The textile workers' strike of 1934 was the largest strike in the labor history of the United States at the time, involving 400,000

textile Textile is an umbrella term that includes various fiber-based materials, including fibers, yarns, filaments, threads, different fabric types, etc. At first, the word "textiles" only referred to woven fabrics. However, weaving is not t ...

workers from

New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian province ...

, the Mid-Atlantic states and the

U.S. Southern states The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, or simply the South) is a geographic and cultural List of regions of the United States#Official regions of the United Stat ...

, lasting twenty-two days.

The background to the strike

The textile industry, once concentrated in New England with outposts in

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state in the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York (state), New York; on the ea ...

and

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, had started moving South in the 1880s. By 1933 Southern mills produced more than seventy percent of cotton and woolen textiles in more modern mills, drawing on the pool of dispossessed farmers and laborers willing to work for roughly forty percent less than their Northern counterparts. As was the rest of economic life, the textile industry was strictly segregated and drew only from white workers in the Piedmont. Until 1965, when passage of the Civil Rights Act broke the color line in hiring, less than 2% of textile workers were African American. Throughout the 1920s, however, the mills faced an intractable problem of

overproduction In economics, overproduction, oversupply, excess of supply or glut refers to excess of supply over demand of products being offered to the market. This leads to lower prices and/or unsold goods along with the possibility of unemployment. The de ...

, as the wartime boom for cotton goods ended, while foreign competition cut into their markets. Although manufacturers tried to reduce the oversupply by forming industry associations to regulate competition, their favored solution to the crisis was to squeeze more work out of their employees through what workers called the "stretch-out": speeding up production by increasing the number of looms assigned to each factory hand, limiting break times, paying workers by piece rates, and increasing the number of supervisors to keep workers from slowing down, talking or leaving work. The stretch-out sparked hundreds of strikes throughout the Southeast: by one count, there were more than eighty strikes in South Carolina in 1929 alone. While most of them were short-lived, these strikes were almost all spontaneous walkouts, without any union – or other – leadership. That year also saw the massive strikes that began in

Gastonia, North Carolina Gastonia is the largest city in and county seat of Gaston County, North Carolina, United States. It is the second-largest satellite city of the Charlotte area, behind Concord. The population was 80,411 at the 2020 census, up from 71,741 in 2 ...

, and

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, which were violently suppressed by local police and vigilantes. Here again, workers were often more militant than their

trade union A trade union (labor union in American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers intent on "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment", ch. I such as attaining better wages and benefits (s ...

leadership: to take one striking example, the workers at the Loray Mill in Gastonia walked out under the leadership of the

communist Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...

-led National Textile Workers Union. The Communist Party founded the NTWU in its short-lived attempt to create revolutionary unions. In the meantime, the Great Depression made matters worse. The economic collapse drove a number of New England and Mid-Atlantic manufacturers into bankruptcy, while those employers who survived laid off workers and increased the amount and pace of work for their employees even further. Textile workers across the region, from worsted workers in

Lawrence, Massachusetts Lawrence is a city located in Essex County, Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachuset ...

and silk weavers in

Paterson, New Jersey Paterson ( ) is the largest city in and the county seat of Passaic County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.Greenville, South Carolina, engaged in hundreds of isolated strikes, even though there were thousands of unemployed workers desperate to take their places.

Rising hopes under the New Deal

The election of

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...

and the passage of the

National Industrial Recovery Act The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) was a US labor law and consumer law passed by the 73rd US Congress to authorize the president to regulate industry for fair wages and prices that would stimulate economic recovery. It also ...

(NIRA) appeared to change things. The NIRA, which Roosevelt signed in June 1933, called for cooperation among business, labor and government and established the

National Recovery Administration The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was a prime agency established by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in 1933. The goal of the administration was to eliminate " cut throat competition" by bringing industry, labor, and governm ...

(NRA). It was to oversee the creation of codes of conduct for particular industries that would reduce overproduction, raise wages, control hours of work, guarantee the rights of workers to form unions, and stimulate an economic recovery. The NIRA rarely, if ever, lived up to its promises: employers usually dominated the panels that created these codes, which often offered far less than what workers and their unions demanded, and the NIRA and the codes themselves were toothless, since the Act did not provide any effective means to enforce the standards. Even so, the promise of the right to join a union had an electrifying effect on textile workers: the United Textile Workers (UTW), which had no more than 15,000 members in February, 1933, grew to 250,000 members by June, 1934, of whom roughly half were cotton mill workers. Textile workers also put tremendous faith in the NIRA to bring an end to the stretch-out, or at least temper its worst features. As one union organizer said, textile workers in the South saw the NIRA as something that "God has sent to them." The NIRA quickly promulgated a code for the cotton industry regulating workers' hours and establishing a minimum wage; it also established a committee to study the problem of workloads. In the meantime, however, the employers responded to the new minimum wages by increasing the pace of work. When the labor board set a forty-hour work week, mill owners required the same amount of work in those forty hours as they had in the previous fifty- to sixty-hour week. By August 1934, workers had filed nearly 4,000 complaints to the labor board protesting "code chiseling" by their employers; the board found in favor of only one worker. Union supporters often lost their jobs and found themselves

blacklist Blacklisting is the action of a group or authority compiling a blacklist (or black list) of people, countries or other entities to be avoided or distrusted as being deemed unacceptable to those making the list. If someone is on a blacklist, ...

ed throughout the industry. Workers, both north and south, wrote thousands of letters to the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, D.C., NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. preside ...

, the Department of Labor, the NRA, and

Eleanor Roosevelt Anna Eleanor Roosevelt () (October 11, 1884November 7, 1962) was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four ...

asking for them to intervene. In what proved to be a dry run of the larger strike to follow, cotton mill workers in

South Carolina )'' Animis opibusque parati'' ( for, , Latin, Prepared in mind and resources, links=no) , anthem = "Carolina";" South Carolina On My Mind" , Former = Province of South Carolina , seat = Columbia , LargestCity = Charleston , LargestMetro = G ...

's Horse Creek Valley struck to force employers to live up to the code, only to face special deputies, highway patrolmen and a machine-gun unit of the National Guard sent to keep the mills open. When the NIRA's special board came to Horse Creek, it did not respond to the workers' complaints, but urged them to return to work. When they attempted to do so, the mill owners not only refused to allow the workers back, but evicted them from company housing. The NIRA took no action to stop the employers from violating the codes.

First steps toward a national strike

When the mill owners made the cotton mill employees' hours larger still further – with the blessing of the NRA – without raising their hourly wage rates in May, 1934, the UTW threatened a national strike. This talk was largely bluster; the union had made no preparations for a strike that size. When the NRA promised to give the UTW a seat on the board, balanced by the addition of another industry representative, the UTW canceled the planned strike. While the UTW called off its plans for a strike, local leaders thought differently. The UTW locals in the northern part of

Alabama (We dare defend our rights) , anthem = " Alabama" , image_map = Alabama in United States.svg , seat = Montgomery , LargestCity = Huntsville , LargestCounty = Baldwin County , LargestMetro = Greater Birmingham , area_total_km2 = 135,7 ...

launched a strike that began on July 18 in Huntsville, then spread to

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, Anniston,

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, and

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the We ...

. While the strike was popular, it was also ineffective: many employers welcomed it as a means of cutting their expenses, since they had warehouses full of unsold goods. In Columbus, Georgia, a city on the Alabama border, the Georgia Webbing and Tape Company had been on strike since July. On August 10, 1934 Reuben Sanders was killed in a scuffle between strikebreakers and strikers. "Eight thousand people viewed Sander's body as it lay in state at the Central Textile Hall in the heart of the city on Sunday, August 12." The UTW called a special convention in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

on Monday, August 13, 1934 to address the crisis. The UTW drew up a list of demands for the industry as a whole: a thirty-hour week, minimum wages ranging from $13.00 to $30.00 a week, elimination of the stretch-out, union recognition, and reinstatement of workers fired for their union activities. The delegates, especially those from the southern states, voted overwhelmingly to strike the cotton mills on September 1, 1934 if these demands were not met. They planned to bring out the woolen, silk and rayon workers at a date to be set later. Mill owners had seen the strike threat as more empty talk from the union. The White House took a largely "hands off" attitude, leaving it to the first

National Labor Relations Board The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is an independent agency of the federal government of the United States with responsibilities for enforcing U.S. labor law in relation to collective bargaining and unfair labor practices. Under the Nati ...

to set up a meeting of the parties. The employers refused to meet with the union.

The strike begins

The strike swept through Southern

cotton mill A cotton mill is a building that houses spinning (textiles), spinning or weaving machinery for the production of yarn or cloth from cotton, an important product during the Industrial Revolution in the development of the factory system. Althou ...

s, outpacing the union organizers and employing "flying squadrons" which traveled by truck and on foot from mill to mill, calling the workers out. In Gastonia, where authorities had violently suppressed a strike led by the National Textile Workers Union in 1929, an estimated 5,000 people marched in the September 3rd

Labor Day Labor Day is a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the first Monday in September to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements of the United ...

parade. The next day union organizers estimated that 20,000 out of the 25,000 textile workers in the county were out on strike. It is not clear whether the UTW expected to have this much success so easily and so quickly in the South; it had only shallow roots and few regular organizers in that region. But Southern textile workers had a good deal of experience in confronting management, both by impromptu strikes and other means, and a deep well of bitterness against their employers. Some workers converted their experience into a nearly messianic belief in the power of unionism to take them out of bondage. One labor official made the connection in Biblical terms: "The first strike on record was the strike in which Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. They too struck against intolerable conditions". Textile workers in the North went out on strike in great numbers as well, although they were spread more evenly across different industries and had more diverse grievances than the Southern cotton mill workers. Within a week, almost 400,000 textile workers nationwide had left their jobs and the textile industry was shut down. Music also played an important role in the strike as radio stations looking for an audience located themselves near mill stations spreading information to workers and giving them a better sense of community. The stations would mainly play music that was popular and well known among the workers.

Reaction from the authorities

The mill owners were initially taken by surprise by the scope of the strike. They immediately took the position that these flying squadrons were, in fact, coercing their employees to go out on strike. Governor

Blackwood Blackwood may refer to: Botany * African blackwood ('' Dalbergia melanoxylon''), a timber tree of Africa * African blackwood (''Erythrophleum africanum''), ('' Peltophorum africanum'') also Rhodesian blackwood, trees from Africa * Australian bla ...

took up this theme, announcing that he would deputize the state's "mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen" to maintain order, then called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills. Governor Ehringhaus of

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia a ...

followed suit on September 5. Millowners persuaded local authorities throughout the

Piedmont it, Piemontese , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = , demographics1_info1 = , demographics1_title2 ...

to augment their forces by swearing in special deputies, often their own employees or local residents opposed to the strike; in other cases they simply hired private guards to police the areas around the plant. Violence between guards and picketers broke out almost immediately. The major known incidents include: * On September 2, a picketer and mill guard died in a shootout in Trion, Georgia * On September 2, guards killed two picketers in

Augusta, Georgia Augusta ( ), officially Augusta–Richmond County, is a consolidated city-county on the central eastern border of the U.S. state of Georgia. The city lies across the Savannah River from South Carolina at the head of its navigable portion. Georg ...

* On September 3, the Saylesville Massacre was committed by the Rhode Island State Guard. Four picketers were killed and 132 injured. * On September 6, the

Chiquola Mill Massacre The Chiquola Mill Massacre, also known locally as Bloody Thursday, was the violent dispersal of a picket line of strike action, striking workers outside the Chiquola cotton mill, textile mill in Honea Path, South Carolina. The strike was part ...

saw seven picketers killed and thirty others wounded as they fled the picketline ( Honea Path, South Carolina) Authorities ordered out the National Guard elsewhere in the second week of the strike. Governor

Green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 Nanometre, nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by ...

sent the Guard to Saylesville, Rhode Island after several thousand strikers and sympathizers trapped several hundred

strikebreakers A strikebreaker (sometimes called a scab, blackleg, or knobstick) is a person who works despite a strike. Strikebreakers are usually individuals who were not employed by the company before the trade union dispute but hired after or during the st ...

in a factory. Governor Green declared martial law in the area on September 11, after picketers armed with rocks, flowerpots and broken headstones from a nearby cemetery battled troops armed with machine guns, in a 36-hour incident that resembled a civic insurrection. Casualty figures vary. A granite marker erected at one of the battle sites names four workers who died in the Saylesville conflict. Another picketer was shot to death the following day, about five miles away in

Woonsocket, Rhode Island Woonsocket ( ), is a city in Providence County, Rhode Island, United States. The population was 43,240 at the 2020 census, making it the sixth largest city in the state. Being Rhode Island's northernmost city, Woonsocket lies directly south of ...

, when guardsmen fired into the crowd attempting to storm the Woonsocket Rayon Plant. Governor Green then asked the federal government to send federal troops; the Roosevelt administration ignored the request.

Maine Maine () is a U.S. state, state in the New England and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Provinces and territories of Canad ...

deployed the Guard in a more tactical manner, sending them to Augusta and Lewiston to discourage wavering employees from joining the strike. That tactic did not work, however, everywhere: workers at Pepperell Mills' plant in

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and York Manufacturing's plant in Saco went out even though the guard was sent to prevent the arrival of flying squadrons rumored to be coming from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Governor

Wilbur L. Cross Wilbur Lucius Cross (April 10, 1862 – October 5, 1948) was an American literary critic who served as the 71st governor of Connecticut from 1931 to 1939. Biography Born in 1862 in Mansfield, Connecticut, Cross attended Natchaug School in Wil ...

Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its cap ...

also mobilized the Guard, but did not declare martial law. Instead the state labor commissioner met with picketers during the second week of the strike and brought about a reduction in tensions by urging strikers to respect the law and not hurl epithets at strikebreakers. Things were different in

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to t ...

, where Governor

Eugene Talmadge Eugene Talmadge (September 23, 1884 – December 21, 1946) was an attorney and American politician who served three terms as the 67th governor of Georgia, from 1933 to 1937, and then again from 1941 to 1943. Elected to a fourth term in November ...

declared martial law in the third week of the strike and directed the National Guard to arrest all picketers throughout the state, holding them in a former

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

prisoner of war A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold prisoners of ...

camp for trial by a military tribunal. While the state only interred a hundred or so picketers, the show of force effectively ended picketing throughout most of the state.

End of the strike

The strike was, in fact, already falling apart, particularly in the South, where local government refused to provide any relief assistance to strikers and there were few sympathetic churches or unions to provide support. Although the union had pledged before the walkout began to feed strikers, it was wholly unable to fulfill this promise. While roughly half of the textile workers in North and South Carolina and roughly three fourths in Georgia were on strike at this point, with similar figures in

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

and

Rhode Island Rhode Island (, like ''road'') is a state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is the smallest U.S. state by area and the seventh-least populous, with slightly fewer than 1.1 million residents as of 2020, but i ...

, workers had started to drift back to work and struck plants were reopening, if with only skeleton crews. At that point the mediation board that Roosevelt had appointed in the first week of the strike issued its report. As was typical of federal commissions of this era, the board temporized, urging further studies of the economic plight of the employers and the effects of the stretch-out on their employees. It urged the President to create a new Textile Labor Relations Board to hear workers' complaints and urged employers not to discriminate against strikers. President Roosevelt announced his support for the report, then urged employees to return to work and the manufacturers to accept the commission's recommendations. The UTW took the opportunity to declare victory and held a number of parades to celebrate the end of the strike. In fact, the strike was a total defeat for the union, particularly in the South. The union had not forced the mill owners to recognize it or obtained any of its economic demands. The employers refused, moreover, to reinstate strikers throughout the South, while the Cotton Textile National Industrial Relations Board never ceded any authority to any other board. Thousands of strikers never returned to work in the mills.

Aftermath

In March 1935, approximately 2,000 textile workers at Callaway Mills went on strike in LaGrange, Georgia, and martial law was declared in the city. At least one striker was killed by National Guardsmen as the soldiers evicted families from mill-owned homes. Some consider the 1935 strike in LaGrange to be the last throes of the General Textile Strike. Ironically, President Roosevelt was a friend and frequent visitor of Cason Callaway, President of Callaway Mills at the time. The strike represented the high point for union hopes of organizing textile workers in the South for the next several decades. When the

CIO CIO may refer to: Organizations * Central Imagery Office, a predecessor of the American National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency * Central Intelligence Office, the national intelligence agency of the former Republic of Vietnam * Central Intellige ...

formed the Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC) three years later, TWOC focused on northern manufacturers outside the cotton industry. TWOC's successor, the

Textile Workers Union of America The Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) was an industrial union of textile workers established through the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1939 and merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to become the Amalgamated Cl ...

, faced similar problems organizing in the South; the CIO's postwar organizing drive in the South fell apart chiefly because of its inability to organize textile workers there. The union might have escaped this disaster if it had characterized the strike as a first step, rather than attempting to pass it off as a victory. That, however, would have required that the union also devote the resources necessary to follow up with renewed, systematic organizing efforts in the immediate aftermath of the strike, instead of concerning itself with the futile effort to win reinstatement for discharged strikers through the Textile Labor Board. The memory of blacklisting and defeat soured many Southern textile workers on unions for decades. The 1934 defeat was less cataclysmic in the North, in that the strike was in fact, a number of separate events, commencing at different times in separate industries and in furtherance of local goals. Northern employers were not as ruthless in blacklisting workers and the TWOC made some headway in organizing these plants in the years that followed. Those victories were impermanent, however, as much of northern industry either went South or went bankrupt in the years that followed. Anti-union sentiment in the South kept wages low for decades, but also acted as a catalyst for development later when industries moved there from the North and Midwest because of lower costs. Employers resisted integrating

textile mill Textile Manufacturing or Textile Engineering is a major industry. It is largely based on the conversion of fibre into yarn, then yarn into fabric. These are then dyed or printed, fabricated into cloth which is then converted into useful go ...

s; when they were forced to do so by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, researchers found that African Americans were accepted overall by other employees, although they continued to face discrimination in job training and advancement. By the time this occurred, many jobs in the textile industry were already moving overseas, a trend that accelerated in the 1980s.Thomas Lyons, "Review of Timothy Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980." EH.Net Economic History Services, Jun 18 199

accessed 28 Mar 2008

References

External links

South Carolina Encyclopedia

Southern Labor Archives
at

Georgia State University Georgia State University (Georgia State, State, or GSU) is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1913, it is one of the University System of Georgia's four research universities. It is also the largest institution of hig ...

Southern Workers and the Search for Community
by

G. C. Waldrep III G is the seventh letter of the Latin alphabet. G may also refer to: Places * Gabon, international license plate code G * Glasgow, UK postal code G * Eastern Quebec, Canadian postal prefix G * Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia, g ...

. Partial text of a history of the strike in Spartanburg, SC.
The Uprising of '34
A Film by George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock
Impact of The Uprising Of ’34
Jumpcut magazine article on production and distribution of documentary
Uprising of '34 Collection
from Georgia State University
Georgia State University Lesson Plan on The Uprising Of ’34

"Treated Like Slaves": Textile Workers Write to Washington in the 1930s and 1940s

b

writing in ''Class Struggle Official Organ of the Communist League of Struggle (Adhering to the International Left Opposition)'' Vol. 4 #9/10. October 1934
The Uprising of '34
A

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of ed ...

Point of View documentary. {{Authority control 1934 labor disputes and strikes 1934 in the United States United Textile Workers of America Textile and clothing labor disputes in the United States Labor disputes in Rhode Island Labor disputes in South Carolina Labor disputes in North Carolina Labor disputes in Georgia (U.S. state)