Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2023/Fall/Section33/Charlise Pope

Overview

Charlise Pope was a white woman born in 1910 Hickory, North Carolina. She worked in the textile mill industry, struggling to support her family of five throughout the 1930s.

Biography

Early Life

Raised in poverty on the cotton mill hill, Charlise and her family shared their house with borders. Each day, she and her siblings accompanied their parents to work.

Textile mill worker

Mill machines

Pope secured a mill job of her own at age 14. Though she notes that the job worked her long hours and she disliked her boss, she was not overall dissatisfied with the life she was making for herself. At the time, Pope was making $9 per week. At age 16, Pope got married.

Later Life

When Pope first married her husband, she was anticipating that he would be the breadwinner for the family. However, she was disappointed to find that her work was still required to support her family, in addition to keeping up with household and maternal duties. Charlise’s job at the mill only allowed her a break during pregnancy.

Due to her family’s medical problems, in her young twenties, Pope became the sole financial supporter of the five person household. Her husband, with an ulcerated stomach condition, was unable to continue working. Additionally, Pope’s oldest child suffered from infantile paralysis, a condition requiring consistent, expensive medical treatment.

The family barely scraped by, relying on one biweekly income of $14.72. The $10 rent for their three bedroom apartment in Hickory took more than half of this paycheck. The support of disability and unemployment welfare was heavily leaned upon when matters complicated as Pope was laid off from her job during the Great Depression.

Values

Although through her childhood, Pope’s parents never instilled religious values in her or her siblings, she decided to send her children to Methodist Sunday school. On such a tight budget, the family does not have extra funds for extravagance or entertainment and Pope’s mood is often discouraged and dour.

Though lacking in hope for her future, Charlise Pope continues to emphasize the importance of voting, noting that she is a Democrat and never passes up on the opportunity to influence her community and nation at the polls.

Social Context

Roosevelt signs Social Security Act in 1935

Disability and Unemployment Welfare

The United States turned to president FDR to pull the economy from the trenches. Roosevelt’s New Deal established government employment programs for countless demographics and insured federal banks through the FDIC. Most notably, "the Social Security Board (SSB) was enacted in 1935 and 1939, providing benefits to the elderly and to widows, unemployment compensation, and disability insurance” . Combined with other welfare programs enacted by the New Deal, such as unemployment insurance, it was considered some of the most successful acts in aiding the public and transforming the government’s authority.

Labor Unions for Textile Workers

Loray Mill in Gastonia, NC

Other New Deal programs included the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB increased “authority of the federal government in industrial relations and gave further organizing power to labor unions” . Due to poor marketing and cotton overproduction, many textile workers experienced wage reductions  and began to create unions to advocate for better pay. The United Textile Workers organized the 1929 Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, NC, not far from Hickory . The participation of 10,000 united workers kicked off a nationwide strike. The mobilization of labor groups in the 1930s such as the “United Textile Workers union” was incredibly influential to the labor movement.

Textile Industry Layoffs During Great Depression

As the Depression worsened, many employers began laying off their workers. By 1933, unemployment rates were at 24.9% . Besides the loss of jobs, wages were reduced and many factories were shut down. Employers began to lay off their employees, no longer affording to pay them an acceptable salary for their work. Wage incomes of those who could retain their jobs fell to around 42.5%. Lower incomes resulted in lower demand for products, destroying jobs and trapping the economy in a positive feedback loop until wartime demands reinvigorated the U.S. Meanwhile, "the condition of the textile industry parallel[ed] the condition of every other industry in the country" . The entire country faced issues of supply and demand, and cotton was in low demand and oversupplied. This contributed to the shutdown of countless mills across the country and job loss topping hundreds of thousands.

References

Borneman, Jim. “Jim Borneman.” Textile World, October 1, 2005. https://www.textileworld.com/textile-world/textile-news/2005/10/the-country-and-the-industry-pull-out-of-the-depression/.

Dunne, Sierra. “The Great Depression.” Digital Rocky Mount Mills. https://rockymountmill.prospect.unc.edu/mill-history/narrative/great-depression/.

FDR, Library. “Great Depression Facts.” FDR Presidential Library & Museum. https://www.fdrlibrary.org/great-depression-facts#:~:text=throughout%20the%201920s.-,At%20the%20height%20of%20the%20Depression%20in%201933%2C%2024.9%25%20of,economic%20disaster%20in%20American%20history.

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, Robert Korstad, and James Leloudis. “Cotton Mill People: Work, Community, and Protest in the Textile South, 1880-1940.” The American Historical Review 91, no. 2 (1986): 245–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/1858134.

Paul, Catherine A. “The New Deal.” Social Welfare History Project, September 14, 2020. https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/the-new-deal/.

"Charlise Pope” Interview by Deal & Crawford, date August 5, 1939, Folder 344 Federal Writers’ Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.