Elna C. Green

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Elna C. Green | Relief from Relief: The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike of 1937 and the Right to Welfare | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Relief from Relief: The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike of 1937 and the Right to Welfare

In July 1937 Mabel Hagan and her co-workers in a Tampa, Florida, sewing room went on strike. The sit-down was short-lived and unsuccessful. In a week's time, the workers were back at their machines, the leaders had been fired, and the entire event quickly disappeared from historical memory.¹ In Tampa, a city with an impressive history of labor activism, strikes were common events, and this one seemed a minor skirmish. But the event was notable. The women involved were relief workers who made clothing and other items to be distributed to nonprofit organizations; their jobs had been created by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA). Although relief workers had staged other strikes across the country, very few had taken place in the South, and in 1937 Florida had yet to see one. Even rarer was a relief strike conducted by women workers. So the Tampa sit-down was intriguingly unusual.	1
Tampa was itself unusual, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the South. Its immigrant residents did not easily fit into the region's racial binary system. Cuban, Spanish, Italian, and Bahamian immigrants, along with native-born whites and African Americans, provided the labor to make Tampa Florida's premier industrial city. Still largely an agricultural state, early twentieth-century Florida was beginning to show signs of its future service-sector economy. Already tourism had become a significant industry, and within a very few years the Sunshine State would seem far removed from its Old South history, as it laid the foundations for the post-1940 economic revolution that the historian Gary R. Mormino has called "Florida's Big Bang."²	2
So this was an unusual strike in an unusual city in an increasingly unusual "southern" state. How then can the strike have any relevance to the larger histories and historiographies of labor, race, gender, or region? As Christine Stansell once noted of antebellum New York City, unusual does not mean irrelevant. The failed sit-down of 1937 offers historians a unique opportunity to examine the complicated labor relations of the New Deal–era South, a region suddenly feeling the impact of federal labor legislation, national unionization drives, and the emerging welfare state. The sit-down strike and its unsuccessful conclusion also open an entirely new vista from which to view women and work in twentieth-century America. But most important, the sit-down highlights the contests over welfare in early twentieth-century America. I will argue that a belief in the right to relief, or entitlement to public support, had a long history in the United States but that by the New Deal era the old "settlement rights" inherited from the English poor law had disappeared while no replacement ideology had yet emerged. Women therefore struggled to find ways to stake their claims to a right to public support. Women in the Tampa sitdown attempted to use the language and tactics of the labor movement, only to learn that work relief was more relief than work. It would take another generation to articulate a right to welfare.³	3
The Tampa sewing-room strike meant different things to different constituencies, each framing the sit-down from its own perspective. In the politically charged climate of the 1930s, Tampa's business classes saw the event as a potential threat to the manufacturing economy they dominated. Although the strikers were all women, the press coverage focused on a man identified as the instigator of the strike—Eugene Poulnot. By 1937 Poulnot was famous (or infamous) in Tampa for his role in the city's labor contests and radical politics; his activities had dominated the front pages of the local papers for several years. Thus to many observers the sit-down in the sewing room seemed a product of Communist agitators, another worrisome sign of the successful expansion of radicalism during the country's greatest economic crisis.⁴	. . .

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