Exploiting the North-South Differential: Corporate Power, Southern Politics, and the Decline of Organized Labor after World War II

Tami J. Friedman

In October 1945 the Alexander Smith and Sons Carpet Company, one of the leading carpet manufacturers in the United States and the largest employer in Yonkers, New York, marked its hundredth year. At a gala celebration sponsored by the Yonkers Chamber of Commerce, the company's first vice president, William F. C. "Bill" Ewing, shared his vision for the postwar future. Ewing called for greater federal support for business since, as he put it, "in the last 10 or 12 years, Government has been deliberately unfriendly to business." He also expressed concern about labor's demands; without federal tariff protection, he cautioned, high wages would "prevent successful competition." Ewing reminded the audience that his great-grandfather, Alexander Smith, had relocated to Yonkers eighty years earlier "to escape deliberate sabotage and to find a friendly atmosphere. He found it and prospered." Ewing alluded to Smith's move to Yonkers in 1864 after his first factory, established in 1845, burned down; the fire may have been set by employees incensed by Smith's introduction of the power loom. Ewing's remarks undoubtedly struck a chord with the city's business leaders, who understood that if postwar conditions proved undesirable, the company could move again.1	1
Five years later Ewing, now company president, followed his ancestor's lead. In August 1950 he and several Smith colleagues traveled to Greenville, Mississippi, a small community nestled in the heart of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where they met with civic leaders eager to attract northern firms. The two groups quickly solidified arrangements to construct a new carpet mill. By early 1953 Greenville Mills was up and running; by June 1954, it had 450 employees and company officials were ready to abandon the northern operation. On June 24, during a strike by Yonkers members of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), Smith managers announced that it had become "economically impossible" to continue running the Yonkers plant. In the coming months, they closed the Yonkers facility, which employed over three thousand workers, and shifted production to the Delta site.2	2
Alexander Smith and Sons Carpet Company executives and Greenville, Mississippi, business and civic leaders meet at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York City on Friday, December 15, 1950, to finalize arrangements for a $4.75 million bond issue to build a carpet mill in Greenville. Seated, left to right: Greenville city attorney Albert Lake, Smith president William F. C. "Bill" Ewing, and Greenville city councillor Rhodes Wasson. Standing, left to right: Smith assistant secretary William Kennedy, Smith attorney Charles Nourse, plant manager Herbert J. "Jack" Potts, Smith vice president Harold C. Zulauf, and Greenville Chamber of Commerce officials C. M. Brough and A. H. Blum. Courtesy Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, December 18, 1950.
When Smith officials decided to relocate their operations, they chose from a multitude of strategies that companies pursued in the early postwar years. As historians have demonstrated, the early post–World War II period was marked by what Howell John Harris has called a "managerial counteroffensive" against the labor movement's advance. Corporate leaders inaugurated or resuscitated programs of welfare capitalism meant to restore employees' loyalty, aggressively promoted a political agenda designed to restrict labor's power (resulting in such federal legislation as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947), launched vigorous public relations campaigns to sell the U.S. public on the advantages of "free enterprise," and fought hard at the bargaining table to contain unions' authority on the shop floor. And some employers sought to escape or erode union power by moving from place to place.3	. . .