Herring, Harriet L. (Harriet Laura)

Research associate at the Institute for Research in Social Science, and professor in the Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

From the description of Harriet L. Herring papers, 1925-1968 [manuscript]. WorldCat record id: 26320021

Harriet Laura Herring (27 July 1892-18 December 1976), social science researcher and student of socio-industrial relations in the South, was born in Kinston, N.C., daughter of William Isler and Laura Loftin Herring. A member of the class of 1913 at Meredith College, Harriet spent 1914-1915 as a high school teacher in Scotland Neck, N.C., then two years on the staff at Chowan College, 1915-1917. She received a master's degree in history from Radcliffe in 1918 and a special certificate in industrial relations from Bryn Mawr College the following year.

Herring began her lifelong work with the industrial community and its workers as an employment manager with the Roxford Knitting Company, Philadelphia, Penn., in 1918. She returned to North Carolina and became a community worker for the Pomona Mills in Greensboro, and, in 1922, personnel director for the Carolina Cotton and Woolen Mills, a division of Marshall Field and Company in Spray. There, with the support of Luther H. Hodges, then personnel manager for Marshall Field in the Leaksville-Spray area, she instituted the first comprehensive employee welfare system for cotton mill workers in the South.

In 1925, Herring accepted the invitation of Director Howard W. Odum to join the staff of the Institute for Research in Social Science (IRSS) at the University of North Carolina. Her appointment as a research associate charged with examining reports of social ills connected with the industrialization of the South was sought by Odum in the belief that, having been born here of the same folk, she would be an investigator acceptable to mill owners and others in positions of power and influence. IRSS's projected study of the wide-ranging effects of paternalism in the textile industry was, however, rejected by the North Carolina Cotton Manufactures Association and attacked by David Clark, editor of the Southern Textile Bulletin . As a result, Herring's initial research focused on the company's role in shaping life in the mill village. Published as Welfare Work in Mill Villages: The Story of Extra-Mill Activities in North Carolina (1929), it was but the first of many investigations of the textile industry in particular and the industrialization of the region in general she would conduct as IRSS's specialist in industrial research. During her 40-year association with IRSS, she wrote numerous articles and reports on these subjects and two more books, Southern Industry and Regional Development (1940) and Passing of the Mill Village: Revolution in a Southern Institution (1949).

Herring also contributed to IRSS's research in other areas. During the 1930s, with Odum and T. J. Woofter, Jr., she directed a group of related projects on A State in Depression. She was coauthor of Part-time Farming in the Southeast (1937), a research monograph prepared for the Works Progress Administration, one in a series on the plight of the southern farmer. With George L. Simpson she wrote North Carolina Associated Communities: A Case Study of Voluntary Subregional Organization (1953), one of a number of community surveys prepared during the directorship of Gordon W. Blackwell. Throughout this period, Herring also served on the faculty of the Department of Sociology at UNC, teaching a course on the industrial community.

Her continuing investigation of social welfare questions and her commitment to the industrialization of the state and the region influenced her activities outside the institute and the university. She participated in the work of the North Carolina Conference for Social Service, serving as secretary from 1928 to 1931. She was frequently a consultant to the state government of North Carolina. On leave from the IRSS, she served as state superintendent of reemployment during the 1930s, and later she produced a section-by-section study entitled Industrial Development in North Carolina, issued by the State Planning Board in 1945. Governor William B. Umstead appointed her to the Commission of Reorganization of State government (1953-1957). With other members of the institute staff, she provided the leadership for the state Commission on Revenue Structure's Conference on Economic and Social Factors in the Development of North Carolina (1955-1956). In addition, she was active in politics on all levels; in 1960, she was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

After retiring from UNC in 1965, she continued to live in Chapel Hill for several years as professor emeritus of sociology. She then returned to the Kinston area. At the time of her death at age 84, Herring was working on a social history of industrial communities through the ages.

From the guide to the Harriet L. Herring Papers, 1925-1968, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)