For Labour/Le Travail, January, 2005

Vincent J. Roscigmo andWilliam F. Danaher, The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). "Social Movements, Protest and Contention," vol. 19.

In The Voice of Southern Labor, Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher seek to make a contribution both to social movement theory and labor historiography. With respect to the former, they regard theoretical approaches to collective activism that stress only "issues of grievance, union influence, or strike success and failure" (p. xx) as of limited use in explaining the timing and character of social protest mobilization. Noting the highly dispersed character of the textile industry, they explore "the question of how processes relevant to social movement formation are manifested across space." They conclude that it was the confluence of indigenous culture, rapid technological development, and changes in national politics that help significantly to explain the militancy and solidarity that textile workers exhibited in the great 1934 strike. It was only in the brief period of the early 1930s that popular access to radio in the South meshed with decentralized ownership of broadcasting to provide opportunities for local musicians, many of whom had roots in the textile industry and whose songs often called attention to the plight of workers. At the same time, Franklin D. Roosevelt's radio-borne fireside chats conveyed a strong sense of entitlement to workers everywhere, nowhere more so than in the impoverished Piedmont villages.

The authors' examination of the relationship between radio and mill culture as primarily reflected in music constitutes their main contribution to labor historiography. Why was there such an explosion of broad-based worker-generated activism in 1934 and not before? Since mill workers' grievances long predated the great strike of that year, the explanation cannot lie in the simple facts of workplace mistreatment. To be sure, southern mill workers had earlier waged significant strikes, most notably in 1919-20 and at Gastonia and Marion, North Carolina, in 1929. But before the massive, Piedmont-wide 1934 uprising, strikes had been local affairs. Now, however, a quarter million or more southern mill workers walked out, exhibiting fierce militancy and region-wide solidarity in the face of harsh repression.

According to the authors, central to explaining the great textile strike are three overlapping themes that differentiate it from earlier job actions. The coincident expansion of radio broadcasting (and listening) throughout the upland South, the vigorous emergence of indigenous protest music, and the new presence in Washington of a president seen as a genuine friend of working people gave shape and cohesion to mill worker activism. To demonstrate this point, the authors carefully plot out the geography of rapid radio expansion in the late 1920s and early 1930s, showing a close correlation between the existence of outlets and the nodes of worker activism. Station owners and managers relied heavily on local talent, just as a gifted corps of mill-worker performers became available to fill air time. Since many of the most popular singers and musicians were mill workers or closely connected to family and friends who toiled in the mills, their music resonated immediately and powerfully in the textile towns and villages. Moreover, a high proportion of the most popular songs, such as David McCarn's "Cotton Mill Colic" and the Dixon Brothers' "Weave Room Blues," spoke of workers' grievances, singled out employers for criticism, and endorsed collective response. The sense that a new regime in Washington, as personified by the charismatic FDR, provided government support for mill worker empowerment complemented this techno-cultural thrust to create a powerful, cohesive mass movement that triggered the mass strike.

In a spirited conclusion, the authors argue persuasively for the importance of cultural resources in the shaping of workers' responses to working and living conditions. Fellow sociologists will be able to judge whether this somewhat fortuitous joining of cultural, political, and technological forces constitutes a significant contribution to the development of mass movement theory. Social movement theory, they sensibly argue, must include consideration of workers' cultural resources. And they are persuasive in holding that the combination of indigenous music and new technology helped to create a climate of cohesion and militancy in the early 1930s. This point, however, raises implicit questions as to how other configurations of popular culture and technological development might contribute, as seems to be the case today, to conservative patterns of political and social activism.

For historians, the authors' discussion of radio dispersion and its linkage with grass-roots musical expression constitutes their main contribution. The basic story of textile labor relations and especially of the 1934 strike is familiar, as are the limitations of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the National Industrial Recovery Act insofar as protecting workers' rights is concerned. Also well established in the historical literature is the rank-and-file character of the textile strikes, the ineptitude of the leadership of the United Textile Workers, and the harshness and efficacy of employer and state-conducted repression. Moreover, the authors do not inspire confidence when they confuse Section 7 (a) of the NIRA with the provisions of the NRA's Textile Industry Code (102, 133). But their careful examination of radio's role in unifying otherwise-parochial textile worker militancy adds an important element to the story of the great strike.

The University of Minnesota Press has not served these authors well. This book suffers from careless writing and copy editing. The authors' addiction to the passive voice sometimes threatens to rob mill workers of the agency that they otherwise herald. Lengthy block quotes drawn largely from mill workers' oral histories at the Southern Workers Project at the University of North Carolina do provide first-hand testimony but are not well integrated into the narrative. Misplaced modifiers and vague pronoun references abound. On two occasions, the authors remark that the importance of certain developments "cannot be underestimated," when in fact they mean the opposite (64, 103). Firm copy editing should have caught these errors, thus permitting readers to contemplate the authors' contributions free from distracting gaucheries.

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida