Culture of Misfortune: An Interpretive History of Textile Unionism in the United States by Clete Daniel, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001, 327 pp., ISBN 0-8014-3853-5.

Following the historic, depression-era organizing successes by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the auto and steel industries, one key manufacturing industry remained to be conquered: textiles. The epic struggle, and ultimate failure, of the CIO and its affiliate, the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), to achieve a breakthrough in the textile industry are documented and assessed in Clete Daniel’s ambitious book Culture of Misfortune: An Interpretive History of Textile Unionism in the United States. Daniel describes his work as “an attempt to explain why an undertaking that [the CIO leadership] expected to yield one of industrial unionism’s greatest triumphs produced, instead, perhaps its greatest disappointment.” He sets out to examine both the social, economic, political and legal barriers that the TWUA faced and the pivotal role of the union’s own internal politics: “the singular challenges of leadership in an organization whose internal political culture was increasingly vulnerable to the destructive pressures of apparently irreversible decline and the concomitant ravages of seemingly unavoidable dissention.” The fate of the TWUA, Daniel suggests, presaged the crisis that all American manufacturing unions would face at the end of the century, as “the specter of postindustrialism” loomed. Daniel’s story begins, not with the birth of the TWUA, but with the earliest organizing efforts by workers in North America’s oldest manufacturing industry. In cataloguing the long list of failures by organized labour—from the first craft unions to the Industrial Workers of the World—to gain a foothold in textile manufacturing, he clearly establishes the barriers of poverty, disunity and fragmentation, the “culture of misfortune,” that beset unionization in this sector. The defining features of the industry made it naturally resistant to organization: “Characterized by intense competition among a large number of producers, none sufficiently influential in product or labor markets to constitute an industry-wide force for rational operation, textiles exhibited the tell-tale signs of chronic incoherence; low profit margins, excess capacity, irregular production, inadequate capitalization, and a widening technological divide that fostered wildly uneven productivity rates.” Again and again textile workers demonstrated a desire to organize—dramatically displayed in the 1934 strike by hundreds of thousands of workers in southern textile mills—but these sporadic outbreaks of labour action never led to durable unions. The opportunity to reverse this history of failure arose in 1937 when the CIO, fresh from its victories in the auto and steel industries, set its sites on the textile industry, then the employer of 1,250,000 American workers. The effort was significantly funded with over $2 million from the CIO affiliates and led by Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) president Sidney Hillman, “one of the country’s most astute and resourceful labor leaders.” With an army of 600 organizers, Hillman, through the Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC) set out to transform the industry. And he just about did it. The initial successes of the TWOC fell short of the gains won by the CIO in auto and steel. But the potential of the TWOC, which evolved into the TWUA, became evident during the industrial expansion and tight labour market experienced during World War II. By 1944, the TWUA was entrenched in almost every subsector of the textile industry and could claim a membership of 400,000 workers in 600 locals. It was the third largest affiliate in the CIO. For a brief shining moment, it must have seemed that the promise of textile unionism would be fulfilled. But it did not happen. After the war, the weaknesses of the TWUA immediately became evident. The accelerated shift of textile jobs from the union’s northern bastions to the hostile environment in the southern states, the …