Tangled: Organizing the Southern Textile Industry, 1930–1934 by Travis Sutton Byrd (review)

Fifty years ago, Irving Bernstein began his classic portrayal in The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker (1960) with a prologue titled “Revolt in the Piedmont,” which looked at the uprising of textile workers at the onset of the Great Depression. In the intervening years, many terrific historians have refocused our gaze on these workers and this time period. Using a variety of lenses, they have examined the textile industry from the perspectives of race, class, gender, family, daily life, religion, popular culture, and politics. So central has the textile industry been to regional notions of economic development that it is often tempting to substitute this one group of workers for the entire southern working class. In fact, that is not just a recent mistake; both the AFL and the CIO overemphasized textile workers when they began ambitious campaigns to organize the South in the 1930s and again in the 1940s.

Travis Sutton Byrd’s second contribution to the literature on southern textile labor struggle explores what to him are understudied developments occurring between the Marion/Piedmont strikes of 1929 (the subject of his first book) and the uprising of 1934. It is, he tells us, the major goal of this book to reconnect “these antipodes into historical Pangaea” (6). Other scholars have failed to link these two seminal rebellions and thus have falsely portrayed textile workers as passive and fatalistic subjects awaiting “the benevolent, messianic cupped palms of a future president” (6). Byrd constructs a narrative that demonstrates the sustained and even heroic struggles of textile workers to demand fairness and decent treatment. Through detailed coverage of strikes in Greensboro, High Point, and Bessemer City in North Carolina and in Danville, Virginia, the author shows that there was continuity from Marion to the uprising of 1934. Successive strikes imposed important lessons for the workers. For example, in High Point, mill hands strained to put their own stamp on protest. Caught between contesting unions — one promoting a Marxian class consciousness, the other a timid cooperation with management — Byrd believes that true class consciousness “emerged among the folk of the piedmont” when they eschewed both Communists and national labor organizations (210). Jumping back and forth between local and national scenes and between strike actions and politics, Byrd seeks to recreate the circumstances that shaped the decision making of actors in the textile industry, especially the workers who risked much to improve their conditions.

To restore the agency and vitality of southern mill hands in confronting their employers during the nadir of the nation’s economy, Byrd turns to newspapers as his primary source of choice, particularly the Asheville Citizen, supplemented by the local newspapers of the other major textile labor struggles between 1930 and 1933. Byrd posits that newspapers “determined what people knew and how they viewed the world in which they lived. In turn, those sources reflected the mores of their consumers” (7). Really? It is true that Herbert Gutman’s doctoral dissertation, “Social and Economic Structure and Depression: American Labor in 1873 and 1874” (1959) demonstrated just how valuable reading newspapers could be in uncovering a hidden working-class world, but he turned to newspapers because other sources documenting working-class daily life were scarce. This is not the case for the Depression-era textile belt, and an overreliance on a handful of newspapers reflects a missed opportunity for a richer and more balanced analysis.

This research strategy shapes Byrd’s narrative. A reliance on newspaper coverage clearly privileges actions undertaken by local forces, but it hardly gives equal weight to all of the actors in a given struggle. Was the hostility to the Communist Party in High Point the perspective of the strikers or was that perspective determined by reporters and editors of the newspapers in Greensboro and Asheville (the newspapers used for the High Point chapters)? Did Governor O. Max Gardner intervene in the strike because of the simultaneous coverage of the...