Textile workers strike (1934)
Encyclopedia
The textile workers' strike of 1934 was the largest strike
in the labor history of the United States
at the time, involving 400,000 textile
workers from New England
, the Mid-Atlantic states
and the U.S. Southern states, lasting twenty-two days. The strike's ultimate failure and the trade union
's defeat left the Southeastern United States
an unorganized and anti-union region for the next 50 years.
and Philadelphia, had started moving South in the 1880s. By 1933 Southern mills produced more than seventy percent of cotton and woolen textiles in more modern mills, drawing on the pool of dispossessed farmers and laborers willing to work for roughly forty percent less than their Northern counterparts. As was the rest of economic life, the textile industry was strictly segregated and drew only from white workers in the Piedmont. Before 1965, after passage of the Civil Rights Act broke the color line in hiring, less than 2% of textile workers were African American.]
Throughout the 1920s, however, the mills faced an intractable problem of overproduction, as the wartime boom for cotton goods ended, while foreign competition cut into their markets. Although manufacturers tried to reduce the oversupply by forming industry associations to regulate competition, their favored solution to the crisis was to squeeze more work out of their employees through what workers called the "stretch-out": speeding up production by increasing the number of looms assigned to each factory hand, limiting break times, paying workers by piece rates, and increasing the number of supervisors to keep workers from slowing down, talking or leaving work.
The stretch-out sparked hundreds of strikes throughout the Southeast: by one count, there were more than eighty strikes in South Carolina in 1929 alone. While most of them were short-lived, these strikes were almost all spontaneous walkouts, without any union – or other – leadership.
That year also saw the massive strikes that began in Gastonia, North Carolina
, and Elizabethton, Tennessee
, which were violently suppressed by local police and vigilantes. Here again, workers were often more militant than their trade union
leadership: to take one striking example, the workers at the Loray Mill in Gastonia walked out under the leadership of the communist
-led National Textile Workers Union. The Communist Party founded the NTWU in its short-lived attempt to create revolutionary unions.
In the meantime, the Great Depression
made matters worse. The economic collapse drove a number of New England and Mid-Atlantic manufacturers into bankruptcy
, while those employers who survived laid off workers and increased the amount and pace of work for their employees even further. Textile workers across the region, from worsted workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts
and silk weavers in Paterson, New Jersey
, to cotton millhands in Greenville, South Carolina
, engaged in hundreds of isolated strikes, even though there were thousands of unemployed workers desperate to take their places.
(NIRA) appeared to change things. The NIRA, which Roosevelt signed in June 1933, called for cooperation among business, labor and government and established the National Recovery Administration
(NRA). It was to oversee the creation of codes of conduct for particular industries that would reduce overproduction, raise wages, control hours of work, guarantee the rights of workers to form unions, and stimulate an economic recovery.
The NIRA rarely, if ever, lived up to its promises: employers usually dominated the panels that created these codes, which often offered far less than what workers and their unions demanded, and the NIRA and the codes themselves were toothless, since the Act did not provide any effective means to enforce the standards.
Even so, the promise of the right to join a union had an electrifying effect on textile workers: the United Textile Workers, which had no more than 15,000 members in February, 1933, grew to 250,000 members by June, 1934, of whom roughly half were cotton mill workers. Textile workers also put tremendous faith in the NIRA to bring an end to the stretch-out, or at least temper its worst features. As one union organizer said, textile workers in the South saw the NIRA as something that "God has sent to them."
The NIRA quickly promulgated a code for the cotton industry regulating workers' hours and establishing a minimum wage; it also established a committee to study the problem of workloads. In the meantime, however, the employers responded to the new minimum wages by increasing the pace of work. When the labor board set a forty-hour work week, mill owners required the same amount of work in those forty hours as they had in the previous fifty- to sixty-hour week.
By August 1934, workers had filed nearly 4,000 complaints to the labor board protesting "code chiseling" by their employers ; the board found in favor of only one worker. Union supporters often lost their jobs and found themselves blacklist
ed throughout the industry. Workers, both north and south, wrote thousands of letters to the White House
, the Department of Labor
, the NRA and Eleanor Roosevelt
asking for them to intervene.
In what proved to be a dry run of the larger strike to follow, cotton mill workers in South Carolina
's Horse Creek Valley struck to force employers to live up to the code, only to face special deputies, highway patrolmen and a machine-gun unit of the National Guard sent to keep the mills open. When the NIRA's special board came to Horse Creek, it did not respond to the workers' complaints, but urged them to return to work. When they attempted to do so, the mill owners not only refused to allow the workers back, but evicted them from company housing. The NIRA took no action to stop the employers from violating the codes.
While the UTW called off its plans for a strike, local leaders thought differently. The UTW locals in the northern part of Alabama
launched a strike that began on July 18 in Huntsville
, then spread to Florence
, Anniston
, Gadsden
, and Birmingham
. While the strike was popular, it was also ineffective: many employers welcomed it as a means of cutting their expenses, since they had warehouses full of unsold goods.
The UTW called a special convention in New York City
on Monday, August 13, 1934 to address the crisis. The UTW drew up a list of demands for the industry as a whole: a thirty hour week, minimum wages ranging from $13.00 to $30.00 a week, elimination of the stretch-out, union recognition, and reinstatement of workers fired for their union activities. The delegates, especially those from the southern states, voted overwhelmingly to strike the cotton mills on September 1, 1934 if these demands were not met. They planned to bring out the woolen, silk and rayon workers at a date to be set later.
Mill owners had seen the strike threat as more empty talk from the union. The White House took a largely "hands off" attitude, leaving it to the first National Labor Relations Board
to set up a meeting of the parties. The employers refused to meet with the union.
s, outpacing the union organizers and employing "flying squadrons" which traveled by truck and on foot from mill to mill, calling the workers out. In Gastonia, where authorities had violently suppressed a strike led by the National Textile Workers Union in 1929, an estimated 5,000 people marched in the September 3rd Labor Day
parade. The next day union organizers estimated that 20,000 out of the 25,000 textile workers in the county were out on strike.
It is not clear whether the UTW expected to have this much success so easily and so quickly in the South; it had only shallow roots and few regular organizers in that region. But Southern textile workers had a good deal of experience in confronting management, both by impromptu strikes and other means, and a deep well of bitterness against their employers.
Some workers converted their experience into a nearly messianic belief in the power of unionism to take them out of bondage. One labor official made the connection in Biblical terms: "The first strike on record was the strike in which Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. They too struck against intolerable conditions".
Textile workers in the North went out on strike in great numbers as well, although they were spread more evenly across different industries and had more diverse grievances than the Southern cotton mill workers. Within a week, almost 400,000 textile workers nationwide had left their jobs and the textile industry was shut down.
Governor Blackwood
of South Carolina
took up this theme, announcing that he would deputize the state's "mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen" to maintain order, then called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills. Governor Ehringhaus
of North Carolina
followed suit on September 5.
Millowners persuaded local authorities throughout the Piedmont
to augment their forces by swearing in special deputies, often their own employees or local residents opposed to the strike; in other cases they simply hired private guards to police the areas around the plant. Violence between guards and picketers broke out almost immediately: in Trion, Georgia
, a picketer and mill guard died in a shootout and guards killed two picketers in Augusta, Georgia
on September 2. Six picketers were shot to death and more than twenty other picketers wounded, most shot in the back as they were fleeing the picketline, in Honea Path, South Carolina
on September 6.
Authorities ordered out the National Guard elsewhere in the second week of the strike: Governor Green sent the Guard to Saylesville, Rhode Island
after several thousand strikers and sympathizers trapped several hundred strikebreakers in a factory; he subsequently declared martial law in the area on September 11, after picketers armed with rocks, flowerpots and broken headstones from a nearby cemetery battled troops armed with machine guns. A picketer was shot to death the following day in Woonsocket, Rhode Island
when guardsmen fired into the crowd attempting to storm the Woonsocket Rayon Plant. Governor Green then asked the federal government to send federal troops; the Roosevelt administration ignored the request.
Maine
deployed the Guard in a more tactical manner, sending them to Augusta
and Lewiston
to discourage wavering employees from joining the strike. That tactic did not work, however, everywhere: workers at Pepperell Mills' plant in Biddeford
and York Manufacturing's plant in Saco
went out even though the guard was sent to prevent the arrival of flying squadrons rumored to be coming from New Bedford, Massachusetts
.
Governor Wilbur L. Cross of Connecticut
also mobilized the Guard, but did not declare martial law. Instead the state labor commissioner met with picketers during the second week of the strike and brought about a reduction in tensions by urging strikers to respect the law and not hurl epithets at strikebreakers.
Things were different in Georgia
, where Governor Eugene Talmadge
declared martial law in the third week of the strike and directed the National Guard to arrest all picketers throughout the state, holding them in a former World War I
prisoner of war
camp for trial by a military tribunal. While the state only interned a hundred or so picketers, the show of force effectively ended picketing throughout most of the state.
and Rhode Island
, workers had started to drift back to work and struck plants were reopening, if with only skeleton crews.
At that point the mediation board that Roosevelt had appointed in the first week of the strike issued its report. As was typical of federal commissions of this era, the board temporized, urging further studies of the economic plight of the employers and the effects of the stretch-out on their employees. It urged the President to create a new Textile Labor Relations Board to hear workers' complaints and urged employers not to discriminate against strikers.
President Roosevelt announced his support for the report, then urged employees to return to work and the manufacturers to accept the commission's recommendations. The UTW took the opportunity to declare victory and held a number of parades to celebrate the end of the strike.
In fact, the strike was a total defeat for the union, particularly in the South. The union had not forced the mill owners to recognize it or obtained any of its economic demands. The employers refused, moreover, to reinstate strikers throughout the South, while the Cotton Textile National Industrial Relations Board never ceded any authority to any other board. Thousands of strikers never returned to work in the mills.
formed the Textile Workers Organizing Committee three years later, the TWOC focused on northern manufacturers outside the cotton industry. TWOC's successor, the Textile Workers Union of America
, faced similar problems organizing in the South; the CIO's postwar organizing drive in the South fell apart chiefly because of its inability to organize textile workers there.
The union might have escaped this disaster if it had characterized the strike as a first step, rather than attempting to pass it off as a victory. That, however, would have required that the union also devote the resources necessary to follow up with renewed, systematic organizing efforts in the immediate aftermath of the strike, instead of concerning itself with the futile effort to win reinstatement for discharged strikers through the Textile Labor Board. The memory of blacklisting and defeat soured many Southern textile workers on unions for decades.
The 1934 defeat was less cataclysmic in the North, in that the strike was in fact, a number of separate events, commencing at different times in separate industries and in furtherance of local goals. Northern employers were not as ruthless in blacklisting workers and the TWOC made some headway in organizing these plants in the years that followed. Those victories were impermanent, however, as much of northern industry either went South or went bankrupt in the years that followed.
Anti-union sentiment in the South kept wages low for decades, but also acted as a catalyst for development later when industries moved there from the North and Midwest because of lower costs. Employers resisted integrating textile mills; when they were forced to do so by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, researchers found that African Americans were accepted overall by other employees, although they continued to face discrimination in job training and advancement. By the time this occurred, many jobs in the textile industry were already moving overseas, a trend that accelerated in the 1980s.
Publications
Strike action
Strike action, also called labour strike, on strike, greve , or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became...
in the labor history of the United States
Labor history of the United States
The labor history of the United States describes the history of organized labor, as well as the more general history of working people, in the United States. Pressures dictating the nature and power of organized labor have included the evolution and power of the corporation, efforts by employers...
at the time, involving 400,000 textile
Textile
A textile or cloth is a flexible woven material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibres often referred to as thread or yarn. Yarn is produced by spinning raw fibres of wool, flax, cotton, or other material to produce long strands...
workers from New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
, the Mid-Atlantic states
Mid-Atlantic States
The Mid-Atlantic states, also called middle Atlantic states or simply the mid Atlantic, form a region of the United States generally located between New England and the South...
and the U.S. Southern states, lasting twenty-two days. The strike's ultimate failure and the trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
's defeat left the Southeastern United States
Southeastern United States
The Southeastern United States, colloquially referred to as the Southeast, is the eastern portion of the Southern United States. It is one of the most populous regions in the United States of America....
an unorganized and anti-union region for the next 50 years.
The background to the strike
The textile industry, once concentrated in New England with outposts in New JerseyNew Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
and Philadelphia, had started moving South in the 1880s. By 1933 Southern mills produced more than seventy percent of cotton and woolen textiles in more modern mills, drawing on the pool of dispossessed farmers and laborers willing to work for roughly forty percent less than their Northern counterparts. As was the rest of economic life, the textile industry was strictly segregated and drew only from white workers in the Piedmont. Before 1965, after passage of the Civil Rights Act broke the color line in hiring, less than 2% of textile workers were African American.]
Throughout the 1920s, however, the mills faced an intractable problem of overproduction, as the wartime boom for cotton goods ended, while foreign competition cut into their markets. Although manufacturers tried to reduce the oversupply by forming industry associations to regulate competition, their favored solution to the crisis was to squeeze more work out of their employees through what workers called the "stretch-out": speeding up production by increasing the number of looms assigned to each factory hand, limiting break times, paying workers by piece rates, and increasing the number of supervisors to keep workers from slowing down, talking or leaving work.
The stretch-out sparked hundreds of strikes throughout the Southeast: by one count, there were more than eighty strikes in South Carolina in 1929 alone. While most of them were short-lived, these strikes were almost all spontaneous walkouts, without any union – or other – leadership.
That year also saw the massive strikes that began in Gastonia, North Carolina
Gastonia, North Carolina
Gastonia is the largest city and county seat of Gaston County, North Carolina, United States. It is also the third largest suburb of the Charlotte Area, behind Concord and Rock Hill. The population was 71,226 as of Gastonia is the largest city and county seat of Gaston County, North Carolina,...
, and Elizabethton, Tennessee
Elizabethton, Tennessee
Elizabethton is the county seat of Carter County, Tennessee, United States. Elizabethton is also the historical site both of the first independent American government located west of both the Eastern Continental Divide and the original thirteen British American colonies.Elizabethton is also the...
, which were violently suppressed by local police and vigilantes. Here again, workers were often more militant than their trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
leadership: to take one striking example, the workers at the Loray Mill in Gastonia walked out under the leadership of the communist
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
-led National Textile Workers Union. The Communist Party founded the NTWU in its short-lived attempt to create revolutionary unions.
In the meantime, the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
made matters worse. The economic collapse drove a number of New England and Mid-Atlantic manufacturers into bankruptcy
Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....
, while those employers who survived laid off workers and increased the amount and pace of work for their employees even further. Textile workers across the region, from worsted workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts
Lawrence, Massachusetts
Lawrence is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States on the Merrimack River. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city had a total population of 76,377. Surrounding communities include Methuen to the north, Andover to the southwest, and North Andover to the southeast. It and Salem are...
and silk weavers in Paterson, New Jersey
Paterson, New Jersey
Paterson is a city serving as the county seat of Passaic County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, its population was 146,199, rendering it New Jersey's third largest city and one of the largest cities in the New York City Metropolitan Area, despite a decrease of 3,023...
, to cotton millhands in Greenville, South Carolina
Greenville, South Carolina
-Law and government:The city of Greenville adopted the Council-Manager form of municipal government in 1976.-History:The area was part of the Cherokee Nation's protected grounds after the Treaty of 1763, which ended the French and Indian War. No White man was allowed to enter, though some families...
, engaged in hundreds of isolated strikes, even though there were thousands of unemployed workers desperate to take their places.
Rising hopes under the New Deal
The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery ActNational Industrial Recovery Act
The National Industrial Recovery Act , officially known as the Act of June 16, 1933 The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), officially known as the Act of June 16, 1933 The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), officially known as the Act of June 16, 1933 (Ch. 90, 48 Stat. 195, formerly...
(NIRA) appeared to change things. The NIRA, which Roosevelt signed in June 1933, called for cooperation among business, labor and government and established the National Recovery Administration
National Recovery Administration
The National Recovery Administration was the primary New Deal agency established by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. The goal was to eliminate "cut-throat competition" by bringing industry, labor and government together to create codes of "fair practices" and set prices...
(NRA). It was to oversee the creation of codes of conduct for particular industries that would reduce overproduction, raise wages, control hours of work, guarantee the rights of workers to form unions, and stimulate an economic recovery.
The NIRA rarely, if ever, lived up to its promises: employers usually dominated the panels that created these codes, which often offered far less than what workers and their unions demanded, and the NIRA and the codes themselves were toothless, since the Act did not provide any effective means to enforce the standards.
Even so, the promise of the right to join a union had an electrifying effect on textile workers: the United Textile Workers, which had no more than 15,000 members in February, 1933, grew to 250,000 members by June, 1934, of whom roughly half were cotton mill workers. Textile workers also put tremendous faith in the NIRA to bring an end to the stretch-out, or at least temper its worst features. As one union organizer said, textile workers in the South saw the NIRA as something that "God has sent to them."
The NIRA quickly promulgated a code for the cotton industry regulating workers' hours and establishing a minimum wage; it also established a committee to study the problem of workloads. In the meantime, however, the employers responded to the new minimum wages by increasing the pace of work. When the labor board set a forty-hour work week, mill owners required the same amount of work in those forty hours as they had in the previous fifty- to sixty-hour week.
By August 1934, workers had filed nearly 4,000 complaints to the labor board protesting "code chiseling" by their employers ; the board found in favor of only one worker. Union supporters often lost their jobs and found themselves blacklist
Blacklist
A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize a person from a certain social circle...
ed throughout the industry. Workers, both north and south, wrote thousands of letters to the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
, the Department of Labor
United States Department of Labor
The United States Department of Labor is a Cabinet department of the United States government responsible for occupational safety, wage and hour standards, unemployment insurance benefits, re-employment services, and some economic statistics. Many U.S. states also have such departments. The...
, the NRA and Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of her husband, distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and became an advocate for civil rights. After her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt continued to be an international...
asking for them to intervene.
In what proved to be a dry run of the larger strike to follow, cotton mill workers in South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
's Horse Creek Valley struck to force employers to live up to the code, only to face special deputies, highway patrolmen and a machine-gun unit of the National Guard sent to keep the mills open. When the NIRA's special board came to Horse Creek, it did not respond to the workers' complaints, but urged them to return to work. When they attempted to do so, the mill owners not only refused to allow the workers back, but evicted them from company housing. The NIRA took no action to stop the employers from violating the codes.
First steps toward a national strike
When the millowners reduced cotton mill employees' hours still further – with the blessing of the NRA – without raising their hourly wage rates in May, 1934, the UTW threatened a national strike. This talk was largely bluster; the union had made no preparations for a strike that size. When the NRA promised to give the UTW a seat on the board, balanced by the addition of another industry representative, the UTW canceled the planned strike.While the UTW called off its plans for a strike, local leaders thought differently. The UTW locals in the northern part of Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
launched a strike that began on July 18 in Huntsville
Huntsville, Alabama
Huntsville is a city located primarily in Madison County in the central part of the far northern region of the U.S. state of Alabama. Huntsville is the county seat of Madison County. The city extends west into neighboring Limestone County. Huntsville's population was 180,105 as of the 2010 Census....
, then spread to Florence
Florence, Alabama
Florence is the county seat of Lauderdale County, Alabama, United States, in the northwestern corner of the state.According to the 2005 Census Bureau estimates, the city's population was 36,721....
, Anniston
Anniston, Alabama
Anniston is a city in Calhoun County in the state of Alabama, United States.As of the 2000 census, the population of the city is 24,276. According to the 2005 U.S. Census estimates, the city had a population of 23,741...
, Gadsden
Gadsden, Alabama
The city of Gadsden is the county seat of Etowah County in the U.S. state of Alabama, and it is located about 65 miles northeast of Birmingham, Alabama. It is the primary city of the Gadsden Metropolitan Statistical Area, which has a population of 103,459. Gadsden is closely associated with the...
, and Birmingham
Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham is the largest city in Alabama. The city is the county seat of Jefferson County. According to the 2010 United States Census, Birmingham had a population of 212,237. The Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Area, in estimate by the U.S...
. While the strike was popular, it was also ineffective: many employers welcomed it as a means of cutting their expenses, since they had warehouses full of unsold goods.
The UTW called a special convention in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
on Monday, August 13, 1934 to address the crisis. The UTW drew up a list of demands for the industry as a whole: a thirty hour week, minimum wages ranging from $13.00 to $30.00 a week, elimination of the stretch-out, union recognition, and reinstatement of workers fired for their union activities. The delegates, especially those from the southern states, voted overwhelmingly to strike the cotton mills on September 1, 1934 if these demands were not met. They planned to bring out the woolen, silk and rayon workers at a date to be set later.
Mill owners had seen the strike threat as more empty talk from the union. The White House took a largely "hands off" attitude, leaving it to the first National Labor Relations Board
National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the United States government charged with conducting elections for labor union representation and with investigating and remedying unfair labor practices. Unfair labor practices may involve union-related situations or instances of...
to set up a meeting of the parties. The employers refused to meet with the union.
The strike begins
The strike swept through Southern cotton millCotton mill
A cotton mill is a factory that houses spinning and weaving machinery. Typically built between 1775 and 1930, mills spun cotton which was an important product during the Industrial Revolution....
s, outpacing the union organizers and employing "flying squadrons" which traveled by truck and on foot from mill to mill, calling the workers out. In Gastonia, where authorities had violently suppressed a strike led by the National Textile Workers Union in 1929, an estimated 5,000 people marched in the September 3rd Labor Day
Labor Day
Labor Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the first Monday in September that celebrates the economic and social contributions of workers.-History:...
parade. The next day union organizers estimated that 20,000 out of the 25,000 textile workers in the county were out on strike.
It is not clear whether the UTW expected to have this much success so easily and so quickly in the South; it had only shallow roots and few regular organizers in that region. But Southern textile workers had a good deal of experience in confronting management, both by impromptu strikes and other means, and a deep well of bitterness against their employers.
Some workers converted their experience into a nearly messianic belief in the power of unionism to take them out of bondage. One labor official made the connection in Biblical terms: "The first strike on record was the strike in which Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. They too struck against intolerable conditions".
Textile workers in the North went out on strike in great numbers as well, although they were spread more evenly across different industries and had more diverse grievances than the Southern cotton mill workers. Within a week, almost 400,000 textile workers nationwide had left their jobs and the textile industry was shut down.
The authorities respond
The mill owners were initially taken by surprise by the scope of the strike. They immediately took the position that these flying squadrons were, in fact, coercing their employees to go out on strike.Governor Blackwood
Ibra Charles Blackwood
Ibra Charles Blackwood was the 97th Governor of South Carolina from 1931 to 1935.Born in rural Spartanburg County, South Carolina, Blackwood studied at Furman University preparatory school and obtained his law degree from Wofford College...
of South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
took up this theme, announcing that he would deputize the state's "mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen" to maintain order, then called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills. Governor Ehringhaus
John C.B. Ehringhaus
John Christoph Blucher Ehringhaus was the Governor of North Carolina from 1933 to 1937.-Biography:He was born on February 5, 1882....
of North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
followed suit on September 5.
Millowners persuaded local authorities throughout the Piedmont
Piedmont (United States)
The Piedmont is a plateau region located in the eastern United States between the Atlantic Coastal Plain and the main Appalachian Mountains, stretching from New Jersey in the north to central Alabama in the south. The Piedmont province is a physiographic province of the larger Appalachian division...
to augment their forces by swearing in special deputies, often their own employees or local residents opposed to the strike; in other cases they simply hired private guards to police the areas around the plant. Violence between guards and picketers broke out almost immediately: in Trion, Georgia
Trion, Georgia
Trion is a town in Chattooga County, Georgia, United States. The population was 1,993 at the 2000 census. The estimated pop. as of 2006 is 2,001. Trion is the second largest incorporation is Chattooga County, which has a population of approximately 27,000...
, a picketer and mill guard died in a shootout and guards killed two picketers in Augusta, Georgia
Augusta, Georgia
Augusta is a consolidated city in the U.S. state of Georgia, located along the Savannah River. As of the 2010 census, the Augusta–Richmond County population was 195,844 not counting the unconsolidated cities of Hephzibah and Blythe.Augusta is the principal city of the Augusta-Richmond County...
on September 2. Six picketers were shot to death and more than twenty other picketers wounded, most shot in the back as they were fleeing the picketline, in Honea Path, South Carolina
Honea Path, South Carolina
Honea Path is a town in Abbeville and Anderson counties in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The population was 3,504 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Honea Path is located at ....
on September 6.
Authorities ordered out the National Guard elsewhere in the second week of the strike: Governor Green sent the Guard to Saylesville, Rhode Island
Saylesville, Rhode island
-History:The area was settled as a farming community in the 17th century. The historic Eleazer Arnold House is located in the village. The Saylesville Meeting House is one of the oldest surviving Quaker meeting houses in New England and one of the oldest church buildings in Rhode Island. In the...
after several thousand strikers and sympathizers trapped several hundred strikebreakers in a factory; he subsequently declared martial law in the area on September 11, after picketers armed with rocks, flowerpots and broken headstones from a nearby cemetery battled troops armed with machine guns. A picketer was shot to death the following day in Woonsocket, Rhode Island
Woonsocket, Rhode Island
Woonsocket is a city in Providence County, Rhode Island, United States. The population was 41,186 at the 2010 census, making it the sixth largest city in the state. Woonsocket lies directly south of the Massachusetts border....
when guardsmen fired into the crowd attempting to storm the Woonsocket Rayon Plant. Governor Green then asked the federal government to send federal troops; the Roosevelt administration ignored the request.
Maine
Maine
Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...
deployed the Guard in a more tactical manner, sending them to Augusta
Augusta, Maine
Augusta is the capital of the US state of Maine, county seat of Kennebec County, and center of population for Maine. The city's population was 19,136 at the 2010 census, making it the third-smallest state capital after Montpelier, Vermont and Pierre, South Dakota...
and Lewiston
Lewiston, Maine
Lewiston is a city in Androscoggin County in Maine, and the second-largest city in the state. The population was 41,592 at the 2010 census. It is one of two principal cities of and included within the Lewiston-Auburn, Maine metropolitan New England city and town area and the Lewiston-Auburn, Maine...
to discourage wavering employees from joining the strike. That tactic did not work, however, everywhere: workers at Pepperell Mills' plant in Biddeford
Biddeford, Maine
Biddeford is a town in York County, Maine, United States. It is the largest town in the county, and is the sixth-largest in the state. It is the most southerly incorporated town in the state and the principal commercial center of York County. The population was 21,277 at the 2010 census...
and York Manufacturing's plant in Saco
Saco, Maine
Saco is a city in York County, Maine, United States. The population was 18,482 at the 2010 census. It is home to Ferry Beach State Park, Funtown Splashtown USA, Thornton Academy, as well as General Dynamics Armament Systems , a subsidiary of the defense contractor General Dynamics...
went out even though the guard was sent to prevent the arrival of flying squadrons rumored to be coming from New Bedford, Massachusetts
New Bedford, Massachusetts
New Bedford is a city in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States, located south of Boston, southeast of Providence, Rhode Island, and about east of Fall River. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 95,072, making it the sixth-largest city in Massachusetts...
.
Governor Wilbur L. Cross of Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...
also mobilized the Guard, but did not declare martial law. Instead the state labor commissioner met with picketers during the second week of the strike and brought about a reduction in tensions by urging strikers to respect the law and not hurl epithets at strikebreakers.
Things were different in Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
, where Governor Eugene Talmadge
Eugene Talmadge
Eugene Talmadge was a Democratic politician who served two terms as the 67th Governor of Georgia from 1933 to 1937, and a third term from 1941 to 1943. Elected to a fourth term in 1946, he died before taking office...
declared martial law in the third week of the strike and directed the National Guard to arrest all picketers throughout the state, holding them in a former World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
prisoner of war
Prisoner of war
A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...
camp for trial by a military tribunal. While the state only interned a hundred or so picketers, the show of force effectively ended picketing throughout most of the state.
End of the strike
The strike was, in fact, already falling apart, particularly in the South, where local government refused to provide any relief assistance to strikers and there were few sympathetic churches or unions to provide support. Although the union had pledged before the walkout began to feed strikers, it was wholly unable to fulfill this promise. While roughly half of the textile workers in North and South Carolina and roughly three fourths in Georgia were on strike at this point, with similar figures in MassachusettsMassachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
and Rhode Island
Rhode Island
The state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, more commonly referred to as Rhode Island , is a state in the New England region of the United States. It is the smallest U.S. state by area...
, workers had started to drift back to work and struck plants were reopening, if with only skeleton crews.
At that point the mediation board that Roosevelt had appointed in the first week of the strike issued its report. As was typical of federal commissions of this era, the board temporized, urging further studies of the economic plight of the employers and the effects of the stretch-out on their employees. It urged the President to create a new Textile Labor Relations Board to hear workers' complaints and urged employers not to discriminate against strikers.
President Roosevelt announced his support for the report, then urged employees to return to work and the manufacturers to accept the commission's recommendations. The UTW took the opportunity to declare victory and held a number of parades to celebrate the end of the strike.
In fact, the strike was a total defeat for the union, particularly in the South. The union had not forced the mill owners to recognize it or obtained any of its economic demands. The employers refused, moreover, to reinstate strikers throughout the South, while the Cotton Textile National Industrial Relations Board never ceded any authority to any other board. Thousands of strikers never returned to work in the mills.
Aftermath
The strike represented the high point for union hopes of organizing textile workers in the South for the next several decades. When the CIOCongress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
formed the Textile Workers Organizing Committee three years later, the TWOC focused on northern manufacturers outside the cotton industry. TWOC's successor, the Textile Workers Union of America
Textile Workers Union of America
The Textile Workers Union of America was an industrial union of textile workers established through the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1939 and merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to become the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1976. It waged a...
, faced similar problems organizing in the South; the CIO's postwar organizing drive in the South fell apart chiefly because of its inability to organize textile workers there.
The union might have escaped this disaster if it had characterized the strike as a first step, rather than attempting to pass it off as a victory. That, however, would have required that the union also devote the resources necessary to follow up with renewed, systematic organizing efforts in the immediate aftermath of the strike, instead of concerning itself with the futile effort to win reinstatement for discharged strikers through the Textile Labor Board. The memory of blacklisting and defeat soured many Southern textile workers on unions for decades.
The 1934 defeat was less cataclysmic in the North, in that the strike was in fact, a number of separate events, commencing at different times in separate industries and in furtherance of local goals. Northern employers were not as ruthless in blacklisting workers and the TWOC made some headway in organizing these plants in the years that followed. Those victories were impermanent, however, as much of northern industry either went South or went bankrupt in the years that followed.
Anti-union sentiment in the South kept wages low for decades, but also acted as a catalyst for development later when industries moved there from the North and Midwest because of lower costs. Employers resisted integrating textile mills; when they were forced to do so by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, researchers found that African Americans were accepted overall by other employees, although they continued to face discrimination in job training and advancement. By the time this occurred, many jobs in the textile industry were already moving overseas, a trend that accelerated in the 1980s.
Further reading
Books- Conway, Mimi. Rise Gonna Rise: a portrait of Southern textile workers. Photographs by Earl Dotter. Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York. 1979. ISBN 0-385-13194-1.
- Flamming, Douglas. Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Mangers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984. Fred W Morrison Series in Southern Studies. 468 pages. University of North Carolina Press; Reprint edition. November 1, 1995. ISBN 0-8078-4545-0.
- Irons, Janet. Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000 ISBN 0-252-06840-8
- Salmond, John A. The General Textile Strike of 1934: From Maine to Alabama. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002 ISBN 0-8262-1395-2
- Tullos, Allen. Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont. Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies. 440 pages. University of North Carolina Press. September 1, 1989. ISBN 0-8078-4247-8.
- Waldrep III, G. C. Southern Workers and the Search For Community: Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000 ISBN 0-252-06901-3
Publications
- Lewis, Sinclair. Cheap and contented labor; the picture of a southern mill town in 1929. United Textile Workers of America; Philadelphia, Women's Trade Union League, New York. 1929. Marion, N.C. strike.
- Textile Workers Union of America. They said it couldn't be done, a history of the Textile Workers Union of America, AFL-CIO, CLC. Textile Workers Union of America, New York. [1960?], 21p
- War Manpower Commission. Training new workers quickly in the textile industry. Comprehensive plan developed by textile mill in South in cooperation with Apprentice-Training Service. Reprinted through the courtesy of TEXTILE WORLD. War Manpower Commission, Bureau of Training, Apprentice-Training Service, Washington. 1944.
External links
- Southern Labor History Archives at Georgia State University
- Southern Workers and the Search for Community by G. C. Waldrep III. Partial text of a history of the strike in Spartanburg, SC.
- Uprising of '34 A Film by George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock
- Impact of The Uprising Of ’34 Jumpcut magazine article on production and distribution of documentary
- Georgia State University Lesson Plan on The Uprising Of ’34
- "Treated Like Slaves": Textile Workers Write to Washington in the 1930s and 1940s
- A contemporary Marxist account of the General Textile Strike by Albert Weisbord writing in Class Struggle Official Organ of the Communist League of Struggle (Adhering to the International Left Opposition) Vol. 4 #9/10. October 1934