Demands for higher pay and a 40-hour workweek ignited the Loray Mill Strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. We often like to think that we have come a long way with better working conditions, higher wages, and even a work-life balance, but have we? Despite what is currently taught in our educational systems across America, people generally got along after the Civil War, because it was all about greed. People from the northeastern United States had the money, and the people from the South had cheap human capital, managed by the southern elite.
Tensions were high when the Loray Mill in Gaston County, which was organized in 1900 and reportedly the largest factory under one roof in the World, changed ownership in 1923 to the Manville-Jenckes Company of Rhode Island. The company built a massive fence around the plant, which caused resentment among the employees. By the late 1920s, the company had increased its capital to $39 million and pressed for more productivity, even if that meant doing so in an unsafe working environment.
Workers began to walk out by early spring of 1929, and a general strike was called on April 1. Soon, Governor Gardner dispatched the National Guard to Gastonia on April 4.
The National Textile Workers Union sent activist Fred Beal and others to North Carolina, since the Loray Mill was the key to Gaston County. The workers’ strike would drag through the summer and fall of 1929, but violent incidents increased. In June of that year, O.F. Aderholdt, the chief of police in Gastonia, was shot and killed. Ella May Wiggins, ballad singer and union sympathizer, was killed that September.
Ultimately, the strike and the violence associated with it dealt a heavy setback to union efforts, which bolstered anti-union sentiment across the state of North Carolina and other southern states.
Written By: John G. Clark Jr.