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International Praise for
Travels of a T-Shirt, 2nd Edition
“This charming, intelligent narrative debunks myths on both sides of the
globalization debate. Mixing historical perspective with current events,
the book highlights that it’s not market forces but avoiding them that
creates winners in world trade … a rich tapestry of globalization past and
present that focuses on real people to rip fabrications on all sides of the
debate … a great read.”
—Asia Times
“Don’t miss this unusual book on economics.”
—The Hindu
“ … thought-provoking … Regardless of your stance on global economics,
you will find a lot to agree with and a lot to think about in Travels of a T-Shirt.”
—The China Daily
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the TRAVELS of
a T-SHIRT in the
GLOBAL
ECONOMY
SECOND EDITION
An Economist Examines
The Markets, Power, and
Politics of World Trade
Pietra Rivoli
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Time: 3:10 pm
Copyright © 2009 by Pietra Rivoli. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise,
except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without
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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts
in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or
completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of
merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales
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For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Rivoli, Pietra.
The travels of a t-shirt in the global economy: an economist examines the markets, power, and
politics of world trade/Pietra Rivoli. – 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-470-28716-3 (pbk.)
1. T-shirt industry. 2. International trade. 3. Free trade. 4. International economic
relations. I. Title.
HD9969.S6R58 2009
382 .45687115–dc22
2008054905
Printed in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Dennis, Annalisa, and Denny
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CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
PROLOGUE
PART I
KING COTTON
1
How America Has Dominated the Global
Cotton Industry for 200 Years
2
The History of American Cotton
3
Back at the Reinsch Farm
4
All God’s Dangers Ain’t the Subsidies
ix
xvii
1
3
9
24
49
PART II
MADE IN CHINA
5
Cotton Comes to China
6
The Long Race to the Bottom
7
Sisters in Time
8
The Unwitting Conspiracy
75
77
92
105
120
PART III
TROUBLE AT THE BORDER
9
Returning to America
10 Dogs Snarling Together
11 Perverse Effects and Unintended Consequences
of T-Shirt Trade Policy
12 45 Years of “Temporary” Protectionism End
in 2009—Now What?
141
143
156
MY T-SHIRT FINALLY ENCOUNTERS A FREE MARKET
13 Where T-shirts Go after the Salvation Army Bin
213
215
PART IV
171
196
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CONTENTS
14
How Small Entrepreneurs Clothe East Africa
with Old American T-Shirts
15 Mitumba: Friend or Foe to Africa?
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
227
239
253
262
264
283
305
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
How Student Protests Sent a Business Professor around the World
On a cold day in February 1999 I watched a crowd of about 100 students gather on the steps of Healy Hall, the Gothic centerpiece of the
Georgetown University campus. The students were raucous and passionate, and campus police milled about on the edge of the crowd, just in case.
As speaker after speaker took the microphone, the crowd cheered almost
every sentence. The crowd had a moral certitude, a unity of purpose,
and while looking at a maze of astonishing complexity, saw with perfect
clarity only the black and white, the good and evil. Corporations, globalization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade
Organization (WTO) were the bad guys, ruthlessly crushing the dignity
and livelihood of workers around the world. A short time later, more than
50,000 like-minded activists had joined the students at the annual meeting
of the WTO in Seattle, and by the 2002 IMF-World Bank meeting, the
crowd had swelled to 100,000. Anti-globalization activists stymied meetings of the bad guys in Quebec, Canada, and Genoa, Italy, as well. At the
2003 WTO meeting in Cancun, the activists were joined by representatives from a newly energized group of developing countries, and world
trade talks broke down across a bitter rich-poor divide. Anti-globalization
activists came from college campuses and labor unions, religious organizations and shuttered textile mills, human rights groups and African
cotton farms. Lumped together, the activists were named the globalization
“backlash.”
At first, the backlash took the establishment by surprise. Even the
left-leaning Washington Post, surveying the carnage in Seattle, seemed
bewildered. “What Was That About?” they asked on the editorial page
the next day. From the offices on the high floors of the IMF building,
the crowd below was a ragtag bunch of well-intentioned but ill-informed
obstructionists, squarely blocking the only path to prosperity. According
to conventional economic wisdom, globalization and free trade offered
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salvation rather than destruction to the world’s poor and oppressed. How
could the backlash be so confused?
The backlash seemed to quiet by about 2005. “Phew,” the business
establishment seemed to say, “Glad that’s over with.” But a closer look
reveals that nothing was really over with, and that, in fact, the reverse had
happened. While some of the craziest slogans (“Capitalism is Death”) had
faded away, the backlash was not gone, but had gone mainstream. Surveys showed that Americans were markedly less supportive of trade and
globalization in 2008 than they had been at the beginning of the decade:
while 78 percent of Americans surveyed had a positive view of international trade in 2002, by 2008, only 53 percent were broadly supportive.
Americans were also less supportive of trade than citizens of virtually every
other industrialized country.1
In Washington, Congress responded to this popular discontent by
stymieing further trade liberalization, and the 2008 presidential candidates responded with sound bites strangely similar to those of the 1999
protestors. By 2008, the WTO talks that had been stalled by protestors in
Seattle and Cancun were still stalled—after nearly eight years of mostly
fruitless negotiations. While the negotiations had been difficult in the best
of times, the severe economic downturn that began in late 2008 left little
hope for the revival of the trade tasks.
B
ack at Georgetown in 1999, I watched a young woman seize the microphone. “Who made your T-shirt?” she asked the crowd. “Was it a child
in Vietnam, chained to a sewing machine without food or water? Or a
young girl from India earning 18 cents per hour and allowed to visit the
bathroom only twice per day? Did you know that she lives 12 to a room?
That she shares her bed and has only gruel to eat? That she is forced to
work 90 hours each week, without overtime pay? Did you know that she
has no right to speak out, no right to unionize? That she lives not only in
poverty, but also in filth and sickness, all in the name of Nike’s profits?”
I did not know all this. And I wondered about the young woman at
the microphone: How did she know?
During the next several years, I traveled the world to investigate. I not
only found out who made my T-shirt, but I also followed its life over thousands of miles and across three continents. The result of this investigation
was the first edition of Travels of a T-Shirt, published in 2005. The book
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xi
was—and is—a story about globalization and about the people, politics,
and markets that created my cotton T-shirt.
It is fair to ask what the biography of a simple product can contribute
to current debates over global trade. In general, stories are out of style
today in business and economics research. Little of consequence can be
learned from stories, the argument goes, because they offer us only “anecdotal” data. According to today’s accepted methodological wisdom, what
really happened at a place and time—the story, the anecdote—might be
entertaining but it is intellectually empty: Stories do not allow us to formulate a theory, to test a theory, or to generalize. As a result, researchers
today have more data, faster computers, and better statistical methods, but
fewer and fewer personal observations.
The story, of course, has a more esteemed role in other disciplines.
Richard Rhodes, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Making of the Atomic
Bomb, peels back, layer by layer, the invention of the atomic bomb. In the
process, he illuminates the intellectual progress of a community of geniuses
at work. Laurel Ulrich, in A Midwife’s Tale, uses the diary of a seemingly
unremarkable woman to construct a story of a life in the woods of Maine
200 years ago, revealing the economy, social structure, and physical life of a
place in a manner not otherwise possible. And in Enterprising Elites, historian
Robert Dalzell gives us the stories of America’s first industrialists and the
world they built in nineteenth-century New England, thereby revealing the
process of industrialization. So, the story, whether of a person or a thing,
can not only reveal a life but illuminate the bigger world that formed the
life. This is my objective for the story of my T-shirt.
“Does the world really need another book about globalization?”
Jagdish Bhagwati asked in the introduction to his 2004 book on the topic.
Well, certainly the world does not need another tome either defending
or criticizing globalization and trade as abstract concepts, as the cases
on both sides have been made eloquently and well.2 I wrote Travels of a
T-Shirt not to defend a position but to tell a story. And though economic
and political lessons emerge from my T-shirt’s story, the lessons are not
the starting point. In other words, I tell the T-shirt’s story not to convey
morals but to discover them, and simply to see where the story leads.
I brought to the first edition of Travels of a T-Shirt my own biases, and
I surely harbor them still. Because I have spent my career teaching in a
business school, and no doubt because of my academic background in
finance and economics, I know that I share with my colleagues the somewhat off-putting tendency to believe that if everyone understood what we
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understood—if they “got it”—they wouldn’t argue so much. More than
200 years after Adam Smith advanced his case for free trade in The Wealth
of Nations, we are still trying to make sure that our students, fellow citizens,
and colleagues in the English department “get it,” because we are sure that
once they understand, everyone will agree with us. When I happened
by the protests at Georgetown and listened to the T-shirt diatribe, my
first thought was that the young woman, however well-intentioned and
impassioned, just didn’t “get it.” She needed a book—maybe Travels of a
T-Shirt—to explain things. But after following my T-shirt around the world,
and after nearly a decade spent talking to farmers, workers, labor activists,
politicians, and businesspeople, my biases aren’t quite so biased anymore.
T
rade and globalization debates have long been polarized on the virtues
versus evils of competitive markets. Economists in general argue that
international market competition creates a tide of wealth that (at least
eventually) will lift all boats, while critics worry about the effects of unrelenting market forces, especially on workers and the environment. Free
trade in apparel, in particular, critics worry, leads only to a downward
spiral of wages, working conditions, and environmental degradation that
ends somewhere in the depths of a Charles Dickens novel.
My T-shirt’s life suggests, however, that the importance of markets
might be overstated by both globalizers and critics. While my T-shirt’s life
story is certainly influenced by competitive economic markets, the key
events in the T-shirt’s life are less about competitive markets than they are
about politics, history, and creative maneuvers to avoid markets. Even those
who laud the effects of highly competitive markets are loathe to experience
them personally, so the winners at various stages of my T-shirt’s life are
adept not so much at competing in markets but at avoiding them. The
effects of these avoidance maneuvers can be more damaging for the poor
and powerless than market competition itself. In short, my T-shirt’s story
turned out to be less about markets than I would have predicted, and more
about the historical and political webs of intrigue in which the markets
are embedded. In peeling the onion of my T-shirt’s life—especially as it
relates to current debates—I kept being led back to history and politics.
Many once-poor countries (e.g., Taiwan or Japan) have become rich
due to globalization, and many still-poor countries (e.g., China or India)
are nowhere near as poor as they once were. The poorest countries in the
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world, however, largely in Africa, have yet to benefit from globalization in
any sustained way, and even in rapidly growing countries such as China,
many are left behind. My T-shirt’s life is a story of the wealth-enhancing
possibilities of globalization in some settings but a “can’t win” trap in others,
a trap where power imbalances and poorly functioning politics and markets
seem to doom the economic future.
My T-shirt’s story also reveals that the opposing sides of the globalization debate are co-conspirators, however unwitting, in improving the
human condition. Economist Karl Polanyi observed, in an earlier version
of today’s debate, his famed “double movement,” in which market forces
on the one hand were met by demands for social protection on the other.3
Polanyi was pessimistic about the prospects for reconciling the opposite
sides. Later writers—perhaps most artfully Peter Dougherty—have argued
instead that “Economics is part of a larger civilizing project,” in which markets depend for their very survival on various forms of the backlash.4 My
T-shirt’s story comes down on Dougherty’s side: Neither the market nor the
backlash alone presents much hope for the world’s poor who farm cotton
or stitch T-shirts together, but in the unintentional conspiracy between
the two sides there is promise. The trade skeptics need the corporations,
the corporations need the skeptics, but most of all, the Asian sweatshop
worker and African cotton farmer need them both.
T
he second edition of Travels of a T-Shirt is very much the product of
reader reactions to the first. During the past several years I have had
the opportunity to speak with fellow academics, students, businesspeople,
and policymakers around the United States and the world about the myriad
issues raised by the biography of this simple product.
My basic conviction that the biographical approach can illuminate
complex economic and political issues in a unique way has only been
strengthened by these many conversations, and the second edition of
Travels of a T-Shirt remains loyal to this conviction. While the biographical
facts of my T-shirt’s life are unchanged, as is the approach I have taken,
my many conversations with readers have also illuminated a number of
ways in which the story of my T-shirt can evolve to continue to engage a
variety of debates.
First, much has happened in the world of international trade since
the book’s publication in 2005. While the major lessons of my T-shirt’s
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life are unchanged, or perhaps even strengthened, much has evolved in
the manner in which the relevant industries operate, in the competitive
dynamics, and in political developments related to trade and globalization.
I hope in this edition to provide an update of this changing landscape and
to answer the many questions I have received from readers regarding what
has happened in the world of my T-shirt since 2004.
Second, during the 2005 to 2008 period I have also made return
trips—often multiple trips—to most of the locations in my T-shirt’s life
story, and I have continued to learn from these visits as well as from my
continuing correspondence with the many people involved in each stage of
the T-shirt’s life. I hope in this edition that the reader can learn as well from
these visits and continuing correspondence. I have also benefited tremendously from the hundreds of e-mails and many conversations that have
helped me to sharpen the arguments, review new research and evidence,
and expand on several topics that have been of special interest to readers.
The third change was born in 2006–2007. I was visiting many colleges
and universities during that period, and at Wellesley College and University of Iowa, at Colby College, and at UC Santa Barbara and at Texas
Tech—in other words, at universities across the geographical and political
landscape—readers were interested in the environmental implications of
my T-shirt’s life story. During the same period, the book was also being
released in translation, so I found myself in Tokyo, Vienna, and Milan as
well. Again, around the world readers wanted to talk about environmental
sustainability. Indeed, by 2008, it seemed inconceivable that a book about
globalization would fail to address the related environmental issues.
Of course, an entirely new book could be written to tell the environmental story of my T-shirt’s life. I make no claims that I have written such
a book. I have, however, illuminated a number of the debates that relate
environmental issues to both my T-shirt and to broader issues of trade and
globalization.
Though I did not write Travels of a T-shirt for the “college market,” I have
heard from many university faculty who have used this book for a variety
of purposes and courses, and I especially hope that the updates provided
in this edition will be useful in these settings. To that end, some teaching
resources are now available at www.wiley.com/college/rivoli.
Needless to say, I enjoyed some reviewers’ and commentators’ views of
the first edition of this book more than I did others. Sometimes, however,
I have heard a reviewer or commentator explain a point in the book, or an
argument, better than I did. More than once, I have thought, “I wish I had
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written that,” when I heard a particularly insightful or evocative comment
about what I actually did write. In late 2005 I spoke about Travels of a
T-Shirt at the IMF in Washington. There, Hans Peter Lankes, one of the
commentators, explained his reaction to the book in language that not only
has stuck with me, but which has helped me in this revision. Hans Peter said
that reading the book was “… sort of like circling a Buddhist stone garden.
One slips into every conceivable perspective on this issue and there are
no villains, only actors in what I call an epic struggle and a fantastically
complex, forward-driving, and culture-transforming enterprise.”
As I write this in early 2009, I still have not met any villains. Every
aspect of my T-shirt’s life is even more fantastically complex than it was
earlier in the decade, while the struggles seem even more epic and the
actors seem to be running in an even faster race. Yet in this revision I have
kept in mind the image of the Buddhist stone garden. My objective, quite
simply, has been to continue to circle.
I
f I learned anything from my travels over most of the past decade, it is that
university students represent one of the most powerful forces for change
in our society. After I first encountered the protests at Georgetown University in 1999, students peacefully occupied the university president’s office
and refused to budge until the university and its apparel suppliers agreed
to address the alleged “sweatshop” conditions under which Georgetown
T-shirts and other licensed apparel were produced. Similar protests went
on at dozens of universities across the country. By 2008, the students and
their compatriots around the globe had dramatically changed the way the
global apparel industry operates, and had completely rewritten the rules
for how some of the world’s largest companies do business. The life story
of a T-shirt made today is a different and better story for both workers and
for the environment than the story of a T-shirt made just a few years ago. I
thought, when I started to follow my T-shirt, that I would in the end have
a story that would help the students to see things my way, to understand
the virtues of markets in improving the human condition. I do have such
a story, I hope, but it is not the whole story. To the students, I also say, I
(now) see where you’re coming from. Though I think they see where I’m
coming from, too.
Students at Georgetown and elsewhere continue to push corporations
and universities to improve labor practices in the global marketplace, but
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they are now joined by those concerned with the environmental impacts as
well. Already, I see these new footprints in business practices and political
debates.
My old friends are still here: Nelson, Ruth, Gary, Patrick, Yuan Zhi,
Auggie, Julia, and Gulam, everyone who played a part in my T-shirt’s life
during my first trip around the world. But new friends are here too: Eric
is printing T-shirts with soy-based inks, Yiqi is spinning yarn from corn,
and Kelly is marketing organic cotton. In 2008 my simple T-shirt is more
complicated and fascinating than ever, a tiny microcosm of creation and
destruction in our modern world.
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PROLOGUE
Finding My T-Shirt’s Likely Birthplace
Walgreen’s Drugstore
Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
Spring 1999
The civic leaders of Fort Lauderdale have laid new paint over much of the
city in recent years. The stoned surfers and rowdy college students are
less visible now, pushed away from the beach with its new cafes and highend hotels. The college students of the 1970s are parents now, and they
have money to spend. The city bends toward the money like a palm tree,
polishing, sweeping, painting. Yet, like tourist destinations everywhere, a
scratch on the shiny paint reveals a bit of the tawdry underneath. Though
the city fathers might prefer art galleries, it is T-shirt shops that line the
beach because that is what people want to buy.
A large bin of T-shirts sat near the exit of a Walgreen’s drugstore near
the beach. The bin was positioned to catch shoppers on the way out,
and it worked: Nearly everyone who walked by pawed through the bin,
if only for a minute. The bin was full of hundreds of T-shirts, each priced
at $5.99, or two for $10. All were printed with some Floridian theme,
seashells, bright fish, or palm trees.
I reached in and pulled out a shirt. It was white and printed with a
flamboyant red parrot, the word “Florida” scripted beneath. I went to the
checkout line, and then stepped out into the sun and looked at the shirt
through the wrapper.
“You’re it,” I thought.
Back in Washington, I took the T-shirt out of the poly bag and looked
at the label. “Sherry Manufacturing,” it said, and underneath, “Made in
China.” I typed “Sherry Manufacturing” into my search engine. A few
minutes later, I had reached Gary Sandler, Sherry’s president, on the
telephone. “Sure,” he said. “Come on down. We don’t get many visitors
from Washington.”
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PROLOGUE
herry Manufacturing Company is located in Miami’s original industrial
district, a bleak landscape of factories and warehouses not far from
the airport. Gary Sandler is Florida-tanned and friendly, with a healthy
skepticism about college professors. He is completely without pretension,
but clearly proud of what he and his family have built. On the wall of his
office are pictures of his children and his sales force.
Gary’s father, Quentin, formed Sherry Fashions just after World War
II, naming the company for his eldest daughter. Quentin started out as an
independent wholesaler, going shop to shop along the beachfront, selling
souvenir trinkets to the store owners. He would travel to New York to buy
and return to Miami to peddle his wares during the tourist season. Then,
as now, people liked to shop while on vacation, especially for souvenirs.
Quentin found that trinkets with a tropical theme were especially popular
with the visiting Northerners.
In the 1950s, options for “wearable” souvenirs were limited, and vacationers typically brought home trinkets rather than clothing. However,
Quentin found that one of his most popular items was a souvenir scarf, a
small cotton square printed with a Floridian motif. The scarf, like much of
the tourist kitsch of the era, was made and printed in Japan. Before long,
Sherry found itself in a classic wholesaler’s predicament, with margins
being squeezed between the suppliers and the retailers. In 1955, Quentin
Sandler dispensed with his New York suppliers and opened his own clothprinting shop in Miami. Sherry Fashions became Sherry Manufacturing
Company.
In the mid-1970s, Gary Sandler quit college to join his father’s company, and in 1986 became president. In mid-1999, the presidency passed
to the third generation when Sandler’s nephew (and Sherry’s son) assumed
responsibility for day-to-day operations.
Today, Sherry is one of the largest screen printers of T-shirts in
the United States. It remains a business focused on the tourist trade. In
Key West, Florida, and Mount Denali, Alaska, and many tourist spots in
between, as well as in Europe, Sherry has T-shirts for sale. Sherry’s artists
design motifs for each tourist market, and the designs and locations are
printed or embroidered on shirts in the Miami plant.
Sherry’s inventory of blank T-shirts (as well as beach towels and
baseball caps) fills a two-story warehouse. The blank goods go from the
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PROLOGUE
xix
warehouse to the printing machine, which resembles a Ferris wheel lying
on its side. Workers slide each shirt on the flat end of a wheel spoke, which
then turns and stops briefly up to 14 times. Each time the wheel stops, a
different color is shot through the tiny holes in the screen. When the shirt
returns to the starting point on the wheel, a worker slides it off and passes
it to another worker, who lays it flat on a drying conveyor belt. The next
worker picks it up from the end of the drying belt and lays it flat on a
second conveyor belt, which swallows it into a tunnel and shoots it out,
neatly folded, from the other end. It’s no longer underwear; it’s a souvenir.
The shirts piled up in rolling carts tempt with scenes of beaches,
mountains, skyscrapers, and glaciers. Each shirt will allow someone to
take a bit of a place and wear it home. A walk through the warehouse
adjoining the plant is a travelogue, too, but for the more adventurous.
Where the shirts are headed you need sun lotion, but where they come
from you need shots.
Gary Sandler buys T-shirts from Mexico, El Salvador, the Dominican
Republic, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Honduras, China, Pakistan, Botswana,
India, Hong Kong, and South Korea. When I spoke with Gary again in
2008, the T-shirt business was tougher than it had been just a few years
before: Competition—especially from abroad—was greater, the Miami
labor market was more unpredictable, and overseas sourcing was more
complicated. In addition, the economic downturn had severely affected
the tourism industry, which had in turn affected Sherry’s business.
My T-shirt is from China. It likely departed Shanghai in late 1998
and arrived in the port at Miami a few weeks later. All told, the shirt cost
Sandler $1.42, including 24 cents in tariffs. The shirt was one of about 25
million cotton T-shirts allowed into the United States from China under
the U.S. apparel import quota system in 1998. The shirt’s journey, as we
shall see, is a testimony to the power of economic forces to overcome
obstacles. To arrive here, the shirt fought off the U.S. textile and apparel
industries, Southern congressmen, and a system of tariffs and quotas so
labyrinthine that it is hard to imagine why anyone would take the trouble.
But Gary Sandler takes the trouble. Despite the best efforts of Congress,
industry leaders, and lobbyists; despite the quotas, tariffs, and Chinese
bureaucracy, China has the best shirts at the best price.
But China is a big place. Where, exactly, I asked Sandler, did the shirt
come from? Sandler riffled through his Rolodex and pulled out a card. “Mr.
Xu Zhao Min,” the card read, “Shanghai Knitwear.”
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PROLOGUE
“Call him up,” said Sandler. “He’s a great guy. He’ll tell you everything.”
“Xu Zhao Min,” I tried to read aloud.
“No, no,” said Sandler. “Patrick. His American customers call him
Patrick.”
Patrick Xu and his wife accepted my invitation to visit Washington
during their next trip to the United States.
P
atrick Xu straddles East and West, rich and poor, communism and capitalism with almost cat-like balance. He travels to the United States two
or more times each year, visiting old customers and scouring for new ones,
watching the Western fashions and bringing ideas back to the factories.
While Patrick is happy to sell white T-shirts to established customers like
Gary Sandler, he does not see much of a future in white T-shirts for Shanghai Knitwear. There is too much competition from lower-wage countries
and other parts of China, and soon, he believes, his hard-won customers
will be sourcing T-shirts far from Shanghai. Patrick is trying to move up
the value chain into fancier goods such as sweaters.
“Come to China,” Patrick said during our first meeting in 1999. “I’ll
show you everything.”
I wanted the whole story, I explained. Could he show me where the
shirts were sewn? No problem. What about where the fabric is knit? Yes,
of course. I pushed my luck: What about the yarn the fabric is made of?
The spinning factory? Yes, he could arrange it. But this wasn’t quite the
beginning. What about the cotton? To tell the life story of my shirt, I
had to start at its birthplace. I knew that China was one of the world’s
largest cotton producers. Could I go to the farm and see how the cotton
is produced?
Patrick looked at the T-shirt. “Well, that might be difficult. I think the
cotton is grown very far from Shanghai. Probably in Teksa.”
“Teksa? Where is Teksa? How far away?” I asked. There was a globe
on my desk and I spun it around to China. Could he show me Teksa on
the globe?
Patrick laughed. He took the globe and spun it back around the other
way. “Here, I think it is grown here.” I followed his finger.
Patrick was pointing at Texas.
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Date: Jan 22, 2009
Time: 3:35 pm
PART I
KING COTTON
Nelson and Ruth Reinsch at Their Farm in Smyer, Texas. (Photo
Courtesy of Dwade Reinsch and Colleen Phillips.)
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Date: Jan 22, 2009
Time: 3:35 pm
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Date: Jan 22, 2009
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1
HOW AMERICA HAS
DOMINATED THE
GLOBAL COTTON
INDUSTRY FOR
200 YEARS
REINSCH COTTON FARM,
SMYER, TEXAS
U
nlike French wine or Florida oranges, Texas cotton doesn’t brag
about where it was born and raised. Desolate, hardscrabble,
and alternately baked to death, shredded by windstorms, or
pummeled by rocky hail, west Texas will never have much of
a tourist trade. Flying into the cotton country near Lubbock on a clear fall
day, I had a view of almost lunar nothingness: no hills, no trees. No grass,
no cars. No people, no houses. The huge and flat emptiness is jarring and
intimidating at first, since one can’t help but feel small and exposed in this
landscape. Though I had traveled to dozens of countries and to almost
every continent, during my first visit to Lubbock, Texas, I thought it was
one of the most foreign places I had ever been. Somehow, since then, it
3
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Date: Jan 22, 2009
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
has also become one of my favorite places. There is a very good chance
that my T-shirt—and yours—was born near Lubbock, the self-proclaimed
“cottonest city” in the world.
The people of this forbidding yet harshly beautiful place are wellsuited to the landscape. Indeed, they are the product of it. The land has
humbled them with its unpredictable temperament and its sheer scale, yet
made them proud of each small success in taming and coaxing from it the
fluffy white gold of the cotton plant. According to local legend, when
God created west Texas, He made a mistake and forgot to fashion hills,
valleys, rivers, and trees. Looking at His desolate and barren mistake, He
considered starting over, but then had another idea. “I know what I’ll do,”
He said. “I’ll just create some people who like it this way.”
And so He did.
Nelson Reinsch, cotton farmer, still stands tall and handsome at the
age of 87. He laughs easily but speaks carefully. He calls his wife, Ruth,
“Sugar,” and every other woman “Ma’am.” Nelson is a gentleman in the
older sense of the word, well-mannered and considerate from the inside.
We last met in 2008, and, remarkably, Nelson seemed not to have aged a
bit since our first meeting in 2000.
In his 87 years, Nelson has missed four cotton harvests, all of them
during his Navy service in World War II. Nelson and Ruth are happy
enough (or perhaps just polite enough) to talk about the past if that is
what their guests want to hear about. But they wallow not one bit in “the
good old days,” and their minds are opening rather than closing as they
approach the ends of their lives. The world is still very interesting to Nelson
and Ruth Reinsch. Of the many places and people I have visited during
the research for this book, among my favorite times have been sitting in
the Reinsch kitchen, eating (too much) of Ruth’s cake and learning about
cotton. In 2008, Nelson and Ruth remained on their farm in the middle of
the west Texas emptiness. However, in that year Nelson scaled back his
cotton operation and began to rent out much of his land.
Producing cotton is no longer the backbreaking physical process it
once was, but every year Nelson and Ruth still battle both the whims
of nature and the vagaries of markets. Each summer they take on the
wind, sand, heat, and insects; and each fall, at harvest, they take on the
world markets, in which they compete with cotton farmers from over
70 countries. The Reinsches’ 1,000 acres can produce about 500,000
pounds of cotton lint if fully planted, enough for about 1.3 million Tshirts. That Nelson is ending his life in the same occupation in which he
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Date: Jan 22, 2009
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HOW AMERICA HAS DOMINATED THE GLOBAL COTTON INDUSTRY
5
began tells us much about him. It also tells us much about the U.S. cotton
industry.
History shows that almost all dominance in world markets is temporary
and that even the most impressive stories of national industrial victories
typically end with sobering postscripts of shifting comparative advantage.
Within the baby boomers’ lifetime, preeminence in consumer electronics
has shifted from the United States to Japan to Hong Kong to Taiwan
to China. Apparel production has moved from the American South to
Southeast Asia to the Caribbean and back to Asia. Advantages in steel
have moved from the U.S. Rust Belt to Japan to South Korea. But for
over 200 years, the United States has been the undisputed leader in the
global cotton industry in almost any way that can be measured, and other
countries, particularly poor ones, have little chance of catching up. The
United States has historically occupied first place in cotton production
(though recently second to China), cotton exports (though occasionally
second to Uzbekistan), farm size, and yields per acre.1
On the surface, cotton is an unlikely candidate for economic success
in the United States. Typically, American industries compete with those
in “like” countries. U.S. firms compete with Japanese automakers, German
chemical companies, and Swiss pharmaceuticals. But for climatic reasons,
few advanced industrial economies produce cotton. Instead, American
cotton growers compete with producers in some of the world’s poorest and least developed regions. If our labor costs—among the world’s
highest—have toppled or relocated industries as diverse as apparel, steel,
and shipbuilding, how has U.S. cotton maintained its world dominance?
More broadly, how can an industry so basic and “downstream” as
cotton production continue to thrive in an advanced, service-oriented
economy? There would appear to be little sustainable advantage in an
industry such as cotton. Models of business strategy would predict that
dominance in such an industry can only be fleeting and stressful: The lack
of product differentiation, the intense price competition, and the low barriers to entry make it scarcely worth the trouble. Business professor and
strategist Michael Porter notes that
advantages [are] often exceedingly fleeting [in these industries]. … Those
industries in which labor costs or natural resources are important to competitive advantage also often have … only low average returns on investment.
Since such industries are accessible to many nations … because of relatively
low barriers to entry, they are prone to too many competitors. … Rapidly
shifting factor advantage continually attracts new entrants who bid down
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Date: Jan 22, 2009
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
profits and hold down wages. … Developing nations are frequently trapped
in such industries. … Nations in this situation will face a continual threat of
losing competitive position. …2
While this description of life on the economic precipice rings true
for poor cotton farmers in South Asia and Africa, it does not describe the
cotton industry around Lubbock. Year in and year out, American cotton
farmers, as a group, are on top. What explains American cotton’s success
as an export commodity in a country that has experienced a merchandise
trade deficit in each year since 1975? And what explains U.S. cotton producers’ ability to export such a basic commodity to much poorer countries?
Why here? Why was my Chinese T-shirt born in Texas?
Oxfam, the international development organization, believes it has the
answer. According to a number of scathing Oxfam reports, the comparative
advantage enjoyed by U.S. cotton farmers lies in their skill at collecting
government subsidies.3 In the fall of 2003, bolstered by Oxfam’s research
and resources, the poorest countries in the world cried foul against the richest at the opening of the World Trade Organization (WTO) trade talks
in Cancun, Mexico. Tiny, desperately poor countries such as Benin and
Burkina Faso stood firm and stared down U.S. negotiators: They charged
that U.S. cotton subsidies were blocking their route out of poverty, and
that it was impossible to compete with Uncle Sam’s largesse to U.S. cotton
farmers. In a soundbite that carried considerable punch, the poor countries pointed out that U.S. cotton subsidies exceeded the entire GDP of a
number of poor cotton-producing countries in Africa. If the United States
was going to champion the case for free trade, Americans needed to walk
the walk as well as talk the talk. The stare-down continued for several
tortured days until the talks collapsed and both rich and poor gave up and
went home.4 The point, however, had been made, and several months later
the WTO ruled that U.S. cotton subsidies violated global trade rules and
unfairly tilted the playing field toward American producers. In the summer of 2004, with the huge subsidies in the public spotlight, U.S. trade
negotiators agreed not only to put cotton subsidies on the table, but to
tackle the cotton issue “ambitiously, expeditiously and specifically” during
the Doha Round of trade negotiations.5 As of the fall of 2008, however,
the negotiations remained stalled, with most of the subsidies still in place.
There is no doubt that the subsidies are big and little doubt that
they are unfair to poor countries. But anyone who believes that America’s
competitive power in the global cotton industry reduces to government
subsidies should spend some time near Lubbock, Texas. While the
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Date: Jan 22, 2009
Time: 3:35 pm
HOW AMERICA HAS DOMINATED THE GLOBAL COTTON INDUSTRY
7
subsidies are, of course, a boon to U.S. producers, the success of cotton
growers such as Nelson Reinsch is a much more complex phenomenon.
First, the dominance of the U.S. industry predates by well over a century the implementation of national farm subsidies. As Chapter 2 describes,
the U.S. cotton industry passed its competitors over 200 years ago. Therefore, while subsidies may account for some cost advantages today, they
cannot be the longer-run explanation for the industry’s dominance.
Second, the subsidy explanation for America’s dominance gives short
shrift to the astounding entrepreneurial creativity of the American growers.
In many ways, the American cotton farmers are MBA case studies in adaptability and entrepreneurship. American cotton growers have adapted their
production methods, their marketing, their technology, and their organizational forms to respond to shifts in supply and demand in the global
marketplace. The shifts in demand and supply that reveal cotton’s story as
a business were sometimes gentle and predictable trends of ascendancy and
decline, and the farmers could see what was ahead; but sometimes changes
were sudden and cataclysmic, reshaping the world in front of them. In
each case, the cotton farmers responded with a creative maneuver—a new
idea, a new technology, a new policy. Whether it occurs by design or
necessity, the open-mindedness and forward orientation that struck me
within minutes of first meeting Nelson and Ruth Reinsch is a regional
trait as well as a comparative advantage, because farmers in poor countries
who are tradition bound—for whatever reason—rather than innovation
bound, lose.
The American growers’ remarkable adaptability and entrepreneurial
resourcefulness have their roots in character but also in the institutions
and governance mechanisms taken for granted in the United States, but
which are lacking in many poor countries. In the United States, the farms
work, the market works, the government works, the science works, and
the universities work; and all of these elements work together in a type
of virtuous circle that is decades away for the poorest countries in the
world. In much of West Africa, with or without U.S. cotton subsidies,
these institutional foundations for global competitiveness are weak. In
addition, the institutions that are in place in many poor countries serve to
funnel resources and power away from farmers rather than toward them.
While subsidies alone cannot explain U.S. dominance in this industry,
the subsidies are but one example of a much broader phenomenon that has
contributed to the U.S. farmers’ seemingly immutable spot at the top. For
200 years, U.S. farmers have had in place an evolving set of public policies
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Date: Jan 22, 2009
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
that allow them to mitigate the important competitive risks inherent in
the business of growing and selling cotton. They have figured out how
to compete in markets but also—and at least as important—how to avoid
competing when the risks are too high. Put another way, U.S. cotton
growers have since the beginning been embedded in a set of institutions
that insulate them from the full strength of a variety of market forces.
When we consider the risks that a cotton boll faces on its way to
becoming a T-shirt, it is a wonder we have clothes at all. The cotton can’t
be too hot, and it can’t be too cold; it is susceptible to both too much water
and too little; and it is too delicate to survive hail or even heavy wind and
rain. Cotton plants are easily overtaken by weeds; there are dozens of
varieties of pests that can take out a cotton crop; and crop prices are highly
volatile. There is labor market risk as well, as workers must be available at
a reasonable price when the cotton is ready to be weeded or picked. Every
cotton farmer in the world faces these risks. And of course there are the
normal business risks associated with falling prices and rising costs, foreign
competition, and access to financing. As explained in Chapters 2–4,
however, American cotton’s story, and its success, have been about
excellence in avoiding—or at least cushioning the impact of—these risks.
Today’s proponents of markets and globalization can find much to like
in the story of American cotton’s victory, but the backlash can find support as well. For every noble victory in this industry, and for every case in
which the Americans were smarter, faster, and better than the competition,
there is a shameful victory as well. The most shameful of all was the cotton slave plantation, where the U.S. cotton industry was born, and where
the Americans first trounced their foreign competition. Less shameful but
still embarrassing are today’s high subsidies. But to understand American cotton’s long-run dominance, we should begin by agreeing to neither
demonize nor romanticize American cotton farmers. During the 200 years
in which the United States has dominated this industry, sometimes it was
possible to win on the high road and sometimes it wasn’t. My T-shirt’s
parentage in the fields of the American South has many things to be proud
of, but some things to hide.
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Date: Jan 19, 2009
Time: 12:41 pm
2
THE HISTORY OF
AMERICAN COTTON
WINNING BY DUCKING
THE LABOR MARKETS
Demand Pull: The Humble Class Gets a Taste for “Gaiety of Dress”
The world’s first factories were cotton textile factories, and it was
entrepreneurial developments in the production of cotton cloth and yarns
that launched the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Britain. A
rapid-fire series of technical improvements in both the spinning and weaving of yarns made large-scale production possible and opened the way for
the manufacture of textiles to move from the home and workshop into
the factory. The exploding productivity of the English cotton industry
dramatically lowered prices, so that for the first time, the poor could dress
attractively. A consumer class was born. Edward Baines, a nineteenthcentury historian, described the consumer pull of cheap cotton clothing:
It is impossible to estimate the advantage to the bulk of the people, from the
wonderful cheapness of cotton goods … the humble classes now have the
means of as great neatness, and even gaiety of dress, as the middle and upper
classes of the last age. A country-wake in the nineteenth century may display
as much finery as a drawing room of the eighteenth.1
9
Date: Jan 19, 2009
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
1800
1600
Millions of Pounds (weight)
E1C02
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
1791
1801
1811
1821
1831
1840
1850
1860
India
Africa
Asia excl. India
U.S.
Latin America and Caribbean
Other Areas
Source: Bruchey, 7.
Figure 2.1 Cotton Production (Millions of Pounds) by Region and Time
As technological innovation increased productivity, higher productivity in turn lowered prices. The lower prices spurred demand for textiles,
which then left England starving for raw cotton. Once the British masses
had a taste of “gaiety of dress,” there was no turning back. The cheap
cotton clothing available to the masses was the historical equivalent of
today’s $5.99 cotton T-shirt. Then, as now, consumer demand was behind
the push and pull of world trade flows.
Of course, British demand for cotton does not fully explain American
success in meeting that demand. Indeed, at the takeoff of the Industrial
Revolution, the United States did not seem like a promising source of
cotton at all. As Figure 2.1 shows, in 1791, the U.S. share of world cotton production was almost too small to be counted. The American South
produced barely 2 million pounds of cotton in 1791, a minuscule amount
compared to the output of producers elsewhere. It is doubtful that producers in Asia (primarily India), with production of nearly 400 million pounds,
perceived much of a competitive threat from the American South.
The boom in U.S. cotton production that happened next was
astounding. In 10 years, American production increased by 25 times. And
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THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN COTTON
11
by the outbreak of the Civil War, the South was producing more than
a billion pounds per year, approximately two-thirds of the total world
production. Cotton production was overwhelmingly export oriented.
From 1815 to 1860, cotton constituted approximately half of the value
of all U.S. exports, and more than 70 percent of all American cotton
produced was exported, primarily to England.2 In a relatively short period
of time, American cotton farmers had trounced their foreign competition.
The victory did not come cheaply. First, the single-minded concentration of capital, labor, and entrepreneurial energies into cotton production
left the American South far behind the North in broader industrial development, a gap that has narrowed decisively only during the past 25 years.
Second, early American cotton production took place mostly, though not
entirely, on slave plantations, and there is little doubt that this system
of human captivity contributed significantly to the “productivity” of the
American cotton grower. And while plantation slavery was undoubtedly
the most horrible of the many labor systems in U.S. economic history, as
we will see, slavery is not the only instance in which a horrific—or at least
objectionable—labor system played a role in the production and trade of
cotton clothing such as T-shirts. On this issue, today’s trade skeptics have
a point.
Slavery was the first significant American “public policy” that served to
protect cotton growers from the perils of operating in a competitive market. For a number of reasons, relying on a competitive labor market—rather
than on captive slaves—was a risk that growers were loath to assume, and
it was also a risk that would have likely precluded the explosive growth in
American cotton production.
Growing cotton in the antebellum South was mind-numbing, backbreaking physical labor. Beginning in mid-spring, the ground would be
prepared for planting with hoes, and later, mule-drawn plows. Following planting, the battle of the weeds began. The tender cotton plant was
not able to hold its own against the rapacious weeds, and so required
the constant help of workers who guarded the young plants against their
encroachment. Indeed, numerous journals and diaries reveal that keeping cotton “out of the grass” was perhaps the planters’ biggest worry and
the most physically demanding work.3 Weeding and thinning continued,
although at a slower pace, almost until the four-month harvest season
began in late summer. On a large plantation, one worker could prepare,
plant, weed, and harvest about 18 acres of cotton.
Critically, the timing and intensity of each of these tasks was dictated by the weather, so the growers were unable to predict their labor
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Date: Jan 19, 2009
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
requirements beyond the weather forecast. During a very rainy spring,
each field had to be weeded up to six times, which doubled the labor
requirement during that season. The harvesting of cotton was perhaps the
most unpredictable task. (Even today, Nelson and Ruth Reinsch cannot
plan for Thanksgiving travel.) Cotton cannot be picked either in the rain
or while still wet, and it typically takes three to four days to dry. A few
days of rain, then, might leave pickers idle for a week. But once the cotton
was open and dry, it needed to be picked as soon as possible, so that the
tender fluffs did not blow away or fall to the ground. Cotton that had been
rained on became spotted and weaker, so often planters tried hurriedly to
get the cotton picked as rain clouds approached.
These exacting and unpredictable labor requirements were impossible
to meet while relying on the market. As Gavin Wright has argued, farm
labor markets in the American South barely functioned, if in fact they
existed at all.4 Farms were geographically dispersed, which made communication and transportation difficult. The very low population density,
combined with uneven labor requirements throughout the year, as well as
poor information flows, meant that a farmer who relied on the “market” to
meet his labor needs might not be able to harvest his crop at any price.
The problem of farm labor, then, was not limited to a shortage of workers
or high wages. Rather, the problem was the absence of a well-functioning
market where farm workers and growers could transact with any degree of
effectiveness. Relying on the market to supply the right number of workers
at the right time was a business gamble that cotton farmers preferred to
avoid.
Even with a functioning labor market, however, it is doubtful that
workers would have been attracted to opportunities as wage hands in
cotton production. As a very early student of the cotton economy noted,
“the difficulty or impossibility of inducing the whites to become wage
earners while they were in contact with cheap land is undoubtedly the
chief reason why the cotton industry in the country was developed by
slave instead of by free labor.”5 Of course, the same could be said of blacks.
In the absence of slavery, blacks as well as whites would prefer a farm of
their own to work as wage hands. And, in the early years of the American
South, land was available to all comers.
In summary, free labor—black or white—was unlikely to be attracted
to wage work on Southern cotton farms, because of both the poor functioning of labor markets and the superior alternative available to these
workers—the family farm. Slavery, then, allowed cotton farmers both a
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THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN COTTON
13
way to avoid the risks associated with transacting in the labor market and
a way around the family labor constraint. Slavery also enabled the growers
to cultivate greater acreage. The greater acreage in turn allowed cotton
production to increase. The average farm size in the cotton South was
nearly twice that of the free states of the North, and there was a strong
positive relationship between farm size and relative cotton production, at
least for farms below 600 acres.6 Put simply, large farms were slave plantations, not family farms, and it was the slave plantations that produced
most of the world’s cotton by 1860.
Keep the Fiddler Well-Supplied with Catgut
Slave ownership alone did not guarantee successful large-scale cotton production. Effective systems of control, monitoring, and incentives were
also required. These systems accounted for both the economic success
of the slave plantation for the planters, and for the inhumanity of slavery. The profitability of the plantation depended not on slave ownership
per se, but on the planter’s ability to induce his slaves to perform repetitive and exhaustive physical labor at unpredictable times. Large volumes
of cotton production required that the planter devise a “factory” system
wherein a large number of workers performed repetitive tasks, and the
factory “shift” could be activated at the whim of the weather. The planters
were able to induce this repetitive labor on demand with a complex blend
of positive incentives (e.g., prizes), negative incentives (e.g., whipping),
and paternalism.7 A common theme in slaveholder journals is that the
planters had a moral duty to protect those “in dependent status,” and
that slaves who were well cared for and happy would be more productive. A large plantation owner in Georgia offered his own practices as
exemplary:
My first care has been to select a proper place for my “Quarter” well protected
by the shade … and to erect comfortable houses for my negroes. … A large
house is provided as a nursery for the children where all are taken at daylight,
and placed under the care of a careful and experienced woman, whose sole
occupation is to … see that they are properly fed and attended to. … I have
a large and comfortable hospital provided for my negroes when they are
sick … [and] I must not omit to mention that I have a good fiddler, and keep
him well-supplied with catgut, and I make it his duty to play for the negroes
every Saturday night until twelve o’clock.8
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Lest we be tempted to sign up, the writer later notes that his solicitous human resource policies reduced, but did not eliminate, the need for
whipping. Whatever its motivation, paternalism clearly strengthened the
control of the planter over his slaves and served as a governance mechanism. And when combined with constant monitoring, and the positive
and negative incentives that ruled the workday, the planter’s domination
was complete.
To summarize, slavery was the first in a set of evolving public policies
that served to insulate farmers from the perils of the market. American
success in producing large volumes of cotton for world markets required a
reliable supply of farm labor, but this labor was likely both unwilling and
unavailable through a market mechanism in the pre–Civil War South. But
slave ownership alone did not assure productivity. To induce slaves to perform the repetitive and exhausting tasks associated with cotton production,
planters used a complex blend of governance mechanisms, including positive and negative incentives, paternalism, and monitoring. Many elements
of the command-and-control factory system, of course, survive today in
many industries. And complicated blends of incentive and monitoring
mechanisms survive as well.
The lessons of the early American cotton industry are relevant for
modern debates. America’s early dominance of the cotton industry illustrates that commercial success can be achieved through moral failure, an
observation especially relevant for T-shirts, which critics allege are produced under sweatshop conditions not far removed from slavery. But the
early story of American cotton also reveals a critical lesson for the marketphobic: It was not the perils of the labor market but the suppression of the
market that doomed the lives of the slaves. More generally, the tactic of
suppressing and avoiding markets rather than competing in them continues today to be a viable business strategy, particularly in agriculture but
also in other industries. This ability to suppress and avoid competition,
as we will see, is often the result of a power imbalance between rich and
poor, an imbalance that persists in world cotton agriculture today.
W
ith the labor problem “solved” by slavery, unlimited land to the
West, and unlimited demand from the East, the pieces were still not
quite in place for American cotton’s victory. In their westward expansion,
cotton growers encountered perhaps the greatest production bottleneck in
American economic history. Once they had pushed farther than 30 miles
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THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN COTTON
15
from the Atlantic coast, the cotton growers found that the lustrous and
strong Sea Island cotton demanded by British mills would not bloom. Only
Upland cotton, with a shorter fiber and stickier seed, would grow further
west. However, while Sea Island cotton could be separated from the seeds
with a simple roller gin modeled on an ancient device from India (the
Churkka gin), this device was unable to separate the sticky seeds in Upland
cotton from the lint.
The severity of this supply bottleneck is difficult to overestimate. A
young and healthy slave could pick up to 300 pounds of cotton each day.
Even children could typically pick 100 pounds per day. With the seeds,
however, the cotton had no market. Since the roller gins would not remove
the seed from Upland cotton, slaves were required to pick the seeds out by
hand. So sticky and stubborn were the seeds, however, that a slave could
clean no more than 1 pound per day. England’s mills would die of cotton
starvation at this pace.
So if it hadn’t been Eli Whitney, it likely would have been someone else,
and soon. In the fall of 1792, the necessary ingredients for entrepreneurial
success converged: a production bottleneck, an idea, a source of capital,
and a way to make a profit. For developing countries today, the important part of the story is not Eli—poor countries have plenty of smart and
inventive people—it is the convergence of all the ingredients necessary
for forward leaps.
Eli Meets a Venture Capitalist
From his childhood in Massachusetts until his graduation from Yale, Eli
Whitney was known to friends and family as a talented and inventive
tinkerer. Following his graduation he traveled south to assume a position
as a private tutor. What happened next is perhaps best related by Whitney
himself, in a letter to his father dated September 11, 1793. Whitney’s
letter conveys his technical brilliance and entrepreneurial energy, but more
touchingly, also the guilt and excitement of a young man who, in pursuing
his entrepreneurial dream, has somewhat neglected his familial duties. He
starts by admitting he should have written sooner to let his parents know
what he was up to:9
Dear Parent:
I received your letter of the 16th of August with peculiar satisfaction and
delight. It gave me no small pleasure to hear of your health and was very
happy to be informed that your health and that of the family has been so
good since I saw you. … I expected to have been able to come [home to]
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Westboro’ sooner than I fear will be in my power. I presume, sir, you are
desirous to hear how I have spent my time since I have left College. This I
conceive you have a right to know and that it is my duty to inform you and
should have done it before this time. …
On the way to Savannah, Whitney had met the widow and family of
Major General Greene of Revolutionary War fame. Mrs. Greene took a
liking to the polite young man and invited him to spend a few days on
the family’s plantation before continuing his journey. When a group of
Revolutionary War officers who had served under General Greene came
to the plantation to pay their respects to his widow, the conversation
soon turned to the pressing need for a mechanism to separate Upland
cotton from its seeds so as to meet the British demand. The seeds, the
planters were sure, were the only obstacle to their fortunes. “Gentlemen,”
Mrs. Greene remarked, “apply to my young friend, Mr. Whitney,—he can
make anything. ”
Whitney quickly protested that he had never seen either cotton or
cottonseed. Yet he was immediately intrigued, as is evident from the next
paragraph of his letter:
I went from N. York with the family of the late Major General Greene to
Georgia. I went immediately with the family to their plantation … with an
expectation of spending four or five days. … During this time I heard much
said of the difficulty of ginning Cotton, that is, separating it from its seeds.
There were a number of very respectable gentlemen at Mrs. Greene’s who
all agreed that if a machine could be invented which would clean the cotton
with all expedition, it would be a great thing for both the Country and the
inventor.
Critically, there was a venture capitalist at the Greene plantation, as
Whitney explains later in his letter:
I involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan
of a machine in my mind, which I communicated to Miller (who … resides
in the family, a man of respectability and property). He was pleased with the
Plan and said that if I would pursue it and try an experiment to see if it would
answer, he would bear the whole expense, I should lose nothing but my time,
and if I succeeded we would share the profits. …
The machine worked, of course. Whitney’s simple and elegant model
was quickly duplicated throughout the South. The good news was that during the next eight years, cotton production rose 25-fold, and by 1820, more
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THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN COTTON
17
than 90-fold. The bad news was that more than any other single factor,
Eli Whitney’s cotton gin solidified the slave plantation in the cotton South.
For the growers, it was good while it lasted. For the men and women who
had been bought and sold and bred and whipped and captured and fiddled
to, it was good when it ended.
Where Was the Competition?
Where, we have to ask, was the competition? What of India and China,
especially? Why were these countries, world leaders in cotton production
in the late 1700s, left in the dust by the Americans?
At the beginning, as Figure 2.1 shows, other countries continued to
produce cotton in relatively stable quantities while American production
soared. It was not a matter, then, of American producers squashing the
competition with low-cost and efficient production. Instead, for the older
cotton producers, it was business as usual. But business as usual was not
good enough.
British demand for cotton had exploded with the new textile machinery and the burgeoning consumer class. It was not a matter of steady growth
in demand, not a curve that the old cotton producers could ride profitably
on into retirement. The British Industrial Revolution was a lightning bolt
in cotton’s story, like the cotton gin or the boll weevil or emancipation,
which changed everything ahead. By 1860, Britain was consuming over a
billion pounds of cotton per year, which was considerably more than the
entire production of the world, excluding the United States.10
An explosion in demand required an explosion in supply. The question, then, becomes why the supply exploded in the United States rather
than in the countries that had been the world’s major producers since
the beginning of the cotton trade. The question of American success
becomes more intriguing when we note the remarkable lengths to which
the British went—quite unsuccessfully—to reduce their risky dependence
on American cotton.
Put simply, modern markets did not yet work in India or China, in
cotton or in anything else. As economic historian David Landes advises, a
useful way to understand why something in economic history did or did not
happen at a certain place and time is to ask, Who would have benefited?11
If cotton growers in India or China could have benefited by increasing
their productivity, improving quality, and selling cotton to British mills,
they would have done so. It appears, though, that they would not have
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
benefited; the risks were too great, the rewards likely minimal. Capitalism
of the type that rewards an idea, an improvement, or an initiative, had not
yet taken hold in Asia. The foundations were lacking.
First, there were no property rights, or as Francois Bernier, a Frenchman
who lived in India during the seventeenth century, wrote, no mien et tien (no
mine and yours).12 There were no incentives to improve age-old methods,
to learn, to grow more, to do better. The agricultural workers were at
the mercy of rulers who were often absent, and who changed and moved
frequently. And even if wealth had been created, Bernier wrote, it had to
be hidden lest it be extorted or seized.13
In China, too, cotton growers would not have benefited. Under the
tyranny of the emperor, there was little reason to take a business risk in
the modern sense of the term. As a Christian missionary remarked in the
late 1700s, “Any man of genius is paralyzed immediately by the thought
that his efforts will win him punishment rather than rewards.”14 As Landes
notes, too directly for most tastes, China’s “cultural triumphalism and petty
downward tyranny made [the country] a reluctant improver and a bad
learner.”15 Culturally, the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from the 1600s
until the early 1900s, displayed an aversion to all things Western, and to
change in general. A Jesuit passing through commented that the Chinese
were “more fond of the most defective piece of antiquity than of the most
perfect of the modern.…”16 In other words, all of the Eli Whitneys in
China had no reason to try.
On the surface, of course, the American cotton victory over India
and China appeared to be due to slavery. An 1853 observer confidently
noted that American cotton growers’ “superiority” was due to the “cheap,
and reliable labor they derive from that patriarchal system of domestic
servitude.”17 While certainly it was slavery that allowed the cotton factories
on the plantations to produce such enormous volumes of cotton, India and
China, too, had millions of people who were made to work for nothing
by tyrannical rulers, millions of people who could not say no. Why these
people were never organized to produce large volumes of cotton for export
is another matter entirely.
Thus, while slavery allowed farmers to evade the risks of the labor
market, it does not explain why other countries failed to seize the opportunities presented by the Industrial Revolution. The institutions necessary to
support factory-style cotton production—property rights, incentive structures, what is today called “governance”—also had an important role to
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THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN COTTON
19
play. Governance still has an important role to play, which will remain the
challenge for many poor cotton-producing countries. As we will see, all
of the Eli Whitneys in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Benin often still have little
reason to try.
All God’s Dangers Ain’t a White Man
Shortly before the beginning of the Civil War, James Henry Hammond
of South Carolina—senator, former governor, plantation owner, cotton
farmer—stood to address the U.S. Senate. In one of the most famous pieces
of Southern political oratory of the era, Hammond thundered on about
the destruction of the world that would surely accompany the demise of
the slave cotton plantation. It was not just the Southern gentleman’s way
of life that Hammond sought to preserve, it was civilization itself:
Would any sane nation make war on cotton? Without firing a gun, without
drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the world to our
feet. … What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? …
this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized
world with her, save the South.18
This dire prediction about the demise of civilization rested on the
importance of cotton to the industrial centers of the Northern states and
Europe. The giant textile mills that lined the rivers of the new industrial
centers depended on the South to supply cotton. This bit of fluff, the boll as
big as a fist yet lighter than a breath, reigned supremely, if not benevolently,
over the world’s new economic order. Southern cotton had a God-given
monopoly. Because it could not be grown either in the Northern states
or in England, Hammond reasoned, the industrial world would bow to
cotton, and the South had nothing to fear:
No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war
on cotton. Cotton is king.19
It is clear from his words that Hammond did not believe that the
cotton kingdom could thrive under the rules of the North. To destroy the
slave plantation was to destroy the cotton economy, or so he thought.
But while the Civil War eliminated slavery, the cotton economy of
the South survived because public policy evolved to continue to protect
the growers from the perils of the labor markets. Labor requirements in
cotton production remained highly seasonal, and the challenge was still
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to have sufficient labor available at critical but unpredictable times in the
cotton cycle. However, transacting in a labor market was fraught with
risk, as the market still offered no guarantees about either the price or
availability of labor at these critical times. Without the tight control of
slavery, landowners needed an alternative system to bind labor to their
land upon demand. The labor system that emerged—tenant farming, or
“sharecropping”—fit the bill.
In exchange for their labor, the landowner provided the sharecroppers
with housing and food (known as the furnish) as well as the right to hunt and
to fish. By providing housing and food, rather than cash, the landowner
bound the worker to the property and assured himself of labor at critical
times. The worker was contractually bound as well, since he was indebted
to the landlord through the harvesting of the crop.
A wide variety of public policies were instituted to bind the sharecroppers to the land and insulate the cotton growers from the risks of
transacting in the labor market.20 Gradually, the legal definition of sharecropper shifted in favor of the landowners, especially through the passage
of crop lien laws.21 These laws changed the status of the sharecropper in the
courts to a laborer who was paid wages in crops rather than a tenant with
ownership of a share of the crop. The difference was critical. As a laborer,
the sharecropper could not offer his crop for lien because it technically
belonged to the landowner. The crop lien laws, then, shut the sharecropper out of the capital markets while widening access to capital for the
landowners. Other laws, such as vagrancy laws and “alienation of labor”
laws (which protected the landowner from having his labor hired away)
also served to bind the sharecropper to the land. At the same time, planters
opposed public schooling for blacks and poor whites, so illiteracy and lack
of education kept the balance of power in the sharecropping arrangement
heavily in favor of the planter, and limited the alternatives of the workers.
Moreover, the contractual arrangement between sharecropper and
landowner left the sharecropper little hope of climbing out of subsistence.
The sharecropper’s dream—to own land—was thwarted by a cycle of perpetual debt whereby the sharecropper’s share of each harvest was barely
enough to settle the year’s debts, and by exclusion from external capital
markets. A remark reportedly made by Louis XIV of France is apt: “Credit
supports agriculture as a cord supports the hanged.”22
Ned Cobb, an Alabama cotton farmer, recalled the standstill that
trapped him as a sharecropper. While he made six bales of cotton in 1908,
a respectable crop:
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THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN COTTON
21
It took all them six bales to pay Mr. Curtis. In the place of prosperin’, I was on
a standstill. … I had not a dollar left out of the cotton. … Mr. Curtis had Mr.
Buck Thompson furnish me groceries … kept a book on me. … [Mr. Curtis]
paid Mr. Thompson and I paid him—the deal worked that way—out of my
crop. So he made somethin off my grocery bill besides gettin half my crop
when the time came.23
Cobb’s biography repeats this theme year after year. Some years, there
was a little cotton left after paying the landlord; in other years, there
was not enough to settle the debts and Cobb had to start the next year
in the hole. Thanks to creative accounting, it was typical to come out
even. In Macon County, Alabama, researchers uncovered a remarkable
coincidence: 62 percent of black sharecroppers had come out even for the
year in 1932.24
Ironically, the success that the planters had in devising public policies
to keep the workforce docile and uneducated soon began to backfire.
When the boll weevil began to ravage the southern cotton crop in the early
1900s, government extension programs were mobilized to spread advice
to farmers on how to combat the weevil and save their crops. The news
and advice reached the large farms and the educated farmers, but often
passed by the poor and illiterate sharecroppers, black and white, who had
to fend for themselves.25 In 1921, approximately 30 percent of the cotton
crop—predominantly that produced by small sharecroppers—was lost to
the weevil.26 Many were pushed off the land. Ned Cobb remembered the
time well:
That was boll weevil time. … these white folks told the colored people if you
don’t pick them cotton squares off the ground and destroy them boll weevils
we’ll quit furnishin’ you. Told em that—puttin the blame on the colored man
for the boll weevil. Couldn’t nobody pay his debts when the weevil et up his
crop.27
“Yes,” he added later, in reference to the weevil, “all God’s dangers ain’t
a white man.”28
F
or Deep South sharecroppers, not much changed from the end of the
Civil War until the late 1920s: a few acres of tired soil, a few mules, a
few bales at the end of the year, and a perpetual crushing debt.
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But while this rhythm played on in the Deep South, a new type of
cotton factory was rising in the West. By the early 1900s, Texas would be
the country’s largest cotton producer. By the 1920s, Texas would be selling
cotton to China.
Cotton Factories Arrive in Texas
Texas and Oklahoma were the new cotton frontier, wide-open, blue-sky
places with no crumbling plantation houses, no old ways of doing things,
and plenty of room to build cotton factories. Between 1900 and 1920,
the area around Corpus Christi was divvied up into huge landholdings
on a scale never seen before, and rarely since, for the purpose of growing cotton. Henrietta King of Corpus Christi owned 1.4 million acres,
Charles Taft owned over 150,000 acres, and C.W. Post—the man behind
the cereal—owned 200,000 acres.29
The requirements for successful large-scale cotton farming had
changed little from the pre–Civil War South. The landowners still required
large numbers of workers to be available on demand to plant, weed, and
harvest the crop at the whim of the weather. Relying on a labor market
in the modern sense of the term was still fraught with risk and expense.
How would the planter be assured that the market would provide for labor
requirements when the weeds bloomed or the cotton opened? And what
if the market wage went up or help was hired away by competitors?
Creative solutions abounded.30 Planters imported monkeys from Brazil
and tried to teach them to pick cotton, but the animals in the end were
uncooperative. And geese, it turned out, will weed a cotton field when
fenced in, and the farmers discovered that only two geese could weed an
acre of cotton. They also discovered, however, that geese could not be
trained not to trample cotton plants, and that insecticide is also goosicide.
For a time, farmers also used flamethrowers to weed cotton fields, but
taking fire down the rows of their livelihood proved too difficult for most.
In the end, neither monkeys nor geese nor fire could accomplish the tasks
as well as a captive labor force.
This time, to tie the labor to the land and to avoid the market, the
cotton growers borrowed an idea from the North: the company town.
The Taft cotton ranch, near Corpus Christi, occupied 39 percent of the
land of San Patricio County.31 The ranch was organized as a corporation,
but in reality it was a community in which people’s lives—not just their
work—were hierarchically managed for the purpose of cotton production.
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THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN COTTON
23
The ranch had company housing, schools, and churches segregated along
ethnic lines for whites, Mexicans, and blacks. Like the “furnish” provided to
old South sharecroppers, workers were paid partly in scrip, which could be
redeemed only at company stores. Finally, like the plantation owner who
kept his “fiddler well-supplied with catgut,” the Taft Ranch provided holidays, music, and festivities as well, again designed for the three different
ethnic groups. This entire system, of course, served to ensure that workers
were around when the cotton needed to be planted, weeded, and harvested. The new cotton factories did not so much influence public policy,
they were public policy over vast stretches of Texas.
These large and tightly controlled production systems were hailed
as models of the farms of the future, models of productivity, efficiency,
and profitability. Once again, successful large-scale cotton production
depended on a factory system in which large numbers of workers
were available on demand to complete the repetitive chores associated
with weeding, planting, and picking. Once again, success depended on
avoiding—not competing in—the labor market.
Of course, observers of the day also acknowledged that the economic
success of these large Texas cotton “factories” also meant the demise of
the smaller family cotton farms. It was sad but inevitable, the way of the
future.
Well, maybe.
Perhaps someone forgot to tell Nelson and Ruth Reinsch.
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BACK AT THE
REINSCH FARM
T
oday, Lubbock, Texas, is indeed the “cottonest city in the world,”
and the surrounding farmland is the leading birthplace of the
world’s T-shirts. Lubbock has the world’s largest cotton cooperative and the world’s largest cottonseed oil mill, and the region
produces nearly 30 percent of American cotton. Texas Tech University,
on the west side of town, performs some of the most advanced cotton
research in the world. And Lubbock is an international cotton center. A
majority of the region’s cotton is exported: loaded onto trucks and trains
in Lubbock, and bound for ports on every U.S. coast. And at the bottom of this successful chain are neither plantations nor sharecroppers nor
company towns nor even family farms, but people like Nelson and Ruth
Reinsch.1
No single factor explains the success that cotton farmers in west Texas
have had in competing in international markets. The growers are embedded in a web of institutions that help them to continue their tradition
of shifting market risks away from themselves, and they continue to win
as much by limiting competition as by competing. Texas cotton farmers have solved, once and for all, the age-old labor market risk problem
associated with cotton production, creatively applying mechanization, scientific research, and public policy to the challenge. These producers were
24
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BACK AT THE REINSCH FARM
25
also leaders in the development of the modern agricultural cooperative, a
brilliantly simple organizational form that allows cotton farmers such as
Nelson and Ruth Reinsch to capture every shred of value from the cotton
plant, backward into the oilseed and forward into blue denim. Texas cotton
farmers are also masters of political influence, leading the U.S. government
to assume the business risks—including price and nonpayment risks—that
the farmers would rather not. Remarkably, the Reinsches and their west
Texas neighbors have even taken control of the wild Texas climate. They
can make it rain, they can stop the sand from blowing, and they can even
freeze the cotton plant on a warm and sunny day.
Perhaps most significant, Lubbock is the center of the “Silicon Valley”
of cotton production. The Lubbock area benefits from a highly symbiotic and virtuous-circle relationship between farmers, private companies,
universities, and the U.S. government. The farmers, well-educated and
entrepreneurial, both contribute to and benefit from the research that
takes place in the universities and firms, while the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) supports both the research and the farmers with funding, technical, and business assistance. Cotton growers in poor countries
are challenged not so much by the prospect of competing with Nelson
Reinsch, but by competing with the much larger and permanent advantages of this interlocking virtuous circle. Competing with Nelson is hard
enough, but competing with Nelson as he is teamed up with Texas Tech,
Monsanto, and the USDA is another matter entirely.
T
o the untrained eye they might be hard to see, but a close look at the
original seal of Texas Tech University shows 10 cotton bolls in the
form of a T, each boll representing one of 10 cotton-producing counties
that surround Lubbock (Figure 3.1). Indeed, Tech history buffs are quick
to point out that the university was founded to support the cotton and
textile industries. Today, though the University is widely acknowledged
to be one of the most advanced centers for cotton research in the world,
Tech is also a diversified national research university with distinguished
programs in many academic fields.
In 2002, Dr. David R. Smith was appointed the new Chancellor of
Texas Tech. Though Smith had spent a number of years in Texas, he was an
Ohio native and a graduate of Cornell. According to marketing consultants
hired by the new Chancellor, most people outside the region associated
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Figure 3.1 Original Seal of Texas Tech University.
(Photo Courtesy of Texas Techsan Magazine.)
Texas Tech with sports. Smith believed that Tech needed to show the
world a new image that reflected the University’s diverse academic and
research accomplishments. After all, the modern Texas Tech was about
more than cotton farming and football.
The Chancellor proposed a new “visual identity system” for Tech, and
in May 2005, he unveiled a new seal for the University. The seal had
an academic emphasis, including an open book and a scholarly-looking
key. In a nod to the University’s agricultural heritage, a branch of vines
decorated the bottom part of the seal. The cotton bolls were gone.2
An uproar followed. Generations of Tech alumni were bound to the
cotton industry: cotton farmers, cotton traders, cotton ginners, cotton
brokers, cotton scientists, cotton exporters. There were news conferences,
town meetings, and angry blogs. Eddie Smith, chairman of the local cotton
cooperative and a Tech alum, took umbrage not only at the removal of
the cotton bolls but at the addition of the vines (“Vines are weeds in my
cotton field,” he complained to the local newspaper).3 The alumni clung
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BACK AT THE REINSCH FARM
27
fast to their cotton tradition while the Chancellor argued that the time
had come for Tech to move on.
John Johnson of the Plains Cooperative Cotton Association was telling
me this story in late 2007:
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re gone now,” John told me.
“The cotton bolls?”
“No” John said, “the Chancellor and the marketing consultants.”
Tech’s new Chancellor, Dr. Kent Hance, was appointed in 2006. Hance
is a Tech alum from Dimmitt, Texas, a tiny cotton community 90 miles
and zero stoplights northwest of Lubbock. On the cover of the next issue
of the Techsan—Tech’s glossy alumni magazine—was a field of snow white
cotton bolls in a Texas sunset.
In many years of thinking about international trade, I had never
thought of tradition-bound and loyal university alumni as the basis for
comparative advantage. But there it is: Tech looks after cotton, cotton looks
after Tech, and Texas cotton is still winning in the global marketplace.
Today, it looks as though Nelson and Ruth Reinsch have arrived at
something of a comfortable place. They are still here, bringing in the
cotton each year, more than 50 years after they arrived. The virtuous circle
works pretty well on the Reinsch farm: the machines, the chemicals, the
GM seed, the cooperatives, the university research, and the government
programs. They can relax now, as Ruth kept telling me back in 2000. Only
now, eight years later, is Nelson giving this a try.
C.F. and Hattie Move West (and Bring a Tractor)
As cotton continued its westward push in the 1920s and 1930s, the
Reinsches moved, too. Although Texas had already become the nation’s
biggest cotton producer by 1890, at this time virtually all Texas cotton
was produced in the eastern part of the state, bordering on the plantation
South. By the 1930s, however, cotton began to take hold of the west Texas
region surrounding Lubbock. It was during this period that C.F. and Hattie
Reinsch arrived here with young Nelson, then a teenager.
The Reinsches come from a long line of early adopters and innovators.
Cotton farmers near Lubbock were starting from scratch. There was no
dismantling of the old ways to be accomplished, no old habits to break,
no Old South traditions to hold back progress. This freedom to start from
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
scratch undoubtedly explains why most innovations in cotton production
spread from west to east rather than from east to west. They still do.
In 2007, I met with Wally Darneille, the new president of the Plains
Cotton Cooperative Association in Lubbock. Wally had spent the previous
30 years in the cotton business in Alabama before moving to Lubbock in
2006 to assume his new role. Wally found a striking difference between
the cultures of the cotton business in west Texas and Alabama: He told me
that a change in practice that would have taken years in Mobile takes just
months in Lubbock.
In the Old South, mule farming in cotton production persisted into
the 1960s. In west Texas cotton country, it never started. When cotton
farmers began to settle near Lubbock—the mid-1920s—the gasoline tractor arrived with them. Whereas the Old South cotton farmers gradually
sold their mules and replaced them with tractors, cotton farming in west
Texas used tractors from the beginning. This led to drastically different
labor patterns in the two regions, differences that would have lasting
implications.
Richard Day has divided the mechanization of cotton production to
1960 into four stages (see Figure 3.2).4 In Stage 1, all land preparation and
planting is mule-powered, and weeding is done by hoe. Cotton is handpicked. In Stage 2, some cultivation and weeding is also mule-powered, but
land preparation is done by tractor. Cotton is handpicked. In Stage 3, the
use of fertilizer increases cotton yields, and more cultivation and weeding
is done by tractor implements, but cotton is still handpicked. Finally, in
Stage 4, cotton is mechanically harvested and only a small amount of hand
weeding remains in the spring and summer seasons.
Early tractor technology was capable only of the brute-strength chore
of breaking the land in winter and so did little to solve the ancient labor
problem of cotton production. There was little reason to buy a tractor for
land breaking, since this chore required the least labor. Therefore, there
was little incentive for Deep South cotton farmers to move from Stage 1
to Stage 2, since the labor force was still needed on demand for the rest of
the year for weeding, cultivating, and harvesting, and the mules would be
needed as well. Gradually, tractor implements became capable of the finer
tasks of weeding between rows, though weeds close to the cotton plant
still had to be pulled by hoe. On the other hand, growers at Stage 3 who
had started with tractors had every incentive to mechanize the harvest
or move to Stage 4, because of the highly uneven labor requirements
associated with harvesting.
Date: Jan 22, 2009
Time: 1:46 pm
BACK AT THE REINSCH FARM
STAGE 2
STAGE 1
60
60
30
30
0
0
60
30
30
0
0
fall
fall
summer
spring
spring
winter
summer
60
90
winter
120
120
90
STAGE 4
fall
STAGE 3
summer
90
spring
fall
summer
spring
winter
Labor Hours/Acre
90
winter
120
120
Labor Hours/Acre
e1c03
S T AG E 1: Mule-powered land breaking and cultivation. Extensive
hand weeding and hand picking.
S T AG E 2: Tractor land preparation in winter. Mule-powered cultivation.
Some hand weeding. Hand picking.
S T AG E 3: Tractor-powered land preparation and cultivation. Some hand weeding.
Hand picking.
S T AG E 4: Complete mechanization with a small amount of hand weeding.
C O T T O N L AB O R C Y C L E :
Winter:
Spring:
Summer:
Fall:
land breaking
planting, cultivation, weeding
weeding
harvest
Source: Adapted from Day, p. 440.
Figure 3.2 Manual Labor Requirements in Cotton Production
29
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THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Percentage of Work Done with Tractors
LAND BREAKING
STATE
1939
1946
PLANTING
1939
1946
CULTIVATING
1939
1946
ALABAMA
10
33
3
15
5
14
TEXAS
49
85
45
80
43
83
Source: Adapted from Street, p. 164.
Figure 3.3 Use of Tractor Power in Cotton Production,
1939 and 1946
The remarkable mechanical leapfrogging of the Reinsches and their
west Texas neighbors is shown in Figure 3.3. By 1946, over 80 percent
of Texas cotton production—including that on the Reinsch farm—had
reached Stage 3, while in the Deep South, this stage had been reached by
only 14 percent of cotton farmers. In 1946, more than 20 years after the
widespread introduction of the tractor into west Texas cotton country, 67
percent of Deep South cotton farms were still exclusively mule-powered.
The reluctance of Deep South cotton farmers to trade in their mules
for tractors in the move to Stage 3 was due largely to a faithful attachment
to tradition and reluctance to change, as well as to the economics of small
holdings. It was even due to an attachment to the animals themselves. In
speaking to his biographer, Ned Cobb seemed to remember each of his
mules—their colors, their names, their personalities, their quirks. To give
up mule farming was to relinquish a way of life, and many were loath to
do so, even as they clearly saw the future in front of them. Here is Ned
Cobb, speaking in the early 1970s:
I was a mule farmin’ man to the last; never did make a crop with a tractor.
I’ve owned some of the prettiest mules that ever walked the roads. Now there
ain’t none of my children, nary one by name, got a mule.5
Something was lost, of course, in the move from mules to tractors:
You couldn’t pet a tractor, or name it, and the machine had no personality
at all. Into the mishmash of obsolete Southern traditions went the art of
talking to a mule.6
Date: Jan 22, 2009
Time: 1:46 pm
BACK AT THE REINSCH FARM
31
1000
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998
1995
1990
1985
1980
1975
1970
1965
1960
1955
1950
1945
1940
1935
1930
1925
1920
1915
1910
1905
1900
1895
1890
1885
1880
1875
0
1870
e1c03
Yield
Source: USDA/NASS.
Figure 3.4 Cotton Yields (Pounds of Lint per Acre)
But while the Reinsches had nary a mule, either, there still was not
a satisfactory mechanical way to pull the fluffy white lint from the cotton plant. From the settling of west Texas cotton country, this was done
as it always had been, by men, women, and children pulling heavy sacks
between the rows. And there was more to pick. Thanks to the introduction of advanced fertilizers, cotton yields were increasing (see Figure 3.4).
While a traditional Deep South plantation might hope for 120 pounds per
acre, by the 1950s, the Reinsches were coaxing nearly a bale (480 pounds)
out of each acre planted in cotton. As Day’s estimates show then, the labor
necessary to harvest the crop from an acre of cotton had approximately
doubled from the pre–Civil War South. At the same time, labor requirements during the rest of the year were dropping dramatically. Rather than
solving the labor problem, the mechanization made the labor problem at
harvest even worse.
White Guys Get All Draggy-Like
Though public policies had ameliorated growers’ labor market risks since
the beginning, on the eve of World War II the federal government entered
the labor market directly to assume these risks on behalf of farmers. With
the December attack on Pearl Harbor and the resulting drain of agricultural
labor to the military, Congress charged the USDA with mobilizing women
and children to bring in the crop. Farmers across the country insisted,
e1c03
Date: Jan 22, 2009
32
Time: 1:46 pm
THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
however, that additional workers were needed, not just to harvest the
crop, but even to win the war. Once again, it seemed, civilization teetered
on the ability to get the cotton picked. Governor Olson of California
wrote to Washington in 1942:
Without a substantial number of Mexicans the situation is certain to be
disastrous to the entire victory program, despite our united efforts in the
mobilization of youth and city dwellers for emergency farm work.7
Congress responded i...