This article was originally written for The Daily Tar Heel. A shortened version of this article can be found there at this address.

When I say “party at UNC” you probably think of booze-soaked frat dudes doing morally questionable things with a keg, a hose, and a funnel. Or maybe you think of scumbags who convene in large groups during a global pandemic because “haha we’re in college we’re supposed to have fun #ImAPlagueRat.” 

Back in the day, however, UNC had other types of “parties.” Make no mistake, the students would still occasionally get hammered and create chaos, but there were also parties of a different sort: political parties. I’m not talking about the Young Democrats or Young Republicans, no, I am referring to the various student-organized political parties that routinely nominated and ran candidates for student offices. 

Prior to the twentieth century, the school was under the domain of the literary societies of UNC, the Dialectic and Philanthropic society. By the late 1800s, however, the societies began to lose their grip on power. In 1904, the University handed over student oversight powers to a University Council, which would come to be known later as the Student Council. 

During the 1920s a sort of one-party state was created, with a 1970 article from the Daily Tar Heel described as “a three-year regime which literally did away with all opposition.” Yes reader, you read that right: the student government used to operate on the same rules as third world dictatorships. In 1930, this political hegemon was faced with token opposition, only to win 30 of the 31 contested seats. 

The next year, a new system emerged. In 1931, a group of students founded a “Complete Non-Fraternity Political Organization” in response to “fraternity men being in the decided majority of the campus elective positions.” Soon thereafter, a coalition of non-fraternity and fraternity students formed an All-Campus Party (ACP). 

The 1931 campaign was lively: torchlight parades were held and opponents’ campaign materials were used to fuel a bonfire. The ACP even ran ads in the Daily Tar Heel, claiming “The University Believes in the All-Campus Party.” The ACP’s candidate, Mayne Albright, won the election in a landslide. 

The revenge of the nerds was had in 1933, however, as the newly organized University Party (UP) crippled the old establishment’s dominance over student politics. By the next year, the university became a one-party state once again, now under the control of the UP. 

After several years, the UP became dominated by the same frat dudes it vowed to destroy. In response, a populist Students’ Party (SP) was created in 1937. They managed to elect quite a few officers, much to the anguish of the UP. The next year, the UP crushed the SP in the legislature, but the SP had one of its own elected president. 

The SP gained power in the late 1930s and early 1940s, only to lose it in 1942 and stay out of power throughout World War II. The party was apparently crippled by the disruption of “dormitory organizing” efforts due to the closure of dorms for military use, whereas the UP was able to fire up its base in the fraternities. In 1944, the frats-dominated University Party absolutely creamed the SP’s temporary replacement, the United Party. The UP and a rebooted SP continued to dominate student politics for the next two decades. 

In 1969, a new group emerged as a response to the rebellious years of the 1960s: the Conservative Party. The party served as a safe space where “conservative and moderate students [could] express themselves.” The group’s very first resolution was to defund the Tar Heel — then a university-funded publication — calling it “a coercively maintained monopoly,” that took “definite political stands and often distort[ed] the news to suit the ideological whims of the editors.” 

Co-founder Gary Fagg was nominated as its first presidential candidate in 1970, only to be arrested on narcotics charges the day before the election. Fagg still managed to get 306 votes, but his referendum to defund the Daily Tar Heel, was defeated in an electoral landslide. 

By 1970, a general attitude of ambivalence had fallen on both of the parties. That year, independent Thomas Bello snagged the student presidency. As to why he ran as an independent, Bello told the Tar Heel: 

“The parties have become worse because they have nothing to do,” says Bello. “They are not providing a forum for the exchange of ideas. They are not bringing controversial ideas to the attention of the student populace. They are not training underclassmen the ways of University politics. They are, in short, doing nothing.” 

They had become shallow husks of their former selves. In the years prior to their decline, thousands of students had attended the parties’ meetings. In 1970, just a handful stopped by. 

In its Mar. 1, 1971 issue, the Daily Tar Heel proclaimed the death of the campus party system. In the obituary, the Tar Heel wrote that the parties “were plagued with failing health” in the late 1960s, and that they were survived by “a new coterie of independent candidates, electoral reform and a majority of disinterested students.” 

Following the 1971 elections, the existing parties faded into obscurity. From 1972-1975, the Blue Sky Party (BSP) ran candidates on a platform of, among other things, abolishing student government, banning cars, expanding North Carolina’s borders to cover the entirety of the United States (except New Jersey), and placing a giant dome over UNC to control the weather. The BSP was also interested in enacting sweeping campaign finances reform, vowing to restrict student campaign expenditures to $10, “to put an emphasis on intelligence instead of the size of Daddy’s Bank Account.”

To accomplish these goals, the BSP nominated student Pitt Dickey for president and a dog named Sage for vice president. In both 1972 and 1973, the duo came in second place in the general election. What likely cost them these elections was their controversial plan to “extend a hand of friendship to that isolated fortress of academia, Duke University” in order to “normalize relations with them and sweep away centuries of distrust and rivalry.” 

Have things improved from our partisan past? Maybe. Student elections are still sometimes bitter, contentious affairs even without parties. Regardless, engagement in campus politics is abysmal; according to the UNC Board of Elections, just 14.11% of students voted in the Spring 2020 general elections. But how do we improve engagement.

My solution: rebuild the party system. At least, somewhat. UNC’s political system is so small that individual candidates standing on their own is a bit difficult. If aspirant legislators formed at least semi-formal, temporary political coalitions with bold ideas and action plans, students would have a lot more of a reason to vote.

We wouldn’t be the only college doing this. This past year, the University of Maryland’s student government elections were fought for by two parties with varying interests. One of the groups, Forward Maryland, even released a detailed, lengthy platform that would make even Elizabeth Warren blush. 

College is supposed to be all about trying new things, right? So let’s make UNC’s student government a little more interesting and a true “laboratory of democracy.”

They knew it was a dangerous task. 

Unionizing workplaces in 1929 wasn’t done through a workplace or company-wide vote like it is today, it was done by brute force. From 1912 to 1921, miners in West Virginia had been battling with local officials and mining companies in order to unionize. This fighting reached its apex in 1921, when thousands of unionized workers fought mine operators and local militias at Blair Mountain. Dozens were killed, but the unionists came no closer to achieving their goals.

Ella May Wiggins and the other organizers of the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) became familiar with this brute force in the summer of 1929, as they sought to unionize the booming textile mills of Gaston County. The daughter of a lumberjack who was killed on the job, Wiggins would eventually move to the Gastonia area in search of better work. After her husband left her, she was forced to support her seven children alone, two of whom would later die due to malnutrition. 

As this was happening, Wiggins and her fellow millworkers were under extreme economic duress. Mill operators began laying off workers, and forcing those who remained to perform the work of multiple workers. In addition to this, automation was increasingly replacing human workers in the mills. The overstretched workers were then forced to take cuts in pay with longer hours. 

In the preceding decades, textile work had been a godsend to the previously impoverished South. Poor farmers flocked to mills for a better life, and to a certain extent, they got it; in the early years, textile workers earned more than they did in the fields. Conditions weren’t the best, but then again, neither were they at the farms they left behind. Initial small labor pools allowed workers to directly confront the owners of the mills in order to achieve better wages and conditions. To attract workers, mill operators even built mill cottages with amenities that were unbeatable for working class communities at the time. A 1911 article from The Charlotte News describes the luxuries of one such village in Great Falls, South Carolina:

“The types of house are of four, five and six rooms each with running hot and cold water and bath in each. […] [I]n addition, each is supplied with electric lights in every room… 

The sewer system has been as carefully planned as the mill itself… The sewer outlet is several miles below the mill and removes all possibility of infection from this source.” 

Things took a turn for the worse, however, in the 1920s. The boom in the cotton industry experienced during the First World War yielded to a bust in peacetime. The aforementioned automation and layoffs crippled the workforce, and an expanding labor force further hurt the millworkers, as increased employee competition decreased individual workers’ bargaining power. 

Major players in the textiles industry used its decline to their advantage. They bought up struggling firms, further consolidating their power and reducing that of individual workers. This reduction in labor’s power allowed companies to defund the villages their workers lived in, leading to worsening living conditions in addition to the workers’ worsening working conditions.

Some strikes with limited success occurred in the immediate aftermath of the end of the First World War. A truly dedicated push for unionization would not come until 1929. 

That year, a wave of labor unrest crashed over the South. On April 15, 2,000 workers at a mill in Elizabethton, Tennessee walked out. On July 18, six hundred workers in Marion, North Carolina walked out after several of their coworkers had been fired for joining a union. Though these and other events would pale in comparison to the strikes that occurred at the Loray Mill in Gastonia. 

An absolutely mammoth complex, the Loray Mill was three times larger than its next largest competitor in the already mill-heavy Gaston County. In 1928, the mill had cut its workforce by more than a third while maintaining pre-cut production quotas. Aside from the quotas, a new system of “piecework pay” was implemented, in which workers were paid by the number of products they produced than by the hours they worked. In March of that year, workers at the mill launched a strike, but dispersed after an unpopular superintendent was fired.

Unfortunately, the poor relationship between management and labor continued. Fed up with these conditions, several workers at the mill formed a union. On March 25, five employees were fired for their union membership, and on March 30, the workers responded by voting to go on strike. On April 2, the workers delivered a list of demands to the mills operators, which included standardized wages, a forty-hour work week, equal pay for male and female workers, improved living conditions in the nearby village, and recognition of the newly organized National Textile Workers Union branch at the plant. 

Meanwhile in nearby Bessemer City, workers at the American mill were preparing their own strike. That mill’s record was particularly egregious, with the wages there being low even by the standards of the day. As Loray’s workers had done, the workers at the American plant walked out, with Ella May Wiggins going with them.

A month later, Wiggins would find herself on Capitol Hill, confronting then-North Carolina Senator Lee Slater Overman. When Overman told her that the children with her should be in school, she responded that it was impossible for her to send them to school when she could barely clothe or feed them. Wiggins became an overnight sensation for her remarks.

After months of violence and conflict between the striking workers and management, things started to fray. The leader of the strike, union organizer Fred Beal, attempted to downplay the NTWU’s more (at the time, anyway) radical platforms of racial equality in order to appeal to the still largely racist workforce of the mills. A former Sunday school teacher, Beal also deliberately swept the NTWU’s anti-religion principles under the rug, but was undermined by higher-ranking unionists sending in operatives advocating for complete revolution and atheism. Many of the workers were increasingly turned off by this rhetoric, causing a collapse in the number of strikers. 

In addition to these shortcomings, a brawl between local unionists and police lead to the death of Gastonia’s chief of police and the consequent arrest of dozens of unionists. Despite all of this, Wiggins continued to work for the Union; she wrote songs and sang to help gain support, and participated in local protests. 

As a part of her efforts, Ella May Wiggins and several other union activists planned a rally in Gastonia on September 14, 1929. In preparation, two thousand armed locals blocked pathways in to the city, including the one on which Wiggins and her comrades were travelling. 

Wiggins and other organizers were eventually stopped and turn around by the blockade. Some time later, another group of anti-union vigilantes swerved their car around the organizers’ truck, causing it to crash. The vigilantes then poured over the vehicles, emptying their weapons into the unionists. Wiggins was shot in the spine, and taken to a nearby home were she quickly died from her wounds.

The response her murder was sharp. Frank Porter Graham, a UNC professor and future president, wrote in a letter to friend that the vigilantes who gunned her down prided themselves on their “Americanism”, while murdering someone in cold blood for their beliefs. “Americanism was somewhere deep in the heart of this mother who went riding in a truck toward what to her was the promise of a better day for her children”, he wrote. 

Unlike with the previous strikes, some changes materialized after Wiggins’ death; conditions were somewhat improved and working hours were reduced, but not to the levels the strikers demanded. The men who allegedly killed Wiggins were brought to trial, but were never convicted. 

92 years after the Loray Mills strike, North Carolina remains one of the least — if not the least — unionized states in the country. So-called “right-to-work” laws — laws that bar unions from forcing workers to pay dues, causing non-paying workers to receive union benefits — have strangled unions in the state for decades. And though strikebreakers and violent mobs aren’t gunning down unionists in the streets, the issues of inadequate wages, poor working conditions, and automation continue to harm workers and their ability to live their lives to the fullest extent possible. 

All of this causing many workers in North Carolina and elsewhere to heed the words of Ella May Wiggins’ poem, The Mill Mothers Lament:

“But understand, all workers,

Our union they do fear,

Let’s stand together, workers,

And have a union here.”

SOURCES 

Van Osdell Jr., John  G. COTTON  MILLS, LABOR, AND THE SOUTHERN MIND: 1880-1930. New Orleans, LA: Tulane University, 1966.

Frederickson, Mary E. “Wiggins, Ella May.” In Encyclopedia of North Carolina. Raleigh: Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 1996. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/wiggins-ella.

Glass, Brend D., and Michael Hill. “Gastonia Strike.” In Encyclopedia of North Carolina. Raleigh: Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 2006. https://www.ncpedia.org/gastonia-strike.

Green, James. “The Devil Is Here in These Hills.” Zinn Education Project n.d. https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/devil-is-here-in-these-hills/#battle.

Kilkeary, Desmond. “Battle of Blair Mountain.” Chaparral n.d. http://archive.glendale.edu/chaparral/apr05/blair.htm.

Knapp, Steven K., “Women in the 1929 Textile Strikes in Elizabethton, Tennessee and Gastonia, North Carolina” (2016). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 3042. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3042.

Salmond, John A. Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

“The Loray Mill Project.” The University of North Carolina College of Arts and Sciences n.d. https://digitalinnovation.web.unc.edu/projects/loray-mill-project/.