Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta's Fulton Mills (review)

Kuhn provides a richly detailed account of one of the New South's first modern industrial-labor disputes in this study of a year-long strike by textile workers in Atlanta that, although unsuccessful, affected the lives of strikers, management, and the community in significant ways. In seeking to challenge the shallow, "two-dimensional" images of mill workers presented by contemporary observers and in some historical analyses, Kuhn moves beyond a narrow labor-relations approach to examine the broader context of the strike, locally, regionally, and nationally. Unlike workers in smaller, more isolated southern mill towns, those in Atlanta lived in a rapidly growing, ethnically diverse city that Kuhn sees as "a border zone mediating between the region and the rest of the nation, between traditionalism and modern times, at the cusp in some sense between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (215-216). The strike revealed much about the class and cultural dynamics of the new industrial order and community reactions to it during the Progressive Era.

When several hundred workers from the Fulton Mills walked out in May 1914 to protest the firing of union members and management's refusal to consider workers' grievances, both sides in the dispute recognized the need to gain the support of a wider public that had already expressed concerns about the impact of industrialization on traditional moral values, gender roles, the employment of children, and threats to white Anglo-Saxon dominance. Strike organizers sought the support of middle-class reformers like the evangelical businessmen of the Men and Religion Forward Movement (MRFM), while mill owner Oscar Elsas attempted to discredit labor activists by highlighting incidents of drunkenness, rowdiness, promiscuity, and violence among the strikers. Both sides used racism to their advantage. The strike leaders drew attention to the use of black laborers to evict union members from company housing, and Elsas warned that a proposed compulsory arbitration law would force white southerners to negotiate with their black sharecroppers and domestics.

The struggle to win public opinion is one of the most interesting aspects of Kuhn's study. As he notes, both sides used modern tools of "authentication and verification," such as affidavits, interviews, statistics, and photographs, to collect evidence that supported their arguments (220). Despite the reputed accuracy of such methods, however, all of the participants in the struggle presented distorted versions of reality in an effort to strengthen their case. Elsas consistently minimized the number of people who were involved in the strike, blaming the labor troubles on outsiders from the United Textile Workers (UTW). In fact, Fulton workers themselves had instigated the strike before the UTW lent its support. For their part, labor leaders inaccurately depicted the strikers as frail, helpless women and children (many were skilled, white male workers), and staged scenes for photographers that emphasized workers' victimization by callous industrialists.

Management, UTW organizers, and middle-class reformers all saw mill workers as passive, childlike creatures who were incapable of acting on their own. Kuhn counters that image with an analysis that uncovers the complex attitudes, assumptions, and motivations of those who joined the strike and those who did not. "Financial concerns, personal relationships, work situations, perceptions of management and the union, pressure, intimidation, and other contingencies all informed individual workers' decisions to quit or stay," he notes, and were not static but varied over time (124).

Kuhn's evidence is drawn from the usual archival sources employed by historians: company records, government reports, transcripts of hearings, newspapers, photographs, and oral interviews. The book is not (nor does it seem intended to be) an interdisciplinary study, and for that reason it might only be of limited interest to readers of this journal. Nevertheless, Kuhn's account of the Fulton Mills strike, especially his nuanced portrayal of...