Peachy the Magazine October November 2014 | Page 120
Last Man Standing
he wanted the battle to be fair. With
the arrival of the Dalian dresser, JBIII
knew he was up against a pernicious
opponent bigger even than his own
gumption. The dresser was a Chinese
knock-off of a Vaughan Bassett piece
which cost $235 to make in Galax. The
Chinese were wholesaling it for $100.
JBIII knew the government-subsidized
firms in China were selling products in
the U.S. for less than they cost to produce in China—“dumping” in a brazen
attempt to do nothing less than destroy
American furniture manufacturing.
JBIII had his hackles up now, retreat
was not an option, and he took on a
range of roles in order to combat this
lethal and very present threat. He
became a first rate sleuth, traveling to
China in the guise of an importer, as he,
his son Wyatt and a Taiwanese liaison
Still Making It In America, a co-production
of The Roanoke Times and Equal Voice
News. Video by Ryan Loew.
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named Rose sniffed out the remote production facility for the Dalian dresser
near the North Korean border. He also
became well-versed in esoteric trade
law and, with the help of handsomely
paid King & Spalding lawyers, discovered the legal redress for dumping:
the Tariff Act of 1930 and the godsend
Byrd Amendment, which put the duties
awarded not in the U.S. Treasury but in
the coffers of the injured companies.
Perhaps the most remarkable role JBIII
took on was as a charismatic industry
organizer who had an uncanny ability
to mobilize a fractured cartel and lead
one of the largest anti-dumping campaigns ever waged against China.
It turns out JBIII was a born general
who, had he been reared a generation
earlier, just may have given Patton a
run for his stars. His fervent leadership is all the more remarkable when
one considers the fraught milieu in
which he was operating, as garnering
the troops proved much more exacting than one might think. He needed
to have 51 percent of his industry sign
the petition, and yet many of those
he was soliciting had already closed
their plants and become importers and
thus were actually benefiting from the
dumping discounts, as were the retailers
who were JBIII’s customers. Many