The Sparta Shirt Factory Strike of 1947

 Troy D. Smith

On July 29, 2021, I gave a presentation at the Sparta Rotary Club about the Sparta Shirt Factory Strike of 1947. I prepared a powerpoint, which was mostly newspaper excerpts, but it was way too big to actually give- so at the meeting I merely told the story, promising the slides would be available online for those who wanted more detail. 

Here it is- in between newspaper excerpts I have written some explanatory text so that, even if you did not hear the presentation, you can follow the story.

Some of the newspaper articles are in small print. You should be able to enlarge the on your phone or, if working on a computer, click on them and enlarge them.

Incidentally, the county had paid Bassine and his partners $5,000 to bring the factory to Sparta to begin with, in 1936-37.

 

Bassine left Sparta and never came back. It is not likely he went through with the sale of all the equipment in the factory, but he did sell his home on Gaines Street (it is the large white house across from Crag Rock Village). He returned to Brooklyn, and later in life moved to Palm Beach, where he died in 1990 at the age of 81.

The unionized workers at the Thompson-Weinman Limestone Quarry also went on strike in November.

In January, chancery court issued on injunction that ordered picketing at the factory could be done by no more than 15 people at a time, and at least 10 feet apart. In early February, unemployment claims were allowed by non-union workers who had been out of work because of the strike, but denied to strikers.

Silas Huddleston, then, played a role in national affairs after the 1940s.

Charles Bassine would play an even larger one. He did not sell out the factory after all, he continued to own it from afar... and managed to attract enough investors to expand. Within a few years, he owned eight shirt factories around the South and changed the company name to Spartan Industries, named for the location of his first factory. By the early 1960s he had expanded to a chain of 20 Spartan department stores, that would sell the products his factory made. 

By the early 1960s, Bassine was extremely wealthy and prominent. He regularly made million-dollar donations to various hospitals, schools, and other causes, including to the nation of Israel after the Sis Day War in 1967. 

An interesting side note: notice who the new 1967 Rotary officers were.

In late 1970, the "Sparta shirt factory" was closed down. Bassine moved the operation to South Korea, where labor was cheaper. This opened the way for several other (smaller) shirt factories to come into Sparta, due to the now unemployed work force. They all left in the 1990s, after the passage of NAFTA, to set up operations in Mexico where labor was cheaper.

One final side note: after this presentation was mentioned in the paper, a local family member of one of the union officers at the shirt factory in the 1940s contacted me. I was told that woman was never able to get work in Sparta again... but went to work in a unionized factory in a neighboring town, where she served in local union leadership for decades.