Historian Travis Sutton Byrd’s latest book explores 1930s labor strife

In his previous book, Unraveled: Labor Strife and Carolina Folk During the Marion Textile Strikes of 1929, historian Travis Sutton Byrd examined the labor unrest that culminated in the deaths of eight individuals in East Tennessee and parts of Western North Carolina. In his latest work, Tangled: Organizing the Southern Textile Industry, 1930-1934, Byrd picks up where he left off.

The book, published this year by The University of Tennessee Press, chronicles labor disputes in the South, including revolts in Greensboro and High Point, N.C., as well as Danville, Va. It also unpacks the development of class consciousness among the region’s workers and the political movements that formed on account of those events. The story concludes with a nationwide strike in 1934 that involved more than 400,000 textile workers.

Among Byrd’s objectives in writing Tangled was to connect the dots, linking events that many scholars have deemed unrelated. “The major problem with previous scholarship has been that the strike wave of 1929 and the general strike of 1934 were taken to have existed in separate vacuums,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “Divorced by half a decade, by the onset of the Depression, and by a change in national administrations, they have been seen as separate as the top of the world and Antarctica.”

The reality, argues Byrd, is far more intricate — a story based, in part, on “Southern labor waking up.” But besides shining a light on this often overlooked period of American history, the author hopes to extend his book’s wake-up call to the region’s present-day workers. Too often, he says, historical accounts portray Southern labor as anti-union, and whether directly or indirectly, he believes this influences the way today’s workers perceive their situation and their options. But as his book makes clear, the region has a rich heritage of organized strikes and grassroots movements.

“Southern workers,” he points out, “have been very successful in forcing collective action — when they want to.”

Valuable tools

Byrd, a UNC Asheville graduate and current doctoral candidate at UNC Greensboro, notes that there are two prominent schools of thought concerning the role of the historian. One views historians as pure researchers whose sole task is to uncover and present information. The other sees them as activists for whom historical events are tools for creating change.

“I fall somewhere in the middle,” says the author, adding that in choosing a topic and deciding how to present it, “You can’t escape from the shadow of the milieu in which you yourself live.”

During the period when he was conducting research for this book, however, Byrd was steeped in the past. Unlike many historians who rely primarily on official documents and oral histories, the author chose to explore less conventional sources to help shape his understanding of the issues. A self-described newspaper hound, he scrutinized the headlines and articles in various publications (including The Asheville Citizen) to better grasp the way the day’s events were being presented at that time. “The media shapes public opinion, but public opinion shapes the media as well, in terms of coverage,” he maintains. “You can recover a lot of voices through reportage.”

Along with daily newspapers, Byrd also pulled information from magazines, radio broadcasts and works of fiction published during those years. “This was the heyday of proletarian realism,” he stresses. “These writers were expressing the problems and paradoxes of their milieu.”

Among the many authors featured in Tangled is Asheville native Thomas Wolfe. Rather than citing Wolfe’s fiction, however, Byrd turned to the writer’s letters. A 1931 missive to his mother opens the second section of Tangled. In it, Wolfe denounces the waste and perils of capitalism in the wake of the Great Depression:

“For the first time in history we have far too much rather than too little; and machinery can produce faster than we can consume. Our enormous wheat & cotton crops amount to nothing unless people have money to buy them — and we are glutted, literally starving in the midst of plenty, unable to market at a profit what we produce. This system of over-production will not improve, will get worse, unless something is done to control it — I think we are at the end of a period: it may be that the whole Capitalistic system is finished — if so, I think we should welcome some other one that is not so stupid and wasteful.”

Such sources, Byrd believes, provide a more complete picture of the era, giving readers a window into the everyday thoughts and concerns of those who lived through that period. In addition, he continues, they make for more vivid and visceral reading.

“If you write dry-boned history, nobody is going to read it,” argues Byrd. “Sources such as literature, newspapers, music and poetry — if applicable — are valuable tools.”

The end is the beginning is the end

“Even during the bleakest days of the early 1930s … the folk of the textile belt were agents and actors who labored to shape their own destiny,” the author writes in Tangled. “Looking back, one is struck by the fact that the size of labor actions — both in geographical scope and the numbers involved — steadily increased between 1929 and 1934, which simply proved that workers in the Depression-era South were coming to grasp the raw power they wielded.”

That power, Byrd asserts, still exists today: It simply needs stronger guidance and direction. Tangled, he believes, could be a road map for present-day union leaders and grassroots groups. “We’ve [organized] in the past … and we can do it again in the future,” he maintains. “But if we don’t know our history, then we all drink the Kool-Aid of right-to-work and at-will employment, and we just assume that this is the way things have always been and the way things will always be.”