A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry (review)

Beth English chose the Dwight Corporation of Chicopee, Massachusetts, and Alabama City, Alabama, to demonstrate the interregional factors that created capital flight and manufacturing relocation as an "early" example of globalization. Wishing to "disengage" from social-cultural methodology, she seeks to broaden her analysis by focusing on mill managers and their policies in order to rejoin labor and business history. A Common Thread gives a solid view of the southern perspective and Dwight operations, but an unclear understanding of northern reasons for capital flight.

The Dwight records reveal the close control of management policy by T. Jefferson Coolidge and Howard Gardener Nichols, father and son, who represented powerful Boston finance capitalists. These (along with Horace Sears) are Boston names unrecognized by the author that provide linkages to key financial interests suggesting that the relocation of the Dwight mills requires deeper exploration to fathom the motives for capital flight. The Dwight records in Alabama City also reveal the leadership role of its native son/manager Rueben Mitchell in the fight first to overturn state child labor regulation in 1887—in order to entice the Dwight mills to decide on Alabama—and then to stonewall twentieth-century labor reform and unionization.

Do the Dwight records retain much on the process of production or on market strategy? In a puzzling lapse, English proves to be uninterested in local production, marketing, or northern developments, except that the Dwight operations in the South would produce the best coarse cotton cloth to "bolster the profitability" of the Chicopee mills (p. 85). Contextually, New England manufacturers were producing diverse products seeking market niches, given the domination of the lucrative print cloth market by Fall River's mammoth mills.

The Dwight company installed in its southern mills ring-spinning machinery and the automatic Draper loom for the production of coarse cloth—the well-known transfer of technology aided by New England machinery firms. Loom-fixers, carefully watched, would be needed from Chicopee, but the workforce was unskilled southern mill help. English dismisses the historiographical issue, "southern exceptionalism" or the lack of textile unionism in the South, by blaming the "regional myopia" of New England's craft unions on a policy of "North First" (pp. 74–75). In this reiterated theme, she is partly right for the wrong reasons.

British immigrant mule-spinners and weavers led by Fall River's Robert Howard organized trade unionism in the textile Northeast. Howard led the National Mule Spinners Association and joined the American Federation of Labor (AFL). English ignores this history. Both the mule-spinners and other skilled groups in the UTW-AFL faced in 1898 a long-term assault on regional wage levels conducted by Boston's Arkwright Club and its members throughout New England. This was another early strategy to deal with southern competition. With few or no mule-spinners in the southern mills and having decided not to organize ring-spinners (English takes no notice of this), Roberts left southern operatives to organize themselves. Technology shaped labor organization.

Heavily in debt to New York banks, the Massachusetts Chicopee mills began to shut down in 1925, and the relocation strategy to the South failed to save them. The book's comparative focus shifts from local to state to region to nation to globe, but English continues to blame the AFL textile unions for their failure to organize textile workers in the 1920s and 1930s. The power of industrial and finance capital and the essential conservatism of the New Deal—readily acknowledged by English, who provides examples from the Dwight operations—contradict this assertion. Dwight stymied the TWUA/ CIO and the National Labor Relations Board in the 1930s and 1940s and became union only when it merged with Cone Mills in 1951. It closed in 1959, ironically in the same decade as Lowell's last two unionized cotton mills.

In sum, capital flight and mill relocation are presented as rational marketplace...