The Most They Ever Had

by Rick Bragg

In these real-life stories, Rick Bragg brilliantly evokes the hardscrabble lives of those who lived and died by an American cotton mill. Even as it filled their lungs and shortened their lives, it allowed them to live in stiff-necked dignity.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Southern, Memoir, Biography, American History, Audiobook

Audio Cassette

First published November 2, 2009

About the author

Rick Bragg is the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of best-selling and critically acclaimed books on the people of the foothills of the Appalachians, All Over but the Shoutin, Ava's Man, and The Prince of Frogtown.

Bragg, a native of Calhoun County, Alabama, calls these books the proudest examples of his writing life, what historians and critics have described as heart-breaking anthems of people usually written about only in fiction or cliches. They chronicle the lives of his family cotton pickers, mill workers, whiskey makers, long sufferers, and fist fighters. Bragg, who has written for the numerous magazines, ranging from Sports Illustrated to Food & Wine, was a newspaper writer for two decades, covering high school football for the Jacksonville News, and militant Islamic fundamentalism for The New York Times.

He has won more than 50 significant writing awards, in books and journalism, including, twice, the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993, and is, truthfully, still a freshman at Jacksonville State University. Bragg is currently Professor of Writing in the Journalism Department at the University of Alabama, and lives in Tuscaloosa with his wife, Dianne, a doctoral student there, and his stepson, Jake. His only real hobby is fishing, but he is the worst fisherman in his family line.

Reviews

[Bett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know what someone who is not from the South will think of this book. I am from there, from the places Rick Bragg writes about. I am from those people. I come from the red clay and the black dirt. This story of the mill people resonates in my bones, in my genes. It hums and throbs like those machines. It cuts through me like the mill whistle in my home town pierced through the air.

This is not a story about the economy. Not a microcosm for what is happening all across the country. It is a story about the people in one small mill town. It is a story about what they felt, and what they knew, and what they had to do.

It is a moving story. It is real. Bragg is eloquent as he listens to these people telling their stories, eloquent in letting their silences speak.

[Cheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

’She is dreaming another life, young enough to believe it can only be better -- indoor plumbing, eight hour shifts, a man who waits unknowing for her, a man who cannot hear through the weave room’s roar the world’s soft click, fate’s tumblers falling into place, soft as the sound of my mother’s bare feet as she runs, runs toward him, toward me.’ - Ron Rash

’As a boy, I was a little afraid of the people of the mills, of the plain, Pentecostal women in long dresses and wait-length hair, and bony, red-skinned men who still remembered the cut of a cotton sack. They had the look of a people who had not lived life so much as endured it, as if they had walked out of a fire. I would learn not to flinch when some old man offered me a three-fingered hand, or stare at people who seemed to cough all the time, even in fine weather…But this grit, the sacrifice, was something else.’

This is the true story of a community in the Appalachian foothills of Northern Alabama whose people had worked in this mill since before airplanes, before automobiles, until the mill shut down twenty years ago last Spring. They depended on it, it was their livelihood, with few other options for work. Their parents, and even grandparents, had worked there, had worked hard for just enough pay to get by, some losing a finger, hand or other limbs in the process. Even those who were lucky enough to avoid losing body parts, were affected. Their lives, their lungs were impacted by the lint they breathed in - the rooms they worked in had no ventilation, shortening their lives with “brown lung” as they worked in order to provide a way to survive for themselves and their families.

This is their story, the impact it had on individuals, their families, and the workers whose lives and livelihood were impacted by the working conditions and the companies who allowed such deplorable and life-threatening working conditions to continue.

’I decided to write these stories that night... about...the people of the mill. It has been known by various names--Ide Mill, Union Yarn--but the people were the same...the sufferings they endured...grim in many places and sad in spaces in between.’
’Now the thing they were needed for is going away, or already gone.’
They are still here.’ - Rick Bragg

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Most They Ever Had tells of the lives of cotton pickers and cotton mill workers in Jacksonville, Alabama, in the Appalachian foothills during the 20th century. Their lives mirror the lives of such workers all over the South.

The unspeakable working conditions in the mills, the long hours without a break, the machines that maimed, bit off and swallowed fingers, hands, arms and feet of those working there, are spoken of by those for whom the mill was their whole life. Historical facts detailing the years of the Prohibition, the Depression, the coming of labor unions, increased knowledge about “brown lung disease”/byssinosis and the eventual legislation limiting the amount of dust in a cubic meter of air are woven in too. Just reading about the cotton dust that filled mills’ air is enough to make you choke. The ingrained belief that you would, should, must follow in the footsteps of your father and grandfather and great grandfather comes across clearly.

Bragg’s book examines the lives of a number of different individuals, individuals tied to the mills--cotton pickers, mill workers, one of whom is a baseball champ and another plays the guitar, and a despicable, heartless mill manager, William Greenleaf. Each chapter looks at one person’s life. Thus, the book does run in chronological order. Some lived through the First World War, some during the second. Some were at the mill in Jacksonville when it closed in 2001. 197 employees were laid off.

The people we look at are to be seen as representatives of the many that lived such lives. With the fall of the American textile industry, these people’s lives, lives that were bad from the start, became worse.

That we are shown a mill manager, and not just those working under him, is good. Just as the workers are representative of other workers, he too is representative of other managers. It is understandable the hatred the workers felt toward him. What is harder to comprehend is the workers’ attachment to their hometown and their inability to even imagine a life other than one coupled to the mill. Other job opportunities were of course scarce. We are told that the bonds that tied members of the community together were strong, but this as a reason to stay is incomprehensible to me. A few did leave. Here in this book, we look at those who stayed.

It is important to note that the author does not analyze or compare those who remained and those who stayed. I wish he had. Few people are willing to leave what they have, regardless of how bad their situation may be. This remains true still today.

In any case, I am glad to have read the book. It has given me a peephole into the lives of mill workers of past generations.

I like very much the author’s own narration of his book. He reads very slowly. He knows where he wants the pauses to be and which words he wants emphasized. The reading wonderfully matches the prose. I suggest listening to the book rather than reading it. Of course, he uses the dialect of where he comes from, Alabama, and this matches wonderfully those whose life stories he tells. The book is read as it should be read. I have given the narration four stars.


***************

Ava's Man 4 stars
The Prince of Frogtown 4 stars
The Most They Ever Had 3 stars

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Most They Ever Had by one of my favorite contemporary writers from the American South, Rick Bragg, was a riveting look at the cotton mills in the Appalachian foothills over the past several generations, including the times of Prohibition, the Depression, and the coming of labor unions. Although they provided a necessary livelihood for many, there was also an inherent danger. The conditions for decades were very unsafe with the cotton thick in the atmosphere clinging to the workers clothes and faces, but the real travesty was the cotton fragments too small to see that were invading the workers' lungs leaving them desperate for air and later in life, attached to oxygen to breathe as they struggled with "brown lung disease." There were also the incidents of unspeakable working conditions lending to work-related injuries ranging from a lost finger to a lost limb or even to death if they became entangled in the unforgiving machinery of the cotton mills. But yet working at the mills was a godsend to the blue-collar people of Jacksonville, Alabama. It is also a heartbreaking story of the sacrifices that were made by all. But, in spite of all of that, this is a tribute to the Appalachian people and their resilience as they struggled to make a life. Rick Bragg tells the individual and unforgettable stories of many of these impoverished people.

A special treat was to listen to this book on audiotape as read by author Rick Bragg. It is quite moving to hear Bragg, in his hypnotic Southern drawl, thank his kinfolk and attribute their stories as the lifeblood of his books. He believes the soul of this book is due to the the people of Appalachia, and I agree.

[Linda Lipko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bragg writes about Appalachian poverty so well that you can hear the southern drawl, see the rough, calloused hands, watch as the moonshine slides down the throat, observe the bare light bulb hanging by a thin cord from the ceiling of the tiny mill owned shacks that teeter on their foundations.

Mainly, the reader cannot help but feel tremendous respect for the honest, integrity filled, salt-of-the-earth people who helped to shape this country by their toil.

Bragg is one of my favorite authors, and while his subject matters are difficult and heart wrenching, I'll continue to read as long as he writes.

In this latest work, he chronicles the history of the mills that maimed, that filled the lungs with unfiltered cotton dust and robbed the workers of life and breath.

These same mills that brought death, gave hope to the workers who stood in line to obtain a chance for a job. Working long, hard, grueling hours for pittance, the company store took the money long before it was earned.

This book is an excellent slice of American history, including the necessity of unions, and the people who lost life and limb in the mills, only to see the mills closed as cheaper labor was obtained overseas.

Highly recommended.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

We so often like to see things in black and white and this book is all about gray. It deals with life in a mill town (getting jobs, losing jobs, having dreams, losing dreams, the gulf between the haves and the have nots, putting one's body and health at risk to make a living, and so much more). And most of all, it deals with the fact that, at least in some ways, the only thing worse than having the mill in town is having the mill leave town. The relationship between the mill and its workers is far more complex than those who have not experienced it first hand would ever assume. This book provides the rest of us the kind of insight that in the past could only have come from actually working in the mill or living in the town. It is a glowing tribute to hard working and determined people who manage to make a life for themselves in conditions that most of us would not be able to tolerate.

A few months after I read this book, the North Carolina Museum of History had an excellent exhibit of photographs of children who worked in the textile mills. Seeing those pictures was a perfect if heartbreaking complement to Bragg's wonderful book. For a more detailed review that really captures the essence of this book, see Lesa's Book Critiques at http://lesasbookcritiques.blogspot.co....

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continuing with my exploration of Alabama humorist/storyteller Rick Bragg, I considered his reflection of a mill village in Calhoun County, The Most they Ever Had. For nearly a century, the textile mill provided for the economic health of its people, even as it destroyed their physical health. It was central to a fight for human dignity in the early 1930s, as the community was forced to strike against the feudal rule of a particularly foul boss, and for decades thereafter the mill was one of the few places in Calhoun County where a working -class family could earn a decent living. The book is not a formal history of the mill, though; instead, its history is learned through the lives of people who lived and worked at the mill their entire lives, sometimes in pride and sometimes with regret; their stories, from organizing a union to losing an army, flesh out the story of the mill until its closing.

[Courtney Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the story of the cotton mill in the south during the early 1900s. America has been carried on the backs of many who paved the way for our nation today. Rather our forefathers, the pioneers who busted the land, the soldiers who fought for our freedom - or the American factory workers that built this nation with the strength in their arms and the sweat off their brow. The cotton mills of the south helped forge the labor and safety laws that, very thankfully, made our factories of today, desirable, profitable, insured, clean, and safe places to work. The early factory worker paid a heavy price; there is no doubt about that. In this book, Rick Bragg expresses this - the burden of earlier industrialized America and the difficulties they endured - like no other book I've read.

I have not suffered the way these people did. And it was obvious they had little choice. But I felt for these people; this generation who worked their bodies to the bone, who fed their families while working under unimaginable conditions, who lost life and limb to care for the ones they loved. And that's why I read this book. Rick Bragg wrote this in a way that I could feel the people's hurt, imagine my own lungs hurting, feel the heat on my body in the plant, feel the drudgery they felt, and even hear that whistle blow at the end of their shift. I could almost hear the people's voices, with their southern accents, as he interviewed them for the book. Homer said about his father coming home from work: "I saw my daddy so tired, he couldn't get up the front porch steps at home. He'd just sink down on the first step and try to breathe." His lungs had been damaged from the cotton dust.

Though I have never been in a cotton mill, I have been in many industrial manufacturing plants in the southeast. I can relate to the people that lived in Jacksonville, Alabama. I've seen many faces like theirs in paper mills, chemical and manufacturing plants and carpet mills from the Carolinas, to Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. Some of them, huge hulks of rusted old plants built in the early- to mid-1900s with massive mechanized and rotating machines that have slowly grinded to a halt in the new global economy. I have, first-hand, spoken with many of the plant personnel about their stories, about how (for example) many lifetime employees in the carpet industry of Dalton, Georgia during the 1980s lost their entire retirements due to a loophole in the law that allowed corporate restructuring to take their only chance at a decent retirement. Forty years and they took everything they had to retire on, except their meager social security. It wasn't right and the American laborer paid the price with blood, sweat and tears. Their families paid too.

This is a wonderful book by Rick Bragg. Well researched, well constructed, and simply written. It is easy to get into, has a nice flow that is easy to follow and read. Not too short and not too long. Highly recommended. Courtney Allen, author of Down From the Mountain and Orange Moon

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written collection of true stories about the impoverished mill town in Alabama where the author grew up.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite book this year. The lives this book describes, are more extreme, but familiar to those lives by folks you know if you were raised in a rural area.

[Robin Spoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having lived in Jacksonville, AL, from 1983 to 2020, I knew many of the people and all the places in this book. I know the Mill Village and the Mill and the Greenleaf place and ….. I still learned so much! Rick Bragg wrote a beautiful and heartbreaking story of the mill workers and their treatment. Bragg says this thin volume was the product of seven years of work. It was worth every second.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book of life and times of working in a mill and in a time when worker's rights and health concerns were second to producing the product and earning a profit. A lot of complex issues - a "yankee owned mill" using southern labor just after the civil war, local labor with limited transportation living in company housing, making barely enough money to feed and cloth their family there was no need for closets in the houses, cotton in air was a known cause of brown lung but they showed up to work early, sick or well - working through lunch because if they didn't there was someone standing outside to take their job who was willing to - for the low salary and housing. Getting ahead - nope, just making a living.

Don't take it wrong - this is not a depressing book - it shines a light back on the reality of the hard work that required in the south in support of the cotton industry. How the need for and enforcement of health standards for workers can run off the jobs to countries without those requirements. Simple issues - simple solutions - unsavory results.

[Dave Gaston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bragg’s incredible gift for delivering flesh and blood southern authenticity is on generous display within this collection. He has assembled a series of profiles from the grizzled poverty of a notorious Alabama mill town (his own hometown). The stories are at turns tragic, noble, soulful and throbbing. Bragg supplies a rich full first-person account that indirectly answers the obvious question, “Why would whole families choose to stay in an industry that literally, slowly, stole away their very breath?” The bottom line; just like most of us, they did it for their families. In addition, social norms, ignorance and fear bent their will. In ranking Bragg’s book within the context of his past efforts, I’d say it comes in a close third (Ava’s Man is still number #1, All Over But The Shouting is #2). Please don’t that dissuade you, each of Bragg’s books has few rivals within the category of contemporary southern memoirs. This is a great book.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of stories about the people who worked in the textile mill in my very small hometown in rural AL. It gives the history of the mill and the town from the perspective of the people whose lives were literally consumed by the mill. I found their stories fascinating and often tragic. This book is not MY story, as the Jacksonville of my childhood and teen years was a college town with the Appalachian foothills, a military base, and dump road. Honestly, the mill was not something I ever thought about, except when driving by. And, my thoughts were usually that it looked pretty creepy. It is not the life of my family, but it IS the life of some people I knew. As children, of course, we never "see" other people's lives though. And, although it isn't my life, my mother's childhood was definitely shaped by cotton, so I feel a strong connection to that part of my southern heritage. I know that cotton influenced who I am because it influenced who my mother is.

[Sungyena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this and any/every other rick bragg book and not the hillbilly elegy. But this is a specific record of some of the cotton mill workers in jacksonville, al who lived in honesty.

“The secret to it is always in knowing that it would hurt you, and you reach for it anyway.”

[Jay French · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mix of personal stories of cotton mill workers from Bragg's hometown in the South. Interesting stories of normal people from the 20s through the 90s. It's interesting to hear a book that feels historical, of another time, yet includes stories from the 60s and 70s. I listened to this on audio narrated by the author. He speaks extremely slow, apparently for effect. This Northerner kept hoping he'd speed up, and he did in some of the exciting parts. Well done.

[Koren · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent look at what it was like for factory workers, specifically textile workers, in the South in the early 1900's until the middle of the century. Some things haven't changed. The rich got rich and the poor got poorer. The workers owed their souls to the company store and died from the fibers that filled their lungs.

[SouthWestZippy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rick Bragg gives voice to the early mill workers. Good collection of stories. Taken from the back of the book. " The mill was here before the automobile, before the flying machine, and the mill workers served it even as it filled their lungs with lint and shortened their lives. " Rick Bragg is wonderful writer.

[Lanier · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did some of the research for this book, collected photos, met the people in it, and watched as Rick wrote and edited it. Read it! It will make you laugh and cry.

[Georgia Gietzen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Rick Bragg. He writes descriptively of a world I have no first hand knowledge of, in a way I can put myself there beside the mill workers. Having traveled through the south (we’re campers) and seeing the rural enclaves mill workers may have inhabited, or traveling through a ghost town with a shuttered mill standing on the outskirts of a now mostly abandoned town, I have wondered who these people were and how their town shut down. It seemed to me like a great American tragedy. This book gave names, faces and places to these forgotten and discarded workers. The cycle of life in these textile mills with all its dangers from the machinery itself to the air these people breathed. If you’re interested in getting to know these forgotten people and their mill community they worked generations at, this book gives an inside look told mostly in their voices to a time many of us today have no knowledge of. My heart breaks for the generations of families that poured their heart and soul into these textile mills only to wake up one morning and have it all be gone. And not just their actual jobs which were very physically demanding and potentially dangerous, but also their community.

[Keren · Rating 5 out of 5]

The lives recounted in Bragg's The Most They Ever Had reveal people with inner strength, loyalty, and dogged determination to survive. The families working America's cotton mills generation after generation suffered and continue to suffer the consequences of the exploitation of their labor, when just as their jobs were becoming somewhat safer, paying a little more, and promising security that encouraged people to increase their standard of living, the rug was pulled from under them and sent outside the country where American capitalists now exploit more impoverished families in places without American regulations. This narrative shines a light on the simmering anger of poor white communities and clarifies their distrust of what they have been taught to call the "deep state" by other capitalists who have long known how to mislead them. I'm left feeling a great deal of empathy for these people and a clear picture of their community, their values, and their ability to persevere. A beautiful vessel carries these stories.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having lived in a former cotton mill town at one time, this book was quite an interesting read for me. However many years have passed since the mills (Alexander City, AL—Russell Athletics) have been open, and my naivety was exposed as this book opened my eyes to the injustice, pain, and hardship of Americans working in the cotton mill industry. The book spans life from the 1900s to the late 90s, which is when most mills moved overseas. I listened to this book on audio, and caught myself with my mouth agape many times, shocked by what I was hearing. The misery some of these people experienced was truly painful to hear. Their recollection of past experiences was compelling. Bragg’s experience having lived in a cotton mill town himself, of course helped him capture the stories of these men and women in a way that no one else could. I am so glad the stories of these individuals was told, especially by such a gifted Southern author.

[Diane Yannick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rick Bragg can write and that’s a fact. In this case, I wish he’d written a bit more about some of the characters he introduced. Their lives were hardscrabble and yet they endured the hardships with few complaints. They inhaled cotton lint and shortened their lives. They worked long days in the cotton fields ignoring their damaged hands. They did this for the dignity that this meager income allowed them. They were satisfied to meet their most basic needs because not meeting those needs was unacceptable to them and their families.

Bragg knew the cotton mills in Alabama that he wrote about as this was his home turf. He took me there with individual stories that he had carefully researched. The cotton mill closed in 2001 and just like everything else in the workers’ lives, they accepted their fate. The owners were often not local and had little interest in anything other than their profits.

“The scale spun to the truth of it, the two women together, had picked six hundred pounds of cotton—at two dollars per one hundred pounds, they made six dollars each and a little change. They had picked three times their weight.”

“Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor the damaged shell that carries it.”

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man does this book catch the heart. What could be an anodyne "the plight of southern cotton millworkers" in Bragg's hands becomes real lives, real voices, the ache of poverty, the hunger for basic decency. I've always loved Rick Bragg and the way he honors his Appalachian roots without glorifying them -- you never come away with fully rosy eyes. (Sometimes his column in Southern Living veers dangerously close to "kooky stories about us rednecks" territory.) But his artistry in The Most They Ever Had will humble you and break your heart.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Men, women, and children of the Appalachian Hills toiled hard their entire lives just to survive. The cotton fields and mills provided a living, if you could call it that, in deplorable working conditions that aged them all quickly beyond their years. They worked hard and never complained. Their stories are told in the way that only Rick Bragg, a true Southerner could. Hard to put down once I started it.

[MonaK · Rating 5 out of 5]

This felt like an incredibly personal book, you could tell how close Bragg is to the subject material. He did an excellent job of balancing the nuanced feelings the workers had toward the mill, walking the line of knowing the exploited and dangerous position they existed in while also acknowledging the value they still managed to squeeze from it (a manageable living, a sense of community, dignity, etc).

Bragg does a great job weaving together the stories of individuals united under similar circumstances, captured in moments of beautiful prose. This felt like a thematic nonfiction companion to the Grapes of Wrath, reading the two so closely together definitely aided the book’s impact.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been 20 years since I read Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shoutin'. I loved it, but there were bad memories of people in my life at that time and so I pretty much ignored Bragg since getting my journalism degree. Not anymore. I liked this a lot and I think what he's done here is important in the same way the work of the WPA writers of the 1930s was. I want to read his bio of Jerry Lee Lewis now.

[Denise Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Rick Bragg! I really didn’t even know what a cotton mill or textile mill was until I read this book. I am from rural Mississippi though, and I know what hard-working people are. My daddy’s motto was “work,work,work and enjoy it!” The book also made my mouth water for fried chicken, potato salad, and banana pudding!

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice little book, it serves as a tribute to the working poor of the textile industry in the south. Full of heartbreaking stories and heart warming stories at the same time. Rick Bragg has a real gift to be a great story teller. It is a quick little read, and I enjoyed it.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book exists so that you don't have to read the poorly written Hillbilly Elegy. Bragg is the authentic best.