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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
H-0001, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Cary Joseph Allen, Jr., was an aluminum worker for Alcoa in Badin, North Carolina, during the 1930s. Focusing specifically on efforts to unionize aluminum workers circa 1936 to 1937, Allen describes how initially the only organized labor in the community was within the American Federation of Labor. With weak representation in the AFL, Allen and some of his fellow workers organized to establish a local branch of the Aluminum Workers of America in Badin, N.C. With the goal of local autonomy for the newly formed union, Allen describes local working and living conditions. Alcoa exercised a strong paternalistic influence within the community, and Allen discusses the poor living conditions workers faced in company housing. Moreover, the strong paternalistic influence, according to Allen, made it initially difficult for the union to attract new members. Fearful of losing their jobs, workers were reluctant to organize. Despite these kinds of early setbacks, Allen emphasizes the long-term goals of the union to better working conditions, earn higher wages, and challenge the company's control over the community. By 1937, efforts to unionize had succeeded.
Cary Joseph Allen, Jr., an aluminum worker for Alcoa in Badin, North Carolina, describes the establishment of a local branch of the Aluminum Workers of America in the mid-1930s. Initial efforts at organization were hampered by the strong paternalistic influence Alco exerted over the community, yet efforts to unionize had succeeded by 1937.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
You had come down to work at Badin, and the wages were not satisfactory to you.
They were thirty-six cents an hour, and we figured that was pretty low. In 1936 the Depression was gradually getting over with. Very few cars in the parking lot; few people could afford cars then. So we decided to investigate the possibility of a union and found that they had an A F of L union in town. But it was very ineffectual; it didn't have but about seven members. So we decided we could do something about it. That process started, and over the long haul we managed to build what we have today, get pensions and our medical care and all the fringe benefits that we have today. But it was a long process, a little bit at a time.
What did you find AF of L union was like in '36 when you first investigated it?
Like I say, it only had seven members, and it was very ineffectual. It
didn't speak for the people in the plant. Then we had an invitation to
come to New Kensington, that they were going to go over the Steel
Workers Organizing Committee of the CIO, which was the Committee for
Industrial Organization—they called it a Congress of
Industrial Organization later—under Philip Murray. So we got
up to Pittsburgh—New Kensington is just outside of Pittsburgh,
and met the head of the AF of L and asked him if we organized a. . . .
Did something with the AF of L in Badin, what would be the end result?
He said, "Well, the machinists' mates will have to go to
Salisbury," where they had railroad shops, see, "and
the electricians'll probably have to attend meetings in
Charlotte." And we told him that that would completely undo all
we had done to unify the plant as one bargaining force. [Interruption]
Our local union picked three of us to see what New Kensington [Laughter] [unclear] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter]
Who called the strike?
Their big plant president out at Maryville, Tennessee. They have a huge
plant out there. They had a big AF of L local out there. So we walked
around; they had pickets on the gates. The president of the local told
one of the pickets to call off his pickets, that the plant manager had
promised not to run in any strike-breakers. He said, "Is that
an order?" He said, "Yes, it's an order." He
said, "All right, I'll obey the order, but I don't think much
of it. I think they will try to run in strike-breakers." [Laughter]
Because you had more CIO plants in Alcoa.
Well, that, and too, more individuals.
Had no commode there. [Laughter] [Laughter]
You say it's an economic battle, but how did this paternalistic system fit into the situation?
I might include a little sidelight; don't let me wander too far off the track. For instance, on the grievance case we went up there, discussing that with the executive vice-president. And I happened to mention that we couldn't get anywhere with the plant manager, Mr. Copp. And Mr. Wilson grew hot about his face and said, "I'll have you to understand he's one of the finest southern gentlemen that I've ever seen." And I said, "Yes, his answer is very nice, but the answer is always no."
What had you been asking him for?
A modification of bypassing the water. It would pull people out of the
repair gang to go up on the dam when they had flood water and bypass the
water. That was shift work. Our work was daylight work, seven till
three-thirty. And our contention was that bypassing the water was shift
work and really belonged under the operating force of the powerhouse,
rather than to break up our repair gang and put us on all the different
dams to bypass the water. It was finally resolved with the company
placing a man up there to watch and to bypass the water. Put it shift
work, and got things settled on that basis, after a good while. [unclear]
What about S.A. Copp's influence in the town?
Oh, he knew everybody in town. You'd go downtown, "Good morning, Cary, how are you this morning?" Like I say, it was purely a paternalistic system.
Did that make people fearful of joining the union, or did that encourage them to want to join a union?
You see, a short time before then President Roosevelt had given the
rights of the workers to organize, but still they were fearful of
joining, afraid they'd lose their jobs. And once they realized that they
did have federal protection . . . [Interruption]
Like I said, about all the people that are concerned with the early days are gone now; they're dead. You'll just have to take my own case about it, because there aren't any ways to know things like that.
How about the question about S.A. Copp? Did his paternalist influence that he had in the town encourage people to want to join the union?
No, on the contrary.
They were fearful?
They were bitterly against unions.
How did you finally convince them?
I don't know whether we ever convinced him or not. We just formed
How did you win the vote?
They had a secret ballot, and the guys would go in and vote for the union or against the union. The union won by eleven votes out of over fifty working plants, so you see it was a very close election.
This was in 1937.
I don't really know. I think so.
But why did they vote for the union if, as you said, they were bitterly against it?
No, the individuals who worked for the company were not bitterly against a union. They simply feared joining a union because they thought they might lose their job if they did. So they had to be persuaded.
What arguments did you use to persuade them?
Better working conditions, for one thing. A higher wage, possibly, if it could be negotiated, was another. We could institute a clean-up modification campaign in the houses that I had previously described to you.. The idea that was spreading over the country with the sit-down strikes in the automobile industry and the upswing of unionism in Big Steel. They were all persuading-type factors. Although I say that most of the early members of the union were single people; they didn't have a family. They had nothing to fear. If they lost their job, they could go down the road and get on another one, so they were willing to join.
So the news of what was happening in the rest of the country was a factor in reducing people's fear about a union here?
Yes.
Did you know O. B. Lackey?
Yes. He was a wonderful person. Only his family life was not so good. His wife's health was bad, eventually and went through a divorce and married again. He was in town here for the dedication of the union hall, the first time I'd seen him in years and years. Apparently he was very happy with his new marriage. He was about seventy-four or 'five.
He was the first president of the AF of L union that you mentioned before?
Yes.
Do you know anything about how he first decided that he wanted to start a union here?
No, I don't. He had done the best he could do with what he had to work with, and how he got connected with the union I don't know. His daughter was the organist down at the church, and because he left her mother, I don't know whether she ever forgave him or not. But for sure she should have, because he was a wonderful person.
Do you know where he came from?
Before he came here, he worked in oil fields, I believe in Oklahoma. And
he said he and his wife were laying there asleep one night and said the
wind got up and took the roof off, and it started raining. Said there
wasn't any use to try and do anything, so they just laid there in the
rain till the next morning to see what happened. [Laughter]
Do you know how old he was during the sit-ins in '36 when you first knew him?
No, I don't. I'd say he was thirty-five or forty years old, probably. Might not jive with what I said about his being seventy-four when he came up here, but he was somewhere around there.
Do you know the names of the other people who were in that first AF of L union?
Red Pickman. You can visit him and talk with him. He'll give you a more objective view of the whole thing than I could, because he was simply a member and not concerned with the overall long-term objectives that Dean Culver and some of the rest of us had for the union.
What were the long-term objectives that you and Dean Culver had?
To have a strong enough union built up to have some bargaining power and to better the conditions around town. Also, we've never had any trouble with the colored race, because when they attended the hall I made it a special point to say that "In the matter under discussion, somebody back there must have a different view, and this is a brotherhood, and get up on the floor and express your views." You see, they were very reluctant to speak on the issues, so we'd ask them to exercise their freedom of the floor to speak anytime they wanted to. So gradually they'd get up and point out the things in the plant that had to do with the article under discussion. Got them to talking then after a while, but it was a brotherhood of blacks and whites so we settled our potential racial problems way back in the very beginning with the brotherhood in the union hall, and we never had one bit of trouble here. This anti-segregation was not necessary in Badin, because we had desegregated long before.
Was that a drawback to some of the people who were considering joining the union? Did they feel that perhaps they didn't want to enter into this brotherhood? Was that ever a factor for people?
No, I don't think so at all, because the whites and the blacks got along perfectly all right on the job. See, they worked together. They were good friends.
But in the early days the blacks were in just the non-skilled jobs, and then whites were foremen and they were in the more skilled jobs, machinists and whatnot. And so that had to change over time, because in the beginning it wasn't set up so that the jobs were open to both races.
That's right, and we knew that it would be a long-term proposition; it
wouldn't be a sudden thing. They would have to be trained. They would
have to hire people with college skills and if they were mechanics,
machinist skills and all that. It was a long, drawn-out process. [Interruption]
We were talking about the working out of the problem of blacks being in certain jobs and whites being in other jobs.
They were restricted as to their line of advancement. Yes, it was back
then. There were certain jobs for whites and certain jobs for blacks. It
was the old South, and the old South had to be broken down, traditions
changed, and a new line of progression drawn up that would include
blacks, such as qualifications the job. All that came much later. There
wasn't any real reluctance on the part of the company to adopt the new
lines of progression or the union, for that matter, but it had been a
well-established way of life, and the divisions and all that sort of
stuff had to be changed gradually. You couldn't be too abrupt; you'd
rock the boat. So it had to be done a little bit, one here and one there
and one over yonder, and then one later.
I guess that's a lot of what Carlee Drye's administration was about.
Yes, he worked on that job classification project for quite a few years.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Carlee Drye quit being president to take a job with the International, and I was vice-president and took over.
What do you remember about your administration?
Nothing in particular. It was fairly smooth. Although while Carlee Drye
was still president, he went to negotiations and told me that there
would in all probability be a strike, and he would call me up and tell
me when to get the guys out of the plant. So he left me, in effect, in
charge down here while he was up there. So, not knowing whether there
was going to be a strike or not, I made an agreement with the plant
personnel manager that the people could go on in their work, but if we
heard they had gone on strike, he would pull the men out. Which they
did. Kept their word. I got some criticism for going along, but it
didn't hurt anything. It didn't hurt the relations between the union and
the company to wait for nine hours [unclear]
A horse fell on him, and he died from complications, so they're
neither
After the union was established, the company pulled away from its more paternalist practices.
Not for a long, long time.
How long did it take for the company to move away from the paternalist system?
The last move they made was this water business around here. They first
turned over the electrical end to Duke Power Company and got out of the
electric utilities. Then they discontinued picking up trash, which they
had done before. Then they had a town band; they did away with that.
Then they tore down the theater building. Built a post office where it
was. It was a beautiful building. They discarded all the things not
immediately connected to the operation of the plants. The latest one was
the Greater Badin program they put on when they got untied from
furnishing water to the town. They must have water for the plant. And
they turned this over to the Greater Badin outfit, and my water bill
went up &4.50 for three months. A tremendous amount they pay for
the store down here; their water bill run about &700 a month.
And they're still getting all kind [unclear]
But in terms of S.A. Copp and his getting out and knowing everybody in town and the kind of administration he had and the way he would really play a part in the personal, daily lives of people in the town, when did that kind of intrusion of the plant into people's personal lives and their home lives start to change?
It was an accepted thing, and nobody had any kick about it, as far as I Know. It was the way it had always been around, and it was the way it continued to be around until these gradual modifications could be made, and the transition carried out to the present day, in fact. Now we have none of that, and all the necessities of life have been transferred from the company to the individual.
What was J. B. Holmes like?
I only met him one time, under very adverse circumstances. I was the grievance committeeman for the powerhouse gang—or the river gang; It was maintenance crew for the powerhouse—and I had to take a grievance to the committee. And they asked for the plant manager to be there. Normally it would have been handled by the immediate foreman, by our superintendent. Well, they asked for the plant manager to be there. After seeing the presentation of a grievance, had a very difficult job that had to be done, so we might as well get on with it. The difficulty being that a man would be told by his immediate foreman how to do something in the powerhouse, and it had to be done right. Those are huge machines down there. If you get a chance, go down and look at them.
I've seen them.
One of the rotors weighs 160 tons. And pulling those things out or
tearing the generator apart, you had to be so very protected, because if
it could swing over it'd take the whole wall of the powerhouse out. So
we'd
[Laughter]
His personal life was not so good. I think his wife wound up in an
asylum, and I'm not so sure of that. But anyway, he didn't get married a
second time. When he retired, he went downhill
Yes, that's right, and I'm trying to figure out how the union fits into the story.
A guy came down here from Pittsburgh. We had no screens on the houses,
and flies walked around over his face when he was tryping to sleep late
in the morning. He got mad about that, and he went back up, and they [Laughter]
So this image of Alcoa building a town that was very, very sanitary, that had all the modern conveniences, was really not true at the time? There were certain things about the living conditions here that were unsatisfactory?
They weren't satisfactory, no. Not satisfactory at all. No, the company.
. . . It was so very hot over there in the pot rooms. They kept the
doors down on the theory that if they could keep the heat in the pots,
it would make more aluminum. The gasses that were given off in the
pot—fluorine gasses and the various other
gasses—would blister the guys' faces, and they'd have to put
salve on their faces. Also, they would take heat cramps, and they'd have
a gang of them laying out beside the first aid building down there with
their muscles knotted up with heat cramps. And it needed a lot of
changes. Of course, that's the way they'd always run everything, and
somebody had to get busy and try to make things a little bit better for
the people that come after. We had reached a stalemate. We had got all
in the local union we could get. So one night we had a normal meeting
down at the union hall. Somebody made a motion to go down to the gates
and see if we couldn't sign up the crew that was going in. We went down
to the gates. And it was the best thing for the union that ever happened
and the worst thing for the company. Because the company
Then the union served in such a way as to keep the company on its toes, to provide the people here in Badin with what it is that they needed and wanted. And that, in turn, had an effect of keeping people satisfied about working at Alcoa?
We didn't press on these home improvements too much. We were all in it, till the company simply closed the door on us. I mean, "You can have these things, provided we go up on the rent to take care of the cost."
I don't mean just about the homes, but I mean also about working conditions and wages.
The working conditions were changed over a period of time involving
grievance cases, winning some of them, losing some. In fact, the plant
personnel manager told me one time, "Why can't we settle our
troubles in the local plant instead of carrying them to Pittsburgh to an
arbitration board up there, and keep all this dirty laundry from being
out in public?" And I said, "Well, in that last
grievance case we had and won. . . ." He said, "Yes, I
think that we should have won that grievance case." I said,
"So there is your answer why we have to take the dirty linen
out, because you're still convinced that you should have won it, and we
were convinced that we should have won it, and we did, and [Laughter]
When the organizing was going on, did you have organizers from out of town come in and help you, or was it mostly an internal effort?
I'm trying to remember if we had any.
Carlee mentioned one man named Nick Zanorich.
Nick Zanorich was elected president of the Aluminum Workers International
while we were up there at New Kensington. And Nick came down
What years were they?
I don't know. Whenever they joined the Steel Workers, Nick took a job
with the combined bodies as an organizer
Do you have any theories about what role the union did play in the development of this town?
Yes, it played a very primary role. In fact, it furnished the impulse for
all the improvements that have occurred in Badin. Now I can prove that
to you very definitely. We would get mimeographed copies, and we'd often
go over to the textile industry and stand at the gates to give them out.
And they'd tell us, "Why don't you go back to Badin and leave
us alone? We're doing all right here." And they are still
operating under the same paternalistic system that Badin was under
whenever I came to town. You can go over and see what their wages are
and talk to those people over there and see what we had to contend with
from the very beginning. It seemed to be an insurmountable odds against
us when we first started, because Alcoa had all the millions of dollars.
Andrew Mellon, and he was the Secretary of the Treasury, and all that
kind of stuff. A gang of guys with a small amount of education to combat
their company corporation lawyers and all that kind of stuff whenever
How do you explain the success that you had here as opposed to the situation in the textile mills?
I don't know. I started to say that educational-wise and
intellectual-wise that we were a little bit ahead of them, but I
wouldn't say that. I don't know. You take J. P. Stevens. They've won
elections, but J. P. Stevens absolutely refused to sit down and agree to
a contract. And they still are. And they say the new president
So you think some of it had to do with the company that you were dealing with.
Oh, it had all to do with it. And then you had the long tradition of, the
cotton mills have always had a low pay scale. And since the major
industry of North Carolina is textiles, I count the fact that North
Carolina, I think, is about the forty-seventh in per capita income,
dragging down the low pay and the textile industry probably has more to
do with it than anything else. Of course, the South now is opening up to
new industries, and that will eventually, I hope, lead to better pay and
better working conditions in the textile industry. But we were told
flatly to go back where we came from. We tried to tell them the
advantages of having a pension plan for the old folks when they retire.
I was at the Fish Camp one night, and an old fellow said,
"Well, I made my last one today. I got laid off." And
I had no business getting into the discussion. Said, "Of
course, you don't mind that. You'll get a nice pension, and insurance
will take care of you if you get sick." "Well, I don't
get any of that stuff." [Laughter]
But the people who you're saying were telling you just to go away and weren't interested, they were the working people who you were talking to in the textile mills.
Oh, I don't know. I can't remember. Said, "If you don't like working conditions here, you can always go down the road and find something better somewhere else." Don't you see? And my answer to that was, that "If somebody doesn't stay here and somebody doesn't straighten it out, it'll never get straightened out. So we'll do what we can. We may not succeed, but at least we'll try."
From what I understand, the International Aluminum Workers of America union had a reputation as being sort of a company union, as opposed to . . .
No, I don't think so. I don't know what it became. As I said before, I
had six years in the Navy. Whenever the War broke out, the morning
END OF INTERVIEW