Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World
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Piedmont Industrialization Project
The Southern Oral History Program began the project in the late 1970s and was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The goal of the project was to collect stories from men and women from agricultural backgrounds who worked in the early textile, tobacco, hosiery, and furniture factories. The project contains over 360 interviews, and only approximately 200 of the interviews were chosen to be included in the publication, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Interviews were conducted in Bynum, Burlington, Charlotte, Durham, and Catawba Counties in North Carolina and Elizabethton, Tennessee and Greenville in South Carolina. The collection is available for public use at Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.1
Background
Like a Family was co-edited by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher Daly. Published in 1987, the first edition was also available in cloth.2
Summary
Part One: Cotton Mill People
Chapter 1, "Everything We Had": This chapter discusses how economic change in the rural South initiated the migration of farmers and their families into mill towns. It also shows how Appalachian farmers became a resource for the developing mill towns because they were familiar with long hours, harsh work, and rural living conditions.
Chapter 2, "Public Work": Innovations in the Industrial Revolution and a cheap energy supply made it easy to establish mills. Mill owners hired entire families with children working as young as 12. They relied heavily on the cheap labor of children. This chapter also discusses the relationship between workers and supervisors. It also explains the hierarchy of labor positions and pay by age, race, and gender. In addition, "Public Work" discusses health concerns and social rituals in the mills.
Chapter 3, "From the Cradle to the Grave": Villages resembled rural communities. This chapter discusses the various types of authority that mill owners and managers imposed on their workers. Welfare work was an idea used by mill owners to make their village more homelike. Typically, mill owners hired a woman to create social clubs, offer advice and counseling, and to work at improving the general welfare of the mill town. Often, residents of the mill town were aware of these ploys by mill bosses, and it interfered with the level of care welfare workers could give because the townspeople were resistant to their presences. This chapter also explains dating and marriage and gender roles in the village. This chapter ends with a discussion on healers, music, and evangelical religion.
Part Two: Air and Promises
Chapter 4, "Hard Rules": This chapter discusses the labor shortage in cotton mills during World War I due to workers finding employment in munitions and automobile plants as well as to military recruitment. Mill workers started to receive better pay. "Hard Rules" covers mill worker walkouts and strikes that occurred at the Swift Spinning Mills in Columbus Georgia and the Highland Park Mill in Charlotte, as well as others that occurred in Southern mills. Organization was welcomed by mill workers in the Piedmont. The cotton mill industry took a downturn in 1921. Wages were cut and many workers went on short time. Mill workers who went on strike during this period failed. The United Textiles Workers union had a severe lack of funds due to strikes in New England. It could no longer support workers who were on strike. However, the UTW still called a strike on June 21, 1921 at the Chadwick-Hoskins and Highland Park mills in Charlotte and the Cannon Mills in Concord and Kannapolis. The strike was ultimately a failure for the workers. The cotton mill industry also faced other challenges such as boll weevil infestations, and declining cotton prices. Hard times also discusses the agricultural depression that followed in the 1920s. This chapter also covers the wave of strikes that occurred in 1929 starting in Elizabethton, Tennessee.
Chapter 5, "Turn Your Radio On": This chapter covers the end of the cultural isolation of people living in mill towns. Not only were residents listening to radio and reading magazines, but they also began to influence popular culture. The sounds of "hillbilly" music was generated on the radio and very popular. Younger mill workers were purchasing Model T’s and the mill owners of the Piedmont were expanding their production by adding dying and finishing plants to their mills. This chapter also discusses members of the Love family of Gaston County, North Carolina who owned Burlington Mills. The conditions of Burlington Mills and Piedmont Heights are also discussed in this chapter. Another prominent figure in this chapter is George Washington Swinney, a Baptist preacher who sought to save the sinners of Piedmont Heights.
Chapter 6, "A Multitude of Sins": The chapter covers the General Strike of the 1930s and the events that led to it. FDR created the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933. The NIRA created the National Recovery Agency. Under the NRA employers were able to increase profits by controlling production, hours, and wages. The Textile Code was also created under the NRA. It provided for a $12/week minimum wage, 40 hour work week, and the prohibition of child labor. Mill owners worked around the NRA codes by “stretching out” workloads.
Quotations
"I never did like to go to a wedding. I don't know; it was always sad to me, and I don't like to go. I've heard several people speak that way about it; said it was said. It was more like a funeral to them than anything else." Louise Jones3
"I daydreamed when I was young. Before I was married, I would daydream about who I was going to marry. I was going to marry somebody that was rich so that I wouldn't have to work; I could have a nice home and beautiful clothes. Then, after I was married, I still had daydreams. And after I had my children, I still had daydreams. I dreamed of wanting a better life for them. It's been a good life, but I'd like for them to not have to work in the mills, to live in better sections of town, to have nicer homes, more conveniences, nicer cars, nicer everything than we had. Dreams like that." Eva Hopkins4
"It was just before World War II, and I dreamed that the Germans had built a wire fence around the whole world, and everybody was in that fence. And I was just hollering, 'The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!' And they got me. And they carried me up in an old barn and put a white uniform on me. And they was going to shave my head. They'd shave your hair off, and then they'd throw you over in [a] lion pit, if you didn't come over and do what they you to do and join the union. Then I says, 'Why are you all doing this to me? I never joined a union in my like, and I never had no part of it.' and one of the girls says, 'Could you proove that?' And she opened a door and said, 'You see that road out there? There's a gang of men with knives going this way, swords going that way, and if you can walk down that line and not get killed, I'll let you out of here.' Well, I didn't know how in the world I'd do it, but I prayed and I prayed. And said, 'Lord go with me.' And I went down that line, and I was not harmed. And I got out, I was the only person out." Bessie Buchanan5
Discussion Topics
With any historical book, it is important for the reader to understand and acknowledge the audience of the book. Like A Family was written for the general public, and the authors write that "we hoped to reach an audience that makes history but seldom reads it."6 Writing for a non-academic audience, the authors acknowledge that personal stories can have an impact on a variety of readers.
With the rise of social history, historians took a closer look at the working class on their own terms. What allows Like a Family to stand out from other studies is the attention given to the common mill worker and their everyday experience. As the reader takes in the stories of mill hands and townspeople, it becomes clear that a rich culture with strong community bonds existed in the mill towns. With its focus on the working class, Like a Family also makes a significant contribution to the history of labor in the United States, and specifically in the South. However, there is very little attention given to tying the work in Like a Family to the larger study of labor and the working class.
It is significant to note what narrators are missing from the text. Displaced workers, workers that moved to a different area, and workers that were seriously injured in the workplace do not have a major voice in this text. Although some individuals from management positions are included, their voices are not heard in this text. The authors note that there is a notable silence on the subject of the strike in the interviews that were collected. The silence is attributed both to the passage of time as well as a fear of unemployment. Workers were reluctant to mention the union or labor rights in light of the massive layoffs that resulted from such talk in 1934. The authors of Like a Family make heavy use of documents to investigate the strike, which had previously been left in the dark.
Awards
- 1988 Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association
- 1988 Philip Taft Labor History Award from the New York School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University
- 1988 Merle Carti History Award in American Social History (co-winner) from the Organization of American Historians
- Honorable Mention for the 1988 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize from the American Studies Association7
References
(1) "Overview."Like a Family: The Making of a southern Cotton Mill World.www.ibiblio.net/sohp/laf/overview.html.(accessed May 3, 2009).
(2) Ibid.
(3) Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., ed, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 159.
(4) Ibid., 163.
(5) Ibid., 349.
(6) Ibid., xiii.
(7) "Overview."
