Ostensibly "Factory Man: One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local – and Helped Save an
American Town" by Bowling Green State University graduate Beth Macy focuses on the life, 
character, family, struggles, heroics and eccentricities of one man – John D. Basset III.  It does.
His battles with self, family, outsourcing, the federal government and his own furniture industry provide
an entertaining and valorous thread. JB III finds wisdom and his management style embodied in the
training of two bird dogs named Jill and Cindy.
The book also offers tales worthy of Aesop, a sociological history of an particular American  culture, an
industry and a fast, lucid course in Economics 404 – World Globalization and its effect on real people.

A chilling look at Chinese entrepreneurs, and the complex racial entanglements of the Confederate South
are part of the story. This juicy tale began a hundred years ago with John D. Bassett and his bride
Pocahontas. Family entanglements? Brother CC married Miss Pokey’s sister Rosie. War in furniture land
was guaranteed. Macy gleefully untangled three generations of lineage at the public library and
published the findings in a Roanoke-Times story. A Bassett granddaughter wrote a thank you note; she
never had been able to figure out all her relationships.
Above all Factory Man is a good read that gallops along – impossible to put down. It is the history of
the American Furniture Industry, its dominant family, founded by John D. Bassett and his brother C.C.,
and the cosmos of real people that lived within their feudal realm.
It is also a tale of two towns. Bassett, VA named after the family, was once so prosperous and fully
employed, that one left home to apply for a job, lunch box in hand, expecting to eat lunch at work. Once
employing thousands, it is a now a ghost town of burnt and leveled factories. The bosses surrendered the
factories and jobs to import prices, and now make their money retailing foreign made furniture.
Galax harbors two embattled branches of the family business. In 1983 the entrenched Vaughn, Higgins
cousins employed 2,200 and  snubbed John Bassett III when he arrived to take over a moribund
Vaughn/Bassett plant. Today the once entrenched family employs forty people to manage their furniture
import business in a new, oversized building. JB III employs 750 workers in his nearby profitable state
of the art furniture plant. Not production like the old days, but some people are working and the
American Furniture industry is not yet dead. JB III salvaged a little
The story of the Chinese domination of furniture production has a diverse cast of characters. The story
of a remarkable Chinese family gives new meaning to "marrying well."
Born in China, Wharton educated Larry Moh, his Yale Chemist Ph.D and Harvard MBA Taiwanese brothers-law
used brains and knowledge, not just cheap labor to create a new Asian industry. (Though cheap labor
helped!)
Later philanthropist Moh gave his wife two chairs for her fortieth birthday – two Wharton endowed
professorships.
Lawrence Moh died a deeply respected businessman. The American furniture industry just died.
More crudely, drunken Taiwanese businessmen scorned stupid Americans for giving away business knowledge.
The true villain (from one point of view) He YunFeng openly bragged about price undercutting, and, aided
by Chinese government support, his determination to destroy American furniture manufacture. He almost
did.
As to the black/white divide … ? Open segregation was unapologetic in this Appalachian region. Bassett
kinsman, "Uncle Bounce," as governor of Virginia closed schools for years rather than
integrate. Black workers were paid a fraction of white wages. On the other hand Bassetts hired them when
no one else did,  bringing them into the cash economy. Cheap labor for the bottom line. Family community
philanthropy was done in white, then in black. Separate but not equal.
The Bassett tentacles in employees lives and towns were unabashedly feudal. There was nothing they
wouldn’t interfere with from the high school football couch to the Presidency of Gallaudet, the college
for the deaf. The men vied for the title of meanest and toughest. It is hard to like Robert Spilman who
gloried in the title of S.O.B."Sweet Old Bob."He was bully personified, yet his wife (Jane
Bassett) and son Bob felt affection.
Mixed in with the stories, anecdotes, characters and drama are questions about dualities that roil our
times. Must workers be the ones to pay the price for an "inevitable" world globalization ? How
should a factory be run: to the ground or modernized? Does shareholder profit always trump humanity?
Can, should, family businesses flourish into the third generation? Will current MBA philosophies lead to
a better world, or a more unequal society? The answers  are still out.
Americans ask, "Where did all the jobs go? "Factory Man has a complex, fascinating answer.