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OWD Focus of E.K. Powe/Duke Center for Documentary Studies Neighborhoods Project
Duke Moves More Offices to Erwin Mills
Mill strike left Durham reeling
by Jim Wise
Reproduced with permission from the Durham
Herald-Sun (September 6, 2004)
"An apprehensive South, not unused
to picket lines, armed guards and business upheaval which accompany
labor unrest, girded itself tonight for what promised to be the greatest
strike in its history."
-- Associated Press, Aug. 30, 1934
Seventy Labor Day weekends ago, Durham had more to anticipate than Monday off. Come Tuesday, there was no telling what might happen.
Fed up with low pay, short hours, pushy bosses, anti-union tactics and the apparent indifference of industry overseers, workers in Southern textile mills had been staging wildcat strikes since May.
The United Textile Workers of America, faced with a labor movement running out of its control, had convened hastily and called a strike nationwide, starting Saturday, Sept. 1.
Monday, Sept. 3, was Labor Day. For the first time, Durham's mills took it as a holiday. But management insisted that they would be open for business Tuesday.
Durham's textile plants employed more than 7,000 people. They were organized to strike -- and they did.
By mid-September, every mill in Durham would be closed. From Alabama to Maine, more than 400,000 workers would be out, 170,000 in the South alone.
By the time the General Textile Strike of 1934 ended on Sept. 23, 10,000 National Guard troops had been mobilized, and 20 people had been killed. One eyewitness called it "the closest thing to a revolution I've seen." One mill owner called it "the gravest emergency ... since Reconstruction."
Labor historian Mary Lethert Wingerd has written that the strike left "the textile unions broken." Conventional wisdom holds that the strikers gained nothing.
Luther Riley, a West Durham striker, disagrees.
"I think if the strike hadn't come along, the burden would have got to the point people just couldn't stand it," Riley said in an August interview.
"You bet your life I will
strike. There is nothing else to do."
-- Shorty Lee Evans, Erwin No. 4 worker, Sept. 3, 1934
In 1934, Louis and Mary Williams Cole were children in West Durham.
"My daddy worked in the mill, and my brother," Louis Cole said. "They had tents set up by the gates, and people would bring them food out. ... They did get a good bit of support from the people of Durham."
Mayor W.F. Carr issued the city's Labor Day proclamation. Ironically enough, he was vice president of the Durham Hosiery Mills.
On Labor Day morning, a full-page newspaper ad proclaimed "In Union There Is Strength." It was sponsored by 18 local businesses. Murdock Ice Co. announced that ice would be available on credit during the strike. Many other Durham businesses were doing the same.
Strike committees were in place at the Erwin mills in West Durham, Pearl on Trinity Avenue, Golden Belt and East Durham Manufacturing in Edgemont. Sept. 1, Saturday morning, 2,500 mill hands rallied at the Carolina Theatre. By Sunday morning, strike posters were up all over town.
American Federation of Labor organizer Albert Beck, busy in Durham for months, moved into a suite at the Washington Duke hotel, with bodyguards.
Violence was a distinct possibility. The bloody Gastonia mill strike of 1929 was still a cause cilhbre for leftists around the world. In 1932, the Durham machine-gun company was put on alert for strike duty in High Point. In 1933, the labor newspaper Hosiery Worker described North Carolina as "a real volcano," and a Durham man, Clem Norwood, was killed in a strike in Philadelphia.
Earlier in 1934, strikes had led to riots in California and Ohio. Durham workers were warned to look out for communist troublemakers in their midst, and pro-Nazi groups called "Silver Shirts" and "Crusader White Shirts" had appeared at labor trouble spots.
"We are going into this strike
not with the implements of war but with arms folded ... and we're not
going to tolerate any rough stuff."
-- Albert Beck, Durham union organizer, Aug. 29,
1934
The momentum that led to the general strike had been building for years.
Between falling demand and rising cotton prices, with pay scales still elevated from the World War I boom, the highly competitive textile industry was troubled, even before the Depression.
Manufacturers brought in new machines and efficiency experts, laid off workers and drove the remaining employees to make more with less. Overproduction made the situation worse.
"The biggest thing that brought about the strike was, you couldn't please the company," said Riley, a weaver at Erwin Mills in 1934. "There was only so much you could do with a piece of machinery. The company wouldn't negotiate on anything."
For any disgruntled mill hand, there was no shortage of unemployed ready to take his job, no matter how low the pay. A whisper of "union" was enough to get a man fired, and, in mill villages like West Durham, losing a job meant losing your home, too.
In 1933, the Roosevelt administration enacted industrial recovery measures that assured labor's liberty to organize, but also allowed the textile industry to set production limits.
In May 1934, the mills cut their operating hours -- which meant cutting the hired help's hourly pay. At plant after plant, employees answered by walking out, and talk began about a general strike.
"Up until 1934, there had never
been any labor trouble except one very minor case. ... But early in
1934, a movement was started to form a textile union in Durham."
-- Kemp P. Lewis, "Annual Report of
the President of The Erwin Cotton Mills Co.," Jan 26, 1935
Labor organizing was not new in Durham. But the textile mills had staved it off by providing worker amenities, keeping wages relatively high while reducing the work week, and allowing labor some say in how the plants were run.
Still, in early 1934, a flier went around town. On one side was an open letter from the American Federation of Labor detailing the organizing provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The other side announced a "Special Organization Meeting" for textile workers, March 10 at West Durham High School. R.R. Lawrence, president of the N.C. Federation of Labor, spoke on "Why I Should Join the Union."
Unions were established in Durham's two cigarette factories by the end of 1933, and in the spring of 1934, even cafi staff and retail clerks were organizing. Candidates in that spring's local election were so united in support of labor that the Labor Voters' League could not choose whom to endorse.
"We had good leadership," said Riley, the Erwin Mills weaver, "and they tried to explain what was going on, and people knew what was going on."
Labor Day morning, more than 4,000 people gathered for a memorial service at Clem Norwood's grave. William Smith, an officer of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers, told them to show solidarity and courage to end "the conditions which lead to killings ... in strike situations." And he called textile companies "the Judases of the New Deal."
Support for the strike, however, was not unanimous.
"We will be on picket duty early tomorrow morning," Catherine Clements and Ernestine Kerr of East Durham Cotton said that day. "To switch a few girls who we know who are not members of our union."
"It was all right there for a
couple of weeks, but then that thing began to turn and there was some
people who went hungry."
-- I.L. Dean, merchant, in "An Oral History
of West Durham"
On Tuesday morning, picket lines that union leaders called "impregnable barricades" surrounded 12 Durham mills. The Sun newspaper reported 4,000 out on strike.
"There was no hint of violence or disorder. For the most part, the strikers laughed and exchanged pleasantries. Pastors from churches in the mill neighborhoods were on hand early to watch the proceedings."
Not everyone felt so festive.
Mayor Carr was allowed into his office at the Hosiery Mill -- "for a little while" -- but he was the only exception. Mill executives were turned away like anyone else trying to go to work. Some managers went home in tears.
"It is naturally galling to an American citizen to have a mob refuse to allow him entrance into his own office," wrote Kemp P. Lewis, president of the Erwin Mills Co., in his 1934 annual report. "And our first impulse, of course, was to call on the city and county authorities for sufficient police protection to open up the gates."
Sheriff E.G. "Cat" Belvin and Police Chief G.W. Proctor had pledged to keep the peace. But neither was inclined to intervene, and management thought better of pushing the issue. Peace prevailed, but not unanimity.
"You had a lot of friction going between the strikers and non-strikers," Louis Cole said. "You had some arrests, there were some fights."
Mary Cole's father was a union president in West Durham.
"We'd go out on strike, and some would go back," she said. "As hard as he worked, and they would turn and go back to work."
All Durham's mills were closed, but credit only went so far, union strike funds ran low, and men without jobs were anxious to take strikers' places. Meantime, reports came of what was going on elsewhere.
Unions sent "flying squadrons" to shut down mills still operating. They were met with armed residents, police and militia. In Georgia, state troops arrested more than 100 strikers and interred them in a former prisoner-of-war camp. In Rhode Island, troops ran out of tear gas trying to control a riot involving 5,000 strikers. In Honea Path, S.C., seven strikers were shot dead. In Belmont, two were bayoneted; one died.
"My two oldest boys are
so bitter toward the union they don't even like to hear the word mentioned."
-- Eve Hardison, wife of an East Durham textile worker, to WPA
interviewer on Aug. 23, 1938
On Sept. 18, Socialist politician Norman Thomas spoke to a crowd of 1,500 at the Durham Athletic Park. He said the textile walkout was "the largest industrial strike on record" and had met with "amazing success."
By then, though, by the hundreds and thousands, strikers were going back to work.
"People were tired," Riley said.
A presidential commission proposed a settlement. On Sept. 22, the strike was called off.
"Things got better," Riley said. "Supervision let up a good deal."
In Durham, mill owners pledged not to discriminate against strikers. But when mills reopened elsewhere, many union members found they had no more jobs and were blacklisted throughout the industry.
Unions remained strong in Durham until the industries that supported them disappeared. But many mill families across the region felt the union had led them on and then deserted them.
Wages remained low, production pressure high. Blacklists, layoffs and blunt force left bitter memories. Still, former strikers and non-strikers had to live with each other.
"One way to deal with that sort of thing is to repress it," said John Shelton Reed, a retired UNC sociologist. "It did sort of disappear from the collective memory."
Reed, a native of Kingsport, Tenn., said he never heard about it until he was grown.
"It was just mutual understanding; we won't talk about it," he said.
© 2004 Durham Herald Company, Inc.