Salome Shepard, reformer

by Helen M. Winslow

“If you could know what a chance this is for me!” she said at last. “If you had known what a dreary thing existence had become, and what a hopeless prospect I had in the future! And now, to live here and work with you,—in your grand scheme,—Oh, Salome!” And she wept again.

“Then I will put the care of the cottages into your hands first of all,” said Salome, patting her cheek. “You’ve kept house and know what one ought to be like for an ordinary family,—what things are necessary for the comfort of the household and convenience of the housewife. I don’t. I should be as apt to build expensive music-rooms and leave out the pantries, as any way. Go ahead, and get up as nice houses as you can, at $1,500, $2,000 and $2,500 a piece. Mr. Villard thinks none of the employes will care to buy anything more expensive. Here is the architect’s address,” and she handed Marion a card.

But the building of the model boarding-house was a project too dear to Salome’s heart for her to easily relinquish to others. Her plan, as she had presented it to Villard and Burnham, grew and magnified itself until her co-laborers had to resort to all sorts of arguments to keep her from wild extravagance.

She had begun by planning for the factory girls a house which should be really a home; but as she went about among the operatives, and began to get an inkling of what the young men of the mills really were, of the bare, desolate dens which gave them shelter, she did not wonder that they resorted to the streets for comfort and amusement. She began to see how the young men and girls who entered the mills could scarcely help drifting into low and unworthy lives; and she grew more determined to do something to raise them to a higher plane of living.

Her grandfather’s manuscripts did not help her much here. In Newbern Shepard’s day, the factory-hand had not sunk to such ignorance or even degradation, as he has, in some instances, in later times; and in those more democratic times, it had not been so hard for him to rise above the level of his kind. In that day, too, it had been possible for him to find a home, in the true sense of the word, with families of a certain degree of refinement. But in Salome’s more modern times, she saw, and grieved, that the factory boarding-places were of the sort that dragged the operatives down and kept them on a lower plane, even, than the Shawsheen tenement system.

She consulted much with the superintendents and with Marion. She visited the large cities and thoroughly examined the young men’s and young women’s various houses and unions. She got ideas from all, but a perfected plan from none. Finally, she collaborated with her architect, Robert Fales, and soon had her model boarding-house on paper. After that it was only a work of days to begin on the foundations of the institution.

The operatives at the Shawsheen Mills gazed on all these changes with curious interest, which, however, they carefully suppressed when any of their superiors were about. The average independent American citizen, as he exists among working-men, does not care to pose as an object of even partial charity. He delights in crying out against Capital, and clamoring for a share of the Profits; but when it comes to actual taking of what he does not feel he has earned, he is more backward.

The Shawsheen operatives, in spite of the promises which had been made, had gone to work again with little hope that the state of affairs for them would be any better in future than in the past. As days went by, and they saw Salome Shepard come to the mills every morning, and knew that she was personally interested in them as her people, they were skeptical of any results for good. And when they began to hear it whispered that she, a woman, was the actual head of the Shawsheen Mills, some of them talked earnestly of leaving. What! they—strong, able-bodied, skilled mechanics—work under a woman?

But they didn’t go. A dull season was upon them, and work scarce. Other mills were shutting down and sending their operatives into two months of enforced idleness. The Shawsheen hands were forced to stay where they were and be thankful for a chance to work.

Then, as the story that they were to be furnished with new and better homes gained credence among them, their first real interest dawned. Many did not believe their conditions would be bettered; many, even, did not care; and most of them grumbled because their rents would probably be high, and said the new buildings were only a means to grind the poor and extort more money from them, to put into a rich woman’s pocket. Such is the thankless task of the philanthropist.