On the Road Again

Monticello ? Bidding adieu to the nation's capital, I head west on 66 past Manassas battlefield, then down Rte. 29, formerly the old Seminole trail that runs south through Charlottesville. I was hoping to make it in time to visit Jefferson's house at Monticello, which I last visited a decade ago. Among those making their way down this same road 200 years ago to visit the great man was one of my favorite characters from the Revolutionary era, Constantin François Volney, whose career is freshly evoked in a wonderful book by my friend Peter Linebaugh (coauthor: Marcus Rediker), The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, recently published by Beacon.

A member of the French Assembly who voted to abolish slavery, Volney published Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires in 1791, republished in English 200 years later by Black Classic Press in Baltimore. Worldwide, Volney was as big a hit as Tom Paine, and more radical. In a year his Ruins had been translated into German, English and Welsh. William Blake pored over it. The United Irishmen distributed a chapter from it and by 1797 in Bahia, Brazil, it was in the hands of a mulatto amidst the 1797 conspiracy of whites, browns and blacks.

Volney opposed nationalism, the division of classes and the oppression of women ("the King sleeps or smokes his pipe while his wife and daughters perform all the drudgery of the house"). Like Paine he saw a new age dawning across the Atlantic: "Turning towards the west...a cry of liberty, proceeding from far distant shores, resounds on the ancient continent."

In 1794, amid the rampages of Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety, the guillotine wasn't far from Volney's neck. He landed in prison but was released on 9 Thermidor, same day as Paine, and soon sailed to America, spending the winter of 1795-'96 in Philadelphia, across from the African church, which was crowded with refugees from the revolution in Haiti. Then he headed down to Monticello for a visit with Jefferson, later recording his impressions:

After dinner the master [Jefferson] and I went to see the slaves plant peas. Their bodies dirty brown rather than black, their dirty rags, their miserable, hideous half-nakedness, these haggard figures, this secretive anxious air, the hateful timorous looks, altogether seized me with an initial sentiment of terror and sadness that I ought to hide my face from. Their indolence in turning up the ground with the hoe was extreme. The master took a whip to frighten them, and soon ensued a comic scene. Placed in the middle of the gang, he menaced, and turned far and wide (on all sides) turning around. Now, as he turned his face, one by one, the blacks changed attitude: those whom he looked at directly worked the best, those whom he half saw worked least, and those he didn't see at all, ceased working altogether; and if he made an about-face, the hoe was raised to view, but otherwise slept behind his back.

Volney's was too strong a dram of universalist revolutionary sentiment for the politer element at the time. As Linebaugh and Rediker relate, William Cobbett denounced him as an infidel and a cannibal; Priestley accused him of Hottentotism and John Adams probably had Volney in mind when he complained that the United States was becoming a "receptacle of malevolence and turbulence, for the outcasts of the universe." Jefferson expressed it as his opinion in 1798 that Volney was the main target of the Act Concerning Aliens of 1798, designed to promote "purity of national character," forcing the Frenchman to return to Europe.

But why did Cobbett and Priestley abuse Volney as a cannibal and Hottentot? The Frenchman believed in the grand family of the human race and, well ahead of William Wells Brown and Martin Bernal, held that civilization had begun in Africa: "It was there that a people, since forgotten, discovered the elements of science and art, at a time when all other men were barbarous, and that a race, now regarded as the refuse of society, because their hair is woolly and their skin is dark, explored among the phenomena of nature, those civil and religious systems which have since held mankind in awe." In fact it was the Pan-Africanists and "Ethiopianists" who kept Volney in print down the years.

Gastonia ? Thunderstorms and terrible traffic in the exploding exurbs around Manassas held me up. It was nearing twilight when I passed Monticello. I drove on; 29 became Interstate 85 and somewhere around midnight I was in a motel near Gastonia, an old textile town, battleground of famous strikes that began in 1929, which my father Claud covered for the London Times, just before the Great Crash that October.

Over the preceding decade the textile industry had boomed in the South. Up in the Northeast textile workers were earning about $20 a week, as one can learn from Samuel Yellen in his classic work, American Labor Struggles. But in the Carolinas wages were running at $7 a week or lower. It was easier to get children into the mills and families were happy to have their kids at work, since their tiny wages were crucial to overall survival.

Even in the South, the textile masters were beleaguered by overproduction and excessive competition by the mid-1920s. So, as always, they tried to hold up profit margins by squeezing more out of their workers. In what was known as the stretch-out, they assigned extra looms to each worker, raising the number from 24 to 96. Local strikes began to break out, in the Carolinas and Tennessee. The AFL tried to lend a hand. Five local businessmen in Tennessee kidnapped the AFL leaders and took them across the state line, threatening to kill them if they came back. The terror tactics had their effect. The AFL men left and never came back.

The Communist Party then sent down a man, Fred Beal, who began to organize secretly among the workers in a Gastonia mill. Soon 2200 went on strike, demanding a 40-hour week, recognition of the union, a minimum weekly wage of $20, plus abolition of the stretch-out. There was a scuffle on the picket line, and immediately the governor of North Carolina sent in five companies of the National Guard. The Gastonia Gazette ran a front-page illustration of a snake coiled around the American flag, with the subtitle, "Communism in the South. Kill It!." Handbills were put about, saying, "Would you belong to a union which opposes WHITE SUPREMACY." (With commendable principle, the Communist union, in contrast to the AFL union, had black and white membership, although the workers in the Gastonia mill were overwhelmingly white.)

The strike began to spread from Gastonia to nearby Bessemer City, Pineville and Lexington: 8000 workers were on strike in the Piedmont. A hundred masked men then destroyed the Communist union's hq. The union rented some land and set up a tent city outside Gastonia, protected by armed guards. By now the strike was ebbing and scabs were gaining a foothold. On the night of June 7, after a workers' march, Gastonia's chief of police Orville Aderholt and four men tried to invade the tent colony. The strikers demanded to see a search warrant. There was none; then a scuffle; Aderholt fell, fatally wounded. Sixteen, including three women, were indicted for Aderholt's murder: eight textile workers, plus Beal and seven others from the North. Amid huge international uproar, the union's lawyers won a mistrial.

Now the mill owners got serious. Goons attacked union hq and fired on organizers' cars, killing Ella May Wiggins. The trial was reopened against a reduced number, and the local D.A. denounced "devils with hoofs and horns who threw away their pitchforks for shotguns." He put on a wonderful act for the jury, kneeling on the courtroom floor while holding the hand of a sobbing Mrs. Aderholt. After 57 minutes the jury came back and pronounced a verdict of guilty of murder in the second degree. The four Northerners drew 17 to 20 years each in state prison, with the locals getting shorter terms. No one got into trouble for murdering Wiggins. After the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the sentences in 1930, all seven men jumped the collective bail of $27,000. Two went into hiding in the U.S. and five, including Beal, escaped to the Soviet Union.

On Oct. 1, 1929, within weeks of the great Wall Street crash, Sheriff Atkins and heavily armed deputies confronted 250 textile workers in Marion who had just gone on strike. The sheriff threw tear gas, a worker struck him with a cane and then the sheriff and his men poured gunfire into the unarmed throng. Seven fell dead, with no losses to Atkins' forces. The mill owner commended Atkins for efficient use of ammunition, with only 35 bullets unaccounted for. As he later described it in his memoirs, my father saw "a Presbyterian minister kneeling beside the open graves of the textile workers, trade unionists, shot by the company guards, his hair tousled by the wind, his arms raised above his head and his voice crying: 'Oh God, what would Jesus do if He came to Carolina.'"

These days, of course, the textile masters have found even lower wages overseas.

Next week: The weird Oklahoma bombing memorial.