Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South

Published by EH.NET (April 2002)

Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the

American South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. x + 262 pp.

$45.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0-252-02527-X; $16.95 (paper), ISBN: 0-252-06840-8.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of

Massachusetts at Amherst.

If America is exceptional, the South is extraordinary. Unions and radical

political movements have been weaker in the United States than in other

advanced capitalist democracies for a century. But it is the South that has

been the most conservative region in a conservative country, the region where

unions have been the weakest. The South has been the home of American

exceptionalism.

Like exceptionalism in general, Southern exceptionalism has been used as

evidence that American workers are fundamentally conservative, opposed to

collective action and to movements to restrict capitalism. But there has been

another approach to studying the South. Instead of focusing on stable

conservatism, some emphasize episodic radicalism and periods of dramatic

upheaval. Rather than view southern workers as actively pro-capitalist, it sees

them as defeated, passive because they have been forced to submit to capitalist

rule. Their real nature has been revealed only on a few occasions when they

rose up in failed rebellions. Perhaps the most spectacular of these rebellions

came in September, 1934 when for three weeks nearly 200,000 southern textile

workers, two-thirds of the total workforce, conducted the largest single strike

in southern industrial history. Spreading their message with ‘flying squadrons’

of car-borne strikers, these textile workers showed none of the conservatism

and docility associated with southern labor. They were the cutting edge of

1930s labor unrest that in Michigan, Pennsylvania, California and elsewhere in

the North led to the establishment of strong labor unions and stable collective

bargaining. But in Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas strike defeats led to

the nearly complete eradication of independent unionism.

Janet Irons tells the story of this strike to make a larger point about

southern exceptionalism. In her account, southern deunionization does not

reflect the wishes of southern workers. Instead, it was created by relations of

power favoring employers and conservative politicians. Given opportunities,

southern workers rushed to join unions and to support working-class based

movements for social change. During World War I, for example, southern workers

formed unions under the protection of the War Labor Board. But, once the war

ended, the withdrawal of government support allowed employers to crush these

independent unions quickly. These struggles suggest to Irons “that workers

would willingly join unions if afforded the opportunity.” But, “in the absence

of some countervailing power, such as that of the federal government . . .

state officials did not hesitate to use state militia to eliminate” unions. “If

southern textile unions were to succeed,” she concludes, “it would be necessary

for the balance of power to shift. Textile workers needed allies,

constituencies in the larger society who would be willing to weigh in against

the power of the mill owners” (p. 22).

The union boom and the strike of 1934 are the core of Irons’s study, the

substance of her argument that conflict, power, and repression are the keys to

understanding southern labor. Southern textile workers wanted collective

representation, she argues, but southern textile unions grew after 1928 because

there were new opportunities created. Facing declining real wages and increased

workloads at the end of the 1920s, southern textile workers joined strikes and,

again, looked to form independent unions. The support of northern unions after

the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the enactment of the National Industrial

Recovery Act (NIRA), gave them a fresh opportunity, which they seized to form

unions. To increase their own economic and political influence, northern

textile unionists (in the United Textile Workers) sent paid organizers into the

South and provided advice, research, and encouragement for union organization.

Labor’s enhanced status in the Roosevelt administration encouraged workers to

join unions. “It is impossible,” Irons writes, “to overestimate the sense of

hope mill workers felt because of the Code. It legitimized their sense of place

in society. It also created an intense loyalty to the New Deal and to President

and Mrs. Roosevelt” (p. 77).

Union membership jumped sharply with the enactment of the NIRA. Some mills

achieving universal membership even while others remained completely nonunion.

Again, Irons concludes that the difference reflected “the divided mindset among

southern manufacturers about how to respond to Section 7(a) [of the NIRA] . .

.” Many mills “brazenly ignored 7(a), others did not attempt to interfere with

union organizing; some even explicitly recognized their workers’ unions” (p.

69). But workers quickly grew disenchanted with the NIRA when it failed to

protect workers’ right to organize or to provide higher wages or better working

conditions. They concluded that either through delay or design, the NIRA

bureaucracy was more responsive to employers than to workers. “Out of several

hundred cases on the stretchout we have placed before the Board,” UTW president

Thomas McMahon complained, “we haven’t received one adjustment” (page 119).

Desperate for protection from anti-union employers and to get help in improving

conditions but convinced that management had no “notion of living up to Article

7a,” UTW locals throughout the South moved to take direct action and to strike.

The UTW voted nearly unanimously for a general strike in August 1934.

The UTW entered the strike with no money and minimal staff. Nonetheless, the

strike attracted wide support throughout the South and was supported with a

missionary spirit by workers who saw themselves as righteous agents of New Deal

justice. “The first strike on record,” Roy Lawrence, president of the North

Carolina Federation of Labor, said, “was the strike in which Moses led the

children of Israel out of Egypt. They too struck against intolerable

conditions” (p. 121). But despite widespread support and innovative tactics,

employer resistance overwhelmed the strike. Irons describes the often brutal

tactics of anti-union southern employers, the beatings and discriminatory

firings, the evictions from company-owned towns, and the murders. State

governors in North and South Carolina promptly deployed militia to drive away

pickets and to help private mill guards; Georgia’s governor waited till after

the state’s primary to declare martial law and arrest strike leaders throughout

the state. At Duneen Mill in Greenville, South Carolina, for example, 425

national guardsmen were deployed to break up pickets. These guardsmen never

acted on their instructions to ‘shoot to kill,’ but nearby, in Honea Mill,

private mill guards killed seven strikers (p. 133).

Southern textile workers could not overcome such powerful repression on their

own. Their only hope was to arouse enough northern support to force their

employers to negotiate. But, as at the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the

North had little patience for southern strife. Rather than condemn the guards

and their employers for the murders at Honea Mill, for example, Secretary of

Labor Francis Perkins called the affair ‘an unfortunate situation” (p. 149).

Such words were hardly designed to galvanize public sympathy for the textile

workers. Instead, news of the killings validated what many in Washington

thought they knew: that the strike was a foolhardy enterprise.

Denied northern support, southern textile workers lost their strike and their

union, a failure that unleashed a flood of recriminations and employer

retaliation that would undermine any renewed organizing drive for decades.

Southern exceptionalism was created in 1934 when national politicians and

northern unions abandoned southern workers’ attempt at win union status.

Through the rest of the twentieth century, low southern wages and nonunion

working conditions would undermine northern unions and liberal politics.

Perhaps, Irons implies, rather than blaming some mythic southern

exceptionalism, it was their own fault.

An important event in American labor history, the southern textile strike of

1934 was one of the turning points where southern history did not turn. Janet

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.

An economic historian at the University of Massachusetts, Gerald Friedman has

written extensively on the development of the labor movements in the United

States and Europe. He is the author of State-Making and Labor Movements: The

United States and France, 1876-1914 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press,

1998) and “The Political Economy of Early Southern Unionism: Race, Politics,

and Labor in the South, 1880-1953,” Journal of Economic History (June

2000).