Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South. (Book Reviews).

Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South. By Janet Irons. The Working Class in American History. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2000. Pp. x, 262. $45.00, ISBN 0-252-02527-X.)

An unprecedented southern labor action, the 1934 general textile strike drew 170,000 workers out of their factories, two-thirds of the region's textile labor force. Mill owners responded by hiring armed guards and sending urgent appeals for help from the various state militias. Conflict erupted with particular savagery in Honea Path, South Carolina, where guards employed by the mill fired into a crowd of strikers, killing seven and injuring over seventy-five others. The strike ended when President Franklin D. Roosevelt assured workers and the leaders of the United Textile Workers Union of America (UTW) that their grievances would be addressed by New Deal agencies.

Janet Irons has written a solid and informative narrative about this unusually widespread southern strike. Able to rely on a growing body of research on southern mill workers, Irons begins instead by concentrating on events outside the mill villages in the months leading up to the strike, when the leading actors were union leaders and New Deal politicians. By focusing on the details preceding the strike, Irons assumes that her audience already knows the outline of the story--a dark and romantic moment in labor history when workers themselves spontaneously took a stand against the "stretch-out," sustained a strike in spite of the reluctance of union leaders, and then found themselves worse off than before. The most valuable part of the book is her account of union and government neglect of southern workers in chapters 3 through 8. She paints a disturbing picture of union prejudice toward southern workers, intertwined with the willingness of federal New Dealers to betray their interests. Irons not only shows that the UTW was an incompetent, company-friendly union, but her bleak assessment of the New Deal demolishes its reputation as an era of reform. By "testing the New Deal" with their strike, workers discovered that the federal government's core values of economic security and stability left little room for actually improving the lot of overwhelmed southern loom tenders.

Although Irons's prodigiously researched indictment of the UTW and the New Deal are effective, the book falters in its later chapters. After the first eight background chapters have primed the readers for a colossal drama, the coverage of the strike in the ninth seems far too brief. Because it was such a rare and widespread southern labor action, more flesh and muscle on the strike's "anatomy," particularly in North Carolina, would have made this a more engrossing work.

Missing almost completely from this work is any sustained analysis of the textile industry itself. Irons does distinguish between "traditional" and "progressive" mill owners, but what of the differences among hosiery, yarn, cotton cloth, rayon yarn, rayon cloth, and finished goods mill operations? For example, in Alamance County, North Carolina, none of the hosiery workers went on strike, but all the cotton and rayon weaving mills were closed. What of the differences between locally owned mills and those controlled by owners from outside the South? In Gaston County, North Carolina, the center of fine cotton yarn production, only one mill tried to reopen, and that one, the notorious Loray Mill, was owned at the time by non-southerners. Irons could have also provided more detail regarding the political culture of southern textile workers. South Carolina's political life during the early twentieth century has been the subject of superb recent examinations, but what of the other states, particularly North Carolina? And what of the strike's consequences? It spelled doom for immediate organizing efforts, but historians, including Irons, have yet to explore its long-term effects. Owners and managers, in particular, must have felt the impact of this strike for years afterward. How did they alter their behavior and policies? While Irons has masterfully analyzed the background of the 1934 general strike, she has left us with many other issues to be resolved.