Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press

CHAPTER 2: Labor in the Old New South

LABOR IN THE OLD NEW SOUTH In the little northeastern Mississippi town of Nettleton in the early 1980s, the Tapscott family was going through the many rooms and countless closets of the century-old, long-vacant home of my late wife Marilyn’s four never-married great-aunts, the last of whom—Aunt Cam (for Camille)— had recently died in a nearby nursing home at the age of ninety-eight. Known as “The Hotel,” the rambling former boardinghouse was about to fall prey to the wrecking ball, and members of the family wanted to see what remained to be salvaged. Many of the rooms had long been emptied of furniture and other belongings. However, in a hidden closet behind one of the stairwells, we found a treasure trove. Inside were stacks of yellowed, decaying newspapers , magazines, political posters, and postcards dating back to the last century, all apparently the personal collection of one of the family’s most prominent—and notorious—members, former U.S. congressman John Rankin, a New Deal–era populist, raging segregationist and anticommunist, and erstwhile chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rankin had at times stayed at The Hotel. Knowing my political and historical interests, the Tapscotts handed the stacks over to me, the newest member of the family, and told me to do with them what I thought best. A quarter century later, those newspapers—original edition after original edition of turn-of-the-century Populist Party leader, twotime presidential candidate, and former U.S. senator Thomas E. Watson’s Jeffersonian—proved invaluable in my research for this chapter, which provides a rough sketch of the history of labor and the press in the South from the Reconstruction era to the eve of World War II. First and foremost was the labor manifesto that appeared in the July 30, 1908, edition of the Jeffersonian, an Atlanta-based weekly published by Watson. This declaration by one of Georgia’s most prominent politicians Chapter 2 19 20 Labor in the Old New South and journalists would be as unthinkable in most Southern newspapers today as it was in Watson’s own day. “We believe in the right of those who labor to organize for their mutual protection and benefit, and pledge the efforts of the People’s party to preserve this right inviolate. We condemn the recent attempt to destroy the power of trade unions through the unjust use of Federal injunction, substituting government by injunction for free government.” The full-page “People’s Party Platform” published in the Jeffersonian goes on to “demand the abolition of child labor,” “oppose the use of convict labor in competition with free labor,” “favor the eight hour workday, and legislation protecting the lives and limbs of workingmen through the use of safety appliances,” and attack the “criminal carelessness” that allowed “thousands of miners” to lose their lives “to increase the dividends of stockholders.”1 Contrast this with the fiery editorials of Major Fred Sullens, editor and part owner of the Jackson Daily News in Jackson, Mississippi, from 1907 to 1957. As for putting limits on the workday, he wrote this in 1916: “The fellow who is always talking about an eight-hour day is too infernally lazy to work at all if stern necessity did not force him to do so.”2 Over his career, Sullens of Mississippi would call for government regulations to protect railroad companies from organized labor, the elimination of the right to strike, repeal of the 1935 Wagner Act that gave federal protection to the right to organize, and the arrest and imprisonment of strikers who take part in “sit-ins” such as during the 1937 strike at General Motors. Sullens saw the killing of three labor organizers in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1919 as a proper rebuke of what he considered Bolshevism. He called the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and CIO leader John L. Lewis “Public Enemy No. I,” a “pig-eyed” man “far more dangerous than Scarface Al Capone,” and he warned CIO organizers in Mississippi that they faced “bloodshed.”3 Sullens, whose caustic, vitriol-filled editorials are legendary in Mississippi , expressed what was essentially the prevalent view among Southern editors toward organized labor, albeit with more fire and brimstone than most. Starting his editorial career at the end of the Populist era and a year before Watson published the “People’s Party Platform,” Sullens would prove to be as bitter an enemy of blacks as he was...