Frowning at the South

...Many northern mill men can scarcely decide whether to stick it out in the North and exert themselves to remove low labor costs in the South, or to desert a sinking ship by moving their machinery to the low-paid, long-worked crackers and sandhillers...

...Both sides, talking of strangers, stretch their fancies...

...Leaving aside the rest of the world, what can the North do to improve labor standards in the cotton mills of the South...

...The ship's company would appease the storm by searching out the southern Jonah, and casting him overboard...

...At a meeting of New York liberals a fortnight ago to discuss the industrial conflict in the South, competent observers and old hands at the labor game urged the audience to get "a little crazy" to see the workers win...

...Like the British cotton men of a century ago when beset by parliamentary correction, they threaten to tumble their factories down if hindered...

...Labor unions attempting to organize southern operatives were credited with being financed from northern mill coffers...

...In the first instance the New England manufacturers wanted to lower their standards toward those of the South...

...that is, of every 1,000 yards of these shirtings manufactured, this mill turns out 20...

...In the face of working conditions that cry out for remedy, with all too few friends on the side of enlightenment, one hesitates to recall the ancient warnings about the slow patience of social change...

...Since then, be it noticed, the design has changed...

...But in any event, the prospect before the mill, if it is to give in, is not exhilarating...

...A New England manufacturer in the annual meeting has sought to oppose the Institute to night work for women and minors in the South...

...The depressed state of the cotton industry, due mostly to overproduction and diversion of taste to other textiles, has brought this outcry against the South...

...Strike relief funds have been collecting, large meetings have been held and more are planned to acquaint the North with the low labor standards prevailing in the South...

...The southward migration of northern mills, which has precipitated the conflict, was long in preparing...

...Everyone recognizes, except perhaps the southern strikers immediately involved, that the recent and current conflicts are really battles between the northern and southern branches of the industry...

...One who is acquainted with the history that has brought the South to its present pass, and who knows the limitations of strikers and mill managements, feels like protesting the superficiality and artfully concealed sensationalism of these reports...

...It does not alter the case that long hours, low wages and absence of union recognition in the textile South represent an anachronism...

...He, no less than his operatives, is caught in a vise which will be relaxed only by practised untwisting of the screw...

...A pervasive pressure from southern public opinion will facilitate the large number of seemingly unconnected betterments, which, taken together, will speed solution...

...Perhaps outsiders who attempt to mediate eventually become partizans on one side or the other, and add to the confusion...

...This is rooted in the past...

...Five years ago Massachusetts cotton mill men, citing the southern differential advantage in lower wages and longer working time, appealed to their own legislature for an extension of the forty-eight-hour week...

...The Cotton Textile Institute, formed to help lift the American industry out of its depression, has developed a rift between its members above and below the Potomac...

...they score few direct hits, but their boom is alarming and they carry many leagues...

...It is not disposed to accept a handicap in the cost of production, and trust to the future...

...Furthermore, other northern firms are already astride the fence, with plants in both sections...

...at every sharp brush between sections it shows itself again...

...This took no account of overproduction that might result...

...While there is a chance of their deciding upon the latter course, they do not want improvement in the South, but the reverse...

...The mill begins to fill and the situation of the strikers becomes more acute...

...A score of Irish and Scottish textile manufacturers, just arrived in this country to study our industry, will find the difference between labor costs in North and South the problem most pressed upon them...

...Feature writers, some of them with names to flag any reader's interest, transcend this back-and-forth imprecation of combatants with a practised and onesided eloquence...

...In the realm of practical bargaining the union faces limitations which may not be dispelled by emotional appeal...

...They are apt to remain just long enough at the southern scene of action to learn little but see much, and what they see, ground through the journalistic mill, comes out as moving copy...

...Their audiences, heretofore looking upon the southern poor whites only as picturesque natives to be glimpsed about Pinehurst or Aiken, are now moved to pity or con-ste.-q.tion...

...Let us suppose this mill is making shirtings of a given grade, and that its product amounts to 2 percent of that of the whole country...

...To be specific: here is a southern cotton mill which has been struck all summer...

...First, the unionists are divided in their own ranks between the National Textile Workers (Communist and, for all the fact that it is largely on paper, bold in its methods) and the United Textile Workers (affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and more moderate in demands and practice...

...Southern manufacturers as a whole, as compared with those in the North, enjoy a differential advantage of 14 to 16 percent in cost of production...

...Hostility to organized labor in the South, which does not attach only to managements and owners, but pervades a large section of the cotton mill operatives themselves, would indicate the wisdom of using southern men as organizers...

...Union men from the building trades or officials from the state and city federations have been drawn in to assist with strikes, but these lack specific knowledge of the industry and are often not of the locality involved...

...It is none the less true that isolated strikes in the southern textile field cannot get far...

...High-powered writers whose eloquence claims a national following have rushed to the South and are now busy syndicating their articles...

...In the present case a surplus of products is the immediate stimulus, and it is proposed to appeal to the southern legislatures to curb the working time of southern factories...

...Special dislike is reserved for the northern textile unions...

...it began two decades ago and for years has been foretellable in its acceleration...

...Social reform has always required the cartoon as well as the table of statistics...

...The British newspapers have been avid for information about the progress of labor's fight against the fifty-five and sixty-hour week and the fourteen-dollar wage in the mills below the Potomac...

...A quarter of a century ago, when child labor in the southern mills was upon the carpet of national investigation and northern humanitarian protest, southern manufacturers were quick to claim that investigating agents were sent down by jealous northern competitors...

...The unions have every motive to raise labor standards in the South...

...If this differential could be wiped out by union action, voluntary response to manufacturers, legislative limitation on the working time, or by all of these methods, bringing the South to a parity with the North, it might have the good result of raising labor standards, lessening the amount of goods turned out, and improving the quality of product...

...their equipment in the North will be moved South with little additional provocation, and they will be lost to the northern opposition...

...The individual manufacturer, whose plant may be struck, is part of an industry unusually competitive sectionally, nationally and in world markets...

...Once the South comes to understand that it has manufactures as well as agriculture, a factory proletariat as well as a rural peasantry, that capitalism is crowding upon the older culture, and that this section is now incorporated into a national and world economy, the dangerous gauntlet of industrial adjustment will be run at once with the necessary caution and courage...

...Here lies some immediate hope...

...This is not the end of the union's disabilities...

...These high-minded reproaches are convincing of national scandal...

...Secondly, at the very time when the United Textile Workers, best equipped in experience and membership to organize the South, needs money and morale for its task, its northern strongholds are crumbling as mills move South and set their operatives adrift...

...By doing so they protect their northern membership against the low bid of the Southerners, which has been taking bread from their mouths, and they also acquire strength in the region to which the industry is demon-strably drifting...

...There have been incidents enough-in poverty, suffering, violence-to excite sympathy and financial support for the workers...

...As a consequence, evictions from the company houses to make room for newcomers loom as a new source of friction...

...Labor standards in the factory are undeniably low...

...There are many temptations, mediate and immediate, to this counsel, but I wonder how much an outraged northern social conscience, with the best intent in the world, can do to bring a solution in the South...

...The bad hours and low wages, and the employers' "welfare offensive" too, have their roots in the competition of the poor whites with Negro slaves a hundred years ago...

...Northern organizers, returned from the South to seek support, tell traveler's tales of the poor whites-men with one suit of overalls, ancient women and half-grown boys and girls toiling in the lint-laden, humid atmosphere of the factories, impoverished villagers nailing together pine boxes to contain their dead...

...Furthermore, the distance to the South and the differences in race and language between northern and southern workers, not to speak of the union tradition of the former, make it impossible to shift these dispossessed ones in pursuit of their machines...

...And yet help from some such source is not chimerical...

...The North may get "a little crazy," but more potent for assistance, and more impressive in its righteousness, will be a spreading awareness and maturing sentiment in the southern public itself...

...They all seem as far away as the Arabs of Palestine, and therefore the imagination has full play...

...This has increased the amount of false report on both sides...

...These, many of them the largest companies, are to be regarded as backing the southern horse...

...First of all, in any activity designed to raise the manufacturing costs of their competitors, the northern mill men must meet hostility and suspicion...

...None of the factors in the present situation has come into being suddenly...

...This is a counsel of perfection which the restricted funds and scanty membership of the organization have heretofore, at least, rendered impossible of realization...

...Industrial development in the South, while it has brought the section nearer to northern interests and ways of thought, has furnished occasion for the opening of old wounds...

...The current strikes in southern cotton mills have called forth a yelp of protest from workers and liberals in the northern states...

...They are stagey things, mere cardboard sets, but probably they are inescapable, and in the wide polemic of industrial betterment, they have a certain admitted place...

...These accounts are the siege guns of the labor war...

...An agreement is reached and broken, each side charging the other with the first show of bad faith...

...In the recent strikes reliance has been placed upon young organizers from the North, who, despite courage, ingenuity and perseverance in the face of staggering difficulties, have been handicapped by unfamil-iarity with the habits of their immediate adherents and, more important, have not been able to make an effective appeal to southern public opinion as a whole...

...It means that for the first time the South is being measured against national and world industrial standards...

...And yet here, as elsewhere, they hold...

...The American Federation of Labor at its Toronto convention has just resolved to raise funds for a concerted drive to organize the southern operatives...

...It seems fatuous to turn from the crack of a deputy sheriff's pistol in a mountain mill village of North Carolina to the world textile inquiry being made at Geneva, and expect an answer...

...All of this is significant...

...The management becomes more and more exasperated, and redoubles efforts to install strike-breakers...

...On the other hand, the southern mill man is apt to paint the northern strike leader and all his sponsors as scheming, conscienceless liars, animated by the spirit of the fiendish Trotzky, if not financed from Moscow...

...Each of the contending parties believes bad things of the other, and reports worse...

...The best course for the union would be to bring pressure to bear on all the manufacturers of shirting of this grade at the same time...

...A second disability of the North is the delicate position of its own textile manufacturing interest toward the South...

...Suppose further that 90 percent of the competitors of this mill are working on the same hours and the same wage-scale with it...

...Added to all is the fact that less than 7 percent of the cotton mill workers of the country are organized...

...Their embarrassing weakness flows from two quarters...

...There are other union groups, their bonds being by craft or regional propinquity...

...for they are injuring his markets more and more...

...Indignation from without must melt into anxiety for remedy at home if the thousand troubles that stand in the way of improvement are to be got over...

...Most of such argument is disingenuous on the part of those who put it forth, but the general public is ready to believe a great deal of it...

...The secession complex has not been dissipated...

...The International Labor Office is preparing to make an inquiry into the depression in the world's cotton and woolen industries, in which conditions in the South must play a large part...

...This attempt is well worth making, but the whole situation is charged with inertia, and always in the shadows the cheaply operated oriental mills loom like goblins before the southern manufacturer of coarse goods...

...If this struck mill has a safe surplus laid by, it may accede to the strikers' demands, planning to meet the increased cost out of surplus, and meaning before this fund is expended to shift the old man of the sea from its back, or to speed up the workers or make adjustments in equipment or product which will enable it to carry the burden...

...The position of organized labor is not equivocal like that of the manufacturers...

...The southern mill owner, set forth as an obstinate and callous ogre, awakens indignant reproaches...

...The union, in pursuing this policy, does too little and too much-it will not attain its goal, and it is likely to cause ultimate loss to the mill and its own people, in places selected for contest...

...But in textiles these may be said not to exist...

...Pressure must be applied with knowledge...

...that they stir up strikes in the first place only to take membership money out of the South...

...The mind of one a little detached runs ahead, however, for an answer to the question, How much, leaving aside the personal equation as expressed in aggressiveness or stubbornness, can the striking workers really expect to get...

...Southern enterprisers still get a hearing when they exclaim to their public, "We lifted you out of the poverty that followed upon the Civil War-it is your patriotic duty as Southerners to protect us in the social subsidy which enables us to keep going...

...The rest of the country, while less active in indignation, is learning the facts as to the South as never before...

...It is pointed out that they are headed by foreigners, Reds, Catholics...