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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
E-0010, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Scott Hoyman began working for the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) during the 1940s. He had first become aware of the labor movement while living in Philadelphia and attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. During his first years of service with the TWUA, Hoyman worked in New England; however, he was transferred to the South during the early 1950s. Hoyman attributes this to divisions within the TWUA when two of its leaders, George Baldanzi and Emil Rieve, were at odds. The organization was divided in loyalty to these two factions, and Hoyman recalls that the division was largely regional in nature — more conservative New Englanders sided with Rieve because of their opposition to the more radical Baldanzi faction, which had a large following in the South. Hoyman speaks at length about the impact of this division on the TWUA, particularly on its membership and efforts to organize locals in the South during the 1950s and 1960s. Shortly after the initial split, Hoyman was sent to Greensboro and then Durham, North Carolina. In Durham, he worked with the Erwin mills in order to keep them from defecting to the United Textile Workers (UTW). Hoyman discusses the challenges he faced at the Erwin Mills and then shifts his focus to his work with the Cone mills in Greensboro, North Carolina. Hoyman was based in Greensboro from 1954 to 1960 but was never able to build a very firm basis of support for the TWUA among the Cone workers. Throughout the interview, he discusses the role of leadership within the TWUA and its efforts to organize in the South. In addition, he discusses how the labor movement evolved after he became the southern regional director of the TWUA in 1967. Focusing on his first major effort to organize workers as a regional director in Whiteville, North Carolina, Hoyman emphasizes the difficulties of organizing in the South after the Baldanzi-Rieve split.
Scott Hoyman worked as an organizer and bargainer for the Textile Workers Union of America. In the 1950s, he was transferred to the South, where he was primarily based in North Carolina, following the Baldanzi-Rieve split in the TWUA. He describes his work during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing primarily on obstacles the TWUA faced in organizing southern textile mills during these years.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
From your accent, you obviously didn't grow up in Charlotte or around here. How did you first become interested in the labor movement? Did that go back into your early years, your childhood?
Well, my parents were missionaries in Egypt and I came back to the United States to go to school, in the last year of high school. And originally, I was interested in the New Deal. At the end of college, I got an internship program in Washington. And I thought that would be very stimulating, but it turned out to be removed from people and so I stopped that and I got interested in the consumer cooperative movement for a couple of years.
What year did you come back from Egypt?
It would have been back in 1936 and I got out of college 1941.
Did you go to Antioch College?
I went to a little church college, Monmouth College out in Monmouth, Illinois and they would give, you know, scholarships for missionary, church-related people.
How about the years before that, were you in Egypt?
Yes.
Then you went to an American school?
They were little schools run for, basically for the children of the
mission group out there. They were very small, three
people in my high school class for example. But I guess it would be
a good teaching ratio, since many high schools graduate 500 yearly. We
three obviously received much individual attention.
That's hard to imagine. I was in India for one year.
Were you?
In the Peace Corps, and that's the closest I can imagine. So, you spent your first seventeen years in Egypt?
Well, with the exception of sabbatical leaves. They would bring the
family back once every seven years. So, '36 was my third trip
to the States. And so at any rate, the internship thing… I
worked in the Department of Agriculture, it was a Rockefeller financed
early program to feed people into public administration and it was
called the National Institute of Public Affairs. It was fun, you know,
the other people were interesting people, they came from a wide range of
schools and backgrounds. And we had tuition scholarships at American U.
You worked under Milton Eisenhower.
Milton Eisenhower. [Laughter]
As an intern.
Very far down. [Laughter]
I didn't cause many waves in the office. [Laughter]
This was through Wharton?
No, they are not too much interested in shop stewards' education. This was through a man, a very fine man called Dr. Benjamin Barkas. And he at that point, I guess, probably was the only labor education man in the United States on the faculty of a city school system. He worked for the Philadelphia public school system and this would have been in 1941 and '42, along in that period of time. So, I took a course of his at Temple University in labor education and then he brought me into teaching shop stewards' classes, things like that. And finally, I decided that labor education was a good operation and the labor movement began appealing to me. Eventually I went to the director of the Steel Workers Union in Philadelphia, Mickey Harris.
This is '40, '42.
Well, this is maybe by '44-'45, I guess. And I
indicated that I wanted to go to work for a union and I thought that the
best way of doing that was to be a rank and file member for awhile. So,
he suggested that I try to get a job with the SKF, which is a Swedish
owned ball-bearing
You had taught shop stewards' classes before …
Before I went to work there.
For a year, went through this Mr. Barkas? You kind of helped him out?
I was doing this part-time while I was going to school at Wharton. [text deleted]
So, at any rate, after I got through with that is when I went to work in
the steel plant and I was looking around after a year for a job, a job
in the labor movement. I couldn't get on with the Steel
Workers Union, I was away down the hierarchy in that. And I did get an
offer for a job with Textiles, from Larry Rogan. He at that time was our
education director and it was for a job that he sponsored in our union
You hadn't had any background in Maine, though, that was just where there was a job.
No, that was it and this was my first full time thing in the labor
movement. Although, I had belonged to the Packing House Workers
organizing committee one summer in Chicago when I worked at Swift for a
few months. And then I had belonged to the Steel Workers and then I went
to work for Textiles. So, in March of '48, I went up to
Lewiston, Maine and I was
Was that a big decision to go with labor as a part of the staff, you had kind of dabbled with teaching the shop stewards and working in the plant there in Philadelphia? It sounds like you just needed a job and it sounds like you were very aggressive, going with the Steel Workers and …
No, I really wanted to … that had become a precise objective, to become a part of the labor movement. And I identified, there were a lot of things going on at that point in the labor movement. It was an exciting period of time… Reuther was just moving up to become the president of the UAW …
Had you met Union people through any of these other contacts, had they turned you on personally or reading …
In Philadelphia, which has an active and pretty sophisticated labor
People that were in all kinds of things.
Yes. Political action, for example used to be called PAC, the Political
Action Committee in CIO days. I can remember the headlines in the
Philadelphia Inquirer in, I guess the '46
Congressional elections indicating that PAC and CIO were Communist
inspired, talking about things like that. Jim Carey, you know, was from
the Philadelphia area. And we felt part of the mainstream of the labor
movement at that time. So, I was interested in getting into the labor
union movement.
The CIO sort of attracted you, not particularly textiles.
Yes.
It wasn't Emil Rieve …, it wasn't Textile people?
Not as such. The CIO was important. I can remember an article in, believe
it or not, in The Saturday Evening Post that came out
while I was working in the Steel Workers plant, the SKF, I believe at
that time, about the southern drive.
Was that Operation Dixie?
That's right. And it was exciting.
But they sent you way off to the boondocks instead of to … or is that the case?
Most Textiles are located in the outer areas in the country, smaller towns.
I didn't mean Biddeford, but Maine seems like a long way away.
Yeah. Well, you know, travelling didn't bother me, I was used to that.
Were Textiles thriving in Maine in 1948?
Well, it was an interesting relationship in Maine. Maine was sort of the equivalent to the South of New England. The wage scales in the big cotton and rayon plants …there was a New England wage scale and then below that was the Maine wage scale and then below that in 1948 was a southern wage scale. Of course, that is no longer true. And Maine was probably the least organized area. There were a lot of unorganized textile plants and there still are a substantial number. I would estimate that at least 40% of the textile plants in New England are still unorganized, although it is a very small total number compared to what it was in 1948.
So, when you went up to Biddeford, were you an organizer? With these two local boards, what were your duties?
I had an interesting job. It was called education and publicity. You did everything, you know, you did anything that came along. Rogan used to say, "The first thing that you learn as an education guy is how to sweep out the hall before the meeting." And that was pretty true. You did whatever needed to be done that was helpful.
But there were organizers working in that area besides yourself?
Yes. There was a fairly large and a strong structure. Each of these joint
boards, at that point had about five thousand members. So, they were
important and they bargained with some big companies. Bates
Manufacturing was the biggest employer up there. That was mostly in the
Lewiston joint board. And then in the Biddeford-Saco joint board, there
But you yourself weren't organizing.
No, but these joint boards had, their structure was that they had a manager of each joint board and then they had two business agents in each joint board paid by the joint board. The managers were on the international union payroll. The business agents were hired by the manager and locally paid. A couple of office girls in each one, and then I was the floater, 50-50. And the joint boards each paid half of my salary, which was a big item, sixty dollars a week.
Now, you started in 1948?
Yes.
Do you remember the Wallace campaign?
Yes. The Progressive Party, I guess. I remember a little bit you know, in
terms of activity of the state itself. Obviously the CIO
wasn't buying that project, we weren't. And I can
remember a sound truck for Harry Truman. I think the statement was that
"If sixty million people vote today, you can be sure that Harry
Truman will be re-elected, because he is the choice of a broad group of
the working people. If we get a small vote, it may be somebody you
don't like." Well, both these areas were at that
point, Democratic islands in Maine. The people who worked in the plants
were 90% Catholic, French Canadian. Many of them first generation, many
of them not citizens. And they would buy Harry Truman, they would buy
anybody on the Democratic ticket. And of course, a few years after that,
Maine tipped over from being a Republican state and
So, were you active politically out of your personal interest or because the union was very active, the CIO was very active?
No, I had worked in politics in Philadelphia before I was in the unions. My wife and I were active on our precinct committee, where we lived in central Philadelphia. And the first big project I had with Textiles in Maine involved a political project. They had two anti-labor bills on a referendum ballot and I think they were voted on in the general election or possibly in the primary, which in Maine, at that point, I think came in September. They were the Tabb and the Barlowe bills. They would have prohibited union shop agreements. And we really beat the bushes on those and we had an awful lot of fun. We set up a Save Maine Labor Committee, which had no representatives of organized labor on it. It consisted of the Catholic bishop and the head of the Maine Education Association, the head of the Maine Council of Churches, a businessman, couple of businessmen, a professor or two…
A coalition.
Yes.
Did you organize that?
Yes, we worked with that. It was mostly an advertising, you know, public statement type of committee. We put out a lot of literature in their name, with their authorization obviously. And those bills were beaten very badly. We got a statement from Margaret Chase Smith. It was a good operation.
You could use those big names and that group. You didn't have to hold rallies and large petitions and …
Well, we had a lot of activity, in the sense that you know, we had
registration drives, we had a total apparatus, I would say. Or as much
as
How long did you work in Maine?
I worked there until 1952, for four years. But the second half of that four years, I changed from a local payroll to the national union payroll and started doing political action work in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. From '51 on.
So, you were working directly under Larry Rogan then, or was George Murphy in education?
Well, Larry was the national education, our education director and we had, you know, staff conferences and so on. This was the year that the Textile Workers Union had its top membership figure.
195- …
1948. And it hit a peak of something like 325,000 dues payers that year. Since then, it has curtailed very, very sharply. So has the industry, but our membership went down faster because it was more concentrated in the North. But at any rate, we had quite a team on board the union. Rogan, who later became the AFL-CIO education director, was our education director. He had come over from the hosiery union before it merged with TWUA and then separated again. Sol Barkin was the research director for TWUA and he was a very capable guy. Al Barkan was …
The same Al Barkan?
The same Al Barkan, was our political action director.
He was out of Textiles?
Yeah. And Ken Fiester, who for many years was active in the AFL-CIO and
IUD publications division. He was our editor for Textile
Labor. We had quite an extremely capable assortment of staff
people, working for Emil Rieve, basically.
Were things still as exciting by '52 as they were when you were first stimulated?
Between '50 and '52, the union became distracted by a very severe internal fight, which arose between the executive vice-president of the union, George Baldanzi, and Emil Rieve.
He ran against him in …
It had started at the '50 convention in Boston and it culminated in the '52 convention in Cleveland, with Baldanzi running a complete slate against Rieve. And being defeated. And the next thing that happened immediately after the Cleveland convention, which was in May of '52, was that a number of the locals that were pro-George Baldanzi, a small number compared to his support at the convention but still a significant number, tried to leave TWUA and go back into the United Textile Workers AFL with George and a lot of staff people that had supported him. And that's how I got South.
How did that happen?
Somebody called me up and said, "Go to Greensboro, North Carolina." And I went.
Were you caught in that dispute?
I wasn't a Baldanzi supporter. He had very little support in
New England. He had a lot of support in the South, at least in the
beginning. And they wanted me to come down South because there
wasn't any TWUA staff
Let me ask you that. One of the things that I've read says that the series of strikes in North Carolina and Virginia, mostly southern in 1951 …
Yes.
About 40,000 people I think, were out at one time.
Yes.
And It seems to be a recoup of Operation Dixie. This source blamed a number of people and says that for one thing, the union got distracted and that Emil Rieve had mixed up and proposed this strike for his political survival.
I think that was true of both groups. It was a very unfortunate thing. The decision was made on striking not only by the staff people from here, but there was a national conference I think, in Washington on … which would amount to a wage conference by managers, local joint board managers and International Union representatives charged with bargaining situations. To determine what to do. This included people from New England and the Mid-Atlantic. And one of the questions was, what to do. Because the employers in the North had given something like 10¢ and the employers in the South would only offer 2¢. And I think both sides sort of got caught up in their own political rhetoric and said, "Well, the thing to do is to be very militant and take the industry on." And we took them on and it was not a good operation in many, many locations.
You say that the decision was taken while the first ones were …it wasn't thought out?
Yes. It's very hard to have a political fight and run a union responsibly at the same time. And the representation at the decision making level, my impression is, I wasn't involved in any of this, was very evenly divided and probably in the South, Baldanzi, who was very popular and spent a lot of time down here, would have had the emotional and political support of the big groups.
Who are some people that are still around who would know … who would have been, who would be frank about what happened between Baldanzi and Rieve in this area? Would Jimmy Blackwell?
Jimmy Blackwell would know about it, if he wanted to get into that.
Was he a Baldanzi person?
No, he would have been an administration person, I think. In this area, there are a small number of people left.
Would Julius Fry?
Fry would know about it. That's a period in which he was the director in Alabama and he was pro-administration. I guess that's why he became the director. And he had a lot of, he had some Alabama people who were strongly opposed to the administration. They were pro-Baldanzi. This was immediately after the '52. He would be one guy.
Was Baldanzi considered or is it easier to consider in retrospect, was he considered more conservative or a political label like that?
No, Baldanzi was much more of an activist, a showman. He would take a
more militant … he used to have a tremendous capacity as an
orator. He was probably the best, other than maybe John L., I would say
that he was one of the finest orators the American labor movement ever
had. And we've got some recordings of Easter messages and
things like that.
Did he have more in his background besides his oratory? Could he put together an organization and make decisions?
Yes, I would rank him as a capable person. I would say that if he made a mistake, it was to be impatient in not waiting for time to bring him to the top of the union. I think that he would have gotten to the top of the union if he had been more patient.
Did you have that perception at the time?
No. I was a very junior guy and this was the first real look at the structure of a union and I found it … you know, I was making very poor judgements about many things. A real greenhorn. I was having a hard time understanding relations between members and staff.
Much less the …
Much less the politics at a higher level. That was something else.
Well, if you couldn't understand then because you were young, in retrospect, why was it that Baldanzi pushed for … you know, the UTW at that time was getting more and more conservative.
For the AFL.
I mean for the AFL.
That was just a move of opportunism. It wasn't …I guess that he felt that he had no place to go.
He lost at Cleveland and that's all he could do?
Yes. And he was offered, by the way, a job with the CIO in Washington.
And he apparently turned that down and the story is, and I think
Do you know any of the North Carolina people that … or South Carolina in this area, Virginia, that went with Baldanzi in the You say that ten out of eleven left and then there was a vacum here.
Yes. Joe Pedigo. Joe Pedigo retired in January. He lives in Charlotte and he went with Baldanzi into the UTW.
Did he come back?
He came back to TWUA and he has worked very hard and very dilligently for our union for … I don't know, the last how many years? He's probably been back with us maybe fifteen years. He's now retired.
But he lost, he had to start back at the bottom? I mean, was it that kind of …
I don't know whether he did or not. I don't know how … it looked like he did. That's a personal matter, you know, between him and the international union. But it constituted a break in his service, as I guess you would say. As far as we know.
But at any rate, they called you up to come down and take over?
They called me up and said, "Go to Greensboro." So, I got to Greensboro and in the meantime …
Who was in the state?
Wayne Dernoncourt. Wayne Dernoncourt was in Greensboro.
Was John Wright still around?
Well, they were non-TWUA people. At any rate, when I got here, it turned out that the Philadelphia joint board had, after some hemming and hawing, decided that they were going to leave TWUA and they wanted me to go back to Philadelphia. So, I did that for one week. And at that point, there was an accommodation worked out between JoeHuetter, the manager in Philadelphia and Rieve, and so then, I came back down to North Carolina.
And what was your position then?
Well, after some shuffling around, what we were doing was staffing up places where the folks had kind of jumped the fence. And what this involved, in my own situation, I went to Erwin Mills in West Durham, which had been TWUA, and Erwin Mills in Erwin which was organized by, was TWUA. Both those locals as well as Cooloomee, which was the third Erwin mill, they were all three trying to go UTW. So, we were bringing in staff from the North and staff from other places in the South that were still with the administration and I ended up in charge of the situation at Erwin, North Carolina. I spent about a month and a half, maybe, in Durham at the old hotel that is torn down now.
You were just trying to rebuild the organizational structure?
Yes. We were doing a very complicated thing, because we were trying to
replace… first of all, all these locals took the money out of
the bank and put it in someplace that they thought would be safe. When
they did that, the international union put them all under an
administrator, which in effect, suspended activity, like imposing
martial law. It suspended everybody and it left only the administrator
in charge of internal affairs and with the ultimate responsibility for a
bargaining relationship. That
This was all internal kinds of … constitutional things …
Yes.
None of this was NLRB or anything like that?
Not at that point. It got there. But this was all following the internal procedures set out in the constitution. You know, dual unionism isn't encouraged in any labor organization or in any international. So, at any rate, I got to be the administrator in Erwin. Mostly because neither of the other two staff guys, both of whom were older and had more service, wanted that responsibility. And what we found down there, happily, was a group of people in the local who thought what the incumbents had done was absolutely wrong and they didn't want any part of the United Textile Workers. And the big argument all over the South was, "Lord, we don't want to get into that Union and have happen to us what they did to our mothers and fathers in 1934."
You heard that a lot?
Oh yeah. About that they had promised in the '34 strike that the food would come and the food never came.
Where did you hear that stuff?
In Erwin.
You heard it in Erwin?
In Erwin, yeah, sure.
Do you remember the names of people?
Yeah, I don't know whether all of these folks … I
was trying to think of the name of an old gentlemen named Hawley. Yeah,
his name was Nate Hawley in the cardroom. He may be dead now. He was
elderly at that
He came back to TWUA?
Yeah, well, he was in the carpenter shop and he was an active UTW supporter and they elected him business agent. And after going through several business agents for about ten years after '52, he got elected and he's been elected ever since. There is a guy down there named Lacey Dawkins, who was the business agent immediately after the split, I think. I don't know how sharp his recollection is.
So, over in Durham, they remembered the '34 strike?
Oh, God. They remembered it in the organized plants, but they really remember it in the unorganized plants. If you want to hear about '34, you ought to go up to Roanoke Rapids and talk to the old people up there. That's what they've got against the unions. That and Henderson. O.K., so the split resulted in some Labor Board elections and we lost Danville to the UTW. We lost all the Cone plants to the UTW except one that went no union.
You lost these to United?
The United Textile Workers, that's right. In a series of elections that began in the summer of '52 and went all the way into '53 in some cases, where there were reruns.
How long had you had Cone Mills?
We started organizing Cone in '41, '42, '43.
You had it in the forties and you lost it to United?
Yeah, we sure did. There was a guy named Bruno Rantane, who was the manager in Cone in the forties. And they had an organizing campaign going on in the big White Oak plant in Greensboro.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
… those organizers switched and they switched the campaign and they organized White Oak for the UTW. There was a fascinating guy, a really agitational type, called Luke Carroll, from Cedartown, Georgia originally. He's still got some sisters who work in the Goodyear UTW plant in Cedartown. He lives someplace else in Georgia, but he was a terrific agitator. And there was an important guy in the UTW, who was their lawyer, who was on our staff and then went into business for himself. He lives in Greensboro now, he's not too much for the labor movement at this stage in life. His name is Bob Cahoon. And he advised their locals and was very helpful to them. And he advised their locals how to do the thing legally, how to leave legally.
Did Baldanzi get these people to switch just by personal loyalties?
Yes, he had a tremendous loyalty from these people.
It wasn't a philosophical split?
There was some political philosophy behind it. They used it at the convention in Cleveland. Now, this was more … maybe not as geniune, but it was important, they used this as an issue: every staff person should get elected by the people that he services. Democracy, that was their word.
Direct Representation, is that what you mean?
I don't think they would have done it, they would have talked
it, you know, but I don't think they would have done it.
It's like this guy that our black vice-president told me
about, who got elected head of the National Black Baptist Conference and
he ran on a platform that the presidency should be rotated at every
convention, and as soon as he got elected, he stopped the proposal for
rotation. And Todd says that he is still there. I don't know,
there was that element, and you know, it is always easy in the South to
be anti-international. That's a fact, you know,
Will be receptive?
Now, that's a little bit different than a Jerry Wurf philosophy, I suppose. But that, basically, you know, was Rogan's philosophy and …
And you learned it from Rogan?
Yes.
As well as by experience, or mostly from him?
Yes and no. The theory was that professionals advise and perform their specialities and the line guys, they get to fight. Well, as a result of this, before '52, I made a decision that I was …
That you were going to be a professional?
No, I wasn't going to be a professional, I didn't want to be on the education side, I wanted to be in where I could make some decisions
You didn't want to be neutral?
I didn't want to be the odd guy, I wanted to be in the line-up, communication and control and that's what I started doing.
And so Glazer … you didn't quite finish there …
Glazer, I'm sure, was pro-Baldanzi.
But Rogan said that "because you are in the department you should be neutral."?
Yes, and there was another guy who was with him who was the same way,
Harry Gersh.
They were behind Rieve, huh?
They weren't behind Rieve. They didn't trust George. There is a lot of background that you can go into, like which part of the union he came out of. He came out of the dyers, and the dyers are a certain ethnic group and they are concentrated in certain states, you know, and the guy who would have replaced George had he lived—and he was a very good guy—he died of a heart attack right after '52, a guy by the name of Mariano Bishop. He was a Portugese-American out of New Bedford. And other than some politicians and people like that, Mariano Bishop, I imagine, could have been one of the most important Portugese people, other than business types.
He would have replaced …
He ran for executive vice-president. We had three officers and he
He would have replaced Baldanzi?
He did actually replace Baldanzi.
But, you know, no telling how many millions of dollars was spent during '51 to '53 and by the time all the locals were shuffling back and forth a couple of times, the total number of union members was just about the same, I think.
Well, we lost some membership. We didn't lose much, but there was tremendous damage done and it was done right here, where it hurts the worst, in the South. We lost almost nothing in the North. You can go from the Mason-Dixon line all the way up, I think there are maybe a couple of locals in Wilkesboro that we lost, and that's it. But Dan River had had a crippling strike in 1951 and we lost the checkoff in that '51 strike. They went UTW. UTW never got the checkoff back. They are on strike today, unless they settle this week. The first strike since 1951.
At …
Danville, Virginia. And Cone. Cone left in '52, they came back in '54. The UTW signed contracts without checkoff and we never got the checkoff back out of that company. Erwin Mills, two out of the three Erwin Mills left. The one I was on happened to stay, but Durham left, Cooloomee left. They broke the chain up. Erwin stayed CIO, the others went AEL. Rockingham …
Did you lose the checkoff there?
We didn't. In Erwin Mills, We were bargaining with DeVyver, by
the way. He was
You finally got Dan River back, is that right?
No, we never tried really, once the checkoff was gone. Well, we did try, I'm sure we tried, but they were in bad trouble.
But there wasn't enough energy for the unorganized.
That's the problem. The first three or four years that I
worked in the South, I worked entirely on either holding these locals,
getting them back where they belonged, or trying to repair the damage. I
came down in '52 and I decided to stay down here. In
'54, I moved into Greensboro
So, they came back.
In Cone, they came back. It was the only place that I can think of off
hand that they came back. North Carolina and Danville, Virginia are
about the only places we lost. Alabama, we kept everything, South
Carolina the same. It's peculiar. And part of
You said that it was because of him that everyone went with Baldanzi?
Yes.
He had that kind of …
He was an effective, appealing personality. He wasn't a strong arm guy, you know, he was a guy who would appeal to somebody, you know, if there was a lady who was an officer of a local, he would call her on the phone, a very sympathetic type.
So, were you a business agent from '54 to '60?
No, I guess you would call that, I would call that organizing, you know,
in the elections, and then when we won the elections, then I started
doing service work. And I didn't know anything about service
work and Julius Fry broke me in. After the split, Fry came up from
Alabama to North Carolina, he was going to replace part of the vacuum.
And he did, he settled in Greensboro and he was servicing these locals
and I was helping in Erwin and he was breaking me in on some of these
locals. That went from all of '53 and then in
mid-'54, we started the Cone project. I moved to
And they came back?
Yes, they all voted to come back. It was a fairly big operation. We had six plants voting on the same day, involving about four or five thousand people at that time. In three plants in Greensboro and they were scattered around in four other small towns in a radius of fifty miles. O.K., and then I worked there on Cone and it was very bad. I was so young that I didn't know how bad it was. But finally, I started to realize that it was pretty bad and it was very depressing and …
Why was that?
We couldn't get contracts with checkoffs. The high point in dues payments was something like 650 …
Was that out of three thousand?
Out of five, five thousand people. And we went for over a year, I think it was, before we signed the first contract. It's a hell of a decision to sign a contract without a checkoff. We had the general secretary treasurer of the union down, John Chupka. And he was really the number one guy on the strategy. We couldn't break the company and we couldn't strike them.
Because you didn't have strength?
That's right. In the '51 strike, the Cone workers were terribly weak. And that wasn't the fault of the politics, it was just an inadequate non-militant response.
Did they remember '34 too, what was the reason for …
I don't know that. They might have even been skipped in '34. You know, some of these places were.
You never got a feeling as to why it was different in Greensboro from Durham or Rockingham or these other places?
There were a lot of places that were bad in '51. Dan River was very bad and we had more capable staff there. We had quite a crew up there at Danville. The Proximity Plant, which is a weaving plant in the middle of Greensboro (White Oak wasn't organized in '51) but that plant, I understand, had 30 or 40% scabs within a week or two after the strike started. The same thing happened, I think, in Gibsonville, North Carolina. I don't know about Haw River. And it's unfortunate. And we've never been able to build a real militant group in Cone.
It's still very low?
Yes, about 5 or 10%. Now, Cone is in a joint board now with Julius, but in 1955, we set up a new joint board I was the manager, I had a business agent. And at different times in that six year period, we had as high as seven or eight staff people. We would come right down to the brink of striking and you wouldn't get enough support. You couldn't get people out. We had one strike that did occur and it was over a work load change and involving a particular group of people.
Does Cone pay a little higher? Is that why people aren't quite as lonely, they aren't as threatened, they have a little bit more?
No, I think that one reason may be the company. The company has a paternalistic … that's maybe an easy word to use … they have certain standards that they maintain, they may come out of a Jewish tradition and like the Jewish tradition, I don't know. They maintain certain standards, some of which they learn from the Union. And they will do that without being forced to do it.
What do you mean?
They will do it as a matter of company policy. They think that people
should be treated in a certain fashion and they are available.
So, they listen to individual grievances like that and keep control of the work force?
To some extent.
And people think well of the Cones, like people think well of the Reynolds?
Yes, maybe so. I don't know what they think of the Reynolds, but… and it varies. All of these things are changing. That's the old pattern and then the second generation of owners-managers is unwilling to maintain those patterns. In this case, it's the third or fourth generation, in the case of the Cones. In fact, there are very few of them left in the mill management, period. So, you change from the personal relationship, it's typical of the history of the industry, you change from the personal relationship to the system.
It's more typical isn't it, in a more isolated mill village than in an urban situation like Greensboro?
Yeah, that's true. But that wasn't an urban
situation. It was a group of mill villages on the edge of a small town.
It's no longer that way, but that's the way that
it started. Each mill had its own village and they sold those out in the
fifties, I think, approximately. So, I worked there until
'60, and then I had a couple of years as an organizer, doing
everything
You were in Greensboro from '54 to '60?
Yeah. I moved over there from Durham and …
Did you have any role at all when Julius was involved at Henderson?
Not very much. Julius lived in Greensboro and he serviced Henderson. And I went over there a few times for arbitration cases, or to make meetings before the strike. I did not play any role, except maybe talking a couple of times to strike meetings, that kind of thing, in the strike. And Boyd Payton was by then the southern director and …
He was in …
He was here. And he came in as the top guy in the negotiations and then sort of took over the strike.
Were there strong feelings about the Henderson strike among other union people. Other staff people that weren't on assignment there.
Oh, I think that everybody got emotionally involved, pretty emotionally
involved in that strike. It was, you know, the first thing about it that
everybody in the union understood, they were two terrifically good local
unions. They were really topnotch locals. And they had good leadership
and they had run a nice, cleancut, basic operation. You know, textile
unionism has a lot of hazards, pitfalls, and they ran a high membership
thing without being overbearing and I would have said that they
weren't being super-militant. They didn't have any
strikes. I don't know what happened in '51,
I'm not sure that they came out in that strike, I think that
they might have. But they didn't have any strikes inbetween
'51 or '58 and you know, they seemed to settle
their contracts, they didn't have a lot of arbitration
You haven't mentioned the merger in '54 and what that did to the CIO.
Well, that's sort of far away. That was a sort of a shot in the arm. But, you know, labor unions after the second World War, were dirty words. You know, we were supposed to be the guys that made hundreds of dollars a week on merchant ships while the boys were getting their heads shot off, you know. And we were the guys that goofed off in the war factories while the boys over there were slugging it out. So, it was what you could call a reactionary period. And where that showed up was really in two places. The bargaining got very difficult with some companies and the Labor Board.
You think that the bargaining, that kind of reaction, seeped all the way down to the local companies, like the Harriat -Henderson Company in Henderson?
Yeah, I think there became a … frankly, I think that if you did an objective study, the reason for that strike, there would be some personality things involved, but basically I think that there was a decision by somebody in the company level, "We're not going to continue this kind of pattern." And I think that there were some good attorneys on the other side. They were capable of presenting that.
From the company's side?
Yeah. Within management groups. There was a period in which in the
forties, things had been going our way. The government was on the
unions'
You think that …
This was a time when they were going to get it back.
Do you have any evidence, or do you… besides the specific strikes. Say, someone in the company level at Henderson was in touch with legislators who passed the so-called "Right to Work" Law … the Association of Manufacturers or …
Well, I don't know about evidence as such. You have to take
certain things for granted. Number one, the southern textile industry is
not an isolated group of companies. They mistrust each other in certain
areas, but they certainly communicate about what they consider common
problems. At the beginning of the 1950's, the threat of being
organized was a common problem. And many, many companies had gone
through the experience of having their workers vote for the union during
the Second World War and being required to bargain. Almost every
bargaining relationship that this union has ever had, began then
… there are only a handful that go back beyond the year 1938
or '37. Those were mostly token relationships when they go
back beyond that. The big group of organizing was '37,
'38, '39, that would be during the TWOC days, and
then a lot of people organized during the Second World War. The whole
Cone chain, with the exception of the Edna Plant in Reidsville, I guess.
I think, it had a local number, 121. That's the lowest local
number of any Cone plant. Proximity Weaving, for example,
NLRB cases, is that …
Well, that's all he does. Well, he gets into school segregation cases once in awhile. But that's what he does, labor cases.
He started doing cases when?
I think that he became a lawyer in '36. And I don't know too much about his early history, except I know that he was never on our side of the fence. A big law firm in Atlanta used to be really powerful, Constangy and Prowel. Constangy started out originally as a Labor Board lawyer and I think that for awhile, he represented us and then he became a management guy. So, at any rate, back to the fifties. It was tough.
From '51 and the strike then, until '58, there were no big strikes, except that there were lots of squabbles between United Textile Workers and you.
Well, a lot of things were going badly. From 1951 to 1955, my
So, if you hire people for a short …
Yeah. And the regular people have certain rights. They are like class A stockholders and the peak people, they are like class B stockholders. You know, the IBEW used to have A memberships in construction and B memberships in factories. At any rate, that was a hell of a problem. It was a low paid industry. You know, wages, poverty. And the work loads, you know, lay offs and Eisenhower, the New Deal was gone. We had a nice government that smiled and did nothing. Except the Labor Board was really tough. The Labor Board now is so much better …
Even under Nixon?
Even with Nixon. So much better with Nixon than it ever was under Eisenhower, it isn't even funny. You know, Labor people don't often say that. But it is really true.
Is it individual members at the top, or is it the way the staff operates?
No, I think that labor has gotten to be important enough so that Nixon from the very beginning and particularly before the second term, he didn't want to alienate the labor vote. And if you look at his strategy in the second campaign, of trying so hard on all the foreign groups, half of whom are blue collar. If he had really gone out to gut us in the first term with the Labor Board, those guys would have picked it up in the work place. He wouldn't have been able to pull the switch that he pulled. He really wanted labor support and he got it. Hell, he got a lot of labor support.
Well, let me ask you about 1960, then. You were at Greensboro then.
Yeah, I went on the road for two years but I had had a very, I don't view the experience in Greensboro as a broadening experience. It was too concentrated. I would get involved in other things, but I hadn't been on the road as an organizer.
You had not?
No. And I went on the road and I traveled around and I put out leaflets. I can remember that one year I guess that I put out leaflets at a hundred plants in North Carolina. You know, part of a wage agitation drive. But I can remember hitting eighty plants in Gaston County with another guy in about eight weeks. We wanted to hit them with a wage leaflet. O.K., that's one transition… And then …
Let me ask you … in 1960, did you have anything to do with Terry Sanford's campaign? The AFL-CIO …
Yeah, the AFL-CIO was backing him. I would have been enthusiastic about it, but when you start moving around, you don't get active in politics except incidentally.
You say that you would have been in or you would not?
You do not.
You would have been enthusiastic about it?
Yes. Because, as I recall it, he was getting strong endorsements from organized labor in North Carolina. I can remember meeting him and that kind of thing. But at any rate, that's '60 and '61. And '62 and '63 are in a category. One is called "Cleveland, Tennessee" and the next one that lasted for exactly fifty-two weeks, is called "Dalton, Georgia." In Cleveland, Tennessee was the Peerless Woolen campaign, which was a Burlington plant and in Dalton, Georgia, I was the coordinator for a Tufting Carpet campaign, which was the first time that I really got into a sort of semi-directing type of role. We were organizing the Tufting plants, the carpet plants in north Georgia. That's where Tufting started, in case you're not familiar with that. This whole efficient method of making stuff by needle punctures was invented on these chenille peacocks spreads you know, the bedspreads that they used to sell on U.S. 41 'way back. And in '48, they started fooling around with how to make a carpet and from '51 to '71, they tore the carpet industry apart and put it back in a new image just from that technological advantage of tufting versus weaving. One tufted machine, if you kept it running, could produce one mile of carpet in twenty-four hours. A carpet loom would be doing very good on the same width, fifteen feet, would be doing very good to get out maybe a hundred feet. I don't know whether they could even do that. So, there is a big difference.
So, that took away a lot of the workers?
Yeah, but the mills that closed were our Northern mills. Alexander Smith,
Mohawk, you know. Bigelow-Sanford, all up North. And the tufting plants
grew up with twelve hour shifts, working for the minimum wage,
Did you have to strike? Or you just won a vote?
No, this was a campaign and it was against Constangy and Prowell in a plant … they were the boys that always beat us. So, that shook up the companies in that area. We tried a lot more than that and failed on the others. But, we hung on to this group of people for a very long time, between the date we petitioned and the election. It was something like a ten-month period, caused by the fact that we were seeking to change the election unit, the old unit under which these people had vot