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- David Lee McMullen, Talk on his book Strike! C-SPAN BookTV, May 10, 2011.
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Ellen Dawson | |
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| Born | 14 December 1900 Barrhead, Scotland, United Kingdom |
| Died | 17 April 1967 (aged 66) |
| Occupation | Textile worker |
Ellen "Nellie" Dawson Kanki (14 December 1900 - 17 April 1967), best known as Ellen Dawson, was a Scottish-American political activist and trade union organizer in the textile industry. Dawson is best remembered as an active participant in three of the greatest textile strikes of the 1920s; the 1926 Passaic textile strike, the 1928 New Bedford textile strike, and the 1929 Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. An activist in the Communist Party USA during the 1920s, Dawson was the first woman elected to a leadership position in an American textile union.
Ellen Dawson was born on December 14, 1900, in Barrhead, a small industrial town of about 9,000 residents on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland. [1] She was the fifth of at least 10 children born to Annie Halford Dawson and Patrick Dawson, a poor working class couple. [1] Her paternal grandparents were indigenous Scots, while her maternal grandparents were Irish emigrants, having left Ireland in the 1840s to escape the Great Famine.
At the time of her birth, Dawson's father worked as an iron foundry worker at Shanks' Tubal Works - a manufacturer of toilets and other bathroom products - in Barrhead. [2] The work was gruelling and pay was based on the piece work system. [3] Her mother was a former power loom weaver in a textile mill. [4]
During the 18th century, Barrhead had been the center of an Owenite utopian cooperative movement — an organization which around the time of Dawson's birth operated 19 businesses and included some 2,100 members — nearly a quarter of the entire community. [5] While no membership records of the Barrhead Cooperative Society are known to exist, and consequently there is no way to either confirm or deny that the Dawson family were members, Dawson's biographer recounts family oral history indicating that they were members of the organization. [5] This would have been an important formative experience in Dawson's life, it is intimated, as the Cooperative was linked to social and educational efforts directed at the children of the community. [6]
Dawson started work in 1914, probably working in a textile mill as had her mother before her. Although the date of her first employment is known, the exact location and the tasks she performed are not recorded. [7]
While this, with other aspects of Dawson's early years, has been poorly recorded, the political and social environment of so-called Red Clydeside — the region in which she was raised — is a subject of considerable academic research. [8] Historian David Lee McMullen sees this environmental factor as a fundamental component in the understanding of Ellen Dawson:
"Given what we know about Dawson's activities in the United States during the late 1920s — where she was a highly effective labor organizer, known for her courage on the picket line and her fiery oratory — Red Clydeside must have been Dawson's classroom and the activists of the period her teacher. During these years she was introduced to the realities of industrial wage labor, and began formulating her own attitudes and opinions as a worker. During this time Scottish women emerged not only as rank-and-file workers, but as leaders within several major labor confrontation.... Dawson may have only been a silent witness to these events, but it seems impossible to believe that she, or any other young worker of the period, could have escaped the influence of such firebrand rhetoric and monumental events." [4]
The end of World War I brought large-scale unemployment to Glasgow and other manufacturing cities of the United Kingdom, as wartime spending was curtailed. [9] Late in 1919, the Dawson family including Ellen, left the Clyde area in search of employment, heading south to Lancashire, England. [10] The family settled in the village of Millgate, about 15 miles north of Manchester. [11] Dawson found work as a spinner and a weaver in local textile mills, remaining in this capacity until April, 1921. [12]
The unemployment situation in Lancashire proved little better than that of west Scotland, and on April 30, 1921, the 20-year-old Dawson and an older brother departed for the prospect of better opportunities in the United States. [13] They travelled as steerage passengers aboard the SS Cedric, arriving in New York City on May 9, 1921. [14]
Soon joined by other family members, the Dawson family settled in the mill town of Passaic, New Jersey, making a home in a working-class neighborhood composed largely of European emigrants, a few blocks from the Botany Worsted Mills. [15] For the next five years, Dawson worked at the Botany Mill, a facility in which over 70 percent of the workers earned less than $1200 annually, at a time when it was estimated that $1600 a year was required to support a family. [16]
Dawson died at 4 am on April 17, 1967, at her home in Charlotte Harbor, Florida. [17] She was 66 years old. Although the cause of her death will not be released by the state of Florida until 2017, according to family members Dawson had been suffering from "a lung complaint contracted during her years working in the mills." [17] Her published obituary in the local press made no mention of her radical past. [18]
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Gastonia is the most populous city in and county seat of Gaston County, North Carolina, United States. It is the second-largest satellite city of the Charlotte area, behind Concord. The population was 80,411 in the 2020 census, up from 71,741 in 2010. Gastonia is the 13th-most populous city in North Carolina. It is part of the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is part of the Charlotte-Concord, NC-SC Combined Statistical Area.
Red Clydeside was the era of political radicalism in Glasgow, Scotland, and areas around the city, on the banks of the River Clyde, such as Clydebank, Greenock, Dumbarton and Paisley, from the 1910s until the early 1930s. Red Clydeside is a significant part of the history of the labour movement in Britain as a whole, and Scotland in particular.
Grace Lumpkin was an American writer of proletarian literature who focused most of her works on the Depression era and the rise and fall of communism in the United States. The most important of four books was her first, To Make My Bread (1932), which won the Gorky Prize in 1933.
The United States textile workers' strike of 1934, colloquially known later as The Uprising of '34 was the largest textile strike in the labor history of the United States, involving 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states, lasting twenty-two days.
Albert Weisbord (1900–1977) was an American political activist and union organizer. He is best remembered, along his wife Vera Buch, as one of the primary union organizers of the seminal 1926 Passaic Textile Strike and as the founder of a small Trotskyist political organization of the 1930s called the Communist League of Struggle.
Edward Hugo Oehler (1903–1983) was an American communist.
Mary Heaton Vorse was an American journalist and novelist. She established her reputation as a journalist reporting the labor protests of a largely female and immigrant workforce in the east-coast textile industry. Her later fiction drew on this material profiling the social and domestic struggles of working women. Unwilling to be a disinterested observer, she participated in labor and civil protests and was for a period the subject of regular U.S. Justice Department surveillance.
The Loray Mill strike of 1929 in Gastonia, North Carolina, was a notable strike action in the labor history of the United States. Though largely unsuccessful in attaining its goals of better working conditions and wages, the strike was considered successful in a lasting way; it caused an immense controversy which gave the labor movement momentum in the South.
Alfred Wagenknecht was an American Marxist activist and political functionary. He is best remembered for having played a critical role in the establishment of the American Communist Party in 1919 as a leader of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party. Wagenknecht served as executive secretary of the Communist Labor Party of America and the United Communist Party of America in 1919 and 1920, respectively.
Ella May Wiggins was a union organizer and balladeer who was killed during the Loray Mill Strike in Gastonia, North Carolina.
To Make My Bread is a novel written by Grace Lumpkin about the Loray Mill strike. It was published in 1932. Lumpkin chronicles the McClures, a family of poor Appalachian tenant farmers, during the industrialization of the south. Released in the heart of the Great Depression, the story takes the McClures to the mill town of Leesville, North Carolina, after their land was taken by a logging corporation. Soon after their optimistic arrival induced by economic conditions, they find the worst is yet to come as they endure a new, challenging life of being a part of the exploited working class under mill management. The book won the Maxim Gorky Prize for Literature that year, too.
The Passaic Textile Strike is a 1926 American silent film directed by Samuel Russak and produced by Alfred Wagenknecht. The film was produced to raise public awareness and financial support for the 1926 Passaic Textile Strike, which involved over 15,000 New Jersey textile mill workers in a work stoppage lasting more than a year. Although in good part a fictional melodrama, The Passaic Textile Strike is regarded as important by film historians both for its documentary footage and for the fact that it is one of the only early American labor films to have been preserved largely intact.
The 1926 Passaic textile strike was a work stoppage by over 15,000 woolen mill workers in and around Passaic, New Jersey, over wage issues in several factories in the vicinity. Conducted in its initial phase by a "United Front Committee" organized by the Trade Union Educational League of the Workers (Communist) Party, the strike began on January 25, 1926, and officially ended only on March 1, 1927, when the final mill being picketed signed a contract with the striking workers. It was the first Communist-led work stoppage in the United States. The event was memorialized by a seven reel silent movie intended to generate sympathy and funds for the striking workers.
The 1928 New Bedford textile strike was a mass work stoppage of approximately 30,000 machinery operatives in several of the large cotton mills located in New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA. The strike, which ran for several months during the spring and summer of 1928, is remembered for the prominent role played by the Workers (Communist) Party of America in mobilizing the immigrant workers of the region.
The Socialist Party of North Carolina (SPNC) is a multi-tendency democratic socialist political party in the U.S. state of North Carolina. The party was launched in 1901 as the state organization of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), its direct organizational antecedent, and later reformed in 1996 as the state SPUSA affiliate after the SPA became Social Democrats, USA.
Dorothy Markey, known by the pen name Myra Page, was a 20th-century American communist writer, journalist, union activist, and teacher.
Clarence Miller was a 20th-century American labor activist who, as a member of the Young Communist League USA, participated in the 1926 Passaic textile strike and the 1929 Loray Mill strike, in which he and six other labor leaders were found guilty of murder.
Vera Wilhelmine Buch Weisbord was an American political activist and union organizer.
Jessie Lloyd O'Connor (1904-1988) was a journalist, social reformer and political activist. She worked as a reporter for Federated Press. O'Connor served and supported numerous progressive organizations, including the American League Against War and Fascism and the ACLU.
Fred Erwin Beal (1896–1954) was an American labor-union organizer whose critical reflections on his work and travel in the Soviet Union divided left-wing and liberal opinion. In 1929 he had been a cause célèbre when, in Gastonia, North Carolina, he was convicted in an irregular trial of conspiracy in the strike-related killing of a local police chief. But having escaped to the Soviet Union, his decision in 1933 to return and bear witness to the costs of Stalin's collectivist policies, including famine in Ukraine, was disparaged and resisted by many of his erstwhile supporters.
