In her recent book Making It in America, independent journalist Rachel Slade sets out to find someone “actually attempting to manufacture things in the U.S.” She finds Ben and Whitney Waxman, founders of the Maine-based apparel company American Roots. On her journey, she introduces readers to a US zipper company founded by a Taiwanese immigrant, an old-school veteran of New York’s Garment District, Mississippi cotton, and the hoodie, which she argues has evolved “from gym gear into a symbol of subversion.”

Early in the book, Slade quotes a Harvard Business School instructor who asks, “Why should Americans care about manufacturing?” The answer has to do with culture, economics, and politics. Culturally, some fabrics have been “produced for more than five millennia” and thus are deeply rooted in a culture. Moreover, in the United States the ideas of “economic independence” and “freedom” are associated with the country’s foundational principles. Economically, Slade notes, textiles are a $3 trillion worldwide industry employing more than 60 million people. Politically, manufacturing plays a key role in the economies of Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, all “swing states” in recent presidential elections.

This entrepreneurial story is based in Maine, a refuge for idealists where utopian fervor is a Yankee tradition. Maine’s culture, Slade writes, spans “across the centuries and across the political spectrum—from celibate Shakers to right-wing libertarians and doomsday preppers.” The book describes how the Waxmans (actually, Ben Waxman and Whitney Reynolds; their firm predates their marriage) started American Roots, a manufacturer that produces “fleece products completely made in America.”

Ben Waxman grew up with manufacturing. At age 12, his parents, Dan and Dory, launched Casco Bay Wool Works to produce capes. By the firm’s fourth year, it recorded $500,000 in sales. But it could not compete with foreign competitors. “One night,” Slade writes, “after fourteen hours of plowing following a massive snowstorm, Ben pulled the truck over to chug a tepid Dunkin’ coffee.” When he arrived home that night, he “woke up Whitney and told her they were going to make fleece vests.”

A former union organizer, Ben views domestic manufacturing as important to “a better America.” Friends thought him crazy, but American Roots experienced remarkable sales growth: $8,000 (2015); $400,000 (2016); $800,000 (2018); $1.1 million (2019); and $3.5 million (2022).

The book’s cast includes the firm’s first employee, Anaam Jabbir, who fled Iraq for US asylum after the war, patternmaker Ann Russo, and producers of US-made fabrics, zippers, and cotton. Ned Pilchman of American Fabrics, one of the last “fabric converters in the country,” is a Garment District veteran focused on transporting bolts of fabric. “It’s heavy, heavy, heavy,” Pilchman explains. I grew up in a Michigan automotive family on the production side and found Slade’s step-by-step description of production processes and manufacturing challenges the book’s strongest section.

Radical? Reactionary? / Slade is weakest when discussing economics. She cites Adam Smith but ignores David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage. The index does not include a reference to Ricardo, and Slade alternates between blaming free trade and China for US manufacturing losses.

For instance, she writes, “After thirty years of free trade policy, the American economy has drifted from producer–exporter to buyer–importer and American consumers now find themselves in a dire situation.” Further, she says, what “happened to American manufacturing over the past two decades was not the organic by-product of free market policy. The Chinese government in particular … subsidized [exports] every step of the way” to “get a foothold in the lucrative American market.”

Slade’s use of pejoratives detracts from what could have been a serious work to explain manufacturing to a broader audience. She terms “free market theory—a radical, reactionary hypothesis developed by then-fringe economists Milton and Rose Friedman in the 1960s.” She claims “free market jargon made mediocre thinking sound smart” in the United States and equates Friedmanite monetarism with supply-side economics.

Product differentiation / New England textile manufacturing has been in decline for decades. In excerpts from Berkshire Hathaway annual reports, the holding company’s CEO, Warren Buffett, explained the challenges of textile manufacturing:

1977 “A few shareholders have questioned the wisdom of remaining in the textile business which, over the longer term, is unlikely to produce returns on capital comparable to those available in many other businesses.”

1978 “The textile industry illustrates in textbook style how producers of relatively undifferentiated goods in capital intensive businesses must earn inadequate returns except under conditions of tight supply or real shortage.”

1980 “During the past year we have cut back the scope of our textile business.”

1985 “In July we decided to close our textile operation, and by year-end this unpleasant job was largely completed.”

Berkshire was founded in 1839 as a New England textile manufacturer. Buffett bought Berkshire in 1965, and in 1993 the company bought Maine-based Dexter Shoe Company, paying $433 million in stock. Slade explains, “Buffett thought American industries would be able to resist the forces of globalization.” In Berkshire’s 2007 annual report, Buffett wrote, “To date, Dexter is the worst deal that I’ve made.”

How could any entrepreneur make New England textile manufacturing work if America’s greatest living investor failed at the task? The answer is product differentiation in American Roots’ marketing—that is, the firm has persuaded consumers there is something about its products that consumers should be willing to pay for. That is the inverse of the “undifferentiated goods” Buffett lamented.

Slade terms the hoodie “an American icon.” During the Great Depression, the hoodie was a niche market providing athletic gear for college sports teams. By the 1960s, the hoodie market expanded as more Americans attended college, wearing their “school colors on and off the field.” But Slade contends athletic apparel wasn’t considered “appropriate attire” outside campuses until the 1976 movie Rocky. Her argument is that Rocky Balboa “sparked the hoodie craze when he donned a plain gray hoodie for his famous run” through Philly’s mean streets.

The Waxmans weren’t thinking about the hoodie’s cultural significance when they launched American Roots. They wanted to help rebuild a domestic supply chain, pay their workers a decent wage with benefits, and serve their niche customer base. American Roots has been in business for nearly a decade, and I look forward to reading a sequel about them in 10 years.