Chapter One
âThe Will to Winâ: Working-Class Culture and Resistance in Myra Pageâs Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt
The preceding introduction proposed that Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan tended to emphasize the ânativeâ forces that propelled the 1929 uprising of Gastonia workers against their employers. Such an emphasis might compel an American readershipâparticularly a white, middle-class oneâto 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 protagonistsâthose who eventually play key roles in the novelâs climactic strikeâall 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 charactersâ rebellion to a geographically broader and more theoretically conceived Communist agenda for a revolutionary takeover of Americaâs government and economic institutions. Although Pageâs novel begins with detailed depictions of the distinct white and black communities in the mill village, it later sends various characters further afieldâto 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 Stormâs representations of working-class culture begins by examining biographical material that sheds light on Pageâs 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 Pageâs 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 Pageâs 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 âSurrounded by books,â she freely indulged her passion for reading (qtd. in Baker 10). Music also had importance in Pageâs early life. She began formal piano study as a young child and continued through college, encouraged by an aunt, âa highly gifted pianistâ (qtd. in Baker 14). Fond memories included playing the organ for her grandmother and singing ârollicking balladsâ with her family in the evenings (qtd. in Baker 15).
Despite a fairly secure home life, Page became sensitive early to her communityâs dramatic class and racial divisions. She learned that vicissitudes of the ubiquitous shipbuilding industry, and the capitalist vision of the shipyardâs absentee owner, shaped her hometownâs social realityâincluding that of friends from working-class families (Baker 24). Although her parents took a relatively liberal stance towards the regionâs Jim-Crow culture, Page observed in retrospect that they âpushed [conservative norms], but they never pushed too farâ (qtd. in Baker 12). As a young child, she gained insight into racism through developing a rapport with her familyâs black maid, Belle: âI grew fond of her and she of meâ (qtd. in Baker 19). Her gradual awareness that social injustices had severely limited Belleâs potential helped her to step outside of her race/class background and imagine âwhat it was like from a black personâs point of viewâ (qtd. in Baker 20). Likely, some of Pageâs emotional identification with a black worldview came from the times when she and Belle would â[sing] old Negro spirituals and hymns togetherâ (qtd. in Baker 19).3
After completing a masterâs 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: âWhen I saw the mill conditions and what the girls and women did day after day, I understood the need for unionsâ (qtd. in Baker 50). Through this experience, Page came to disagree with the YWCAâs belief that âsocial relations would right themselvesâ simply through the influence of âpeace and persuasion, law and order, and the power of loveâ (qtd. in Baker 51). Particularly after her superiors censured her for âpreaching socialism and unionism [to the workers],â she decided that âperhaps the solution depended on changing the system itselfâ (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 âstudy the working people as one of them,â at the same time realizing that, unlike most of the workers around her, she could always fall back on her familyâs 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-workersâthe overwhelming majority of whom were âforeign-born girls [many of Eastern European descent] who spoke little Englishâ (qtd. in Baker 56)âPage observed a high value placed upon music performance and education as âa part of the way they survivedâ (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 âqualifying [their children], in a sense, to become members of the middle classâ (qtd. in Baker 59).
Pageâs experiences in the clothing-workers union convinced her of the difficulty of bridging the gap between the workersâ culture and her own: âI wouldnât be able to function effectively in [this] union setup because of my different backgroundâ (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 âtraditional attitudes of southern textile workersâ (qtd. in Baker 72). Because sociologyâs 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 âknow what ordinary people were thinking and what kind of potential they hadâ and, more specifically, âto see the South get organizedâ (qtd. in Baker 72, 73). The YWCA, with which Page had again become affiliated, helped fund the study, expecting that Pageâs research would assist their goal of âhelping prepare for unionism among women in the Southâ (qtd. in Baker 72). On the YWCAâs 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 âmill hillsâ outside of Greenville and Gastonia, respectively. Soon after completing her dissertation, âSome Behavior Patterns of Southern Textile Workers,â she adapted it into Southern Cotton Mills and Labor (1929). This commercially published, non-fiction study âincluded material [âŠ] that I couldnât have gotten away with in the thesis, a cold, removed academic piece.â She tried to write âsympathetically about mill people and what they wanted to beâ and âto avoid academic language so that it might appeal to a working-class audienceâ (qtd. in Baker 98).
Despite Pageâs 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. Workersâ agricultural backgrounds, she felt, had made them âvery individualistic. Their habits of action and therefore of thought rarely extend beyond the small family groupâ (Southern 39). As a result, she found that âtextile workers didnât believe they could work cooperatively in a union (âOur folks donât stick together much,â they said)â (qtd. in Baker 77). Instead of finding workers close to rebellion, she found them generally âresigned or even pleased with their situationâ (qtd. in Baker 79). Conservative religious convictions, she felt, contributed to their passivity. Still, Page saw some potential for positive collective action, particularly among âworkers [who] had come down from the mountains where communal attitudes were strongâ (qtd. in Baker 79). She came to believe that she and similarly motivated individuals could effect change in the southern labor system by âcombin[ing] teaching and indirect organizational work with radical propaganda,â turning passive workers into âunion fighters [âŠ] once they got the idea!â (qtd. in Baker 83).
The 1929 Gastonia strike cast a new light on Pageâs earlier sense that Southern textile workers lacked enough resolve or indignation to fight labor exploitation en masse. Page found this strike âso dramatic and interestingâ that she decided to attempt a novel. â[I]t never occurred to me,â she later observed, âto do anything elseâ (qtd. in Baker 110). Because she had not witnessed the strike, she âlet the [dissertation] research material sift through [her] imagination.â She based various vanguard characters on certain workers she had observed earlier who seemed like potential radicals among a relatively passive majorityâthose ânative southern textile workers [âŠ] who were ready for a strike and would join one if they had the chanceâ (qtd. in Baker 111). The prominent roles played in the strike by Ella May Wigginsâpicketing worker, activist, single mother, songwriterâalso inspired Pageâs attempt to positively reinvent the subjects of her guarded sociological study as militant strikers: âI 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 tooâ (qtd. in Baker 111).
When Gathering Storm came out in 1932, it âhad little audience outside of workersâ or Left progressive circlesâ and âreceived very few reviews,â mostly unfavorable (qtd. in Baker 116). Barbara Foley reports that it was âgiven short shrift in the Daily Worker and virtually ignored in other leftist organsâ (50). Most criticism of Gathering Storm has focused on the workâs admittedly clumsy tendentiousness. Sylvia Jenkins Cookâs assessment of Pageâs effort, for instance, is unequivocally cynical: âThe 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 readerâs credulity and his right to confront the material with some measure of independenceâ (123). In Cookâs view, Page exaggerated both âsouthern horrorsâ and âthe flexibility of southern workersâ (122) in the interest of her political vision. She mars her story, Cook feels, with âdidactic tone,â âoverpropagandizingâ (120), and âlack of humanizing detailsâ (121) in character development. Like Cook, Laura Hapke sees Page as driven by âa propagandistâs Communismââprone to paint scenes of âsouthern fantasy,â such as those showing white workers easily shedding racist ideology to meet with black workers âon terms of casual equalityâ and plan an integrated strike (164). Hapke also believes that Pageâin her eagerness to build a revolutionary proletariat out of her Southern workersâavoids resolving a fundamental problem of how a female worker can become an âeducated woman militantâ (166) and still remain within the Southâs repressive labor system. At the novelâs conclusion, Pageâs main female activist character, Marge, seems destined to become a professional labor organizer. Another of the novelâs 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 âRow Hillâ and the black âBack Row,â 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 workersâ 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 charactersâ worldviews. References to such a range of cultural texts contribute to a discourse on cultural values that runs the novelâs 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 âGastonia novelsâ of Lumpkin and Dargan, which spend considerable time detailing charactersâ way of living in the mountains before coming to the mill, Gathering Storm begins with its central family already long entrenched in mill life. (Lumpkinâs To Make My Bread and Darganâs Call Home the Heart each devote approximately their first third to incidents that occur in the mountains prior to charactersâ migrations.) Page opens her novel around 1915, introducing a white mill family whose still-living matriarch, âOle Marge,â 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 Americaâs 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. [. âŠ] First they were pushed into the foothills. Many of them retreated into the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains [âŠ]. 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 âstigmatizedâ by and âset off from the rest of the southern populationâ (Southern 35). Thus, Pageâs sociological study and her Gathering Storm both use the term âPoor Whiteâ (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, Pageâs fiction does subtly link Ole Margeâs willingness to openly berate the mills to her having grown up in a mountain culture that values âfighting spirit.â In a long conversation that begins...