National Reports Henderson Strike: Southern Tug of War
WHALEN, RICHARD
NATIONAL REPORTS Henderson Strike: Southern Tug of War By Richard Whalen HENDERSON, N. C. AS THEY walked along the dusty blacktop, the two teenagers were unaware that their words carried. "I...
...nothing like it has been seen in the South since the bloody days of Gastonia and the great general textile walkout of 1934...
...As the mill gate swung open, the hate that had spilled from the boy's lips swelled up into a throaty roar: "Here they come...
...From the other side of the barbed wire come unconfirmed reports that the mills are having troubles too...
...Then it was over...
...That night, church bells pealed and strikers danced in the streets...
...But he wants 'em on his terms, in twos and threes, not all at once...
...Verdicts were about evenly split between management and the union...
...The youths melted into a throng of men, women and children lining the road leading from the north plant of the Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills—several heavily barricaded buildings squatting behind a tall barbed-wire fence...
...With the "conspirators" free on total bond of $165,000, union attorneys, including Hugo Black Jr., are confidently preparing an appeal for the October term of the State Supreme Court at Raleigh...
...Owner of a colorful police record (drunkenness, impersonating an officer) , "agent" Aaron allegedly was hired by Payton and the other plotters as an authority on dynamite...
...While the union denounced the lockout, small businessmen in Vance County circulated a petition, eventually signed by some 1,300 citizens, asking the Governor to close the mills until management dealt fairly with the union...
...They're idealists, not practical realists...
...Hodges sought a compromise settlement...
...A sweating sheriff's deputy, his belt sagging under the weight of his revolver, looked away as a man threw a rock, shattering the rear window of a late-model Ford...
...On April 20...
...Unlike the abject men of 1927...
...Crying "betrayal," the TWUA ordered its members out of the mills and resumed picketing...
...Holding a small boy in her arms, a stout, middle-aged woman shouted after the car: "Scabs...
...Hey," someone shouted...
...News Leader...
...Yet the union exploited the new circumstances prudently, for much had to be built from almost nothing...
...Strikers were to be called for the second shift on April 20...
...He wants 'em back, but he wants 'em cowed...
...On February 12...
...But something more fundamental is at stake in Henderson—whether the union shall continue to exist...
...His family founded the mills around the turn of the century, and has interests in a local bank and tobacco warehouse as well...
...Not only refusing to halt the second shift, as Governor Hodges had requested, Cooper boldly announced he would start a third one as well...
...Jammed into some 30 cars, non-union mill workers who had emerged from the plant prepared to run the gantlet...
...I never thought he'd go back in...
...Withdrawal of the militia raised their spirits, as did the windfall from the unemployment compensation fund...
...Cooper brushes aside the suggestion that his workers have been locked out: "They were offered jobs, they refused to come back...
...Still very much alive and kicking, however, is Henderson's leading citizen, John D. Cooper Jr...
...After 40 payless weeks, the Henderson strikers are still out, still remarkably optimistic that they will win in Cooper's challenge to union security...
...In the past generation, union organizers generally have run against the Southern worker's ingrained individualism, the farm boy's reluctance to fall into step, even for his own gain...
...In April, shortly after Cooper had announced that he would begin a second shift, Governor Hodges, himself a former textile executive, came to Henderson in the role of peacemaker...
...No public relations men or industrial relations experts stand between the outside world and his cluttered desk...
...The strikers aren't hungry : Union relief and recently begun unemployment compensation provide the bare necessities...
...Naturally, Cooper denies all rumors, with his most emphatic negatives reserved for the recurring story that he will sell the mills (worth about $5 million) shortly...
...Corded yarn now being manufactured is said to be well below pre-strike standards, due to inexperienced labor...
...Chief witness for the prosecution was one Harold Aaron, unemployed machinist, former TWUA member and self-styled "secret agent" for the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI...
...Part of this organized minority, the strikers of Henderson, while hardly self-conscious proletarians, is clearly a new breed, born out of the New Deal by way of the Fair Labor Standards Act...
...Many of Henderson's 17.000 inhabitants probably agree with Mayor Carroll V. Singleton, a heavy-set man in his mid-30's, who describes the strikers as "animals, sick of fatback and beans, hungry and mean...
...Cost of the appeal is expected to push strike expenses near the $500,000 mark...
...Payton can quote Scripture with the best of the region's well-versed politicians, and frequently outrages opponents by declaring softly that "the TWUA has the same objectives and principles as Christianity...
...Don't go out there...
...and the third soon after...
...Old John D. needs these people," says unionist Fry of the strikers, "he's hungry for 'em...
...Don't want to disappoint 'em...
...Perhaps the peculiar blend of old and new in Henderson is most aptly symbolized by a picket lustily singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" and marching under a placard proclaiming: SOLIDARITY FOREVER...
...At the Chamber of Commerce, gloom prevails...
...As one stubble-chinned old-timer put it: "Anyone who hurts one of us hurts all of us...
...The gospel of unionism doesn't go down well on the genteel streets remote from the mill villages...
...there the almost nightly thud of explosions and the crack of rifle fire have brought a predictable reaction...
...Castigated in pulpit and press as an alien, radical blight, the union sought indigenous roots...
...For those long accustomed to less than luxury, however, the loss of a television set isn't crushing...
...Answering the rebuke from Raleigh, John D. observed mildly: "The Governor never asked me how many jobs were open...
...Equally provocative is the union's appeal to the religious convictions of the mill workers, true sons and daughters of the Bible Belt...
...Also, the TWUA understood jobs on the first shift were to be open within 60 days...
...At the outset, the dispute here was relatively clear-cut: With the contract up for renewal, management informed the union it would no longer accept the arbitration clause that had been part of the collective bargaining agreement since the mills were organized in 1944...
...Promised those scabs we'd be back to give 'em hell today...
...Strikers drifted toward their bungalows and called children to supper...
...The strike, now in its eleventh month, drags wearily on...
...We just couldn't live with arbitration," explains John D. Cooper Jr., 69-year-old president of Harriet-Henderson...
...Only 56 strikers came back, but Cooper had anticipated a poor response...
...Using as his text the Sermon on the Mount...
...resulted in the agreement of April 17...
...More than 175 strikers have been arrested since last November...
...Seldom did the owner's casual hand fall on the loom operator's shoulder: the hand was turned to other things...
...Following the walkout last November, the Harriet-Henderson mills re-remained shut down until mid-February, when Cooper announced that pressure from stockholders compelled him to open the gates...
...Immediately, the mills filled the first shift by dipping into the reservoir of surplus labor in the surrounding countryside...
...Collective bargaining assumed new usefulness and practicality...
...Strikers' heads nod approvingly when Boyd E. Payton, Carolinas director of the TWUA, sonorously drawls: "Christ and the twelve disciples were the first union...
...a slightly bent, silver-haired capitalist of the Old School...
...In addition, something had come between him and the mill owner, prosperity perhaps...
...And when Mayor Singleton asked for troops in early May, they were sent immediately...
...Now the war of attrition goes on...
...Violence flared on the picket lines and mass arrests were common...
...Almost unheralded outside the labor movement, the Henderson strike is the stretching of long-cramped muscles, the expression of idealism long-vanished from the ranks of sophisticated unionists in the North and Midwest...
...On November 17, 1958, 1,038 workers, most of them members of Locals 578 and 584, Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), left their jobs in the mills...
...Under the clause, any grievance not settled by negotiation could be submitted to a professional arbiter by the aggrieved party...
...Union-sponsored radio broadcasts rally to the strikers' cause the cherished symbols and slogans of the Confederacy...
...Claims of 40-50 per cent drops in business are common...
...Anyone who's reasonable knows the people who work in a plant are dependent on the plant's success for their security, not on the promises of the union...
...Mortgage foreclosures have been averted by relief, but cars and appliances are being repossessed...
...fewer than 30 union members were called for the second shift ; other jobs, the union learned, were permanently filled...
...Among the pallid, work-worn women and thin-shanked men in overalls who walk the picket lines, there is a collective consciousness rarely met in the mill towns of the South...
...Quiet settled on the glass-strewn street...
...Dirty, lousy scabs...
...the others are staking everything on the strength of their self-respect...
...Armed with an injunction against mass picketing, he sought—and received—more than 100 State highway patrolmen to guard the mills...
...Of greatest concern to the union is the legal fight to clear Payton, two other TWUA officials and five strikers, convicted under a remarkably vague State law of conspiring to dynamite the mills' power supply...
...Some of the cases the mills appealed and lost," says Julius Fry of Greensboro, "could have been headed off...
...A canny union official, skilled in arbitration procedure, bemoans the absence of a worthy opponent...
...Collective action was scorned by the "loner," especially when his social betters (for reasons of their own) praised his independence...
...One day recently, three women strikers, as busy as chair-ladies at a church supper, pulled on their boots and slickers and bustled out of the union hall into a steady downpour...
...he inserted an ad in the Henderson Daily Dispatch, urging the strikers to return under the old contract—without the arbitration clause...
...After a dismal day of picket duty in a cold drizzle, the strikers are uplifted by hearing their spirit compared with the spirit of "those who followed Pettigrew, Pender and Pickett to the heights of Gettysburg: of those who stood with Ramseur at the Bloody Angle...
...We've got to," replied the last of the matronly pickets...
...A dry wit belies the tired lines in John D.'s face...
...Soon after the arrival of the militia, the Harriet-Henderson mills resumed normal, three-shift operations, employing mainly farm folk from eastern North Carolina and neighboring Southside Virginia...
...Fewer than 75 union members have gone back to the mills...
...Union concessions, chiefly limitation of the scope of the arbitration clause and elimination of the check-off...
...Those college professors [the arbiters] kept eroding the meaning of the contract...
...he tells strikers that if they truly love their neighbor, they won't go back to work...
...Speakers in nightly talks liken the strikers to "their forefathers, who checked and shattered overwhelming legions sent against them on many fronts 95 years ago...
...They blew up every petty grievance and promised the workers pie in the sky...
...You know, there are people I've known all my life I'd like to see dead now...
...No longer itinerants without property, the mill workers of Henderson are home-owners, drivers of new cars, possessors of television sets and washing machines—modest but self-assured sharers in the American Dream...
...To all outward appearances, the strike has cheerfully been accepted as a way of life, something to be endured as the price of preserving self-respect...
...Bumper to bumper, the cars sped through the gate and down the angry street...
...Quickly overlooking Cooper's apparent deception, Hodges ignored the petition...
...This town is dead for a long, long time," says a deflated booster...
...Under the watchful eyes of the symbols of the State, the agrarians went through the picket lines without a qualm, doubtless believing they were performing a public service...
...So we got new people...
...Along Main Street, merchants are bitter about the loss of the $59.000 weekly payroll to communities closer to the homes of the newly hired mill workers...
...a bit of gossip no longer heard...
...Aaron testified that he received at least $330 in "expenses" from the SBI prior to the arrest of the eight union men...
...The car swerved and the crowd parted, but the driver gunned the accelerator and raced off...
...Chuckling, he recalls that his colleagues in the industry long regarded him as "pro-labor...
...They can't stick to the facts—they love to interpret things...
...Once brightly depicted as a "City With a Future," Henderson has lost at least two good industrial prospects and no others are in sight...
...Illustrating the collapse of what had seemed a harmonious labor-management relationship, Cooper says of 14 years of collective bargaining: "From the beginning, the union tried to drive a wedge between the workers and management...
...The appeal is well-founded, for the church, historically, has been the rural Southerner's chief (and often only) experience with collective expression of belief...
...Once a floor was put under their wages and a ceiling over their hours, the mill workers' link with the past—with the employer paternalism that had succeeded the paternalism of the Old South—was weakened...
...Among the surprisingly deep roots to be found in Henderson, one of the firmest lies in the region's sustaining heritage...
...The eight were given sentences ranging from two to 10 years at hard labor...
...Not the least of his strange qualifications was the fact that he once sued the union for failing to press a grieve-ance while he was employed at a North Carolina mill...
...Though it remains only a small fraction of total non-agricultural employment, union membership has more than doubled in North Carolina since 1939...
...After an uneventful tour of duty, from mid-May to early August, the militiamen were withdrawn, leaving law enforcement to city and Vance County police...
...of those who fired the last shot at Appomattox...
...Today the strikers are both organized and united...
...This is in sharp contrast to the Henderson strike of 1927, when a walkout of disgruntled, unorganized workers was broken swiftly by the militia...
...Today, there are no jobs to return to...
...Actually, the much-discussed arbitration clause seems much ado about almost nothing: In 13 years, 196 grievances arose and 25 went to the "college professors...
...It would have saved a lot of face and money...
...the strikers of today regard themselves as members of the great American middle class...
...The second shift had escaped...
...But it proved a false armistice...
...Three days later, Governor Hodges accused Cooper of "misleading" him (and all concerned) about the job status of strikers...
...With Federal and State mediators...
...RICHARD WHALEN is associate editor of the Richmond (Va...
...In the mills since 1905, Cooper is boss of Harriet-Henderson...
...But this attitude is slowly passing, along with the way of life that nurtured it...
...And, in recent years, there has been no clearer test of the strength of industrial unionism below the Potomac...
...Cooper's former "people" don't appear cowed...
...Such was the scene in Henderson almost daily until Governor Luther H. Hodges dispatched 300 National Guardsmen to patrol the mills...
...With an average hourly wage of $1.42 prior to the strike, the union man in Henderson had come a long way from the bitterly remembered days when an hour's labor brought a dime...
...The chronology of the strike, however, raises doubts about who refused what to whom...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 35
