The original project's results consist of sixteen taped interviews, each with an introduction, an abstract, and an index. Fifteen people were interviewed and one joint interview was held with two previously interviewed individuals. While some interviews are uneven, all interviewees at some point or another provided new information and thoughtful interpretations of the union's history. For those few instances when an interviewee presented a slanted view of an aspect of the union's history, other interviews easily corrected the misleading impressions. All interviewees were cooperative, congenial, and by and large very candid.
The interviews generally followed a biographical/chronological pattern, and together include information on all major events in the union's history. For some topics, like the union's two internal political disputes and the period of textile unionism prior to the formation of the TWUA, these interviews provide essential information and interpretation otherwise lacking in the archival record. On the other hand, important collective bargaining gains and most major strikes are treated more extensively and more revealingly in the TWUA archival collection than in these interviews.
Research at the beginning of the project revealed that the TWUA archival collection was surprisingly complete, with few gaps to be filled by the oral history interviews. Also during this period, the most significant person on the list of interviewees, William Pollock, who served in one or another of the three top executive offices from the union's founding in 1939 until his retirement in 1972, decided not to participate in an interview for the project. This meant that other individuals who had been present at union headquarters would have to be interviewed. These were the department heads, the so-called intellectuals of the union. These two developments--the completeness of the paper record and the unavailability of Pollock--worked hand in hand to permit the interviews to concentrate more on soliciting interpretations of events than on gathering facts missing from the paper records. It was assumed that the intellectuals would lend themselves well to this interpretive approach and they did, often ranging far afield into examination of the American labor movement in general. Also, however, the non-intellectuals, those who had worked themselves up through the ranks to become the union's regional and industrial directors and its officers, proved to be quite introspective and thoughtful.
Of the three additional interviews, the first was an interview with Emanuel “Slim” Boggs by James A. Cavanaugh two and a half years after the Project had been completed. Boggs was interviewed because he was a southerner who could talk about southern textile workers from that perspective, and because, as manager of the Pittsylvania County Joint Board, he was in a key position during the 1951 Southern Cotton Strike and during the union's internal political. fight between George Baldanzi and Emil Rieve, 1950-l952. In the interview, Boggs is particularly helpful in bringing out the North-South tensions within the union.
On November 10, 1984, the Rieve-Pollock Foundation held a reunion of retired TWUA staff and activists in Philadelphia to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1934 textile strike and the forty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Textile Workers Union of America. In order that the speeches and other remarks at the reunion would be recorded and included in the TWUA Oral History Project Collection, the Foundation arranged for Jim Cavanaugh of the State Historical Society's staff to attend and record the proceedings. The formal proceedings lasted a little over four hours and were chaired by Sol Stetin. Featured speakers were George Perkel, Sol Barkin, Larry Rogin, and Al Barkan. All but the latter had previously been interviewed for the TWUA Oral History Project. Joe Glazer, who was unable to attend, sent a half hour tape of textile labor songs, which were played and recorded. The abstract for these tapes is much less detailed than the abstracts of the actual interviews in the collection. Included as part of the abstract, however, is an outline of George Perkel's speech and a critique of the presentations and discussions of the day, which Sol Barkin prepared two days after the event.
The third additional interview was conducted with Scott Hoyman by Jim Cavanaugh on May 15, 1985. Hoyman, since retired, was the Executive Vice President of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union at the time and also Director of its Textile Division. He was interviewed because of the many years he spent working for the union in the south (1952-1979), because of his long association with the union's well-known campaign against the J. P. Stevens Company, and because by the time of the interview he had risen to the ACTWU rank which is equivalent to the presidency of the old TWUA.
In the contents list below is a list of interviewees together with the tape call numbers. This is followed by a combined master index to all of the original 1977-1978 interviews. The introduction, abstract, and index for each interview (including the three additional ones) and the interviewer's final report, with more details on the interviews themselves and further instructions on how to use the TAPE system, are filed as Mss 467. The introduction and abstract for each interview are also available electronically on this finding aid site; the interviewee names in the list below are links to these online abstracts. (To retrieve all of the interview abstracts, search “Textile Workers Union of America Oral History Project”.) Researchers should go from the index to the abstracts and then to the tape recordings themselves.
