Maynard Seider: Howard Fast, North Adams and 'Clarkton'

Seventy-five years ago, Howard Fast, best-selling author of “Citizen Tom Paine” and “Freedom Road,” published “Clarkton,” about a labor dispute in a small Massachusetts town.

At the end of World War II, workers went on strike throughout the country. In an eruption of activism, they demanded gains after losing ground with the “no strike” agreements, wage stagnation and inflation of the war years. In 1945 alone, 3.5 million workers walked picket lines — coal miners, longshoremen, machinists, truck drivers, oil and auto workers, as well as 1,800 employees at Sprague Electric in North Adams.

Years ago, I interviewed Rhoda Steinberg, the widow of Gerry Steinberg, an activist at Sprague during the 1930s and ‘40s, who became an organizer for the United Electrical Workers (UE) union, an original CIO industrial union. At one point in our conversation, Rhoda mentioned that she had heard that Howard Fast had written a novel based on North Adams. Its name, “Clarkton,” was an amalgam of two bordering towns: Clarksburg and Williamstown.

That piqued my interest and I found a copy of the book. It begins with the factory owner, George Lowell, in New York City where he hired a strike-breaking firm to confront the walkout that had just started. Lowell takes the train to Northampton where his wife, Lois, meets him to drive them back home. It’s a 45-minute drive to Clarkton. If it’s really North Adams, it would take me closer to an hour, but we learn that Lois “drove fast.”

Clarkton’s population of 22,000 matches the North Adams total in the mid-1940s. Lowell’s daughter went to Bennington College. Clarkton lies in “the foothills of the Berkshires,” with a view of Mount Greylock. A Williams College professor belongs to the local Communist branch. And “those college boys … from Williams” come to town for food, drink or “to keep a date with a girl at the hotel.” OK, so it looks like it’s North Adams, but I’ve got no smoking gun. I once had a very short phone conversation with Howard Fast, and he couldn’t tell me of any connection. Neither could the biographer of Fast, a dissertation on Fast or a look at Fast’s papers at the University of Pennsylvania archives.

Back to the novel: The firm that Lowell hired wanted violence and, aided by the local police chief, violence he got: nearly two-dozen injuries and the deaths of a worker and a strike supporter. While Clarkton might well be North Adams, the details of both strikes at the end of 1945 differ dramatically, particularly with the violence. For Fast, the deaths undoubtedly symbolized the long history of bloody attacks on striking workers as well as the violence he witnessed while covering a strike in 1946 Chicago.

Clarkton was published in September 1947, right in the midst of an intense anti-Communist political crackdown in the U.S. That same year, the House Committee on Un-American Activities indicted Fast, an outspoken activist and Communist Party member, for refusing to name his colleagues on a committee that aided Spanish Civil War refugees. New York City’s school board ordered “Citizen Tom Paine” removed from high school libraries, and after a federal court found him guilty of contempt, he was barred from speaking at four New York colleges. As for the book, with a small press run of first-edition copies, negative reviews and the temper of the times, “Clarkton” virtually “disappeared.”

What if Howard Fast had actually researched labor struggles in North Adams during the 1940s, instead of writing a fictitious account? He could have focused on the real Gerry Steinberg, who proved to be a continual thorn in the side of management. Another character worth pursuing would be the leading industrialist who not only tried to bribe union activists but used his considerable power to get an activist’s draft classification moved to 1-A. Then, how about the feisty women rallying to bring a real union into the plant while the local union leaders strategize with the factory owner to keep them out? Sit-downs and wildcat strikes ensue, and, as in New York, the red scare reaches the Berkshires in a pitched battle between the entrenched “company” union and UE.

While Howard Fast has given us a good story with “Clarkton,” the real North Adams had enough labor drama in the 1940s to provide a willing author with a full palette.