Race and gender in the workplace in cotton textile mills
Mitchell continues his discussion about his 1915/1916 research trip throughout the South. In documenting the establishment of the cotton textile industry in the South during the post-Civil War years, Mitchell was interested in the dynamics between workers in the workplace and between workers and their employers. Here, he emphasizes a sense of white solidarity in many mill villages, as white workers saw themselves as a group in competition with black workers. He argues that the employment of African American workers occurred gradually and he points to some of the difficulties and aspects of discrimination that characterized that transition. In addition, he asserts that women and children, at least initially, far outnumbered men in the cotton textile mills because men who were accustomed to intensive farm labor lacked the dexterity for the kind of machine work that dominated the industry.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Broadus Mitchell, August 14 and 15, 1977. Interview B-0024. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- MARY FREDERICKSON:
-
How did the men you interviewed, these men who were members
of the first generation of industrialists, view their
workers at the time you were talking to them? In more detail than that
what they were doing by setting up a cotton mill was a philanthropic
effort, but how did they rationalize or think about child labor?
- JOHN BROADUS MITCHELL:
-
I can't answer that specifically, because I don't recall.
- MARY FREDERICKSON:
-
Was it something they didn't think about?
- JOHN BROADUS MITCHELL:
-
I tried to talk with them about as many aspects of the development as I
could, and in my little book about it later I treated first the origins
of the enterprise and then how they collected capital and their labor
relations and their relations with the local community and everything.
Those that I would regard as the abler and more conscienceful ones took
this attitude about the isolation of the mill villages and about the
paternalism of it, that they were in a position of giving a beneficial
tutelage in a transition period from agriculture to industry; that the
workers who came to the mills at first had nothing; they hadn't
experience, they hadn't skill, they hadn't any money, they had just a
few sticks of furniture and a farm wagon which they had brought to the
mill village that was being erected; and that they had to give them
houses, schools, fuel, morals, as well as employment. And sometimes the
wages took the form of furnish at the company store. It began with many
marks of agriculture and of slavery persisting. It was a master-servant,
a master . . . I hesitate to say a slave relationship; it wasn't that.
One thing that saved it from being a master-slave relationship was
that there was a strong prejudice against Negroes
and opposition to giving Negroes employment in the cotton factories, so
that there was a strong alliance, though an unworthy one in many
respects, between the owners of the mills and the white work force. The
white work force was exploited, but at the same time the white workers
had a certain bond with their employers because they were all in
opposition to the blacks. I talked, I remember, with one cotton mill
president particularly about the support of the churches in his mill
village, that the company had built the churches in the first place and
contributed to the salaries of the pastors and so on. I talked to the
pastors themselves in the churches. And the consensus was that this was
a service and that the dominance of the company was necessary if they
were to have these facilities at all. The people on the whole in the
beginning were very grateful for being able to move in from little
tenant farms to a comfortable cottage in the mill village where they had
companionship and some social life. And they put up with a great many
restrictions and limitations, because this was the open door to
something better for them, in spite of the fact that the work force was
made up in great part of women and children. The men who had been
farmers, typically, didn't have the digital dexterity necessary for work
in the factory, not in the spinning departments, at any rate. Some of
them were employed around the mill in various capacities, but it was
known as the city of the dinner pail, the fathers bringing lunch to the
children and sitting around and chatting and then going back to the
house while the women and children did the work in
the mills. Aside from the attitude of the cotton mill officials,
historically it was an excusable thing because by some such means and
only some such means, I think, could an agricultural community graft on
industry with all the entirely new resources that were necessary for
that purpose: capital and machinery and technical skill and engineering
of power plants and everything that went with it. I afterwards knew
Frank Tannenbaum, who was a professor at Columbia for a good many years
and who had written an article called "The South Buries Its
Anglo-Saxons." And he condemned this exploitation of the
southern population, saying that it was being swallowed up in this
industrial maw. Well, he was right; that did happen. But probably there
was no other way of opening opportunity. It was a high cost that the
workers paid and that southern industrial morals paid, really. And it
ought not to have persisted after the southern textile industry was well
developed and had gone on from cotton factories to add rayon mills and
woollen mills and finishing and marketing and the whole complex was
developed. But it did, and, as you well know, to this day it hasn't been
possible to accomplish widespread unionism among southern textile
workers. And recently there's been in the newspapers the Stevens plant
at Roanoke Rapids. My youngest brother George tried to help with the
Committee for Industrial Development, CIO industrial organization, in
their campaign, which was called Operation Dixie, to organize mills, and
he wrote a dissertation which Chapel Hill published on southern
unionism. And he detailed the discouragements that there
were, but he was hopeful of a development that has never
occurred. I knew the man who was placed in charge of the Operation Dixie
by the CIO. This must have been before the union of the AFL-CIO. And
they sent organizers to the South, in many cases college students or
recent graduates, who were idealistic and who were southerners, and
every approach was studied and made. But the resistance on the part of
employers and the lack of knowledge and experience on the part of
workers has prevented . . . There were many studies in this period of
the industry. Mine, I think, was among the earlier ones. There had been
some of a different sort earlier. Mr. Copeland at Harvard had written a
book on American cotton manufacture, and he knew something about the
South. I enjoyed studying his book before I started my project. And Mr.
August Kohn in Columbia, South Carolina, who was a newspaperman turned
real estate operator and became a man of means had visited many of the
cotton mills in South Carolina and had written a book reciting the
particulars of individual mills. That was published, I think, in
articles in the News and Courier, of which he was a
correspondent at that time. And there were some others like that. There
was a man whom I later knew at the University of West Virginia, who was
President of the University of West Virginia. His name escapes me; he
wrote a book called From Cotton Field to Cotton Mill.
I think his was before mine.
- MARY FREDERICKSON:
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Right. Holland?
- JOHN BROADUS MITCHELL:
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Holland Thompson, that's right. And there were others. You speak of the
exclusion of blacks from the cotton mill employment . . .
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
- JOHN BROADUS MITCHELL:
-
This man was the son of a prominent white man in the community who set
his mulatto son up in a cotton mill. It didn't succeed for a number of
reasons. Also, blacks were employed in cotton factories in Charleston,
but the experience of the employers was not good. I talked with them. It
was because the workers were unaccustomed to the rigors of long hours
and confinement in a mill and that kind of thing, and they were
accustomed to a different kind of life. And in strawberry time, many
would leave
[laughter]
the mills, and when they went oystering they would have a high
absent rate.
- MARY FREDERICKSON:
-
A lot of the same problems they face with white workers, though.
- JOHN BROADUS MITCHELL:
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Yes, I'm sure. I know that. But I was going on to say that the employment
of blacks developed gradually. I remember seeing in a mill in Charlotte
staircases built on the outside of the factory so that the blacks could
get up to the floor where they worked without passing by the white
workers in the other departments of the mill. It's been fascinating to
see how industrial practice has filtered into a very different society
in the South, and to see prejudice diminishing due to many causes. But
southern industry generally, I think - or the textile industry,
anyway - is a refuge for employers running away from union
participation.