These wide-ranging strategies built support, which the women desperately needed. The firm didn’t sit idly by. It pushed back from several angles. The Jobbers Association wrote up a report saying the girls were actually well paid—one girl making $6.96 for cheap shirts, another $9 a week for jeans. In addition, the investigators reported that “charges of ungentlemanly conduct on the part of the superintendent were completely groundless.” Several workers wrote to the paper, complaining that the strike leaders hadn’t distributed donated funds fairly. A man named Christian Tingwold claimed to have heard the strike leaders insult the coworkers who had returned to Shotwell, saying they had “no character, no principle.” These strategies drove a wedge between women ostensibly on the same side. The strike ground on, and more and more workers slipped back to their sewing machines.
The Minneapolis Tribune, the Globe’s competition, found the Jobbers’ report particularly convincing, lauding it as “made by a body of men who could not be trifled with, and in language too plain to be misunderstood.” The workers at the factory were happy, the Tribune suggested, until “along comes a St. Paul newspaper interloper, [who] begins a series of tirades against the horrid condition of working women of Minneapolis.” McDonald’s articles, the paper argued, “practically became the direct cause of the strike.” The Tribune called the reporter a “walking delegate,” implying she was a union representative bent on agitation.
The strike leaders denied all of it. The president of the Jobbers Association, they pointed out, was Clerihew of Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman. Tingwold, like the Jobbers report, was an industry plant, they suspected.
But the Tribune was onto something. The charge of “walking delegate” was apt; McDonald knew the strike leaders well; they sat on union committees together, including the reception committee for the Painters and Decorators Protective Association Ball. As early as January 1888, McDonald had given a speech urging factory women to organize. Whatever the St. Paul Globe’s purpose in hiring McDonald, she had her own agenda. She used the character of “Eva Gay” to educate readers about tactics and labor terms. Gay was much more naive about strikes than union-member McDonald must have been, asking innocently at one point, “What is a boycott?”
Just as all this unfolded—as the company refused to budge, as more women returned to making shirts, as the list of firms agreeing to boycott grew longer—McDonald traveled north to Duluth to give her first major union speech on the shore of Lake Superior. At the same time she’d been writing, she’d been learning to lecture. The talk on “Labor Organization” started off inauspiciously. Poor weather kept many away, and only four of the attendees were women, the very group she hoped to inspire. But she spoke anyway, transforming the observations she’d made as a reporter into a rallying cry. Women often worked not just ten-hour days but twelve- to fourteen-hour days and for much lower pay than men. The best they could hope for, if they spent all this time laboring and “never indulging in laughter,” was $4.25 a week and a $25 annual bonus. Their efforts to improve their lives were undermined because they “do not ask for what they want or, if they do, they ask in the wrong way,” McDonald said. If they cooperated and organized, like the men, like the Shotwell strikers, they might get what they wanted.
Eva Gay promotion in the Saint Paul Globe, March 31, 1888
“Eva Gay’s Next Sketch.” Saint Paul Globe, 31 March 1888 (Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub, Minnesota History Center)
Political lecturing blended all of McDonald’s skills—elocution taught by the nun, acting instincts honed on the community stage, a fierce commitment to the working class and women’s rights, and a certain lawyerly fire. “The greatest little ‘Labor Agitator’ in the west,” a friend later wrote about her on-stage magnetism. “Maybe the best speaker I have heard.”
Though she held up the Shotwell strikers as an inspirational example, back in Minneapolis, the strike was collapsing. This was because Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman was collapsing. Financial troubles had surfaced early in the year, and the firm responded by understating its debt. By June, Theodore Shotwell was borrowing from one bank to pay another, writing checks in the hopes he could convince friends in the East to lend him money to cover them. By mid-June the company stopped paying its bills, and the Globe headline declared: “The Firm of Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman Embarrassed.” New York sources decribed debts much larger than previously thought. A bank account supposed to guarantee loans was empty. Shotwell, so distinguished with his gold-headed cane, so upstanding, head of the company the Tribune declared “one of the most responsible in the city,” appeared suddenly in a less flattering light. In early July, Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman were arrested.
By October, notices appeared in the paper advertising deep discounts on flannel, buttons, wool suits—all the “large Bankrupt Wholesale Dry Goods stock of Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman.” And the factory workers who hadn’t been able to find other jobs drifted back to the winds and big bluestem, sky blue aster, and buffalo grass of the prairie, and the farms carved out of it.
Throughout the rest of the year, McDonald continued her exposés (as well as running, and losing, a race to be the first woman on the school board). She had a job, elocution lessons, and the ability to make people pay attention to what she had to say. The Globe took pride in her reporting, calling the series “a crusade for women.” Increasingly, she left behind her younger siblings and explored her freedom. Shocked by her daughter’s latest splash and by her moving into a boardinghouse and wandering all corners of the city, her mother would say, “Well, we’ve come to a fine pass when I
