Southern Stirrings

Textile mill strikes flared up last week like fire in broom straw across the face of the industrial South. Though their causes were not directly related, they were all symptomatic of larger stirrings in that rapidly developing region. Labor troubles first developed in Eastern Tennessee, were followed by strikes in South Carolina and later in North Carolina.

Tennessee. Last October Herbert Hoover went to Elizabethton to make a campaign speech. Proudly its citizens led him through the shiny new mills of the Bemberg and Glanztoff artificial silk companies. He was presented with a sample suit of underwear. Shrewd Germans had invested $10,000,000 in these mills to escape the U. S. tariff. But Germans are hard taskmasters. Mill operatives worked 56 hours per week; their pay envelopes held from $8.90 to $14; overtime brought no extra money. Spurred on by the American Federation of Labor, the Elizabethton workers struck last month. The strike was settled, with the company promising pay adjustments, but 300 union members were discharged.

More trouble seemed imminent when Edward F. McGrady for the A. F. of L. and Alfred Hoffman for the United Textile Union went there last week to smooth out difficulties. Their missions were successfully completed when into McGrady's room at the Lynwood Hotel (where Mr. Hoover was feasted) broke a masked mob at 2 a. m. McGrady was seized, placed in a taxi, threatened with death if he ever returned, deported to the Virginia-Tennesee line at Bristol.

Hoffman was similarly pounced upon in the hotel lobby, blindfolded, forcibly despatched to the North Carolina line. Five men, one a foreman at the Bemberg plant, were later arrested, held for trial. President William Green of the A. F. of L. protested the "outrage" to Tennessee's Governor Henry Hollis Horton.

South Carolina. Operatives first walked out of the Brandon Mills at Greenville. Others at Spartanburg, Union and Anderson followed. Complaint was against the "stretch-out" system whereby workers were given increased work without proportionately more pay. A committee of the South Carolina Legislature, headed by Representative Dowell E. Patterson, who is also president of the State Federation of Labor, investigated these strikes and reported : "The whole trouble has been brought about by putting more work on the employes than they can do. . . . In the 'stretch-out' system it is the employe who does the stretching out. . . . The strike is in no sense a rebellion against improved textile machinery." One weaver, for example, the committee found, had operated 24 looms for $18.91 a week. He was given 114 machines to tend and his pay raised to $23 a week. He struck.

North Carolina. Gastonia, N. C., is named for William Gaston, onetime (1875-76) Massachusetts Governor. There the Manville-Jenckes Co., Pawtucket, R. I., operates the Loray Mills, producing yarn for cord tires. Six months ago the National Textile Workers Union began organizing in this and neighboring mills. Last week they came into the open, called a strike answered by 1,000 Loray workers. They demanded: a $20 minimum weekly wage, a 40-hour (five-day) week, abolition of the "stretch-out" system, a 50% cut in company rents and light rates, recognition of the union. The mill operators refused to recognize the union, damned it as "Communistic." One organizer was George Pershing, representative of the Communist Daily Worker, publicly introduced as General John Joseph Pershing's cousin. With the Loray mill shut down 90% and the streets of Gastonia filled with restless, jeering strikers, Governor Max Gardner ordered out five companies (200 men) of state militia. The Gastonia howitzer company cleared the streets, suppressed incipient riots, broke up picket lines.*

Significance. A generation ago the New England textile industry began dipping from its peak to its present debilitated condition. Causes for the decline were: 1) the unionization of Labor with its new power to dictate higher wages, to call gory strikes, to obtain protective laws; 2) increased taxation; 3) increased cost of power. The mill owners cast anxiously about for a refuge from their troubles. The South, particularly the western sections of the Carolinas, seemed attractive.

Chambers of Commerce told the Northern mill operators about cheap, unorganized white labor in the South, abundant water power, lenient mill laws (the 72-hour week, night work for women and children), special tax exemptions, proximity to the textile industry's raw material, King Cotton. Mill after mill closed in New England to reopen in the Piedmont section of the Carolinas. The labor was new, but the proprietors were mostly the same.

In the South the union labor movement has made the smallest headway. Of old U. S. ancestry, the workers were individualists, long trained to stand alone. Fanatically religious (mostly "wash-foot" Baptists), they viewed organized labor as Communism, and Communism, they were told, turned people against God. They had no fear of Negro competition in the mills because they knew that the blackamoor, inefficient at best with machinery, was lulled to sleep by its rhythmic motion (soporific hypnotism). But now they are no longer "poor white trash." They have begun to taste the power of combined action, to strike for what they want.

*More state troopers have been used in two years in the South on strike duty than in 50 years in the explosive New England mill towns.