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

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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from the workers, and that the leadership of the United Textile Workers of America was out of touch and committed to an outdated style of leadership from the top.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.

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.