Synopsis
In September 1934 two-thirds of the southern textile labor force walked off their jobs, inspired by Roosevelt's New Deal to protest employer harassment and massive industry restructuring. After three weeks, the union that led the strike called it off in return for government promises that remained unfulfilled. Thousands of workers were blacklisted and conditions in the southern mills deteriorated rapidly. Humiliated and demoralized, strike participants maintained a sixty-year silence that virtually eliminated the event from historical memory.Janet Irons steps into this historical vacuum to explore the community and workplace dynamics of southern mill towns in the years leading up the strike, as well as the links among worker insurgency, organized labor, and governmental policy in the New Deal's crucial first years. Drawing on industry and union records, newspaper sources, oral histories, records of the New Deal bureaucracy, and thousands of letters written by southern laborers to President Roosevelt about their working conditions, Irons reveals the dual nature of the New Deal's impact on the South. While its rhetoric mobilized the poor to challenge local established authority, the New Deal's political structure worked in the opposite direction, reinforcing the power of the South's economic elite. A powerful rendering of a pivotal event, "Testing the New Deal" stands as a major reassessment of southern labor in the 1930s.
Reviews
In 1934, 170,000 workers walked off their jobs at textile mills throughout the South in what was to be the largest labor protest in the South's history. The strike quickly turned violent, and many workers were wounded and several killed in skirmishes with private guards and soldiers called out by southern governors. Within less than a month, the United Textile Workers Union called off the strike after negotiating an agreement with Roosevelt's New Deal administration. Mill owners, though, ignored most of the government's recommendations and refused to let more than 75,000 of the strikers return to work. The heady optimism of the walkout's early days quickly gave way to the bitter realization that the strike may have failed. Workers emboldened by their union and the promise of the New Deal felt abandoned and betrayed. Irons is an associate professor at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania. Against the backdrop of the New Deal and the National Industrial Recovery Act and after 60 years of what she calls "historical amnesia," she examines the strike and its consequences. David Rouse
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