The Carolina Piedmont
Allen Tullos, Emory University
Essay Sections:
The Modern Piedmont:
The modern Carolina Piedmont gathered steam through
the 1870s and 1880s. Completion of the Atlanta and Richmond Air-Line Railway
offered a direct route from New York to New Orleans and further shifted
the region's orientation away from the Carolina coast. Cotton agriculture,
cotton mills, and tobacco factories proliferated along the new railway
routes and spur lines. Boxcars, hauling northern-made textile machinery
purchased on credit, followed the rail tracks.
 |
| Piedmont
Manufacturing Company in Greenville County, circa 1890 |
In a romance of New South industry that continues into the
twenty-first century, manufacturers, politicians, town boosters, and newspaper
editors boasted of the region's potential for profit. A seemingly bottomless
pool of displaced tenant and sharecropper families provided generations
of cheap, exploitable labor upon which the new industrial class built
its wealth and political power.
The long era of Jim Crow assigned workers — male and female, white and black — to different industrial and occupational tasks and thwarted efforts at unionization. Black men and women undertook the dirtiest, dustiest, hottest, and heaviest tasks in the tobacco factories of the Reynolds of Winston-Salem and of the Dukes of Durham. All but a handful of African Americans were excluded from the Piedmont's textile mills and from the operation of tobacco-processing machinery until the late 1940s.
By the 1920s and 30s, in the gingerbread neighborhoods and first streetcar suburbs of Charlotte, Greenville, Durham, and Greensboro, captains and lieutenants of Carolina Piedmont industry resided alongside their cities' leading doctors, lawyers, and merchants. On the mill hills and in the "bottoms" of these cities, white and black workers lived as factory "hands" or female domestic "help." Out of this new working class, from the ranks of cotton mill lintheads and tobacco market street performers, came an indelible outpouring of Piedmont fiddle-band music and a genre of blues that carried ragtime rhythms. African American churches birthed a lively music on its way to becoming gospel.
The Depression years brought not only a worsening of conditions on Piedmont farms and further exodus, but stretch-outs, speed-ups, and lay-offs in the mills and factories. As the legitimacy of the national political economy came into question after 1929, protests by Piedmont workers rose to unprecedented levels, culminating in the 1934 General Strike. Before being overpowered by mill-owner tactics that included evictions and blacklisting, as well as reliance upon troops and state-backed repression, thousands of millhands shut down their looms and spinning frames, marched in the streets, and went on strike. It took the coming of World War II to turn Piedmont Carolinians toward a more singular purpose and renew economic activity.
The pace of the region's post-war upturn, from Danville to Charlotte to Greenville, continued to be set by manufacturers, bankers, and businessmen who constituted what political scientist V. O. Key called an "progressive plutocracy." State government interests and initiatives complemented those of the "economic oligarchy." Networks of railways, paved roads that grew into highways, and electric power lines tied together countryside, town, and city. Writing in 1949, following an extended visit to North Carolina, Lewis Mumford celebrated the numerous colleges and universities, the open spaces, the de-centralized distribution of urban and agricultural populations, but warned of the tendencies of unplanned, market-driven growth. His words echo today along the congested Interstate 85 corridor and the euphemistically named "edge cities" that sprawl through the core of the Carolina Piedmont. "In fifty years," wrote Mumford, cities such as Charlotte, Raleigh, and High Point "will take on the worst features of metropolitan areas everywhere . . . and the surrounding countryside will become merely a real-estate speculators' annex to the growing metropolis."
Sentenced to low wage, low-skilled manufacturing jobs in textiles, apparel, furniture, and tobacco, Carolina Piedmont workers' standard of living rose minimally in the 1950s and '60s. At the other end of the economic system, drawn by tax breaks and the anti-union climate, many northern plants relocated. The accumulating capital from the industrial transformation found its way to banking centers in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Raleigh. New initiatives, particularly in North Carolina, began to diversify the region's manufacturing and business base. The creation of the "public/private" Research Triangle Park in 1959 typified the continuing effectiveness of the decades-old collaboration of corporate, academic, and government elites, this time put to the service of the nascent information and technology age.
Photographs and Video:
One of the opening acts of the modern freedom struggle was the 1960 Woolworth's lunch-counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. As long-excluded African American citizens pressed for justice in every aspect of civil and social life, the Carolina Piedmont registered the changes, whether in court-ordered school busing to achieve racial balance in Charlotte, in efforts to desegregate factories and workplaces, or in the number of newly elected black officials. In reaction, drawing upon anti-government resentment and racial codewords, initiatives such as Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy pulled large numbers of blue collar and middle class white voters into the Republican Party — in this region and throughout the South. What William Chafe has called the "progressive mystique" with its reformist emphasis upon "consensus, voluntarism, and the preservation of civility" remains a powerful ideology of "resistance from above." Twenty-first century transformations of the Carolina Piedmont's social arrangements await political coalitions capable of pressing more inclusive agendas of political and economic democracy.
The long era of Jim Crow assigned workers — male and female, white and black — to different industrial and occupational tasks and thwarted efforts at unionization. Black men and women undertook the dirtiest, dustiest, hottest, and heaviest tasks in the tobacco factories of the Reynolds of Winston-Salem and of the Dukes of Durham. All but a handful of African Americans were excluded from the Piedmont's textile mills and from the operation of tobacco-processing machinery until the late 1940s.
By the 1920s and 30s, in the gingerbread neighborhoods and first streetcar suburbs of Charlotte, Greenville, Durham, and Greensboro, captains and lieutenants of Carolina Piedmont industry resided alongside their cities' leading doctors, lawyers, and merchants. On the mill hills and in the "bottoms" of these cities, white and black workers lived as factory "hands" or female domestic "help." Out of this new working class, from the ranks of cotton mill lintheads and tobacco market street performers, came an indelible outpouring of Piedmont fiddle-band music and a genre of blues that carried ragtime rhythms. African American churches birthed a lively music on its way to becoming gospel.
The Depression years brought not only a worsening of conditions on Piedmont farms and further exodus, but stretch-outs, speed-ups, and lay-offs in the mills and factories. As the legitimacy of the national political economy came into question after 1929, protests by Piedmont workers rose to unprecedented levels, culminating in the 1934 General Strike. Before being overpowered by mill-owner tactics that included evictions and blacklisting, as well as reliance upon troops and state-backed repression, thousands of millhands shut down their looms and spinning frames, marched in the streets, and went on strike. It took the coming of World War II to turn Piedmont Carolinians toward a more singular purpose and renew economic activity.
The pace of the region's post-war upturn, from Danville to Charlotte to Greenville, continued to be set by manufacturers, bankers, and businessmen who constituted what political scientist V. O. Key called an "progressive plutocracy." State government interests and initiatives complemented those of the "economic oligarchy." Networks of railways, paved roads that grew into highways, and electric power lines tied together countryside, town, and city. Writing in 1949, following an extended visit to North Carolina, Lewis Mumford celebrated the numerous colleges and universities, the open spaces, the de-centralized distribution of urban and agricultural populations, but warned of the tendencies of unplanned, market-driven growth. His words echo today along the congested Interstate 85 corridor and the euphemistically named "edge cities" that sprawl through the core of the Carolina Piedmont. "In fifty years," wrote Mumford, cities such as Charlotte, Raleigh, and High Point "will take on the worst features of metropolitan areas everywhere . . . and the surrounding countryside will become merely a real-estate speculators' annex to the growing metropolis."
Sentenced to low wage, low-skilled manufacturing jobs in textiles, apparel, furniture, and tobacco, Carolina Piedmont workers' standard of living rose minimally in the 1950s and '60s. At the other end of the economic system, drawn by tax breaks and the anti-union climate, many northern plants relocated. The accumulating capital from the industrial transformation found its way to banking centers in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Raleigh. New initiatives, particularly in North Carolina, began to diversify the region's manufacturing and business base. The creation of the "public/private" Research Triangle Park in 1959 typified the continuing effectiveness of the decades-old collaboration of corporate, academic, and government elites, this time put to the service of the nascent information and technology age.
Photographs and Video:
|
Photo and video essays from
"From Raw Cotton
to Cloth"
|
|
 |
 |
Video Essay by James L. Hughes III (11:49
min.)
|
|
One of the opening acts of the modern freedom struggle was the 1960 Woolworth's lunch-counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. As long-excluded African American citizens pressed for justice in every aspect of civil and social life, the Carolina Piedmont registered the changes, whether in court-ordered school busing to achieve racial balance in Charlotte, in efforts to desegregate factories and workplaces, or in the number of newly elected black officials. In reaction, drawing upon anti-government resentment and racial codewords, initiatives such as Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy pulled large numbers of blue collar and middle class white voters into the Republican Party — in this region and throughout the South. What William Chafe has called the "progressive mystique" with its reformist emphasis upon "consensus, voluntarism, and the preservation of civility" remains a powerful ideology of "resistance from above." Twenty-first century transformations of the Carolina Piedmont's social arrangements await political coalitions capable of pressing more inclusive agendas of political and economic democracy.
Essay Sections:
