In October 1984, the Crompton Company, a Manhattan-based textile firm, filed for bankruptcy and announced plans to sell off $74 million in assets. As a result of the move, Crompton's mills in five states were closed and 2,450 workers lost their jobs. This was, however, more than just another bankruptcy; Crompton was the oldest firm in an industry that the New York Times termed “America's oldest manufacturing industry.”Footnote ¹ Since 1807, when it was founded in Providence, Rhode Island, Crompton had operated continuously, surviving the three biggest wars in American history, as well as countless economic depressions and the disappearance of most of its domestic competitors. Now, however, company president William G. Lord II blamed “drastically increased” levels of imports, particularly from Asia, for sealing the historic firm's fate. “Crompton, the oldest textile company in the United States, has suspended operations after 178 years,” he added sadly.Footnote ²

Crompton's case is worthy of attention for several reasons. Because of its age, the company has clear historical importance yet it has so far escaped scholarly attention.Footnote ³ The company's collapse, moreover, throws light on the broader decline of the textile and apparel industry, especially as it was integrally related to rising import competition, the central problem facing the industry as a whole. At the time when Crompton went out of business, the industry was involved in a high-profile campaign to secure import-restriction legislation and it used Crompton's example to bolster its case. In order to try and save the historic firm, Lord became involved in this fight. In 1985 and 1987, Congress passed bills to restrict textile imports but on both occasions President Ronald Reagan vetoed them. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush vetoed a third bill. As a result of the failure to stem imports, scores of other textile companies soon followed Crompton and became extinct. Crompton's collapse occurred at a crucial time for the industry and helped pave the way for its disappearance.Footnote ⁴

Unlike most textile firms, however, Crompton left behind papers that provide insights into its history and bankruptcy, as well as detailing broader industry trends. In many ways, indeed, the company provides a representative case study of the industry's problems. The papers are valuable because it is rare to find corporate papers in the public archives, especially those that cover a company's decline over a long time frame.Footnote ⁵ The papers detail how imports played the central role in putting the firm out of business, yet they also show that other factors contributed to the collapse, including the strength of the dollar and management's reluctance to diversify. By portraying itself as an innocent victim of imports, Crompton clearly did not tell the public the whole story. While Crompton complained about low-wage competition from abroad, its papers document how a generation or so earlier it had itself moved its production operations to the southern states because wages were lower there and unions were weak. This story of the industry's migration from the North to the South is integral to understanding its long-term decline. Many other American textile firms had also moved to the South, and like much of the industry Crompton had been a supporter of capital mobility when it had worked in its favor. Once overseas firms became a threat, however, Crompton and the industry in general called for government assistance, aping the earlier actions of executives who had kept their operations in the higher-wage northern states. Once its demise was sealed, moreover, Crompton's cash-strapped managers quietly tried to sell their equipment to Asian companies, the very same firms that had helped put them out of business. Crompton's story helps to illustrate the arguments of Jefferson Cowie, who has detailed in a landmark work how industrial capital has been engaged in a “continuous struggle to maintain the social conditions deemed necessary for profitability,” constantly moving in search of “inexpensive and malleable workers.”Footnote ⁶

Although the company was not free of blame, Crompton's collapse certainly does illuminate the broader decline of the American textile and apparel industry and how it has been decimated by import competition. Like Crompton, most firms blamed imports for their collapse, with some justification. In the mid-1950s, 5 percent of women's and children's apparel sold in the US was imported, but by the mid-1980s this figure had increased to 52 percent. Over the same time, textile imports rose 428 percent, and they increased further with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and the phasing out of global textile quotas at the end of 2004.Footnote ⁷ In an effort to compete with imports, American companies turned to automation, and the two factors together led to massive job losses. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1973 there were more than 2·4 million textile and apparel workers in the US, but by 1987 the figure had dipped under two million.Footnote ⁸ Over the next two decades, the number fell rapidly, dropping to 1·5 million in 1996 and to just 407,200 in late 2010. Within the space of three and a half decades, therefore, around two million jobs were lost in this industry, a truly devastating development.Footnote ⁹

Crompton's story is also part of the wider decline of manufacturing in the United States. Sparked by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's influential The Deindustrialization of America (1982), which introduced the term “deindustrialization” to a wide audience, many scholars have explored the decline of manufacturing industries and how it has affected workers. They have thrown much light on a major shift in the US economy; in 1950, half of the American workforce was employed in the manufacturing sector but by 2006 just 10·4 percent were.Footnote ¹⁰ With the advent of the global financial crisis, moreover, job losses in manufacturing accelerated and they constituted a major cause of the huge trade deficit of the United States. Because of its sensitivity to import competition, the textile and apparel industry has been at the center of this story, regularly constituting 30 percent or more of the domestic deficit. Textile workers, as one labor leader has put it, “have been on the firing line of international trade for decades.”Footnote ¹¹

Despite the industry's centrality to this process, it has not received much attention from scholars of deindustrialization. Existing scholarship has concentrated almost entirely on heavy manufacturing industries, particularly steel and automobiles.Footnote ¹² Little has been written on the decline of the textile and apparel industry; its manufacturing was centred in the South, a region associated with economic growth, and most plants were located in small towns rather than the larger centers that defined the steel and automobile industry. This meant that the industry's demise was easy to overlook. As one textile consultant fighting for import controls privately admitted in 1985,

Crompton's example, however, provides the opportunity to explore how one company was able to survive for so long but eventually succumbed to the forces arraigned against domestic textile manufacturers. It also highlights that the textile and apparel industry deserves a more central place in the literature on deindustrialization. Scholars have explored the industry's initial decline in the North and its flight to the South, but this story has not been linked to the subsequent plant closures that occurred as textile production became globalized. There were, however, parallels between the two stories, which together highlight how this labor-intensive industry has been experiencing plant closures for much longer than most other manufacturing industries.Footnote ¹⁴

Furthermore, Crompton illustrated how textiles and apparel, while technically separate industries, were inextricably linked. As a fabric producer, Crompton was a textile maker, yet its customers were garment manufacturers. This was true of most other textile companies, so as apparel imports increased they displaced not just domestic clothing workers, but those who supplied them as well.Footnote ¹⁵ Although not one of its biggest companies, Crompton was also a significant player in the textile industry and had considerable strategic importance. When it went under Crompton was the nation's largest producer of combed cotton corduroy and its only producer of velveteen, a plush velvet-like fabric. Distributed to apparel and home-furnishings makers as well as to retailers of home sewing fabrics, the company's output was sold both throughout the United States and overseas. Customers included well-known namebrands such as Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, Healthtex, and Levi Strauss. The company's slogan, “Crompton is Corduroy, Crompton is Velveteen” encapsulated its dominance over the production of these two specialized fabrics.Footnote ¹⁶ Crompton was also a significant exporter, especially to Western Europe and Asia, and in 1978 its export shipments of $52 million constituted a third of total sales. Highlighting the importance of trade in the Pacific Basin, which was worth over $6 million, in 1978 Crompton opened a sales office in Hong Kong, and the firm also had merchandising offices in several large American cities.Footnote ¹⁷

Crompton's early history reveals much about broader industry trends and how they contributed to its eventual decline. Like most American textile companies, Crompton originated in the northeastern part of the country but later moved its manufacturing operations to the South. The company's age, however, meant that it occupied what one journalist called a “unique spot” in America's textile industry. The company was founded in 1807 as the Providence Manufacturing Company in what became the village of Crompton, about thirteen miles southwest of the Rhode Island state capital. According to Standard and Poor's, Crompton was thus “the oldest textile manufacturer in the country,” an achievement that its managers cited with some pride. The Daily News Record, the textile industry's main trade publication, also recognized Crompton as the oldest mill company in America. Although the Slater Mill in nearby Pawtucket pre-dated Crompton's foundation, there had been a break in the operations of the pioneering spinning mill, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was no longer in business. While the Slater Mill became a National Historic Site, however, Crompton's role in history was overlooked, and in 2011 the company's original mill stood empty after plans to turn it into apartments fell through.Footnote ¹⁸

In contrast to the Slater Mill, the Providence Manufacturing Company experienced steady growth and constant operation. The firm had begun when eight local entrepreneurs got together and purchased twenty acres of land with water rights to the Pawtuxet river. This water power was critical because at the time it was the only way to run the machinery contained in the stone-built, three-storey mill. A company-owned village developed around the mill, which was extended as production increased. In 1823, the name of the company was changed to honor Samuel Crompton, the Englishman who had recently invented the “spinning mule,” a revolutionary machine that allowed for the simultaneous production of several fine and strong threads. In 1828, a second mill was built, followed by a third in 1832 and a fourth in 1881. Crompton's original mill clearly pre-dated the beginnings of the industry in Lowell, Massachusetts, a city often considered the birthplace of the textile industry in the United States. It was in Lowell, however, that mass production of cotton textiles really took off, especially after the foundation of the city's first textile company in 1822. By the mid-nineteenth century, the “Spindle City” was the leading center of textile production in the country.Footnote ¹⁹

Unable to match the size of the Lowell mills, Crompton's owners specialized. By the 1880s the firm's managers, led by brothers Howard and Frank Richmond, had decided to concentrate on the manufacture of velveteens and corduroys. These were low-volume fabrics, and the Richmonds got the operation off the ground by importing skilled corduroy and velveteen cutters from Lancashire, England. By 1887 a visiting journalist from the Manchester Guardian reported that the Crompton village had 932 inhabitants, of whom 550 worked in the mills. Overall, the reporter found that conditions were “much better than in England,” especially as women employees who lived in the company boardinghouse received three “wholesome” meals a day. Over the decades that followed, the company continued to concentrate on corduroy and velveteen, phasing out a calico print business. Under Frank E. Richmond II, who took over when Howard Richmond died in 1907, the company thrived, although it was weakened by an industry-wide slump that occurred at the end of World War I. During these hard times, working conditions deteriorated and textile workers across Rhode Island struck, successfully resisting management efforts to cut their wages. The strike was indeed solidly observed in Crompton, where many workers repeatedly rebuffed management efforts to get them back on their jobs.Footnote ²⁰

The 1921–22 strike increased the differential between the wages received by textile workers in the North and the South, an issue of great concern to executives. Worried about the costs of operating in New England, many companies established plants in the South and then closed down their northern operations. In the late nineteenth century northern textile workers were paid up to three times as much as their southern counterparts, and the difference was greatest for unskilled workers. As Alice Galenson has concluded in her detailed study of the relocation process, “the wage differential between the two regions was critical,” especially as wages comprised about one-quarter of the total cost of producing cotton textiles. According to Galenson, between 1880 and 1930 the differential did narrow, yet it remained decisive.Footnote ²¹ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, southern textile capacity tripled or even quadrupled in every decade, and by 1927 the South produced 82 percent of the coarse yarn and 71 percent of the medium yarn in the country. As Tami J. Friedman has shown in her study of a New York carpet company that relocated to rural Mississippi, capital flight continued after World War II as “cooperative” southern elites lured northern companies with promises of “cheap and plentiful labor” and an “anti-union climate.”Footnote ²²

Crompton epitomized this wider trend, moving its operations to the South both before and after World War II in order to lower wage costs. In 1924, the company purchased 160 acres of land near the city of Griffin, Georgia and built an 83,000-square-foot mill on the site. Shortly afterwards, managers authorized the construction of a corduroy dyeing and finishing plant in Waynesboro, Virginia. Located on the rail line to Detroit, the plant was well located to supply corduroy for use in automobile upholstery. In 1948 and 1953, the company also established operations in the Arkansas towns of Morrilton and Osceola, while in 1972 it constructed a velveteen weaving mill in Leesburg, Alabama. As was typical in the textile industry, all of Crompton's southern plants were located in small or medium-sized towns, offering much-needed industrial employment to local residents. Morrilton, for example, was a town of around five thousand people located in the foothills of the Ozarks. As was also typical, the company's headquarters remained in New York, and print and fabric patterns were designed there. Company sources did not detail exactly how much was saved by moving operations to the South, although wider studies have illustrated that substantial regional wage disparities existed even after World War II, especially in the Deep South. Moreover, Crompton managers also stressed that in the South they could buy land and expand “weaving capacity” much more easily than had been the case in Rhode Island.Footnote ²³

As manufacturing was expanded in the South, it was run down in the North, triggering the industry's first wave of decline. By the end of World War II, company figures showed that the Waynesboro plant was dyeing and finishing more than twice as much cloth as the factory in Rhode Island. A few months later, in early 1946, the historic Rhode Island mill was closed, Crompton president Gale Richmond insisting that higher “costs” in the North had made the plant “no longer economical to operate.” The closure hurt the mill's workers, most of whom were long-term staff, and some felt bitter. “I don't want to say anything,” declared one anonymous worker in the Providence Evening Bulletin, “but I just ask you, do you think it's fair after 53 years?” Some lived on in the simple houses that they had bought from the company, but the factory that had defined their community now stood silent. “The mill has been part of the life of Crompton since 1807,” concluded the Bulletin. “It will take time for the town … to get used to living without it.” Over time, Crompton's ties with Rhode Island were further severed. In 1949, for example, the company sold the plant at auction and gave its library to the town. Ten years later, it dispensed of its final pieces of Ocean State real estate, including a retail store.Footnote ²⁴

The shift to the South was also related to managers' desire to escape union influence, another broader trend. Justifying the move South, for example, one company document declared that it was necessary because “management was in a squeeze with the Southern mills which could produce goods cheaper because of lower labor costs and no restrictions of unionism.”Footnote ²⁵ On some occasions, moreover, capital flight occurred in direct response to northern workers' militancy. In 1936, after velvet workers in Rhode Island successfully organized a union, velvet and velveteen finishing was added to the Waynesboro plant. The Rhode Island mill, moreover, was closed less than a year after the CIO's Federation of Dyers had been declared the bargaining agent for the workers, replacing a company-run system of “Industrial Democracy.” Under the company system, which had been instituted to improve relations in the wake of the 1922 strike, an internal House of Representatives took up problems presented by the workers, but over time employees' demands for independent representation grew. “I don't think the so-called ‘Industrial Democracy’ did much good,” director Peter Richmond admitted later.Footnote ²⁶

In the South, the company received much support from local officials as it tried to keep unions at bay. In rural Waynesboro, for example, the community strongly endorsed the company's efforts. In 1957, when the company celebrated its 150th anniversary, the Waynesboro News-Virginian saluted its contribution to the local economy and its “loyal and efficient employees.” Indeed, the Rhode Island firm had been “forced to move south to a more favourable business climate” because northern workers “were not willing to accept changing methods and changing times.”Footnote ²⁷ In its other southern locations, local officials were similarly pliant. As the Morrilton Democrat-Perry County News asserted, “The decision by Crompton to locate in Morrilton was heralded to the utmost by local businessmen and the local citizens because a considerable number of jobs for both males and females would be made available.” Not surprisingly, neither of the company's plants in Arkansas was ever organized.Footnote ²⁸

Crompton's example was typical, as across the region northern companies located in small southern towns and political and economic elites gave strong support to their efforts to keep unions out. By the end of 1947, for example, seven southern states had already passed right-to-work laws, which forbade firms from making union membership a condition of employment. More states followed suit in the years that followed, and the South became the largest single area in the country with right-to-work laws. In the postwar South, concludes noted historian James C. Cobb, unions were “demonized as nothing less than a mortal threat to industrial development efforts.”Footnote ²⁹

Like most other American textile companies, however, Crompton found that it did not entirely escape labor troubles in the South. Losing members as northern mills closed down, both the Textile Workers Union of America (CIO) and the United Textile Workers (AFL) made a determined effort to organize southern workers. Although few permanent unions were established in the South, there was no shortage of failed organizing campaigns and lost strikes, especially in the World War II era, when the tight labor market and the protection afforded by the National War Labor Board both boosted union efforts.Footnote ³⁰ In 1941, for example, the UTW succeeded in organizing the Waynesboro plant and workers struck when the company would not agree to an acceptable contract. With the Waynesboro News-Virginian declaring that “there is no room for, and no need for, a ‘closed shop’ in Waynesboro,” however, the strike ended when the union agreed to an open-shop contract.Footnote ³¹

Five years later, the TWUA struck Crompton's Griffin plant after the company resisted the automatic check-off of dues for union members. Like many other New England textile companies, including J. P. Stevens, Crompton's managers took a particularly hard line during the Griffin strike, largely because they were determined to lower wage costs and reassert control of decision-making. As historian Howell John Harris has shown, the immediate post-World War II period was characterized by a “managerial counteroffensive” against organized labor's recent gains, and Crompton's actions were part of this. In August 1946 the National Labor Relations Board found the company guilty of unfair labor practices and ordered it to bargain with the TWUA. Following this, the strike was called off but managers refused to give ground on the union security issue. In 1949, the TWUA also survived a decertification attempt at the plant, meaning that it maintained what the Griffin News called a “toehold” in the local textile industry.Footnote ³²

In other ways, Crompton's fortunes mirrored those of the industry. During World War II, the textile industry boomed as it supplied the US military, and only the steel industry was more valuable to the war effort. Crompton thrived by supplying the Navy with “jungle cloth,” a heavyweight cotton fabric lined with wool. In 1943, Rear Admiral W. B. Young told the company's managers that the cloth, which was used in uniforms, had saved the lives of many American sailors who were fighting in cold weather in the North Atlantic. The company was proud of its role in the war, especially as jungle cloth was an exclusive Crompton product, yet by the end of 1952 it was experiencing hard times as the defense-related boom, which had been sustained by the Korean War, finally came to an end.Footnote ³³ Once this depression was over, however, employment in the industry stabilized and most companies enjoyed the benefits of a strong US economy, particularly in the 1960s. As Crompton's Board of Directors noted in May 1966, “in general, the sales of corduroy and velveteen are good, and those fabrics are in strong demand.”Footnote ³⁴

At the same time, company officials worried about the future. For Crompton, as for the rest of the industry, imports were a problem long before the situation came to a head. Following the devastation of World War II, the textile industry was the pioneer industry for emerging economies, particularly Asian powers such as Japan, South Korea and China. As a low-wage, unskilled industry where labor made up a significant proportion of the production cost, textiles and apparel was particularly susceptible to import competition, something that both mill owners and union leaders were acutely aware of. By 1958, the Northern Textile Association estimated that about 16 million people across the world were employed in the textile and apparel industry, and the number grew sharply in the decades that followed. By 1968, textile imports already accounted for one-third of the US's balance-of-payments deficit. In that year, textiles and yarn were Japan's chief exports, constituting 17 percent of the total.Footnote ³⁵

Crompton was affected by these broader trends. In its 1965 Annual Report, for example, the company noted its concerns about the “high” level of imports of velveteen and corduroy in the form of apparel. “We shall have to continue to live with foreign competition in the years ahead,” it warned. Three years later, Crompton president Howard Richmond complained that “growing imports of all types continue to plague the industry.” Richmond hoped for action from the incoming Nixon administration, yet no fundamental changes in trade policy occurred as a result, and imports' share of the domestic market continued to rise. The same fate was endured by the industry in general. In 1970 and 1971 bills to introduce import quotas failed to pass Congress, while in 1978 President Carter vetoed a measure that would have granted the textile industry automatic exclusion from tariff reductions.Footnote ³⁶

In the early 1980s, the situation took a turn for the worse, and Crompton slowly succumbed. “Like most bad things in life,” Lord wrote later, “this tragedy came in stages.” In 1980, for example, the company reported that a “sharp drop” in orders had caused earnings to fall by 29 percent. The following year, Lord related to shareholders that the velveteen business had been “hurt severely by inexpensive garments imported from the Far East,” while a recession in Europe and a strengthening of the dollar had weakened the company's export trade. These were blows from which Crompton never really recovered.Footnote ³⁷ In 1982 and 1983, indeed, the company reported net losses of $11.99 million and $7.8 million respectively. For a company that marketed both corduroy and velveteen as “premium products,” low-cost imports were particularly threatening, something that Lord recognized. Cheap Chinese velveteen, he wrote later, “changed the image of a velveteen garment from a luxury item to a commodity item … We never fully recovered.” In 1982, Crompton closed plants in North Carolina and Virginia; the company that had long been considered “the Cadillac of the pile fabric industry” was clearly in trouble.Footnote ³⁸ The company's problems were severe enough to ensure that a detailed history that it had been preparing to coincide with its 175th anniversary in 1983 was shelved because the timing was “inopportune.”Footnote ³⁹

By the time that Crompton filed for bankruptcy, it was losing about $400,000 a week and had not turned a profit since 1980. On 4 October 1984, the directors voted to terminate the company's profit-sharing plans and called a special meeting to decide the future of the firm. Held on 15 October, it was at this gathering that the decision to suspend operations was made.Footnote ⁴⁰ Given the heavy losses that the company had incurred and the depressed state of the industry, directors knew that the bankruptcy was final. As Lord put it, “Unfortunately, this is not the normal Chapter 11 for reorganization but our intent is to dispose of the assets in an orderly manner.” This was, he declared, “the end of the company as we know it today.” The significance of the moment was not lost on the Daily News Record, which noted that corduroy executives were “dismayed to hear the news.” The company and its reputation for quality would be “missed,” they agreed.Footnote ⁴¹

Crompton management apparently never considered moving their own production facilities offshore, and its papers offer few clues as to why this was the case. Only after 1990, however, when the industry's campaign for import controls had clearly failed, did offshore production become commonplace among textile companies. Prior to this, the bulk of the industry fought to defend domestic manufacturing. In addition, part of the problem was that the velveteen and corduroy business was very depressed at the time of the filing. Velveteen was selling for just $3.50 a yard, and company records showed that the price needed to be $4.25 a yard in order to produce a good profit. Due to the removal of Crompton from the market and a drop in the value of the dollar, by August 1987 the price had jumped to $6.00 a yard, an increase that prompted Lord and associate Bob Van Tassel to explore the possibility of restarting the Osceola plant, yet without financial backing from other American textile companies these plans fell through.Footnote ⁴²

Throughout Crompton's lengthy bankruptcy, Lord was the key company figure and his papers provide insights into how he managed the difficult process. They also throw light on the subtle differences between the public and private versions of events. Born in Philadelphia in 1923, William was descended from Thomas Lord, one of the original founders of Hartford, Connecticut. After graduating from Hotchkiss, a Connecticut prep school, Lord enrolled in Yale University but he left in 1942 to serve with the 508th Parachute Infantry. With the 508th Lord took part in the D-Day landings and he later wrote the official history of the regiment.Footnote ⁴³ After the war, Lord began a career in the textile industry. He joined Crompton in 1961 but switched to work for Burlington Industries, a larger textile company, two years later, returning to Crompton for good in 1972. Within five years, he had replaced Howard Richmond as chief executive officer of the company. Clearly, Lord was a man of considerable energy and initiative, and this was evident as he oversaw Crompton's bankruptcy. “This may be the last thing I shall do in my career,” he wrote at the time, “and I mean to do it as well as I can.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Crompton's demise, moreover, was a representative illustration of the damage that imports were doing to the domestic textile and apparel industry. According to Northern Textile Association president Karl Spilhaus, it was “without question” that imports were the central reason for the industry’s decline.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1984, the year that Crompton collapsed, the industry claimed that there had been a 41 percent increase in the yardage of textile and apparel imports. As the Chicago Tribune summarized in that year, “The American Textile Manufacturers Institute, which can cite a litany of plant closings, layoffs, failures and disappointments, has taken up Crompton's case as an example of the harm imports can do.” Crompton was a member of the American Textile Manufacturers' Institute (ATMI) and the industry's largest trade association took a close interest in the company's problems, sending Lord import data that he used to lobby government officials.Footnote ⁴⁶

Lord's efforts certainly helped to gain attention for Crompton's case. Strongly worded letters that he wrote to US Trade Representative William E. Brock at the time of the bankruptcy were, for example, “widely distributed” by the ATMI, mostly to other industry executives and to southern congressmen. One of them was even included in the Congressional Record.Footnote ⁴⁷ Lord also got involved in the major campaign to secure passage of the Textile and Apparel Trade Enforcement Act of 1985 (H. R. 1562). Drafted by the Congressional Textile Caucus, H. R. 1562 placed “stringent limits” on textile imports from twelve countries, most of them in Asia, and froze imports from other countries at 1984 levels. Overall, the Commerce Department estimated that the bill would restrict textile imports to 7 billion yards a year, much less than the 1984 import level of around 10 billion yards.Footnote ⁴⁸ In July 1985, as the bill was being debated, Lord met with New York congressman William Green and urged him to ignore lobbying from the bill's opponents in the service and retail industries. “I know you have a large retail constituency,” he wrote to the Republican. “It seems to me they have had it all their way and we should not allow their greed to destroy a basic industry.” The following month, Lord addressed a meeting organized by the Caucus in Washington and, with the national media on hand, used his company's plight to dramatize the import issue. Lord also supported the “Crafted with Pride in the USA” campaign, a simultaneous industry effort to encourage consumers to buy American-made textiles and clothing. In late 1984, for example, he wrote to billionaire mill owner Roger Milliken, who was helping to fund the campaign's commercials on national television, that this was a crucial initiative that “may prevent other people from following us down a very unhappy road.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In fact, Lord had been fighting for the industry for some time. In March 1978, for example, he wrote to Robert S. Strauss, Carter's special trade representative, and urged the administration to maintain tariffs on corduroy and velveteen. “Our velveteen operation is neither antiquated nor inefficient,” he declared, explaining that the firm had invested $25 million in the brand new Leesburg plant. Crompton, he added, was a progressive and export-oriented company that had recently won a major contract with British retailer Marks and Spencer. Citing Crompton as a “classic case” of how American manufacturing was being hurt by imports, Lord insisted that textiles should be excluded from tariff cuts at multilateral trade negotiations in Geneva. In reply, Strauss congratulated Lord on the “cogency” of his argument and insisted that the administration would not negotiate an agreement that would hurt domestic manufacturers. Lord's letter, which he also sent to the ATMI, seemed to get through, as he later reported that “we have heard unofficially that tariff cuts for any textile products have now been or shortly will be withdrawn from the negotiating table by Strauss.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In March 1979, after further correspondence, Strauss assured Lord that the administration had made undisclosed “adjustments” in its velveteen tariff that “should meet with your satisfaction.” In addition, the US government tried to secure improved market access for domestic producers of the specialty fabric.Footnote ⁵¹

When Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 presidential election, he won support from textile manufacturers after promising to link import growth to the growth of the domestic market, a key industry demand. The pledges were made in order to win support in the South, a textile-dependent region that was central to the GOP's success.Footnote ⁵² Because most mill owners were Republican supporters, they placed a lot of faith in Reagan.Footnote ⁵³ Once in power, however, imports surged while the industry stagnated. According to the US Customs Service, between 1980 and 1985 textile and apparel imports grew by 86 percent, and in 1984 alone they exceeded $15 billion in value. Between 1980 and 1985, federal figures indicated that over 142,000 jobs were lost in the textile and apparel industry. In November 1983, Roger Milliken, a key GOP supporter, wrote to Reagan aide Edwin Meese that the import figures were a “disaster,” adding that “there is really total dissatisfaction with the way this Administration is handling the textile situation.” The industry's critics, however, including free-traders within the administration, argued that manufacturers needed to continue modernizing in order to be more competitive. Moreover, most mill owners stuck with the Republicans because they could not conceive of voting for the Democrats, who were seen as pro-labor. Even after the Crompton bankruptcy, one mill manager from another company grumbled about imports yet still described Reagan as “the best thing that's happened to the United States in a long, long time.”Footnote ⁵⁴

When the Crompton bankruptcy occurred, Lord's frustration with the Reagan administration was also palpable. In one key letter to Brock, Lord defended his company's record of modernizing and taking on foreign competition. The company had “very modern” plants and had spent $8.5 million on capital investments in 1979 alone. Crompton, he insisted, had always been “a first rate producer … in terms of cost, quality and efficiency” but it had been sunk by cheap imports. “I am now faced with disposing of the assets of a truly wonderful company,” he told Brock. “I am proud of my company, but ashamed of my country.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In reply, Brock argued that the administration had acted in good faith and insisted that its efforts to cut imports had been undermined by the strength of the US dollar. “I can assure you that no one dealing with textiles in this Administration remains unmoved when a firm with Crompton's history and reputation ceases operation,” he added. Lord was unbowed, blaming the administration's “failure to deliver” for his company's demise.Footnote ⁵⁶ Data collected by the ATMI did support Lord's case. In corduroy, imports increased by 240 percent between 1979 and 1984, ensuring that they controlled 42 percent of the US market. In velveteen, meanwhile, the Japanese dominated global production by the time that Crompton dropped out of the game.Footnote ⁵⁷ In an analysis of the company's demise, the New York Times also blamed increasing foreign competition. Its headline, “Crompton's Nemesis: Imports,” said it all. Industry leaders agreed with this diagnosis. Writing to Lord in 1984, Roger Milliken claimed that Crompton's problems had been “incredibly aggravated by the import situation.”Footnote ⁵⁸

In putting the emphasis solely on imports, however, these accounts simplified the reasons for Crompton's collapse. Internal company records highlight this. In a message to its international sales staff, for instance, the company blamed the closure largely on the “continued surge of garment imports,” yet manager John Steppacher acknowledged that the “strength of the U. S. dollar” was also important. The role of the dollar, which appreciated 50 percent against the yen and British pound between 1980 and 1985, was further noted in an affidavit that Lord filed with the bankruptcy petition. Ironically, in September 1985 the Plaza Accord between the US, the UK, West Germany, Japan, and France did devalue the dollar, making American exports cheaper, but the move came too late to save Crompton.Footnote ⁵⁹ Between 1980 and 1983, indeed, the company's exports fell from 25 percent of total sales to 13 percent. Overall, the reasons for Crompton's collapse were captured by the 1983 annual meeting of stockholders, which noted that the company was in trouble because of “decreasing exports and … increasing imports.” Foreign competition alone could not explain the collapse.Footnote ⁶⁰

The company's demise was also related to its overdependence on two fabrics. In 1979, an internal analysis of the firm's prospects by director Peter Richmond, the grandson of Howard Richmond, stressed that the company had made itself vulnerable to imports by concentrating exclusively on corduroy and velveteen. Managers should have diversified earlier but all attempts to do so, including an effort to manufacture chemically treated cotton yarns in the 1940s, had failed. “We end up right where we started,” concluded Richmond, “no diversification, nothing but corduroy and velveteen.” In April 1933, for example, the company had moved into the factoring business but in 1970 Crompton retrenched these operations, chiefly because of competition from the major banks. After World War II the company's automobile fabric business also weakened as carmakers lost interest in corduroy and began to demand wool and cotton blends, which Crompton struggled to produce at a competitive price. The company's papers also showed that the seat-fabric business had declined after selling agent Lawrence Richmond had given up drinking, as most of his business had been conducted in speakeasies in Detroit.Footnote ⁶¹ Once the company went under, some outside observers also cited its failure to develop a wider range of products. As the Chicago Tribune wrote in November 1984, “it was Crompton's reluctance to change its basic two-product mix, along with its failure to diversify and its refusal to market aggressively, that left the company vulnerable to competition from abroad.”Footnote ⁶²

Other company records acknowledged that imports were not the only cause of the bankruptcy. In March 1984, company director George L. Staff told a board meeting that “competition from imports is only one of the problems affecting the domestic corduroy market,” although the official minutes did not detail what these other factors were. The strength of the dollar, however, was certainly one of them, as were changing fashion trends, which saw velveteen and corduroy increasingly being replaced by cheaper fabrics.Footnote ⁶³ In a November 1984 memo to the ATMI's leaders that was written “in a moment of frustration and deep thought,” Lord himself argued that domestic executives were partly responsible for their own problems. The industry, he insisted, had to “get off our butts and recognize that we are responsible for forcing some people to import,” doing more to develop new fabrics and satisfy customer needs. It was an admission that was a far cry from the advocacy position Lord adopted in public. While the import crisis facing the industry was genuine, it was also true that it acted as a rallying cry for disparate interests. As Karl Spilhaus acknowledged, “it's good for an association to have a nice central issue to rally round, and the import issue was a very strong one, for a long time, and it's hard to shift gears.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The company's private records also partially undermine Lord's public position as a defender of the domestic industry and its workers. The Crompton workers were thus harshly treated when the firm went out of business. With the sudden announcement of the bankruptcy, workers who lost their jobs received just one week's termination pay, a tough deal even by non-union standards. Many workers had been with the company all their working lives, and management had often boasted of the loyalty of its workforce, documenting that a high proportion of workers had more than twenty-five years of service. Not surprisingly, some workers felt angry and betrayed. One anonymous employee from the plant in Morrilton, Arkansas, for example, wrote to Lord in October and insisted that executives had not consulted sufficiently with employees before liquidating. “If you had gone to the people who worked for Crompton-Morrilton, Ark. Plant, we would have taken a cut in pay, given up some of our holidays for the Company to stay in business,” declared the writer. “I personally would have given up $10.00 a day of my pay.” The writer pleaded with Lord to keep the plant open, even if wages were slashed. In addition, the worker suggested that poor management was partly to blame for the company's demise.Footnote ⁶⁵ Although there was no record of a direct reply from Lord, in December he visited the Morrilton plant and talked with manager Philip Loh. “I am concerned about the community and particularly the people who worked for Crompton,” he wrote to Loh somewhat defensively after his visit. Lord also praised the quality of the Morrilton workforce, insisting that they had “an enormous feeling of pride” in their jobs. “It is one of the tragedies of life that we had to file for bankruptcy for reasons completely beyond the control of anyone in the Morrilton community,” he concluded. “I feel I owe those people a debt and I would like to deliver on it.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Although Lord did not communicate directly with workers, he did use official channels to try to help them. In October 1984, for example, he wrote to Brock and sought assistance for the two thousand workers who had lost their jobs in Arkansas, a state that was “the second poorest in the United States.” Osceola, for example, was a small, isolated town in the Mississippi Delta and Crompton had provided some of the only industrial jobs in the area.Footnote ⁶⁷ In April 1985, six months after the closures, Lord also wrote to Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers to relate his concern for the welfare of the Osceola and Morrilton employees, as “precious few” of them had to able to find “new permanent employment.” In a separate appeal to Secretary of Labor Raymond J. Donovan, Lord added that he was “deeply concerned” about these workers, whose six months of statutory unemployment pay was about to run out. He also drew attention to unemployed workers in Leesburg, Alabama, another small town where Crompton had been the “major employer” in the area. Still, Lord failed to dwell on the fact that he could have softened the blow of the sudden job losses by retrenching workers gradually or giving them more generous severance packages.Footnote ⁶⁸

An influential Democratic senator, Bumpers supported the company's application for Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a federal scheme designed to help workers who had lost their jobs at least partly because of the pressures of foreign trade. Under the TAA, which dated back to the Trade Act of 1974, certified workers received financial help when they retrained in new fields.Footnote ⁶⁹ The program was often criticized as inadequate and underfunded, however, and the Arkansas workers were denied TAA certification by the Department of Labor on the grounds that most of the imports relevant to the Crompton case were finished apparel goods that contained corduroy or velveteen rather than the fabrics alone, which was what the company made. It was a technicality that angered Lord, who pointed out that corduroy and velveteen was usually imported as finished goods rather than fabric, as fabric incurred more duty. “It is patently unfair that the law has been interpreted in a way to deny these former workers the help they deserve,” he wrote to Bumpers;

Lord duly protested the decision, but TAA director Marvin Fooks explained that the Trade Act did not authorize the Department of Labor to use imports of completed garments as a basis for establishing an assistance claim. Fooks acknowledged, however, that garment imports could have “a serious negative effect” on domestic corduroy and velveteen workers.Footnote ⁷⁰

In an effort to help his constituents, Bumpers called for an amendment to the Trade Act to broaden the coverage of the TAA program. Previous efforts to do this, however, had failed to secure passage in Washington, where many conservatives did not want to increase the costs of the scheme. Without TAA assistance, the former Crompton workers in Arkansas struggled. By August 1985, statistics provided to Bumpers from William Brock, who had recently become Secretary of Labor, indicated that only 353 of the two thousand workers had found new jobs; most of the others were still unemployed, with many of them in retraining programs run by the Arkansas Employment Security Commission. Lord drew attention to the “broader” issues at stake, accurately predicting that the TAA program would not be comprehensive enough to assist others who would lose their jobs to apparel imports.Footnote ⁷¹

Overall, Lord's concern with workers' welfare was limited, as the papers document that most of his attention was focussed on selling the company's assets so that creditors and stockholders could be placated. The situation was urgent; the Board of Directors noted in early 1986 that it was vital to sell assets because interest was constantly accruing on approximately $17 million of secured debt, while in October the company still had around $6 million in unsecured debt. For more than three years, Lord worked to pay off these liabilities as quickly as possible. “I have made a commitment to do whatever is necessary to bring the most money through to the Crompton estate,” he explained.Footnote ⁷² Crompton's biggest asset was its factories, yet disposing of these proved difficult. At the time of the bankruptcy filing, Lord had anticipated problems, writing in his files that “selling the plants is going to be a most crucial job and most difficult.” The president tried hard, for example, to sell the Leesburg and Osceola facilities to other American textile companies, including Springs Mills, Fieldcrest-Cannon, and Bibb Manufacturing Company, but no deal resulted. The main problem was that these companies were also being hit hard by imports. By the mid-1990s, in fact, Bibb was bankrupt, while Pillowtex and Springs were closing plants rather than buying new ones. In February 1987, however, the 300,000-square-foot plant in Leesburg was purchased by Union Underwear Company for $5.235 million, while some parcels of property were also successfully disposed of. By July 1988, Crompton had raised $44 million from the sale or disposition of its assets, but its plants in Morrilton and Osceola, in addition to its velveteen assets, remained unsold.Footnote ⁷³

Lord also tried to sell the firm's equipment to foreign buyers. Thus, after blaming foreign competition for Crompton's demise, Lord ended up trying to sell the company's machinery to competitors in mainland China. In the summer of 1985, for example, he traveled to China and tried to interest industry and state officials in Crompton's assets. “After our trip to China and the progress being made with their Central Committee,” he reported to his files in October 1985, “I think there is an excellent chance we will get a bid for the machinery at $18 million or close to it. I believe the bid will be contingent on an agreement of know-how for which there will be an extra charge.” In December 1985, moreover, a delegation from the Chinese city of Kaifeng, including the mayor, visited the Morrilton plant and showed interest in Crompton's equipment. Lord reported later, however, that he had been unable to reach an agreement with “the Chinese” – he did not divulge the names of the parties involved – largely because they had refused to make what he considered a realistic offer. Although the papers did not document what the offer was, it was clearly well below $18 million. Karl Spilhaus felt that the deal fell through because the machinery “wasn't marketable,” especially as the Chinese recognized the difficulties of competing with the Japanese, who monopolized global velveteen production and consequently had no interest in buying more velveteen equipment. The Chinese, moreover, were doing well by expanding into cheaper, mass-produced fabrics that were becoming increasingly popular with consumers. Lord ended up disappointed, writing in November 1986 that a Chinese sale would have been “the best thing for the estate.”Footnote ⁷⁴

This judgment proved accurate. Other buyers were not found, mostly because they were deterred by the specialist – and depressed – nature of the velveteen business. Indeed, Crompton had been the last remaining velveteen producer in the US. As a result, the bankruptcy dragged on and Lord was not able to pay off all the company's obligations as quickly as he would have wished. It was also not until May 1989 that Crompton was officially dissolved as a corporation. Sixty-five years old at the time, Lord retired to his summer home in Cape Cod, where he was able to indulge his passion for sailing. He lived on the Cape until August 2008, when he died just three weeks before his eighty-fifth birthday.Footnote ⁷⁵

Crompton's demise was part of the broader decline of the American textile and apparel industry, and it reveals much about it. As economists have noted, both textiles and apparel are import-prone industries that for decades have faced increasing international competition. Beginning in the 1950s, developing nations invested in these industries, which had low start-up costs, as a way of earning much-needed export revenue. At the same time, American politicians consistently embraced free-trade policies, believing that these would open new markets for US exports and promote democratic change in the developing world. As historian Judith Stein has argued, moreover, Cold War policy often sought to encourage industrialization among anticommunist allies such as Japan, the key producer of velveteen, ensuring that “strategic interests … trumped economic ones in postwar trade policy.” Between 1973 and 1980 alone, textile exports from twelve key emerging countries increased by 223 percent, and many of these exports ended up in the US, which had the biggest textile market in the world. Imports have certainly caused domestic job losses, especially in apparel, which was more labor-intensive than textiles. In one careful study, for example, economist Lori G. Kletzer found that imports were responsible for “considerable displacement” of apparel workers in the 1980s and 1990s; losses in the textile sector, while not quite as great, were still substantial.Footnote ⁷⁶

Despite a determined effort, the domestic industry's campaign for import controls ultimately fell short. With more than two million workers in the early 1980s, the US textile and apparel industry had much political clout, yet it also faced powerful opponents who grew stronger as the manufacturing sector shrank. Following lobbying from the burgeoning retail and service sectors that was coordinated by the well-funded Retail Industry Trade Action Coalition, in December 1985 President Reagan vetoed the Textile and Apparel Trade Enforcement Act, and a major campaign to override the veto fell short by just eight votes. In 1988 and 1990, similar import restriction bills were vetoed by Presidents Reagan and Bush respectively, with both leaders claiming that the legislation would provoke international retaliation and raise textile prices for consumers. The outcome highlighted the limitations of what Dana Frank has called “economic nationalism,” as free-traders skillfully utilized the language of freedom and dismissed their opponents as “protectionists,” a term that quickly took on pejorative overtones. The industry's strength was also largely confined to the East Coast; in the Mid-west, farming groups generally supported trade liberalization because they wanted greater access to overseas markets, while the West Coast's economy was also heavily geared to exports.Footnote ⁷⁷

Crucially, supporters of globalization were also able to use the industry's previous flight to the southern US to undermine its fight for import controls. Like Crompton, most textile firms did not publicize their earlier shift to the South when they fought for import controls, instead preferring to picture themselves as the victims of cheap labor. Some opponents, however, pointed out that the industry was not telling the public the whole story. As Greg Rushford wrote in the Far Eastern Economic Review in 2004, “Low-wage (non-union) southern U. S. states once were happy to lure jobs away from New England and New York City. Now they cry foul when economic logic dictates that such employment can be performed more efficiently by low-wage (non-union) Asian countries.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The failure of the three textile bills was crucial, paving the way for the passage of further free-trade agreements that decimated the domestic industry. Of particular importance, in 1993 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement divided the industry, as some mill owners supported the agreement because they hoped that it would create a North American trading bloc that could take on China. After the 1997 economic collapse devalued Asian currencies by around 40 percent, however, Far Eastern garment manufacturers had a decisive advantage, and this was reinforced at the end of 2004, when all remaining global textile quotas were lifted under the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC). Because of NAFTA and the ATC, the pace of decline became dramatic; between the year 2000 and 2007, for example, half of all textile and apparel jobs in the Carolinas, the industry's heartland, were lost, and many historic firms went out of business. In 2005 the ATMI itself went bankrupt because it no longer had enough members to keep it afloat. By June 2010, the US Department of Commerce reported that China was responsible for 45·75 percent of all textile and apparel imports, up from 24·5 percent before all quotas were abolished.Footnote ⁷⁹

Like Crompton, much of the industry responded to these changes by selling their equipment to overseas competitors, thus accelerating the collapse of domestic manufacturing. Other firms kept their headquarters in the United States but shifted manufacturing to Asia or Latin America. These moves became more common following the defeat of the three textile bills. By the year 2000, for example, fabric makers Cone Mills, Galey & Lord, and Burlington Industries had all established garment factories in Mexico, and that nation's denim-production capacity had tripled in the space of a few years. Executives from these firms argued that outsourcing was inevitable. “Given the present trade and consumer environment,” declared Cone CEO John Bakane, “either we play the game by looking at the most cost-effective way of production, or we go out of business.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Just as the Crompton workers had found, most mill workers who lost their jobs struggled to find comparable employment. In 2003, one study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluded that two-thirds of reemployed textile and apparel workers earned less on their new jobs than they had previously, while one-quarter experienced losses greater than 30 percent. Although textile jobs paid poorly by manufacturing standards, they still exceeded those in the retail and service sectors, where displaced mill workers often ended up, and they came with a range of fringe benefits, including employer-sponsored health care, which service jobs frequently lacked.Footnote ⁸¹ Studies by economists have also highlighted that workers in general suffered greatly from deindustrialization, so the Crompton experience was again representative. “For many workers,” summarized a 1996 study in the Monthly Labor Review, “adjusting to permanent job loss can be difficult, with low probabilities of reemployment, long durations of joblessness, and sizable earnings losses.” In 1994 and 1996, data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that displaced workers earned 15 percent less in their new posts, many of which were part-time.Footnote ⁸² Scholarly case studies, particularly by anthropologists, have also shown that job loss was psychologically “devastating” for manufacturing workers, who tended to identify closely with their workplace.Footnote ⁸³

Press reports of mill closings indicate that textile workers as a whole shared these reactions.Footnote ⁸⁴ Indeed, textile workers' hardships were compounded by the industry's tendency to locate in small towns. In 1988, for example, federal data showed that about two-thirds of all textile mills were situated in non-metropolitan areas, towns like Leesburg, Alabama and Osceola, Arkansas.Footnote ⁸⁵ Concentrated in the rural South, the industry also employed large numbers of racial minorities and women, groups that were hit particularly hard by deindustrialization. Between 1984 and 1992, for example, black men experienced rates of job displacement that were some 30 percent higher than those of white men, and their reemployment rates were also 30 percent lower.Footnote ⁸⁶

The Crompton bankruptcy, then, ultimately tells us much about the broader decline of one of America's main manufacturing industries. Above all, it was an accurate precursor of what was to come. Even while he publicly fought for the industry, Lord privately predicted in his papers that the industry's days in the US were numbered, something that had been reinforced by his visit to China. In the 1980s, Lord privately refuted many executives and outside observers, who insisted that domestic manufacturers could compete through modernization, currency adjustments, and higher import tariffs. “The trip re-confirmed one notion about which I felt very strongly: no degree of currency exchange differential or duty rates can preserve the American textile industry against this kind of competition,” he concluded in personal notes. At a time when China was only just starting to emerge as an economic power, Lord accurately predicted its rise to dominance and the central role that the textile industry would play in it.Footnote ⁸⁷ Almost two decades later, industry lobbyist Jock Nash proclaimed that China's rise was the central reason for the rapid demise of domestic manufacturing in general. “China is the 800-pound gorilla,” he declared. “I don't know anybody who can compete with them – not in textiles, not in electronics, not in anything.” What had happened to Crompton had become a common American tale.Footnote ⁸⁸