The War the Union Lost in Dixie
By Jonathan Yardley
November 22, 1995
To politicians and unionists who have had to deal with the South's fierce and longstanding resistance to organized labor, the word "Gastonia" has for well over half a century had unique resonance. It was in the North Carolina mill town of Gastonia that, in 1929, a strike against a textile mill was organized by the Communist Party. The strike failed utterly, but not until two people had died violently, innumerable others had been injured physically and/or economically, and a connection between organized labor and communism had been implanted in the Southern mind.
You won't hear many Southerners talking these days about pinko unionists, but echoes of Gastonia still can be heard. John Salmond tells us, in this useful and unbiased account of the strike, that Gastonians are still reluctant to discuss the strike because "the strike was dead and should be left that way." Beyond that, though the South may be more circumspect in its hostility to labor than it was when the textile barons hired thugs and scabs to do the dirty work, the hostility remains, refreshed over and again by the region's suspicion of "outside agitators" and its eagerness to exploit its homegrown cheap labor.
The Loray Mill in Gastonia had been built in 1900 and by 1929 was under the control of Manville-Jenckes, a Rhode Island textile chain. It cut the work force from 3,500 to 2,200, raised workloads through what was commonly known as "the stretch-out," and "put much of the work -- especially that done by women -- on a piece-work basis." The result was an exhausted, embittered work force, one that was wholly receptive to the overtures of the National Textile Workers Union, an arm of the Communist Party that aimed to break the South "by starting a strike in a single mill, then extending it to neighboring mills as time, resources and circumstances permitted."
Loray was chosen as the opening target. Workers went out on April 1, 1929, demanding a variety of concessions, chief among them the elimination of piecework and the stretch-out, but also a long list of demands involving pay and worker housing. The plant rejected them all out of hand, relying on the force of its own guards as augmented by sympathetic local police and National Guardsmen.
The atmosphere in Gastonia was incredibly tense, in large measure because the Gastonia Daily Gazette used "violent rhetoric" that encouraged resistance and violence rather than conciliation; the town's ministers were almost as strident, and the state government in Raleigh had little patience with the strikers, much less their communist leaders. Though Salmond is almost certainly correct that the workers were acting on old, local grievances and had little if any real interest in communism, the party's presence -- and its insistence on trying to call attention to itself at every opportunity -- encouraged the public to see the strike as a communist undertaking and gave the mill owners a receptive audience for the claim that any and all unionists were mere communists.
The two victims of the strike were the town's police chief, Orville Aderholt, who was killed under highly uncertain circumstances during a skirmish with strikers, and Ella May Wiggins, a striker whose songs made her the "balladeer" of the Loray strike and whose death made her its "martyr." She was killed by gunfire while riding with fellow strikers to a union rally; she probably was murdered by vigilantes, but the exact cause of her death has never been determined.
The killing of Wiggins became a national and even international cause celebre. She was mourned not merely by those who sought to exploit her death for political or ideological reasons but also by those who knew that Southern workers -- in this case, poor, white Southern workers -- were ill-used and ill-paid. Their cause was a legitimate one, even if those who took over the management of it did so out of ulterior motives; indeed, their involvement set back that cause for decades.
John Salmond is an Australian scholar with a particular interest in the American South. If he has any axes to grind, they are not evident in "Gastonia 1929." He does, to be sure, argue that "divisions in the Gastonia community" were "essentially class-based," but this seems founded in the facts of the matter rather than in the prevailing academic fascination with race, class and gender. To the contrary, he presents the facts as he finds them, not as he wills them to be, with the result that he has written a fair, dispassionate book.
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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