It’s hard to say at exactly what point I gained a real sense of class consciousness. There are instances I could point to, things that I noticed as a child that certainly were moments of class awareness, but piecing it all together didn’t happen right away.
I grew up on old family land that bordered what eventually became The Carolina Country Club. Some of my earliest memories are of seeing the construction of their golf course, watching the bulldozers sculpt the land from the opposite side of a chain-link fence. As a kid I wondered why they fenced their neighborhood off from the rest of us. Why would they care to keep us out? It left an indelible impact on me, but until my teenage years I was mostly just puzzled by it.
It was in those teenage years that I started connecting certain dots. One of my favorite bands was a group called Rage Against The Machine, and their music was politically revolutionary in a way that I’d never heard before. The songs were radically critical of established power structures, dropping references to radical thinkers like Frantz Fanon and movements like EZLN and their struggle for indegenous rights in rural Mexico. Later on I started listening to early Bob Dylan, and songs like “Maggie’s Farm” spoke to me more personally, tapping into some great truth coming equally from both the music and from somewhere inside.
I read novels like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, and took away valuable lessons on what the line between the powerful and the powerless really means in our country, as well as throughout the world.
If I had to point to a moment though, one that crystallized everything for me, it would be when I first picked up a copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States from the Spartanburg Library. Zinn’s classic is a traditional history book turned upside down. The arrival of Columbus is told from the point of view of the indigenous people he slaughtered. The story of the railroads is told from the point of view of the Chinese and Irish laborers who built them. The story of the Robber Barons is told by their striking workers. World War I is told from the point of view of the bonus marchers.
The big picture that, up until then, I hadn’t even really known I was looking for was suddenly right in front of me. It was a picture of the powerful from below, and in painting that picture, Zinn also showed the path the powerless had taken to successfully confront social injustice. In a certain way, it reads like a book-length version of Frederick Douglass’ famous quote “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Last Sunday, I was reminded of how powerful that experience was when I watched The People Speak, a documentary on the History Channel inspired by Zinn’s book.
The show consisted of readings by different actors of the some of the speeches and writings of people featured in the original book, as well as musicians playing political protest songs running from a traditional slave ballad all the way to an early Dylan song. Seeing those words brought to life that way was a uniquely moving experience that brought up an old question that I’d posed to myself when I first read the book 11 years ago.
What would a people’s history of Spartanburg look like?
What would the history of Spartanburg’s mills look like from the point of view of workers paid just enough to make rent and buy groceries at the company store? What does the settlement of the old Spartan District look like to the American Indians who once used Spartanburg County for their hunting ground? What does the Battle of Cowpens look like to the slaves of Walnut Grove who remained slaves regardless of the outcome? What does the grandeur of the old Spartanburg Opera House look like to the dirt farmer bringing in a bad year’s cotton crop to town?
Some of this we already know. The painful story of African-Americans displaced by so-called urban renewal on Spartanburg’s Southside is told well in the Hub-City Writers Project title South of Main. The story of the hardships faced by Spartanburg’s textile workers is told eloquently and thoroughly in G.C. Waldrep’s Southern Workers and the Search for Community. Other stories remain buried though, waiting for someone to care enough to uncover them.
These wouldn’t be the stories of Spartanburg’s captains of industry. This would be the story of those whom Spartanburg society hasn’t deemed worthy of remembering. It would be the history of the people who passed through life in our little corner of America unnoticed, often bearing the weight of injustice inflicted by the people we do remember. What would that story look like?
It would also answer questions about the fight for social justice in our community. Groups like the Spartanburg Development Association would have their story told by the mill workers they had blackballed for trying to organize. The racist views propagated by Spartanburg politicians like Olin Johnston and James Byrnes would be answered by the calls for equality emanating from Spartanburg’s Civil Rights-era black churches.
Again I ask, what would that story look like?
In the telling of what happened in our past we could better figure out what injustices are still left to be righted. What could a real people’s history of Spartanburg tell us about today? What could we learn about the decay of former mill villages like Glendale, Converse, and Beaumont? These are the places in our county that, if they have a future at all, will likely become hotbeds of new-urbanite gentrification, losing whatever sense of identity they still have in the process. The last remnants of Spartanburg’s “Lowell of the South” working class is withering away, taking with it a century’s worth of oppression and defiance, of community and family.
That’s just one example of how a true people’s history could help us understand the local scene as it is today. There’s a million questions a real democratic history of Spartanburg could answer, questions most people have never bothered to ask.
The lessons of that history could spark a sort of quite revolution in how the people of Spartanburg view their community and their roles in that community. It could shine a light on our hidden past and in the process illuminate a better, more equitable and democratic way forward. That’s something I’d hope all of us would want to see in our community.
Christopher George
While we were watching the Zinn show the other night I was really struck how closely the worker-narratives lined up with some of the “Voices from the Village” we collected and published in Textile Town. It’s just a small piece of our community’s “people’s history,” but powerful nonetheless.
I was also reminded how sad I was when one of my children’s high school English teachers told me that schools could no longer assign “The Grapes of Wrath” because at 600 pages it was too longer to hold students’ attention. That book changed my life.
The “Voices from the Village” segments were my favorite part of “Textile Town”. That’s pretty much the way I think my hypothetical “people’s history” would work, just broaden the scope. I actually see it looking more like Zinn’s recent companion book “Voices From a People’s History.” I think it would work better if the actual stories were the focus, with as little outside commentary as possible.
They weren’t assigning “The Grapes of Wrath” anymore when I was in high school. I had to pick that one up on my own, which I did after hearing Springsteen’s “Ghost of Tom Joad.” It’s still one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read. It’s sad that our high school students don’t get the chance to read it unless they stumble across it by themselves.
It was assigned in my AL high school and the movie was screened on campus on a Saturday as extra credit. I can name a handful of titles that I am thankful to good English teachers for assigning:
“To Kill A Mockingbird”
(I love to see small theater adaptions of this.)
“Our Town”
“Grapes of Wrath”
all things George Orwell (dig past the obvious “1984″ and “Animal Farm”)
I especially should write Mrs. Wilson and thank her for making me MEMORIZE the final stanza of William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.”
wait just a second here. 600 pages is too long??? Have they picked up the last four Harry Potter books lately? I’m sorry but that is amazingly ridiculous.
Heck I read Colleen McCollough’s The Thorn Birds at age 16. I had to read Great Expectations and then watch a film on it in ninth grade. I opted for writing instead of literature classes in high school, but that didn’t stop me from reading. I of course missed many of those “assigned classics” but I picked up a great many on my own. By the time I graduated high school I had read books by E. L. Doctrow, Carl Sagan, Alice Walker, James Michner, Nathanial Hawthorn, Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, Mark Twain, and a countless others as then and since.
You cannot honestly tell me that there is nothing that will keep a teenager interested, UNLESS reading has been made into a chore, or nothing more then a homework assignment. THAT, I believe is a tragedy.
I do need to pick up a copy of Textile Town. I do love history, and the variety of perspectives is what makes history rich and memorable.
“I was also reminded how sad I was when one of my children’s high school English teachers told me that schools could no longer assign “The Grapes of Wrath” because at 600 pages it was too longer to hold students’ attention.”
That is DISGUSTING. All schools ever want to do is just keep pumping kids full of Ritalin and Adderall and shut them up until it’s time for the next batch of hyper little monsters to come through. Not much different than death row. I don’t care if it’s too long to hold kids’ attention. You just beat the crap out of them until they finish the book.
I am SO sending my kids to Catholic school if I ever have any.
You’ll be happy to know students are still reading “The Grapes of Wrath” at local high schools, at least in honors classes.
The whole “what book did my English teacher assign or not” says we don’t value reading. I envision a world where we don’t remember if we read something in class or out of class. What this forum is saying is that we we turned on to reading–that was alwyas my goal as a teacher. I didn’t care if you remembered The Scarlet Letter, only that you could read a book like it later. You try picking a good cross-section of literature for a class, and I’ll name fifty books you should have chosen!
All right, I know I’m ranting–and I’ll add for full disclosure that I was that English teacher who said 600 pages is too long–not because it wouldn’t hold attention, but that it took a boatload of class time to read, and I chose to spread out my reading. I’ll just say that it is entirely unfair to expect an English teacher to provide all the reading for your child. I have favorite books, too, including The Grapes of Wrath; it’s not “DISGUSTING” not to read it, it’s a choice by what one hopes is a professional with a strong sense of literature, history, culture and arts. I’ll add that that was not always the case in high school English classes (ask me for some stories), but that’s another issue.
For what it’s worth, I used Zinn’s book as a primary text in history classes.
To be fair, my comment was pretty over-simplified (as I’m suspecting this one will be as well, considering I’m running late at the moment). First of all, THANK YOU for being a teacher; I don’t know how you manage it. Secondly, what was running through my head that I completely failed to articulate is not that I’m disgusted with teachers, but disgusted with the way most schools’ standards are dropping and much more importantly, I’m disgusted with a LOT of parents. My frustration isn’t simply with The Grapes of Wrath having been taken out of schools, but the idea that a 600 page book being neglected because it’s too long to hold a child’s attention (which I do see now is not the whole story) is intolerable to me. There are just so many things like this happening that it really seems like everyone would just rather dumb down the schools than discipline children and teach them how to really apply themselves.
Like I mentioned earlier, I’m running extremely late at the moment and I’m not really processing my thoughts very well, but I hope you understand where I’m coming from.
Bravo, Ned. Reading GOW might take some classes the entire semester. Parents who are concerned about their children’s reading should provide opportunities outside the classroom, and encouragement too. Unfortunately, some have no involvement in the child’s education, as we know.
The reality is that teachers are squeezed between apathetic students and parents mainly concerned about diplomas and GPAs on one hand, and administration, who demands high standards and critical thinking but NO failures, on the other.
And I would like to add that Ned Barrett (and Allyn Steele) were the two best teachers my kids ever had. Count me still “sad” that they couldn’t read it at school since I totally lost that battle at home, too. Oh well, maybe they will read it one day.
We have Betsy Teter’s HubCity Writers to thank for documenting Spartanburg’s history,good and bad. One of the problems ongoing here remains the Herald Journal which does a very bad effort at chronicling the news of Spartanburg. Little minority community news weekly.No followup on the two hispanic gas station attendants murders.And look at the low response to this year’s Goodfellas fundraising to give those in need one tall bag of food items later this week at the Auditorium. I have done what I could to get the NY Times Co. to discipline or replace chief disgrace to the journalism profession,Michael Smith.Nothing will change. We are stuck while waiting for Roger Milliken’s death to read their ready to print special section on his contributions to our city. But we know how much more Spartanburg is than one rich man.Trouble is,it’s rarely reported in the Herald Journal so I canceled my subscription effective April,2010.I am curious why more of you do not share this disappointment in the management of our daily paper but maybe you don’t read it.
Chris, Good piece, as usual. Small point: I for one would not be so willing to throw out the “commentary.” People’s voices/narratives often aren’t ever enough for me. To simply listen to the voices (whether “the people” or the elites) is to end up with no meaningful perspective. I’m glad that GC Waldrep was able to bring his Duke PHD training to bear on our community in SOUTHERN WORKERS, just as I enjoy his sharp commentary in TEXTILE TOWN. I’ll admit I might not swayed very deeply or easily by family connections or wealth, but earned knowledge and/or practical wisdom do often change my perspective and make me see things in a different or deeper way! JL
Thanks for the comment John.
I guess my affinity for reading people’s stories without the commentary comes from my love of Studs Terkel’s work. I’ve always felt that his oral histories were more powerful because he avoided spelling out what he thought people should take away from the work.
The creativity was in the editing. He allowed the people to do the talking, but used his own knack for storytelling to keep the narrative interesting.
Still, I can see the need for the a knowledgeable voice to put the stories in perspective. Maybe something between the academic style of G.C. Waldrep and the hands-off approach of Studs Terkel would be best, using each to balance out the other.
I love Studs Terkel too. Feel it’s all part of a big whole– the stories coming at us from all sides, the commentary. It’s all perspectives.
Agreed!
Thoughtful post and comments. I do think the issue of perspective is important, and a good historian should include all sorts of perspective in writing any history. Too often we do get top-down history, or the “great men” perspective. Even in areas where you wouldn’t think this would be true, it is. Think about the received version of the history of the American Civil Rights movement: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference launched protests in 1955 after Rosa Parks got arrested in Montgomery. There were some protests until the mid-1960s when Congress changed some laws. That’s about the size of it. In fact, the story is messy, complicated, and there’s a whole lot of grass-roots workers in communities all over the South and elsewhere who fought inch by inch for the movement. And many of them resented Dr. King for riding in to make pronouncements and compromising points they had already won. That’s not the story you hear in the public sphere. Even the old labor history is about labor organizations, leaders, and such. The new labor history looks much more at the lives of workers and how they shaped those organizations.
I think we get top-down history for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easier. That’s who got written up in the newspaper, who left personal papers in libraries and archives, who left a public record of their activities. It’s less messy than airing potential controversies about divisions. Too many people want history to be a chronicle of all the good things and none of the less savory events. Personally, I think it just makes things dull.
History, I like to tell people, really is as much about interpretations as it is about facts. Sometimes there are no right answers. Students don’t always like to hear that either! Doing more oral history, like Studs Terkel, will do more to preserve the perspectives of those who haven’t left massive archives behind than anything else. The more material we have to work with, the more nuanced, the more complete a picture of history we will have. I’d like to see some more local oral history projects to preserve some memories before they’re gone.
Chris mentioned Olin Johnston’s racism. True. However, I can’t think of a SC or Spartanburg political leader of the mid-20th century who had greater concern for the state’s working people. He knew what it was like to work in a textile mill in the 1910s and he never forgot that it was those people who put him in the governor’s office and sent him to the US Senate. Yet we have this cloud over his legacy because he was a product of that rigidly-segregated society and was unable, for the most part, to break free from it. It’s a shame that his focus on white workers didn’t extend to the plight of black workers – though when he was challenged by Strom Thurmond for the Senate in 1950, those African-Americans in SC who could vote generally voted for Olin. And, I think as he neared the end of his life, he was shifting somewhat. How do we handle someone like Olin? You can fall into the trap of writing about him in the same top-down way, but maybe the better way is to look at how he was influenced by those mill workers who corresponded with him and who talked to him at the mill gates or in his office.
OK, enough. Thanks for making me think about all this for a few minutes.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment Phillip.
You bring up some great points about the “great man” perspective. I would add also that I think a lot of people gravitate towards that view of history because it makes for a more compelling narrative. It’s easier for most people to digest the story of a man like MLK than it is to deal with something more abstract like the Civil Rights movement as a whole. People gravitate towards strong main characters, whether it be in fiction or in history.
As for Johnston, I totally agree.
Even with his flawed views on the race issues, he’s still my favorite major South Carolina political figure from that era. He was a staunch supporter of the New Deal, and an undeniable friend to working people–albeit white working people–in South Carolina. When it came to working class issues, he sat pretty far to the left of nearly every other Southern Democrat.
When viewing southern politicians from that era, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to do it solely based on the race issue. Political issues in that day were every bit as complicated as they are now, and I think to throw Johnston completely under the bus based just on the race issue would be wrong.
Having said that, I wrote about his views because the race issue was real, and a great many people in South Carolina were ultimately hurt–or at least not helped–by Johnston’s racism, typical though that racism was at the time.
Personally, I’d consider somebody like Jim DeMint to be every bit as racist as Johnston was. He just cloaks it with terms like “states rights” and “socialism.” With DeMint you get all the racism, but instead of Johnston’s economic populism you get this vile sort of crypto-fascism. Given a choice between the two, I’d take Johnston any day of the week.
One of my intellectual joys was teaching a combined US History/Lit class–two periods a day, five days a week, with exceptional and challenging students. In that class, I often used literature, which does not (always) seek to simplify and eliminate the complicated messiness of life, to get to some of those issues that history books, especially those aimed at high school students, put into pat narratives that tend ignore the conflicts.
So here’s Huck Finn in that mode: HF is a failed novel. The ending, when Tom Sawyer returns to the story and Huck and Tom return to their inane and inhumane treatment of Jim, is terrible. Beyond the ridiculous coincidence of Huck and Jim landing at Tom Sawyer’s aunt and uncle’s farm, the story drags, and leaves behind the great insights into humanity and racial tolerance that Huck and Jim come to on the raft. Twain himself knew the novel was not good, and had no idea how to end it. As a result, it sat in a drawer for several years until he could figure out a way to get Huck free before he revealed that Jim had been freed in Miss Watson’s will.
So why read this failed novel? Because it nearly exactly mirrors the failure of the promises of post-Civil War Reconstruction: Jim, a “free” slave, and Huck, the next generation, are forced into a situation where they must create a community based on equality on that raft. They build a house and hearth, they make rules, Huck learns and loves Jim’s humanity, Jim teaches Huck what love is. But every time they go on shore, the overhwleming weight of racism and slavery separate them, and Jim is forced back into subservience and Huck back into power. The final sequence (over fifty pages in a 300 page novel-the longest passage of the novel)seems to me to be the abandonment of Reconstruction after the Compromise of 1876 (look it up if your history teacher was lax). What Twain’s novel does, then, is show the incredible challenge of Reconstruction, and in many ways gets to the real human dilemma of getting past slavery’s dystopian pressure on the great American experiment.
Twain himself admitted to this difficulty: he said that when he was young, he absoultely believed in the rightness of slavery. What else was he supposed to think, he said, when his church, his town, his parents, his government, in fact the entire upbringing (hanging with Tom Sawyer, perhaps) told him that slavery was right. And then after the Civil War we say, end slavery, now create a just and equal society based on the content of the character and not the color of the skin. Of course we had spent a couple hundred years making the judgements based on the color of the skin (or more likely the status of the mother).
HS history books make this whole episode sound like a straight-line narrative of great men’s decisions and actions. And then, like Chris and I and many others, we read Lies My Teacher told Me, or A People’s History, or The Invasion of America, and we are stunned. I love literature (and art in general I reckon) at least in part because in general writers don’t seem to feel the need to wrap up the narrative so neatly. We get the thoughts of individuals going through something–Tom Joad’s reading of American culture, or Edna Pontellier’s attempts to reconcile her feelings of being trapped by the very ideals of motherhood that she is supposed to fulfill (The Awakening, Kate Chopin), or James Weldon Johnson’s unnamed narrator dealing with the concerns of black society in the early twentieth century and the possiblity of “passing” for white in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Read a novel or poem as a rendition of the thinking of the time in which it was written (as opposed to the time in which the narrative takes place–HF as Reconstruction novel [1876], not as a pre-Civil War novel of the setting). Taking that with all the other stuff we have to learn from–primary sources, commentary and analysis from afar–and I think you approach that perspective issue that Philip and Chris rightly identify as the key to learning.
I think even the people’s histories tend to focus on single actors–Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, Frederick Doulgass. In literature we get the experiences of the every day person, not famous, not running in “elite” crowds, but the person trying to deal with the world despite the lack of money, or fame, or acknowledgement–in other words, the real heroes of history, who hang in there despite the overwhelming strength of the powerful. And occasionally, those folks, too, stand up and say, no more. Usually, those aren’t the ones in the history books.
FO sez:
“What would the history of Spartanburg’s mills look like from the point of view of workers paid just enough to make rent and buy groceries at the company store?”
******************************************************************
I suspect it would not be the preordained answer you desire.
Folk that flocked to the mills did so for food, shelter, and some sort of a life.
Their circumstance before was grim and much worse than working for “the man”.
Remember Chris, oral history did not build a single railroad or factory. Instead, it perpetuated ignorance, poverty, and superstition.
As a child you may have wondered why they wanted to keep you out.
As an adult, an intellectually honest adult, do you still wonder?
“Folk that flocked to the mills did so for food, shelter, and some sort of a life.
Their circumstance before was grim and much worse than working for “the man”.”
Perfect example of a misinformed generalization, and glorification of “job-providers”.
Before dirt farmers went to the mills, sure… they were at the mercy of the rains and land for what crops they might be provided.
But, if you think these people were brought in from horrible conditions under the wing of Saint Mill-owner who housed (in company homes) and fed (from company stores) his flock out of sympathy and the goodness of his heart–you’re out of your gourd.
I’ve found a few books and watched a documentary about the Uprising of ’34. The people share their stories about the conditions of the mills–usually from their parents’ experiences, and it’s wasn’t happytimes. It was reality. The people working in the mills didn’t risk their livelihood (or lives) striking for no reason.
You should probably take a look at that sometimes to help round out that historical palette you have on mills.
On a side note, from stories in my own family’s history, one of my distant relatives who left the farm to go work at the mill ended up sending her children back home to her relatives still at the farm, because they were starving. She and her husband remained at the mill, and she ended up going crazy from Pellagra–a vitamin deficiency–because the company store didn’t provide sufficient nutrition. No meat. I’ve also heard a similar story from an older friend of mine, she said the company store her aunt bought from only sold taters, flour and some corn meal.
Also, my grandparents decided not to go live on the mill-hill–and their circumstances weren’t “grim and much worse” for it. My grampa farmed and hunted, and shared crops with his in-laws that lived next door, and sold skins.
So yeah, I’d love to hear more stories from the point of view of local people who worked–or whose relatives worked–in the Spartanburg’s mills.
Katie sez:
“… But, if you think these people were brought in from horrible conditions under the wing of Saint Mill-owner who housed (in company homes) and fed (from company stores) his flock out of sympathy and the goodness of his heart–you’re out of your gourd.”
camelmike sez:
I do believe thousands of people fled horrible conditions to work in the mills, live in the villages, and buy food from the company store.
You seem to imply that the mill owners of the day were heartless demons.
I doubt that.
Oh camelmine… only a simple mind would resort to the whole “good vs. evil” binary.
I know better than that.
You “believe [insert guessed number] of people fled horrible conditions to work in the mills, live in the villages, and buy food from the company store.”
You have yet to make it clear from what source you’ve drawn this conclusion. Have you read examples or existing historical testimonies of families that clearly state “mill life was better than life outside the mill”… or are you just
While you haven’t even presented anything like that, I’ll go ahead and give the benefit of the doubt–there are probably countless instances of people being thankful for what they had at the mill.
But I think that deserves some specific questions.
Were these people thankful because what they got at the mill was ‘better than nothing’?
Were these people thankful because ‘beggars can’t be choosers’?
Does an oppressed people have to “realize” they’re oppressed in order to actually “be” oppressed?
I’ve read and seen testimonies which clearly point to the fact that mill workers across the country were oppressed.
While that doesn’t mean that the mill owners were so-called “heartless demons”, it does mean they had no regard for the quality of life of their workers, by providing only the base needs to keep them alive enough to work 60-hour weeks–but never to leave the mill.
So no, there’s no need to demonize mill owners with flowery hyperboles when the history of their actions already shows their lack of humanity.
Only a simple mind?
Comments like this do nothing to encourage discussion.
Bye now.
Camelmike, YOU do absolutely nothing to encourage discussion.
You simply drive by and try to shoot holes in peoples articles and comments. Nice try with that line though.
“You simply drive by and try to shoot holes in peoples articles and comments.”
Sometimes I do. Like you just did.
I forgot to add it was a great article.
In my opinion Mr. George should work for the SHJ give us something every other day.
You may be on point regarding the “gourd” issue though.