by Bryant Simon
Hunt relied on more than pro-business speeches and anti-union gestures to bring new jobs to his state. By 1978, North Carolina had six full-time, well-paid industrial recruiters, each with a state-issued credit card and a generous expense account. Aided by his well-funded team of industry hunters and a beefed up, pro-business Department of Commerce, Hunt took to the road as soon he entered the governor’s mansion and didn’t stop moving until the end of his second term in 1984. He went from Pennsylvania to New York to Michigan trying, in his words, to convince audiences of “the enormous potential for growth and progress that this state has.” He would tell audiences, “Our location is ideal; we have a perfect climate, unspoiled natural resources, our cities are still livable and manageable; our people are honest, thrifty, and hardworking.”30 Certainly he told them about the state’s “pro-business climate,” its right-to-work law, and the fact that North Carolina maintained the second lowest rate of unionization in the country. He told them that the state didn’t have a whistleblower protection law on the books, that it had its own state-run OSHA department, and that it was one of only nine states where insurance companies could assign a doctor to examine an injured laborer in a worker’s compensation case. When a deal needed closing, Hunt or one of his professional industry seekers would sweeten the bid by offering free access roads and sewer lines and breaks on industrial training, taxes, and salaries.31 The efforts of Hunt’s team delivered results. They liked to brag that during Hunt’s initial two terms in the office, the state attracted $41 billion in investment in new factories and industries. But the real focus was on jobs. In Hunt’s first full year in office in 1978, the state of North Carolina created 42,000 new industrial jobs. What the governor didn’t talk much about was the quality of these jobs or the rate of pay or the safety of the factories.32
By the 1980s, hunting for industry was not just a southern pastime, but increasingly a national one. Everyone, including Hunt, wanted to bag the biggest factories—the bigger the better. But Hunt didn’t discriminate when it came to industrial recruitment. He wanted all the industries and all the jobs he could get, and he wanted them spread out across the map of the state, from mountains to the ocean, from the biggest cities to the most out-of-the-way counties. Following a North Carolina tradition pioneered in the 1950s by Governor Luther Hodges, he pushed to bring factories to small towns and whistle-stop junctions. Hodges believed that companies could be found that would “locate away from congestion and at the same time . . . draw upon a large and industrious labor supply that is mostly rural.”33 Hunt pushed to keep this tradition alive and, in the words of New York Times journalist John Herbers, to keep growth “scattered” and “away from cities and suburbs.”34
Hunt’s determination to turn North Carolina into a magnet for broadly dispersed new factories and relocated plants paid off, at least in the short run. By 1990, the state was, quite remarkably, the most industrialized state in the country, but by no means the most urban. That meant it had more industrial jobs per capita than Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or any other state. However, it also had the nation’s lowest cost for worker’s compensation insurance, the lowest average hourly wage, and, by then, the lowest rate of unionization. Neighboring South Carolina, just a stone’s throw from Hamlet, had the second lowest rate. It, too, was attracting businesses at a rapid pace, and not just along its highways and interstates.35
Hunt didn’t limit himself to the United States on his recruitment trips. In the spring of 1978, the governor, Richmond County sheriff Raymond Goodman, several aides, and a Raleigh television crew headed to Germany on a $30,000 junket paid for by North Carolina taxpayers in search of new private investment. Along the way, they stopped in Ahrensburg, not far from Hamburg, to announce that the BeA Fasteners Company—makers of industrial clasps for the furniture industry—would open a $1.3 million plant in Hamlet. Hans Hoewner, a member of the German company’s board of directors, explained that his firm chose the location because of its “good transportation network and attractive industrial climate.”36 What he didn’t say was that the state of North Carolina had agreed to pay half of his plant manager’s salary for five years, or that the plant manager that he would hire was the same state industrial recruiter who had lured his company to Hamlet.37
Hunt kept quiet about the insider deal when he came to Hamlet in September 1978 for a blue ribbon–cutting ceremony. “I don’t have to tell you what it means to Hamlet to have this plant here,” the governor proclaimed. He continued, “Hamlet knows what it’s like to have a booming economy, and then lose jobs. This plant is another step forward. By the end of the . . . expansion phase, there may be as many as 128 employees. That translates into more tax revenues for the county, more good paychecks, opportunities for advancement, and better lives for families.” With BeA’s arrival, he said, Hamlet got what it needed. “This is what we want for so many of the small towns in North Carolina,” the governor asserted, “a chance to grow, yet retain the qualities that make them such good places to live and raise families in.” Companies like BeA, Hunt declared, “are looking for a high quality of life, a welcome attitude on the part of local people, in addition to the transportation and other resources they need.”38
In the heated, media-saturated days after the deadly Imperial fire, then-governor Jim Martin and other state officials insisted that no one had recruited Emmett Roe to come to North Carolina. No one from the Industrial Commission had taken him out for a steak dinner, and no one had promised to pay the salary of his plant manager. That was true, but that doesn’t mean Roe hadn’t heard Governor Hunt’s business-first message or the business-first message of local leaders. Maybe Roe had seen one of the North Carolina Department of Economic and Community Development’s advertisements in Forbes magazine in the 1980s, bragging about the state’s “aggressive pro-business mind-set at all levels of government.” “North Carolina takes great pride in the support government offers to businesses,” said another state-produced recruitment brochure. “In regulatory matters,” it continued, “North Carolina businesses find that they deal with Raleigh more often than Washington. North Carolina administers the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the National Pollutant Discharge System, the Clean Air Act, and most environmental regulations.”39 As Roe focused his search on the Buttercup factory, maybe he received a pamphlet from someone at Hamlet City Hall with the cover reading “Greetings from Progressive Hamlet: At the Crossroads of the Carolinas.” As he flicked through the pages, he surely would have noticed the section with the heading “Climate and Farming” and read that “poultry was fast becoming an important fact of life in the area.” The back cover touted Hamlet as “an attractive site for business” with clean water and a “labor potential” made up of “appealing people” from “the surrounding area,” which it claimed was “populated with farm people who are native born.”40
The last line was code. Businesspeople like Roe, explains the historian James Cobb, believed that growing up on a farm bred a brand of individualism that inoculated laborers against collective action. Like Hamlet officials, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce also used this widely held notion about farm families in its promotional literature, telling potential investors that the Peach State was filled with the kinds of people “who work closely together in their church and Sunday School.”41
As Roe did more research on Hamlet, perhaps checking census records or reaching out to a professional human relations firm like Capital Associated Industries in Raleigh, he would have found out just what Governor Hunt meant when he said, “Hamlet knows what it’s like to have a booming economy, and then lose jobs.” Statistics told part of the story of Richmond County’s economic decline. When Roe bought the ice cream plant in 1980, unemployment in North Carolina stood at 6.5 percent.42 In Hamlet and Rockingham, the jobless rate in 1983, after peaking in the mid-1970s at almost 20 percent, still stood at 12.5 percent. By the end of the decade, after Clark Equipment and Carolina Paper Mills closed and t
extile mills cut their payrolls, unemployment leapt back up to 18.4 percent, making just about any job tolerable, if not desirable, even if it was a hot and filthy one that left your back and wrists throbbing. As Alfonso Anderson, whose wife, Peggy, died in the fire, put it, “Round Hamlet, things are slow and people are poor. They are thankful for any job they can get.”43
Increased joblessness, Roe knew, meant increased competition for work at his plant, lower labor costs, and less room for open dissent. Plus, it meant he wouldn’t need to build loyalty or listen to his laborers, as he’d had to do from time to time in Moosic. Hamlet was now a place with an abundance of workers, most of whom were without a lot of options. As Mack trucks moved more goods and the railroad shut down, union men had to work for less. At the same time, they had to compete with out-of-work textile workers for positions.44 And in a pattern repeated across the United States in the 1970s, as men made less, families mobilized more of their resources. White women joined black women and entered the paid labor force in Hamlet in growing numbers, just like everywhere else in the United States. In 1970, 30 percent of women across the country with children under six years old held paying jobs; by 1985, more than half did.45 Having more overall workers in the labor pool—a by-product of the collapse of the nation’s primary industries like railroads, steel, and auto—drove down wage rates for semi-skilled workers, especially as regions and states started to openly compete with each other for industrial businesses. By the time Roe closed down his factory in Moosic, Pennsylvania, poultry workers there were paid 17 percent more than their North Carolina counterparts—an average of $322 per week, compared with $276, and he wouldn’t have to pay quite that much in Hamlet.46 Even if Roe didn’t know the county’s wage and unemployment statistics by heart, he knew from driving by the nearly shuttered depot and the empty storefronts on Main Street and Hamlet Avenue that the town’s better days were behind it.
Abbie Covington, a Hamlet city councilperson in the early 1980s, whose father was once the mayor, an office she would later occupy, remembered being excited to have Imperial come to town “because of the jobs.” A moderate Democrat in favor of growth, more employment, and an even-handed approach to local government, she had worried that “lots of companies wouldn’t relocate to Hamlet.”47 Even as the railroad shed jobs, some investors, she’d heard, still shied away from her hometown, fearful that the lingering union allegiances of brakemen and mechanics somehow blew in the wind and could be stirred up at any time. Few people were likely more sensitive to the threat of a union than Roe was, but it seems he wasn’t concerned about the community’s collective-bargaining past. Nor was he interested in doing business the way Buttercup officials had done business, ingratiating themselves with city leaders and local citizens.
Roe didn’t invite the mayor or the city council or the town manager over to the plant after he acquired it. He didn’t show up at barbecue suppers at the American Legion Hall, bankroll Little League teams, or give away boxes of frozen tenders for middle school social events. He never moved to town and he never joined a church. The Imperial plant didn’t even have a sign above its door. “It was a half mile from downtown,” Mark Schultz, a labor safety advocate, remembered, “and you just got the sense that it was something that someone wanted to keep out of sight. Nothing about the place looked like a place where people went to work.”48 No balloons or ribbon-cutting ceremonies or photo ops accompanied Imperial’s opening. Joseph W. Grimsley, president of Richmond Community College, was, like many locals, barely aware of the company’s existence. “It really was a very self-contained operation,” he recalled. “We invite people to various events,” but “these people,” he remarked about Emmett Roe and his family, “never showed up for anything we have done.”49 When the Richmond County United Way asked the Roes for permission to solicit contributions from Imperial workers, they said no. Other civic leaders got the same chilly reception. Donald V. McClain, executive director of the Richmond County Chamber of Commerce, visited the plant one day and asked Emmett Roe if he would join the organization. Roe said no. “It was like I was trying to get him to join the union,” McClain remembered, “That’s the type of response I got.”50
“It was like a ghost operation,” said Ron Niland, the Hamlet city manager through much of the 1980s and early 1990s. “As long as there weren’t any problems and no one was getting hurt, no one paid any attention.”51
No one paid much attention to Roe or his operation as he geared up for full-scale production at the plant beginning in 1980. It took time and money to turn the ice cream factory into a chicken-processing plant. Exits were moved. Additions were built. Coolers and fryers were brought in. However, architects didn’t seem to be involved in any of the renovations. When Roe finished refitting the plant, it looked like a maze on the inside.52 “They changed it so much I barely recognized it,” said Richard Barnes, the president of Mello-Buttercup right before the company moved out of town. Each of these changes, seven in all, by law required permits. Yet Roe never applied for a single building permit as he expanded the plant from 21,300 square feet to 37,000 square feet. No one in Hamlet asked him for the paperwork, even as they surely heard the sound of walls coming down and delivery trucks grinding their gears as they hauled heavy equipment up the hill from the bottom of Bridges Street to the loading dock on the southern side of the plant.53
On November 1, 1980, just after Roe bought the building, a small fire broke out at the empty plant. Two and half years later, on May 27, 1983, another small but more intense fire erupted near Imperial’s deep fat fryer. No one was hurt, but the blaze damaged a sprinkler system that Buttercup officials had installed a few years before.54 Emmett Roe assured Hamlet fire officials that he would replace the damaged sprinkler with a new state-of-the-art one that turned on automatically. When asked years later if he had ever returned to the plant to see if Imperial had made the changes, Fire Chief David Fuller responded, “It wasn’t our job.”55
After that 1983 fire, Imperial did replace the roof over the main sections of the plant at a cost of $125,000. According to state laws on the books at the time, existing buildings did not have to meet newer, tougher code regulations unless they had been substantially renovated. Richmond County’s building inspector, Jack Thompson, examined Roe’s new roof in 1983 or 1984, but not the entire building. “I just figured,” he said later, “the roof wouldn’t be more than 50 percent of the property’s value.” When pressed about how he had calculated that, Thompson admitted that he had not checked the records and had only guessed at Imperial’s worth. “I did look around, but as far as digging around looking to see what was holding the building up, I didn’t do that. Didn’t nothing stand out to me that wouldn’t meet the code.” Asked by a Washington Post reporter after the 1991 fire who was supposed to look into fire safety at the plant, Thompson said he thought that “OSHA would come around and check an industrial building like that.”56
Turning chicken parts into chicken tenders required prodigious amounts of water and produced a steady flow of liquid waste, yet no one in Hamlet at the outset asked Emmett Roe if he had drawn up plans for water waste treatment or disposal. Over the course of the 1980s, members of the Imperial maintenance crew dug three—likely illegal—wells, one with a pump, inside the plant. This allowed the firm to take water from the city and have it processed as waste without paying the full charge. By one estimate, Roe paid about one-tenth of what he should have for water. For years, though, no one knocked on Imperial’s door, so no one knew or wanted to know for sure about the rivers of water siphoned from the city.57
Even as Imperial expanded its operations and hired more people, the mayor and members of the city council never visited the factory. Neither did many other middle-class townspeople. Twenty years after the fire, residents of Hamlet said again and again that they didn’t know much about the place or didn’t even know it was there. When the plant exploded, some, especially on the white sides of town, still called it Buttercup. Town manager Ron Niland insisted it
wasn’t even up and running until a couple of years before the fire, when in actuality it had been operating for more than half a decade. It was like Roe and his operation were phantoms. But this, of course, was just what the plant owner wanted.58
Back in Moosic, though, Emmett Roe wasn’t getting the anonymity he coveted. Another fire, this one described by the local fire chief as “pretty extensive,” blew his cover. In August 1985, Helene Kosierowski, an Imperial employee in Pennsylvania, suffered second- and third-degree burns to her back and legs after getting sprayed by scalding hot cooking oil while working on the line. A local television station made the story public. That was how the federally administered Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Pennsylvania (OSHA) found out about the plant. When an inspector knocked on the door, Roe wouldn’t let him in. Three months later, the inspector returned with a search warrant. After a painstaking examination of the plant, he cited the company for its lack of proper safety equipment, the presence of two electrical hazards, slippery floors, and failure to complete required forms that noted when workers were sick or injured. OSHA proposed $1,200 in fines. Imperial Food agreed to pay $800 and promised to fix the problems. It is not clear if there was ever a follow-up visit to the factory.59
Two years later, in 1987, another Imperial employee in Moosic contacted OSHA complaining of unsafe working conditions. While examining Imperial’s medical records, OSHA officials in Pennsylvania discovered that the plant’s lost-workday injury rate was nearly four times the national average for manufacturing workers and twice the norm for food laborers. Inspectors wanted to go through the plant again. This time, Roe was even less receptive. Again, he refused to let the inspector inside the plant.