BYNUM: THE COMING OF MILL VILLAGE LIFE TO A NORTH CAROLINA COUNTY (TEXTILES, OCCUPATIONAL FOLKLORE, LABOR HISTORY, WORKERS, SOUTHERN UNITED STATES)

The textile industry of the southeastern United States has engendered an extensive literature concerning southern mill life, but it is a literature burdened with a common frustration. No study sufficiently accounts for the attitudes and actions of southern mill workers, whose history of labor relations strongly contrasts with that of northeastern industrial workers. Southern mill workers are commonly judged passive and self-abasing, trapped in a submissive role by the system of paternalism. This supposed passivity is considered the lingering effect of workers\u27 previous, long-term experience at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This view rests on an entrenched tradition of scholarship, but remains untested by any long-term group studies. It dehumanizes southern mill workers by subsuming them under an inappropriate social model. This study examines the history of the mill workers of Bynum, North Carolina in depth, in order to recover the proper context for an interpretion of their actions and statements. Drawing on recent work in social history and ethnohistory, it uses oral and manuscript sources to trace Bynum\u27s families to their particular origins, and examines their relative positions in the larger society of their home county. Mill workers\u27 origins prove more diverse than generally assumed, and occupying a range of acceptable roles in a coherent, yeoman economy. A number of specific issues crucial to yeoman life are examined on the county level for their later impact on the social relations of the mill village. The expressive culture of Bynum\u27s mill workers is examined from a folkloristic standpoint for its indigenous genres, its range of communally sanctioned performances, and the bounds of propriety entailed. Several patterns cutting across specific genres are revealed, linking diverse expressions in an articulate discourse. This could invest apparently trivial acts with social power, and enable mill workers to exert certain influences in the restricted domain of the workplace. Often invisible to outside observers, such acts were grounded in a common cultural logic distinct from that of the mill owner. Though the particular conditions of southern mill life limited their options, mill workers\u27 response was neither passive nor without power in shaping group life