
          Collusion Between Worker and Power Structure.
          Reviewed by Kravitz, LindaLinda Kravitz
          Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 13-15
          
          Habits of
Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina
Piedmont. By Allen Tullos (Chapel_Hill: University of North
Carolina Press. 1989. 419 pp. $34.95; $12.95 paper.).
          In the late 1920s, to attract manufacturers to the Piedmont region
of the Carolinas, Duke Power Company advertised:
          
            
              A population marked by racial purity and unusually
high character.... Willing labor, unhampered by any artificial
restrictions on outputs native born of old pioneer stock and not
imbued by un-American ideas or ideals.
            
          
          The message of
many such ads quoted by Allen Tullos was that Piedmont workers were
white and would work long hours for little pay, acquiesce in
increasing productivity demands, and resist unionization. In this
engaging and provocative book, Tullos explores the remarkable regional
culture supporting these corporate "habits of Industry," 

which he sees
as feeding upon the traditional "habits of industry" Piedmont
people. He traces their painful "shift from farm to factory, the
transition from folk to working class," through his own
encompassing analysis of the times and through the histories of
individual families representing industry's owners and industry's
workers.
          The family histories, whether of the powerful or the poor, are
imbued with values stemming from Scotch-Irish, English, or German
ancestries, and Calvinist, Methodist, or Baptist upbringings.
          Faith in authoritarian paternalism and the holiness of work shaped
individual social growth; together they produced remarkable collusion
among all economic classes in support of the power structure of the
textile industry and its demands for productivity.
          Acceleration of such demands did bring about labor unrest and
strikes, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, but efforts at
unionization were consistently crushed by factory owners, often with
the cooperation of "the highest officials of state government and
the state's police power." Says Tullos: "Farmers recently
turned mill workers often saw the union as 'foreign' to their
experience, as un-American and atheistic, and as a threat to customary
work arrangements and familial as well as paternalistic ties of
employment."
          The familial and paternalistic ties of employment could not have
been more direct. At its most elementary, the family supplied
workers. Its vital role in doing so did not escape the regional
promoters, whose ads proclaimed: "The birth rate of the Carolinas
is the highest in the United_States. Already a second generation of
textile workers has come along, and in many older textile centers a
third generation has grown up."
          Secondly, as one interviewee noted, "A man will think a long
time before he'll speak out when he's got nine little children about
his knees."
          Third, and perhaps most essential to the character of Piedmont
industry, entire families, including those of all ages and genders,
worked for individual employers. As Tullos explains, until the 1930s,
a "family wage" commonly meant that children and adults all had to
tend the factory machinery to earn a livelihood. Mill bosses
understood that much of the job of enforcing discipline and industry
among the youngest workers would be managed by the fathers and
mothers. "Besides [being] under the company's jurisdiction,"
said Grover Hardin, who entered the mills of Greenville, S.C., as a
child, "you was under your parents." Fathers ruled both roost
and workplace. "To the child, religion, stoic discipline, fatherly
authority, and the mill hierarchy seemed to be cut from the same
cloth."
          Tullos alternates voices of the Piedmont industry's captains, all
white males, with those of its labor force, primarily white_women. As
he follows their family histories, the captains, including the tobacco
mogul James Buchanan "Buck" Duke (founder of Duke Power Co. and Duke
University), J. Spencer Love (founder of Burlington Mills), Daniel
Augustus Tompkins (promoter of textile schools and child labor), and
William Henry Belk (innovator in "single-pricing" and creator of Belk
stores) are chiefly heard through their writings and speeches. They
bear few surprises, little self-questioning or deviation from
promotion of industry. Witness the refrain of John Belk, heir to the
Belk fortune, who sums up his view on the habits of industry: "Man
is a working animal."
          In this whole book, the only real exception to the untroubled tales
of the upwardly mobile is the sad story of D.W. League, a weave-room
overseer who in 1928 sacrificed his job at Poe Mill in a "stand of
Christian conscience" against increased workloads for his weavers,
lost another job in a refusal to work Sundays, took another requiring
two shifts, and finally, exhausted, turned back to family farm
life. Said his daughter, "He had just got so confused, till he
wanted to get quiet. He worried himself to death." Said another,
"It bothered him a great deal, this change that had come
about. People were not given the consideration that they had been
before. You were pushed as a worker...More looms, more than you could
run."
          It is the tales of the workers which are the life of the
book. Typically, their families were sharecroppers or yeomanry
displaced by the agricultural collapse of the late nineteenth
century. Tullos gives their present-day accounts in their own words,
which are never sugarcoated, and often spirited and humorous. They are
frequently fascinating simply because of their implied acquiescence in
end expressed gratitude for the "habits of Industry" which, having
allowed them to make a meager living, also brought them much
suffering. They impress us with the vulnerability of people with
desperately immediate needs to jobs whose benefits are so low as to
guarantee that those needs are perpetuated.
          Upon the retirement of Icy Norman, for forty-seven years a yarn
winder for Burlington Mills, company officials lauded and publicized
her as its "oldest hand." She was royally taken to dinner by "big
shots" from the New_York office, who told her that "if you ever
come to New_York...you will have a welcome mat." She recalled that
"I really enjoyed it" and later "Every time I go back up
there [to the factory] I feel like I'm going back home."
          But in the same interview, she also related how she was forced to
retire before she could benefit from a new profit-sharing plan. "I
said, 'Just let me work one more year. . .Then I could have my debts
paid off.' The man says, 'I wish we could.' That kind of hurt me...I
could really have used that money [$12,500]. I felt like if anybody
was entitled to it, I was, because I put my whole life there. My young
life, and I growed up there. I feel like I was part in the making of
Burlington Industries, because I come there 

and stayed with them. I
went with them through thick and thin."
          Ethel Hilliard, another long-time employee of Burlington, related
how the mill hired two of her children before they were sixteen [the
legal age] because "they knowed we needed work." Her son
"oiled that machinery and climbed over them looms. I thought about
that a lot of times. I don't reckon they really wanted to work a child
like that, but they just done it to help out, I reckon. I know it was
dangerous for him to be up there."
          Ultimately, Ethel Hilliard felt, "They was good to me at the
Burlington Mill." Mother of ten children, with an unemployed
husband, she was most grateful that "They'd always take me
back. I'd stop when a baby was going to be born, and then when they
got old enough, I'd go back. Usually I'd stay out a couple of
months."
          These workers were naturally wary of unions. Wariness approached
fear in Bessie Buchanan, who in the early 1940s had witnessed a strike
at Durham's Erwin Mill. She believed she had barely escaped the union
due to "a vision that the Lord gave me." She had a dream about
Nazis, who also resembled Old Testament persecutors, who tried to
force her to join the union. In her dream, her faith as she walked a
gauntlet convinced the unionizers to free her.
          The workers' stories are not all dreary. Ethel Hilliard's
irrepressible account of her childhood, her mother's healing talent
and herbal remedies, and her marriage is alone worth the purchase of
this book. Ethel also enjoyed her work, "scalloping bedspreads," which
she felt was her "talent."
          These stories tell us that in the Piedmont any challenge to the
workplace would have been a challenge to an entire culture. The
Piedmont's "habits of Industry" were reinforced by family, church, and
workplace and, as Tullos documents, by the education system, from the
early textile schools to Duke University and the University of North
Carolina. They were benignly interpreted by the Institute for Research
in Social Science, established by Howard Odum (SRC's first president)
as a laboratory for regional sociological investigation. "With a
bit of hammering out by Odum, the habits of Industry appeared as
inevitable, manifest, progressive."
          Finally, "In time, Industry's assurance of having its way and of
having it publicly confirmed became one of the Piedmont's, and the
South's most secure habits."
          Habits of Industry would be an excellent text
for students of labor history. It is challenging reading for any who
wonder how it came about that in this country so many people would
work so hard, over so many generations, so profitably for others, and
for wages so low that their incomes would never rise above the poverty
line. And it is graceful, enjoyable reading for those who may simply
be intrigued by the rich, albeit perverse, culture of the Carolina
Piedmont.
          
            Linda Kravitz has recently resigned as research director
of the Housing Assistance Council. She is immediate past chair of the
National Council of Agricultural Life and Labor. In her undergraduate
days she worked a summer at the Council. She is co-author of the Other
Housing Crisis, published by HAC and the Center on Policy and Policy
Priorities, 1989.
          
        
