In the spring of 1929, 3,500 textile operators at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, went on strike against the company. Under the leadership of Fred Beale, the National Textile Workers Union, a union allied with the Communist Party, had been organizing in Gastonia for months. Low wages, the stretch-out system of assigning looms to workers, and long hours were among the workers’ chief grievances. On April 1, workers from both shifts walked out, demanding employers meet their demands and give the union recognition. They were met with a well-organized resistance. Local employers formed a Committee of One Hundred to break the strike, and the governor of the state sent in the National Guard to keep the mill open.
Within weeks of the walkout, thousands of workers in the Piedmont South joined the Gastonia workers in massive strikes in protest against employer decisions to increase their workload and lower wages. Impoverished not simply by a low-wage economy but also by a decade of recession in the textile industry, mill workers had been silent when employers speeded up the machines at which they worked. By 1929, however, the industry was showing some signs of revival. With that upturn, workers organized throughout the Piedmont region in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. While the campaign benefited from outside funding and leadership, some of its most visible labor activists were long-term employees with roots in local communities.
In Gastonia, labor violence escalated. Police and National Guardsmen harassed those walking the picket line, and a local crowd destroyed the union office. Employers then ordered the workers evicted from company housing. In an exchange of gunfire one night, the local chief of police was killed. Sixteen strikers and leaders, including Beale, were charged with the murder. Seven were eventually convicted of second-degree murder. They fled to the Soviet Union while out on bail. Locally, one worker, Ella Mae Wiggins, had caught the attention of the press with her songs written from her mill experience, such as the “Mill Mother’s Lament.” Wiggins became another victim of the violence. She was killed on September 14, when the car she was riding in was ambushed on the way to a strike meeting. Although five Loray Mill employees were charged, no one was convicted of her murder.
The fierceness of conflict between local workers and local police caught the attention of labor reformers nationwide. Reporters from labor and radical newspapers and organizers, some of whom belonged to the Communist Party, went south to support the strike. Newspaper reporters told the powerful story of how textile workers, long viewed as passive, stood up to employers. The strike also made it into radical literature as the subject of six novels, including Mary Heaton Vorse’s Strike! (1930) and Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart (1932). Still, the workers fought an uphill battle. Evictions from mill housing and lack of resources made it difficult for strikers to sustain the conflict. Although the conflict lasted throughout the summer, in Gastonia, as throughout the region, the strike was lost.
Further reading: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, et al., Like a Family: The Making of the Southern Cotton Textile Mill
World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); John Salmond, Gastonia, 1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
World History
