Chief Aderholt

DESCRIPTION: "Come all of you good people And listen while I tell The story of Chief Aderholt, The man you all know well." Aderholt is shot in Union Ground. The police imprison and prepare to try labor leaders; the singer calls on hearers to join the union
AUTHOR: Ella May Wiggins
EARLIEST DATE: 1953 (Greenway), but Wiggins was shot to death in 1929, the year of the events recounted
KEYWORDS: homicide police labor-movement
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1929 - The Gastonia/Loray Strike
FOUND IN: US
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Burt-AmericanMurderBallads, pp. 186-187, (no title) (1 text, 1 tune)
Greenway-AmericanFolksongsOfProtest, p. 248, "Chief Aderholt" (1 text, 1 tune)
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia1, pp. 241-242, "Chief Aderholt" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: (no author listed), _Let's Stand Together: The Story of Ella Mae Wiggins_, Metrolina Chapter, National Organization for Women (Charlotte, NC), 1979, p. 21, "Chief Aderholt" (1 text, 1 tune)
Kristina Horton, _Martyr of Loray Mill: Ella May and the 1929 Textile Workers' Strike in Gastonia, North Carolina_, McFarland & Company, 2015, pp. 193-194, "Chief Aderholt" (1 text)
Roud #22302
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Floyd Collins" (tune)
NOTES [8695 words]: This song comes out of the Gastonia Strike of 1929, and the violence that it inspired. Two people would be killed: Police chief Aderholt, the nominal subject of this song, and Ella May (Wiggins), the woman who wrote the song. This entry will start with the story of the Gaston County strike, and Aderholt's death and its aftermath; the story of Ella May will follow.
Weir/Hanlan, p. 89: "The Gastonia Strike was part of a wave of labor struggles that hit the cotton textile industry in North and South Carolina in the spring of 1929. The most famous of these occurred at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, which featured the active involvement of youthful members of the Communist Party of the United States." It is thought to have been the largest Communist-inspired strike in American history (Horton, p. 23).
The South had become a center of textile milling after the Civil War, especially in the decades around 1900. Indeed, by the end of the decade, the South had surpassed the Northeast as the center of American textile production (Wiley, p. 88). The town of Gastonia had seven mills in 1929; the Loray Mill itself had been built in 1900, and the mills had caused the population of the town to grow to 5000 by 1900 (Salmond, pp. 10-11). Bessemer City, where Ella May Wiggins lived, was smaller, but the history was similar.
The Loray Mill derived its name from the two men who founded it, John F. Love and George A. Gray (LOve+gRAY). Love's grandson would eventually found Burlington Industries, which is still around a century later (Horton, p. 54), but Love and Gray by 1904 lost ownership of Loray; by 1919, it was in the hands of absentee owners (Salmond, p. 12).
Incidentally, although it was bought by Firestone in 1935 and was closed down as a factory in 1993, the Loray Mill building is still standing, though it has been rebuilt somewhat to look less grim; you can see it on Google Street View (look for "Loray Mill, Gastonia, NC"). It is one of those apartment-complexes-with-a-few-businesses-on-the-bottom-floor places; it doesn't appear that there is any memorial to its history except one small sign (shown on p. 185 of Horton; pp. 182-183 show the mill shortly before and after restoration).
The first strike against the Loray Mill came in 1919, the year the outsiders took over, but the strike -- and the union -- failed (Salmond, p. 13). And in its aftermath, things got worse. In 1927, Loray became the first mill in North Carolina to use the "stretch-out" -- putting workers on a piece-work basis, making them run more machines, and imposing pay cuts. The new manager cut annual costs by about a half a million dollars -- but he did it by getting rid of 1300 workers, and imposing pay cuts that amounted to 25% to 50% on the rest (Salmond, p. 14). In 1929, after all those changes, Loray had 2200 workers, and some 8000 people lived in its mill village (Horton, p. 55). Regular workers were expected to work between 60 and 66 hours per week, for pay of about $13. (this was about half the national average wage) -- and "spare hands" earned only about half of that too-low wage (Wiley, p. 88). Women and children were paid even less, with no greater protection (Horton, p. 58). By 1928, small, spontaneous labor actions were common (Salmond, pp. 14-15).
A new union, the National Textile Workers Union, affiliated with the Communist Party, had been formed in September 1928, with the goal of replacing an AFL-affiliated union with one that was more radical and aligned with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, it was based in the North and didn't understand southerners very well (the northern organizers often came South and found the locals so hard to deal with that they fled back north; Salmond, p. 35, and those atheistic communists of course didn't understand southern religion; Salmond, pp.. 39-40). Despite that, the Party decided that southern mills would be the best place to organize (Horton, pp. 60-61. Economically, they were right; socially, they weren't). It was part of a new policy by the Communists of taking radical action rather than trying to gradually change things from within. (Later, the national party's insistence on party-building end political education rather than supporting the strike probably contributed to the strike's failure; Salmond, p. 28. Also, a lot of the older residents seem to have disapproved of the allegedly loose and/or un-feminine behavior of the young strikers and their supporters; Salmond, pp. 30-31). The NTWU sent a 33-year-old named Fred Beal, who as a teenager had heard Big Bill Haywood talk about the socialist ideals of the IWW, to encourage labor actions in North Carolina (Horton, pp. 61-62; there is a picture of Beal on p. 62; Baker, p. 73, quotes how Haywood showed Beal information about the 1912 Lawrence strike associated with "Bread and Roses").
Beal arrived in Gastonia at the beginning of 1929 (Horton, p. 63) and began organizing. There was a meeting on March 30 (Horton, p. 66) -- and the mine owners immediately started firing those who attended (Horton, p. 67). The Union wasn't ready for a strike -- they hadn't made plans, hadn't trained the employees about picketing, and didn't have much of a strike fund -- but if they didn't act at once, they would lose all their power. So they called a strike meeting that very day -- and it supposedly voted unanimously to walk out (Salmond, pp. 20-23). "The evening of April Fool's Day, 1929, the night shift didn't enter the Loray Mill and more than half of the 2,200 employees were on strike" (Horton, p. 69). The organizers didn't even have demands yet, but they presented a list on April 3.
The demands would frankly have made the mill uncompetitive -- the workers wanted a pay raise, a forty hour week, and didn't want a time clock; they also wanted equal pay for women, better working conditions in the factory and in the company towns (Horton, p. 69) -- plus recognition of the union (Salmond, p. 23). The company couldn't have done all of it -- but ownership didn't even seem willing to talk. (This even though they had infiltrated the strike committee and could know most of its plans; Salmond, p. 24.) And the local newspaper, the Gastonia Gazette, thundered against the union and against communism -- but by doing so, let the rest of the area know just how bad conditions were at Loray; it increased the level of activism at other mills (Horton, pp. 76-77).
The owners called on the governor (who himself had a stake in the mills, according to LetsStandTogether, p. 11), who brought in the National Guard to end the picketing (Salmond, pp. 24-25, who describes the minor violence that arose when the Guard deployed. There is a striking image on p. 25 of Salmond of a guardsman in a World War I-type uniform and a gun with a fixed bayonet in a physical confrontation with two much smaller women; Horton, p. 80, has a photo of half a dozen soldiers with what looks like a light artillery piece). Gastonia police chief Orville Aderholt also joined the request (Horton, p. 79). Apparently there were about 250 guardsmen active, with a general in command (Horton, p. 79).
The strike organizers tried hard to keep things peaceful (they even used primarily women on the picket line so as to seem less threatening; Horton, p. 84) and to keep their supporters from going armed -- but this was the American South. Often, the strikers went armed despite what the leaders wanted (Horton, p. 83).
On April 15, the Loray strike broadened to include Bessemer City (Horton, p. 88). The Bessemer City strike wasn't a very successful action; production was only "briefly" crippled, though the Bessemer strikers did provide some support for those at Loray. "Most important of all, the strike at the American Mill drew into the Gastonia story its most famous figure -- its balladeer and martyr, Ella May Wiggins" (Salmond, p. 50).
With the Guard in place, the situation on the ground was so bad that the NTWU felt they had to guard their headquarters and the supplies there day and night (Salmond, p. 41). On April 17-18, someone attacked their headquarters, destroying a wooden building and tossing out or ruining the supplies kept in a brick building that wa too strong to destroy, before disappearing again (Salmond, p. 41-42). This may have been the first act of a group that was known as the Committee of 100, a semi-official group whose formal role was simply to decide which mill workers were trustworthy (Horton, p. 87; Salmond, p. 44) but which in fact engaged clandestinely against the strikers; it "became the focal point of acts of violence against the strikers"; it took the place of the National Guard when they went home (Salmond, p. 43). For this reason, it was sometimes known as the "Black Hundred."
The unofficial head of the Committee was one Major A. L. Bulwinkle (Salmond, p. 44), a former congressman who had helped organize the local American Legion post after coming home from service in World War I (Salmond, p. 37); he had also served the mill bosses as a lawyer. As the National Guard left, he recruited Legionnaires to police the area (Horton, p. 88).
Interestingly, the National Guard had a camp only about a tenth of a mile away from the NTWU headquarters that were attacked, but they claimed not to have seen or heard any of what happened; certainly they did not intervene (Horton, p. 89). None of the attackers was ever arrested; instead, the people guarding the building were charged with destroying their own property! At the same time, an anti-parade ordinance was passed to control the strikers' picketing and demonstrations (Horton, p. 90).
After this, a committee, including Ella, went to Washington to testify about conditions in Gastonia (Horton, pp. 100-101, with a photo on p. 101 of those who made the visit), but little came of that -- except that one of Ella's comments, about having to lock up her children at home at night for lack of a better way to care for them, made national headlines (Salmond, pp. 57-59).
The strike did not fail all at once, but since the strikers had little savings and the Union wasn't supplying much support, workers were soon going back to work: "Only three weeks into the strike, the Gastonia Gazette was reporting that production at the Loray Mill was almost back to normal" (Horton, p. 92; cf. Salmond, p. 68). Certain of the most radical workers, however, were blacklisted; Ella was probably one of them, and certainly she stayed on the picket line (Horton, p. 93).
On May 6, with production close to normal, the mill owners started to evict the mill workers who were still on strike from their company housing (Salmond, p. 56). Thirty families were evicted on that first day; eventually the number reached about two hundred families -- a thousand people (Horton, pp. 108-109).
Meanwhile, the NTWU started to rebuild its headquarters -- and, by the end of May, was posting armed guards. And people around the headquarters sometimes accosted people in the streets, which bothered the local police (Salmond, p. 64). Although the strike was functionally over, the NTWU hoped to get the workers to walk out again on June 7 (Horton, pp. 112-113).
It's a little unclear what happened next. Did the mill owners plan a raid? Or was it just that a couple of drunk anti-union policemen, Gilbert and Roach, decided to act against the union camp? (Horton, pp. 114-115). Whatever happened, there was a fight (Salmond, p. 72) -- and Chief Aderholt and the police were either involved or came to try to stop the fighting.
"In May Chief Aderholt of the Gastonia police department raided the tent colony with several deputies, some of them alleged to have been drunk. The strike guards demanded a search warrant. The deputies tried to disarm the guards. [It seems likely that Gilbert, who was among them, said he didn't need a warrant; Salmond, p. 72.] Shots rang out. When the smoke cleared, two policemen were slightly wounded, one striker was seriously hurt, Chief Aderholt was dying. Cash notes reason to believe he was killed 'by a gun in the hand of one of his own officers'" (Joyner, pp. 21-22; compare Salmond, pp. 73).
Aderholt, unlike most of those who fought against the strikers, seems to have been an honest and respected officer (Horton, p. 113). He had been a member of the police for 19 years, and the chief for seven. "A tall, gaunt man who was easily recognizable by the large black hat he always wore, he had treated the strikers reasonably decently and, indeed, may have gone to the union hall mainly to keep an eye on Gilbert and Roach. If so, he paid dearly for his sense of duty. The Gastonia community and the Loray management now had their own martyr" (Salmond, pp. 73-74). He was shot in the back and lungs, and died in hospital the next day (Horton, p. 115). The defense would eventually use this as an argument that he was shot by his own men, and would also argue that he was shot by a shotgun, which was a weapon carried only by one man, one of the attackers (Salmond, p. 146). Indeed, it has been suggested that this man, Adam Hord, killed him deliberately because he wanted Aderholt's job (Salmond, pp. 149-150). But it sounds as if no one performed enough of an autopsy to demonstrate the nature of the deadly weapon; Salmond, p. 150, says that the truth can no longer be known, and I strongly suspect he's right.
There is a cropped photo of Aderholt on p. 114 of Horton, and Salmond, p. 73, has what I think is the uncropped photo, showing him with a National Guard officer.
"When news of Chief of Police Aderholt's death came on the following day, excitement in Gastonia reached fever pitch. Beal narrowly escaped lynching. The dead chief became a symbol of a community outraged. The [Gastonia] Gazette sponsored a fund for his family and demanded vengeance. Editorials on the day after the shooting called for the immediate expulsion of all Communists in the vicinity" (Pope, pp. 271-272). Reports claimed that 6000 people attended his funeral (Pope, p. 272).
In the aftermath, about seventy people were detained. 23 would be charged with crimes: 16 with murder and assault and seven with just assault. Eventually the case proceeded against 13: ten men accused of first degree murder and three women with second degree (it sounds as if the charges against the women were downgraded because the prosecution didn't like the publicity; Salmond, p. 101 -- and the women were glad to be released on bond and get out of the South). Among those initially charged were Fred Beal and several others from the national Communist party (Horton, p. 119). The men were all housed together in difficult conditions; the women were also together, although their conditions were better; the jailer is said to have treated them as well as he could (Salmond, pp. 89-91). But the jailer couldn't get them a fair trial.
In the aftermath of the Aderholt raid, the role of the Bessemer City strikers increased as the NTWU , or what was left of it, directed more of its efforts there there (Salmond, p. 80), and Ella suddenly became a major focus of attention (Horton, p. 119).
Not everyone initially accused went to trial, but over a dozen strikers were eventually tried for murder in the Aderholt case, out of hundreds arrested. Thirteen faced capital charges. The trial was held in Charlotte to avoid the tensions in Gastonia (LetsStandTogether, p. 12; Horton, pp. 122-123, who adds that the judge was carefully chosen by the governor because of his relative objectivity; Salmond, p. 101, describes the circus atmosphere that cause Judge Barnhill to move the trial). They had to examine 408 potential jurors to seat a jury (Pope, p. 289); because there were 13 defendants, the defense was allowed 168 peremptory strikes (Salmond, p. 115). The prosecution was truly a massive effort; sixteen lawyers were involved, including Major Bulwinkle of the Committee of 100 (Horton, p. 124). And the Party wasn't always very helpful to the defense; the International Labor Defense (ILD), the main party legal organization, was more interested in propaganda than saving the defendants, and often put out very un-helpful statements and organized mass demonstrations that offended many locals. This caused at least one defense lawyer to quit (Salmond, pp. 94-95). And it didn't pay on time, if at all (Salmond, p. 152), which led to problems with the appeals process and bailing out and all sorts of things. The defense also had internal disputes about what course to take (Salmond, p. 115).
The ACLU eventually started supporting the legal defense, but there simply weren't enough lawyers to fight the legal hordes retained by the mills and the local governments (Salmond, pp. 84-85; on p. 91 he reports that the defense had just five lawyers, meaning they were out-lawyered by more than three to one. And lead lawyer Tom JImison had been threatened with lynching; Salmond, p. 123. He didn't let it stop him, but it must have influenced him).
Despite the relatively honest judge, the prosecutors were allowed to build a clear bias against the defendants -- e.g. the defendants were asked about their religious beliefs, over defense objections. Most of them being orthodox Communists, they had to admit to atheism (Salmond, pp. 86-87). Clearly this was intended to prejudice the religious bigots on the jury (which was probably all of them) against the defendants. Salmond, p. 87, points out parallels to the Scopes Trial. Many noted parallels to the Sacco-Vanzetti trial as well (Salmond, p. 93), although that was probably not a good thing to publicize in the South!
In fact, under North Carolina law, non-Christians were not competent to bear witness (Salmond, p. 136) -- a law that we would declare patently unconsitutional today (and, indeed, some Carolina judges dd at the time; Salmond, p. 151), but the Constitution only matters when someone is willing to enforce it! But this essentially declared testimony from all the NTWU organizers unusable, and the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the law during the appeals process (Salmond, p. 167).
The first trial resulted in a mistrial when a juror had to be removed-- according to LetsStandTogether, p. 12, he "went insane after the chief prosecutor displayed an effigy of Aderholt in the courtroom." (In fact it was a wax model dressed in Aderholt's blood-stained clothes -- a deliberate piece of theater inspired a movie; Pope, p. 290; Horton, p. 125, adds that the judge refused to allow the prosecution to use the thing, although he allowed them to show the clothing; Salmond, p. 117. On p. 126, Horton shows the juror being forcibly restrained and isolated. The juror had been quite amusing during jury selection; apparently no one realized that these were potential symptoms of mental illness; Salmond, pp. 116-117. The juror did not immediately go insane upon display of the effigy, but the defense declared the gimmick to be the cause of his problems; Salmond, p. 121).
The mistrial may have harmed the defense; the prosecution witnesses were all Loray employees with stories that sounded suspiciously similar (Salmond, p. 118). All had to admit that they did not know who had shot Aderholt (Salmond, p. 119). Several jurors said afterward that the evidence to that point inclined them toward acquittal, and most defense lawyers felt they would have been cleared; the testimony was that no one knew who shot whom (Pope, p. 290; Horton, p. 126). Some thought, too, that the prosecution, given a do-over, learned from the first trial did and didn't work, and so was able to offer a better case the second time (Salmond, p. 137).
The prosecution also decided to drop the cases against the three women and all but seven of the men. This was a sound tactical move -- since the charges were political anyway, they didn't care who they convicted, as long as they convicted someone. And, by having just seven defendants, it meant that the defense was allowed just 28 peremptory challenges of potential jurors, so the prosecution could get a jury much more to its liking (Salmond, p. 138). And the Communist Party, faction-riven and frankly too dumb to succeed, is thought by many to have coached its witnesses (who were not themselves on trial, note) to spout party propaganda rather than offer testimony best suited to clear the defendants (Salmond, p. 145). After the trial, it would kick out several of its appointed local leaders out of the party (Salmond, p. 174); the internal politics of the Communist party was one of the most disgusting things in the whole case.
After the mistrial was declared, the violence, which had been relatively mild during the court case, started up again (Pope, p. 290); raids on the union offices and camps continued, with workers beaten and kidnapped and the office itself being blown up (LetsStandTogether, p. 12; Horton, p. 127). During it, a party of toughs stopped a vehicle carrying Union organizers, and Ella was shot (more on this below, in the biography of Ella).
Ella was the only person other than Aderholt to die by violence in the Gastonia struggles (it is truly ironic that the only death resulting from the strike were of good people; the toughs on both sides survived). But her death didn't end the violence; the very next day, a union supporter was abducted and brutally beaten (Salmond, p.133). Pope, p. 293, calls what followed a ten day "reign of terror." On September 20, the Communist party and the NTWU gave up and suspended activities. By September 27, all the outsiders were gone (Pope, p. 293; Horton, p. 161).
On October 21, the seven men still on trial for Aderholt's murder were convicted; the jury needed only an hour to reach its decision (Salmond, p. 148) -- though the judge reduced the sentence from first degree murder to second degree, so none of them were executed (Horton, p. 184). The sentences the judge handed down were still harsh: Beal and three others received sentenced of 17-20 years, and even the lightest sentence was five to seven year (Salmond, p. 148). Given that there was clearly reasonable doubt that they had even killed Aderholt, it appears that being a Communist from outside of North Carolina was a crime deserving twelve years or so.
At this stage, the ILD's failure to function effectively was shown in sharp relief: Bail was available for the prisoners pending appeal, but the money wasn't available because the lawyers hadn't been paid. It was months before all the prisoners were out -- and in the meantime, lawyers and prisoners and Communist Party organs attacked each other. "It was a sad, bitter ending to what had started in April as a genuine attempt to provide assistance for an exploited and harassed group" (Salmond, p. 153). The lawyers weren't entirely blameless, but I think the bottom line is that the Communist Party had failed everyone at every level.
Eventually released on bond pending appeal, the defendants fled to Russia rather than see the case through to the end (Horton, p. 164); whlie the Soviet Union was hardly a good place to go, I suspect they were right to not trust the North Carolina appeals court.
Fred Beal would grow so disillusioned in the Soviet Union that he returned to the United States and went to prison rather than continue as a Communist (Horton, p. 165. Salmond, pp. 168-169, tells us that he claimed he never wanted to leave the U.S., and actually headed back upon arriving in Russia, prepared to serve his sentence once his appeal failed, but was convinced to go to the Soviet Union after all). He was taken into custody on February 16, 1938, and between a partial commutation of his sentence and parole, he was allowed to leave prison in January 1942. He died in 1954 (Salmond, p. 172). Apparently little is known of the others who defected, who stayed in the Soviet Union; there seem to have been various rumors, but nothing publicly confirmed (Salmond, p. 173).
That left the issue of those accused of killing Ella. Seven men were initially charged (Horton, p. 162). One of these, Horace Wheelus, is the man thought most likely to have fired the fatal shot (Horton, p. 163. He was easy to identify, since he had a deformed left hand -- and he was said to have tried to hide it in court; Salmond, p. 159; and scrambled hard to create an alibi; Salmond, p. 166. Curiously, there were deathbed confessions from others; Salmond, p. 166). But a Grand Jury refused to indict them (Salmond, p. 155). For once, the national indignation about the events in Gastonia provoked a response. The governor intervened; new investigators came in, and a new case was brought (Horton, pp. 165-166). The mill owners again bailed out their lackeys, to the tune of $37,500; Salmond, p. 159 -- in other words, enough to raise every striker's pay by about a dollar a week, or 10%, for three to four months). The ILD and the Communist Party played no part in this -- indeed, the Party didn't even want to cover it in the Daily Worker -- so what little help there was for the prosecution came from the ACLU (Salmond, pp. 159-160). This lack of funds was unfortunate, because a lot of important witnesses seemed to have faded from sight (Salmond, pp. 160-161).
The trial began February 24, 1930 (Salmond, p. 163). The prosecution -- which was led by the state's attorney general Dennis G. Brummitt! (Salmond, p. 162) -- was still hampered by the absence of key witnesses, but there were many, including Ella's lover Charlie Shope, who testified.
The defense spent much of its effort portraying Ella as godless, a communist, and a believer in racial equality (Horton, p. 166). It worked. On March 6, after less than an hour's deliberations, the jury acquitted all the defendants (Horton, p. 169), even though there is no serious question but that they were present at the murder; even if none of them fired the fatal shot, they were involved in a felonious assault in which someone died.
"Communism versus Americanism -- that was the issue of the Wiggins trial, as it had been throughout the year in Gastonia. The jury took less than thirty minutes to find all the defendants not guilty... [O]ne of the jurors explained why[:] The attorney general 'just didn't have witnesses that we could rely on,' he said. [Attorney general] Brummitt, for one, knew that perfectly well. After his closing argument, he had left the courtroom without waiting for the verdict. But 'unlike the local authorities,' wrote Fleet Williams [of the Raleigh News and Observer], Brummitt could hold his head up high. He had done all he could 'to secure exact justice" (Salmond, p. 165).
Pope, p. 295, writes, "The Wiggins trial ended the long series of criminal actions growing out of the Gastonia strikes, though several appeals were still pending. A North Carolina newspaperman wrote in summary: 'In every case where strikers were put on trial strikers were convicted; in not one case where anti-unionists or officers were accused has there been a conviction.'"
Workers managed to secure slightly shorter hours and an end to night work, but the NTWU failed and nothing replaced it (Weir/Hanlan, p. 188) -- indeed, after some mills imposed another pay cut in 1930 and the NTWU tried to return to Gaston County, "Striking workers seized the NTWU men and unceremoniously ran them out of town" (Salmond, p. 180). Joyner, p. 22, thinks the Communist Party misunderstood what was going on, and left the union to fail and Beal to face charges from the local authorities. Beal, thinking (probably correctly) that he could not get justice, fled to Russia.
In hindsight, it seems clear that the textile workers needed a union, and they needed collective action -- but the Communists completely blew it. Had they taken their time, gotten to know the people, and built a real union, they might possibly have been able to succeed. But they called the strike too soon, they insisted on wasting their time on Communist doctrine that Southerners rejected without thought, they antagonized the locals, and they had no understanding of the situation. In the end, it's likely they did more harm than good.
Fred Beal wrote a book about Gastonia, but it's listed as published in Moscow and is called "Proletarian Journey," so it perhaps has a little bias. There is also Pope's study, which is well-respected but which devotes much of its content to religion and the history of churches. Margaret Larkin wrote extensively about Ella and about Gastonia, but it all appeared in periodicals (including The Nation) rather than book form. Salmond is probably the best available book on Gastonia, and Horton is the only real book about Ella.
Salmond, p. 188( lists six novels that were written in the five years after the Gastonia strike based on the events there, but many were highly polemic and none of them had much acclaim or long-lasting success; some (based on searches of used bookstore sites) seem to have all but disappeared. Certainly you aren't likely to find them on the average library shelf.
There is a memorial marker to Aderholt, shown on p. 186 of Horton, and a memorial bridge.
In the aftermath of all this, Bulwinkle -- the lawyer who probably led the Committee of One Hundred and certainly led the prosecution of the accused strikers -- was re-elected to congress in 1930, running largely on the basis of his Gastonia success. It is a sad commentary on history that one of those he defeated in the primary was Tom Jimison, the most important defense lawyer (Salmond, p. 175).
This is one of the many songs by Ella May Wiggins about the strike. Note that it says relatively little about Aderholt and his death, and much about the trial of those accused of killing him -- it's not an anti-Aderholt song, it's a song demanding a fair trial. It uses the tune of "Floyd Collins" [Laws G22], and Horton, p. 136, notes how Ella converted the line "We'll never, no, we'll never let Floyd Collins die" into "We'll never, no, we'll never let our leaders die." This is not atypical of Ella's songs; like the early Bob Dylan, she often took an element of the song she was parodying and worked it into her rewrite.
There is a capsule biography of Ella, who was killed September 14, 1929 at the age of 29 (very possibly at the instigation of Loray mine owner Manville Jenckes), in Greenway-AmericanFolksongsOfProtest, pp. 244-247. There were many witnesses to the murder, but no one ever went on trial.
In 1979, a booklet was published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Wiggins's death, Let's Stand Together: The Story of Ella Mae Wiggins; here cited as LetsStandTogether. It's no longer easy to find -- and probably not worth the effort; although it has a very short biography of Wiggins and a few quotes from those who knew her, most of it is rhetoric on behalf of women's rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and organized labor -- good causes, but not really relevant to Wiggins or her time. Wiley Cash's novel The Last Ballad is said by Wikipedia to have been "inspired" by her life; there are other fictionalized accounts. The primary biography is Horton's (written by a great-granddaughter of Wiggins), which has the benefit of family knowledge but the disadvantage of a severe lack of objectivity (and a severe lack of the ability to write coherently).
The spelling "Ella Mae Wiggins" found in LetsStandTogether occurs elsewhere also -- including on her tombstone -- but is incorrect; the correct form is "Ella May Wiggins." Horton, p. 27, explains that her maiden name was "May"; she became "Ella May Wiggins" when she married. After her husband left her, she often signed herself simply "Ella May" again (Horton, p. 48) -- Horton, p. 94, has a note with her signature which clearly reads "Ella May," and on p. 82 prints her union card, which also reads "Ella May."
Green, p. 78, refers to Wiggins as "the tragic martyr and song maker of the 1929 Gastonia strike." On p. 79, they quote a verse of this song as an example of Wiggins' work.
Horton, p. 21, opens its description of her by saying, "She demonstrated native intelligence and raw talent. She picketed on the line, sang at union gatherings, and at times would speak to the masses... in the pre-Depression era, within her own community she was considered a woman of ill repute. She spoke her mind against authority; she was brash, blunt, and did not follow the socially accepted behavior of a woman. She was associated with rabble-rousing and threatening the very livelihood of her neighbors. She intermingled with those outside her own race." And, of course, she spent her time with communists.
Horton, p. 30, says she was born September 17, 1900 in Sevierville, Tennessee, near the border with North Carolina. Her mother Catherine Maples May was just sixteen, of Cherokee heritage; her father James May was already thirty years old and already had children by another partner. The story of the Wiggins children was tragic; Ella's younger brother Wesley accidentally shot a still younger brother, Lum, to death in 1914. Another younger sister, Hattie, died at age four of hookworm (a disease that would also afflict Ella's daughter Millie, and probably her other children as well).
The May family initially lived by farming (Horton, p. 31), but in 1910 James May took a lumbering job. and the family started moving around with the lumber camps (Horton, pp. 31-32). Ella supposedly sang in the lumber camps -- Horton, p. 32, says she sang "Little Mary Phagan" (which was a very new song at the time; one wonders where she learned it), "Lord Lovell," and "Fair Margaret and Sweet William." (I find it somewhat ironic that she sang about Mary Phagan, who was almost exactly the same age as Ella, and both worked at a time when most women did not, and both died of violence in a work-related situation, and in neither case was the guilty party punished.) Margaret Larkin (who heard her just once, while visiting the strikers, and as a result started collecting her work; Salmond, p. 113) wrote "She had a clear, true tone in her untaught voice. She sang from the chest. Full throated, unmodulated, her voice rang out in the simple monotonous tunes" (Horton, p. 135). There are also several references to her playing guitar, although it is not clear how she could have afforded one.
Ella's marital situation somewhat resembled her mother's: an older husband who already had a child. John Wiggins was seven years older than Ella and had a three-year-old named Lula, whose mother had died in childbirth. Ella and John married around 1917; their first child, Myrtle, was born in a logging camp in 1918 (Horton, p. 33. The same page has a photo of a group of men including John Wiggins). The next year, her father died when a tree fell on him (Horton, pp. 33-34), causing Ella's mother and brother to move in with Ella and John. But her mother died of a kidney ailment in 1920 (Horton, p. 34), she would have been only about 36 years old. Then John Wiggins suffered a logging accident which crushed his leg, making it hard for him to continue as a lumberman. Plus the logging companies had cleared out the area; there was little work left for him. He supposedly disappeared for long periods of time, or turned up drunk, doing little for the family except getting Ella pregnant again and again (Horton, pp. 34-35). Some people who knew him called him a "ne'er-do-well" (Salmond, p. 50).
LetsStandTogether, p. 7, opens its biography of Wiggins by saying, "Like many millhands, Ella Mae Wiggins came to Gaston County seeking a better life. She came from the mountains near the North Carolina-Tennessee line near Bryson City. Her father was a logger, but times were hard and there was no future in the hills. In the early 1920's, she, her husband, John, and their three children settled in Bessemer City, near Gastonia. But the measly salary of $8 a week was not enough to feed the family. Her husband deserted her, now with nine children to support."
It wasn't quite that simple. Ella didn't go directly to Bessemer City. Ella spent some time working on a plantation before she arrived in the mills; Horton, p. 36, and tried her luck at several mills in her short period as a mill worker (Horton, p. 37).
Also, John Wiggins still turned up from time to time -- but he didn't supply any money. Ella never formally divorced him, but eventually she stopped using his name, and started spending time with a man named Charlie Shope (Horton, p. 35). There is a picture of her with Shope on p. 49. It appears Shope, not Wiggins, fathered her youngest child -- indeed, the birth certificate apparently agreed with that -- and he apparently had gotten her pregnant when she died; Horton, p. 49. (Ella doesn't seem to have had much judgment in men; Wiggins was a drunk, and the children said Shope was mean; Horton, p. 49. On the other hand, he had enough money to buy a car; Horton, p. 78. It fascinated Ella enough that she drove it when he was away -- and crashed it.)
Four of her nine children died young. Ella once told a crowd they all died of whooping cough, because she had no money for medical assistance. The mill supervisor wouldn't even let her change her shift to better care for them (Wiley, p. 93; Horton, p. 83). The children did die, of course, but Ella was oversimplifying (to give it the most generous interpretation). The situation as described on p. 37 of Horton is more complicated; the children did not die all at once, and not all of whooping cough. Two -- possibly twins -- died in Cowpens, South Carolina, the first mill where she worked; at least one (and probably both, if they were twins) died shortly after birth. Another child died after she arrived in Gaston County; Millie, of the surviving children thought this was a girl named Thelma. And a boy named Guy, born 1925, died in 1927 of pellegra. (Supporting evidence for this comes from surviving photos of the children. All have extremely short hair -- evidence that Ella was trying to do something about their skin rashes.) In America. In 1927. Although the cause of pellegra (niacin deficiency) was not discovered for another decade, it would take an extraordinarily poor diet to explain that! Nonetheless the children did suffer many diseases as well; Millie Wiggins is reported to have had diptheria, measles, chicken pox, and whooping cough in 1926-1927, in addition to hookworm. Plus malnutrition from having bad food and not enough of it (Horton, p. 51). They had poor clothes and no shoes (Horton, p. 52). They were so ill-clad that Ella would not send them to school (Horton, p. 52).
All that unconventional activity caused her to develop a bad reputation (Salmond, p. 51) -- understandable, by the standards of the time. She simply didn't fit the conventional society of rural North Carolina.
So Ella became a radical (LetsStandTogether, pp. 7-8) -- which meant that the mills often weren't interested in keeping her on despite their need for workers (Horton, p. 38) -- which perhaps explains how she ended up working at the American Mill #2; the working conditions there were reportedly the worst in the state (Horton, p. 46; Salmond, p. 51), and it was the one which suffered the most strikes (Horton, p. 53), so it was the place where the workers rejected by other mills would end up. She also lived farther from the mill than most workers because the housing there was cheaper (Horton, p. 47). She was truly radical, for a southern woman: She actually turned to Blacks, who were subjected to even worse conditions than the White workers, to try to form a common front. (The NTWU wanted to include the Backs, but no one local -- Black or white -- wanted to have the races mix. The Blacks wouldn't go near the NTWU organizers. It seems that only Ella could get them to listen; Salmond, pp. 65-66.)
Unfortunately, the Communists' willingness to treat Blacks as human beings probably hurt the strike (Horton, p. 95); the millhands might have been worked like slaves for pay little better than slaves, but at least they thought themselves better than those n****ers -- and crossed the picket line rather than see Blacks succeed alongside them. The White strikers disliked even songs like "Solidarity Forever," sung as it was to the objectionable tune of "John Brown's Body" (Salmond, pp. 61-62). But Ella treated people as people.
"Early in the strike Ella May became involved with the NTWU. Ella was not a regular speaker at the meetings in the beginning. However, Ella was a regular attendee, both at Bessemer City [her home] and Gastonia. She would stand to the side, listen t the speakers, and observe the crowd.... Se would often chew tobacco while attentively watching others speak. Unlike many of the single young women, she did not appear to primp herself prior to meetings. In fact, despite her youthful age of twenty-eight she looked older, won, and thin. Her plump belly, which contained her unborn child, stuck out against her petite frame. She often held her youngest baby Charlotte in her arms as she listened to strike organizers and fellow workers. While she did not always speak, she did always seem to have a song ready. After union business was done she would perform for the strikers" (Horton, p. 81).
Her role increased as more leaders were locked up (Horton, p. 136); she started giving speeches as well as singing -- though apparently she embroidered her facts sometimes (Horton, p. 83).
Her reward was reportedly that someone poisoned the spring where she got her water (LetsStandTogether, p. 9; Horton, p. 112, adds that the man who probably did it was caught trying to poison the strikers' camp, but was bailed out by the mill owners and never punished). And she spent time in prison; some of her songs were apparently written there (Horton, p. 84). It appears she wrote many more songs than have survived; she apparently worked on material almost every day, and would often be called upon to sing something in her "deep, resonant voice" at union meetings (Salmond, p. 61).
It is reported that someone attacked and raped Ella's 11-year-old daughter Myrtle in this period (Horton, pp. 111-112). I would not automatically assume this was an intimidation tactic, but it shows how the extent to which the forces of "law and order" felt entitled to attack the strike leaders. Clearly the man who did it thought he could get away with it.
After the Gastonia Strike was failing, and after the death of Aderholt, Wiggins helped organize a truckload of workers to go to a rally (LetsStandTogether, pp. 12-13). "On September 14, 1929, Ella and about twenty other Bessemer City union members prepared to travel seven miles east to South Gastonia. The NTWU had planned a rally.... [and] the Bessemer City group did not realize it had been canceled due to fear of retribution by the Committee of 100" (Horton, p. 147).
"Two dozen or so Bessemer City NTWU mambers gathered at their Bessemer City union headquarters. Ella, seven months pregnant, her lover Charlie, her brother Wesley, and the other NTWU members climbed aboard the bed of a rented pickup truck. Some men in the group wanted to bring guns for protection.... Ella was the one who convinced the men in the truck to travel unarmed" (Horton, p. 149).
The truck was stopped by an armed force. The truck driver, a hired man, accepted the guards' order to turn back (Horton, p. 149). The truck turned around -- and was pursued by several vehicles. One got in front of it; the truck and this other vehicle collided. Vera Buch Weisbord quoted Wiggins's cousin Charley's account of what came next (quoted on p. 13 of LetsStandTogether):
"[T]his Essex coach run right around the front o' us an' we collided with it. So we was stopped an' it was then that Ella Mae was standin' at the railin' of the truck leanin' against it, an' a man come up not fifteen feet away and raised a gun an' fired at her.
"She turned to me an' said, 'O my Lord, they've done shot and killed me.' I caught her in my arms and Ella died right then. They shot her through the heart and killed her." [N.B. the orthography -- in particular, the alternation between "an'" and "and" -- is in the original!]
Of course, that's just one person's account, and other witnesses differed. But there is no question: Ella was shot at the site of the collision. The bullet ruptured her aorta and lodged in her spine (Salmon, p. 128); she died within seconds.
Supposedly dozens of shots were fired thereafter, but there were only a few other injuries and no other deaths (Horton, p. 150).
When Ella did not come home that night, the children went to a black neighbor -- who knew what had happened and told them. Only Myrtle, the oldest, had any real possibility of understanding what had happened, and none of them knew what to do; they simply turned around and returned home. Charlie Shope, Ella's lover, who was there when she was killed said he came to them -- but didn't stick around long. It was the undertaker who handled Ella's body, Frank Sisk, who first took in the children (Horton, p. 151).
Ella was buried in a $10 grave, without a marker; it was feared that it would be vandalized if one were set up (Horton, p. 156); it was not until 1977 that a proper headstone was set up (Horton, p. 177, with a photo on p. 180). The children were in borrowed clothes (Horton, p. 157, with a photo on p. 158). They sang Ella's "Mill Mother's Lament" over her grave.
Her five surviving children ended up in orphanages (LetsStandTogether, p. 14); although the NTWU organizers wanted to take them in, no one in the mill country wanted them to fall into the hands of northern Communists (Horton, p. 157; given the propaganda mills the Party ran at that time, was probably wise). The children were better off than they had been with their mother, but apparently felt isolated and mistreated; Myrtle the eldest, at least, seems to have missed her mother dearly (Horton, pp. 157-158; there are photos of the four older children at the orphanage on p. 159). At times they were abused. When they visited their relatives, things often weren't much better (Horton, p. 160). All apparently suffered severe symptoms of anxiety and fear.
II is a sad and astonishing commentary on the way American politics works that Wiggins's children wound up being vigorously anti-union, and on the fiftieth anniversary of her death spoke against unions (Green, p. 80); in 1977, when Ella was commemorated by various unions, Millie, the second surviving daughter (and Horton's grandmother), thought the unions were exploiting her mother's memory (Horton, p. 178). Her brother Wesley also skipped the event (Horton, p. 179).
"For the mill faction, Ella May's death did settle the score, and things could and did get back to normal. For the strikers, Ella May's death confirmed the brutality of their oppressors and, in the manner of that confirmation, unsinewed their resolve. As the fall of 1929 wore on, the striking mill mothers and their children went back to mill life, their singing resistance and hope for a better life a memory."
(Ironic that, half a century later, their grandchildren were mourning the loss of the mills, as recounted, e.g., in Si Kahn's "Aragon Mill.")
Ella's death caused enough of a stink that the governor actually ordered it to be looked into -- and quickly. Seven men were arrested; the mill manager promptly bailed them out (Salmond, pp. 128-129).
"The Grand Jury, which met in Gastonia on January 13, 1930, had more than 60 witnesses willing to testify to the crime. One positively identified the killer. Indictments were returned against five Loray Mill workers. On March 6, 1930, however, they were all acquitted" (LetsStandTogether, p. 13. However, Salmond, p. 66, says "There is simply no evidence one way or another about who was responsible for May's death, and why." Horton, p. 154, admits the lack of certainty but thinks it "more likely that the shooter knew exactly what he was doing and who he was doing it to." It seems nearly certain that it was deliberate murder, although I don't think it certain that the murderer knew the identity of the person he shot. Vera Buch suggested that Ella was killed for a personal reason rather than he labor work as such: because she had reached out to Blacks; Horton, p. 155).
There is now an "Ella May Wiggins Memorial Committee"; their web site is ellamaywiggins.com. It has texts (but not tune references or music) for many of her songs.
The American Mill #2, where Ella worked, was still standing as of 2013; it had by then become the Dawn Processing plant. Dawn Processing still exists in Bessemer City in 2021; the listed address is 205 E Alabama Avenue (corner of Alabama Avenue and 11th Street), but it looks fairly decrepit and shows no signs of its history in the Google Street View photos.
It's interesting to ask whether there has been any folk processing between the Burt-AmericanMurderBallads and Greenway versions. The tunes differ by only a single note, and the lyrics by only a single word; either might have been a printing error. But they are ever so slightly different.
Wiley, p. 90 says that twelve songs from the strike survive in print, though he is sure there were others. All are new texts set to existing tunes.
For another song about these events, see "Up In Old Loray," sung to the tune of "On Top of Old Smokey"; it is listed in the "Same Tune" field to "Old Smokey." It too is in Greenway, and a version was printed in NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal; as of this writing, I have no reason to think it genuinely traditional, but it was remembered in North Carolina. The author was Odell Corley, whom Wiley, p. 90, was only eleven years old at the time of the strike, and worked as a "spare hand," so she earned very little (spare hands were paid less, even though they usually worked full shifts, and the bosses ignored child labor laws; Horton, p. 140). Salmond, p. 63, calls her "frail" and says that "the ILD dubbed [her] the poet laureate of the strike." Given her precocious skill, I'm surprised that we don't find more records of her as an activist or songwriter as an adult. She also wrote something called "May I Sleep in Your Tent Tonight, Beal?," which does not seem to have been as well-remembered. Horton, pp. 198-199, prints the latter under the title "Let Me Sleep in Your Tent Tonight, Beal," "Com on You Scabs If You Want to Hear" (built around "Casey Jones," and, like Ella's songs, using some of its imagery), and a fragment called "I Bought a Scab for Fifty Cents" (to the tune of "Mademoiselle from Armentières"). "Up In Old Loray" is on pp. 197-198 or Horton.
Another woman, Daisy McDonald (oddly enough, she, like Ella, was part-Cherokee, and had a crippled husband and a lot of children and had to support her family herself; Horton, p. 105), wrote a song "On a Summer Eve" (based on one or another member of the "Ship That Never Returned"/"Wreck of the Old 97" family) that in part was about Ella May's murder (Wiley, p. 91, although Horton, p. 144, notes a number of errors it contains); it is the last of the surviving strike songs (Wiley, p. 92). McDonald used the same melody for a song Salmond, p. 62, calls "The Speakers Didn't Mind." The two McDonald songs -- apparently the only two she wrote that survive -- are reprinted on pp. 199-201 of Horton.
But it was Ella May's songs that really took flight. The other Wiggins song in the Index is "The Mill Mother's Lament," to the tune of "Mary Phagan" [Laws F20] -- which, as we saw above, was a song Ella had known for a long time. "Two Little Strikers" has a "Same Tune" entry under "Orphan's Lament (Two Little Children, Left Jim and I Alone)." "All Around the Jailhouse," to the tune of the song we call "Ten Thousand Miles Away from Home (A Wild and Reckless Hobo; The Railroad Bum)" [Laws H2], apparently is about Ella May's own life (Wiley, pp. 92-93).
A quarter of a century later, Malvina Reynolds wrote a song, "Ballad of Ella Mae" (sic.), which is found on pp. 203-204 of Horton. On the following pages, Horton prints "The Murder of Ella May Wiggins Song," which Gary Green wrote and recorded on a Folkways album.
Horton, p. 186, lists six historical novels with Loray Mill strike links, many of which have characters based on Ella. I doubt they live up to the reality. - RBW
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