On I August 1893, already feeling the pinch of economic downturn, management at the Pray, Small & Co. shoe factory in Auburn, Maine, posted new wages for its employees. Twelve days later, facing their first lower pay checks, female stitchers in the factory walked off their jobs. The union which represented the stitchers declared the shop non-union a week later and called for all of its members to join the stitchers' strike. Only about a dozen male workers answered this call, as the two most highly-skilled groups of male workers, the lasters and the shoe cutters, remained on the job. These workers belonged to their own separate unions, which had either already agreed to the new wage list (the cutters) or were in the middle of negotiations over it with the company (the lasters). It took the cutters another week before they decided to join the stitchers' action; it would take the lasters a month and a half and a citywide expansion of the strike to make the same decision.

Once the lasters joined the strike, however, their employers lost no time in bringing in recent immigrants from Armenia to replace the striking lasters. Strikers similarly lost no time in their response, firing off both letters to their congressmen and bricks and stones at the hapless Armenians. The strikers, who had appeared to be almost hopelessly divided by gender and skill at the beginning of August, found themselves in early October united as “honest American workmen” [sic] against “the pauper labor of Europe”.