The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934 (review)

History has rarely been kind to southern textile mill workers. Writing in 1923, Tannebaum described mill folk as existing in a "state of childish impotence. . . . Their faces seem stripped, denuded and empty . . . and their eyes are drawn and stupid. They give the impression of being beyond the realm of things daily lived and experienced by other people . . . they are men and women who have been lost to the world and have forgotten its existence."¹ Although such interpretations went unchallenged for decades, one of the most welcome trends in the historiography of the American South has been the effort to restore the dignity, humanity, and voice of this much-maligned segment of the southern population. Like a Family and Bryant Simon's A Fabric of Defeat (Chapel Hill, 1998) are especially noteworthy in this regard. Though not as authoritative, Roscigno and Danaher's The Voice of Southern Labor builds upon these earlier works, examining how music and the radio helped white southern mill workers articulate shared grievances and mount some form of collective resistance at a time "when unions had virtually given up on southern organizing, and southern businessmen and political leaders adopted the view that southern workers were apathetic or conservative" (ix).

In describing life and labor in the early mill villages, the authors pay special attention to the heavily paternalistic worker/owner relationship that went a long way toward muting class tensions. These relationships grew more confrontational during the late 1920s and the 1930s, however, as mill owners looked to circumvent labor guidelines through "stretch-outs" and other scientific management techniques. Workers expressed their dissatisfaction with this orientation in several ways, including song. Much of the music and many of the musicians that they favored had deep cultural and economic ties to the mill village. Performers such as Gastonia's Dave McCarn amplified themes of dangerous working conditions, deadly and debilitating poverty, and debt and injustice with a distinct message about who was to blame. This point is made abundantly clear in the Ella Mae Wiggins' tune "Big Fat Boss and the Worker." As families and communities gathered around their radios, they began to develop an oppositional framework that set the stage for the dramatic but ultimately unsuccessful walkouts of 1929.

The events of 1929 laid the groundwork for the massive general strike of 1934. The music and messages from local radio stations helped to sustain and broaden workers' collective anger. While mill villagers nodded their heads and stomped their feet to the Dixon Brother's "Hard Times in Here" and "Spinning Room Blues," Franklin Roosevelt's "fireside chats" convinced many listeners that they had a potentially powerful ally in the White House. These assurances offered less than concrete dividends, however, and lacking adequate political and union support, the strikers of 1934 succumbed to the pressures applied by southern governors, judges, police, and vigilantes.

Although certainly provocative, Roscigno and Danaher's analysis requires more clarification. The authors privilege the voice of white southern labor, tending to overlook the uglier side of their subjects' racial politics, which played no small part in undermining southern labor movements. The authors also struggle at times to make a strong causal connection between forms of cultural protest, such as music, and direct political action, such as labor strikes. The lyrics that Roscigno and Danaher cite would certainly appear to stoke worker unrest, but the link between the two remains implied in many cases.

Criticisms of this nature are neither original nor peculiar to this work. Roscigno and Danaher's larger argument is noteworthy. The authors emphasize that the strikes of 1929 and 1934 were the product of "southern workers' native radicalism," and in standing up to the considerable political and economic forces arrayed against them, the "indigenous radicalism" of the cotton-mill villages proved that textile workers were genuine forces in—not men and women lost to—the world that they had...