War of Attrition

A strike, like an army, moves on its stomach. Food became the crux of the textile strikes in North Carolina last week. Supplies for strikers were dwindling. Relief funds dribbled in slowly. A war of attrition moved into its sixth week.

At Pineville, 200 workers went back to their looms and spindles, claiming that they had been "starved out" by the union. Into Pineville only $150 had been sent to sustain 150 families during three weeks of strike.

Around Gastonia, strikers were evicted from company houses, four-room boxlike places, their poor possessions put out on the street. But somehow the National Textile Union continued to find food for 1,700 members out of the Loray mill.

The professional leaders of the strike were faced with a difficult psychological problem. They sought to restrict the strike to its present confines, to increase union membership in mills now operating and thus collect dues to sustain the strik ers already out. But they found it hard to keep members at work -members who glanced out of mill windows to see strikers idling in the sunshine, who realized that they were in effect supporting those strik ers by their labor. Many a new union member was tempted to quit the mills and join the "free grub" line in the sunshine.

New words crept into the strikers' back country vocabulary. Professional agitators taught them the word "sweatshop" which seemed particularly applicable to Southern mills, with their hungry hum ming machinery, high humidity,* closed windows, lint-laden air. Said one striker: "I ain't afeared of Hell. I've spent 20 summers in the mills."

Last week strike leaders slightly modified their demands. They were ready to accept a 48-hour week instead of a 40. They would return on the 1927 wage scale, instead of the $20 per week minimum. But Manager J. A. Baugh of the Loray Mill was "too busy" even to discuss these concessions. To him the strikers were just "discharged" employes. His mill, he claimed, was running well without them.

To hobble the strikers' leisure, Gastonia adopted an anti-parading ordinance. Last week some 90 strikers maneuvered about the town in mass formation, dodged the police, jeered. They were set upon by a dozen officers with clubs and bayonets. Two strikers, aged 15 and 16 were arrested, lodged in jail. Mrs. Callie Jones saw her young son in the melee, rushed to pull him forth, was arrested for profanity.

Even middle-class citizens who had scant sympathy for the strikers could not stand and gossip on the street corners without a deputy poking a bayonet point into the group and gruffly ordering: "Open up hereopen up or I'll. . . ."

Official cognizance of the textile strikes was taken in the U. S. Senate last week when Montana's Wheeler offered a resolution for an investigation, at the request of President Green of the American Federation of Labor. Quickly uprose in protest North Carolina's two Senators -white-haired, old-fashioned Lee Slater Overman and small, grey-foxy Furnifold McLendel Simmons. They could see no good reason for an inquiry into North Carolina's labor troubles -and antiquated labor laws. Senator Simmons declared that if there was to be a textile strike investigation, let it include Massachusetts as well as the South. Senator Overman, pulling himself heavily to his feet, opposed investigations "costing hundreds of thousands of dollars which do not amount to that" (a snap of the Overman fingers).

* Water jets must play constantly in a textile mill to keep the fibres moist and pliable.