workers could not make them out.
“We hear today that a very prominent labor leader has recently addressed a church assembly here…and given such advice and counsel as has apparently caused ‘the law to be laid down’ to us in terms which it would seem must mean we can only quit business or begin to live under a rule that impresses us as little different than enlisting in and submitting to the gangster’s weapons and mode of life,” he wrote in one ad in The Star .
With an unlimited advertising budget, he spent thousands of dollars to defend his position against paying workers a few dollars more. He routinely fired off manifestos in half-page ads, including one that promised the people of Calhoun County that the mill would never run again. “Until we can operate with a reasonable certainty of having a HAPPY, CONTENTED, LOYAL GROUP OF WORKERS, none of whom will be subjected to INSULT, THREAT AND INTIMIDATION AT ANY TIME…and until we can operate without the protection of National Guards or ANY EXTRAORDINARY POLICE PROTECTION WHATSOEVER—a condition which is not possible today.”
The strikers, who could not afford a classified ad let alone a half-page one, retaliated the best way they knew how.
They attacked Greenleaf’s automobiles.
One man sliced open the top of Greenleaf’s convertible with a pocketknife, and workers routinely stole the valve stems from his Packard’s tires, leaving the big car on four flats in the mill lot. Greenleaf began carrying a tire pump and extra valve stems to work with him and had his few loyal workers pump up his tires so he could go home. Striking workers also unscrewed the valve stems from the tires of the loyal managers and office workers, then sold them back for a quarter. Greenleaf castigated the strikers as petty criminals and low vandals, incapable of any meaningful negotiations beyond such childishness. Soon after, hearing a loud crash in the parking lot, Greenleaf raced out the door of the ground-level office. His Packard was upside down.
He had the power to evict the workers from their company houses, but that would have dangerous in such a violent time, and cost him his most skilled people.
Finally, he just closed down the mill, locked its doors, and went home to the bunker of his antebellum house, which police patrolled night and day.
___
The better-off people in the foothills sided with Greenleaf. They were frightened by it all, and considered such a rebellion a socialist uprising. Newspapers editorialized against it. Without a paycheck, and with the mill commissary refusing to extend credit, workers and their families went hungry.
Nearly two hundred families, people who considered “relief” shameful, applied to the county welfare committee for help, and 175 sacks of Red Cross flour—more than two tons—were passed out in the village. As summer cooled into fall, as the flour barrels showed bottom, the first cracks in solidarity showed. Men and women who supported the strike grew angry as the outside organizers told them to hold fast, even as the strikers’ children did without bread and milk and medicine.
One night, as an out-of-town union-organizer tried again to whip up enthusiasm, a union man named Jack Taylor had all he could stand. Taylor, whose father held one of the best blue-collar jobs at the mill as a master mechanic and electrician, came up out his seat, his face red and his fists bunched up. He waded through the crowd toward the union organizer, to fight him right there for being so full of wind as the people suffered. Paul Stewart, a staunch union man, stepped between them.
Taylor threw the first punch, which landed against Stewart’s head. They traded punches and staggered across the floor, then locked arms, teeth bared, face to face. “They fought and tumbled right down the stairs all the way to the bottom,” said H.L. West. “They was going after one another pretty rough.”
Union men finally broke it up, but something was lost that
“We hear today that a very prominent labor leader has recently addressed a church assembly here…and given such advice and counsel as has apparently caused ‘the law to be laid down’ to us in terms which it would seem must mean we can only quit business or begin to live under a rule that impresses us as little different than enlisting in and submitting to the gangster’s weapons and mode of life,” he wrote in one ad in The Star .
With an unlimited advertising budget, he spent thousands of dollars to defend his position against paying workers a few dollars more. He routinely fired off manifestos in half-page ads, including one that promised the people of Calhoun County that the mill would never run again. “Until we can operate with a reasonable certainty of having a HAPPY, CONTENTED, LOYAL GROUP OF WORKERS, none of whom will be subjected to INSULT, THREAT AND INTIMIDATION AT ANY TIME…and until we can operate without the protection of National Guards or ANY EXTRAORDINARY POLICE PROTECTION WHATSOEVER—a condition which is not possible today.”
The strikers, who could not afford a classified ad let alone a half-page one, retaliated the best way they knew how.
They attacked Greenleaf’s automobiles.
One man sliced open the top of Greenleaf’s convertible with a pocketknife, and workers routinely stole the valve stems from his Packard’s tires, leaving the big car on four flats in the mill lot. Greenleaf began carrying a tire pump and extra valve stems to work with him and had his few loyal workers pump up his tires so he could go home. Striking workers also unscrewed the valve stems from the tires of the loyal managers and office workers, then sold them back for a quarter. Greenleaf castigated the strikers as petty criminals and low vandals, incapable of any meaningful negotiations beyond such childishness. Soon after, hearing a loud crash in the parking lot, Greenleaf raced out the door of the ground-level office. His Packard was upside down.
He had the power to evict the workers from their company houses, but that would have dangerous in such a violent time, and cost him his most skilled people.
Finally, he just closed down the mill, locked its doors, and went home to the bunker of his antebellum house, which police patrolled night and day.
___
The better-off people in the foothills sided with Greenleaf. They were frightened by it all, and considered such a rebellion a socialist uprising. Newspapers editorialized against it. Without a paycheck, and with the mill commissary refusing to extend credit, workers and their families went hungry.
Nearly two hundred families, people who considered “relief” shameful, applied to the county welfare committee for help, and 175 sacks of Red Cross flour—more than two tons—were passed out in the village. As summer cooled into fall, as the flour barrels showed bottom, the first cracks in solidarity showed. Men and women who supported the strike grew angry as the outside organizers told them to hold fast, even as the strikers’ children did without bread and milk and medicine.
One night, as an out-of-town union-organizer tried again to whip up enthusiasm, a union man named Jack Taylor had all he could stand. Taylor, whose father held one of the best blue-collar jobs at the mill as a master mechanic and electrician, came up out his seat, his face red and his fists bunched up. He waded through the crowd toward the union organizer, to fight him right there for being so full of wind as the people suffered. Paul Stewart, a staunch union man, stepped between them.
Taylor threw the first punch, which landed against Stewart’s head. They traded punches and staggered across the floor, then locked arms, teeth bared, face to face. “They fought and tumbled right down the stairs all the way to the bottom,” said H.L. West. “They was going after one another pretty rough.”
Union men finally broke it up, but something was lost that
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