Stacy D. Fahrenthold, Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Stacy D. Fahrenthold (SDF): Several years ago, I learned about a young Syrian man who was bayonetted at a labor strike. At the time, I was a new PhD student and a recent arrival to Boston, thirty miles from Lawrence, Massachusetts, where John Ramey was killed by a state militiaman in 1912. In US history, the Bread and Roses Strike is presented as the moment that “made” the US working class. But its mahjari history was indeterminate. Lawrence then hosted the United States’ second-largest Arab immigrant community and nearly 4,500 Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians struck as part of a multiracial coalition led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). However, when accessing the vast archives of Arabic print culture in the Americas, stories like John’s were slight if they were reported at all. Traces of labor upsurge appear everywhere in the mahjar’s archives, but they were always understated—references to “good works” by ladies aid clubs, a fixation on modern management techniques, and “cooperative” approaches to maintaining industrial peace, subtly-stated aspersions tossed at unruly factory workers, prescriptive discussions about “bolshevism” and its dangers to an Arab community’s right to remain in the United States. Following this print culture, my first book led me away from workers and into the nationalist politics of the mahjar’s printing class (Between the Ottomans and the Entente). But all the while, these echoes of labor mutinies lingered with me. I was haunted by all the negative space in the press.

Unmentionables is in a lot of ways the result of that haunting. I set out to write a “Syrian workers of the world”-style labor history, focusing centrally on strikes and uprisings in the United States between 1912 and 1934. The book narrates the history of Arab American workers in the woolens, weaving, garment work, and linen embroideries industries; taken collectively, these industries drove the Arab Atlantic mahjar, constituting the single largest sector for immigrant workers from the Middle East and shaping the diaspora’s labor economy in underacknowledged ways. Along the way, the book contends with various sorts of “unmentionables”: the centrality of young Syrian women and girls in industrial labor and on picket lines, the coercions and class politics of racial respectability tropes which claimed their labor power to “raise the Syrian name” in the United States, and the specific challenges of labor contests waged within the ethnic community during a moment of intense immigration restriction and anti-worker politics. The book reconsiders how Arab American labor histories have been marginalized by historians’ view of what acts count as labor activism. While the book captures traditional shop floor contests and formal bargaining, it also focuses on activists who led mutual aid efforts, raised bail funds, fed communities at strike kitchens, and built interracial coalitions with other immigrant communities. Similarly, Unmentionables traces the emergence of a Syrian émigré capitalist class in the Arab Atlantic, merchant-manufacturers who built global brands through deft navigation of textile supply chains, partnership with US expansionists, and (contested) claims upon the Syrian diaspora’s labor power.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

SDF: Unmentionables addresses the labor history of the mahjar, narrating activist strategies and labor contests in the textile industry amid a generational labor upsurge in the United States. For instance, the book explores how Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian workers went on strike alongside unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); American Clothing Workers of America (ACWA); and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). One finding is that in several work stoppages in the textile industry, Syrian workers joined in numbers large enough to shut down the industry and wrest concessions from manufacturers. Because most of these workers were women, the book includes a significant thread in feminist labor history. As I wrote the book, a fuller picture of the mahjar’s textile industries emerged—the proliferation of Arab workers in the woolens, silk weaving, broadcloth, and garment work industries, but also the emergence of the so-called “Syrian shops,” Syrian-owned factories where women stitched kimonos (kimuna), underwear, crocheted cuff-and-collar sets, embroidered linens, or other household textiles. The book therefore tells the story not just about “labor v. capital” in factories where Syrian workers labored under white American management but also examines how such contests looked within Syrian-owned factories. Similarly, the book traces the mahjar’s supply chain, each chapter following the processing of raw textile fibers into finished goods, each touched by the hands of distinct groups of Syrian workers. Thinking through the notion of the supply chain allows Unmentionables to move beyond factory floors and shop politics in New York City, Paterson, Lawrence, or Boston; the book’s latter chapters follow Syrian capitalists as they outsourced production to the Portuguese island of Madeira, to Manila, Shanghai, and Yokohama (tellingly, all sites for expanding US commercial power), and into the US-Mexico borderlands.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

SDF: In my first book, I pursued an émigré politics of a particular sort: diaspora nationalism as pursued and practiced by Syrian and Lebanese newspapermen in print cultural centers like New York City, Buenos Aires, or Sao Paulo. For the most part (there were exceptions!), these men distrusted workers’ movements, trade unions, and labor activists, rejecting them as potential threats to their politics of national development in the homeland, which (they argued) relied on industrial peace and profits from abroad. Unmentionables challenges this narrative choice, writing a history of class formation and labor contest from the perspectives of working women, union leaders, so-called “child operatives,” and textile peddlers as they moved across the continental mahjar in search of work.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SDF: Unmentionables is written for anyone interested in social histories of the global Middle East as well as those familiar with US immigration and labor histories. It is also written with an eye for the multitudes of family histories I have been honored to listen to over the years, and some of the individuals in this book can only appear there because of the efforts of community archivists and family historians who have collaborated in parts of the work. I would love for Unmentionables to have an impact on how we think about histories of migration and mobility from the Middle East; first, through a better understanding of the history of the mahjar’s representational politics and second, by centering humility in the pursuit of mahjar stories and thinking about the role silence (“unmentionability”) plays as much as voice. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SDF: Most of my projects right now are focused on opposing scholasticide in Palestine and working for the continued right to study, teach, and learn Middle Eastern histories in the United States amid the cascading emergencies of our moment. At UC Davis, I have partnered with the California History Social Science Project to develop curricular materials for the teaching of Middle Eastern and Arab American immigration histories at the K12 level statewide; we are bringing university researchers in direct collaboration with teachers and publishing lesson plans that build on the State of California’s History-Social Science Framework ready for immediate classroom adoption. On the higher education front, I am engaged in a new collaboration called “Academic Freedom from Below,” which studies how insurgent, alternative traditions of study have shaped our campuses through popular education and the demand that universities encourage (not suppress) vigorous public debate. Both projects focus centrally on academic freedom and on effecting institutional change against significant headwinds. This work has brought me into closer connection and collaboration with scholars in Middle East and American studies.

Excerpt from the book (from the introduction)

January 29, 1912—The moon was nearly full the night before John Ramey died. The snow was several days old now, hardened with daily melt into a thick sheet of ice that refracted the moonlight surrounding the checkpoint. A makeshift garrison protected state guardsmen who had come to Lawrence, Massachusetts to stop rioters from tossing the ice through mill windows. This billet was at the corner of Elm Street, a throughfare in Lawrence’s Syrian Quarter. That’s where they found the dynamite, one militiaman said to another, tipping back a bottle of local araq to kill the cold. Behind them, a cluster of boys assembled unnoticed in preparation for an ambush. The boys crept closer, gathering snow to build an arsenal of projectiles. One of them yelled, and they started chucking snowballs at the men occupying their neighborhood. Startled, the militia broke formation and, in the ensuring chaos, guardsmen began frantically chasing their assailants through the Syrian tenements. They captured two Syrian boys, so-called “child operatives” employed by the American Woolen Company (AWC) then on strike with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Najib Kalil, age 15, and Abdallah Najjum, age sixteen, were detained at the mill building overnight, guarded by armed men deployed by the state. The rest of the Syrian boys fled into the night, but within an hour Kalil’s and Najjum’s fathers—also AWC strikers—joined an angry crowd that descended on the garrison. Surrounding the checkpoint and banging pots and pans, they woke up the city and demanded the boys’ release. A standoff resulted. And John Ramey was observed there, holding at the front.

In later sworn testimony, police and state officials squabbled over whether John Ramey was sixteen, eighteen, or twenty years old. Some said he was among those boys who had thrown ice at the garrison, and that he returned with a seething mob after his friends were detained. Others claimed he was never there. What is certain is that the next day—January 30, at noon—John marched at the head of a strike demonstration through the mill zone, carrying the coronet he played with the city’s Syrian Drum Corps. Ramey led hundreds of Syrians to the canal separating the AWC factories from the tenements known as the Syrian quarter. As demonstrators pushed the armed militiamen across the canal bridge, Ramey was bayonetted twice: in the shoulder and back. He fled home to his parents, who brought him to a hospital where he died from his injuries. Fearing a retaliatory insurrection, officials banned public assembly and locked down the city. But that night, the moon reached fullness as the Syrian Drum Corps marched on the streets, men playing their drums and women at the flanks, banging pots and pans. Midnight marches came every night that followed, as grieving Syrian strikers reminded Lawrence about their slain coronet player. John Ramey’s body was interred at St. Anthony’s Maronite Church. The garrisons stayed. Neighborhood boys continued to pelt soldiers with snowballs.

This is what we know about John Ramey. He was born in Falougha, in Ottoman Mount Lebanon, and he died by bayonet in Lawrence, one of three people killed during the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912. Ramey’s story is repeated everywhere one reads about the Syrian immigrant working class, inflected a little differently each time. There’s a version where John is marching at the militias at the head of an IWW contingent; another where he is an innocent bystander, not a striker at all. In one account, John witnesses a police officer brutalizing a Syrian woman and is stabbed in the back as he defends her. John Ramey, an anarchist villain engaging in deportable offenses; John Ramey, a factory boy murdered for tossing snowballs at police. In each of these stories, Ramey’s ghost speaks for the living, put to work in the memorialization of the strike credited with making the American working class. John Ramey offers a glimpse into Syrian proletarian life in the mahjar (diaspora); an entirely new history awaits behind him. 

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This book explores the making of the global Syrian working class, situating Arab textile workers within the fields of labor history, migration studies, and critical studies of capitalism. It also traces the development of the Syrian textile industries in the mahjar. As weavers, stitchers, garment workers, or peddlers, Syrian migrants fed a transnational textile trade directed by Syrian merchants. These workers had a vastly different experience of the mahjar from that celebrated by cultural elites of the time. This is revealed in Syrian American print culture, and the numerous serials, novels, and books that champion titans of Syrian commerce: the chiefs of émigré politics, the intellectual luminaries of the Pen League, or the nostalgic, pioneering figure of the pack peddler. Each of these figures told a specific history of the mahjar, portraying emigrants as shrewd and entrepreneurial, upwardly mobile, racially respectable, hard-working, and devoted to living in two worlds, both Syrian and American. Early histories of this diaspora call Syrians “incurable emigrants and traders,” connecting their arrival in America to “an age-long movement, a chapter in a long series of migrations” dating back to the Phoenicians. Syrians “did not usually take up factory employment” and are remembered for their commercial ventures instead. “Profiting by the special aptitudes of their race and prompted by wanderlust and the desire for profitable trade,” historian Philip Khuri Hitti wrote in 1924, “business is their lodestar… no nook of the world escapes them.” Hitti published The Syrians in America the same year that the 1924 Immigration Act imposed quota restrictions on new arrivals, necessitating a migration story staked on racial respectability and Arab contributions to America. 

Yet, the well-known arc of mahjari historical writing and its fixation with commerce as its central driver is discordant with evidence that factory labor formed both bones and sinews of the mahjar’s economy. Syrian factory operatives struck and shut down factories in Lawrence in 1912, 1919, 1921, and 1924, in Paterson in 1913, 1919, and 1924, and in New York City in 1913, 1916, 1919, and through the 1930s. In New England mill towns, Syrians formed a crucial part of woolens, leather, silk, and cotton broadcloth industries, a unit capable of organizing across multiple mills and taking a strike general. Many labor unions saw Syrians as a key constituency, and Syrian workers joined the Industrial Workers of the World, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. However, the conservative wings of the American labor movement, including the United Textile Workers (an American Federation of Labor affiliate) viewed them as a racial threat to native labor. The AFL’s craft unionism sought to protect skilled white industrial workers from immigrant labor, a strategy that was “exclusionary by nature” and led the union to endorse instruments like hiring controls, immigration restrictions and deportations. Xenophobic organizers joined employers in stereotyping Syrians as irredeemable radicals. During a 1919 silk strike in Paterson, New Jersey, UTW vice president Thomas McMahon condemned Syrian weavers linked to the IWW, calling them “traitors in the industrial movement” who “through their un-American organizations…and every underhanded method seek to arouse class hatreds and racial animosities.” These weavers stopped work to protest McMahon’s refusal to discuss their demands for a forty-four-hour work week. 2,000 of them walked off the job, undermining UTW’s bargaining power with Paterson’s silk manufacturers. Trade unions were not only aware of the numbers of Syrian workers in woolens, cotton, and silks but appreciated that Syrian organizers could quickly mobilize 3,000 workers in Lawrence, or 5,000 in New York, Brooklyn, or Paterson. 

In addition to working for U.S. firms, Syrian immigrants, particularly young women in garment work, were employed in factories established by other Syrians. The so-called “Syrian shops” (as unions called them) appeared in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, established by émigré merchants who had followed Syrian textile workers abroad. New factories emerged as the Syrian merchant-manufacturer class scaled up, employing anywhere from a few dozen to a thousand people. Most of these factories produced white goods: undergarments, lingerie, pajamas, and household linens with lace and hand embroidery. Of all these goods, the Syrian kimono was most iconic, a collarless long robe that opened in the front, adapted to American tastes from its Syrian skandarani silk counterpart. The kimono created a new émigré industrial elite, the so-called “kimono kings” of New York: Mikhaʾil Arida, Abdalla Barsa, Elias Mouakad, among others. Popular writings on the mahjar often begin here, with a Carlylean fascination with émigré merchant-manufacturers, great men with rags-to-riches stories, who achieved immense wealth, status, and power. The workers who stitched these pieces are effaced from these narratives; the presence of Syrian women workers in the garment factories was as “unmentionable” as the lingerie they produced. Once finished, the Syrian American kimono joined the abundance of white goods in the suitcases of Syrian pack peddlers.