Gastonia and the Loray Mill Strike

By nineteen twenty-nine, Gaston County had more textile mills than any other county in the world. That statistic was the product of forty years of deliberate industrialization after the Civil War, when the New South's boosters built mill after mill along the Catawba River watershed, drawing in workers from the surrounding mountains and offering wages that, while low, exceeded what small-scale farming could provide.

The Loray Mill here in Gastonia was the largest single mill in the state, employing more than two thousand workers. It was owned by Manville-Jenckes of Providence, Rhode Island, and in the late nineteen twenties, management implemented what workers called the stretch-out: fewer people doing more work for less pay after a round of layoffs cut the workforce from thirty-five hundred to twenty-two hundred.

On April first, nineteen twenty-nine, more than a thousand workers walked off the floor. The National Textile Workers Union, a Communist-affiliated organization, had targeted the mill for an organizing drive. That communist connection was all the opponents of the strike needed to frame it as a threat to the American way of life rather than a labor dispute about wages and working conditions.

The strike turned violent by summer. In June, Gastonia's police chief, O.F. Aderholdt, was shot and killed during a confrontation at the union tent headquarters. No one was ever proven to have fired the fatal shot, but sixteen strike leaders were charged, and after an initial mistrial, seven were convicted of second degree murder and given lengthy sentences. In September, a union sympathizer named Ella May Wiggins, a balladeer who put the workers' grievances into song, was shot dead in broad daylight. The men accused of her murder were acquitted by an all-white jury.

The Loray strike failed. Unions would not gain a real foothold in Piedmont textiles for decades. But the strike drew national press, exposed the conditions inside the southern mill system, and left its mark on American labor history as one of the first major confrontations between organized labor and the industrial South.