On April 7, 1902, the workers at the King Mill in Augusta went on strike demanding a 10% increase in pay. In retaliation, local mill owners closed all of the local mills, which included King Mill plus all the mills in Horse Creek Valley on the other side of the Savannah River — Vaucluse, Graniteville, Warrenville, Bath, Langley, and Clearwater. The closures instantly threw 10,000 people out of work.
The King Mill strike was coordinated with a number of strikes at unionized textile mills, both large and small, throughout the northeastern US, all scheduled to begin on April 7th, which had been organized by various labor unions — textile workers, weavers, loomfixers, and mule spinners, and others.
A major victory occurred 10 days before the scheduled strike as the New Bedford, Massachusetts mill strike was called off on March 28th after the mill’s managers yielded and agreed to the 10% pay increase. The hope among all workers was, of course, that other mill owners would follow suit. (1) That didn’t happen.
Locally, it was the mill workers from the Horse Creek Valley mills that helped break the strike.
One thing all millworkers shared in common that spring — union and non-union, north and south, alike — was headlines. For a while, the news of Aiken area mill workers was read in papers all over the country: from the Boston Daily Globe — which ran numerous stories throughout the spring — to the Portland Morning Oregonian, to the Savannah Morning News, to the Omaha Daily Bee, to the Baltimore Sun, to the Butte Inter Mountain, (out of Butte, Montana), to the Blackfoot Bingham News, (out of Blackfoot, Idaho), to the Thomasville Time Enterprise, (out of Thomasville, Georgia), to the Yorkville Enquirer, (out of York, SC). Hundreds of stories about Aiken County’s mill workers in newspapers papers all over the country.
Curiously, I was unable to find any record whatsoever of this story in the Aiken Standard. What role the absence of news coverage on important stories of the day may, or may not, play in the history of a place is good food for thought on this Labor Day.
________________
(1) Sourced from various articles in The Boston Globe, March 29, 1902. Pgs 1 and 4.
Thanks for this informative article. Sometimes the most important history is what’s been forgotten.
Hmmm, that would have been about the time of Yellow Journalist’s great great great grandsire. The revolution will not be televised or in this case, published. Thank goodness for The Aiken Chronicles who is not afraid to cover what is really happening in Aiken.
Thanks for the Labor Day-appropriate intriguing and informative article.
RE: “Curiously, I was unable to find find any record whatsoever of this story in the Aiken Standard.”
Seems as though the “Aiken Standard” of today, is pretty much like the “Aiken Standard” of times gone by. That is, nothing of much value can be found therein.