The Ghost Shirts - Plant Closings and the Brave New Economy by Mike Davis, ProgressiveTrail.org, OR
September, 1, 1934: Millions of cotton spindles stopped spinning. Across the Southern Piedmont, mill whistles blew but workers didn't come to work. The most exploited industrial workforce in the United States – the "lint heads" of the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama – was on strike.
As mill owners appealed frantically for injunctions, tear gas, and the National Guard, a vast, peaceful army of textile workers demolished the image of Southern labor as culturally servile and unorganizable. With voices honed to spare beauty in the choirs of mountain Baptist churches, they sang, instead, powerful hymns of solidarity.
And they were robustly answered (often in Portuguese, Italian, or French) by the mill workers of New England who joined what became the first industry-wide general strike of the 1930s. It was also the most violently repressed. Before FDR (more concerned to appease the "lords of the loom" than to liberate their slaves) cajoled the national textile union to call off the strike, thousands had been beaten, tear-gassed, and arrested. Thirteen –- mostly in the South -- had been shot dead.