Factory Man : How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town (9780316322607)

by Macy, Beth

  My agent, Peter McGuigan at Foundry Literary + Media, shaped every element of this book with gusto, smarts, and good humor, with help from his colleagues Bret Witter, Matt Wise, and Kirsten Neuhaus. Included in the cadre of journalists, authors, and friends who cheered, read drafts, or offered wise counsel at key points along the way were Roland Lazenby, Ralph Berrier Jr., Andrea Pitzer, Jeff Howe, Gary Knight, Martha Bebinger, Alissa Quart, Annie Jacobsen, Jim Steele, Mary Bishop, Margaret Newkirk, Shankar Vedantam, Marcela Valdes, John Beckman, Bond Nickles, Leigh Anne Kelley, Josh Meltzer, Katelyn Polantz, Gemma de’Choisy, Kevin Sites, Lisa Mullins, Audra Ang, Joe Wilson, Jordan Fifer, Stephanie Klein-Davis, Mike Hudson, Darcey Steinke, Sue Lindsey, Sharon Rapoport, Will Fletcher, Dan Crawford, Aida Rogers, Joe Stinnett, Jonathan Coleman, Evelio Contreras, and Clay Shirky.

  At Little, Brown and Company, executive editor John Parsley shepherded every sentence of this book with a rare blend of curiosity, skepticism, and kindness. Other phenomenal Little, Brown supporters include Malin von Euler-Hogan, Sarah Murphy, Amanda Brown, Fiona Brown, Tracy Roe, Michael Pietsch, Judy Clain, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Helen Tobin, and Miriam Parker.

  For travel, financial, and other assistance—like getting me to Asia and back—I’m tremendously thankful for the generosity of the Ochberg Society for Trauma Journalism (special thanks to Deirdre Stoelzle-Graves, Dr. Frank Ochberg, and Jeff Kelly Lowenstein) and to the Lukas Prize Project, a collaboration of the Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard (with special thanks to Lisa Redd, Gene Foreman, Bob and Nancy Giles, Shaye Areheart, James Geary, Ellen Tuttle, and Ann Marie Lipinski). I’d also like to thank the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for residency support.

  Huge hugs to friends and relatives who fed me along the way and must have grown tired of listening to my furniture tales—but were usually too polite to say so—including Chris and Connie Henson, Angela Charlton, Jenna Swann, Chet Weiss, Ed and Katherine Walker, Betsy and Gerry Bannan, Frances and Lee West, Jean and Scott Whitaker, Sarah Macy Slack, Tim Macy, Chris and Bill Landon, Barbara and Frosty Landon, and Chloe Landon. Lezlie and Keno Snyder at Parkway Brewing Company in Salem, Virginia, deserve a hoppy shout-out for launching their own made-in-America collaboration in celebration of this book: Factory Girl Pale Ale. My sons, Max and Will Landon, were usually patient with my lack of cooking and were always handy with a hug when I needed one.

  This non–business writer was schooled in furniture-making by many experts: Joel Shepherd, Mike Micklem, Jerry Epperson, Steve Walker, Art Raymond, Joe Meadors, Buck Gale, Spencer Morten, Rob Spilman, David Williams, Reuben “Scotty” Scott, the late Bob Merriman, and the generous Indonesian Stanley Furniture crew of Richard Ledger, Jim Febrian, Jerry Hall, and Dini Martarini. Heartfelt thanks—and re-employment hopes—go to Stanley’s Robbinsville workers, who learned in April 2014 that their factory would soon close.

  As an interloper writing about an industry that has long been the purview of business and trade-publication beat journalists, I owe a great debt to past and current reporters at Furniture/Today (especially Powell Slaughter, Thomas Russell, and Clint Engel), the Wall Street Journal (Timothy Aeppel and James R. Hagerty), the Martinsville Bulletin (Ginny Wray and Debbie Hall), the Roanoke Times (Megan Schnabel, Duncan Adams, George Kegley, Jeff Sturgeon, Matt Chittum, and the truly fabulous Ben Beagle), the Galax Gazette (Chuck Burress), and Virginia Business magazine (Estelle Jackson). I’m also grateful to the American Furniture Hall of Fame for sharing their oral histories, as well as to Michael K. Dugan, whose Furniture Wars became one of my most dog-eared sources.

  Roanoke historian John Kern’s research on early African American workers at Bassett Furniture was incredibly helpful, as was Dorothy Cleal and Hiram H. Herbert’s Foresight, Founders, and Fortitude: The Growth of Industry in Martinsville and Henry County, Virginia. Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China schooled me on the human side of offshoring from the other side of the globe. For context on racial complexities in the southern Piedmont—and in America—there is no finer book than Henry Wiencek’s The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White.

  I’m grateful for materials shared from the archives of Pat and John Bassett, Richard Stanley Chatham, Desmond Kendrick, Rob Spilman/Bassett Furniture, John Nunn, John B. Harris, Naomi Hodge-Muse, Doretha Estes, Coy Young, and, especially, the Bassett Historical Center. For snacks and for extending a true sense of community to me, no one was kinder than lifelong Bassett residents Mary and Junior Thomas, who never let me drive unassisted across their tiny bridge. Mary passed away on November 19, 2013, at the age of eighty-one, and her jam-packed funeral was truly and tee-totally glorious. Speakers marveled about her Let’s Make a Deal purses (“She had whatever you needed in that thing”) and her home remedies—especially her secret cure for taking the sting out of a burn, which she could do both in person and over the telephone. (“You could just feel the fire comin’ outta you.”)

  In the category of Librarians and Clerks Who Rule: Bill Bishop at the U.S. International Trade Commission helped me navigate the thousands of documents stemming from the bedroom-furniture antidumping case. Belinda Harris at the Roanoke Times unearthed old photographs and stories and helped tally the layoffs. Spencer Johnson at the Martinsville–Henry County Economic Development Corporation waded through stacks of data on changing workforce patterns, as did Ray Kohl in Galax. Volunteers and staffers at the Bassett Historical Center were welcoming enough to let me take up most of a room in the summer of 2012. The best fact-checker and census-comber award goes to BHC director Pat Ross, with props to her plainspoken assistant Anne Copeland, who grimaced when she saw me drenched and shivering in the wake of my Smith River plunge. Cloaked in Pat’s blankets, with Pat’s car heater on high, I knew Anne would come gawk at me in the center parking lot, and, sure enough, out she strode with both eyebrows raised. “Well, now you pretty much have to dedicate the book to her, don’t you?” she said.

  At Vaughan-Bassett Furniture, Wyatt Bassett spent many hours going over the intricacies of the antidumping case with me, and Doug Bassett, Doug Brannock, Jim Stout, Joyce Phillips, Rose Maner, Pat Bassett, and especially Sheila Key shared many insights. For his three-hundred-plus phone calls at all hours of the day and night—and for that inimitable, booming voice that never once began with “Hello, this is John”—thank you, John Bassett III. You weren’t the easiest person to talk to, but you were always interesting and you were often fun. And not just anyone can explain the intricacies of grouse hunting and Chinese currency manipulation, and tell a dirty joke—all in the same breath.

  To all the unemployed and underemployed former factory workers who poured out their hearts—especially Wanda Perdue—consider this book yours.

  Lastly, to the updraft beneath my armpits and for every single thing, thanks to my husband, Tom Landon.

  About the Author

  Beth Macy writes about outsiders and underdogs. Her work has appeared in national magazines and the Roanoke Times, where her reporting has won more than a dozen national awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard. She lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

  Appendix

  A Virginia Furniture Dynasty

  Most of Virginia’s furniture companies were launched with the help of patriarch John D. Bassett Sr., who created his own competition while at the same time maintaining a thread of control. Intertwining his corporate babies with the family tree, he helped spawn such companies as Bassett, Hooker, Stanley, Vaughan, and Vaughan-Bassett—and generations of family fortune. (This diagram shows the progression of the business through the family.)

  Notes

  Prologue: The Dusty Road to Dalian

  Interviews: John Bassett, Wyatt Bassett, Rose Maner

  The largest migration in human history: By 2008, 130 million Chinese people had moved from the country to the cities, according to Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (New York: Spiegel
and Grau, 2008). By 2010, that figure was 150 million workers, according to Yuyu Chen, Ginger Zhe Jin, and Yang Yue, “Peer Migration in China” (NBER Working Paper Series, vol. w15671 [January 2010]). In 2012, nearly 160 million migrant workers were living in China’s cities (“The Largest Migration in History,” Economist, February 24, 2012).

  Chapter 1: The Tipoff

  Interviews: Naomi Hodge-Muse, Bernard “Bunny” Wampler, Joel Shepherd, Jared Soares, Wanda Perdue, Kay Pagans, Delano Thomasson, Maury Hammack, Octavia Witcher, Mary Redd, Wayne Withers, Marcia Bailey.

  Jared Soares’s work on Martinsville: http://jaredsoares.com/index.php?/project/martinsville/.

  Top-down coverage of the financial crisis: “Covering the Great Recession,” Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, October 5, 2009.

  Most millionaires per capita: Undocumented but widely held local belief and often repeated in Virginia media, from the Martinsville Bulletin to Blue Ridge Outdoors to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

  Unemployment figures: Virginia Employment Commission and Mark Heath, Martinsville–Henry County Economic Development Commission, interview with the author, February 9, 2012.

  Crane’s crimes: Crane pleaded guilty and was convicted in June 2012, sentenced to one year and one month in prison, and fined nearly $970,000: Alison Parker, “Silas Crane Pleaded Guilty in Court Wednesday Morning,” June 13, 2012, WDBJ7.com.

  Property- and drug-related crime: Henry County assistant commonwealth’s attorney Wayne Withers described an increasing number of cases involving copper thefts from abandoned factories and even churches. Shoplifting and drug-related break-ins were also on the rise.

  Cedar hope chests: At its peak in the 1960s, the Lane Company, based in Altavista, Virginia, operated seventeen factories in five states. Its promotional mini-cedar-chest program was once so popular that nearly two-thirds of young women graduating from American high schools received certificates for them.

  “It’s the Real Love-Gift”: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1948-Lane-Cedar-Hope-Chest-Wanda-Hendrix-vintage-2pg-ad-/150536985049?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item230cb419d9.

  “creative destruction”: Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) coined the term to describe the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. He called capitalism “the perennial gale of creative destruction.”

  The World Is Flat: The benefits of globalization appear on page 143 of Friedman’s The World Is Flat (New York: Picador, 2005); he is quoting a study by Morgan Stanley that was originally reported in Fortune magazine on October 4, 2004.

  Background on Grimes Manufacturing: Sarica Manufacturing Company, a circuit-card assembly supplier for Honeywell based in Urbana, was started by former Honeywell employees when Honeywell announced it was going to begin outsourcing the circuit boards. Sarica employs ninety workers, according to Urbana economic development coordinator Marcia Bailey.

  Chapter 2: The Original Outsourcer

  Interviews: Pat Ross, Jane Bassett Spilman, John Kern, Mary Elizabeth Morten, Spencer Morten, John Bassett, Pat Bassett

  The history of Bassett: Bassett, Virginia, was built on land that was known as Horsepasture before the magisterial districts were divided in the late 1800s. Bassett land is now part of the district of Reed Creek.

  Mr. J.D. buying the little kids ice cream: Recounted in a 1935 letter by Mabel Coleman of Mayodan, North Carolina, on file at the Martinsville–Henry County Museum. She wrote to him for a school assignment, asking him to buy her a bike for Christmas. It’s unknown whether he bought the bike, but he did save the girl’s letter.

  Flood description of J.D. Bassett: Howard White, longtime plant manager who grew up in Bassett and started working for BFI in 1939; interview with the author, July 30, 2012.

  Description of flood scene: Malcolm Donald Coe, ed., Our Proud Heritage (Bassett, VA: Bassett Printing Corporation, 1969).

  Slave population: According to 1840 census figures, Henry County had 2,852 slaves, which was 41 percent of the population. One in four Virginians owned slaves, and the largest slave owner in the state—as well as one of the largest in the South—was Henry County’s Samuel Hairston, whose family owned 1,600 slaves on several tobacco plantations according to Henry Wiencek’s remarkable book The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

  “Race is entwined”: John Kern, interview with the author, June 15, 2012.

  Hairston pronunciation: Beth Macy, “Lingering Racial Divide Clouds Foundation’s Efforts,” Roanoke Times, March 18, 2012.

  Patrick Henry’s presence in the county: “Martinsville & Henry County—Historic Views” (Martinsville–Henry County Women’s Club, 1976).

  Nonwhites as new majority: From the 2010 U.S. Census, the first census in which whites were a minority in Martinsville. The Hispanic population is 3.9 percent.

  Land begetting more land: Detailed in Anne Bassett Stanley Chatham, Tidewater Families of the New World and Their Westward Migrations (Austin, Texas: Historical Publications, 1996), 627–30.

  Largest slaveholding state: In 1860, Virginia had 490,865 slaves, accounting for 31 percent of its population. See “Slavery in Virginia: A Selected Bibliography,” edited by David Feinberg (Library of Virginia, 2007).

  John Henry Bassett’s two young slaves: Chatham, Tidewater Families, and the 1860 Henry County slave schedule.

  John Henry Bassett’s holdings: 1860 Henry County slave schedule and census records.

  Protecting the family assets: Chatham, Tidewater Families.

  Role model of relentlessness: J. L. Scoggin’s description of J.D. Bassett’s work ethic in the Bassett Journal, 1932.

  Mr. J.D.’s ambition theorized: Chatham, Tidewater Families, 665.

  Role of plug tobacco: In 1900, four tobacco factories made chewing tobacco in the city, according to “Martinsville & Henry County—Historic Views.”

  Moonshining practices in southwest Virginia: Henry County is directly south of Franklin County, which inspired Matt Bondurant’s novel The Wettest County in the World (New York: Scribner, 2008) and the subsequent film Lawless, about illegal moonshining activities in the region.

  How the town of Bassett got its name: “Memories of Grandma and Grandpa Bassett,” recorded by Mary Elizabeth Bassett Morten and reprinted in Chatham, Tidewater Families. According to the original post office deed, the town was initially called Bassetts (with an s), and the original postmaster was John Henry Bassett, not his son.

  J.D. Bassett as a young adult: “Big Oaks Prompted Industry,” Martinsville Bulletin, 1964.

  Casket-selling business: J.D. Bassett obituary, Martinsville Bulletin, March 1, 1965.

  Splitting four hundred rails a day: Ann Joyce, “J. D. Bassett Sr. Notes His 92nd Birthday,” Martinsville Bulletin, 1959.

  Miss Pokey and the founding of Bassett Furniture: John Bassett III, Pat Ross, Jane Spilman, Mary Elizabeth Morten, and various grandchildren, interviews with the author.

  First North Carolina furniture makers: Thomas Wrenn organized the High Point Furniture Company in 1888, and by 1900, High Point claimed twelve furniture makers. Bernhardt Furniture began in Lenoir, North Carolina, in 1889, and Lexington Furniture in Lexington, North Carolina, in 1901, according to John James Cater, “The Rise of the Furniture Manufacturing Industry in Western North Carolina and Virginia,” Management Decision 43 (2005): 906–24.

  Lots of timber but no roads: Account of Mary Elizabeth Morten in Chatham, Tidewater Families, 675.

  J.D. Bassett selling his brothers on becoming partners: Dorothy Cleal and Hiram H. Herbert, Foresight, Founders, and Fortitude: The Growth of Industry in Martinsville and Henry County, Virginia (Bassett, VA: Bassett Print Corporation, 1970).

  J.D. bossing Reed Stone around: Chatham, Tidewater Families, 666.

  Work ethic of early factory workers: Historian Liston Pope noted that workers “took it for granted that all members of the family would work as early as possible… and began notoriously large families, even surpassing the immigra
nts who populated the East with a plentiful supply of workers”; see Liston Pope, Mill-hands and Preachers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942).

  Selling price of first Bassett Furniture: Cleal and Herbert, Foresight, Founders, and Fortitude.

  Initial designs of Bassett Furniture: From Bassett corporate history and Rob Spilman, interview with the author, May 2, 2013.

  Demand for mass-produced furniture: Cleal and Herbert, Foresight, Founders, and Fortitude. “By offering cheaper labor costs in a union-free environment and abundant capital, the South enticed hundreds of textile mills to move,” wrote Michael K. Dugan, a retired industry executive and business professor, in The Furniture Wars: How America Lost a Fifty Billion Dollar Industry (Conover, NC: Goosepen Press, 2009).

  J.D. Bassett’s money for his children: Spencer Morten, interview with the author, June 29, 2012.

  Hardscrabble workers: When the original Old Town plant caught fire in December 1917, the entire town formed a bucket line to the Smith River, but the heat was too intense and the factory burned to the ground. The company rebuilt the building—in brick—immediately. Henry Bulletin stories, 1918.

  Five hundred employees: History of Virginia, entry on John D. Bassett Sr. (Chicago and New York: American Historical Society, 1924).

  The South as a dominant furniture-making region: Cleal and Herbert, Foresight, Founders, and Fortitude.

  “I pay Pete twenty-five cents”: John Bassett, interview with the author, April 26, 2013.

  J. D. Bassett Jr.’s exclamation upon having a son: Recollections of Minnie Lane Bassett, J.D. Bassett’s granddaughter, recounted in Chatham, Tidewater Families.

  Letter from John D. Bassett Sr. to John D. Bassett III: Dated June 14, 1938, the letter now hangs on JBIII’s Vaughan-Bassett office wall in Galax, Virginia.