnesota, New Jersey, of them with roughly four hundred markets were concentrated on the East and Iowa. or more workers. Eighty-five percent Coast, and even farther away to the of the city's furniture workers worked west. Grand Rapids products could not 14 Volume XXXVII· Number 2 ·2019 and "Christian dow would be back in the hands of the Reformed," owners who had paid it out on Saturday. with a few other This economic hamster wheel fueled in• variants as well. dustrial discontent among the furniture Only seven workers. Consumer prices were rising, of the Dutch but when the workers asked for an in• congregations crease in wages, the men who owned the held services big houses on the bluff pleaded poverty.6 in English in When a delegation of furniture 1911.' The Re• workers appealed for higher wages in formed (RCA) 1909, they were first asked to wait for churches tended an answer until after the owners saw the to stress a more results of the always crucial semi-an• pious Calvin• nual buyers' conventions. The eventual ism, one more at answer was to ignore the requests and home with other dismiss the petitioners as agitators. The Protestant de• manufacturers association would only nominations and deal with individual workers, claim- American cul• ing that each worker should be free to Women painting furniture. Image courtesy the Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Archives, Grand Rapids Public Library, Grand Rapids, ture. The Chris• negotiate his own terms of service with Michigan. tian Reformed a fair-minded employer. Another local ( CRC) ministers organization, the Employers Associa• be shipped in bulk via the Great Lakes. stressed principled living, strongly in• tion, kept files on workers' behaviors. Neither did the city sit on the nation's fluenced by social and political trends Still another group backed by the major railroad trunk lines, the nearest recent immigrants imported with them manufacturers, the Good Government of which lay in Indiana. Five railroads from the Netherlands. The question of League, sought to keep city politics held the transportation keys to the secret society membership was a major inclined to the industrialists' interests. city. The furniture makers formed the sticking point. The CRC vigorously All this prompted Viva Flaherty, the Furniture Manufacturers Association denounced groups like the Masons. social outreach workers for the Fountain to jointly negotiate freight rates with It looked askance at any organization Street Church, to write, "The associated the railroads. Those lower bulk rates that included membership oaths and employers refused arbitration in order to were a vital part of the city's ability to rituals, including labor unions. The · maintain the right of organized capital win such a large share of the national RCA held no such official positions.5 to deal with labor unorganized." furniture market.3 During the six days of the week In 1910, the several thousand fur• On Sundays the factory owners spent laboring at the lathes, unskilled niture workers organized Local 335 of and their workers occupied different laborers (mostly Polish and Lithu• the United Brotherhood of Carpenters spiritual realms. The owners gravitated anian) earned less than two dollars and Joiners of America. From the outset to congregations located in the center for their ten hours of toil. The skilled five Dutch-Americans stood among of the city, especially Park Congre• carpenters, joiners, and veneer men the leaders, four of them members of gational and Fountain Street Baptist (mostly Dutch) garnered about $2.25 the Christian Reformed Church. Henry Church. The workers scattered among per day. The managers and foremen Bowmaster, the first president of the dozens of churches, both Catholic and (mostly Germans and Swedes) re• local, had been born into a Dutch im• Protestant. The Dutch, who accounted ceived considerably more. A healthy migrant household in Allegan County for a quarter of the city's population, percentage of the workers managed to in 1865 and reared in the Christian supported thirty-three separate congre• buy modest houses, financing them Reformed Church.8 After working in the gations in the city. Theologically the through mortgages held by a savings Chicago area, where he also married, he denominations ranged from Unitarian and loan association. Those institu• moved to Grand Rapids to make a liv• to Roman Catholic, with the vast ma• tions were, in turn, beholden to the ing building houses. Garrit Verburg, an jority featuring the word "Reformed" furniture manufacturer who controlled immigrant from the Oudewater prov• in their titles. Reformed was subdi• the banks. By Monday, the money in a ince of Utrecht, the Netherlands, served vided largely between "Reformed" pay envelope carried from a pay win- variously as president, treasurer, and 15 Origins in 1913, had denominational ( CRC) Synod proved moved from reluctant to issue blanket condemna• Muskegon to tions, except for banning membership the Grandville in the Knights of Labor in 1886, local Avenue neigh• church bodies dealt with the question borhood and on a case-by-case basis.' Classis Grand worked as a Rapids West denounced the Wood cabinetmaker. Workers Union in 1899 and then His service asked the denomination to create a list in the union of banned unions.15 That request was brought him to denied. In 1904 Synod again refused the attention of to condemn unions but urged careful Grand Rapids scrutiny of each one. While Christian Mayor George unions were preferable, prudence E. Ellis, who required Christians to act as salt and Chair makers at the Widdicomb Furniture Factory. Image courtesy the Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Archives, Grand Rapids hired Timmer light in existing organizations as well. Public Library, Grand Rapids, Michigan. as a secretary. But, in 1906, Synod did distinguish Gerrit Raterink, between "bread and butter" unions, business agent.9 Employed as a cabi• president in 1916, was a house builder like those affiliated with the American netmaker, Garrit and his wife, Lena in the West Leonard area and a long• Federation of Labor, and overtly Marx• Vander Schelde, raised their children time member of the Alpine Avenue ist unions connected to the Socialist in the Grandville Avenue Dutch en• congregation.12 People like Verburg, Labor Party.16 An American Federation clave. Twenty-six-year-old millworker Van Dyke, and Timmer, cabinetmakers of Labor union membership might Louis (Lieuwe) Van Dyke, who served in the factories, earned approximately be compatible with church member• a year as president of the local, was $550--$645 per year, working ten-hour ship, but church members could not Michigan born and lived with his wife, days, five and one-half days per week, endorse violent protests or political Engeltje (Lena) Kooistra and their with no paid vacations or any other revolution. The anti-union sentiment growing family in the Creston neigh• benefits, but they earned enough to in the Christian Reformed Church borhood, within walking distance of allow someone like Van Dyke to own could be best summarized in words the Dutch-speaking Coldbrook CRC.® his home on Spencer Avenue in 1910. Professor Louis Berkhof published in John Timmer, secretary/treasurer Timmer and Verburg also purchased 1916: "Surely the brotherhood of be• homes eventu• lievers takes precedent over the broth• ally. Bowmaster erhood of labor." And again, '"Not for a and Raterink class, but for the King' should be their built the homes slogan; the establishment of social their families righteousness, their [unions'] ideal inhabited on goal."" Dunham and But under the leadership of Rev.
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