CHAPTER I
1. Robert Christie, Empire in Wood: A History of the Carpenters’ Union (Ithaca, N.Y.: New York State School of Industrial Relations, 1956), pp.19–45; Stuart Bruce Kaufman, Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor, 1848–1896, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), pp. 38–39; Daniel Rogers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Vintage Books, 1966).
2. Michael Rogin, “Voluntarism: The Political Functions of an Anti-Political Doctrine,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 5 (July 1952): 521–535; Joyce Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968).
3. Ronald L. Filippelli, Labor in the U.S.A.: A History (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 168. Nelson Lichtenstein places AFL membership at 4,078,000 in 1920, 3,600,000 in 1924, and 2,150,000 in 1932 (Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1982], pp. 279, 296, 315).
4. Milton Cantor, The Divided Left: American Radicalism, 1900–1975 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Sidney Howard, The Labor Story: A Survey of Industrial Espionage, 1619–1973 (New York: Praeger, 1974); Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979); David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1979); William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
5. Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 1920–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), on pp. 32–34, provides a succinct discussion of federal unions.
6. David Brody, “The Emergence of Mass Production Unionism,” in Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 82–94; Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 9–11.
7. The historic debate within the AFL is effectively summarized in James O. Morris, Conflict Within the AFL: A Study of Craft versus Industrial Unionism, 1901–1938 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958). However, an in-depth study of the struggles involved in the creation of the CIO and the AFL’s response at all points along the way is presented by Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 3–74. Galenson also provides individual chapters that chronicle the beginnings of industrial unionism in seventeen industries.
8. Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 572–634; Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL, especially pp. 75–192, 239–282. J. Raymond Walsh provides a more contemporary view of events, especially pp. 48–138, and also an examination of the CIO’s early tactics, pp. 165–195, in CIO: Industrial Unionism in Action (New York: Norton, 1937). Benjamin Stolberg, The Story of the CIO (New York: Viking, 1938), captures the spirit of the time as well. Peter Friedlander presents a case study in The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939: A Study in Class and Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975). Although Friedlander notes at the outset that he disagrees with some of Fine’s assumptions and analysis (p. xv), he presents a clear picture of the impact of the Flint sit-down on nearby workers, and on the recruitment of those workers into the UAW (pp. 10–21). Daniel Nelson provides a view of the sit-downs in the rubber industry in “Origins of the Sit-Down Era: Worker Militancy and Innovation in the Rubber Industry, 1934–1938,” Labor History 23 (spring 1982): 198–225. See also Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, pp. 46–48.
9. David Brody, “The Expansion of the American Labor Movement: Institutional Sources of Stimulus and Restraint,” in Institutions in Modern America, ed. Stephen E. Ambrose (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); P. K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), pp. 12–51, 134–172; Thomas R. Brooks, Picket Lines and Bargaining Tables: Organized Labor Comes of Age, 1935–1955 (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1968); Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy Racket (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937).
10. None of the Flint strike leaders could be credited with originality in forging the sit-down weapon. It had been tried unsuccessfully in the Midwest in 1935 and again in the auto industry in Atlanta in 1936. The tactic of the occupational strike had its origins in Europe, where it was popularly known as “the Polish strike.” What made Flint special was that the sit-down had worked against the nation’s largest corporation. See Wyndham Mortimer, Organize! My Life as a Union Man (Boston: Beacon, 1971); Fine, Sit-Down; Michigan Labor History Society, Sit-Down (Detroit: The Society, 1979).
11. Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 19–20; Filipelli, Labor in the U.S.A., p. 185; Edwards, Strikes in the United States, pp. 142–143; Vernon H. Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism, 1932–1954: A Story of Leadership Controversy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954), pp. 10–13.
12. Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 17–19.
CHAPTER II
1. Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 110–117; Paul A. C. Koistinen, “Warfare and Power Relations in America: Mobilizing the World War II Economy,” in The Home Front and War in the Twentieth Century: The American Experience in Comparative Perspective, ed. James Titus (Proceedings of the Tenth Military History Symposium, Oct. 20–22, 1982; Washington, D.C.: U.S. Air Force Academy and Office of Air Force History, 1984), pp. 91–110.
2. David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America Studies in The History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 153–175; Bert Cochran, ed., American Labor in Midpassage (New York: Monthly Review, 1979), pp. 46, 150; Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism During World War II,” in The Labor History Reader, ed. Daniel J. Leab (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), pp.383–406.
3. Paul David Richards, “The History of the Textile Workers Union of America, CIO, in the South, 1937–1945,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1978, p. 184 (hereinafter cited as “History of Textiles”).
4. John Wesley Kennedy, “A History of the Textile Workers Union of America, CIO,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1950, pp. 23–33 (hereinafter cited as “A Textile History)”; Richards, “History of Textiles,” p. 150.
5. Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO (New York: Pioneer, 1964), pp. 257–283.
6. A sense of desperation prevailed among many workers in wartime mass production factories who were laid off in 1945. “They’ve closed up Willow Run,” exclaimed a representative of the CIO. “Nobody wants Willow Run. Nobody wants the 51,950 pieces of machinery. And nobody wants the more than 20,000 human beings who go with the plant” (quoted in William Tuttle, “Cold War Politics, 1945–1961,” in A People and a Nation, vol. 2, ed. Mary Beth Norton et al. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982], p. 843).
7. Sidney Lens, Left, Right, and Center: Conflicting Forces in American Labor (Hinsdale, Ill.: Regnery, 1949), pp. 363–364; Bruce Morris, “Industrial Relations in the Automobile Industry,” in Labor in Postwar America, ed. Colston E. Warne et al. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Remsen, 1949), pp. 399–417; Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 221–232.
8. Richards, “History of Textiles,” p. 95.
9. Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Lawrence C. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); David E. Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965); Glenn Gilman, Human Relations in the Industrial Southeast: A Study of the Textile Industry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956); Margaret J. Hagood, Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939); Jennings J. Rhyne, Some Cotton Mill Workers and Their Villages (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930).
10. Benjamin Stolberg, Nation, Dec. 1929, p. 43.
11. Ibid., pp. 38, 40, 57. “Runaway” textile companies had, by 1935, left “ghost towns across New England where textile mills had thrived” (Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Robert Korstad, and James Leloudis, “Cotton Mill People: Work, Community, and Protest in the Textile South, 1880–1940,” American Historical Review 91 [April 1986]: 278).
12. Richards, “History of Textiles,” pp. 58–59. The bitterness of the 1934 strike, during which no fewer than 11,000 troops were called out by various state governments, left long and angry memories.
13. Kennedy, “A Textile History,” pp. 84–94.
14. Richards, “History of Textiles,” pp. 99–103.
15. By 1945, the comparative regional employment figures were North, 629,000; South, 579,000 (Richards, “History of Textiles,” p. 152).
16. Textile Workers Union of America, Proceedings, Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, May 15–19, 1939, p. 131.
CHAPTER III
1. CIO News Release, Atlanta, June 4, 1946. See George Baldanzi to Van Bittner, July 1, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA); Robert Oliver, Texas state director, to “All Local Unions,” June (n.d.) 1946, Texas Labor Archives, Special Collections Division of The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries; Arlington, Texas, 51-18-11 (hereinafter referred to as UTA).
The South Carolina director, Franz Daniel, seemed to resist this centralization. As late as August 21, and again on August 29, long after this policy had become accepted elsewhere, Bittner was forced to express his anger at unilateral filings for NLRB elections coming out of South Carolina (Van Bittner to Franz Daniel, Aug. 21 and 29, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA; Van Bittner to William Smith, North Carolina state director, Aug. 21, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA). Even when officers were willing to accept such rules and regulations, there was no insurance that the organizers under their direction would comply (Boyd E. Payton, regional director, TWUA, form letter to eight TWUA organizers working in Virginia, Sept. 10, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Virginia Papers, ODA; also Boyd E. Payton, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 27, 1984). One example of CIO staff members who did try to comply is found in Robert Oliver to A. J. Pittman, director, District 8, United Packinghouse Workers of America, dated as “1946,” UTA, 51-13-8.
On the PAC issue, Bittner wrote Daniel: “I think the PAC in South Carolina is about as useful as Bill Green as a CIO organizer. . . . If I had my way about it, as vice chairman of PAC, I would simply dissolve PAC in South Carolina and I expect to work toward that end” (Van Bittner to Franz Daniel, July 3, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA).
2. Bittner was described variously by some who knew him as “phlegmatic,” “pompous,” or “dull,” by Packinghouse Workers’ President Ralph Helstein as “essentially immobile,” and by historian Irving Bernstein as a man “whose supply of vitriol was inexhaustible” (Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971]; p. 544). Relevant are: Ralph Helstein, personal interview, Chicago, Oct. 13, 1984; Karl Korstad, personal interview, Greensboro, N.C., March 29, 1982; Jim Pierce, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 26, 1982; John Russell, personal interview, Arden, N.C., March 12, 1983; Raymond J. Schnell, personal interview, Surf City, N.C., June 27, 1982; Daniel Starnes, personal interview, Oklahoma City, Aug. 10, 1984.
3. Jane and Joel Leighton, personal interview, Annapolis, Dec. 9, 1986.
4. These portraits are assembled from the correspondence written by these men (to be found in the Operation Dixie Archives), by an interview with one state director, Charles Gillman (Riverdale, Ga., July 17 and 21, 1984), and the following interviews with other retired CIO staff members: Lida Hurtt, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 27, 1984; James Jackson, personal interview, East Point, Ga., July 19, 1984; B. T. Judd, personal interview, Knoxville, Tenn., Feb. 28, 1983; Melville Kress, personal interview, Piney Flats, Tenn., Feb. 26, 1983; Nicholas Kurko, personal interview, Fort Worth, Aug. 4, 1984; Frank Parker, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 23, 1984; Pierce interview; Lillian Roehl, personal interview, Silver Spring, Md., March 16, 1984.
5. F. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 247.
6. Ibid.
7. See Chapter VIII on ideological warfare within the labor movement.
8. CIO News, May 6, 1946; “Labor Drives South,” Fortune, Nov. 1946, p. 138. As late as September 1946, CIO officials were still having difficulties in keeping organizers focused on the big plants and away from the small ones—a tendency that must have been unavoidable on occasion, in order to achieve some results and maintain morale. However, according to the North Carolina state director, the CIO had “had some very sad experiences with these small plants,” and he insisted that organizers follow the CIO’s strategy (William Smith to “All Staff Members,” Sept. 12, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA).
9. Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
10. Marshall, Labor in the South, p. 256; Frank T. De Vyver, “The Present Status of Labor Unions in the South, 1948,” Southern Economic Journal 16 (July 1949): 1–22.
A number of veteran CIO organizers had obviously understood the need to target “bellwether plants,” in the sense that the industry wage would not be changed significantly until the big plants were organized (Schnell interview; John Thomas, personal interview, Oak Ridge, Tenn., Aug. 14, 1984; James Touchstone, personal interview, Meridian, Miss., July 27, 1984).
11. However, the CIO News reported that seventy-eight organizers were working in North and South Carolina as of July 29, 1946, an increase due perhaps to a decision to concentrate more of the CIO’s personnel on textile states, or an exaggeration by the labor press.
12. Details of the conclave of FTA organizers at Highlander Folk School were provided by Karl Korstad (Korstad interview). Under the general heading of “problems of setting up an ad-hoc committee” such as Operation Dixie, one notes that the drive in Mississippi operated more or less out of the hip pocket of the Mississippi state director, Robert Starnes, throughout the summer of 1946. It was not until August 20 that Starnes found permanent office space in Jackson (Starnes to Eugene Albert Roper, Jr., quoted in Roper, “The CIO Organizing Committee in Mississippi, June 1946–January 1949,” unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Mississippi, 1949, pp. 1–2.
13. Parker and Starnes interviews; Geneva Sneed, personal interview, Knoxville, Tenn., Aug. 14, 1984. A sophisticated discussion of the benefits that accrue from assigning organizers to their “home” industries is offered in a letter from Toby Mendes to George Baldanzi, June 21, 1946, in the course of resisting Baldanzi’s decision to transfer him elsewhere (CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina, ODA).
14. Van Bittner to “All State Directors,” June 3, 1946, and S. H. Dalrymple, secretary-treasurer, CIO Organizing Committee, to “All State Directors,” June 3, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA. For examples of the controversy between state directors and field staff, see Glenn Earp, Gene Day, and Bill Hopps, Sumter, S.C., to Franz Daniel, July 9, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA; Franz Daniel to Glenn Earp, July 12 and July 17, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.
At the close of June, the initiation fee was still not being collected. In Georgia, the CIO’s state director, Charles Gillman, was “very much disturbed” as a result of the “organizing efforts in Athens, Georgia, and the failure to charge the initiation fee of $1.00” (George Baldanzi to John McCoy, second vice president, American Federation of Hosiery Workers, June 26, 1941, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA).
Perhaps as an effort to compete with the CIO, the AFL was not attempting to collect initiation fees under the Southern campaign it had begun at the same time, although there was some confusion over the exact nature of official policy on this matter, as was also the case in the CIO (Anthony Valente, international president, UTWA-AFL, to Paul Smith, regional director, AFL, Richmond, Va., Sept. 27, 1946, Joseph Jacobs Collection, SLA/GSU 1039-208. See also Ward B. Melody, Texas District Council, American Newspaper Guild, to Franz Daniel, Sept. 27, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.)
15. Nancy Blaine, Report of Activities, July 21–26, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
16. Sumter, South Carolina, was but one of many towns in which police harassment made it extremely difficult for the local organizer to do his job. “Late yesterday afternoon the Chief of Police picked him up and paraded him all over town in the police car. No charges were filed and Earp was released immediately” (Franz Daniel to Van Bittner, July 30, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA).
17. For details of anti-union newspapers published by religious fundamentalists, see CIO News, June 3, 1946. Also see Stetson Kennedy, Southern Exposure (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1946). “The activities of mill village preachers in Liberty and Easley are distinctly bad” (Lucy Randolph Mason, Atlanta, to Franz Daniel, Sept. 14, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA).
18. In an effort to cope with the hostility of local police and elected officials, the CIO hired Mason to be its Southern public relations representative. She would visit communities in advance of an organizing campaign in order to persuade unfriendly officials over to the CIO’s side or, at least, to urge them to enforce the law and protect the rights of the organizers. For further information about Mason’s experiences with the CIO, see Lucy Randolph Mason, To Win These Rights: A Personal Story of the CIO in the South (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952). The matter is treated in greater detail in Chapter VII.
19. Edmund F. Ryan, Alabama state director, Textile Workers Union of America, to George Baldanzi, Oct. 25, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA.
20. “In the Handleman Mills, Incorporated, of 208 eligible voters, 154 had signed up with us on a $1.00 basis. The organizer there did a good job and worked hard. The workers at the outset had several issues which bothered them. They, therefore, wanted the union. However, the employer granted them their requests and there was no longer any interest in the Union. Two or three days prior to the election our organizers were sure we would win this one, but despite the fact that we had 154 paid up, we only got 38 votes” (William Smith to Van Bittner, Oct. 10, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA).
21. “Comer is fighting the union with two weapons—on the one hand a very paternalistic system as regards wages, insurance, health, home and safety conditions; and on the other hand a very vicious system of outright firing, discrimination and every conceivable way to terrorize workers whom he finds belong to the Union” (Edmund F. Ryan to Emil Rieve, general-president, TWUA, Oct. 25, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA).
22. Edwin E. Pieper, Report of Preliminary Plant Survey, Ecusta Paper Corporation, July 19, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA.
23. Van Bittner to state directors, July 1, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.
24. D. D. Wood to Dean Culver, Concord, N.C., July 9, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; Van Bittner to Franz Daniel, Spartanburg, S.C., Aug. 27, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA; Texas State Nineteenth Industrial Union Council, CIO, Proceedings, Nineteenth Annual Convention, Austin, Tex., Oct. 19–20, 1946, p. 22; Frank Ellis, vice president, United Packinghouse Workers of America, to A. J. Pittman, director, District 8, Sept. 5, 1946, UTA, 15–17-1.
25. Harry Stroud, Activity Report, July 1–7 and 8–14, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; R. C. Thomas to William Smith, July 17, 1946; CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
26. Donald Swazey to Ernest Pugh, Virginia state director, July 30, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Virginia Papers, ODA; Joe Kirk to Draper Wood, July 1, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
27. Edmund F. Ryan to Emil Rieve, Oct. 26, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA; Edmund F. Ryan to George Baldanzi, Oct. 25, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Virginia Papers, ODA.
28. Dean Culver to D. D. Wood, July 19, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA. The intent here is to describe the remarkable ingenuity of organizers under the pressure of intense opposition and defeat; it is not in any way intended to denigrate their efforts or to call into question their honesty. One of the greatest challenges in organizing is the ability to keep going each day, especially when previous efforts have not been very successful. The euphemisms in these field reports can be understood as organizers’ efforts to convince themselves to keep going, as well as attempts to calm the fears of their supervisors. However understandable, such reports did not do much to help the cause. As one veteran organizer, who had had extensive supervisory experience and routinely received field reports from local organizers, said, “The experienced director didn’t look at rhetoric on reports; they just looked at numbers.” Going one step further, if an organizer sent in a lengthy “narrative report, you could bet it was just crap” (Pierce interview). For a more detailed analysis of this important component in the interior life of Operation Dixie, see Chapter IX.
29. CIO Executive Board Minutes, CIO Headquarters, Washington, D.C., July 22, 1946; CIO News, July 22 and 29, 1946.
30. The AP wire report on the CIO meeting was picked up by a number of the nation’s metropolitan dailies; Newsweek, July 8, 1946, also carried an optimistic report on the CIO’s Southern drive.
31. A detailed case study of the protracted struggle against one of the bellwethers—the Cannon chain—is presented in the next chapter. The CIO had been making even less headway in another textile-dominated state: South Carolina. By August 29, 1946, the CIO had held only one election in the state during the drive, and that election did not even involve textiles (Bittner to Daniel, Aug. 27, 1946). Perhaps it was from such difficulties that at least one CIO organizer said that everyone knew that being sent to South Carolina was “like being sent to Siberia” (Lloyd Gossett, personal interview, East Point, Ga., July 21, 1984).
32. “To all Caramount Workers,” Aug. 6, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
33. “Elections Won,” undated CIO compilation, CIO Organizing Committee, Virginia Papers, ODA.
34. William Smith to Frank Bartholomew, July 17, 1946; George Baldanzi to Hannah Pickett Mills Company, July 24, 1946; D. D. Wood to William Smith, July 29, 1946; D. D. Wood to Frank Bartholomew, Aug. 9 and 12, 1946—all CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
35. “Elections Won,” undated CIO compilation.
36. William Smith to R. C. Thomas, Aug. 10, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA. Smith was even more direct to his Western area director, Wade Lynch: “You have been calling me quite often and telling me how much you are doing in the Western area. However, I fail to see any initiations or membership cards coming in. What are you doing—holding them back to make a big showing at one time—or are you just not getting any?” (William Smith to Wade Lynch, Aug. 14, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA).
37. By October, CIO staff anxiety over the situation in textiles was being expressed openly in letters to one another. “I am terribly anxious to get going in the textile industry” (Van Bittner to Franz Daniel, Oct. 11, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA); “May I suggest that you begin to transfer most of the staff not engaged in the textile industry” (Van Bittner to Charles Gillman, Georgia state director, Oct. 11, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA). Also see Van Bittner to Ernest Pugh, Virginia state director, Oct. 11, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Virginia Papers, ODA; Van Bittner to William Smith, Oct. 11, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; George Baldanzi to Van Bittner, “re: Peerless Woolen Company,” July 27, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; Paul Christopher, Tennessee state director, to Franz Daniel, Nov. 23, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA.
38. Ryan to Rieve, Oct. 25, 1946; CIO News, Sept. 30, 1946; “Labor Drives South,” Fortune, Nov. 1946, p. 139.
39. Fortune delineated quite clearly the intimate relationship between the CIO’s overall chances of success in the South and its performance in textiles (“Labor Drives South,” p. 138).
40. Walter Orrell, personal interview, Linwood, N.C., May 12, 1982.
41. Jerome Cooper, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 24, 1984
42. Palmer Weber, personal interview, Charlottesville, Va., April 15, 1984.
43. Ibid.
44. “When I first got into the CIO [in 1946], there was a fire and a verve, a crusading fervor in the movement” (Kress interview).
45. “The Southern drive failed because we followed a Northern strategy” (Tom Knight, personal interview, Jackson, Miss., July 28, 1984).
46. “Our situation in Charleston is largely dominated by extreme left wing elements. As a result, we are losing our wide membership” (Franz Daniel to Van Bittner, Sept. 10, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA). This interpretation must be assessed against countervailing evidence offered by Daniel when he was not under the pressure of explaining to Bittner, his superior, the reasons for the textile organizing failure in South Carolina. For example, three weeks later, when writing to a competing colleague, Tennessee State Director Paul Christopher, Daniel managed a different overall assessment: “Progress is slow, but very healthy” (Franz Daniel to Paul Christopher, Oct. 3, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA).
47. “This [organizing defeat] does not make me feel too happy. . . . The company embarked on a purely Communistic campaign in the last few days prior to the election” (Frank Ellis to A. J. Pittman, United Packinghouse Workers of America, Sept. 8, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA).
48. “We had a lot of organizers who talked over the heads of the workers. Educated fools. We had a meeting where a rep was talking about trying to get some key contacts in the plant. Said he would go to town to see if he could ‘ascertain’ what kind of guy this fellow was. I said, ‘Ascertain’ hell! Just go out there and see if he lives there! Talk to him!’ That guy used that word all the time. ‘Ascertain!’” (Judd interview).
49. Van Bittner to Anthony Lucio, July 3, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA; Chris Dixie, personal interview, Houston, July 31, 1984; Charles Wilson, personal interview, Fairfield, Ala., July 25, 1984; Jackson interview.
50. CIO News, Sept. 23, 1946; Nov. 11, 1946; Jan. 27, 1947; Feb. 3, 10, 17, and 24, 1947; March 3, 10, 17, and 24, 1947; April 14 and 21, 1947. It should be recorded that a great many organizers—probably a clear majority, based on the available evidence—handled the question of “blame” with considerable poise, and could later recount vivid details, without any pejorative overtones, of tension between organizers and workers. Even a wry humor could be achieved, as demonstrated by Ray Schnell, a steelworker sent south by his International to work in Operation Dixie: “In house-to-house work, you could almost tell when a worker is really shooting you a curve. He might be telling you what he thinks you want to hear, or he might just tell you right out. I’ve had them pull guns on me and tell me to get the hell off their porch and everything else. And you’re pretty sure, then, that they don’t want the union” (Schnell interview).
51. Smith to Bittner, Oct. 10, 1946.
52. These issues form the bases of Chapters IV–VIII.
53. Report on CIO Organizing Staff Meeting, Chattanooga, Tenn., Dec. 2, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA.
54. “CIO’s ‘holy crusade’ to organize a million southern workers moved off to a flying start in May in Atlanta, Ga.” (CIO News, May 13, 1946).
55. See James E. Fickle, The New South and the “New Competition”: Trade Association Development in the Southern Pine Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980). Also see Jerry Lembcke and William M. Tattam, One Union in Wood: A Political History of the International Woodworkers of America (New York: International Publishers, 1984).
56. Marshall, Labor in the South, pp. 256–259; De Vyver, “Present Status of Labor Unions in the South,” pp. 10–14; Roper, “The CIO Organizing Committee in Mississippi,” pp. 17–33; United Furniture Workers of America, “Resume of Minutes of the General Executive Board Meeting,” New York, Dec. 7–8, 1946, p. 9.
57. F. Ray Marshall, “Some Factors Influencing the Growth of Unions in the South,” in Industrial Relations Research Association, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting, ed. Gerald G. Somers (St. Louis: The Association, 1960), pp. 166–182.
58. William Smith to “Dear Sir and Brother,” sent to twenty-three staff members, Dec. 2, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
59. George Baldanzi to William Smith, Dec. 13, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; Paul Christopher to Melville Kress, Nov. 13, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA.
60. Jesse Smith to Baldanzi, Dec. 11, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; Baldanzi to Smith, Dec. 13, 1946.
61. See Chapter IV.
CHAPTER IV
1. This is not to imply, however, that textiles were the only “runaway” shops. To name several others, managers of industries engaged in furniture, wood and wood products, and tanneries that required tree bark as part of the production process all saw the advantage in moving operations closer to the Southern forests.
2. A detailed historical overview of textile workers and the dynamics of life in mill villages from 1880 to 1980 are among the subjects of an extensive work in progress entitled, “Like a Family: An Oral History of the Textile South,” a project of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Robert Korstad, and James Leloudis, “Cotton Mill People: Work, Community, and Protest in the Textile South, 1880–1940,” American Historical Review 91 (April 1986): 245–286; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Journal of American History 73 (Sept. 1986): 354–382. John G. Selby provides a relevant case study of life in High Point, North Carolina, in “Industrial Growth and Worker Protest in a New South City: High Point, North Carolina, 1859–1959,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1984.
John Shelton Reed explores some of the differences between Northern and Southern labor, in part by examining that which has so often been referred to as “different regional characteristics” (John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982]).
3. Cannon’s Amazon mill at Thomasville had technically been organized during World War II, but the result could not be considered an indication of successes still to come. “Management hostility [at Amazon] was so intense the NWLB contract remained virtually unobserved” (Paul David Richards, “The History of the Textile Workers Union of America, CIO, in the South, 1937–1945,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1978, p. 167, hereinafter cited as “History of Textiles”).
4. The twenty-first mill was at York, South Carolina. This summary of the Cannon complex was compiled by the CIO team there. See William Smith to Van Bittner, Atlanta, Aug. 9, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
5. The strongest argument against the small plant approach was experiential: the TWUA had tried it once before—in 1938–1941. “Success, coming slowly, painfully, was measured in terms of footholds rather than membership or dues” (Richards, “History of Textiles,” pp. 92–93).
6. Walter Orrell, personal interview, Linwood, N.C., May 12, 1982; Robert Freeman, personal interview, Kannapolis, N.C., Nov. 6, 1964. Freeman was born and raised in Kannapolis and joined the CIO staff there in the early summer of 1946.
7. As one staff member put it, “You couldn’t get an office in Kannapolis, I’ll guarantee you that, ’cause Cannon owned every nail in the buildings down there” (Orrell interview).
8. “Initial Report on the Kannapolis Situation,” July 9, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
9. Freeman interview.
10. Ibid.
11. When organizers used the word “emotional,” it often had the effect of glossing over something they could not fathom. While a perfectly understandable response to a frustrating situation, it was not a term of sufficient precision that it would help them find out and isolate what the concrete problems, in fact, were. The form and style of this unsigned report indicate that it was probably not written by Culver, but, rather, by his most gifted subordinate, Harry St. Clair Stroud (“Initial Report on the Kannapolis Situation”).
12. Harry Stroud, “Weekly Report, 7/8–7/14,” 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
13. Nancy Blaine, “Report of Activities, 7/14–7/20,” 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
14. Harry Stroud, “Weekly Report, June 24–June 30,” 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA. Also Joe Kirk, Jr., “Report of Week’s Work, Monday June 24th,” 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
15. Marcelle Malamas, “Report of Activities for 6/23–6/29, 1946,” CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; Stroud, June 24–30, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
16. Marcelle Malamas, “Report of Activities for 6/9–6/15, 1946,” CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
17. Ibid.
18. Fred Wingard to D. D. Wood, CIO area director, “Weekly Report,” June 24–29, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
19. Draper Wood to Bruno Rantane, June 25, 1946, Textile Workers Union of America, Greensboro-Burlington, (N.C.) Joint Board Papers, ODA. The CIO staff did try, however, to use workers’ previous contact with organized labor to their advantage, with one organizer reporting that she had spent the “entire day” in the office, working on a “draft of letter to Cannon workers who signed pledge card two years ago” (Malamas, “Report of Activities for 6/23–6/29, 1946”). The Malamas report referred to workers signed up during the wartime campaign at the Amazon plant in Thomasville, North Carolina. (See note 3, Chapter IV.)
20. Ibid. For additional examples of organizers’ work with veterans, see Stroud, “Weekly Report, June 24–June 30,” 1946, and Kirk “Report of Week’s Work, Monday, June 24th,” 1946.
21. “Initial Report on the Kannapolis Situation.”
22. Ibid.
23. Associated Press dispatch, “Rules of Conduct Given to CIO Men,” Concord, N.C. June 28, 1946, CIO Publicity Department, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
24. Dean Culver to “Dear Friend,” July 10, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
25. Dean Culver to Draper Wood, July 9, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
26. Harry Stroud, “Weekly Report,” July 22–28, and Joe Kirk, Jr., “Weekly Report,” July 22–28, both from CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
27. Draper Wood to Dean Culver, July 9, 1946; Draper Wood to Frank Bartholomew, July 9, 1946; and Draper Wood to Clyde Jenkins, July 9, 1946—all from CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
28. Draper Wood to Ruth Gettinger, July 9, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA. Gettinger’s later report to State Director Smith on the subject of pastors she contacted in the Concord-Kannapolis area may be understood as an attempt to comply with Wood’s directives (Ruth Gettinger to William Smith, July 23, 1946, John G. Ramsay Collection, SLA/GSU, 1566-132).
29. Wood to Gettinger, July 9, 1946.
30. In case Culver was unclear about the dimensions of the weekly workload, Wood added: “If you have mass mailing to go out, please arrange it so it can be worked out on Sundays” (Draper Wood to Dean Culver, July 10, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA).
31. Identical letters from Draper Wood to Dean Culver, Frank Bartholomew, and Clyde Jenkins, July 19, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
32. Dean Culver, “Report of Activity, Concord-Kannapolis Situation, Week of July 21st,” 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
33. See pages 40–42, Chapter III.
34. William Smith to Van Bittner, Aug. 8, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
35. Dean Culver to Draper Wood, Aug. 5, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
36. Dean Culver to Draper Wood, Aug. 12, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
37. Dean Culver to Draper Wood, Aug. 20, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
38. In actual contributions, as distinct from pledges, CIO internationals other than the TWUA put an average of $90,000 per month into Operation Dixie between the opening of the campaign and the general reappraisal that took place at the National CIO Convention in October 1946. To this sum must be added the $95,000 per month invested by the TWUA itself. These figures may best be described as highly informed estimates rather than an exact accounting. Overall expenditures, according to Marshall, are “impossible to calculate” (Ray Marshall, “Some Factors Influencing the Growth of Unions in the South,” in Industrial Relations Research Association, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting, ed. Gerald G. Somers (St. Louis: The Association, 1961), p. 166 n.; CIO Executive Board Minutes, Washington, D.C., Jan. 22 and 23, 1948).
39. Dean Culver, “Report of Activity,” Oct. 9, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
40. Dean Culver, “Suggestions,” ca. Sept. 17, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
41. Concord Tribune, Oct. 23, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
42. “I have a feeling in my bones that this coming year is going to be one of great activity for us, and I do not think it will be all bad. I am sure you will be interested to know that this past week has been one of the greatest activity there has been since I have been in here. That does not mean the mills are organized, or even started. But compared to the deadness that has been here, the widely scattered reaction and the few members that have suddenly started signing up, coming to the office, and showing a general interest is most heartening. We may organize something here yet this year” Joel Leighton to Emil Rieve, Jan. 18, 1947, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA).
Certainly, different individuals possessed differing degrees of competence. For a range of scholarly opinion, see Richards, “History of Textiles”; Patricia Hammond Levenstein, “The Failure of Unionization in the Southern Textile Industry: A Case Study,” unpublished M.S. thesis, Cornell University, 1964); John Wesley Kennedy, “A History of the Textile Workers Union of America, CIO,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1950 (hereinafter cited as “A Textile History”). Also relevant are Joseph A. McDonald, “Textile Workers and Unionization: A Community Study,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tennessee, 1981); Barry E. Truchil, “Capital-Labor Relationships in the United States Textile Industry: The Post-World War II Period,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1982; Ralph R. Triplette, Jr., “One-Industry Towns: Their Location, Development, and Economic Character,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1974). For particular attention to conflict among TWUA leadership at different points in history, see Daniel Regis Knighton, “A Special Case of Union Influence on Wages: The Textile Workers Union of America,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1972; Boyd E. Payton, Scapegoat: Prejudice/Politics/Prison (Philadelphia: Whitmore, 1970); Boyd E. Payton, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 20 and 27, 1984.
43. The nine states were North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana.
44. Research Department, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union of America, New York, “Textile Workers Union of America: Representation Elections in the South,” statistical compilations for 1946 by the author. The “other unions” cited above included one mention of “AFL,” presumably the UTWA, the ILGWU, and District 50 (Frank T. De Vyver, “The Present Status of Labor Unions in the South, 1948,” Southern Economic Journal 16 [July 1949]: 13).
45. Bessie Shankle, personal interview, Kannapolis, N.C., Nov. 6, 1986.
46. Doris Sloop, personal interview, Kannapolis, N.C., Nov. 6, 1986.
47. Ray Beam, personal interview, Kannapolis, N.C., Nov. 6, 1986.
48. Sloop interview.
49. Chuck Wilson, personal interview, Kannapolis, N.C., Nov. 6, 1986.
50. Ibid.
51. Shankle interview.
52. Ibid.
53. A detailed history of the 1934 general strike by Janet Irons of Duke University is forthcoming.
54. Freeman interview.
55. Shankle interview.
56. Ibid.
CHAPTER V
1. Ralph Helstein, personal interview, Chicago, Oct. 13, 1984. It should be noted that unionization in the telephone industry had a long and complex history, in part a result of the structure of the industry itself. While there was a history of cooperation between them, particularly in the Southwest, the CWA did not join the CIO until 1949. For a detailed discussion, see John N. Schacht, The Making of Telephone Unionism, 1920–1947 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), especially pp. 100–190.
2. Van Bittner, in an early organizing meeting in Atlanta, CIO News, May 13, 1946.
3. CIO News, May 13, 1946.
4. CIO News, May 6, 1946 and June 10, 1946.
5. CIO News, June 24, 1946.
6. CIO News, Nov. 25, 1946. One political writer referred to this activity by saying that “dark Mississippi” is “sorely sick with Bilbonic plague” (Walter Davenport, “Headache Down South,” Collier’s, July 13, 1946, p. 14, Carey Haigler Collection, SLA/GSU, 952–16). The Washington, D.C., CIO Council pressed the labor secretary into ending the practice of separate lines at U.S. Employment Service offices, with separate sets of interviewers and separate sets of files for each race (CIO News, Sept. 30, 1946).
7. Ralph Helstein, international president, United Packinghouse Workers of America, Chicago, “To All District Directors, Field Representatives, and Affiliated Local Unions,” July 12, 1946, UTA, 51-15-11. According to Helstein, the arrests of these thirty-one blacks, more than half of whom were veterans, had been the result of a “dispute between a white shopkeeper and a Negro customer. They culminated in lynch threats, an armed invasion of the Negro district, wanton destruction of Negro property and wholesale arrests and beatings of Negro citizens.” He assured staff members that any financial help they might provide would “pay dividends to coming generations.”
8. Donald Henderson, general president, FTA, Philadelphia, “To CIO International Unions, Industrial Union Councils, Regional Directors and Labor Editors, and to FTA International Vice-Presidents, Regional Directors, International Representatives and Organizers, and Local Union Presidents,” Aug. 1, 1946, UTA, 36-1-2; CIO News, Aug. 26, 1946.
9. CIO News, Aug. 5, 1946.
10. James Augustine Gross, “The NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and the Negro Worker,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1962; James S. Olson, “Organized Black Leadership and Industrial Unionism: The Racial Response, 1936–1945,” Labor History 10 (summer 1969): 475–486; John Streater, “The National Negro Congress, 1936–1947,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1980; Herbert R. Northrup and Richard L. Rowan, Negro Employment in Southern Industry (Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 1970); F. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Dorothy K. Newman et al., Protest, Politics, and Prosperity: Black Americans and White Institutions, 1940–75 (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
11. F.A.C.T., first quarter, 1946, SLA/GSU.
12. CIO News, Nov. 25, 1946.
13. Jim Pierce, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 26, 1982.
14. Karl Korstad, personal interview, Greensboro, N.C., March 29, 1982.
15. B. T. Judd, personal interview, Knoxville, Tenn., Feb. 28, 1983.
16. Helstein interview.
17. Pierce interview.
18. James Jackson, personal interview, East Point, Ga., July 19, 1984.
19. On the internal racial policies of the postwar AFL and CIO, a solid source, in addition to Northrup and Rowan, is N. F. Davis, “Trade Unions’ Practices and the Negro Worker: The Establishment and Implementation of AFL-CIO Anti-Discrimination Policy,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1960. As has been noted by many scholars, the CIO’s philosophical commitment to industrial unionism, as distinct from the craft orientation of the AFL, encouraged mass recruitment irrespective of race. However, customs developed within such industrial and craft unions could sometimes prove more powerful than the established philosophies of either the CIO or the AFL. In comparing the racial policies of the (relatively few) AFL industrial unions with those of the (relatively few) CIO craft unions, Davis notes that “the industrial AFL unions generally displayed better racial policies than the craft CIO unions” (p. 41).
20. Woody Biggs, personal interview, Jackson, Miss., July 28, 1984; Pierce and Korstad interviews.
21. Frank Parker, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 23, 1984.
22. Biggs interview.
23. Jerome Cooper, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 24, 1984.
24. Parker interview.
25. Biggs interview.
26. Barney Weeks, personal interview, Montgomery, Ala., July 26, 1984. This incident had a certain impact on a number of organizers in Alabama. Frank Parker also referred to this incident.
27. Biggs interview.
28. Ibid.
29. Private interviews with two sources, not for attribution. One black organizer, with a long association with one of the more left-wing unions, replied to telephone inquiries as to his whereabouts that the organizer in question was “deceased.” James A. Gross points out that the focus of a great deal of labor history has centered on those workers who were organized, thus leading to the neglect of the majority of black workers who were not organized at all. He suggests the need for studies and autobiographies of “non-policy-making, non-establishment, non-intellectual Black workers” of the sort that would make “exceptionally valuable” oral history projects. The point is well taken. A problem, however, is the one that has already presented itself in this study: an unwillingness on the part of at least some retired black organizers to resurrect such memories (James Augustine Gross, “Historians and the Literature of the Negro Worker,” Labor History 10 [summer 1969]: 536–546.
30. Biggs interview. The same general assessment was made by many organizers (Pierce interview; Daniel Starnes, personal interview, Oklahoma City, Aug. 10, 1984; Parker interview; Charles Gillman, personal interview, Riverdale, Ga., July 17 and 21, 1984.
31. Raymond J. Schnell, personal interview, Surf City, N.C., June 27, 1982.
32. Judd interview.
33. Cooper interview.
34. Weeks interview.
35. Walter Orrell, personal interview, Linwood, N.C., May 12, 1982.
36. Parker interview.
37. Pierce interview.
38. Charles Wilson, personal interview, Fairfield, Ala., July 25, 1984.
39. Lloyd Gossett, personal interview, East Point, Ga., July 21, 1984.
40. Pierce interview.
41. William Smith to Frank Green, Oct. 3, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
42. Franz Daniel to Frank Grasso, International Representative, United Paperworkers of America, Sept. 30, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.
43. Van A. Bittner to Anthony Lucio, secretary-treasurer, National Maritime Union Hall, July 3, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA. It should also be noted here that admonitions that “the prime objective of CIO is to organize unions and bring about higher wages and better living standards through genuine collective bargaining” were used to castigate and, eventually, expel suspected Communists from the CIO, because they had priorities that orthodox CIO staffers regarded as “higher” than the “simple goal” of unionization. This issue is explored in Chapter VIII on ideology.
44. John Russell, personal interview, Arden, N.C., March 12, 1983.
45. Weeks interview. Also relevant is Donald Dewey, “Negro Employment in Southern Industry,” Journal of Political Economy 60 (Aug. 1952): 279–293. Bernard Mergen presents a detailed study of the concrete problems presented to one international in “A History of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, 1933–1951,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1968, especially pp. 138–144.
46. Biggs interview.
47. Pierce interview.
48. Parker interview.
49. Biggs interview.
50. Russell interview.
51. Olson, “Organized Black Leadership and Industrial Unionism,” p. 481; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), especially pp. 9–30.
52. Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942); Robert Durden, The Dukes of Durham (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975).
53. Karl Korstad, “An Account of the ‘Left-Led’ CIO Unions’ Efforts to Build Unity Among the Workers in Southern Factories During the 1940’s,” paper presented at the Southern Labor History Conference, Oct. 1982, Atlanta; Korstad interview.
54. Russell interview. Clearly employers had history on their side in persuading black workers that unions had never treated them equally. Robert C. Weaver provides illuminating conclusions on this subject in Negro Labor: A National Problem (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), especially pp. 215–245. See also Herbert Hill, “Labor Unions and the Negro: A Record of Discrimination,” Commentary 1 (Dec. 1959): 479–488. Raymond Wolters provides background out of an earlier historical period in “Section 7a and the Black Worker,” Labor History 10 (summer 1969): 459–474.
55. Biggs interview.
56. Chris Dixie, personal interview, Houston, July 31, 1984.
57. Michael S. Homes provides background on the historical roots of racial wage differentials in the South, in “The Blue Eagle as Jim Crow Bird’: The NRA and Georgia’s Black Workers,” Journal of Negro History 57 (July 1972): 276–283.
58. Helstein interview; Steve R. Mauser, field representative, UPWA, to A. J. Pittman, director, District 8, Nov. 6, 1946, UTA, 51-17-1. See also Philip Weightman, vice president, UPWA, Chicago, to A. J. Pittman, Dec. 21, 1946, UTA 57-17-1. Northrup and Rowan provide additional background on blacks in the Southern packinghouses, in Negro Employment in Southern Industry. For a study of black packinghouse workers in Fort Worth, see Moses Adedeji, “The Stormy Past: A History of the United Packinghouse Workers of America–CIO, Fort Worth, Texas, 1936–1956,” unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1975.
59. Helstein interview.
CHAPTER VI
1. Lloyd Gossett, personal interview, East Point, Ga., July 21, 1984.
2. John Russell, personal interview, Arden, N.C., March 12, 1983.
3. Jerome Cooper, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 24, 1984.
4. Woody Biggs, personal interview, Jackson, Miss., July 28, 1984.
5. CIO News, Oct. 28, 1946.
6. Paul Schuler to George Baldanzi, Atlanta, June 20, 1946, ODA.
7. Eula McGill, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 24, 1984.
8. CIO News, May 27, 1946. For evidence of anxiety stirred among CIO staff organizers by various corporate campaigns, see Franz Daniel to Van Bittner, July 30, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA; Franz Daniel to John J. Brownlee, July 26, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA; Steve R. Mauser, field representative, United Packinghouse Workers of America–CIO, to A. J. Pittman, Nov. 6, 1946, UTA, 51-17-1. Other sources that bear on this issue are E. K. Bowers, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 24, 1984; Purnell Maloney, personal interview, Mebane, N.C., July 11, 1984; Herbert S. Williams, personal interview, Nashville, Tenn., Aug. 13, 1984; interview; Cooper, Nicholas Kurko personal interview, Fort Worth, Aug. 4, 1984; McGill interview; Boyd E. Payton, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 20 and 27, 1984.
9. The statement is meant to apply as a generalization, all exceptions being freely conceded. J. Wayne Flynt, for example, is careful to record occasional exceptions to the pattern of ministerial support for textile management, noting that established Southern churches “were largely apathetic about economic injustice” and were “often” allied to the business community (J. Wayne Flynt, Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites [Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979], pp. 70–71).
10. For a searing account, based on local studies, of authoritarian police practices in Southern mill villages, see Paul David Richards, “The History of the Textiles Workers Union of America, CIO, in the South,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1978, pp. 1–12 (hereinafter cited as “History of Textiles”).
11. James Jackson, personal interview, East Point, Ga., July 19, 1984.
12. Barney Weeks, personal interview, Montgomery, Ala., July 26, 1984.
13. Jackson interview.
14. Geneva Sneed, personal interview, Knoxville, Tenn., Aug. 14, 1984.
15. Gossett interview.
16. Lloyd Davis, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 23, 1984.
17. McGill interview.
18. Davis interview.
19. Walter Orrell, personal interview, Linwood, N.C., May 12, 1982.
20. McGill interview.
21. Davis interview.
22. Gossett interview.
23. Until very recent years, Southern academics have generally characterized these dynamics in terms of results rather than analyzing the process that produced them. Thus, “each succeeding generation saw more Southerners fall into the socially ignorable ranks of white trash. They became the original lazy men; illiterate, worthless, debilitated” (Thomas D. Clark, The Emerging South [New York: Oxford University Press, 1961], p. 26). The disdain that “town people” had for “mill persons” is one of the sociological features of the South that comes through quite clearly in the detailed study of a piedmont town published in the 1950s; (John Kenneth Moreland, Millways of Kent [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958], p. 125).
24. “Memorandum by Lucy R. Mason,” Greenville, S.C., Aug. 13, 1946, Lucy Randolph Mason Papers, ODA.
25. Cooper interview. Also relevant are Howard Strevel, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 24, 1984; Chris Dixie, personal interview, Houston, July 31, 1984.
26. Carey E. Haigler to John J. Brownlee, Legal Department, CIO Organizing Committee, Atlanta, Oct. 22, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA.
27. Dean L. Culver, personal interview, Concord, N.C., July 1, 1982.
28. Frank Parker, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 23, 1984. Also relevant among many others are interviews with Cooper and Orrell; Daniel Starnes, personal interview, Oklahoma City, Aug. 10, 1984; Jim Pierce, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 26, 1982; John Thomas, personal interview, Oak Ridge, Tenn., Aug. 14, 1984; James Jackson, personal interview, East Point, Ga., July 19, 1984. See also Edmund F. Ryan to Emil Rieve, Oct. 25, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA.
29. Cooper interview.
30. M. W. Lynch, western area director, to William Smith, Aug. 4, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; William Smith to M. W. Lynch, Aug. 5, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; Pierce, Culver, Dixie, and Orrell interviews.
31. Nelson Lichtenstein presents a thorough examination of interaction between the CIO and the federal government during World War II and the legacy of that relationship in Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
32. Raymond J. Schnell, personal interview, Surf City, N.C., June 27, 1982.
33. Schnell and Gossett interviews; James Touchstone, personal interview, Meridian, Miss., July 27, 1984.
34. Gossett and Melville Kress, personal interview, Piney Flats, Tenn., Touchstone interviews; Feb. 26, 1983.
35. Daniel to Bittner, Atlanta, July 30, 1946.
36. Cooper interview.
37. B. T. Judd, personal interview, Knoxville, Tenn., Feb. 28, 1983; Schnell interview; Jerome Cooper to William Smith, Nov. 5, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
38. CIO News, Oct. 28, 1946.
39. CIO News Nov. 11, 1946.
40. CIO News, Nov. 4, 1946.
41. Touchstone interview. Baldanzi even called on the Internal Revenue Service for help on one occasion during the second month of Operation Dixie. His complaint concerned the Farmers’ States’ Rights Association of Rock Hill, South Carolina, and several other organizations that had been soliciting contributions to back a “newspaper propaganda campaign against the CIO under the guise of advertising.” Contributors had been told that their contributions would be tax deductible (George Baldanzi to Commissioner Joseph D. Nunam, Internal Revenue Service, Washington, D.C., “Night Letter,” June 19, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
42. Weeks interview.
43. Gossett interview.
44. Schnell interview.
45. Orrell interview.
46. Palmer Weber, personal interview, Charlottesville, Va., April 15, 1984. For a closer examination of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers “tradition” referred to above, see Vernon H. Jensen, Nonferrous Metal Industry Unionism, 1932–1954: A Story of Leadership Controversy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954); Horace Huntley, “Iron Ore Miners and Mine Mill in Alabama, 1933–1952,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1977.
47. Touchstone interview.
48. Parker interview.
49. Schnell interview.
50. Tom Knight, personal interview, Jackson, Miss., July 28, 1984.
51. Edmund F. Ryan, Jr., Alabama state director, TWUA, to Emil Rieve, general president, TWUA, Oct. 25, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA.
52. Glenn Earp to Franz Daniel, July 28, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.
53. Daniel to Bittner, July 30, 1946.
54. Ibid. For other examples, see “CIO Organizing Staff Meeting,” Chattanooga, Tenn., Dec. 2, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, Tennessee Papers, ODA. Also relevant is Joseph Pedigo, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 20, 1984.
55. In this case, John Ramsay showed the level of ingenuity to which the CIO could rise in fighting such companies and also, perhaps, the level of desperation within CIO ranks. “As a special effort, I went to New York to contact members of the Milliken family. The family opinion is divided, which may prove helpful in settlement. At least the liberal part of this family know of this situation. The direct management is not liberal” (John Ramsay to Van Bittner, Atlanta, Aug. 8, 1946, John Ramsay Collection, SLA/GSU, 1556–13).
56. Frank Ellis, vice president, United Packinghouse Workers of America, to A. J. Pittman, July 15, 1946, UTA, 51-17-1.
57. Lynch to Smith, Aug. 4, 1946. Though one effect was to provide CIO lawyers with “abundant evidence of extreme coercion and intimidation,” the union compiled rather more proof of this kind during Operation Dixie than it wanted, or could effectively exhaust in court appeals (William Smith to Reed Johnson, examiner in charge, NLRB, 5th Regional Sub-Office, Aug. 5, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA).
58. Gossett interview.
59. McGill interview. Additional accounts of anti-union mobs, beyond those sources already cited, were offered by J. D. Bradford, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 23, 1984; I. R. Gray, personal interview, Arlington, Tex., Aug. 4, 1984; Kurko interview.
60. CIO News, Sept. 30, 1946. The article, quoting Van Bittner, noted that “Bennie Bibb, president of a CIO union at Montgomery, Alabama, was beaten by a deputy sheriff.”
61. Ryan to Rieve, Oct. 25, 1946.
62. CIO News, Sept. 30, 1946.
63. Cooper interview; Dixie interview.
64. Biggs interview.
65. Kress interview.
CHAPTER VII
1. Connections between Southern agricultural conditions and the development of Southern religion, as well as between religion and Southern racial customs, are explored in Cedric Belfrage, South of God (New York: Modern Age Books, 1941).
2. See, for example, Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); John Daniel, Labor, Industry, and the Church (St. Louis: Concordia, 1957).
3. Donald W. Shriver in John R. Earle, Dean D. Knudson, and Donald W. Shriver, Jr., Spindles and Spires: A Re-Study of Religion and Social Change in Gastonia (Atlanta: John Knox, 1976), p. 18.
4. Ibid.
5. F. Ray Marshall, in Labor in the South, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), also stresses the difficulties inherent in trying to determine the extent and character of organized religion’s influence on people’s attitudes toward organized labor. He suggests that, while it is “true that many preachers have fought unions,” there have been “other examples in which ministers and churches have organized unions and fought for the right of workers to organize.” Marshall also highlights those Southerners who had been “induced to promote unionism” precisely because of religious convictions, citing Lucy Randolph Mason as a case in point. It is unclear, to this writer at least, whether Mason’s well-documented, progressive efforts arose out of religious convictions or out of a world view that was a product of secular ideology, or even from a cosmopolitan perspective that was partly a product of her class background.
6. “You can either be a Christian or a CIO man, but you can’t be both,” South Carolina preacher, quoted in Isadore Katz, general counsel, TWUA-CIO, “Taft-Hartleyism in Southern Textiles: Feudalism with a New Face,” in testimony before the U.S. Senate, October 9, 1950, CIO Political Action Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
7. H. Shelton Smith, In His Image, but . . . : Racism in Southern Religion, 1780–1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972); Liston Pope, Labor’s Relation to Church and Community (New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies, 1947); Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942).
8. Katz, “Taft-Hartleyism in Southern Textiles.”
9. John Roy Carleson, The Plotters, quoted in CIO material, Militant Truth file, ODA.
10. CIO News, June 3, 1946. Stetson Kennedy, Southern Exposure (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1946), p. 234.
11. Kennedy, Southern Exposure, p. 235.
12. Ibid., p. 232.
13. Stetson Kennedy, “How Militant Truth Works,” n.d., CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
14. Ibid.
15. Militant Truth, “Special Labor Edition,” n.d., CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.
16. Ibid.
17. William Smith to Wade Lynch, Sept. 6, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
18. Lucy Randolph Mason to Franz Daniel, Aug. 6, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA; Lucy Randolph Mason to William Smith, Sept. 6, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA; Lucy Randolph Mason to Franz Daniel, Aug. 31, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.
19. Mason to Smith, Sept. 6, 1946.
20. John Ramsay to Van Bittner, August 8, 1946, John G. Ramsay Collection, SLA/GSU, 1556-13.
21. Franz Daniel to Van Bittner, Aug. 10, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA; Franz Daniel to Lucy Randolph Mason, Sept. 16, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.
22. Jim Pierce, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 26, 1982. For another example of the cordial response to the Mason-Ramsay-Gettinger effort, see Glenn Earp to Franz Daniel, July 28, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.
23. Allen Swim to John Ramsay, July 22, 1946, John G. Ramsay Collection, SLA/GSU, 1556-8; Lucy Randolph Mason to Earl Taylor, Sept. 14, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA; Ramsay to Bittner, Aug. 8, 1946; John Ramsay to Reverend R. Bryce Herbert, pastor, Trinity Methodist Church, Sumter, S.C., Nov. 1, 1946, John G. Ramsay Collection, SLA/GSU, 1568-151.
24. Swim to Ramsay, July 22, 1946.
25. Among sources emphasizing the adverse impact of religion in particular states were Walter Orrell in North Carolina, Eula McGill in Alabama, Woody Biggs, Jim Touchstone, and Daniel Starnes in Mississippi, and B. T. Judd in Tennessee and Georgia. All had spent a good portion of their time organizing in textiles. Among organizers who placed less stress on the hostility of the clergy were James Jackson in Mississippi and Dean Culver in North Carolina. Both also worked in textiles. Interestingly, some organizers made due note of church hostility to the CIO but argued that it could be overcome. This attitude was most noticeable among organizers for left-wing unions, such as John Russell with Fur and Leather, Karl Korstad of Food and Tobacco, and Ralph Helstein, the international president of the Packinghouse Workers.
26. Kennedy, Southern Exposure, pp. 250–251.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 233.
29. Eula McGill, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 24, 1984.
30. Pierce interview.
31. James Jackson, personal interview, East Point, Ga., July 19, 1984.
32. Woody Biggs, personal interview, Jackson, Miss., July 28, 1984.
33. Kennedy, Southern Exposure, p. 235.
34. Lloyd Gossett, personal interview, East Point, Ga., July 21, 1984.
35. Ibid.
36. Pierce interview. J. Wayne Flynt, in Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979), discusses other more historical aspects of the development of Southern religion that led to the “natural” affinity one would eventually find between Southern corporations and Southern ministers: “As Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian laymen entered the middle class, they discarded the concerns that had made many of the reformers in the Populist and Progressive eras. Ministers became better educated, and fewer of them were bivocational, earning a living by farming, in mill or mine, while also pastoring a church. The deacons, stewards, and elders who governed congregations were drawn from the most successful parishioners and dampened the enthusiasm of the occasional minister whose social consciousness challenged the economic order” (p. 99).
It is not meant to imply, here, that religious opposition to the CIO was a monopoly of the Protestant churches, however narrowly or broadly defined. For Catholic opposition, see Neil Betten, Catholic Activism and the Industrial Worker (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1976), especially pp. 119–121; Douglas P. Seaton, Catholics and Radicals: The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists and the American Labor Movement, from Depression to Cold War (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981). The emphasis herein is upon Protestant churches because the Catholic sector of the Southern working class was, except in isolated pockets of the region, quite small.
37. McGill interview.
38. Dean L. Culver, personal interview, Concord, N.C., July 1, 1982.
39. Barney Weeks, personal interview, Montgomery, Ala., July 26, 1984.
40. Lucy Randolph Mason to Franz Daniel, Sept. 14, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA
41. Frank Ellis, director, UPWA Organizing Department, “Staff News Letter,” Oct. 26, 1946, UTA, 51-17-6.
42. E. Paul Harding, assistant public relations director, to “All State Directors, CIO Organizing Committee,” Oct. 31, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, South Carolina Papers, ODA.
43. “The Bible and the Working Man,” n.d., c. 1946, ODA.
44. “Transcript of Proceedings, Tenth Annual Convention of Texas State Industrial Union Council, CIO, Austin, Texas, October 19 and 20, 1946,” UTA (no box or file number).
45. Walter Orrell, personal interview, Linwood, N.C., May 12, 1982.
46. B. T. Judd, personal interview, Knoxville, Tenn., Feb. 28, 1983.
47. Ellis, “Staff News Letter,” Oct. 26, 1946. (2nd ref).
48. Ibid.; see also Daniel, Labor, Industry and the Church, especially chap. 4, “What Does the Bible Say About Labor,” for other examples of usable “pro-labor” biblical quotations.
CHAPTER VIII
1. For a most illuminating discussion of the idea of “fellow travelers,” see David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment (New York: Macmillan, 1973), especially his treatment of the popular front era, pp. 132–184.
2. Nelson Lichtenstein suggests that “by 1943 the Communists were a powerful force in unions representing between a quarter and a third of all CIO union members.” Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 142.
3. Karl Korstad, personal interview, Greensboro, N.C., March 29, 1982.
4. Ibid.
5. In average hourly wages textiles ranked 132nd out of 135 industries surveyed in 1944—$25 per week at a time when the Bureau of Labor Standards estimated that $35.75 was necessary in Southern mill villages to sustain “an emergency level budget,” (“Statement of Textile Workers Union of America in the Matter of Southern Cotton Textile Mills,” U.S. Senate, Hearings, Jan. 9, 1945, pp. 12,881–12,898, quoted in Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 210–216).
6. Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, pp. 215–216.
7. Ibid., p. 235.
8. Len DeCaux, Labor Radical: From the Wobblies to the CIO, a Personal History (Boston: Beacon, 1970), p. 454.
9. Frank Emspak, “The Break-Up of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 1945–1950” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1972, p. 83 (hereinafter referred to as “The Break-Up of the CIO”).
10. David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 26.
11. Ibid., p. 27.
12. “Labor Hears Challenge for Record Production,” Journal, Winston-Salem, N. C., Sept. 3, 1946.
13. Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO (New York: Pioneer, 1964), p. 337.
14. CIO News, Sept. 16, 1946.
15. Caute, The Great Fear, p. 27.
16. Ibid.; Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 248–271.
17. Cochran, Labor and Communism, p. 262.
18. Douglas P. Seaton, Catholics and Radicals, The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists and the American Labor Movement, from Depression to Cold War (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981), pp. 201–202.
19. Cochran, Labor and Communism, p. 267. One author claims that, in fact, the CIO’s executive board in November 1946 had authorized Murray “to take over the funds and property of any local or state council that refused to conform” (Caute, The Great Fear, p. 352; Max M. Kampelman, The Communist Party vs. the CIO: A Study in Power Politics [New York: Praeger, 1957], pp. 47, 49, 55, 58).
20. Cochran, Labor and Communism, p. 267.
21. Ibid.
22. Philip S. Foner, The Fur and Leather Workers Union: A Story of Dramatic Struggles and Achievements (Newark, N.J.: Norden, 1950), p. 675.
23. Emspak, “The Break-Up of the CIO,” p. 81.
24. Cochran, Labor and Communism, p. 266.
25. Pamphlet, Box 158, File 272, ODA.
26. Korstad interview.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Caute, The Great Fear, p. 28.
30. Kampelman, The Communist Party vs. the CIO, p. 110.
31. Nelle Morton to Franz Daniel, June 3, 1947, The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen File, ODA.
32. Franz Daniel to Nelle Morton, June 5, 1947, The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen File, ODA.
33. Nelle Morton to Franz Daniel, June 7, 1947, The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen File, ODA.
34. Korstad interview.
35. John Russell, personal interview, Arden, N.C., March 12, 1983.
36. Ibid.
37. Raymond J. Schnell, personal interview, Surf City, N.C., June 27, 1982.
38. Ibid.; Nannie Tilley, The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Robert Korstad, dissertation in progress, University of North Carolina.
39. Ibid.
40. Jim Pierce, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 26, 1982.
41. Russell interview.
42. Ibid.
43. “Report on 1946–1947, American Civil Liberties Union,” as quoted in Caute, The Great Fear, p. 28.
44. Alonzo L. Hamby, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S Truman and American Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 147.
45. Foner, The Fur and Leather Workers Union, p. 500.
46. Sidney Lens, The Crisis of American Labor (New York: Sagamore, 1959), p. 93.
47. Korstad interview.
48. Ibid.
49. Kampelman, The Communist Party vs. the CIO, p. 110.
50. Caute, The Great Fear, p. 352.
51. Ibid., p. 353.
52. Ibid.
53. Kampelman, The Communist Party vs. the CIO, p. 157.
54. Caute, The Great Fear, p. 353.
CHAPTER IX
1. Paul David Richards, “The Textile Workers and Operation Dixie, 1946 to 1950,” paper presented at the Southern Labor History Conference, Atlanta, Feb. 23, 1976, p. 11.
2. Emil Rieve, Minutes of Southern States Directors Meeting, Textile Workers Union of America, May 5, 1949, Organizing Reports and Summaries, p. 1, TWUA Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, quoted in Frank Emspak, “The Break-Up of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 1945–1950,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1972, p. 182.
3. Jerome Cooper, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 24, 1984.
4. Paul David Richards, “The History of the Textile Workers Union of America, CIO, in the South, 1937–1945,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1978, pp. 2, 3, 213, passim (hereinafter cited as “History of Textiles”).
5. Interview not for attribution. See Chapter V, note 29.
6. Solomon Barkin to Emil Rieve, Oct. 25, 1939, “RE: My Trip South, Oct. 10–24th, 1939,” as cited in Richards, “History of Textiles,” pp. 132–139.
7. George Baldanzi, “Problems of Organization in the South,” memo to Emil Rieve, Isadore Katz, Solomon Barkin, and Payne, April 8, 1942, as cited in Richards “History of Textiles,” pp. 176–179.
8. Frank Parker, personal interview, Birmingham, Ala., July 23, 1984; James Touchstone, personal interview, Meridian, Miss., July 27, 1984; Dean L. Culver, personal interview, Concord, N.C., July 1, 1982.
9. Raymond J. Schnell, personal interview, Surf City, N.C., June 27, 1982.
10. Parker interview.
11. Touchstone interview.
12. Kress, Melville personal interview, Piney Flats, Tenn., Feb. 26, 1983.
13. Parker interview.
14. Smith to “All North Carolina Staff,” Aug. 5, 1946, CIO Organizing Committee, North Carolina Papers, ODA.
15. Jim Pierce, personal interview, Charlotte, N.C., June 26, 1982.
16. Parker interview.