Making It in America

Description

A moving and eye-opening look at the story of manufacturing in America, whether it can ever successfully return to our shores, and why our nation depends on it, told through the experience of one young couple in Maine as they attempt to rebuild a lost industry, ethically. • From the best-selling author of Into the Raging Sea

Meet Ben and Whitney Waxman, two tireless idealists attempting to do the impossible: produce an American-made, union-made, all American-sourced sweatshirt—an American hoodie.

Ben spent a decade organizing workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin, fighting for Americans at a time when national support for unions had sunk to an all-time low. Struggling with depression and a drug dependency, Ben lands back in his hometown of Portland, Maine, desperate to prove that ethical manufacturing is possible. There, he meets Whitney, a bartender wrestling with her own complicated past. In each other they see a better future, a version of the American dream they can build together.

Making It in America is a deeply personal account of one couple’s quest to change the world. As they navigate private struggles, international trade wars, and a global pandemic, their story carries us across the nation and across time, from the cotton fields of Mississippi to New York City’s hollowed-out garment district to a family-owned zipper company in Los Angeles to the enormous knit-and-dye factories in North Carolina. Throughout, we grapple with what “Made in the USA” really means to Americans in the twenty-first century.

Making It in America also offers a unique look at global politics, economics, and labor through the story of textile manufacturing. It was the demand for cheap cloth that sparked the industrial revolution. It was the brutality of the textile industry that first drove workers to organize.

Making It in America reveals how profoundly manufacturing shapes all of us. Each twist and turn of the Waxmans’ quest tells us how we got here, where we are now, and where we’re headed—through the people that produce the fabric of our lives. Preamble: The Traffic Jam That Never Ends xi

Introduction: The High Cost of Cheap Stuff 3
Maine Roots 30
This Kid Is Okay 50
Greed Is a Real Thing 61
Witness 77
She’s Outta Your League 81
Reboot 91
Let’s Make Something 99
Game On 104
New Americans 116
A Brief History of the Hoodie 132
Just Pull It and It’s Done 14
54 Operations 149
Can You Make 5,000? 158
The Fabric King of 38th Street 165
Follow the River 172
It Takes Chutzpah 186
Pandemic Panic Along Route 66 199
We’ll Come Back 209
We Gotta Shut Up and Listen 220
An Omen 226
Cornering the Cotton Market 231
Labor Pains 239
Your Job Is to Produce 271
The Never-Ending Quest for Smart Money 285
Epilogue 293
 
Acknowledgments 307
Bibliography 311
Index 319One of Cosmopolitan’s 14 Best Nonfiction Books Coming Out in 2024
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Pick in Business and Economics
One of the Next Big Idea Book Club’s 40 Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in 2024
One of the Financial Times’ Best Business Books of the Month

“An enlightening look at the history of manufacturing in America and how we got to where we are today.”
—Cosmopolitan

“By following the Waxmans over years as they build their business — and more than once come close to losing everything — Slade tells a story of trade, globalization, capital, labor and the political choices that have led to American manufacturing’s decline, and makes an impassioned case for its return.”
—The New York Times

“Persuasively argue[d] . . . Slade’s book gives a granular sense of just how hard it is for business owners, particularly those in manufacturing, to do the right thing by their workers in America today. It also conveys just how meaningful and rewarding building a truly ethical business can be, for owners and workers alike . . . its broader political resonance is potent and timely.”
—The Washington Post

“A timely examination of the difficulty of reviving manufacturing in the US . . . Slade explores the imprint that decades of neoliberalism and offshoring has left on America’s worker and economic resilience through the Waxmans’ compelling story. From Ben’s idealistic youth working for unions to the couple’s drives up the eastern seaboard in search of the last vestiges of the American textile network, Made-in-USA enthusiasts and free-trade hawks alike will be rooting for this couple to succeed.”
—Financial Times

“Excellent . . . I have been waiting with great anticipation for many months for this book to come out, and I’m pleased to report that it was worth the wait. Making It in America is a treasure trove of fascinating, relevant historical information—a Buy American manifesto disguised as a narrative. It’s both a delight and an education to see how Rachel puts all the information together and how she chooses to construct it.”
—Greg Olear, Prevail podcast and newsletter, author of Dirty Rubles

“An incisive look at the history and current state of American manufacturing. . . . This galvanizing call for Americans ‘to start making things for themselves’ serves as both a sweeping report on a globalized industry and a practical road map for aspiring small-scale manufacturers. Readers will feel invigorated.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Both provides a wealth of background information on the rise and fall of manufacturing in America and tells a story of rebellious entrepreneurship, one full of hope, determination, and the American spirit.”
—Booklist

“[A] page-turning chronicle . . . Slade is an experienced and insightful storyteller.”
—Boston Business Journal 

“Reads almost like a drama.”
—News Center Maine

“At turns rousing and heartbreaking, Making It in America takes the reader on a journey that is both encyclopedic and intimate, through the wastelands of America’s lost manufacturing might, and the jobs, families and communities that were crushed in the process.  As we ride on the shoulders of Ben and Whitney Waxman, who wanted nothing more than to make a sweatshirt ethically in America and pay their workers a fair wage, Slade’s revelatory account brings home the greed and immense global forces bearing down on average Americans, and how a plucky duo battled to retain their integrity.”
— Katherine Eban, author of Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom

“A knowledgeable indictment of failed American trade and labor policies, Rachel Slade’s timely book, powered by her admirable skills as a storyteller, also provides a much-needed glimpse of a potentially fairer, more equitable future for American workers and consumers.”
—Philip Dray, author of There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in AmericaRACHEL SLADE is the acclaimed author of Into the Raging Sea, a national bestseller, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction. She spent a decade in the city magazine trenches at Boston—first as the design editor, ultimately as executive editor. Her editing and writing have won national awards in civic journalism, reporting, criticism, and reader service. She has been a lecturer in political science and journalism at Tufts University. She splits her time between Brookline, Massachusetts, and Rockport, Maine.MAINE ROOTS

On April 28, 2012, Dory Waxman sat very still at the kitchen table listening to the family van as it climbed the steep driveway and stopped at the barn door. She heard the engine shut off with a resent­ful knock. At her ankles, the dog whimpered, then sat back on his heels, swishing his tail back and forth across the floor.
 
Dory took off her reading glasses and tossed them onto the mount­ing hill of bills, invoices, letters from the city council, school board minutes on the table.
 
“Well,” she announced to the empty room, “Ben’s back.”
 
She ground her palms into the table, pushing herself up, wisps of hair slipping free from her loose bun. Wiping her hands on her apron, she maneuvered around the dog, now ecstatic, and swung the storm door into the cool afternoon air while reflexively grabbing the animal’s collar to keep him from leaping into the wet grass.
 
The storm door’s spring had stretched out forever ago; the door gaped wide and stayed there. The heat of the kitchen rolled out.
 
Dory studied two of the people she loved most in the world—her husband, Dan, and her oldest son, Ben. Over the past decade, he’d evolved from a skinny redhead in cargo shorts to a sturdy, commanding union man. Dory always wondered what side of the family the red hair came from.
 
Ben looked up from unloading the van and waved. “Hi, Ma.”
 
After four months of rehab, Ben looked fit, trim, and tan, healthier than she’d seen him in years. That was the moment she realized he’d been hiding his addiction for a long time.
 
Ben trudged up the rotting front steps, which sagged under his weight. “One day, someone’s gonna fuckin’ kill themselves on these,” he told her for the thousandth time.
 
The running joke melted any tension between them. After leaving Maine a decade ago, Ben was home again.
 
“Well, come in, come in,” Dory said as the dog wriggled at the end of her arm like a fish on a hook.
 
Ben leaned over the mutt to give Dory a perfunctory peck, wip­ing his sneakers on the mat. In the kitchen, Dory stood next to Dan in solidarity and gave Ben her best I’m not worried impression. “I’m good,” Ben said impatiently. Dan reached for Ben’s duffel, but Ben grabbed it and hefted it over his shoulder, then headed upstairs to his boyhood room.
 
Dory stood listening for the familiar creak of floorboards above them. It was the sound of her boys in her house, under her roof, in her care. But no, this wasn’t right. There was addiction in Dory’s fam­ily, and in Dan’s, too. No matter how far you run away from it, it still finds you. Would their oldest find his way out?
 
She called up to Ben in her resonant alto, “Fresh linens on your bed, Ben. And the shower’s working again. Towels are up there, too.”
 
Dan and Dory Waxman knew that life was a journey full of false starts and dead ends. The trick was to keep going. They’d met in Bos­ton in the mid-1970s—two free spirits, bound together by their sense of justice. Dan had a mass of black curls and a handsome cleft chin. Dory was a blond-haired, blue-eyed, farm girl from central Massachu­setts. Dan dreamed of becoming a professional musician and dropped out of the University of Delaware to immerse himself in Boston’s folk rock and jazz scene. Dory was energetic and independent, eager for adventure. She didn’t bother with college. Her father had worked in a factory; her mother had been a nurse. She’d moved to Boston to build a life for herself.
 
Dory was one of those New Englanders whose roots go “all the way back to the Mayflower,” she’d say, which was local shorthand for “We’ve been here a while.” Her grandfather, a Harvard man, won Olympic gold in the high jump. Her grandmother came from Wales. Some close family members struggled with alcoholism and mental illness.
 
She viewed her heritage with a mix of pride and sadness.
 
Dan’s family embodied the Eastern European Jewish immigrant experience. His father’s mother had escaped the pogroms in Odessa, Russia, to raise five children in Wilmington, Delaware. She never learned to read or write. Dan’s grandfather had been a professional boxer who fought in the early twentieth century under a pseudonym to hide his Jewish roots. Later, he became an officer in the U.S. Army. Dan’s maternal grandfather founded a dry-cleaning business in Wilmington in the 1930s, which exists to this day. Dan’s father enlisted in the Army Air Force during World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, then took over his in-laws’ dry-cleaning business. He loved telling people that Delaware’s young senator, Joe Biden, was a regular customer.
 
Although Dan and Dory eschewed conventional life, the cult of hard work was in their DNA. They moved to Midcoast Maine so that Dan could study jazz at the University of Maine, Augusta. Earthy and gregarious, Dory hustled to support them both. She gardened, waited tables, and worked as a line cook. It didn’t take long before everyone in town knew her. Like Dory, Dan began building a mile-long CV of odd jobs—dishwasher, busboy, cashier, short-order cook, house painter, a farmhand for haying, a counselor at a tiny residential high school for troubled teens. In the winters, they’d house-sit for wealthy absentee owners in large, drafty “summer cottages” along the coast, waiting out the cold under piles of quilts while keeping out the raccoons and making sure the pipes didn’t freeze.
 
That he became known around town as “the egg that wouldn’t hatch.” When he finally came out on June 15, 1979, the local newspaper ran a front-page story about him.
 
That year, Dan and Dory bought a 1965 beige and red VW bus with an engine that would start only when rolling downhill, with one foot working the clutch, another pumping the gas, and one hand gripping the emergency brake. If they couldn’t find a hill to park it on, they’d have to crawl underneath and cross the solenoid. Ben’s brother, Adam, arrived a year later.
 
Throughout the Reagan years, when much of America was embracing Ralph Lauren and free trade, Dory and Dan held tightly to their progressive beliefs. Maine was a refuge for idealists like them. Utopian fervor was a northern Yankee tradition. It spanned across the centuries and across the political spectrum—from celibate Shakers to right-wing libertarians and doomsday preppers. Countless descen­dants of the self-righteous Protestants who’d fled England in the seventeenth century still lived in the Maine woods, alongside back-to-the-land types, artists, and writers. Maine was big enough (and rural enough and cheap enough) that someone could even slip off the grid, like Christopher Thomas Knight, the so-called North Pond Hermit, who survived alone in the woods for twenty-seven years until he was arrested in 2013 for multiple burglaries.
 
In 1983, Dan began selling ads for Farmstead Magazine, a homespun-looking stapled affair founded a few years earlier. The magazine was geared toward the new crop of back-to-the-landers arriving in Maine. The cover of the first issue, published in 1974, featured a woodcut of a farmer riding a plow drawn by two muscular horses, their heads bending elegantly toward each other, forming the shape of a heart. Stories included a Maine planting calendar; a feature called “You Can Raise Turkeys”; something about E. B. White; and “Helen Nearing’s Rosehip Recipes.”
 
Helen and Scott Nearing had fled the cacophony of their native New York City to rural Vermont forty years earlier, and resettled on a saltwater farm in Midcoast Maine in the 1950s when the skiing craze made Vermont too popular for their taste. Throughout their long lives (Scott died at one hundred; Helen lived to age ninety-one), the Nearings published dozens of books about the farming life, guiding others in the art and craft of rural self-sufficiency. They described themselves as part of a movement stretching back to the first European settlers in New England—people who, they wrote, were like “the many young people of today who find no satisfactory way to exercise or develop their talents and interests in modern city or suburb.”
 
Dan and Dory had been drawn to the Maine life the Nearings wrote about. Cult heroes to the end, they romanticized one version of American bootstrapping—not the suburban postwar version, some­thing more akin to an updated version of colonial homesteading.
 
After World War I, which thrust the U.S. onto the international stage, Americans spent a lot of time thinking about who they were and building a narrative to fit their new superpower status. In the 1920s, John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought an entire Virginia town with a multitude of dilapidated colonial-era buildings. His enormous, decades-long restoration of Williamsburg fired up Americans’ imagi­nations. Museums around the country opened “period rooms” rife with Chippendale chairs and Paul Revere serving pieces; the heirs of DuPont Chemical filled their Delaware estate, Winterthur, with 90,000 American antiques and opened it as a museum in 1951. Amer­icans went crazy for colonial-style home design and furnishings, trig­gering a demand for domestic cabinetmakers and other craftspeople.
 
The Nearings encouraged their followers to go beyond the aes­thetic and embrace the colonial pioneer mindset. They taught them how to clear their own land, build their own homes, dig and cultivate their own gardens, and survive by the sweat of their brows.
 
Native Mainers may have chuckled at the Nearings for making life harder for themselves, but the promise of honest reward for hard work attracted generations of people searching for a more authentic life. (It was later reported that while the Nearings certainly worked hard, they could not have supported themselves without their sizable inheritances.) Heavily subsidized or not, the Nearings lived one ver­sion of the American dream—a life based on rising early, soil-tilling, beekeeping, and animal husbandry.
 
To the children of suburbia who questioned their privilege and yearned for a stronger connection to the earth, there was honor in that.US

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