The Most They Ever Had (5 page)

The holidays brought out a gentler side of Greenleaf. Trucks would roll through the village, loaded with free shoes, hams, and turkeys. Yet he was insulted when working class people came accidentally into his presence. Two blue-collar boys from Piedmont came up his driveway in a rusty car, wanting to rent one of Greenleaf’s houses. “Hell, by the time he got through insulting them, they just got in the car and left and blew the horn all the way out to the road,” Pruett said. Greenleaf marched down the road after them, screaming about lawsuits.

But in a time of grim deprivation, when the whole world seemed worn and faded, Greenleaf exploded with color, with bombast and bluster.

Pruett remembers seeing Greenleaf walking through the yard one evening in his dressing gown and a pair of rubber boots.

Pruett yelled: “Good evening, Mr. Greenleaf.”

“Who goes there?”

“John Pruett.”

“Well, ol’ John Pruett, where you going?”

“Goin’ over to see ol’ man Greenleaf.”

“What are you going to see ol’ man Greenleaf about?”

“I’m goin’ over there to borrow a couple hundred dollars.”

“Why you damn pauper,” Greenleaf said, “you wouldn’t know what to do with it if I gave it to you.”

If Greenleaf was afraid of anything, it was his own government. Greenleaf told anyone who would listen that the Democrats were Communists in thin disguise, that putting them in power in Washington would be the end of everything American.

In 1932, he was confident that his America would not be so foolish and talked about all the big things he was going to do, in his empire, when the Republicans won the election. Then Franklin D. Roosevelt ruined everything.

Democrats meant reformers, and reformers meant unions, and unions meant that the little people would try to stand up to the big people, and this could not be allowed.

___

In 2004, in a sickroom in Jacksonville, Gardner Greenleaf whispered a defense of his father over the hiss of a respirator. But even as he lay dying of emphysema, his family still shaped the face of this town. He had recently sold fifty acres of Greenleaf land, some of the last, to developers of a new subdivision.

“But any damn thing we ever owned,” he said, “it cost us.”

His father, he said, should be remembered as a good man who treated workers humanely, paid them fairly, and created a safe, clean work environment. His father made sure that the mill store sold groceries and other items at cost. He said his father gave a doctor land for his home in return for providing medical services. “It didn’t cost the cotton mill people one dime.”

His father thought so much of his secretary at the mill, Marie, that he named the children’s fox terrier after her, spelling it backwards. “Eiram.”

“It was a nice mill,” he said. “It didn’t have any problems.”

His father fought to do away with the entrenched practice of child labor, he said, treated black and white employees the same in a time of rigid, violent segregation, and did not allow floor bosses to employ the hated “stretch-out,” when machines ran so fast that people could not keep up and sometimes collapsed, exhausted, into their machines.

When he was a boy, he liked to watch it run, to watch the people rush across the floor. “It was beautiful,” he said.

___

H.L. West, in his nineties now, cannot recall that mill, that idyllic realm. There were no parties, no dances in his world. At age four he had lain near death from Spanish flu, his lungs full of fluid, his fever spiking, hallucinations crawling up the wall. Spanish flu killed more people worldwide than the Great War. In Alabama, schools, stores, and businesses closed as people tied rags and handkerchiefs around their faces to avoid being infected. West’s family could not afford medicine or a doctor, and children like him just died in the pines, victims of their class as much as any microbe.

In one of his first memories, he can recall choking in his bed, remember asking his father for a soda cracker. His father walked a mile to the store to get them, and when he came back, he held them out to his son, hoping he would rise from his bed, walk over to him, and take them. But the boy was too weak, and he can still see his father’s hands as he broke them up and fed them to him. “The best crackers I ever ate,” he said.

These were the people who came to Greenleaf’s mill village for salvation.

In ’33, his family moved to a company house at 115 D Street in the village. His mother, father, and seven brothers and sisters crammed into the small house, where the only source of heat was one coal stove. There was no free doctor that he can recall. His father was paid in steel tokens and earned less than his family ate, less than he owed.

“It wasn’t all that good,” he said, “but we didn’t know any better.”

He joined his father in the mill that year, when he was sixteen, sweeping scraps of cotton and lint. He routinely worked eighty hours a week, never a penny of overtime because there was no such thing as overtime. One day, when he stopped and stared at a piece of paper he had swept up, his broom going still for just seconds, his boss spotted him.

“You better git back to work,” the boss yelled.

“I’m workin’,” he said, and swept faster.

The boss, a big man, walked over and stood over him.

“I was just looking at this paper,” H.L. said.

The boss just stood there, looking down at him.

“There’s a barefooted boy outside, just like you,” the boss said, “wanting your job.”

You just took it then, because there was no other way to be.

Then the union men came to town.

___

It had been coming, this trouble, for a long time. World War I had brought a boon to the industry—war meant uniform contracts—and Southern cotton mills prospered even as working conditions remained hot, dirty, and dangerous. Subsistence, not prosperity, was all a worker could expect even in the best of times. In the Roaring twenties, dresses went from ankle-length to thigh-high—not here, of course, but in the wider world—and shorter skirts meant less cloth, and less yarn. Mill owners, trying to increase production, went to faster machines and spread their workers more thinly across the floor, working them half to death. A wave of strikes rippled across the South, from Elizabethton, Tennessee, to Gastonia, North Carolina. Mill owners hired thugs to put the strikes down hard. In Gastonia, the strike turned bloody in the spring of ’29. The city’s police chief was killed, and a strike leader, Ella May Wiggins, was murdered on her way to a rally. Soon, it became clear that the union, the United Textile Workers, could not stand against mill bosses who owned politicians, and could, with a telegram, summon strike breakers or even the National Guard. But the noise they made had nudged Roosevelt toward his minimum wage act, and emboldened the unions.

Men with Yankee accents, bad neckties, and big ideas began to appear in the little towns, talking about a worker’s rights. The hill people laughed at them at first. What good is it to wave a sign you can’t read? The workers had always known it wasn’t right when the mill bosses fired them for getting sick, or walking too slow across the floor, or fouling the line. But it was the boss’s mill, wasn’t it? They lived in his houses, drank his water, read their Bibles—the ones who could—by his electric light.

But now, these union fellows told them the president—the president, no less—said they were worth something too, worth five dollars more a week, by God. The
government
said that. And old man Greenleaf and men like him said to hell with the government, to hell with the law.

H.L. West, who is believed to be the last surviving member of what would become a textile workers union in Jacksonville, said the mill workers always resented Greenleaf. But in the summer of ’33, “we hated him.”

John Pruett felt that hatred first hand when he went with one of Greenleaf’s sons to a city swimming pool on the edge of the mill village, one of the few places where town people and the village people came together. “I dived in, and a son of a bitch dived in on the opposite side with a big ol’ rock and hit me on top of the head,” Pruett said. “If he’d knocked me out, I would have drowned.”

The morning after the mill hands hanged Greenleaf in effigy, they did not step meekly into the weeds when the big man’s car wheeled into the mill village. Instead, they crowded around it. His sons, expecting trouble, had followed him to the mill as bodyguards, and walked him through a gauntlet of men who stood not cheering or jeering, but quietly staring, their jaws set and their fists clenched.

There would never be common ground. The distance, across the veranda, was too great.

They had pleaded for decency, and he had flipped a quarter at them.

___

JACKSONVILLE, Ala., Aug 2,
The Anniston Star
—The Profile Cotton Mill here was closed today when employees struck, protesting alleged failure to receive the minimum wage provided under the textile code in the National Recovery Administration…“I’m not going to fight,” said Mr. Greenleaf. “I have offered them all I can…”

The striking men and women met in a grocery store on the south side of the town square, to hear organizers from the United Textile Workers of America tell them they had to hold out, do without if they had to. The people smiled at that. You did without even when you were at work, in Greenleaf’s mill. The union men extolled workers to chant, sing, and march, in non-violence. “And you know, a smooth-mouthed feller can get a lot of people to follow him,” said Homer Barnwell, whose father was a union man.

But they miscalculated, those outside agitators, the nature of these workers. These were people who cut and shot each other for sport on a Friday night, people with the mountains still fresh in their hearts and minds, people who lived by the feud. Non-violence was a new concept.

About three hundred fifty people, the majority of the work force, walked out that summer, people with no savings and no cushion to get them through the deprivations to come. Their vote to strike was not just a symbolic gesture. It meant they were willing to starve to be treated decently and paid fairly for the first time in their lives. They formed a picket line stronger than barbed wire, not a barrier of waving cardboard and slogans but a fence of flesh and blood, and it would not be crossed. More than one hundred striking workers, both men and women, some carrying hickory clubs, shotguns, and rifles, surrounded a truck loaded with yarn as it tried to leave the mill. They threw the spools of yarn to the ground. Some workers picked up rocks and stoned the drivers for trying to haul the yarn off the mill property, but they stopped short of murder. Over the days ahead, strikers boarded more trucks and tossed yarn over the side as quickly as the few, non-striking workers could load them.

“They besieged our office, and for several hours threatened violence and injury to everyone therein,” Greenleaf wrote in an affidavit that he published in a three-quarter page advertisement in
The Anniston Star
, to make sure his side of the story was told. The workers “openly declared they didn’t care whether they were within their rights or not because they proposed and intended to take matters into their own hands. While this riot was still in force the sheriff of Calhoun County came upon the scene but viewed it so gingerly from his car and the outskirts of the crowd that he apparently saw nothing of interest to him or felt that it was altogether too serious a matter for him to make any attempt whatever to restore law and order.”

Greenleaf did not mention that he had summoned a city policeman, and that, upon his arrival, the strikers had taken away his gun.

“Walked up behind him and hit him with a brick,” Homer said. “People always wondered how that brick fell off the wall of the mill and hit him just right.”

For Greenleaf, the strike was a criminal act. He grew red in his face and sputtered, even in his writings, which were so verbose and convoluted that most mill workers could not make them out.

“We hear today that a very prominent labor leader has recently addressed a church assembly here…and given such advice and counsel as has apparently caused ‘the law to be laid down’ to us in terms which it would seem must mean we can only quit business or begin to live under a rule that impresses us as little different than enlisting in and submitting to the gangster’s weapons and mode of life,” he wrote in one ad in
The Star
.

With an unlimited advertising budget, he spent thousands of dollars to defend his position against paying workers a few dollars more. He routinely fired off manifestos in half-page ads, including one that promised the people of Calhoun County that the mill would never run again. “Until we can operate with a reasonable certainty of having a HAPPY, CONTENTED, LOYAL GROUP OF WORKERS, none of whom will be subjected to INSULT, THREAT AND INTIMIDATION AT ANY TIME…and until we can operate without the protection of National Guards or ANY EXTRAORDINARY POLICE PROTECTION WHATSOEVER—a condition which is not possible today.”

The strikers, who could not afford a classified ad let alone a half-page one, retaliated the best way they knew how.

They attacked Greenleaf’s automobiles.

One man sliced open the top of Greenleaf’s convertible with a pocketknife, and workers routinely stole the valve stems from his Packard’s tires, leaving the big car on four flats in the mill lot. Greenleaf began carrying a tire pump and extra valve stems to work with him and had his few loyal workers pump up his tires so he could go home. Striking workers also unscrewed the valve stems from the tires of the loyal managers and office workers, then sold them back for a quarter. Greenleaf castigated the strikers as petty criminals and low vandals, incapable of any meaningful negotiations beyond such childishness. Soon after, hearing a loud crash in the parking lot, Greenleaf raced out the door of the ground-level office. His Packard was upside down.