Read an Excerpt

In his flawed epic The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash described how "the Southern mill worker had pretty fair cause for complaint" on the eve of World War I. Moreover, Cash wrote, "Looking casually at the scene, you might easily have concluded, indeed, that he was responding to it directly, vigorously, and with clear eyes. For in 1913 a big strike would break out in Atlanta, and from there spread to other places in Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee."[1]

Cash was referring to the strike at Atlanta's Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills (which actually began in 1914), an event at the heart of the American Federation of Labor's first attempt to organize southern workers in over a decade. The year-long strike attracted considerable regional and national attention, from cotton manufacturers to the labor and reform press to a host of federal investigators. As United Textile Workers (UTW) organizer Sara Conboy declared, the Fulton strike "brings before us the whole Southern textile situation." At least in its celebrity, it was the southern counterpart of the contemporaneous industrial conflicts in Paterson, New Jersey; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Ludlow, Colorado.[2]

Yet Cash also warned that "it is necessary not to read more into this than it contained." As with other previous southern strikes and organizing drives, because it did not bring about lasting modern trade unionism into the textile South, Cash felt that the Fulton strike was "mere foam before passing gusts," a largely spontaneous, ephemeral action of little lasting consequence.

Cash's perspective contained numerous problems. He presented a single, monolithic portrait of Southern mill hands, what might be called "the mind of the male textile South." He narrowly equated "true" class consciousness with the establishment of enduring labor organizations and maintained that southern workers were inherently incapable of attaining either. And he was wrong about the significance of the Fulton strike.

Fulton Bag president Oscar Elsas would have surely disagreed with Cash's assessment of the strike, all of his numerous public pronouncements to minimize its significance to the contrary. For Elsas, the strike certainly mattered, a lot. Because of the incipient union activity at the plant, he hired labor spies to infiltrate the union, the shop floor, and the surrounding community, a practice he would continue into the 1920s. All told, over forty "operatives" filed some 2,700 daily reports to mill management during the six years after the strike's onset. Elsas also launched a vigorous campaign against strike sympathizers that reached high into national financial and corporate circles. He spent a great amount of time preparing for federal investigations of the Fulton situation and the southern textile industry. He drew upon his experiences in the strike to advance unified anti-union employer action at the local, state, regional, and national levels, at the strike's end joining the board of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). And he substantially revamped the company's industrial relations policies in the strike's aftermath.

There were other people involved in the matter from different vantage points who also would have taken issue with Cash's assertion that the Fulton strike was ultimately inconsequential. The local branch of the Social Gospel-influenced Men and Religion Forward Movement (MRFM), one of the nation's most active chapters, spent thousands of dollars on newspaper advertisements to draw attention to the matter and linked the Fulton situation to broader concerns of industrial justice and Progressive Era reform. Similarly, UTW and AFL leadership saw the Fulton dispute as central to the southern organizing drive and a key battle in a larger contest for public opinion over the labor question.

Others experienced the strike in more personal ways, no less significant, as the lives of Sallie and Robert Wright illustrate. Sallie Wright, who worked in the printing department of the company's bag mill, was closely monitored by management and then discharged from her job after she expressed interest in the union. Her husband, Robert, who ran a cutting machine in the bag mill, joined the strike after witnessing the wholesale eviction of union members from company housing.[3] One of those evicted was musician "Fiddlin' John" Carson, a weaver at the mill, who would become a pioneering star of country music radio and recording.[4]

Robert Wright quickly became one of the union's most active members. He was a regular speaker at the daily union meetings, touching on a number of concerns and fears of Fulton workers that extended well beyond working conditions alone. In addition, Wright described child labor practices at Fulton Mills, raising an issue that not only attracted national sympathies but was also at that very moment the focus of a coalition of local Progressives seeking to strengthen Georgia's child labor laws. He denounced the unsanitary conditions in the mill village, the head of the firm's internal security force, and the complicity of the local settlement house with management.[5] Wright also provided testimony about the work rules at Fulton Mills to an investigator for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR) and supervised a picket line to keep newcomers from working at the mill.[6] For his efforts, he was made president of UTW local 886 in August 1914.

Yet Wright soon became disillusioned with the chief union organizers, who became increasingly overwhelmed as the strike dragged on. The union-sponsored commissary was a major problem, since hundreds of people from Atlanta and across the Piedmont flocked to it. Wright claimed that most of those who got food from the commissary were not even Fulton workers but rather "hoboes and bums that blowed in here on a cyclone from everywhere" while "the real strikers fair and square" were shut out. In addition, Wright resented the leadership of the chief local strike organizer O. Delight (Mrs. E. B.) Smith, an active trade unionist who repeatedly challenged and transgressed conventional gender norms. Smith was a particular target for mill management, and she ultimately left town in disgrace as the strike and her marriage fell apart. Yet, over thirty-five years later, she still recalled the strike as the most significant event in her long and illustrious career in the labor movement.[7]

Aiding and abetting Wright in his grievances against union leaders was Harry Greenhough Preston, one of the ablest labor spies employed by the company. In addition to encouraging Wright, Preston became the union song leader and wormed his way into the top levels of the UTW. In contrast to Smith's downward trajectory, he was rewarded for his activities during the strike by being named southern vice president for the Railway Audit and Inspection Company, one of the nation's leading industrial espionage firms.