Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike

Salmond's work is a much needed book on a crucial strike in southern industrial history. The book is excellently researched, drawing on interviews with former participants of the strike and an abundant source of contemporary newspapers. The book is in narrative form; however, Salmond provides important analyses in explaining the causes of the strike, what distinguished the Loray Mill Strike, and the author does a good job of placing the strike in its historical context. This is a must read for students of American industrial and labor history, and I would recommend "Gastonia: 1929" to anyone interested in Southern history.

On the eve of the Great Depression, textile workers in Gastonia, North Carolina, walked out of the town's largest plant to protest management's efforts to speed up the production line. The Communist-led National Textile Workers Union saw the walkout as an opportunity to unionize southern industry and sent veterans of the Passaic textile strike to assume leadership. Two years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Gastonia quickly became an international cause celebre. Despite daily coverage in the New York Times and other major newspapers at the time and the later publication of six novels on the strike, the walkout has long since been forgotten. John Salmond's account brings to life the bizarre collision between the Communist Party and Bible Belt populism, which resulted in the murders under mysterious circumstances of Gastonia's police chief and a striker who was a talented country singer, kidnappings, ghost sightings in the Mecklenburg County Courthouse, and the eventual escape of the strike's leaders to the Soviet Union. For me, a particularly telling instance of cultural incomprehension was the decision of a sidewalk Pentecostal preacher to quit the strike because his participation conflicted with the "principles" of the Ku Klux Klan. A few weeks later, the national leadership of the NTWU decided to spotlight the union's dedication to racial integration in its strike pamphlets, eroding local support. (This was 1929, and the KKK had yet to become disreputable, even in some northern states.) Given the charged and intemperate nature of the contemporary accounts, I appreciated Salmond's efforts to sort out where accounts agree and where they conflict. I highly recommend this exceptionally well-written and fair-minded book