Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2022/Spring/105i/section007/Miles Mathis

Miles Mathis was an American mill worker and mill manager from Lincoln County, North Carolina. He was interviewed by Robert Williams for the United States Federal Writers' Project on November 1, 1938 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Miles Mathis
Born	Around 1910 Lincoln County, North Carolina
Occupation	Mill worker, Mill manager
Spouse(s)	Odessa Mathis
Children	Jack Mathis
Parents	Olin Mathis (father) Annie Mathis (mother)

Biography

Early Life

Miles Mathis was born in Lincoln County, North Carolina around 1910. He grew up on his father Olin Mathis' farm along with his mother Annie Mathis, his seven sisters and his twin brother. Being one of three men in the family, Miles began doing hard labor on his father's farm from a very young age. When he was in the sixth grade, Miles' mother became sick and he dropped out of school to work in a mill in High Shoals, North Carolina to help pay for her medical bills. A few years later, Miles' mother died. Shortly afterwards, he met Odessa May, who was working in a mill and living with her sister at the time. "Dessie" was born around 1911 and grew up on her father's farm in western North Carolina. Like Miles, Dessie also grew up working on her family's farm and moved away from home to work in a mill. They got married in 1927. Miles describes this time as "the first time either had ever been real happy."

Search for Employment

Shortly after Miles and Dessie got married, the mill in High Shoals closed down. Having both grown up working on farms as children, Miles and Dessie swore to never do hard labor on a farm again. They moved to Kings Mountain, North Carolina and worked in a mill there until it closed in 1932. They moved back to High Shoals and lived in a one-room furnished house. Dessie gave birth to a boy named Jack. In 1935, the mill closed again and Miles and Dessie moved to Lexington, South Carolina after Miles' brother sent a letter telling him there was an abundance of work there. Upon arriving, Miles found that all the jobs were taken up, so he spent the last of his money moving his family to Charlotte, North Carolina in 1937. Because of his experience working in mills, Miles was given a management position at a mill and was able to rent a company house for the family. After over eight years of searching for a job, Miles and Dessie were finally able to settle down.

Life in Charlotte

After moving to Charlotte in 1937, Miles’ father, Olin, died and the family was able to have a proper funeral thanks to Miles' newfound steady income. Miles started taking Dessie and "Jackie" on trips to see Dessie’s father, Ledford, in the summers. In late 1937, on the way to a fishing trip with four of his coworkers in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the driver rounded a turn too fast and flew into a ditch. Miles only suffered minor injuries, but explained that he began thinking about his life in a spiritual way for the first time.

Miles was an avid reader and collector of magazines. He read about a program called “How to Be a Man” and sent $5 to the address on the advertisement. He stopped drinking more than two cups of coffee and ate two green vegetables a day. He gained thirty-five pounds in a few months and was promoted to head man of the weave room, making $22 a week. He was invited to the “big lunch meeting” with the most important men at the mill, and at the time the interview was written, was being considered for another promotion. In 1938, Jackie started school. Miles and Dessie both stated they were determined to make sure he would finish high school and never have to work at a mill in his life.

Social Context

Child Family Labor in the Early 1900's

Before the Great Depression, it was considered socially acceptable for children from agricultural families, especially lower-class families, to work on farms from a young age. Some of these children worked over eight hours during the day, and because these children worked for their families, typically received little or no payment in any form. When industry labor emerged in the southern United States in the early 1900's, many workers who grew up working on farms emigrated to urban areas and worked in mills and factories. Many of these workers, some of them still children, saw urban labor as a significant improvement to their current situation of hard agricultural manual labor and "the only means open to them for improving this condition." After leaving agricultural regions for industrial jobs, many of these workers "rarely go back to the mountains [agricultural work] or leave the mills to engage in other lines of work." Many family farms closed down, were bought out, or suffered significant financial ruin during this time period for this reason, as farm owners ended up with no one to pass their family business to.

Job Scarcity in the Great Depression

Unemployment struck the United States during the Great Depression severely. People who had previously held long-term jobs suddenly found themselves without work and struggling to support themselves and their families. In many ways, unemployment was a new phenomenon for many people in the United States. Before the 1930's, long-term unemployment "was associated with specific personal problems, such as illness." This contributed to much of the cultural and social impact of the Great Depression, as mass unemployment was something the country had never really seen before in such a communal way. It is what "caused so much surprise, anguish, and hardship, and occasioned widespread distrust of the self-correcting capabilities of capitalism”

Those who were out of work for a considerable amount of time were considered the "hard-core" unemployed. Even though millions of people found jobs during the Great Depression, no one wanted to hire the hard-core unemployed. They would be totally out of work, save for a short part-time job or two, for years at a time.” For many people, unemployment meant moving to a new town or city to find openings for work. The expense of moving, especially for larger families, took a heavy toll on workers who were already struggling to find money.

Living conditions of textile mill workers in Concord, North Carolina (Lewis Hine, 1912)

Southern Mill Communities

When the textile industry emerged in the southern United States in the early 1900's, many companies constructed mill communities around their mills and factories to be a living space for their workers. Employees would rent houses owned by the mills, and some communities had stores, churches, and even movie theaters owned by the mills. Mill operators used these communities to attract workers from rural areas with furnished houses and urban lives as well as "offer better working conditions than farms from which mill workers come." Essentially, in many places, mill operators "control and regulate practically the entire lives of the workers."

When unemployment was rampant during the Great Depression, mill communities found themselves overrun with employees. Traveling workers rotated between mills in search of work as "‘spare-hands,’ who showed up each day hoping to fill a vacancy." Most mill communities refused to hire black workers in an attempt to attract white workers. Starting in the 1920s, the regional out-migration of workers in the south was primarily black, "while the textile industry continued to employ almost exclusively white labor." North Carolina specifically "experienced net immigration of native white labor between 1920 and 1930.”

References

Williams, Robert V. “The Mathis Family.” Federal Writers Project, November 1, 1938. Federal Writers' Project Papers Folder 776, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/03709/id/1363/rec/1

Rosenberg, Chaim M. “Child Labor in America.” Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. Accessed February 27, 2022. https://library.biblioboard.com/content/f34098a9-4710-4131-a6f3-b7d0c11d9231

“Textile Industry Heads to Southern Territory.” The Charlotte News No. 1, December 31 1922. Accessed February 27, 2022. https://newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068256/1922-12-31/ed-1/seq-6/#words=close+mill+mills

Jensen, Richard J. “The Causes and Cures of Unemployment in the Great Depression.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19, no. 4 (1989): 553–83. Accessed February 27, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/203954

“Press Treatise on Mill Towns Stirs Reviewers.” The Daily Tar Heel Vol. 38, No. 16, May 11 1930. Accessed February 27, 2022. https://universityofnorthcarolinaatchapelhill.newspapers.com/image/67926480

Wright, Gavin. “Cheap Labor and Southern Textiles, 1880-1930.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 96, no. 4 (1981): 605–29. Accessed February 27, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/1880743

Hine, Lewis. 1912. Some of the housing conditions of the workers in Cannon Mills, Concord, N.C., to contrast with the homes and gardens sometimes shown from the "show mills" of the state. Location: Concord, North Carolina. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cannon_Mills_-_Concord,_NC_(1912).png