Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory

by Cathy N. Davidson, Cathy N. Davidson

A powerful collection of nearly one hundred full-color and black-and-white photographs and an elegiac text portray the workers and managers of the White Furniture Company, a family business that was forced to shut down after a century in business. Tour.

223 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

Cathy N. Davidson served from 1998 until 2006 as the first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, where she worked with faculty to help create many programs, including the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the program in Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS). She is the co-founder of Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, HASTAC (haystack), a network of innovators dedicated to new forms of learning for the digital age. She is also co-director of the $2 million annual HASTAC/John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition. She has published more than twenty books, including Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (with photographer Bill Bamberger) and The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (with HASTAC co-founder David Theo Goldberg). She blogs regularly on new media, learning, and innovation on the www.hastac.org website as Cat in the Stack. She holds two distinguished Chaired Professorships at Duke University, the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. She has been awarded with Honorary Doctorates from Elmhurst College and Northwestern University."

Reviews

[Kari Larsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Closing: The Life of Death of An American Factory, is an interesting take on the de-industrialization of America.

[Drew Billings · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well written and put together Narrative of just how a community can rely on the importance of one building or factory

[CJ Louis · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was an okay book, nothing to special. The pictures helped make the story, they gave you a personal view of the lives of the workers.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pick up this book and you will find on its back cover several statements of praise from people like Martin Scorsese, Joyce Carol Oates, Reynolds Price and John Sayles. I’ll just quote the words of Scorsese here, “If there’s an untold story in America today, this is it. This sad, engrossing and utterly unique book explores the precise moment of a factory closing with such eloquence and clarity of purpose that it feels like a great novel.” That’s a pretty fair statement about the book, and it feels like the book was written about what is going on in the United States today, but it was published in 1998 about a furniture plant that closed in Mebane, North Carolina in 1991.

I bought the book mainly because it was written by Cathy Davidson. I loved her 1993 book 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan, and I just recently bought her 2011 book,
Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. And so I wondered what else she had written. I discovered that she had written this case study of the closing of a factory, owned by White’s Furniture Company, in Mebane, North Carolina. And it was perhaps that last fact that made me buy the book immediately, because Mebane is the home town of one of my good friends.

White’s Furniture Company at one time was known as the best maker of fine furniture in the South. It also was the first furniture company to promote a “line” of furniture. And yet it failed. More correctly it was acquired by another company, the Hickory Manufacturing Corporation in 1985. From that moment, the Mebane plant was doomed, although this was not obvious at the time. Almost immediately Hickory moved the company away from manufacturing quality furniture to trying to maximize production while disregarding quality. The story has been repeated across many states and industries now, but in North Carolina, it has seen a large number of furniture and textile companies and their plants go out of business.

The book explains why furniture manufacturing came to be located in North Carolina. Put simply ,it was due to three factors: a good railroad system, hardwood forests, and a skilled but cheap labor force. That last factor actually deserves more explanation and Davidson indeed gives it in just a few paragraphs. She explains how, after the Civil War, North Carolina tax laws and fencing laws made it hard for small farmers to stay independent and drove these famers off their farms and into the factories. By 1900, there were 44 furniture factories, and these continued to grow through the first six decades of the 20th century. And White’s Furniture Company was truly one of the best companies, not just for the furniture it made but generally for how it treated its workers.

What happened? Just like there were three factors that led to the establishment and growth of the furniture industry in North Carolina, so there were three factors that brought down this company. First, the White company really failed to modernize in terms of technology. Second, financial changes affecting not just the furniture industry but many American industries caught up with the company. And finally, feuding within the White family over who would head up the company was the deciding factor that led to the selling of the company.

After establishing that background, the book focuses on the closing of the factory in Mebane and how that event it affected the workers. It chooses five of these workers and tells their stories, using their own words whenever possible. Their stories are both poignant and eloquent in their simple words. There actually isn’t a lot of despair (these are tough individuals), but there truly is a lot of economic pain and financial suffering. As much as I liked the book, I thought more could have been told. It could have gone beyond these five workers and it especially could have told us about what the closing of the plant meant for Mebane economically. Likewise, the photos are good and capture the sadness of the closing on the faces of the workers, but again, they are just good and could have been better. These are truly minor criticisms, and the book accomplishes exactly what it set out to do in both words and pictures

Davidson is a distinguished professor of technological change (she was at Duke when she wrote this book and is now at the City University of New York) and Bill Bamberger is a photographer who has won many awards (he now lives in Mebane). The book was prescient for telling a story of a company’s failure that suggested what could happen—and has indeed happened--to thousands of factories in the United States over the last two decades. It is sad that Scorsese’s words that I quoted initially about this being an “untold story” are no longer true. Similar stories have been told and retold many times in recent years and are likely to continue to be told over the next few decades as factories continue to be shut and as skilled workers continue to lose their jobs.