The Null Persona: Race and the Rhetoric of Silence in the Uprising of '34

The Null Persona: Race and the Rhetoric of Silence in the Uprising of '34 Dana L. Cloud "My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.... Because the machine will try to grind you into dust, anyway, whether or not we speak." Audre Lorde2 "Establishing links between what is said and audiences denied access to public space brings rhetorical theory back to earth." Philip Wander3 Silence is audible only in relief from the sound of voices. During the month of September, 1934, hundreds of thousands of cotton mill workers across the Piedmont region of the southern United States stilled their weaving machines and raised their voices in protest. In an industry-wide strike, they held mass pickets outside mills and formed flying squadrons to spread what has come to be remembered as "the Uprising of '34."4 Despite the scope and militancy of this strike and despite its contemporaneity with other, successful mass strikes,5 the mill workers went down to defeat. The loss came after mill owners called in the National Guard and after President Roosevelt appointed a commission to "study" the problems of mill workers. Strikers were beaten, shot, discredited, and evicted from their homes in company-owned towns. Blacklisted, thousands never found work in mills again. To this day workers in Southern cotton mills are notoriously hard to organize, suspicious of unions and their promises, even as they continue to face many of the same problems—long hours, work hazards (dangerous machines, ubiquitous cotton dust), and low wages—as their 1930s counterparts.6 Dana L. Cloud is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. She would like to thank Robert Woodrum at Georgia State University for his archival assistance in gathering transcripts at the Southern Labor Archives, and Robert Jensen at the University of Texas for his helpful advice on earlier drafts. Additional debts of gratitude are owed to Steven Goldzwig, the editor of this special issue, and to three anonymous reviewers whose suggestions strengthened this work. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 2, No. 2,1999, pp. 177-209 ISSN 1094-8392 178 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Lives of textile workers have been popularized in films such as Norma Rae7 and more recently, in a documentary called The Uprising of'34? This documentary, discussed in more detail below, features the voices of former mill workers involved in the 1934 strikes and is an important contribution to our memory of the hardships faced and struggles undertaken by workers during the Depression decade. The present article starts with this documentary and the interviews that comprise it, and expands its sights to include sections of the interviews not featured in the documentary . These interview records were gathered from the Southern Labor Archives in Atlanta, where the filmmakers placed their transcripts. More specifically, this article examines the transcripts of interviews with black workers Blanche Willis and E. O. Friday, who lived and worked around the mills during the Uprising of '34, for clues about the significance of race in those events. In addition, this article draws upon some material from interviews with members of two additional black families, the Nealeys and the Gardins. Although mill towns were, on the whole, white and racially homogeneous, race did matter in the cotton mills.9 The sometimes coercive enforcement of unequal power relations created the conditions for a "rhetoric of silence" on the part of black workers. By "rhetoric of silence," I mean a discursive pattern in which speakers gesture incompletely toward what cannot be uttered in a context of oppression. Textual criticism of the interviews reveals patterns of self-interruption, indirection, diversion and refusal to speak about certain subjects. These interviews provide a case study of how textual scholars, working within a materialist frame, can discover symptoms of contextual power in the text itself and relate them to broader contextual features of social reality. For many of the workers interviewed in the documentary, the primary lesson of the strike was to keep quiet. As I will suggest in an analysis of the transcripts, the silence about the strike is linked fundamentally to a system of combined race-, gender- and class-based oppression and exploitation, in which...