1919 through 1921. While advocating a "united front from below," the Party attacked other socialist parties as "social fascists" and denounced the AFL as "an organ to suppress and disorganize the masses" which workers should join only to "overthrow the reformist bureaucracy" that ran them. The CP instead focused on founding new revolutionary unions in the expectation that the collapse of capitalism was just around the corner. These new dual unions were, in fact, often more like ginger groups than unions, with few members and even fewer long-term members. Nonetheless these groups did make some heroic efforts to organize the unorganized. In 1929 the National Textile Workers led a strike of thousands of textile workers in Gastonia, North Carolina, who walked out, despite the NTW's attempts to hold them back, after management fired five union activists. That strike was crushed after mobs of citizens smashed up union offices and murdered a union activist. While local authorities, preachers and newspapers played up the National Textile Workers' association with godless communism and its opposition to white supremacy, it is unlikely that this made much difference in the final analysis. The authorities reacted just as violently when the much less radical AFL intervened after a spontaneous strike of textile workers erupted in other mill towns several months later. That strike likewise ended in mass arrests and the killing of three strikers, shot in the back by sheriffs. Miners' unions The CP's efforts in mining were just as unsuccessful. The CP had once had a good deal of support in the internecine struggles within the United Mine Workers in the 1920s, when John L. Lewis used every weapon available to defeat his rivals for union leadership while wages and working conditions in the industry grew worse. The TUEL-supported candidate who ran for UMW President against Lewis in the 1924 election was credited with 66,000 votes in the official tally – nearly half what Lewis received. The CP later allied itself, for a time, with John Brophy, whose "Save the Union" slate probably would have won election to national leadership in 1926 if the vote had been held democratically. Lewis, however, effectively drove all of the TUEL and Brophy supporters from the union after his victory in 1926. The CP later burned its bridges with Brophy, denouncing him as a reformist. The CP founded its own National Miners Union in 1928. It engaged in a