Like Fire in Broom Straw

Drawing heavily on a series of southern newspapers, Whalen (Queen's College, North Carolina) carefully explores their accounts of the textile strikes that rippled across the region from 1929 to 1931. The southern press's examination of the labor turmoil proved to be inconsistent, hesitant, and incomplete, demonstrating perplexities, contradictions, and downright confusions. Whalen asserts that the strikes were tied to the enormous tectonic shift in the southern mind that was to eventually transform the South. In the short run, newspapers attempted to balance market developments with human rights and democratic precepts. Forced to grapple with the often-dire conditions afflicting workers, those same publications came to view themselves as independent voices that demonstrated fortitude and moral rectitude. Moreover, editors portrayed their newspapers as representatives of the democratic community. The media, they insisted, had to avoid extremes on either side of the spectrum--the plutocracy or communist agitators. Consequently, longstanding ties between the newspapers and mill barons became more tenuous. While damning radicals as irrational, anarchistic, and un-American, the papers frequently referred to laborers as overworked, underpaid, and mercilessly exploited. With the passage of time, some came to depict labor unions in a more moderate, if not an altogether positive, light. Recommended for general libraries and advanced students. -Choice Anyone interested in journalism history and textile history in the South will find both in Robert W. Whalen's well-written narrative, Like Fire in Broom Straw. -The North Carolina Historical Review ... a fine book, refreshingly well-written for a monograph and elegantly slim, worthy of the widest readership among historians of southern labor and journalism and of southern society more generally. -The Register Whalem has succeeded here in showing that the New South was a more complex phenomenon than has often been supposed. His book is an imaginative contribution to understanding the New South. -The Journal of Economic History ?Anyone interested in journalism history and textile history in the South will find both in Robert W. Whalen's well-written narrative, Like Fire in Broom Straw. ?-The North Carolina Historical Review ?...a fine book, refreshingly well-written for a monograph and elegantly slim, worthy of the widest readership among historians of southern labor and journalism and of southern society more generally.?-The Register ?Whalem has succeeded here in showing that the New South was a more complex phenomenon than has often been supposed. His book is an imaginative contribution to understanding the New South.?-The Journal of Economic History ?Drawing heavily on a series of southern newspapers, Whalen (Queen's College, North Carolina) carefully explores their accounts of the textile strikes that rippled across the region from 1929 to 1931. The southern press's examination of the labor turmoil proved to be inconsistent, hesitant, and incomplete, demonstrating perplexities, contradictions, and downright confusions. Whalen asserts that the strikes were tied to the enormous tectonic shift in the southern mind that was to eventually transform the South. In the short run, newspapers attempted to balance market developments with human rights and democratic precepts. Forced to grapple with the often-dire conditions afflicting workers, those same publications came to view themselves as independent voices that demonstrated fortitude and moral rectitude. Moreover, editors portrayed their newspapers as representatives of the democratic community. The media, they insisted, had to avoid extremes on either side of the spectrum--the plutocracy or communist agitators. Consequently, longstanding ties between the newspapers and mill barons became more tenuous. While damning radicals as irrational, anarchistic, and un-American, the papers frequently referred to laborers as overworked, underpaid, and mercilessly exploited. With the passage of time, some came to depict labor unions in a more moderate, if not an altogether positive, light. Recommended for general libraries and advanced students.?-Choice .,. a fine book, refreshingly well-written for a monograph and elegantly slim, worthy of the widest readership among historians of southern labor and journalism and of southern society more generally. -The Register