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1 [First [101] [101] chapter five “A General Demoralization of Business” The Textile Depression of the 1920s In January 1916, the managers and overseers of the Dwight Manufacturing Company’s Alabama City textile mill gathered with prominent townspeople for a six-course banquet to celebrate the company’s recent record output of manufactured cotton goods. “The record made by the mill has been most remarkable during the past six months. . . . The parent mills at Chicopee, Mass., are running on full time and the Alabama City mills are fully as prosperous,” boasted Alabama City’s mayor, W. T. McCord. “[I]t is said,” noted the local press, “to have been one of the most enjoyable affairs . . . ever held here.”1 During the years of World War I, the textile industry saw production and profits soar as wartime orders kept mills running virtually nonstop. Cotton-mill operatives, likewise, saw their earnings rise, joined labor unions in record numbers, and looked forward to better times ahead. With the armistice in 1918, however, government contracts ended, the demand for cotton goods plummeted, and warehouses overflowed with unsellable stock. Throughout the 1920s, textile mill owners waited year after year for increased consumer consumption, better profits, and an industry-wide recovery. Prosperity’s decade proved instead to be one of depression for the textile industry . Mill operatives, North and South, saw the gains of the war years slip away with rounds of wage cuts, unsuccessful strikes, and open-shop campaigns used by management to eradicate unions from their cotton mills. As the textile depression deepened, the missteps of New England textile unionists in their past approaches to southern competition caught up with them. Decades of focusing on local interests had undermined a wider solidarity and fundamentally spoiled any possibility of a strong national union that could impose common standards of wages, hours, and working conditions throughout the industry. Indeed , many of these New England unionists saw southern textile workers more as threats to their wages and working conditions than as friends with whom they had a common cause and should form a united front. Through the 1920s, New England operatives often blamed southern workers themselves, not the conditions under which they labored, for the successive rounds of wage cuts 101 102 • “a general demoralization of business” 1 and mill closures that plagued the cotton textile industry in the North. As increasing numbers of textile companies throughout New England looked southward , hoping to save themselves from bankruptcy, the United Textile Workers of America found itself without a membership base or strategy capable of halting the movement of textile capital to the states of the Piedmont South. Nowhere were the implications of the UTWA’s virtual powerlessness more evident than at the Dwight Manufacturing Company. Dwight management used the openshop branch mill it had operated in Alabama City since 1896 to extract concessions from the unions organized at the parent mill in Chicopee, and ultimately, to make the Chicopee mill and its workers expendable as the company struggled to remain profitable in the midst of depression conditions. Hints of the impending 1920s textile depression were evident in New England nearly a decade before, when cotton textile manufacturers experienced a series of slack years during the 1910s. “Conditions in cotton manufacturing during the past six months have been deplorable,” complained Franklin Hobbs, president of the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers in 1911. “Mills have been running short time and it is estimated that during the past month production, both north and south, has not been fifty per cent. of normal.” As was the case with most coarse-goods producers, the Dwight Manufacturing Company felt the pinch of these slow years. During the summer of 1914, the Dwight mill in Chicopee began operating on a four-day schedule, due, according to the local press, to the “present business depression.”2 Unlike many Massachusetts mills that were unable to make enough earnings to pay dividends to their stockholders , however, the Dwight Company, because of its Alabama City operations, remained profitable. For the eighteen months from December 1913 to May 1915, for example, the Dwight Company made a net profit of over $62,000, even though the Chicopee mill registered a net loss of over $7,000.3 The lower wages paid to and longer hours worked by the Alabama City mill operatives translated into a lower production cost for Dwight’s southern-made goods and profits for the parent company in Massachusetts, even during...

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