The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  Unlike, say, George Pullman or Milton Hershey, Cannon seemed to have few grandiose plans for Kannapolis. The construction of Piedmont mill villages dated back to the antebellum years, and he was likely just following established custom. In most such places, there would be a few houses, a little school, a small church, the mill, and the residence of the owner-manager. Kannapolis would end up being so much more than that. But in the main, James Cannon was responding to what was a sheer necessity. In the words of one local newspaperman: “Mr. Cannon had to build houses, because the people coming in from farms to work in the mills had to have a place to live. They were broke. They didn’t even dream about building houses.”3

  During World War I, more than 86,000 North Carolinians fought in Europe, in such affrays as the Second Battle of the Marne, St. Mihiel, and in the Meuse-Argonne, and more than 2,000 died of wounds or disease. The war meant windfall profits and expansion for Cannon, as the government took all the towels the company could produce. One specialty product was the Patriot Cannon towel, emblazoned with the words TO HELL WITH THE KAISER.

  James died of a stroke in 1921 after a two-week illness. At the time, he was the master of twelve mills that turned out 300,000 towels each day. The company employed more than 15,000 workers and enjoyed an estimated $40 million in annual sales.4

  Quickly a quarrel broke out among family survivors. David, who had no children, had died some years earlier. But James’s sons disagreed over the disposition of the estate, with Joseph threatening to sue Charles, the youngest of six boys. In the end, Charles and daughter Adelaide’s husband, David Blair, were named trustees of the estate. Joseph was forced out of the textile company’s management. And in accordance with James’s wishes, Charles took his place at the helm of the company, where he remained for the next fifty years.

  Charles showed little interest in diversification: Cannon Mills focused on what it knew best, soon producing half of all the towels purchased in the United States, along with sheets and women’s hosiery.

  When Charles took over the Cannon empire, the Kannapolis mills and worker houses were pretty rudimentary. Each house “sat on brick pillars, and the wind blew under it and through the knotholes in the floor,” as one resident recalled. There could be as many as ten people, including boarders, living in each four-room house. Until the 1930s, everyone shared outdoor privies.

  The company commissary was a “jot-’em-down store,” selling groceries, shoes and clothing, coal, and furniture, all on credit to the cotton millworkers. (No one store dominated, though; there were many neighborhood shops in town.) Cannon Mills paid the workers in cash, with a 75-cent deduction for rent every two weeks. In the 1920s, typical earnings for an adult might be $18 for 110 hours of work—ten hours a day through the week and five hours on Saturday. It was not uncommon in such mills for a quarter of the workers to be under the age of sixteen—and children’s wages were, of course, much less.5

  Over the next several decades, the company built more worker housing, schools, and office buildings. In 1919, it completed two large dorms for single women—Mary Ella Hall, named after James’s wife, and Cabarrus Hall—housing hundreds of residents. Denominations erected a half-dozen churches on land Cannon donated.

  Main Street and the downtown area featured a number of substantial, two-story brick buildings, home to the A&P, Woolworth’s, a hardware store, and more. But the closest hospital was in Concord until 1937, when Cabarrus Memorial Hospital opened in Kannapolis. Charles Cannon served the institution as board president for more than thirty years. Nor was the leisure of the workers neglected, between the YMCA and a local, semi-pro baseball team, the Towlers, which played in the Carolina Textile League. Cannon even built a large lake in a park right across from the main plant.6 But for all that, Cannon could not stop the clock—nor could he gain social peace just by wishing for it.

  In the post-Civil War years, the South was a study in contradictions. Well into the second half of the nineteenth century, visitors to the region commented on the poverty and idleness of the natives, along with the decay and lack of vitality in what had once been thriving cities. At the same time, the area was seen as a land of opportunity, notably in a body of “get-rich-quick” literature. Both land and natural resources were abundant there, according to eastern newspaper reports, and everything was available on the cheap. Books bearing such titles as How to Get Rich in the South echoed the sentiments of prominent New York attorney and future U.S. Senator Chauncey M. Depew, whose 1890s address to fellow Yale alumni was titled “Go South, Young Man.”

  Across much of the Piedmont, the local merchant became the pivotal economic figure. Plantation agriculture supported by black slavery was gone, but given that land ownership remained concentrated, new institutions emerged: tenant farming and sharecropping. A new merchant class—backed by the crop-lien system, under which much of a farmer’s crop was pledged to whoever put up seed money—became the supplier for this smaller-scale agriculture. As merchants got more and more involved with buying and selling cotton, trading centers grew up around their stores. Before long, many merchants, such as James Cannon, became cotton-mill entrepreneurs.

  Soon they found themselves part of a much-hyped crusade. Starting in the 1880s, newspapermen and development-minded townspeople initiated a passionate campaign urging the construction of a southern textile industry on the scale of that in New England. The enthusiasts promised that the textile industry would reinvigorate the region and its institutions, raise up a new rank of leaders, and offer economic betterment to the millhands. With a fervor rivaling that of the region’s evangelical preachers, the agitators thundered: “Bring the mills to the cotton,” in the words of the Charleston News & Courier. “Where the cotton is produced here and manufactured elsewhere, South Carolina is in the position of furnishing the elements which make other communities rich,” reasoned another writer. Towns competed against one another to win development, some offering free land equipped with water power to whoever would build.

  This propaganda and organizational effort culminated in the 1881 International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta, where apostles of the new industrial order gathered and drew attention from northern investors. The principal exhibition building there resembled a cotton mill, chockablock with textile machinery, including two Corliss steam engines, knitting and lace-making machines, wool combers, pickers, carding engines, and more. Before long, lawyers and bankers, merchants and teachers were abandoning their former professions to become cotton-mill executives.7

  There was rapid expansion of a number of southern industries, from mining and lumber to railroads and tobacco, encouraged by an inflow of northern and British capital. But it would be the textile mill that became the leading symbol of the New South, and with good reason: Between 1860 and 1880, North Carolina doubled the value of textile-mill output, while that figure tripled in Georgia and quadrupled in South Carolina. The number of mills rose from 161 in 1880 to 239 in 1890 and to 400 in 1900. Meanwhile, in the old textile-producing region of New England, production was decreasing. Southern mills featured competitive new technology and a burgeoning number of workers, up from just fewer than 17,000 in 1880 to nearly 100,000 in 1900.8 And the scale of southern enterprises quickly rose: In 1880, the typical South Carolina mill had fewer than 6,000 spindles; by 1910, this figure would be more than 25,000. Whereas the South was first primarily home to small factories that produced for a local market, it was soon characterized by integrated cloth mills competing in international markets.9

  Yet the textile industry was much like other enterprises that thrived in the region: It was marked by low-skill, low-wage work and products of little added value. To attract the mills, southern promoters followed a formula that still operates today, promising low taxes, cheap power, municipal subsidies, and hostility toward organized labor. Most important, the mills were ensured a steady supply of would-be wage laborers thanks to the hardships of rural living. Increasingly, when rough weather or even minor economic difficulties hit tena
nt farmers, who already subsisted on meager plots of land, ruin followed. The first migrant millworkers were farm widows. Next came whole families, migrating to one of the roughly one hundred mill villages that stretched across backcountry North and South Carolina and part of northern Georgia.

  This “cracker proletariat” was looked down on by many people from the professional and business classes. Common terms of approbation included “factory rats” and “lintheads” or “cotton-tails,” easily identified by the cotton dust on their worn clothes and the fluff in their hair. Particularly by the early twentieth century, middle-class people began to express concern over the “cotton mill problem” and the lawless, “shiftless” social types who migrated to labor there. 10

  The heyday of southern mill villages was between 1880 and the 1930s. At the turn of the twentieth century, 92 percent of southern textile workers lived in such hamlets, from Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, to Honea Path, South Carolina, and Columbus, Georgia.11

  At the simplest level, such a village consisted of the mill and a few rows of worker housing—some two-story, four-bedroom clapboard houses set on brick piers, others one-and-a-half-story structures comprising two rooms and a hallway downstairs, a kitchen in back, and a sleeping loft. (For all, the privies were out back.) Far from innovative, these were typical country town dwellings. 12 In addition, there would be a company store for provisions, a church, and maybe a schoolhouse. For journalist W. J. Cash, the son of a textile-mill superintendent and the author of the influential The Mind of the South, the model was clear: “a plantation, essentially indistinguishable in organization from the familiar plantation of the cotton fields. . . . Many of the new towns were not regularly organized municipal corporations at all, but merely the fiefs of the mills.”13

  Given that wages were often startlingly low (perhaps only 60 percent of those paid in New England), what would keep anyone in such places? A chief draw, especially for widows and those who’d been unable to make ends meet on the farm, was the cheap rent the textile companies charged, traditionally 25 cents weekly per room. 14 Into the twentieth century, some mill villages were little more than country crossroads. Low wages were less burdensome given that many workers kept chickens and other livestock and maintained vegetable gardens adjoining their small houses and supplemented their diets with hunting and fishing. 15

  But bear in mind that these formerly rural folks had not internalized industrial discipline—the necessity of reporting to work on time every day for long shifts (six twelve-hour days in the late nineteenth century, later adjusted to five ten-hour days plus five hours on Saturday), or the idea of committing oneself to years of work for a single enterprise. Instead, some who came saw themselves working in a factory—or, as they called it, doing “public work”—only until they could amass sufficient means to return to the farm. Like coal miners, many were afflicted with what mill owners would come to call “the wandering habit”: a tendency to pick up at a moment’s notice and move away to . . . whatever.

  Compare such attitudes with the high-flown expectations of cotton-mill enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. Such townsfolk proclaimed themselves to be public philanthropists, saviors of a near-destroyed southern civilization, benefactors of the white race and, specifically, of the formerly rural white poor. Blacks had worked in textile mills since antebellum times, but increasingly, and almost absolutely by the turn of the twentieth century, textile labor was for whites only, excepting the most menial tasks. As one mill manager testified before Congress in 1902, the mills had passed on using cheaper black labor, as “mill life is the only avenue open today to our poor whites.” Whites resisted racial mixing and, moreover, it would be wrong, said the mill manager, to have blacks working alongside white women and children, who made up more than half of the millworkers.16

  Given such assertions of paternalism, it’s no wonder that measures were taken to ensure that the new industrial working class would behave itself. As in Appalachian coal-mining towns, textile companies provided preachers and teachers to offer frequent reminders of the workers’ duty. Some mill owners themselves, or their hired police, would monitor workers’ private hours. And if the carrot of wages and cheap rent didn’t hold the workers, there was the stick of indebtedness to the company store. Paydays might be spread out, but stomachs needed to be filled regularly. Company-store bills, along with rent, could be deducted from workers’ earnings—and before long, many were in arrears, guaranteeing that they couldn’t walk away from their jobs. 17

  Under James, the Cannon company had made strides toward modernity. Like the early New England mills, most outfits in the South had begun by using water power from nearby streams and rivers to run their machinery. Cannon first employed coal-fired steam turbines to power its equipment in Kannapolis, but it soon converted to electricity from hydroelectric provider the Southern Power Co. And in 1916, it broke with the established practice of maintaining an independent, commission-based sales force and developed its own New York City-based sales organization.18

  Not long after Charles Cannon assumed the helm, he began making the company into a modern corporation. By 1928, he’d consolidated its nine separate units, with plants in seven different towns, into Cannon Mills Co., headquartered in Kannapolis, and the corporation was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. (The family also managed six independent mills that were outside of the corporation.)

  Cannon Mills began building a unique brand that came to stand for quality, utilizing as the Cannon trademark an antique artillery field piece. This, executives felt, was a fitting symbol of an enterprise that had emerged successfully “from the shambles of the Reconstruction Era.” And in an important innovation, in the mid-1920s, it began spending millions of dollars on national advertising, particularly in women’s magazines and the Saturday Evening Post. Cannon products demonstrated unusual flair, courting consumers with fancy packaging and stylish designs. Towels came in flower patterns and polka dots, and in colors to complement bathroom decor. 19

  The town of Kannapolis also continued to develop. Even though children and adolescents still worked in the mill, the town built new educational facilities, notably the eight-room Old North School, completed in 1917, and J. W. Cannon High School, in 1924. But the academic year was only six months long in 1925, extended to eight months in 1927.20 Legal restrictions on child labor and state laws for compulsory school attendance—pressed by middle-class progressives who worried about the detrimental impact of the millworker population on society—came into force by the early 1930s. By 1931 all southern states had outlawed factory labor for those under age fourteen and restricted those under sixteen to working no more than an eight-hour day.21 But such restrictions were largely unnecessary, given that the Depression had largely eliminated underage workers from the ranks and reduced the hours of all workers.

  Given the labor-saving nature of machinery in southern mills, much of the work was rudimentary. Workers were little more than unskilled or semiskilled machine tenders. Whether they labored on a picker, a card machine, a slubber, or a stripper, a spinning frame or a loom, plenty of jobs were interchangeable. Spinning, spooling, and duffing were tasks that could be learned in only days. More demanding jobs included weaving, winding, and beaming, and it could take weeks for one to become proficient at these. Becoming a loom fixer, on the other hand, required a lengthy period of apprenticeship.

  But even if the jobs weren’t demanding intellectually, the work was often punishing. Lint filled the air, covered everything, and got into workers’ lungs—ultimately causing a medical condition known as byssinosis, or brown lung. Still today, after decades of improvement, the noise in a textile plant is deafening. Before air conditioning, mills in the subtropical South were stifling in the summer and warm even in winter months.22

  Life was not always peaceful in Kannapolis: In 1921, there was a bitter strike at Cannon Mills involving 9,000 workers. That decade featured a series of geographically dispersed job actions, prompted by uncertain times, textile over
capacity, and wage cuts. The events culminated in a 1934 general strike of hundreds of thousands of workers across the southern textile region. That major uprising threatened Kannapolis, although in the end Cannon experienced little disruption.

  Before the 1920s, the most common form of protest among southern textile workers was simply quitting a job. World War I saw an expansion of the South’s textile industry. With European manufacturing disrupted and global and domestic markets for textile products strong, jobs were easy to come by and family and social networks kept workers informed of likely openings across the region.

  But with the coming of peace, there clearly was too much textile capacity. As companies began cutting the wage and bonus rates established during wartime, friction rose. The United Textile Workers (UTW), an American Federation of Labor craft union with its roots in New England, expanded across the South. Then beginning at Charlotte’s Highland Park Mills in 1919, a series of walkouts intended to secure the pay levels won during the war. Lockouts were common that year, including at Cannon facilities in Concord and Kannapolis, where workers made no demands of management but seemed to support the union. In more than one community, workers formed armed patrols and threatened gunplay. North Carolina’s governor, Thomas W. Bickett, stepped in. After defending workers’ right to organize, he denounced the potential turn to violence, for which he seemed to place the most blame on the “unwise, unjust” owners. Surrendering to this suasion, Highland Park’s president agreed to a settlement that included a fifty-five-hour week at wages calculated on the former sixty-hour rate and said there would be no discrimination against union members. Within weeks, Cannon agreed to the changes as well. Across North Carolina, the UTW enlisted 40,000 new members.