Southern Sayings

Repugnant --unfair --rotten --archaic--unjust --unacceptable-- deplorable--

With such adjectives educated Southerners, gathered last week at the University of Virginia's Institute of Public Affairs, denounced the South's labor conditions. Southern industrialists were excoriated for working women and children long hours, were criticized for opposing unionization, were advised to take warning from upheavals in the textile mills in the Carolinas and Tennessee (TIME, April 15 et seq.). Chief critics were West Virginia's W. Jett Lauck, chairman of the Bureau of Applied Economics, and Virginia's Bruce Crawford, Norton publisher. Declared Publisher Crawford:

"Southern industrial leaders are still clinging to the discarded and discredited wage theories and working conditions of the pre-War period. It is still believed and practiced that low rates of pay are synonymous with low labor costs. . . . The labor union has not been accepted as a permanent and inevitable institution in modern industrial life."

Up in defense of Southern industrialists rose Homer Lenoir Ferguson, president of Newport News (Va.) Shipbuilding Co., onetime (1919-20) president of U. S. Chamber of Commerce, employer of 7,000 non-union men, stockholder in four textile mills. Mr. Ferguson's company is one of the South's great industrial concerns. It reconditioned the Leviathan after the War, built the turbo-electric Panama-Pacific liners Virginia, California, and Pennsylvania, as well as many a vessel for the Navy. Strongwilled, strong-spoken, Mr. Ferguson declared:

"Industrialism in the South . . . is undergoing a series of growing pains.

. . . The condition of the Southern cotton mill worker is very much better than it was a generation ago when he had no work at all. . . . When they talk about $12 a week, they do not tell you about the free homes, the good country food, water and light for nothing and the palaces they live in compared with the mountain homes from which they came. . . . You are dealing with a backward people who had to learn industry from the ground up. . . . Perhaps children do work, but in juvenile vagrancy North Carolina is so far ahead of Ohio there is no comparison. . . . The hours may be long and the pay small but [the textile industry] is a most highly competitive industry. There must be a profit in any industry or it will cease to exist. . . . Unionization is not the universal and complete panacea the American Federation of Labor would have you believe. Anyway, the unions aren't as strong as they used to be. . . . If the Southern textile owners and operators tie up with the labor unions, then they will see the textile industry move elsewhere, as it already moved once. . . ."