Norma Rae Revisited

One of the last Hollywood films to unabashedly showcase working class activism was released in 1979, on the very eve of the Reagan era neoliberalism that, in the coming decades, would effectively destroy the American labor movement.

Norma Rae, which won Sally Field her first Oscar for her portrayal of the title character, is based on real-life labor organizer Crystal Lee Sutton and the ultimately successful struggle of workers to unionize a J.P. Stevens textile plant in 1974. Despite many details, as well as dialogue lifted almost verbatim from a New York Times article about Sutton, (then known as Crystal Lee Jordan) the film bears the usual "this is a work of fiction and any connection to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental" disclaimer in the closing credits. As a result, Sutton herself never saw a dime from the film, which became a major box office hit. In that regard, too, it very much presaged the brutal backlash against working people that was to come.

Still, the movie stands out for its realism, from the pro-labor dialogue, to the cross-racial worker solidarity portrayed, right down to the depressing, paint-peeling company-owned abodes of the mill workers, who at the time represented nearly one third of the population of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. (Since the movie was shot in Alabama, no actual factory workers were needed as extras, of course.) Another irony is that the producer, 20th Century Fox, only forked out money for the film because it was drowning in record profits from the first edition of the Star Wars franchise, the escapist fantasy for the ages.

Another hint of the neoliberal swing from labor politics to the identity-driven politics to come was the film's marketing as a feminist story rather than a class story. Labor historian Jefferson Cowie writes that although class solidarity and worker solidarity were, in fact, the underlying themes of Norma Rae, "one of the most important aspects of the film is the subtle way that both individualism and feminism subtly trump workerism in the film. Rather than creating a solid foundation for the merging of gender and class, as (director Martin) Ritt had hoped for, this film was backed and marketed as a woman's picture. Like all Hollywood productions, the film focused on the rising consciousness of the lead heroine at the expense of the rest of the workers' efforts. Crystal Lee found this so problematic that she came close to suing Martin Ritt and launching a competing narrative of the events in collaboration with the Academy-award winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple. The narration of political uplift also became the center of the marketing strategy."

The promotional poster, in fact, features a perky Sally Field, arms outstretched like a cheerleader, looking carefree and happy in skintight designer jeans, which were soon to be branded in department stores as "Norma Rae Work n Class Jeans!" 

The only trouble is that this triumphal image never happened in the actual movie, let alone in real life. Crystal Lee herself no longer worked at the minimum wage (then about $3 an hour) job at the textile mill she had helped to organize. This is the original advertising poster, which Fox distribution and marketing executives nixed as being too dangerously close to real working class angst:

In the movie trailer, the excited voice-over gushes: "Norma Rae is a survivor and for the first time in her life she has the chance to become something more - a winner!" 

This tripe not only presaged the neoliberal era, it presaged neoliberalism's ultimate excrescence - the win-at-any-cost persona and propaganda of our current pseudo-populist president, Donald J. Trump. Not for nothing were the anti-union mill owners of the South also among the most generous right-wing funders of the Republican Party. From Henry P. Liefermann's gut-wrenching Times article, which inspired the film:

 The industry, from floor sweeper to chairman of the board, reaches everywhere in the South. Senators such as Strom Thurmond, Sam Ervin, Herman Talmadge, governors such as John West, Terry Sanford and Jimmy Carter started their campaigns with the mill vote. Roger Milliken of Deering‐Milliken mills, the world's third largest, was one of Richard Nixon's finance chairmen in 1968 (as well as one of the John Birch Society's directors in 1962). It was the souls of the mill hands Billy Graham began with—he has gone on to Presidents and the world, they to such as the Great Speckled Bird Baptist Church in Greenville, S. C.

Mill hands are the bedrock of the Deep South's economy, religion, politics, industry. They are also the lowest paid industrial workers in the South and the nation. Their average income is $6,000 a year before any deductions; their average work day includes 20 minutes for lunch and two 10‐minute rest breaks; their average work week is six days, including a scheduled day of overtime; their average hourly wage of $2.79 is 35 cents less than the Southern average and $1.22 an hour below the national average for industrial workers, and their wholly non‐average life is plagued by alcohol, sex, violence and an image of themselves as deserving no better than what they get.

These mill workers got sick manufacturing high-end bedding for the rich and fulfilling contracts for damask tablecloths for the entire chain of luxury Hilton hotels.  And, Liefferman wrote, mill workers were even encouraged to bring their children to work in order to learn the trade.

Now, of course, much of this manufacturing work for what Forbes aptly calls Carl Icahn's "Undercover Empire" is increasingly offshored to workers, paid even less than Crystal and her pre-union co-workers were, to get sick as they manufacture Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren and Disney and Izod sheets and towels and clothing.
 
Crystal Lee Sutton would die of a brain tumor in 2009 at age 68, having escaped the brown lung disease which prematurely claimed the lives of so many of her former co-workers and generations of members of her own extended family.

The Roanoke Rapids, NC mill where she'd worked and agitated had shut its doors six years previously, in 2003, eventually becoming subsumed in the WestPoint-Stevens conglomerate, which itself was taken over in bankruptcy by corporate raider (and Trump adviser) Carl Icahn, who continues to live long and prosper despite his felony record. As recounted in The Encylopedia of Forlorn Places, the building where Sutton and her co-workers fought for and gained their rights has fallen into disrepair, while many other factories of its kind were quickly demolished for fear of too many people remembering history.


The penultimate scene in the film version, in which the newly-fired and defiant Norma Rae jumps up on a table happened just that way in real life. For the first time in generations, the whole plant went quiet.

Crystal Lee returned to her work table to pick up her purse. Suddenly she pulled out a sheet of cardboard, and with her black marker lettered on it, “UNION.” She climbed on her table and slowly began to turn, holding the sign high so the side hemmers, terry hemmers, terry cutters and packers could see what she had written.

That's what she was doing when Drewery Beale came to get her, found her on the table, angry, afraid, close to tears, holding her “UNION” sign. Later that night Chief Beale would take Crystal Lee to jail, book her on disorderly‐conduct charges, and the union organizers would came to bail her out. Weeks later the charges would be dropped, her firing taken before the N.L.R.B. by the union, and she would be on unemployment, the family living only on Cookie Jordan's salary.

That mill might be falling down today, but Crystal Lee's memory lives on, especially at Allemance Community College, where a museum has been established in her memory. 

Crystal, Thinking

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Norma Rae is currently available on the Filmstruck streaming platform, which is also showcasing several other rarely aired labor films this month, including Salt of the Earth, about striking New Mexico mine workers, and Barbara Koppleman's iconic Harlan County USA.