The Loray Mill Strike 1929
Cotton mills littered the waterways of the North Carolina Piedmont at the turn of the twentieth century. Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Burlington, and Gastonia had multiple cotton mills accompanied by mill housing and company towns. Cotton mills in the South were owned by men from New York. The somewhat isolation of a still-recovering Confederate defeat in the American Civil War, the seemingly endless supply of cheap labor, and the massive expansion of the railroads made the North Carolina Piedmont a good place to do business.
Most mill workers lived in company-owned housing. Entire families would leave their tenant farms or mountain homes for the prospect of good housing and decent wages in the cotton mills. Like most of the country, the First World War created a manufacturing boom in all industries. Military orders for tents, uniforms, and socks rewarded mill owners handsomely and workers earned high wages. When the war ended, cotton mills began producing flannel, jeans, store awnings, and delicate ladies’ stockings. Despite the increased production of domestic goods, wages sunk.
The South did not experience the massive European immigration that northern cities did. Instead, the South was still finding its identity after the forced collapse of its slave labor system. As such, unions played a much smaller role in southern mills than they did in the industrialized cities of Detroit and Chicago. When northerners came south to unionize mill workers, they were often greeted with distrust and sometimes violence.
Since the conclusion of the First World War in 1919, cotton mills had implemented a stretched-out system. This meant that a worker’s production increased while their pay decreased, an eerily similar move made by other industrialists, most famously George Pullman. Mill owners needed to keep costs down in order to maintain their profitability. For laborers in the mills, this meant dirty and dangerous working conditions that caused dismemberment of limbs or loss of life, long working days, and low wages. As labor activists took an interest in the plight of southern mill workers, they began to hold informational meetings in attempts to unionize workers.
The National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) and the Trade Union Unity League came to Gastonia to unionize workers in the Loray Mills. Demanding a forty-hour work week, a minimum $20 weekly wage, abolition of the stretch-out system, and recognition of the union, 1,800 Loray Mill workers walked off their jobs on April 1, 1929. In patterns seen before, mill owners evicted striking workers from their company-owned homes.
The Mayor of Gastonia asked the North Carolina Governor for assistance. On April 3, Governor Gardner sent 250 National Guard troops. The arrival of the troops escalated violence among strikers, city residents, non-strikers, and company men. On April 18th, roughly 100 masked men destroyed the headquarters of the NTWU in Gastonia. The NTWU created a tent city that was guarded by armed strikers at all times.
The Loray Mill continued production even as workers struck. For sharecroppers or tenant farmers unable to get out from under the weight of perpetual indebtedness, crossing a picket line and replacing striking workers with the chance of encountering violence was a far better option. The strike continued for months with minor skirmishes continuing between opposing parties. Finally, on June 7, 1929, 150 striking workers called out the night shift. The striking workers were attacked and dispersed by Gaston County sheriff’s deputies. Later in the night, the Gastonia Police Chief and three officers arrived at the NTWU tent city and demanded that the guards hand over their weapons. In the chaos and violence that followed, the police officers and strikers were wounded and the police chief was killed.
The judge of the murder trial of the eight strikers and eight members of the NTWU declared a mistrial when a juror went insane after viewing disturbing evidence. In the aftermath, vigilantes ran amuck in the countryside terrorizing strikers and forcing them out of the county. On September 14, 1929, vigilantes chased down a truck with 22 striking workers heading to a union meeting in Gastonia. Armed men fired upon the truck and killed a pregnant Ella May Wiggins, who had become a champion of the union at Loray Mills. After her murder, the strike collapsed.