The authorities couldn’t tell for certain who shot Gastonia,
N.C. police chief Orville Aderholt on June 7, 1929, so they
arrested nearly everyone at the scene. Seventy-one people were
detained, all of them organizers for or members of the National
Textile Workers Union, whose camp Aderholt was visiting when
he was killed. The trial received national attention. Members
of the media, like many locals, were divided as to whether the
strike at the Loray Mill, which had begun earlier that spring,
represented an honest effort by workers to improve their conditions
or a dangerous plot by Northern Communists to infiltrate the
The textile industry in North Carolina was booming in the
first decades of the 20th-century. New mills opened all over
the Piedmont while old ones expanded. Investors from other
parts of the country poured money into the region, taking advantage
of one of the South's most important resources: cheap and abundant
labor. The authors of a pamphlet issued by the Seaboard Air
Line Railway around 1924 made a compelling case for bringing
textile businesses south. "Labor is the South's greatest
inducement to the textile industry," they wrote. "It
would be difficult to find in any industry in the north or
west more intelligent people than those comprising the operatives
of our southern mills." Workers in the region, they claimed,
faced longer hours, less pay, raised much of their own food,
were protected by fewer labor laws, and even needed less clothing
than their counterparts in Northern states.
By the late 1920s, mill owners faced increased competition
and a declining economy. They tried to cut down on costs by
applying the new principles of scientific management, reducing
the labor force by ensuring that each worker was as efficient
as possible. This practice of requiring more work in the same
time period period without raising (and often reducing) pay
was known by mill workers as "the stretch-out."
Union organizers saw the textile industry as the perfect place
to gain a foothold in a region that had previously resisted
organized labor. The National Textile Workers Union (NTWU),
formed in Massachusetts in 1928, planned to start its work
in the South with one mill in North Carolina, in hopes that
a single strike would inspire sympathetic walkouts at other
mills throughout the state. Fred Beal, an NTWU organizer, arrived
in the North Carolina in early 1929 and began to look for a
mill where labor conditions were poor enough, and workers were
eager enough, to form a union. By the spring of that year,
he had found it.
The Loray Mill in Gastonia was one of the largest in the state.
The size of the mill, and the fact that it was owned by a textile
company in Rhode Island, led Beal and others to believe that
workers at Loray might respond to a call for unionization.
Many workers did join the union, and the company responded
by firing five union members in late May 1929. In response
to the firings, the union members voted to strike. On April
1, close to 1,800 workers refused to return to the mill until
their demands were met. The mill owners refused to negotiate,
and by the end of the month, many of the strikers could not
hold out any longer and returned to work. But that didn't mean
that the troubles were over.
A few hundred workers remained on the picket line even after
being evicted from their mill-owned homes and forced to live
in a tent village put up by the union. There were frequent
scuffles between strikers and local men who were sworn in as
deputies solely for the purpose of subduing them. The hostilities
reached their apex on June 7, 1929, when deputies broke up
a picket line composed largely of women and children. The deputies
and other police officers then went to the tent village, shots
were fired, and the Gastonia police chief, Orville F. Aderholt,
Sixteen union members were tried for the murder of Aderholt
and were released when a mistrial was declared in September
1929. The troubles in Gastonia continued. At a large rally
of union workers on September 14, 1929, Ella May Wiggins, a
popular speaker known for her ballads in support of working
women, was killed. Wiggins’s death helped bring attention
and sympathy to the plight of the mill workers, but it was
not enough to secure a victory for the unions. Although workers
received some relief from federal and state legislation in
the 1930s, employers were successful in keeping unions out
of the state, a legacy that has continued to the present. As
of 2003, only 3.1 percent of North Carolina’s workers
were members of unions, the lowest representation in the United
Suggestions for further reading:
John A. Salmond, Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray
Mill Strike. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Joe A. Mobley, ed. The Way We Lived in North Carolina.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Mary E. Frederickson, “Ella May Wiggins.” In Dictionary
of North Carolina Biography, vol. 6. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1996.
The South: Your Textile Opportunity. Savannah, Ga.:
Seaboard Airline Railway, .
Charlotte Observer, June 9, 1929. Used with permission
of The Charlotte Observer. Copyright owned by The Charlotte
Observer. Please click on the image for a larger view.