Date
10-14-2026
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Luci Vaden
Keywords
Textile Mills, Cotton Mills, Georgia, Populism
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Hunsucker, Alix, "Challenging the Consensus: Labor Struggle, Worker Experience, and Presidential Intervention at the Mary-Leila Textile Mill During World War II A Scholarly Interpretation of a Newly Discovered Textile Mill Archive, 1930s–1940s" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 8987.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/8987
Abstract
Four sealed wooden crates discovered in the rafters of the Mary-Leila Textile Mill in Greensboro, Georgia, provide the evidentiary foundation for this dissertation and reveal a previously unavailable history of southern textile labor, industrial paternalism, unionization, and federal intervention. Sealed in 1946 and hidden from ordinary circulation for more than half a century, the cache contains legal correspondence, telegrams, wage records, contracts, photographs, architectural materials, and documentation connecting this small rural Georgia mill to a much larger regional labor dispute and the expanding authority of the federal government during World War II. Combined with oral histories, local government records, census data, newspapers, and regional labor histories, these materials make possible a micro historical examination of the lives of poor White textile workers while placing the Mary-Leila Mill within broader transformations in Southern and American labor history.
This dissertation argues that the Mary-Leila Cotton Mill demonstrates that Southern industrialization did not simply replace the postbellum cotton economy with a modern wage system. Instead, the mill transferred important features of the older southern order, including economic dependency, paternalistic authority, racial privilege, and restricted worker autonomy, into an industrial setting that nevertheless offered poor White families greater stability, community, and material opportunity than the agricultural economy they left behind. This contradiction is central to understanding the Mary-Leila experience. Mill employment represented genuine economic advancement for many White families emerging from tenant farming and an increasingly unstable agricultural economy, while simultaneously binding those workers to a disciplined labor system controlled by mill management and largely closed to Black residents of Greene County.
The newly recovered archive also reveals that Mary-Leila was neither isolated from national labor developments nor merely a small southern mill operating beyond the reach of the federal state. Mill executives and attorneys defended the non-union mill as a stabilizing institution that provided employment, housing, social structure, and economic security without outside interference, while labor organizers associated with the Textile Workers Union of America challenged that authority through organizing efforts, legal proceedings, and appeals to federal labor agencies. Mary-Leila's involvement in the Twenty-Three Mills dispute connected the mill to a coordinated regional resistance to organized labor involving textile manufacturers across the South. What began as a struggle over authority within southern textile communities consequently became entangled with national questions involving collective bargaining, wartime production, federal labor regulation, and the limits of private managerial power.
The conflict ultimately reached the Truman administration in 1945 and resulted in federal intervention under President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9560. The archival record demonstrates that this intervention was not an abrupt presidential response to an obscure Georgia mill, but the culmination of a labor controversy that had moved for years through the administrative and legal machinery of the wartime federal state. Mary-Leila therefore provides a local view of a national transformation: during the New Deal and World War II, employment relationships that southern manufacturers had traditionally treated as matters of private and local authority increasingly became subject to organized labor, federal regulation, and presidential power.
By bringing the Mary-Leila archive into the historical record, this study contributes to the historiography of southern textile labor while connecting histories of agriculture, class formation, race, industrial paternalism, unionization, and federal authority that are too often considered separately. The Mary-Leila experience challenges interpretations of southern mill communities as either exploitative company towns or nostalgic communities of security and belonging. They could be both. More significantly, the case demonstrates that the modernization of the South did not erase the social and economic structures inherited from the cotton economy; it adapted many of them to an industrial order until organized labor and the expanding federal state increasingly challenged the authority on which that order depended. In this way, the history of one small Georgia textile mill illuminates a much larger transformation in the relationship among workers, employers, organized labor, and the federal government in twentieth-century America.
