Textile Pioneers
STARR, MARK
Textile Pioneers Nine Lives for Labor. By Richard Kelly. Praeger. 182 pp. $3.00. RevieWed by Mark Starr Educational director, International Ladies Garment Workers Union Tills is labor history...
...Students of the history of union organization, particularly in the South and in textiles, will get much feeling as well as fact from this saga of labor union struggles and of nine workers who lived them...
...The manner of the telling of these life stories makes the reader feel the excitement of the many strike situations in which these potential leaders found their opportunity...
...Its story of the lives of Herb Payne, Mariano Bishop, Tom McMahon (UTW President), Joe White...
...Undoubtedly Executive Suite has its parallels in the large unions which are currently making history...
...Rieve's short historical survey, from the time of the striking mill girls in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834 down through the Marion, North Carolina massacre, serves as an effective introduction to the well-written biographical sketches of the nine union activists...
...and that is one reason why its greatest center, the Southeast, remains the economic problem of the nation...
...This book rescues a few of the otherwise unknown soldiers from obscurity...
...Some of these heroes described by Mr...
...RevieWed by Mark Starr Educational director, International Ladies Garment Workers Union Tills is labor history told in terms of vivid personalities who gave their lives to the struggle to organize the textile workers of the United States...
...In some Southern areas, police surveillance and harrying of organizers and union pickets, false arrests, dismissal and black list, outrageous injunctions granted by judges compliant to business interests, and mobs armed with fire-hose and guns still challenge the union organizers...
...Horace Rivere, Joe Steiner, Clyda Crawford, Vincenzo Tortolano and Lowell Simmons shows the devotion which has created the modern labor movement...
...The variety of their ancestral background and of their contrasting experiences in New England and in the South effectively suggest the mosaic that is the United States...
...Away back in the Twenties and the early Thirties, the proletarian novel idealized the workers and their leaders...
...Now that the internal struggles of business executives have been discovered by our modern novelists, we may hope that there will be a new and more fruitful approach to union members and leaders...
...This is largely an investigation of the activists in the lower echelons and of what made them lick...
...The foreword by Emil Rieve, President emeritus of the Textile Workers Union, recalls the saga of struggle which has by no means ended...
...We have not vet recovered from the excesses of the proletariannovel caricatures...
...But they shared a common faith in union organization and a full commitment and devotion to the purposes of the labor unions...
...Kelly had more need of a bullet-proof vest than a flannel suit...
...Currently, we hear much about the "men of power.' the oligarchy which is alleged to make all the big decisions about industry and labor...
...And that is why, as Rieve says, "This oldest and largest industry [textiles] is today the least organized and the lowest-paid...
Vol. 39 • July 1956 • No. 28
