Remembering the Fallen Chiquola Workers on Labor Day
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On a Labor Day morning in 1934, a small contingent of textile workers marched around the Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina, waving American flags and singing union songs. On the roof, a machine gun had been mounted.
It was a grim episode in a larger American story, one that unfolded in Anderson County, where the struggle of working men and women against the absolute authority of mill owners was reaching a fever pitch. In the era of the company town, these mills were the arbiters of life itself. They owned the houses where families lived, the churches where they worshipped, and the stores where they spent company-issued script on goods priced higher than elsewhere. Children as young as six worked six-day weeks, toiling for two dollars, often on machines that posed a risk to those of any age. The owners cultivated a facade of paternalism, but their control was absolute, and their philosophy was blunt: keep a man hungry and he will work.
But that veneer began to crack in the nineteen-thirties, as a national push for organized labor coincided with a shift in industrial relations. The owners, seeking to squeeze more profit from a depressed market, began to stress efficiency and technology over a sense of family, demanding longer hours without a commensurate increase in pay. These changes helped set the stage for the events of that week.
By September 6, 200 mill workers had been joined by 150 workers from a neighboring town to picket the mill. Management had prepared in advance, positioning strikebreakers inside and out, armed with rifles and clubs. Police Chief Paige and a number of patrolmen also stood watch, guns drawn.
At noon, a confrontation erupted. A group of non-union workers tried to cross the picket line. Sticks were thrown. According to later testimony from Chief Paige, a “scuffle” began. Then, a local magistrate, Dan Beacham, gave an order to fire. A barrage of gunfire erupted from the mill. The machine gun on the roof, for reasons that remain unclear, jammed, and the death toll did not climb higher than seven. The striking workers fled, but the shooting continued. A coroner later found that all seven victims had been shot in the back. One of the men, Claude Cannon, was reportedly shot five times, including while on his hands and knees.
The aftermath was a stark demonstration of power. At an inquest, eleven strikebreakers were charged with murder, but Magistrate Beacham, who had given the order to fire, ensured their acquittal. When two eyewitnesses testified against him, he had them arrested and charged with perjury. For their participation in the strike, dozens of workers were fired and evicted from their homes. The churches, subsidized by the mill owners, refused to hold funerals for the slain. On September 9, more than ten thousand people gathered in an open field for a union-organized service for the dead.
For decades, a powerful silence settled over the community, a hesitation to speak of the violence that had been quelled by force. One man, who was a seventeen-year-old striker that day, recalled being in the march when the shooting started. He remembered his neighbor falling, assuming he had stumbled, until he saw the blood. “I looked up at the mill and saw the supervisor shooting at us with a rifle from his office window, and I just took off,” he said. The mill reopened just four days later, guarded by soldiers with machine guns.
In recent years, documentaries and memorials have helped break that silence, leading to a small stone marker for the fallen workers in Dogwood Park. The brutal events of 1934 remain a reminder that the rights and protections afforded to workers today were not given freely but were won through hardship, at a cost of blood and lives.
