The Company Town (18 page)

Under James, the Cannon company had made strides toward modernity. Like the early New England mills, most outfits in the South had begun by using water power from nearby streams and rivers to run their machinery. Cannon first employed coal-fired steam turbines to power its equipment in Kannapolis, but it soon converted to electricity from hydroelectric provider the Southern Power Co. And in 1916, it broke with the established practice of maintaining an independent, commission-based sales force and developed its own New York City-based sales organization.
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Not long after Charles Cannon assumed the helm, he began making the company into a modern corporation. By 1928, he'd consolidated its nine separate units, with plants in seven different towns, into Cannon Mills Co., headquartered in Kannapolis, and the corporation was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. (The family also managed six independent mills that were outside of the corporation.)

Cannon Mills began building a unique brand that came to stand for quality, utilizing as the Cannon trademark an antique artillery field piece. This, executives felt, was a fitting symbol of an enterprise that had emerged successfully “from the shambles of the Reconstruction Era.” And in an important innovation, in the mid-1920s, it began spending millions of dollars on national advertising, particularly in women's magazines and the
Saturday Evening Post
. Cannon products demonstrated
unusual flair, courting consumers with fancy packaging and stylish designs. Towels came in flower patterns and polka dots, and in colors to complement bathroom decor.
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The town of Kannapolis also continued to develop. Even though children and adolescents still worked in the mill, the town built new educational facilities, notably the eight-room Old North School, completed in 1917, and J. W. Cannon High School, in 1924. But the academic year was only six months long in 1925, extended to eight months in 1927.
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Legal restrictions on child labor and state laws for compulsory school attendance—pressed by middle-class progressives who worried about the detrimental impact of the millworker population on society—came into force by the early 1930s. By 1931 all southern states had outlawed factory labor for those under age fourteen and restricted those under sixteen to working no more than an eight-hour day.
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But such restrictions were largely unnecessary, given that the Depression had largely eliminated underage workers from the ranks and reduced the hours of all workers.

Given the labor-saving nature of machinery in southern mills, much of the work was rudimentary. Workers were little more than unskilled or semiskilled machine tenders. Whether they labored on a picker, a card machine, a slubber, or a stripper, a spinning frame or a loom, plenty of jobs were interchangeable. Spinning, spooling, and duffing were tasks that could be learned in only days. More demanding jobs included weaving, winding, and beaming, and it could take weeks for one to become proficient at these. Becoming a loom fixer, on the other hand, required a lengthy period of apprenticeship.

But even if the jobs weren't demanding intellectually, the work was often punishing. Lint filled the air, covered everything, and got into workers' lungs—ultimately causing a medical condition known as byssinosis, or brown lung. Still today, after decades of improvement, the noise in a textile plant is deafening. Before air conditioning, mills in the subtropical South were stifling in the summer and warm even in winter months.
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Life was not always peaceful in Kannapolis: In 1921, there was a bitter strike at Cannon Mills involving 9,000 workers. That decade featured a series of geographically dispersed job actions, prompted by uncertain times, textile overcapacity, and wage cuts. The events culminated in a 1934 general strike of hundreds of thousands of workers across the southern textile region. That major uprising threatened Kannapolis, although in the end Cannon experienced little disruption.

Before the 1920s, the most common form of protest among southern textile workers was simply quitting a job. World War I saw an expansion of the South's textile industry. With European manufacturing disrupted and global and domestic markets for textile products strong, jobs were easy to come by and family and social networks kept workers informed of likely openings across the region.

But with the coming of peace, there clearly was too much textile capacity. As companies began cutting the wage and bonus rates established during wartime, friction rose. The United Textile Workers (UTW), an American Federation of Labor craft union with its roots in New England, expanded across the South. Then beginning at Charlotte's Highland Park Mills in 1919, a series of walkouts intended to secure the pay levels won during the war. Lockouts were common that year, including at Cannon facilities in Concord and Kannapolis, where workers made no demands of management but seemed to support the union. In more than one community, workers formed armed patrols and threatened gunplay. North Carolina's governor, Thomas W. Bickett, stepped in. After defending workers' right to organize, he denounced the potential turn to violence, for which he seemed to place the most blame on the “unwise, unjust” owners. Surrendering to this suasion, Highland Park's president agreed to a settlement that included a fifty-five-hour week at wages calculated on the former sixty-hour rate and said there would be no discrimination against union members. Within weeks, Cannon agreed to the changes as well. Across North Carolina, the UTW enlisted 40,000 new members.

Then, after the textile depression of 1920 hit, companies cut wages once again. In June 1921, the UTW struck three companies—the Chadwick-Hoskins and Highland Park mills at Charlotte and Cannon's plants at
Concord and Kannapolis. Union leaders worried that victory was unlikely in the midst of an industrywide downturn. But they gave in to the rank-and-file militancy, taking on “some of the strongest mills in the country” because that was where union organization seemed most solid.

Charles Cannon refused to rescind the wage cuts or deal with the union at all. Instead, he joined with the mayor of Concord to call upon the state's new and more conservative governor, Cameron Morrison, to send in the National Guard “to preserve law and order.”

For strikers, hunger soon became a real issue. Union commissaries supplied only a few staples, and as the summer gardening season neared its end, even union stalwarts grew concerned. As the mills reopened in mid-August under the armed protection of the militia, Cannon workers began crossing picket lines and returning to work. Observed journalist Gerald Johnson of the
Charlotte Labor Herald
: “The overwhelming nature of the mill owners' victory can hardly be overstated.”
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All the same, the fat years were at an end for management and labor alike. Overcapacity would continue to plague the industry for decades to come. In New England a long period of downsizing continued, as 40 percent of that region's textile mills would close during the next decade. The South was afflicted with an oversupply of willing employees: Ever more people abandoned the rural life even as manufacturers installed labor-saving equipment and applied scientific management to squeeze workers ever harder.

This “stretch-out,” which had workers tending acres of machines at a backbreaking pace, in time sparked a new round of labor troubles. In March 1929, another strike wave began in the small Blue Ridge Mountains town of Elizabethton, Tennessee, and soon thousands of workers from thirteen different mills walked out. In April, workers at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina—called “the South's City of Spindles”—joined in, demanding a $20-per-week minimum wage, equal pay for women and children, an end to the stretch-out, and recognition of their union, the Communist-led National Textile Workers Union.

The city of Gastonia outlawed picketing, the state sent in the National Guard, and Loray began evicting families from company-owned housing. Through the summer and into the fall, there was a spasm of violence that saw the murder of the town's police chief, a terror campaign
aimed at unionists and union property, and finally the murder of a key union activist.

The rebellion continued despite the collapse of the Gastonia uprising in September. UTW-led strikes took place in Marion—where six more unionists were shot and killed—in 1930 and 1932, in Danville and High Point. Everywhere unions were met with force and crushed, although there were some gains such as shortened workweeks at Gastonia and Marion.
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Then in 1934, the UTW declared a general strike of all textile workers. The New Deal's National Industrial Recovery Act had encouraged unionization, at least rhetorically. The voluntary National Recovery Administration (NRA) textile industry code of fair competition, facilitated by that law, said all companies should provide minimum wages of $12 per week ($13 in the North), limit the workweek to forty hours, and discontinue the use of child labor. But nothing in these restrictions prevented a further stretch-out, which required workers to perform as much work in eight hours as they had before in twelve. Many companies experienced impressive profits despite the Depression. “The Blue Eagle has learned to cover a multitude of sins since he alighted in the Piedmont area,” one Cannon worker wrote to NRA head General Hugh Johnson, referring to the agency's avian symbol. In the end, it was all too much, and UTW delegates to a national convention voted for the massive walkout to begin on September 1.

Across the country, perhaps as many as 325,000 textile workers struck. It became the largest labor conflict in U.S. history to date. Flying squadrons of cars and trucks crossed the countryside, going from one isolated mill town to another, forcing a great many plants to shut down. But the strike was hardly totally effective. In Gastonia, throngs of angry millworkers paraded through the streets, some threatening to confiscate the property of the respectable citizenry. In Durham, energetic strikers were highly effective in shutting down operations—but in Burlington the strike failed to take hold. In Concord, pickets closed four plants—but in Kannapolis, Cannon Mills continued to run uninterrupted, despite the appearance of three hundred pickets on September 10.

All in all, the action closed around two hundred North Carolina mills, while more than three hundred remained open. In response, the state governments of the Carolinas called out 14,000 National Guardsmen,
and Georgia declared martial law. In Kannapolis, a contingent of the National Guard was billeted at Mary Ella Hall, the women's boardinghouse.
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Violent incidents multiplied. In early September, a striker and a deputy were killed during a gun battle in Trion, Georgia. In Lowell, Massachusetts, 2,500 workers rioted. At Honea Path, South Carolina, strikebreakers and deputies killed seven pickets and wounded many more. In Saylesbury, Rhode Island, a three-day pitched battle occurred between pickets who were attempting to shut down a plant and authorities armed with shotguns and machine guns. At Woonsocket, Rhode Island, police and National Guardsmen fought with a crowd of 8,000 workers before the city declared martial law.
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The violence prompted a federal board of inquiry to urge the UTW to end the strike—and the union complied. The government appointed committees to investigate the stretch-out complaints, and the Federal Trade Commission studied whether the industry could afford higher wages. President Franklin Roosevelt implored the companies to rehire strikers without discrimination, but in the end few companies complied. Despite the clear defeat, UTW officials asserted that it had been an “amazing victory.” The end result was to leave a generation of millworkers embittered and disillusioned with unionism. In the words of one Kannapolis local union member: “Our local is gone and it don't seem there is any use to try now as they have lost faith in the union. . . . It looks like Cannon Mills are running the whole thing. We want to know if they run the whole country.”
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In the late '30s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) set up a Textile Workers Organizing Committee, envisioning rapid unionization of the hundreds of thousands of workers in the field. But it had little success in the South, where workers were suspicious and fearful.
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