Fresh Blood

Textile mills in the Carolinas run all night. After sunrise, the mill siren gives a blast to warn the day workers throughout the village that it soon will be time to go to work.

At Marion. When the warning siren blew on the Marion Manufacturing Co.'s mill in Marion, N. C., one morning last week, Sheriff Oscar F. Adkins began to make a speech at the mill gates. He and several deputies had been up all night, warned by the mill officials of impending trouble. Across the street in front of the postoffice was a crowd of night shift workers bent on persuading the day shift not to go to work. The picketers were union people, men, women and children, members of United Textile Workers (subsidiary of the A. F. of L.). They had heard that, as the result of a strike last summer (TIME, Sept. 9), the company was transferring all union workers to the night shift. Then the night shift would be discontinued for a while and the union workers got rid of. "Now, men," Sheriff Adkins says he said, "You will have to stand back and let anybody through that wants to come to work." Someone in the crowd shouted: "Over our dead bodies, then!" A day shift man shouldered his way through the crowd toward the mill gate. The crowd surged to hold him back. It was then, says Sheriff Adkins, that he started discharging, not his bullet pistol, but his tear gas gun. He and Marion, N. C., were unfamiliar with this weapon, about the size and shape of a large flashlight. He got a lot of tear gas in his own face. The crowd recoiled. An old man reached the Sheriff and belabored him with a stick. While grappling this assailant, who later died, Sheriff Adkins says he heard his deputies start shooting their real guns. The crowd fled shrieking down the street in all directions. The deputies kept shooting. Bodies began to drop--three, five, ten, a score. "For God's sake stop firing!" Sheriff Adkins says he shouted. But already a lot more blood had been shed in the textile war of the Carolinas. Three men were dead. There were 24 wounded (mostly in the back), including a woman. One of the wounded men died before the Marion mill whistle shrieked its next day's warning. Three more were dying. Sheriff Adkins, 13 of his deputies, two mill foremen and a mechanic were arrested, charged with murder. Governor Oliver Max Gardner sent in two companies of National Guardsmen, also an outside judge to investigate. Forty of the mill workers were arrested for riot and rebellion but released without bail. R. W. Baldwin, chief of the Marion Manufacturing Co., blamed Vice President John A. Peel of the State Federation of Labor for the deaths. John Peel, of course, blamed Manufacturer Baldwin in his speech at the quadruple funeral. The service was held in a scrub-oak grove. The four pine coffins, painted grey, lay on a low platform. Four girls led the hymn-singing, which included this chant: We are building a strong union, We are building a strong union, We are building a strong union, Workers in the mill. Chief preacher was Cicero Queens, a gnarled little old man from 60 miles away in the mountains. While the men sat immovable and the women wailed amens, he cried under the bright morning sun: "This is one of the most saddest times I ever have witnessed. It is a cloudy day today down in our hearts. . . . "Here lies four people dead; hits an awful pity. The Devil's come into the world and confused the people. Think of it--blood of our blood, bone of our bone, our own Caucasian race of God Almighty's children. And I want to say, if you believe as Jesus told Marthy, thank God a man who believeth in Jesus Christ is not dead. "We know that we are not very high in society, but God loves us. ... O, what would Jesus say if he passed through Marion? He's weepin' at all this scenery." At Gastonia. The Marion murders gave North Carolina its sixth textile tangle now current in the courts. One of the other trials, that of 16 workers accused of murdering the police chief of Gastonia, got going again last week at Charlotte after repeated delays (TIME, Sept. 23). The 16 defendants, mostly Northern organizers of the National Textile Workers' Union (Communist), hired a new lawyer--a big-framed, ingratiating Baptist named Frank Flowers who voted for Al Smith and has conservative social views. His type and standing were expected to help the "atheistic" labor radicals with the fundamentalist jury. Further help to the defendants, who were pleading they shot in self-defense when Sheriff Aderholt came to "raid" their headquarters, seemed to lie in recent episodes of the textile war-- unionists flogged, one woman murdered, the Marion slaughter. To meet these changed aspects of the case, the State's prosecutors adopted quick new tactics. They dropped all charges against nine defendants, including the three women involved and six natives of North Carolina. Against the seven remaining defendants--four of them Northern Communists--the charge of first-degree murder was dropped and with it the shadow of the electric chair which juries shun. In Elizabethton, across the border in Tennessee, officials of the American Bemberg and Glanzatoff mills, where labor troubles began last spring simultaneous with the Carolina strikes, got the employes to cast anonymous ballots for or against another strike, to test the sentiment. They reported 2,883 votes against striking, 255 for. Observers could learn no connection between the Bemberg and Glanzatoff labor situation and the discovery last week that the acting President of these mills was on his bed, with his wrists slashed, dead. In Rockhill, S. C., the United Textile Workers held a conference, proclaimed "No Communists wanted here," announced their firm intention of organizing the whole southern textile industry under the A. F. of L. At Washington, Senator Wheeler of Montana introduced, at the request of President William Green of the A. F. of L., a resolution for a Federal investigation of the textile South.