With regard to the perspective offered by conventional accounts of the past, Alex Haley maintained: ôHistory is written by the winners.ö The United Textile Workers-led general strike of 1934 included one third of a million mill workers pitted against the powerful forces of mill ownership and unsympathetic politicians, the most significant action of Depression-era labor in the South. The three-week long strike and the events leading up to it and those that came after it are the subject of filmmakers George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne RostockÆs The Uprising of Æ34.
By pidcing together a significant number of individual recollections of the event from the perspective of survivor accounts and footage from the era, the filmmakers attempt to counterbalance the seven decades of silence surrounding the most significant organized labor movement in the U.S. South û a region whose workers were often thought to be anti-union. As Flora Maye Caldwell, a southern textile worker, says at the beginning of the documentary: ôIt was rumored that there was a union, somewhere back in the æ30s. But nobody will talk about it.ö
In the late 1920s, southern textile unions began to emerge. Because of declining real wages and increased workloads, mill workers engaged in strikes and began to seek union representation. The election of Franklin Dl. Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the establishment of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) further encouraged southern textile mill workers to form independent unions. Known as ôlintheads,ö the filmmakers show how powerful mill owners and politicians only too ready to send in militia to oppose strikers eventually eroded the mill workerÆs faith that the New Deal would help secure their democratic rights. Many who wrote angry letters to New Deal officials are in the film, reading letters they wrote six decades earlier.
To show why history is often written by the winners,
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