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

Notes

1 notes Introduction 1. New York Times, 3 September 2000. 2. New York Times, 26 December 2002. Writing during the early 1940s, Joseph Schumpter described a process of “creative destruction” wherein the decline of old sectors of an economy makes possible the development of new sectors in their place. Joseph Schumpter , Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942), cited and discussed in Bluestone and Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America, 9. 3. On the use of case studies as a valuable framework for examining capital mobility trends and deindustrialization as they occur in various industrial settings, see Craypo and Nissen, eds., Grand Designs; Cowie, Capital Moves; Cowie and Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins. 4. Examples of early works focusing on mill owners and boosters include Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture; Josephson, The Golden Threads; Broadus Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South; Cash, The Mind of the South; Gaston, The New South Creed. 5. See especially Dublin, Women at Work; and Hall et al., Like a Family. Other works include Hareven, Amoskeag and Family Time and Industrial Time; Cumbler, Working-Class Community in Industrial America; Blewett, The Last Generation; McLaurin, Paternalism and Protest; Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920; McHugh, Mill Family; Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers; Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied; Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls; Newby, Plain Folk in the New South; Flynt, Poor but Proud. 6. See, for example, Flamming, Creating the Modern South; Simon, A Fabric of Defeat ; Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order; Brattain, The Politics of Whiteness; Waldrep, Southern Workers and the Search for Community; Blewett, Constant Turmoil; Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism; Daniel, Culture of Misfortune; Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For; Clark, Like Night and Day. 7. Notable exceptions are Flamming, Creating the Modern South; Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order; and Clark, Like Night and Day. 8. The process of writing in-depth studies of workers’ cultures fractured American history into myriad fields and sub-fields. Numerous historians, dubbed “new institutionalists ,” have responded to this loss of synthesis by shifting their focus back to the study of institutions, especially trade unions, which had dominated the approach to studying labor history through the 1960s. But these new historians have broadened the economicdriven focus of earlier studies by exploring the connections between and dynamics of the relationships that existed among various institutions, especially the state, and how they shaped the realities of working people. Theda Skocpol made the call in 1985 to “bring the state back in” to historical analysis in her essay in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In. Examples of recent works that do this include Dubofsky, 183 184 • Notes to Pages 4–9 1 The State and Labor in Modern America; Greene, Pure and Simple Politics; McCartin, Labor’s Great War. 9. Examples of the use of location theory in analyses of capital mobility within the U.S. textile industry include Galenson, The Migration of the Cotton Textile Industry, and Kane, Textiles in Transition. Cowie’s Capital Moves is a less economically-driven capital mobility analysis and includes factors of community life, gender, and labor organization at the local level. 10. See for example Saxon, “Fall River and the Decline of the New England Textile Industry”; Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline; and Hartford, Where Is Our Responsibility . 11. Portions of chapters 2–5 are reprinted by permission of the University of Missouri Press from “Beginnings of the Global Economy: Capital Mobility in the 1890s U.S. Textile Industry,” in Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South edited by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, copyright 2005 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. 12. Abend, “U.S. Mills Move South”; Jones and Anderton, “Shaping Strategic Alliances in Mexico”; Patterson, “Cone to Build in Guatemala”; Cone Mills, A Century of Excellence , 45. One. “Positively Alarming”: Southern Boosters, Piedmont Mills, and New England Responses 1. Dublin, Women at Work; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 15, 36; Jonathan Prude, “The Social System of Early New England Textile Mills,” in Frisch and Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America, 1–36; François Weil, “Capitalism and Industrialization ,” 1334–45. On the development of the Lowell textile industry during the early nineteenth century, and on the Boston Associates, also see Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture; Dalzell, Enterprising Elite. 2. Weil, “Capitalism and Industrialization,” 1343–47; Szetela, History of Chicopee, 52– 53; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town...