SHOTGUNS AND REVOLVERS

Evening Star, Issue 20256, 17 August 1929, Page 6

SHOTGUNS AND REVOLVERS

AMERICAN TEXTILE STRIKE FtOMI FOR BETTER CONDITIONS ELEVIK-MItJR SAY AMO LOW WAGES \9f S.K.R., in tiie ‘ New Statesman.’] lu the whole world of labour there can hardly be found a contrast more complete than that between a strike in England and a strike in the United Stales. With us an industrial dispute it a quiet, if grim* affair, from which it is impossible to banish the British forms of humour. In America, almost invariably, it is civil war. marked by a ferocity such as, since the general' recognition of trade unionism Half a century ago, w« in England have not experienced. Nor can it be said that in the United States there is any ten-

dency discernible towards a mitigation of the civil war conditions. The horrors associated with Lawrence in 1914 and Colorado in 3914 have been repeated during the past decade in the steel and coal strikes, in the recurrent outbreaks of terror at .Herrin, Illinois, in the toxtil© towns of New Jersey. And it is Sow the day of the Southern States! Since the niidde of April there has been , going on in Tennessee and the- Carolines a textile war which, shocking enough in itself, is especially significant because of its relation to on© of the moat important movements of presentday America—the rapid industrialisation _of the South. This development is not by any means , all modern, but it has in recent years bee® immensely quickened and expanded. The South was ruined in the |\Var of Secession, and it had almost no part in the first great epoch qt Am©>; xican industrial prosperity after tho opening of the West. Even in that interval of neglect, however, it was apparent to some manufacturers that the Carolinas, Georgia, aud other States were destined for the textile industries, and many mills were established. After the Great W T ar the southward drive of industry became almost sensational. American capitalists awoke to the meaning of certain facts, which, as we may think to-day, must always nave been sufficiently obvious—for example, the vast potential wealth of tho Southern States, the facilities for water jiower, access to the sea, nearness to many raw materials, remoteness'from jthe crushing difficulties of the Northern winter, and splendid stretches of country, attractive alike for holiday grounds and for permanent residence. A SPECIAL DEVELOPMENT. The more special development, however, affected the cotton industry, hitherto concentrated, as regards the great capital investments, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Economic conditions of a vanished past had caused New England to he the home of textile manufactures. In the present ag© the advantages of the South were seen to be overwhelming—nearness to the cotton fields and a climate altogether suitable, low wages, and an abundant labour supply, with little or no restriction upon the hours of women and children, and social conditions which seemed to promise security against union organisers and revolutionary influences. The cotton industry, therefore, moved South, just as the woollen industry was being hit in the vitals; aul in such New England towns as J.owcl! and Lawrence, New Bedford and Fall River, the abandoned mills proclaimed at least one grave exception to American prosperity. There are, of course, no effective safeguards, especially in a primitive community, against the social results of industrialism. The process of awakening and revolt is inevitable, and eight years ago a strike of the workers in the cotton town of Charlotte came as a plain warning that North Carolina could no longer be counted as one of the agricultural States of the Old South. Gaston County was formerly known as a great corn-whisky producing area, with its appropriate community of “ moonshiners.” It is to-day the leading centre in the South for combed yarn, and of labour unrest. The Charlotte strike of 1921 was conducted by the American Federation of Labour on orthodox lines. The present strike is centred in a neighbouring town, Gastonia, and is under Communist direction, tho leader being one Fred. E. Beal, who sleeps in a worker’s cottage, guarded by a squad of four men armed with shotguns and revolvers. As one correspondent at the front- remarks, ho needs them all. FEAR AND HATRED. The strike began at the Loray .mill, Gastonia, a concern owned by a New England company, employing some 2,200 workers, most of whom live in the company houses of the mill village. It is stated that the manager deliberately accepted the challenge of the National Textile Workers’ Union, a new Communist rival to the regular union (known as the United), which is affiliated to the American Federation of Labour, and discharged five union men. Promptly, one-half of the labour force walked out in protest, and when a policeman was knocked down, the Governor of North Carolina, himsef a mill owner, ordered out five companies of the National Guard—that is, the State Militia. This was the signal for civil War. The action of the workers at Loray mill met with an instant response throughout the textile towns of North and South Carolina, and Gasuonia, N.C., has provided’the worst instances on the eastern side of the mountain border of the State, while on -tho western side, at Elizabethton, Tenn., there are 15,000 strikers, largely workers in the artificial silk mills; equally determined, but - apparently content with the leadership of the United Textile Workers and the sympathy of the A.F. of L. Over the entire area the strike goes on in an atmosphere of fear and hatred. The armed police and National Guard parade the towns, the mills are ringed round with armed guards, conflicts are almost incessant, and the strikers are provoked to violence by the bringing in of, strike breakers. For the: first time in the annals of the industrialised -South, the authorities and protective organisations are able, because of the prominence in some towns of Communist leaders, to make colourable use of Bolshevism! with ite familiar accompaniment or the marriage and home scare. The manufacturers of Gastonia announce, as we should expect; World revolution is its ultimate goal. It has no religion, it has rio colour line; it believes iu free love! The special correspondents on the ground appear to be in agreement about the exceptional absurdity of the employers’ propaganda, since the local facts are so manifest. In some districts the - strikes are strictly under union direction: in others they are evidently spojptfiaqqijis . arid Jead*sk*s# *

simple rebellion against intolerable conditions. The strikers may be purely individualistic, _ asserting that they do not want a union of any kind. In qnt> town of -North Carolina they are following the lead of a local physician, who holds the farcical office of Grand Dragon in th«L ■ It is well known, of course, that tho Communists tend to complicate tlm racial issue by their advocacy of the right of negroes to enter the unions, but there appears to be evidence enough that the mill workers as a body stand upon the Southern principle of whit© supremacy. They may not object to the admission of negroes, but they insist upon keeping at a distance, and the rale of tin* mills is that white and coloured do not work together. The tradition is so strong that the mill owners would not dare to import negro strike-breakers. The community would not stand it, and there would be heavy casualties among the negroes. WAGES AND HOURS. Low wages and long hours, together with what is known as the “ stretchout ” sj’stem, afford a sufficient explanation of an outbreak which amounts to an industrial revolt. The mill workers of the South endure a working day of about twelve hours, with an average weekly wage, over the whole cotton region, of a trifle more than 12dol, which might fairly be reckoned as equal to about twenty shillings in England, ft is commonly said _ that three wage earners are needed in a family to earn a minimum for the household. In North Carolina the wages are above the average, with a standard week of sixtyfour hours. The eleven-hour day and twelve-hour night are permitted by law for both men and women, and children of fourteen who have passed the fourth grade in school may be worked for eleven hours. The “stretch-out” system is a device of scientific management recently adopted throughout the cotton States of the South in the interests of higher production and lower costs. It would appear that “ efficiency engineers ” have been everywhere at work, with results that could not fail to be terrifying to the operatives, Men who had handled twenty looms were put in charge of eighty or a hundred. In some mills the new system called for the discharge of one worker in every three or four. The reductions in overhead expenses were enormous, and production was increased; but the general complaint of the workers is that, instead of bringing a higher level of wages to a smaller number of employees, the “ stretch-out ” system lias involved a serious reduction. At Gastonia, it is stated, men who had earned 20dol and more before the inauguration of the new system were do ( wn to ISclol when the strike was called, while spinning room- workers might find themselves brought down as low as lOdol. Judged by any American standard a weekly wage of less than 30dol is hardly endurable.

It remains to he said that the mill workers of the South belong in the main to the old Anglo-Saxon American stock, strikingly different from the polyglot European hordes of the Northern industrial cities. A large percentage of them are mountaineers, of the Piedmont region of Carolina and the Tennessee Mountains, members of viliage < communities growing out of the earliest settle-; jnents: the people among whom Cecil Sharp discovered tho survivals of folk song-and custom, taken out from England in the seventeenth, century. Living for. generations in the hills; far from the main streams, of. American life, they have been brought into the factories by the need of work and the lure of wages, only to encounter the miseries of an industrial system which, “scientific”, and ultra-modern, is no less ruthless than that of Chicago and Pittsburg in the first age of American expansion. Gastonia and Elizabethton, it would appear, like their fellow victims of stockyard and steel mill, make a fight for the l.are elements of life in the country of tiiq free,.