Joe Jacobs Interview 5

 JAMIE STONEY: Um, they're all right. We're rolling.

GEORGE STONEY: OK, could you tell me about, uh, the strike of '34?

JOE JACOBS: Well, there are a lot of things to tell you about it. Uh --

GEORGE STONEY: Now, just a minute. When you say, "it," remember, we're going to cut out my voice. So, you say, "a lot of things to tell you about the strike of '34."

JACOBS: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: OK.

JACOBS: There, there are a lot of things to tell you about the strike of '34. In my mind, that's the closest thing to a revolution that I have seen in this country, and that, by the way, includes even the Civil Rights marches and everything else. And the reason I say that is because it was so spontaneous. Uh, just before that strike was when Roosevelt tried the Blue Eagle of the National 00:01:00Recovery Act, and when he did not keep going, the people who had been led to believe that with his advent that there would be a better day, found that it wasn't. What was happening was because the depression was moving in so strongly, the companies were cutting back. They were increasing workloads. If they had money, they were buying newer machinery, increasing workloads because of the new machinery. And instead of them making more money, they were making less money. And once the strike started, it caught like wildfire. And when I say, "caught like wildfire," it spread everywhere. You did not have the communication systems th at we have now, but the grapevine served to do it. 00:02:00People who worked in a textile mill, for example, in Griffin had kin people who worked in Newnan, had kin people working in Macon, and if they got together in church over the weekend or they saw each other, for whatever reason, they talked about what was happening. And the United Textile Workers at that time was trying to do something. Uh, a lot of people have said that the UTW didn't do what it should have. Uh, those of us who lived in those days wondered that they did as much. They had no money. They had no staffs. Mostly volunteers, and as a result, they couldn't cover everything. I can remember when you talk about a revolution and like wildfire, I remember I got a call one day from the Forward -- Jewish Daily Forward, at that time -- they said they wanted to cover what was 00:03:00happening down here in the strike. They were gonna send down Jack Rich, who wa-- if you remember, wrote for their paper in Yiddish, and he also wrote for the Hat Worker, under the name of Jack Rich. Uh, he came down. We went to Griffin. I remember getting in the old Ford that I had that -- a two-seater, not a Touring, they called it a -- wasn't a touring car, but it was an open thing, I guess you'd call it a uh, oh, I don't know what they call them now, without the tops on them, but whatever they call them. We rode down there. As we got to Griffin and we were getting near the mills of -- that belonged to the one company down there that -- Dunning, that ran most of the mills, we saw, as we looked at the mill a long line of peoples stretching down the road in front of 00:04:00the mill. I remember we turned off and we went there. And we parked. There were other cars parked alongside the road. The road was not a paved road at that time. And we followed the line all the way up, and when we got to the end of the line, there was a fruit crate that, like, they packed oranges in. Two of them on their sides, one of them standing up, and a man sitting on a fruit ca-- on, uh, another case. He had a little rece ipt book, he was writing receipts for one dollar. The people were joining the union. Some of them from the Dunning Mill, some of them from the other mills. I talked to the man who was down there. His name escapes me now. I keep thinking of Mr. Judd who was one of the organizers, but that wasn't who was there. And asked him if all the mills had closed down. And "Oh," he said, "we're still closing some of them down." I said, 00:05:00"Where?" He told me, we got in the car, we drove over there. When we drove over there, there was a group of a couple hundred people. Two, three American flags in the front. Singing "We Shall Not Be Moved," marching around the mill. On the dirt road around it. And as they'd pass by the different doors, and there were doors on four sides in the mill. In those days, they were not air conditioned, so they had all kind of entrances, all kind of windows and a lot of the windows were open, too, to get a breath of air. This was in a hot summer. People would filter out of the mill, come down the ste ps, and as they did, (laughs) everybody would shout, "Hooray. Come on." (laughs) They'd get in the bunch, then march around with us, and as we marched, you could hear some of the machines sho-- cutting off. Whatever the room was, whether it was spinning 00:06:00room, weaving room -- wherever it was that -- and the weave room, as you know, makes a lot of noise. And, as they closed down, the people would filter out while they keep shouting. And then after a while, so many people had come out and joined the group, that everything closed down. It was -- well, I don't think you can call it a deathly silence, but it was a quiet that prevailed there and, of course, when they heard -- when this quiet prevailed, then they really shouted and started dancing. Singing other songs. A lot of singing that they did was hymns from churches, and they adopted words for the union from it, too. And we saw that one close down. I can tell you, subsequent to that, we saw others. Uh, Jack talked with a number of the people who had interviews . I suspect that 00:07:00those stories are carried in the, uh, Forward, if anyone would dig back.

GEORGE STONEY: Uh, could you tell us about the --

JAMIE STONEY: Uh, George?

GEORGE STONEY: Yep.

JAMIE STONEY: Perfect timing, because I need to change batteries.

GEORGE STONEY: OK. You were doing --

JACOBS: You mean he ran -- no such thing as really washing u--

GEORGE STONEY: OK.

JACOBS: The conditions in the cotton mills were, by today's standards, primitive. Uh, machinery in so many of the mills had deteriorated. Uh, when they made the spinning room run, or the spinning machines run, if it needed to be repaired and they had a halfway decent mechanic who could repair it, they repaired it. If they couldn't, we used to say they tied it together with bailing wire. And they had a lot of bailing wire, because when the cotton came, 00:08:00it came in bails, and it had wire around it. The cotton mills today, by and large, Rayon mills, the others that are in the industry, by and large, are air conditioned. The floors, much more solid than they were then. When the machinery was running then, there were some rooms where you could, you were bouncing all the time because of the vibration of the machinery. And the people who worked in the spinning room, as an example -- if you were not tall enough, you really had to walk, walk on a board that was in front of the spinning machinery, in order to reach up, to make your doff, to take the uh, thread off, to take the spool off, to tie in the uh, cotton thread as it was coming. And that room, the 00:09:00combing room, where they were preparing the material into the thread, which became in the spinning room, started off in the big bail of cotton, then they made roving out of it, and roving is just like a rope. Big rope of it, and then it gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it, finally, when it gets to the spinning room, where you've got the thread, and then after you have your thread, then you move it into the weaving room. Lint used to fly in the air. That's where the name came, lintheads. Which cotton mill workers always resented. Because they felt it was a derogatory term. And it was bad enough that they had to work in conditions where there was this lint flying all over. There were no such thing in -- I don't remember a single mill where they had showers, where they could go in, or there were basins where you could wash up. You could wash your hands, but then whe n you walked out, why, you were still 00:10:00full of lint. You had it in your hair. The, the women that worked in the cotton mills used to wear -- I used to call them bonnets, they weren't bonnets -- it was, uh, like a hairnet, but it was cloth, over their hair, so that they wouldn't get it in their hair completely. 'Cause if they didn't, it would be completely in their hair. With the men, they'd shake their head and get some of it off, or wipe their hands off it with it. But the mills were hot. We, we found, at that time, one of the big complaints, by the people, in addition to the fact they had no redress of grievances, they had nobody that would talk to them. If you didn't like it, get out. If you had a -- any kind of a complaint over working condition, nobody listened to ya. Nobody paid any attention to ya. And that was one of the big reasons. First, the fact that nobody paid any 00:11:00attention to ya or listened to ya. The other was, you worked under conditions, in the summertime, hotter than hell. Wintertime, the he ating wasn't that good, either. I can remember that, when we talked at some of the meetings that we had with, uh, a number of the mills of different people, all around in the state and out of the state that the big complaint was, in the summertime, they -- we couldn't get them to put fans in. All they wanted was these f-- exhaust fans, if they'd put them in, it would have helped to relieve it. It would have stirred up that much more lint, though. But at least it'd been cooler. Today, if the mill is a modern mill, they've got ice water in the, in the uh, ra-- water coolers that they have there. In those days it was a bucket. It was a 00:12:00bucket and a dipper. You went and you dipped it. Everybody used the same dipper. And if there was lint on it, you moved it away and then you drank with it.

GEORGE STONEY: OK. OK, now the -- we were -- I was talking with a manufacturer's son the other day, and he said that most of his father's workers were against unions. He said they were -- they had -- they thought that it was really like being against Christianity. Now, do you think that these people knew anything about unions before '34?

JACOBS: Well, before '34, in this end of the country, in the cotton textile industry, they did not know much about unions. First, the industry was fairly new here. It had moved out of New England, and out of the northeast, out of Pennsylvania, and those areas. And they'd had no real experience with it. If 00:13:00they had any experience at all, it's what somebody else said to them. I think it was after '34, and the failure of the strike, that we heard the stories about "my father lost his job, my mother lost her job, my uncle lost his job," because they blacklisted them. That's what exactly happened. They had promised, as I understand it, from what I saw in the papers and what I heard in the meetings we had, was that the -- those whom I call the textile barons had promised Roosevelt, through a committee, that had visited and worked and he had called them in to see what he could do to settle that strike, that there'd be no blacklisting. We didn't call it discrimination, then, we called it blacklisting. And there was b lacklisting. Anybody who participated in the 00:14:00strike actively, anybody who held an office in a union, anybody who attended any substantial number of union meetings, was blacklisted. And I am certain that those lists were passed by the textile manufacturers association, not only in the state of Georgia, but in every state they had. But there was one group that you might be able to say were against unions because of their religion. We called them the black stockings. That's a group of people who were in the Christian religion. A lot of them live up in the east part of Tennessee. Some of them had migrated into Georgia. Uh, they were real fundamentalists. Uh, every word in the Bible was God's word. Every word was true, and you had to in-- 00:15:00interpret it literally, word by word by word, and there was some section in there -- and for the life of me, I can't remember it, but there was a section that they used to repeat to us -- and that was the section which said to them, "You cannot belong to a union." It didn't say a nything like that. But it was something that had to do with the devil, as I remember it, and who was his workers. And they interpreted it as being those who belonged to the union were those who were the devil's workers, and therefore they would not belong to the union. Well, we still have today, at this end of the country, some of them who will not agree to the check-off. We have, in some areas, the Seventh Day Adventists who will not agree to check off in textile mills, or in other mills, too. And we have to make some provision about it, for whatever reasons.

GEORGE STONEY: Now, there -- some people have said that that almost came about because the manufacturers were financing the churches and the ministers, could you talk about that?

JACOBS: (laughs) Well, you put it, you put it, you put it --

GEORGE STONEY: Remember --

JACOBS: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: -- they're not gonna be hearing my voice.

JACOBS: Yeah. Well, as far as financing the churches and the ministers, let's see how that happened. In today's world, there are relatively few textile villages. In the '30s, in that world, almost every mill had a village. Even in the big towns. Even in Atlanta, like the Fulton Bag and Cotton mill, like the Scottsdale mill -- oh, I forget the name of the one over on here on the other side of Piedmont mills. And the reason that they had a textile village was that 00:17:00the pay was so low, that what they paid them would not have enabled them to buy food for the table and pay a decent rent. So, what they did was they followed the example that, I think, had been set before the textile mills came here, that was set over in Alabama in the coal mines, and in the foundry areas over there, in Walker County and Jefferson County, 'round Birmingham and in the surrounding counties, and that was that they built the village. They charged them, I think it was 50 cents a month a room, most of the houses had three rooms. That meant that they were paying a dollar and a half a month, and as I remember it, for that they got their electricity furnished, they got their water furnished. When they did that, and they had the village, then the question is, 00:18:00"We're out here, we're isolated," where they gonna go to church? And these were, by and large, religious people. Usually the company would donate the land. He would -- primarily was the Baptist -- he would inveigle the Baptists who have a rather loose arrangement of how you become a preacher. All you've got to do in some of the Baptist, uh, segments is to say, "I've seen the Lord. He's called me, and I'm gonna preach. And I'm gonna have my church." And he'd set up a church in his house. And he'd invite his friends and neighbors and if they liked the way he preached, why they kept coming. The company would build the church for them. When they built the church for them, then you have to support a preacher. Well, on the pay they were getting, you can't support much of a preacher. He either, then, had to work 00:19:00full time for the mill -- and if he did, since he was a preacher, they didn't put him in the opening room to open the cotton bails -- that's where, most of the time, the blacks were at. They used to put him in a place where he wouldn't be as busy, and so that when the evening came, he could prepare his sermon for Sunday, he could have his prayer meetings on Wednesday, and on the bulletin board of the mill, he would have his sermon that he's gonna preach the next time, and if he had a visiting preacher he had the name of it. So, when one asks, "Did the company support it?" Yeah. Why? Because the way the mill workers lived, in those days, it was the natural thing for them to do. Later on, though, those of us who were interested in the trade union movement, found out 00:20:00that that was a bad thing. Because, since he was beholden to the boss for the job which was not a hard working job, most of the time -- or he may have become, by that time, a, uh, flunky, uh, supervisor, you know. Uh, not necessarily a f oreman, but a, a pusher, or extra hand, or whatever it was, where, where he could take things a little easier. And he had, in many places, that he had begun to associate with some of the supervisors, and when he began to associate with them, why they -- those were his friends, much more so, even than his flock. And we found that in a lot of areas, they were against the union. Where they were not, they were real good leaders. Real good leaders. I can remember, we had, uh, oh, this was in the, uh, after the strike --

GEORGE STONEY: Can you start over?

JACOBS: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: Where the preachers were not in the pay of the manufacturers, they were really good leaders.

JACOBS: That's right.

GEORGE STONEY: Could you say that?

JACOBS: Yeah. When they were not in the pay --

GEORGE STONEY: Well, no, when the preachers were not.

JACOBS: Yeah. That's what I'm saying. When the preacher was not in the pay of the company, they were good leaders in many instances. There were some instances, too, where they bowed away. They wouldn't take part one way or the other. We found, though, by and large, that in later strikes, after the '30s, and after we got things squared away, uh, and people started getting back and after a period of some 10, 15 years, that a lot of the preachers recognizing the problem of the people who were in their flock, would move out of the village, of the textile village, set up their own church, and then they spoke with greater freedom and everything else. And, of course, as you know, later on, when the 00:22:00wage hour law came, that helped to do away with the mill village, and there were some cases that followed where they, uh, uh -- the companies, uh, tried to raise the rents on it, where there were collective bargaining and there was charges files because they didn't bargain with the union in the particular mill, but the mi ll village disappeared. And with that disappearance, a lot of things changed in the mill village. For example, we -- when we went to the mill village of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company -- who, by the way, would bargain with the automobile workers because they were strong, but who wouldn't bargain with the textile workers because they were weak, and fought them at every turn of the, of the road -- they had the big mill there. Then here was this row of houses that had four, six rooms in it. Nice front porch. Nice little yard there. Nice yard in the back, a place where you could have a garden. Superintendent and 00:23:00the foreman lived in that. You go to the next street, right behind it, three rooms. 25 foot lots as -- against the 50 foot lot. All the differences of status. And the status was, if you were a mill worker, you were in one category, if you were a supervisor, you were in another, if you were the owner, you were still another.

GEORGE STONEY: Could you talk about the young leaders that you found when the strike started?

JACOBS: Well.

GEORGE STONEY: Now, let me explain what I meant by that.

JACOBS: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: Because, here was a group of people who had been down --

JACOBS: When the strike started, it was a spark. That spark was lit, in any number of people. Could have been some long old-timers, could have been some new 00:24:00ones. Among the younger people, as I remember it, we found that there was a feeling that, "My father has spent all of his life here, I've just come in to the mill. If I'm gonna spend my whole life here, and apparently I am, then I've got to do something about it." That made them become among those who were leaders in it, whether they were officers, whether they were on a committee, whether they were volunteer organizers. And in that day, by the way, we had a system of volunteer organizers. I smile about it when I think about it now. We gave them a card. I say "we," the United Textile Workers, gave them a card, and right at the top of it, it said, "Volunteer Organizer." And then it said, "We, hereby, recognize" whatever the man's name or the woman's name was, "as a volunteer organizer for the United Textile Workers of 00:25:00America," and then it said something a bout extending courtesies to them and they are fighting to improve wages, hours, working conditions, and then it was signed by the president of the uh, international loom and I can remember seeing Gorman's name on any number of them. And, of course, the organizers, many of whom were on half pay, used to carry them around, they'd get a good man who would organize, a good woman, they'd fix one of them up. They became part of the leadership. I would --

GEORGE STONEY: Talk about a fella named Paul Christopher.

JACOBS: Yeah. Well, (laughs) Paul Christopher, uh, came along, uh, with the surge that took place. He became active in trade unions. Stayed active. There's an example of a man who started at the bottom and moved all the way 00:26:00up, 'til he became one of the top men in the textile wo-- union. And when the TWOC, the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, came along, why, he went with them. Uh, Paul was an able man. Not only able, but he was one of those that you could say started off with a minimum of background in trade unions. With a minimum of interest in trying to learn things, speak -- become a speaker, whatever it was. And who grew with it. Just like I can give you an example of somebody who nobody probably will, will, will think about or hear of. A man named Johnny Brown. Johnny Brown, when I first saw him, was a sweeper, and a Rockmart mill of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and this was after the strike, this was sometime later. And Johnny Brown's people had been in the '30 something strike, and went he heard that the -- some of them were joining 00:27:00a union at Rock Mart, he was scared to death. And I remember talking with Johnny. And asked him what he was doing. He said he was a sweeper. I asked him what he was paid, I don't remember the amount. But it was small, and I said, "Well, Johnny, what have you got to lose if you join a union?" (laughs) He said, "Well, got to have a job, I'm helping to support my family." I don't think he was married at that time. I said, "Think about it. You have so little to use -- to lose, that you ought to become a member of the union." Well, he did, he joined the union, became a steward, became an officer of the local. When he finally died, and that's within the last couple of years, Johnny was an international vice president of the United Textile Workers. He grew. Now, if you saw Johnny, when he was a sweeper, Johnny was a young fella -- 00:28:00because his folks were poor, one of his eyes did not look straight. One of his eyes wandered, like so many people who have trouble with their eyes and don't get it corrected when they're kids. And he was that way all through his life. He never had -- if, if he went through grammar school, I don't know it. But, because of the fact that he got into the union, before he died, he was not only a leader and a representative, but an organizer and a vice president, and could draw union contracts that were highly technical. Those are the things that make one feel good about unions.