Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Working Class in American History) [Hardcover]

Janet Irons (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 29, 2000 | Series: Working Class in American History

In September 1934 two-thirds of the southern textile labor force walked off their jobs, inspired by Roosevelt's New Deal to protest employer harassment and massive industry restructuring. After three weeks, the union that led the strike called it off in return for government promises that remained unfulfilled. Thousands of workers were blacklisted and conditions in the southern mills deteriorated rapidly. Humiliated and demoralized, strike participants maintained a sixty-year silence that virtually eliminated the event from historical memory.

Janet Irons steps into this historical vacuum to explore the community and workplace dynamics of southern mill towns in the years leading up to the strike, as well as the links among worker insurgency, organized labor, and governmental policy in the New Deal's crucial first years. Drawing on diverse sources including thousands of letters southern laborers wrote to President Roosevelt about their working conditions, Irons reveals the dual nature of the New Deal's impact on the South. While its rhetoric mobilized the poor to challenge local established authority, the New Deal's political structure worked in the opposite direction, reinforcing the power of the South's economic elite.

A powerful rendering of a pivotal event, Testing the New Deal stands as a major reassessment of southern labor in the 1930s.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In 1934, 170,000 workers walked off their jobs at textile mills throughout the South in what was to be the largest labor protest in the South's history. The strike quickly turned violent, and many workers were wounded and several killed in skirmishes with private guards and soldiers called out by southern governors. Within less than a month, the United Textile Workers Union called off the strike after negotiating an agreement with Roosevelt's New Deal administration. Mill owners, though, ignored most of the government's recommendations and refused to let more than 75,000 of the strikers return to work. The heady optimism of the walkout's early days quickly gave way to the bitter realization that the strike may have failed. Workers emboldened by their union and the promise of the New Deal felt abandoned and betrayed. Irons is an associate professor at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania. Against the backdrop of the New Deal and the National Industrial Recovery Act and after 60 years of what she calls "historical amnesia," she examines the strike and its consequences. David Rouse

Review

"Against the backdrop of the New Deal and the National Industrial Recovery Act and after 60 years of what [Irons] calls 'historical amnesia,' she examines the strike and its consequences." -- Booklist "Irons's book proves yet again that labor history provides a window to view and understand America. The inner workings of American governmental policy, American society (especially in the South), and labor issues that divided and continue to divide management and workers are all considered and treated deftly. Irons probes large questions: what was the nature of the New Deal? What was the nature of the working lives of men and women in southern textile mills before and during the New Deal? And, after more than sixty years of silence, what was the significance of the general textile strike of 1934?" -- James Duane Bolin, American Historical Review "The union boom and the strike of 1934 are the core of Iron's study, the substance of her argument that conflict, power, and repression are the keys to understanding southern labor... Irons has told an important story in a book that should be read by all interested in the development of modern American history and economics." -- Gerald Friedman, H-Net, Economic History "Addresses an important and neglected episode in southern labor history... Well -researched and clearly argued ... it will serve as an important reference point for many historians." -- Tim Minchin, Labor History "Irons has provided us with an important and original study of labor protest during the New Deal. Historians of the 1930s will greatly benefit from a close reading of this excellent book, but so will any reader with an interest in southern history." -- Anthony James Gaughan, South Carolina Historical Magazine "This massive strike ... has been extraordinarily neglected...Irons's study, the first modern account of the 1934 textile strike, is a welcome addition to the literature." -- Robert Justin Goldstein, Journal of American History "Irons rightly skewers the industry for its failure to treat its workers with the dignity that their courageous efforts to gain a larger place in the American South merited." -- Thomas E. Terrill, The Historian "[A] well-crafted, closely argued monograph. It is both an inspiring and depressing story she tells." -- North Carolina Historical Review "After the crushing of resistance of workers in southern textiles, it seemed as if even the memory of the strike had been obliterated... Irons succeeded in breaking through the silence using primary and secondary sources and oral interviews with participants. It is a major and very useful effort." -- Martin Glaberman, Labour/Le Travail ADVANCE PRAISE "Wide-ranging and insightful... No one has approached this crucial moment in American and Southern history from the same angle as Irons." -- Bryant Simon, author of A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Textile Workers, 1910-1948 "Catches the dramatic sweep of the huge textile strike of '34 ... impeccably researched and vividly written." -- George C. Stoney, producer of The Uprising of '34 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (February 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 025202527X
• ISBN-13: 978-0252025273
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,763,001 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An untold New Deal labor story, April 16, 2000

By 

Robert W. Blythe (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Working Class in American History) (Paperback)

Janet Irons provides a comprehensive look at a shockingly neglected piece of US labor history: the 1934 general strike of southern textile workers. Irons convincingly shows that the impetus for the strike came from the workers, and that the leadership of the United Textile Workers of America was out of touch and committed to an outdated style of leadership from the top. One of the most fascinating areas Irons explores is the effects of mass communication, new hard-surfaced roads, and inexpensive autos in enabling Southern workers to innovate a new organizing technique: the flying squadron. Teams of strikers in cars and trucks went from mill to mill throughout the Piedmont to spread the walk-out. A minor drawback to the book is its failure to put the textile strike in a broader context. The fall of 1934 saw a general strike in San Francisco and labor unrest in Seattle, Minneapolis and other cities. Arguably, FDR's New Dealers had a lot more than the textile situation on their minds in this period. There is not doubt that Irons's book is an important contribution to an emerging, more nuanced view of southern workers and their alleged passivity.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine account of an important though largely ignored part of our history, September 26, 2007

By 

Chris (Washington state, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Working Class in American History) (Hardcover)

This is a very readable book. With Irons's use of primary sources, Southern workers come to life at a time when they were at their most heroic. It describes the strike of cotton textile workers in four southern states in September 1934, which was part of a general strike of textile workers stretching from New England to Georgia. I've heard this strike called the largest in American history. It describes how hundreds of thousands of poor whites across the south launched a mass movement for economic justice. The author states that this strike has been a very painful episode over the years in the communities in which it affected. The workers were intimidated into submission in the years after the strike. The Wagner Act, according to Irons, did not help them much. Their story seems all too typically American.

Throughout the 1920's, what we today call "downsizing" hit the textile industry full force. The decade saw the emergence of theories on efficiency and "scientific management." Mill owners began pushing aside their pre-capitalist paternalism and started firing workers and increased the workloads of the remaining workers at levels extremely hazardous to physical and mental well-being. In textile mills, the increased workload was called the "stretch-out." These measures increased once the great depression hit and there were many strikes at individual plants which responded by firing strikers, evicting them from their homes in company towns, sending masked men to kidnap union organizers and drive them out of town, etc.etc. Now with Roosevelt in power, there was a major law passed in June 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act, (NIRA), section 7a of which stated that workers had the right to organize unions and not suffer employee intimidation for doing so. Southern workers were very optimistic, Irons shows quoting their letters to Roosevelt.

For two years, from June 1933 to May 1935 after the NIRA passed, an attempt was made to organize the country's economy through a bureaucracy called the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The NRA was supposed to work with businesses in each industry and draw up a code for each regulating prices, wages, output levels and so on. The aim was to stabilize these industries and eliminate the cutthroat competition which had contributed to causing the Great Depression. Implementation of the textile code was handed over to a committee dominated by textile mill owners. A special NRA committee to analyze the feasibility of reducing or expanding the stretch-out was formed but it was chaired by an industry-friendly industrial engineer. The other members of this committee were an anti-union mill owner and the leader of the printing-pressman's union, George L. Berry. Irons describes how Berry left the running of the board to the other two though occasionally he wrote letters to the leaders of the United Textile Workers (UTW) demanding they do more to reign in the militancy of southern textile mill workers. When the NRA textile mill code went into effect in the summer of 1933 it called for reduced production which gave many mills the impetus to lay off workers and intensify the workload on the remaining members. Minimum wages set by the code were often the maximum wages paid. Firings of union members increased, as did evictions from company housing and physical and sexual abuse by overseers. Many workers started joining locals of the UTW. Complaints were sent to Washington by workers such as relating to the refusal of overseers to open windows in horrendously humid mill work rooms and sexual abuse of female employees. These complaints were almost always rerouted to the special NRA subcommittee on the stretch-out which rarely did anything more than send an investigator who would listen to employer denials and then leave.
The way Irons describes it, the UTW was a big problem for southern textile mill workers. The UTW leadership, as was the leadership of most unions, was anxious to increase its own power by gaining places of influence in the NRA bureaucracy. They wanted to prove their lack of militancy and their devotion to efficiency in business...They were dragged reluctantly into the strike.

Irons shows how southern workers managed to spread the strike wave dramatically with little help from the cash strapped UTW. The strike saw terrible violence. 15 strikers were killed, including the seven by gunfire at Honea Path South Carolina. Irons reconstruct the Honea Path massacre in a way that shows its barbarity, in contrast to previous efforts to minimize it.

The strike ended after a few weeks in September 1934. Mill owners were able to create a climate of fear and insecurity amongst workers. In Georgia, Irons notes, the Democratic governor Eugene Talmadge did not send out the national guard for a while. But after he won the Democratic primary that mid-September and he was thus electorally safe, he declared martial law and imprisoned many striking workers. Some mill owners apparently met with him and gave him a generous campaign contribution just before the election. However the biggest factor ending the strike was FDR using his prestige amongst the poor workers to get them to go back to work. In return for calling off the strike, workers were promised they would not be fired once they returned and a new NRA board was created to hear complaints from textile workers about employer treatment.

Despite Roosevelt's assurances, union members were fired en masse once they returned to work and the climate of fear was maintained in southern textiles. This new NRA textile labor board, Irons shows, made its pro-industry bias clear by its method in conducting its own investigation of the stretch-out. It had received complaints about the use of the stretch-out from 249 of 1200 mills in the south. It decided to investigate 36 of those mills and found 11 of them to have valid worker complaints about the stretch out. Thus with this method it decided that only 6.5 percent of the mills were engaged in excessive workloads.