Don McKee and Sol Stein Interview

 DON MCKEE: (tone) [that had?] the union (inaudible). OK.

GEORGE STONEY: [When you're ready?].

SOL STETIN: God, that's 53 years ago.

GEORGE STONEY: OK.

MCKEE: Actually, Sol, violence got to be so prominent in Gaffney that the federal government got into the picture. Well, for one thing, the National Labor Relations Act guaranteed the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, and one of the unfair labor practices was to discharge workers for union activity. In Gaffney, some 26 leaders of the textile workers union had been discharged for union activity in the Hamrick Mills. I petitioned with the 00:01:00National Labor Relations Board in Washington, and after hearings and an investigations, we got every single one of those workers back to work with back pay for all of the compensation they'd lost since their discharge. Moreover, the Hamrick Mills, when the minimum -- when the national --

GEORGE STONEY: I want you to start over. Tell that story, and then say, "And one of the workers was able to buy a new car (inaudible)." So let's start at the beginning.

MCKEE: Oh, OK. Uh, where do you want me to start?

GEORGE STONEY: Right at the -- the, uh -- the (inaudible) -- the -- the NLRB.

MCKEE: Oh.

GEORGE STONEY: National Labor Relations.

MCKEE: Yeah. The National Labor Relations Board, of course, had essentially two aspects to it. First of all, it had a procedure whereby workers, in a secret election held by the federal government, could vote for a bargaining unit to vote for or against the Textile Workers Union of America. Secondly, there were 00:02:00five unfair labor practices in the statute which no company, no employer, could commit. One of them was discharging workers for union activity. In Gaffney, 26 of our most active leaders in the effort to organize the Hamrick mills were discharged for union activity. I filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board. There was an investigation. There was a formal hearing, and, as a result, every single one of the 26 workers got their jobs back with back pay. One of them, Frank [McCulloch?], I remember, utilized his compensation to buy the first automobile he had ever possessed, uh, which he drove around with great pride, uh, in -- in Gaffney. Moreover, the Fair Labor Standards Act -- 00:03:00usually called the Wage and Hour Law -- had gone into effect in 1938, and, uh, incidentally, while I was in Spartanburg and in Greenville and Gaffney, the -- practically all the mills in the area had to raise wages in order to pay the 25-cent minimum. Well, in Gaffney, we found out that the Hamrick Mills was paying -- was paying -- underpaying workers, paying them less than the minimum. Often, they would have two people receiving 25 cents an hour, so, uh, compensation really was 12 and a half cents apiece. We found -- we found hundreds of violations. I, uh -- I went around with a typewriter and got 00:04:00affidavits from various workers. Incidentally, uh, during that period, the labor department in South Carolina was, at that period, responsible for enforcing the Wage and Hour Law, and I sent all my affidavits to them. They sent an investigator into Gaffney and said that, uh, there's no violation there, so I sent the affidavits in to Emile Reavy, the president of the Textile Workers Union of America. He, of course, had -- had a big contribution in pushing through the Wage and Hour Law in the first place, and when Roosevelt signed the law, Emile Reavy was standing behind him. But Emile Reavy called the Wage and Hour division, and they had Gaffney swarming with investigators who sustained the affidavits which I had taken and the -- there were hundreds of workers in the Hamrick mills that got back pay because they had been underpaid 00:05:00and weren't even paid the 25-cent minimum. Actually, there was so much problem in terms of violence and, uh, statutory violations in Gaffney that the Department of Justice got into the picture. Lucy Randolph Mason, who was the public relations person for the CIO, came into Gaffney, saw what was going on, and sh-- she was a good friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. So Lucy calls up Eleanor and said, "There's horrible things going down here -- going on down here in Gaffney." And I guess that night Eleanor had a talk with Franklin, because Roosevelt had just set up a civil liberties unit in the Department of Justice. 00:06:00The first investigation made by that first civil liberties unit was in Gaffney, South Carolina. And incidentally, the FBI agents who came down to make the investigation wouldn't even stay in Gaffney. There was a hotel there where I stayed, but they wouldn't conduct their investigation in Gaffney. They, uh -- they -- they went over to Spartanburg and had witnesses come over there because they didn't like the atmosphere that was prevailing in Gaffney at the time. So, you know, they would come over and make some investigations there, but they wouldn't reside in that town. They had to go elsewhere because they didn't like the climate of violence and civil liberties violations.

STETIN: I'd like to make this additional point, if I may, about the role that the employers played when the New Deal came into being. Uh, it was a roll that 00:07:00they had been playing for a long time anyway. The National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, as was brought out very vividly by the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee at the time -- they showed in those hearings that when the NRA first came out, what they did -- they formed company unions, and they employed spies and strike-breaking agencies. And in fact, if I had my way, I would see to it that every student in high school and every student in college is given a copy of every one of the hearings that were held by Senator La Follette in the La Follette Civil liberties Committee, because there they would see the powerful use of the government, of the police, of the 00:08:00National Guards, of strike-breaking agencies, to deny workers their simple rights, their justice, the right to belong to a labor organization. We're supposed to have a democratic country, and the Ameri-- the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee points out vividly how the power structure in this country did all they could to deny workers their just rights despite the NRA, despite the National Labor Relations Board, despite the so-called support of the New Deal. They -- I strongly would urge the public to see to it that all students in high school and in colleges are given the facts, because the facts will speak for themselves. The facts are the truth, and the truth will make you free.

GEORGE STONEY: Beautiful. OK, Judy, do you have any ideas?

JUDITH HELFAND: Um, yeah, (inaudible).

GEORGE STONEY: OK.

MCKEE: Well, while you're talking about company unions, let me say that, of course, the Hamrick Mills had organized --

GEORGE STONEY: (inaudible).

JAMIE STONEY: We're still rolling.

GEORGE STONEY: OK, go ahead, yeah.

MCKEE: Wh--

GEORGE STONEY: What are you talking about?

DON MCKEE: Well, while you're -- Sol, while you're talking about company unions, the Hamrick Mills did have a company union, and the union members called it by an interesting name. It was called the Red Apple Club.

GEORGE STONEY: OK.

JAMIE STONEY: Why was it -- why was it called the Red Apple Club?

DON MCKEE: I forget.

GEORGE STONEY: OK, Judy.

HELFAND: Yeah, um, Don, before, you mentioned in a -- in a general way how, when you were organizing, you often met people who referred back to the '34 strike --

MCKEE: Yeah.

HELFAND: -- and, um, what happened back then and, um -- and why they didn't want to join again. I was wondering if you could, if you remember -- if you could be specific, maybe name the town, name the person and the kind of job that he or she did, um, and maybe that, you know, conversation in a more specific way.

MCKEE: Well, let's see. I -- I did mention Greenville and Spartanburg. That's where I was -- or -- and Gaffney. Uh, but I couldn't name individual workers.

HELFAND: You don't have to name individuals.

MCKEE: I was doing house-to-house calling, uh --

HELFAND: That's what I want to start with.

GEORGE STONEY: (inaudible). Tell me about it.

JAMIE STONEY: (inaudible).

GEORGE STONEY: Tell me about it, not her.

MCKEE: Oh, OK, OK.

GEORGE STONEY: I was [doing?] house-to-house calls.

MCKEE: Yeah, uh -- wh-- when -- do you want to ask me the question again?

GEORGE STONEY: Yeah, OK. Don, tell us about your organizational methods --

MCKEE: OK.

GEORGE STONEY: -- and then what you heard through the screen door --

MCKEE: Sure.

GEORGE STONEY: -- or wherever it was.

MCKEE: The -- one of the most difficult things in union organizing -- and, incidentally, something that I did not particularly enjoy -- was going house to house, talking to workers about joining the union. One of the best things to do 00:11:00would be to get a union member to go with you, with one, to make the introduction and let the workers know that, um, at least one person in the factory had -- was supporting the union. So th-- that's very, very difficult, and, uh, kind of work, going house to house, calling on workers. Well, it's on these occasions that, when I sit down and talk to the workers about joining the union, that they often threw up the 1934 strike really as an e-- as an excuse for not joining the union, mainly because they were afraid of losing their jobs. They ha-- they knew people who, five years ago, had lost their jobs as a result of union activity in the '34 strike, and they knew of the thousands of workers who had been blacklisted in the textile industry for their 00:12:00participation in that '34 episode. So, uh, my impression was that the '34 strike was really used as a way of getting around and arguing against participation in union activity again.

GEORGE STONEY: OK. Now, one other thing, Don -- and you had this very closely -- the attitude of other people toward the cotton mill workers, we have inspired a lot of, uh, heartrending stuff. When we talked to textile workers [and said?], "Talk about lintheads."

MCKEE: OK.

GEORGE STONEY: Now, could you do the same thing from your perspective?

MCKEE: Ce-- certainly. Well, in the typical textile community or in communities where textile mills are found, really, there's the middle class people who you 00:13:00might categorize as being uptown, and then, there are the lintheads, who work in the mill villages, who are -- which are almost always, um, in the periphery of the town or the city. And the people uptown -- generally categorized, perhaps, as middle class people -- they would look down, uh, on the lintheads who worked in the cotton mills as being, uh, ignorant, as being incapable of, uh -- of, uh, becoming independent, as being dominated by the employers and by the, uh, mill village itself, which the employer ran very autocratically in most instances. The employer, you know, would be responsible in some of these mill villages for 00:14:00what education there was in the schools. He would, uh, be running the company store, where the workers could, uh, borrow money and, incidentally, as a result, get no pay when it came to getting their compensation at the end of the week. I have thousands of checks in my collection which bear the title "Zero dollars and zero cents," because the worker went to the company store when in debt and therefore never got any compensation from the company sometimes for years. Moreover, the employer usually paid the salary of the minister who would be active in a village church. So, uh -- so on the whole, I'd say that, uh, the 00:15:00people uptown looked down on the textile workers, although they were very glad for the common purchased goods in their stores, but they treated them as secondhand citizens.

GEORGE STONEY: Now, you -- you were college-bred. I mean, you went to college, and then you came there. You didn't come out of a textile -- I want you to say, "Well, I didn't come out of a -- a textile -- I didn't come out from a worker family," and then tell me the impression you got, were they ignorant, what -- what they knew, what they didn't know.

MCKEE: All right. I didn't come out of a union family. My father was a, uh, college professor, and therefore, you know, when I came into contact with textile workers and with union activity, it was quite something fresh and new for me. On the whole, I 00:16:00would say that the workers with whom I came in contact in the textile villages desperately needed medical condition, be-- uh, uh, medical care. They desperately needed dental care. On the whole, I'd say, uh -- I don't want to depreciate them, but I found them to be rather ignorant when it came to what was going on in the country or, uh, e-- even the tremendous and exciting things like the adoption of the National Labor Relations Act and the Wage and Hour Law and the -- the organization by the CIO of the mass production industries. They knew very little about it.

GEORGE STONEY: Uh, what was it -- talk about their education.

MCKEE: The-- their -- their education was usually, uh, very skimpy. Sometimes, uh, if a person had been as far as the sixth grade, that was high. Most of the work-- most of the people I came in contact with had -- had left, uh, the schools at a very early date, hadn't even -- didn't finish high school and had left during the elementary grades.

GEORGE STONEY: Now, uh, how do you run a -- how could they run a local when you had, uh, uh, people like that?

MCKEE: Well, the textile workers union had a marvelous educational, uh, department, and one of the things that we constantly did was to have training sessions for the leadership of the various local unions. Representatives would come into a local union from the educational department, like Joe Glazer and Pat 00:18:00Knight, and would he-- he-- help these textile workers learn how to conduct an organization. Actually, I was very interested in that aspect myself, and that's the kind of thing that really interested me. So we would have to teach 'em parliamentary procedure and how to, uh -- how to take the, uh -- well, the, uh, dollar a month dues, which the textile workers had, and to keep proper financial records, make proper reporting. And of course, one of the most exciting things was helping shop stewards take up grievances with the employer once collective bargaining is established and the union has negotiated the collective bargaining contract. That I found to be one of the most exciting 00:19:00things involved in union activity, because workers who had been voiceless before and had nothing to say about conditions of work, about wages and hours, now had some say and some voice in what went on in the factory insofar as labor matters were concerned. So, uh, when I was a (inaudible), North Carolina, for instance, uh, helping to e-- enforce a collective bargaining contract at the Erwin Mills, we would have the most marvelous meetings of shop stewards where workers with grievances would come before the assembled shop stewards, present their grievances, and the shop stewards would have to determine whether the grievance 00:20:00should be taken up or not. They'd get out the contract, collective bargaining contract. We would see if there was a clause covering this particular, uh, grievance, and then, sometimes -- and this often happened -- shop stewards had to tell the workers, "That's not a grievance under the contract." But the exciting occasions would be when the shop stewards decided to take up a grievances. And under collective bargaining, there's a grievance procedure that goes all the way to arbitration. In case, uh, the employer and the union can't reach an agreement on how to resolve a dispute, the dispute is referred to a third, impartial arbiter for a final decision. And sometimes, of course, the union would win on an arbitration decision. Sometimes, we would lose. Sidney Hillman was a big advocate of arbitration in collective bargaining 00:21:00contracts, and I would certainly agree that one of the things it did was to give workers a voice and a say on conditions and pay in a factory, because when it came to an arbitration decision that went against the employer, what did it do? It broke the dictatorship of the company. The company was no longer a dictator as long as an arbiter in an arbitration, uh, hearing could reverse the position taken by the company. And arbitration, as a consequence, also -- as a threat to the employer -- also led to settling a lot of disputes at the lower level so as to avoid arbitration and a decision that possibly could go against the management.

GEORGE STONEY: Now, we're going to be talking about one of the leaders who was reasonably well educated. Could you tell me about Paul Christopher, mentioning his name?

MCKEE: Yes. Paul Christopher had been very active in the 1934 strike. That's where he -- what shall I say -- cut his eyeteeth with unionism. When I went to work with the textile workers union in the summer of 1939, Paul Christopher was the state director in South Carolina. Actually, at that time, those who worked for the textile workers union staff weren't being very well paid, and so Paul Christopher invited me to stay at his house and pay something like $15 a month, 00:23:00and he invited Red Lisk -- that's H. D. Lisk -- to come and live with him too. And so, of all things, Paul Christopher, Lisk, and I, together with Paul Christopher's wife, [Buba?], and, uh, two daughters, all lived together in Spartanburg. Paul was on the executive board of the textile workers union, the national executive board, and was extremely effective as a representative of the union because he had come out of a textile mill himself. He had -- he kne-- he knew the various processes that are involved in textile production and was very 00:24:00skilled as a negotiator in collective bargaining contracts. Wh-- when it came to meeting with local unions, he was a highly entertaining speaker who would, um, cause union audiences to constantly break out in laughter and, uh, had a tremendous capacity for entertainment in that way. Paul, later on, became very active in the, uh, political action committee of the CIO and actually went to Tennessee, where he was, uh, the, uh, executive for all CIO unions in that state.

GEORGE STONEY: OK. Uh, Judy, other questions here?

HELFAND: Oh, yeah, sure. Um, you mentioned Cooleemee. We spent some time there. Could you tell us a little bit about the organizing that you did there, what -- an-- and if --

MCKEE: Wou-- wou-- would you like to hear about how we had a [walk?]?

GEORGE STONEY: Yeah. (inaudible)

MCKEE: OK, Would you like to hear about --

GEORGE STONEY: We got some very stuff in [Cooleemee?].

JAMIE STONEY: [Go?].

MCKEE: Oh. I was sent to Cooleemee to, uh, help administer a collective bargaining contract that ha-- we had just, uh, gotten at the three plants of the Erwin Mills in North Carolina. It's at Cooleemee that we had an extremely active shop steward group, and that was my number one purpose there, to try to develop shop stewards to learn how to enforce and take up the collective bargaining process. Our union was a very responsible union when it came to 00:26:00enforcing a collective bargaining contract. One thing that I'll always remember is that while I was there, a handful of doffers -- they are those who remove the spinning bobbins from the frames -- went on s-- strike in the factory in violation of the collective bargaining contract. In other words, a handful of doffers, by going on strike, actually shut down a mill that employed over, uh, 1,200 or 300 people. The strike was in violation of the collective bargaining contract because the union had pledged not to strike. The position that the textile workers took in that episode was that the doffers should go -- 00:27:00get back to work, and the textile workers union did not support that strike. As a matter of fact, I even distributed a piece of literature at the factory gates pointing out that the strikes was in violation of the contract's no-strike clause and that the textile workers union was not in support of the strike. Having done that, w-- we did go into management and negotiate on behalf of the doffers in such a way that we resolved their dispute too. But I thought that might be interesting to mention because, uh, it indicates the responsible position the textile workers union took. I might say something else that would be interesting, perhaps. When I got to Cooleemee, there was a segregated union for the black people in the mills. Now, in those days, black people in the 00:28:00mills worked in opening and picking, and in some states -- like in South Carolina -- black people were even prohibited from working in the same room as a white people unless they were janitors or custodians. But here, I was put in a situation where there was a segregated black union and then a white union. I worked for about six, uh, months to try to integrate the two locals at the Cooleemee plant. One of the ways we began is begi-- is by having, uh, representatives who were the shop stewards in the black local to come and meet 00:29:00with the shop stewards from the white local. I must tell you that the -- the consequence in Cooleemee of even having one black shop steward meeting with the white shop stewards had a very disastrous impact on some of the leadership of the local union, but what we would have to -- what we tried to do is point out that, uh, in unions, it's all for one and one for all. And if there were to be a strike in that mill over a new collective bargaining contract that it would be, uh, very, very poor if the black workers weren't in on unity with the white workers. And as a consequence, before I left that community, despite some opposition from some of the leaders of the white union, we did get the two local 00:30:00unions integrated.