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Eula McGill describes management's reaction to the strike

About this recording

Eula McGill interviewed by Jacquelyn Hall, Atlanta, Georgia, February 1976. Interviews # G-39 and G-40 in the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Provider
Southern Oral History Program
Date created
1976
Duration
1:10
File
MP3
License
This recording copyright ©2004. All Rights Reserved
Source
Original audio housed by UNC Libraries / Documenting the American South

See this recording in context

  • North Carolina in the early 20th century: Primary sources and readings explore North Carolina in the first decades of the twentieth century (1900–1929). Topics include changes in technology and transportation, Progressive Era reforms, World War I, women's suffrage, Jim Crow and African American life, the cultural changes of the 1920s, labor and labor unrest, and the Gastonia stirke of 1929. (Page 7.4)

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Eula McGill describes management’s reaction to the strike.

Transcript

Jacquelyn Hall
How did the managers react to the strike? What did they do? Did they come out and talk to you? Did they have armed guards out?
Eula McGill
No, no; they shut the gates and shut down the mill. The bosses just left the mill—except they had a watchman, you know, to watch it. But there was no activity at the mill; they didn’t attempt to open it up, except that one time they brought that truckload. They couldn’t run it with that one truckload; they were on a flatbedded truck standing up like a bunch of cattle, but they couldn’t have operated it with that.
See, there were one or two paid organizers in the state, and they couldn’t supervise; we were just more or less left pretty well to fend for ourselves the best we could. And they had to spend, of course, a lot of their time in Huntsville because they had more people out and three big mills: Dallas, Merrimack and Erwin Mills were all out. And of course they got contracts there.