Lucille Thornburgh Interview 3

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M1: Rolling.

GEORGE STONEY: Ok roll.

M1: Rolling.

GEORGE STONEY: -- water fountain.

LUCIILE THORNBURGH: Ok, What, what, what were you going to say?

GEORGE STONEY: Tell us about the fountain the irritation (inaudible) water fountain.

LUCILLE THORNBURGH: Oh, among the things that we wanted after we got -- after the NRA had given us the 40 hour week and the $12.40 weekly wage, there were conditions there that we wanted. And one of 'em was we wanted a cleaner and a little bit bigger, ah, restroom and we also wanted a water fountain that didn't stay stopped up all the time, because working in the mill there you'd get very thirsty with that cotton and lint all around you and you go back there to get a drink and the water fountain stayed stopped up all the time. I don't remember -- so we started bringing -- I don't think any of us had a thermos, but you could everybody bringing a little jar of water and set up on the machine, because the 00:01:00water fountain was -- and that was really something that we all -- that we all wanted. That was one of our demands when we were drawing up our contract that we were getting ready to negotiate before the strike. That was one of the things that we had in there, that we would have a water fountain that worked.

GEORGE STONEY: Now could you describe your organizational methods before the strike? Your orgzinational methods—we played the tape back and we know did something with going home with people and walking with people. Why you couldn't do it in the mill and all of that. Just talk about it.

THORNBURGH: Uh, alright. Ah, the way we organized there, it was so noisy in the mill that you couldn't talk to the person next to you during work. Anyway, you didn't want to take up their time because we were all on piecework. You couldn't go over and have somebody stop their machine to talk to you because, well, we 00:02:00needed to keep working on the machine. So we -- we did most of our organizing -- well, we did all of it by department. Ah, we would find one person who was truly interested and we'd tell him/her, "You get all the others in here to sign up." And they would see 'em on the lunch break or when their machine was broken down, which the machinery there was breaking down all along. When somebody's machine was broken down, they'd come over to work at somebody else's machine and stand there and talk. And we're organize 'em that way. And then we had committees that went out and visited people in their homes at times. And, by the way, we could visit in homes then. In these latter years, you can't organize in a home because if you go to that home there's somebody sitting there telling you, "Well, look at that cowboy. He's going to jump over the fence" and all that kind of stuff. 00:03:00And they're watching television and you don't get their attention. But we could -- some of the people, very few. One of my sisters finally bought us a radio and some of the people had radios, not all of 'em, and they were sorta glad to see company at night and you could go out and talk to them. You can't do that now. There's too many distractions.

GEORGE STONEY: You mentioned walking home with people, that you lived closed to the mill and you could walk home with people and you could talk with them then.

THORNBURGH: Oh, yes. Ah, walking home from work, that was a very good place to do your organizing because we all had to walk several blocks and the people that, ah -- possibly the people working -- that I was walking home with might not have been the people that was working in the department that I was. So I could spread the word to them and I would tell whoever I was talking to, "Now 00:04:00you go back tomorrow and you get so many to join." She'd come back the next night when we were walking home and say, "Hey, look, I got this one and I got that one and we're gonna get 'em." So that's the way we had to organize it. But that visiting in the home -- and that created friendship, too. It was -- well, it was just a part of our social life, you know, to visit at night and at the same time talk union.

GEORGE STONEY: Weren't they afraid of you talking this dangerous -- was it dangerous, radical philosophy?

THORNBURGH: Ah, some of them were, yes. Yes, we had some.

GEORGE STONEY: Sorry, put my question in your answer.

THORNBURGH: Ok. Ah, some of the people that we went to visit were afraid, particularly if there was a father, the breadwinner in the family, that had a job that he was afraid of. We would run into it there. But even with him, we had 00:05:00become fairly good talkers and when we talked about "more money for your wife or your daughter", we'd get his attention.

GEORGE STONEY: Okay. Tell us the story of you almost had your contract – almost had the un— tell us the size of your union and then the

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THORNBURGH: Alright

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THORNBURGH: After we had organized our union, ah, we were working toward a contract. We -- we had heard from the construction workers and railroad workers that you must have a contract with the company before you must set out what you need. Well, we got a sample contract from somebody -- I've forgotten who it was now -- from some union and we were rewording that contract. We had our contract 00:06:00committee appointed. We were meeting every night to work on the contract, what all we wanted in it. And, of course, some of 'em would say, "Don't put that in there" and another one would say, "Do put that in there." Well, we had a long contract. It was terribly long. It might have been refined if we had had a chance to do it, but we were just in the process and had already notified management that we wanted to negotiate a contract with 'em and they had agreed that they would have somebody to sit with us, not promising us anything, but telling us that they would meet with us. And just at that time we got this word from the national United Textile Workers, UTW, we called 'em then, that the strike was being called and that we were expected to go out. And we thought we -- we didn't give that -- being uneducated union members, we didn't know. We 00:07:00thought we had to do what the national union did or they would take away our charter, which they would have. We -- we were supposed to go out on strike because it was a nationwide strike. But that was a terrible mistake. There were 600 employees there and we had 600 union members. They were all signed up. We were having weekly meetings. We were even planning a picnic, a union picnic to get our contract signed and all that. And all of that, of course, just went down the drain when the national strike was called.

GEORGE STONEY: I believe that your union voted not to strike and then there was a reversal of that. Tell us about that.

THORNBURGH: That's right. They voted --

GEORGE STONEY: My question in your answer.

THORNBURGH: Ok, um. Oh, at one point there, ah, after we got this notice that there was to be a nationwide textile strike, we called a meeting and I think 00:08:00some of our more intelligent and more learned and particularly the weavers and those people were talking about, "Well, we shouldn't strike right now. Maybe we shouldn't." And we took a vote and we voted not to strike. But then, on the heels of that, this international union put out the flyers and we got the flyers there we were expected to come out on strike, and we did. We did in spite of that.

GEORGE STONEY: Okay. Now tell us about the first day on the picket line and what it was like and how you got people there and what you did.

THORNBURGH: The first day on the picket line it was a little bit sparse. They didn't know whether to go to a picket line -- in fact, see, everybody didn't have a telephone then. They didn't all know that we wanted 'em to come to the 00:09:00picket line. So we had to get the word around. But there was -- oh, I guess there was 25-30 of us on that picket line the first day. And then we had to try to make us some banners and to get those things together. And as the word got around, our picket line started growing and we started thinking, "Well, we're out here," you know. Some of 'em even enjoyed it. You know, you can enjoy a strike for the first few days, but after that it gets pretty grimy. The first few days it's fine, you know, till you start missing that payday and there's that, ah, wife at home asking her husband, "What are we going to do for money?" See, we didn't have all these welfare agencies then. There was nowhere to go, but we did help each other. Our members who lived out in the country, they would bring in produce to the rest of us.

GEORGE STONEY: Now in many places there was some kind of federal relief for people who were on strike, though the manufacturers fought against that and there was a big fuss in Washington. Explain that, the fight over federal help.

THORNBURGH: Okay. This fight over federal help never got to Knoxville. The only thing that I could ever remember during the Depression of the people in Knoxville getting was that Red Cross flour. We got the flour. Most people say it wasn't any good, but we got it anyway. But that was all. And what can you do with flour and you don't have anything to go with it?

GEORGE STONEY: Tell us about the guy with the flag. You may not know that. Maybe that's Foots' story.

THORNBURGH: Yeah I don't remember—

GEORGE STONEY: Foots said—

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THORNBURGH: One of those super patriotic, reglious---

STONEY: Lets start then Jamie. Ok.

THORNBURGH: Yeah, I remember the man came by, one of the super patriotic guys, you know, that we were, ah, ah, against the United States government and he wanted to walk down there with the flag to show that we were all Americans. And somebody asked him, I think, "Well, weren't you born right here in Knoxville? We all were. Aren't we all Americans?" And, ah, something else that we had to think about along there, too, was this is the Bible Belt and it was very Bible Belt at that time. You've probably run into that in interviewing some of these people, that you run into that Bible Belt, that was this the Christian thing to do? That was the question. Was this the right thing to do? And with all the preachers and the churches against us, it was mighty hard to explain to the people that it was the right thing to do, but, you know, there's a Bible there. We got us up some quotes, too, you know, that we'd use. You know, "Lord helps them that help 00:12:00themselves." We'd use that one a lot.

STONEY: Okay. Now what was your --

THORNBURGH: You mean was there any protest from the -- we called 'em "straw bosses"? You know, you had your straw boss in ever department and then you had the overall superintendent and all. And the bosses, ah, they were making such little wages that in a way they were -- they wouldn't help us any, but they were egging us on to do it because it was going to get more money for them.

GEORGE STONEY: And they weren't getting pressured from their bosses to fight you?

THORNBURGH: They possibly were, but it really didn't come down because they sort of egged us on.

GEORGE STONEY: Ok, that's a story, that's another story. Okay. Tell about the injunction.

THORNBURGH: Oh, the injunction was -- that really broke the back of our -- our 00:13:00strike, because none of us had ever been served with a court paper before. We didn't know what that was all about and they all thought, "Well, if we violated the injunction, we'd go to jail," which we possibly would have. And the injunction really ruined us because it -- it broke up our meeting. We had been used to meeting on the picket line, and it was hard to call a meeting and get the word around when you weren't seeing the people. And as scattered as we were, we tried to get a meeting and did have meetings, but they weren't well attended because we didn't get the word out to the people. And a lot of 'em, too, took that as a complete defeat, that the injunction had -- and it had, it had broken the strike.

GEORGE STONEY: And you didn't have the attorney. You didn't have anybody else to go to court to defend you. You were -- you were pretty well kind of an amateur operation.

THORNBURGH: We were very much an amateur operation and one thing that I blame that international union for, in fact the whole American Federal of Labor, because that's what it was then, you know -- there wasn't a CIO -- that I blame them for, they should have sent an international representative here to have helped us because we had the spirit, we just didn't have the knowledge.

GEORGE STONEY: Great. What about the attitude of people in town towards all of this?

THORNBURGH: I'd say it was pro and --

GEORGE STONEY: Uh, uh, the people in Knoxville.

THORNBURGH: The people in Knoxville in the various communities, they were pro and con. We even had people who were afraid -- you know, this is Depression days. You have to keep your job -- because we lived next door to a man who had kept his job as a streetcar motorman through the Depression. And he helped us in 00:15:00every way that he could to the extent of giving food to the strikers, but he was doing it all undercover. We had a lot like that. And in the low income neighborhood, where we all lived, we pretty much had the support of the people there. Now we -- we didn't have across the tracks.

GEOGE STONEY: I'm sorry I'm going to ask you to do that again because I interrupted you and my voice (inaudblie). I'm sorry Judy, I'm very sorry. Do you mind doing that again?

THORNBURGH: Starting as what?

GEORGE STONEY: Starting from uh, what did people in uh, town think about you.

THORNBURGH: Oh. What the people in town thought about us was, it was pro and con. In the low income neighborhoods, where I lived and, well, where we all lived, ah, of course, in different sections of town, some of the people there, in fact most of 'em, they were with us, but they were undercover doing it, because we lived next door to a man who was working. He was a streetcar 00:16:00motorman. And he helped us and all the other people that we knew, because we'd been riding the streetcar, and, ah, they helped us. In fact, they would slip us a dollar, you know, or give us some money, something like that. They would help us. And we got good support from the railroad workers and we had some support from the construction workers. So, ah -- but now the people on the other side of the tracks, they didn't -- they didn't feel that way about us.

GEORGE STONEY: Now we've looked back at the newspapers and the journal particularly was full of communism and all that kind of thing. Did -- could you talk about that?

THORNBURGH: The papers at that time were full of the stories about communists. There was a communist under every bush, the way they were telling it here. And 00:17:00our people, they didn't take too much to that. They thought communism is something that's away from here, that it -- that didn't bother us. I understand that it did in some places, you know, and we all knew each other, you know, from all this organizing and visiting in homes, that, ah, if you'd asked some of 'em if they were a communist, they'd probably said, "I don't know," because they don't know what communism is. They didn't know anything about it. Like one of our guys said, "They don't know the difference in communism and rheumatism." So that -- that was not -- really not a big issue with us. But now they had heard that Miles Horton was a communist and that Highlander, that that was a communistic -- you know, that was formed in 1932. And they -- they had heard that Miles was. But, anyway, Miles came here and they liked him so well that nobody cared whether he was communist or not.

GEORGE STONEY: Tell us--

M1: Hey Jamie, excuseme, you're either gonna have to get a blimp for the camera or don't shoot any stills while we're rolling.

JAMIE STONEY: I only shot when we were—

M1: Well I kept hearing a lot of noise. It sounded like clicking and clattering of the camera, winding or the straps jiggling or whatever. Ok.

JAMIE STONEY: Ok.

GEORGE STONEY: Ok, we're all clear Jamie?

JAMIE STONEY: Yeah I'm fine

GEORGE STONEY: Ok. Then the next thing will be, tell us about Miles Horton. When you're ready, let me know when you're are ready.

M1: I'm, I'm fine.

GEORGE STONEY: Ok. Tell us about Miles Horton.

THORNBURGH: Miles Horton of Highlander came down here, or came over here, I guess it would be, from Mount Eagle, Tennessee, ah, to help us. And Miles was the only one that ever offered to help us education wise at all. Miles saw the need of it there and he rented a little office up over a drugstore here and set up some classes there. At first he might have had 12 or 15, then it was down to 00:19:008 and all of this was going on and all, but Miles carried on those classes if there was one person there. It was just wonderful the way he helped us. And if we had had him in here guiding us from the very beginning, but, of course, Miles was involved in other things, you know, all over the South. But he was a -- he was a great help to us.

GEORGE STONEY: I believe that he helped you get songs for the picket line. Could you talk about singing on the picket line?

THORNBURGH: Oh, yes. Uh huh. We, ah -- ah, Miles gave us the song "Solidarity" and we got good on "Solidarity" because that was a tune that we knew, you know.

GEORGE STONEY: How'd it go?

THORNBURGH: Let's see. (singing) "Solidarity forever" -- I'm not a singer, but that's the way it goes. And it had good words to it, too, you know. And another one that we sang, too, that Foots mentioned yesterday, was "We Shall Not Be Moved". Do you remember, though, he said that came out of the Bible? Well, that 00:20:00one was all right, but one that wasn't all right was "The Preacher and the Slave". Do you remember that one? "Long haired preachers come out every night, try to tell us what's wrong and what's right, but when you ask about something to eat, they will answer in voices so sweet." They wouldn't use that because they said that that wasn't quite like the Bible. But now, "Solidarity", you know, that'as "Onward Christian Soldiers", that one was all right and "We Shall Not Be Moved", that was their favorite 'cause it was short and snappy. And we added all kinds of verses to it.

GEORGE STONEY: Now could you tell us about the people, the religious people who were for you. You mentioned—

THORNBURGH: Oh yes!

GEORGE STONEY:-- the catholic preist and the Jews. Ok?

THORNBURGH: Well now, I talked about the churches being against us. They were certainly not all against us. The Catholics were not. Ah, in fact they helped us 00:21:00in the undercover way and so did the Jews. The Jews provided us a place to meet. We met up over a tailor shop. Ah, so they were with us, but some of the very fundamentalist churches, and they had all kinds of signs out in the yard, you know, about "They'll preach today on strikers going to hell" or something along that line. But now the itinerant preachers that were working all week and preaching on Sunday, they -- they were our good friend. And the first president of our local at Cherokee, ah, was a preacher, Preacher Campbell, and he was good. See, he'd been used to preaching out here on the street corners and he knew how to get up before a crowd and do that. So the preachers that were really good, we liked to have the preachers in there because they could tell 'em and people would believe them that you're not going to hell just because you're 00:22:00striking. And they'd believe them where they wouldn't believe me.

GEORGE STONEY: Now I want just a neat story about Max Friedman himself. Mention his name, because that's just a nice little story itself.

THORNBURGH: Ah, Max Friedman, I want to tell you about him. Max Friedman was a jeweler right here in Knoxville, very active in the Jewish church. Ah, he was later -- well, he was a city -- he was always active politically. He was a city councilman for many years, and he was really a -- a great person. He helped us in every way that he could. In fact, he helped us get our meeting place and he was -- he was truly a great man here, he was.

GEORGE STONEY: I'm going to ask you to do that again because what you did was that you told us.

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THORNBURGH: Alright. Ready?

GEORGE STONEY: Yes.

THORNBURGH: Ah, Max Friedman was a Jewish jeweler here and he was the one who helped us get his friend, the tailor, to let us meet up over his place there. And he advised us and we went to him and asked him questions all along about what we should do. In fact, he was sort of a consultant to us. Everybody loved Max Friedman. And then later he became a city councilman here. He was very active in politics. And later on one of his nephews, David -- I've forgotten David's last name momentarily, but David was his nephew and David came to the labor movement and he said, "I want you all to love me like you did Uncle Max." But we never did. We never loved anybody like we did Uncle Max.

GEORGE STONEY: Nice. Okay. Tell us about the calling off of the strike and how 00:24:00you felt and how you felt about Gorman and all of that.

THORNBURGH: Well, when the strike was officially called off, ah, we were in a state of confusion. We -- we -- we didn't -- we didn't know what to do. "Where's our union? Where's all these people that we've been meeting with? The mill is opening and what are we going to do? Are we going to go back or what are we going to do?" So one of the union organizers from the Central Labor Council here told us when they opened the gate, for all of us to go down and apply for a job, which we did. And that's where the blacklist came from. The foreman -- the -- the superintendent knew of all us, of course, and they were standing there by the gate with a clipboard and like when they came to me, "Go away," you know, "You're -- you're -- you're out." So they picked the ones that they wanted and 00:25:00the rest of us were out, and it was terribly confused. You couldn't have a meeting then because the blacklisted ones were looking for jobs other places and the ones who had gone back in weren't interested and were scared and everybody was looking for a job then, you know, for meat and bread.

GEORGE STONEY: Now what happened to you?

THORNBURGH: After I was blacklisted, I knew that my cotton milling days was over because I couldn't get a job anywhere. And that blacklist, as we understood it at that time, was scattered all over the United States. So I couldn't find a job anywhere. But the TVA was just coming in then and I had some good friends at TVA. You possibly remember Clara Killen who was director of labor relations there? Well, he and some other people helped me to get a job at TVA as a file 00:26:00clerk. So I started working there at a huge salary. I was getting $1,260 a year. That was $105 a month with no Social Security being taken out, 'cause there wasn't any Social Security Act. I was in good shape then. My sister got a job at -- also at TVA and my older sister became a union organizer and we began to get on Easy Street.

GEORGE STONEY: Now all of that must have given you a different feeling about Roosevelt, but could you talk about Roosevelt and the end of the strike? How did you feel about that?

THORNBURGH: Ah, I understood later that, ah, ah, Roosevelt had something to do with the strike ending as it did. At that time we did not know that and we thought Roosevelt, you know, that he was sitting on the right 00:27:00hand of God and that Roosevelt could do no wrong. He had brought TVA here, he had brought the NRA in, and he could do no wrong. So it didn't diffuse his popularity at all. We liked Roosevelt so well that everybody that had a radio would listen to the fireside chats. People who didn't have a radio went to somebody's house that did have a radio, so we could listen to that. And every once in a while it would come on, you know, that Mrs. Roosevelt was going to be on the fireside chat and everybody gathered for that. We were just very much in love with Roosevelt.

GEORGE STONEY: Ok now,

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THORNBURGH: All right. We -- we tried and we, I think, successfully --

GEORGE STONEY: Just, just, I'm sorry after the strike.

THORNBURGH: After the strike, ah, we tried, and I think at least partially successful, ah, we called the people together that something could still be 00:28:00done, that it wasn't completely hopeless, and we did find these people that would write letters, and we wrote letters to everybody, possibly people that weren't connected with it at all, but every time we'd see a name in the newspaper, we'd say, "Well, let's write him a letter." So we did. And the people really got interested in that writing letters. Ah, I'm sure there're not copies of those everywhere because we would have a letter writing session, you know, "Bring your tablet and pencil. We're going to write a letter today," and we sent all those letters up there. I don't know whether it did any good or not, but it let 'em know that we were here.

GEORGE STONEY: Ah, ok—

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GEORGE STONEY: Ok go.

M1: Speed

THORNBURGH: Back to the letters? We -- we would call -- we called our union members, the ones that we could get, mostly the blacklisted ones -- we called 00:29:00them into meetings and we started writing letters. Every time we'd see a name in the paper -- we didn't care if he was the Secretary of Defense or whatever he was, we would write him a letter telling him about our strike, how we lost our job, how we wasn't able to find other employment. And I don't know whether those letters ever helped any or not, but we did. We would have letter writing sessions at our meetings, tell everybody, "Bring your tablet and pencil. We're going to write a letter today." Of course, postage wasn't as high then as it is now. That was one thing that we could write the letters on. And we had several people like Roxie Clark. Roxie, particularly, liked to write letters. We had several of them that did, and they didn't think that the people in Washington would read a handwritten letter, so they would ask me to type their letters. "Okay. You write it out in longhand and I'll type it." And so I would type the, ah, letters to send in, whether they were any better or not.

GEORGE STONEY: You wrote a let--