Book Review

Bryant Simon's study of working-class politics in the New South is a welcome addition to the growing literature joining labor and political history. Focusing on South Carolina's textile mill workers and their neighbors, who composed roughly a fifth of South Carolina's electorate by the 1930s, Simon meticulously reconstructs the winding political road traversed by mill workers over the course of roughly four decades. The state's mill workers were important political agents, Simon argues, who were courted assiduously by state politicians at the same time they articulated their own distinct visions of politics and their place in the social order. Their journey took them from a politics built upon anxieties about race to one based upon class, and then back again. How and why white mill workers defined and acted on their interests in the political sphere constitute the heart of Simon's book.	1
In the first two-and-a-half decades of the twentieth century, white male mill workers enthusiastically supported Coleman Blease, a politician who opposed compulsory public education and child labor laws, denounced middle-class critics of mill life, social reformers, Yankees, and trade unions, championed white supremacy, and cheered the lynching of African Americans. Far from constituting an irrational devotion to an opponent of their class interests, male mill workers' embrace of "Bleasism" addressed, in perverse ways, their widespread anxieties about the impact of industrialization on their independence, patriarchal authority, and racial position. Male mill workers, Simon argues persuasively, "interpreted Blease's rhetoric and actions as a defense of their manhood against the forces of industrialization and the reform agenda of the progressives" (34). In casting their ballots for Blease, millworkers reasserted "their claims of patriarchal privilege and equality with all white men" (34).	2
As psychologically reassuring as Blease might have been, he did little to address workers' deteriorating material circumstances. By the mid-1920s, rising unemployment, a squeeze on wages, and the intensification of the labor process drove workers to the breaking point, resulting in well-chronicled waves of union organizing campaigns and often unsuccessful violent strikes in the late 1920s and 1930s. Angry that the power of the state government was firmly on the side of capital, mill workers eventually rejected Blease and migrated politically to candidates more sympathetic to labor's cause. Simon carries the story from the workplace to the polling place, as mill workers overwhelmingly embraced the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt—a "powerful God-sent man, who would deliver them to the promised land of industrial democracy" (108), on the national level, and Olin D. Johnston, on the state level, as the path to their economic salvation. "Slowly and unevenly from the late 1920s through the early 1930s," Simon observes, "workers moved away from the racially, sexually charged politics of Bleasism toward government intervention in the economy on their own behalf" (81). Ignoring the rhetoric of states rights and blatant appeals to racism, mill workers voted their class interests, at least for a time.	3
Ultimately, however, the New Deal and a pro-labor governor failed to deliver what workers thought they had promised. The National Industrial Recovery Act and the National Labor Relations Act conferred a degree of legitimacy upon trade unions, but mill employers continued to do battle against their workers during the Depression years. Political influence did matter: with the election of pro-labor candidate Olin Johnston—"South Carolina's Roosevelt" (136)—as governor in 1934, mill workers for the first time had a genuine ally in the state's highest elective office. Unlike his predecessors, Johnston did not provide mill owners with the repressive services of the National Guard during strikes and lockouts, and the governor aggressively supported labor legislation—but to little avail. A seemingly endless supply of rural strikebreakers meant that employers retained the upper hand, and a hostile state legislature exercised virtual veto power over the union movement's legislative agenda. Twenty-eight out of twenty-nine pro-labor bills went down to defeat in 1935, and the twenty-ninth was passed only in a dramatically watered-down form. The structure of political power in South Carolina, which gave disproportionate influence to anti-union low-country politicians, "doomed workers' challenges" (166). "In the end," Simon concludes, "Johnston's election and the New Deal's liberal labor policies made little difference in the day-to-day lives of South Carolina laborers" (165).	4
The final stage in mill workers' political journey traced by Simon, and the one he explores in the least detail, began with the election of 1938. Wedding virulent racism to sharp attacks on New Deal liberalism, incumbent senator "Cotton Ed" Smith denounced CIO interracialists and the influence of northern blacks in the Democratic party, defended states rights against the New Deal's supposed racial liberalism, and invoked white images of a rerun of Reconstruction's alleged horrors. Although mill workers declined the "bait" (216) of white supremacy and backed Olin Johnston, their candidate—who eschewed racist appeals and embraced the CIO and the New Deal—saw his challenge handily rebuffed by Smith. The politics of race had successfully returned, only to grow more intense over the next decade.	5
As African Americans in South Carolina stepped up their protests in the 1940s and as New Deal liberalism shifted its focus away from economic democracy toward an emphasis on group rights and racial justice, South Carolina whites, Johnston included, made anti-statism and the preservation of white supremacy their political core. Although mill workers, too, embraced the new politics of race eagerly, they unfortunately fade from view in Simon's examination of the 1940s.	6
Throughout his book, Simon depicts mill workers as complex and dynamic political agents whose identities were changing and multifaceted. As central as race was to mill workers' beliefs and experiences (and the arguments in this book)—the mills remained an all-white preserve, white workers supported segregation, and few if any advocated civil or political rights for blacks—Simon rejects recent calls to view labor history primarily through the lens of race and instead rightly refuses to reduce their identity to race or whiteness alone. Focusing "only on racial identity flattens the identity of white workers," Simon contends; "it says that they were racists, and that is it." Race "was never the only issue that mattered" (7). Indeed, Simon demonstrates that it is possible to produce a balanced portrait of white workers that interrogates their racial beliefs without reducing them to those beliefs alone. Historians of American labor, the South, and working-class racial identity would do well to emulate Simon's approach.	7
Eric Arnesen University of Illinois at Chicago

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