A New Voice in the South

...Almost, but not quite, for there was still the vivid recollection of unionism in the minds of the people...

...The employers in the cotton-mill South come by their superiority complex quite as naturally...

...This is neatly apparent in the current passage of arms at Danville, Virginia...

...All of this is a regular enough remonstrance of a late representative of the old South...

...Welfare work which had been ingenuous was undertaken with the design of attracting operatives and keeping them contented at low wages with long hours...

...Not that he was thirsty for admiration...

...Fifty years ago the first of them came to the new cotton mills in thousands-unlettered, beggars for bread...

...The poor whites under slavery had been excluded, while slaves were cherished...

...Historically, they are aristocrats...

...If they owned their little places, these were apt to be mortgaged to the hilt, and they derived little besides a meaningless pride of possession...

...Thus the employees...

...The Riverside and Dam River Cotton Mills, some dozen plants (one of them a few years ago claimed to be the biggest cotton factory under one roof in the world) have 467,000 spindles, 13,000 looms, 5,000 workers, and assets in excess of $25,000,-000...

...Each has a definite background...

...In the autumn the United Textile Workers appealed to the American Federation of Labor for aid, and in January of this year at Charlotte, North Carolina, President William Green launched the South's first widespread organizing campaign...

...Several circumstances lend hope: the employers, in their claim to be considered moralists, are assailed by their own misgivings, and the public is less credulous of their professions than they once were...

...And they went on to recite the failure of the company union to protect them, closing on the note, "We are sending this letter to you in good faith, and ask you to accept our offer of friendship in all sincerity...

...For some years previously labor had become scarcer, and now wages rose, because the cotton farmer was getting his tardy innings on the land, men were drawn off to cantonments and munition plants, and the mills enjoyed spectacular prosperity...

...They had been unnecessary, now they were all-important...

...Gradually the adventure proved itself...

...It was fatherhood...

...This lesson has always been learned at the cost of lives, money, social cleavage...

...The organized workers, however, lost their strikes against post-Armistice wage cuts, and the employers sat almost as firmly in the saddle as of yore...

...So came the series of strikes beginning last spring, which took out 17,000 operatives and found high-water marks in Elizabethton, Marion and Gastonia...

...The mills were successful, and as the technique-financial, mechanical and commercial-became familiar, plants increased in numbers...

...Fitz Gerald posted a notice addressed "To All of Our People...

...If they were tenants on a plantation they swapped promise of labor for credit at commissary or country store, and their crop netted them little cash in hand at the year's end...

...The counterpart of the southern workers' long patience in the past is undoubtedly conservatism and reason for the future...

...And not least in importance is the fact that the present organizing campaign, particularly in the face of depression in the industry, has adopted and proclaimed the engineering approach to the whole vexing problem...

...These northern mills came seeking cheap labor primarily, and their arrival brought new problems-increased demand for workers, further dilution of the welfare motive, weakening of the old sectional defenses for low labor standards...

...Now the disinherited were read into the will...

...When you say their whole method of operation depends upon agitation and strife we would call to your attention that the officials of the labor movement have advised the workers in your mills to keep calm, that the American Federation of Labor is not here for strife or strike, but to organize the workers and do business in an orderly manner with justice to employer and employee...

...to assist us...

...They are the southern poor whites, descendants of the stepchildren of slavery...

...We do not desire the employees of the company to be misled by these outsiders for the simple reason that they cause discord, and their whole method of operation depends upon agitation and strife...

...Wages were reduced 10 percent...

...The eagerness and rapidity with which they learned a new routine of industry shows how bankrupt was their past enterprise...

...Soon the workers showed a dissatisfaction which would not limit itself in its expression to the company plan of labor representation...

...This letter proves that at least some in the South have reached this third phase, and that industrial relations in that section can never be quite the same again...

...The first real thrust at the employers' immunity from attack came during the world war...

...I use the word in its pure sense...

...A mule and a bull-tongue plow were their instruments of production, and the more cotton they grew the worse was their plight...

...Any stirrings of revolt met their defeat, not in the employer's opposition, but through the workers' own gratitude for his service to them in their extremity...

...The operatives are only beginning to emerge into self-determination, and to claim a voice in public counsels...

...Asking everything, contributing only compliance with orders, they demanded nothing...

...They supplied the essential boon for a broken people- the opportunity to work...

...Those in the mountains enjoyed an empty liberty, which consisted more in idleness than in material sufficiency...

...He grew into humility which is the high counterpart of lordship...

...The South must remember this history, and in the years that lie next ahead seek to avoid it...

...To the esteem in which the manufacturer was held was added his own consciousness that he was the means of survival, and beyond that the engine of progress...

...He was too busy about the works which deserved it...

...Capitalist industry everywhere has experienced three phases-first, revolutionary increase in production...

...The issue is now fairly drawn between an outworn tradition and the new need for workers' representation...

...They had been starved, now they were subsidized...

...The bond of sympathy between whites of both classes were cemented against the common enemy, the Negro...

...Here is a calm putting aside of the old sanctions-without hysteria, with the minimum of bitterness, with eyes to the future...

...The same favorable conception of the proprietors' character, aided by pressure which they brought to bear, served to quiet local stirrings against the abuses of child labor, but were not sufficient to avoid federal inquiry and condemnation of the evil...

...Fitz Gerald declared that the organizers want the money of his people not only for union purpose, but "incidentally, to fill their own depleted coffers...

...Apprehension gave way to security...

...Our system of employee representation contains every element of collective bargaining that has any real merit...

...This reply of the Danville operatives marks an epoch in the history of southern labor...

...The first mill builders, who rescued the post-Civil War South from the poverty of a disrupted agricultural system, were men of family or position, often of both...

...Two of these major strikes were organized only after they had begun, and all of them caught the responsible labor leaders perforce without plans or fighting resources...

...in 1929 in order to do this three-fourths of the payment to common stockholders had to come from surplus...

...He has had extensive welfare work, but in addition, a decade or so ago, he introduced John Leitch's company union plan known as "industrial democracy...

...If anything were needed to clinch their position, it was furnished in the response of the common people to their complete paternalism...

...The president and treasurer is H. R. Fitz Gerald, who is to be accounted a comparatively enlightened southern cotton manufacturer...

...When labor unionism first showed its head a generation ago there was no difficulty in putting it down...

...The reward they reaped was adoration...

...They have no purchase on economic life, but have been like golf balls knocked about a putting green until they fell into a hole...

...The company paid 6 percent on its preferred stock and 10 percent on its common...

...What can such a movement do for you that you do not already have except to take your money in dues to pay a lot of foreign agitators...

...Mr...

...The cotton manufacturers of the South must manage to exchange a patronal relationship to their employees for a contractual one...

...The factory owner, by tradition, through economic mastery, and as racial champion, went unquestioned...

...The fact that they alone had plans and the contrivance to carry them out, would in itself have marked them as figures of distinction...

...By necessity they placed themselves in the hands of the factory owner, and he accepted responsibility for maintaining and reshaping their lives-in work, in play, in thought if there was such, in morals...

...Ambitions that had been sustained by hope were now established in good fortune...

...One is to remove the inferiority complex of the employees, the other to remove the superiority complex of the employers...

...The surprise is in the answer it promptly elicited from a meeting of the workers...

...Fitz Gerald doubtless believed that his position was not only irreproachable, but that he was a benefactor of his workers and, in a perfectly proper way, an example to other employers in the South...

...secondly, elevation of laissez-faire, with the accent on individual bargaining...

...They rejoined: First of all we want you to know that the American Federation of Labor and the officials of that organizatian came to Danville at out request for a union...

...It began: We are informed that paid organizers have appeared in our midst, and that, as usual, they are appealing to such prejudices as they can arouse...

...By insensible degrees the employers began to presume upon their position...

...thirdly, humanitarian revolt against exploitation, formation of labor unions being the most important item in this program...

...All of them formerly and a portion of them until recently, have been attached to the land, but either they owned not a foot of it, or what they possessed was worthless...

...few of the public thought the operatives could have a legitimate protest against employers so benevolently inclined...

...The men have been doing more thinking than the management...

...Owners boasted of their social services to their workers...

...But he was unconvinced...

...The representatives who came here are not foreign agitators but American citizens delegated by President Green...

...The present writer had some correspondence with him when the company union was inaugurated, pointing out the imperfect protection which it gave to the workers, and suggesting that it would not answer in a crisis...

...Then a lull, until the southward drift of eastern cotton factories aroused attention, gathered force, and then became one of the great movements in the history of the industry...

...Operatives held organization meetings...

...Thus the workers as a group became convinced of their importance to the industry, and two score thousand in the Carolinas joined the union...

...Simultaneous depression in the industry was responsible for the introduction of an alien efficiency device, the multiple loom or "stretch-out" system, by which the workers were required to tend more machinery without always being compensated in number of helpers and increase in wage...