The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC

2. "Go Ahead and Do Harm": The Academic Study of Labor Relations

49 2 “Go Ahead and Do Harm” The Academic Study of Labor Relations In 1924, Howard Odum eagerly anticipated launching a new study of conditions in North Carolina’s textile industry and mill villages, under the auspices of the Institute for Research in Social Science (IRSS). The project’s scope fit perfectly within the core mission of the IRSS, which was to initiate a “cooperative study of problems in the general field of social science, arising out of state and regional conditions.”1 Writing to his colleague Harriet Herring, Odum looked forward to the trust and cooperation he expected from the textile manufacturers: “I am sure no one would misunderstand us because we are working for the same purpose.”2 Others at UNC made similar assumptions. The year before, UNC president Harry Chase had written an article weaving together the school’s expertise with the trust he presumed the state to have in that expertise. Chase wrote in the Journal of Social Forces that, even though he thought it unlikely, “it would indeed be tragic were an institution whose faculty is made up of competent specialists, and supported by the citizens generally , not to put at the immediate disposal of men and women . . . the benefits of its knowledge and skill in an immediate way.”3 Alan Tullos quotes sociologist Eugene Branson’s assurances to Upton Sinclair that the university was “far beyond the reach of organized big business and the politicians of the state. We are free here to consider the foundational problems of life and livelihood in North Carolina, whether these concerns have to do with agriculture, manufacturing, capital, labor, whatnot.”4 By a wide margin , Branson, Odum, and Chase all turned out to be overly optimistic. 50 The New Southern University Once university researchers sought to bring their expertise to bear on the problems of industrial relations, they inadvertently initiated a bruising conflict with some of the state’s textile industry leadership.5 As UNC sociologist Guy B. Johnson recalled years later, “In some ways the conservative industrial faction was worse than the [conservative] race faction.”6 Attacks from textile industry spokesman David Clark, editor of the Southern Textile Bulletin, did the most damage to the university’s research efforts and exacted a heavy personal toll on Chase and Odum. A relentless reactionary, Clark rejected the legitimacy of the university’s search for industry “facts” and questioned the university’s trustworthiness and its defense of academic freedom. Chase, worn down by years of attacks, eventually tried to narrow the parameters of academic freedom for his faculty by suggesting they funnel their expertise into safer channels, and Odum’s goals for service to the state also grew considerably more cautious. By the end of the decade, it was often UNC students who championed the university’s academic freedom to ask hard questions of the textile industry. UNC began to consider the problems of labor in earnest when it hired Eugene C. Branson in 1914. Branson created the Department of Rural Economics and Sociology and a rural extension service that allowed him to begin investigating the living conditions of poorer North Carolinians. In 1916 Branson acknowledged that the growing millhand population was reaching a level worthy of investigation, but “the question of child labor in the country regions is a far bigger problem in the South.”7 This emphasis soon changed. Tar Heel writers floated a rumor in 1919 that “a group of the University ’s ablest writers” were working together to produce a fictionalized yet “gripping story of modern industrial life.” Even though they predicted being able to soon read “of titanic struggle between Capital and Labor, Bolshevism and Democracy opposing each other,” it was apparently just a rumor.8 Yet interest in the state of industrialization was increasing on campus. In the midst of a brief post–World War I season of labor unrest in North Carolina, invitations to guest lecturers gave more evidence of the efforts UNC made to approach industrialization and labor relations as topics worthy of close academic inquiry. In 1920, L. E. Nichols of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), an organization energized by wartime promises to industrial labor, spoke before a UNC audience by invitation of the School of Commerce. Nichols outlined the organization’s The Academic Study of Labor Relations 51 principles and assured listeners that his was not a radical organization along the lines of the Industrial Workers of...