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BRENT GLASS:

Why do you think it is that the mills have been so slow to organize, when other industries get organized all over the country? Yet you find in the South the textile mills have not been organized.

GEORGE R. ELMORE:

Well, one of the things, cotton mills are not a steady … they have their peaks and they have their lows. And the majority of them would shut those things down and throw the key away in those low periods if they couldn't run them in an organized… They cut their own throat: in other words there was too much competition, over-production maybe, and they couldn't make enough to pay the stockholders. The stock-holders never get much out of cotton mill stock. And those families, if it hadn't been for someone in the family being an officer and drawing—you know ten thousand dollars was a big salary during the thirties… That's about all they got out of it, and the rest of the stockholders got next to nothing. It just wasn't there to give. And the people knew that if they had insisted too much more there by raising salaries, that the people couldn't make it. And the man that was the head of the mills didn't have the ability to get out and get better prices; they had been whittled down. The Jewish people in the North were buying all of the thread and handling that, and they would strike a hard bargain when they'd buy that stuff. So I don't know what… And they run more the sewing rooms. They were buying stuff as cheap as they could. And of course the South, they had to stay low, because they ran Massachusetts out of the textile industry by underselling them. But it was a touch-and-go proposition. When you're talking about strikes, we had seen so much happening at Dan River. I think during World War I they had a strike or two up there, and I don't know how many times they have been having labor troubles in Dan River. Now I always looked at the Cannon Mill; more or less they didn't have a company union, they made it so pleasant for them over and above all other mills that the union didn't have a chance there.