Mill Villages Research Articles

A Natural-Born Linthead

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In my mother's picture box was an old black and white photograph of her and my daddy as a smiling, young Alabama working-class couple, wearing their Sunday best. They were standing across from village kindergarten, at south end of Fairfax Mill where they both worked, along with thousands of other employees. The cotton mill, a blue-paned, three-story, red-brick monolith, rose grand and mighty in background, and they seemed small and shy before it; and incredibly young and happy. I am sure many Chattahoochee Valley families have a similar photograph in their family albums; my parents' story was not uncommon. It was repeated by countless other young people in first half of last century. They had their pictures made in front of mills to commemorate their arrival in a strange land and a new beginning--in my parents' case a beginning that would lead to four generations of my family working in West Point Manufacturing textile plants. Like many Valleyans, my parents grew up in rural Randolph County, Alabama, and joined a steady migration of friends and relatives to what everybody simply knew as the which lay hard against Georgia line in eastern Alabama, seeking jobs and a better life, and they found it. They left backwoods farms, that were basically unchanged since 1800s, for a mill house with electric lights, running water, coal fireplaces, and an inside toilet--they never had it so good. They might as well have been on another planet. Riverdale and Langdale were company's first mills, starting production in 1866, powered by water wheels turned by Chattahoochee River. The founders of what was to become West Point Manufacturing were area planters, merchants, and former Confederate soldiers who started two cotton mills with money scavenged from smoke and rubble of Civil War. One of mightiest textile manufacturing enterprises in history of world began as much with desperation as with hope; as it turned out, Providence smiled on their bold venture. By early 1900s, West Point Manufacturing owned five Alabama mill villages in Chattahoochee Valley. Each of villages was built around its own mill, starting with Lanett at northern end, and then, in descending order, Shawmut, Langdale, Fairfax, and Riverdale. The mills were electrified and no longer depended on waterwheels for power. The boundaries between each village were amorphous, with one blending into other, but each mill village possessed a strong self-identity that fueled fierce rivalries, mainly concerning their respective athletic teams. Their baseball teams, particularly, were revered and supported with a near religious fervor. (In later years, Valley and Lanett High Schools would produce a steady supply of football players for college and professional ranks.) Of such intensity were animosities that a wedding between residents of different villages was seen as a mixed marriage. Each West Point Manufacturing Company mill village was a self-contained universe of employee housing, churches, schools, grocery and drug stores, cafes, barber shops, beauty parlors, shoe repair shops, filling stations, dry cleaners, doctors, including chiropractors, and picture shows. A person could live without ever setting foot off mill village, if so inclined. (Indeed, it was rumored that only way some mill village folk could find West Point, Georgia, mill company headquarters a few miles away across state line, was to follow Chattahoochee Valley Railroad tracks out of town.) The only item not easily obtainable was alcohol. Because of teetotalers who ran Valley, strong spirits were prohibited. But they were available, if you knew right person--and most people knew that person, and several more just like him. It was a time and a place that we shall never see again, and it was not by any means a bad place. …

Images of America: Bemiston , and: Images of America: Marion County (review)

the alabama review 244 an analysis of the science; reserve works less well, in relative terms, when revisiting the litigation, the official apology by the Clinton administration , and the cultural legacy of the Tuskegee syphilis study. And no treatment of the Tuskegee study could be complete without an examination of its cultural effects, because, as Reverby notes, it “never stayed just as a memory” (p. 187). Given how dramatic and hotly contested those effects were, the approach here inadvertently dulls them. One suspects that this was done out of a sense of fairness and a desire to avoid the white‑hot debates that the Tuskegee syphilis study cannot help but engender. Still, that academic detachment, and the careful “academic” language that is employed, seem to rob Reverby’s work of some of its potential power. R. Volney Riser University of West Alabama Images of America: Bemiston. By Bobbye Baker Trammell. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. 127 pp. $21.99. ISBN 978-0-7385-6803-4. Images of America: Marion County. By the Marion County Historical Society with Barbara Woolbright Carruth. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. 127 pp. $21.99. ISBN 978-0-7385-6849-2. Arcadia Publishing has produced thousands of books in its Images of America series. They are to be found in any bookstore, large and small, in America. All are the same size, have sepia-toned covers, are heavily illustrated , and are written by local authors. Indeed these books are more like scrapbooks telling the stories of villages, towns, cities, and counties. The authors are often amateur, not academic, historians, and draw the old photographs they use from the local historical society, friends, and neighbors. Some of the pictures are clearer than others, occasionally the captions leave something to be desired, but the story comes through. These books are prepared for local and regional audiences, and, indeed, most academic historians turn their noses up at them, dismissing them out of hand. After all, such books do not explore themes of gender inequality , or racial discrimination, or systematic economic exploitation. They are not meant to be controversial, but to celebrate communities which often had their glory years—if they had them at all—generations ago. Many also endeavor to save the story of people and places that now exist largely in old pictures, and in the memories of old men and women. Academic historians are unlikely to immerse themselves in the July 2011 245 story of a cotton mill town such as Bemiston, or Marion County, a hill country county where most people have made a marginal living since it was founded early in the nineteenth century. Both are remote from the comforts of a major research library, from which their stories could not be told, anyway. No, if you want to learn about places like Bemiston or Marion County you must go there and stay a while until the people come to trust your motives and intentions and share their treasures with you. When you have done all that, do not expect a warm reception from your colleagues on the tenure and promotion committee. They may have a point, but the result is that the authors of such books, and places like Bemiston and Marion County, must fend for themselves. Well, how do they do? Actually quite well. Both books work in preserving the story of the people, businesses, wars, and workplaces that were at the heart of these communities. Marion County presents a more difficult task, as it was founded in 1818, and the 127-page limit presents challenges for the author. Some of the pictures are not very sharp, almost all are posed, and there are periods of time that are simply not illustrated. Still, Carruth conveys the truth that her people had a history and presents it enthusiastically. Trammell, on the other hand, has a chronologically easier time, as Bemiston began in the late 1920s as a cotton mill village. The mill closed in 1979, but the town endures as an outlying suburb of Talladega. Many of the residents or their parents and grandparents worked in the mill making cotton bags. The village is small, compact, and quietly appealing. The Bemis brothers treated the...

Riders of the Imagination: George Monteiro on Stephen Crane Studies

Riders of the ImaginationGeorge Monteiro on Stephen Crane Studies Robert M. Dowling (bio) Scholar and poet George Monteiro, Professor Emeritus of English and of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, was first introduced to Stephen Crane as a subject in 1954 while studying for his master’s degree at Columbia University. “I can recall sitting, one gray autumn afternoon, in Columbia University’s Butler Library,” Monteiro told me, “reading John Berryman’s book on Crane, not because it was assigned in any of my courses, but because of my interest in Ernest Hemingway,” who had cited Crane as one of his most important forerunners.1 Since that first afternoon in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan devouring Berryman’s foundational 1950 biography Stephen Crane, Monteiro has authored over sixty articles, notes, and reviews directly pertaining to Crane—an average of more than one a year for over half a century—along with scores of other articles, monographs, translations, and edited collections in English and Portuguese on writers as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Luís Vaz de Camões, and Fernando Pessoa. Monteiro’s prodigious body of Crane scholarship culminated in Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage (2000) and offered an ideal foundation for the edited volume, Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews (2009). No urban dweller by background, Monteiro was born and raised in the small village of Valley Falls in the township of Cumberland, Rhode Island. Alice R. Clemente, a close friend of his since elementary school, describes their hometown as “one of those nineteenth/early twentieth-century mill villages nestled on the banks of the Blackstone River in a region historians now call ‘the cradle of American industry’” (148). New York City was thus a revelation for the 22-year-old Portuguese-New Englander and recent Brown University graduate, who notes that “New York was definable—as [End Page 37] it might still be, though more ironically—as ‘accessibility to experience’ (Marianne Moore’s words).” “Having come from a small university,” he continues, “I found Columbia enormous, especially by the day’s standards. All day long and well into the evening its twenty-five thousand students (it seemed) crossed and criss-crossed the heart of the campus at West 116th street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.” Perhaps most important for the emergent scholar, Monteiro’s English professors at Columbia loomed large as the undisputed titans of twentieth-century literary criticism. “All I had to do was pay attention and I could legitimately consider myself to be a (minor) party to big literary doings. In Philosophy Hall new students paused to read the names on the office doors.” The “names” in question included F. W. Dupee, William York Tindall, Eric Bentley, Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, Lewis Leary, Suzanne K. Nobbe, Roger Sherman Loomis, and Marjorie Hope Nicholson (then head of the English Department), among others. Monteiro never took a class with Lionel Trilling, the department’s brightest star, but Trilling’s influence on him has always been immense: “When I found it difficult to begin writing a paper, I would then (and for years afterwards) read in The Liberal Imagination on any topic whatsoever until I felt inspired enough to go back to my own writing, usually on a topic foreign to Trilling’s concerns” (“Notes on Columbia”). Indeed, in 1955 Monteiro was writing his thesis, under the direction of Daniel G. Hoffman, on a topic no doubt “foreign to Trilling’s concerns,” Monteiro adds, entitled “Sports in the Writings of Ernest Hemingway.” Hoffman, now a legendary poet and critic, was then a Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation examining Crane’s poetry, a study based largely on new acquisitions at Columbia’s library that he soon after expanded into his seminal book The Poetry of Stephen Crane (1957). Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library had just obtained, auspiciously for Monteiro and Hoffman, a raft of primary Crane material that still stands, along with collections at Syracuse University and the University of Virginia, as one of the most important repositories for Crane scholarship. After reading Berryman’s biography, Monteiro...

Company magazines and the creation of industrial cooperation: A case study from the Southern textile industry, 1880–1940

Much has been written about welfare capitalism or industrial paternalism in American industry. Steel, machinery, coal and rubber are only a few of the industries that experimented with offering welfare benefits to employees in exchange for worker loyalty and co-operation.The most comprehensive examples of industrial paternalism occurred in the Southern textile industry, and this article explores the extent of paternalistic relations in the context of a single, large mill district in South Carolina.The description of the Parker Mill District is enhanced by an examination of the role of company newspapers and magazines in creating and maintaining employer dominance and employee co-operation in the culturally isolated mill villages of the American South.

Silent victories: the history and practice of public health in twentieth-century America

SECTION 1 - CONTROL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES 1. Control of Infectious Diseases - A 20th Century Public Health Achievement 2. Advances in Food Safety to Prevent Foodborne Diseases in the United States 3. A Brief Romance with Magic Bullets: Rene' Dubos at the Dawn of the Antibiotic Era SECTION 2 - CONTROL OF DISEASE THROUGH VACCINATION 4. A Shot at Protection: Immunizations Against Infectious Disease 5. Polio Can Be Conquered: Science and Health Propaganda in the United States from Polio Polly to Jonas Salk SECTION 3 - MATERNAL AND INFANT HEALTH 6. Safe Mothers, Healthy Babies: Reproductive Health in the 20th Century 7. Pioneering Efforts to Decrease Infant and Maternal Mortality SECTION 4 - NUTRITION 8. The Impact of Improved Nutrition on Disease Prevention 9. The More Things Change, ...: A Historical Perspective on the Debate over Vitamin Advertising in the United States SECTION 5 - OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH 10. Safer, Healthier Worker: Advances in Occupational Disease and Injury Prevention 11. A Prejudice that May Cloud the Mentality: The Making of Objectivity in Early Twentieth-Century Occupational Health (A study of the Progressive Era origins of occupational medicine) SECTION 6 - FAMILY PLANNING 12. Family Planning: A Century of Change 13. Teaching Birth Control on Tobacco Road and Mill Village Alley: Race, Class, and Birth Control in Public Health SECTION 7 - ORAL AND DENTAL HEALTH: FLUORIDATION 14. Changing the Face of America: Water Fluoridation and Oral Health 15. The Task is a Political One: The Promotion of Fluoridation SECTION 8 - VEHICULAR SAFETY 16. Drivers, Wheels and Roads: Motor Vehicle Safety in the 20th Century 17. The Nut Behind the Wheel: Shifting Responsibilities for Traffic Safety Since 1895 SECTION 9 - CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE 18. Heart Disease and Stroke Mortality in the 20th Century 19. Dietary Policy, Controversy and Proof: Doing Something Versus Waiting for the Definitive Evidence SECTION 10 - TOBACCO AND DISEASE PREVENTION 20. Thank You for Not Smoking: The Public Health Response to Tobacco Related Mortality in the United States 21. The First Surgeon Generals Report on Tobacco: Science and the State in the New Age of Chronic Disease SECTION 11 - CONCLUDING CHAPTER 22. Public Health at the Dawn of the 21st Century

SHELLEY SALLEE. The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 207. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95

This case study of child labor reform in Alabama between 1901 and 1919 raises provocative questions and deserves a wide readership. Two middle-class white activists from different social circles spurred Alabama's early twentieth-century anti-child labor crusade. An Episcopal minister, Edgar Gardner Murphy, founded the all-male Alabama Child Labor Committee. His successor, Nellie Kimball Murdoch, revived the issue after Murphy fell ill and, enlarging the importance of female-led reform, helped to establish the Alabama Child Welfare Department as a new branch of state bureaucracy in 1919. Although Shelley Sallee focuses on Murphy's and Murdoch's campaigns, her book also includes a rich secondary cast of characters: the “mill men” intent on creating an industrially modern “new” South; the worker families who left farms for lives in cotton mill villages; the southern clubwomen who provided the most consistent support for restrictions on work by children. Sallee argues that an emphasis on the “whiteness” of reform helped southern anti-child labor advocates sidestep longstanding regional resentment of perceived outside interference. It also offered a solution to a home-grown problem: the declining status of poor white “crackers,” whose high rates of illiteracy, chronic bad health, and supposed tolerance for lives “buried under old tin cans … rags, and chicken feathers” (p. 111) threatened to throw dead weight on efforts at southern economic progress.

Federal leverage attracts private investment at US heritage sites: A case study

This case study examines why people are returning to the Blackstone Valley, America’s industrial birthplace. Beginning in 1790, with cotton manufacturing, the Valley became the place to achieve the ‘American Dream’. By the 1940s, industry was leaving. The Valley went into economic freefall, people moved away, and mill villages decayed. In 1986, the National Park Service, with special legislation, and the Valley’s historic resources, began to tell the story about this special landscape. Using education, the Blackstone River is cleaner, historic properties are being thoughtfully restored, and visitor numbers are growing. Private investment in the Valley is now 15 times the National Park Service investment.

The General Textile Strike of 1934: From Maine to Alabama

In January 1933, United Textile Workers of America was in danger of collapse. Its membership was no larger than 15,000; its attempts to organize southern workers had failed disastrously; and it was constantly under attack from rival organizations. Yet, barely eighteen months later, with 300,000 dues-paying members, with newly established or revived branches covering southern cotton textile workers, as well as northern woolen and worsted workers, silk and jacquard weavers, dyers and finishers, even rayon workers, and with locals in 208 cities, towns, and mill villages, UTW was about to embark on what one historian has termed the greatest single industrial conflict in history of American labor. The General Textile Strike of 1934 is story of that conflict. The few historians who have concerned themselves at all with 1934 textile strike have all concentrated on its southern aspect, presenting it as a southern event, a cotton textile event. No one argues that South and cotton were not crucial to strike's story. It was cotton mill workers' anger over broken promises of National Industrial Recovery Act that had forced a reluctant UTW leadership into supporting a strike vote. No industry leader was more devious in his dealings with UTW leaders than George Sloan, chair of Cotton Code Authority and head of Cotton Textile Institute. Nevertheless, 1934 strike was a nationwide one, involving hundreds of thousands of silk, woolen, and rayon workers, all represented by UTW and mostly living in states outside South. Moreover, Peter Van Horn and Arthur Besse, head of Silk and Woolen Code Authorities, respectively, lost little to Sloan in their intransigence toward labor's demands. And, though great transfer of cotton industry from New England to South was almost complete, there were still little pockets left in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine. In The General Textile Strike of 1934, John Salmond tells everyone's story. Looking at strike from a national and an industrywide perspective, Salmond explains why workers were willing to risk protesting and describes differences and similarities between southern and northern workers. Setting strike within a New Deal context and focusing on its impact on future of labor relations in industry and lives of those who participated in it, The General Textile Strike of 1934 fills an important gap in American labor history.

Cultural production, media, and meaning: hillbilly music and the southern textile mills

This article examines the formation and popularity of hillbilly music in the US South of the 1930s, drawing from perspectives on social change and within the sociology of culture. Archival accounts, first-hand interviews, geographical data on radio station foundings, and historical literature are used to explore production and reception perspectives on cultural formation—specifically the interplay among musicians, audiences, and station personnel. Technological innovation during the Depression era was crucial in affording performance opportunities and in changing how musicians from textile mill villages played and sang. In the process of finding stable employment as musicians rather than mill workers and through a geographic cluster of radio stations, musicians interacted with one another and with their audiences in a manner that fundamentally shaped the content and character of what they created.

My Twentieth Century: Leaves from a Journal

am not sure why the number eighty seems so weighty, compared with its predecessor or even with its successor. What are the landmark ages? Being old enough to drive? To vote? Or fifty? One young friend told me gloomily that after fifty it is all downhill. could only respond that my resume begins at age fifty. At any rate, eighty is a good time for putting the pieces together, for trying to make sense of eight decades of My title was inspired by the protagonist in Penelope Lively's novel Moon Tiger, who says--apropos of her plan to write a history of the world--My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours. The voice of ... Darwin, of whoever you like, speaks in one tone to me, in another to you. The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life. Like this woman, assume that my twentieth century is not yours and that we can only imperfectly convey our individual life experience to each other. But also assume that with documents the historian can try to reconstruct a partly shared past--and that we are all primary sources for the social historian. The documents in this case are thirty-one volumes of a journal begun in the summer of 1939. For the years before the journal must rely on treacherous memory. My beginning was decidedly provincial and my geographic frame narrow. Born in a village in southwest Georgia, grew up from age two in the small, sleepy town of Athens, Georgia, founded in the late eighteenth century to be the home of the state university. When enrolled there 150 years later, one member of the faculty had taught my grandfather, and his colleagues were nearly all in a nineteenth-century mold, more like Mr. Chips than like twentieth-century scholars. The most admired of them were classicists. Retirement was not even a concept. There were no pensions. Faculty members continued to teach until illness or death brought their careers to an end. am astonished to find myself in 1939 writing, I enjoy him [the professor of Latin] immensely. But somehow I'm not sure he isn't a prisoner in the ivied walls of the University and the world at large is just a mass of shadows to him. It seems unlikely that had at that point come upon Plato's cave, but whence came that echo? Faculty people, along with impecunious members of long established families, a few lawyers, a couple of doctors, and a handful of prosperous businessmen made up the town elite. With few exceptions, these people lived in what was called genteel poverty. Across the river was the mill village about which children on our side of town, or indeed our elders, knew very little. Beyond the town limits were many farm families, mostly poor, and half the population of the county was black. That vanished world, so clear in my mind's eye, is now totally gone. Soon there will be no one alive who remembers it. How can convey to you, who are mostly younger and mostly not southern, what it felt like? The drowsy summer atmosphere when few students were around, and when, in that dark age before air conditioning, everyone, perforce, moved slowly. High ceilings and electric fans helped for those who could afford them. Everyone else simply accepted being hot as a fact of Evenings found most folks on front porches, their own or those of their neighbors. Twice each day a dignified African American gentleman delivered the mail on foot--letters bearing a three-cent stamp and often with only the name of the town for an address. He knew every child by name. Youngsters walked to school and in summer had to make their own recreation--in my case by hanging around the neighborhood tennis court and imitating what saw. That tennis court was itself emblematic of life in the first part of this century: a great aunt had built it for her five children. Three of them died of tuberculosis in young adulthood, yet she continued all her life to maintain the court for all the other youngsters in the neighborhood, one of whom turned out to be some sort of state tennis champion. …

Oral History and the Study of Communities: Problems, Paradoxes, and Possibilities

Community oral is a protean term, invoked by scholars and grass-roots historians alike to describe a variety of practices developed for a variety of purposes. The term itself is vague and conceptually limited, with generally positive associations and not entirely deliberate implications of commonality and comity. A community oral history project typically refers to one defined by locale, to a group of interviews with people who live in some geographically bounded place, whether an urban ethnic neighborhood, a southern mill village, or a region of midwestern farms. Yet also refers to a shared social identity, and so we speak of interviews with members of the gay community, the black community, the medical community. In fact, many community oral history projects combine the two meanings of the term, focusing on a particular group's experience in a particular place-steelworkers in Buffalo, Chicanos in El Paso, jazz musicians in Los Angeles. Distinctions exist among broad genres of oral history. One axis of difference is defined by the provenance of interviews: At one end, there are interviewing projects developed by grass-roots groups to document their own experience; at the other, interviews conducted by scholars to inform their own research or to create a permanent archival collection for future scholarly work. In practice, most oral history projects fall somewhere between the two poles: historical society volunteers develop a project to document some aspect of local life in collaboration with the local college; a scholar, working on his own research project, makes contact with the retirees' group of a union local as a means of entree for interviews he wishes to conduct about the union's history and along the way agrees to participate in a union educational program. The second axis is defined by voice, that is, the extent to which the narrator's voice or the historian/interpreter's voice dominates the final product of the interviews. At one end are archival collections of interviews that are almost entirely in the narrators'

"Whiteness," Job Segregation, and Working-Class Conservatism in the Southern Textile Industry

The 1990s explosion of scholarly interest in manifested itself across many disciplines but perhaps nowhere more resoundingly than in the field of labor history. Inspired by the work of David Roediger and others on the role of whiteness in class formation among nineteenth-century immigrant groups, Michelle Brattain shifts the spotlight to native-born workers in the textile mill villages of the twentieth-century South.' With this meticulously researched case study of workers, labor relations, and electoral politics in Rome, Georgia, from the turn of the century through the 1960s, Brattain contributes to the vast literature on southern textile workers and to a new

Disability in the Family?: New Questions about the Southern Mill Village

This article reexamines two classic social history texts, These Are Our Lives (1939) and Like A Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987), and the oral history interviews on which the books where based, in order to explore the potential value for historians of including questions about disability experiences in their work. Although disability experiences are discussed in the personal narratives of mill workers, historians have not discovered how to use these stories in their analysis of the past. This article suggests ways of using disability stories in order to enrich our understanding of textile mill history, while also helping to lay the foundation for a new field of historical inquiry, disability history. It argues that it is time for historians to review the work they have done and the sources they have used, and to reconsider what they have lost by not including disability issues in their work; that it is time to revisit many of the primary written and oral sources social historians have used and discover what historians have missed about what people have been saying concerning disability; that it is time to try to imagine disability as a socially constructed phenomenon having a history.

Music, culture and social movements: song and southern textile worker mobilization, 1929‐1934

Highlights the importance of music in ritual and culture generally, extending the focus to collective action. Argues that music and its emotional and cognitive impacts can be fundamental to the construction of social movement culture. Analyses song lyrics from the southern textile strikes of 1929‐1934 in an attempt to show how music and song helped construct a collective identity across relatively dispersed mill villages, shifted accountability for mill workers problems towards the labour process and its beneficiaries and suggested to the listener a collective solution. Discusses the implications of the findings for understanding music, culture and their relation to subordinate group challenge.

Stepping on Two Boats: Urban Strategies of Chinese Peasants and Their Children

During the 1990s, over seventy per cent of the married men and adult children of Stone Mill village in northeastern China have been employed i n wage labor each year. Because a vast number of household laborers (i.e. husbands, sons, and daughters) have nonagricultural jobs outside the village, daily agricultural tasks are performed by married women and elderly men, who are fondly described by the villagers of Stone Mill as “Troop Number 3860” (3860 budut). The number 38 refers to International Women's Day, March 8, representing the women in the village's agricultural labor force, while the number 60 represents the minimum age of the elderly agricultural workers.

Southern Millhands and Politics: A Defeat for Some or for All?

Bryant Simon's A Fabric of Defeat is a distinctive, original study that adds to the growing list of important studies in southern labor history.' It is mandatory reading for historians of the American South and deserves a careful reading by others. Simon's study begins with two thoughtful questions: what did textile workers in South Carolina reveal about themselves when they engaged in electoral politics and why, though they constituted a very substantial block of voters, did these workers get so little from electoral politics? Simon has obviously taken a different tact from that of previous analyses of southern millhands and from that in most studies in labor history. This imaginative approach is reinforced by a compelling narrative, fine writing, and thorough research. Millhands found a political champion in Coleman Livingston Coley Blease in pre-World War I South Carolina. Blease struck a resonant note in mill villages as he shrewdly combined a volatile mix of masculinity, race, and class with an inflammatory rhetorical style. He understood and articulated the frustrations of millhands. He assured them that they were part of the white patriarchy of the state, ever bit as good as the growing urban middle class and the landed who disdained them as lintheads. Blease attacked

Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884–1984 by Douglas Flamming

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 253 of the Swedish National Committee for the History of Technology. His publications include Engineers as System Builders: The Rise ofEngineers to Executive Positions in Swedish Shipbuilding and the Industry’s Emergence as a Large Technological System, 1890-1940 (1995) and Undergraduate Teaching ofHistory of Technology: A Survey ofthe Teaching at Some Universities in the USA in 1993 (Gothenburg, Sweden: Department of History of Technology and Industry, Chalmers University of Technology, 1995). Creating the Modem South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884—1984. By Douglas Flamming. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Pp. xxxi+433; illustrations, tables, ap­ pendices, notes, bibliography, index. $42.50 (cloth). The textile industry transformed the social and economic land­ scape of the post-Civil War American South. Built on the ruins of an agricultural culture, large-scale manufacturing produced new classes of industrialists and factory workers. By 1920, the South had surpassed New England as the dominant textile region. Although southern mills utilized the most modern machinery, their success owed little to technology, instead resting on the economic advantage of low wages: southern textile workers earned 40 percent less than their northern counterparts. The mill village made this possible by institutionalizing labor relations and social reproduction, providing families ofworkers with the necessities ofwork, subsistence, and lei­ sure. Racial and cultural homogeneity supported the system. North­ ern and immigrant workers avoided the low-wage South, while at­ tempts to hire blacks invariably produced violent reactions from white workers. Debates about the origins and meaning of this social and indus­ trial order have made southern labor historiography one ofthe most exciting fields in American history and Douglas Flamming’s book makes an important contribution to it. Flamming departs from the usual pattern of regional or statewide studies by focusing in depth on a single company, the Crown Cotton Mill in Dalton, Georgia. In most respects Crown’s story parallels that of hundreds of other piedmont mills. Founded by local merchants in 1884, the mill turned Dalton from a rural backwater into a booming industrial cen­ ter. Over the next decade, workers, initially reluctant to commit themselves to “public work,” moved back and forth between farm and factory. However, by World War I wage increases, especially for adult males, had stabilized the labor force. The industry, thriving during the twenties, was devastated by the Great Depression. After the war, as national and international competition undermined profitability, the textile economy faltered again and the mill commu­ nity began to dissolve. In 1969, following a pattern repeated across the South, the plant shut down. The firm survived, reborn as CrownAmerica , a diversified corporation with carpetmaking subsidiaries in Europe and Australia. 254 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Flamming goes beyond the boundaries of the case study to address key questions and challenge existing interpretations in southern tex­ tile history. Avoiding the singular explanations that characterize much previous scholarship, Flamming underlines the nuances and complexity of the industrialization process. Thus, while identifying modernization rather than tradition as a basic dynamic, he empha­ sizes that its specific outcomes were not inevitable but often marked by ambiguity and failure. Similarly, arguing that the rise and fall of mill village paternalism is the central theme in southern textile his­ tory, he stresses its two-sidedness, documenting workers’ active par­ ticipation in forging a “negotiated loyalty.” Often interpreted as an extension of the plantation ethos or tradi­ tional piedmont deference to authority, corporate paternalism actu­ ally appeared after 1900 as part of a national movement—welfare capitalism—used to attract steady workers and as a weapon against unions. Schools, parks, life insurance, savings plans, baseball teams, and marching bands contributed to a corporate culture built on ru­ ral traditions of cooperation. Until the depression, the workers’ and the company’s interests merged to form a cohesive mill community. Once economic pressures imposed firings, layoffs, and evictions in the village and stretch-outs and speedups in the mill, paternalism’s contradictions became evident. Motivated by corporate profits rather than shared interests, management withdrew its securityjust when workers needed it most. Crown employees reacted by organizing a United Textile Workers Union local and supporting the 1934 General Strike. In spite...

Rethinking Paternalism: Power and Parochialism in a Southern Mill Village

Rethinking Paternalism: Power and Parochialism in a Southern Mill Village

Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century by Walter Licht

838 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE should know that some of the essays are in French. But Fox’s work is well written and rewarding, and these essays deserved to be col­ lected in this convenient form. Ken Alder Dr. Alder is assistant professor of history' at Northwestern University and the author of Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (forthcoming). Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. By Walter Licht. Balti­ more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Pp. xviii+219; bibli­ ography, index. $38.95 (hardcover) $13.95 (paper). This modest book has big ambitions. In just under two hundred pages, Walter Licht provides a sweeping overview of the causes and course ofAmerican industrialization over the 19th century. The emi­ nently readable narrative is geared to undergraduate teaching. It introduces many of the key historiographic debates in industrial his­ toriography and touches on most of the relevant specialized studies from business, economic, labor, legal, social, women’s, and techno­ logical history. Behind this narrative and synthesis, the book ad­ vances a strong analytical theme on the evolving character of the American political economy. In combination, Licht has accom­ plished a difficult task, synthesizing a huge literature with style and authority. Industrializing America should prove an essential compo­ nent of American history survey classes for years to come. This is the first synthesis of industrial history to span the 19th century—probably because the task of inclusion has seemed so daunting. Yet Licht manages to touch on almost all the key issues of relevance. He accomplishes this through some highly original ap­ proaches and by deftly melding elements normally considered sepa­ rately. Chapter 1, “Context,” combines a portrait of regional diversity in the American economy circa 1800 with a description of contrasting contemporary ideals for the developing American political econ­ omy—Jeffersonian agrarians’ debate with Tench Coxe and other ad­ vocates of a market-based manufacturing future for America. Chap­ ter 2, “Paths,” underscores the varied character of antebellum industrial development by discussing mill villages (Pawtucket, Rock­ dale), single-industry cities (Lowell and Lynn), diversified urban centers such as Philadelphia, and industrial slavery in the South. In chapter 3, “Reactions,” Licht blends the literature on artisanal pro­ tests against the risingJacksonian market economy (viz., Eric Foner, Bruce Laurie, and Sean Wilentz) with that on other responses to industrialization, such as workers’ high geographic mobility, revival­ ism in the Second Great Awakening, and middle-class women’s lead­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 839 ership of social reform causes. Chapter 4, on the Civil War’s role in industrialization, also summarizes the general history ofgovernment intervention in the economywhile outlining the transportation revo­ lution. Chapter 5, “An Industrial Heartland” combines a narrative tour of the nation’s leading industrial regions in the Gilded Age with an analysis of the differing interpretations that historians have offered about the causes of industrial expansion. In chapter 6, “The Rise of Big Business,” the careers of Carnegie and Rockefeller pro­ vide an accessible avenue to Chandler’s views on the rise of big busi­ ness—further leavened with Lamoreaux’s treatment of the 1893 depression and Hovencamp’s on antimonopoly politics. Finally, chapter 7, “Explosions,” surveys the major Gilded Age labor dis­ putes; then it explores the trade unionist, Populist, and utopian cri­ tiques of the emergent industrial order of the late 19th century. Licht is a gifted writer who carries the reader smoothly across the real chasms that divide the historical scholarship on industrializa­ tion. Some topics are omitted; for example, studies by Patricia Coo­ per and others on semiskilled work and gendered divisions of labor in the Gilded Age go unnoted. On balance, however, Licht has au­ thored a masterful and inclusive synthesis. Technological history plays a supporting role in this account. Thus Licht notes antebellum workers’ approval of technological innovations, even as their coun­ terparts in the late Gilded Age rallied in opposition to the demands of mechanized production. The book also offers a directed analytical theme on the evolving character ofAmerica’s political economy. Although noting that mer­ cantilism had died with the American Revolution, Licht argues that the political economy of 1800 was comparatively ordered, albeit mostly market-based...

Invisible labours: mill work and motherhood in the American South.

With an almost total lack of access to contraceptive information before the mid 1930s, a high percentage of married women working in the textile mills of the American south were or rapidly became mothers. Without the financial resources to provide their families with wholesome food, medical care, and adult supervision, these women, who bore many children and shouldered most domestic duties in addition to their mill jobs, presumably had particular health care needs. This essay intially questions the usefulness of traditional categories that label physical ailments and accidents as either job-related or lifestyle-related. A group of female physicians in Greenville and Spartanburg Counties in South Carolina, all of them southern natives, worked during the 1930s to address some of the most immediate medical needs of the region's working women. These physicians had no appreciable effect, however, on workplace conditions and did not question the social and economic relationships that led so many working mothers to depend on their services. This essay also provides a partial analysis of public health services available to working mothers in Carolina mill villages during the Depression decade and explores reasons why the region's female medical professionals failed to challenge a form of social organization that left working mothers' particular health care needs unaddressed.