Gastonia
The
Story of the Loray Mill Strike
By
John A. Salmond
Preface
If
one thinks of the southern Piedmont as a rough area stretching from
Danville, Virginia, to Birmingham, Alabama, then Gastonia, North
Carolina is located at its center Gaston County, of which Gastonia is
the county seat, had by 1929 come to contain more textile plants than
any other county in the world, and some Gastonians proudly claimed
that there were more looms and spindles within its hundred-mile
radius than in that of any others southern city. Few doubted the
boast, for since 1880 both the county and the city had undergone a
profound industrial and economic transformation. Originally dotted
with small and not particularly profitable farms, Gaston County had
both the natural and the human resources, in its abundance of water
and its large potential labor force to make the transition to a
textile center with extraordinary rapidity. Working the land had
always been hard there, and thousands of unsuccessful farmers were
only too ready to furnish the manpower for the mills. Though in 1929
there were still some forests to be found in Gaston County's gently
rolling landscape, and its most fertile land was still being farmed,
the dominant features of its flattish topography were "cotton
mills and industrial villages."[1]
In
1920, Gastonia had a population of 17,000. The 1920s had been a time
of substantial construction in the city, resulting in a downtown area
of solid business enterprises, including both stores and office
blocks, as well as an impressive array of public buildings, all brand
spanking new. The radical journalist Mary Heaton Vorse commented
after her first visit that the town gave the impression of "having
sprung from the earth fully equipped." Gastonia had "a new
city hall, a new courthouse, a new county jail," and "a
splendid new high school," each of them fine, solid structures.
This decade had seen a boom in residential construction as well,
mainly due to the conspicuous consumption of the town's elite. The
mill owners and managers increasingly moved away from their mills and
built themselves huge, beautiful, lavishly furnished homes in the
city's uptown area. These houses were removed both physically and
conceptually from the mill villages where the bulk of Gastonians
lived, and the town's leading professional people - the lawyers, the
doctors, the real estate agents, and the clergy - generally followed
the mill owners' example. Gastonia, then, was a town clearly divided
by class, as aerial photographs of the time show. In the uptown area
of these photographs one sees the large, elegant houses with their
commodious gardens, divided by the business center and the railroad
tracks from the drab, identical mill villages. Dominating the
mill-district landscape is the huge, ugly Loray Mill, the largest in
the whole South, located in West Gastonia. The mile of road
separating town and suburb amply illustrated the community's class
division. This road began at the large houses with their pleasant
gardens and ended at the gates of the huge brick mill. Behind the
mill lay its village, "a flock of little houses all alike,
perched each one on brick stilts," Night and day, wrote Vorse,
"men women and children from the little houses go into the mill.
It is their whole life." Gaston County's smaller centers -
Bessemer City, Belmont, and Mount Holly - presented much the same
aspect. They were all divided communities: the owners and those which
they did business will lived on one side of the tracks, the mill
workers on the other, and they met increasingly rarely. They would
meet in 1929 as a wave of violent strikes swept through the
Piedmont's textile communities.
 |
| Child labor was common in the textile industry |
This book is the story of the most
famous of these. The violence that accompanied the strike at the
Loray Mill; the fatal shooting of Gastonia's police chief, Orville
Aderholt, and the strike's balladeer, Ella May Wiggins; the
international outcry at May's death and at how the state failed to
punish her killers yet imposed savage sentences on those strikers
accused of the police chief's murder; and the determination of the
militant Communist Party of the United States to use these events to
further world revolution have together given them a particular
resonance that has resolutely refused to fade away over the years.
Even today, the town of Gastonia is deeply divided over what to do
with the now-abandoned Loray Mill. For some it is a symbol of a
violent past best forgotten; for others it is the site of the most
significant event in the town's history and should therefore be
preserved. The purpose of this book is simply to tell the story of
the events of 1929. I have no overarching thesis to present, though
some perspectives will, I hope, arise from the narrative that
follows. If anything, I think this work reinforces those historians
who still insist on the power of class as an explanatory factor in
the historical process, but in the hope that a well-cold story has a
justification of its own, I have tried to minimize my intrusions into
the tale.
The
study had its genesis in the Empress of China restaurant, in
Melbourne's Chinatown. After a splendid meal, Professor Robert Allen
of the University of North Carolina, Dr. Lucy Frost of La Trobe
University, and I began to talk about the South Bobby and Lucy are
both southerners and grew up in smallish cities - Lucy in Maryville,
Tennessee, and Bobby across the mountains in Gastonia. As they talked
about shared experience, and particularly as bobby recalled his
growing childhood awareness that he lived in a town in which
something terrible and occurred, something never to be talked about
openly, we all decided that one of us had to try and unravel the
Gastonia story. I got elected to the job. I remember that night with
great warmth, and I thank then both for their continuing
encouragement as I went about my allotted task. Bobby turned over his
own Gastonia files to me, including several taped interviews with
strike participants that he had made when he was student at Davidson
College, while Lucy carefully read the completed manuscript making
several important suggestions toward its improvement.
My
friends Bill and Christina Baker, or the University of Maine, also
encouraged me to begin this work, and they have been greatly
supportive throughout its gestation. Tina too grew up in Gastonia and
has talked to me often about the way her increasingly frequent
inquiries about the town's "secret' were always gently by firmly
discouraged. Both of the Bakers had also interviewed strike
participants, and they generously made their tapes available to me.
It was through them, too, that I met Si and Sophie Gerson - survivors
of that tumultuous year, 1929 - whose vivid recollections have formed
such an important source for this book. My thanks to all these people
is profound. Such generosity with time, memory, and resources has
turned the business of research into pleasure.
Thanks
are also due to the myriad archivists and libraries at Wayne State
University La Trobe University, the Chicago Historical Society, the
Perkins Library at Duke University, and especially the Southern
Historical and North Carolina Collections at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, for their labors in locating material for me
and their patience in answering my many queries. Moreover, the
research could not have been done at all without the considerable
financial support of the Australian Research Council and the research
fund of the La Trobe University School of Humanities. La Trobe's
Outside Studies Program Committee generously approved an extended
period of leave, during which much of the research and the bulk of
the writing was completed.
My
friends and fellow scholars Jan Jackson, Bruce Clayton, Bill Breen,
Jack Cell, Alan Frost, and Tim Minchin all read the manuscript at
various stages during its completion, and the book benefited greatly
as a result. During 1993, Alan Johnston, of Deakin University, and
Richard L. Watson Jr., my mentor at Duke University, were constant
sources of encouragement and advice, as Anthony Wood, of Monash
University, has been throughout. Laraine Dumsday unflinchingly went
about the task of translating my scribblings into readable sentences,
and did so with rate skill, high good humor, and sound comment. At
the University of North Carolina Press, Lewis Bateman has been a
source of encouragement from the beginning of the project, and
Christi Stanforth's skilled editing has greatly the manuscript. My
colleagues in La Trobe University's history department were, as
always, unfailing in their support and keen in their constructive
criticism. Few scholars have such a felicitous atmosphere in which to
work. My thanks to them all, and to those many friends whose
continuing support one can only accept with bemused gratitude.
My
greatest debt, as always is to my family to my children and
grandchildren. Much of the research and writing for his book, to my
great good fortune, has been done with my grandchildren close at hand
Bill, Hilory, Lim and Tom Washington, of Burlington, North Carolina,
and Lucy and Robert Henningham, of Melbourne and Cairns, have all
shared joyously and irreverently in its making, and in doing so they
have taught me much about priorities. The five others will readily
understand why the work is dedicated to my youngest grandson, Robert
John Ralph Henningham, who is so special to us all.
Chapter
One: The Setting
Ella
Ford was raised by her grandparents in the mountains of western North
Carolina, and she married while still in her teens. She and her
husband tried to farm in the hills, but it was "hard living."
They simply could not make do, and that, she said, was "why we
went down to the better mill one winter." Many mountain people
did that at first, working in the mils during the winter and then
going back to their farms for the growing season. But as times got
harder, fewer and fewer returned to the farms. They had "got
into the habit" of being mill workers and town dwellers,
according to Ella.[1]
She
got work at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, by far the largest mill in
Gaston County. There she did various jobs, sometimes making as much
as twelve dollars a week. The work was hard, however, and the
conditions were increasingly unhealthy. Moreover, things were always
changing the same money, while others found their jobs reclassified
as piecework, which resulted in a serious drop in income. The
stretch-out system had come to Loray, and it "wasn't long before
two beam boys were doing the work of seven." Machinery replaced
workers in many departments, and soon "one man was doing the
work of three under the old system. They cut all thru the mill."[2]
The
workers resisted the change as best they could. In 1928 the manager
who had introduced the most severe of them was driven from the town
amid great public celebration. "But other managers came,"
Ford said, the stretch-out gathered pace, and the workers remained
bewildered and angry. Despite the shortage of jobs, they would often
"get talking about a strike." In 1929, the strike came.[3]
There
were hundreds of thousands of people like Ella Ford in the southern
Piedmont, people who made the always difficult and often painful
transition from farm to factory. As historians Jacquelyn Hall, Robert
Korstad, and James Leloudie stated with great definition, "textile
mills built the new South," changing the lives of all that they
touched. "Beginning in the 1880s," they wrote, "business
and professional men tied then hopes for prosperity to the whirring
of spindles and the beating of looms." The post-Civil War
destruction of the region's independent farmers was the key to this
growth. Merchants made money out of the tenant and share-cropping
systems that replace one-owner farms, and with this capital they
built mills - hundreds of them. The dispossessed white farmers
provided the labor and soon the southern textile industry was
"underselling northern competitors" so successfully that
"by the end of the Great Depression, the Southeast replaced new
England as the world's leading producer of cotton cloth, and the
industrializing Piedmont replaced the rural Coastal Plain as
pacesetter for the region."[4]
The
twin keys to the spectacular rise of the southern textile industry
were cheap labor and the availability of local investment capital. As
Gavin Wright has written, "The spread in tenancy and the decline
in farm size increased the number of farm families for whom factory
work seemed an acceptable alternative. From the 1870s to the end of
the century, employment grew at nearly 10 percent per year with no
detectable upward pressure on wages." By the turn of the
century, southern mill owners were able to pay their workers at rates
between 30 and 50 percent below those of their New England
counterparts, a decisive competitive advantage. By this time the mill
boom had enveloped the region, and every little town wanted its own
mill. Textile mills became a matter of such civic pride that the bulk
of the capital to finance their building was raised locally; stock
was sold in small amounts to small investors to whom local boards of
directors were responsible. Wright was one of a long line of
commentators on the industry's growth to draw attention to the
disadvantages of this mode of development. With their local
perspectives and limited experience, these first mill men, as Broadus
Mitchell long ago pointed out, were like "a set of blundering
children, some a little more apt than others." Yet without this
local involvement, this intense civic boosterism, it is doubtful
whether local industry could have taken root as completely as it
did.[5]
Of
course, the workers had much to learn, too; they had to make the
conversion from an agricultural to an industrial way of life. Here
the key institution was the mill village - management's answer, in
industry historian James Hodges's words, to "the practical
problem of assembling a workforce in small towns and rural places."
As Hall and her colleagues have observed, "nothing better
symbolized the new industrial order than the mill villages that
dotted the Piedmont landscape." The industrial development of
the expectations as well as practical considerations," these
"mill hills" certainly made it easier for management to
control their workforce. Because of their unincorporated nature, no
taxes needed to be paid on them, and those who lived there played no
part in local politics. Yet the villages also "reflected the
workers" heritage and served their needs." By the 1930s
this village system was in decline, and when most commentators looked
on them, they saw misery, oppression, and squalor. These things
certainly always existed in mill villages; yet to those who worked
and lived there, the village also became home - a neighborhood where
friendship were formed and developed and a distinctive and sustaining
culture evolved. By 1905, "`one long mill village' ran along the
are of the southern Piedmont."[6]
 |
| Early Loray Mills |
The
family labor system too "helped smooth the path from field to
factory." Women and children had always been essential to
farmwork, and the mill owners understood this fact and adapted it to
their own needs. "They promoted factory work as a refuge for
impoverished women and children from the countryside bred family
units rather than individuals, and required the labor of at least one
worker per room as a condition for residence in a mill-owned house."
Yet at the same time, these strategies fit in with the needs of
working families, who wanted a place where the members could all work
together as they had done on the farm. Moreover, as Hall and her
colleagues have pointed out, this ability to move as a family from
farm to factory and, indeed, to combine the two, like the people in
Ella Ford's story did, gave these first factory workers a sense of
freedom, of an "alternative identity" that enabled them to
resist, to a degree, the demands of management. Their children,
however - again like those in Ford's narrative - "eventually
came to the mills to stay."[7]
The
mill village was obviously a certain of managerial self-interest, yet
it also provided the space within which the distinctive mill workers'
cultures Hold provided and "familiar ways of thinking and
acting" could be gradually transformed into a "new way of
me. Both contemporary observers and later analysts of village society
have been far too inclined to describe it as essentially thin,
lacking sustenance, and breeding an apathetic, irrational social type
that could be easily controlled by mill interests. Now we know
better. Hall and her team have described a vital evolving cooperative
culture, one of considerable variety and strength, and much more than
the sum of management's designs. The mill-village culture represented
"a compromise between capitalist organization and worker's
needs."[8]
Not
all of the recent writing on mill-village culture provides such a
positive view of its main characteristics or of those who made it. I.
A. Newby, David Carlton, and Douglas Flamming, for example, have each
stressed the virulent racism of the villagers - something Hall and
her colleagues have tended to ignore. In his superb Plain Folk in the
New South, Newby describes a singularly unattractive world but at the
same time remains deeply sympathetic to those who lived in it. Life
was often nasty, brutish, and short there; Newby is particularly
convincing in his contention that the often shocking living
conditions in the villages caused health problems that had immense
economic and social consequences, problems whose legacy persists to
this day, Moreover, the sustaining qualities of egalitarianism and
individualism in the rural culture that mill villagers had left
behind were not those best suited to enable them to comfort their
employers in a disciplined, cohesive way as they sought some means of
improving the condition of their lives. Flamming, too, talks of the
"darker implications" of mill-village life, in particular
of its coercive aspects, especially in the area of accepted behavior.
Moreover, social isolation too often led to violence - to workers'
venting their hostility not on their employers or on hapless African
Americans but rather on their fellow workers. Nevertheless, he
argues, though such disputes were both frequent and disruptive, they
did not necessarily mean that community feeling did not exist or even
that the notion of "family" is hopelessly romantic. Rather,
they simply signify that, as in most communities, life in mill
villages was at times riven by tension between individuals, families,
or competing social groups. Essentially, Carlton, Newby, and Flamming
all share the view of Hall and her team that what developed in these
mill hills was much more than the sum of the owners' wishes. Rather,
the villagers created their own world, their own common culture.
"Neither docile nor foolhardy," writes Robert Zieger,
"millworkers relied primarily on themselves, regarding the plans
of union organizers and the programs of government bureaucrats
skeptically, forever weighing these instruments of change against the
likelihood of deterioration in their circumstances." To this
wariness may be added a similar skepticism toward the blandishments
of their employers.[9]
What
about the workplace itself? Here the owner obviously had more
control. Work in the mill, with its repetitive tasks, closely
supervised and governed by rigid notions of time, bore little
resemblance to the slower rhythms of agricultural life. It was dirty,
and the workday was long (though perhaps not particularly long for
farm folk, who were used to working from sunup to sundown), but the
pay was better. Furthermore, in the first decades of the industry's
growth, the potential harshness was moderated somewhat by fairly
relaxed work patterns. There was often time to talk, to eat lunch in
a leisurely fashion, even to slip home to check on the younger
children - an important consideration, given that women represented a
large percentage of the labor force (49.9 percent in 1890, 45 percent
as late as 1900). Sometimes, if the occasion warranted it, workers
simply walked off the job. Elections were usually celebrated in this
manner, as was the advent of a singular attraction, such as a circus.
Often these practices resulted from the fact that the workers had
direct access to the owner; there was an element of personal
involvement which, while doubtless paternalistic, at least afforded
workers some chance of directly influencing the conditions under
which they labored, either to protest the decisions of a supervisor
considered ??? unjust or even at times, to influence policy directly.
Management, anxious to keep production levels up, would often accede
to such limited demands. Moreover, when demand for labor was high,
workers always had the opportunity to move elsewhere. Owners and
managers came to know the limits of their authority. Nowhere is this
more obvious than in the decision, even in times of labor shortage,
to restrict black labor in the mills to janitorial tasks. The extreme
racism of the white workers would not have permitted otherwise. It
may have made good economic sense, as Flamming points out, to have
hired African Americans for more advanced work, and many textile
leaders were anxious to do so. Those who tried, however, "quickly
learned that such efforts were counterproductive." Violence,
walkouts, and political action was the inevitable result, as workers
successfully fought to keep blacks out of the mills.[10]
The
balance between the positive and negative aspects of mill work - a
relatively relaxed work pace versus long hours and low wages - was
not a stable situation, however. Even in the early years of
development, there was unrest from time to time, as some workers
turned to either the Knights of Labor or the National Union of
Textile Workers to defend their interests. A succession of strikes
around the turn of the century, culminating in the Haw River strike
in Alamance County, North Carolina, suggests that the secure world
desired by the manufacturers was always ripe for the shattering. Yet
unionism was scarcely a significant factor in the textile industry
prior to World War I. When workers attempted to control their labor
conditions, they were much more inclined to do so on their own.
Shortage of labor and, hence, the ability to move on gave them a
bargaining power that was independent of any organization and much
more attuned to the individualism of their cultural roots. When
workers protected their conditions of labor, then, it was much more
likely to be through spontaneous, often personal action than through
concerted, union-directed protest.[11]
In
response to such manifestations of unrest, owners answered not by
repression or union-bashing except in quite isolated instances, but
by making it more difficult to move.
In part, this move forced wage
rates upward. Between 1902 and 1907, for example, "the earnings
of male weavers in South Carolina rose by 58 percent, those of female
weavers by 65 percent, and those of spinners by 138 percent,' while
the cost of living rose by only 9 percent. There were other means of
increased competition for labor as well: inducements of all kinds
were offered to entice workers from one mill to another. Finally,
manufacturers made real efforts to improve the quality of life in
their villages; they built better houses with modern plumbing,
beautified the surroundings, and provided a range of social and
recreational services for their employees, from holiday camps to
company-sponsored "welfare work," all in an attempt to bind
their workers to them and thereby bring stability to the industry. To
a limited degree, in the decade before World War I, these measures
worked. As Wright pointed out, "the mill-village, family labor
system" - the expenditure on welfare work in order to promote
stability - "did have a certain internal logic," as long
as
times stayed good.[12]
Times
were certainly very good during the First World War. The wartime
demand for cotton cloth sparked another boom, so there was another
round of mill construction, while existing mills started to operate
around the clock, further stimulating the demand for labor in a tight
wartime situation. The inevitable result was that wages throughout
the Piedmont rose to new heights, often tripling in the years between
1915 and 1920. Any relationship between farm and textile wages was
now well and truly shattered, prompting further movement to the
mills.[13]
The
boom continued till 1920, when it broke with dramatic suddenness.
Wartime overexpansion was compounded by several other factors.
Lucrative foreign markets were lost due to the Harding
administration's tariff policies and the development of the industry
in other parts of the world, such as India. Changes in women's
fashions added to the trouble. "Young women in the 1920s hiked
their skirts six inches above the ankle, then all the way to the
knee, causing consternation among their elders and panic in the
textile industry." The Great Depression, which for the rest of
the country did not begin until much later in the decade, for
textiles started with the armistice and did not let up.[14]
The
response of the managers was to cut costs, which translated into an
attack on the wage gains of the past few years. Somewhat to the
managers' surprise, the mill hands fought back, for heightened wages
had brought heightened expectations; moreover the war boom had
altered the composition of the mills' labor force. Family labor was
on the decline; more and more of the operatives were adult workers
supporting themselves, men and women living independently of
families; and an increasing percentage were male - a trend that
accelerated as the troops returned from overseas. These workers
comprised the first generation to see the mills as providing a
permanent vocation and no longer as simply supplementing farm income,
thus the wage cuts impinged directly as their sense of
self-worth.[15]
From
1919 to 1921, industrial strife rocked the Piedmont as workers
flocked to join the AFL's United Textile Workers (UTW), which before
the war had had no presence in the South at all. Locals grew so
rapidly that as workers fought to preserve their incomes, the central
office could not keep up with the process. Manufacturers were equally
determined not to give an inch to union demands, and the industry was
convulsed by a wave of strikes, sometimes accompanied by violence
from both sides. Aided by the business downturn, which soon
transformed labor shortage to labor surplus, management proved to be
stronger than labor. In North Carolina managers were always able to
call on the state, through the use of the state militia, to keep the
plants working. The local unions, inadequately supported by the UTW
central organization, soon collapsed, and industrial peace of a sort
returned to the Piedmont. Profoundly shaken, the mill manufacturers
took two truths from the experience. The first was an abiding hatred
of unions and a determination to prevent their future formation,
under whatever aegeis, in their region. The second was that slashing
wages drastically as a means of cutting costs and maintaining profit
margins was too disruptive; they would need to find other means to
achieve this end.[16]
During
the 1920s, this search was successful. Hard times led to
bankruptcies, which offered the opportunity for consolidation. More
and more mills fell into fewer hands. Men like J. Spencer Love of
Burlington Industries became textile giants, taking over mills that
had been locally owned. Ownership of other plants, like Castania's
Loray Mill, passed outside the region and occasionally even outside
the country. These powerful mill men set about finding a new solution
to the problems of declining profitability, and they found it in the
rise of new technology and new productive techniques. Men and women
were replaced by machines wherever possible, the number of operatives
needed to perform particular tasks was greatly reduced, and employees
were made to work, really work, around the clock. Gone was the
relaxed prewar pass of operation. In its place came fast,
labor-saving machinery; massive job reorganization, including much
greater resort to piecework; and new, restrictive supervisory
practices, all against a backdrop of such a massive labor surplus
that the need to hang onto workers was no longer a factor.
Consequently, most mills abandoned or greatly restricted their
welfare activities during the decade. Others cut the cost of village
maintenance to the bone. The result was a steady deterioration in
working and living standards.[17]
Gavin
Wright has argued that given the labor surplus (especially the
numbers of men over thirty for whom no work commensurate with their
expectations could be found) and the limited prospects of wage
reductions, the introduction of such management practices as those
instituted was inevitable. For the workers, however, the whole nature
of employment had changed, as Ella Ford pointed out. The workplace
was now a situation of tension. Men with more machines to tend now
ran where they had once ambled; women found timepieces -
"hank-clocks," they called them - installed on each piece
of machinery they used; gone was the chance to chat with one's
neighbor, let alone to make the occasional trip home to see the
children. Even going to the bathroom was likely to come under
scrutiny from a new breed of unsympathetic, aggressive
supervisors.[18]
Women,
especially those over thirty, were particularly hard hit. Besides
losing their cherished flexibility, as a result of job reorganization
or consolidation they often found themselves transferred from wage
rates to pieceworks rates with a resultant drop in income.
Furthermore, as mills began to be run on a round-the-clock schedule,
it was women, increasingly, who worked the night shift, because they
had to be home during the day to care for their children. Hanging
over male and female workers alike was the dark cloud of job
insecurity. It was easy to get yourself laid off, for there was
always someone to take your place. It was not so easy to find another
job, especially given the owner's network, which was reinforced by
company spies.[19]
Manufacturers
called these new practices by various names and were extremely proud
of them. Workers referred to them collectively as "the
stretch-out," and they hated them. And in 1929, despite the
labor surplus, the power of management, the intimidation of union
members, and the impotence of the UTW and other national labor
institutions, thousands of textile workers in the southern Piedmount
resisted the stretch-out in the only way they knew how: by walking
off the job. On March 12, 1929, in Elizabethton, Tennessee, the
entire workforce of the Bemberg and Glantzoff rayon plant struck. Led
by young women workers, the strikers closed down the mill, starting
the year off in a tumultuous way. Before 1929 was over, thousands of
workers had followed their lead. In South Carolina, eighty-one
separate strikes involving 79,027 workers were recorded. Almost all
of these actions were organized without union leadership, very much
in the "personal" or spontaneous tradition of prewar
protest. In North Carolina even more workers were involved. In Forest
City, in Charlotte, in Pinesville, in Leaksville - all over the
Piedmont, in fact - workers protested the "hard rules" of
the new industrial order.
Most
of the 1929 strikes were short, relatively quickly settled, and soon
forgotten, but some of them were violent and prolonged. In
Elizabethton, following the pattern established between 1919 and
1921, eight hundred troops were called in to break the strikers
resistance, while AFL official Edward P. McGrady and UTW organizer
Albert Hoffman were both roughed up by vigilantes purportedly acting
on behalf of the town's businessmen. Their lives were threatened, and
they were driven beyond the city limits and warned never to return.
More tragic were the events in Marion, North Carolina, where a
prolonged strike in the town's three mills resulted in not only the
sending of troops to force their reopening but also the death of six
strikers. On October 2, 1929 special deputies (who allegedly were
drunk at the time) opened first on pickets at the Baldwin Mill,
killing six of them and wounding twenty-five more. But of the many
strikes of protest that year, none has become better known than the
one that occurred in Gastonia. North Carolina, at the huge Loray
Mill.[20]
In
1924, Gaston County marked half a century of progress with a pageant.
In the preface to the play a prominent manufacturer wrote, "Gaston
County, amazed at its own progress, humbly wonders what the next
decade may bring forth." The play concluded with a herald
delivering a similar message:
O
ye, who watched this pageantry Of vision, Old and New, Go forth a
part of ages past And live your part as well. Build greater than your
fathers built For they have built for you.[21]
In
truth, Gaston County and its county seat, Gastonia, had much to
celebrate. In previous decades, their progress had closely followed
the contours of the textile industry's general development. The
county was created by up out of the estate legislature in 1846, and
the development of its cotton textile industry started two years
later. It was not for textiles that Gaston County first became known,
however for a time the county was the state's center for whiskey
distilling. The economic development of both Gaston County and
Gastonia, which was incorporated in 1877 with a population of 236,
was at first slow, but this situation changed in 1887, when the
combined efforts of R. C. G. Love, George A. Gray, J. D. Moore, and
John H. Craig resulted in the building of the Gastonia Cotton
Manufacturing Company's first mill. Two more followed in 1893,
another in 1896, another in 1899, and another two - one of which was
the Loray Mill - in 1900. Seven cotton textile plants were thus
constructed in Gastonia alone within twelve years, and by 1900 the
town's population had grown to five thousand, while similar
development had occurred in nearby Bessemer City, Belmont, and Mount
Holly. These first mills were founded by local people and financed by
widely subscribed local investment, as Gaston County Started down the
road of development. By 1935 the county would have the largest number
of mills of any American county and would be generally known as the
nation's "combed yarn manufacturing center." Gastonia would
be called "the city of spindles."[22]
In
1901, at the Arlington Cotton Mills in Gastonia George W. Ragan
produced the South's first "combed" yarns. As the Cotton
boom accelerated this was to be the county's special claim to
distinction. By 1920 Gaston County's ninety functioning mills were
producing 80 percent of all the fine combed yarn made in America.
Observers noted that the county had only slightly more churches than
mills and that some local businessmen seemed in danger of confusing
the two. The war-time boom in the industry was strongly felt in the
county. Wages and profits both soared even more mills were organized
amid an orgy of speculation, when the Gaston County slogan seemed to
be "organize a mill a week." By war's end, the county
already had more mills than any other in the country.[23]
As
in the industry's basic pattern, Gaston County's boom was followed
by, if not a crash, then a marked slowing of growth, and the textile
industry there never again reached wartime levels of profitability.
Yet the community remained optimistic; so much had been achieved in
such a comparatively short time that it was difficult to believe that
progress would not continue, provided that the textile manufacturers,
Gaston's acknowledged leaders, were allowed free rein. The community
was a particularly tight-knit one, its business, civic and religious
leaders bound together in a web of civic, patriotic, and religious
organization. As one survey the lists of church membership, Masonic
lodge affiliations, membership of the local American Legion post, of
the Rotary Club, the Civitans, the Kiwanis, the Lions, even the
Daughters of the American Revolution, the same names keep occurring.
Some of them were to be key players in the dramatic events of 1929.
For example, Major A. L. Bulwinkle and district solicitor John G.
Carpenter were both on the Board of Deacons of the Holy Trinity
Evangelical Lutheran church. Bulwinkle and Stephen B. Dolley were
charter members of both the Lions Club and the American Legion Test,
as was R. Gregg Cherry, and Bulwinkle was also a member of the legal
team that both prosecuted the Gastonia striker and defended those
accused of Ella May Wiggins. Such interlocking networks of influence
were to be expected in small booster communities like Gastonia, and
they help explain the ferocity with which the community defended
itself against what were perceived to be alien forces.[24]
The
new labor-saving devices of the 1920s were eagerly embraced by
Gastonia's ???, and by none more enthusiastically than those who
managed the Loray Mill, Built in 1900 by its namesakes, John F. Love
and George A. Gray, by 1929 it was, according to Liston Pope "both
the pride and despair of Gastonia." Though Gastonia residents
could not help but be impressed by the size of the structure, which
literally dominated the town, form its very beginning there was
something different about the Loray Mill. The fact that at least half
of the money needed for its construction was raised in New York
automatically gave it a slightly "northern taint," and this
situation was exacerbated in 1919, when ownership passed to the
Jenckes Spinning Company, of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. It was thus the
first mill in the county "to be owned and operated by outside
capital."[25]
Little
is known about labor relations in the community during Gastonia's
early development. The Knights of labor were reportedly active there
for a few year, but in Gastonia as elsewhere, workers much more
commonly signaled their restlessness with aspects of the new
industrial order through personalized or spontaneous action - the
leaving of work only in order to visit a traveling circus, the 1906
violence against the Loray Mill paymaster over a proposal to hire
immigrant labor - than through actions of a more organized nature.
Moreover, in the climate of expansion which prevailed, there was
always plenty of work available. Gastonia's mills had extremely high
turnover rates, reflecting the mill workers' determination to
maintain some control over the conditions of their lives.[26]
During
its first twenty years, the Loray Mill's labor policies generally had
differed little from those elsewhere in the industry. There was a
large mill village, with the customary paternalistic relations. The
very size of the mill, however, meant two things. First, many of the
recruits were first-time mill workers, brought directly from the
mountains by recruiting agents; and second, relations between Loray's
management and workforce could never be as personal as in the smaller
structures. This was possibly one of the reasons why the UTW chose
the Loray Mill as the place to start its southern drive during the
postwar instability. A local was formed in 1919, and in October of
that year, 750 employees walked out in Gaston County's first strike
of any significance. In a preview of what was to happen ten years
later, the workers were objecting to the dismissal of eight
operatives for union membership. The strike was lost, and the men
returned to work having gained nothing, but according to Pope, "the
seeds of unionism" had been "definitely planted in the
community." So had the determination of management to resist the
unions.[27]
 |
| Once the strike was over people were dead |
Once
the strike was over, the Jenckes Spinning Company both expanded the
mill and changed its character. Weaving was discontinued, and the
facility was converted to a yarn mill that manufactured nothing but
fabric for automobile tire. To deal with the larger workforce, the
company expanded and modernized the village; the additions included
extensive welfare services. This expansion continued after 1923, when
the Jenckes Company merged with another Rhode Island chain, the
Manville Company, even though the industry was now deep in
depression. By 1927 the number of employees had increased to 3,500,
the total village population was over 5,000, and the welfare services
included a company doctor, a baseball team, a bank, and Camp Jenckes,
a summer camp inn the county's other mills. Nevertheless, there was a
downside to work and life at Loray, Manville-Jenckes had fenced the
whole area in an had also taken to locking the doors during working
hours, so that employees had to have special permission to leave.
Moreover, the welfare workers seemed less interested in helping the
workers than in monitoring every aspect of their lives. Company ponce
were constantly visible, and the village had an atmosphere of
increasing impersonality, exacerbated by absentee ownership. Workers
soon came to refer to the mill as " the jail," and even in
a time of labor surplus, turnover was high. Huddled on the outskirts
of town, the huge red-brick mill and its village - composed of
"several hundred stilted frame-cottages" scattered around
it, looking for all the world like a fussy old hen with a brood of
bedraggled chicks" - was not a happy place.[28]
Like
most of their contemporaries, the Manville-Jenckes plant's managers
saw their salvation in the new management techniques and seized on
them with enthusiasm. In 1027 the Loray Mill gave the stretch out its
first application in Gaston County. A new superintendent, G. A.
Johnstone, was appointed, with order to reduce production costs
drastically. He went about his work with enthusiasm, dramatically
raising workloads, replacing skilled with cheaper labor, and
redistributing or abolishing tasks, and within fifteen months the
Loray labor force had been reduced from 3,500 to 2,200. He slashed
wages, imposing two general reductions of 10 percent, and, more
important, put much of the work - especially that done by woman on a
piecework basis. The general result was a wage reduction of between
25 and 50 percent, a drastic alteration in the mill's work practices,
the bitter alienation of its workers, and the collapse of any
lingering notions of a community at Loray.[29]
Management,
of course, was delighted at what Johnstone had achieved. In a letter
of congratulation given wide currency during the strike, F. L.
Jenckes admitted that he had been skeptical about Johnstone's
prospects of cutting the payroll by $500,000 annually without any
loss of production and was delighted to be proved wrong. Now he
thought that $1,000,000 could probably go, and he urged Johnstone to
keep up the good work, The workers, though, were of a different mind.
The year 1928 was one of unrest at the mill, and workers resisted
when they could. On March 5, the entire weave room walked out in the
protest at wage reductions, which they claimed had reduced their
incomes by about half. Their statement of explanation encapsulated
the scale of their resentments about the stretch-out. "We were
making $30 to $35 a week," it ran, "and were running six to
eight looms. Now we are running ten to twelve looms and are getting
$15 to $18 a week. We can't live on it. All we are asking is simple
justice. A weaver cannot run ten or twelve looms at nay price. It is
more than a man can stand let alone a woman. There used to be women
weavers in the mill but when the number of looms was increased the
women all had to give up the work." Low wages were one thing,
said Loray weaver Henry Totherow, but the stretch-out was something
else. "There just ain't no a-bearin' [it]," he told
left-wing journalist Margaret Larkin. "It used to be you could
git five, ten minutes rest now and then, so's you could bear the
mill. But now you got to keep a-runnin' all the time. Never a minute
to git your breath all the long day. I used to run six drawing frames
and now I got to look after ten. You jist kain't do it. A man's dead
heat a t night." There was no union to stir these weavers up;
again, this was the spontaneous action of men and women driven beyond
endurance by the way their working lives had changed. "The mill
is asking something that is impossible," a strike representative
stated on March 6. "It is a condition that can't continue to
exist if we are to make a living. Most of us have been in this mill
for years and have accepted cuts, even recently. But last week's went
beyond the limit. So we are out. We believe the public will
understand our position if they but knew the facts."[30]
Johnstone's
response was simply to wait it out, knowing that spontaneous strikes
rarely lasted more than a few days. His instinct was right: the
weavers were soon forced back to work. Yet their outburst, especially
the terms in which they justified their action, revealed the deep
tensions the mill's policies had aroused. Moreover, they found other
ways to make these obvious. Liston Pope discovered that later in the
year a group of Loray workers staged a kind of charivari in
Gastonia's main street. They paraded down the thoroughfare "bearing
a coffin in which lay an effigy of the Loray superintendent."
Every fifty yards or so "The effigy would sit up and shout: How
many men are carrying this thing?" "Eight," the
marchers would shout back, and the effigy would retort, "Lay off
two; six can do the work." Pope concluded perceptively that
these workers "hid a frowning face under a boisterous
countenance."[31]
The
most obvious demonstration of worker alienation, however, occurred in
August 1928 when the company, realizing that Johnstone had outlived
his usefulness, ??? his replacement. That night worker anger boiled
over. Let social scientist Benjamin Rutchford, himself from Gastonia,
describe the scene:
On
this night in August several trucks, loaded with workers from Loray,
mostly young people, paraded through the principal streets of
Gastonia. The, occupants of the trucks were shouting, laughing,
singing, blowing horns, beating tin pans, shooting fire crackers, and
in general staging genuine, spontaneous celebration. They looked very
much like one of the picnic parties that are frequently organized for
outings into the country, except that they were somewhat more
boisterous. They continued through the city and out about two miles
eastward into an exclusive residential section. Here they turned into
the driveway of the home of a Mr. Johnstone finally was force to
summon the sheriff [sic] and deputies to disperse the crowd and stop
the demonstration. The crowd then returned through the city,
continuing the celebration.
Ratchford
went on to explain that Johnstone, having introduced the stretch-out
system to the Loray Mill, "had incurred the intense dislike of
the workers." The motor vehicle parades, the noisy
demonstrations, the involvement of young people, and the present of
the police to defend mill interests. Gastonia was to see much more of
these elements in the year ahead.[32]
Johnstone
was gone, and the workers celebrated their victory, nut nothing much
changed, for as Ella Ford said, "others managers came."
Johnstone's replacement, J. L. Baugh, moderated a few of the most
objectionable aspects of the new policies but left their essentials
in place. The workers remained discontented, and the Gastonia
community remained divided, fertile ground for the activities of Fred
Erwin Beal and the National Textile Workers Union. Soon the History
of Gaston County became intertwined with that of the frankly
revolutionary, faction-ridden Communist Party of the United
States.[33]
Originally
born of left wing disaffection with the Socialist Party in the heady
aftermath of the October Revolution, the American Communist Party
spent its first years in a furious factional struggle that was
initially conducted underground. Even after its emergence
above-ground in 1922, internecine warfare continued, the main line of
cleavage being between those who, with Jay Lovestone, believed in
"American exceptionalism" a concept based on "the
unique status of being the home base of the foremost capitalist
power" - and those who advocated immediate worldwide revolution.
The Lovestoneites argued that revolutionary changed could hardly be
corrupted by an "imperialist-laden" prosperity that was
shared by large sections of the working class. Rather, change would
occur through patient, strategic political effort. "American
conceptionalism" had been briefly tolerated by the Comintern,
but with Stalin's consolidation of power and, in 1928, the attendant
proclamation that the world had entered the "third period"
of revolutionary upsurge, the Lovestoneites were swept from the
CPUSA, as were the remaining adherents to the views of Leon Trotsky.
By 1932, the orthodox Stalinists, led by William Z. Foster and his
protégé Earl Browder, were firmly in control.[34]
The
Communist Party's industrial policy had gone through a similar
metamorphosis. For most of the decade it had operated through the
Trade Union Educational League (TUED). Formed in Chicago in 1920 and
led by William Z. Foster, the TUEL was the most radical group
operating within the American labor movement, Its aims were many -
industrial unionism, the organization of the unorganized, the
formation of a labor party, the eventual establishment of a workers
republic - and its method was "boring from within." The
TUEL rejected dual unionism; its policy was rather to infiltrate
established trade unions and convert them to Marxist militancy. Its
leadership of strikes in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1926, and New
Redford Massachusetts, two years later had given it a strong
constituency among textile workers, but the increasing hostility and
conservatism of the AFL leadership, together with Moscow's changing
perspectives, led to its dissolution in 1928. The "boring from
within" policy was jettisoned in favor of the building of a new
labor movement through the establishment of dual unions, and the
Trade Union Unity League was created as a rival to the AFL. The new
league's program called for militant prosecution of the class war for
mass strikes rather than labor-management cooperation, and the
ultimate overthrow of capitalism. Its first affiliate union was the
National Textile Workers Union (NTWU).[35]
The
NTWU was founded in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in September 1928, at
a conference called to discuss the conduct of the recent strike
there. Organized on an industrial basis, with James P. Reid as its
first president, it was democratic in its governance and
unremittingly revolutionary in its "class against class"
rhetoric, in accordance with third-wave communist perspectives. Its
negotiating demands included higher wages, shorter hours, equal pay
for equal work, and the complete abolition of child labor in the
industry. Bitterly antagonistic to its AFL rival, the United Textile
Workers. (UTW), the NTWU planned to stage its first organizational
drive in the American South, for no other reason than that the UTW
was about to move in there; in those years the region was, in
Theodore Draper's phrase, "virtually terra incognita" for
both the union and the Party. The first Communist even to include the
South in a speaking tour was the Party's 1928 vice presidential
candidate, Benjamin Gatlow. There were no Party district offices in
the region, which was ignored both in Party literature and on its
priority task lists. Nevertheless, Fred E. Beal was sent out as
NTWU's southern organizer in late 1928, after he had receive NTWU
secretary Albert Weisbord's instructions to use the "rolling
wave" strike strategy. This was how the South would be broken,
Weisbord believed: by starting a strike in a single mill, then
extending it to neighboring mills as time, resources, and
circumstances permitted. It was Beal's task to find that ???.[36]
In
1929 Fred Beal was a thirty-three-year-old New Englander, fleshy,
red-haired, and "heavy-faced." The radical journalist Mary
Heaton Vorse thought him "boyish" and unassuming, with
"absolutely no pose, no front whatsoever, ... seemingly
unconscious that he is a big man hereabouts." Sophie Melvin, who
worked with him in Gastonia, described him as "sweet and
gentle," with a feeling both for his work and the people he
dealt with. "Sweetness" was hardly a usual characteristic
for a union organizer in the hostile south, but in other ways Beal
was well qualified for the task. He had been a textile worker since
the age of fourteen, when he started at a mill in Lawrence,
Massachusetts. Beal had joined the International Workers of the World
(IWW) in his youth, and in the 1920s he had shifted to the
Socialists, no the Communists. Politics was never of much importance
to him, however; he was first and foremost an organizer, with little
patience for theoretical or ideological concerns. His interest in
independent unionism was what eventually drew him to the Communists
at the time when they were changing their ideas and when his
organizing work in the New Bedford strike had gained him a certain
national prominence in left-wing circles. Beal probably joined the
Party in 1928, shortly before he began his southern odyssey.[37]
He
arrived in North Carolina on New Year's Day 1929, having traveled
from New York by motorcycle. His only contact was a blind Party
member in Charlotte - "the only functioning member" in the
entire city, he thought - and it was to his house that he went first.
His host was enthusiastic about the prospects of organizing a union
in the Charlotte area, given the woeful working conditions in the
local mills, and it was there that Beal began his activity. He was
unable to get a job on one of the mills, so made his contacts after
work, visiting mill families in their homes, talking to them about
the union, trying to find our what their real feelings were. He found
them wary, partly because of their perceived betrayal by the UTW in
1921, but desperate in the face of the general application of the
stretch-out. Slowly he began to sign people up.[38]
It
was one of these first union members. O. D. martins, who pointed him
toward Gastonia, which until then had been 'just another dot on the
industrial map" to Beal. Martins had a brother working at the
Loray Mill; he would help Beal organize the workers there. If Beal
succeeded in doing that, martins said, "you'll organize the
south" - a statement that unconsciously reinforced Welsbord's
"rolling strike" policy. In mid-March Beal decided to go to
Gastonia to see for himself. There, at the Loray Mill, he found
conditions even worse than those he had encountered in Charlotte,
plus a disaffected workforce that was itching for action. He launched
a secret union then and there, with Will Truett, a local worker, as
its secretary-treasurer. Then, afraid that the situation would outrun
his ability to control it, Beal made a swift trip to New York to
plead for money and reinforcements.[39]
Party
and NTWU officials were delighted at the progress he had made and
needed little convincing that the Gastonia situation was just what
they had been looking for. Here was their third-period opening in the
United States, The beginning of the revolution that would bring about
capitalism's collapse, and here, at Loray, was Weisbord's "first
mill." If a single man could penetrate so quickly the most
inaccessible, most hostile region in the United States, a place where
"no Communist organizer had ever ventured before, where might it
all end? Beal returned to Charlotte, assured that he would receive
all possible support.[40]
When
Beal returned from New York, there was a telegram waiting for him
from Will Truett. He had been fired from the Loray Mill, he said,
because of his union work. Moreover, company police were busily
ferreting out other members and summarily dismissing them. Beal knew
he had to act, ready or not. Events had simply overtaken him.
Accordingly, he and Truett held a secret meeting at the house of a
fellow unionist to canvas the possibility of a strike. The enthusiasm
was infectious, the resolve grim. Even Beal was moved, and he allowed
himself to believe that they "might achieve on this backward
Southern soil, a great resounding victory for the American working
class," An open meeting was to be called for March 30, 1929. the
die, said Beal, was cast.[41]
True
to its word, the NTWU sent him the first reinforcements, in the
doughty personage of its second vice president, Ellen ("Nellie")
Dawson. Variously described as "a wee bit of a girl" or the
little orphan of the strikers," the diminutive, seemingly frail
Dawson was in reality anything but that. A veteran of the New England
strikes, she was a tough, experienced organizer and a superb stump
speaker who delivered her messages in the soft brogue of her native
Scotland. She made her Gastonia debut on March 30m urging workers to
stand resolute; meanwhile, Manville-Jenckes supervisors stood
silently by, noting the names of those present. Heckled by the crowd,
especially the women, with cries on "what about the stretch out?
How about God and the bathtubs? [a reference to the recent remark of
a millsponsored preacher that as the lord was not an advocate of
frequent bathing, bathtubs were not a necessity for mill-village
houses]," the supervisors eventually beat a humiliating
retreat.[42]
Beal
knew then that there would be no turning back, that the bosses would
force the issue on the next working day and that, despite the look of
preparation and resources, the union must meet the challenge. And so
the dramatic events began to unfold. On the morning of April 1, five
workers were dismissed for attending Saturday's "spekin'."
They sang hymns together as more discharged workers arrived at the
NTWU's newly acquired union headquarters. As he prepared for a strike
meeting called for three o'clock that afternoon, Beal sensed that
Gastonia would soon be much more than just a dot on the map.[43]
©
1995 The University of North Carolina Press
University
of North Carolina Press
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