Let me stipulate that I am not a neutral party. I grew up on a Blue Ridge farm in Carroll County, close enough to Galax that the Old Fiddlers’ Convention was less an event than a season, and many of my family and neighbors worked the furniture plants there. When somebody on the internet undertakes to explain Galax to the rest of Virginia, I take it personally.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger went to Felts Park the second week of August and got booed. Then, as Dwayne Yancey reported here, a fellow posting as “Clovis Mcdoogal” — a name that reads like it came off the line at an Appalachian stereotype factory — informed the commonwealth that it was watching “the poor, uneducated in their natural environment.”
Yancey has already dispatched the schools argument, and thoroughly. I want to take up a different question, one the mountaineer-slandering commenters seemed in no way curious about: why would these people boo anybody?
Because the caricature has it exactly backwards. Mountain manners are real and strict. This is a place where you lift two fingers off the steering wheel at every oncoming lumber truck and where traffic still pulls to the shoulder for a stranger’s funeral procession, unasked. Felts Park has been running fiddler competitions since 1935 — this August marked the 90th — and that crowd will sit in respectful silence through a fiddler whose bowing arm has plainly deserted him. Galax has spent 90 years being polite to bad banjo players. Booing a governor is not the natural environment. It is a departure from it.
Departures have causes.
By the 1960s, Galax — a city of about 7,000 — supported six furniture factories and a mirror plant to match the suites. Among them were Vaughan Furniture, which at its height ran five plants and better than 1,800 jobs, and Webb Furniture. An uncle of mine was killed in one of those plants when a machine went into his stomach. My father worked the line at Pulaski Furniture, which is closed now. My mother worked at a hosiery factory in Hillsville until seamless hosiery finished that trade. That was the ordinary architecture of a working life in these two counties.
Today Galax has essentially one furniture plant. Vaughan-Bassett is still there, still employing more than 500 people, still the largest maker of wooden adult bedroom furniture in the United States. It is there because John Bassett III filed what was then the largest antidumping petition ever brought against China and won it at the International Trade Commission in 2005. Beth Macy, a veteran Roanoke Times reporter, told that story in her book Factory Man. But one survivor is not a regional economy. Vaughan Furniture closed. Webb closed. The mirror plant closed. The suppliers, truckers, finishers, sawmills and machine shops that lived off all of it went too. Six became one.
The timing is the whole point. On May 24, 2000, the U.S. House voted to grant China Permanent Normal Trade Relations. The Senate concurred that summer, 83 to 15. President Clinton signed it on October 10, 2000, having told the country that the economic consequences would be “100-0 in our favor.” China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001. Chinese wood furniture exports to the United States rose from $241 million in 1994 to $4.2 billion in 2004, by the Richmond Fed’s accounting, and between 1999 and 2009 North Carolina lost more than half its furniture jobs.
Economists have since traced the cliff American manufacturing employment fell off after 2000 directly to that vote. Ending the annual review of China’s trade status is what made it safe for firms to move production to China. There was no comparable drop in Europe, where trade policy did not change. What people here felt in their bones, that something broke at the turn of the millennium, was not a trick of memory. It took the economists 15 years to document the damage.
Now the honest part. The trade decision was never a Democratic project. A Republican, Bill Archer of Texas, steered PNTR through the House. Republican senators supplied many of the 83 votes. Governors of both parties lobbied for it. And the furniture executives required no lobbying whatever. They went hunting the cost advantage in China on their own initiative, and what they carried home was their own replacement. The Chinese suppliers they trained became the competitors that buried them. If the Galax crowd was assigning blame by political party, the crowd was being unfair.
Democrats got the blame anyway. Politics does not run on shares of responsibility; it runs on faces. Clinton had signed NAFTA, his administration drove PNTR and he was the one in front of the cameras saying 100-0, even more so as his party took to speaking the language of diplomas and retraining rather than the language of work.
Nor is this governor a plausible defendant. The immediate reasons, as Yancey noted, are current rather than historical. Spanberger won 31.72% of the vote in Galax last November and barely 21% in neighboring Carroll and Grayson counties. Redistricting proposals and new gun restrictions had already given a Republican electorate more reason to oppose her. Nobody should be startled by the acoustics.
But grievance is not filed by defendant. It accumulates, and then it discharges on whoever is standing on the stage. Galax has the lowest median household income in the commonwealth of Virginia — $38,675, by the Census Bureau’s 2020–2024 figures — and it did not get there through some failure of character. It got there because a bargain was struck in Washington in which this town’s payroll was the consideration, and the benefits were spread out to consumers who saved a few dollars on a pair of jeans at Walmart while the costs were piled on 7,000 people. Both halves of that were true. Only one half was felt here. Twenty-six years of it, and somebody eventually boos.
There is some justice over the ridge. Carroll County now has a British firm growing tomatoes under tens of acres of glass at Wildwood Commerce Park, heated with wood chips from local sawmills — a couple hundred jobs when the second greenhouse is done. It is not six furniture plants. But after 50 years of watching things leave, it is no small thing to stand in Carroll County and watch something arrive.
So: was it the Chinese dragon that got booed in Galax? Not entirely, and not on purpose. The dragon wasn’t on the program. But some of what came out of that grandstand had been accumulating since a vote in Washington in the spring of 2000. It had nowhere else to go, and the woman at the microphone was standing where it could reach.
Which is the part I would have thought a governor could see coming. Nobody expects her to reopen Vaughan Furniture or repeal PNTR. But she might have walked into Felts Park having done the reading. She might have said out loud that this town once had six furniture plants and now has one, that Galax was the consideration in a bargain Washington struck and that her party signed it. That is not an apology. It is arithmetic, and this crowd already knows it. What people cannot abide is being governed by someone who appears not to.
So here is my advice to the next politician who comes to Felts Park, of either party. Do not bring a message. Bring a payroll. And if you haven’t got one, at least bring the job ledger and read it out. This crowd will sit through an evening of mediocre fiddling out of pure courtesy and come back the next night for more, which is more patience than it has left for anybody promising that the economic adjustment will work out fine.
They tried that one already. It didn’t.
Jim Branscome is a native of Carroll County, Virginia, and a graduate of Berea College. A former staff member of the Appalachian Regional Commission and a retired managing director of Standard & Poor’s, he has reported on Appalachia for more than five decades. His new book, Annihilating the Hillbilly Redux: Appalachia’s Struggle Against America’s Institutions, is available on Amazon and most other book sites.
