Empty Mills: The Fight Against Imports and the Decline of the U.S. Textile Industry

Empty Mills demonstrates the devastating impact of the demise of the U.S. textile and garment industries on workers and communities and tells the story of the curious cross-class campaigns that tried-and ultimately failed-to preserve U.S. jobs using import controls. This is a tragic cautionary tale for working people and unions in the neoliberal era.

Historian Minchin (La Trobe Univ., Australia) provides a thoroughly documented study about one of the lesser-known and most disastrous stories of America’s deindustrialization–the decline and fall of the textile industry. Textile manufacturing was the nation’s first industry, early in New England and later in the South, employing many thousands of people, mostly in small cities. Because of this, small cities were devastated when a mill closed. Little attention was given in the media to the mill closings in small cities, as opposed to the wide media coverage of layoffs in large cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh. In addition to these mills’ being the major employer in a small city, a great proportion of the workers were women and blacks. Minchin also reports on the unsuccessful efforts to save the industry through union compromises and employer organization, to no avail. The effects of imports, trade deals such as NAFTA, and automation are discussed in detail. The book concludes with two microeconomic studies, one in the North and one in the South, of cities that were devastated and their efforts to recover. Abundant footnotes; exhaustive bibliography. Summing Up: Recommended.

Minchin makes a convincing case. His research is thorough, combining oral history interviews with research in the papers of textile-state politicians, newspaper accounts, and a substantial peek into the secondary literature of the field. The book provides well-footnoted support for the conventional wisdom, familiar to most residents of the textile South, of the negative impact of deindustrialization on communal and personal levels. Minchin tells his story with clarity and a certain verve. … Minchin writes with clarity, and his research is solid. It provides a valuable addition and source of information about Washington, D.C.’s wrangling with the imports and a working depiction of the functions of deindustrialization. The book is useful for scholars of American deindustrialization in the post- World War II South. For graduate seminars it should provide a very good tool for discussions about methodology and the mentality of historians’ tasks.