Gabriel Winant: The Revolution the South Forgot
[Gabriel Winant is a graduate student in American history at Yale.]
This is America, on Labor Day week in 2010. But in more ways than we like to notice, it feels like 1910. Somehow, the labor laws and basic protections that we once thought were part of the fabric of American democracy have been quietly excised. Of course, in the South, the postwar dream of free, prosperous, safe labor was never really there at all. The region has always been poorer. It's always had more rapacious bosses. And Southern workers (especially white ones) have always seemed mysteriously willing to take it, as far as often-condescending Northern liberals can tell.
It's the glaring question that sharp students always notice and want to ask about Southern politics: Why have poor white people, seemingly such obvious beneficiaries of progressive politics, never joined with their oppressed black neighbors to overthrow their outnumbered overlords?...
But, despite the temptation to liberal arrogance, it'd be a mistake to imagine that poor white Southerners are befuddled fools, with no understanding of their class identity and class interest. That's the view of someone who won't grant the courtesy of knowing some of the history of workers in the region. And there's no better week than this one to remember.
On September 6, 1934 -- 76 years ago Monday -- gunmen guarding Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina opened fire on a crowd of picketing textile workers. They killed seven, and wounded about 30. If the history of industrial labor in the South has been a stage tragedy, this was the climactic moment; the rest, for white workers at least, is denouement....
A strike wave broke out in 1929, but it was spontaneous and ill-organized. A series of bloody crackdowns extinguished the flashes of protest easily enough -- most famously at Gastonia, N.C., where a fairly fraudulent trial followed a massacre, and ended with communist organizers fleeing to Russia.
Hope was renewed, after the failure of this first series of uprisings, by the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Mill-hands viewed the new president as a near-spiritual personal savior. In huge numbers, they wrote letters to him, to Eleanor Roosevelt and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Wrote one, "I want you to know that I am for you in this most wonderful undertaking. I am a long ways from you in distance yet my faith is in you my heart with you and I am for you sink or swim." And they didn’t hesitate to tell him what they really thought. The mill bosses, wrote another, were "old slimy serpants crowling spiting their Poison fighting your program." In one now-famous letter, a mill-hand wrote to FDR, "You are the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch."...
Although they still felt the president himself was on their side, mill-hands understood that negotiations were over. After a summer of watching the textile companies flout their demands, Alabama workers decided they'd had it. The union, the United Textile Workers, was reluctant, but they walked off the job anyway in midsummer of 1934. Word spread up the Piedmont virtually overnight. Strikers piled into trucks and cars and raced from mill town to mill town to call mill-hands out to join them before the bosses could catch on. Since the strike was obviously happening one way or the other, the UTW -- a generally feeble and conservative union -- called a meeting, and endorsed the thing. On September 1, 1934, the general textile strike began. With participation between 200,000 and 400,000, from Maine to Alabama, it was the largest labor rebellion in American history to that point. The only prior uprising that exceeded it was the collapse of slavery during the Civil War.
But, while a general strike is an inspiring thing, it's not easy to pull off. Strikers quickly started finding themselves evicted from company houses, and homeless. As people who lived to hand-to-mouth, how could they last without paychecks? The UTW, broke and disorganized as it was already, was in no position to feed a few hundred thousand hungry people. The churches -- another common fallback -- were largely unfriendly. Worst of all, the federal government was nowhere to be seen, and state and local officials were getting their response ready....
...[A]t Honea Path, on the sixth day of the general strike, the inevitable massacre happened....
The basic tenets of 20th-century progressive politics in America -- unionism, the welfare state, public-safety regulations -- all failed the mill-hands, the largest class of industrial workers in the South. And the failure was spectacular, a once-in-a-generation trauma. The inability of New Deal liberalism to bring on board the Southern white working class was, it seems in retrospect, its ultimate undoing. Who was it that voted for Wallace, then Nixon, then Reagan? The depressing question points to the politically weak people for whom racism was the only bullet left in the chamber. We can't excuse their racism this way. But we can start to understand it.
The historian Robert Zieger has said that, although we are fond of thinking of the South as stuck in the past, when it comes to labor relations, Dixie is not where we have been. It’s where we are going. It is exaggerating, but not by too much, to say that the unraveling public safety state and the union-free country we know today emerged from the violence at Honea Path. This descent has been possible, in part, because we forgot about 1934. And we forgot about 1934 because the mill-hands did themselves. It was too painful to remember.
Read entire article at Salon
This is America, on Labor Day week in 2010. But in more ways than we like to notice, it feels like 1910. Somehow, the labor laws and basic protections that we once thought were part of the fabric of American democracy have been quietly excised. Of course, in the South, the postwar dream of free, prosperous, safe labor was never really there at all. The region has always been poorer. It's always had more rapacious bosses. And Southern workers (especially white ones) have always seemed mysteriously willing to take it, as far as often-condescending Northern liberals can tell.
It's the glaring question that sharp students always notice and want to ask about Southern politics: Why have poor white people, seemingly such obvious beneficiaries of progressive politics, never joined with their oppressed black neighbors to overthrow their outnumbered overlords?...
But, despite the temptation to liberal arrogance, it'd be a mistake to imagine that poor white Southerners are befuddled fools, with no understanding of their class identity and class interest. That's the view of someone who won't grant the courtesy of knowing some of the history of workers in the region. And there's no better week than this one to remember.
On September 6, 1934 -- 76 years ago Monday -- gunmen guarding Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina opened fire on a crowd of picketing textile workers. They killed seven, and wounded about 30. If the history of industrial labor in the South has been a stage tragedy, this was the climactic moment; the rest, for white workers at least, is denouement....
A strike wave broke out in 1929, but it was spontaneous and ill-organized. A series of bloody crackdowns extinguished the flashes of protest easily enough -- most famously at Gastonia, N.C., where a fairly fraudulent trial followed a massacre, and ended with communist organizers fleeing to Russia.
Hope was renewed, after the failure of this first series of uprisings, by the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Mill-hands viewed the new president as a near-spiritual personal savior. In huge numbers, they wrote letters to him, to Eleanor Roosevelt and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Wrote one, "I want you to know that I am for you in this most wonderful undertaking. I am a long ways from you in distance yet my faith is in you my heart with you and I am for you sink or swim." And they didn’t hesitate to tell him what they really thought. The mill bosses, wrote another, were "old slimy serpants crowling spiting their Poison fighting your program." In one now-famous letter, a mill-hand wrote to FDR, "You are the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch."...
Although they still felt the president himself was on their side, mill-hands understood that negotiations were over. After a summer of watching the textile companies flout their demands, Alabama workers decided they'd had it. The union, the United Textile Workers, was reluctant, but they walked off the job anyway in midsummer of 1934. Word spread up the Piedmont virtually overnight. Strikers piled into trucks and cars and raced from mill town to mill town to call mill-hands out to join them before the bosses could catch on. Since the strike was obviously happening one way or the other, the UTW -- a generally feeble and conservative union -- called a meeting, and endorsed the thing. On September 1, 1934, the general textile strike began. With participation between 200,000 and 400,000, from Maine to Alabama, it was the largest labor rebellion in American history to that point. The only prior uprising that exceeded it was the collapse of slavery during the Civil War.
But, while a general strike is an inspiring thing, it's not easy to pull off. Strikers quickly started finding themselves evicted from company houses, and homeless. As people who lived to hand-to-mouth, how could they last without paychecks? The UTW, broke and disorganized as it was already, was in no position to feed a few hundred thousand hungry people. The churches -- another common fallback -- were largely unfriendly. Worst of all, the federal government was nowhere to be seen, and state and local officials were getting their response ready....
...[A]t Honea Path, on the sixth day of the general strike, the inevitable massacre happened....
The basic tenets of 20th-century progressive politics in America -- unionism, the welfare state, public-safety regulations -- all failed the mill-hands, the largest class of industrial workers in the South. And the failure was spectacular, a once-in-a-generation trauma. The inability of New Deal liberalism to bring on board the Southern white working class was, it seems in retrospect, its ultimate undoing. Who was it that voted for Wallace, then Nixon, then Reagan? The depressing question points to the politically weak people for whom racism was the only bullet left in the chamber. We can't excuse their racism this way. But we can start to understand it.
The historian Robert Zieger has said that, although we are fond of thinking of the South as stuck in the past, when it comes to labor relations, Dixie is not where we have been. It’s where we are going. It is exaggerating, but not by too much, to say that the unraveling public safety state and the union-free country we know today emerged from the violence at Honea Path. This descent has been possible, in part, because we forgot about 1934. And we forgot about 1934 because the mill-hands did themselves. It was too painful to remember.