Ellen Dawson

Ellen "Nellie" Dawson Kanki (1900-1967), best known as Ellen Dawson, was a Scottish-American political activist and trade union organizer in the textile industry. Dawson is best remembered as an active participant in three of the greatest textile strikes of the 1920s — the 1926 Passaic textile strike, the 1928 New Bedford textile strike, and the 1929 Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. An activist in the Communist Party USA during the 1920s, Dawson was the first woman ever elected to a leadership position in an American textile union.

Biography

Early years

Ellen Dawson was born Friday, December 14, 1900 in Barrhead, a small industrial town of about 9,000 residents on the Southeastern outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland.^[1] She was the fifth of at least 10 children born to Patrick Dawson and Annie Halford Dawson, an impoverished working class couple.^[1] While her paternal grandparents were indigenous Scots, Dawson's maternal grandparents were emigrants from Ireland to Scotland.^[2] They were from families who had left their native land in the 1840s to escape the Great Famine there^[2] — a social catastrophe which is estimated to have killed as many as 1 million people and forced the departure of a like number.^[3]

At the time of her birth, Dawson's father worked as a foundry worker at Shanks' Tubal Works - a manufacturer of toilets and other bathroom products - in Barrhead. ^[4] The products of this foundry were made of cast iron, made by pouring molten metal into a mold.^[5] The work was grueling and pay was based upon the energy-sapping piece work system.^[5] Her mother was a former power loom weaver in a textile mill.^[6]

During the 18th Century, Barrhead had been the center of an Owenite utopian cooperative movement — an organization which around the time of Dawson's birth operated 19 businesses and included some 2,100 members — nearly a quarter of the entire community.^[7] While no membership records of the Barrhead Cooperative Society are known to exist, and consequently there is no way to either confirm or deny that the Dawson family were members, Dawson's biographer recounts family oral history indicating that they were members of the organization.^[7] This would have been an important formative experience in Dawson's life, it is intimated, as the Cooperative was linked to social and educational efforts directed at the children of the community.^[8]

Scottish years

Dawson entered the working world in 1914 as a young teenager, probably going to work in a textile mill as had her mother before her.^[9] Although the date of her first employment is known, the exact location and the tasks she performed are not recorded.^[9]

While this, with other aspects of Dawson's early years, has been poorly memorialized, the political and social environment of so-called Red Clydeside — the region in which she was raised — is a subject of considerable academic research.^[10] Historian David Lee McMullen sees this environmental factor as a fundamental component in the understanding of Ellen Dawson:

"Given what we know about Dawson's activities in the United States during the late 1920s — where she was a highly effective labor organizer, known for her courage on the picket line and her fiery oratory — Red Clydeside must have been Dawson's classroom and the activists of the period her teacher. During these years she was introduced to the realities of industrial wage labor, and began formulating her own attitudes and opinions as a worker. During this time Scottish women emerged not only as rank-and-file workers, but as leaders within several major labor confrontation.... Dawson may have only been a silent witness to these events, but it seems impossible to believe that she, or any other young worker of the period, could have escaped the influence of such firebrand rhetoric and monumental events."^[6]

The end of World War I brought massive unemployment to Glasgow and other manufacturing cities around Great Britain, as wartime spending was curtailed.^[11] Late in 1919, the Dawson family, with Ellen in tow, found themselves forced to leave the Clyde in search of employment, heading South to Lancashire in Northwest England.^[12] The family settled in the village of Millgate, located about 15 miles north of the major industrial center of Manchester.^[13] Dawson soon found work as a spinner and a weaver in local textile mills, remaining in this capacity until April, 1921.^[14]

The unemployment situation in Lancashire proved to be little better than that of Western Scotland, however, and on April 30, 1921, the 20-year-old Ellen and an older brother departed for the prospect of better opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.^[15] The pair embarked as Third Class passengers to America aboard the SS Cedric, arriving in New York City on May 9.^[16] A new life was being begun.

Labor organizer in America

Soon joined by other family members, the Dawson clan settled down in the mill town of Passaic, New Jersey, making a home in a working-class neighborhood composed largely of European emigrants, mere blocks away from the massive Botany Worsted Mills.^[17] For the next five years, Ellen Dawson worked at the Botany Mill, a facility in which over 70 percent of the workers earned less than $1200 annually — well under the estimated $1600 a year needed to support a family in that era.^[18]

Death and legacy

Ellen Dawson Kanki died at 4 am on April 17, 1967 at her home in Charlotte Harbor, Florida.^[19] She was 66 years old at the time of her death. Although the cause of her death will not be released by the state of Florida until 2017, according to family members Dawson had been suffering from "a lung complaint contracted during her years working in the mills."^[19] Her published obituary in the local press made no mention of her radical past.^[20]

See also

• The Passaic Textile Strike

Footnotes

Works

• "Gastonia," Revolutionary Age [New York], vol. 1, no. 1 (Nov. 1, 1929), pp. 3–4.
• "The Convention of the Textile Workers," Revolutionary Age [New York], vol. 1, no. 6 (Jan. 15, 1930), pg. 10.

Further reading

• Fred E. Beal, Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow. New York: Hillman-Curl, 1937.
• William F. Dunne, Gastonia: Citadel of the Class Struggle in the New South. New York: National Textile Workers Union/Workers Library Publishers, 1929.
• Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement from World War I to the Present. New York: Free Press, 1980.
• David Lee McMullen, Strike! The Radical Insurrections of Ellen Dawson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010.
• John A. Salmond, Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

External links

• David Lee McMullen, Talk on his book Strike! C-SPAN BookTV, May 10, 2011.