Bryant Simon. A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands 1910-1948. Chapel
Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xiv + 345 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN
978-0-8078-4704-6; $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-2401-6.
Reviewed by Randall L. Patton (Department of History and Philosophy, Kennesaw State University)
Published on H-South (March, 1999)
Southern History as Tragedy
Bryant Simon has crafted a fine narrative of the political fortunes of South Carolina mill workers. Avoiding
traditional stereotypes, Simon presents South Carolina’s
textile mill laborers as “everyday working people, capable of love and hate, racism and heroism.” These workers “understood the world they lived in.” This is a tragic
story, according to the author, played out in the careers
of two tribunes of the mill village masses, Cole Blease
and Olin Johnston. By detailing and analyzing the roots
of the appeal of these popular South Carolina politicians,
Simon provides an enlightening (if depressing, at least to
this reviewer) glimpse of the world view of southern mill
workers in a crucial period. That world view was shaped
by race, class, and gender identities which helped forge
a sense of common purpose among mill workers. Both
Blease and Johnston provided victories of sorts for the
millhands. In the end, however, textile workers wove a
fabric of defeat, able to understand their world but ultimately “unable to change it” (p. 239).
hands. Blease led the opposition to progressive era reforms such as restrictions on voting by “the propertyless and illiterate,” compulsory school attendance laws,
medical inspections for mill girls, and other elitist intrusions into the prerogatives of white males. “Laws
that dictated who could vote and who could not and
told mill parents when their children had to go to school
and when they must stay at home,” according to Simon,
“violated the principles of independence, white equality, and patriarchal authority” (p. 30). Blease also defended lynching as a proper tool for maintaining white
supremacy and discouraging sexual misconduct among
African-Americans, and he advocated strict regulation of
black behavior. Blease opposed state action, in essence,
in an attempt to preserve the shrunken privileges of
white working-class men. Blease’s opposition to state
action functioned a class argument, allowing the demagogue to skewer middle-class reformers who threatened
the remaining field of independence for South Carolina’s
millhands. Simon thus rejects W.J. Cash’s familiar charge
that demagogues like Blease offered nothing of substance
to their followers.
Simon’s narrative is structured like a play in three
acts. Act One “moves around the figure of Coleman Livingston Blease.” Blease represented all three of the sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary identities
of race, gender, and class. Blease offered a defense of
white patriarchy, defending the male mill worker’s social autonomy. In an age when traditional notions of
economic independence were rapidly being lost in the
transition from farm to mill village life, Blease accurately
represented the anxieties of first generation white mill-
Economic good times during World War I set in motion a shift away from Bleasism. Real wages for textile
mill workers rose substantially , and mills competed vigorously with one another for workers. Anecdotal evidence supported Simon’s contention about labor market
competition: the Taylor family moved sixteen times in
the years 1916-1925, going from mill village to mill vil1
H-Net Reviews
lage in Georgia and the Carolinas, and workers often kept
“moving money” on hand. Villagers moved in search of
higher wages, bigger company houses, electricity, indoor
plumbing, and “sometimes they moved just because” (p.
41). Mill workers began to participate in a meaningful
way in the consumer economy. After World War I, mill
owners tried to scale back wages and increase workloads,
but South Carolina mill hands fought back with a series
of relatively successful strikes, and they generally maintained the gains of the war years.
called the “ruinous competition” which characterized the
textile trade. To workers, the NRA seemed to promise
better working conditions, an end to the stretchout, and
a minimum wage. As owners widely ignored the labororiented provisions of the textile code and the NRA (especially section 7a, which supposedly protected the workers’ right to organize), mill hands became increasingly
restive. Finally, mill workers openly rebelled against the
mill owners and their repeated refusals to abide by the
terms of the cotton textile code. Millhands were convinced, as one of them remarked, that FDR was “the first
The expansion of World War I and the early 1920s, man in the White House to understand that my boss is
fueled by northern capital and new plant and firm crea son of a bitch,” and they blamed the failure of NRA
ation, ran out by 1925. Years before the stock market
on management resistance rather than on the President’s
crash, a crisis atmosphere settled over the American tex- unwillingness to enforce the labor provisions of the code
tile industry (this pervasive sense of an industry in crisis, (pp. 82-89).
shared by most observers, became a recurring theme in
discussions of U.S. textiles through the 1970s, and perThe growing frustrations of millhands led to the Genhaps beyond[1]). Southern textile mill owners pursued eral Strike of 1934 and the rise of Olin Johnston. In early
a cost-cutting strategy, trying to squeeze out every po- September, a nationwide textile strike idled almost twotential ounce of fat in their operations in order to re- thirds of South Carolina’s millhands (some 43,000 workmain competitive in a saturated, overpopulated market- ers), and more than 400,000 nationally. This searing event
place. Southern mill workers had a name for the most fre- in southern labor history formed the backdrop for Johnquently used cost-cutting scheme: the stretchout. Mills ston’s gubernatorial campaign of 1934 (the bloody vioincreased the number of looms supervised by each em- lence at Honea Path, for example, in which six strikers
ployee and brought in efficiency experts to suggest other were killed and a dozen wounded, preceded the Septemchanges in work styles and routines to promote greater ber 12 primary election by less than a week). Johnston, a
productivity. One mill worker bitterly recalled tending former millhand, won the governorship in 1934, largely
looms “by the acre” by the end of the 1920s, with no because of overwhelming support from the mill village
time for a break. The collapse of cotton agriculture also districts. In the process, he defeated Cole Blease, the forhastened the flight of rural South Carolinians from the mer favorite on the mill hills. Johnston represented New
farm, creating a labor surplus which further threatened Deal liberalism, avoided the race issue, and appealed to
mill hands. Worker turnover rates declined in the face of the economic interests of the millhands. Johnston, in
the labor surplus; millhands stayed in one village longer. speeches to mill audiences, stressed his support for state
According to Simon, this made collective protest more legislation to limit hours, set a minimum wage, and limit
likely.
the number of looms a weaver could be required to tend.
Johnston promised, like FDR, positive state action to imAct Two of Simon’s tragedy begins with this deterio- prove the lives of millhands. Johnston’s election in many
ration in the daily lives of mill workers. “Before 1925,” he
ways represented the high tide of the mill workers’ New
observes, “millworker politics stressed race and gender
deal-oriented retreat away from Bleasism.
concerns ahead of economic issues.” This changed with
the onset of hard times in the late 1920s as workers began
Once in office, however, Johnston ran afoul of
a “retreat away from the politics of Bleasism.” Workers a malapportioned state legislature and organized mill
launched a series of bitterly-contested strikes in 1929 in owner opposition. In Act Three of Simon’s tragedy, Johnan effort to eliminate the stretchout. The strikes failed, ston failed again and again to deliver on state legislation
but politicians took note of the number of mill workers favorable to mill workers. Johnston also tried and mostly
who participated.
failed to defend the rights of workers in the Palmetto
State to organize and strike.
Both millhands and mill owners hailed Roosevelt’s
National Industrial Recovery Act as a turning point. To
Johnston’s one legislative success on behalf of
owners, the NRA promised a chance at (to put it bluntly) workers–a workers’ compensation bill–was so watered
collusion to reduce what John D. Rockefeller would have down by mill owner representatives in the legislature
2
H-Net Reviews
that within a year of its passage millhands favored its repeal. In all of these bitter conflicts, the race issue was
notably absent. In other words, employers and lowland
conservatives successfully fought the millhand-madegood Johnston by organizing themselves along class lines
against the class interests of workers. Employers effectively resisted union organization by simply massively
ignoring the spirit (and often the letter) of New Deal labor laws. Mill owners successfully developed their own
version of massive resistance. Federal authorities were
reluctant to intervene, and Johnston was unable to protect workers’ right to organize, whether he used state
power to try and aid striking workers or not (an inelegant
summary of details in Simon’s Chapter Nine, on Johnston’s responses to strikes at Tucapau and Pelzer, among
others). New Deal liberalism failed in South Carolina,
but “not because of the southernness of the workers or
because they lacked class consciousness or because they
pursued a racially exclusive organizing strategy.” Rather,
“it was the structure of power in the state that doomed
workers’ challenges” (p. 166).
action. Fearing for their economic and social positions,
middle-class proponents of economic development, lowland conservatives, and mill owners and management
personnel rallied against Johnston’s labor-oriented program, fearing it as a threat to what would come to be
called in later years the favorable business climate in
South Carolina. Johnston lost in 1938 not because millhands abandoned him, but because many of the middleclass folk who supported his gubernatorial campaigns
crossed over to Cotton Ed, swayed by the demagogue’s
opposition to further federal intrusions into the southern regional economy. Workers refused to be swayed
by Smith’s racial appeals, and voted their class interests. South Carolina’s millhands “continued to try to
use their access to the ballot to redistribute power on
the shop floor, not to cut down African-Americans.” Unfortunately for Johnston and his followers, “the votes of
millworkers were not enough” (p. 218) in the face of increasing middle-class anxiety about labor as a threat to
economic growth.
Johnston ran for the Senate against Smith again in
1944. The demise of the state’s white primary at the
hands of the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1944 gave Johnston a symbolic chance to stake out a position on the race
question. In a wonderful turn of phrase, Simon notes
that “Olin Johnston was not the kind of man who swam
against history.” Days after the Supreme Court’s decision had been announced, Governor Johnston addressed
a special session of the legislature and delivered a speech
that would have made Pitchfork Ben Tillman and Cole
Blease proud. Johnston conjured images of the horrors of
Radical Reconstruction and the carpetbaggers who had
tried to exploit the South. Johnston urged the legislature to repeal all state laws regarding the Democratic primary, making it a purely private affair (and therefore,
supposedly, not subject to the dictates of the Constitution). Johnston moved toward the reactionary racial politics which characterized the South in the post-war years.
He rode the race issue into the U.S. Senate, out racebaiting Cotton Ed himself, in 1944. He remained in the
Senate until his death in 1965, a staunch opponent of integration and racial equality. Johnston increasingly came
to oppose the state activism he had once championed, a
stance that mirrored the politics of the millhands who
helped make his career.
By 1938, the New Deal had run its course at
the national level, foundering against the determined
opposition of Republicans and conservative southern
Democrats. FDR launched his ill-fated attempt to purge
the Democratic Party of obstinate southerners in 1938.
“Cotton Ed” Smith was FDR’s chief nemesis in South
Carolina. A bitter racist and successor to the legacy of
Blease, Smith used the race issue as an excuse for opposing almost any positive action by the federal government
aimed at the South. Smith was a dedicated champion
of southern distinctiveness and isolation. Johnston challenged Smith for a U.S. Senate seat in 1938, with FDR’s
implicit backing. Johnston defended the concept of state
action to improve labor’s lot, but he refused to defend
black rights, consistently contended that the race question had been settled at the end of the nineteenth century
in South Carolina, and used racially offensive terms to
describe African-Americans to millhand audiences. Nevertheless, Cotton Ed managed to defeat Johnston with a
race-baiting campaign. By the end of the 1930s, given
their experiences with FDR and Johnston, workers were
beginning to question their faith in state action. While
some succumbed to Smith’s arguments, most millhands
stood by Johnston in 1938. Smith’s tirades against New
Deal programs that promoted advancement for blacks (in
most cases as a by-product) struck a responsive chord
among voters who had supported Blease in earlier times.
Johnston’s campaign for the senate, like his governorship, galvanized the wealthy in the state into concerted
Simon makes it clear that the race issue did not sink
the labor-liberalism of Olin Johnston. Johnston’s program had failed already at the state level by the time
he challenged Cotton Ed in 1938. The main obstacle to
the success of mill worker political action was organized
3
H-Net Reviews
class power. The mill owners in South Carolina made
common cause with lowland conservatives in the malapportioned state legislature to stymie Johnston at every
turn. Near the end, Simon also alludes to the increasing material standard of living for millhands which came
during and after World War II. Mills sold off village housing to workers and granted wage increases in an effort
to counter the threat of union organization among white
mill workers. At the same time, the national Democratic
party moved away from its earlier emphasis on economic
issues toward a sharper focus on the moral issue of racial
justice. By the early 1960s, white millhands had come
to see state action as almost universally negative, threatening to destroy the meager benefits offered by white
supremacy but offering nothing in return.
ism of Howard Odum, however, while not emphasizing
class, did project a cooperative view of the South’s future. Odum and the regionalists envisioned the South as
a coherent community (broadly conceived) with unique
problems and opportunities to be shared by southerners of both races. The emergence of the race issue also
doomed the regional vision, recasting the debate over the
South’s future in explicitly racial terms.[2]
Whether the intellectual and political “migration” (to
borrow Carlton and Coclanis’s metaphor) was from class
to race (as Bartley suggests) or from region to race, the
end result was the same: economic injustice received
much less attention from the late 1940s on, as the race issue took center stage. The South had gone from being the
nation’s number one economic problem to being its numOther historians have discussed the relationship be- ber one moral problem. In this scenario, as Bartley and
tween race and class in the defeat of labor-oriented liber- Bryant Simon point out, the white mill worker was left
alism (or New Deal liberalism or Popular Front liberalism; out. For poor white mill hands in South Carolina, whitethe terms are used loosely and sometimes interchange- ness had carried real social benefits and privileges. When
ably in the literature). Recently, numerous scholars have liberalism abandoned its economic critique of working
identified this shift in focus among American liberals as a conditions and the inequitable distribution of power in
turning point for labor and the cause of liberal reform in southern industry in favor of a frontal assault on segrethe South, and Simon’s narrative buttresses these argu- gation, white workers feared that they would lose those
ments. Numan V. Bartley, for example, has written that privileges and gain nothing in return: it appeared to be a
the new liberalism of the postwar years “offered white zero-sum game.
workers little aside from contempt and the right to comSimon’s work is important because it shows that
pete for scarce jobs with black workers.” The emerging
race
was not universally a factor in the defeat of laborrights-based liberalism of the “vital center” (to borrow
oriented
reform movements in the South. In other words,
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s characterization) defined the reconservatives
were not able to use the race issue to divide
form agenda “not in terms of the redistribution of wealth,
and
conquer
the
working class in South Carolina. Empower, and privilege, but as an issue of individual moralployers and landlords scrambled to find other avenues
ity,” thus “sharply narrow[ing] the liberal agenda.” Bartof maintaining their own class power. Simon’s narrative
ley saw class as the enduring true division among southerners; race was a false issue used to mask the true in- implies that even when a working class party achieves
terests of black and white common folk throughout the state power in a capitalist society, true reform is difficult
to achieve. Private power in the form of accumulated
region.
wealth effectively countered democratic power in South
While not agreeing with Bartley’s emphasis on class Carolina.
cohesion in the 1930s, David Carlton and Peter Coclanis
A Fabric of Defeat is a very good book. Some readhave recently argued along somewhat similar lines. Carlers might wish for a few more comparisons to other
ton and Coclanis emphasized the regionalism of Howard
Odum and other southern moderate liberals in the de- southern states. In Georgia, for example, the end of the
pression decade. For Bartley, the Cold War helped un- white primary signaled the end of New Deal liberalism
dermine radical economic critiques of the South’s colo- as well, opening the door for the return of Eugene Talnial economy and fit with the emerging concern with madge and the defeat of the gubernatorial candidate favored by that state’s liberal governor, Ellis Arnall. (Arthe race issue in national liberal circles. Southern New
nall’s forces lost in 1946 because they refused to follow
Deal liberalism collapsed as the race issue came to the
fore and submerged other concerns (much as it had dur- what widely became known as the South Carolina option;
ing the Populist campaigns of the 1890s). For Carlton in the Palmetto State, New Deal liberal Johnston simply
and Coclanis, class was never the defining element in the transformed himself into a caricature of his former envision of mainstream southern reformers. The regional- emy, Cotton Ed Smith. The end result was the same.)
4
H-Net Reviews
Others might wish for some discussion of the Popular
Front and its representative organizations (such as the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare).[3] A study of
South Carolina’s millhands and their politics surely can
tell us something about the broader fate of southern liberalism. Simon alludes to this issue at the end, and perhaps
this is asking too much. Simon’s story is a compelling
one, and too many diversions into the related historiography simply may not have fit into this tragedy.
Notes
[1]. See Philip Scranton, “ ‘Have a Heart for the Manufacturers’: Production, Distribution, and the Decline of
American Textile Manufacturing,“ in Charles Sabel and
Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility
and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge, 1977), 310-343.
[2]. Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge, 1995), 38-73; David Carlton and Peter Coclanis, “Another Great Migration? From Region to Race in
Southern Liberalism” (Fall 1997): 37-62.
Simon’s artful rendering of this story reinforces and
adds important detail to the story of the rise and fall of
southern New Deal liberalism, and the fall and rise of the
race issue as the defining feature of southern politics. He
also adds to our understanding of the complex attitudes
expressed by southern workers about state power and the
paths that led from enthusiastic support for the New Deal
to bitter opposition to anything emanating from Washington. This story is indeed a tragedy. South Carolina
millhands resembled, as Simon notes at the end of his
book, characters in a Eugene O’Neill play: they were “on
stage, facing life, fighting against odds, not conquering,
but perhaps inevitably being conquered” (p. 239).
[3]. For a discussion of the Popular Front approach
in the South, a good starting point would be Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal
Era (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1997).
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This
work may be copied for non-profit educational use if
proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other
permission, please contact [email protected].
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
https://networks.h-net.org/h-south
Citation: Randall L. Patton. Review of Simon, Bryant, A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands
1910-1948. H-South, H-Net Reviews. March, 1999.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2840
Copyright © 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication,
originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at [email protected].
5