You Factory Folks Who Sing This Song Will Surely Understand

Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargin

Wes Mantooth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135515393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

First published in 2007. In early 1929, two organizers for the American Communist Party's recently established National Textile Worker's Union (NTWU) journeyed south by motorcycle to investigate the potential for beginning organizing work among textile workers in the Piedmont region. One of these organizers, Fred Beal, decided to try his luck in Gastonia, North Carolina, which had been described to him as key to organizing the South In a chain of events whose rapidity and magnitude took Beal by surprise, workers at the Loray mill became embroiled in a Communist-led strike that would eventually focus national and even international attention on Gastonia. This book focuses on Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan—the three authors of Gastonia novels who penetrate most incisively into the working-class experience beneath historical and political accounts of the strike and its larger context.

Chapter One

“The Will to Win”: Working-Class Culture and Resistance in Myra Page’s Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt

The preceding introduction proposed that Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan tended to emphasize the “native” forces that propelled the 1929 uprising of Gastonia workers against their employers. Such an emphasis might compel an American readership—particularly a white, middle-class one—to recognize that they and the apparently revolution-minded strikers shared relatively similar cultural and historical backgrounds. Indeed, Page draws on this rhetorical strategy in her Gastonia novel, Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932). Her core group of protagonists—those who eventually play key roles in the novel’s climactic strike—all grow up in working-class families in the same Southern mill town and develop grievances against the capitalist system that are grounded in local experience. At the same time, Page certainly does not shy away from linking the forces influencing her characters’ rebellion to a geographically broader and more theoretically conceived Communist agenda for a revolutionary takeover of America’s government and economic institutions. Although Page’s novel begins with detailed depictions of the distinct white and black communities in the mill village, it later sends various characters further afield—to work in the shipyards of New York City and the stockyards of Chicago (where they become involved in ill-fated labor movements); to fight in Europe during World War I; to convalesce on an Appalachian farm; and to live in post-Revolution Russia. Eventually, Page uses the Gastonia unionization effort and strike to gather in her wide-ranging flock of characters. She portrays the genesis and outcome of the strike, as well as the meaning characters get from it, as the result of a complex intermingling of ideologies shaped by diverse local and distant experiences.

My own focus on Gathering Storm’s representations of working-class culture begins by examining biographical material that sheds light on Page’s complex relationship to this culture and to the people who created and/or consumed it.¹ In telling ways, aspects of family background, artistic inclination, cultural interests, and activist/academic goals all inform Page’s development into the radical writer of Gathering Storm. Page adapted many experiences from her childhood and young-adult life into her fiction, imaginatively transmuting them into experiences of worker-protagonists whose lives, in terms of class background, are distant from her own. The intensely radical orientation of Page’s representations of culture in the novel reflects the trajectory of her own diverse experiences.

Born in 1897, Page grew up in an affluent and cultured home in Newport News, Virginia, the daughter of a prominent local doctor and an artistically gifted mother (Baker 10, 14).² “Surrounded by books,” she freely indulged her passion for reading (qtd. in Baker 10). Music also had importance in Page’s early life. She began formal piano study as a young child and continued through college, encouraged by an aunt, “a highly gifted pianist” (qtd. in Baker 14). Fond memories included playing the organ for her grandmother and singing “rollicking ballads” with her family in the evenings (qtd. in Baker 15).

Despite a fairly secure home life, Page became sensitive early to her community’s dramatic class and racial divisions. She learned that vicissitudes of the ubiquitous shipbuilding industry, and the capitalist vision of the shipyard’s absentee owner, shaped her hometown’s social reality—including that of friends from working-class families (Baker 24). Although her parents took a relatively liberal stance towards the region’s Jim-Crow culture, Page observed in retrospect that they “pushed [conservative norms], but they never pushed too far” (qtd. in Baker 12). As a young child, she gained insight into racism through developing a rapport with her family’s black maid, Belle: “I grew fond of her and she of me” (qtd. in Baker 19). Her gradual awareness that social injustices had severely limited Belle’s potential helped her to step outside of her race/class background and imagine “what it was like from a black person’s point of view” (qtd. in Baker 20). Likely, some of Page’s emotional identification with a black worldview came from the times when she and Belle would “[sing] old Negro spirituals and hymns together” (qtd. in Baker 19).³

After completing a master’s degree in sociology at Columbia University, Page took a position as a YWCA industrial secretary at a silk mill near Norfolk. There, she gained intimate and troubling glimpses into factory labor: “When I saw the mill conditions and what the girls and women did day after day, I understood the need for unions” (qtd. in Baker 50). Through this experience, Page came to disagree with the YWCA’s belief that “social relations would right themselves” simply through the influence of “peace and persuasion, law and order, and the power of love” (qtd. in Baker 51). Particularly after her superiors censured her for “preaching socialism and unionism [to the workers],” she decided that “perhaps the solution depended on changing the system itself” (qtd. in Baker 52).

In a further attempt to transcend her privileged class background and understand working-class life, Page again left the South in 1921 and, against the wishes of her family, sought factory work in Philadelphia (Baker 54). Through various menial jobs, she attempted to “study the working people as one of them,” at the same time realizing that, unlike most of the workers around her, she could always fall back on her family’s financial security (qtd in Baker 55). Wanting to grasp the full spectrum of responsibilities entailed in labor activism, she served as an organizer with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union while also holding various standard sweatshop jobs. In her acquaintances with the families of co-workers—the overwhelming majority of whom were “foreign-born girls [many of Eastern European descent] who spoke little English” (qtd. in Baker 56)—Page observed a high value placed upon music performance and education as “a part of the way they survived” (qtd. in Baker 59). Although these families used music-oriented gatherings to promote working-class solidarity, they also, Page noted, saw musical education as a way of “qualifying [their children], in a sense, to become members of the middle class” (qtd. in Baker 59).

Page’s experiences in the clothing-workers union convinced her of the difficulty of bridging the gap between the workers’ culture and her own: “I wouldn’t be able to function effectively in [this] union setup because of my different background” (qtd. in Baker 64). After deciding against the life of a professional organizer, Page taught at the University of Minnesota and eventually worked towards a doctorate in sociology. For her dissertation, she decided to return to her native South to investigate “traditional attitudes of southern textile workers” (qtd. in Baker 72). Because sociology’s particular academic rigors required heavy use of statistics, she prepared a series of questions for workers and management designed to yield quantifiable insights into attitudes towards social relations. Beneath the dispassionate approach, however, lay a desire to “know what ordinary people were thinking and what kind of potential they had” and, more specifically, “to see the South get organized” (qtd. in Baker 72, 73). The YWCA, with which Page had again become affiliated, helped fund the study, expecting that Page’s research would assist their goal of “helping prepare for unionism among women in the South” (qtd. in Baker 72). On the YWCA’s advice, Page selected Greenville, South Carolina, and Gastonia, North Carolina, both major textile cities, for her field research. In the summers of 1925 and 1926, she spent several weeks in “mill hills” outside of Greenville and Gastonia, respectively. Soon after completing her dissertation, “Some Behavior Patterns of Southern Textile Workers,” she adapted it into Southern Cotton Mills and Labor (1929). This commercially published, non-fiction study “included material […] that I couldn’t have gotten away with in the thesis, a cold, removed academic piece.” She tried to write “sympathetically about mill people and what they wanted to be” and “to avoid academic language so that it might appeal to a working-class audience” (qtd. in Baker 98).

Despite Page’s working-class sympathies, her impressions of Greenville and Gastonia initially left her feeling ambivalent about the prospects for building strong unions in the southern mills. Workers’ agricultural backgrounds, she felt, had made them “very individualistic. Their habits of action and therefore of thought rarely extend beyond the small family group” (Southern 39). As a result, she found that “textile workers didn’t believe they could work cooperatively in a union (‘Our folks don’t stick together much,’ they said)” (qtd. in Baker 77). Instead of finding workers close to rebellion, she found them generally “resigned or even pleased with their situation” (qtd. in Baker 79). Conservative religious convictions, she felt, contributed to their passivity. Still, Page saw some potential for positive collective action, particularly among “workers [who] had come down from the mountains where communal attitudes were strong” (qtd. in Baker 79). She came to believe that she and similarly motivated individuals could effect change in the southern labor system by “combin[ing] teaching and indirect organizational work with radical propaganda,” turning passive workers into “union fighters […] once they got the idea!” (qtd. in Baker 83).

The 1929 Gastonia strike cast a new light on Page’s earlier sense that Southern textile workers lacked enough resolve or indignation to fight labor exploitation en masse. Page found this strike “so dramatic and interesting” that she decided to attempt a novel. “[I]t never occurred to me,” she later observed, “to do anything else” (qtd. in Baker 110). Because she had not witnessed the strike, she “let the [dissertation] research material sift through [her] imagination.” She based various vanguard characters on certain workers she had observed earlier who seemed like potential radicals among a relatively passive majority—those “native southern textile workers […] who were ready for a strike and would join one if they had the chance” (qtd. in Baker 111). The prominent roles played in the strike by Ella May Wiggins—picketing worker, activist, single mother, songwriter—also inspired Page’s attempt to positively reinvent the subjects of her guarded sociological study as militant strikers: “I never knew Ella May personally, but I read everything I could about her and talked with people who knew her. It seemed like I knew her too” (qtd. in Baker 111).

When Gathering Storm came out in 1932, it “had little audience outside of workers’ or Left progressive circles” and “received very few reviews,” mostly unfavorable (qtd. in Baker 116). Barbara Foley reports that it was “given short shrift in the Daily Worker and virtually ignored in other leftist organs” (50). Most criticism of Gathering Storm has focused on the work’s admittedly clumsy tendentiousness. Sylvia Jenkins Cook’s assessment of Page’s effort, for instance, is unequivocally cynical: “The book is a display of virtuosity in including all the proper Party doctrines and giving them life in a wishful vision of the South, but it demands the sacrifice of both the reader’s credulity and his right to confront the material with some measure of independence” (123). In Cook’s view, Page exaggerated both “southern horrors” and “the flexibility of southern workers” (122) in the interest of her political vision. She mars her story, Cook feels, with “didactic tone,” “overpropagandizing” (120), and “lack of humanizing details” (121) in character development. Like Cook, Laura Hapke sees Page as driven by “a propagandist’s Communism”—prone to paint scenes of “southern fantasy,” such as those showing white workers easily shedding racist ideology to meet with black workers “on terms of casual equality” and plan an integrated strike (164). Hapke also believes that Page—in her eagerness to build a revolutionary proletariat out of her Southern workers—avoids resolving a fundamental problem of how a female worker can become an “educated woman militant” (166) and still remain within the South’s repressive labor system. At the novel’s conclusion, Page’s main female activist character, Marge, seems destined to become a professional labor organizer. Another of the novel’s models for the activist female worker, the historical Ella May Wiggins, has been killed in the strike. What, Hapke rightly wonders, of the thousands of undereducated female workers left behind? (166).⁴

Despite such aesthetic and ideological tensions, Gathering Storm deserves further investigation. Among the Gastonia novels, it is unique in trying to bring the experiences of black workers, as well as white, to the fore.⁵ To intertwine the political destinies of white and black families, her narrative shuttles between the white “Row Hill” and the black “Back Row,” and between this segregated Southern mill village and New York City, where progressive white and black characters work together towards socialist goals. As part of depicting these diverse social realms, Page often represents and makes value judgments on the relative worth of various cultural modes of expression. Particularly, she assesses the role of culture in fomenting or stifling workers’ understanding of exploitation and desire to combat it. Representations of music across a spectrum of styles and within a range of contexts appear most frequently. Characters encounter white hymns and black spirituals, songs associated with wartime patriotism and love of the South, sentimental and jazzy popular songs, older radical songs, and, finally, new protest songs from both white and black traditions. Print mediums such as books, newspapers, and letters are also shown contributing to characters’ worldviews. References to such a range of cultural texts contribute to a discourse on cultural values that runs the novel’s length. Within the ideological framework that the novel constructs, creating or consuming certain cultural products may be politically frivolous or even insidiously repressive, while engaging with other class-attentive ones may be politically motivating.

In contrast to the “Gastonia novels” of Lumpkin and Dargan, which spend considerable time detailing characters’ way of living in the mountains before coming to the mill, Gathering Storm begins with its central family already long entrenched in mill life. (Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread and Dargan’s Call Home the Heart each devote approximately their first third to incidents that occur in the mountains prior to characters’ migrations.) Page opens her novel around 1915, introducing a white mill family whose still-living matriarch, “Ole Marge,” had been part of a large out-migration from the North Carolina mountains to the low-lying mill towns some forty years earlier. Long years in the mill village have mostly subsumed mountain heritage into a homogenous culture of white mill workers. As her pre-Gathering Storm sociological study of Southern textile workers reveals, Page had an economic-derived belief that mountain culture was never truly independent of the currents shaping America’s economic development. White mountaineers, she explained, were descended from poor colonial-era settlers

who came to the south-Atlantic colonies as debtors or indentured servants, [and] soon found competition with large plantation owners so one-sided that they were forced onto poorer and poorer land and into greater and greater poverty. [. …] First they were pushed into the foothills. Many of them retreated into the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains […]. Seemingly, this section of the Poor Whites preferred the illusions of semi-independence and social equality which their greater isolation gave. Here in the mountains there were no plantation owners or merchant aristocrats, no Negro slaves. The competition was no less real, but more indirect. These differences in the situation of highland and lowland Poor Whites led, after some generations, to minor differences in the traditions of the two, but these have never been fundamental enough to affect the basic unity between them. (Southern 34-5)

Further, outside of the mountains, in contexts where capitalist interests exploit their labor, all white wage and tenant laborers, regardless of background, are equally “stigmatized” by and “set off from the rest of the southern population” (Southern 35). Thus, Page’s sociological study and her Gathering Storm both use the term “Poor White” (generally capitalized as above) to highlight the idea that poverty creates profound cultural links among a broad and geographically diverse segment of the white population.

Nevertheless, Page’s fiction does subtly link Ole Marge’s willingness to openly berate the mills to her having grown up in a mountain culture that values “fighting spirit.” In a long conversation that begins...