he broke them up and fed them to him. “The best crackers I ever ate,” he said.
These were the people who came to Greenleaf’s mill village for salvation.
In ’33, his family moved to a company house at 115 D Street in the village. His mother, father, and seven brothers and sisters crammed into the small house, where the only source of heat was one coal stove. There was no free doctor that he can recall. His father was paid in steel tokens and earned less than his family ate, less than he owed.
“It wasn’t all that good,” he said, “but we didn’t know any better.”
He joined his father in the mill that year, when he was sixteen, sweeping scraps of cotton and lint. He routinely worked eighty hours a week, never a penny of overtime because there was no such thing as overtime. One day, when he stopped and stared at a piece of paper he had swept up, his broom going still for just seconds, his boss spotted him.
“You better git back to work,” the boss yelled.
“I’m workin’,” he said, and swept faster.
The boss, a big man, walked over and stood over him.
“I was just looking at this paper,” H.L. said.
The boss just stood there, looking down at him.
“There’s a barefooted boy outside, just like you,” the boss said, “wanting your job.”
You just took it then, because there was no other way to be.
Then the union men came to town.
___
It had been coming, this trouble, for a long time. World War I had brought a boon to the industry—war meant uniform contracts—and Southern cotton mills prospered even as working conditions remained hot, dirty, and dangerous. Subsistence, not prosperity, was all a worker could expect even in the best of times. In the Roaring twenties, dresses went from ankle-length to thigh-high—not here, of course, but in the wider world—and shorter skirts meant less cloth, and less yarn. Mill owners, trying to increase production, went to faster machines and spread their workers more thinly across the floor, working them half to death. A wave of strikes rippled across the South, from Elizabethton, Tennessee, to Gastonia, North Carolina. Mill owners hired thugs to put the strikes down hard. In Gastonia, the strike turned bloody in the spring of ’29. The city’s police chief was killed, and a strike leader, Ella May Wiggins, was murdered on her way to a rally. Soon, it became clear that the union, the United Textile Workers, could not stand against mill bosses who owned politicians, and could, with a telegram, summon strike breakers or even the National Guard. But the noise they made had nudged Roosevelt toward his minimum wage act, and emboldened the unions.
Men with Yankee accents, bad neckties, and big ideas began to appear in the little towns, talking about a worker’s rights. The hill people laughed at them at first. What good is it to wave a sign you can’t read? The workers had always known it wasn’t right when the mill bosses fired them for getting sick, or walking too slow across the floor, or fouling the line. But it was the boss’s mill, wasn’t it? They lived in his houses, drank his water, read their Bibles—the ones who could—by his electric light.
But now, these union fellows told them the president—the president, no less—said they were worth something too, worth five dollars more a week, by God. The government said that. And old man Greenleaf and men like him said to hell with the government, to hell with the law.
H.L. West, who is believed to be the last surviving member of what would become a textile workers union in Jacksonville, said the mill workers always resented Greenleaf. But in the summer of ’33, “we hated him.”
John Pruett felt that hatred first hand when he went with one of Greenleaf’s sons to a city swimming pool on the edge of the mill village, one of the few places where town people and the village people came together. “I dived in, and a son of a bitch dived in on the opposite side with a big ol’ rock and
These were the people who came to Greenleaf’s mill village for salvation.
In ’33, his family moved to a company house at 115 D Street in the village. His mother, father, and seven brothers and sisters crammed into the small house, where the only source of heat was one coal stove. There was no free doctor that he can recall. His father was paid in steel tokens and earned less than his family ate, less than he owed.
“It wasn’t all that good,” he said, “but we didn’t know any better.”
He joined his father in the mill that year, when he was sixteen, sweeping scraps of cotton and lint. He routinely worked eighty hours a week, never a penny of overtime because there was no such thing as overtime. One day, when he stopped and stared at a piece of paper he had swept up, his broom going still for just seconds, his boss spotted him.
“You better git back to work,” the boss yelled.
“I’m workin’,” he said, and swept faster.
The boss, a big man, walked over and stood over him.
“I was just looking at this paper,” H.L. said.
The boss just stood there, looking down at him.
“There’s a barefooted boy outside, just like you,” the boss said, “wanting your job.”
You just took it then, because there was no other way to be.
Then the union men came to town.
___
It had been coming, this trouble, for a long time. World War I had brought a boon to the industry—war meant uniform contracts—and Southern cotton mills prospered even as working conditions remained hot, dirty, and dangerous. Subsistence, not prosperity, was all a worker could expect even in the best of times. In the Roaring twenties, dresses went from ankle-length to thigh-high—not here, of course, but in the wider world—and shorter skirts meant less cloth, and less yarn. Mill owners, trying to increase production, went to faster machines and spread their workers more thinly across the floor, working them half to death. A wave of strikes rippled across the South, from Elizabethton, Tennessee, to Gastonia, North Carolina. Mill owners hired thugs to put the strikes down hard. In Gastonia, the strike turned bloody in the spring of ’29. The city’s police chief was killed, and a strike leader, Ella May Wiggins, was murdered on her way to a rally. Soon, it became clear that the union, the United Textile Workers, could not stand against mill bosses who owned politicians, and could, with a telegram, summon strike breakers or even the National Guard. But the noise they made had nudged Roosevelt toward his minimum wage act, and emboldened the unions.
Men with Yankee accents, bad neckties, and big ideas began to appear in the little towns, talking about a worker’s rights. The hill people laughed at them at first. What good is it to wave a sign you can’t read? The workers had always known it wasn’t right when the mill bosses fired them for getting sick, or walking too slow across the floor, or fouling the line. But it was the boss’s mill, wasn’t it? They lived in his houses, drank his water, read their Bibles—the ones who could—by his electric light.
But now, these union fellows told them the president—the president, no less—said they were worth something too, worth five dollars more a week, by God. The government said that. And old man Greenleaf and men like him said to hell with the government, to hell with the law.
H.L. West, who is believed to be the last surviving member of what would become a textile workers union in Jacksonville, said the mill workers always resented Greenleaf. But in the summer of ’33, “we hated him.”
John Pruett felt that hatred first hand when he went with one of Greenleaf’s sons to a city swimming pool on the edge of the mill village, one of the few places where town people and the village people came together. “I dived in, and a son of a bitch dived in on the opposite side with a big ol’ rock and