243 - Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike

Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike
By John A. Salmond

Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 226 pp. $24.95.

The fact that John A. Salmond is professor of history at La Trobe University in Australia evokes one of the themes of the book: how the textile strike of 1929 in Gastonia, North Carolina, brought that obscure town to international attention. Ever since, the name "Gastonia" is likely to appear in even the most cursory domestic or foreign recollection of labor history in twentieth-century America.

Salmond's retelling of the story is anything but cursory. With dense but not excessive detail, he rehearses the conditions that prompted the strike in

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the South's largest textile mill: the shift to absentee ownership, the low wages, the production stretchout, the management intimidations, the coming of Communist Party union organizers, and the growing perception of millhand's that (even in 1929) life at twelve dollars a week was a bare escape from the poverty of upcountry farming.

Communism and murder put the strike on the international map. Salmond carefully documents the backgrounds, the strategies, and the conflicts between members of the Party who saw in Gastonia the opportunity for sweeping Southern industry to region-wide revolt against the paternalism and exploitation that dominated workers' lives. Their willingness to strike was radical enough in the culture of any Piedmont industrial town of the era-rafter all, industrial jobs were supposed to be the economic salvation of mountaineers and red-clay farmers. But truly radical-and disastrous for the success of the workers' cause-was the June 7 fatal shooting of Gastonia's chief of police, Orville Aderholt. The name "Chief Aderholt" was to go down in local lore as the great, dark atrocity in the history of the town, symbolizing the inherent violence of labor unionism, its close kinship with Communist ideas, and its assault on the forces of law, liberty, progress, and civic peace. No matter, for local memory, that labor unionism in most of American history bore little resemblance to this profile. No matter, either, that the less-remembered September murder of Ella May Wiggins, poet and balladeer of the strike, was a more realistic symbol of the plight of the vast majority of textile workers than a police chief could be. Her story composes one of Salmond's most touching portraits. He quotes Robert Thompson of the Raleigh News and Observer: "[She] was no more a Communist than she was a capitalist. She joined the union, just as she no doubt joined the church at some time in her life, in the hope that it would in some mysterious way, improve the lot of herself and her children." And, Salmond adds, "Her five children were sent not to the Young Pioneers school in Philadelphia but rather to the Presbyterian orphanage in Barium Springs, North Carolina. The Communists lost that battle as well."

The 1929 Loray strike spawned a numerous array of news stories, novels, and historical-sociological studies. As coauthor of one of them (Spindles and Spires) and student of the author of another (Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers), I suspect that as straightforward narrative history, Salmond's book is the most detailed and balanced account of the 1929 event itself. My one criticism of his way of telling the story is the scant attention he gives to the power and complexity of religion in the strike and its aftermath over the next sixty years. Salmond quotes Pope from time to time but dwells little on the diverse ways in which religion influenced Southern industrialization before and after the fateful year of 1929. Indeed, his writeup of the strike's "aftermath" comes down to the "collective amnesia" of the local culture. In fact, a little band of survivors of 1929 have not forgotten the event, nor have their younger neighbors. They have buried it only by half. Religion and its leaders assisted in this

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process, covering over some of the painful past with cloaks of fear and dread while agreeing with several generations of establishment leaders to organize town history around the theme "up from 1929."

Like this half-buried memory itself, Salmond is half right: Gastonians like to tell each other that they remember enough about 1929 to fear any repetition of its horror. If third-generation Gastonians read this book, they will have another opportunity to shake their heads, not only over the badge of murder they like to pin on the event. Mob violence in the service of vested interests, judges and lawyers in the service of popular demands for vengeance, and religion that cries "peace, peace" at the price of public justice and truth-these are the scandals of 1929 that Gastonia ministers and teachers, among others, should specialize in remembering. This book will help them do so.

DONALD W. SHRIVER, JR.
Union Theological Seminary
New York, NY