Cotton Mill Workers in the Southern U.S.
November 6th, 2007
Like a Family by Jacquelyn Down Hall, et al. is an excellent work on cotton mill workers in the southern U.S. in the early twentieth century. Relying heavily on oral history, the authors persuasively argue that workers were active agents in the history of mill villages and recast southern paternalism in the villages as a form of welfare capitalism. The work is not entirely flawless, there were a few things they omitted which could have strengthened the work, but overall the good vastly outweighs these minor weaknesses. Anyone interested in American labor or southern history will like this book.
Hall, et al argue that workers related to each other 'Like a Family' and that workers were not passive victims but had a role in shaping their own communities and workplaces. Their work is a story of class formation, with some similarities to E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Like a Family is divided into two parts and six chapters, with World War One as the key turning point between the two parts. The first part discusses the transformation of southern farmers into textile workers and the role their rural values played after they joined the mill workforce. The second part discusses workers after the workforce had been formed, including dramatic cases of working class resistance like strikes, culminating with the general textile strike of 1934.
The work relies primarily on interviews with surviving textile workers as its main source, but they supplement it with trade magazines and letters from textile workers to Franklin and/or Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great Depression. The use of these additional sources enable them to overcome potential weaknesses of oral history, such as the fact that most of the mill workers they interviewed did not want to talk about the 1934 textile strike.
One of Hall, et al.'s best contributions is their argument that workers' resistance altered the way their communities and workplaces were run. The earliest works on southern textiles focused more on the elite and tended to portray them as benevolent fathers. Later works attacked this perspective and portrayed workers as passive victims of management and the owners. Hall, et al critique both views, showing that while workers may have been victims they were not passive. Workers engaged in many forms of resistance, including not only strikes in the twenties and thirties but also forms of everyday resistance such as refusing to work as many hours as management wanted, leaving work without management's permission, and high turnover. Mill workers were actors in their own history, not solely victims exploited by employers.
In response to working class resistance resistance, and to ward off outside criticism, employers implemented “welfare work” - a form of welfare capitalism. They constructed “community centers, landscaped their factory grounds, sponsored YMCAs, and organized a variety of recreational and educational activities” (p. 131) in an effort to reduce working class resistance, decrease turnover and evade external criticism by reformers and the general public. Hall, et al. persuasively argue that many workers contested these attempts at buying their loyalty and formed their own community and work culture.
Previous works had tended to explain these welfare capitalist policies by employers as a form of southern paternalism that was specific to the region and caused by southern cultural factors. Dowd, et al. show that it was really a form of ordinary capitalism (whether you call it “welfare capitalism” or something else) not that different from capitalist relationships elsewhere in the country. The older paternalist/southern exceptionalist view argued that workers' use of family analogies to describe life in the mill village showed the paternalism of the village, but Hall, et al. convincingly point out that workers tended to use these family analogies to describe their relations with each other - that the communities they constructed were “like a family.”
Although an excellent work, Like a Family does make a few omissions which slightly weaken it, or at least leave room for additional research. Perhaps the largest is the lack of attention to the impact of racial inequalities on the workers. Though the book does discuss the racial division of labor and the exclusion of African-Americans from most mill jobs, it says relatively little on how racial inequality and concepts of whiteness affected white workers. The work could also use more on the few African-American workers who did work in the mill and their relationship with other workers. More fully taking race into account would have strengthened their work.
In addition to not sufficiently analyzing racial inequalities, there are several other secondary issues which could have strengthened the work. It neglects issues of masculinity and its impact on the mill workers. The addition of quantitative data could have strengthened the work by providing additional evidence that their portrayal of mill workers is not limited to a particular minority of workers. However, these omissions are forgivable since the evidence they do use is persuasive and because gathering and analyzing quantitative data was much more difficult in the eighties, when they wrote the book, than it is today. Despite these omissions the work is still an exemplary contribution to labor history.
Despite these minor weaknesses Like a Family is still an excellent work. It is well researched and well written, with a well supported argument. It makes mill workers agents in their own history and their own creation, challenges old conceptions of southern paternalism and shows how workers evolved their own community and work culture. The authors' achieved all the major aims they set out for themselves.