American Imperialism | Brenda Wensil | September 2010
It was the perfect hiding place: that little gap between the bedroom sets and rows of couches, dining room tables, bedroom suits and reclining chairs. My Dad would never find me here. So I sat, curled up and quiet, listening to the sounds of his furniture store. For a seven year old, this was the ideal space to listen to my Mother’s adding machine clicking away in the office, and watch my Father extolling the values of handcrafted furniture and upholstery to his loyal customers.
Eight-way. Hand Tied. Notch-in-Groove. Hand Crafted. These were the catch phrases of my youth heard thousands of times with a particular point of pride. “Let me show you the fabric choices,” my Dad would say, fanning literally hundreds of swatches from which to choose. He would slide his hand across the cloth and ask the customer to do the same as he talked about beauty, durability and richness of colors. As I hid and listened, I would press my small face against the fabric of a couch as I drifted off into my dreams. Sometimes he would wake or pull me out of hiding to say hello to customers. Nearly everyone knew and trusted my Dad and that’s how things work in a small South Carolina town. Few knew more about furniture than he, though his real talent was extolling the virtues of textiles. But that was then.
As a child hiding among the rows of furniture, I could not have known that my small face was pressed against a legacy of labor, progress and innovation. I could not have known that the hand carved and crafted wood furniture made just up the road was a byproduct of the textile industry itself and was fueling retail stores like my Dad’s all over the country. In fact, it was all that and more because the sum total of those thousands of threads against my face was, in fact, symbolic of Imperialism and the historic rise, fall and redemption of the American South.
Threads of a Once Grand Industrial Empire
There is an old, Danish tale of some weavers who one day promised an Emperor a new suit of clothes. The suit, they said, would be invisible to those unfit or incompetent for their positions. As the tale goes, the newly clothed Emperor, pretending that he can see the fabric for fear of appearing unfit, parades before his subjects who are equally afraid of admitting they actually see nothing at all. Only until a child cries out the obvious reality that the Emperor has no clothes on at all do the masses reluctantly begin to admit the same. The Emperor’s New Clothes has become a standard metaphor for anything that smacks of pretentiousness, collective denial, or the group dynamic that prevents a healthy challenge of authority when speaking the truth. Similarly, the textile industry of the past 30 years was equally unwilling to admit an escalating problem that no one wanted to address or discuss: that of its gradual competitive demise to foreign countries. The collective conscience of industry leaders believed that markets would bounce back and that an industry so dominant and great could not possibly be threatened. And therein lies our tale.
Beauty and creature comforts are perhaps the most enduring theme within the whole of civilization. History records garments from 550 B.C. embroidered with “wool from a tree” or cotton. Wool was woven into garments thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt and trimmings were fashioned to adorn the lush tapestries in Persian Palaces. From the days of Pharaoh, cotton has clothed and comforted every civilization and society. Fiber from the flax plant was woven into linen that provided clothing, shrouds and sails for Pharaoh’s realm. And eventually cotton, which made all this possible, would become the dominant material of the world’s textile industry.
From the most basic necessities of our time right up to the most exquisite artifacts of beauty, the textile industry has been the great provider. The industry of fiber to fabric and design to dyes, textiles brought woven beauty into the homes of the world and became part of virtually everything we touch in nearly every moment. The economic crown jewel, American Textiles, ruled that landscape at home and abroad. It fueled emerging economies, created jobs, and provided a living for scores of people seeking a better life. But eventually a changing world pulled at the edges: fraying the fabric as emerging nations offered a less expensive route. Cheap labor abroad and consumer demand for the lowest possible prices set the industry on a collision course that has seen the great textile empire rise, fall and struggle to redeem itself.
