Fifty years ago, Irving Bernstein began his classic portrayal in The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker (1960) with a prologue titled “Revolt in the Piedmont,” which looked at the uprising of textile workers at the onset of the Great Depression. In the intervening years, many terrific historians have refocused our gaze on these workers and this time period. Using a variety of lenses, they have examined the textile industry from the perspectives of race, class, gender, family, daily life, religion, popular culture, and politics. So central has the textile industry been to regional notions of economic development that it is often tempting to substitute this one group of workers for the entire southern working class. In fact, that is not just a recent mistake; both the AFL and the CIO overemphasized textile workers when they began ambitious campaigns to organize the South in the 1930s and again...

You do not currently have access to this content.