VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR: -- eleven, 12, 13, 14.
JAMIE STONEY: We'll roll and he's going to ask you your first question.
GEORGE STONEY: All right, Virginia, could you tell us about the '34 strike,
what do you remember?DURR: Well, I remember very uh a lot about it -- for the reason that we drove
very often from Washington to Montgomery, and we drove through North Carolina, and we drove through Kannapolis, and Concord and -- in fact, every little textile village we came through we saw the same situation which was that the National Guard was occupying the city or the town. The strike was on, the mills were closed, and there was just like an armed camp. There would be a machine gun, you know, at every corner of the mill, and there'd be the National Guard in the streets, and the mill people would be usually in groups gathered together 00:01:00somewhere, and it was frightening and very terrifying indeed. And we would try to find ways of getting around the villages but it was very difficult because the -- you know, there weren't other roads that went around those little villages, but that was true. I can't remember exactly the names of all the places but it was true all through North Carolina. There was a textile strike that took in the whole state as I recall.GEORGE STONEY: What did you think about that as a -- as a middle class person
who didn't have anything to do with textiles?DURR: Well, I thought it was absolutely disgraceful because the -- the
conditions in the mills I thought was disgraceful, and I thought for them to call out the National Guard to break the strike was absolutely disgraceful. See, I was a Great New Deal in those days and still am I suppose. The New Deal, 00:02:00you see, the labor -- labor had been made legal under Roosevelt. I mean the unionization of labor, and for that time they had no protection whatever, so I thought that they were -- they being not only dangerous but also being illegal. I mean, in calling out the Guard. They did that all over the South though because where I lived in Birmingham, Alabama, they called out the National Guard for the coal strikes and so, you see, at that time the South was almost entirely -- un-- not unionized or not unionized except for various special skilled crafts like the bricklayers or the carpenters may have a union. But the thing that was such a -- always such a puzzle to me and that I never have yet really, you know, d iscovered why is that the National Guard is mostly made up of just the run and 00:03:00file, I mean the rank and file of people. It's not an elite organization and now it's become extremely integrated because today they get $138 every time they go out to train. And a lot of women joined because of the $138 and, as you know, about 30% of the people in the Gulf are now black because they usually join often for the $138 too. And now those people, of course, are being sent way over to Saudi Arabia to fight, but the point about the National Guard was that so often the very people who were in the National Guard were also people who worked in the mills. And I always thought that was very strange that the people who worked in the mills they had been coerced into performing the act of breaking up the union. Very puzzling.GEORGE STONEY: We've been talking with some of the cotton mill workers about
00:04:00being called "lint-heads." Did you hear anything about that?DURR: Oh, heavens yes. You see, they had a big mill in Birmingham, the Comer
family, the Avondale Mills and they lived in a certain part of town and I can remember very plainly, you know, the children, particularly, we called them all lint heads that was because, you know, the cotton -- what we thought that it meant was that, you know, they all were extremely blond. They had pale eyelashes, and pale eyebrows, and pale hair, and pale skins, and at that time I was so unconscious of the facts of life that I just thought they were born that way but, of course, it was really malnutrition. And but -- you could always tell a cotton mill child and it was very painful to when I think about -- look 00:05:00down on who they were. You know, you just said, like somebody had a, you know, some sort of wound or scar, well, that's just a cotton mill child. And that's the way they was regarded.And the people in the mills were regarded that way too, as you know. And, of
course, the thing about the people in the mills that came down out of the mountains particularly, but usually the people that came off the farms, we thought those old villages were, you know, terrible little houses that they liked and all kind of squinched up together but they were crazy about it because they had running water, and they had electricity, and they'd never had that before in their lives because -- they thought that was wonderful. And, you see, it took a really long time before they ever got up the nerve to strike. I mean they went on for years, and years, and years. And now the thing that's so sad 00:06:00is that they've all gone. They've all gone. I mean the textile trades gone to Taiwan or Korea, and all the textile mills are just shutting up. The little towns are dying.GEORGE STONEY: Now, did you associate with the families of the employers like
the Comers and the Callaways and so forth?DURR: Well, I suppose I did. I went to school with the Comers and they went to
public to school with me. One of 'em was a dear friend. And -- but I never thought anymore about them as employers, you know, that was after I was grown. I just felt they were neighbors, you know, they lived in the same neighborhood but, no, I never met the Callaways until the last summer and that was rather amusing because the Callaways, you know, were terrifically stern with their help and they always thought of themselves as benevolent paternalist and, of course, 00:07:00they had those wonderful gardens, you know, the Callaway Gardens. So last summer I was at -- Lady Bird Johnson has a house at Martha's Vineyard every summer, and so last summer she had a house and she had all of her wildflower friends so I went to the dinner party to meet 'em, big party she had, and one of 'em was Mr. Callaway and Mrs. Callaway and they were the Callaways from Callaway Gardens in LaGrange, Georgia, but they now live in Colorado and have a ski lodge . And they talked about the Callaway Gardens. Well, he never mentioned the Callaway Mills. But he also ran, you know, for senator, I believe, and got beat. But -- well, you know, it was marvelous because the queen -- the king of the daffodils was there, and Mr. Callaway, I think, is 00:08:00known as one of the great horticulturists in the field of azaleas. But you went to Lady Bird Johnson's house for dinner and he didn't talk about anything but flowers.GEORGE STONEY: Now, you are -- you are pretty knowledgeable about Southern
history. How do you feel about the preservation of the history of the textile industry almost entirely in terms of the big houses and the big mills?DURR: Well, it's extremely interesting because it was the beginning of
industrialization. Up to that time, you see, the South had been almost entirely an agricultural part of the country. And I think the textile mills came in and they was -- as my knowledge goes, which is not as expert as you might think, but as my knowledge goes the textile industry was the first industry that took root 00:09:00in the South. Of course, in Birmingham the coal mines started pretty early too. But the textile industry was really the Southern industry that was -- and, uh, see it was almost entirely due to the North. And then many of these mills were owned by the northerners because they wanted to get back down closer to where the cotton was grown. And it was only after so many years, really many years that the southern money came into it. It was usually northern money that ran the mills.But industrialization -- I mean, the unionization of the mills came many years
after the industry had been running. And the workers were not dissatisfied 00:10:00until sometime in -- well, really in the New Deal days is first time I remember 'em having terrible strikes and getting all worked up. And they'd really at that time they got awful mad. And I always had a strange suspicion, which, of course, I can't prove so you probably can't print it, is there was some people in the textile unions who were working against the union. Who were actually trying to get dissention. One of 'em was Roy Lawrence, I thought was a very bad fella -- but he had terrible red bait in the first place. And then I thought that there was something sort of shady about him that he was in there for ulterior purposes.GEORGE STONEY: Now, Lucy Mason wasn't in the Textile Workers Union at that
time --DURR: No, she never was. Lucy Randolph Mason, as you know, was -- got connected
with the union movement -- I know all that very well because I was living up in 00:11:00Virginia, you know, and down in Alexandria when I met her, and she was brought to my house to meet me because I happened to be a great friend of Kathryn Lewis, it was John L. Lewis's daughter who's a rather large lady who was a very brilliant woman. And she was very anxious -- her sister -- see they were the aristocrats of the aristocrats. I mean you couldn't go any higher in Virginia than the Randolphs or the Masons. She was both, you know, Lucy Randolph and Mason, and, you see, George Mason lived right down on the Potomac right below Alexandria, so her sister had married somebody named Brian who was head of the bank in Alexandria and she was quite a society leader, and so Lucy used to visit her sister. And she was working with the YWCA and she had gotten very upset and 00:12:00disturbed about the condition of the girls who worked in the tobacco factorie s. She thought they were treated very badly and she thought they were paid very little, and so her sister brought her up to see me to see if I could get her an introduction to John L. Lewis, which I managed to do through his daughter, Kathryn. Well, she just bowled Mr. John L. Lewis over because she was such a Southern lady, you know, she just absolutely the very epitome of a Virginia lady. She just wore little white collars and looked so pretty and dainty and sweet. And he sent her South as his, uh, you know, publicity representative, and she (laugh) -- people would say that she walked in any office, you know, Eddleton's office, the head of the mills or whatever she was doing, and then all the men instinctively rose and took off their hats. (laughter) Just looking 00:13:00at Ms. Lucy they'd just rise up and take off their hats. And she was really a lovely, sweet lady. She was -- but she was so (laugh) completely out of character if you can -- there were two people, you know, that started the Southern Conferen ce and she was one and the other one was Joe Galvis. He was the same way. I mean he was just such the epitome of a Southern gentleman, you know, extremely -- so the radical movement in the South started with the descendent of George Mason and a young Jewish physics professor who descended from Abraham I reckon.GEORGE STONEY: When did you -- when did you go to Washington?
DURR: Well, we went to Washington in 1933. See, my brother-in-law, Justice
Black, who was a senator and so my father fell on evil times when cotton went down to five cents a pound after the first World War. He lost all of his land and had to sell it for nothin', and he couldn't even pay the taxes, and so I 00:14:00had to come home from college and then I married, and Cliff was working for Alabama Power Company, it was a law firm, and then Hugo Black asked if he'd like to come to Washington when the banks foreclosed. They were looking, you know, the banks were all shut all over the country and they were looking for lawyers who -- Crawford lawyers who could deal with the banks. So he wasn't terribly happy with the Alabama Power Company because he was in a rather ambiguous position there. My brother-in-law, Hugo Black, was fightin' tooth and toenail for the TVA. You can imagine how popular that made him with Alabama Power Company and so Clifford was frequently reproached for having a brother-in-law working for the TVA. So he saw things were not going to be happy, and so we seized upon the chance of getting to Washington. And we went 00:15:00to Washington in 1933 and he immediately began working with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation opening up the banks.GEORGE STONEY: Now, I was asking about that because the climate in Washington
seemed to have been very pro-labor as you look back on it but the textile people -- textile workers were having a hard time getting the right kind of government support for this strike.DURR: Well, you see, one of the reasons the textile workers did as bad is they
did in a way -- I mean, I certainly felt sorry for 'em and I think they was -- but they were very racist people. The textile workers never allowed in the union a black person and they never tried to keep 'em out of the industry entirely. And they were extremely racist and they were very -- and they never 00:16:00got much support. They never got any support from the black people because they were so racist. And it's that streak, you see, that keeps the South down today, like Governor Hunt of Alabama. Here you have, you know, big rich Republicans, millionaires and so forth, and then they have this primitive Baptist preacher who is practically illiterate but he's a racist and so he got elected with the millionaire vote and the poor white trash vote. Now that's quite a strange combination. But he got elected just the same.GEORGE STONEY: And you're associating the textile workers with poor white trash.
DURR: You make me seem more of a snob than I really am but if you want to know
the truth of the matter, I did associate textile workers with poor white trash. And I thought that, you know, I thought that they were born that way. And I hate to admit it but that's exactly what I thought when I was young. See, I learned different as I got older. George, you got to admit I tried. (laughter) 00:17:00GEORGE STONEY: OK, I think we've got everything we needed out of this lady.
That's a perfect truth confession. That's wonderful. (laughter)DURR: Well, you see, the thing I'm trying to explain was that the reason they
didn't have so much political -- because in the first place they were terrible red badges attached to the union. In the second place, they were racist too. So that did sort of cut off a lot of political support they might have had that they didn't get.GEORGE STONEY: Absolutely, that's -- nobody else has had the guts to say that
and I think it was very informative.DURR: Well, it was absolutely -- it was absolutely true. I don't know why
nobody said it. It's just it couldn't be truer.JUDITH HELFAND: I wonder if -- Virginia, if you have anything you'd like to
add about the women who were involved in the strike. The women textile workers and their involvement in the strike.DURR: Honey, I never knew a woman textile worker in my life. Yeah, not on a
00:18:00personal basis. And, uh, see, I -- it's so strange to try to explain. I lived in very close association with blacks all my life from the time I was born. I mean, intimate association. I slept and ate and played and, you know, everything except go to school but I never had any association with poor whites at all. And I can remember 'em now, you know, they'd come over the mountains on Saturday and they'd go -- they were walking. This was the ones that worked in the iron ore mines and the coal mines and they'd come back home at night drunk and they were reeling. And I can hear my mother now saying oh, poor white trash, you just absolutely can't do a thing with 'em. You 00:19:00can't imagine how you were raised in the South if you had just, you know -- you get indoctrinated in a class system. You have to just get over it like you get over the measles or the mumps or typhoid fever.Well, George, you're a fine one to talk. You a Stoney from Charleston,
good God. You have a whole lot more aristocrat than we was so I don't know why you look at me 'cause the Stoneys, whew. If you didn't -- I bet your family even went to that damn ball. What was the name of that ball? If you went to that you were certified. What was the name of that ball in Charleston? Oh, you do know. Everybody knows. If you got invited to that ball you were certified, 100% pure blue-blooded all the way through. And you don't even remember the name of it?GEORGE STONEY: No, you're associating me with the family -- the friends of the
family that were very distant from mine. 00:20:00DURR: The Stoneys in Charleston?
GEORGE STONEY: They've only been -- it's only a convenience when I need to
get somewhere. (laughter)DURR: Well, as far as I know, I was raised on the fact that the Stoneys are
about as aristocratic as you can get.HELFAND: (inaudible) interviewing.
GEORGE STONEY: OK, I think -- Virginia, you've been just great.
JAMIE STONEY: You've introduced me to a side of the family I've never heard
of. Who are these people? I'd like to go meet them.GEORGE STONEY: OK.
DURR: Well, the name Stoney --
GEORGE STONEY: I promise you it wouldn't be more than 15 minutes.
DURR: OK, pack it up.