The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-03-26
By JENk HARDY.

battles which Will CONFUSE Cne oOuJn during
the next decade" In other words, just as the
historian dates the beginning of the struggle of
the American bourgeoise to free itself from
strangle-hold of British imperialism from the
first shots fired at Lexington and Concord,
so will the historian of the future date the
beginnings of mass revolt in the South from
the day when the textile workers in the Loray
Mill of the Manville-Jenckes Company shut
off the power and walked out of the mill under
the leadership of the National Textile Workers
Union and the Communist Party.
Veterans of thousand class battles the
forces which led the recent struggle in the
South had already come into head-on contact
with capitalism and its apparatus, the state,
in all of its ways and methods-police brutal
ity, frame-up, mob violence, murder of strike
leaders, etc, etc. The events which transpired
during and after the strike, therefore, were
no surprise to its leaders. Nor, on the other
hand can such tactics swerve the proletariat
one iota in its march to inevitable power Just
as the new industrial bourgeois brushed aside
the old plantation owning feudal baron, so will
the working class, under the leadership of the
Communist Party, brush aside the mill owning
industrial barons of today.
The owning class of the present South is
attempting to re-enact the medieval setting of
the Negro driving gentleman planter of the
slavery epoch. 1t has been we'll established,
as matter of fact that the gentry of the old
agricultural South who found themselves de-
feated and their plantations broken up by the
industrialists of the North as result of the
American Civil War were the very persons
who established the cotton textile industry in
the Piedmont. What we see in the Southern
mills of today, therefore, is the attempt to
| carry over the ways and the methods of the
| feudal agricultural into the newer period
| of industrialism-the attempt to harness the
/ remnants of feudalism and brutal exploitation
! to modern machinery.
The feudal, save-owning baron of the pre-
| Civil War period owned his Negro chattel body
| and soul. He purchased and sold him, at so
1 much per head, at the market place. He per-
| mitted him no education but instilled in him
the fear of god Initiative was to the slave
prohibited and unkonwn. His nose kept at
his back-breaking toll in the hot fields by the
whip of Simon Legree, the plantation baron
| provided tools, houses, paternal care and per-
| mitted neither initiative nor responsibility. AS
long as the slave worked hard, never grumbled
at his lot in life and continued to pile up prof
it's for the gentry out of his sweat and blood,
| he was patted on the back, called by his first
name, Toasted at barbecues and apparently sub
| jected to the kindest treatment IT, on the
| other hand he ran foul of his masters pleas
| ure, he might be beaten, tortured, and under
some circumstances even killed. He had no
redress of any kind in the courts, where no
| Negro was permitted to testify against white
| man.
In the 1S50s the abotionist movement was
| gaining force in the Northern states. where
experience had proven slave labor unsuited to
the economic needs of the ruling industrial
class. Fearing lest the abolitionist propaganda
H. al
Southern states enacted series of "Black
Codes" Negroes might not be out after dark,
except by written permission from their mas
tiers. Not more than two of them might con-
| gregate at one place-with the exception of
church. To be found bearing arms was pun
ishable by death.
The feudal owning class lived in a vertabe
nightmare of fear The Northerners were pic
tured from press and pulpit yankee rats"
demons with long horns, destroyers of order,
peace and security, free lovers, and other choice
phrases A Negro who by change happened to
| be influenced by the "John Browns" was
| starved beaten, tortured and often killed as
an example to his fellows
When the Civil War had been fought and
lost by the South, there was ushered in the
so-called period of Reconstruction" Negroes,
under the influence of the Northern carpet
baggers" were given full civil rights and even
came into the majority in the legislatures of
several of the Southern states where they were
used in the interests of the Northerners. 1t
was then that the Ku Klux Khan came into
its original eXstance-as a movement the OBJ
ject of which was to stem the rising tide over
come the power of the Negro and the North
ern "agtator" through force and violence, and
preserve the feudal interests of the landed
gentry.
Such is the heritage of Southern feudalism.
To what extent is it being carried over by the
mill barons of today?
Just as the slave dealers shouted the merits
of their wares in the market places of the
old South, where human flesh bought and
sold so today the local Chambers of Commerce
are praising their goods to the skies. 'In our
district wages are only a dollar and half
day. We have sixty-hour week here" You
can have eleven hours of night work and no
unions" 'In our district you will find the
best reserves of female labor power" "No
minimum wage here" Thus run hundreds Of
advertisements proclaimng the advantages of
the industrial slavery of the Piedmont.
Just as the slave of the eighteenth and nine
teenth centuries regimented at his work
and provided with shelter, tools, entertainment
and paternal care, so does the mill baron of
today attempt to carry on this tradition in his
mill village. In this sort of medieval fief every
house is owned by the mill baron He builds
every school, draws up the course of study,
pays the teachers salary, dictates how long
the child may stay in school and when he shall
enter the mill. He owns the company store,