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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-0288, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Mary Robertson entered the union movement as part of a colonization scheme: the Food and Tobacco Workers Union enlisted her to find work at a tobacco company in Asheville, NC, and convince workers there to join the organization. A career in organization followed, with Robertson weathering blacklisting and a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee to secure a position of power within the Central Labor Union, a centralized network of unions in western North Carolina. In this interview, Robertson offers a history of unionization in the region, drawing connections between regional character and union membership; revealing union strategies for recruiting members; and the role of women in organized labor and southern society. She concludes the interview by describing some of the strategies union leaders are using in the region to create conditions for increased organization. This interview will prove a rich resource for researchers interested in the role of unions in western North Carolina.
Mary Robertson offers an insider's view of the organized labor movement in western North Carolina.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
… a little bit about yourself--where and when you were born.
All right. I always hesitate when people ask me where I was born because so often they're disillusioned if you don't say you were born in Western North Carolina. But the truth of the matter is that technically I was born in El Paso, Texas. I came here when I was ten and I've been here ever since. This is my mother's home going back quite a few generations, here in Buncombe and in the western counties of North Carolina.
How did your family happen to get to Texas?
Well, my father was a disabled World War I veteran. He came here to the VA Hospital, that's now generally referred to as Oteen, and he met my mother and married her. He was from the northern part of South Carolina. And he was offered a job with the border patrol in El Paso, Texas, so they moved there. Actually, he didn't take the job when they got there; for whatever reasons, he took another job. But that's how it happened that they went to El Paso, and I was born there shortly thereafter. I tbink they'd been married about six months before they left South Carolina.
And why did they come back to the mountains?
Well, that's an interesting story, too. My father as a
disabled veteran drew total disability compensation. After World War II,
up until the Roosevelt administration, a veteran could draw one hundred
percent disability payments and work at the same time if he were able
to. But because of the Depression and the need for putting unemployed
people to work, one of the early acts of the Roosevelt administration
was to say that if a man drew permanent disability compensation, either
he had to give up the compensation, or he had to give up working. He
couldn't do both. And my father, because of the condition of
his health, was afraid that he could not sustain working for a long
period of
Did you come back to Asheville?
Yes.
Did you have brothers and sisters?
I've got one brother and one sister and they both live in Asheville.
Are they older or younger?
They're younger than I am. I'm the oldest.
So you grew up here after the age of ten?
Yes, and [I was] old enough to be aware at least of the more traumatic aspects of the Depression. I knew that people were in bad shape. I didn't necessarily understand all the ramifications of the economy and how it contributed to the Depression, but at ten you can realize that there is a critical situation.
When would that have been that you moved to Asheville?
Well, I was born in 1923, so I guess that makes it '33.
Yes, and that was right in the midst of the Depression.
Particularly in this area. We talked about the uniqueness of this Appalachian area, and of course it was already depressed, so the Depression just accentuated it.
Did you live close by your mother's people?
At that time she had several brothers and sisters who lived in Buncombe County, yes. One of them was Bascomb Lamar Lunsford.
That's her brother?
Yes. It was in the early days of his Mountain Folk Festival.
The Central Labor Union was somehow involved in the first …?
Yes. It was one of the sponsors of the first festival. It was the AFL, actually.
Do you know how that came about?
No, I don't. In fact, somebody called me about it this spring. That's the first I knew.
David Whisnant?
Yes, probably.
He's the one that told me that, too.
I come from an industrial union background with the CIO. That was the AFL, which was the craft union then. Even when I got old enough to be involved in the labor movement I didn't know that much about the local history of the AFL. But I'm not surprised that it was one of the sponsoring agents, because Bascom was looking for sponsorship anywhere he could find it.
How did you, then…
How did I get involved with the labor unions?
Yes.
Well, I was in the Air Force in World War II, and while I was in the service I met people, men and women, who'd been involved in the labor movement and learned a little bit about it, and when I got out of the service I preferred opportunities in organized plants because unions make good ones.
Did you go in the service right out of high school?
Well, actually I'd been working for a year or two--I didn't finish high school. I didn't finish ninth grade. I went to work to help support my brother and sister. But I was eighteen, so that's about the age.
Where had you been working?
I didn't work in any kind of industry. I worked in a restaurant or--actually, at the time I went in the service I was working for a mail-order photographic house.
You would have been in the …
It was called WACs. The Air Force was the Air Corps. It was part of the Army, not a separate military arm the way it is now.
How did you make the decision to join?
Oh, that wasn't difficult. At my age, at that time, it was the one avenue of escaping the dull, monotonous routine.
I've known several women, from this part of the country particularly, who took that way out during World War II. Obviously the Army's always been an avenue for young men in that kind of condition, but I've been becoming more aware of how much during World War II it was sort of that for women.
Yes. I would hesitate to say how realistic the advantages were to most women. To me they were real enough because I was a photographer. I went to photographic school at Lowery Field. I did aerial photographic work, I did emergency photographic work, and I did fun photographic work. There were not too many women in the Air Force who were photographers. It was one of the half-dozen really elite jobs for women. Most women were relegated into the same clerical sort of work that they had done in civilian life, but I had one of the really adventurous, glamorous jobs.
Had you already been doing photography?
Yes, I was working for a mail-order photographic place when I went into the service.
So that gave you a little bit of experience.
Right. It was an accident that I was working, that I went in at the time
I went in. I don't know if you want to get involved in all
this,
Hap Arnold?
Well, that was his nickname--I can't remember what his name was. You can look that up. But anyway, he finally agreed to accept women in the Air Corps provided that he would be the commanding officer of the women, instead of Oveta Culp Hobby, who was the commanding colonel of the women. And he stipulated that only under those conditions--that he would be in command instead of she of the women who were in the Air Corps--he would accept them. So of course as soon as he made that decision and it became official, there was a sudden need for women to fill the jobs that he wanted filled. And I just happened to go in at that time. So there was a sudden need for photographers, clerical people, and so on. So I went out of basic training into photographic school.
Was that an advantage or a disadvantage to women that he put himself …
We thought it was an advantage. That's because of course we considered ourselves just a cut above women in the Army and other women in other branches of service. The Air Force was the darling of World War II. And so to be in the Air Corps at all, even for men, was considered an elite branch of service, and for women, especially since they had been deprived of better opportunities for a long while, considered it to be an elite position and actually preferred it, because as far as we could tell it made no difference. The chain of command in any military service is such that the peons never really know what the difference is between the commanding generals. You know the difference between your lieutenant and your sergeant, but you don't know the difference between…
What was Hobby's position exactly?
She was the top commanding officer of all the women in the Army. And of course the Air Corps was part of the Army; it was not a separate branch of service at that time. It would have been the same thing if the Artillery Corps for example, whoever happened to be the top commander of the Artillery Corps had said "Well, the only way I will have women in the Artillery Corps is if I command them." Same thing. It just happened that this guy did it. And I don't hesitate to say this as though I know--I'm sure it could be documented that one of the reasons that he was able to get away with it was because the Air Corps was an elite corps. It was the darling of the military establishment and it was evident that it was going to be an air war, and the commanding general of the Air Corps therefore had clout with the general staff.
How long were you in the Air Corps?
For about three and a half years.
What kind of effect did that experience have on you?
It isn't really difficult to imagine the effect that it had. I had lived a very sheltered life. When I went to school I went to private schools.
Why was that?
Because my parents were Catholics. There are not many Catholics in western North Carolina now; there were even fewer then. So I went to a parochial school, and it was a very small parochial school. There were four of us in my seventh grade class. So I hadn't even had the broadening experience of public school. And so it had a decided effect to anybody at that age who goes from an isolated situation into the maelstrom of a world war, a major world war.
Were you overseas?
No. I was not overseas.
Did you have any bad experiences?
No, no bad experiences. I enjoyed every minute of it. By
Did that mean that you worked more with men than with women?
Yes, in some respects that was true. I wouldn't say the reverse of that was necessarily true for all the women who were in the Army or the Air Corps or any other branch of service. But it was true in my case. There were more men. Every place where I was stationed there were far more men than women anyway. The only place where there were more women was in basic training and that hardly counted. That was a preliminary experience and had a short life--I think basic training at the time I went in the service was only six weeks. So that didn't really make much difference. When you completed basic training you were assigned to some military base and everywhere a woman went there were more men than women. One of the nice things about it. Girls had their choice of dates. Anywhere else in the world there're more women than that. So that wasn't a bad thing at all.
Did you make close friends there that you couldn't have here?
No. It's a very peculiar experience. I don't know what it's like in the peace-time army--I was never in the peace-time army, and of course all those things have changed now for men and women--but in a war-time army it's just almost automatic that you don't make terribly close attachments because you're not going to be with people for very long. They're going to be transferred somewhere else eventually. Momentarily I made close contacts, but I didn't try to keep up with anybody and they didn't try to keep up with me. My experience is that in most cases nobody did that--that's the exception rather than the rule. I would be hard put to remember the names of a lot of women that at the moment I had close relationships with.
What happened then when you got out of the Air Force?
I came back to Asheville, and by that time my mother was a widow, and I had a younger brother and sister who were still in high school, so I went back to work. I went back to the job I had when I went in the service, which was in this photographic place, but that was far too tame for me by that time. So I got a job as secretary-receptionist for the then Fur and Leather Workers. That union has been long since absorbed into the Meatcutters' Union. And from there I went to Winston-Salem, and I went to work in the Reynolds plant, and they had a union contract with the old FTA--the Food and Tobacco Workers' Union, that no longer exists--and I worked for FTA as an organizer for a time with the tobacco workers in Winston-Salem.
That was a really interesting episode.
Yes, it was fun to me. I mean
Did you know a guy named Korsted?
Yes, your saying the name makes me remember that I did, but I don't remember any details. I just remember the name.
I can't remember his first name. He was an organizer for the FTA. His son, Bob Korsted, is writing a book about Local 22 in Winston-Salem, and he got to interview a lot of the people that were involved. But there's a woman in Winston-Salem whose name I can't …
Velma Hopkins is still there. There were some other people who have since
died or moved on who were involved in that, but I know Velma
It was mostly a black union?
Yes. It's not fair to really try to condense a situation as important in the lives of North Carolina workers into a single sentence, but if I were going to that was the problem in the tobacco industry as a whole. It started out with a predominance of black employees who worked in the pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco, and so forth departments. As time progressed and cigarettes became more important, they eventually became the key phase of the industry. And when the cigarette departments began, they involved white workers. So you began with a situation where the majority of workers were black, working in specific departments, and they organized into a union. Then the company expanding into a white community in a different department, where the white workers had not yet been persuaded of the need for a union. So that then you look around, and suddenly your base is gone. You have a majority of people in departments that are being slowly shut down and ceasing to exist. You lose employees. The majority of your workers are workers who are not organized, and that's how Reynolds was lost.
What years would it have been that you were there?
I got out of the service in '46, so it must have been '47, '48, somewhere along the late forties. I'm very bad about dates if I don't have a point of reference.
I'm trying to remember what I know about that local. What was going on during those years when you were there?
I'll tell you what happened. To say that I went to work at
Reynolds is confusing. I was asked to come to work at Reynolds. That was
during the CIO's southern campaign in every industry in the
South. One of the organizing techniques that was being used at that time
was what they called
What was your job?
I worked in the cigarette plants as an inspector on a cigarette packing machine.
Was your purpose especially to try to organize white workers?
Yes, especially to organize white workers. That was the whole point in getting me to go, because I was white and I could be hired into the cigarette departments. Blacks were not being hired in the cigarette departments. And persuade white cigarette workers in those departments to join the union.
How did you go about trying to do that?
It wasn't difficult. Statistically, I suppose I was
tremendously successful. I got five people in my department to join the
union, and I don't think there was but maybe one other person
in all of the cigarette factories at that time who joined during that
period. If you want to call that success. It was a situation that was
doomed from the outset, because of this imbalance; the base was gone.
The contract was going to expire in a matter of months, and there was no
possibility at that time under those circumstances of changing the base.
There was just no way. There was no way that that many white workers
were going to be talked into
There were virtually no white workers in the union at that time?
Virtually no white workers. And those white workers who did belong to the union or had belonged to the union for any appreciable amount of time were completely isolated and ostracized because they did belong and had very little persuasive power with other white workers. That's the reason the colonizing plan was ideal for that, except that it came too late and too little. It was a doomed situation.
Why did the union wait so long to understand what …
The answer to that question would be, why would textile unions fool
around today asking for a nickel increase here and try to
nickel-and-dime the company to death, I guess.
That was your first real experience.
That's right. I had never worked in a factory in my life, and my whole role in the labor movement was an artificial one to start with. After I came home from the service, I happened to make contact with a man who was an organizer in the fur industry. And that was a pure accident. I never worked in a fur operation in my life.
Who was that?
That was Harvey Scott. In some of your material, his name may turn up
somewhere. So I was in an artificial situation, and my opportunities for
learning to understand the philosophies of the labor movement were
really stilted rather than enhanced by being in an artificial situation
like that. I believed in the idea as I understood it. Of course, working
in that particular
How would you explain the reluctance of white cigarette workers to join the union?
That's not hard to explain. Right now, today, your yourself,
without realizing it, you always accept in lieu of pay--all of us
accept, in lieu of pay--a substitute, a vicarious sort of thing. And
when that substitute is a sense of superiority, even though that in
itself is a lie, because it's not a sense of your
superiority, it's a sense of somebody else's
inferiority,
Did you get that in real concrete responses from people, people not wanting to join the union because blacks were in it?
Oh, yes, it was very outspoken. And it's not that whispered today in certain areas. Among the old craft unions, you still run across a lot of that. "We don't want no niggers in our outfit." I'm talking about the rank and file. But at that time nobody apologized for it. They had not been made to feel there was any necessity for apologizing for it; that was just the way God had created the world, that white people made cigarettes and the black people made chewing tobacco.
Obviously.
And to resist the establishment in any aspect anywhere was just to commit
an act of treason against the whole social-economic-political structure.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
… and on that basis have. That is not the way it happened. Those people who tell you that they're Christians because they received a call have deluded themselves. Life just doesn't work that way. You go into the situation to do something, and then from that you learn. You join a union, and then after exposure to the union you begin to learn what the union is. You don't join it because you have a deep understanding of what the labor movement is to start with. It just doesn't work that way. It sounds good in the books, but it doesn't work that way. At least so rarely that it doesn't count.
You were there when they lost the contract.
Actually, no. I got fired.
How did that happen?
Of course, they was bound to catch on to me sooner or later.
What kind of relationships did you have with the black leaders of the union?
Oh, fine. I was doing splendid with that. There was no problem there.
You've got to give several weeks to these interviews, because
it covers so much ground.
Has that given the labor movement in the mountains a different shape than the labor movement in the Piedmont?
It's undoubtedly had an effect on it. But I don't
want to confuse you, because in the last thirty years since World War
II, since the people left the mountains… They left the
mountains for the first time in World War II. They went either to get
jobs in the munitions factories, the shipyards, and they went into the
services. Before that, they'd been very isolated. When they
came back, they brought back this idea of white superiority, that is, of
an overt response to the feeling of white superiority. And all of a
sudden there were people who learned and taught other people what the
Confederate flag looked like, so that only in recent times do the
So you came back to Asheville then?
Are you talking about after the tobacco experience? Yes, I came back to Asheville and lived here. I've lived here ever since.
What did your husband do?
All of his experience had been with heavy machinery. There were several plants in Winston-Salem. For example, it was near the furniture capital, and there were a number of plants that made hardware. And he operated heavy stamping machines and that kind of thing. At that time, western North Carolina had very little heavy industry, and so he had a tough time getting a job that was productive, that lasted long enough or he made enough money. So we went back to Winston-Salem when our daughter was two years old, and that's when I worked at Western Electric.
In Winston-Salem?
Yes, and stayed about a year, and then we came back to Asheville and never left after that.
What's been the history of your work in the labor movement since then?
Of course, on again and off again, because I spent a good
What was your involvement in civil rights?
My direct involvement was rather puny, to tell you the truth. We organized a little group here in Ashville called the Buncombe County Committee for Jobs for Negroes. And it was not attached to any national organization, although there were a lot of such organizations going on all over the country at that time. I can't even remember the name of the early civil rights legislation that everybody was working for, and job rights, but in any case …
Interracial committee?
As long as I was in it, it was, if you mean were there blacks and whites.
Most of the people were black, because obviously it was a group to try
to get blacks hired as something other than maids and janitors at that
time. At that time there were no jobs in Asheville for blacks except
When would this have been?
It would have been in the fifties.
After the Supreme Court decision.
No, before, well before. It was during the McCarthy period, as a matter
of fact. And since getting blacks hired in capacities other than as
maids and janitors was absolutely hopeless from the outset
I have a book that came out this spring that's about a group
called the Association of Southern Women
Vaguely. I don't know that I've known anybody personally that belonged to the group.
It was sort of a major, mostly white, liberal organization in the South in the twenties and thirties, and it was replaced by the Southern Regional Council. But rest rooms for black women was the issue that they worked on?
Yes. We never got anything.
Starting in the twenties.
All we ever got out of it was a free book on the life and times
And they gave you a copy of the book?
Yes, they gave us a copy of the book.
They didn't open the rest room, but they gave us a copy of the
book. And then it wasn't too much longer after that that the
Supreme Court ruling initiated. And I was mildly involved on the
periphery of the integration of eating places. At that time I
didn't take an active role, certainly not a leadership role,
because to have done so with the stigma of having been a
"communist" or whatever it happened to be would have
been detrimental to the success of the movement. But I was involved in
the periphery of that
Were you red-baited?
Oh, my God, yes.
What form did that take?
Whatever happened to be available. I was subpoenaed before the House Unamerican Activities Committee when they met in Charlotte. That was the most overt. But you used to be melodramatic around this town to be in a car with blacks after dark, and we used to get stopped. Nobody ever did anything, but they would stop us. "Where are you going?" "What are you doing?" "What you black boys got those white girls in there for?" But other than that and a certain amount of just general social ostracism and that kind of thing… But I was subpoenaed.
How did you feel about that? Was that painful at the time?
No. There were two aspects of it that were painful. It didn't
bother me--I was just immature enough to get a big kick out of it--but
When did that happen? Why was your picture in the paper?
When I was subpoenaed. The Charlotte Observer referred
to me as "an attractive young housewife," and
I've never been treated that well by anybody.
I'm surprised they didn't tell what you had on.
They did. Dressed up.
Oh, they did.
He did and he didn't. We are divorced now. We parted in a very
friendly, amicable way after our daughter was eighteen years old and was
able to sit down with us and understand what we were doing. He still
lives in Asheville, and we are always friendly when we meet on the
street, and my daughter has a very good relationship with him and with
me and exchanges, you know, "I saw Dad yesterday, and
he's doing so-and-so," or "I saw
Mother." But that situation contributed to that, because my
husband was by nature somewhat introverted and a very private person and
did not feel comfortable if he was singled out or felt exposed in this
sort of way. And while morally and privately he agreed with me, he
didn't feel comfortable the
Those differences in temperament have a lot to do with the way people get involved in stress situations.
Oh, yes, I remember the stress.
Did you get involved with the Central Labor Union
I went back to work for the Meatcutters about eleven or twelve years ago and worked for them until about a year ago, and then I came to work as a fulltime employee of the Central Labor Union.
What was your job with the Meatcutters?
The simplest thing to say is the publicity-education department. The Meatcutters is a large local. There's one local union that has the entire food industry in the entire state in one local. And so in order to disseminate educational material and that sort of thing, they have to have somebody who makes the leaflets, and I did the mechanics of this sort.
This labor union in Asheville has been around for a very long time.
Yes, it's been around for a long time, because there has been
a very old building trades group in Asheville. One of our local unions
was chartered before the turn of the century, the Carpenters. And that,
of course, was the AF of L. Then when the amalgamation of the AF of L
and the CIO took place, there was already the base there, you see. There
was no industrial council in this area at that time. The major
industrial unions were textile in this area at that time, and there was
no industrial council; there was a building trades council, but not an
industrial council. So when
When that amalgamation took place, was there a lot of tension or resistance, the craft unions versus the industrial unions?
I'm sure that there were. I don't know that from personal contact, because I was not involved in the labor movement when that took place, but I'm sure there were, and one reason I'm sure is because it still crops up occasionally, not any real animosity but a difference between the building trades, the craft unions and the industrial unions.
How would you characterize that difference?
In western North Carolina, where, as I say, the building trades are the backbone of the central labor movement, the craft unions do not always understand the problems faced by the industrial workers, and the industrial workers do not always understand the problems faced by the craft unions. And you occasionally run across a little sneer about how much money plumbers make. And conversely, you run across a little sneer about factory workers.
My understanding is that the Asheville area has been one of the strongest centers of the labor movement in the state, or was historically.
It is now. Now how far back that strength goes, I would hesitate to say,
because of course it was based on the craft unions. And the craft unions
are as strong as their trade is strong. In other words, if
there's a big building program, then you've got a
big craft union building
What exactly is the role of the Central Labor Union?
The Central Labor Union is just an avenue for bringing together
representatives of all of the local unions in a given geographical area
so that those issues that concern all local unions can be acted upon and
information disseminated from a central body. In some respects
it's a somewhat cumbersome, awkward structure, not by its
nature so much as by the way it is used. George Meany has no
authoritative word to say to an international union or any of its
locals. He can advise, he can suggest, but
How did he quash that?
In the case of the Asheville Central Labor Union, he sent a letter saying "You will retract that statement from the newspaper."
Or else what?
Or I'll lift your charter. And he did the same thing to Wilbur. In other words, in order to have any flexibility at all, you have to be pretty fast on your feet sometimes in the central labor unions.
How much autonomy do you have on local or state issues?
It depends on what the national organization wants to take up, and
obviously they're going to leave you alone if
you're not interfering in their playhouse. So the way you
operate is to stay out of their playhouse. On a political level--and
that's the only real reason for the existence of state and
national and central labor union organizations is politics, in the end--
What are some of the main issues that the Central Labor Union has been involved in over the years?
This Central Labor Union has been involved to the hilt in politics, certainly ever since I've been a delegate, the last ten or twelve years, and without question has more political clout than any other Central Labor Organization in the state, and to some degree has more clout than the state office. That's partly because we've been involved for a long time, and it's partly because, if I may frankly say so, we have developed strategies that work. And, of course, it is largely because we have a membership that is politically involved, not as much as we'd like them to be …
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
There are no delegates who are not actively involved in politics, and there are very few who are not officers in their precinct or in their county structure.
How would you describe the strategies that you've developed
that made this possible
I'd have to talk in specifics, and, of course, I
don't want to talk in current specifics
Historically.
We have made it evident to politicians that we do indeed speak for a
large number of workers, that we do indeed have their ear, and we have
been very, very careful in the way we have selected candidates or
whether we've selected them or not. In other words,
we've been very careful. We have not just simply jumped out
there and said, "Yes, we're going to support
Candidate X." We have sat down with the Pope(
How many people would you say that you do represent?
We like to say that we represent a potential of 50,000 people.
Numerically it fluctuates so much that it's just not
realistic to try to say how many we represent. We have everything from
the textile plants to the small six-, seven-man operations into the
craft unions where you have individual carpenters and so forth. And the
industry in the area is far more diversified than it once was. We have
plants who manufacture components for radio and television; we have
plants who work with the furniture trade--I'm talking about
organized plants--in our jurisdiction who have delegates in our hall.
The glass plant out here, the Baby Boom
How many counties?
Sixteen counties. We have all the western counties in North Carolina except Haywood County. Haywood County has its own Central Labor Union.
Why is that?
It has a lot of industry, and all that industry is organized. And at some
time in the past before my time, it was given jurisdiction within its
own county. The national office--in the end, George Meany--decides what
I want to ask you both of your personal experiences and what generalizations you might make about your role as a woman, the way you've been treated, opportunities you've had. What effect did the fact that you're a woman have?
Of course, when you ask me personally, I am me, see, and the way I'm treated is me, and
that doesn't mean that if another woman sat in this seat that
she would have the same experience. But personally, I'm just
one of the bold, brash, bitchy-type women who just ignore the fact that
I'm not supposed to be in that area.
But there are ways that it gets communicated to you that you're not supposed to be doing certain things that you've done?
Oh, yes, and finally get told outright, and I just say, "The
hell with you"
They don't make decisions, and if they try to make decisions,
they're more often than not either ignored, bypassed, or even
squelched if there's an excuse for it. Wilbur Hobby would sit
right there and say that I'm a damn liar, but it's
true. Because look at it: the Executive Board is made up of men; the
decisions are made by men. Two women, I think, is about all we have on
the Executive Board. We have Barbara Brown of the Teachers'
Union, and we have a girl whose name I can't remember, a
young black woman from the Ladies' Garment Workers. Now how
is it possible, you see, for these two women to really effectively make
decisions when they're outvoted by some sixteen or twenty
men? I mean when there are that many more men. And all of these
international leaders, all the local union leaders, there
isn't a single woman who's the president of a
local union. Yes, there is one small local in western North Carolina
that has a woman as its president. It's Excello, a little
textile plant; it's just been organized. And that young woman
has not really had a long enough time… Now all of these men
will tell you that oh, that isn't so; we just go out of our
way to make it possible for women to serve. And they probably really
believe that, but it isn't true, because go out of their way
is sort of like you go out of your way to have what the blacks refer to
as "a nigger in the window."
What are the barriers, exactly? How does it work? How are women prevented
from moving into these
In the first place, in industry--now in the building trades there have
never been women--but in industry women have always been relegated to
the lower-paid, the less desirable jobs. That's particularly
true in textiles, furniture, the paper industry. These are the big
industries in the South. Women have always been relegated to the lowest
and most undesirable jobs by the management. And, of course, society has
relegated women to the background, so that women themselves
don't think of themselves as being capable of doing these
jobs. They assume that a man can be a supervisor or a foreman, a man is
better able to operate an intricate machine, he's better able
to drive a truck, the desirable jobs. They assume, on the whole, that he
is more capable of doing it. It naturally follows, then, that he is also
more capable of running the union. And that is especially true in areas
and industries where by its very nature a local does not have the
finances to have fulltime leadership personnel. More often than not, in
that case, the man who is elected to be president is the man who has a
job with a company that gives him more free time and more energy to give
to the job. So he usually is in one of the better jobs. It just
naturally follows. You know if he's digging ditches all day,
he does not have the energy to go that night and conduct a union
meeting. This is one of the reasons. Another reason, of course, is
because the men just naturally resist the idea. They've been
taught to resist it, so they just naturally resist it. And they think
they're being fair, but the truth of the matter is,
they're finding all kinds
Do you think women in the mountains have been in a different position in some ways than, say, women in other parts of the South or women nationally? Do you think it's a more patriarchal culture, or do you think that it's a culture that in some ways has given women…
It's a little of both. Now we're not talking about the plantation South. Now this was the area where women were reduced to little more than a dream-child. The mountain women, like the pioneer women, were forced to assume responsibilities, because it was the only way to survive. In that respect, the mountain woman has a different position than other women of the South, or even other women of other parts of the country. She is more likely to be a decision-maker in the family, and you're more apt to see some signs of a matriarchal society in the mountains on the one hand. And on the other hand, because of their isolation and their meager economic clout and the whole social structure, they're also more apt to bow to some religious social theory that they should be naturally subservient to men. So you get a contradiction there that's very strange. The same woman who is perfectly capable of running the tractor and does, of making decisions about whether we're going to plant wheat or corn, of building a house or deciding to build a house, that same woman is the one that's more than likely to voice an anti-ERA attitude on the grounds that the Bible did not mean for women to play a dominant role. Why this contradiction, I don't know.
Have you seen that in the lives of, say, women in your own family, your mother and her relatives, that kind of contradiction in a concrete sense?
Well, yes, I have. In my mother's family the oldest child was
a male, and he went away early on to teach school in Louisiana, which
left the next oldest child a girl. And the mother was an invalid, and
the father taught
The thing he could do best was go listen to somebody else play and write it down. That was his great contribution. But my aunt had one of the best farms and the best beef herds and the best cattle herds in Buncombe County, and yet she had an extreme tendency to not do certain things, not go to certain places, not make certain associations, because those things were not proper to a woman's role in society. A woman's role in society was to serve her husband. So I see that contradiction all the time. Obviously it's going to take a young generation of women to resist this, and whether it's going to be this generation of young women, the oncoming generation, or not, I don't know. I would have thought it would have been my generation. It was so logical for it to have been my generation, and yet my contemporaries, my peers, are more apt to have negative attitudes about ERA in this area than my mother's generation had.
Oh, yes.
And why that is would take somebody who has a far deeper understanding of
the trends and the makeup of human nature than I have.
You've moved out of this part of the country in your dealings within the national labor movement. Do you think that part of the reason for your particular kind of character has been your roots in this area?
Is there a certain style or certain attitudes that come out of your …
Yes. My particular circumstances, my beginnings made me the person I am, but then that's true of everybody. Now whether I would have had those particular circumstances in another state or another age, I don't know. If I'd grown up in Texas and never come back here, what then? I don't know. And I don't suppose anybody knows those things. I think that my economic background, well, everything that contributed to make my situation, made me, but then I think that's true of everybody.
What do you see the future bringing?
As far as the labor movement is concerned? I think that in western North
Carolina in particular that we've got a hammerlock on it. I
think that we've no way to go but up. I don't know
if that's necessarily true in other parts of the state,
because we're on the threshold of a very society-shaking
series of events in the whole world because of the energy crisis,
because of the entry into space. All of these factors put us right on
the threshold of some major changes in the structure of society and the
structure of the economy and this sort of thing. And what that will do
in other parts of the state, I don't know, and frankly
that's because I just don't live there, and I
don't see people's reactions. Here in the
mountains
Do y