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CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP.
It was while I was in Birmingham that the industrial depression reached rock bottom.

In the depth of this industrial paralysis the iron workers of Birmingham struck for better pay.

I, with a train load of other strikers, went to Louisiana and the whole bunch of us were practically forced into peonage.

It was a case of "out of the frying pan into the fire." We had been saying that the mill owners had driven us "into slavery," for they had made us work under bad conditions; but after a month in a peon camp, deep in the swamps of Louisiana, we knew more about slavery than we did before.