Relief from Relief: The Tampa SewingRoom Strike of 1937 and the Right to
Welfare
Eina C. Green
In July 1937 Mabel Hagan and her co-workers in a Tampa, Florida, sewing room went
on strike. The sit-down was short-lived and unsuccessful. In a week's time, the workers
were back at their machines, the leaders had been fired, and the entire event quickly disappeared from historical memory.' In Tampa, a city with an impressive history of labor
activism, strikes were common events, and this one seemed a minor skirmish. But the
event was notable. The women involved were relief workers who made clothing and other
items to be distributed to nonprofit organizations; their jobs had been created by the New
Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA). Although relief workers had staged other
strikes across the country, very few had taken place in the South, and in 1937 Florida had
yet to see one. Even rarer was a relief strike conducted by women workers. So the Tampa
sit-down was intriguingly unusual.
Tampa was itself unusual, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the South. Its immigrant residents did not easily fit into the region's racial binary system. Cuban, Spanish,
Italian, and Bahamian immigrants, along with native-born whites and African Americans,
provided the labor to make Tampa Florida's premier industrial city. Still largely an agricultural state, early twentieth-century Florida was beginning to show signs of its fiiture
service-sector economy. Already tourism had become a significant industry, and within a
very few years the Sunshine State would seem far removed from its Old South history, as
it laid the foundations for the post-1940 economic revolution that the historian Gary R.
Mormino has called "Florida's Big Bang."^
So this was an unusual strike in an unusual city in an Increasingly unusual "southern"
state. How then can the strike have any relevance to the larger histories and historiographies of labor, race, gender, or region? As Christine Stansell once noted of antebellum
Elna C. Green is Allen Morris Professor of History and department chair at Florida State University. She would like
to thank several peopte who gave advice and assistance on this project: Nancy Hewitt, Georgina Hickey, David J.
Neison, Tamara Spike, Chriscopher Wilhelm, archivist Gene Morris, and the anonymous readers for thcJAH,
Readers may contact Green at egreen@fsu.edii.
' The terms "poor relief" and "relief" originated in the colonial era and generally indicated government aid to
the poor as opposed to privare charity or alms. Work relief wa.s public assistance obtained by doing work. In the
rwencieth cencury, rhe word "welfare" came to replace "relief," and it referred primarily to assistance from public
funds. Scholars generally use the phrase "social welfare" inclusively, to indicate both public aid and private charity.
The only puhlished article on the strike is James Tidd, "Stitching and Striking: WI'A Sewing Rooms and the 1937
Relief Strike in Hillsborough County," Tampa Bay History, 11 (Spring/Summer 1989), 5-21. Mabel Hagan's surname is spelled variously in different documents; her own signature on a petition from 1935 is the source of the
spelling used throughout this essay
^ Gary R. Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (Gainesville, 2005),
2. On the Old South history of Florida, see Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation
Frontier before the Civil War (Ghape! Hill, 2002).
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The Journal of American History
March 2009
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1013
New York City, unusual does not mean irrelevant. The failed sit-down of 1937 offers
historians a unique opportunity to examine the complicated labor relations of the New
Deal-era South, a region suddenly feeling the impact of Federal labor legislation, national
unionization drives, and the emerging welfare state. The sit-down strike and its unsuccessful conclusion also open an entirely new vista from which to view women and work
in twentieth-century America. But most important, the sit-down highlights the contests
over welfare in early twentieth-century America. I will argue that a belief in the right to
relief, or entitlement to public support, had a long history in the United States but that
by the New Deal era the old "settlement rights" inherited from the English poor law had
disappeared while no replacement ideology had yet emerged. Women therefore struggled
to find ways to stake their claims to a right to public support. Women in the Tampa sitdown attempted to use the language and tactics ofthe labor movement, only to learn that
work relief was more relief than work. It would take another generation to articulate a
right to welfare.^
The Tampa sewing-room strike meant different things to different constituencies, each
framing the sit-down from its own perspective. In the politically charged climate ofthe
1930s, Tampa's business classes saw the event as a potential threat to the manufacturing
economy they dominated. Although the strikers were ail women, the press coverage focused on a man identified as the instigator ofthe strike—Eugene Poulnot. By 1937 Poulnot was famous {or infamous) in Tampa for his role in the city's labor contests and radical
politics; his activities had dominated the Front pages ofthe local papers For several years.
Thus to many observers the sit-down in the sewing room seemed a product of Communist agitators, another worrisome sign oFthe successful expansion of radicalism during the
country's greatest economic crisis."*
To Tampa's labor community, the sit-down suggested the possibility of bringing new
members into the house of labor and thereby helping bolster a troubled movement. For a
southern city, Tampa had a remarkably vibrant labor movement, but one that found itself
on the ropes in the 1930s. The city's tobacco workers had lost a major strike in 1931, as
the Great Depression took its toll on unions and workers.^ A successful sit-down—still a
very new tactic in 1937—might energize Tampa's labor movement. Effectively mobilizing
the unemployed might also provide a new base of strength For organized labor.
Tampa's "Latin" workers saw the strike as an opportunity to reach across ethnic barriers in the city and make an alliance with the Anglo labor movement, a goal made all the
more immediate by depression conditions.*' {"Latin" had a locally specific meaning. In
' Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York. ¡789-1860 (New York, 1986). On similar
struggles to articulate a right to public assistance elsewhere, see, for example. Lisa DiCaprio, "Women Workers,
State-Sponsored Work, and the Right to Subsistence during the French Kcvolmion," Journal of Modem History 71
(Sept. 1999), 519-51. On the English poor laws, see George R. Boyer, An Economic History ofthe English Poor Law,
¡750-1850 (Cambridge, Eng., 1990); and Steven King, Poverty and Welfare in England, ¡700-1850- A Regional
Perspective (Manchester, 2000).
•* On radicalism in the South, see Mark Fannin, Labor's Th-omised Land: Radical Visions of Gender, Race, and Religion in the South (KnQxv\\\c,imyi;KohmV.Mimn,
Howard Kester and the Strudle for Social JusHce in the South,
¡904-77 (Charlottesville, 1991) ; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990); and Anthony P Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southem Radicals andT'rophets. ¡929-¡959
(Charlottesville, 1981 ). On fears of Communism in the 1930s, see M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism- Combating the Enemy Within, /530-/970 (Baltimore, 1990).
^ On the tobacco workers' strike, see Robert R Ingalts, Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa. ¡882-¡936
(Gainesville, 1988), 152-56.
" On labor In Tampa and in Florida, see ibid; Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black
Organizing and White Violence in Eloridafrom Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of ¡920 (Berkeley, 2005); Nancy
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The Journal of American History
March 2009
the early twentieth century, Tampa's immigrant community consisted of Cuban, Spanish,
and Italian residents. Contemporaries used the term "Latin" to describe the three groups
collectively. It is not to be confused with "Latino," a term that does not apply in this context.) Tampa's Latin workers had a strong tradition of labor activism, but one informed
by radical ideologies that native-born whites tended to resist. The two groups of workers
often cooperated only uncomfortably.
To relief recipients, the strike offered a chance to draw attention to the conditions of
work relief. Relief workers had legitimate grievances. Work relief jobs were sometimes offered only during off-seasons, on the assumption that the unemployed would find jobs
in seasonal work. Such an assumption neglected entirely those workers not suited to agricultural labor. Other relief workers complained about the challenges of getting to and
from their assigned posts: they lived at a distance from the nearest "WTA project and had
"to get there the best way we can." Relief workers also suffered from low wages and often
dismal working conditions in outdoor labor. A county commissioner from nearby Tarpon Springs condemned the low wages given WPA workers, comparing them unfavorably
to what he spent on his mules each month. In addition, relief jobs seemed to disappear
overnight, and the unreliable income was unnerving to families hovering on the edge of
poverty.'^
For women "reliefers," the sit-down might promise an opportunity to draw attention to the special needs and circumstances of women in the Great Depression. They understood all too well the gendered nature of poverty and poor relief. Women had fewer
opportunities for employment, and the jobs open to them paid less than those reserved
for men. Often dependent on someone else for all or part of their support, women felt
keenly the vulnerability that dependence created. Both state and federal welfare programs
assumed that married women were supported by their husbands and thus provided them
no aid, but a jailed, bedridden, or long-absent spouse did not provide that support regardless of the government's assumptions. Women faced challenges that were unique to
women, as the sewing-room workers tried to make clear to policy makers.**
From the perspective of the WPA officials, the sit-down threatened the stability of the
New Deal in Tampa and perhaps elsewhere. Tampa's sit-down was one of a growing number of relief strikes across the country. Workers in other cities in Florida were watching the
events carefully, planning to base their own labor actions on the outcome of the sit-down
in Tampa. A success in the Cigar City would undoubtedly provoke more strikes elsewhere, and WPA officials therefore saw it as a threat to the success of the relief program.^
A- Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s (Urbana, 2001); and Gary R.
Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World ofYbor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa.
1885-1985 (GainesviUe, 1998).
^ Martha Ghestnut to David Sholn, Nov. 29, 1935, folder 7, box 17, series 278 (Sholtz), Governors' Papers, RG
102 (State Archives of Florida, Tallahassee). Martha Ghestnut traveled twelve miles to the sewing room. "W.P-A.'s
Minimum Wage $29 a Month Is Insufficient to Keep Mules, E. H. Beckett Asserts in Attack upon Scale," St. PetersburgTimes.]n\y%, 1937, p. 14. A representative headline read: "FERA Workers Goncinue with Jobs Uncenain; Have
No Assurance of Future Allotments," Tampa Tribune. Nov. 2, 1935, p. 9.
' On women and the gendered nature of poverty, see Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age
of Welfare Rrform {New YOT\Í. 2003); Susun L Thomas, Gender and Poverty (New York, 1994); Linda Gordon, ed..
Women, the State, and Welfare {Madison, ! 990); and Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives ofWomen: Social Welfare
PolicyfromColonial Times to the Present (Boston, 1988).
'' On the unemployed movement, see James J. Lorence, Organizing the Unemployed: Community and Union
Activists in the Industrial Heartland (Albany, 1996); Franklin Folsom, Impatient Armies of the Poor: The Story of
Collective Action of the Unemployed, 1808-1942 (Niwot, 1991); Ghad Alan Goldberg, "Gontesting the Status of
Relief Workers during the New Deal: The Workers AJHance of America and the Works Progress Administration,
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1015
A study of the sewing-room sit-down adds to the remarkably thin literature on working-class women and the New Deal. It also adds complexity to our understanding of
women in the South during this era. And it uncovers a lost chapter in southern labor
history.'" Finally, the relief strike permits an analysis that includes both labor history and
social welfare history, two streams of historiography that need to be more integrated. Often studying the same populations, historians of the working class and historians of social
welfare need to look to each other's work. As social welfare historians have begun to realize, individuals move back and forth across the lines that demarcate poverty and employment, and charity and welfare payments frequently supplement a working family's wages.
An analysis of working-class life that includes visits to the welfare office can only strengthen our understanding of the various strategies working families used to survive."
In the 1930s Tampa was an extraordinary setting for labor history. Several historians,
including Robert Ingalls and Louis A. Pérez Jr., have recounted the city's turbulent early
decades. The cigar industry, founded in the 1880s, had relied heavily on the skills of
cigar workers from Cuba. Those workers brought with them a tradition of labor radicalism unusual in their New South setting. They settled in what would soon be the Latin
quarter of Tampa: Ybor City. Although the cigar industry had moved from Cuba to
Florida partly to avoid labor troubles on the island, in Cuba skilled cigar workers had
been accustomed to a great deal of control over the manufacturing process, and they
brought their expectations and their commitment to organized labor with them when
they immigrated. Tampa saw its first cigar strike in 1887, just months after the advent
of the industry.'^ In subsequent years, strikes became almost commonplace in Tampa.
Major citywide efforts by cigar workers in 1910, 1920, and 1931 were particularly important to the labor movement in Tampa, and dozens of smaller actions took place in other
1935-1941," Social Science History, 29 (Fall 2005). 337-71; Roy Rosenzweig, "'Socialism in Our Time'; Tlie Socialist Party and the Unemployed, 1929-1936," Labor History, 20 (Fall 1979), 485-509; and Roy Rosenzweig, "Organizing the Unemployed: The Early Years of the Great Depression, 1929-1933," Radical America, 10 (IUIV-AUE.
1976), 37-60.
^ }
h
"' Scholars have concentrated more on middle-class than on working-class women in the New Deal. Important
recent work on middle-class women includes Julie Novkov, Constituting Workers, Protecting Women: Gender. Law,
and Labor in the Progressive Era and New Deal Years (Ann Arbor, 2001); Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism:
The National Consumers' League. Women's Activism, and Labor Standare in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 2000);
and Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ith^a, 1998). On women in the South during the New Deal, see Landon R. Y Storrs. "Gender and Sectionalism in New Deal Politics:
Southern White Women's Campaign for Labor Reform," in Searchingfor Their Places: Women in the South across Four
Centuries, ed. Ihomas H. Appleton Jr. and Angela Boswell (Columbia, Mo., 2003); and Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman,
"The Creation of a Subversive Feminist Dominion: Interracialist Social Workers and the Georgia New Dcal."/ff«rnalofWomen's History. 13 (Winter 2002), 132-54. On labor in tbe South in the 1930s, see Vincent J. Roscigno and
William F. Danaher, The Voice of Southern Labor Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes. ¡929-1934 (Minneapolis, 2004);
Janet Christine Irons, Testing the New Deal- The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Urbana, 2000);
and Bryant Simon, A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948 (Chapel Hill, 1998).
' ' Pioneering work that connects labor and welfare history includes Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: Vie Culture of
Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modem England (Chicago, 2006); Jane Long, Conversations in Cold Rooms:
Women. Work, and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Northumberland (Rochester, 1999); Timothy A. Hacsi, Second
Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); and Beverly Ann Stadum, Poor
Women and Their Families: Hard Working Charity Cases. 1900-1930 (Albany, 1992).
'' On the 1887 strike, see Ingalls, Urban Violantes in the New South. 32-36. See also Durward Long, "Labor
Relations in the Tampa Cigar Industry, \88'j-\*)\\"
Labor History. 12 (Fall 1971), 551-59. Louis A. Pérez Jr.,
"Cubans in Tampa: From Exiles to Immigrants, 1892-\9O\," Florida Historical Quarterly. 57 (Oct. 1978), 129-40;
Mormino and Pozzetta, Immigrant World of Ybor City: Patricia A. Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men. Women, and
Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, / 9 0 0 - / 9 / 9 (Urbana, 1987).
1016
The Journal of American History
March 2009
years. Organized labor in industries other than cigars also contributed to the strike-prone
environment. A year before the sewing-room strike, Tampa's overall union membership
was estimated at 9,500 members {more than 20 percent of the city's 1930 work force of
46,000), most of them seasoned veterans of the city's labor wars.'^
The backbone of organized labor in Tampa was the Latin community. Cubans, Spaniards, and Italians joined labor unions, social clubs, and mutual aid organizations. In addition to industry-specific unions where the ethnic groups mixed {such as the Tobacco
Workers Industrial Union) and ethnically specific social organizations where they did not
{such as the Club Beneficio Público), Cubans also built political organizations devoted
to ending colonial control of their homeland. Both Cubans and Spaniards from Tampa
joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigades during the Spanish civil war. Similarly, Italians
joined local organizations but also stayed involved in political movements in Europe.
These internationally oriented workers linked their efforts in Tampa to other labor struggles across the world.'^
Parallel to, but usually separate from, those efforts were the organizational activities of
the city's African American population. Tampa was the home to multiple black social and
political organizations, such as the Knights of Pythias, the Order of Calanthe, the Grand
United Order of Odd Fellows, the Prince Hall Masons, the black Young Women's Christian Association, and the City Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. Unlike the largely
anticlerical Latin immigrants, blacks in Tampa made churches important sites of community building. Instead of international politics, their efforts remained focused on ending racial discrimination and racial violence at home. The socialist, anarchist, and Communist ideologies that inspired activism among Latins had less resonance for their black
neighbors. Although Tampa's black workers were willing to join unions and strike, many
labor unions, especially those affiliated with the American Federation of Labor {AFL), either excluded or segregated black workers, making organized labor less central to black
aspirations. The Tampa Urban League and the Helping Hand Day Nursery, both founded
in the 1920s, better expressed the political and social ideals of black Tampa.'"^
As Nancy A. Hewitt has recently explained, women were centrally important to Tampa's cigar industry, its labor movements, and its social organizations. Unlike employed
women in most southern cities, who were concentrated in domestic work, more than 40
percent of wage-earning women in Tampa worked in manufacturing. Although divided
by race and ethnicity on many other issues, women cigar workers were prominent in the
city's volatile labor contests. Anglo, Cuban, Italian, African American, and Afro-Cuban
women joined unions, participated in strikes, and raised money for labor causes. Working women in Tampa had experience in labor activism far beyond that typical of women
'^ Between 1887 and 1894, workers in all industries conducted at least twenty-three strikes in Tampa. See Mormino and Pozzetta, Tmmigram World ofYbor City, 114. "Labor Enters Fight Here for Honest Voting," Tampa Tribune, March 17, 1936, p. 5. For the work force in Tampa in 1930, see U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of
the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States: ¡930: Population, vol. Ill, pt. I (Washington, 1932), 435.
'•* Nancy A. Hewitt, "Economic Crisis and Political Mobilization: Re.shaping Cultures of Resistance inTampas
Communities of Color, 1929-1939," in Women's Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices, ed. Sharon Harley (New Brunswick, 2007), 73-74.
'^ ¡bid., 66-70. Black leaders in Tampa volunteered to raise a militia unit for che Spanish-American War, but
the offer was rejected. According to Paul Ortiz, the offer expressed a desire for black military service and full citizenship rather than an international perspective. Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed. 82. See also Dennis Halpin, "'Race
Riot,' 'Midnight Melee,' and Other 'Crimes' Reconsidered: African-American Soldiers' Protests in 1898 Tampa,"
Gulf South Historical Review, 20 (Spring 2005), 37-62. On the anticlericatism ofltalian and Cuban immigrants in
Tampa, sec Mormino and Pozzetta, Immigrant World ofYbor City, 210-29.
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1017
HELPING HAND
NURSERY
KINDERGARTEN
The African American community in Tampa, Florida, had ro rely largely on its own self-help
institutions, such as the Helping Hand Day Nursery, pictured here in 1925. Courtesy State
Archives of Florida, Tallahassee, Florida.
in the southern states, and they showed no hesitation to join or even initiate strikes when
they saw fit. Wotnen tobacco stemmers were responsible for launching strikes in 1916
and 1921.""'
The Great Depression of the 1930s turned Tampa's already energetic labor scene into
a potent and potentially dangerous mix of fear, desperation, and extremism. The national and international markets for Tampa's high-quality cigars plummeted, as Americans
learned to smoke much cheaper cigarettes. Essentially a one-industry town, the city was
devastated by the collapse of the cigar industry. Tliousands were thrown out of work.
Many fled the city, looking for work in Cuba or the Northeast; others stayed, requiring assistance to survive. The mayor reported in May 1934 that some 45,000 people in
the city were dependent on charity. (At the time the population of Tampa was just over
100,000.) A report by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) the next year
concluded that tobacco workers were the largest category of unemployed in che city. The
streets simmered with discontent; angry muttering echoed through the city; fears of crime
and violence grew.'^
246.
Ethel L. Best, Women in Florida Industries (Washington, 1930), 2-3; Hewitt, Southern Discomfort, 222,
'" Mormino and Pozzctta. Immigrant World of Ybor City, 131; R. E. Chancey to Harry Hopkins, May 21, 1934
folder "Florida Miscellaneous, A-F," box 14, Civil Works Administration Central Files, 1933-34, State Series Florida, Works Progress Adtninisuation Records, RG 69 (National Archives, College Park, Md.); "12,190 Jobless Listed
1018
The Journal of American History
March 2009
Most ofthe contemporary discussion of unemployment concerned men. Both in Tampa and in the country as a whole, women's unemployment was overshadowed by the
numerically larger problem of unemployment for men. Assuming men to be the family
breadwinners, Americans ofthe 1930s saw male unemployment as the real unemployment problem. Moreover, unemployed and able-bodied men presented a source of potential violence and social upheaval, a threat not generally associated with unemployed
women. In American society in the 1930s, men were seen as both the main breadwinners
and the main agents of violence. Nevertheless, the U.S. Women's Bureau estimated that at
least 2 million American women were out of work in January 1931, and as many as half
the unemployed women were responsible for one or more dependents.'**
Despite their demonstrated need, women never received work relief in proportion to
their level of work-force participation. In 1934 women were 7 percent of work relief recipients under the Civil Works Administration (CWA), although they constituted 25 percent of the unemployed. The next year, with the creation of the WPA, women's relative
status in the relief programs improved. Women held between 12 and 19 percent of WPA
jobs, still below the level of women's participation in the work force, but an improvement
over the record ofthe CWA.'''
The figures reflected the federal government's dilemmas over women and work. Should
the government be encouraging women to work? Or should federal policy encourage
stay-at-home motherhood instead? Should women be given relief jobs when so many
men were still unemployed, or should all the men be taken care of first? Should women
reliefers be paid the same wages as men? And in southern states such as Florida, federal
authorities also had to contend with the complications of race—how to separate work
for white women from work for black women, or how to create a system that conformed
to "Jane Crow" imperatives. White employers regularly complained that relief programs
drained away their labor force, and they seemed particularly incensed that the presence
ofthe WPA might induce black women to withdraw from work in cotton fields or white
women's kitchens. New Deal policy makers faced tremendous challenges in the South.^"
The federal government's decisions on those policy questions were critical for women
in Tampa, for there was little help available to them otherwise. Florida's state welfare system, still in its infancy in the 1930s, provided no direct assistance to the state's needy
residents. Indeed, the state constitution prohibited the appropriation of stare tax funds
for relief. Many counties had no welfare offices, and those that did had extremely limited
funds, drawn from property taxes and distributed in minuscule amounts. (The average
grant was less than $5 per month per family. In comparison, someone working full time
at the minimum wage after the enactment ofthe Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 earned
$2 per day or $40 per month.) The state legislature had authorized the counties to offer
mothers' pensions but had provided no funding. Few counties therefore established penin FERA County Checkup," Tampa Tribune. April 23, 1935, p. 18.
'* Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women, 280.
I" Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, ¡890-1935 {New York,
1994), 193; Susan Ware, "Women and the New Deal," in Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated, ed. Harvard
Sitkoff (New York, 1985), 124.
^" On [he New Deal in the South, see Ronald L. Heinemann, Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion (Charlorresville. 1983); Douglas L. Smith, The New Deal in the Urban South (Baton Rouge, 1988);
Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal (Lexington, Ky., 1993); Karen Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill. 2002); and Anthony J. Badger, New Deal/New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader {Fayetteville,
2007).
Tlie Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1019
sion programs, and in those offering such aid the amounts granted were often less than
$2 per child per month.-' The only aid some counties offered was a stay in the poorhouse,
and despite the stigma attached, those institutions were flooded.'^
Nor was the city government better able to offer assistance. Tampa's municipal resources were exhausted early in the depression. And private charities were likewise swamped by
the overwhelming needs of the community. Local charities could provide small amounts
of assistance—such as the three hundred free meals a week served at the Tampa Welfare
Home. A privately run Old People's Home cared for fewer than 80 people at a time, with
"a large waiting list." The private sector had tremendous difficulty raising funds: Tampa's
Community Chest {forerunner of the United Way) regularly failed to reach its annual
goals during the depression, as pledge drives fell short year after year. The city's African
American residents fared even worse, since they were regularly excluded from white-run
charities. The black community had to rely heavily on its own resources, such as the Urban League, the Knights of Pythias, the Daughters of Elks, the Helping Hand Day Nursery, and other mutual aid organizations.'^
With great needs and little aid, the levels of dissatisfaction grew palpable, as groups of
workers expressed their frustrations loudly and insistently. Tampa was the scene of dozens
of protests, strikes, walkouts, and riots. Communists in the city led protests against evictions and held rallies of the unemployed. City officials nervously reported "some overt
demonstrations. Many school children whose parents were unable to provide lunches
have engaged in demanding demonstrations, as well as others who have been in distress
and style themselves as an Unemployed Brotherhood."'"' Tliis Unemployed Brotherhood
soon evolved into a chapter of the Workers Alliance of America, a national organization
of the unemployed and relief workers that pressed for expanded work relief programs and
increased wages. Allied with and supported by the Socialist party, the Workers Alliance
was most effective in urban, industrial centers with historically strong labor movements.
In Florida small chapters were formed in Miami, Cainesville, Pensacola, and Tampa.
Tampa's unit was headed by Eugene Poulnot, a printer by trade thrown out of work by
the depression and dependent on a WPA truck-driving job.^''
•^' "A Summ^^ry oí Fcdciai Relief in ñonda," Florida Social Welfare Review, 1 {Dec. 1935), p. 7; William W. Rogers, "The Great Depression," in The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville, 1996), 304-5; Helen
G. Mawer, Organization and Activities of the State Board of Public Welfare, January I, 1931 to January 1, ;iJ3J (Tallahassee, 1933), 6-7, 27, 33; "History of Federa] Minimum Wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938-2007,"
United States Department of Labor: Employment Standards Administration, http://www.dol.gov/ESA/minwage/chart.
htm#footnote; Emma O. Lundherg, Mothers'Pensions in Florida. /93J (Tallahassee. 1934), 5-6, 24; Winifred Bell,
Aid to Dependent Children (New York, 1965), 10.
In the nineteenth century, poorhouses (or almshouses) supported by municipal or county governments were
one of the primary public institutions for the care of the poor. TTiey provided housing, food, and medical care to
those with legal residency. Usually underftinded and understaffed, the poorhouses typically provided minimal quality care, and most residents tried to avoid them. Although poorhouses declined in numher in the early twentieth
century, in 1930 Florida still had fifteen poorhouses housing more than five hundred people. See numbers of poorhouses reported for individual counties, Florida, Fifteenth Gensus of the United States, 1930, available at Ancestry,
com. See David Wagner, The Poorhouse: America's Forgotten Institution {Unham. 2005); FJna G. Green, This Business of Relief Confronting Poverty in a Southern City, ¡740-1940 (Athens, Ga., 2003); and Michael B. Katz, In the
Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986).
' ' "Welfare Home Lives Up to Its Name," Tampa Tribune, May 3, 1935, p. 11 ; "Old People's Home Operated
atLowGost,"/¿/^.Jan. 29, 1936, p. 1; "Allotment Agencies Fill Needs,"/¿/^, May 17, 1935. p. 16; Hewitt, 5OMÍAem Discomfort. 248-53.
'" Anita Brenner, "Tampa's Reign ofTerror," Nation. Dec. 7. 1932, p. 556; Ingalls. Urban Vigilantes in the New
South, 150-51 ; Ghancey to Hopkins, May 21, 1934, folder "Florida Miscellaneous, A-F," box 14, Givil Works Administration Gentral Files, 1933-34, State Series, Florida, Works Progress Administration Records.
" The Workers Alliance of America was formed in 1935 when three smaller efforts, including the Gommunist-
1020
The Journal of American History
March 2009
Eugene Poulnot of the Workers Alliance was prominent in the Tampa, Florida, work
relief strike of 1937. Courtesy Tampa Tribune.
Poulnor was one of the thousands of workers in the city reliant on WPA wages. In January 1936, 5,576 workers in Tampa held WPA jobs. By summer 1938, the number was over
9,000. As critical as these federal programs were to the unemployed, Tampa workers were
nevertheless willing to challenge federal policies and programs. In September 1935, for
example, 400 WPA workers in the city protested a three-week delay in receiving their paychecks. When the police arrived, fights broke out and several men were injured.^^
Such violence frequently accompanied labor activism in the city. Tampa had grown notorious for its violent attempts to suppress local labor movements. The "reign of terror" by
the city's commercial class had brought it national attention (and wide condemnation) for
led Unemployed Councils, combined. Matt Perry, Bread and Work: Social Policy and the Experience of Unemployment. 1918-39 (London, 2000), 155-56. For an example of its activities, see the account of a four-day strike of
some six thousand workers in Minneapolis: "Talks of Halting Minneapolis WPA," New York Times. Sept. 6, 1936, p.
18. On Eugene Poulnot, see Elna C. Green, "Hidden in Plain View: Eugene Poulnot and the History of Southern
Radicalism," Florida Historical Quarterly. 84 (Winter 2006), 349-82.
''• James Francis Tidd Jr., "The Works Progress Administration in Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties, Florida,
1935 to 1943" (M.A. thesis. University of South Florida, 1989), 14, 16, 33. The Works Progress Administration
(WPA) figures do not include people working on Civilian Conservation Corps (ccc), National Youth Administration, or other projects.
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1021
urban vigilantism. The depression seemed only to heighten the violence. A general strike
in 1931 provoked widespread violence. In November 1935 (just a year and a half before
the sewing-room strike), three labor organizers, Joseph Shoemaker, Eugene Poulnot, and
Sam Rogers, were kidnapped, savagely beaten, tarred and feathered, and left in the woods
to die. Shoemaker died of his injuries days later, but Poulnot and Rogers lived to testify
against the perpetrators, who were linked to the Ku Klux Klan. The trials dominated the
local news throughout 1936 and 1937. Prominent in the trial testimony and in the newspaper coverage was the often-repeated suspicion that Poulnot was a Communist. Hence
Poulnot's association with the sewing-room strike meant that, in many people's minds,
the entire event was the product of Communist agitators. As the local businessman H.
C. Tillman put it, "Poulnot is a trouble-maker and is generally considered a 'RED.' . . . I
cannot see why the local authorities of the WPA should give employment to men of Poulnot s stripe. . . . I do heartily agree with the action of those authorities in seeking to keep
a trouble-maker like Poulnot from trying to cram his Communistic doctrines down the
throats of the workers of this Community."^^
How Poulnot made contact with the women of the WPA sewing room is unknown. But
perhaps the Workers Alliance reached out to the sewing-room workers (rather than vice
versa) as potential converts; such a strategy would have made sense, WPA sewing rooms
represented the largest work relief program for women in the city and. for that matter, in
the nation.^^ At the agency's peak, 405,000 women held WPA positions across the country.
In 1936, 56 percent of them worked in sewing rooms, making hospital gowns, band uniforms for public schools, costumes for wPA-produced plays, and a wide range of clothing
for charities and relief agencies. (In some states, the proportion was even greater; in New
Mexico, for example, it was 84 percent.) In Florida as a whole, in January 1937, 66 percent of the 6,593 women employed by the WPA worked in the sewing rooms. In Tampa,
more than 1,000 women were at work in at least four different sewing centers by 1937.
If the Workers Alliance could provoke a strike of sewing-room workers, it would reach
a large contingent of women relief workers in the city and would have the potential to
spread to sewing rooms throughout the state."'
Although the WPA offered jobs to many women, WPA policy makers did not hold a
feminist perspective on women's employment. Instead, the WPA perpetuated the general
assumption of the era that men were the primary breadwinners. If married, a woman
was automatically ineligible for WPA work relief The WPA claimed that its programs were
"intended to conserve the skills, work habits and morale of the able-bodied unemployed
' For national coverage of Tampa vigilantism, see, for example, Brenner, "Tampa's Reign of Terror," 555-57.
Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes in the New South, 150-56. On the flowing, see IngaJls, Urban Vigilantes in the New South.
180-204. H. C. Tillman to Aubrey Williams, Nov. 18, 1936, folder "Florida July 1937-July 1938," box 1122, Civil
Works Administration Central Files, series 693. States, 1935-1944, Works Progress Administration Records. H.
C. Tillman was the son of the South Carolina governor and U.S. senator "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman and was later a
circuit court judge.
^^ There is no general history of the WPA sewing rooms. For a specialized account, see Georgina Hickey, '"The
Lowest Form of Work Relief: Authority, Gender, and the State in Atlanta's WPA Sewing Rooms," in The New Deal
and Beyond: Social Welfare in the South since 1930. ed. EIna C. Green (Athens, Ga., 2003).
^'' Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 194-95. The WPA created white-collar and professional jobs for women, but
only a few. For example, the Tampa WPA sponsored a class in dress design, open to the public without charge. But it
hired only one teacher, "WPA Will Conduct Cla.sses in Dress Designing in Tampa," Tampa Tribune. Feb. 6, 1936, p.
4. On sewing-room workers as a percentage of Florida women WPA relief workers, see Report. Jan. 1-15, 1937, box
7, Correspondence and Reports by State, Household Workers Training Program, Records of the Division of Professional and Service Projects, 1935-1941, Works Progress Administration Records. On the number of Tampa sewingroom workers, see "Work Is Sought Here for 1000 Jobless Women," Tampa Tribune. AprW 18, 1936, p. 14.
1022
The Journal of American History
March 2009
through work suited as far as possible to their abilities." But Ellen Woodward, director
of the Women's Division of the WPA, pointed out that this phiiosophy applied mostly to
men. After culling out a few white-collar workers for the Federal Writers' Project, the
Federal Art Project, and the Federal Theatre Project, the WPA placed the vast majority
of unemployed women in traditionally female jobs such as those in the sewing rooms
and food-canning projects. As one official put it: "For unskilled men we have the shovel.
For unskilled women we have only the needle."^" In 1937 the WPA furthered this traditional emphasis when it established the household service demonstration project, to train
women for domestic employment. (In the South, the program trained African American
women to be maids and cooks.) Such programs stereotyped women's work as demanding
few skills and offered no training for more challenging and remunerative jobs that might
open up when the depression ended."
When New Deal administrators established sewing rooms to provide work relief for
women during the Great Depression, they fell back on a tradition of poor relief many
generations old. From the days of the Elizabethan poor laws, both public welfare authorities and private charitable organizations had relied heavily on sewing to provide assistance to poor women." But in the 1930s, that traditional approach to poor relief represented a profound lack of imagination by policy makers. When it came to work relief
for men. New Dealers broke with tradition. Unemployed men were not relegated to the
woodyard—the male cognate to the sewing room—where generations of needy men had
been asked to cut wood for their poor relief. Instead, the New Deal offered unemployed
able-bodied men a remarkable range of options—including not only jobs but also education and vocational training. Through the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National
Youth Administration, and the WPA, men gained new skills such as welding, carpentry,
and small engine repair. Large numbers learned to read, contributing to tbe Souths improving literacy rates. Not only did their industrial skills not atrophy during their unemployment, many men's skill levels were improved by these federal programs. As a result,
many found themselves newly prepared for higher-paying industrial jobs when the United States entered World War II. Women, in contrast, saw a steady erosion of their place
in the work force, experiencitig a de-skilling and gender stereotyping that consigned them
to low-paid jobs In both the present and the future.'^
Nevertheless, the sewing rooms represented a lifeboat for many women in a city with
high unemployment such as Tampa. With few alternatives available, desperate women
clamored to get positions in the sewing rooms, pulling strings and asking for favors wherever possible. Dominga Alvarez, a twenty-four-ycar-old Tampa woman, boldly wrote directly to Eleanor Roosevelt: "Please do all what is in your power to help me get in the
W.P.A. Sewing Room. . . . I been trying to get on the W.PA. for 10 months, and they
^ Abramovicz, Regulating ée Lives ofWomen, 282; Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 109.
" Ware, "Women and the New Deal," 124; Abramovitz. Regulating the Lives of Women, 283. The WPA was not
alone in these policies. By 1937 there were ninety ccc camps for women, serving 5,000. Unlike the men's ccc,
which paid wages, the women's corps provided neither pay nor vocational training. Remedial education was the
main focus until Congress eliminated the program in 1937. ibid, 285- On the domestic training programs in Florida, see "WPA to Open School to Give Negro Women Domestic Training," Tampa Tribune, Nov. 12, 1937, p. 21.
" Sec, for example, Amy Gilman, "From Widowhood to Wickedness: The Politics of Class and Gender in New
York City Private Charity, Vl'i^-XZ^K History of Education Quarterly, 24 (Spring 1984). 63; and Green, This Business of Relief. 34-35.
^^ Here my argument follows that of Sharon Hartman Strom, "Challenging Woman's Place': Feminism, the
Left, and Industrial Unionism in the 1930s,'' Feminist Studies, 9 (Summer 1983), 362.
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1023
In Tampa, Florida, during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administraiion {\V\>A)
sewing rooms, including the one pictured here in 1935, constituted the largest work relief
program for women. Sewing-room jobs were a lifeboat for many women, especially older
ones, whom private employers shunned. Courtesy State Archives of Fbrida, Tallahassee. Florida.
always tell me the same thing, because they ain't taking new aplication." Those fortunate
enough to get one of the coveted spots often considered it lifesaving. Alma Bazemore
wrote to thank Eleanor Roosevelt: "Some time ago, I wrote to you, asking your help in
getting work in the WPA Sewing Room at Tampa, Fla. I just want to let you know that I
am now working there, and feeling that I owe it to you, I want to thank you. It is meaning so much to me, and I appreciate it more than I can express. May God bless you for
your kindness, dear First Lady."'^
Women "of a certain age" especially considered the sewing jobs critical. Very few jobs
of any kind were available to older women, as a WPA district director wrote: "Because of
the age of a great majority of our workers and the lack of previous training in those things
which modern industry demands we musr inevitably reach the conclusion that in most
cases private industrial absorption will be extremely difficult for them. . . . the constant
demand for well trained youth makes the present lot of rhe average WP.A. worker look
hopeless." Older women were keenly aware of rhe situation. Rachel E. Bradley of Tampa
wrote that she had to have a WPA position "as I am a woman fifty years old [and] it is impossible for me to get work in the commercial world any way" Bertha Ludlam, a sixty'* Dominga Alvarez to Eleanor Roosevelt. Oct. 4, 1939, box ! 118. Civil Works Administration Centrai Files,
series 661-62. States, 1935-1944, Florida, Works Progres.s Administration Records; Aima Bazemore to Roosevelt
Feb. 28, 1939, ibid
1024
The Journal of American History
March 2009
three-year-old widow from nearby St. Petersburg, noted that she had "tried to get other
work but am told that I am to old no one wants me." Fifty-year-old Frances Bell ofTampa
put it succinctly: "No one of my age can get a job other than the W.RA."^^
Moreover, needy women made clear their understanding that relief was a right they
had earned. Some grounded that claim in their citizenship, arguing that, as law-abiding
citizens, taxpayers, and voters, they had a right to government assistance from any agency
available. Mrs. A. B. O'Quinn of Chattahoochee based her entitlement to assistance on
"taxes paid to the State of Fla. here and Jax. [Jacksonville] by my grandmother and my
mother for the last Thirty-Five years, and I feel that 1 deserve a job to work for my three
children and mother as I have no income." Mabel G. Braswell of Fort Myers wrote the
governor on behalf of her mother, whose husband "was a Tax payer of the State of Fla for
over 65 years. She should be entitled to the blind pension if any one is and we need it."
Hettie Youngblood argued that "we are a worthy family we was both borned and raised in
Fla. and . . . both voted for you for our governor of Fla. I think I deserve help. My father
was a Tax payer of Florida 50 years.""'
Other women pressed their claims based on their marriage and motherhood. The late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had given women increasing opportimities to
gain public assistance through dependent relationships to husbands. Civil War and other
military pensions, the allotments and allowances program of World War 1, and mothers'
pensions had provided public aid to wives, widows, or mothers, nurturing a concept of
entitlement based on female dependency. Mrs. N. J. Sellers of Marianna explained;
1 understand of course, there's not work for all, but I feel that they should give
me work for a while. I need the work very much as I have 4 small children, 8¿ my
husband's income is not sufficient to keep us up. I am perfectly capable of doing
the work and our family is of thouroughly good character. Also I have asked for a
few of the clothes they have there (made at the sewing room) &C have rec'd only one
small allotment, & that was last year. So I feel that we should have a few of them,
as others get them regularly.
These and other desperate women saw relief as an earned right and not an embarrassment. Pointedly, they drew on a tradition of entitlement based on female dependency,
not on their status as workers.''^
The sewing rooms in Florida and across the country received a mixture of women with
a range of work experiences. Some of the women assigned to the sewing rooms had years
of industrial experience behind them. They were unemployed as a result of layoffs and
" Narrative Report. May 1937, p. 13, box 5, Narrative Reports, Records of tbe Division of Professional and
Service Projects, Works Progress Administration Records; Rachel E. Bradley to Roosevelt. July 9. 1939, box 1118,
Civil Works Administration Central Files, series 661-62, States, 1935-1944, Florida, ibid; Bertha Ludlam to
Roosevelt, Aug. 9, 1939, ibid; Frances Betl to Roosevelt, May 27, 1939, ibid.
'^ Mrs. A. B. O'Quinn (Chattahoochee) to Fred Cone, May 26, 1937, folder 3, box 66, series 368, Cone Papers
(State Archives of Florida); Mabel G. Btasweil (Fort Myers) to Cone, May 17, 1937, folder 3, box 10, ibid,; Hettie
Youngbiood (Tyty. Ga.) to Cone, Oct. 18. 1937, folder l,box 104. ibid.
^' On Civil War pensions, see 'Iheda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social
Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Larry M. Logue and Peter Blanck, '"Benefit of the Doubt':
African-American Civil War Veterans and Vensxom" Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 38 (Winter 2008), 377-99;
and Elna C. Green, "Protecting Confederate Soldiers and Mothers: Pensions, Gender, and the Welfare State in
the South, a Case Study from Florida," Journal of Social History. 39 (Summer 2006), 1079-1104. On World War
I allotments and allowances, see K. Walter Hickcl, "War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Servicemen's
Dependents in the Soutb, I9l7-\92l "Journalaf American History. 87 (March 2001), 1362-91. On mothers'pensions, see Joanne L. Goodwin, Gender and ihe Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers' Pensions in Chicago. 1911-1929
(Chicago, 1997). Mrs. N. J. Sellers (Marianna) to Cone, June 9, 1937, folder 10, box 82, series 368, Cone Papers.
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1025
plant closures. But others had little or no record of paid employment. Lurlee Balssell,
for example, noted that she was turned down for a WPA position because she had never
worked before.'^ Such women were needy for a variety of reasons—their spouses had died
or abandoned them; or their children had grown and left home, leaving a widowed mother without support. Some, whose husbands were incapacitated, hid the fact that they were
married so they would qualify for assistance. Others were domestic workers, unable to
find employment as middle-class families scaled back their expenses by laying off their
cooks and maids. Thus the sewing-room women had no single, common work history.
They came from a range of age groups and life experiences, and they viewed their time in
the sewing rooms according to those experiences.
Some women hoped to gain new job skills they could apply in the private sector, but
few were so rewarded. Although the WPA often claimed that women gained training and
new industrial skills by their work in the sewing rooms, officials acknowledged that Florida had "few garment manufacturing plants," and so only 158 women from the sewing
rooms obtained jobs in that industry over the course of a year. Considering that nearly
10,000 women were at work in the state's sewing rooms at the time, the match between
job training and job opportunities in the garment industry seemed extraordinarily poor.
Ihe disjuncture between sewing-room training and potential industrial employment
reached ludicrous extremes in October 1937, at a meeting of WPA county supervisors. A
special feature ofthat month's program was a "demonstration of spinning presented by a
seamstress of the Pensacola [sewing] center who used a spinning wheel one hundred and
fifiy years old. . . . The area supervisor expressed the hope that the arts of spinning and
weaving would become a part of the training received in the WPA sewing rooms." In other
words, not only were Floridas sewing-room women being trained for industrial jobs that
did not exist, some in the agency wished to train women in obsolete technologies."
Instead of real job training, sewing-room women were given numerous opportunities
for "self-improvement," including classes in hygiene, baby care, and first aid. The classes
focused on women's roles as homemakers and mothers, not as workers or breadwinners,
WPA nurses gave lectures on the control and prevention of venereal diseases. The state
staffers noted, "Inasmuch as many of the workers previously have been denied sources
of information regarding these diseases, the lectures are proving of real benefit to them
and members of their families. Health education which the women receive at the sewing rooms, undoubtedly, is one of the most valuable by-products of the projects."'*'^ The
agency never really reconciled itself to a view of women as permanent members of the
work force; its policies assumed that most women were in need of work only because of
the depression and would return to their homes at the first opportunity.
More than marketable skills, the sewing-room administrators hoped to build morale
and camaraderie among the workers. Their monthly reports were filled with examples of
'*• Lurlee Balssell ro Roosevelt, March 15, 1938, folder 662 A-J, box 1118, Civil Works Administration Central
Files, series 661-62, States, 1935-1944, Florida. Works Progress Administration Records.
" According to an upbeat account of the skills imparted in the sewing rooms, "Special classes in buttonholemaking have been conducted in the Miami Colored unit with remarkable results. Women report that they have
been able to earn small sums out of hours making infant garments." See Narrative Report, Feb. 1938, p. 6. box 4,
Narrative Reports, Records of the Division of Professional and Service Projects, Works Progress Administration Records. Narrative Repon, Nov. 1938, p. 19, ibid; Narrative Report, Oct. 1937, p. 7, box 4A, ibid
^" Narrative Report, Nov. 1938, p. 22, box 4, ibid. In Georgia the WPAS monthly reports exaggerated the number of self-improvement classes offered. Hickey, "'Lowest Form of Work Relief,'" 10. If such padding occurred in
the reports from Florida, it was not discovered at the time.
1026
The Journal of American History
March 2009
their efforts and their self-assessed positive results. Sewing-room workers attended plays
and operas by the local WPA arts groups, had picnics and lemonade parties, and joined in
organized, group recreational activities such as playing on softball teams and singing in
glee clubs. The sewing centers sponsored holiday parties, Christmas toy giveaways, and
dinners for workers and their families, which reportedly had "a tonic effect upon tbe morale of the sewing-room workers."'*' Most of the larger centers had lunchrooms, where the
women socialized on their breaks. The intended result was the creation of social bonds
and a sense of community spirit.
Anecdotal evidence, filtered through the perspective of the supervisors, suggests that
many women in the sewing rooms did indeed make friends there and that a sense of community developed in the workrooms. In February 1938, for example, the monthly report
noted with pride: "Cooperation among workers in the centers reached a new bigh in the
Tampa area where one worker's house was destroyed by fire, and a shower was given her
by her fellow workers. In Hillsborough County, four workers offered to give blood for a
transfusion to save a fellow worker's life. Fortunately, one matched and the transfusion
saved the woman's life. The Sewing room also sent food to the eight children of this ill
worker." In another instance, the supervisor at Plant City (near Tampa) recorded her observations of the "friendly and congenial" relations in her center. The women "take pleasure in helping each other, exchanging flower and vegetable cuttings and recipes of every
kind." Administrators may not have realized that their efforts at creating friendly relations
between the workers could also bond them together in ways unintended by the WPA. The
social functions of the sewing rooms promoted among the workers a solidarity that might
then be put to other uses—including organizing a strike.^^
We should not overinterpret that solidarity, as there were clear limits on the bonding
and camaraderie. Tampa sewing rooms, like those throughout the South, were racially
segregated. One of the four sites in the city was designated for African Americans. While
race was established as a dividing line de jure, ethnicity divided workers de facto. The
"white" units were open to both Latins and Anglos, but because the sewing rooms were
based in neighborhoods, only the Ybor City sewing room had many Latin women. The
picnics, ice cream parties, and glee clubs would therefore be segregated by race and ethnicity.
While uniformly grateful for their paychecks, women in the sewing roonns might have
good reasons for dissatisfaction with their jobs. The work centers were sometimes located
in facilities not designed for the purpose, which as a result had ventilation or sanitation
problems. Sewing centers were not always conveniently located, and transportation was
a constant problem. Local supervisors often came from the ranks of the unemployed and
might lack training or credentials for the job. Administrators were seldom professional social workers, and they could be insensitive to the emotional needs of the relief recipients.
A worker from Tampa wrote the WPA to complain that
the women in the sewing rooms are being given two dresses made exactly alike—the
same color—and told to wear them to work. Is It necessary that we wear uniforms
so that everyone knows when they see us we belong to the W.P.A. God knows its
a wonderful thing but must we advertise it to the world our poverty on street cars,
streets, wherever we go. No one else is getting them but the sewing room women
*' Narrative Report, Dec. 1937, p. 1, box 4, Narrative Reports, Records of the Division of Professional and Service Projects, Works Progress Administration Records.
*^ Narrative Report, Juiy 1938, p. 14, ibid.; Narrative Report, Jan. 1937, pp. 4-5, box 5, ibid.
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1027
the lowest paid of all workers. Must our poverty be shown in our clothes, must we
be uniformed?''^
Black women had additional, racially specific, grievances. African American sewingroom workers from Orlando petitioned to have a black supervisor and a black janitor assigned to their center. The white janitor, they complained, refused to clean for them and
so the sewing-room workers had to clean their own facilities, WPA administrators cooperated energetically with local whites who sought domestic labor. When whites complained
that black women were refusing jobs as cooks and maids because they had sewing-room
jobs, the state administrators closed the black sewing rooms down.'*''
Probably the single most common source of dissatisfaction for both black and white
women was the inconsistent operations of the centers and the resulting insecurity. The
sewing-room projects were erratic in their operations, opening and closing in bewildering
patterns. More than 1,000 women wete thrown out of work in Tampa when all the sewing rooms there shut down in April 1936 for lack of funds. The sewing rooms reopened
six weeks later but hired fewer than half of those previously let go. Another shutdown
occurred two months later, due to a delay in the arrival of paper work from Washington.
The sewing rooms opened again two months later, with yet another reduction in force.
Women workers, so desperate for this employment, could never feel confident that it
would continue. And on July 1, 1937, the sewing rooms across the nation cut their work
forces dramatically, responding to orders from Washington to trim the program and its
costs. (The cuts were part of the so-called Roosevelt recession of 1937.) In Tampa 88
women were released from the largest sewing room, which was located in Ybor City in an
old cigar factory at Twentieth Street and Twelfth Avenue.^'^
The result of the 1937 cuts, as WPA officials throughout the nation noted, was "considerable unrest among the workers, [and] community protests." Many localities were
left in a "chaotic condition" because the reduction "in many instances left families with
no income, a condition which brought about severe criticism in each county." The timing was particularly bad for Floridians, since many seasonal businesses remained closed.
"Industrial absorption" (the New Deal term for moving from relief jobs to private-sector
employment) was at an all-time low. One Florida official reported, "The month was beset
with difficult problems following a reduced working load. Released workers were not the
only ones to complain, as whole communities have protested the release of women workers from the centers." The Workers Alliance called a national convention in Milwaukee to
discuss possible responses to the nationwide layoffs. Despite the protests, the closings and
cutbacks of July 1 proceeded
*^
••' Anonymous to Col. P. C. Harrington, n.d., folder 610.2, box 1073, Civil Works Administration Central
Files, States, 1935-1944. ibid
^ Martha James to T. Arnold Hill, Feb. 21, 1939, folder 1939. box 1122, Civil Works Administration Central
Files, series 693, States, 1935-1944, Florida, ibid.\ Narrative Report, Dec. 1936, p. 2, box 5, Narrative Reports.
Records of the Division of Professional and Service Projects, ibid.
^' "Work Is Sought Here for 1000 Jobless Women," Tampa Tribune, hcñ\ 18, 1936, p. 14.; "County Women
WPA Sevving Rooms to Be Reopened for 450," ibid. May 10, 1936. p. 11; V P A Sewing Rooms Close Pending New
Projects," ibid.,]\Áy 18, 1936, p. 7; "WPA Sewing Room Will Be Reopened in Tampa," ibid., Aug. 10, 1936, p. 12.
On [he Roosevelt recession, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New
York, 1995).
'"' Narrative Report, July 1937, pp. 1, 10, 3, box 4A. Narrative Reports, Records of the Division of Professional
and Service Projects, Works Progress Administration Records; "Workers' Alliance Convention Maps Program to Aid
wPAers," Tampa Socialist Call, june 26, 1937, p. 12.
1028
The Journal of American History
March 2009
In Tampa rumors of a relief strike had been swirling even before the cuts went into
effect. Strikes by relief workers had become more common in the previous two years. A
federal Bureau of Labor study reported 95 relief strikes in 1935, involving more tban
41,000 workers nationwide. The southern states, with their weaker history of labor activity, had seen relatively few relief strikes, and Florida none. Nevertheless, on July 8, one
week after the "reduction in force," women in the Ybor City sewing room launched a sitdown strike/^ As the morning began, a group of the recently fired workers entered the
factory where approximately 400 women worked and told the forewomen on each floor
that the project was on strike and no work was to be given out that day. The strike committee, identified as Mabel Hagan, Elsie Seth, and Adela Santiesteban, told the workers
in both Spanish and English that the strike was to protest the firing ofthe 88 workers the
week before and that the workers would stay until the 88 were reinstated. La Gaceta, Tampa's Spanish-language newspaper, noted pointedly that the 88 fired workers were mostly
"Americans," not Latins, and that the Latin women had joined the strike in solidarity with
the Anglos. "Let's stand together like they do in the north," Hagan said. "That's the way
to get your rights." The strike leaders said that no one would be injured if the workers
sat quietly and refrained from working, but the supervisor claimed that the strikers had
threatened to harm anyone caught working."*"
The strike committee then submitted a list of demands to the WPA district director, W.
E. Robinson. They demanded reinstatement ofthe released workers and a 20 percent increase in wages for all relief workers. To put pressure on the WPA, they also called for a general sit-down strike of all WPA workers in the city, which if successful would have involved
thousands of people. Eugene Poulnot ofthe Workers Alliance was tasked with persuading
other WPA units to join the strike/^
From the beginning, both WPA and local authorities took the strike very seriously. The
rapid arrival in Tampa of district and state officials testified to their fear that the sit-down
could successfully promote the broader general strike the women announced or could
spread to other cities. Officials realized that a strike by women might elicit substantial
public sympathy, especially if the workers projected an image of themselves as mothers,
wives, and elderly widows deserving of charity and support. Because these were relief
workers, rather than just workers, they were by definition needy. The sheriff believed that
the sit-down, with its call for a more general strike, was "deliberately started with women" for this very reason. Moreover, the kinds of vigilante violence practiced in Tampa in
the past would probably not be effective in this instance. Not only had public opinion
seemingly turned against vigilante tactics after the national outcry about the flogging of
Poulnot in 1935, physical attacks on poor women engaged in a peaceful sit-down would
•" The two major contemporary sources on the strike are daily coverage by the local press and a report by the
sewing-room supervisor, Hattie McKeel. (The workers left no direct testimony.) Neither source was sympathetic to
the strikers. Nor was the Elorida Labor Advocate, the voice of the state's American Federation ot Labor (AFL). The
only source consistently supportive ofthe strike was the Spanish-language newspaper La Gaceta, which ran only
brief daily articles. On rumors of an upcoming strike in the Tampa sewing room, see "Account ofTampa Strike by
Project Supervisor," unpaginated and appended to Narrative Repon, July 1937, box 4A, Narrative Reports, Records
of the Division of Professional and Service Projects, Works Progress Administration Records. Florence Peterson,
Strikesin the United States. ¡ 880-¡ 936 i'Wishmgwn. 1937), p. 160, table 37.
*^ "Chungas y no chungas" (Quips and comments), La Gaceta (Tampa), July 10, 1937. p. 1; "WPA Sit-Down
Called; Women Hold Building," Tampa Tribune, July 9, 1937, p. 1; "Account ofTampa Strike by Project Supervi.sor."
^'^ V P A Sit-Down Called; Women Hold Building," Tampa Tribune, Jdy 9. 1937. p. 1.
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1029
have undoubtedly horrified the public. This strike would have to be defeated by other
means. ^"
At 4:00 p.m. that afternoon, district director Robinson called all the women together
and read the demands of the strike committee and his replies. An interpreter read them
in Spanish "for the benefit of those who do not understand English." Robinson offered to
reinstate some of the 88 women who were found to have dependents, but he threatened
to do so by firing current workers who might have additional incomes in their households. As for the demand that wages be raised, Robinson told them that wages were set
by Washington, and he had no power to adjust them. Sheriff J. R. McLeod then spoke to
the assembled women, promising that anyone who wanted to leave the building would
be permitted to do so. "No one woman had the right to tell us that we couldn't work and
leave the building as we were accustomed to doing . . . [and] he would accompany them
to the door and see that they were allowed to leave unharmed; also that all of the women
who wanted to work the following day could report at their usual time and he would assure them of protection as they came to and from work." McLeod, who had once been a
WPA supervisor himself, also said, "I have heard that some want to leave to go cook. Anyone who wants to leave can.'"*'
Mabel Hagan, the leader of the strikers, then "jumped upon the table" and told the
women that the strike committee could not accept Robinson's terms and that they should
return to their respective workrooms and resume the sit-down. Hagan, a forty-three-yearold divorcée, had been working in the sewing room since at least November 1935. Although she was identified in the press as the head of the women's committee of the Workers Alliance, Hagan apparently had little previous experience in labor activism, and she
allowed herself to be outflanked at this critical point in the day.'^^ "At the suggestion of the
timekeeper, the strikers were called into one room and all of the others left the building."
Approximately 260 American women left, while 102 Latin women and 21 Americans remained.^' The strikers thus effectively surrendered most of the building, and the sit-down
tactic would henceforth be less productive, since the majority of the factory space would
be open to nonstriking workers.
The sheriffs office wanted to clear the building entirely at 6:00 p.m., but word of the
plan "spread quickly through Ybor City, and more than 500 persons gathered," surrounding the factory as a protective barrier. The crowd drew local law enforcement, but the
police were outnumbered and ineffective. The plan to force the strikers out of the build'"' Ibid.; Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes in the New South. 200-204.
"Account ofTampa Strike by Project Supervisor"; "Las costureras americanas y latinas de la WPA mantienen la
huelga sentada en el edificio donde estuvo 'La Flor de Cuba'" (American and Latin WPA seamstresses carry on a sitdown strike in the building where "La Flor de Cuba" was located), La G^ÏCÎÎA (Tampa). July 9, 1937, p. 1.
"Account ofTampa Strike by Project Supervisor." In November 1935 Hagan signed a petition by sewingroom workers endorsing tbe promotion of their district supervisor to a state office. It appears in the misleadingly
dated folder "Florida 660 A-Z Jan 1939," box 1114, Civil Works Administration Central Files, series 651.363
(Mar-Oct 1939) to 660, States, 1935-1944, Florida. Works Progress Administration Records. Records on Hagan's
background are very sketcby, and it is unclear why she was cbosen as ibe strike leader. Her WPA job may have been
her first "industrial" employment, and this may have been ber first labor action. The 1930 census listed her as taking
in boarders. I cannot locate her in the 1920 census. Population Schedules, Precinct 13, Tampa City, Hillsborough
County, Florida, Fifreenth Census of the United States, 1930, available at Ancestry.com.
These numbers, from the supervisor's report, appear more accurate than those in the local newspaper, which
said between 60 and 100 women remained. La Caceta noted that tbe returning workers were Americans, while
the strikers were predominantly Latin. "Account ofTampa Strike by Project Supervisor"; "WPA Sit-Down Called;
Women Hold Building," Tampa Tribune. }u\y 9. 1937, p. 1; "Chungas y no chungas," ¿ÎÏ G/rfW (Tampa) July loi
1937. p. 1.
1030
The Journal of American History
March 2009
ing was abandoned when the officers concluded they had "no authority to eject persons
from federal property." The sheriff warned that most other WPA projects were on city and
county property and that no trespassing would be allowed on those sites.^**
Food and other supplies began arriving at the factory as the strikers prepared for a
protracted sit-down. "The strikers crowded to the windows to wave and shout at friends
along the sidewalk and to cheer whenever additional food supplies arrived." Thousands
of people, in cars and on foot, paraded through the streets around the building. "Several
truckloads of bread, buckets of ice water and coffee and other edibles were handed to
them through the windows." (The bakers' union wanted it made clear that the workers,
not the bakery owners, had sent the bread.) Hagan told the press that the strikers had sufficient food to last a month. Many women had blankets and bedding delivered to them as
well. During the evening, telegrams of support arrived from the national headquarters of
the Workers Alliance and the International Labor Defense, and cheering could be heard
from the factory as the endorsements were read.^^
On the second day, Friday July 9, the 260 nonstriking women came back to work and
began operations as usual, with the strikers blocked off on one floor of the three-story
building. Police patrolled the scene all day, roping off the area immediately around the
factory to prevent crowds from outmaneuvering them as had happened the day before.
The police did permit children of the striking women to go to the windows and visit with
their mothers. Some women were seen nursing their babies, who were passed through the
windows. Frank Ingram, the state WPA director, arrived and tried to negotiate with the
strikers, but he was rebuffed by the women, who insisted that he negotiate only with the
Workers Alliance, which he refused to do."^*'
On this second day, 250 men from three different WPA projects joined the strike. Eugene Poulnot visited other projects in the city and predicted that the strike would spread
the next week. Mabel Hagan made even bolder claims: "Every project in town will be out
next week, and other workers will join us." Poulnot also reached out to cigar workers, asking for solidarity among all workers, even those not on relief jobs. The Workers Alliance
held a mass meeting that night at the Labor Temple, a few blocks from the sewing center,
to rally support for the effort.^^ Given the success of the Workers Alliance in other industrial cities, local officials took seriously the possibility that the sewing-room sit-down
could indeed provoke a general strike.
Unfortunately for the strikers, the weekend interrupted some apparent momentum in
their favor. The effect of a sit-down is considerably neutralized when the site is not scheduled to be open, and so the weekend created a lull. City officials took advantage of this
moment of quiet to plan their strategy. After one of the women strikers was sent home
sick, the city ordered its health officer to inspect the building. The inspector concluded
that the strikers were keeping the building clean, but that the "serious lack of plumbing
facilities" was both dangerous and a violation of city health codes. He also claimed that
the strikers represented a fire hazard in the building, which was not prepared to accommodate people sleeping. City officials then charged that the sit-down represented a threat
^ "WPA Sit-Down Called; Women Hold Building," Tampa Tribune, July 9, 1937, p. 1.
'^ ¡bid; "Las costureras americanas y latinas de la WPA mantienen la huelga sentada en el edificio donde estuvo
'La Flor de Cuba,'" La Gaceta (Tampa), July 9, 1937, p. 1; "El pan a las huelgistas" (Bread for the strikers), ibid..
July 9, 1937, p. 4.
'^ "250 Men Join 130 Women in WPA Sit-Down," Tampa Tribune, }u\y 10, 1937, p- 1.
^' Tbid.; "Del Comité Central" (From the central committee), La Gaceta (Tampa), July 14, 1937, p. 3.
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1031
to public health and demanded that the federal government clear the building for the
health and safety of the workers. Federal authorities did not immediately respond to the
charges, but they did decide to close all projects in the city for one day on Monday July
12.'^^ The closing would preempt sit-down attempts at other projects, further slowing any
momentum for an enlarged labor action. Both sides persistently refused to negotiate.
The Workers Alliance still hoped to provoke a more general strike, and it sent representatives to WPA projects and private industries trying to gain workers' support. The alliance stationed pickets at several projects around the city. But, with the exception of the
250 men already out, no other groups joined. Even the three other sewing rooms in the
city avoided participating. The response given by relief workers approached at a project at
Shell Point helps explain why relief strikes were so difficult to organize. "We are glad to
have our jobs," said a spokesman, "and because most of us are elderly men, we doubt if
we could get jobs in private industry."^^
After the citywide closure on Monday, state WPA director Frank Ingram ordered all
projects re-opened on Tuesday July 13. Although their numbers had dwindled over the
long weekend, over 100 women were still sticking to the sit-down that Tuesday morning.
Ingram issued a statement explaining the WPAS rule on dismissals: Anyone absent from a
work relief job for more than four consecutive days could be fired, and pink slips were being prepared. Any striker who did not return to work on Wednesday would lose her job.
After Ingram's statement at least a dozen more women left the sit-down.'*
All day, rumors circulated through the city that the strike was coming to an end, and
"many of the women threw their belongings out of windows to relatives in preparation
for their return home. By nightfall, a crowd had gathered around the factory, but there
were no disorders [and] no arrests." The Workers Alliance held a "stormy" meeting in the
Ybor City Labor Temple that evening, after which the organization decided to call off
the strike. Eugene Poulnot, as president of the local alliance, told the press afterward that
the vote to end the strike was taken "in order that there would be no bloodshed between
strikers and strikebreakers." Although there had been violence at relief strikes in other cities, it was hardly likely to occur in the Tampa sewing room, given the thorough segregation of the strikers and the nonstriking workers within the building. His was more a facesaving excuse for ending the already-waning sit-down than a statement of reality.^'
The audience poured out of the Labor Temple and met the strikers as they were leaving the factory. More than twenty-five hundred people cheered them as they entered the
meeting hall. "Tired and bedraggled," the newspaper reported, "they smiled and embraced friends and relatives. A few children tugged gleefully at their skirts." "We have no
regrets, none whatsoever," said Hagan. "We were in there a week, and it was not pleasant,
but we would do it over again." After a couple of short speeches, including one in Spanish
by Adela Santiesteban, the crowd dispersed. The sit-down was over, and the remaining 86
women returned to their homes."^'
The following day, 53 of them returned to the sewing room and were given their jobs
back. (Men from the other WPA projects who had gone on sympathy strike were also re""" "City Acts in Sit-Down," Tarnpa Tribune, July 11, 1937, p. 1.
" "Strike Closed WPA Projects to Be Reopened," ibid.,]\i\y 14, 1937, p. 18.
^" Tbid\ "WPA Sit-Down Here is Ended; Women Co Home," Tampa Tribune. July 15, 1937, p. 1.
'•' "WPA Sit-Down Here Is Ended; Women Co Home," ibid.. July 15, 1937, p. 1. On violence at another relief
strike, see "Violence Marks WPA Strike in Birmingham," ibid.. April 17, 1936, p. 2.
''- "WPA Sit-Down Here Is Ended; Women Co Home," Tampa Tribune, July 15. 1937, p. 1; "Finaliza la huelga
sentada" (The sit-down strike ends), Li Gáce/d (Tampa), July 15, 1937, p. 3.
1032
The Journal of American History
March 2009
hired.) în Ybor City the local labor community continued to celebrate the strikers, as
when they were special guests at the bakers' union ball. But outside the labor community,
the leaders of the strike were subjected to harassment. The strike leaders, including Hagan
and Poulnot, were fired from theit WPA jobs. The local hostile press reported with obvious
glee when a tearful Mabel Hagan applied to the county commission for poor relief''^
Given the circumstances of the strike and the odds against its success, it is not surprising that the attempt failed. Its failure gives us the opportunity to examine how the outcome affected the interest groups involved and what the event can tell us about women,
work, and welfare in the 1930s. The fact that the other three sewing rooms never joined
the Ybor City group highlights the barriers that separated the reliefers from one another.
The social activities that had helped forge friendships and camaraderie within a sewing
room did not necessarily extend to women in other sewing rooms in the city. No evidence
has surfaced of any social activity that brought women from different sewing rooms together. They had little experience to nurture a sense of solidarity across the units. And
workers in one sewing room may very well not have known any in other sewing rooms
since they were organized geographically. Co-workers in the sewing room would have
come from the same neighborhoods.
The racial geography of the sewing rooms was illustrated by the response of the black
women's sewing room to the sit-down. Women in the African American center made a
joke at the expense of the strikers, perhaps to reassure administrators that they had no intention of joining the movement. According to the (white) supervisor:
The colored center in Tampa was not affected by the local strike and the attitude of
the group was well expressed when the coiored women chanted derisively, the story
from "Green Pastures," of the new arrival from Heaven, who was so overwhelmed
by the promised land that he failed to take the chair offered by "De Lawd."
"De Lawd": "Won't you please sit down?"
Chorus: "Lawd no I caint sit down! 1 just got to Heaven and I got to look
around. No Lawd, I just cain't sit down!"'''*
Although these black women refused to sit down in this relief strike, a black community in Florida had mounted a successful work relief protest in a previous generation.
In 1888, when a yellow fever epidemic devastated Jacksonville, the city's committee on
sanitation created a public works program to provide work relief to the large numbers of
unemployed. When tbe city later announced plans to curtail the program, black residents
organized continuous public demonstrations to protest the cuts. After three days of relentless pressure, the city gave in and agreed to reinstate the dismissed workers. The leaders of Tampa's sit-down did not appear to know about this model of a work relief protest
or the role of black activism in its success. The failure to reach across racial lines in organizing the sit-down meant that the 1888 experience could not be tapped.*"^
'•' "Invitadas de honor a! balle de los panaderos" (Guests of honor at the bakers' ball). La Gaceta (Tampa), July
16, 1937, p. 1. Poulnot complained that the strike leaders had complied with the four day-absence rule just as had
the rank and file, and that therefore they too should be reinstated. The WPA disagreed. See "Poulnot and Strike Leaders Lose WPA Jobs," Tampa Tribune,]\i\y 18, 1937, p. 1. "Woman Strike Leader Asks County's Help to Get Her New
Job," Florida Labor Advocate. Aug. 27, 1937, p. 2.
'"* Narrative Report, July 1937. p. 23, box 4A, Narrative Reports, Records of the Division of Professional and
Service Projects, Works Progress Administration Records.
*^ Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed, 50-51. The black women of Tampa in 1937 may have known nothing of the
events in Jacksonville in a previous generation.
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1033
The strike's rapid collapse also dramatically exposed another fault line that weakened
labor solidarity: the background and characteristics of the sewing-room employees. Although Tampa had a large female industrial work force and a rich history of women's labor activism, women in the sewing rooms did not generally share the experiences of industrial work and activism. The majority of sewing-room workers were older women who
were responsible for dependents and had few other options. Many were not in the work
force permanently, some had never worked for wages before, and they therefore were not
strongly union-oriented. Sewing-room workers were not like the women ofthe southern
cotton mills who saw the factories as their permanent workplace, their "ticket to the smart
life that the radio, the magazines, and the movies told them about." The needle trades
may have been among the most strike-prone industries in tbe country, but the WPA sewing rooms were not like factories in the garment industry.^**
In fact, the sewing rooms were something of a dumping ground for women who had
few industrial skills, often little work experience, and probably little future in the industrial work force. Nor had their training there taught them to think like class-conscious industrial workers. The strike leader Mabel Hagan is representative: employed in the sewing
room for at least two years. Hagan had no previous industrial experience. A middle-aged
divorcée with a teenage daughter to support. Hagan had last worked taking in boarders. Tellingly, the women who stuck with the sit-down the longest were from Ybor City's
Latin community. The Anglo women, with less union experience and less commitment to
organized labor, folded more quickly.^^
The strike effort was also caught in the crossfire of competition between the AFL and
the Committee for Industrial Organization (cio). In 1936 and 1937, the years surrounding the strike, the AFL was engaged in sometimes vicious opposition to the organizing efforts ofthe CIO. Since the sit-down method was largely the brainchild ofthe cio, the AFL
opposed it^ in principle, AFL president William Creen denounced sit-downs as "destructive policy" and "likely to pave the way to a fascist dictatorship/'^-« Hence the local labor
organizations affiliated with the AFL reftised to support the Tampa sit-down. There was
no chance that local unions would join in a general strike, or even a symbolic sympathy
action. The sewing-room strike was at least pardy a victim of labor's internecine battles
in the 1930s.
The strike's chances for success were also reduced by the participants' lack of familiarity
with the newly devised sit-down tactic. The sit-down method had been used successfully
in other settings—striking miners had staged a sit-down in Illinois just weeks before the
Tampa event—but the Tampa strikers and observers agreed that it was new in Florida.
The sense of novelty is evident in a letter that Eugene Poulnot wrote to a fellow activist:
"I wish I could see you and tell you in detail about the WPA strike, a sit-in something new
down here but it sure brought on re-action from every corner of the state gave them a
scare, and gave the cigar workers who have always had great difficulties an idea of a new
^ On the obstacles to women's labor union activism, see Dorothy Sue Cobble. Dishing It Out: Waitresses and
Tl,etr Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, 1991); and Lisa A. Schur and Douglas L. Kruse, "Gender Differences m Attitudes toward Unions,"//li/fuirw/a««/¿«eor feAïWow Ä«wi« 46 (Oct. 1992), 89-102 John A Salmond
ne C.eneral Textile Strike of ¡934, from Maine to Alabama (Columbia, Mo., 2002), 241; Joan M. Jensen and Sue
Davidson, eds., A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike: Women Needleworkers in America (Philadelphia, 1984), 86.
"Chungas y no chungas," La Gaceta (Tampa), July 10, 1937, p. 1.
"* "preen Assails CIO Sit-Down Strikes and Third Party Movement," fiijna^íZtíior^^yoí-^rf. Sept 10 1937 p
CL On the struggle between the labor organizations, sec especially Robert H. Zieger, Ue ao. ¡935-¡955 (Chapel
1034
The Journal of American History
March 2009
Wash Day At Sii-Down; Pickefinn
As word of the sewing-room relief workers' strike spread through Tampa,
Florida, the strikers attracted public attention and community support.
In the upper photo, strikers hang out their laundry to dry. In the lower
one, supporters of the strike picket outside the factory. Courtesy Tampa
Tribune.
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1035
strategy." The strike leaders, especially those inside the factory, were apparently uncertain
exactly how to run a sit-down. The strike committees failure to keep control of the buildmg on the first day indicated inexperience with the strategy. Moreover, the sit-down tactic
was considered so radical that even cio leaders did not want women to use it. It might
open them to the charge of neglecting their children at home as they stayed overnight in
the factory.''''
In the Latin community of Tampa, the strikes outcome increased frustration with attempts to reach out to the Anglo labor movement. Latin women had joined the Americans in the sit-down without hesitation, even though none of the 88 fired workers were
Latin. Although ethnic tensions were certainly present in the city, as commentary in La
Gaceta makes dear, it does not appear that ethnic divisions undermined the strike. Anglo
women were the majority of those who left the sit-down, but they did not do so because
of the presence of the Latin women. The Anglos abandoned the sit-down for fear of losing
their relief jobs, not because continuing the strike would mean they were associated with
the Latin women. Evidence demonstrates that the failure of the strike produced ethnic
tensions, but not that ethnic tensions undercut the strike.
For the women relief workers, the failure of the strike had several implications. The
poor conditions of relief work that had led them to protest remained. Just a few weeks
after the end of the strike, the WPA once again shut down the sewing rooms in Tampa "because of exhaustion of an appropriation to keep them open."™ The frustrating pattern of
unpredictable employment would continue. So would the low wages.
The failure of the strike helped quash any sentiment for a movement on behalf of relief
rights. The women reliefers believed they did indeed have a right to their work relief positions. Their rights to those jobs were based both on their needs and on their citizenship, a
relationship between poor women and the state that harked back to the poor laws of the
colonial era. As citizens in need, they were the "deserving poor" who had a right to public assistance. What was different in the twentieth century were the tactics used to extract
the benefits of citizenship from the state. Although occasionally gathered in one place to
sew, poor women in previous generations had litde opportunity or incentive to organize.
A strike of poor relief recipients in the nineteenth century would have made little sense,
even if they did have a sense of entitlement to their relief. But in New Deal Tampa, the situation was very different. The federal government, through the Wagner Acr of 1935, had
pronounced itself the protector of workers' rights to organize. Women working for the
federal government might logically assume that they possessed the right to strike against
their employer.^' They also believed that they earned their relief payments and had a right
to them. But the strike's collapse muffled fiirther expressions ofthat right.
The federal sewing rooms had treated their workers as women and mothers first, and as
workers only secondarily. The majority of sewing-room workers also identified themselves
as relief recipients rather than lifelong members of the work force. But the Tampa strikers used the tactics of organized labor to redress their grievances and to try to force the
'"' "Sit-Down Miners Win All Strike Demands," Tampa Socialist Call June 19, 1937, p. 7. Eugene Poulnor to
Aron S. Gilmartin, Sept. 8, 1937. folder 31. box 143, Workers Defense League Papers {Walter V. Reuther Library,
Wayne State Universit}', Detroit, Mich.). The South had seen only a handful of sit-down strikes, such as one begun
in November 1936 at a General Motors plant in Atlanta. See Douglas L. Smith, The New Deal in the Urban South
(Baton Rouge, 1988), 204. Strom, "Challenging 'Woman's Place.'" 364.
"^ "Mayor Seeks Reopening of Sewing Rooms," Tampa Tribune, Aug. 26, 1937, p. 5.
'' The WPA claimed that federal employees had no right to strike, that only workers in che private sector could
do so.
1036
The Journal of American History
March 2009
government to give them the public assistance to which they claimed a right, just as citizens in previous generations had used other collective efforts such as petitions, rallies, and
other protests to secure the fruits of citizenship. Using the techniques of organized labor
did not mean they viewed themselves as part of organized labor. The fact that the strike
crumbled so quickly, under the flimsiest of pressure from the police and tbe authorities,
suggests how little affinity with labor activism most of the women had.
The sit-down strike was more closely related to the welfare rights movement of the
1960s than to the labor movement of the 1930s. But women in the sewing rooms in 1937
did not have the language of "welfare rights" at their disposal; they could articulate their
protest only in the terms of organized labor. Nevertheless, their demands had to do more
with a right to welfare than with organized labor. As Chad Alan Goldberg has pointed
out, both New Deal and Great Society programs that offered new forms of assistance to
the needy stimulated organization and activism by poor people made newly conscious of
their opportunities and their entitlement. I do not claim that the Tampa sit-down was
the inspiration for later welfare rights movements. But 1 think the event—like the Jacksonville protests of 1888—served as a predecessor to the 1960s welfare rights movement,
giving a deeper history to that cause.^'
For the radicals in Tampa, the failure of the strike had profound implications. The
failure of the sit-down fatally wounded the Workers Alliance in Tampa. The alliance lost
members as a result of the strike. A bitter Mabel Hagan, believing the Workers Alliance
had failed to support the sewing-room workers, publicly denounced the effort and its
leadership. In a desperate attempt to maintain its viability, the Workers Alliance eventually purged all the reds, including Eugene Poulnot. At a meeting held at the Labor
Temple in July 1940, the alliance condemned Poulnot for "betraying the unemployed."
But the purge did little to save the organization, which collapsed shortly thereafter. The
disintegration of the alliance meant that Tampa no longer had an organization in place
that could unite employed and unemployed workers in cooperative effort. No longer was
there a local organization that would accept radicals into its ranks. The range of political
expression thus contracted in Tampa.'''
Tampa was not, it would seem, a city well suited for this experiment in relief strikes.
Although it was a labor city, a majority of the sewing-room women did not come from
the ranks of organized labor. A city with a strong women's movement that included such
organizations as the National Consumers' League might have been a more promising location for a welfare-rights strike by women. A maternalist definition of the sit-down as
a demand for state protection for women and children, a définition successfully used to
promote mothers' aid and Aid to Dependent Children, might have been more appropriate to the Tampa sewing-room protest/* In Tampa the women's movement was small, and
it did not lead the way toward a welfare rights campaign.
^^ On the welfare rights movement, see Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in
Modern America (Philadelphia, 2007); Lesley A. Jacobs, Rights and Deprivation (New York, 1993); Jacqueline Pope,
Biting the Hand That Feeds 'Them: Organizing Women on Welfare at the Grass Roots Level (New York, 1989); Guida
West, The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women (New York, 1981); and Frances Fox
Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York, 1977). Chad
Alan Goldberg, "Welfare Recipients or Workers? Contesting the Workfare State in New York City," Sociological
Theory, 19 (July 2001), 187.
'•^' "Woman Strike Leader Asks County's Help to Get Her New Job," Fbrida Labor Advocate, Aug. 27, 1937, p.
2; Federal Bureau of Investigation Freedom of Information Act Request file. Octavio Alfonso (in EIna C. Green's
possession); Federal Bureau of Investigation Freedom of Information Act Request file, Eugene Poulnot, ibid.
^* On maternalism and the welfare state, see Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World: Maternal-
The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike and the Right to Welfare
1037
For the state's WPA officials, the events in Tampa provided experience in dealing with
discontent in the sewing rooms. They moved to preempt any potential disorder elsewhere. The week after the strike in Tampa, when rumors of a planned sit-down in Daytona Beach surfaced, the state director closed the sewing room there preemptively and
indefinitely. In a further effott to prevent fiiture "disturbances," state WPA officials decided
to decentralize the work centers. "In Jacksonville and in Tampa, where there were formerly large sewing units, an effort has been made to decentralize, both from the standpoint
of convenience of workers and efficiency. It has been demonstrated that there is a 'golden
mean' in size of units from the standpoint of efficiency and morale." Pointedly, the administration noted, "The need for decentralization was greatest in Tampa." Rather than
four large centers, Tampa soon housed a dozen, much smaller, sewing rooms. Events in
Tampa thus shaped the federal governments approach to organizing women's work relief.
Smaller units, they had come to realize, were more manageable.-"^
Like the southern women workers who joined the general textile strike of 1934, the
strikers in the Tampa sewing room did not reject Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal,
nor the federal government's role in combating the depression. As had the World War I
generation before them, "women in the South readily turned to the federal government
for help" despite the region's reputation for hostility to the activism of the federal government. They left clear evidence that they desperately wanted the work relief jobs and did
everything in their power to secure them. Their dissatisfaction was with the local and state
administrators, the layoffs, and the low wages.^"^
Not only did they want relief jobs, many of the women believed they had a right to
them. But by the 1930s, earlier understandings of a right to relief had vanished. During
the colonial period and through the early nineteenth century, localities had offered poor
relief to legal residents. Those who had acquired a settlement through residence over a
year's time had the right to draw on the locality's poor relief. Communities reinforced
the idea that relief was a right by working so hard to remove those without a settlement.
During the nineteenth century, though, changes in welfare ideology effectively disconnected 'welfare" and "rights." Concepts of the "able bodied" versus the "deserving poor"
drove a wedge between rights and welfare. By 1937, relief workers had no tradition of
settlement rights to fall back on, and the language had disappeared from their vocabulary. The women in the Ybor City sewing room tried out the language of organized labor,
and they found it wanting. "Welfare" and "rights" would remain separated for another
generation.
ist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993); Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: and Gordon
Pitied but Not Entitled.
"Daytona Beach's WPA Sewing Room Is Ordered Closed," Tampa Tribune, July 22, 1937. p. 2; Narrative Report, July 1938. p. 2, box 4, Narrative Reports, Records of the Division of Professional and Service Projects, Works
Progress Administration Records,
"• Salmond, General Textile Strike of ! 934. 243-44; Hickd, "War, Region, and Social Welfare," 1382.
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