Testing the New Deal: the General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South
- List Price: $45.00
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publish date: 01/01/2009
Janet Irons steps into this historical vacuum to explore the community and workplace dynamics of southern mill towns in the years leading up to the strike, as well as the links among worker insurgency, organized labor, and governmental policy in the New Deal's crucial first years. Drawing on diverse sources including thousands of letters southern laborers wrote to President Roosevelt about their working conditions, Irons reveals the dual nature of the New Deal's impact on the South. While its rhetoric mobilized the poor to challenge local established authority, the New Deal's political structure worked in the opposite direction, reinforcing the power of the South's economic elite.
A powerful rendering of a pivotal event, Testing the New Deal stands as a major reassessment of southern labor in the 1930s.
