Alamance: The Holt Family and Industrialization in a North Carolina County, 1837-1900. (Book Reviews).

Alamance: The Holt Family and Industrialization in a North Carolina County, 1837-1900. By Bess Beatty. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxii, 247. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8071-2449-4; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8071-2373-0.)

Bess Beatty provides a fascinating look at one family's role in the industrialization of North Carolina by tracing the business, social, and labor history of Edwin Holt's textile empire in Alamance County. She carefully ties her findings to the latest scholarship on southern textiles, especially that of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Douglas Flamming, and Melton McLaurin. The book provides important insights and is a significant contribution to the debate over continuity and discontinuity between the Old and New South.

Edwin Holt began his textile business in 1837, and by the time of his death in 1884 he was one of the richest men in North Carolina. Although Holt owned a plantation and slaves, he practiced scientific agriculture, admired northern industry, and supported railroad expansion. Holt cultivated close relations with northern manufacturers and depended on northern skilled labor and machinery. A Whig who did not support secession, he nonetheless profited from supplying textiles to the Confederate government. By the 1880s, as the plantation South withered, Holt and his sons had expanded their business enterprise to twenty-five textile mills.

Holt studied northern textile mills' labor organization and management. He recruited workers to live in company houses and to work for wages. Debunking the myth of southern paternalism, Beatty concludes that Holt's "primary concern was not to rescue poor whites but to make a profit" (p. 57). In showing that many of Holt's first workers were young white women and children, Beatty also makes the important argument that gender relations explain much about the South's transition to industrialization. Moreover, Beatty points out that southern labor was not docile but was often hostile to the demands of industrial discipline. As yeomen farmers lost their selfsufficiency after the Civil War, more men moved into jobs in textile mills, and Beatty notes the resulting rise of class conflict. She closes the book with an analysis of the 1900 Alamance County strike that pitted textile owners against a new class of mill workers.

Far from asserting that the Holt family was an example of a uniquely southern way of running a business enterprise, Beatty argues that they accepted northern, bourgeois values. Holt raised his sons as "mill men" rather than plantation owners and stressed practical business education. His daughters, however, found their world circumscribed by gendered expectations. Beatty also reveals how the second and third generations of the Holt family accepted the new consumerism of the Gilded Age. Unfortunately, they did not stay on top of new business practices, and by the twentieth century the family empire had been eclipsed by much larger textile mills.

Beatty has produced a fine work that addresses family, gender, and class issues and also examines business and technological advances. The thematic organization of the book, however, does create redundancies. Business historians may be disappointed that the unavailability of primary sources precluded an in-depth discussion of managerial and organizational practices. Nevertheless, Beatty adds to our understanding of change and continuity in the nineteenth-century South.