1Introduction

For three weeks in September 1934, the South’s industrial belt erupted in open revolt. Some 170,000 southern textile workers from Virginia to Alabama went on strike, joining hundreds of thousands of other workers from as far north as Maine. Striking with the blessing of the United Textile Workers of America (UTW), millworkers cast their collective action as necessary and timely. Strikes in the Textile Belt had broken out before, but the General Textile Strike of 1934 (or “Uprising of ’34,” as it came to be called) became the most broad-ranging and coordinated, taking place in small Piedmont mill towns like Kannapolis, North Carolina, and Honea Path, South Carolina, to industrial-urban cities like Atlanta. By the time it ended, three weeks after it started, it was one of the largest labor strikes in US history.¹

The strike’s causes were both long-in-coming and immediate. Difficult working conditions, low pay, unmet expectations, millowner paternalism and control, and a host of personal and communal grievances sparked revolt, especially as the Great Depression accelerated worker action. Management up and down the Textile Belt had cut jobs and wages before and during 1934 and “stretched out” work expectations in an effort to force more production in an unsteady market. The New Deal also fueled worker discontent while raising hopes, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to understand the millworkers’ plight. Earlier in the year, Congress had passed and Roosevelt had signed a new Textile Code as a part of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Section 7(a) protected the right of millworkers to organize, a right most southern mill owners either ignored or suppressed. Thus, the strike—which began in earnest on Labor Day—came as a collective affirmation of local workers’ attachment to the New Deal. It also evidenced a willingness among hundreds of thousands of working southerners to make local mill owners, state officials, and political powerbrokers bend to their will.²

Three weeks of UTW and worker action produced everything from passive acceptance of their demands to violent reaction from millowners and their allies. Violence came in many forms during the strike: from street tussles and gunplay to the forceful detainment of striking workers and even incendiaries. Workers beaten or roughed-up along picket lines left physical scars, while deeper, emotional scars resulted from what locals witnessed at particularly dangerous or frightening moments. Indeed, in at least one instance in the small town of Honea Path, South Carolina, seven workers died when management ordered strikebreakers—some their own neighbors—to fire on them.

With the stakes raised and with the UTW, federal officials, and millowners looking to bring an orderly and fair conclusion to the strike, labor leaders inked deals that promised to preserve the rights of workers and their jobs. The strike’s end, however, allowed for the reassertion of managerial power in dozens of mill communities. Textile owners blacklisted workers, ferreted out UTW leaders and members, and further curtailed unionizing efforts. In the weeks, months, and years after the strike, union organizing in the Piedmont stalled; memories of the 1934 strike faded, along with the hope for a unionized South; and an eliding of memory prevailed through an intentional and collaborative effort by textile companies. Blacklisted workers scattered, while others stayed mum to keep their jobs. Fear of retaliation from management kept many millworkers from talking about their involvement in the strike. As a result, the strike appeared nowhere in history classes or in textbooks. Not a single public site memorialized it.

The story that follows is about the General Textile Strike of 1934 as historical memory and memoryscape.³ It intends to push scholarship on American memory, both in its national and regional framing, beyond fixations on war, liberationist movements, historical tourism, and consumerism.⁴ To do so, it historicizes the social remembrance and forgetting generated about and by industrial and postindustrial modes of capitalism.⁵ It also examines the physical, material, and cultural landscape (memoryscape) left behind by labor and the nation’s chief framework for citizenship and politics, namely the modern federal state as established via the New Deal.⁶ If memory, as affected by industrial and postindustrial capitalism, has yet to become a subject of protracted inquiry, then working Americans’ remembrances have also received little attention in the available scholarship outside of folk heroes and select labor leaders.⁷

At first glance, a dearth in remembrance sites seems to explain the scholarly omission. As Kenneth E. Foote has noted, “Rights that modern workers take for granted were won at a high price in struggles as heroic as any in American history. The movement is replete with martyrs and heroes, myths and legends, but nowhere in the United States are these marked by anything more than modest local memorials. A national holiday is dedicated to labor, but the movement itself has never been inscribed on a grand scale in the American landscape. Not a single national park is dedicated to the cause of labor or to its heroes and martyrs.”⁸ Compared to the Civil War and foreign wars, the civil rights movement, and other social movements, the nation’s labor movement seems to have left behind few physical memorials and cultural sites for study, especially in the South.⁹ One need only look to places related to General Textile Strike of 1934 to uncover numerous sites hiding in plain sight. As such, it offers an illustrative and instructive model for analyzing the connections between labor history, memory, and capitalism, both during the intensive period of the 1930s and ensuing decades.

The strike’s memorial history also revises the accepted story of a specific form of capitalism: neoliberalism. Scholars have written about neoliberalism for decades. Trying to find a fixed definition of “neoliberalism,” or a set of beliefs, practices, and policies that all “neoliberals” affirm, might be a fool’s errand. Still, certain aims have proved relatively common over time since the term’s first use in the 1930s and popularization as analytic device in the 1970s. Through economic policy and/or politics, neoliberals have generally sought any or all of the following: deregulation and tax cuts, “free trade” agreements, a privatization of public resources and spaces, the culling of welfare or “entitlement” programs, the disempowerment of organized labor, and a commodification of identity and social relations. Culturally, neoliberals have lauded personal liberty as a principle, albeit with limits and framings that have generally energized right-wing movements over leftist, bohemian, or transgressive ones. In initial scholarly treatments, neoliberalism’s ascent appeared to be a product of the 1970s and ’80s.

More recently, historians have backdated neoliberalism’s roots to the New Deal era. They have recast the 1930s and ’40s as pivotal decades for inspiring both reactions to reform and first gestures toward neoliberal-friendly economic policies. The focus on neoliberal manifestations in policy and political economy, however, has shortchanged the study of its cultural manifestations, save for scholarship on its religious advocates and ethics. As with scholarship on the Great Depression, the New Deal state, or labor history in general, memory has not been threaded into neoliberalism’s history, thus giving the false sense—promoted by its advocates along with its historians—that its cultural logic only works in one direction, namely toward the future instead of also toward the past. The 1934 strike’s memory revises such assumptions and characterizations while elucidating the cultural techniques of neoliberalism. Indeed, neoliberalism flourished not only thanks to its intellectual or political thrust (its “great persuasion” as historian Angus Burgin put it) but also through its great suppression and management of the immediate or distant past, as demonstrated in locales like the industrial and postindustrial Piedmont. In other words, a neoliberal memoryscape resulted soon after the strike’s conclusion. Privatized and elided from social and public spaces, the strike’s memory worked as a necessary prelude for neoliberalism’s normalization as an alternative to the New Deal’s southern memoryscape and political economy.¹⁰

Violence, trauma, and fear created the privatized memories of the strike. Indeed, soon after the strike’s conclusion, revolt gave way to reticence, resulting in the privatization of stories leftover from 1934, with any residual trauma becoming a taboo matter. Millworkers relegated memory to private spaces and individual experiences, even while their demands made their way into the New Deal’s labor provisions and protections. Such an atomization of memory forestalled wider public reckoning with the psychological, social, and political toll experienced by working people in the midst and aftermath of the Great Depression, thus making additional attempts at organizing after 1934 more difficult, as if they were without cultural or historical precedent.

Fuller remembrance did not occur in force until the 1970s and ’80s. Arrestingly, remembrance happened during the years that Americans “traded factories for finance” and deindustrialization created the social and political conditions for the “last days of the working class.”¹¹ To be sure, industrial modes of work and community continued their long slide across the Textile Belt, in what should be understood as the Piedmont’s own “Rust Belt.” Yet, in the face of such structural changes, social remembrance—enabled by collecting memories, placing them in social contexts, and often publicizing them—remained a viable option of resisting alienation and forgetting. Indeed, in the 1970s and ’80s, historians, labor leaders, documentarians, millworkers, and writers worked together to reconstitute the strike’s social memory one interview, one oral history, and one archive at a time. Greater public commentary, renewed remembrance, and a physical monument related to the strike resulted from that work. As a result, the General Textile Strike of 1934 was no longer a forgotten episode in labor history.

During and after the 1990s, a new round of market pressures transformed the strike’s memory once more. Numerous sites of potential or continuing remembrance, especially mill buildings and complexes, had fallen into disrepair. The violence of the strike, which led to the neoliberal privatization of memory a generation before, gave way to a rewriting of physical space and the transformation of a remembered textile past into selective tidbits that complemented neoliberal purposes, specifically as real estate. As a result, the strike’s memoryscape took on new physical and aesthetic forms at carefully managed historical sites and in gentrified spaces. In stories expressive and commercial, the strike and its southern mill world also retained a certain cultural presence, built from a forgotten, remembered, redeveloped, and re‑neoliberalized past.¹²

2From Revolt to Reticence

As a revolt, the General Textile Strike of 1934 portended revolution, at least from the perspective of some organizers and memorialists. Collective action promised a new opportunity for striking workers, enabled by the New Deal and southern labor’s role within it. In the aftermath, however, the strike became remembered as a jarring and traumatic event. Violence brought disruptions to personal and community security, creating stressors that encouraged the internalization of memory. As Flora Maye Caldwell, a worker from Kannapolis, North Carolina, told her interviewers some six decades after 1934’s events: “It was rumored there was a union, somewhere back in the ’30s. But nobody will talk about it. Only to say: ‘I will not be a part of this union because of what happened a long time ago.’ But nobody tells what happened a long time ago.”¹³

Internalization was not unique to the 1934 strike. The Gastonia strike of 1929, for instance, scared and scarred as well. Robert Allen, who grew up in Gastonia and later became a history professor at the University of North Carolina, told John Salmond that he “recalled his growing childhood awareness that he lived in a town in which something terrible had occurred.” Like millworkers after the 1934 strike, Allen remembered the 1929 strike as “something never to be talked about openly.” Christina Baker, a professor at the University of Maine who also grew up in Gastonia, related how “her increasingly frequent inquiries about the town’s ‘secret’ were always gently but firmly discouraged.”¹⁴ Similar concerns and traumas shaped the memory of the 1934 strike, but the intensity of violence and its lasting divisions amplified the reluctance to remember. “I’ve never been through nothing like that and I hope I don’t never go through nothing like that anymore,” replied one worker when asked by interviewers about her father, whom strikebreakers “shot in the back” during protests at Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina. “I took a man’s hat off his head and fanned him ’til he died, ’til the breath left him,” remembered one millworker, “but I ain’t got no more to say into it. I’ve been trying to forget about all of that, and this is just bringing it all back up.”¹⁵ The daughter of another witness to the Honea Path shootings recalled, “I can’t understand why my dad didn’t tell me. He could talk about the war and about people being blown to bits, but he couldn’t talk about his neighbors being killed. It’s like somebody trying to hide a dirty secret about their family, like they’re ashamed.”¹⁶ Sue Hill’s mother, whose husband local supporters of the mill killed in Honea Path, exhibited classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression, as did others. In Hill’s mother’s case, Chiquola Mill emotionally blackmailed her with the offer of a permanent job for her silence about her husband’s murder. Facing no other options for a livelihood, she took the offer, but it came at a cost. She “was alone, she never remarried” and “never did date again.” Hill recalled that “she led a lonely life, as I’m sure the rest of the families [of the dead] did.” Among the community, “it was not mentioned that much,” she said. “It was just like everybody was trying to keep everything quiet. Maybe it was . . . just trying to get away from the sadness or . . . what they had gone through. [. . .] They knew these people’s families. They knew they had children. And there was a lot of talk between the people . . . after this was over, the terrible things that happened to some of those men. . . . One went insane. They had to keep him in a room, a padded room for the rest of his life. . . . It was just the things that came up that they said was coming from this strike.”¹⁷

Psychological trauma combined with social stigmatization to encourage long-lasting reticence toward remembrance and further labor action. “[I]t scared everybody so bad until they were afraid to try anything else,” Hill recalled about her community’s amnesia. “When you stand on the mill ground and you see people being shot down around you,” she said, “it puts a fear into you that you don’t ever want to try this again.” Thus, it was “not discussed that much anymore,” Hill noted sixty years after the strike. “You see the ones that is working now. Their parents, some of them is deceased, some of them never tell their children about how bad it was or about the strike, so they know nothing of this. . . . They had just . . . soon forget about it. Or they didn’t want any more problems.” Another millworker, when asked about the shootings in Honea Path, responded similarly to inquiries: “Things like that don’t happen anymore, you don’t need to know about it.” Other millworkers from around the Textile Belt also refused to talk about the strike. When interviewers asked about what happened, a common response in other communities was, “Yes, I remember but I don’t want to talk about it.” Kathy Lamb, a daughter of workers involved in the 1934 strike, told interviewers, “Well, even now you can ask people that work where I do [in Belton, South Carolina] that have . . . sister[s] and brothers that are Daddy’s age and . . . they’ve asked ’em and they don’t want to talk about it. They’re still scared.” Ethel Atkins of Honea Path exemplified the haunting nature of memory. Even after committing to an in-depth interview about her experiences, she questioned “what good it’s gittin’ you to get all this. That’s done gone. People try to [forget] it.” Holding back tears, she confessed that she and others were not “over it to yet.”¹⁸

Other obstacles stood in the way of recollection. “That’s the thing about it,” another worker’s son explained. “Anybody that mentions [the strike] now, they don’t want to talk about it, or it makes ’em furious.” Anger was understandable, but “why cuss somebody out or do somethin’ to somebody that happened 58 years ago[?]”¹⁹ Rosa Holland, a North Carolina worker, had plenty of reasons to be angry. Shortly after the strike ended, the mill fired and evicted her. Company men had killed several of her friends. Such injustices, and any requisite anger, ran up against the need for a livelihood. As she told interviewers, “You see, after we come back and got out of the union and got back to work, why that was a thing of the past. You don’t think about such things.” Her non-participation in unions related to the UTW had a secondary effect. It kept her from a vital community for remembrance. “If I’d been in the union right along, you see, I’d have it all in my mind,” she said. “You forget about things in the past, ’cause you don’t think about them, you don’t talk about them, and that leaves your mind.” Given that she had found work again in the industry, she decided not to mention “the union in there for nothing, because if I had I’d been fired again.”²⁰

Decisions made during the strike also left a long and divisive legacy, further driving the strike’s remembrance out of social spheres. In South Carolina, one widowed worker complained that “part of the union folks . . . turned against us” and were “talking and treating the union people so we can’t hardly bear it.” Cut off from local churches, an important social institution for creating communal solidarity and the groundwork for shared experiences and memories, she lamented what she lost “because we [were] trying to do what is right & for the best.” In Charlotte, North Carolina, another worker remembered how the label of “scab” stuck after his family left the picket line out of desperation. Taunting and mistreatment from former union members continued for four or five years after the strike ended. Participants and survivors alike clammed up.²¹

Company actions also caused social forgetting. Management’s blacklisting of strike participants or union leaders contributed to a general inclination to keep the strike’s memory behind closed doors. By sending former union members outside of communities, management separated them from friends and other union supporters who might listen to stories, confirm memories, and pull together for shared recognition of the event’s occurrence and importance. Blacklisting and violence between neighbors in isolated mill communities also spread suspicion, which caused trepidation about open remembrance. Admittedly, it is difficult to determine the extent of self-enforced silence caused by blacklisting efforts. Still, in clearly divided communities, a blacklist’s effects could be enduring. Honea Path, remembered Sue Hill, “was never the same town anymore. You were kind of afraid to talk because you didn’t know who was for the union and who was against the union. So, we pretty well . . . stayed to ourself and never discussed it among other people.” “The strike of 1934 was the one secret the town kept,” recalled Frank Beacham, the grandson of Dan Beacham, the town’s mayor who doubled as Chiquola Mill’s superintendent. “Fear caused the town’s workers to internalize their grief. Their way of coping with the violence had been to construct a societal cocoon that gave the community of illusion of normalcy and allowed daily life to proceed. This cultural artifice was an effective mask for over two generations.”²² Civic leaders—many close associates or kin to powerful textile mill owners—elided the strike further. Local histories made no mention of the strike. Labor Day celebrations did not ritualize it. “When I [was] attending school as a little girl and then growing up, I never remember the strike being brought up in school” remembered Hill. “It was like, as if the teachers were told not to bring this up. I think they were just trying to keep it as quiet and maybe get it settled.” For Beacham, it was also a “dark secret.” “The incident was never mentioned when I was growing up,” he recalled, “and never taught in history classes at school.”²³

Yet, even in the face of significant pressure to keep the strike forgotten, at times millworkers shared passed-down rumors or stories, when it seemed safe to do so. One millworker who worked for Cannon Mills in North Carolina recalled that he heard “about [the 1934] strike . . . I would say about ’65.” He first heard about unions in the South when he went to work in the early 1970s, but he “didn’t know what a strike was. I just thought they was striking [hitting] at something, you know?”²⁴ Learning indirectly about the strike in 1934 made him inquire for more information, although it resulted in a dead end. Though traumatized by the killings in Honea Path, Sue Hill’s mother never let the strike go. Neither did Hill’s uncle. For their family, storytelling worked as a form of self-therapy. Her uncle, who had asked her father to accompany him to the mill on that fateful morning, would “talk to mom a lot . . . [because] I think he felt guilty.” Because of the pain he thought his actions had inflicted on Hill’s family, “Uncle Jess came to visit us a lot. And . . . as a small girl I would hear them talking . . . about what happened[,] about the conditions, about Dan Beecham [sic] and some of the other families that lost their husband in the strike.” Her mother also “talked about the strike [in private] until she died [because] she was lonely, and just needed to talk with someone” even though “she didn’t want to talk to outsiders about it.”²⁵

Other children of strikers had parents willing to speak about the strike in private environs. “I was born in 1934. And when this was going on . . . my parents were in the middle of it,” remembered a Georgia millworker’s daughter. Both of her parents joined the UTW local and went on strike. She also had other relatives “working in the same plant” and she remembered “hearing my parents talk, and uncles and aunts talk about how windows were shot out of the cars” and company men “light[ing] sticks of dynamite to throw in their yards.” “Some [strikers were] tarred and feathered, and there would be a lot of times a lot of threatening letters against you and the members of your family would be put in your mailbox,” she recalled her parents telling her. Another millworker’s daughter “didn’t know a great deal about the 1934” in her household. Though her mother, father, and older sister did not share stories about the strike directly with her, they “were always encouraging about wanting to work in union places.” In this instance, at least, reticence regarding the strike did not preclude the next generation from teaching or talking about unions or considering labor activism for themselves.²⁶ Kathy Lamb, a textile worker in Belton, South Carolina, and union organizer for one of the UTW’s successors—the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU)—first heard about the events in Honea Path during “a union convention over 100 miles from home.” When she confronted her father about the strike and the killings in her hometown, “he cried almost the entire time.” As with other workers, Lamb’s father had not spoken with her about the killings because “he didn’t want me to be afraid of the union.”²⁷

In Lamb’s case, her own labors as a millworker pushed her toward union membership, but for thousands of other mill workers, the strike remained an event too troubling or traumatic to revisit, or it seemed no longer a necessary or desirable part of the stories they wanted to tell about the past. The failures of additional organizing drives, especially Operation Dixie from 1946 to 1953 and various intermittent strikes undertaken thereafter targeting specific mills, undercut favorable impressions of unions and further suppressed memory of any prior action. Other factors—general postwar consumer prosperity, rising wages apart from union demands, the slow-going migrations of millworkers or their children away from the Piedmont—also led to community fragmentation and remembrance’s limited social power or relevance. The privatization and marginalization of the strike from public spaces had resulted in its relegation to microfilmed newspapers and administrative archives. No physical markers acknowledged the strike, at least none beyond the very mill buildings where participants or their children worked. The suppression of memory in the Textile Belt made it a place ripe for further privatizations and market normalization. The management of the past presaged the Piedmont’s neoliberal future, starting out in the midst of the New Deal’s industrial reforms and southernization.²⁸

Despite the forced privatization of memory, remnants of remembrance remained, specifically in song. Music detailing millworkers’ personal and collective experience—the move from farm to town, the labors of the day, the plight of families making ends meet, the yearning for both an old country home and a ramblin’ life on the rails, and so on—laid the groundwork for folk and country stylings and themes well before the 1934 strike. Music also created community, as well as identity and belonging (at times across racial lines before the commercial partitioning of “hillbilly” and “race” music via radio and records). Songs about the 1929 Gastonia strike foreshadowed songwriters and performers across the region singing songs that they adapted or created on the spot—from spirituals, popular tunes, or local favorites—as the political soundtrack to the 1934 strike, especially as strikers sang along a “dancing picket” of their own devising. As Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher noted, “The targeting of balladeers during strike events, and the suppression of these songs after the defeat of the 1934 general strike, clearly speaks to music’s centrality, importance, and power.” To be sure, as a commercial and cultural form, music could be quite ephemeral, enacting memories only in the moments when a melody or lyric carried the singer and listener back to a strike they may or may not have experienced directly. Still, that it could spark memory did not mean it reignited communal feelings or class politics, especially since “many ex-mill-worker musicians, particularly those who wrote oppositional music, fell by the wayside after 1934, were forced to return to mill work, and never could quite understand why they no longer received radio airtime or recording contracts.” Only much later, as performers like folk revivalist Pete Seeger carried millworkers’ musical catalog forward into the 1950s and ’60s, did the aural landscape they created revive in song, particularly for listeners outside the Piedmont to hear.²⁹

As a cultural site of potential remembrance, music complemented mill buildings, streets, houses, and other material forms, such as a photographic record that millworkers maintained in family albums or private archives or that newspapers kept preserved on microfilm reels for researchers to consult in later years. Additionally, any passed-down stories, often told in private quarters, served as another aural and visual geography of the Great Depression’s largest labor conflict and the New Deal’s intersection with the industrial South of the 1930s. When researchers started to drive around the South’s Textile Belt, pushing mill people and their families to remember, such left-behind, vernacular remnants proved vital starting points for inquiry. Armed with audio recorders, notebooks, and lists of workers gleaned from archives, researchers took up the arduous task of reconstructing social memories out of a violent, suppressed past. One question and answer at a time, reticence gave way to remembrance.

3From Reticence to Remembrance

Popular interest in the American worker revived as hard times defined the recessionary 1970s and early 1980s. Working-class heroes and antiheroes appeared on television and on film. Piggybacking on the midcentury proliferation of countercultural performers and festivals idealizing “the folk,” blue-collar songs and characters peppered popular music and genres like country and rock. The decline or restructuring of heavy and light industries brought closer attention to the travails and political leanings of working men and women. Race and gender mattered in the working-class revivals, just as they were televised for dramatic or comedic effect, such as on hit shows like All in the Family or Laverne and Shirley. The pro-union film Norma Rae focused on empowered women, specifically in the southern textile industry, while artists and journalists tended to cast the white working class—especially men—as victims of forces larger than themselves. Broadcast television hits like The Waltons reframed New Deal Appalachia as a place where white nuclear families exuded admirable, salt-of-the-earth virtues alongside community resilience and (at times) progressive outlooks on race, religion, and gender. Working people in communities of color created their own musical cultures of resilience and resistance, from disco to funk to rap, and television and film offered a means for working-class heroes and anti-heroes to speak with racial specificity, ranging from Shaft to Sanford and Son. In short, at the very moment the American working class underwent significant transitions regarding the meaning and purpose of work, American culture and politics responded in kind. Most often, as scholars like Jefferson Cowie have detailed, alienation, disillusionment, and cultural fracture marked working-class fixations and frustrations—as well as the fuller unraveling of organized labor’s political power. But such a declension or diffusion narrative overlooks the optimism or efforts of journalists, folklorists, and historians aiming to restore or nourish working-class community in places like the Piedmont South. Neither does it account for how they used past solidarities to make sense of their present, with the 1930s becoming a focal point.³⁰

The subfield of southern labor history developed as a part of this larger pastward-looking endeavor. Historians joined a broader interdisciplinary project to document and (at times) celebrate resilient southern cultures, especially as the rural and industrial South transformed into a postindustrial “Sunbelt” less distinctive in its economic, cultural, racial, and political arrangements. Like others working to define or redefine “southernness” in an era of assumed regional-national confluence, southern labor historians used firsthand encounters, interviews, folklore, and oral history to document and navigate the Piedmont’s working-class past. Memory, in other words, became both method and findings. Recreating social memory would revise and regionalize social history. Renewing a sense of class solidarity, especially in the face of neoliberal restructurings, also became a goal. Fresh interest in history as truly “public history”—emotionally impactful, relevant to the present, an accessible public good—complemented a hopefulness hard earned by decades’ worth of anti-segregationist activism, civil rights wins, and on-the-job pushes for economic access and justice.³¹

In the Textile Belt, interviewers drove countless miles, recorders in hand. They visited hundreds of mill communities and spoke with any worker willing to share what they remembered, hoping to record for posterity the experiences of a fading but distinctive “southern” working class. Researchers’ immediate inspiration was the Depression-era Works Progress Administration and its mission: create a corpus of memories for future historians and scholars to consult while legitimizing ordinary people and their personal, social, and political experiences. Doubling as labor activists, the new generation of researchers also thought the collection and publication of mill workers’ experiences might do more than reconstruct the past or offer new historical insights. Memory might link the past to the present, providing inspiration and tips for contemporary activists. In an emerging neoliberal order of market atomization and privatization, driven by the alignment of policy and capital and slow-rolling collapse in organized labor, solidarity might survive and thrive through the very thing companies had used to break it after the 1934 strike: memory.

The strike of 1934 had a peculiar hold in workers’ recollections while also presenting significant methodological obstacles. For historian Janet Irons, who interviewed dozens of workers for her book on the 1934 strike, decades of internalizing memories often proved difficult to overcome. During her interviews, workers “who clearly remembered the ’34 strike recalled not the reasons for the strike but its impact.” The remembered “impact” was often haunting, if impressionistic. “They remembered,” she noted, “the machine guns posted on the mill towers, the national guard armed with guns ready to shoot, the battles between striking and non-striking workers.” Workers also tended to tell stories that “possesse[d] a timeless quality,” finding “it difficult to recall in which strike a particular incident occurred.” Often, “the stories of different strikes [ran] together” and “specific causal details blur[red] into a larger truth, one which seems to apply [to] whatever strike, or whatever union [was] being discussed.” Researcher G. C. Waldrep III ran into similar problems. “The Spartanburg workers whom I interviewed almost inevitably conflated the General Strike with other conflicts during the 1930s,” he noted. “Only those who had been particularly active in the labor movement at the time, or who had experienced a major life event during the General Strike, could make clear distinctions.” Though archival evidence suggested otherwise, “they agreed that, what with the strength of Spartanburg’s local unions and the fact that so much strike action occurred elsewhere, ‘It was peaceful here. . . . In ’34 it went smooth in Spartanburg.’”³²

Despite the challenges, scholars headquartered at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill used the memories of mill workers as the foundation for the first, fully contextualized treatment of the 1934 strike. Published in 1987, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World was a landmark in southern oral history and historical scholarship. The book was over a decade in the making. Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, scholars Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly built on interviews with former millworkers conducted by the Southern Oral History Program at UNC. Most interviewees had been employed in Piedmont mills from the 1910s through the 1950s. Interviewers were not solely interested in millworkers’ experiences during the Great Depression. As a broad-ranging work of social history, Like a Family intended to join millworker memories to archival research, industry records, and economic and demographic data to reconstruct the “southern cotton mill world.” Still, in the hands of labor historians and sympathizers like Hall and her colleagues, the strike could not be downplayed or ignored. The strike fit into the social and political world that millworkers made for themselves and hoped to remake for themselves and their families through collective action.³³

Like a Family detailed the racial and gendered dynamics of mill towns and fraught class relations between millworkers, preachers, political officials, labor leaders, and company management. Like a Family also emphasized change over time and worker agency, and it highlighted the power and influence of women in mill communities. Challenging long-held notions in the historiography of a docile millworker class, Like a Family argued that millworker activism and public influence reached a high point in the mid-1930s. Emboldened by poor treatment from mill management and a sense of common cause and community, as well as Roosevelt’s labor legislation and the Textile Code of the National Industrial Recovery Act, Piedmont workers tried to make a New Deal for themselves. The result was a record of labor activism, culminating in the 1934 strike, that, with few exceptions, had undergone social forgetting for the better part of a half-century. Like a Family thus cast the 1934 strike as an understudied but seminal event in southern labor history. Moreover, the transcripts and oral histories that served as the book’s evidence base formed one of the first instances where scholarship and historical research fomented remembrance of the strike. It was not a social or public set of memories, to be sure, at least not in the fullest sense. Most of the interviews remained stored inside the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill, although a later online compendium to the book provided a number of interviews and transcripts for readers to peruse. But the strike of 1934 was now a part of scholarly discussions, social practice, and the public record. Another set of researchers would soon take the strike’s remembrance even further into the public sphere.³⁴

Coinciding with renewed scholarly interest in the strike, a group of filmmakers, historians, and activists attempted to publicize the strike through a broadcast documentary, The Uprising of ’34. The filmmakers—George C. Stoney and Judith Helfand—believed in the cathartic and political power of ordinary people’s stories and memories. Stoney, a North Carolinian and UNC graduate, had an extensive filmography, often using his camera or production know-how to privilege and humanize working people’s lives and livelihoods. For Stoney, telling a good story meant fully contextualizing it in local social and political relations, local history, and local conflicts, ideally within a broader regional or national framework. Given both his skill and approach as a documentary filmmaker, he seemed a suitable choice to sociologist Vera Roney, who had organized the Coalition on the General Textile Strike of 1934 (CGTS) as a loose confederation of scholars, activists, educators, and labor leaders devoted to studying the strike and publicizing its importance in US history. With Roney the main advocate for the film, CGTS tapped Stoney in 1988 to pursue the project.³⁵

Two years after signing on, Stoney contacted one of his former film students for help. Judith Helfand shared Stoney’s commitment to realistic storytelling, and she proved crucial for the project’s planning and execution. A native of suburban New Jersey and Stoney’s junior by nearly fifty years, Helfand used her personal background with remarkable aplomb, building trust with mill workers during interviews. Thanks to a recent hysterectomy, required due to cancer brought on by her mother’s exposure to diethylstilbestrol (DES), a commercial form of synthetic estrogen, Helfand opened doors with workers suffering from brown lung, a terminal condition caused by breathing in damp cotton fibers over the course of their working lives. On learning of Helfand’s plight and corporate stonewalling to DES’s removal from the market, millworkers tended to open up with her about their own suffering and sacrifice. Others responded positively to her (at times over Stoney) due to her sex or outsider status as a northerner. Regardless of their reasons for doing so, millworkers reconstructed the past for Stoney and Helfand, often overcoming decades of fear or shame regarding their various roles in the strike.³⁶

Still, progress was slow. More often than not, millworkers initially resisted Stoney and Helfand’s questioning. “For a very long time most of those we did find would be reluctant to talk,” Stoney recalled. “On the phone they would say, for example: ‘You sound like a very nice man and I’d like to help you. But, you know I’ve got a granddaughter in the mill yet, and it would be held against her if I talked.’” Only a handful of workers “on first encounter spoke proudly of what she or he had done in ’34. [. . .] [E]ven though we had clear documentary evidence of their leadership,” Stoney remembered, “it would seem that for more than half a century making a living in their town had required them to keep silent; admitting their part in organizing a union so long ago was close to confessing a secret sin.” Undeterred, he and Helfand kept at it, pushing against what Stoney called a “forced amnesia” among aging millworkers. Their interest became a feature in the Charlotte Observer, which published about the strike and asked “people with a story to tell” to call in to an 800 number. (“There was a flood of responses,” noted a later assessment of their efforts.) They handed out copies of Like a Family to encourage mill people to plumb their memories or ask others for recollections. They drove to small towns and sat on porches and in living rooms, asking workers from across the Piedmont about their lives. What was it like to live on the farm before turning to the mills? What did your parents do? When did you arrive in the mill? What did you think of it? What was life like? Stoney and Helfand also asked millworkers’ friends and family to vouch for them and their assurances of privacy or protection. Then they asked about the Great Depression or the New Deal, “which led into tentative remarks about ‘that mess’ in ’34.”³⁷

Methodological quandaries and limitations abounded in using interviews as the primary vehicles for documentary film or historical reconstruction. Historian Clifford M. Kuhn supported the film and interviewed workers for The Uprising of ’34, but he also had methodological qualms:

There exist numerous documentaries in which interviewed individuals hold a special position in the events described, a position which no doubt colored their recollection and interpretation of those events, but which is never revealed to the audience. We don’t know about the nature of their memories, as imparted to the interviewer; whether, for instance, these memories are self-serving, malleable, counterfactual, idiosyncratic, or guarded. We also don’t know to what degree the edited oral history excerpts seen on screen were true to the integrity of the whole interview with the individuals featured, to the full corpus of interviews conducted by the film maker and others, to the entire array of available historical documents, or to the existing historical literature.

The Uprising of ’34’s intellectual and political commitments also mattered. It was a social history put to film, with a clear intent to inspire and organize southern labor once more through memory. Rigor was there, to be sure, in the filmmakers’ work, much as it was among the scholars who researched and wrote Like a Family and continued to produce historical works on the 1934 strike and the textile South. Still, the film was not an uncomplicated presentation of “true” memories garnered from the Piedmont’s mills and mill communities. Rather, it was a curated collection of disparate stories and discordant voices, only having a certain overarching narrative order, imperative, and meaning through Stoney and Helfand. Reticence had given way to remembrance, but remembrance could give way to erratum or an imposed memorial structure only existing onscreen in the film’s version of 1934.³⁸

For Stoney and Helfand, methodological quibbles tended to take a backseat to telling the story of the strike. From their perspective, each interview overcame any “forced amnesia.” To facilitate remembrance, archival materials and books on the textile industry helped to settle or steel wary voices. “As documentary filmmakers,” they recalled, “we found ourselves in the position of interlocutors—bringing the physical evidence of unionism into the Piedmont towns where it had been forged and then forgotten. The trunk of our rental car was weighed down with proof: cardboard file cabinets, organized by mill and by state, filled with copies of letters from mill workers to the Roosevelt administration demanding that their rights as workers and citizens be protected. We also brought a file full of the only comprehensive collection of photos of the 1934 strike. [. . .] For many strike veterans, our visit was the first time that they had seen these pictures and letters.” Such materials and methods encouraged interviewees to remember passed-down songs, whether folk tunes or shopfloor melodies, thereby tapping into the aural landscape of memory. Stoney and Helfand’s approach also granted legitimacy to millworkers’ remembrances, whether pleasant or painful, while providing a route for individuals to find one another and reunite. Memory’s reconstitution also created a sense of solidarity around historical fact. The strike had happened. It was a real—not imagined—event that others might want to know about and benefit from. Any trauma, loss, or silence they or their kin had endured had not been in vain. Any erasure—namely the erasure of labor’s memory and memoryscape—had been a political act. A counter-politics of social memory came through forceful storytelling and documentary film.³⁹

Stoney and Helfand said as much. In their hands, The Uprising of ’34’s purpose was twofold. It was “to help divided communities to come together and talk” while helping community organizers, union organizers, educators, and scholars conduct open discussions “about labor, class, race, history, power, memory, and shame.”⁴⁰ For instance, female organizers, such as UTW local leader Eula McGill, related the crucial role of women in union efforts across the Piedmont. Mill owners also featured in the film, and their paternalistic assumptions and selective amnesia regarding their role in fomenting shopfloor angst or social forgetting went on full display. In an effort to create a cross-racial memory of the strike, the filmmakers also made a point of including Black voices in the film. Reconstituting Black experiences was not only good history. It related the problematic racial history and memory of the strike and the limits of class or gender solidarity because of race. As Like a Family revealed, Black millworkers played noteworthy but forgotten roles in the strike, on occasion joining nearly all-white unions. More commonly, Black workers had to negotiate discriminatory hiring and firing practices, outright suppression from owners, personal fear of revenge, and racism from their white counterparts on the picket line or in the union. Black workers also confirmed the normative whiteness of the strike—and its memory—when speaking with Stoney and Helfand. Blacks were “afraid they’d be lynched,” one worker recalled as he spoke about black reluctance to join the very marches that gave public voice to white grievances. “In the whole crowd, you couldn’t find a black in there, in that parade,” he remembered. Still, The Uprising of ’34 made sure to honor the presence of separate Black locals and their importance for channeling Black grievances, conveyed by a down-panning shot of a faded, typewritten document listing each UTW local in South Carolina with a “(C)” for “colored.” Black women, many former domestic workers in the mill towns and villages that Stoney and Helfand visited, also received well-deserved attention in the film, as did the racial contradictions and limitations of mill life. Regarding segregation in mill communities, one interviewee recalled with obvious consternation that Black women could “take [their] black hands and . . . stir it in their dough . . . and take [their] black body and lay in the bed with the [white] child and protect them. But you couldn’t come in their front door.”⁴¹

Yet, for as much as the film challenged the whiteness of the strike’s memory, Black workers retained the long discursive strategy of silence or sidestepping when confronted with white inquiries about their memories and inner lives. Responding to Stoney’s seemingly innocuous questions about Black life in the Piedmont, Bruce Graham, a Black worker formerly employed in Belmont, North Carolina, deferred to Stoney when pressed for an answer to why the local plant did not employ Blacks. “They were saving the jobs for the white men,” Stoney told Graham, who responded, “That’s what I thought. I was letting you say it first.” To be sure, white supremacy, as it had existed in the mill villages of the 1930s, was dead by the 1990s. But Jim Crowism could live on in internalized, remembered form. The unspoken rules of race, class, and gender continued, even in the very interviews that gave Black workers a chance to air their own memories of the 1934 strike.⁴²

Though attentive to the historical and contemporary complications of race and gender, The Uprising of ’34 privileged a straightforward, class- and culture-based argument about the strike itself. Following the lead and published work of southern labor historians, the film argued that the strike had a long backstory, connected to agrarian individualism, the work ethic of millworkers, the collective class identity of workers as a “family” in isolated villages, the pressures of the stretch-out, and the promise of Section 7(a) and the New Deal. The strike ended, according to the film, due to a combination of worker exhaustion, direct violence and oppression, along with the hesitance of federal officials to challenge mill owners or political elites in southern states. To be sure, this line of argument simplified and overlooked much. Thanks to its emphasis on solidarity, the film tended to flatten worker experiences into a “with-us-or-against-us” binary, overlooking the nuanced outcomes of organizing efforts. For instance, in Durham, North Carolina, UTW locals—which had been in operation since World War I—openly defied management, keeping the mill shut down through the entirety of the strike. In Spartanburg County, South Carolina, nearly every mill shut down and over 90 percent of workers went on strike. Yet, as historian Bryant Simon noted, “The mills in and around Greenville proved to be almost as solidly antiunion as neighboring Spartanburg was prounion.” In smaller or mid-sized towns across the Carolina Piedmont, such as Chester, Gaffney, Pelzer, Rock Hill, Union, and York, “millworkers . . . stood firmly behind the union.” Elsewhere, UTW locals negotiated partial concessions or ran into open and sustained resistance from management and other textile workers, unionized and not. In tinier, more isolated mill villages, such as Ware Shoals and Honea Path, the UTW had to establish “flying squadrons” to travel from town to town, organizing non-unionized mills. In Honea Path, as the film related, the result was violent and tragic, given the absolute control of local management. In other small towns, by contrast, flying squadrons and UTW organizers had little to no effect in stirring support for the strike, or no violence occurred. Tone-wise, the film could also tip into a presentation of workers that Robert H. Zieger once identified as the “primordial folk,” a perspective that cast mill people as “denizens of the isolated rural South, toiling in a modern industry but tenacious in adhering to their traditional culture.” Still, as a product of the scholarly efforts of historians in the 1980s and early 1990s, the film did not unthinkingly lean on the “folk” trope in its analysis. Neither were millworkers depicted as part of a docile or subjugated proletariat, although they did seem defeated at the end of the film, left only with whatever memories they held about their vanishing southern cotton mill world. That story of defeat did not accord with later historical findings, which suggested the strike presaged and enacted a fuller shift in the Roosevelt administration and New Deal toward labor oversight, particularly in the creation of the permanent National Labor Relations Board in 1935, the strengthening of industrial codes within the NRA, and the general receptivity of the federal government to rights-based labor reform. Resilience also came through non-academic memoirs of life in the Piedmont, such as Wilt Browning’s Linthead: Growing Up in a Carolina Cotton Mill Village and George Suggs’s “My World is Gone”: Memories of Life in a Southern Cotton Mill Town. Still, as an exercise in social remembrance, The Uprising of ’34 reaffirmed the filmmakers’ hope in memory’s ability to inspire and organize for change. Quoting Czech writer Milan Kundera, the film’s epilogue read: “The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”⁴³

Life imitated art as The Uprising of ’34 moved from production to broadcast. For the most part, Stoney and Helfand’s end product encountered receptive stations and supporters, airing without controversy or pushback. Yet, a handful of stations, under pressure from the relatives or descendants of millowners, challenged its televising. Charlotte-based WTVI received a $150,000 grant from the textile industry to produce “Spinning Through Time.” The station twice aired this hagiographic treatment of the industry’s history in prime time. South Carolina Educational Television (SCETV), the state’s main public television network, also decided not to air The Uprising of ’34. Criticism of their decision lasted for years. “It continues to be a very hot topic,” noted Kathy Gardner-Jones, a SCETV spokeswoman, in 1998. After a change in the network’s administration, it finally aired later that year, joined to “a panel discussion and a 24-page viewers’ guide based on a handbook designed for social studies teachers and grassroots organizers.”⁴⁴

The film’s subject could also be a sore spot. Journalist Peter Applebome uncovered local hesitancy, or even outright resistance, to the film in Honea Path. For Fred Moore, who ran the town’s newspaper for almost four decades, the strike deserved to be forgotten. “There are too many bad memories, too many people it could hurt,” he told Applebome. Reemerging union or strike talk seemed to jeopardize future economic development. “We’ve got Dixie Container making boxes and Chiquola [still manufacturing textiles] and we got a shirt plant and the Maxxim Medical glove plant,” Moore said. “There’s Coleman Machine that makes parts for corrugated box companies all around the world. There’s Owens Corning. We got beaucoups of industry. Why would anyone want to mess it up by bringing in a union?”⁴⁵

Efforts at undercutting the film largely petered out, primarily because the film aired nationally and because of the active involvement of several interests in promoting and screening it. Indeed, supporters of The Uprising of ’34 did not take lightly the broadcast blocks or local fears or concerns. In Orangeburg, South Carolina, when the state’s public television network chose not air the film, activists, academics, and labor civic leaders organized a screening at South Carolina State University. Dozens of other communities welcomed the film for public viewings, usually followed by open-floor discussions and instruction with filmmakers. Labor organizations, such as the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFE); the Services Employees International Union (SEIU); United Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE); and Grassroots Leadership, also worked with educators and the filmmakers to schedule dozens of screenings. “Screenings took place,” noted one report, “in cultural centers such as the Peace Center in Greenville, malls, community meetings, libraries, national union meetings of both the SEIU and the Conference of National Organizers Alliance, a workshop on labor history in Charleston, religious conventions such as the Quakers Palmetto gathering, and labor meetings such as the Greenwood chapter meeting of CAFE.” Educational supplements about the strike’s place in southern history and American labor history provided audiences with additional context and information. Reviewers and awards committees also gave the film critical acclaim. Remembrance, through The Uprising of ’34, had become social and public once more, albeit right at the very moment the strike’s memoryscape underwent yet another revolution.⁴⁶

4From Remembrance to Redevelopment

The Uprising of ’34 aimed to revisit and remember a forgotten part of southern labor history. It also intended to create new public conversations and memories, using the past as a springboard for discussing the fate of labor and labor organizing in the late-stage textile industry and neoliberal South and nation. The future did not look bright. Especially since the 1960s and ’70s, service-oriented jobs had replaced many industrial forms of employment in the Piedmont, while agricultural labor continued a century-long decline. Right-to-work laws, along with aggressive lobbying by companies and their political partners in state legislatures and Congress further undercut hope for a widespread union movement in the textile South. Jobs did open up for African Americans and other racial or ethnic minorities after the long, hard fights of the civil rights era, much to the chagrin of many white workers. Though often hired over whites as an alternative source of cheaper labor (rather than because of the anti-discriminatory dictates of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or other legal actions), minority workers nevertheless cherished textile jobs as a viable option against more exploitative forms of employment, such as in poultry processing. Textile companies also used globalization to create a kind of “security zone” in the South, keeping headquarters, select mills, and a steady workforce made more efficient via technology in the region, while exploring manufacturing expansions elsewhere before sending jobs overseas. County by county, mill by mill, and job by job, the industry’s restructuring brought a multitude of blessings and curses.⁴⁷

On the individual level, the loss of work created the potential for new traumas, as it had in other sectors of the nation’s declining industrial base. Individual traumas reflected a general trend of regional trauma, this time via the quiet violence of a pink slip, a plant closing, and a regional industry’s slow death. Year after year, decade after decade, employment numbers went down in textiles, especially for white workers although causing Black displacement as well. Mills closed. Millworkers’ children explored other employment options. Less and less remained of southern cotton mill worlds.⁴⁸

When interviewed, either for The Uprising of ’34 or by journalists looking to detail the rise of a southern Rust Belt, few mill people had forgotten much about the industrial landscape that had once defined their lives. They remembered the exact location of streets and houses in the community. They remembered the look and feel of warehouses, loading docks, carding rooms, supervisor’s stations, and other places and spaces where friends and family members worked, sweated, learned, struggled, lived, and died. In the faltering physical and social landscape that had nurtured the strike in 1934, memories turned into stories that kept past formulations of their mill communities alive, even while the physical infrastructure of memory crumbled. “The people in Bolton [South Carolina] are fighting to keep the smokestack here as a historical martyr,” related one worker about “a particular plant” from 1934 that had “refused to strike.” Local efforts at preservation did little to prevent the “vandalism done to [the] building” or prevent the future “tear down [of] what is left of the building except the warehouse.”⁴⁹ Dramatic changes had overwritten places in Atlanta’s textile mill district of Cabbagetown in a similar fashion. Taking interviewers on a tour in the early 1990s, UTW lawyer and organizer Joe Jacobs remembered “during the time that the strike was on, these streets were not anything like they are now.” He pointed out “where they had one station of the Pinkertons” and “a tent that was pitched by the National Guard” along with lookalike mill houses that housed workers siding with or opposing the strike, each still conveying the look and feel of 1934 despite “different changes” like “front porches, little gardens,” and how “the paint is crumbling off.”⁵⁰ Region-wide, little could be done to stem the flight of capital and labor—and neoliberal reformulations of capital and labor—that had marginalized the textile South’s workforce. In one poignant and illustrative instance, the writing was literally on the wall. During a tour of the massive but deteriorating Fulton Bag Mill complex in Atlanta in 1996, a critical site of labor organizing and mass striking in 1934, observers noted a plea for public and collective remembrance spray-painted in large, black lettering: “THIS MILL IS PART OF ATL. HISTORY Please DO NOT DESTROY IT! SAVE THE MILL.” Such pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. Local civic and business interests had the building marked for either demolition or renovation.⁵¹

Textile mills might have had no fixed place in the neoliberal future, but their memory could, especially when put into words written elsewhere. Eureka Mill, a slim volume of poems published in 1998 by Ron Rash, attempted to bring readers into closer contact and solidarity with the figurative ghosts of the Piedmont’s lost industrial world. Each of Rash’s poems worked as an act of figurative resurrection and social remembrance, with writer and reader alike guided—and united—by narrative verse. In “Invocation,” the collection’s opening poem, a narrator invited his grandfather’s spirit “to hear my measured human prayer” and “guide my hand / to weave with words a thread / of truth as I write down / your life and other lives, / close kin but strangers too, / those lives all lived as gears / in Springs’ cotton mill.” The speaker asked his kin to “let me not forget / your lives were more than that.” To capture the course of his family’s life, Rash’s poetic séance unfolded in rough chronological order. The narrator’s family moves from their tobacco farm in Buncombe County, North Carolina, to “Eureka Plant / located east of Chester, South Carolina,” and into the Depression and postwar era. Few contextual clues gave a sense of each poem’s setting in time, save for in Eureka Mill’s middle section, which focused on the years of roughly 1929 to 1945.⁵²

Two poems—“Flying Squadron” and “1934”—dealt directly with the strike. In “Flying Squadron,” union supporters lived through “a dangerous time,” riding “from mill to mill to spread the word.” Disdained by scabs and supervisors alike, they “carried scars / from fists and clubs” and remembered “friends . . . / in Gaston County, down in Honea-Path, / shot by the owners’ thugs or bayoneted / by frightened kids in National Guard uniforms.” Strikers withstand abuse, sing, and make love with other strikers, symbolizing the intimate bonds of industrial relations while proving “two bodies rubbed together can / spark up heat as well.” Although the speaker “knew we’d never be as brave again,” the poem ended on a note of relief and freedom: “It felt so good / to breathe fresh air instead of cotton dust, / to be outside that spinning room awhile.” By contrast, “1934” told of workers who did not join the strike. Faced with the possibility that a mill shutdown might impoverish their families, they rejected “what organizers promised us,” namely that “the time had come to share the wealth.” It was not an easy decision. Rash captured the ambivalence of many workers during the strike and tensions that had split communities and privatized memories. The union men’s message “sounded good,” but so did the company, which “made sure we had some work . . . when the other mills laid off.” Siding with “Old Man Springs”—a nickname for Colonel Leroy Springs, the owner of Springs Mills—the workers acted decisively: “When a flying squadron headed south / and crossed the Chester County line, / we left our shift to walk outside. / We filled our fists to welcome them.”⁵³

Rash’s poetry was an expressive venture in memorialization, evocative but not as all-encompassing as Like a Family or as politically charged as The Uprising of ’34. Rash also faced less of an uphill battle to get his literary take on memorialization in the public sphere, contrasting with the efforts by locals—particularly Kathy Lamb of Honea Path—to set up physical markers memorializing those involved in labor action over a half-century before. If able to build off the buzz created by The Uprising of ’34, Lamb struggled to find funds for a monument in Honea Path for workers slain during the strike. Lamb cast her efforts as a form of public service, necessary memorialization, and pushback against any continued privatization of memory. “Sixty painful years have come and gone,” she told an audience at a screening of the film at the Peace Center, a renovated textile site-turned-music venue in Greenville. “These men gave their lives for the rights of the working man everywhere. It is time for us to recognize their sacrifices and sacrifices their families made through the years. . . . It is time to remember, to heal and to honor these lost loved ones and those who were wounded. And, to hope something like this never happens again. Although, it is a part of our history that must not be forgotten.”⁵⁴ Lamb and the filmmakers scrounged up dollar-by-dollar support for the monument from viewers of The Uprising of ’34. Moral support came from Frank Beacham and a single donation by Springs Industries. Honea Path’s city council, however, initially questioned the monument. One former owner of the Chiquola Mill called it “ridiculous.” Rebuffed but resolute, Lamb’s efforts paid off, as the city council relented to the marker’s placement in a prominent park, where “children would walk past . . . every day.” On Memorial Day, May 29, 1995, Lamb, Beacham, and the filmmakers dedicated the monument in front of a crowd of about four hundred people. “The only people who didn’t show up,” she recalled, “were the people related to the ones who did the shooting.”⁵⁵

The monument was a simple granite marker, proclaiming, “They Died for the Rights of the Working Man.” Listing the names of the seven dead, the monument stated the most basic of facts while assigning no specific blame for their deaths. “These men,” it read, “were killed in Honea Path on September 6, 1934, in the General Textile Strike. This monument is dedicated to their memory, to their families, and to all workers.”⁵⁶ For Lamb, the passive voice of the monument’s inscription did not mean that it was an innocuous or platitudinous marker. “Erecting the monument in Honea Path was a battle against time, tradition, and fear,” she believed. “The monument enabled townspeople to say openly that this tragedy happened here—something they had tried to deny for 61 years. [. . .] By breaking the silence,” Lamb concluded, “it also took away the shame that some families felt.”⁵⁷ The town’s mayor, Billy Gilmer, had relatives among the shooters and those shot. Like Lamb, he viewed the occasion as an opportunity for reconciliation and healing. For Beacham, the monument doubled as a political statement, written in stone and difficult to remove. “Memories are fragile,” Beacham surmised, “and we can see that here in Honea Path. But though memory is fragile, knowledge is power. That may explain why some people in South Carolina don’t want us to know this story. I don’t think we should let them win.”⁵⁸

Elsewhere, locals clearly did not show much enthusiasm for memorialization. For business leaders in various textile towns, a large textile mill was not a welcome memorial space but merely another piece of misappropriated or obsolete real estate, in need of redevelopment or demolition. In Honea Path, for instance, the very mill where the 1934 strike reached its most violent stage stood as a complicated symbol of the past impinging on the present. Chiquola Mill had been out of operation since the mid-1990s. When journalist Katrina A. Goggins visited the site in 2009, “the building, the largest in the area,” had “become an eyesore. Partially ripped out wooden and metal beams are covered in dust, paint chips, and cotton fibers. Grass and kudzu grow through concrete.” The mill symbolized little more than the “familiar image of manufacturing’s decline” in the region and nation. “In its heyday, the mill was the economic backbone of the town,” Goggins averred. “Now, there’s double-digit unemployment.” Tommy Martin, a city councilman interested in saving the mill from the wrecking ball, said, “It’s just sad that here you have a landmark that was involved in changing the labor laws just wiped away. If it’s gone, when you ride by you’ll never have any indication that it ever existed.” Honea Path resident Nora Hughes Smith, born thirteen years after the strike, linked the mill’s death to the deaths of the workers memorialized in stone just a few blocks away: “It’s murder again,” she believed, only this time “they’re murdering the building.” Fifteen years later, however, a fresh start seemed on the horizon. A mix of federal grants and state aid totaling almost $4 million had Mayor Christopher Burton optimistic about the mill and town, now within the exurban orbit of Greenville. “People over there just want it cleaned up at this point,” he noted. Grants promised the site’s redevelopment into a senior living facility or recreational space while building on prior social remembrance. “I think they’re ready to let this history be known,” Burton thought, speaking for the town and for himself. “I’m ready for the world to know Honea Path is the site of something that really set our country’s labor laws in motion.”⁵⁹

Chiquola Mill was emblematic. In dozens of towns and cities in the former Textile Belt, mill buildings took on new meaning and purpose as civic officials, investors, historic preservationists, and real estate developers showed a renewed interest in abandoned textile mills. The process started at around the same time historians turned their attention toward mill people and their social and political worlds. In the 1960s and ’70s, mills started going up for sale, as all the Piedmont’s major textile companies followed neoliberal trends and shifted operations overseas. A few companies repurposed or updated textile mills for continuing production. Others sold off buildings to other manufacturers. Most often, companies simply cut jobs and pulled machinery out of buildings, sending both to newfangled plants in Latin America or Asia. Neoliberal trade agreements like NAFTA supercharged already long-established moves. By the late 1990s, the industry was in free fall. As The Charlotte Observer reported, between 1997 and 2002, 75,000 textile jobs ended while 236 plants closed, leaving behind a landscape of not just forgetting the strike of 1934 but eliminating the foremost physical reminders of the Textile Belt’s long presence and importance in the region.⁶⁰

Regarding unused properties, investors saw promising if chancy ventures. Redevelopment, either through renovation or repurposing, seemed risky, especially since companies only saw significant losses or uncertain demand for aging or abandoned mill buildings. (In fact, one textile company, Mount Vernon, simply gave away its mill in Fries, Virginia, to the town to use as a rental property.) Updating often meant modernizing interiors with drywall and air-conditioning, fixing structural flaws, or reconfiguring large, open rooms into smaller ones with low ceilings, corridors, and storage spaces. “It’s like going to the store when mini-skirts are in fashion [and] only finding antebellum hoop skirts,” Gorham Boyington, a broker, told The New York Times in 1991. “They won’t sell for much . . . [and] they are no longer functional in their original use.” Still, when buyers did decide to invest in an abandoned, condemned, or in-disrepair mill, they typically foresaw a wide array of alternative uses for the property. Some could be reconfigured for commercial real estate or newer manufacturing operations. Others needed creative remodeling for recreational, educational, or mixed-use outcomes. In Columbia, South Carolina, investors bought a mill near the University of South Carolina and renovated it to house college students in 170 rental apartments. In Greensboro, North Carolina, a 200,000 square foot mill became a new outlet mall.⁶¹

As in all things related to real estate, location often proved the deciding factor for investors and buyers repurposing industrial mills for postindustrial profit. As Jerry Olson, a leasing agent for the Greensboro outlet mall, noted, “It is immaterial whether it’s a strip shopping center, an office tower or a textile mill. They’re all real estate, and if you don’t have the right location, you’re not going to make it.” Mills in smaller or isolated places, often in the very towns and hamlets that served as front lines for the 1934 strike, proved harder sells. Deemed unconducive to redevelopment plans, most sat unused and unproductive. Tax bases felt the strain of empty, rusted-over, graffitied, or otherwise rundown mills, and they fit awkwardly into local efforts to rebrand their towns with “historic districts” attractive to seasonal tourists or getaway homebuyers. “There’s not a big market now for four-story, turn-of-the-century textile plants,” Sam Bennett, the city manager for Clinton, North Carolina, told The Charlotte Observer in 2002, recounting a decade of frustrated ambitions regarding the town’s 600,000-square-foot plant. In Clinton, a town in 1934 riven with strike divisions, locals decided to make it public property, which also made it a tax sink instead of a tax benefit. Two decades of turnovers in owners and buyers had not solved similar problems elsewhere in the textile South, whether in towns nearer to interstates and metropolitan areas (such as in Kannapolis or Gastonia, both flashpoint communities during the strike) or in the strike’s more isolated environs (such as in Forest City, Shelby, Ware Shoals, and Honea Path). Pricing also dogged the bottom line and kept vacancies up, even after a mill’s renovation into multifamily housing. “In the right neighborhood in Raleigh or Charlotte,” said Murray Gould, who was involved in renovating Loray Mills, the site of the famed 1929 Gastonia strike now operating as a mixed-use residential complex, “[$800] is not unreasonable rent [for an apartment] . . . but in Cramerton or Mount Holly, $800 a month won’t fly.”⁶²

Captured or swept up in neoliberal aims and ends, local and state interests proved crucial for the Textile Belt’s late-stage shift toward an interwoven investment, asset, and rentier market. Appraisals, renovations, and rental rates mattered most, although sustainability and job growth couched and justified redevelopment efforts. Developers cast various projects as a way to kill several birds with one stone, often with help from state or federal subsidies or allowances. “Redeveloping these properties,” noted a guidebook published by the South Carolina Department of Commerce, “links economic vitality with environmental protection” while “productively reusing such properties reduces urban sprawl, increases the tax base, cleans up the environment, encourages urban revitalization, and creates jobs for the community and surrounding communities.” Such boosterism was not mere bluster. Most abandoned mills were in poor condition. Salvage companies had gutted dozens of mills, leaving them largely empty and lacking in basic upkeep. Dozens were near collapse. Soaked with linseed oil after decades of use, mills could also be fire traps. (Between 2006 and 2012, three mills in Anderson County, South Carolina, alone burned to the ground.) The guidebook also listed asbestos, lead paint, polychlorinated biphenyls, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds, Freon, dyes, and other dangerous materials as often on site.⁶³ If able or capable to work through the permits and costly cleanup, subleasing parts of a mill could prove workable, as at the Greenwood Mills plant in Joanna, South Carolina, where its owner rented space to a recycling company and additional space to a lumber company. “I’m thinking seriously about turning it into a mushroom factory,” joked the owner about the 880,000-square-foot behemoth. “You can hold the temperature in the basement because it’s 11 bricks thick.”⁶⁴

Others saw renovation as the first step in restoring struggling towns and tax bases. “I admit it’s mostly economic,” stated David Bradbury while planning to turn Greensboro’s massive Cone Mills into a multipurpose shopping and rental site known as Victory Mills. “But we’ve been in these towns for 80 years and all the employees there lost their jobs,” he continued. “As a business, we would like to do something good for the towns and not just leave these ugly buildings sitting there.” A decade later, developers had similar plans for the Loray Mill complex in Gastonia. After decades as a Firestone Tire plant, it closed in 1993. Preservationists maintained the property until renovations began in 2013. Helped by FHA and HUD programs, the Camden Group—an investment firm—had bought the building for $660,000 and planned $39 million worth of renovations during the project’s first phase. Nearly two-hundred loft apartments and thousands of square feet of commercial space now had the green light at the old mill. Lucy Penegar, vice chair of the Gaston County Historic Preservation Commission, was both relieved and excited: “This building,” she told a reporter, “is going to evolve into something great.”⁶⁵

When old mill properties became sites where memories faded or faced redevelopment themselves, they did so in the context of a globalizing neoliberal South. As European and Asian capital flooded into the Textile Belt in the 1980s and 1990s, investment ventures and capital reshaped the public appearance, economic framework, and physical landscape of the mills and the communities they once sustained or centered. Especially in Greenville, a former mill center and hotbed of resistance to the strike in 1934, post-NAFTA restructurings fit hand-in-glove with preservation, public history, and memory. Community, place, collective purpose—all could seemingly be retained or restored through redevelopment, as the “glocal” (global-local) came about via a postindustrial tourist economy and incoming capital, people, and jobs. To that end, an Upcountry History Museum approached final planning in 2002 after nearly two decades of work by local business, civic, and educational leaders. “The Upcountry’s textile history,” claimed a marketing publication, “[was] represented by the brick façade of the building and the barrel-vaulted roof which resembles Textile Hall,” or the main venue for the region-wide Southern Textile Exposition, which the city had demolished in 1992. In 2007, the museum opened, featuring “interactive exhibits [to] showcase the diverse history of the Upcountry.” The exhibits “include[d] touch screen displays, oral histories, multimedia presentations and replicated buildings.”⁶⁶

It was not without a touch of irony that the communities and historic buildings detailed in the museum and swept up by the very events of 1934 sat only blocks away. Mill houses, once rented by mill workers as a part of the paternalism that sparked strike action in 1934, had long transitioned into workers’ hands after World War II, sold off piecemeal as companies sought to cut holdings and detach capital from local communities. At century’s end, mill houses served as rental housing for poorer white, Black, and Latino residents, as well as for East, Southeast, and South Asian arrivals living and working in the greater Greenville area’s post-textile economy. Their presence close to downtown was, arguably, temporary until rental prices rose to the point that such mill houses became gentrified real estate for upscale buyers or tenants. The gentrification of downtown Greenville had already priced out many working people in the city, pushing them into lower-rent housing in surrounding suburbs or communities a mile or two north and west of downtown. Gentrification had also already occurred at two prominent mills, Mills Mill and Monaghan Mill, both flashpoints in 1934 and symbols of Greenville’s forceful local suppression of the strike. In the early 2000s, developers transformed the former into The Lofts at Mills Mill. The latter became The Lofts of Greenville. Other local properties—Woodside Mill, Brandon Mill, and Judson Mill—joined the lineup for redevelopment. All featured upscale flats for professionals working downtown or in the thriving Greenville-Spartanburg corridor and served as a new kind of “textile crescent” anchoring mixed-use residential and commercial ventures. All also signaled the new memoryscape of the neoliberal Piedmont. Preserving the area’s textile past seemed not only an exercise in public history. It was also an exercise in intentional and unintentional memorial containment, keeping the more complicated or troubling aspects of the textile South’s past relegated to a museum while allowing the physical landscape of the textile industry and the 1934 strike to be simplified, spiffed up, and reused as a fresh generator of rent, tax revenue, and asset appreciation. Commercialized forms of social memory ensured the old textile South’s role in a new “glocal” neoliberal order oriented around state and municipal endorsement of capital flows, labor shifts, redevelopment plans, and nostalgia.⁶⁷

A revised and redacted version of history framed how investors presented redeveloped mill properties to interested parties. Websites and marketing materials often noted important founding dates or years of productive use before describing debilitating shifts in the Piedmont’s textile economy. Simplified history complemented a gentrified aesthetic that suggested impersonal decline and intentional rebirth. Nearby water towers, looming smokestacks, exposed brickwork, rusted beams, and restored windows did much of the memory work for designers, developers, landlords, and sales managers. So did any original or replica machinery and interior walls, floors, and passageways, all cleaned of lint, sweat, grime, blood, and odor. The “baseline for the color scheme,” The Greenville News reported about the loft apartments at Mills Mill in 2004, “was to use metal, such as pewter, gold, iron, silver, and bronze.” Interior designer Linda McDougald stated, “We wanted it to be very sophisticated, very calming, and very comfortable. Add a music element, some scented candles and, it’s really cool.” Millworkers, if included in the overall aesthetic, remained nameless and voiceless. They were presented or pictured as décor, posted to webpages or put up on walls to add an aura of “heritage” to the site, indirectly through their working-class standing and whiteness. Conversely, apartment floorplans were named after local civic leaders, businessmen, or celebrities but also included Confederate generals Wade Hampton and James Longstreet. A local working-class hero type—the textile-league baseball player—inspired other floorplans. The most famous, Shoeless Joe Jackson, was a former millworker made infamous through the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Jackson had not worked at Monaghan Mill and had long left Greenville by the time of the strike. Earlier in the century, he had been employed at Brandon Mill, another site of vigorous union resistance in 1934 that also was under consideration by investors for renovation into “approximately 150 1,500-square foot New York style lofts with open floor plans, exposed brick, and 18-foot ceilings.” All in all, the southern cotton mill world remembered online or onsite served to prop up the mill’s new identity as upscale property. A redeveloped memoryscape underwrote mortgages and rent while eliding its past as a workplace, community, and political site.⁶⁸

Fittingly, at least in terms of memorial irony, units like the “Shoeless Joe” far outpaced what working people in the Greenville metropolitan area could afford. Little has changed in that regard since the first units opened decades ago. Today, at Woodside Mill, approximately $1,800 per month serves as entry-level rent. Small studio units rarely fall below $1,000 per month while one-to-two-bedroom loft rentals at various mill complexes start anywhere between $1,200 to $2,200 per month. In 2020, Mills Mill featured “a 108-unit luxury loft building” offering residents “16-foot ceilings, nine-foot windows, gated parking, an indoor workout room, community pool, rooftop deck and dog park,” all for a starter price of “between $230,000-500,000.” (Equivalent two-bedroom lofts at Mills Mill now lowball list for half-a-million dollars.) In the surrounding village, $1,500-$2,500 per month for a two-to-three-bedroom mill house is typical, while during the “great inflation” of 2020–25 housing valuations in the area ballooned roughly 40 to 60 percent. Even if a significant market correction comes along in the near future, it will unfold along a trendline. The mills and memoryscape of 1934, now almost a century old, have been redeveloped and privatized once more; or, in a word, re-neoliberalized.⁶⁹

5Conclusion

It would be enticing to consider the story told here about the General Textile Strike of 1934 as exceptional. It is not. Sites of memory left behind by the Great Depression and New Deal remain everywhere in the US and elsewhere. Each site and memoryscape, whether in the South or not, suggest the 1930s’ importance as a cultural flashpoint for the politics and economics of social forgetting and remembrance. Each site also affords a helpful framework for understanding how memory formed and reformed, especially when under significant duress and direction from broader economic and political interests. Indeed, the transition of the 1934 revolt from reticence to remembrance to redevelopment was not—and is not—an inevitable story but contingent one. As such, what happened in the Piedmont since 1934 provides a model for thinking about memory in other places shaped by labor and neoliberalism’s history.

Neoliberalism’s rightful periodization, and its regional or local variations, matter because, then as now, capitalism’s creative and destructive processes do more than shape people and places, lives and labors. In myriad communities and contexts, neoliberal capitalism has shaped the terms and conditions of remembrance and forgetting itself, notably (even violently) at the individual level but especially when deployed in private, social, or public spaces. Such complex memorial histories and landscapes often remain hiding in plain sight, as do the driving forces behind them, as reflected in the psychological, emotional, expressive, and physical left-behinds of that very memoryscape. They also provide the beginnings of answers to an important line of inquiry, one as pertinent in the wake of a Great Recession and global pandemic as they were in the wake of a Great Depression and the textile South’s New Deal.
What gets remembered and forgotten when hard times leave behind hard memories? The answers are vernacular remnants. A passed-down story. A forgotten one. A box of documents. Songs, photos, books, documentaries, films. Buildings. Places. Streets. People. Today more than ever, historical research and remembrance can blend through sites online, whether projects like the Living New Deal or ones like this longform essay. Memory also lives today through a vibrant metascape of social media posts and streamed podcasts, songs, and stories.⁷⁰ Such remnants can last beyond the actions, contingencies, and hard times—even violences—that made them. But only if ordinary, everyday historians, storytellers, musicians, poets, listeners, photographers, and documentarians strive to keep what binds people and places together, perpetually overcoming reticence for the sake of remembrance.