Book Review

This author stresses the existence of a self-conscious sense of community among the textile mill villagers of Spartanburg, South Carolina. The workers, according to G. C. Waldrep III, lived in a vibrant community with a social vision of mutuality that they expanded into the mill itself. When the stretch-out system emerged after World War I, villagers resisted it as a violation of long-standing habits and customs. During the 1930s and 1940s, the energy and solidarity of the villagers, according to Waldrep, earned them some degree of autonomy, which he describes as a system of negotiated loyalty with owners.	1
Waldrep wants to restore these local union leaders to a central role in southern labor history as examples of those who, in the face of tremendous obstacles, challenged the highly stratified, grinding world of poverty in which they lived. Waldrep recognizes that the workers' community was no paradise; it excluded African Americans and relegated women to subservient roles. Even so, Waldrep wants the reader to appreciate that cotton mill workers hoped for worker control and democracy within a hostile environment.	2
Waldrep uses his own interviews with almost one hundred local workers, government and union records, and the local newspaper. He had planned covering other mill communities but discovered that the material in Spartanburg County was so rich that he could concentrate on it alone. This decision makes the book one of extraordinary depth but gives short shrift to comparisons.	. . .