Piedmont Mill Workers and the Politics of History

Abstract

RARELY IS A HISTORIAN presented with such an opportunity to reflect on the deepest matters of historical method and analysis. These two books have a remarkable amount in common — subject, sources, origin in a collaborative project, and even a leftist politics rooted in a shared generational experience — and yet they offer profoundly different interpretations of the history of southern cotton mill workers and their world. The pedagogical allure is irresistible. Like a Family and Habits of Industry both originated in collective research for the project on Piedmont working people and regional industrialization organized in 1978 by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Allen Tullos were among the four project founders and shared from the outset a dual commitment to oral history as a method and to working-class history as a legitimate perspective on southern industrialization: those commitments remain evident in the finished books, both of which are exemplary models of politically-engaged scholarship. Although the geographical parameters of each study are drawn slightly differently (Tullos deals only with the Carolinas while Hall et ai, include parts of Tennessee), both retain the project's original focus on the region called the southern Piedmont. A wide strip extending from central Virginia through the central Carolinas and into northern Georgia and Alabama, the Piedmont emerged, by the early 20th century, as the industrial heartland of the South. The process by which that was accomplished—the transformation of an impoverished staple agricultural economy into the center of the South's and, eventually, the nation's textile industry