Beth Macy

Factory Man

About the Book

The Bassett Furniture Company was once the world’s biggest wood furniture manufacturer. Run by the same powerful Virginia family for generations, it was also the center of life in Bassett, Virginia. But beginning in the 1980s, the first waves of Asian competition hit, and ultimately Bassett was forced to send its production overseas.

One man fought back: John Bassett III, a shrewd and determined third-generation factory man, now chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co, which employs more than 700 Virginians and has sales of more than $90 million. In Factory Man, Beth Macy brings to life Bassett’s deeply personal furniture and family story, along with a host of characters from an industry that was as cutthroat as it was colorful. As she shows how he uses legal maneuvers, factory efficiencies, and sheer grit and cunning to save hundreds of jobs, she also reveals the truth about modern industry in America.

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Photo by Stephanie Klein-Davis | Courtesy The Roanoke Times
John Bassett is from The Bassett Furniture Co. family, a dynasty begun in 1902 by his wily sawmill-owning grandfather, John Bassett Sr., who stole furniture-making lock, stock and barrel from its 19th-century home base in Grand Rapids, Mich. The company rose to become the largest furniture-making enterprise in the world. But JBIII is the only true furniture-maker left in the family.
John Bassett III gathered the media, politicians and his factory workers together in January to announce that not only was he not closing his factory; but he was actually expanding it into the vacant plant next door. Photo by Jared Soares
At the Community Storehouse in Ridgeway, volunteers can divine what people used to do by their ailments: Women who’d been bent over sewing machines all day making sweatshirts had humps on their backs. The men who culled lumber were missing fingers. Photo by Jared Soares
Among my most treasured sources was Mary Thomas, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 81. She loved to dispense advice about home remedies and was reported to have the psychic ability to take away the sting out of a burn — both in person and over the telephone.
Old Town, the original Bassett Furniture Company factory, circa 1902.
A rare light moment during the storied 1937 flood that put a hurt on Bassett, Va. The creation of the Philpott Dam in the ’50s, a $13 million project that finally kept the Smith River silt out of factory workers’ homes. | Photo courtesy of Bassett Historical Center
JBIII (right) with his cousin/uncle “Mister Ed” Bassett, who taught him such sayings as “There is no water in the swamp” and “When you see a snake’s head, hit it.”
Meet the Factor Man Himself: John Bassett III
Factory Man by Beth Macy
Factory Girl Beer and the Parkway Brewing Company
Factory Man by Beth Macy: Made in America

Praise for Factory Man

Tom Hanks on Twitter (holy cow!): Factory Man is “Great summer reading. I give it 42 stars. No, I give it 142 stars. Yeah, it’s THAT good. Hanx.”

Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times: “Ms. Macy zeroed in on a family-run Virginia furniture company that was being put out of business by cheap Chinese knockoffs, and happened to find an owner determined to fight back. Ms. Macy got to know the factory town, its workers, the facts behind offshoring and the tactics that might keep it at bay. Early warning: ‘Factory Man’ (coming July 15) is an illuminating, deeply patriotic David vs. Goliath book. They give out awards for this kind of thing.”

Garden & Gun magazine, by Jamie Gnazzo, June/July 2014 issue: “In a compelling and meticulously researched narrative, Macy follows the story from the Blue Ridge Mountains to China and Indonesia, chronicling John Bassett’s tireless work to revive his company, and with it, an American town.”

New York Times column by Joe Nocera, locks in on what my book is all about:  “… I also find myself deeply sympathetic to Macy’s essential point, which is that globalization inflicts a great deal of suffering on millions of people, something the news media should do a better job of acknowledging and the government should do a better job of mitigating.”

New York Times Book Review, “Still Made in the U.S.A.” by Mimi Swartz: “It is impossible to read Beth Macy’s ‘Factory Man’ without casting the inevitable movie version to come. …Macy cares more about ordinary Americans in the same way [John] Bassett does, and in the same way so many Wall Street players and corporate shareholders do not.”

Financial Times, “When Chinese competition threatened his business, one man refused to accept defeat,” review by Shawn Donnan: “Factory Man deserves to be read for anyone wanting to wrap their heads around the present-day dynamics and politics of globalisation. Macy’s book is an important read, whether or not you agree with its premise and economics.”

New York Times, Bryan Burrough (Sunday Business): “Mr. Bassett is a character out of Faulkner, a benevolent patriarch who modernizes his new realm while cajoling his employees in a syrupy drawl that Ms. Macy likens to that of the cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn. … Oh, if only we had more business writers like Beth Macy, and more business books like her debut. You don’t need to care a whit about the furniture industry or free trade or globalization to fall under the spell of Ms. Macy’s book.”

Carl Hays, Booklist: “Macy’s down-to-earth writing style and abundance of personal stories from manufacturing’s beleaguered front lines make her work a stirring critique of globalization.”

Starred review in Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2014: “… Drawing on prodigious research and interviews with a wide range of subjects, including babysitters, retired workers and Chinese executives, Macy recounts how Bassett, now in his mid-70s, mobilized the majority of American furniture manufacturers to join him in seeking U.S. government redress for unfair Chinese trade practices. The author’s brightly written, richly detailed narrative not only illuminates globalization and the issue of offshoring, but succeeds brilliantly in conveying the human costs borne by low-income people displaced from a way of life. Writing with much empathy, Macy gives voice to former workers who must now scrape by on odd jobs, disability payments and, in some cases, thievery of copper wire from closed factories. … A masterly feat of reporting.”

Starred review in Publishers Weekly, March 17, 2014: “Macy’s riveting narrative is rich in local color. … Macy interviews the Bassett family, laid-off and retired workers, executives in Asia, and many others, providing vivid reporting and lucid explanations of the trade laws and agreements that caused a way of life to disappear.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer review by Earl Pike: “Factory Man” is a Big Tale of a Big Man doing Big Things, and a rebuke to those who would declare American manufacturing dead.”

Fortune, “A furniture mogul’s tireless quest to protect his workers’ jobs,” by Ethan Rouen: John Bassett’s “story, masterfully told in ‘Factory Man’ by journalist Beth Macy, is one of alternating bouts of selflessness and ego, a riches-to-slightly-less-riches tale of a man who had everything and was willing to sacrifice some of it to preserve the dignity and livelihood of the people who built that fortune.”

Christian Science Monitor, Janet Saidi, “‘Factory Man’ wonderfully recounts the David-and-Goliath story of a Virginia furniture maker fighting Chinese imports,” July 15, 2004: “To say that Beth Macy’s new book, Factory Man, is about the impact of globalization on rural communities in the American South might be a little like saying the television series “Mad Men” is about advertising or “The Sopranos” is about the mafia. It may be true, but it doesn’t come close to capturing the essence of the thing. And capturing the essence is what Macy is all about.”

Vulture, “7 Books You Need to Read This July“: Macy’s first book, ostensibly the story of John D. Bassett III — furniture heir, Virginia good old boy, and unlikely savior of domestic manufacturing — is better thought of as an Appalachian Random Family. In the course of narrating Bassett’s efforts to fight China’s underhanded underpricing, Macy digs in all directions, visiting company towns without companies, unearthing family secrets, and explaining the economic forces that determine our lives.

Bestseller Debut Status 

Interviews, Adaptions, and Excerpts

“Factory Man” in progress, a very loose storyboard