Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)

by Rachel Slade

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Detailing the hit that American manufacturing, shipping and labor took through the pandemic, Rachel Slade explores what was lost, why and what it would truly take to bring it back. This is a moving and intimate narrative on a timely subject written with excellent reportage.

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




Ben Waxman spent a decade organizing workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin, fighting for men and women at a time when national support for unions had sunk to an all-time low. Frustrated with the state of the world, he lands back in his hometown of Portland, Maine, to rethink his life. There, he meets Whitney Reynolds, a restless bartender eager for a challenge. In each other, they see a better future, a version of the American dream they can build together.

Ben and Whitney set out to prove that union-made, all-American-sourced apparel manufacturing is possible in the twenty-first century. Their quest takes us across the nation and across time, from the cotton fields of Mississippi to the hollowed-out garment district in New York City to a family-owned zipper company in Los Angeles to the enormous knit-and-dye houses in North Carolina. While battling anti-immigrant hostility, trade wars, and a global pandemic, they grapple with the true meaning of made-in-USA in our globalized world.

Making It in America offers a fascinating new take on free-trade economics and manufacturing history. Woven through the Waxmans’ journey is the essential story of textiles and their critical role in shaping capitalism. It was the demand for cheap cloth that sparked the industrial revolution. It was the brutal conditions in New England's textile mills that first drove workers to organize. Making It in America is a deeply personal account of how individual choices shape a nation. Each touchpoint casts a rare, compassionate look at what came before, where we are now, and where we’re going—through the people, places, and ecologies that produce the fabric of our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593316894
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	949,292
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

RACHEL SLADE is the acclaimed author of Into the Raging Sea, a national bestseller, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction. She spent a decade in the city magazine trenches at Boston—first as the design editor, ultimately as executive editor. Her editing and writing have won national awards in civic journalism, reporting, criticism, and reader service. She has been a lecturer in political science and journalism at Tufts University. She splits her time between Brookline, Massachusetts, and Rockport, Maine.

Read an Excerpt

MAINE ROOTS


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

Table of Contents

Preamble: The Traffic Jam That Never Ends xi

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

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/27/2023

Journalist Slade (Into the Raging Sea) offers an incisive look at the history and current state of American manufacturing. Using as a lens the story of Ben and Whitney Waxman—a young couple with backgrounds in union organizing and working low-paid jobs who set out in 2015 to found an entirely American-made hoodie company in Portland, Maine—she charts the once stalwart American garment industry’s slow death, from billionaire attacks on the early unions in the 1930s, through international trade agreements such as NAFTA. She shows how the latter have allowed multinational corporations to move production to countries with fewer rights and protections for workers or the environment, thereby lowering their costs and undercutting American-based manufacturing with cheap imports. Tracking the Waxmans’ difficulties sourcing American-made cotton fleece, drawstrings, zippers, and grommets in this depleted manufacturing landscape, Slade delves into the histories of the companies they eventually find to supply them, some of which have been family owned for over 100 years. The Waxmans’ company, American Roots, has transformed their community, according to Slade, who writes that every hoodie made “supports one-hundred-plus Maine workers.” This galvanizing call for Americans “to start making things for themselves” serves as both a sweeping report on a globalized industry and a practical road map for aspiring small-scale manufacturers. Readers will feel invigorated. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

One of Cosmopolitan’s 14 Best Nonfiction Books Coming Out in 2024
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Pick in Business and Economics
One of the Next Big Idea Book Club’s 40 Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in 2024
One of the Financial Times’ Best Business Books of the Month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Readers of this engaging story will find themselves rooting for the plucky couple . . . an uplifting Horatio Alger story.”
—The Christian Science Monitor

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

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

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

“A knowledgeable indictment of failed American trade and labor policies, Rachel Slade's timely book, powered by her admirable skills as a storyteller, also provides a much-needed glimpse of a potentially fairer, more equitable future for American workers and consumers.”
—Philip Dray, author of There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America

From the Publisher

Natalie Duke perfectly delivers the tone of Slade's concise deep dive into how America came to reject domestic manufacturing and the long-term damage that resulted. Listeners may be familiar with how union membership has bottomed out, the ripple effects of so-called free-trade agreements, and the explosive growth of online shopping. Slade's audiobook brings this damaging history together--with infuriating results. In Duke's performance one hears compassionate notes when she recounts stories of decimated communities and families. Her tone shifts appropriately to subtle ire when covering the rising xenophobia that targets immigrant workers, many of whom were the very people who kept the economy afloat during the pandemic. The result is required listening for those who want to understand how our nation arrived at this juncture. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2024 - AudioFile

2023-09-16
What does “Made in the U.S.A.” mean these days? One company’s odyssey suggests an answer.

There aren’t many success stories in 21st-century American manufacturing, but Slade, a journalist and bestselling author of Into the Raging Sea, has found one: an apparel firm called American Roots, founded by idealistic Ben and Whitney Waxman. They were determined to compete against cheap imports while paying their workers at good rates and with union benefits to make vests, shirts, and hoodies. When the pandemic hit, the firm pivoted to produce face shields and other protective equipment, reconfiguring their factory so workers could operate safely. The American Roots story shows that manufacturing in the U.S. is alive and deserves support, which makes it unfortunate that Slade often wanders away from the primary narrative. The text meanders for 100 pages before the company is established; after that, the author takes numerous detours to deliver diatribes on misleading official statements about masking made during the pandemic and “the demonization of unions, wrapped in the new mystical language of free trade.” Granted, a certain amount of background information and cultural context is welcome, but the amount of it here raises the question as to what the book is really about. Slade is on firmer ground when she examines the problems of running the company, from haggling with fabric suppliers and finding skilled employees to monitoring the bottom line. It was a constant battle between operational efficiency and social objectives, but eventually, the Waxmans found a balance. By the end of the book, American Roots is poised for the next step in its growth path. If Slade had been willing to tell the story in straightforward terms, this would have been a more readable, engaging book.

A sometimes illuminating but uneven examination of the current state of American manufacturing.

Kirkus Reviews