Communities in competition: Capital migration and plant relocation in the United States carpet industry, 1929--1975.

摘要

This dissertation explores the causes and consequences of capital flight in the U.S. carpet industry. From humble beginnings in the 1820s, carpet manufacture flourished for generations in the mid-Atlantic and New England states. By the late 1960s, however, it was concentrated largely in the South. The transition was particularly pronounced in the years following World War II. Perhaps the most dramatic instance of the industry's migration was the relocation of Alexander Smith, a leading carpet firm that transferred production from Yonkers, New York, to Greenville, Mississippi, in the early 1950s. What Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hodding Carter called the "hegira of Alexander Smith" inaugurated a process of industrial decline in Yonkers, while propelling Greenville into the industrial age.; Through a close examination of the Smith case, this study addresses several key aspects of capital flight. First, it considers how disparate conditions in local communities---combined with changing patterns of state and regional development---influenced industrialists' decisions to move from the North to the South. Second, it shows how, both in places that lost industry and in those that acquired it, capital migration transformed local economies, reconfigured the balance of political power, and altered the rhythms of community life. Third, it illuminates how public policy---not only locally but also at the state and federal levels---helped to perpetuate capital flight.; The dissertation argues that capital mobility, and the competitive conditions to which it gave rise, strengthened the hand of manufacturers in both the North and the South. After World War II, carpet makers---along with many other industrialists---began to disinvest from northern locations that they viewed as troublesome, while shifting resources to more accommodating southern locales. In each region, migration produced complex and contradictory responses, not always in line with what employers desired. Ultimately, however, capital flight intensified the pressure on both northerners and southerners to court and keep industry by any possible means. As a result, it helped to narrow the distinctions between regions, as desperate communities across the nation vied for the favors of private enterprise in the name of the "public good."