Factory Man

In the small towns of Virginia's Blue Ridge foothills, the Bassett family built a furniture-making empire that once employed thousands and dominated the American industry. Beth Macy, a Roanoke Times journalist and daughter of a factory worker, traces the rise and near-collapse of that empire through the story of John D. Bassett III (JBIII), a third-generation furniture maker who refused to let globalization destroy his factory, his workers, or his family's legacy.

Macy begins in 1902, when J.D. Bassett Sr., a shrewd country storekeeper in Henry County, Virginia, persuaded the Norfolk and Western Railway to route its new line through his property, then used the lumber proceeds to build a furniture factory near the Smith River. With cheap Appalachian labor and plentiful hardwood, he undercut Northern competitors and built Bassett Furniture into the largest wood furniture manufacturer in the world. He founded the unincorporated company town of Bassett, where his family controlled the bank, the police, and the housing. Black workers earned half of what white workers made and were confined to the dirtiest jobs, though J.D.'s willingness to hire them was unprecedented in the region. He reportedly acknowledged their contribution: "The Negroes made me" (58). The family's paternalism was intertwined with exploitation, including the sexual coercion of household servants and a secret mixed-race child fathered by J.D.'s brother and cofounder, C.C. Bassett.

JBIII was born during an epic flood in 1937. His grandfather wrote him a letter expressing hope that he would accomplish great things, and his father, Mr. Doug, groomed him to lead the company. But JBIII's sister Jane proved to be the sharper intellect. After JBIII attended Washington and Lee University and served three years in the U.S. Army in Germany, the family dynamics shifted. Jane married Bob Spilman, a hard-charging former army veteran from North Carolina who rose rapidly through the company. When Mr. Doug was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the mid-1960s, he made a deathbed change to the succession plan: Instead of naming JBIII as his successor, he designated his cousin Mr. Ed as chairman and Spilman as number two. Multiple sources attribute the reversal to Jane's influence over her dying father.

Spilman proved to be a brilliant but tyrannical CEO who grew Bassett Furniture through acquisitions, amassing more than 30 plants, while systematically marginalizing JBIII. In the early 1970s, Spilman sent JBIII to run a new plant in Mount Airy, North Carolina, framed as a promotion but widely understood as exile. JBIII worked 19-hour days, overhauled operations, and made the plant profitable within two years. He recruited Linda McMillian, a self-taught eccentric he discovered dismantling a popcorn machine at a dime store, who became one of the best furniture engineers in the country. When JBIII returned to Bassett, Spilman had taken over his office and relegated him to a cubicle. In late 1982, after a rumored physical confrontation that both men denied, JBIII resigned, declaring he would no longer be "somebody else's surrogate" (155).

JBIII moved to Vaughan-Bassett Furniture in Galax, Virginia, a small company his grandfather had helped found in 1919. He found a struggling operation with $28 million in annual sales and antiquated machinery. He invested his own money, moved his desk to the center of the machine room, poached top talent from Bassett Furniture, and modernized production. In 1987, he acquired a bankrupt factory in Sumter, South Carolina, and launched a venture making cheap paper-on-particleboard furniture for low-income consumers. By the early 1990s, Vaughan-Bassett's sales had nearly quadrupled.

Meanwhile, the Asian import wave was building. Larry Moh, a Chinese-born, Wharton-educated entrepreneur based in Taiwan, pioneered the export of American-style furniture from Asia using rubberwood, a previously discarded byproduct of rubber-tree plantations, and low-cost labor. His company, Universal Furniture, grew to $500 million in annual sales. American furniture companies, including Bassett, responded by importing from Asia and teaching their competitors how to make American-style furniture. As one executive observed, "once that process starts, there's no stopping it" (163).

By 2001, Chinese furniture imports were surging. A Louis Philippe-style dresser from a factory near the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian wholesaled for $100, far below the cost of materials. In late 2002, JBIII sent his younger son, Wyatt Bassett, and Rose Maner, a Taiwanese consultant with connections across Asia's furniture industry, to Dalian. They located Dalian Huafeng Furniture Company, where owner He YunFeng, a Communist Party official, was building a massive complex to export bedroom furniture to America. When JBIII traveled to meet He YunFeng, the magnate told him to close all his factories. JBIII refused.

JBIII hired Joe Dorn, a Washington trade lawyer, to file an antidumping petition, a legal action allowing domestic producers to seek duties on foreign goods sold below their cost of production. To file, he needed companies representing at least 51 percent of the domestic bedroom-furniture industry to join. He spent months pressuring reluctant manufacturers, many of whom backed out after retailers threatened retaliation. His older son, Doug Bassett, who had years of Capitol Hill experience, managed the political operation. By October 2003, JBIII had assembled 31 companies from 17 states, and Dorn filed what became the largest antidumping case ever brought against China.

The backlash was fierce. Retailers canceled millions in Vaughan-Bassett orders, and at the High Point furniture trade show, buyers wore mocking buttons with basset hound caricatures. But the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) voted unanimously that domestic producers had been injured by illegal dumping. The initial duties of 14 percent disappointed JBIII, but Dorn implemented annual administrative reviews through the Department of Commerce to identify and penalize the worst dumpers. Chinese factories paid settlement money to avoid review, a process opponents called "clever shakedowns" (347) but which the coalition used to fund ongoing enforcement.

As the legal battle played out, the human costs of globalization became stark. In the Martinsville and Henry County region, nearly half the workforce was eliminated. Unemployment hovered between 15 and 20 percent, one in three families received food stamps, and displaced workers turned to disability benefits and part-time retail work. Thieves stripped copper and brass from abandoned factories and from the Bassett family mausoleum.

Rob Spilman, Bob and Jane's son and Bassett Furniture's new leader, closed all remaining Bassett-area factories and reinvented the company as a retailer, directing much of the $17.5 million received in antidumping duties toward the retail transition rather than keeping factories open. JBIII took a different path: He invested $23 million of Byrd Amendment proceeds, antidumping duties distributed to injured domestic producers under federal law, in new equipment, contributed 10 percent to employee profit-sharing, and established a free health clinic for workers. In January 2012, he reopened a closed factory next door, investing $8 million and rehiring 115 displaced workers. Chinese wooden bedroom-furniture imports declined more than 70 percent between 2006 and 2013, and Vaughan-Bassett became the largest wooden bedroom-furniture manufacturer in America. Critics argued the duties merely shifted production to Vietnam and Indonesia, while supporters countered that they preserved hundreds of jobs in communities with no alternatives.

Macy closes the book with a return to Bassett, Virginia, where she and JBIII tour the devastated town, visiting the family cemetery and the razed factory sites. On a kayak trip down the Smith River, a retired factory manager names the abandoned factories they float past. On a steep hillside behind a Black church, Macy locates the grave of Mary Hunter, J.D.'s maid, who saved $40,000 and left it for the education of Black children. The tombstone is covered in kudzu, an invasive Asian vine. The people of Bassett, Macy reflects, have placed commemorative bricks on bookshelves and factory rubble on riverbanks as monuments to a vanished way of life.