May Not Fiction Book Discussions

What is it about an underdog that makes for a good story? In Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local--and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy, we have two underdogs, John D. Bassett III, the factory man of the title, and American industry itself.

Bassett, Chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company in Galax, Virginia, is a complicated hero. Macy says,

Once in a reporter's career, if one is very lucky, a person like John D. Bassett III comes along. JBIII is inspirational. He's brash. He's a sawdust-covered good old boy from rural Virginia, a larger-than-life rule breaker who for more than a decade has stood almost single-handedly against the outflow of furniture jobs from America. "He's an asshole!" more than one of his competitors barked when they heard I was writing a book about globalization with JBIII as a main character. Over the course of researching this book, over the course of hearing his many lectures and listening to him evade my questions by telling me the same stories over and over, there were times that I agreed.

Bassett fought against family intrigue to take charge of Vaughan-Bassett, and then he fought against the offshoring of American furniture manufacturing to Asia, to save 700 American factory jobs. As Shawn Donnan notes in a review of Factory Man in the Financial Times, "There is an element of Don Quixote about it."

Bassett's family built their furniture dynasty in the early 20th century through exploitation of American labor and the manufacture of an inferior product, and Asian manufacturers used those same business ethics and techniques to shift the profits of the furniture industry overseas. Bassett successfully fought this trend, but can American industry fight globalization? Macy said in an interview with Talking Biz News,

I hope the reader will come away from Factory Man with a deep understanding of why their furniture and other Asia-manufactured products cost a little bit less than they once did--and what that means for the 5 million Americans who used to make those products. I hope they're entertained and inspired by my main character, an iconoclast multimillionaire who cares enough for the generations of workers who made his family rich that when others in his industry were closing their factories, he dug in his heels and said, Oh hell no. I hope the families impacted by all the job losses take some small comfort in seeing the full story of globalization told: That work meant something to them. I hope policy makers and business leaders reading it are inspired to compete in the global economy based on more than just the quick-hit bottom line.

What do you think of JBIII and his company?  Is his example feasible for all of American industry? Or is his populist and Quixotic quest dependent upon his unique personality and circumstances? Is globalization really the villain? Or is it the American shareholder system, as Ethan Rouen suggests in his review in Fortune? Could American industry somehow turn globalization to its advantage?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, May 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, May 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.