| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bryant Simon. A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910–1948. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. xiv, 345. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

Every historical narrative reveals not just the past but its own present as well. In 1987, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly wrote Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World with "preoccupations" "rooted" in the 1960s and 1970s (Like a Family, p. xvii). Hall and her fellow authors reported that cotton mill workers achieved class consciousness; their book ends on a note of triumph with a worker telling how she "growed to fellowship" with her fellow workers (Like a Family, p. 363). Now Hall's student, Bryant Simon, brings the preoccupations of our time to his account of South Carolina's cotton mill world. Simon's concern is with legal culture, the attitudes ordinary people have about what role government should play in their lives. By the 1940s and 1950s, South Carolina mill workers had seen government flounder. They marched into the civil rights era convinced that government reform was no good; after all, they saw the state fail to help them in the New Deal. Like Eugene O'Neill, Simon wants his audience to see "somebody on stage facing life . . . not conquering, but perhaps inevitably conquered" (p. 239). This story is tragedy. . . .

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