by Richard Grossman

In 1628, King Charles I granted a charter to the Massachusetts Bay Company.  In 1664, the King sent his commissioners to see whether this company had been complying with the terms of the charter. The governors of the company objected, declaring that this investigation infringed upon their rights.  On behalf of the King, his commissioners responded:

"The King did not grant away his sovereignty over you when he made you a corporation.   When His Majesty gave you power to make wholesome laws, and to administer justice by them, he parted not with his right of judging whether justice was administered accordingly or not.  When His Majesty gave you authority over such subjects as live within your jurisdiction, he made them not YOUR subjects, nor YOU their supreme authority."[1]

From childhood, this King had been led to act as a sovereign should. What about us?

By means of the American Revolution, colonists took sovereignty from the English monarchy and invested it in themselves. Emerging triumphant from their struggle with King George and Parliament, they decided they would figure out how to govern themselves.  Alas, a minority of colonists were united and wealthy enough to define MOST of the human beings in the 13 colonies as property or as non-persons before the law and within the society, with no rights that a legal person was bound to respect.

Ours was a flawed sovereignty from the beginning.  Because of its moral failings and structural inequities, whole classes of people had to organize and struggle over centuries to gain recognition as part of the sovereign people--that is, they had to get strong enough as a class to define themselves and not let either people or institutions define them: African Americans, native peoples, women, debtors, indentured servants, immigrants...

To this day, many still must struggle to exercise the rights of persons, to be recognized as persons by law and by society.

Throughout this nation's history, there has always been plenty of genuflecting to democracy and self-governance.  But the further each generation gets from the Revolution, the less the majority act like sovereign people.  And when it comes to establishing the proper relationship between sovereign people and the corporations we create, recent generations seem to be at a total loss.

Yet, earlier generations were quite clear that a corporation was an artificial, subordinate entity with no inherent rights of its own, and that incorporation was a privilege bestowed by the sovereign.  In 1834, for example, the Pennsylvania Legislature declared:

"A corporation in law is just what the incorporation act makes it.  It is the creature of the law and may be moulded to any shape or for any purpose the Legislature may deem most conducive for the common good."[2]

During the 19th century, both law and culture  reflected this relationship between sovereign people and their institutions. People understood that they had a civic responsibility not to create artificial entities which could harm the body politic, interfere with the mechanisms of self-governance, assault their sovereignty.

They also understood that they did not elect their agents to positions in government to sell off the sovereignty of the people.  In other words, they were human beings who tried to act as sovereign people. One thing they did was to define the NATURE of the corporate bodies they created.  If we look at mechanisms of chartering--and at the language in corporate charters, state general incorporation laws and even state constitutions prior to the 20th century--we find precise, defining language that was often mandatory and prohibatory and self-executory in nature.

These mechanisms defined corporations by denying corporations political and civil rights, by limiting their size, capitalization and duration, by specifying their tasks, and by declaring the people's right to remove from the body politic any corporations which dared to rebel.

Here is an example of language which sovereign people--responding to the rise of corporations after the Civil War--placed in the California Constitution of 1879, and which appears in other state constitutions at about that time:

"Article I, section 2: All power is inherent in the people...

"Article I, section 10: The people shall have the right freely to assemble together to consult for the common good, to instruct their representatives...

"Article XII, section 8: The exercise of the right of eminent domain shall never be so abridged or construed as to prevent the Legislature from taking the property and franchises of incorporated companies and subjecting them to public use the same as the property of individuals, and the exercise of the police power of the State shall never be so abridged or construed as to permit corporations to conduct their business in such manner as to infringe the rights of individuals or the general well-being of the State."[3]

The principal mechanism which sovereign people used during the 19th century to assess whether their corporate creations were of a suitably subordinate nature was called QUO WARRANTO.  The QUO WARRANTO form of action, as attorney Thomas Linzey has noted,[4] is one of the most ancient of the prerogative writs.  In the words of the Delaware Court of Chancery, "the remedy of QUO WARRANTO extends back to time where of the memory of man runneth not to the contrary."

QUO WARRANTO simply means "by what authority?".  All monarchs understood how to use this tool in self-defense.  They realized that when a subordinate entity they had created acted "beyond its authority," it was guilty of rebellion and must be terminated.

Sovereignty is in our hands now, but the logic is the same: when the people running a corporation assume rights and powers which the sovereign had not bestowed, or when they assault the sovereign people, this entity becomes an affront to the body politic.   And like a cancer ravaging a human body, such a rebellious corporation must be cut out of our body politic.

During the first hundred years of these United States, people mobilized so that legislatures, attorneys general and judges would summon corporations to appear and answer to QUO WARRANTO. In 1890, the highest court in New York State revoked the charter of the North River Sugar Refining Corporation in a unanimous decision:

"The judgment sought against the defendant is one of corporate death. The state which created, asks us to destroy, and the  penalty invoked represents the extreme rigor of the law.  The life of a corporation is, indeed, less than that of the humblest citizen, and yet it envelopes great accumulations of property, moves and carries in large volume the business and enterprise of the people, and may not be destroyed without clear and abundant reason...

Corporations may, and often do, exceed their authority only where private rights are affected.  When these are adjusted, all mischief ends and all harm is averted.  But where the transgression has a wider scope, and threatens the welfare of the people, they may summon the offender to answer for the abuse of its franchise and the violation of its corporate duty... The abstract idea of a corporation, the legal entity, the impalpable and intangible creation of human thought, is itself a fiction, and has been appropriately described as a figure of speech...

The state permits in many ways an aggression of capital, but, mindful of the possible dangers to the people, overbalancing the benefits, keeps upon it a restraining hand, and maintains over it a prudent supervision, where such aggregation depends upon its permission and grows out of its corporate grants... the state, by the creation of the artificial persons constituting the elements of the combination and failing to limit and restrain their powers, becomes itself the responsible creator, the voluntary cause, of an aggregation of capital... the defendant corporation has violated its charter, and failed in the performance of its corporate duties, and that in respects so material and important as to justify a judgment of dissolution... Unanimous."[5]

Such a judgment should not be regarded as punishment of the corporation, but rather a vindication of the sovereign people. When our sovereignty has been harmed, we are the ones who must be made whole.  The concept is similar to what Hannah Arendt described in her book EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM (1963), writing about Nazi crimes against humanity.

"The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community as a whole, and not because, as in civil suits, damage has been done to individuals who are entitled to reparation.  The reparation effected [here] is of an altogether different nature; it is the body politic itself that stands in need of being 'repaired,' and it is the general public order that has been thrown out of gear and must be restored, as it were.  It is, in other words, the law, not the plaintiff, that must prevail."[6]

There is no shortage of court decisions affirming the sovereignty of the American people over corporate fictions, recognizing the need to restore the general public order.   In RICHARDSON V. BUHL, the Nebraska Supreme Court in the late 19th century declared:

"Indeed, it is doubtful if free government can long exist in a country where such enormous amounts of money are... accumulated in the vaults of corporations, to be used at discretion in controlling the property and business of the country against the interest of the public and that of the people, for the personal gain and aggrandizement of a few individuals."[7]

[1] Neil Berman, "A Short History of Corporations in  Massachusetts," written for POCLAD, October 1995, p. 2.

[2] Carter Goodrich, ed., THE GOVERNMENT AND THE ECONOMY, 1783-1861, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967, p. 44 (Report of the Packer Committee of the Pennsylvania Legislature).

[3] Excerpts from the "California Constitution of 1879," selected by the author, March 1996 (POCLAD memo).

[4] Thomas Linzey, et al., Brief in Support of Motion for Peremptory Judgment, COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND V. THOMAS CORBETT, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF PA ET AL., CIV. NO. 1074 M. D. 1996, p.[4], citing WILMINGTON CITY RAILWAY CO. V. PEOPLE'S
RAILWAY CO., 47A, 245, 248 (Del. Ch. 1900).

[5] PEOPLE V. NORTH RIVER SUGAR REFINING CORP., 24 N. E. 834  (1890).

[6] Hannah Arendt, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM, New York: Viking Penguin, 1977.

[7] RICHARDSON V. BUHL, 43 N. W. Rep. 1102.

PART 2

In the late 19th centry, the Supreme Court of Georgia, in RAILROAD CO. V. COLLINS, wrote:

All experience has shown that large accumulations of property in the hands likely to keep it intact for a long period of time are dangerous to the public weal.  Having perpetual succession, any  kind of corporation has peculiar facilities for such accumulations, and most governments have found it necessary to exercise caution in their grants of corporate charters.  Even religious corporations, professing and in the main, truly, nothing but the general good, have proven obnoxious to this objection, so that in England it was long ago found necessary to restrict them in their powers of acquiring real estate. Freed, as such bodies are, from the sure bounds--the grave--to the schemes of individuals they are able to add field to field, and power to power, until they become entirely too strong for that society which is made up of those whose plans are limited by a single life."[1]

FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF BOSTON V. BELOTTI:

Justices White, Brennan and Marshall, dissenting in a 1978 case,

"It has long been recognized,  however, that the special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amount of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process... The State need not permit its own creation to consume it."[2]

Chief Justice Rehnquist, dissenting in the same case: "...the blessing of potentially perpetual life and limited liability... so beneficial [sic--R.G.] in the economic sphere, poses special dangers in the political sphere."[3]

A great  achievement of corporations, as they set out towards the end of the 19th century to transform the law and recreate themselves, was to replace basic tools of sovereign  people--chartering, defining incorporation laws, "by what authority" proceedings and charter revocation--with regulatory and administrative law, new legal doctrines and fines as corporate punishment.  Many people of that time understood that these changes amounted to a counterrevolution, and so they resisted with great passion and energy.

Farmers and workers were not willing to concede that the corporate form would define work and money and progress and efficiency and productivity and unions and justice and ethical conduct and sustainability and food and harmful and reasonable behaviour.  They were not willing to concede that corporations should have the rights and privileges of persons. So they organized, educated, resisted. They were crushed by giant corporations' ability to use state and federal government to take rights away from people and bestow them upon corporations.

Over time, corporations were able to claim for themselves rights and privileges taken from the sovereign people via violence with favorable decisions by federal judges.   Corporations were conceded personhood, and a long list of civil and political rights such as free speech, and property rights such as the right to define and control investment, production, and the organization of work.

By the beginning of the 20th century, corporations had become sovereign and they had turned people into consumers, or workers, or whatever the corporation of the moment chose to define humans as.

Without a clear understanding of history, most citizen efforts against corporations in this century have been struggles against the symptoms of corporate domination which we have waged in regulatory and administrative law arenas.

But these are NOT arenas of sovereignty.  These are stacked-deck proceedings, where people, communities and nature are fundamentally disadvantaged to the constitutional rights of corporations.  Here, we cannot demand "by what authority" has corporation X engaged in a pattern of behavior which constitutes an assault upon the sovereign people?   Here, we cannot declare a corporation ULTRA VIRES, or "beyond its authority."  To the contrary, regulatory and administrative law only enables us to question specific corporate behaviors, one at a time, usually after the harm has been done... over and over and over again.

In these regulatory and administrative proceedings, both the law and the culture concede to the corporation rights, privileges and powers, which earlier generations knew were illegitimate for corporations to possess.  In addition, in these proceedings, the corporation has the rights of natural persons: a human and a corporation meet head on, in a "fair fight."

Today, our law and culture bestow our sovereignty on corporations.  So do most of our own citizen organizations dedicated to justice and environmental protection and worker rights and human rights. Consequently, our organizations use their energy and resources to study each corporation as if it were unique, and to contest corporate acts one at a time, as if that could change the nature of corporations.

Folks relentlessly tally corporate assaults, study the regulatory agencies and try to strengthen them.  We try to make corporate toxic chemicals and corporate radiation and corporate energy and corporate banking and corporate agriculture and corporate transportation, corporate buying of elections, and corporate writing of legislation, and corporate education of our judges and corporate distorting of our schools, a little less bad.

Isn't it an old story?  People create what looks to be a nifty machine, a robot, called the corporation.  Over time the robots get together and overpowerd the people.  They redesign themselves and reconstruct law and culture so that people fail to remember they created the robots in the first place, that the robots are machines and not alive.  For a century, the robots propagandize and indoctrinate each generation of people so they grow up believing that robots are people too, gifts of God and Mother Nature; that they are inevitable and the source of all that is good.  How odd that we have been so gullible, so docile, so obedient.

Isn't it odd that we don't remember who We the People are?  How sovereign people should regard ourselves, how sovereign people should act?  We need to realize what power and authority we possess, and how we can use it TO DEFINE THE NATURE OF CORPORATIONS, so that we do not have to mobilize around each and every corporate decision that affects our communities, our lives, the planet.

In the face of what we experience about corporations, of what we know to be true, why are so many people so obedient?  Why do we hang on to the hope that the corporation can be made socially responsible?  Isn't this an absurd notion? After all, organizations cannot be responsible. This is just not a relevant concept, because a principal purpose of corporations is to protect the managers, directors and stockholders from responsibility for what their corporations do.

But only people can be responsible.  How?  By defining ourselves as sovereign people so that we then can define all the corporate bodies that we create (governmental, business, educational, charitable, and civic).

We the People are the ones who must be accountable.  We are not accountable when we create monster robots which run rampant in our communities and which, in our names, sally forth the across the world to wreak havoc upon other places and upon other people's lf-governance.

We are not being socially responsible or civically accountable when we don't act like sovereign people.

We are not being socially responsible or civically accountable when we play in corporate arenas by corporate rules.

We are not being socially responsible or civically accountable when we permit our agents in government to bestow our sovereignty upon machines.

We are not being socially responsible or civically accountable when we organize our communities and then go to corporate executives and to the hacks who run corporate front groups and ask them to please cause a little less harm; or when we offer them even more rewards for being a little less dominating.

Sovereign people do not beg of, or negotiate with, subordinate entities which we created.  Sovereign people INSTRUCT subordinate entities. Sovereign people DEFINE all entities we create.  And when a subordinate entity violates the terms of its creation, and undermines our ability to govern ourselves, we are required to move in swiftly and accountably to cut this cancer out of the body politic.

With such deeds do we honor the millions of people who struggled before us to wrest power from tyrants, to define themselves in the face of terror and violence.  And we make all struggles for justice and democracy easier by weakening the ability of corporations to make the rules, and to rule over us.

Some might say this is not a practical way to think and act.   Why?

Because corporations will take away our jobs?  Our food? Our toilet paper?  Our hospitals? Because we don't know how to run our towns and cities and nation without global corporations?

Because they will run away to another state, to another country?

Because the Supreme Court has spoken? 

Because philanthropic corporations won't give us money?

Because it's scary? 

Because it's too late to learn to act as sovereign people?

Because it is not realistic for people across the nation and around the world to take away the civil and political rights of all corporations, to take the property rights and real property corporations have seized from human being and from the Earth?

Yeah, and it IS realistic to keep conceding sovereign powers to corporations, to keep fighting industrial corporations and banking corporations and telemedia corporations and resource extraction corporations and public relations corporations and transportation corporations and educational corporations and insurance corporations and agribusiness corporations and energy corporations and stock market corporations, one at a time forever and ever?

On January 10, 1997, President William Jefferson Clinton sent a letter to the mayor of Toledo, Ohio.  The mayor had asked the President for help in getting the Chrysler Corporation to build a new Jeep factory within Toledo city limits to replace the ancient one which Chrysler Corporation was closing. The President of the United States, leader of the most powerful nation the world has ever known, elected head of a government always eager to celebrate the uniqueness of its democracy to the point of forcing it upon other nations, wrote:

"...As I am sure you know, my Administration cannot endorse any potential location for the new production site.  My Intergovernmental Affairs staff will be happy to work with you once the Chrysler Board of Directors has made its decision..."[4]

Our President may not have a clue, but We the People did not grant away our sovereignty when we made Chrysler into a corporation.  When we gave the Chrysler Corporation authority to manufacture automobiles, we made the people of Toledo not its subjects, nor Chrysler Corporation their supreme authority.

How long shall We the People, the sovereign people, stand hat in hand outside corporate boardrooms waiting to be told our fate?

How long until we instruct our representatives to do their constitutional duty? How long until WE become responsible...until WE become accountable, to our forebears, to ourselves, to our children, to other peoples and species and to the Earth?

[1] RAILROAD CO. V. COLLINS, 40 GA 582.

[2] FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF BOSTON V. BELOTTI 435 US 765 (1978).

[3] The same source as Note 2, above.

[4] Letter from Bill Clinton to the Honorable Carleton S. Finkbiner, January 10, 1997, printed in the TOLEDO BLADE, 25 January 1997.

One Example of how Corporate Rules Our Life.

The Life and Death of an American Factory

DURHAM, N.C. - Mebane looms up as a crossroads town in North Carolina's Piedmont region, where traffic roars along I-85 between Durham and Greensboro, old Southern cigarette and textile manufacturing cities. Here, history bears down on you.

Across the street from the railroad tracks - the iron link that forged a New South with noisy factories in the rural woods after the Civil War - sits the hulk of the once-vibrant White Furniture factory, "the South's oldest maker of fine furniture." The downtown factory closed in 1992.

Now Mebane (population: 5,522) is being plowed under for new suburban homes as North Carolina's technological center, Research Triangle Park, expands its bedroom communities. Like much of America, Mebane appears to be booming, but, in reality, says Cathy Davidson, Duke University's incoming vice-provost for interdisciplinary studies, the town has been swept into today's economic whirlwind.

In a new documentary book Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory, on which Davidson collaborated with DoubleTake magazine photographer Bill Bamberger, she writes, "There are many reasons to care, not least that the story of White Furniture Company is a study in miniature of work - what it means when you have it, what it means when you don't."

Four years in the making, Closing uses archival materials, first-hand accounts, 28 oral-history tapes and dozens of photographs to lay bare post-industrialization's effects on American workers at all levels, from company president to factory-floor worker.

The story behind White's closing - the family-run business, the hostile takeover, the buyout terms, the absentee corporate raider, the drive for higher profits, the speedup of work, the plant's shutdown, the shattered lives, the stock market above all else -- "is an allegory of what's happening to all of us," says Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney professor of English.

Davidson hopes Closing will contribute to a new literature of our post-industrial age, much like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men revealed the hidden costs of the industrial revolution. She has written or edited more than a dozen books, including The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995) with Linda Wagner-Martin.

Mebane lies at the heart of this country's $20 billion furniture industry, located in nearby High Point, home of the world's largest furniture mart, the annual International Home Furnishings Exposition. Before White's closing, 203 Mebane residents - white, black, Hispanic; young and old; male and female -- worked side by side at the factory. "There was an incredible camaraderie, and it crossed racial lines," Davidson says. "Workers depended on one another in a very intimate way, and could share a sense of community and town pride.

"People were proud of their skill. They were proud of making furniture that most of them could not themselves afford to buy. They felt like there was a kind of immortality in what they were creating. When the White Furniture Company shut down, a part of their sense of work, their sense of craft, their sense of longevity, their sense of pride, was destroyed.

"I asked them what they thought happened there, and I found most of the workers had a far more sophisticated sense of the larger, national scope of what was happening to them and the economics of downsizing than I had at the beginning of the process.

"From the CEO down to the manual laborer, everyone felt violated by what happened at the plant."

Unlimited access to any working factory, much less one undergoing a shut-down, is unprecedented, says photographer Bamberger, who spent four months inside White Furniture Company photographing daily life at the factory and, ultimately, layoff meetings and the plant's dismantling. Bamberger, who teaches photography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says: "I was in the plant day in and day out, and often would stay late into the night. I came to know many of the workers as friends. I just feel a tragic loss. I live in this community, and pass by the plant everyday. I am haunted by its silence."

Today, Davidson says, one in four Americans has experienced a lay-off, either directly or indirectly. The author of 36 Views of Mt. Fuji (1993), Davidson worked in Japan in the 1980s, when citizens viewed the overheated stock market as "the bubble economy. The Japanese warned: "It can't last. It can't last."

In academia where she works, the English professor says, she has watched as full-time jobs have grown scarcer: "In a deep sense, I identify with the White Furniture people. In this new era, which many people call post-industrialization, we've lost so much, especially a sense of job security. Even people who've never lost a job feel the effects of downsizing in the form of an almost universal work speed-up. Anxiety and overwork are the indirect psychic costs of downsizing."

In Closing, Davidson profiles six laid-off White Furniture workers. Six people, six points of view, but no villain, she says, except for bank-lending practices, perhaps, and a U.S. tax system changed in the 1980s, during the Bush and Reagan administrations, to allow large corporations to assume greater debt and accelerate capital depreciation, thereby profiting from corporate losses as a result of buyouts, hostile takeovers and corporate mergers. Davidson says, "The big issue for White workers was: 'Did Clyde Engle and his conglomerate Sunstates buy the White Furniture Company in order to close it down. "Was it just a tax write-off?"

Like any story, this one has a beginning, middle and end:

Stephen A. White V, whom Davidson describes as "Harvard-educated, patrician, civic-minded," served as company president before the buyout. His two uncles founded White's in 1881 (Mebane incorporated that same year). White's reputation for high-quality furniture grew in 1906 with a commission from the U.S. Army for its Panama Canal outpost and in 1912 from millionaire Edwin Grove for his soon-to-be legendary Grove Park Inn in Asheville. Throughout its history, White's made expensive reproduction antiques, with many finishing touches done by hand.

According to Davidson, employees were given autonomy and responsibility, with any worker able to stop the line to correct a flaw. Rarely were people laid off. Few people quit. Everybody was part of a company "family." Although White's smacked of Southern paternalism, people found it a decent place to work. Workers never unionized, the factory operated on a cash-and-carry basis, and everybody celebrated everyone else's birthday and could draw, when needed, from a Hard Luck Fund.

But time came for a third generation of White family members to take over the plant. Tensions mounted over Stephen White's successor. Pressed by foreign competition, the plant lost money in 1982 and 1983, going into debt for the first time since the Great Depression. Family members began to worry about their inheritance. There was disagreement over who would operate the factory.

By 1985, however, White's was out of debt and making a small profit. It boasted $300,000 in savings, a stack of unfilled orders, a huge inventory, more than $1 million in accounts receivable and an over-funded workers' pension account. Enter Chicago-based venture capitalist Clyde Engle and his Sunstates, parent company to furniture-maker Hickory Manufacturing Corp., which Engle dominated with a 93 percent share. In May, Davidson reports, Engle plucked off White's for a rumored $5.1 million.

Shareholders - all White family members - favored the buy-out, 54 percent to 46 percent. A local civil-rights-attorney-turned-businessman, Martin Eakes, proposed an employee buyout at the last minute, but the idea failed. Once sales papers were signed, Stephen White's retirement became mandatory. Hickory fired the rest of White's management team. After that, says worker Ed Clayton, White's "went downhill in a hurry."

Margaret Holmes White worked her way up from billing clerk at White's to become executive assistant to the president. Margaret married Stephen White in 1989, after her ailing parents died and he became a widower. She worked at the factory for 37 years, taking only two days off for her parents' funerals and two days off for her honeymoon. In Closing, she describes Hickory's take-over and the subsequent production speedup: "They were putting stuff in the box that wasn't all together. They mortgaged everything that wasn't nailed down and what was nailed down, too. We were forever having bankers coming in to evaluate everything and see if we could borrow more money."

James Gilland worked at White's for 41 years. He ended his career as upholstery department supervisor. He credits Hickory's chief financial officer, Mike Robinson, with straightening out salary inequities left over from White-family management. Hickory also trimmed the workforce, brought in newer, more efficient equipment, raised salaries and

improved benefits. But in addition, it speeded up the line, putting pressure on workers to lower quality and increase production. Says Gilland, "When Hickory took over, if it was off an eighth of an inch, why that didn't make any difference, we'd just cut the drawer a little bit and make it fit." He figures Hickory got White's for a song: "They didn't buy it, they stole it."

Don McCall was recruited by Hickory in 1990 to head the plant's sanding department. Three years later, he helped shut the factory down. "I was in Vietnam," he says. "I closed a factory. I don't ever want to be a manager again." Today, he's back in his hometown of Brevard, N.C., where he cares for his ailing mother while working the second-shift line at the nearby Frigidaire plant. McCall says he will never again lay off another human being: "That's what a manager does. You get paid an awful lot of money to do the dirty work...."

He says Hickory made a smart business move, but he believes the human cost was too high: "You could see them the last time they hit that clock, and it's just like, you know, their feet dropped on the floor and their hearts." Alternately, he blames the new economy, Hickory, the U.S. tax system and the venture capitalist who was responsible for the buyout: "All he cares about is the dollar bill. He didn't see the people. ... He never had to look at their faces."

These days, McCall questions what it means when supervisors, instead of training and supporting employees, pull the rug out from under them. He believes White's operated in the black until Hickory closed it down. (The shutdown, Davidson reports, cost $2 million.) Workers sealed their fate by working too hard, McCall says, thus earning a profit for their new owners: "I think the first couple of years basically it was a tax write-off, or it was supposed to be. I don't think they expected to make money. You make money by losing money."

Annette Foust Patterson, a divorced mother of three and grandmother, was one of White's only women to work in its rough mill - where raw lumber is stripped, sorted, cut and planed. Today, she works two jobs, but can't make ends meet: "I have been taught to work for what I want. That's the way I was raised up." But lately, she says, she has considered welfare, even foolishly considered suicide. She laments, "I think they lost a piece of Mebane when they closed down."

Robert Riley became White's first African-American supervisor, heading the shipping department. He joined the company when it was segregated (African-Americans labored in the lumberyard). Riley served on the skeleton crew that closed the plant: "As they were tearing this place apart and selling it off, it was like they were tearing us apart inside and selling us off in pieces." Today, at 59, he has two jobs: He drives a van during the day and works at Wal-Mart at night. He says the only other available work is temp work. Riley's pension is frozen until he turns 62. His wife worries he'll die of a heart attack before then. Riley believes Clyde Engle bought White's to get the name, capitalizing on the factory's reputation for quality. (Hickory was renamed Hickory-White.)

Throughout April, Davidson will travel on a nine-city book tour, joined by Bamberger in New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Raleigh, N.C. This summer, Raleigh's North Carolina Museum of Art will open an exhibit of Bamberger's photographs (July 26-Oct. 18). The museum will tour the exhibit to The Light Factory in Charlotte (Nov. 21 to Jan. 17, 1999), the Yale University Art Gallery (Feb. 9 to June 13), and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (summer 1999). An earlier exhibit in Mebane attracted 1,400 people, including many laid-off White furniture workers.

Support for the Closing project came from Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, the Lyndhurst Foundation, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Southern Oral History Program and Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the North Carolina Humanities Council.

All oral-history interviews, taped with former White Furniture factory workers and Mebane townspeople, were conducted under the auspices of the Southern Oral History Program. The interviews were completed over a two-year period.

Bamberger calls the White Furniture factory, sitting quietly at the corner of Fifth and Center streets: "Two hundred and forty thousand square feet of emptiness." Hickory-White declared bankruptcy in 1996, and was subsequently sold. Meanwhile, White's old-time president, Stephen White V, whose uncles started the business, died on Sept. 29, 1995. His friends and family buried him wearing his 50-year White employee pin.

 [ Click here for Feb. posting ]