Myra Page: Daughter of the South, Worker for Change

By Mary Frederickson

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 10-12, 14-15

On a summer evening this past August, Myra Page sat surrounded by books, papers and manuscripts in her home of thirty-nine years in Yonkers, New York, telling the tale of her most recent demonstration. Her lively eyes belied the eighty-two years that her face and hands proclaimed. A week before, she had joined a group of thirty peace activists, mostly women, as they faced fifty uniformed American Legionnaires in front of Yonker’s World War I memorial.

The men insisted it was “sacriligious” for the demonstrators to gather at the memorial that steamy Sunday morning on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. Tension mounted as members of both groups exchanged comments about nuclear weapons. Several legionnaires proudly recalled where they had been when the bombs exploded in 1946; some argued that their lives had been saved, others that it hastened the end of the war.

As Page stood near the commander of the group, he whispered that he didn’t want another war either, that he didn’t want his grandson to have to fight.

The legionnaires moved into formation three deep around the war memorial. The protesters took positions across the street. As Page crossed over with her comrades, the Commander spoke to her again. This time loudly. “Don’t worry lady, there’ll never be another war!”

In reporting this event, as she had the many demonstrations and protests in which she participated during six decades of work for labor, civil rights and human

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rights causes, Myra Page focused on the personal, highlighting the irony of a Legion commander disclosing private feelings about war to a peace activist. This personal perspective has been at the core of Page’s work, as a reformer and labor organizer in the 1920’s, as a reporter for the labor press in the 1930’s, and then as a writer of fiction. Her dual objectives have been to relate social conditions on a human scale and to place personal struggle within a framework of broader issues.

Sustained throughout a lifetime, Myra Page’s belief in the priority of human rights developed during her childhood in Virginia. Myra, born Dorothy Page Gary, and her younger brother learned their first lesson in Southern racial mores one summer on their grandfather’s farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Abruptly, they were forbidden to play together with a black friend. Told that the child would lose his job on the farm if they disobeyed, Myra and her brother wept with a “great unnamed misery.” She wrote later that “something big and ugly had descended upon us. Something which awoke in me a vast incoherent questioning and hate.”

Page’s father, the town physician in Newport News, Virginia, was a humanitarian who served as a volunteer on the staff of the local black hospital, and treated black and white, rich and poor in an era when a family doctor was “almost like a preacher.” Although opposed to his eldest daughter becoming a doctor, Page’s father took for granted that his four children, male and female, would go to college. He had seen enough destitute widows to want his three daughters to have the means to make their own living.

Page’s mother did not openly oppose the status quo. Regarding race, she “accepted the traditional pattern in the South,” while confiding to her children that she “thought it was a big mistake.” Page saw her mother and three aunts as leading limited lives marked by ignored talents and suppressed sadness. She felt that she “couldn’t follow the path that any one of them was following.” For her, “the woman question, without being very concrete, developed very early.” Pressured by her mother to conform to a preconceived pattern of “the way life should be,” Page rebelled against the traditional belief that daughters “owed everything to the family.”

Page lived in a home filled with “endless books” and with parents who argued about George Bernard Shawl As a child accompanying her father on rounds to see his patients, Page saw “both sides of town, and all that went on.” Like Mick Kelley in Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Page roamed the town, went to the waterfront piers, met children from the nearby Irish shantytown, and watched the dockers load ships. In the years before World War I, Newport News was a bustling town dominated by the noise of a shipyard filled with crews which built ships twenty-four hours a day. As Page grew older she heard news stories of lynchings and rumors about the Klan. But she also attended the meetings of an integrated community group, the Newport News Joint Committee, established to deal with public works and educational facilities. Sitting separately, on opposite sides of the aisle, the black and white group worked to obtain sewers and a high school for the black section of town. In addition, black longshoremen in Newport News formed a union during this period, and then helped organize their white counterparts. Although in separate locals, the two groups worked together-and added a different chapter to the long history of craft unionism in the shipyard. Page’s father supported organized labor, many of his patients were union members, and with them he viewed labor’s platform as one antidote to the high rate of industrial accidents that plagued workers in Newport News.

Page grew close to Belle Franklin, the black woman who worked in her parent’s home; they sang hymns and folk songs in the kitchen and shared Myra’s school lessons. Myra was repeatedly told, by Belle, to be glad she wasn’t “born colored.” Their bond deepened when Myra discovered that her ambition to become a doctor was thwarted because she was born female. The black woman understood, when other adults did not, about “the injustices and the yearning for things you could not have.” Myra began to rebel against “this bad Southern tradition of women.”

When Page left home to attend Westhampton College in Richmond, she carried with her a complex legacy inherited from a society permeated by racial segregation, divided by fixed class lines, and steeped in a tradition of inflexible gender roles. At Westhampton, in the supportive atmosphere of a woman’s college, she found allies in her search for new ideas and ways to change Southern society. On Friday afternoons at tea in a liberal professor’s apartment, Page and a few close friends read The Nation and The New Republic, periodicals not allowed in the college library. “We were pacifists,” Page recalled over sixty years later, “and very much against the idea of going into the First World War.”

A small group of students, including Page, became active in the YWCA in order to give substance to New Testament concepts of brotherhood and peace. Page remembers:

It was in college that we first got a chance to know black students, girls mainly, at the summer YWCA conferences. Up there in the beautiful rarefied air of Blue Ridge, North Carolina, you know, so many things seemed possible. At Blue Ridge we were able to be friends, to ignore color lines and to have discussions.

Following one of the YWCA conferences, Page and a close friend decided to invite a black YWCA secretary they had met at Blue Ridge to speak at Westhampton. Over the opposition of “ill-prepared” classmates who “went by us in the hall as if we had some disease that was catching,” Page and her small group of friends organized and attended the first integrated meeting on their campus in 1917.

Through interracial work in the YWCA, by teaching music to young industrial workers in a Richmond settlement house, and by working with women at the state reform school, Page met people from many backgrounds during her years in Richmond. Gradually, she began to evaluate the regional effects of racism and industrialization, and to question her own place and function in the society which surrounded her. A dozen years went by, however, before Page wrote about the chaingangs she had

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seen as a student in Richmond (The Nation, 1931) and about her experiences with the forbidden black playmate, with Belle Franklin, and in the YWCA (The Crisis, 1931).

* * *

Page began to write about the South only after she left the region, a process which occurred in stages, over a period of several years. Her first step out of Virginia was to attend graduate school at Columbia University in New York City. Page studied sociology with Franklin Henry Giddings and anthropology with Franz Boas, sat in on John Dewey’s classes and attended lectures by Harry F. Ward and Harry Emerson Fosdick: “it was like a whole world opening up.”

In the North, Page continued to be plagued by questions about race. In her university dormitory the young black woman who cleaned the rooms talked with the students about literature, and offered to loan one of Page’s roommates her set of Victor Hugo’s writings. The students discovered that the woman had graduated from college with honors, but could not get a job, except cleaning floors.

A year later, convinced that “the future of the country would lie with the workers getting organized and making good sensible reform,” Page joined the YWCA Industrial Department. As part of what she viewed as “a real movement of women for democracy,” Page agreed to return home to work with women factory operatives. Still close to her family, Page wanted to return South, and the YWCA’s goals of interracial harmony and industrial reform meshed with her own agenda for social change in the region. Page came back to Virginia in 1920, “with a little sociology theory and Christian philosophy,” to a job as YWCA Industrial Secretary in Norfolk.

In this non-union town, Page began to organize groups of women workers and to plan educational programs designed to prepare them for union membership. There were problems from the beginning. Page had to seek permission from management to meet with workers during their lunch hour, and then enter factories to face women who were convinced that she represented the company. In addition, several YWCA board members from the business community accused Page of “talking unionism” and stressed that they would not continue to finance that kind of socialism through the YWCA. Progressives within the YWCA counseled Page to proceed gradually, to have patience and look ahead, but to Page, “suddenly the whole thing was a farce.” She wrote later:

We had been trained to believe that social relations would right themselves through Peace and Persuasion, through changing hearts one by one. Finally, for me there was no going on. The theory simply did not work. The system was stronger than individuals, and the solution depended on changing the system itself.

Page resigned from the YWCA in 1921. Feeling that little social change could be accomplished in the South, she decided to leave. Despite close family ties and over her parents’ objections, Page was determined “to break away” from a region totally dominated by a rigid system of caste and class.

Page left Norfolk for Philadelphia and St. Louis and~ worked as a wage-earner in department stores and factories. In Philadelphia she clerked at Wannamaker’s until the management discovered she had a college degree and suspected she might be an organizer. A stint in the hat trade, where organized male workers opposed the entry of women into the union, taught Page about occupational segregation by gender and demonstrated the consequences for the labor movement.

After several attempts to get work in the clothing trade, Page went to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America’s Philadelphia office. There she met Hilda Shapiro, a staunchly feminist clothing worker from the New York’s East Side. Page and Shapiro worked together for the next four years as rank and file organizers for the Amalgamated. The two women organized picket lines and entered open shop factories to get the workers to come out. In one shop Page remembered being “scared to death” when the boss came at them with a hot iron. Page found the whole set-up “like a jungle.”

But the “vicious” experiences she had in unorganized shops contrasted sharply with her work-life in union factories. For Page, the union shops were havens in which men and women of different nationalities and races could work together. She saw herself participating in “one great movement” of workers, and the answers she had been seeking in Norfolk began to appear. Through the labor movement, Page saw the goal of interracial industrial unionism, what she described later as “a freedom to be fought for and won, black and white alike,” as an attainable end.

After four years in Philadelphia and St. Louis, Page left the shops to return to school and train as a teacher in workers’ education. At the University of Minnesota, Page obtained a doctorate in sociology, taught a course in social movements, joined the teacher’s union, and became active in the Twin Cities labor movement. Appointed head of the Education Committee of the Minnesota State Federation of Labor, Page organized speakers and classes for union locals throughout the state.

As she taught the history of women in the trade union movement to women in St. Paul, spoke at cooperatives, and interviewed miners in the Iron Range, Page thought about her first organizing experiences in Norfolk. Soon, she formulated a plan to write about textile workers in the South. To document the “traditional Southern attitudes” she saw as hampering union organization, Page lived for several months in a mill community outside Columbia, South Carolina.

Two books resulted from Page’s PhD research on Southern Textiles. The first, Southern Cotton Mills and Labor (1929) appeared immediately after a wave of textile strikes had spread across the Piedmont. The second work, Page’s first novel, entitled Gathering Storm (1932) was a fictional account of the Gastonia Strike of 1929. In both manuscripts, she provided an analysis of textile workers which transcended traditional

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accounts. Page argued that although the culture of Southern textile workers (unlike that of miners) did not foster collective organization, neither did it preclude intense class consciousness and overt expressions of discontent. Taking the long view of textile unionism, she wrote:

Ever since the textile industry has been well established in the south, there have been intermittent union campaigns there. Usually these organizing efforts have been initiated by spontaneous strike movements among southern textile workers, with a national union then coming into’ the field. In consequence, union efforts have often been rather sporadic and poorly organized. Also company opposition has been ruthless. Nevertheless, in nearly one half of a century of struggles, this section of the American working class has shown itself capable of courage, sacrifice, leadership and endurance that speaks well for the determination of southern mill hands to conquer all difficulties and build their union movement.

Page held two basic criteria as crucial for the labor movement in the South: First, it was essential to “organize black and white workers on an equal footing in industrial unions and unite them in struggles for full economic, political and social rights.” Second, Page contended that only a “system of collective ownership and operation of mills” would provide the fundamental reorganization required to provide workers with a decent standard of living.

Page criticized AFL organizing efforts in Southern textiles, arguing that the United Textile Workers (UTW) repeatedly entered local strike situations too late and then withdrew active support prematurely. Moreover, Page continued, the UTW either ignored black workers entirely or segregated them into separate locals.

In 1929 Page felt that the momentum for major change had begun and that “nothing can stop the revolt of Dixie mill hands. now under way.” But the early 1930’s proved to be difficult years for organizing and for the realization of interracial unionism. Nonetheless, as she met with interracial groups of union men and women she argued that as Southerners “learned through their industrial struggles the common economic lot of white and black wage-earners, and the necessity of common action,” they would be freed of racial prejudices.

During the 1930’s Page’s work as a reporter for the labor press took her into Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas. But it was in Alabama that she began to see the promise of what the union organization of agricultural workers, miners and industrial workers could mean.

Page came to Alabama several times in the early 1930’s at the request of union men and women in “this land of steel, coal and cotton.” She traveled by train into a rural Alabama county to meet with members of the sharecropper’s union and there found “brave people who were taking so much into their stride.” Page had great confidence in this predominantly black group of men and women who were fighting to obtain basic control of their worklives in a county where they comprised eighty-five percent of the population. In Birmingham, Page met with miners, one-third of whom were out of work, who had “downed tools” and demanded the right to bargain collectively and to obtain equal rights for black and white miners on the job and in the union.

In 1932, Page wrote phrases which echo fifty years later:

The big steel mills of Morgan’s T.C.I. and Mellon’s Republic Steel Corporations which belch their crimson tongues of smoke and flame against the night, today are running around forty percent capacity. Nearly one-third of Alabama’s coal miners are without work. In Birmingham, unemployed are estimated at forty-five to fifty thousand, affecting one out of every three households.

As Page left Birmingham to return to her home in the Northeast, she predicted that “the outbreaks and struggles against Morgan and banking and landlord rule will become increasingly more violent and sweeping in character.” Threatened strikes among miners and steelworkers meant to Page that “the working masses in this steel and coal stronghold of the South are in motion, and as Birmingham goes, so goes the South.” The organizing activity of workers in Birmingham confirmed Page’s belief in interracial industrial unionism, and offered the promise of a time when the South “will be freed of its shadows; when its toiling people will march shoulder to shoulder, beyond the color line.”

The optimism of Page’s rhetoric in the early 1930’s reflected her belief that out of the ferment of the Great Depression “big changes were going to take place . . . that the working people were really going to get more control of their lives, and there would be much more democracy in the country.” Page recalls that in the 1930’s, “I could see that change was coming,” and in Birmingham and other parts of the South that vision was palpable. But there were also unrealized, perhaps unrealistic, dreams: the belief that black Southerners would demand and be given distinct regions, or a separate nation; that the violence against Morgan in Southern steel areas like Birmingham would spread to workers in other Southern industries, and that the Southern working-class would oust the economic imperialists who controlled the region’s natural and industrial resources; also unrealized was her firm hope that the organization of Southern workers was inevitable, and once accomplished would be the key to labor’s strength nationwide.

“We were young, enthusiastic, and thought things were going to happen faster,” Page remembers. Today Page remains hopeful–“that one of these days we will get a working-class party” in the United States; that racism

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will diminish as the South and the nation become thoroughly integrated; that the United States has learned and will never forget the hard lesson of Vietnam; that the “creativity and determination of the American people” will allow us to solve our problems.

During the late 1930’s Page took up her pen more frequently and struggled with questions about the South in her writing. As a member of the League of American Writers she was asked to come to Highlander Folk School in 1938 and 1939 to teach classes and workshops. While at Highlander, Page visited miners’ families in the Tennessee mountains. Later she met Dolly Hawkins Cooper, the woman whose story she tells in Daughter of the Hills (1978, first published in 1950 by Citadel Press as With Sun In Their Blood). Page’s friendship with Hawkins grew out of an intense admiration for the strength of the women whose fathers, husband’ end sons mined coal, and an appreciation of “a woman’s part in the coal miner’s struggle.”

During these years Page continued to report for the labor press and to write radio play scripts and short stories to supplement her income. She had married John Markey, a fellow graduate student from Minnesota and then college professor, and they had had a daughter and a son. Page still felt “a certain pull, a certain allegiance to the South.” But family visits to Virginia in the 1930’s were “painful,” and Page’s rejection of the social and political status quo was manifest in her unwillingness to rear her children in the South.

In the post-war period, Page traveled South each summer and, again at Highlander Folk School, shared in the expansion and development of the civil rights movement. “We had crucial sessions at Highlander,” Page recalls. “The Southern people working in the field were leading . . . I took a little part, but not very much, because I wasn’t living and working then in the South.” But it was the movement for which Page had worked since before World War I.

As Page participated in civil rights work in the 1950’s and 1960’s, she noticed many Southern white women who “connected with the movement.” To her, “it was noticeable that so many came north and worked.” Page argues that these were Southern women who saw parallels between their own limitations and lack of freedom and that of black people. She believes that many of these white women, as she had done in 1920, felt a special kinship to the black quest for civil rights and as a result either “they got out from down there, or if they did stay in the South, they worked with the movement.”

As the progressive gains of the 1960’s became apparent within the South, Page shifted her attention to include an even wider range of issues: expanding civil rights efforts, anti-war work against Vietnam, a growing woman’s movement, environmental concerns, and support for the United Mine Workers of America (to Page “the enduring backbone of the American labor movement”).

In June of 1980, Page returned to Newport News, Virginia, the town she had left sixty years earlier. Three months before her visit, the community’s 16,500 shipyard workers had won their first United Steel Workers of America (USWA) contract with Tenneco. Members of the union had invited Page to come South. She met with many of the shipyard workers (black and white, male and female) who had fought for three years and endured an eleven week strike to win company recognition of Local 8888 (see Southern Changes, June 1979). The union’s contract with substantial wage increases, a grievance procedure, a health and safety committee and better medical benefits and pensions, signaled to Page that “In Tidewater and the South, a new day has begun” (see Mountain Life and Work, November 1980). The union’s victory affirmed many of the principles that Page had believed in and fought for since she left Virginia to join the labor movement in 1920 (see Southern Exposure, Winter 1981).

Over the years Page had seen many of her political dreams and social ideals flounder; early textile organizing efforts in the South faltered, the dream of a worker controlled society has not been fulfilled, a classless social system has yet to be established. On the other hand, the civil rights movement transformed American society, and the women’s movement has realized many changes for which Page worked. The union victory in Newport News was both a substantive and symbolic triumph. Organization of the shipyard workers was a goal that Page had sought for years, and it validated her theory, considered too radical in the 1920’s and 1930’s, that Southern workers could organize effectively only when black and white joined forces. Symbolically, the victory held a special personal significance for Myra Page–Dorothy Markey–because it meant that in a sense she had been able to come full circle, and to come home.

Formerly a research fellow at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Mary Frederickson is now assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. This article copyright, 1988, by Mary Frederickson.

BOOKS:
What’s A Union For?: New Perspectives on Textile Unionism in the Post-World War II South
By Mary Frederickson

Vol. 19, No. 3-4, 1997 pp. 36-39

Daniel J. Clark, Like Night and Day: Unionization in a Southern Mill Town, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Timothy J. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For?: The TWUA in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

On August 13, 1997, workers in Kannapolis, Concord, and Salisbury, North Carolina plants owned by Fieldcrest Cannon, Inc., voted by a narrow margin (2,194 for and 2,563 against) to decline representation by UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. The past breathes heavily down the backs of those who live and work in southern textile communities and North Carolina textile workers know well that they have inherited a particularly burdensome history.

That history is the subject of two books published just a few months before the Fieldcrest Cannon campaign. Daniel J. Clark’s Like Night and Day cogently analyzes the successful unionization of the textile mills in Henderson, North Carolina in the years between 1943 and 1958. Clark offers a detailed explication of the ways in which the union transformed the worklives of Henderson employees, and then provides a graphic narrative of the deconstruction of the union and the ways in which the very fabric of work and community was torn apart by an intransigent management determined, for reasons that had little to do with economic pragmatism, to regain the power they had wielded in the days before unionization. Timothy J. Minchin’s What Do We Need a Union For? views the Southern textile industry through a lens with a wider angle. Minchin has written a fine history of the TWUA (Textile Workers Union of America) in the South in the decade immediately following World War II. He argues. that the decline in union membership between 1945. 1955, resulted not from the overt hostility of Southern mill workers to unions but from a combination of factors, including strategies used by non-union companies to match union wages and the pragmatic decision reached by many workers to eschew union membership in a decade of relative economic prosperity marked by rapid increases in pay and a parallel escalation of consumer debt. Minchin takes a close look at the TWUA period in the South and analyzes these years as an aberration, a decade out of sync in a history marked by low pay and continuous exploitation. The TWUA’s travail in the years following World War II has relevance beyond the South, Minchin contends, for the waning influence of this union foreshadowed the decline of the American labor movement as a whole in the years after 1970. Both Clark and Minchin pay close attention to the ways in which issues of gender and race have shaped the history of Southern textiles; neither author, however, places these variables at the center of his analysis.

The history of the Southern textile industry is complicated, richly nuanced, perturbing, and ever ripe for revision. Historians who venture into the field, and the numbers are many, are rewarded for their perseverance; they also risk participating in an exercise that resembles a bunch of blindfolded men and women describing the

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specific part of the elephant which they happen to reach out and touch. The works produced by Clark and Minchin reflect both aspects of the fate that awaits scholars of Southern labor history and the history of Southern textiles in particular.

Daniel Clark’s work on Henderson relies heavily on oral evidence collected from workers employed by the Harriet and Henderson mills in this small North Carolina town in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In addition, he interviewed management officials who in a gracious gesture, so unlike their actions when they provoked the 1958 strike, allowed Clark to “burrow in the dank, steamy basement of one of their mills” (p. 2) . There Clark found the equivalent of an historian’s goldmine: old boxes containing the records from “the union years.” Transcripts of union-management meetings, grievance testimony, and arbitration hearings provide the solid underpinings of Clark’s interpretation of the unionization and deunionization of Henderson. Clark presents a strong argument that contrary to conventional wisdom about “business unionism” in the post-war years, the grievance procedure put in place after the signing of contracts in 1943, “empowered mill workers, who were able for the first time to assert themselves without fear of arbitrary retribution” (p. 203). The implications of this empowerment were extraordinary, so extraordinary that in the end management could not continue to grant workers the right to have a voice, no matter how much it would cost them to restore the pre-union status quo.

As Clark tells us, the clearest conflicts between management and workers developed, as one might predict, around issues of workload: “Union members pitted their subjective evidence, based on job experiences, against management’s claims, based on scientific time studies, that workloads could be measured objectively.” It was “aching joints versus slide-rule calculations” (p. 105). At stake were contrasting views of what work should be. Henderson workers sought to balance work with the rest of their lives, from caring for their children, to food preparation to hunting, fishing, and gardening, and all the rest that goes into shaping a life. They did this by working as much as they needed to but not more. They wanted, among other things, “the right to earn LESS money by taking a day or two off each week” (p. 205). One result of this stance was that absenteeism was high, often averaging 25-30 percent (p. 66). Over several decades, particularly in the high-profit years of the 1940’s, management had accomodated this informal system by hiring extra workers, called “utility help,” or more traditionally, spare hands. Unionization had institutionalized what was actually a longstanding practice by Southern industrial workers. Shop stewards dutifully settled hundreds of disputes over workload with an eye toward protecting workers’ health and endurance. Plant supervisors also faithfully negotiated workload challenges, resolving most before formal grievances were written. Company modernization plans were routinely foiled by workload complaints and by union members’ determination to have some control over the work lives. The strike in 1958 brought this central conflict to the fore and to a terribly bitter and painful conclusion.

What is so interesting about Clark’s analysis is the contemporary relevance of the Henderson workers’ case. They were openly grappling with, and often successfully re-solving, the thorny issues of balancing the demands of work and the call of home. This issue was by no means laid to rest in 1958, although management’s destructive victory certainly marked the direction in which American industry was headed on the question of workload and compensatory time issues. As Juliet B. Schor’s The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1991) so skillfully documents, U.S. workers have rarely been given the choice of not working, even when they were willing to reduce their take-home pay. Current battles over flextime and family leave policies only reinforce this argument. Henderson workers lost their union and their jobs in the 1958 strike. They also lost the right to control their worklives and the struggle for what, as Clark articulated, “They perceived to be a more humane existence” (D. 205).

Timothy Minchin’s history of the TWUA’s initiatives in the South parallel’s Daniel Clark’s work in the mining of rich new sources. Minchin used documents held in private hands in Danville, Virginia, combed the voluminous and now fully catalogued records of Operation Dixie, and tapped the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) records on the Tarboro, North Carolina strike in 1949, as well as conducting extensive oral histories with over

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sixty textile workers and union officials. Minchin offers a different perspective on the TWUA in the South, arguing that the rapid rise in industrial wages between 1941 and 1951 had an especially dramatic impact on textile communities, changing living standards and making it extremely difficult for the union to “sell its message in the South” (p. 2). As a strategy designed to prevent unionization, companies gave union pay and benefits to all workers, union and non-union alike. Consequently, workers did not have to take the considerable risk involved in joining a union in order to reap the material rewards that came with union membership. In contrast to what many historians of pre-World War II Southern textile history have argued, Minchin contends that “the failure of the TWUA during the 1940s and 1950s had less to do with worker culture and employer hostility than with economic and social changes set in motion by World War II” (p. 2). Those changes included workers using newly acquired disposable income to purchase consumer goods on time. Minchin sees workers in the 1940s and 1950s as having “more to lose” than their predecessors in earlier decades, a situation that made them less willing to strike or even to risk supporting a union (p.3). He also sees the TWUA as a seriously factionalized northern-based union that viewed Southern textile workers as undesirable step-children and consequently designed union strategies and tactics that were primarily tailored to protect northern wage levels.

Minchin’s work is particularly valuable because as he analyzes the TWUA across the Southern region after its formation in 1939, he also closely examines how the political, social, and economic systems of the South operated in local textile communities. He provides nuanced case studies of three communities that have not been studied in much depth before now: workers’ struggles in Danville, Tarboro, and Rockingham in the 1940’s and early 1950’s are added to the familiar triptych of Elizabethton, Marion, and Gastonia in 1929. Minchin also provides a useful examination of the rarely mentioned General Strike of 1951, seeing it as a turning point for the TWUA in the South, the juncture at which the union lost its power to set Southern wage patterns. After 1951, wages in the South were established not by unionized workers, especially those in the mills at Danville, as before, but “by nonunion chains such as Burlington, Cannon, Springs, and J.P. Stevens.” As Munchin tells us “This pattern was maintained in ensuing decades (p. 156). Significantly, What Do We Need a Union For? argues that the failure of the 1951 strike destroyed “the ability of many Southern locals to endure another strike” (p. 166). Without being able to threaten a strike, the union was, Minchin argues, “gravely weakened,”for the strike had been the most effective tool Southern textile workers could wield against corporate resistance. With the power of the strike diminished throughout the South, by increasingly sophisticated company tactics and by the growing unwillingness of workers to risk their own relatively fragile financial well being, the TWUA fell prey to internal splits and feuds. The effects of interunion rivalry are demonstrated vividly in Minchin’s examination of the Aleo union plant in Rockingham, North Carolina. It was at Aleo that Minchin found workers who had lost their union after a short strike in 1955, but who were still ardent unionists in 1994, stressing to Minchin that unionism was “in the heart” and claiming that “once workers crossed the line” and experienced freedom, they “rarely went back” (p. 194) . Even, one might add, after the union was eliminated.

Now, as we consider these well-written studies, it is important to ask whether or not these two historians are describing the same animal. Has Clark grabbed the elephant’s tail, and Minchin the trunk? Each describes a set of discreet realities circumscribed by time and place. But Minchin is arguing that the TWUA could not win strikes in the years between 1945 and 1955 because workers had benefitted from union-set higher wages and consequently stood to lose more if they went on strike. And Clark is arguing that Henderson workers put every-

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thing on the line in their strike in 1958, and that “if solidarity could have produced a union victory, these locals would have survived” (p. 200). The Henderson strike was finally lost not because the workers gave up, or because of TWUA failures, but because of management intransigence and willingness to lose significant amounts of money. Minchin is arguing that Southern textile workers spent their available disposable income, buying cars and other consumer goods on the installment plan. But Henderson workers in the same period, Clark contends, were trying to retain the right to not work as many hours a week as management demanded, harking back to a spare hand system used since at least the late nineteenth century. Were textile workers becoming more like other American industrial worekrs, or even like other Southern workers in steel, rubber, and automobilies, in these post-war years? That is not clear. Based on the Henderson case, Southern textile workers were not buying into the American dream as fully as Minchin argues they were. So there are questions that remain unanswered. And both of these studies, like all good books, raise a host of new, significant, and perplexing issues that need further examination. Clearly though, Clark and Minchin have both made major contributions to the field.

Finally, there is a crucial way in which these two books do fit together: when the workers whose stories Timothy J. Minchin has so carefully documented asked “What do we need a union for?” It is important to recognize that one answer to this question rests in Daniel J. Clark’s text: The difference that a union can make is “like night and day.” Clark and Minchin would no doubt agree that unions reinforce in tangible ways worker dignity and respect, and yes, experience has shown that unions bring better wages and working conditions for those in both union and non-union jobs. “Like night and day”–those North Carolina workers who in August voted for (and against) union representation, and all of us who work, need to acknowledge and remember that distinction, both in the past and also in the present.

Mary Frederickson teaches history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In August 1997, she participated in the Southern School for Union Women in Birmingham, Alabama.