Gastonia Strike

GASTONIA STRIKE. The Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in the spring and summer of 1929 was largely the result of a decision made by the American Communist Party, following a shift in Comintern policy, to reverse its strategy of “boring from within” existing unions in favor of “dual unionism. ”The first of the separate revolutionary unions was the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU), created in September 1928. Among its major goals were solidarity with the Soviet Union and the organization of textile laborers in the American South. NTWU agents selected Gastonia’s Loray Mill, the largest in the area, with thirty-five hundred workers, as a prime target.

Fred Beal, a New Bedford strike leader and Communist Party member, was selected to lead the Gastonia effort. Residing in nearby Charlotte for three months prior to the strike, Beal established contact with Loray workers, convincing them of the advantages of a union. On April 1, both shifts walked out, demanding increased wages, a forty-hour week, abolition of the notorious stretch-out
system, and union recognition. Rejecting their demands, mill owners organized a “Committee of One Hundred” to fight the union. The local press incited citizens to violence, urging destruction of the strike and the “Red Russianism” inspiring it; the governor called in the National Guard to break up the picket lines.

While the American Federation of Labor denounced the strike, Communist Party officials in New York sent representatives of the Workers International Relief, the International Labor Defense, the Young Communist League, the Young Pioneers, and the Daily Worker to Gastonia. Directions from central headquarters, in accord with goals of the international Communist movement, often proved inappropriate for the Gastonia situation. Despite insufficient funds for the Loray strike, Party leaders called for a general strike throughout the textile South. Although only two blacks worked in
Loray Mill, the Party made racial equality a central issue in the rhetoric surrounding the strike, antagonizing white mill-workers as well as the “uptown”community.

Intent on ending the strike, policemen terrorized picket lines composed largely of women and children, an armed mob demolished union headquarters, and mill owners evicted strikers from company houses. In an exchange of gunfire on the night of 7 June, the chief of police was slain. Sixteen strikers and leaders, including Beal and three women organizers—Vera Buch, Sophie Melvin, and Amy Schecter—were charged with first-degree murder. In major cities throughout the Western world,
groups of the political Left gathered petitions and demonstrated in the streets on behalf of the accused.

At the trial, the defendants confined their testimonies to the facts of the case, but witness Edith Miller shocked the courtroom by denouncing capitalism and religion, and proclaiming the virtues of the Soviet system. Seven of the accused were found guilty of second-degree murder, charges having been dropped against the other nine. Released on bail provided by the American Civil Liberties Union, the defendants fled to the Soviet Union, where four remained permanently. In contrast, when mill worker and ballad singer Ella May Wiggins was slain in a hail of gunfire on 14 September, the five Loray employees indicated for her murder were never convicted.

Although Loray Mill workers gained a slightly reduced work week and the eventual abolition of night work for women and children, the strike of 1929 was a failure. Throughout the South, textile labor remained unorganized. Yet the. Gastonia strike left its mark on proletarian literature. In the very year of
the strike, Michael Gold, editor of the New Masses, urged young American writers to “go left” for a firsthand knowledge of working-class life.

To go left was to go South, to Gastonia for rich material that fed the imaginations of novelists eager to employ “art as a class weapon.” The political issues and violent drama of the Gastonia strike inspired no fewer than six novels in the 1930s: Mary Heaton Vorse, Strike! (1930); Sherwood Anderson, Beyond Desire (1932);Fielding Burke (Olive Tilford Dargan), Call Home the Heart (1932); Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread (1932), recipient of the Maxim Gorky Award for the best labor novel of the year; Myra Page, Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932); and William Rollins, The Shadow Before (1934).

For realistic portrayals of mill workers, the four women novelists surpassed the more experimental novels of Rollins and Anderson. Vorse, Page, Lumpkin, and Burke were especially sensitive to the problems of women as mill workers and activists. Lumpkin and Vorse portray fictional representations of strike martyr Ella May Wiggins; Burke feminizes her rebellious heroine; and Page makes the
problems of black women central to her work. In addressing issues of gender as well as class, women novelists added an essential dimension to proletarian fiction.

Beal, Fred E. Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow. New York: Hillman-Curl, 1937.

Cochran, Bert. Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Horton, Kristina. Martyr of Loray Mill: Ella May and the 1929 Textile Workers’ Strike in Gastonia. North
Carolina. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015.

Lacey, Candida Ann. “Engendering Conflict: American Women and the Making of a Proletarian Fiction
(With Particular Reference to the Period 1929 to 1935).” Ph.D. diss., University of Sussex, 1985.

Pope, Liston. Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942.

Salmond, John A., Gastonia, 1929: The Story of the Loray Mills Strike. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of
North Carolina Press, 1995.

Weisbord, Vera Buch. A Radical Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1977.