Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta's Fulton Mills (review)

Long overshadowed by the great textile strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts and Patterson, New Jersey, the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill strike has received scant attention from historians. With his compelling account of the strike, Kuhn hopes to correct this oversight and lay to rest the traditional view of southern cotton mill workers as "downtrodden, passive victims of an overarching paternalistic system."

Kuhn brings to life the "great throbbing heart" of Atlanta's Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills and the culture and values of the 3000 workers who worked at the mills and lived in the company's substandard housing. He describes a vibrant Atlanta in the throes of rapid industrialization, marked by stark divisions between rich and poor, growing ethnic and racial tension, and a "burgeoning trade union movement."

Against this rich backdrop Kuhn unfolds his account of the strike from its beginnings as a spontaneous walkout involving less than 200 workers, to a major industrial dispute. From the outset, union officials from the AFL and the United Textile Workers saw the strike as central to their efforts to organize southern textile workers. Despite the mill owner's claims that the strike affected only a small percentage of workers, Kuhn describes how organizers succeeded in focusing national attention on the plight of southern mill workers by linking the strike with "broader concerns of industrial justice" of interest to middle-class progressives.

The public relations war between management and union leaders is balanced nicely with detailed descriptions of the suffering and struggles endured by individual mill workers determined to challenge the status quo and "assert their dignity, independence and self-respect." Sadly, this newfound assertiveness was all too often expressed in strident appeals to racism and anti-Semitism (mill owner Oscar Elsas was a prominent member of Atlanta's Jewish community).

Though general readers will benefit from Kuhn's gift for narrative and analysis, specialists will profit from his access to an unprecedented collection of company documents found when the mill was sold in the 1980's. Consisting of daily reports from the company's elaborate network of labor spies, the correspondence of mill owner Oscar Elsas, and a host of management documents concerning working conditions at the mill, the collection comprises an extraordinarily detailed picture of this historic dispute.

"Like wars, natural disasters and other major upheavals," according to Clifford Kuhn, "strikes offer a glimpse at many aspects of a society that normally are concealed or overlooked." Contesting The New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike At Atlanta's Fulton Mills provides an invaluable reference source for labor educators searching for a pivotal historical event to help workers and students understand the racial, ethnic, and economic fault lines exposed by rapid industrialization in the progressive-era South.