Deutsch, SarahWood, Brad2020-06-092022-05-272020https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20935<p>Following World War II, in the estimate of the Congress of Industrial</p><p>Organizations (CIO), one out of every six people in the city of Gadsden, Alabama</p><p>belonged to the union, making it the “best organized CIO city in the US.” At</p><p>midcentury, as most southern communities were growing more antiunion and more</p><p>conservative, workers in this city of 60,000 in northeastern Alabama insisted that they</p><p>had the same interests as union workers elsewhere and looked to a liberal Democratic</p><p>Party and robust federal government to bolster them. In the late 2010s, little evidence</p><p>remains that Gadsden and Etowah County were once so different from the rest of the</p><p>South. White people here often vote for Republicans. Unions have all but vanished. Development officials openly brag that 94 percent of</p><p>industry in the county operates unorganized.</p><p>A visitor to Gadsden today might find it hard to believe that the community was</p><p>once perhaps the most pro-CIO city the world has ever known. Yet those who came to</p><p>study Gadsden in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to see it as a union town, like the</p><p>famous American author John Dos Passos, had to reckon with a transformation even</p><p>more difficult to conceive: just a few years before their arrival, the city was perhaps the</p><p>most anti-CIO town in the country. In the mid-to-late 1930s, it was dangerous to give</p><p>even tacit support to the federation. On more than one occasion, workers joined with</p><p>police and civic leaders to literally run organizers out of Alabama. But this antiunionism</p><p>represented even yet another sea change: in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Gadsden had</p><p>also been something like a union town.</p><p>The purpose of this dissertation is to use Gadsden as a case study to come to</p><p>terms with the historical forces that have turned its feeling about unions upside down</p><p>and inside out. When the residents of Gadsden changed their minds</p><p>about unionism, for the most part, they did so as a community. This consensus was not</p><p>the result of shared values; neither was it compelled by the dominance of local elites. It</p><p>was, to the contrary, an outcome of Gadsden’s relationship to the out-of-town capitalists</p><p>who sustained it. For all but a few exceptional years in the twentieth century (when</p><p>Gadsden could be a union town), residents here have had to fight for capital against</p><p>people from communities like their own. In both of the cases in which this working class</p><p>city has forsaken unionism, it was because, and only because, that was what American capitalism demanded of it.</p>HistoryAlabamaCapitalismDeindustrializationDevelopmentLaborSouthDissertation