One of the more intriguing aspects of Southern history is the industrialization that occurred in the period following the Civil War. Many in the South blamed the loss of the war on the lack of an industrial base. While there were those who sought to reconstruct a separate regional identity in the hearts and minds of Southerners, there were still others who eagerly sought to build a New South that would look remarkably like the industrialized North.

These individuals set out to ally themselves with Northern Capital to develop the South. Birmingham, Alabama was a case in point. It was blessed with rich iron ore deposits, and nearby coal and limestone. All it needed to become a major site for the production of steal was capital, and railroads to transport the raw materials and finished products.

These budding industrialists were among the first to mount a serious challenge to the Religion of the Lost Cause. Where Sledd and other dissenters were little more than gad-flies, these industrialists had the resources to attack the Religion of the Lost Cause, and survive. In so doing, they helped move the South into the modern world both physically, and psychologically.

In focusing on the ante-bellum era, the Religion of the Lost Cause attacked the greedy commercial and industrial interests of North, and chose to contrast this grasping, materialistic way of life to the agrarian, spiritual, life of Southerners before and during the war. To accept Northern ways in the realm of business--they claimed--was an act of apostasy. Indeed, they claimed the North was mounting a new invasion. This time the invaders weren't being led by US Grant, but by such Lords of Capital as the Carnegies and Rockefellers.

To bolster this line of argument, many ministers argued that the South must serve as a model to the corrupt North. In 1872 at Washington and Lee College, Benjamin Morgan Palmer,--a Presbyterian--gave an address in which he "foretold the impending crisis" of the social effects of industrialization in the South. No doubt this language was intended to remind people of an earlier "impending crisis" that had led to a Northern invasion. Palmer went on to predict that the traditional Southern sense of honor would be destroyed, and would be followed by the swift decay of virtue." "The Spirit of Materialism," he continued with classic prophetic imagery, "infused into all the transactions of business and common life, is the Angel of Pestilence dropping the seeds of death from it's black wing wherever it sweeps. It is this subtle and dangerous spirit which is at the bottom of that fearful demoralization that has spread like a leprosy over the land."

Another leader of the Lost Cause was Albert Taylor Bledsoe, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Bledsoe was one of the greatest diehard defenders of the Confederacy. Earlier in his career , he had wrote an essay proving Jefferson Davis had not been guilty of treason. Now he described how "The great defect of Northern Civilization is it's materiality. It is of the earth, earthy, and ignores the spirituality of our nature. Its grand motive and object is the accumulation of money; and its prime boast is of the things money can buy--"the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.' Mammon is its god; and nowhere has he more devout and abject worshippers, or has set up a more polluted civilization than in the North."? To Bledsoe, the South's poverty was a badge of righteousness.

Wolves in Confederate Gray

This kind of opposition in many churches and denominations did not last long. Being shrewd men, many industrialists stole a page from the Religion of the Lost Cause. They set out to inoculate their industrial projects from attack by using Confederates to serve as front men for their industrial investments. PGT Beauregard and Jubal Early were two of the more famous Confederates who sold their services. Such measures served to limit criticism, but there were still sermons decrying this dependence on the money of the wealthy. Although by the late 1880's such criticism was ceasing, there were still warning about materialism as late as World War I.

One of the leading proponents of this industrialized New South was Henry W. Grady, the Publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. This newspaper became a proponent for the new industrial order that was taking shape as a result of the efforts of such men as Washington Duke of Durham, and R.J. Reynolds of Winston-Salem. The Dukes' vision was not limited to Tobacco. James B. Duke, Washington's son, played a key role in the establishment of Duke Power and the expansion of hydroelectric dams in the Catawba River Basin. His work helped lay the foundation for the textile industry by providing cheap electricity to run the looms.

Like industrialists in the rest of nation, these Southerners were advocates of Laissez Faire. "Let Buffalo gore Buffalo" was the Duke motto. They bought up a number of tobacco companies--including RJR. Although it is not well known in Winston-Salem, this was the first buy-out of Reynolds Tobacco. Later the Tobacco trust was broken up by anti-trust measures, and the companies that Duke had bought were divested.

There were those in churches who also advocated this new order. By the 1880's, southern churchmen, like Atticus Haygood, the president of Emory College, were championing the rise of a new re-constructed South. They proposed increased industrialization, urbanization, improved education, harmonious race relations, and a more national focus as the prescription for what ailed the region. They accepted the alliance of Northern capitalists and Southern ruling class to promote the region's development.

There were rewards for clergy who surrendered their Lost Cause religion, and became advocates for a New South of industry and commerce. There were contributions for buildings and operating funds. (This is still done. We at Sunrise received funds from Sara Lee for our building. This practice is a legacy from the period that we are now looking at.) Many ministers were paid directly by the mill for caring for its workers. This symbiotic relationship between church and corporation was more than a sign of appreciation for the Church's service, or the role it played in helping foster industry. But with money, came control, as we will see later.

On one level, all of this was much ado over nothing. Listening to the jeremiads about the evils of materialism, or the rosy portraits of the blessings that would accrue to the South if it encouraged industry and commerce, it is easy to accept the traditional view of the period of the 1880's as having marked the beginning of an industrial awakening that transformed South. But as C. Vann Woodward points out in his book, Origins of the New South, the reality was somewhat different. In fact, the focus of industrialization was limited to particular regions and industries. The rest of the region remained pretty much as it was. Tobacco was the focus of Richmond, Winston, and Durham. While steel was concentrated in Birmingham. Textiles centered around Gastonia, Spartenburg, and a few other cities.

The major impact of the new industrial order, according to Woodward, was in the number of new urban areas that were spawned. Industry drew farmers off land and led to such new towns as Durham, Winston, Greenville, Anniston, Birmingham, and Danville. The South on the eve of WW I was still the most agrarian section of the nation. Only 4% of North Carolina was urban. The South had 17% of the nation's factories and 11% of capital in 1860. By 1900, that had declined to 15% of the nation's factories and 11% of its capital.

The Reconstruction that Took

Yet, industrialization was--to use Carl Degler's phrase--the reconstruction that took. The effort to hold on to the Old South would ultimately fail. But those who planted the seeds of industrialization would be the ones who have truly shaped the South of our own day.

By the end of the century, villages were fighting to get new textile plants. Incentives were being offered in communities, and in the accompanying publicity towns and villages painted themselves as an image of an industrial Eden. That the reality was often quiet different did not seem to matter.

The way that churches responded to this change is intriguing. Over the course of just a few years there was a shift from vocal opposition to industrialization on the part of the churches toward becoming silent supporters of the new commercial order. And at least in the case of Haygood, these active cheerleaders of the new order turned a blind eye to the social consequences which were numerous, ranging from unemployment during frequent depressions, to child labor, to white slavery, and the new slavery of factories that afflicted whites, to the growing chasms between rich and poor.

As industry expanded in the wake of war, it had the effect of concentrating wealth in the hands of just a few persons. This only mimicked a process that was going on nationally. This was also the period of the Great Barbecue, of the Gilded Age as it was sometimes known. By 1890, one percent of the families owned more than 1/2 of the wealth of the country. The industrial machine left individual feeling insignificant and powerless. Whereas on a national level this concentration of wealth led labor to unsuccessfully attempt to create a counterbalance to concentrated capital by staging bloody strikes in 1877, 1886, 1892, 1894, the South for a long period was relatively immune to such actions despite similar circumstances.

Mill owners quickly became wealthy from their investment. Their profits from the mills rivaled those of Hillary Clinton's now infamous stock trades. One investor who put $5000 in a mill made $5000 a year for each of 9 years. Many earned 30% and more on their investment. Residences of $100,000 and more were not uncommon, while mill villages were populated with homes in the $700-2,000 price range. The average weekly wage was just shy of $15.

Despite such disparities, the South's laboring classes were late to organize, and what efforts were made were destroyed by the strike of 1929 in Gastonia. The looms were worked by men, women and children drawn from those persons who had lost land their land during the post-war period and Reconstruction. Sharecroppers hoping to make a fresh new start were drawn to the mill village where a house and job awaited. Such an arrangement appealed to people with little. They were well acquainted with hard work. All the members of a family worked on farm, and so few people saw anything wrong with children going into the mills for 12-14 hours a day. (Refugees are willing put up with almost anything to get a fresh start, and these people were refugees from the slavery of sharecropping).

It must be pointed out that African-Americans were excluded from these mill villages and these mill jobs. The mill and its village were refuges for poor Whites, but they soon discovered that they had traded one slavery for another. The mill village was not all that different from sharecropping, they were soon to discover. They quickly became indebted to the company store just as they had to their landlords. The had to keep working in the mill to pay off a debt that kept growing as they worked for low wages, and bought goods on credit that were high priced due to large mark-ups. Anyone who challenged a boss for overworking his hands, or who protested the low wages was inviting the eviction of one's family, and the call of one's debt. With no land, no money, the worker had few options.

The Loray Mill Strike and the Response of the Church

It was in this situation that the Loray Mill in Gastonia. sought to reduce wages further through a stretch-out. The company decided to double the workload, but to keep wages the same. When workers complained they were dismissed, and were replaced by lower wage workers from rural South Carolina (the third world country of that day and this).

Using such measures, the strike was broken. The owners claimed the strike had been Communist inspired which led to a loss of public sympathy. To compound matters for the men and women of the factories, they were also deserted by their pastors. Many became informers for the mill owners and passed off on the suitability of new hires. The Churches encouraged the workers to defer to their betters, and to accept their lot in life. And many did, withdrawing into an other worldly religion.

There were a number of reasons for this. Churches were deterred from giving moral leadership in the industrial crisis by: (1) laissez-faire economics and (2) their past legacy. As far as laissez-faire economics were concerned, most churches were inclined to accept it as theological orthodoxy. Laissez-faire economics was the ghost of the doctrine of God's providence dressed in the ill-fitting clothes of eighteenth century scientific law. It taught that there is a good Creator who undergirded human relations with beneficent principles, and that if only man could avoid interfering with these principles everything would work out for the best. Thus if the individual served his own enlightened self interest it was supposed that he was serving the good of the whole.

On its face, laissez-faire seemed convincingly Christian, but in the true spirit of the Enlightenment, it eliminated the crucial doctrines of the Fall and of human sin, doctrines which point to the necessity for regulation and restraint. Laissez-faire economics thus encouraged an unrealistic optimism and a lack of moral disciple which would have horrified classical Protestantism. Unfortunately, this view of human relations only intensified with the rise of the Social Darwinism which taught that only the fittest would survive.

The second reason Churches did not challenge the new industrial culture was their past legacy. Southern churches were singularly unprepared to deal with the moral problems of the new industrial order. Just as they had failed to challenge the great moral evil of slavery, now they found themselves unable to address the dehumanization of persons who worked in the factories of the South. Because they had come to view religion largely as a matter of personal experience of salvation, the Churches of the South found themselves unable to speak to these pressing social issues. Such was not their province. They could, they believed, only address questions of individual morality. But if that were not bad enough, they were made even more captive by the mill village culture, and the subsidies they received. As a consequence, they were impotent to discuss the low wages and child labor that was common.

Resources for Change

This is not to suggest that resources were not available to bring about change. Rising interest in the social sciences offered valuable social resources to church. Sociology--a term first coined by Auguste Comte in 1837--had by 1880 been fully accepted as an academic discipline in a number of leading American institutions of higher learning. By 1900, sociology was being taught in both Protestant and Catholic seminaries.

But it made little impact on the South. The only figure to utilize sociology to any degree was Liston Pope who studied at Yale. He focused on the dynamics of Gastonia, and the role played by the churches there in support of the existing social order.

There was also the growing influence of socialism. In 1877, the Socialist Labor Party was organized, and in 1898 Social Democratic Party. In the 1880's, American clergy were unanimously opposed to socialism. After 1890, however, many leaders responsible for shaping Protestant social thought adopted a number ideas from Socialism, while a small minority went so far as to became avowed socialists. In 1889, the Society of Christian Socialists formed under the leadership of W.D.P. Bliss. Although it never had a widespread following, its ideals infiltrated mainline thinking.

Kingdom of God and the New Theology

But perhaps the greatest resource open to Southern Churches was the New Theology just coming onto the scene. Protestants expressed many of the ideas borrowed from Socialism in theological terms that were closely related to the changes that were taking place in the broader society. Instead of focusing on the individual's experience of God, and standards of individual morality which had proven to be largely ineffective in the new order, exponents of a Social Christianity offered a social doctrine of the Kingdom of God.

They came to see the Kingdom--not as the product of a Divine catastrophe--but as a human endeavor, a society that grows up in midst of disciples of Christ. This was the Kingdom that Jesus had talked about, but this original pristine message had been corrupted and then replaced by the church, which had domesticated his gospel. Advocates of a Social Gospel did not expect isolated individuals to change society, but thought of this new society of disciples as a transforming power, as a community of the ethically earnest. This vision of the Kingdom of God was no longer otherworldly, but of this world and ethical. The idea of the Kingdom of God was preferred to that of Church for two reasons. The concept of individualism had so weakened the idea of the church, that there was not that much substance left. Secondly, the Kingdom of God provided a way for Christians and Non-Christians to have a common base for ethical action in way the Church could not do, in that it was made up of the ethically interested, rather than a community of the redeemed.

Other aspects of the New Theology contributed to its social interest and involvement. The doctrine of God's immanence (a major theme in the New Theology) broke down the barrier between the sacred and secular, and prepared the way for the application of Christian principles to society as a whole. Philosophical idealism, likewise, encouraged this emphasis. God is not outside the social process, but within it. These ideas combined with the doctrine of Evolution to create an optimistic attitude toward social problems and toward history as a whole. God is now in the process of working out his purposes in society, the argued, creating a demand for immediate social renewal.

This new approach to the faith went under different names. The earliest tendency was to refer to it as the New Theology. Another name was the Social Gospel, a term that came to be applied to this way of thinking just before the turn of the century. But there was a difference in these two theological movements. Where the New Theology had sought to reconstruct theology, the Social Gospel sought the reconstruction of society. By 1910, the Social Gospel was the term most widely used to describe this new movement.

Two of the new movement's principle spokespersons were Washington Gladden, and Josiah Strong. They urged that the rights of labor be respected, and industrial peace be made. They also warned of dire social changes if steps were not taken to alleviate the pressure on the poor. They advocated on behalf of just wages, and profit sharing, at the same time as they denounced concentrations of wealth, unrestrained competition, and laissez faire.

The Social Gospel was not a revolutionary attack on capitalism from the outside, but an effort to reform it from within. It showed a timely awareness that society is more than the aggregate of individuals composing it; and realized that Christianity had deep ethical obligations to society. It sought to state these obligations in terms of the theology of the day. Before the end of the nineteenth century, it was gaining entrance into many seminaries, and soon after the turn of the century had received official recognition from leading denominations. Indeed, the Social Gospel was a major factor in creating the Federal Council of Churches in 1908, the forerunner to the National Council of Churches.

But in the South, as our reading for today makes clear, the idea of a Social Gospel had little or no impact on the church.

A Summary of Liston Pope's Argument

Beginning with the various factors which led to the industrialization of the Southern piedmont in the late nineteenth century, Pope suggests that the rise of the Cotton Mills in Gaston County was in large part a community exercise in which the churches were involved both directly and indirectly. As these mills flourished, and "mill villages" grew up around them, the local churches were not unaffected by this new order, increasing both in membership and in wealth. Moreover , as the new wealth began to lead to class distinctions in the general populace, the churches also began to mirror these divisions. Wide social and economic gaps appeared between denominations as each became identified with one or more of the emerging classes, and new sects began to arise to fill the vacuum created by these class divisions. As the wealth of the community grew, increasingly churches came to recognize that their prosperity depended on the preservation of the paternalistic mill system, particularly in light of the fact that budgets and salaries were subsidized heavily by the mill owners. Few efforts were made to address the social and economic evils of the mill system. Instead, ministers tended to concern themselves with questions of individual morality. As a result, when the Loray strike led by communists broke out in Gastonia, the clergy supported management, rather than the strikers, and played a significant role in crushing the unrest by presenting the strike as an attack on the Christian faith itself. So significant was their role, that it was to the clergy the mill owners turned to insure the cultural reintegration of the community, and the eradication of any remaining communist influence.

Thesis

The events of the Loray strike of 1929 do not lend themselves to either an "economic interpretation of history," or to an interpretation in which "religious factors" are to be considered "determinative of all social patterns," rather they suggest that "religious and economic institutions can have a complex symbiotic or reciprocal relationship" which in turn can have a powerful impact on patterns of social development.

Bibliography

The bibliography provided by the author is both extensive and through, and the annotations which accompany each citation are extremely helpful in evaluating the given document or source in question as to its bias or value to the scholar. From the listing of sources it is apparent that the author did a great deal of his research in unpublished manuscripts, records, graduate theses, ecclesiastical records, pamphlets, government records, newspapers and periodicals of the period. While the bibliographical citations do not always indicate the location where documents may be found, the reader is informed in the book's preface that much of the research was done in the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University, the Montreat Historical Foundation of Montreat, N.C., the Wake Forest College Library, the Gastonia Public Library, and the Ruthenberg Library in New York.

Critique

Millhands and Preachers was written in 1942, and despite its age, the author's insights into a dynamic relationship between a community and its churches remains fresh and original. His discussion of the "class church" is particularly interesting to the modern student of American religious life because so little has changed in fifty three years. Most congregations today are segregated along social and economic lines despite a great deal of effort on the part of denominational leaders to make them more exclusive.

While Millhands and Preachers is an impressive study of an obscure, but important event, it has a number of faults which limit it's usefulness. First, the author accepts uncritically church statistics on membership or giving, and then proceeds to draw a number of important conclusions from them. Unfortunately, such statistics are perhaps the least reliable sources of information that one could use. Generally speaking, the minister of a church reports such information, and there is a tendency to report more members, and less giving than is true in reality. (One's prestige is enhanced by a large membership, while the amount of money one is expected to raise for the national church is reduced by reporting a low collection.)

Secondly, Mr. Pope fails to recognize that much of the unwillingness to speak out on social issues that was evidenced by the churches of Gaston Country was due as much to the fact that they were Southern churches as it was to their economic bondage to the mill system. Early in the nineteenth century, Southern churches were forced to declare themselves on that most pressing of social concerns--slavery--and most were content to assert that social matters of this sort were beyond the jurisdiction of the Church in order to avoid attacking the region's "peculiar institution." Only those issues relating to individual morality such as drunkenness, gambling, and dancing were considered to be proper objects of ecclesiastical pronouncements. This tradition of distinguishing between social and personal concerns did not end with slavery, but became a characteristic trait of the Southern churches in the years following the war. The refusal of the Gaston Country churches to espouse a social gospel is perfectly understandable in light of their heritage.

Despite these criticisms, Millhands and Preachers remains an important work that can not be easily dismissed. It is one that every graduate student should be familiar.