Cannon Mills and Kannapolis: Persistent Paternalism in a Textile Town Timothy W. Vanderburg. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2013.This is a comprehensive history of what was once America's largest manufacturer of household textiles, that in many ways exemplified the textile industry and industrial paternalism in the postbellum South. However, its particular strain of paternalism was both much more powerful and enduring than elsewhere. From its foundation and the establishment of its company town Kannapolis (near Concord, northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina) during the late 1880s until the mid1980s, Cannon Mills operated as a paternalistic company controlled by a small group of insiders. Its founder James William Cannon and his associates on the board of directors ran the firm from its creation until 1921, when his son, Charles, took over. He would lead the firm until his death in 1971. While other companies in the textile industry were getting rid of mill villages and the vestiges of paternalism, Charles Albert Cannon was leading the firm in the mode established by his father. Kannapolis became the nation's largest unincorporated town, a distinction it kept until 1984. Thus, this firm's paternalism lasted long after most of the industry had changed to modern, bureaucratic management, which included the deployment of and resources practices, based on insights from the applied behavioral and social sciences.As the author points out, southern textile mill paternalism resembled the paternalism of northern textile mills, which, in turn, was modeled after English textile practices. By the early 1800s, for example, textile firms in Rhode Island and Massachusetts were providing a range of provisions for their workers. Pioneered by two companies in Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts, this paternalist approach to manufacturing became known as the Waltham (sometimes called the Lowell) system. Northern industrial paternalism influenced the development of the textile industry in both the antebellum and postbellum South. Eventually, paternalism declined in the North, and industrialists replaced it with bureaucratic authority marked by impersonal business relations-a pattern that was followed by the southern textile industry that had settled in the southern Piedmont (xiii).Timothy Vanderburg claims that James Cannon exemplified the typical southern textile industrialist. Although industrialization was changing the nature of work and human relations in the workplace, he and other southern industrialists continued to have a strong belief in the role of a genteel upper class. In his The Mind of the South (1941), Wilbur Cash argued that the paternalism of the Old South plantation system was evident in the mill towns of the New South. The mill owners provided for their operatives like the plantation owners supplied their slaves with necessities; deference and fear were key elements of paternalism during both periods. But Vanderburg insists that this comparison should not be taken too far. Cotton mill operatives, unlike slaves, could also demonstrate their discontent with their employer by leaving, although, if they did so, they usually found themselves working in another cotton mill under a similar industrial regime. He furthermore points out that New South industrialists also held a strong belief in individualism and the sanctity of contracts. These beliefs led to a strong antiunion bias. Workers, they thought, should present their grievances to mill superintendents and owners personally, without the specter of collective bargaining or the influence of outside agitators. Yet, New South industrialists still would feel the burden of noblesse oblige: A tenuous balance existed between their desire for profits and their social obligations to improve the community. Enlightened self-interest often settled this conflict (3-4). Mill village paternalism was a pre-eminent manifestation of this tension between profits and community interest. …
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Dec 30, 2015
Waseem Ahmad + 2
Open Access
