A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948 (review)

A Fabric of Defeat is an excellent study of the politics of South Carolina textile workers, from the Progressive era through the New Deal and World War II. It is, first and foremost, an artful blending of the subfields of labor, political, and southern history, but the book will be of interest to political scientists and to students of cultural studies as well. Simon’s exploration of the limits of New Deal reform is superb, and his analysis of the multiple dimensions of millworkers’ identities is insightful, and often provocative.

For many observers of the American South, it has long been an article of faith that racism, individualism, and the repressive power of the state explain the weakness of trade unionism and the absence of class politics in the region. But after examining the political activity and beliefs of South Carolina millworkers, Simon reaches a different conclusion. The key focal points of his study are the millhands’ political heroes, Cole Blease and Olin D. Johnston, whose radically different agendas suggest a significant discontinuity in the politics of the white working class.

White workers were reflexively racist, Simon acknowledges, but they were not always attracted to the politics of race. In 1910, Blease won the governorship of South Carolina by defending white supremacy and southern white manhood, and opposing middle-class reform, at a time when sweeping social changes were undermining economic independence and patriarchal authority. The key agent of this transformation was the textile industry. As it pulled tens of thousands of yeoman farmers into the confined and carefully ordered world of the mill village, once-proud men appeared to forfeit not only their manhood but their full citizenship in the white republic. In this context, says the author, Blease’s defense of the “rights” of lynch mobs, and his opposition to middle-class meddling in the lives of an already besieged textile workforce, represented not false consciousness but “the rational, albeit sometimes unsavory, response of tradition-bound white southerners to the forces of modernization” (18).

Gradually, the impact of consumerism, welfare capitalism, scientific management, and, above all, the trauma of the Great Depression created the basis for a new politics in which class superseded race. By the 1920s, the “lintheads” had accepted their status as industrial workers, and independence no longer meant a return to their rural roots. Rather, they aspired to a decent income, a reasonable pace of work in the mill, and the freedom to participate in the brave new world of consumption. But the imperatives of a highly competitive industry dictated otherwise. The result was falling wages, speedup on the job, strikes, unionization campaigns, and—finally—bitter class warfare.

In this context, the millworkers turned their backs on Blease’s anti-statism and enthusiastically embraced President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, along with the Palmetto State’s leading New Dealer, Olin D. Johnston. Johnston won the governorship in 1934 by defeating Blease, and then sought to implement an aggressively pro-labor agenda. His bill limiting the number of looms tended by each millworker passed the house of representatives by a vote of ninety-four to six. But the conservative state senate killed the proposal. In fact, Johnston and his legislative allies proposed thirty pro-labor bills in a single year and, according to Simon, all but one of them “either drowned in committee or sank on the senate floor” (139).

Millowners, meanwhile, flagrantly disregarded the directives of the National Labor Relations Board and other federal agencies, and suffered no reprisals for their lawlessness. When, in 1938, Roosevelt finally intervened in support of Johnston’s United States Senate campaign against the reactionary “Cotton Ed” Smith, Johnston was defeated. These were painful lessons in the limits of progressive reform, but through it all, millworkers consistently supported the politics of class. They simply lacked the numbers and the institutional power to prevail in a rural state where...