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

Introduction

introduction “It has been said,” U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan noted in advance of a September 2000 United Nations summit meeting of world leaders, “that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.”1 Perhaps. Certainly, the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and the exodus of industrial capital to other parts of the world have spurred heated debates. Are capital relocations and related restructuring within the U.S. economy a long-term boon or bane? What is the best strategy to raise global labor standards? What are the most effective ways to mitigate the unemployment and hardships caused by downsizings and plant closures? Factory closings associated with globalization have become endemic in the United States, a phenomena described in 2002 by Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times as “the infection that has hit so much of industrial America .”2 Indeed, “globalization” has become a buzzword of the early twenty-first century, and its effects are a hot-button political issue. Yet while capital flight appears to be relatively new, in reality, it and the dialogue about effective strategies to deal with it have been ongoing for well over a century. The cotton textile industry was one of the first in the United States to experience massive relocations of capital and plant closures when the center of the industry shifted from New England to the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Competition from textile mills operating in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama became a serious challenge for northern cotton textile manufacturers as early as the 1890s. Owners of northern textile corporations—watching profits turn into losses during the 1893 depression while output and sales of southern goods continued apace—felt unfairly constrained by state legislation that established age and hours standards for mill employees, and by actual and potential labor militancy in their mills. As a result, several New England textile manufacturers opened southern subsidiary factories as a way to effectively meet southern competition. In 1896, the Dwight Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts, was one of the first New England cotton textile companies to open a southern subsidiary, building a branch mill in Alabama City, Alabama. In subsequent decades, the Dwight Company worked to maintain the manufacturing advantages found there by utilizing aggressive union-busting tactics and, in conjunction with other Alabama textile manufacturers, by lobbying against and stymieing the passage of meaningful state labor legislation. The Dwight Company eventually shifted all of its production to the Alabama mill, and in 1927 it closed its Massachusetts 1 2 • introduction 1 operations completely. Within a thirty-year period, many of the largest textile corporations in Massachusetts would move part or all of their operations southward . When southern textile companies began to feel the pinch of post–World War II competition from manufacturers operating in lower-cost, comparatively unregulated labor markets worldwide, they too began liquidating holdings and relocating capital as their New England counterparts had done at the turn of the century. In 1959, the mill in Alabama that the Dwight Manufacturing Company opened in 1896 was one of the first cotton textile mills in the South to close in the face of this postwar foreign competition. The Dwight Manufacturing Company’s relocation from Massachusetts to Alabama was an early step in the process of textile industry globalization. At the turn of the last century, this process began in the United States as region-toregion relocations and continues today from nation to nation. The owners of the Dwight Company recognized that the highest profits could be made in the underdeveloped, overwhelmingly rural South where surplus labor was abundant , opportunities for gainful employment were few, and labor was cheap and unorganized. Late nineteenth-century southern industrial boosters and many state legislators, moreover, linked the South’s economic development inexorably to the maintenance of the region’s low-wage, probusiness status quo, using this climate to attract the dollars of more northern investors. The Dwight Company’s corporate officers were very vocal about the conditions in Massachusetts that “pushed” the company to move while other conditions in Alabama “pulled.” The company’s southern operations became a lightening rod for both praise and criticism by mill owners, mill village apologists, advocates of child-labor reform, and organized labor. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse about Dwight’s decision to open a subsidiary mill in Alabama and its eventual move out of Massachusetts parallels much of the modern...