Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont Book

Habits of Industry provides a richly descriptive social, historical, and cultural account of the Carolina Piedmont—the area between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Coastal Plain—over the course of 150 years. By examining the social and religious culture of the region, Allen Tullos illuminates the lives of the working men and women whose "habits of industry" shaped their world.

Tullos combines archival research with an extensive collection of oral histories to shed new light on the essentially all-white textile industry in the era before World War II. He examines such topics as workers' transition from an agrarian folk culture to an industrial working class, the changing patterns of employers' paternalistic relations, and the contrasting and complimentary meanings of "industry." Using biographies and autobiographies of both mill owners and mill workers, Tullos juxtaposes the entrepreneurial narratives of the Belks, Hammetts, Tompkinses, Dukes, and Loves with the equally remarkable stories of such workers as Ethel Hillard, Alice and Grover Hardin, and Nigel League.

Publishers Weekly

Informative and highly readable oral autobiographies highlight this history of the Carolina Piedmontdoes this extend through both Carolinas?we should note where it is.gs region (the area of North and South Carolina extending between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Coastal Plain)pk and its industry by an Emory University assistant professor of American studies. In spirited personal accounts, workers explain that pk they left unproductive farms for the cotton mills, where children came under a company's jurisdiction as well as their parents'. Given this paternalistic atmosphere, it's perhaps not surprising that one woman recalls her father, a mill superintendent, ``didn't pay a bit more attention to unions than he would a dog barking.'' Private life is also covered: Ethel Hillyard, a particularly gifted storyteller, depicts in marvelously homely detail her struggle to support her family during the Depression. Given the author's stated desire ``to question industry's habits and cap correct here/pk//why cap?needs explanation or it looks like our error. Perhaps it's a typo in the galley; at any rate, I think it should be made lowercase--rl/i changed to lc/pk industry's assurance,'' he treats the mill owners surprisingly gently, apparently trusting readers to draw their own conclusions from the juxtaposed accounts of the dramatically different conditions of worker and owner life. The book in general offers a wealth of factual material and very little analysis. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Nov.)