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“The floods of cheap cotton clothing that flow today from China to the United States are almost
a symmetric reversal of the trade flows of a century ago. The cotton mills were the first factories
in the American South, and the ‘mill villages’ that soon turned into towns diversified the Southern
economy away from agriculture and spurred the development of ancillary industry. Before long,
the South had developed a capability in finer goods as well and had wrested the higher end of
the domestic market from New England. For the 50 years ending in 1930, the New England
mills gradually shuttered and reappeared in the South. By the mid-1930s, 75 percent of the yarn
spindles in America were in the South3”
As investment flowed out of New England and into the South, textiles and clothes became very
important employers for many rural and semi-rural workers. The Kannapolis mill complex -
known first as Cannon Mills, then as Fieldcrest-Cannon, finally as Pillowtex - was the largest
single example of this flow of industry from north to south. Its history dates back precisely a
century, to James Cannon’s launch of the first Kannapolis mills in 1907. Until its closure in 2003,
it was North Carolina’s largest factory employer.
The North Carolina textile industry was born, as it happens, in an era of intense debate over
trade. Before the First World War and the Depression, despite high American tariffs, the world’s
industries were almost as “globalized” as they are today, based on the ratio of trade to estimates
of world GDP. One sees this in the ‘illustrious Ramires’, hero of Eça de Queiroz penultimate
novel, with his plantation in Mozambique, his South American mahogany cabinet, Chinese
lacquered clock, and porcelain dinner services imported from India and Japan. Americans
accordingly carried on an intense and often emotional debate on trade, with Northeastern and
Midwestern Republicans - reliant on manufacturing lobbies for organizational and financial
support - favoring high tariffs while southern Democrats close to agricultural-export interests
favored low tariffs. Ida Tarbell’s contemporary book The Tariff in Our Times spends a chapter
describing the textile trade policies of the time, quoting Senator Aldrich of Maine (in a tariff
debate of 1908) to the effect that criticism of tariffs on cotton and wool textiles, then in a range
between 18 and 40 percent, was “an attack upon the very citadel of protection and the lines of
defence for American industries and American labor4”.
Between the Civil War and the 1930s, Aldrich and the Republicans won most of these
arguments. In the first half of the 20th century, therefore, the southern textile industry was born
into a relatively sheltered world, through high tariffs as well as the high sea transport costs for
bulky goods like textiles, and the relatively undeveloped state of America’s immediate neighbors.
Whether these conditions had a major effect on the flows of industry and investment is hard to
say. But it is certain that for the past nine decades the Kannapolis mill was the center of industrial
life for the town, with a population of 30,000, and also for the Cabarrus County region, whose
population is 131,000.
Known first as Cannon Mills for its founding family, then as Fieldcrest-Cannon after a change of
ownership in 1982, and finally as Pillowtex after a buyout in 1997, by 2002 the plant employed
4,650 people. During the 1990s, it was the largest textile mill in a complex of over 2,200 North
Carolina textile, clothing and household textile product factories. Together they employed
286,000 people, or about one in nine of the state’s 2.6 million private-sector workers5.
II. Globalization and its Causes
The era of the southern textile industry’s foundation was, it seems in rosy hindsight, one of idyllic
self-reliance. But here hindsight is an untrustworthy guide. Isolation was never complete, and
never nearly complete; and by the 1930s it was breaking down.
3 Rivoli, Pietra, Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy, Wiley & Sons, NY, 2004.
4 Tarbell, Ida, The Tariff In Our Times, MacMillan, NY, 1915.
5 http://www.soc.duke.edu/NC_GlobalEconomy/textiles/overview.php