Gastonia: Another Harper's Ferry

...The Charlotte trial is important in showing the attempt of a judge to render justice to defendants against whom the community was highly prejudiced...

...Was it the conclusion...

...Six locals of the United have been extended to fifteen...

...Upon this stronghold both unions turned their organization guns early this year...

...There are contrasts, too: Brown, bearded, fifty-nine years old, father of twenty children, twelve of whom lived to maturity...

...WHEN John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry in 1859 he never could have dreamed that exactly seventy years later another New Englander would be fighting to free white men in the South from an industrial bondage which has been compared to the black slavery on the old southern plantations...

...It is now adroitly laying the foundations for other labor legislation-the reduction of the legal working week from sixty to fifty-five hours...

...Passing through the South Atlantic piedmont one sees a few attractive mill villages with white cottages settled in the grass and trees, with handsome churches and social buildings on the corners, and modern, well-ventilated factories across the streets...

...Brown was supported by eastern Abolitionist leaders, who furnished him with money and supplies...

...For the mills brought the workers from the farms...

...The trial has importance for us in another, and to the South a more important, relation...

...These are the men and women and children whom southern chambers of commerce have advertised as ioo percent Americans, docile, contented with their hours, delighted at their meagre pay, antagonistic to unions, awaiting eastern exploiters...

...thousands of new members have been secured...

...In both cases the harvest seemed plentiful, proved scanty...

...The Communists of the East have done the same for Beal...

...Nor does it close with the analogy of the Abolitionist's capture by Lee in the following October and the Communist's conviction by a Mecklenburg County jury in the same week of the same month exactly seventy years later...

...They have remembered the long, hard days on the tenant farms of the lowlands...

...Since 1880 these people have been moving to the mills...

...Or, will it mark the decline of both groups ? The answers are hidden in the past...

...And just as many historical students believe that the supporters of Brown were perhaps more interested in creating further slavery strife than hopeful of a successful insurrection, so observers today have claimed that the Communists back of Beal were more concerned with the spread of their political propaganda than the success of their strike...

...and Beal, the free thinker, the man without a religion...

...After winning most of their demands without the aid of union officials, they returned to their mills...

...They have ignored the fact that this mill was running at full blast and that all but one of the other 103 textile plants in that county were untouched by the Communist agitation...

...Certainly it marked the climax of Communistic activities...

...Charles G. Good, representative of the United States Department of Labor, reported on April 11 to the Bureau of Conciliation: "We can make no headway for the benefit of deserving workers unless and until they have divorced themselves from leaders who stand in the way of negotiating a fair settlement...

...Each sought to revolutionize society, and each failed because that portion of society which he attacked would not be revolutionized...

...Fundamentally, however, they both stand out as fanatics...

...Altogether, the answer of the mill owners to the cry of unionism has been highly effective...

...Each had his system, logically developed from premises beyond which he would not stir...

...Conspiracy likewise played a great part in Beal's trial before the North Carolina court, where he was defended by counsel including New York and New Jersey lawyers, convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to serve from seventeen to twenty years in the penitentiary at Raleigh...

...Fred Erwin Beal and his National Textile Workers' Union encountered a similar lack of cooperation and understanding in Gastonia...

...The United States government statistics show that they are laboring for hours that are prohibited in some states, for wages that would be ridiculous in others...

...it has not attempted any sudden revolution in living conditions, nor made any preposterous demands for changes of hours or wages...

...The Communist methods were crude, involving incitement of the strikers, threats of force, talk of Communism among a people naturally conservative, and attacks upon the soldiers who were sent to guard the mill property...

...They have not forgotten the corn-patch poverty of the hills...

...There are free lights and water, cheap rent in the company houses, wholesale prices for coal, wood, ice and sometimes milk...

...In the mills men and women are working day and night...

...Softly, skilfully, surely, it has maneuvered...

...There are some superficial parallels in the two exploits...

...There are, however, many more clusters of dismal houses...

...Brown set out to lead the slaves in an insurrection...

...The children are young, there are only two wage-earners in the family, pennies must be counted...

...Once the children have grown older, their wages are added to the family income, and a new prosperity reigns...

...Some were mere boys...

...Each grasped the wrong method, violated the statutes, was convicted before the law and failed in his immediate aim...

...He was disappointed by their apathy, their bewilderment amid his talk of freedom, the lack of sufficient support from the North, and the steady hand of the law...

...They had companions in the day's work and associates for the night's play...

...And incidentally the company houses have enabled the employers to fight unions with the weapon of evictions as well as with discharges...

...Since then the United Textile Workers' Union has been honeycombing that section with locals...

...the union has worked in accord with both state and federal labor departments...

...The mill owners have turned every energy toward nourishing this contentment...

...The strike simultaneously resulting in Tennessee and North and South Carolina were of four distinct types: In a rayon plant at Elizabethtown, Tennessee, unorganized laborers struck, rushed into the leadership of the American Federation of Labor's United Textile Workers' Union, and eventually succeeded in winning their demands...

...Pictured to them by foreign agitators as a curse, it has in their hearts seemed a blessing...

...Starting with a walk-out of 2,000 workers, the strike failed through reckless radical management in a situation that undoubtedly and imperatively demanded a conservative approach...

...Though it has encountered considerable difficulty at Elizabethtown and Marion, the United has maintained a conservative approach to the southern textile ills...

...Movies came on Saturdays, old Fords stood in their back yards, and money, real money, not credit, jingled in their pockets...

...The heat of the sun in the fields from sunup to sundown is not preferable to the shade cast by factory walls...

...In contrast to these crude tactics and scanty returns has been the clever progress of the United Textile Workers' Union...

...Brown was tried before a Virginia court, defended by Massachusetts counsel, convicted of conspiracy, treason and murder, and hanged at Charles-town, now a part of West Virginia...

...The third type was at Marion, North Carolina, where the same union organized the workers, conferred with the employers and called a strike when their demands were rejected...

...Each man is identified with an important movement: anti-slavery for Brown, labor unionization for Beal...

...But just as John Brown's cause was achieved later through means he did not foresee, so there are many indications that unionization of the southern textile employees will come through an agency which Beal opposes: the American Federation of Labor, advancing gradually with, rather than against, the capitalist textile interests...

...Churches have been built, preachers paid, Y. M. C. A.'s fostered, swimming pools installed and welfare work supplied...

...In turn, the strikers were antagonized by the vile utterances of the local press, the intimidation of officers of the law and threats of loafers about town...

...And the farms produced a more terrible life than that of the mills...

...One was a girl of nineteen...

...He divides the strikes in the Carolinas and Tennessee into four classes, and also provides an accurate survey of the acts of violence and the trials which followed them.-The Editors...

...What of the denouement...

...Of Brown's party of twenty-two men, nineteen were under thirty...

...The fourth type, and the most widely heralded, was called in Gastonia by the National Textile Workers' Union after several of the members recruited by Beal had been discharged by the Loray mill authorities...

...This weapon has two edges: that of social activities to make the village life more pleasant, and that of a variety of compensations for the low wages...

...Of more significance than many of the strikes was the enactment early in the year of a workmen's compensation law for the state of North Carolina...

...To them it seemed natural that the entire family should work...

...Their paternalism, which seemed natural in the years when the mills were small, personal affairs, has become the most powerful defense against unionism...

...Thirty, on the other hand, was the maximum age of the sixteen strikers indicted at Gastonia...

...In the spring they were aided by a restlessness among the workers, attributed by some observers to the cotton trade deflation, the part-time work, and the new efficiency methods, notably the stretch-out system whereby one worker did the labor formerly requiring several...

...There ensued scuffling with the troops, breaking up of strikers' parades, the pillaging of union headquarters, and a score of other events which were climaxed by the fatal shooting of the city's police chief...

...In the South Carolina cotton mills came a series of strikes by workers also unconnected with any union...

...In the huts undernourished children go to bed as the father leaves for the loom and wake as the mother trails off to the spindle...

...Wharton draws an interesting parallel between John Brown of Harper's Ferry and Fred Beal of Gastonia...

...As the sentiment for further social acts advances, it plans to reduce this to forty-eight hours, to abolish night work for women in industry, and to make changes in laws concerning child labor...

...While labor leaders have contrasted the misery of the mill villages with the luxury of the white-pillared homes of the mill owners, the workers have had bad dreams of the life from which they and their fathers sprang...

...How well Judge Barnhill succeeded is a matter for history and the higher courts to determine...

...One must search the history of these cotton-mill workers whose low wages and long hours have produced a migration of textile mills from New England...

...In the trial of Beal and his fifteen young associates, and the accompanying so-called anti-Communist riots, too many people have lost sight of the chief significance of the Gastonia experiment-its relation to the larger trend toward the unionization of southern working-men, a trend which has shown especial strength this year after three decades of sporadic and unfortunate moves...

...Each was an idealist, with principles upon which he would rebuild the world...

...The demands involved an increased cost of operation, which no factory has ever been known to accept when a surplus of workers, trained for the jobs, was ready to replace the strikers...

...Will it retard or stimulate labor unions in that Sahara of organizations ? Will it auger further development of Communist unions in the South or the success of more conservative ones under the control of the American Federation of Labor...

...Fred Beal, with his Communist strike at Gastonia, his armed guards and his radical tactics, is a twentieth-century reincarnation of John Brown...

...Beal, clean-shaven, boyish, red-haired, only twenty-nine and unmarried...

...Brown, a religious zealot, calling on the God of Moses for aid, thinking himself the prophet of a new redemption...

...The Communist demands included a forty-hour week and a minimum wage of $20.00, which no company in the South could meet while competing with other firms working on the legal fifty-five and sixty-hour weeks...

...The comparison of the two men does not begin with the mere historical coincidence of Brown establishing his Negro headquarters on a Virginia farm in June, 1859, and Beal defending his North Carolina strike colony in June, 1929...

...They all worked on the farm for nothing...

...Its leaders have not sent any radical agitators into the South to cry the evils of the capitalist system...

...The reason for the twentieth-century inaction is simple: the life of these southern textile workers is the best they have ever known...

...They have forgotten that before Chief Ader-holt was killed, most of the strikers had returned to their jobs in the Loray mill or moved to other textile centres...

...Its victory was consolidated by the appointment of one of its North Carolina officials to help administer the new provisions...

...The following paper by a newspaperman familiar with the scene and favored to witness much of what occurred, is a statement of as much as is exact in that acceptance...

...The legislature was given the credit but the American Federation of Labor did the work...

...To the union leaders the ground has seemed fertile, just as to John Brown of Osawatomie the slaves of the South seemed awaiting the insurrection signal...

...several months ago it claimed to have more than 20,000 Palmetto names on its membership cards...

...The young people marry, more children are born, and in their homes come repetitions of the cycle of poverty, prosperity and poverty...

...an atheist if ever there was one...

...He found that the blacks had no thought of rising to kill their masters...

...Incidentally, out of this strike came Governor Gardner's condemnation of the obstinacy of the mill owners, and later the battle between police and strike picketers which resulted in the death of five of the latter...