North Carolina’s Ella Ford, one of the Gastonia strikers, tells of her and her community’s transformation from people of the mountains to people of the mills.

‘We Are Mill People’ by Ella Ford from New Masses. Vol. 5 No. 3. August, 1929.

This is the story of a Gastonia striker. No effort has been made to improve the literary quality of the story. It is a simple narrative of a mountain woman; her first experience in a highly developed industry, her first contact with vicious speed-up methods and the resulting struggle. At this moment fifteen men and women go on trial for their lives in Gastonia for fighting against such slavery. This story we believe is an important social document. It is an indictment of conditions as brutal as those in England a hundred years ago. Ed.

1. MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

I am one of the strikers in the Gastonia textile strike. It was the first strike I ever was in. I was raised in the mountains of the western part of North Carolina. It was near the Balsam mountains. My parents died when I was small and I was raised by my grandparents. They rented land and raised corn, beans and such things, and had chickens, cows and hogs to make meat for the winter.

Then I was married at an early age. My husband and I took up some land in the mountains but it was hard living. You can get enough to eat, but not enough for clothes.

That’s why we went down to the cotton mill one winter. Many of the mountain folks did that. They worked in the mills winter to get their clothes and shoes then went back to the farm for the summers. Sometimes the mills sent men up to the mountain towns and farms. They would go around and make all kinds of promises and ship off a whole trainload of farmers and their families to work in the mills. They said it was free transportation, but when we got there they took the fare out of our first week’s wages.

They liked to ship off big families, because then there’d be lots of children for the mills. At first none of the farmers would go down to the mills. They didn’t like to leave the farms. They called the people who went the “poor trash.” But as times got hard everyone started going to the mills.

Once people were down in the city they got into the habit of living there. They liked the movie shows and the radios, and being surrounded by people. And they got to buying dresses and things on the installment plan, and that kept them working, too. So fewer and fewer mill people “went back to the mountains.

I worked in the Loray mill for seven years. My first job was in the spinning room, but it was hot and there was too much noise. It made me sick, and I quit after two and a half days. But they just kept coming after me, and they gave me a place in the spooling room, so I went there and liked it better. I spooled for about two years. Sometimes I spooled, sometimes I untangled yarn. I made about $12 a week.

One of my boys worked a few days and quit too. It was too confining for him in the mill. He was beginning to look bad, so one day I told him to get work elsewhere. He worked in a grocery for some years but then went back to the mill because there was no other work for him.

Then I was given a beam clerk’s job. I worked on that job for four years. I had to talk to most of the warpers and creelers in the mill. Lots of times they worried when they could not make a week’s pay. It was piece work, and things often went wrong, and then they had to work faster and faster. Children work in the mills. I have seen small boys not over 10 but they said they were 14. They work a 12 hour shift. In the morning you will see whole families going to work. The families run big down our way. When a mother works in the mill and has a small baby she takes off time to nurse it. The company has a community house for the small children. Of course the mother loses time by the nursing and doesn’t draw pay.

In 1927 they first began closing in on us. A new manager came out there, but we finally got him away. He was scared. He thought we would do something with him and he left town. Then we celebrated and the streets were full of people going around the town.

But other managers came. That’s when the stretch-out system began. It wasn’t long before two beam boys were doing the work of seven. They doubled up all over. They put in new machinery and that knocked out a lot. They put in automatic spoolers and warpers. 16 new warpers could do the work of 72 old warpers. One man was doing the work of about three under the old system. They cut all thru the mill.

Jobs got hard to find. Lots of times the hands would get talking about a strike.

2. STRIKE

The first time I knew anything about this strike is when one of the men who was running a warper asked me if I would join a union if there was one. I said I could not do anything different. “Well, here,” he said, “sign this card. Be quiet, don’t say anything.”

That was the beginning of the strike. On Saturday I went to the open meeting and on Monday I went out. I never did go back.

Along that evening about four o’clock on nobody worked. We waited until the whistle blew and then went out.

That night the girl that got my job came in to work. I asked her not to go in. She never answered me. I could have stomped her.

There was a tremendous crowd around the mill. Only a few went in.

On Wednesday we were not allowed to picket. They roped us off and would not let us get to the gate. Then the National Guard came and we were not allowed to get nearer than two blocks from the mill.

I got to the employment office once when I was trying to get to the manager to see him about our union. I went with two men of the National Guard who were sent with me. I did not get to see the head manager. He sent word that if it was anything about the union he did not want to see me.

It was the night after that that a mob of 100, from the mill, the deputies and the police, tore up the headquarters in splinters. Then they went to the store of the Workers International Relief broke the windows, threw out the food in the streets and wrecked the building. Later we found police badges, blackjacks and some tools from the mill in the wreck.

They broke up the picket line every time it went out. The National Guard would not beat up the people, but the police and deputized police were the ones who did the dirty work. The National Guardsmen had guns with fixed bayonets. They just drove the crowd.

At this time about 1700 were out on strike. One evening they drove the people from the picket line up to the store. I got up on top of the counter so I could see what was happening. They were driving the men with bayonets, guns and clubs. There was one old man who kept saying that he hadn’t done anything. They twisted his arm and put the old fellow in a car. Chief Alderholt was shouting “get the hell out of here”. There was a very old woman standing close to me when I went out of the store and one of the deputies kept jumping her with his bayonet. Her back showed blood where he kept sticking the bayonet. Then three policemen came to her and grabbed her by the arms and twisted them around and they took her to jail where she was beaten terribly. Her face was an awful sight when she came out.

All these things only made the strikers stronger. Most of our American people are proud and they won’t be driven like in slavery. The use of the guns, bayonets and police clubs, and the wrecking of the W.I.R. relief store made us stick. It made people see things more clearly. There are over 100 cotton mills in Gaston County. We got people from all of them to join the union.

Nobody would rent us a store for relief or for headquarters. Everyone was afraid it would be burned down.

Then they began throwing people out of the homes. There was no place to go. Some of the things lay in the streets for a week. Some fixed their beds on the street and they would cook the food there that they got from the W.I.R. We finally got a place just to store things away.

We were looking out for the women and children first. The W.I.R. sent us tents and moved the families in them so the children would have somewheres to stay.

One night some of the millmen on the Committee of 100 came down to the open meeting and began to throw rotten eggs at our speakers. The police did not take a single one of them to jail.

3. GUNS, BAYONETS AND BLACKJACKS

Then the strikers formed a picket line to march on the mill. The police broke it up. Soon we learned that the chief of police and his men were going to raid the place. We had some men and boys guarding the headquarters. When they came down in cars, the police started firing and Chief Alderholt was killed. No one knows who killed him but police shots were flying everywhere.

Our people had to run. The mob from the mill did not tear down the headquarters but they destroyed all the union books and the little groceries we had. Then they went over to the tent colony and searched the tents all night.

They took the men to jail and told the women they would also be arrested if they would not go. Some of the women took their children and walked for miles that night.

The tents were scattered and the floors were taken up. Some of the strikers had their furniture scattered and were never able to find it.

Early the next morning I went with Caroline Drew to get relief for the people who were hungry. Her check was refused for groceries and as it was only 8:30 in the morning we started out for the bank in town. On the way we stopped for coffee. While we were there the police walked in. They knew Caroline was in charge of relief and they were after her. They twisted her arm and threw her into a car to take her to the station. I was also arrested.

Four of us were packed into a tiny cell. Three of us were kept there for a couple of nights. From Saturday until Wednesday following we were kept without water to wash our face in. They gave us two sandwiches in the morning, nothing Tor dinner, and two sandwiches for supper. We all had to drink water out of one rusty cup.

Long after midnight we could hear the police abusing the boys. We could hear them knocking them around while they were handcuffed. I saw them when they were led away to court. One was being hit with a blackjack and the blood was all down his back.

The women were not taken. But on Wednesday night just outside the window we heard a man telling another how to hold his hand and the way something was to be thrown into the union hall. Just then a tear bomb was thrown through our window. The gas was in our eyes and ears and throat and my eyes smarted terribly. We finally lay down to sleep under an old blanket.

On Thursday we were taken to the county jail where we had a good supper of corn bread and milk. They put us in a big room with plenty of beds and blankets and I did not wake up until the next morning.

I was finally released after being held on charges for carrying a deadly weapon with intent to kill. Those who were guarding the tents were all held.

4. FRED BEAL, OUR LEADER

There are many down there who would like to railroad all those workers to the electric chair. They know that would bust up the union in the South. The South would not be organized; we would have to go on working like before.

We would not be able to do anything if it was not for the people in the North from whom we get our food. We think if we could get one meal a day we could fight and stick it out until we won. We are getting our shelter from the tents the W.I.R. sent us.

At first the bosses talked a lot about the Communists. They kept saying the Bolsheviks and Reds were free lovers. We were told that Russia was an awful place. This was new for us at first. You have to realize and study about these things before you understand them.

Not many Negroes work in the Loray Mill where I was. In Bessemer City, 150 Negroes work in the waste department.

At first the members of the union did not understand how to deal with the Negro workers. Now they are working side by side with them. Everybody realized they had to be organized with the whites. If we stood apart the boss would get the benefit.

The mill owners were especially after our leader Fred Beal. They printed leaflets saying that he was a Bolshevik and that he did not believe in God. Most of the workers are Methodists and Baptists. But they would pay no attention to the leaflets. They tore them up. Everybody there likes Fred Beal. We know the people that are working for us.

The majority of the people are for the strikers. The workers are all back of the people on trial now. But they are broke and they can’t do much unless the people in the North will help them.

The strike would go on forever if only the children did not suffer so much. So many have Pellagra, they eat too much of one kind of food. Their arms and their bodies break out, they get thin and they waste away. In the mountains we never had clothes but there was always enough to eat. We had canned beans we picked in the fall and sauerkraut we had made.

Sometimes people get to wishing they could go back to the farm but they don’t have certain pay days there. Once you get in the mill it is pretty hard to get out.

You work from six in the morning until six at night. There are always payments to be made. Sometimes we can go to the movies.

For the last two years I only missed a day and half outside of Sundays. I would get one or two days off for Christmas. You don’t get any holidays. Even on the fourth of July you work all day until six o’clock and the mill has fireworks in the ball park in the evening.

We are used to another kind of life now. I think most of us will never go back to the mountains. We are mill people now.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1929/v05n03-aug-1929-New-Masses.pdf