Ann Washington Craton (1891–1970) was a labor activist, social services, worker, and feminist who helped to organize and support low-paid women workers who worked in rural and suburban garment factories during the 1920s. Middle-class and American-born, she helped to expand unionization work beyond the then-dominant Yiddish-speaking urban shops of the time and helped as well to overcome male-dominated resistance to female labor organization. Using trial and error as her method, she became adept at working with women of varying ages and ethnic backgrounds. She refused to adopt party-line labor political positions. She successfully overcame accusations of being merely a "sentimental middle-class liberal" or "bourgeois intellectual" and showed that enthusiastic and idealistic college-trained women organizers could perform at least as well as the working-class men who dominated the labor movement. Craton wrote vividly of her experiences in contemporary news sources. As organizer and activist, she helped to reduce and alleviate the hardships of child labor, provide relief for families in distress, and place unwanted children in good homes.
Born in North Carolina, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Washington University in 1915 and attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Social Sciences in the early 1920s. During the depression years of the 1930s, she worked in public service agencies including the Institute of Social and Religious Research, the WPA Public Works of Art project, and the New York Temporary Emergency Relief Committee. After her marriage to Heber Blankenhorn in 1936, she devoted her time to study and research but produced nothing for publication.
Early life and education
Craton grew up with her mother and five siblings in a family from which her father, an insurance salesman, was absent much of the time. In about 1911, Craton moved with her mother and siblings to Washington, D.C. That city was the home of her maternal grandmother who had been widowed in 1907. She began study at Columbia College in George Washington University and in 1915 graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She also attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Social Sciences between 1922 and 1924.
Career as progressive activist
After graduating from college, Craton worked for a social services organization and an agency of the federal Labor Department in Washington and then moved to New York City where she transitioned to union organization and relief work.
Social services worker
Craton's first job out of college was as a case investigator and adoption supervisor for the Washington, D.C., Board of Children's Guardians. Founded by Congress in 1892, this agency was charged with reviewing requests from indigent parents or guardians and interfacing with parents seeking to adopt. A news piece in the Washington Post in 1915 described Craton as "mother at large" to 150 children of "varying ages, colors, races, and parentage". In performing this job, she became a frequent spokesperson at local clubs and other social gatherings in the District and at this time was elected as a member of the local Federation of Women's Clubs. Early in 1919, she joined the Bureau of Labor (now the Bureau of Labor Statistics) as a field investigator responsible for compiling statistics on workers' cost of living.
Union organizer and relief worker
Later that year, she moved to New York City and became the secretary and an employment counselor for the National Child Labor Committee. While that group failed in its attempt to achieve government regulation, it succeeded in investigating and publicizing the extreme hardship caused by unregulated child labor. Her prior work experience and new contact with socialists, labor leaders, and other radicals led Craton to seek a career in the then relatively youthful labor movement. Convinced that she was capable of organizing women working in the garment industries, she applied to Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, for a job as organizer. The Amalgamated opposed the American Federation of Labor's relatively narrow focus on skilled trades and in particular its cautious approach to unionizing women in the garment industry. Craton thought that because it was dominated by foreign-born, mainly Yiddish-speaking men, the union needed women like her as organizers. She believed that as a native-born American, she could help organize the many native-born American girls and women who were working in the "runaway shops" that the big urban firms used to avoid paying union wages. At first, Hillman dismissed her as a "sentimental middle-class liberal", but recognizing that English-speaking workers had become outraged by the poor English spoken by Amalgamated staff members, he put her on the payroll and told her to report immediately to the shirtmakers' union in Philadelphia for training.
After a short period of training in Philadelphia, Craton began organizing in the runaway shops of the anthracite mining region of northeast Pennsylvania. Not long after her arrival, while talking to a factory girl about the union, she placed her hand on the girl's shoulder and was promptly arrested for assault and battery. In bailing her out, union officials explained that organizers were not permitted to touch nonunion workers. Thereafter, working in the tiny rural hamlets of the Schuylkill valley, she met many coal miners' daughters, widows, and wives who were, as she said, "exploited and overworked and underpaid". The inhabitants of this region were hyphenated Americans from Poland, Lithuania, Germany, Ireland, and other European countries. Despite the opposition of elected officials, sheriffs, clergymen, and factory owners, Craton found that the girls and women she encountered were generally eager to join up. Because their fathers and husbands were mostly committed members of the miners' union, they did not need to be convinced of the benefits of disciplined collective action. Craton wrote, "What pleased me as days went on were the steadily increasing badly spelled notes in childish handwriting from young shirtmakers in all the surrounding towns begging me to organize them. If an employer responded to the union movement by locking out workers, the union's city workers would strike in support of the rural union. Craton wrote, "The Pennsylvania State Constabulary, with its training station in the coal fields, was used to terrorize the strikers, so were the coal and iron police, and the local officials. Organizers were arrested and persecuted. It was difficult to find lawyers who would represent the union. The manufacturers brought all of their influence into play to break the struggling, plucky little local which was steadily getting a foothold." It took a year of effort, but in the end, one of the new locals obtained its objectives, including a 44-hour work week, doubled hourly pay, and weekly pay envelopes. Craton's success as an organizer was real, but the local's achievements were short-lived as a business slump subsequently caused the employers to shut down many rural workshops, including this one.
In 1920 and 1921, Craton encountered prejudice among native-born American workers against unionized foreign-born ones. Dispatched to a Boston suburb, she was asked to gain the cooperation of impoverished but in their minds respectable American-born women who had continued to work when Italian-American union members went out on strike. Taking care to honor their dignity and self-reliance, she won over these Yankee women one by one until, in the end, the last of the scabs capitulated. Once again, Craton's success was accompanied by a union defeat when a court injunction stopped the strike. The strikers were not greatly discouraged however since the union found work for them in Boston.
In May 1921, Craton helped to direct a strike at a runaway shop in Binghamton, New York, where, once again, the shop's owners used violence against strikers and organizers. The following year, she wrote an article for Amalgamated's journal, Advance, in which she ridiculed a large open shop clothing manufacturer who tried to convince his workers and the public of his benign intentions. While studying at Columbia University, she carried out research on the clothing and textile industry under the joint auspices of Columbia's economics department and the research department of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
During the second half of the 1920s, Craton traded work as a union organizer for work in a variety of paid and volunteer positions. She joined organizations that gave encouragement to girls and young women, relief to disaster victims, and support for garment industry strikers. In 1924, she joined the National League of Girls Clubs, an organization that gave working girls and young women opportunities for recreation and training in organizational management. The following year, she was appointed secretary of the Civic Club of New York, a radical organization of artists, teachers, and social workers. In 1926, she was affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1927, she served as secretary for an ad hoc group called the Committee of One Hundred for the Defense of Needle Trade Workers and in that position defended the American Civil Liberties Union against an accusation of Communist sympathies.
In 1928, she directed efforts to provide relief for the 30,000 workers and their families in the New Bedford textile strike. During the New Bedford strike, Craton directed relief efforts for the industrial assistance program of a communist group called Workers International Relief. When she insisted that all the funds collected for relief should be distributed to the striking workers and none of it diverted to the communist group, she was taken off the project and returned to New York. In reporting on the strike, a reporter for the New Bedford Evening Standard said Craton did not limit herself to distributing relief but also addressed mass meetings of the strikers. She would draw attention to the many women present and stress the importance of women in all aspects of the strike. The reporter said, "She stands at the front of the platform, gestures little, speaks slowly and clearly, in simple language, repeats the expression, Fellow Workers constantly. Her face and manner draw the crowd. She gets applause."
In 1930, Craton became a field investigator for an ecumenical Christian charity devoted to studying social problems called the Institute of Social and Religious Research. Her job was to assemble data for a detailed study of the role of churches in rural industrial villages. The organization defined an industrial village as a hamlet dominated by a single industry and estimated that there were 4,000 of them in the U.S. at the time, many of them dominated by mills and many of the mill towns devoted to making textiles.