Appalachian History

When you buy clothes on easy terms,
The collector treats you like measly worms;
One dollar down and then, Lord knows,
If you don't make a payment they'll take your clothes.

When you go to bed, you can't sleep,
You owe so much at the end of the week.
No use to collect, they're all that way,
Peckin' at your door till they get your pay.

Chorus:

I’m a-gonna starve, ev'rybody will.
You can't make a livin' at a cotton mill.

When you go to work, you work like the devil,
At the end of the week you're not on the level.
Pay day comes, you pay your rent.
When you get through, you've not got a cent

To buy fat-back meat, and pinto beans
Now and then you get a turnip green.
No use to collect, they're all that way,
You can't get the money to move away.

Chorus:

I’m a-gonna starve, ev'rybody will.
You can't make a livin' at a cotton mill.

Twelve dollars a week is all I get
How in the heck can I live on that?
I got a wife and fourteen kids,
We all have to sleep on two bedsteads.

Photographer Ben Shahn made this 1937 photo on the same trip he photographed square dancers at Skyline Farms in Jackson County, AL. He doesn't identify the player by name, however. More commentary at end of lyrics.







Patches on my breeches, holes in my hat,
Ain't had a shave since my wife got fat.
No use to collect, ever' day at noon
Kids get to cryin' in a different tune.

Chorus:

I’m a-gonna starve, ev'rybody will.
You can't make a livin' at a cotton mill.

They run a few days, and then they stand,
Just to keep down the workin'man.
We'll never make it, we never will,
As long as we stay in a roundin' mill.

The poor are gettin' poorer, the rich are gettin' rich,
If I don't starve, I’m a son of a gun.
No use to collect, no use to rave,
We'll never rest till we're in our grave.

Chorus:

I’m a-gonna starve, ev'rybody will.
You can't make a livin' at a cotton mill.

from Our Singing Country, A Second Volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs, collected and compiled by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1949
online at www.archive.org/stream/oursingingcountr013537mbp/oursingingcountr013537mbp_djvu.txt

Notes to piece from Our Singing County: No. 1629. Acc. on guitar and sung by Joe Sharp of Skyline Farms, Scottsboro, Ala., in Washington, D.C., 1939. By courtesy of Nicholas Ray. See also "Cotton Mill Blues." Decca 5559.

Sharp played mandolin for the Skyline Farms square dancers when they performed for Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House, and his band was recorded by the Library of Congress on that trip. Players: Chester Allen, guitar and violin, Joe Sharp, mandolin, Herbert Green, violin, and Thomas Holt, guitar.

“For the last three or four years, or until the middle of 1920, the cotton mills passed through a very prosperous period, just as did every other kind of business that was properly managed.

“The cotton mills made large profits, but if any other business, including farming, failed to make large profits during the period named the manager of that business should have resigned and gone to work for wages. The mills, the farmers, the merchants and in fact, everyone, passed through a very prosperous period, but all of us failed to realize while passing through the prosperous period that an end to that period was inevitable.

“We failed to take into account the inevitable fact that that tail end of all booms must show a loss, deducting of course a portion of the profits which were heretofore made.

Liberty Cotton Mill workers, Liberty SC, 1917.

“During the Spring of 1920 the cotton goods market began to decline very seriously and buyers of cloths became very scarce. The buyers who had purchased in advance were disposed to be very critical and in many cases took advantage of technicalities and in some cases bankruptcy in order to cancel contracts.

“The mills having sold the goods naturally purchased the cotton at a high price to make those goods and when the contracts for goods were cancelled, either legitimately or through the bankruptcy courts, or otherwise, the mills had to bear the burden of loss on the cotton which they purchased to manufacture the high priced goods.

“The income tax has been very excessive and unfortunately the idea has been permitted to creep into the minds of the public that profits of the mills represented the gross profits without first deducting the large amounts taken from the mills by the Federal Government through profit taxes.

“In addition to this the State and County taxes, including school taxes, have materially increased so that our present tax from both Federal and State has become burdensome.

“For the last several months it has been impossible to secure a profitable business and as a matter of fact for the last few months practically all of the goods which have been sold have been sold at a material loss, and at the moment we are unable to do a business that is in any way satisfactory.

Pickens Mill interior, early 1900s, Pickens, SC.

“Most of the mills have kept their machinery running most of the time in order that their organizations may be kept intact and to give employment to those people who are more or less dependent upon the mills. The operation of the mills has been done at a loss, and while I do not intend claiming any philanthropic motives, at the same time I do contend that the mill management as a rule has at all times kept the welfare of their employees before them and has endeavored to furnish enough employment to avoid serious trouble on the part of the operatives.

“The mills’ payrolls in the last few years have increased in excess of 200 per cent above the pre-war wage scale, and it is my understanding that the wage scale has necessarily been decreased about 25 per cent below the scale prevailing in July 1920.

“There has been a disposition in many quarters to misrepresent the position of the mills, and the statements have not always been in line with the truth. In fact in many cases the statements made have been entirely at variance with the truth.

“Unfortunately a few officials whom we have every reason to feel should represent us as well as other lines of industry have been inclined to make political capital at the expense of the mills and at the expense of the truth.

Norris Cotton Mill, Cateechee, SC, before 1899.

“It is impossible to forecast the future, but I feel it safe to say that the mills will operate so far as may be possible so as to avoid serious want on the part of those who are dependent upon the mills, and while we are hoping for an improved business and have no doubt that it will come sooner or later, at the same time we do recognize that the intense speculation in cotton, cloths, stocks, land and everything else that was experienced during and directly after the war ended has not been in the interest of the people generally, and that everything must come down to a legitimate price before a happy and prosperous condition can prevail.

“At the present the prices of cotton goods are about one third the price prevailing in the Spring of 1920 and are about in line with the prices prevailing in 1913. We are operating at present without profit and often with loss and of course that condition cannot continue indefinitely without serious injury to the capital of the mills, though as stated above we are hoping for better times and will in most cases endeavor to so conduct the business as to avoid serious want on the part of operatives.

“The writer personally feels it would be much in the interest of all if everyone will recognize the loss experienced by them during the last several months and accept that loss in good faith and go to work on a proper basis or a basis that is normal, forgetting the losses experienced, and assume a cheerful attitude towards the future.

“There is no question in my mind but that the present condition is largely psychological and that if everyone will get their liver to working correctly and forget their troubles of the past, and look forward with confidence to the future, we will have a better 1921 than the last half of 1920 has proven to be."


James D. Hammett, of Anderson, SC, president of the Cotton Manufacturers Association of South Carolina, in
Annual report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, Commerce and Industries, Volume 12 , by South Carolina. Dept. of Agriculture, Commerce, and Industries, 1920

In 1924, when I was 16 years old, I started workin' at the Appalachian Mill as a cone winder operator. Now on that machine, that was a long machine, it had about 50 spindles on it and I was windin' threads from a cone up to a spool. There wasn't a clock in the room. I didn't have a watch and I didn't know what time it was. So about 9 o'clock I thought it must be time to go home. That was the longest day that I can ever remember. And I remember, very definitely, eating my lunch at 10:30 because I thought it must be lunchtime. It wasn't lunchtime.

I still had to continue on until 12, until the whistle blew and most of us carried our lunch. And that was the shortest 30 minutes you've ever had, too. We would go outside the mill and sit on the steps and eat our lunch, but that was a long day. And when I started to thinkin' about that, "From now till 4:30, can I make it, can I make it?" But I did make it and, of course, each day that got a little easier, you know.

Did I know what I was doin' when I went into the cotton mill? No, I did not. It was just a way to, ah, help earn a living for the family. I had no ideas at all about, ah, ah, union labor. Now I had heard of the railroad strike in 1921, but there were—there wasn't any railroad workers living around where we were and there was very little in the papers about it. But I didn't know that they were even in the union. I thought they just quit work. I—I had no way of knowing anything about the labor movement.

It was the last thing in the world that my parents wanted, for us to go into cotton mills. They wanted us to all continue going to school. My mother had visions of us going to university and college and graduatin' and becoming doctors and lawyers and all that. And that was a dream that was never realized, because of the Depression there and there was no way.

My father couldn't make a livin' workin' in a butcher shop and in food markets around. And he had no other skills either. And my mother had been a—a cook and a dressmaker and they had no way of makin' a livin'. So it was up to us children to do that. We—we had to. We had to go to work.

Boys and girls at Bemis Cotton Mill in Bemis, TN, 1905.

The—at the Cherokee Spinnin' Company there in 1933, where I was still working as a winding machine operator, but the end of my machine was near a window and right around the corner from that was the weave shop. And I looked out there one day and here's all these weavers sittin' out there in the afternoon—it wasn't their lunch hour—they were sittin' out there on a pile of lumber, just sitting there. And we all—I told everbody to run to the window and looked at 'em and we all wondered, "What are—what are they doing?"

And we still didn't quite understand it, but I think now that they did gain something from that strike.

Oh, yes. That's—that's when we got the 8 hours. When the NRA came in, we got 8 hours then and our wages went up to $12.40 a week.

That was great, but you know what an argument here in Knoxville was and it was in all the newspapers. What—wasn't that gonna cause a crime wave or wasn't something gonna happen with those people with all that leisure time on their hands? In fact, a newspaper reporter—I don't think that's in my scrapbook anywhere, but a newspaper reporter came out to my house one day to ask, "What do you do with all this leisure time?" We—that was time that we hadn't had before and they were really afraid of it, that we had that leisure time. And then we were off on Saturday. See what a break that was there? We got the 40-hour week.

Lucille Thornburgh

----

In 1933, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Recovery Act, which included provisions that protected the right of workers to organize, Lucille Thornburgh and seven coworkers drew up a union charter. With the help of a local union organizer, they signed up all 603 employees at Cherokee Mills.

In 1934 Cherokee workers joined textile workers across the South in a general strike known as the Uprising of 1934. Knoxville workers remained out for eight weeks, but the strike collapsed following the sudden death of owner Hal Mebane, an event Thornburgh says workers interpreted in religious terms. When the workers returned, Thornburgh was blacklisted, and other mill owners refused to hire her.

In 1995 Thornburgh was featured in the PBS film Uprising of '34, which documented the general textile strike.


Source: Lucille Thornburgh interview, edited, from WORK 'N PROGRESS: Lessons in the History of American Labor at Archives, Library and Information Center, Georgia Institute of Technology www.library.gsu.edu/spcoll/Labor/wnp/wnpdocument/uprising34/uprising34.pdf

commentary by Connie L. Lester, Mississippi State University/Tennessee Historical Society/Tennessee Encyclopedia