Making It In America (with Rachel Slade)

The rise, fall, and potential resurrection of U.S. manufacturing.

When the Archduke was assassinated in 1914, the United States was ill-prepared to go to war. The country had been rapidly industrializing since the end of the Civil War, and in 1910 had surpassed Great Britain as the largest industrial power, with over 35 percent of the world’s manufacturing capacity. But the U.S. lagged behind the European powers with respect to logistics.

“I mean, we were fairly good at making things for ourselves, but the idea of, like, actually having a robust export economy was a new thing after World War One,” says Rachel Slade, author of the forthcoming book Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way) and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “We didn’t have any ships to export things during World War One, and our infrastructure. . . we didn’t have a highway system, obviously—that came much later—but also our railroads were kind of a mess, because they had all been developed by various industrialists, various entrepreneurs.” There was no uniformity. Railway tracks had different gauges. And where the trains actually went was often a matter of some rich guy’s whim.

“And so it was really a patchwork system of logistics, which becomes really, really important when you’re trying to prepare for war,” Slade says. “Like, that is a limiting factor. So the fact that the United States could actually pull it together, and pull together an army, and go over to Europe, was a miracle.”

It was a miracle that the Germans did not foresee. As Hew Strachan writes in The First World War, “the creation of a mass army had two short-term consequences likely to work against the rapid dispatch of the American Expeditionary Force overseas: first, it required the existing army to become the cadre for the new, and second, the latter was likely to commandeer the war production of American factories carefully nurtured by Britain and France.” Erich Ludendorff, the general calling the shots in Berlin, calculated that by the time the U.S. got its shit together, it would be 1919, and by then, Germany would have already prevailed.

But the United States did get its shit together—way sooner than Ludendorff, or even our own military planners, thought. And after the First World War, the nation’s manufacturing capacity, as well as its logistical capabilities, only grew. During both world wars, and for the first two decades of the Cold War as well, the U.S. was the top dog.

Things began to shift after the Second World War. Tasked with rebuilding Japan, but not wanting it to become a great military power again any time soon, Washington made a conscious decision to boost the Japanese economy by outsourcing the manufacturing of apparel and textiles—the easiest products to make. Cotton grown in the South would be exported to Japan—and, later, to other countries, many in Asia—which would use the raw materials to make our shirts, dresses, and bedsheets. The oft-decried loss of manufacturing, then, was not initially an accident, but a calculated move to jump-start the Japanese economy and prevent another war.

And it worked! The problem was that, over time, all that outsourcing created an extreme imbalance. As it stands now, U.S. manufacturing is relatively weak, union membership is puny, and, as we all saw firsthand during the pandemic, a lot of our stuff—not just clothes, but electronics and pharmaceuticals—comes from other countries. China today controls over 28 percent of the global manufacturing output; the U.S. comes in a distant second place, at 16.8 percent.

Slade’s book is an examination of a remarkable company called American Roots, based in Maine, which makes hoodies and other apparel, using only U.S. materials. The owners of American Roots wanted to prove that yes, this could still be done: “By providing high-quality, durable clothing made from 100% American-sourced materials by Union labor in America, we are proving that success does not have to come at the expense of workers or the quality of the products they make.”

Slade, for her part, sees the resurrection of U.S. manufacturing as vital to our economic future. “We would be having a different conversation if we weren’t so dependent on the Chinese goods—Chinese-manufactured goods,” she tells me. “And ultimately that’s where I land with Making It In America: we can’t even begin to be a world power, I think, in the sense that we would like to see ourselves, unless we have some capacity to make all the things that we use every day—not just computer chips, not just cars, but, like, everything.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S5 E14: Making it in the USA, or, Building Back Better (with Rachel Slade)

Where have all the manufacturing jobs gone? Is it possible to bring them back? Can an American manufacturing company exist in today’s market? Greg Olear talks to the best-selling author and journalist Rachel Slade, whose forthcoming new book, “Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way),” explores these and other ideas. They also discuss unions, Reagan, kaizen, floating capital in emerging markets, work culture, China, American Roots, and the genius of “Animal House.” Plus: a new support group.

Visit Rachel’s website:
https://www.rachelslade.net/

Pre-order her new book:
https://www.amazon.com/Making-America-Impossible-Manufacture-U-S/dp/0593316886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

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Photo credit: Pixabay.