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To Make My Bread
This classic novel, written in the midst of the Great Depression, translates the themes of Balzac to a Southern Appalachian setting. Lumpkin traces the path of the McClure family as they move from living as poor bootleggers in the mountains to living in a mill town, earning a pittance as factory workers. The McClures are navigating the treacherous path of industrialization without a safety net, even as the entire country reels with the effects of the Depression.
Lumpkin weaves a story in poetic mountains speech, moving through powerful religious experiences, through lawless love, and reaching a tremendous climax in a mill strike waged with all the desperation of a life and death struggle. Without literary tricks or devices she achieves tremendous emotional effects through sincerity and realism.
Lumpkin weaves a story in poetic mountains speech, moving through powerful religious experiences, through lawless love, and reaching a tremendous climax in a mill strike waged with all the desperation of a life and death struggle. Without literary tricks or devices she achieves tremendous emotional effects through sincerity and realism.
- GenresFiction
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1932
7 people are currently reading
117 people want to read
About the author
Grace Lumpkin
9 books1 followerGrace Lumpkin (March 3, 1891 – March 23, 1980) was an American writer of proletarian literature, focusing most of her works on the Depression era and the rise and fall of favor surrounding communism in the United States.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 11, 2020
There was a story the teacher told the young ones at school, and Bonnie playing teacher, told it over to the children at home. “And the ogre said, ‘I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.’ “ At first the throb of the mill had been like the throb of a big heart beating for the good of those who worked under the roof, for it gave hope and desires to be fulfilled….Now to Emma the throb of a heart had changed. She was feeling the grind of teeth. The mill crunched up and down – “I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.”
SOUTHERN TEXTILE MANUFACTURING
By the 1920s, the South had surpassed New England in textile manufacturing. In fact, by 1920, there were more Southerners working in textile mills than most other occupations. They had been promised good wages, as well as comfortable homes and superior schools in company towns, something that they had not had as small farmers eking out an existence in the mountains.
The reality was a different matter. Management was able to exploit the existence of cheap surplus labor as a result of farm families being displaced by the timber and mining industries. Consequently, the employees worked from ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a hot, noisy, and dangerous environment, for such low pay that both fathers and mothers, and even children, were forced to work in the mill in order to put food on the table, without much left over for anything else, including clothing. Few children attended school beyond the third grade making the existence of schools an empty promise.
Malnutrition led to pellagra, while breathing the lint in the factories resulted in many cases of tuberculosis, and the lack of sanitation and medical care led to outbreaks of infantile paralysis.
TO MAKE MY BREAD
Grace Lumpkin’s debut novel, To Make My Bread (1932), tells the story of the two McClure families, who were forced by economic circumstances to sell their small farms in the Appalachians to a lumber corporation. They were then lured by the promise of a better life to seek employment in a textile mill located forty miles away, only to find themselves in a situation like that described above.
Eventually, union activists intervened in an effort to increase pay and improve working conditions, which led to strikes by the workers and violent retaliation by management that resulted in injuries and deaths on both sides.
The fictitious Wentworth Mill in Lumpkin’s story is based on a real one, that being the Loray Mill that was located in Gastonia, North Carolina. And the horrible working conditions that she describes in her book are the kinds of conditions that existed at the Loray Mill and the strike and the associated violence that she recounts are based on actual events that transpired there in 1929 – including the murder of a female worker who had become one of the leading activists.
Lumpkin’s book is a many-layered study of class divisions, race, and cultural and feminist history. Although there are males in the McClure families, in many ways the force preventing familial ties from unraveling is provided by strong female characters. This was true even though the women had to struggle with the conflict they faced between the demands of working in the mill and their traditional role as mothers.
THE ENIGMATIC GRACE LUMPKIN
Grace Lumpkin was born in 1891 (or 1896) in Milledgeville, Georgia. She was the ninth of eleven children in a deeply religious, socially prominent, but financially strapped family. The family moved to South Carolina when Grace was seven-years old. Her father died soon thereafter thus placing the family in an even greater economic bind.
As a young woman, she moved to New York and began to write short stories. She also became involved in liberal – at the time perceived as radical – politics and in 1927 was arrested while participating in a picketing under the sponsorship of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee.
Two years later she was sent by the Communist Party to the South in an attempt to organize sharecroppers. It was there that she witnessed the poverty and suffering of black and white sharecroppers and other laborers. She also traveled to North Carolina to observe and participate in the Gastonia textile strike. Her experiences served as source material for To Make My Bread.
With the publication of that book, she became “a left-wing literary star.” She became an important figure in the feminist movement and a champion of workers’ rights and though she never officially joined the Communist Party, she supported its cause.
By 1938, however, she had become disillusioned with communism and publicly denounced it, not so much for its stated goals, but for its methods. But unlike other American intellectuals who had flirted with communism as an antidote for the ills of capitalism during the Great Depression and likewise became disillusioned with it, Lumpkin took it a step further.
She appeared before the McCarthy committee that was engaged in witch hunts seeking to ferret out communist influence in the government and the wider society and went so far as to name people who had once been members or “fellow travelers” of the Communist Party.
In 1962, she published her fourth and final book, Full Circle, a stridently anti-communist novel. She, in effect, had also come full circle. Why she did so is not entirely clear to me, but I don’t believe that she ever disowned To Make My Bread. I hope not, for it was an accurate depiction of an unfortunate period in American history, one for which she served as an eyewitness and expertly documented in her book.
Grace Lumpkin and her book are virtually forgotten today; both, however, deserve to be remembered.
******
“The novel springs naturally from its author’s immersion in and personal knowledge of her absorbing subject material.” – The New York Times (1932)
SOUTHERN TEXTILE MANUFACTURING
By the 1920s, the South had surpassed New England in textile manufacturing. In fact, by 1920, there were more Southerners working in textile mills than most other occupations. They had been promised good wages, as well as comfortable homes and superior schools in company towns, something that they had not had as small farmers eking out an existence in the mountains.
The reality was a different matter. Management was able to exploit the existence of cheap surplus labor as a result of farm families being displaced by the timber and mining industries. Consequently, the employees worked from ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a hot, noisy, and dangerous environment, for such low pay that both fathers and mothers, and even children, were forced to work in the mill in order to put food on the table, without much left over for anything else, including clothing. Few children attended school beyond the third grade making the existence of schools an empty promise.
Malnutrition led to pellagra, while breathing the lint in the factories resulted in many cases of tuberculosis, and the lack of sanitation and medical care led to outbreaks of infantile paralysis.
TO MAKE MY BREAD
Grace Lumpkin’s debut novel, To Make My Bread (1932), tells the story of the two McClure families, who were forced by economic circumstances to sell their small farms in the Appalachians to a lumber corporation. They were then lured by the promise of a better life to seek employment in a textile mill located forty miles away, only to find themselves in a situation like that described above.
Eventually, union activists intervened in an effort to increase pay and improve working conditions, which led to strikes by the workers and violent retaliation by management that resulted in injuries and deaths on both sides.
The fictitious Wentworth Mill in Lumpkin’s story is based on a real one, that being the Loray Mill that was located in Gastonia, North Carolina. And the horrible working conditions that she describes in her book are the kinds of conditions that existed at the Loray Mill and the strike and the associated violence that she recounts are based on actual events that transpired there in 1929 – including the murder of a female worker who had become one of the leading activists.
Lumpkin’s book is a many-layered study of class divisions, race, and cultural and feminist history. Although there are males in the McClure families, in many ways the force preventing familial ties from unraveling is provided by strong female characters. This was true even though the women had to struggle with the conflict they faced between the demands of working in the mill and their traditional role as mothers.
THE ENIGMATIC GRACE LUMPKIN
Grace Lumpkin was born in 1891 (or 1896) in Milledgeville, Georgia. She was the ninth of eleven children in a deeply religious, socially prominent, but financially strapped family. The family moved to South Carolina when Grace was seven-years old. Her father died soon thereafter thus placing the family in an even greater economic bind.
As a young woman, she moved to New York and began to write short stories. She also became involved in liberal – at the time perceived as radical – politics and in 1927 was arrested while participating in a picketing under the sponsorship of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee.
Two years later she was sent by the Communist Party to the South in an attempt to organize sharecroppers. It was there that she witnessed the poverty and suffering of black and white sharecroppers and other laborers. She also traveled to North Carolina to observe and participate in the Gastonia textile strike. Her experiences served as source material for To Make My Bread.
With the publication of that book, she became “a left-wing literary star.” She became an important figure in the feminist movement and a champion of workers’ rights and though she never officially joined the Communist Party, she supported its cause.
By 1938, however, she had become disillusioned with communism and publicly denounced it, not so much for its stated goals, but for its methods. But unlike other American intellectuals who had flirted with communism as an antidote for the ills of capitalism during the Great Depression and likewise became disillusioned with it, Lumpkin took it a step further.
She appeared before the McCarthy committee that was engaged in witch hunts seeking to ferret out communist influence in the government and the wider society and went so far as to name people who had once been members or “fellow travelers” of the Communist Party.
In 1962, she published her fourth and final book, Full Circle, a stridently anti-communist novel. She, in effect, had also come full circle. Why she did so is not entirely clear to me, but I don’t believe that she ever disowned To Make My Bread. I hope not, for it was an accurate depiction of an unfortunate period in American history, one for which she served as an eyewitness and expertly documented in her book.
Grace Lumpkin and her book are virtually forgotten today; both, however, deserve to be remembered.
******
“The novel springs naturally from its author’s immersion in and personal knowledge of her absorbing subject material.” – The New York Times (1932)
March 13, 2009
This book blew my mind. I don't think I've ever read anything from what is described as the "socialist realism" genre of the 1930s, but this book was amazing. Why? Because I fear it was so realistic. The existence of the Appalachian mountain folk Lumpkin describes is heart-breaking in its poverty. But what is important to recognize is that they don't see their lives as impoverished. They recognize that their lives are deprived of certain material things, such as food (most definitely), and perhaps some clothing, but in many ways, they are happy. I don't think I ever read a book that so clearly illustrates how capitalism reshaped and redefined the very structure of our daily lives. What does it mean when you commodify your labor? More importantly, in an environment such as the Gastonia Mills, can you ever really commodify your labor in a means distinct from that of your body? Though lengthy, this book is a must-read. What makes it so frightening to read is that nothing in North Carolina has changed. In a right-to-work state, employers have the same rights to exploit the bodies of workers today as they did in the 1930s: isn't Smithfield the perfect example?
September 8, 2018
Depressing as hell, especially when they leave the mountains, but well written and captivating.
Read
September 1, 2019Amazing book about white working people - people who first were mountain dwellers and then people leaving for the textile factories. It was published in 1932 and follows several families and their challenges. It is supposed to be one of the books about the Gastonia Textile strike (1929) but it actually only describes the union organizing near the very end. I borrowed it from the Enoch Pratt library in baltimore and had a first edition copy! They've held on to it those many years.
October 22, 2022
Depressing yet uplifting at the same time. Sad to think that in some parts of this country workers aren't treated much better than the millworkers slaving away between the two World Wars who are depicted in this tragically underappreciated novel.
December 22, 2017
Read for English class senior year at SLU
June 16, 2023
A true proletariat novel. Though this book was published in 1931 the message is one that is still very much alive. The story is intriguing with many complex characters. A slow beginning but worth it in the end.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews