Textile Workers Union

TEXTILE WORKERS UNIONS. At least four radical textile unions fielded efforts to organize the unorganized across New England and the South from the 1870s to the 1930s. Although ultimately unsuccessful, they provided both a background for the success of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) and an avenue for radical activism, especially in New England.

Building on a New England tradition of philanthropic and gender-conscious appeals for “hours legislation,” and on a mixed tradition of sporadic labor upsurge and tenuous craft organization, radicals began to mobilize textile operatives during the 1870s. In the wake of the 1877 railroad strike and reorganization of the immigrant-based socialist movement, a prominent group of socialists and labor reformers created the International Labor Union (ILU) in the “Little Lancashire” of Fall River, Massachusetts. Founded on a spinners’ union, the ILU conducted a notable relief effort for a major Fall River strike, and essentially joined with strikers in local activities, 1878–1880. Its president, George McNeill, was perhaps the most prominent Christian Socialist-inclined labor leader of the age; its secretary, Carl Speyer, was a German American follower of Marx. The ILU’s weekly paper, the Labor Standard, began as a New York socialist paper and transferred to Fall River under the editorship of J. P. McDonnell, one of the most prominent Irish figures in the First International’s U.S. branches. For a moment, the ILU seemed capable of sweeping through New England to western New York and the South; the Labor Standard served an important role in elementary communications. Employer strength proved too great, American-born labor leaders turned to hours legislation, and the ILU did not survive to benefit from the return of textile militancy during the 1880s.

The Knights of Labor, growing out of a secret labor society and some aggressive efforts in the Philadelphia area, emerged as a major force in textiles during 1883–1885. Predominantly Irish among textile workers in particular, the Knights offered no obvious opening to the mostly German American Marxists. On a local and regional basis, however, socialist branches reorganized around the growing enthusiasm for the Knights. So long as momentum was sustained (i.e., until May Day, 1886), socialists could join with others in calling for strikes where necessary, workers’ control of productive processes, and the substitution of a cooperative society for the existing competitive one. In some places, labor reformers and Christian Socialists even founded “socialistic” daycare centers as an adjunct to the Knights. Local Knights leaders, themselves sometimes veteran Irish American craft unionists with a Christian Socialist bent, led the broadening of the socialist movement here and there into a transethnic organization.

The retreat of the Knights’ leadership into timidity, and its unwillingness to support the Haymarket victims, both reduced the organization to a shell in textile towns and bitterly alienated socialists from the remnant. Socialist sympathies and hopes for industrial unionism (rather than the craft unions of spinners and other trades, mostly ineffectual, surviving in the mills) spawned continuing support campaigns for textile strikes, and the formation of the National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) in 1894. The NUTW, based in Providence, Rhode Island, had as its president socialist James P. Reid and as its national affiliation the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, dominated by the Socialist Labor Party. Strongest in the industrial valleys south of Providence, the NUTW could not survive the deepening depression and the internal strife among socialists. The NUTW folded into the American Federation of Labor’s small and cautious affiliate, the United Textile Workers (UTW).

Radicalism revived among textile workers with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Strong among sections of Italian Americans in particular, the IWW held “free speech” fights in textile towns and directed many strikes in 1912–1913. Dominating public attention, the strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey, pointed to the hopes and the limits of radical organization. As before, the strike wave revived flagging socialist activity and caused the creation of new branches, although once again often of limited duration. Among local leaders, James P. Reid of Providence especially tied the fate of the socialist movement to that of the Wobblies. By the time wartime prosperity had brought a renewal of militancy, after widespread repression, the IWW had been effectively destroyed as a mass movement. Textile strikers operated temporary organizations of their own, often under “One Big Union” slogans of the IWW.

The Amalgamated Textile Workers Union (ATWU), founded in 1920 and led by the Reverend A. J. Muste, temporarily filled the leadership gap. Undertaking to coordinate and lead where possible the postwar strikes against reductions of wages and lengthening of hours, the ATWU—modeled after the vastly successful Amalgamated Clothing Workers—was overtly militant and covertly radical. Despite considerable success in several strikes, the ATWU faded with the “American Plan” rollback of unionism. Once more the UTW, small in size and conservative by inclination (despite the participation of some scattered local socialist activists), ruled the field unchallenged.

The Communist Party-dominated Trade Union Unity League established the Providence-based National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) in 1929, with James P. Reid as president. Like its radical predecessors, it had few financial resources and tended to join in or support existing strikes rather than lead labor struggles for union recognition. Its most prominent activist, Anne Burlak, was known as the Red Flame, for her fiery oratory. She led some of the most militant strikes in 1931–1932 and was elected national secretary of the NTWU at age twenty-one, the only American woman to hold such a high union post. She carried on NTWU organizing work in New England, South Carolina, Georgia, and New Jersey.

During the “textile general strike” of 1934, the NTWU merged with the UTW, grown somewhat more militant from the pressure of a grass-roots militancy. The failure of the UTW to take maximum advantage of the strike encouraged the formation of the Textile Workers Organizing Committee and another industrial union, the TWUA. Although former NTWU leaders maintained a low profile around the TWUA, Communists played an important role in a number of branches, until purged for the most part from their leadership positions during the Cold War. The UTW, whose New England leader, Tom Gorman, had ironically been among the strongest mid-1930s proponents of an independent labor party, operated as the more conservative and craft-conscious alternative, gradually disappearing as mills closed. The TWUA gained prominence after the Second World War as the leading edge of “Operation Dixie,” the well-funded but utterly failed effort to organizer Southern textile workers (out of the struggle came the film Norma Rae, directed by a gray listed Martin Ritt and starring Sally Fields, a strong supporter of the labor movement). At first competing with other unions attempting the same goals in the South, the TWUA merged with the historically progressive Amalgamated Clothing Workers to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. The ACTWU merged, in turn, with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union into UNITE in 1995, an organization at first dominated by the more conservative ILGWU functionaries. Led years later by younger people, many of the veterans of the New Left or related movements of the 1970s, UNITE merged with the Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ union, HERE, one of the most dynamic unions in the faltering AFL. HERE-UNITE withdrew from the AFL with several other unions to form a new federation, Change to Win, in 2005.

The convoluted saga has a curious conclusion beyond the presence of textile workers themselves. Change to Win, a coalition combining the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers with HERE and the remnant of the textile and needle trades workers, shortly fell into disarray over a lack of progress. What little remained of the old textile workers union—no longer actually representing textile workers—now affiliated with the SEIU as Workers United, claiming more than a hundred thousand members in hospitality, gaming and other related trades. Its larger rival UNITE HERE—likewise representing no textile workers—reaffiliated with the AFL-CIO. The Sidney Hillman Foundation, staging elaborate celebrities in Manhattan for noted radicals in various fields, might be described as a last memory of socialism in labor’s bygone days.

Buhle, Paul. “Italian-American Radicals and the Labor Movement, 1905–1930,” and “The Knights of Labor in Rhode Island.” Radical History Review 17 (spring 1978).

Kelly, Richard. Nine Lives for Labor. New York: Praeger, 1956.

McNeill, George E., ed. The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today. Boston: A. M. Bridgman, 1887.