Exploiting the North-South Differential: Corporate Power, Southern Politics, and the Decline of Organized Labor after World War II

Abstract

In October 1945 the Alexander Smith and Sons Carpet Company, one of the leading car pet manufacturers the United States and the largest employer Yonkers, New York, marked its hundredth year. At a gala celebration sponsored by the Yonkers Chamber of Commerce, the company's first vice president, William F. C. Bill Ewing, shared his vision for the postwar future. Ewing called for greater federal support for business since, as he put it, in the last 10 or 12 years, Government has been deliberately unfriendly business. He also expressed concern about labor's demands; without federal tariff protection, he cautioned, high wages would prevent successful competition. Ewing re minded the audience that his great-grandfather, Alexander Smith, had relocated Yon kers eighty years earlier to escape deliberate sabotage and find a friendly atmosphere. He found it and prospered. Ewing alluded Smith's move Yonkers 1864 after his first factory, established 1845, burned down; the fire may have been set by employ ees incensed by Smith's introduction of the power loom. Ewing's remarks undoubtedly struck a chord with the city's business leaders, who understood that if postwar conditions proved undesirable, the company could move again.1 Five years later Ewing, now company president, followed his ancestor's lead. In August 1950 he and several Smith colleagues traveled Greenville, Mississippi, a small com munity nestled the heart of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where they met with civic leaders eager attract northern firms. The two groups quickly solidified arrangements construct a new carpet mill. By early 1953 Greenville Mills was up and running; by June 1954, it had 450 employees and company officials were ready abandon the northern operation. On June 24, during a strike by Yonkers members of the Textile Workers Union of America (twua), Smith managers announced that it had become economically im possible continue running the Yonkers plant. In the coming months, they closed the