Mill Family

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 325 subjects of interest and opportunities for future research as it flits from man to man (most with photographs) and mill to mill in the textile industry’s grand campaign to improve the lot of all southern­ ers. It treats unions, the civil rights movement, OSHA, and the J. P. Stevens boycott harshly; and it does not believe in the stretch-out and in cotton manufacture as the cause of byssinosis. References to technological change are regularly erroneous. The account of the Gastonia tragedy of 1929 is unrecognizable. In sum, the book reads like advertising for the industry. Yet it sketches developments that are as yet unrecorded elsewhere. Endless industry efforts to regulate labor and markets are described unself-consciously. Major shifts in approaches to labor relations, from the creation and destruction of mill villages to the replacement of pension plans with employee stock option plans, are identified without analysis. Andrews describes mergers, recombinations, move­ ment into and out of public ownership, and the changing involve­ ments of financial houses over the decades. These trends in many ways simply perpetuate long-standing practices in the industry, but perhaps they have or will take it to a new scale and manner of operation. The demise of United States machinery builders is de­ scribed, though with conflicting explanations, as is so often the case in this account. Overall, the book is unreliable. Nevertheless, it indicates the degree to which the seemingly well-researched textile industry remains full of significant and unexamined issues. Laurence Gross Dr. Gross is a curator at the Museum of American Textile History. He studies labor and technology and is writing a book on the Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. Mill Family: The Labor System in the Southern Cotton Textile Industry, 1880-1915. By Gathy L. McHugh. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. x+144; tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $24.95. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. By Jacquelyn Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly. Ghapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Pp. xxxiii + 468; illustrations, notes, bibliog­ raphy, index. $34.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). Both of these fine books examine the family labor system that predominated in southern textile mills from the late 19th century through the 1920s. They illustrate the ways in which technological changes transformed the composition of the labor force and the daily 326 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE routine of industrial workers. Cathy McHugh’s Mill Family is an econometric analysis that explores the factors encouraging southern mill operators to adopt the family as a work unit in contrast with the pattern of individual employment that prevailed elsewhere. Like a Family is a gracefully written social history that derives its eloquence from the rich resources of the Southern Oral History Project that Jacquelyn Hall directs. Hall and her coauthors trace the historical roots of the family labor system, but the book focuses on the characteristics of the mill village and its decline beginning in the 1920s. The two books together give a fairly complete and balanced view of the rise and decline of industrial paternalism in the South. As southern investors turned their resources toward industrializa­ tion in the 1880s, they sought to draw agricultural workers off the land and into textile mills. Both the absence of an experienced industrial labor force and the low level of urbanization in the South necessitated the development of towns, as well as factories, as the textile industry grew. Millowners turned to families rather than individuals to run the mills because, McHugh finds, multiple-worker families maximized firm returns on town building. The family labor system allowed the poor to keep their families intact as they moved into industrial labor. Southern farmers, accustomed to the labor of children on farms, found family labor in the mills to be consistent with their expectations. Hiring wives and children as well as men held down total housing costs of the work force, depressed the individual wage that employers had to pay, and answered the initial need for unskilled and semiskilled labor. McHugh’s thesis is that “The developments

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