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    returned from a two-year stint in the army during World War II to the textile mill in Rome, Georgia, where he had previously worked for five years.Anchor Rome Mill, however, was not the same place it had been, nor was Shiflett the same man. During the war, workers in the plant had organized Local 787 of the Textile Workers Union of America,  (), and Shiflett returned just as new contract negotiations with Anchor Rome management reached a critical point. He promptly joined the union and won immediate election as shop steward for the spooling department’s second shift. Soon thereafter, Shiflett became an officer of the local.1 During Shiflett’s term of office, Anchor Rome management embarked on a vigorous campaign to break Local 787,focusing particularly on persuading workers to withdraw their union membership.2 Shop floor supervisors, for example, regularly harassed Shiflett, warning him against signing up new members among employees, laying him off for brief periods, and even accusing him of obscene behavior.3 This campaign of intimidation, however, served to strengthen, not weaken, Shiflett’s commitment to Local 787, which he repeatedly defended. He explained to one supervisor, for example, that“the union was responsible for us having the eight-hour shift and wage increases.” Shiflett maintained his faith in industrial democracy because, as he later explained,“I honestly believed in it.”4 4: Is This What We Fought the War For? Union Veterans and the Politics of Labor If the hostile climate within the mill was not enough to discourage Shiflett, the lack of federal support for Local 787’s subsequent strike against Anchor Rome in 1948 certainly was.As president of the local, Shiflett called the strike after Anchor Rome’s refusal to cooperate stalled contract negotiations. Shiflett assumed a leading role, including organizing the picket line at the plant’s front gates. A local injunction aimed at the strikers soon secured Shiflett’s arrest and brief incarceration .5 But the worst was yet to come. Although Local 787 eventually filed charges of unfair labor practices against Anchor Rome with the National Labor Relations Board (), it had to end its strike, unsuccessfully, early in 1949. On top of this disheartening turn of events, the  shortly overturned an earlier order that had directed Anchor Rome to rehire all of the striking workers. As a result, the company refused to reinstate four hundred union members to their prior jobs. Shiflett was outraged, not so much by the actions of Anchor Rome, from which he doubtlessly expected no better, but by the equivocation of the  in the face of these violations.6 It represented a betrayal that called into question the whole purpose of the recent war.“I can not understand the ruling handed down by the board,” a perplexed Shiflett explained to the chairman of the . After all, he noted,“there [are] still 405 people walking the streets of this city blackballed in every cotton mill in the south by the adverse ruling of the board.”As“an ex serviceman,”Shiflett bitterly wondered: “is this what we fought the war for?”7 In postwar Georgia William Shiflett was not alone in thinking that service in the war should guarantee working-class veterans and the unions they joined a voice in the community’s economic, political, and civic affairs. World War II produced a sense of personal efficacy and civic entitlement among a coterie of returning veterans, who expressed a newfound identity as workers and citizens by joining the ranks of the . These veterans became committed and steadfast unionists, who worked hard to sustain both their locals and the ’s southern organizing drive. The vision of industrial democracy they held—a conviction in the rights of veterans, workers, and unionists to actively participate in the economic, civic, and political affairs of their community and state—challenged the paternalistic pattern of labor relations that had long characterized southern mill towns. In communities throughout the state, but particularly in the textile belt of the Piedmont and northwest, veterans signed union cards, organized fellow workers, and walked picket lines. Their union locals also worked with the  Political Action Committee in Georgia (-) to register voters, to educate the electorate on the candidates, and, at times, to support or oppose particular campaigns. This activism created a third strand in the thread of southern veteran insurgencies that disrupted the political and...

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