The Hamlet Fire
Page 6
In those early days, Roe ran the plant thinking, like many businesspeople did at the time, that labor and management could and should get along and that good relations would keep employees on the job and working steadily. At the time, the Scranton area still had a wide range of employment options, even for women, the target of Roe’s labor recruitment efforts, so he couldn’t dismiss their concerns. “He worked with us on the floor,” recalled Betty Shotwell, who had a job on the Empire assembly line from 1965 to 1970, and then returned to the company in 1983 for five more years of processing chickens. “He boned and packed [chicken]. He worked with us as if he was another worker.” Even though Roe could be a “screamer,” sometimes angrily wagging his finger in workers’ faces, each September he threw a big clambake for his employees at a lakeside picnic area not far from the plant.4
In 1970, Roe left Moosic for the opportunity to run a chain of fried chicken restaurants.5 Three years later, that venture went bust, and Roe was back in Moosic. Using his house and other personal assets as collateral, he signed a five-year lease on the plant where he and Shotwell had worked. Later, he bought the 21,000-square-foot Empire factory outright for $200,000 and changed its name to Imperial Food Products Incorporated. Roe’s new company started out small, with forty employees, but he beat the pavement and drummed up business, providing chicken products to grocery stores and food suppliers in eastern Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey. By the end of the decade, the business had grown, and Imperial had a workforce of 120 employees.6
Roe launched Imperial at the very moment when doing business and making money in the United States was getting harder and more complicated. With profits on the wane just about everywhere, the 1970s brought increased taxes, added licensing fees, new regulations, stiffer competition, and renewed worker militancy. In response to the added pressures, Roe’s managerial style changed. There were no more clambakes, and gone were the days when the owner filled in on the line or took a turn de-boning chickens. Most important, between the time when Roe had left Moosic to try his hand at the fast food business and when he returned in 1974, workers at the plant had voted in a union, Local 12 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Retail Clerks.
A brochure put out by the Amalgamated in 1975 told workers that winning collective bargaining rights would provide them with an eight-hour day, higher wages, sick leave, additional holidays off and vacation time, life insurance, pensions, “paid clothes [and] changing time,” and “many fringe benefits.” In the end, the union vowed, “Your Dues Bring You a Better Life: Respect and Dignity.”7
“He did not like unions,” Shotwell remembered of Roe. “He just changed” after Local 12 came in. “He was more strict. He was very much down to business. He knew the union would be riding hard on him. This is what I think really changed him.”8
Roe never spoke about Local 12 in public, but there seems to be little doubt that he loathed its presence in his plant. The idea that workers should have a say in pay rates or benefits or days off was, as the historian Erik Loomis put it, “an affront” to someone like Roe, who saw himself as a “maker,” a doer, an asset to society providing jobs for others. Really, he saw employing people as a service. But in exchange for providing this social benefit, Roe, it seemed, thought he had the right to run his factory the way he wanted to, without question.9
Unwilling to share a seat at the table with a union representative or anyone else, Roe turned to his family to help him run the company. Even people who thought of Roe as coarse and callous acknowledged that he was a committed family man. “His life revolves around his family,” a reporter concluded after interviewing several people who knew him. Roe’s only other passion was business. “He’s a workaholic,” observed Bill Sawyer of the Cumming Chamber of Commerce during his dealings with him in the 1980s.10 As the years passed, and his company grew and struggled, Roe trusted only family members to work hard enough, run his businesses the way he wanted them run, and keep things to themselves.
Emmett Roe’s wife, Joan, worked as the company’s secretary. His daughter, Kelly, held the position of vice president for marketing and sales. From the time they were teenagers, Roe’s two sons, Emmett Jr. and Bradford, spent summers and afternoons after school on the production line and by their father’s side. Both would go on to become company vice presidents. After finishing college, Brad, as everyone called him, served as the plant manager in Hamlet. Joan Roe’s nephew, Edward Woncik, worked in Moosic and later headed an ill-fated Alabama plant. Emmett Jr.’s father-in-law, James Neal Hair, worked alongside Brad as a manager and the number two in charge at the Hamlet plant.11
Beginning in the late 1970s, as his reliance on his family deepened, Emmett Roe looked over his ledger sheets and began to think about moving part of Imperial’s operations away from Moosic and Pennsylvania. He started paging through trade magazines in search of newer, less expensive locations. An advertisement from Mello-Buttercup, an ice cream manufacturer based in Wilson, North Carolina, listing a 33,000-square-foot facility with ready access to transportation in Hamlet, North Carolina, caught his eye. Roe’s next step was to investigate the area’s local history and labor market.12
Louis A. Corning founded the Corning Quality Ice Cream Company as the United States geared up for World War I. Originally from Elmira, New York, Corning began his career as a pharmacist. On the side, he dabbled in vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. His ice cream caught on with locals, and in 1919 a larger firm scooped up his fledgling company. The deal paid Corning well, but prohibited him from selling ice cream again anywhere within 500 miles of Elmira. At the time, Corning was only in his forties and was not ready to retire or go back to working behind the pharmacy counter. “He picked up a map,” Roland Corning, his grandson, later a South Carolina politician, recalled, “and noticed all the railroad connections in Hamlet.” Eventually, his new company, Buttercup, set up shop in a factory on Bridges Street. He bought his blueberries and peaches from local farmers. When trucks pulled up in front of the plant full of milk and butter, he paid local kids, often African American boys living in nearby houses and rental units, to unload the cargo. During the summer, he hired college students home from school to work inside the plant, and hot-shot pitchers and nimble shortstops to fill out the company’s American Legion roster. Outside of work, Corning cruised up and down Main Street in a Pierce-Arrow coupe, the “swankest car in town.” He socialized with the mayor and church leaders and brought five-gallon tubs of ice cream to dinner parties and bake sales.13
“It’s FAMOUS because it’s GOOD,” Buttercup’s slogan in the 1940s boasted. “Oh, they made good ice cream,” Hamlet native Jane Mercer laughed. She remembered taking tours of the factory in grade school and getting to pick whatever flavor she wanted on the way out of the building. “People around here had a lot of pride in the Buttercup plant,” said Barbara Thomas, whose husband, Richard, worked for a time as the manager. “Buttercup had a really good name. I felt like it was just a real part of Hamlet for so many years.”14
Corning died in 1954, but family members maintained the business and its public presence for the next decade or so. Facing mounting competition from larger ice cream manufacturers, they sold Buttercup to the Coastal Dairy Company in 1969. For the next nine years, Coastal ran the business, now called Mello-Buttercup, as it had always been run, purchasing materials from nearby farmers, giving local kids jobs, and donating ice cream to church summer camps and end-of-the-season baseball banquets. But in 1977, the company shut down most of the Hamlet facility and consolidated its operations in Wilson, a slightly larger town one hundred miles away to the north and east of Hamlet.15 The plant sat more or less idle until September 1980, when, according to Richmond County tax records, Emmett Roe paid $137,000 for the boarded-up factory.16
Before he signed the papers, Roe spent time studying Hamlet, the region, and the people who lived around the Buttercup site. Hamlet, he knew for starters, would bring him closer to his suppliers. Just outside of Rockingham was White’s, a midsize ch
icken slaughterhouse. There were other processing plants in Moore and Union counties. In the areas to the west, around Wilkesboro and Morganton, farmers had taken to raising chickens after World War II, while their wives and children took jobs de-feathering and eviscerating the birds for weekly paychecks. Not far away, in North Georgia, sprawling chicken plants cranked out boneless breasts and leg and thigh parts by the millions on highly automated lines. By 1980, when Roe bought the Buttercup plant, chicken had become the South’s largest agricultural product, bigger than tobacco in North Carolina, peanuts in Georgia, cotton in Mississippi, and all the crops combined in Alabama.17 Roe, of course, knew about this transformation and recognized that a plant in Hamlet would allow him to cut his shipping costs. With a North Carolina location, he could buy frozen breast meat from a southern supplier, process it in the South, and ship it to a Long John Silver’s fast-food outlet in the South for far less than it would cost to move raw materials and finished product back and forth across the Mason-Dixon Line.
Buying Buttercup cut Imperial’s costs in other ways. As oil prices shot up in the wake of Middle East wars and the formation of OPEC, the new location would bring Roe closer to cheap power and a warmer climate that required less electricity.
The real draw of the Hamlet location, though, was cheaper labor and doing business in a region, state, and community where political leaders felt like they had no choice but to keep costs down for industry by limiting business regulations. Roe felt like he didn’t have a choice either. He needed to make some changes to stay competitive.
The chicken industry, and the competition in it, set the price for his raw materials and finished products. Given the relatively modest size of his operations, there was nothing Roe could do about those factors. All he could change were his variable costs, and the biggest variable for him was labor. If he wanted to stay afloat and keep his family business going, he felt he had to find cheaper workers, even if it meant moving all or part of his factory and leaving behind some of the investments he had made in equipment and capital improvements at the Moosic facility.18
When Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady and his followers first sketched out a vision in the 1890s of a resurgent New South where industry replaced agriculture as the region’s economic mainstay, they imagined the states of the defeated Confederacy dotted with red brick factories threaded together by husky train lines.19 Bringing textile mills, furniture factories, steel plants, and railroads to Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina involved more than dreaming, however. It required capital. Industrialists and investors, especially those in low-margin sectors of the economy like textiles and timber, were always on the lookout for lower costs, so southern boosters promised them an abundant supply of inexpensive labor to go with copious natural resources and raw materials. But even more important, Grady’s followers pledged freedom—freedom to exploit waterways and forests and freedom from regulations and state intervention. Under these conditions, as the leading scholar of southern economic modernization, James C. Cobb, has explained, “industry could be its own boss.” Every generation of southern boosters from the 1890s onward has renewed Henry Grady’s call for more capital investment and more factories. Come south, they beckoned in the 1940s and again in the 1970s to prospective employers. When the industrialists moved in a little closer, the recruiters whispered, “We will leave you alone and let you run your businesses just the way you want.”20
The eager men of the New South essentially pioneered a political economy that looked like a harbinger of the global phenomenon of neo-liberalism, which is usually associated with a much later period. The region’s early twentieth-century elected leaders, just like their counterparts a hundred years later in underdeveloped Bangladesh and Vietnam, let business leaders—who were feeling the heat of competitive pressures and shrinking profits in their current locations, wherever they were—know that they would keep taxes low and the government out of their affairs, giving them the freedom they sought to pursue the highest rates of profit possible through a combination of deregulation and benign neglect. Essentially, the men of the New South promised a social bargain at odds with the New Deal order and European social democracy, the reigning systems of governance in the mid-twentieth-century West. Instead, they built state structures that prioritized business growth and job creation ahead of protecting the vulnerable and providing social security.21
Roe knew what he wanted to hear from political leaders and government officials. When he first considered relocating to Hamlet, he might have been concerned about the state of North Carolina politics in the 1980s. As Roe weighed his options over where to move his operations, perhaps he read a speech from then governor James B. Hunt, a Democrat taking over the state’s highest office from a Republican. Hearing the lawmaker’s pitch for early education and racial reconciliation, Roe could have mistaken him for another New Deal liberal, pushing for the kind of safety-net seeking, regulatory government he wanted to avoid. But as he tuned in, he would have figured out that the young governor from Wilson County, a notch on the state’s traditional tobacco belt running east from Raleigh to the coast, was an heir, above all else, to the region’s pro-growth, New South tradition. He was the latest in a long line of North Carolina “business progressives”—men from both sides of the political aisle who imitated Henry Grady and ran the Tar Heel state for most of the twentieth century with a laser-like focus on boosting its economy by bringing in outside investors and businesses.22
Business progressives, like Hunt, followed the dictum that what’s good for business is good for society. A better, more modern society meant moving away from agriculture and farming and the dominance of planters and cash crops. But, even more, it was about employment. “Southern businessmen,” observed the historian LaGuana Gray, “focused on quantity of jobs over quality.” More jobs, they insisted, translated into more money for lawmakers to spend on roads, schools, and prisons. The most effective government did what it could to attract more jobs, any jobs, even dirty and dangerous ones. “We all worship at the altar of jobs,” one local development official confessed, “and don’t differentiate between low and high wage jobs.” Business progressives bet that the emphasis on jobs would pay off in the end with a steadier, more robust economy, and a wealthier citizenry, and they felt that getting those jobs, the foundation for moving forward, warranted making all kinds of deals with business owners and investors.23
In the 1970s, boosters and government officials took their faith in job creation as salvation on the road in search of a congregation. They targeted their message at firms located in union strongholds and in states with thick codebooks full of regulations. Anticipating Ronald Reagan and the larger break with the New Deal, North Carolina’s industry hunters were not anti-government, not in the least; they instead wanted to redefine the role of government. To them, it was not first and foremost a protector of citizens or a watchdog of the economy. They saw it more as a banker, facilitator, and entrepreneur trying to sell what it had to offer in a competitive market to eager and savvy investors. Once businesses had settled into North Carolina, they imagined a government that was open to corporate leaders and steadfastly safeguarded the interests of job-creating industries by building roads and bridges, laying down water and sewer lines, keeping other costs and taxes down, and doing little else. “If business prospers,” Hunt once said, summing up his governing philosophy, “so will workers.”24
Jim Hunt was not the first southern governor to hit the road trying to lure jobs to his state. Convinced that Henry Grady’s team of boosters and editorial writers couldn’t get the job done on their own, in the 1930s Mississippi established a development board that was run by state officials and funded by the state treasury. The agency’s goal was to sell the Magnolia State to outside investors. Over the next two decades, just about every other southern state imitated Mississippi and established a well-funded government agency to coordinate business recruitment schemes. In North Carolina, as in most other southern states, these board
s had the backing of politicians from both parties and from every corner of the state, from the mountains in the west to the decaying plantation belt in the east.25
Few politicians, however, went hunting for businesses and for jobs with as much fervor as Jim Hunt did, and the times couldn’t have been better for him and his message. As the 1970s revved up competition for businesses across the nation and, in fact, the world, numerous factory owners and investors, pressed by their own tightening circumstances, were on the lookout for cheaper options, and they were willing to move their operations to save money.
First elected in 1976, Hunt was known around the country, as the longtime New York Times columnist and Hamlet native Tom Wicker put it, as being “vigorous and active.” He won acclaim from national Democrats and newspapers for investing in North Carolina’s schools and building new water and sewage plants. But he was known even more, again in Wicker’s words, as “a tireless pursuer of industry and economic growth.”26 To get the job done, Hunt cast himself as a “new” Democrat, not beholden to the racism of his region’s past or his national party’s longstanding connection to organized labor. “We should maintain our good business climate,” Jim Hunt stated as he announced his re-reelection bid in 1980, just as Emmett Roe was looking to relocate his factory.27 The governor’s message never varied. He never condemned unions outright, but he didn’t support them or see them as part of the state’s bigger plan for moving forward. He appointed officials with similar views to oversee business recruitment to the state. “North Carolinians are as bright as anyone else,” Larry D. Cohick, Hunt’s director for economic development, told a reporter. “I would guess that if they as a group wanted unions, the state would have them. If union leaders could demonstrate the need for unions, you would have them.”28 When the state’s longshoremen pushed for a closed-shop agreement in the late 1970s, Hunt said no. Labor leaders pressed the governor to reconsider, and again he said no, this time more emphatically. Instead, he reiterated his support for the state’s right-to-work law, a measure that made it difficult for unions to require membership and dues payments as conditions for employment at worksites covered by collective bargaining agreements.29