Contesting the New South Order

“Kuhn’s book has considerable interest for southern labor history. . . . His understanding of women’s roles in the strike is welcome. . . . An enjoyable read.” — Labor History

“Contesting the New South Order should assure the Fulton Bag strike’s rightful place alongside the contemporaneous upheavals in Lawrence, Ludlow, and the Lower East Side as a pivotal moment in the nation’s Progressive Era industrial history.” — Journal of American History

“Kuhn’s narrative . . . is enhanced by vivid descriptions of key players and the actions of ordinary workers responding to an extraordinary situation. . . . An important book that advances our understanding of mill workers and owners in the early twentieth century.” — Journal of Southern History

“In Contesting the New South Order, Clifford M. Kuhn deftly saunters through the early twentieth-century dialectic of continuity and change in a transitional South. Through a thorough use of primary sources connected with the strike, and with the changing social climate of the region, he fashions a persuasive argument regarding both the unique qualities of the strike, and its regional, even national, significance. . . . The vivid descriptions of the behaviors, attitudes and environment of all the parties involved-workers, owners, management, politicians, union representatives-makes for fascinating reading. . . . Kuhn makes a unique and worthy contribution to the scholarship on traditionalism versus modernism in southern history, and on gender, race, and labor relations in the twentieth-century South.” — Georgia Historical Quarterly

“A richly detailed and smartly analytical work. . . . It stands on its own as one of the most thorough chronicles of a lengthy strike in American history.” — Business History Review

“Kuhn offers a detailed look at the issues that led to the strike and the personalities on both sides of the dispute. In addition, he does a good job of putting the dispute in a broader social context. . . . It is to Kuhn’s credit that he leaves no aspect of the strike unexplored.” — Business History

“Clifford Kuhn has long been admired among historians and journalists for the archival quality of his compendious mind; he carries whole epochs, and movements of classes, and industrial trends in his memory; foolish is the man or woman who would set out to compose a portion of Atlanta history without consulting him first. In Contesting the New South Order, Kuhn tells a dramatic story of life among early-20th-century mill workers. The data he has amassed is sharpened by the personal portraits he sketches, including glimpses of white, barefoot, laboring children. This crucial moment in American labor history is set before the reader not only accurately and comprehensibly, but with Kuhn’s quintessential compassion and humanity.” — Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing

“Clifford Kuhn’s account of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills strike illuminates not only the history of southern industrial labor, but also the tangled interplay of race, class, and ethnicity in the Progressive-era urban South. Especially arresting is his exploration of how representations of the strike, by both sides, helped shape the image of the southern working class. Historians of southern labor, business, society, and culture will profit from it.” — David L. Carlton, Vanderbilt University