GASTONIA 1929
Ella May Wiggins, September 1929 (Courtesy Australian Picture Library/Bettman)
GASTONIA 1929
THE STORY OF THE LORAY MILL STRIKE
JOHN A. SALMOND
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
CHAPEL HILL AND LONDON
1995
The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salmond, John A.
Gastonia 1929 : the story of the Loray Mill
strike / by John A. Salmond.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and
index.
ISBN 0-8078-2237-X (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Textile Workers Strike, Gastonia, N.C., 1929. I. Title.
HD5325.T42 1929.G377 1995
331.892877009756773dc20 95-8517
CIP
99 98 97 96 95 5 4 3 2 1
THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.
To Robert John Ralph Henningham
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
Ella May Wiggins, September 1929
Fred Beal, leader of the strike
Loray Mill workers vote to continue the strike
Women strikers battle National Guardsmen
Guardsmen await the strike pickets
Ada Howell after her beating
Children of African American textile workers in Stumptown
Fred Beal with a group of strikers
Evicted strikers family
Binnie Green, a fourteen-year-old striker
Tom Jimison and a group of strikers
Guards at the tent colony
Orville Aderholt and Major Stephen Dolley
Major A. L. Bulwinkle
New York demonstration in support of the strikers
ILD appeals for aid
Clyde Hoey, attorney for the prosecution
Gaston County jail
Fred Beals statement from jail
Strikers children selling the Labor Defender
Sophie Melvin, charged with murder
Labor Defender cover, July 1929
International support for Gastonia workers
John Carpenter, Gaston County solicitor
Arthur Roach, wounded in the strike headquarters attack
Ella Mays orphaned children
Ella Mays ILD membership card
Ella Mays children mourn at her funeral
Fred Beal in jail
Delegates at the NTWUs 1929 conference
Cover of the Labor Defenders memorial issue for Ella May
PREFACE
If one thinks of the southern Piedmont as a rough arc stretching from Danville, Virginia, to Birmingham, Alabama, then Gastonia, North Carolina, is located at its center. Gaston County, of which Gastonia is the county seat, had by 1929 come to contain more textile plants than any other county in the world, and some Gastonians proudly claimed that there were more looms and spindles within its hundred-mile radius than in that of any other southern city. Few doubted the boast, for since 1880 both the county and the city had undergone a profound industrial and economic transformation. Originally dotted with small and not particularly profitable farms, Gaston County had both the natural and the human resources, in its abundance of water and its large potential labor force, to make the transition to a textile center with extraordinary rapidity. Working the land had always been hard there, and thousands of unsuccessful farmers were only too ready to furnish the manpower for the mills. Though in 1929 there were still some forests to be found in Gaston Countys gently rolling landscape, and its most fertile land was still being farmed, the dominant features of its flattish topography were cotton mills and industrial villages.
In 1929, Gastonia had a population of 17,000. The 1920s had been a time of substantial construction in the city, resulting in a downtown area of solid business enterprises, including both stores and office blocks, as well as an impressive array of public buildings, all brand spanking new. The radical journalist Mary Heaton Vorse commented after her first visit that the town gave the impression of having sprung from the earth fully equipped. Gastonia had a new city hall, a new courthouse, a new county jail, and a splendid new high school, each of them fine, solid structures. This decade had seen a boom in residential construction as well, mainly due to the conspicuous consumption of the towns elite. The mill owners and managers increasingly moved away from their mills and built themselves huge, beautiful, lavishly furnished homes in the citys uptown area. These houses were removed both physically and conceptually from the mill villages where the bulk
Gaston Countys smaller centersBessemer City, Belmont, and Mount Hollypresented much the same aspect. They were all divided communities: the owners and those whom they did business with lived on one side of the tracks, the mill workers on the other, and they met increasingly rarely. They would meet in 1929 as a wave of violent strikes swept through the Piedmonts textile communities. This book is the story of the most famous of these.
The violence that accompanied the strike at the Loray Mill; the fatal shooting of Gastonias police chief, Orville Aderholt, and the strikes balladeer, Ella May Wiggins; the international outcry at Mays death and at how the state failed to punish her killers yet imposed savage sentences on those strikers accused of the police chiefs murder; and the determination of the militant Communist Party of the United States to use these events to further world revolution have together given them a particular resonance that has resolutely refused to fade away over the years. Even today, the town of Gastonia is deeply divided over what to do with the now-abandoned Loray Mill. For some it is a symbol of a violent past best forgotten; for others it is the site of the most significant event in the towns history and should therefore be preserved.
The purpose of this book is simply to tell the story of the events of 1929. I have no overarching thesis to present, though some perspectives will, I hope, arise from the narrative that follows. If anything, I think this work reinforces those historians who still insist on the power of class as an explanatory factor in the historical process, but in the hope that a well-told story has a justification of its own, I have tried to minimize my intrusions into the tale.
The study had its genesis in the Empress of China restaurant, in Melbournes Chinatown. After a splendid meal, Professor Robert Allen of the University of North Carolina, Dr. Lucy Frost of La Trobe University, and I began to talk about the South. Bobby and Lucy are both southerners and grew up in smallish citiesLucy in Maryville, Tennessee, and Bobby across the mountains in Gastonia. As they talked about shared experiences, and particularly as Bobby recalled his growing childhood awareness that he lived in a town in which something terrible had occurred, something never to be talked about openly, we all decided that one of us had to try and unravel the Gastonia story. I got elected to the job. I remember that night with great warmth, and I thank them both for their continuing encouragement as I went about my allotted task. Bobby turned over his own Gastonia files to me, including several taped interviews with strike participants that he had made when he was a student at Davidson College, while Lucy carefully read the completed manuscript, making several important suggestions toward its improvement.
