The Men and the Mills

324 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Increasingly, however, Colvin came to praise the machine tool industry less for its technical virtuosity than for its essential contribu­ tions to the relief of want and thus to the preservation of democracy. Two world wars using the fruits of machine production and fought in the name of democracy made the connection concrete. For Colvin, these wars demonstrated how the skills and cooperative values of the machine tool industry could, when brought to the fore, achieve greatness for society. Writing immediately after the second of those wars, Colvin expresses fears that the spirit of cooperation has broken down and that management and labor will fall back into adversarial relations. He pleads w'ith both sides to avoid work stoppages, which in Colvin’s eyes would only deprive society of the benefits of machine production. One could easily dismiss Colvin’s version of events as the product of an older journalist w'ho spent a lifetime seeking out the middle ground and wished not to offend. This would be a mistake, for Colvin was very much a man of his times. Indeed, the philosophy he expounds in these memoirs seems remarkably similar to that of his more famous contemporary, Herbert Hoover, another technical man who made the transition from the small enterprise of the 19th century to the corporate economy of the 20th. That men like Colvin and Hoover could make this transition with such ease tells us a great deal about the emergence of the modern American system of production. For that reason, as well as Colvin’s shrewd insights into the nature of the machine tool industry, historians should be pleased to have these memoirs in print again. STEVEN USSEI.M.W Dr. Ussei.man. an assistant professor of history at the L’niversitv of North Carolina at Charlotte, is completing a book on the management of innovation by American railroads, 1860-1914. The Men and the Mills: A History of the Southern Textile Industry. By Mildred Gwin Andrews. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1987. Pp. xvi + 367; illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. $35.00. Warmly welcomed by industry leaders, Mildred Gwin Andrews’s The Men and the Mills is a sugarcoated history of the textile industry in the South, w'here intentions are only the best, the men are farsighted, and the mills are all above average. The writer served the industry in public relations, journalism, and Washington, as w'ell as spending years as executive secretary of the American Textile Machinery Association. Her work combines anecdotal history and apocrypha with her own recollections and research. It raises innumerable TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 325 subjects of interest and opportunities for future research as it flits from man to man (most with photographs) and mill to mill in the textile industry’s grand campaign to improve the lot of all southern­ ers. It treats unions, the civil rights movement, OSHA, and the J. P. Stevens boycott harshly; and it does not believe in the stretch-out and in cotton manufacture as the cause of byssinosis. References to technological change are regularly erroneous. The account of the Gastonia tragedy of 1929 is unrecognizable. In sum, the book reads like advertising for the industry. Yet it sketches developments that are as yet unrecorded elsewhere. Endless industry efforts to regulate labor and markets are described unself-consciously. Major shifts in approaches to labor relations, from the creation and destruction of mill villages to the replacement of pension plans with employee stock option plans, are identified without analysis. Andrews describes mergers, recombinations, move­ ment into and out of public ownership, and the changing involve­ ments of financial houses over the decades. These trends in many ways simply perpetuate long-standing practices in the industry, but perhaps they have or will take it to a new scale and manner of operation. The demise of United States machinery builders is de­ scribed, though with conflicting explanations, as is so often the case in this account. Overall, the book is unreliable. Nevertheless, it indicates the degree to which the seemingly well-researched textile industry remains full of significant and unexamined issues. Laurence Gross Dr. Gross is a curator at the

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