Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta's Fulton Mills / Edition 1

by Clifford M. Kuhn

Overview

In May 1914, workers walked off their jobs at Atlanta's Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, launching a lengthy strike that was at the heart of the American Federation of Labor's first major attempt to organize southern workers in over a decade. In its celebrity, the Fulton Mills strike was the regional contemporary of the well-known industrial conflicts in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Ludlow, Colorado. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the strike was an important episode in the development of the New South, and as Clifford Kuhn demonstrates, its story sheds light on the industrialization, urbanization, and modernization of the region.

Drawing on an extraordinary collection of sources—including reports from labor spies and company informants, photographs, federal investigations, oral histories, and newly uncovered records from the old mill's vaults—Kuhn vividly depicts the strike and the community in which it occurred. He also chronicles the struggle for public opinion that ensued between management, workers, union leaders, and other interested parties. Finally, Kuhn reflects on the legacy of the strike in southern history, exploring its complex ties to the evolving New South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807849736
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/24/2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.71(d)
Lexile:	1640L (what's this?)

About the Author

Clifford M. Kuhn is associate professor of history at Georgia State University and director of the Georgia Government Documentation Project. He is principal author of Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914-1948.

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.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Making of a New South Business, 1868-1900
Chapter 2. Atlanta: Metropolis of the South
Chapter 3. A Busy Industrial Community
Chapter 4. Causes and Commencement
Chapter 5. We Thought We Knew Our Help
Chapter 6. To Present to the Public a True Picture
Chapter 7. The Fight Will Be Centered There
Conclusion: The Strike's Legacy and Place in Southern History
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Kuhn's book has considerable interest for southern labor history. . . . His understanding of women's roles in the strike is welcome. . . . An enjoyable read.—Labor History



Contesting the New South Order should assure the Fulton Bag strike's rightful place alongside the contemporaneous upheavals in Lawrence, Ludlow, and the Lower East Side as a pivotal moment in the nation's Progressive Era industrial history.—Journal of American History



Kuhn's narrative . . . is enhanced by vivid descriptions of key players and the actions of ordinary workers responding to an extraordinary situation. . . . An important book that advances our understanding of mill workers and owners in the early twentieth century.—Journal of Southern History



In Contesting the New South Order, Clifford M. Kuhn deftly saunters through the early twentieth-century dialectic of continuity and change in a transitional South. Through a thorough use of primary sources connected with the strike, and with the changing social climate of the region, he fashions a persuasive argument regarding both the unique qualities of the strike, and its regional, even national, significance. . . . The vivid descriptions of the behaviors, attitudes and environment of all the parties involved-workers, owners, management, politicians, union representatives-makes for fascinating reading. . . . Kuhn makes a unique and worthy contribution to the scholarship on traditionalism versus modernism in southern history, and on gender, race, and labor relations in the twentieth-century South.—Georgia Historical Quarterly



A richly detailed and smartly analytical work. . . . It stands on its own as one of the most thorough chronicles of a lengthy strike in American history.—Business History Review



Kuhn offers a detailed look at the issues that led to the strike and the personalities on both sides of the dispute. In addition, he does a good job of putting the dispute in a broader social context. . . . It is to Kuhn's credit that he leaves no aspect of the strike unexplored.—Business History



Clifford Kuhn has long been admired among historians and journalists for the archival quality of his compendious mind; he carries whole epochs, and movements of classes, and industrial trends in his memory; foolish is the man or woman who would set out to compose a portion of Atlanta history without consulting him first. In Contesting the New South Order, Kuhn tells a dramatic story of life among early-20th-century mill workers. The data he has amassed is sharpened by the personal portraits he sketches, including glimpses of white, barefoot, laboring children. This crucial moment in American labor history is set before the reader not only accurately and comprehensibly, but with Kuhn's quintessential compassion and humanity.—Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing



Clifford Kuhn's account of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills strike illuminates not only the history of southern industrial labor, but also the tangled interplay of race, class, and ethnicity in the Progressive-era urban South. Especially arresting is his exploration of how representations of the strike, by both sides, helped shape the image of the southern working class. Historians of southern labor, business, society, and culture will profit from it.—David L. Carlton, Vanderbilt University

Editorial Reviews

This crucial moment in American labor history is set before the reader not only accurately and comprehensibly, but with Kuhn's quintessential compassion and humanity. (Melissa Fay Greene, author of "Praying for Sheetrock" and "The Temple Bombing")

Historians of southern labor, business, society, and culture will profit from it. (David L. Carlton, Vanderbilt University)

From the Publisher

This crucial moment in American labor history is set before the reader not only accurately and comprehensibly, but with Kuhn's quintessential compassion and humanity.

Melissa Fay Greene

Historians of southern labor, business, society, and culture will profit from it.

David L. Carlton