Focuses on the ways in which labor struggles provoked Southern small-town reporters and editors to reimagine and begin to reconstruct their world.
The southern textile strikes of 1929-1931 were ferocious struggles--thousands of millhands went on strike, the National Guard was deployed, several people were killed and hundreds injured and jailed. The southern press, and for a time the national press, covered the story in enormous detail. In recounting developments, southern reporters and editors found themselves swept up on a painful and sweeping re-examination and reconstruction of southern institutions and values. Whalen explores the largely unknown world of southern journalism and investigates the ways in which the upheaval in textiles triggered profound soul-searching among southerners. The southern textile strikes of 1929-1931 were ferocious struggles--thousands of millhands went on strike, the National Guard was deployed, several people were killed and hundreds injured and jailed. The southern press, and for a time the national press, covered the story in enormous detail. In recounting developments, southern reporters and editors found themselves swept up on a painful and sweeping re-examination and reconstruction of southern institutions and values. Whalen explores the largely unknown world of southern journalism and investigates the ways in which the upheaval in textiles triggered profound soul-searching among southerners.
The worlds of labor, journalism, and the American South collide in this study. That collision, Whalen claims, is the prelude to the stunning social, economic, and cultural transformation of the American South which occurred in the last half of the twentieth century. The textile strikes shocked the mind of the South, a fact that can readily be seen in hometown papers, as reporters and editors ran the gamut from denial and scheming to hoping and dreaming--sometimes even bravely confronting the truth. The reevaluation of southern manners and mores that would culminate in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s can be dated back to this period of turmoil.
Introduction: "Like Fire in Broom Straw"
Eruption and Astonishment
Hysteria and the Restoration of Order
Metaphors of Struggle
Portraits of Workers
Girls Everywhere
The Inescapable Question of Race
What is to be Done?
Conclusion: "Journalism Below the Potomac"
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
Drawing heavily on a series of southern newspapers, Whalen (Queen's College, North Carolina) carefully explores their accounts of the textile strikes that rippled across the region from 1929 to 1931. The southern press's examination of the labor turmoil proved to be inconsistent, hesitant, and incomplete, demonstrating perplexities, contradictions, and downright confusions. Whalen asserts that the strikes were tied to the enormous tectonic shift in the southern mind that was to eventually transform the South. In the short run, newspapers attempted to balance market developments with human rights and democratic precepts. Forced to grapple with the often-dire conditions afflicting workers, those same publications came to view themselves as independent voices that demonstrated fortitude and moral rectitude. Moreover, editors portrayed their newspapers as representatives of the democratic community. The media, they insisted, had to avoid extremes on either side of the spectrum--the plutocracy or communist agitators. Consequently, longstanding ties between the newspapers and mill barons became more tenuous. While damning radicals as irrational, anarchistic, and un-American, the papers frequently referred to laborers as overworked, underpaid, and mercilessly exploited. With the passage of time, some came to depict labor unions in a more moderate, if not an altogether positive, light. Recommended for general libraries and advanced students.—Choice
