Mill operatives walked off their jobs at Atlanta's Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills complex in the spring of 1914, initiating a strike that involved ethnic confrontations, gender divisions, social and economic reforms, regional and sectional differences, and the textile industry's rendition of the "gospel of efficiency." In this richly documented account, Gary Fink explores the year-long strike that followed, using the reports of labor spies who were paid by management to gather information about striking employees and to disrupt union organizing activities.
Mill operatives walked off their jobs at Atlanta's Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills complex in the spring of 1914, initiating a strike that involved not only the class conflict inherent in a labor-management dispute, but also ethnic confrontations, gender divisions, social and economic reforms, regional and sectional differences, and the textile industry's rendition of the gospel of efficiency.
Labor conflicts, arrests, espionage--it was all there at the once ubiquitous mills of Fulton County. Employee records and snatches of paper prove workers spied on each other. Company owners were paranoid about labor unions taking over. Copious documentation, unearthed here by author Lisa M. Russell, brings the workaday drama back to life. These mills sustained families, but exploitation was far from uncommon. When mill workers finally went on strike, there was hell to pay. The company bosses yanked strikers from their shacks. With the help of Governor Talmadge, the National Guard arrested working women with their children. They marched these "criminals" to a former WWI prisoner of war camp that once held enemy German soldiers. Hard to believe this was happening in and around Atlanta in the early 1900s.
New Voyages to Carolina offers a bold new approach for understanding and telling North Carolina's history. Recognizing the need for such a fresh approach and reflecting a generation of recent scholarship, eighteen distinguished authors have sculpted a broad, inclusive narrative of the state's evolution over more than four centuries. The volume provides new lenses and provocative possibilities for reimagining the state's past. Transcending traditional markers of wars and elections, the contributors map out a new chronology encompassing geological realities; the unappreciated presence of Indians, blacks, and women; religious and cultural influences; and abiding preferences for industrial development within the limits of "progressive" politics. While challenging traditional story lines, the authors frame a candid tale of the state's development. Contributors: Dorothea V. Ames, East Carolina University Karl E. Campbell, Appalachian State University James C. Cobb, University of Georgia Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Stephen Feeley, McDaniel College Jerry Gershenhorn, North Carolina Central University Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Yale University Patrick Huber, Missouri University of Science and Technology Charles F. Irons, Elon University David Moore, Warren Wilson College Michael Leroy Oberg, State University of New York, College at Geneseo Stanley R. Riggs, East Carolina University Richard D. Starnes, Western Carolina University Carole Watterson Troxler, Elon University Bradford J. Wood, Eastern Kentucky University Karin Zipf, East Carolina University
In Clearing the Air, Gregory Wood examines smoking's importance to the social and cultural history of working people in the twentieth-century United States. Now that most workplaces in the United States are smoke-free, it may be difficult to imagine the influence that nicotine addiction once had on the politics of worker resistance, workplace management, occupational health, vice, moral reform, grassroots activism, and the labor movement. The experiences, social relations, demands, and disputes that accompanied smoking in the workplace in turn shaped the histories of antismoking politics and tobacco control.The steady expansion of cigarette smoking among men, women, and children during the first half of the twentieth century brought working people into sustained conflict with managers’ demands for diligent attention to labor processes and work rules. Addiction to nicotine led smokers to resist and challenge policies that coldly stood between them and the cigarettes they craved. Wood argues that workers’ varying abilities to smoke on the job stemmed from the success or failure of sustained opposition to employer policies that restricted or banned smoking. During World War II, workers in defense industries, for example, struck against workplace smoking bans. By the 1970s, opponents of smoking in workplaces began to organize, and changing medical knowledge and dwindling union power contributed further to the downfall of workplace smoking. The demise of the ability to smoke on the job over the past four decades serves as an important indicator of how the power of workers’ influence in labor-management relations has dwindled over the same period.
From the beginning of the Industrial Age and continuing into the twenty-first century, companies faced with militant workers and organizers have often turned to agencies that specialized in ending strikes and breaking unions. Although their secretive nature has made it difficult to fully explore the history of this industry, From Blackjacks to Briefcases does just that. By digging through subpoenaed documents of strike-bound companies, their mercenaries, and the testimony of executive officers and rank-and-file strikebreakers, Robert Smith examines the inner workings of the antiunion industry. In a clear and lively style, he brings to life the violent armed guards employed on the picket line or in the coal camps; the ruffians who filled the armies marshaled by the “King of the Strikebreakers,” Pearl Bergoff; the labor spies who wrecked countless unions; and, after the Wagner Act, those who manipulated national labor law to serve their clients. In From Blackjacks to Briefcases, Smith follows the history of this ongoing struggle and tells a compelling story that parallels the history of the United States over the last century and a half.
Politics, while always an integral part of the daily life in the South, took on a new level of importance after the Civil War. Today, political strategists view the South as an essential region to cultivate if political hopefuls are to have a chance of winning elections at the national level. Although operating within the context of a secular government, American politics is decidedly marked by a Christian influence. In the mostly Protestant South, religion and politics have long been nearly inextricable. Politics and Religion in the White South skillfully examines the powerful role that religious considerations and influence have played in American political discourse. This collection of thirteen essays from prominent historians and political scientists explores the intersection in the South of religion, politics, race relations, and southern culture from post–Civil War America to the present, when the Religious Right has exercised a profound impact on the course of politics in the region as well as the nation. The authors examine issues such as religious attitudes about race on the Jim Crow South; Billy Graham's influence on the civil rights movement; political activism and the Southern Baptist Convention; and Dorothy Tilly, a white Methodist woman, and her contributions as a civil rights reformer during the 1940s and 1950s. The volume also considers the issue of whether southerners felt it was their sacred duty to prevent American society from moving away from its Christian origins toward a new, secular identity and how this perceived God-given responsibility was reflected in the work of southern political and church leaders. By analyzing the vital relationship between religion and politics in the region where their connection is strongest and most evident, Politics and Religion in the White South offers insight into the conservatism of the South and the role that religion has played in maintaining its social and cultural traditionalism.
