Appalachian History

“We didn't even know what a union was. We'd never heard tell of a union. But we just decided that we wasn't going to work for this wage. We just wasn't going to work for $10.08 a week. But as it happened, there was a carpenter and a union man, John Penix. He called someone that he knew in the labor movement, and they came here and organized, and it was just one big mess, and they just panicked. [Everyone else in the plant was] getting the same wages, and I imagine that they decided that if we were going to quit, they'd quit, too.

“At that time they paid a flat scale. You started out at $8.96 a week; $10.08; $11.20. I don't know whether you got past $11.20 or not. I never did hear any man say how much they made, but I don't think they paid them more. If they did, they didn't pay them much more. [The supervisors] were American, most of the people from up close by, the close counties. A lot of people worked there from Johnson City and way back up in Pogey. One time, I think we went to Pogey. There wasn't a thing on earth but just mountains with rocks sticking out. And people worked from up in Butler. Oh, just all around.

“Fifty-six hours [a week], they didn't seem to pay any attention to it. People had never been nowhere, and they'd never done anything. Maybe go to a movie on Saturday night. So I don't guess the hours made that much difference. I don't remember, except I know you'd get awfully tired.

“I went to the washroom when I wanted to. I went by my own rules, if you needed to go to the washroom. Oh, you worked so hard, you didn't fudge on them any. They didn't take any breaks. They were just supposed to go to the washroom and back.

“I don't remember who did the talking. You see, they selected the one to do the talking, and they passed the word around they was going to ask for a raise. Said, ‘If they don't give us that raise, we'll just quit work.’ And that was it.

“It just got in a bigger and a bigger and a bigger mess. Other people kept joining us, first from North American and then Bemberg, because everybody wanted a raise anyway, until that John Penix got in touch with somebody in labor, and an organizer came here and organized.

“There was five thousand people out. And we had asked for an $11.20 raise! We were arrested twice, on those picket lines. It was over here on the old State Line Road. They brought out the National Guard. In the meantime, my daddy cooked down there at the plant during that time. Some of them stayed in there, I reckon, to take care of the machinery and things that had to be looked after, and he cooked for them.”

Christine Galliher
Interview August 8, 1979
Discusses plant strike at North American Rayon Corp.
In Johnson City, TN on March 12, 1929
Southern Oral History Program Collection
http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/H-314/H-314.html

Related posts: “The stretch-out and the strike”


Christine+Galliher North+American+Rayon American+Bemberg labor+strike Johnson+City+TN appalachia appalachia+history appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

By the mid 1920s Appalachia, land of farms and farmers, had been crisscrossed by railroad tracks and dotted with mill villages, and the Piedmont had eclipsed New England as the world's leading producer of yarn and cloth. But along with the promise of new jobs came intense competition in the decentralized textile industry, depressing wages, and faster mill machines, which with each new technological advance threatened to further exhaust their operators.

These developments inevitably put labor and management on a collision course. Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936) captured perfectly the panic of the average millhand caught in the cross-fire of the “stretch-out”: sped up machinery and ever expanding work quotas.

In October 1926 American Bemberg began the manufacture of "artificial silk," or rayon, at its new plant in Elizabethton, TN. The parent company, J. P. Bemberg, was the German affiliate of Vereinigte Glanzstoff Fabriken (VGF), one of the international giants in the production of rayon. Two years later, in August 1928, VGF opened another rayon plant in the small East Tennessee town. Visions of economic growth encouraged government officials in Elizabethton to make concessions to VGF concerning property taxes and charges for the huge volumes of water needed to make rayon. They also promised the German industrialists that they would have an abundant supply of docile and cheap--that is, nonunion-- labor.

John Fred Holly, who grew up in Elizabethton and worked at the plant during the 1930s, reported that local banker E. Crawford (E.C.) Alexander showed him a copy of an agreement between the company and the Elizabethton Chamber of Commerce assuring the rayon concerns that they would never have to pay weekly wages in excess of ten dollars and that no labor unions would be allowed to operate in the town.

The stage was set for one of the first, if not THE first, strikes in the Southern textile field. On March 12, 1929, 800 employees of American Bemberg walked out in a fumbling strike, poorly organized and not under union leadership. They demanded wage increases; the company ordered the plant closed the following day. On March 19 the adjoining plant, under the same management, was also closed and its 3,000 employees joined the ranks of the strikers, all native Americans. The courts quickly granted injunctions against the strikers and two companies of National Guardsmen were rushed to Elizabethton by Governor Henry Horton.

“The employers utilize various devices to put the militia under obligations to them. During the Elizabethton, Tennessee, rayon strike, the Glanzstoff-Bemberg Corporation not only provided barracks but served free refreshments, provided music and furnished dancing partners to the men on duty,” noted the New International magazine.

On March 22, after the strikers had joined the A. F. of L., a settlement was reached and the mills reopened.

Sources: New International, New York City, Vol.IV No.6, June 1938, pp. 189-190
http://newdeal.feri.org/guides/tnguide/ch07.htm
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/epub/books/waldrep/02.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/sohp/laf/protest.html
http://www.etsu.edu/cass/Archives/Collections/afindaid/a243.html


Elizabethton+strike American+Bemberg Appalachian+history Appalachian+culture history+of+Appalachia Appalachia