Peachy the Magazine October November 2014 | Page 117

BOOKS

wrote to his infant namesake that very
night, just as the floodwaters mounted
and threatened to destroy the very
legacy he wished to bestow upon his
grandson. Decades later, when family
loyalties shifted and JBIII was stripped
of his birthright and left Bassett for
good, locals said that the flooding of
the town the night of his birth was a
prescient sign that the heir would be
pushed out of Bassett, as surely as if
the infant had been caught in the frigid
rapids of the Smith River that stormy
Depression-era night.
The flood scene described above is
recounted in Beth Macy’s enthralling
new book, Factory Man, and the storm
might be considered, in literary parlance, an example of pathetic fallacy, a
term coined by John Ruskin to describe
the manner in which writers attribute
human qualities to inanimate objects
of nature in order to give atmospheric
nuance to their works. Surely Macy must
be employing this and sundry other literary devices, for how else could she craft
a tale so fanciful? And yet her book is a
biography not a novel, and is built upon
facts, not metaphors. Factory Man is the
product of years of painstaking research,
and the flood, as well as the hurricane
and the manifold infernos which are also
described in the book, were not conjured

by the author to heighten the tableau
she presents. Rather incredibly, they
are events which actually occurred and
defined the life of John D. Bassett III.
Nor did the author contrive the
stranger-than-fiction tales of feudal
infighting, dynastic power struggles,
miscegenation, grave-robbing, corporate incest, Machiavellian trade
maneuvers, Chinese robber barons and
K Street political intrigue which are
relayed in the book. Macy takes the fodder of JBIII’s life and weaves a tale that
is positively Shakespearean in its sheer
drama. The story stretches from the
foothills of Appalachia to burgeoning
factories in rural China, from congressional back rooms to ex-pat enclaves
in Indonesia. It spans a long and
steady century of ascension, as Bassett
Furniture Industries became the largest
manufacturer of wood furniture in the
world. And it relays how quickly the
“waltz of cheap labor” lured Bassett
and almost all other furniture manufacturers to sign on to the “dance card” of
the Chinese, shuttering their domestic
plants, abandoning manufacturing
and becoming importers and retailers. Left in their wake as wallflowers
were legions of unemployed, unskilled
factory workers and entire company
towns reeling in desperation.
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