The Politics of Whiteness, Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South, and: Culture of Misfortune: An Interpretive History of Textile Unionism in the United States (review)

"In no other American industry has unionism had so checkered and uncertain a career as in textiles." Few would dispute this assertion and the authors of both these books aim to enlarge our understanding of organized labor's failure to effectively organize the textile industry.

Clete Daniels, author of Culture of Misfortune, An Interpretive History of Textile Unionism in the United States, focuses primarily on the struggles of the United Textile Workers and its successor, the Textile Workers Union of America, to represent the interests of workers in the volatile textile industry. He is particularly effective at charting the internal struggles that handicapped the response of both unions to economic changes and the "endlessly resourceful efforts" of employers to block unionization.

Daniel's major challenge, however, is explaining why labor ultimately failed to achieve the kind of gains in textiles that it achieved in other industries. The answer, Daniel argues, lies in the failure of textile unions to build a sustained presence in the South. As long as southern mill owners were "largely invulnerable" to unionism, the industry would inevitably trek south to exploit the wage disparity between the regions.

Unfortunately, textile unionism's major efforts in the South—the great textile strike of 1934 and the CIO organizing drive of 1937—made little headway against the fanatic opposition of employers and the resistance of "virtually every institutional force in the region." Unable to make significant inroads with these efforts, a generation of textile union leaders watched their hard won gains erode as plant after plant moved from the union-strong Northeast to the unorganized South.

Michelle Brattain, in The Politics of Whiteness, Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South, turns her attention to the historical realities of racism in the South and its influence on southern white textile workers and their unions. In contrast to Daniel's comprehensive overview, Brattain centers her study on a single southern textile center—Rome, Georgia. She forthrightly explores the ways white textile workers in Rome, from the New Deal to the advent of the Civil Rights movement, used race to define themselves and their place in society.

According to Brattain, racism brought white workers social and material benefits. Until the 1960s, whites in Rome, as elsewhere in the South, had sole access to jobs in the textile industry. Their whiteness also gave textile workers the opportunity to make alliances with white powerbrokers who provided them access to the "spoils of discrimination" unavailable to blacks—including the vote, welfare, and access to political power.

Brattain argues that southern mill workers did not share identical interests with black workers. In fact, "interracial" alliances threatened to undercut "the value of whiteness" and endangered the tenuous gains white workers had achieved in the face of fierce resistance from employers.

Though in agreement with historians who view white textile workers as political pragmatists striving to preserve "a more humane moral economy," Brattain believes the central role race played in the lives of textile workers has been overlooked. She remedies this oversight with her compelling and well-researched account.

Taken together, Daniel and Brattain provide both a comprehensive institutional history of textile unionism and a chronicle of the daunting cultural and social challenges it faced. Both books are also valuable resources for helping union members understand the historical impact of racism on unions and the legacy of American Business's unceasing pursuit of cheap non-union labor.