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Gerald Markowitz, Fraying Fabric: How Trade Policy and Industrial Decline Transformed America, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Page 392, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae167
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The textile and apparel industries in the United States have been at the forefront of industrial changes, both positive and negative, since the early days of the Republic. They played a crucial role in the early industrialization of New England in the 1830s. In the mid- to late ninteenth century, the industries initiated the movement of factories from New England to the South in search of lower wages and a racially divided work force. By the mid-twentieth century the textile industry was one of the first sectors of the economy to suffer the effects of deindustrialization and globalization. James C. Benton's Fraying Fabric is an important, incisive book that examines the roots of globalization in the trade policies that successive presidential administrations have pursued since the 1930s. In this richly researched book, Benton shows how, even during the New Deal, policy makers lowered trade barriers so that imports could increase, devastating the textile and apparel industries in the 1950s and 1960s, and, later, U.S. manufacturing as a whole. He concludes that U.S. trade policy since the 1930s has harmed the American working class, which, in turn, encouraged the development of right-wing populist working-class movements.
