Part IThe Story
Half a Floor
The looms started before the building was done. That is the first fact, and in some ways the only one that matters. On July 29, 1924, in a weave room raised in the middle of a cornfield outside Burlington, North Carolina, workers began running cloth on machinery that had been pulled out of a failed mill 132 miles to the southwest. Only half of the room had a floor. The other half was dirt. Somewhere between the two surfaces a 28-year-old Harvard man named James Spencer Love was betting $250,000 of a town's money, $200,000 of its citizens' savings, and every dollar his family had recovered from its last mistake on the proposition that he could make cotton fabric pay in a market that had already stopped wanting it.
He was wrong about the cotton. The flag cloth, the bunting, the scrims and curtain goods, and the bird's-eye diaper cloth his machines produced that summer were, as one company historian later put it, already becoming obsolete by the time the shuttles began to fly. The mill nearly went under within months. What he was right about, and would keep being right about for the next thirty-eight years, was something harder to name: that motion precedes foundation, that a room can be half dirt and still produce, that a man who waits for the floor to be laid will discover someone else has already sold the cloth.
By the time Love died in Palm Beach on January 20, 1962, the company he named after that town had become the largest textile manufacturer in the world. It employed 62,000 people. Fortune had ranked it the 48th largest corporation in the United States, with $913 million in sales. In the year of his death it would become the first textile company in history to pass $1 billion in annual revenue. He did not live to see the number.
Forty-three years after that, on a morning in May 2005, thousands of people gathered in Greensboro to watch the company's award-winning headquarters building, sheathed in glass and opened in 1970, collapse into itself under planted explosive charges. The firm had gone bankrupt in 2001. A private equity investor had bought what was left for $614.1 million and named himself chairman. The building came down in seconds.
So there are two rooms at either end of this story: one that was not yet finished, and one that was finished and then unmade. Between them sits the life of a man who left almost no memorable sentences behind him, who built a Georgian mansion and then spent much of his marriage elsewhere, who campaigned for a higher federal minimum wage while, by the account of a labor journalist in 1975, "systematically weeding out all union supporters" from his mills. A man born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who became, in the estimation of Business North Carolina magazine in 1999, the most influential business figure in the history of the state.
He spent his life proving he belonged to a place he had grown up visiting. The place, in the end, could not keep what he built.
By the Numbers
From a Cornfield to the Fortune 50
$3,000Love's personal savings when he headed south after World War I
$250,000Loan underwritten by the Burlington Chamber of Commerce in 1923
104 lbsSize of the experimental rayon lot that saved the company
22Plants in 9 communities by 1936, most bought during the Depression
48thBurlington's rank among U.S. corporations in 1961
62,000Employees at the time of Love's death in 1962
$1BAnnual sales crossed in 1962 — a first for any textile company
The Grandson Who Came Back
Begin with a bell.
In 1875, after Reconstruction had shuttered the University of North Carolina for five years, a woman named Cornelia Phillips Spencer climbed to the belfry at Chapel Hill and rang the bell herself to announce that the school would reopen. She was a writer, a widow, a fierce partisan of education and of women's place in it, and the act made her a regional legend; generations of Tar Heels would know her simply as the woman who rang the bell. Her daughter Julia married a mathematician from Gaston County named James Lee Love. Their son, born on July 6, 1896, was given his mother's maiden name as a middle name, and it was by that name — Spencer — that he would be known.
The Spencer side supplied the intellect and the institution: a grandfather, James Munroe Spencer, who was a professor; a grandmother whose life was a long argument for the University of North Carolina. The Love side supplied the mills. They were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who had pushed into the North Carolina Piedmont around the same time as the Holts of Alamance County, settling west of Charlotte in Gaston County, where the Loves and their kin the Rhynes became textile men. Spencer's paternal grandfather, Robert Calvin Grier Love, co-owned the Gastonia Cotton Manufacturing Company, founded in 1887. One generation further back stood Andrew Love, a wealthy slaveholder — a fact that appears in the scholarship on the Southern mill world with no particular emphasis, which is itself a kind of emphasis.
James Lee Love was the defector. He was, in the language of the North Carolina State textile historians, "more attracted to teaching," and he left the family business to teach mathematics at Harvard, where he stayed roughly twenty years. So the boy grew up in Cambridge. He went to the Cambridge Latin School. He spent summers and holidays in Gaston County, around the looms and spindles and the relatives who owned them, and then went back north to the brick and the river and the particular Massachusetts conviction that one's ancestors had invented the country.
There is a version of this biography in which Spencer Love is a Yankee interloper — a Harvard boy who came south to exploit cheap labor and loose regulation, like a dozen New England mill families did in the 1920s. The North Carolina State historians anticipate that reading and reject it in a sentence: "This was no Yankee carpetbagger come south." They are right, technically. But the sentence exists because the question needed answering, and Love would spend the rest of his life answering it, in deeds rather than words, before audiences of bankers and politicians and mill hands who had every reason to wonder.
He was fast. He took his Harvard bachelor's degree in three years and then spent a year at the Harvard Business School, finishing in 1917 — just in time for the war. He served in France on the headquarters staff of the 78th Division, U.S. Infantry, and came home, by the account of the journalist Bill Finger, "sporting the rank of major and a personal citation from Gen. John J. Pershing." He was perhaps 22.
What happened next is the hinge of his life, and it is a small, humiliating thing. The decorated major with the Harvard degree and the business school training walked Boston's financial district looking for work and could not find any. Finger places the failure on "Boston's bank-lined Boylston Street." The state's historical marker program, which tends toward euphemism, says only that Love was "unable to find employment in his native state."
He had $3,000 in savings. He had a Harvard education. He had, crucially, a family name that meant something 900 miles south. He went.
Seven Months as Paymaster
The job was payroll clerk. His uncle offered it at $120 a month, at the family mill in Gastonia, which was by then a run-down operation running out-of-date equipment. In 1919 Love became the paymaster, handing out wages to the hands every week, learning the names and, presumably, the arithmetic of what a cotton mill actually cost to run.
It lasted about seven months. Then he and his father bought the mill out from under the grandfather. The accounts differ in their details — one says Love "and his parents decided to buy out his grandfather," another that "he and his father bought the run-down mill" — but Finger supplies the number that matters: at age 23, Love borrowed $80,000 and took a controlling interest in the entire company. He became secretary-treasurer, and effectively its chief of operations.
It is worth pausing on what this meant. Love had been in the textile business for less than a year. He had no technical training in it. He was buying a mill that the people who owned it had allowed to decline, with equipment the historians bluntly describe as "totally out of date," at the very top of the post-war boom. Between 1923 and 1933, New England would lose 40 percent of its mills while Southern capacity increased fivefold — the great migration of the industry was underway — but the South's gain did not lift every boat, and a creaky Gastonia plant making ordinary cotton goods was precisely the kind of boat that sank.
He paid the debt off in four years, which is remarkable. And then, in 1923, he gave up on the place, which is the more remarkable thing.
The usual telling treats Gastonia as a prelude, a brief apprenticeship before the real story begins. Read differently, it is the first evidence of the trait that would define his career: Love did not confuse inheritance with obligation. This was his grandfather's mill, the mill of his father's family, the mill whose existence had given him a reason to come south at all. He saw that it could not be fixed and he let it go. A declining market "forced Love to sell the mill," the marker says. More precisely, he liquidated it — and took the best of the machinery with him.
Word had gotten around the Piedmont that a young operator with Harvard credentials and a clean debt record was looking for a new place to build. Towns heard. One of them was looking for exactly him.
A Town in Want of a Knight
To understand what Burlington offered, you have to understand what it had lost.
From 1837 to 1900, a family named Holt founded, bought, or partnered in more than twenty textile mills in and around Alamance County. Edwin Michael Holt, the patriarch, produced the first factory-dyed yarn south of the Potomac River, and the cloth that came out of his mills — the "Alamance Plaids" — was known across the country. When a trade publication called Commerce and Finance polled Southern mill officers in 1921 to name the six greatest leaders in the history of the region's textile industry, E.M. Holt's name was on the ballot of nominees. He was not among the six chosen. Caesar Cone of Greensboro was; so was J.W. Cannon of Concord. The Holts were already becoming a footnote.
What happened to them is the oldest story in family business. The founder builds; his children maintain; his grandchildren sell. Reid Maynard, a hosiery manufacturer in Alamance County in the middle of the century, described the decline to an oral historian with an unsentimental economy that no business school case could improve:
— Reid Maynard, Alamance County hosiery manufacturer, on the grandchildren of E.M. HoltThey had let them go down. …A lot of them closed, some of them bankrupt, the others just took their money and got out and quit.
"They just gave them up," Maynard said elsewhere. By the early 1920s, Burlington was a mill town without a mill family — a place whose identity and payroll had been built around an enterprise its heirs no longer cared to run. The town fathers, in the phrase of the State historians, "were looking for a knight on a white horse to come to town and pick up the pieces." What they had to offer was money: a $250,000 loan, underwritten by the Burlington Chamber of Commerce, to anyone willing to revitalize the dying plants.
Love took it. Here the sources braid together and fray slightly at the ends. The company was incorporated on November 1, 1923, according to the textile historians at North Carolina State; it was chartered on November 6, according to both Burlington's own corporate history and a later magazine account. It hardly matters. What matters is the capital structure, which reads like a modern founder's dream: $50,000 worth of machinery hauled up from Gastonia, $200,000 in proceeds from the sale of the old plant, and an additional $200,000 in stock sold to local residents. The town did not merely lend Love money. It bought in. When the mill went up, the people who owned it would be, in some meaningful fraction, the same people who walked past it every day.
He named the company after the town. It was a tribute, and it was also a contract.
In early 1924 Love began construction on what would become known as the Pioneer Plant, along with a mill village of seventy houses called Piedmont Heights. He did not wait for the plant to be finished. The looms ran on half a floor.
There is a letter in the Spencer Love Papers at the University of North Carolina's Southern Historical Collection, dated May 17, 1935, from Eugene Holt to Spencer Love. The business historian Annette C. Wright cites it in the opening pages of her study of Burlington's strategy, among the sources on how the old families of the Piedmont regarded the industry they had built. I have not read the letter, and I cannot tell you what it says. But I find it hard to look at that citation — a Holt writing to the man who had taken over his family's town, twelve years after the fact — without wondering what it costs to put a stamp on that envelope.
Artificial Silk
The cotton failed. Love's early products — flag cloth, bunting, cotton scrims, curtain and dress fabrics, diaper cloth — were the wrong goods for a market that was turning away from them, and the company faltered almost immediately. The North Carolina State account says he turned to the alternative "out of desperation," a word corporate histories tend not to use.
The alternative came by Pullman car.
Harry Dalton was a salesman for American Viscose, the company that manufactured rayon in the United States, and he believed in personal contact with an intensity that bordered on the monastic. He traveled the South by train so exhaustively that he sometimes spent six out of every seven nights sleeping in Pullman berths, carrying samples of a fiber most Americans had never touched. Rayon was made from purified cellulose — wood pulp, chemically converted into filament — and in the 1920s people called it "artificial silk," which was both its selling point and its curse. It promised the drape and sheen of a luxury fabric at a fraction of the price. It also sounded like a fake.
Love bought a 104-pound lot. That was the entire experiment: a little over a hundred pounds of rayon yarn, woven as filling into a 40-inch cotton warp. The result was a crinkled fabric. Seamed up the middle, two widths of it were wide enough to make a bedspread.
The bedspreads were, by the frank admission of the textile historians who otherwise lionize Love, "awful — stiff, slippery, and streaky." They sold anyway. They sold so well that a company magazine piece written for the centennial calls them "a runaway success." Rayon offered something new to households that had never had anything shiny on the bed, and Love, who had no sentimental attachment to cotton or anything else, followed the demand wherever it went. He moved into drapery fabric, then into cloth for garments. Dress goods sales were described in an early company history as "phenomenal." A second mill opened with 48 Jacquard looms — in 1926 by one account, in 1928 by another; the sources disagree, and I have left the disagreement where I found it.
What made the bedspreads profitable was not only the fiber. It was the truck.
Love built — or committed to building, in the phrase of the centennial account — "a world-class truck fleet for delivering products." In the 1920s most Southern mills shipped by rail and sold through commission houses in New York that took a percentage and controlled the relationship with the buyer. A truck fleet meant Burlington could get goods to customers faster than competitors could, and on its own schedule. It meant speed. The company's own corporate history, written long after Love's death, places the trucks at the center of its 1930s rise: "With a new trucking fleet, Burlington quickly became the largest weaver of rayon fabric in the US."
By 1929, Burlington Mills had reached $1 million in sales and opened its own sales office in New York City. The State historians mark the moment with a three-word sentence that sounds like it was written by someone who had spent a long time with the archives and grown fond of the man: "He had arrived."
He opened the New York office in the year of the crash.
Buying the Dead
Most of the founders in this story are undone by the Depression. Love was made by it.
The arithmetic was simple and brutal. As the economy contracted, demand for silk collapsed and demand for its cheaper substitute rose. Rayon, which had been a novelty, became a necessity for families who wanted to look like they had more money than they did. At the same time, across the Piedmont, family-owned cotton mills were going idle — the same kind of mills the Holt grandchildren had abandoned, run by the same kind of families, defeated by the same kind of market. Their buildings stood empty. Their looms were obsolete. Their owners wanted out.
Love bought them. He acquired faltering mills across central North Carolina, ripped out or refitted their equipment with looms that could handle rayon, and reopened them. The pattern repeated so often that by 1935 Burlington operated the largest rayon-weaving business in the United States. By 1936 it had 22 plants in nine communities and $25 million in revenues. In 1937 he consolidated the separate operating units into the Burlington Mills Corporation and listed it on the New York Stock Exchange.
In 1935, he moved the headquarters from Burlington to Greensboro, and the reason he gave was railroads. Greensboro had better rail connections to New York. The move is recorded in a photograph in which Love stands under a portico in a light-colored overcoat. The town that had put up $250,000 and sold him $200,000 in stock lost its headquarters twelve years after the charter. The name stayed.
There is a tendency, in retellings like this one, to describe the Depression acquisitions as heroic — a young builder saving dying mills, rescuing jobs, reopening plants that would otherwise have rotted. Some of that is true. Plenty of those communities got their mills back. But it is also true that Love bought distress at distressed prices, and that the families who sold to him were not, in most cases, getting a good deal. He understood something the Holt grandchildren never had: that a textile mill is not a building or a family heirloom but a set of assets whose value depends entirely on what you can make them produce. A dead cotton mill was worth very little. A dead cotton mill fitted with rayon looms and attached to a New York sales office and a truck fleet was worth a great deal. The difference between the two numbers was Burlington.
Decades later, a man named Fred Rogers, who worked in the company's Burlington House division for about ten years beginning around 1990 — in the New York offices at 1345 Avenue of the Americas and in the town of Burlington, "just down the street from the pioneer plant" — tried to correct what he saw as a common misreading:
— Fred Rogers, former Burlington House division employee, in O.Henry Magazine (2023)A lot of people think of Love as a manufacturing man, but he was, in fact, a financial man. I'd say he was one of the earliest and best financiers in America, because he grew his company by acquisition. He was a financial genius.
It is an overstatement — "earliest" has a lot of competition in American history — but it gets something right. Love's essential talent was not in the weave room. It was in recognizing that the weave room was a commodity, and that the real leverage lay in deciding which weave rooms to own, when to buy them, and what to point them at.
By 1938 he had pointed them at hosiery. In May 1940 Burlington introduced nylon hosiery — the new synthetic DuPont had brought to market, which within a few years would become the most coveted product in American retail.
The Customer of the Chemist
The war gave Love nylon on a scale no peacetime market could have provided.
When the United States entered World War II, Burlington shifted to making more than fifty products for the armed forces. Its research laboratories went to work on government projects, the most consequential being an investigation into using nylon — a thermoplastic, petroleum-derived, stronger and lighter than silk — to make parachute cloth. Silk had come from Japan. Japan was now the enemy. Nylon was the answer, and Burlington became one of the companies that learned to weave it at volume.
About 4,000 of Burlington's male employees went into the military. Women replaced them on the floors. The company acquired Harriman Hosiery Mills in 1944 and Stark Brothers, a ribbon maker, around the same period. When the war ended, the parachute work became the foundation for an entire postwar line of nylon-based textiles, and the company invested $50 million in revamping and expanding its facilities. It opened its first plants overseas. In 1950 it received its first shipment of acrylic yarn, another chemical fiber; polyester followed. By 1952 Burlington was the largest synthetic textile producer in the world, with 73 facilities and 31,000 workers.
This is the triumphal version. Annette C. Wright, whose 1995 article in the Business History Review remains the most serious analysis of Burlington's strategy, tells a more interesting one.
Love's great insight, in Wright's account, was "shrewd product selection" — choosing rayon, then nylon, then the other synthetics, in an industry most observers regarded as declining. Having won with that insight, he tried to do something more ambitious: to make Burlington dominate textiles the way U.S. Steel dominated steel, General Motors dominated automobiles, and DuPont dominated chemicals. He pursued integration, diversification, and a multidivisional structure — the full Alfred Chandler playbook, the same organizational logic that had made the great industrial corporations of the twentieth century.
It did not quite work. The problem was the fiber itself. The very move that had made Love — abandoning cotton, which any farmer could grow, for rayon and nylon, which only a handful of chemical companies could produce — had made him dependent on those chemical companies. "After the emergence of artificial and synthetic fibers," Wright writes, "textile mills became dependent on large yarn manufacturers in the chemical industry such as Du Pont and Celanese." The weaver had become the chemist's customer. Burlington could be the largest textile company in the world and still not control the price or availability of its most important input.
Forward integration — buying into the businesses that turned his fabric into finished clothing — fared worse. The women's garment industry was volatile, fashion-driven, unforgiving; Wright calls it "especially dangerous." Size did not always protect Burlington's profits. Diversification did not always cushion its downturns.
And so the man who had spent three decades expanding concluded, near the end, that Burlington should contract its ambition. "In the end," Wright writes, "Love concluded that Burlington should remain a weaving and knitting company." Textiles, when he died, remained an industry "in which small, specialized firms survived alongside the corporate giants."
He had tried to become the steel trust of cloth. He discovered that cloth does not consent to being a trust. It is one of the rare cases in American business history of a founder who reached the edge of his own strategy, saw it clearly, and stepped back.
In 1955, he renamed the company Burlington Industries and reorganized it into nine divisions. That year it ran some 75 plants with 32,000 employees in ten states and three foreign countries, and reported sales of nearly $1 million a day. It also helped fund North Carolina State's reactor program — the first fission reactor built solely to apply nuclear fission in peacetime for educational purposes. The building was named Burlington Engineering Laboratories. A company that had begun in a cornfield making diaper cloth now had its name on an atomic reactor.
The Personnel Man
Three men entered Southern textile mills in the years during and immediately after World War I. Bill Finger, writing in 1975 for Southern Exposure, traced all three: Spencer Love, "as an owner and empire builder"; Lacy Wright, "a mill hand with a secondary school education"; and Joe Pedigo, "an embryonic union organizer." All descended from Southern families. All, in Finger's telling, made textiles, "and therefore the South, what it is today."
Lacy Wright grew up in a mill village in Greensboro owned by the Cone family, where his father had moved them off a farm near Carthage. In 1917, at the age of 12, after five and a half years of school, he went into the mill to help support the family. He moved between two Cone mills. He never left Greensboro. He worked with the union and watched it decline. When Love bought his first mill, Wright was still working in a Greensboro plant — the same city where, in 1935, Love would plant his headquarters.
The juxtaposition is Finger's, and it is devastating in its simplicity. The year Lacy Wright quit school for the mill, Spencer Love finished at Harvard.
What Love did with labor is the hardest part of his story to hold in one hand. The state's own historical marker, cast in 2007 and standing at U.S. 70 and Beaumont Avenue in Burlington, records both halves in consecutive clauses: Burlington "was among the first in the industry to adopt human resources management and led in the campaign against unions in the South." Finger is blunter. Love "became a super personnel manager, systematically weeding out all union supporters."
The textile industry, in the four decades after 1923, became the largest employer in the South and, in Finger's phrase, "the biggest obstacle to organized labor." Burlington, the largest company in that industry, was the largest single piece of the obstacle. Love's mills were modern, his management sophisticated, his personnel practices among the first of their kind — and the sophistication served, among other things, to keep the unions out.
Then there is the other Love. The same man was a loyal Democrat. He "crusaded for higher federal minimum wages," according to a 1985 tribute published by Elon College, and worked for what that tribute called "an equitable solution to tariffs and imports, seeking safeguards for the jobs of textile employees, who suffer most from cheap imports produced in low-wage countries." He served on President John F. Kennedy's Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy. At one point Kennedy considered appointing him ambassador to Great Britain.
These positions are not as contradictory as they first appear. A higher federal minimum wage raised costs for every mill in the country, including the small, inefficient ones Burlington competed with and the low-cost operations that might undercut it; a large, modern company could absorb that cost more easily than its rivals. Tariff protection kept foreign competitors out. A strong personnel department kept unions out. All three served the same interest: a stable, predictable, domestic labor market in which the biggest, best-run firm won. Love was not a hypocrite. He was consistent, and the consistency was the interest of Burlington.
His friend and fellow mill man Roger Milliken of South Carolina — the head of a closely held family firm whose secretiveness about its own profits was legend — would spend the end of the century financing lobbying battles against free-trade agreements and telling Women's Wear Daily he was "outraged, totally outraged" about normalized trade with China. The fear Love had articulated in the 1950s, that "cheap imports produced in low-wage countries" would hollow out the industry, turned out to be exactly right. It was the thing that eventually killed Burlington.
On February 1, 1960, four Black students from North Carolina A&T sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro. The sit-ins that followed spread across the South and made the city a symbol. Love, by then one of Greensboro's most powerful civic figures, took an active role, according to the state marker, "in attempting to quell racial tension." He dispatched a man named Ed Zane to work full time on resolving the standoff, according to the Greensboro News & Record. The marker describes Love as a supporter of "racial harmony and justice." It is an interesting word, quell. It means to calm. It also means to suppress.
His older sister would have known the difference. Cornelia Spencer Love, born in 1892 and named for their grandmother, had grown up in Cambridge too, attended Radcliffe, and in 1917 — the same year her brother graduated — come to Chapel Hill to work in the University of North Carolina's library, where she stayed for the rest of her life. She became close to the Black educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown and gave quietly to Chapel Hill's Black community. In a 1975 oral history recorded for the Southern Oral History Program's collection on the civil rights movement, she talked extensively about her brother. The two of them carried the same name of a woman who had rung a bell to open a university. Each, in a different register, kept answering it.
Westover in Irving Park
In 1936, the year Burlington reached 22 plants, Love sat down in his Greensboro headquarters to review drawings for a house.
The architect was William C. Holleyman Jr., a local man. The model was Westover, the plantation residence of William Byrd II of Virginia, built in 1730 and considered one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in America. What Holleyman drew was a Georgian Revival mansion for Irving Park, Greensboro's finest neighborhood — a house with wide Palladian floor-to-ceiling windows on the first floor, quoins at the corners, ornate modillions supporting the eaves, and brickwork laid in Flemish bond, the bricks alternating end and length, short and long, which the preservationist Benjamin Briggs once described as looking "like Morse code." Above the front door: a broken pediment curving into what architects call swan necks. At its center, a carved pineapple — the colonial symbol of welcome.
Greensboro had never seen anything like it. "Probably never will again," wrote the journalist Ross Howell Jr.
The interiors went to Otto Zenke, a designer born in Brooklyn in 1909 who had worked at B. Altman & Co. in New York before coming to Greensboro in 1937 as chief decorator for the Morrison-Neese Furniture Company. Zenke had a passion for late eighteenth-century English rooms — he built miniature versions of them by hand, now in the Greensboro History Museum — and in time he would run his own studio with offices in Greensboro, London, and Palm Beach. He left his fingerprints on the elliptical railings and window grilles of the Love house, departures from strict Georgian form that Briggs could still identify by sight nearly ninety years later. Another New Yorker come south to build a Southern house.
Consider what Love was making. He had grown up in Cambridge, the son of a Harvard professor. He had come south and built a business on the most modern fiber in the world, chemically spun from wood pulp. He had replaced the Holts as the defining family of Alamance County. And the house he built to announce himself was a reproduction of an eighteenth-century Virginia planter's mansion — the most Southern, most aristocratic, most rooted architectural form available, the house of a family that had been there before the Republic.
The pineapple said welcome. It was not entirely clear who was welcoming whom.
The family that filled the house did not last long in it. Love had married Sara Elizabeth Love — the same surname, a coincidence or a distant relation; the record does not explain — on January 22, 1922, in Davie County, North Carolina, a year before the Burlington charter. They had four sons: James Spencer Jr., born in 1926; Robert Lee; Richard; Julian. The marriage ended in separation in 1939, three years after the house drawings, and in divorce in 1940.
On July 23, 1944, in the middle of the war, Love married Martha Eskridge in Cleveland County. She was from Shelby, a 1933 graduate of Agnes Scott College, with a graduate degree in business from Simmons College in Boston. She had worked as personnel director for the J.B. Ivey Company, the Charlotte department store. She was the first woman in North Carolina to join the Women's Army Corps in World War II. In short, she was a professional manager in an era when almost no women were permitted to be — a personnel specialist marrying the man who had made personnel a weapon. They had four more children: Charles, born in 1945; Martin, in 1947; Cornelia Spencer Love, in 1949, the third woman in the family to carry that name; and Lela, in 1955.
The sons of the first marriage scattered into the record in ways that resist summary. On April 7, 1955, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided Boland v. Love, a case brought by a woman named Sheila Ilina Boland who had been struck by an automobile near Ashland, Virginia. The car belonged to Robert Lee Love. His father was named as a co-defendant. Decades later, in 2008, the Greensboro News & Record ran a piece about another son under a headline that could serve as an epitaph for the whole dynasty: "Death of tycoon's son a mystery, as was he."
In 1947 Spencer and Martha Love established a foundation to support educational institutions. When he died, his will directed one-third of his estate to it. In 1985 the foundation gave $1 million to Elon College, then the largest private gift in the school's 97-year history; the trustees named the business school for both of them. Charles Love, chairman of the foundation, announced it at a news conference, surrounded by his siblings.
The house still stands. In 1997 its owner, Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, was asked by a reporter why she had bought it. "I cannot tell," she said. "There's no rational reason why you would buy a house like this. It's totally emotional, irrational." In 2021 it was listed for $7.5 million.
Moses at the Border
When Commerce and Finance conducted its 1921 poll of Southern mill leaders, it included the dead alongside the living, and it explained why in a sentence of florid Southern Presbyterian piety that its editors would not have imagined could apply to a 25-year-old payroll clerk in Gastonia:
— Commerce and Finance (1921), as quoted in William Plumer Jacobs, The Pioneer (1935)The marvelous growth of the cotton industry in the South was largely due to the vision and self-sacrificing enthusiasm of the many men who, like Moses, were taken away before they could enter the Promised Land to whom they led their followers.
Spencer Love died of a heart attack in Palm Beach on January 20, 1962, at 65. The death was, by every account, unexpected. He had been president of the company for nearly forty years. That year, Burlington Industries became the first textile company in history to exceed $1 billion in annual sales.
By then it was the parent corporation for 17 constituent companies operating more than 100 plants, making ribbon and suiting, hosiery and carpet. Burlington House had opened its merchandising headquarters in New York. A "dancing man" in Burlington socks was winning awards for television commercials — the company had been the first textile corporation to make a television advertisement, back in 1952 — and later campaigns featured the singer Petula Clark and the actor Robert Morley. Love had begun advertising in the late 1930s, on the advice of an associate, marketing Burlington rayon as the best quality available, fabric that would not shrink or fade. A commodity had become a brand.
One small ceremony from the decade after his death has stayed with me. The original plant in the cornfield had for years been called the Piedmont Weaving Plant. In the 1960s the company formally renamed it the Pioneer Plant, and employees with more than 35 years of service were invited to attend. Do the arithmetic and you arrive at people who had started in the plant's first decade — some of whom, presumably, had stood on the dirt half of that first weave room.
The company did what companies do after a founder dies. It came under new management. It diversified into furniture, buying Globe-Home Furniture of High Point in 1966, United Furniture of Lexington in 1968, and National Upholstery of High Point in 1971 — exactly the kind of forward expansion beyond weaving and knitting that Love had concluded, at the end, was dangerous. It built the glass headquarters in Greensboro in 1970, designed by Odell Associates. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it reinvested 85 percent of its revenue, some $1.5 billion, in new equipment.
In 1987 a Canadian textile company and a New York investor came after it in a hostile takeover. Management fought them off by borrowing $2.4 billion from Morgan Stanley and taking the company private in a leveraged buyout. That July, Burlington laid off 525 workers and closed its research and development facility in Jamestown. It returned to the New York Stock Exchange in 1992. In 1998 its name was attached to a Supreme Court case, Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth, which established that employers could be held responsible when a supervisor created a hostile work environment. Through the 1990s it lost money, mostly to the cheap imports Love had warned about forty years earlier.
On November 15, 2001, Burlington Industries filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $800 million in outstanding debts. It closed seven facilities and cut 6,650 positions. In 2003 the private equity firm WL Ross & Co. bought its assets for $614.1 million, and Wilbur Ross appointed himself chairman. The carpet division went to Mohawk Industries for $352 million. In 2004 Ross merged Burlington with Cone Mills — the company of Caesar Cone, the man who had made the 1921 list, whose family had owned the mill village where Lacy Wright went to work at twelve — to form the International Textile Group. In November of that year the staff left the Greensboro headquarters. In May 2005, the building came down.
There is a marker now on Graham Street in Burlington. The state placed it in 2008, three years after the implosion in Greensboro, at the site of the first mill. It recognizes the Pioneer Plant — the building that went up in a cornfield in the summer of 1924, that started running before it was finished, where half the weave room had a floor and the other half was earth.
Part IIThe Playbook
Spencer Love left behind remarkably little in the way of aphorism. His sister talked about him for an oral historian; his employees remembered him to magazines; his archive sits in Chapel Hill and his letters to a secretary sit in a Greensboro museum collection that describes them, tantalizingly and without elaboration, as "an interesting glimpse into how Love dealt with and treated those who worked for him." The principles that follow are therefore not his stated philosophy. They are inferences from his decisions — read against the evidence of what worked, what failed, and what the people who outlived him did with the machine he built.
The principles
- 1.Abandon the inheritance before it abandons you.
- 2.Start the looms before the floor is laid.
- 3.Make the town an owner, not a lender.
- 4.Bet on the input everyone else calls fake.
- 5.Run tiny experiments with existential stakes.
- 6.Own the road to the customer.
- 7.Buy the dead when everyone else is burying them.
- 8.Know who owns your molecule.
- 9.Find the edge of your strategy and step back from it.
- 10.Brand the commodity.
- 11.Build the pipeline that builds your industry.
- 12.Treat your own mortality as a strategic variable.
L
The Love Trajectory
Thirty-eight years from a half-floored weave room to the first billion-dollar textile company.
1919
Love joins the family mill in Gastonia as a $120-a-month payroll clerk; within months, borrows $80,000 for a controlling interest.
1923
Liquidates Gastonia; charters Burlington Mills with a $250,000 Chamber-backed loan and $200,000 in local stock.
1924
Pioneer Plant begins operations on July 29 — before the building is finished.
1929
$1 million in sales; opens a New York sales office in the year of the crash.
1935
Largest rayon weaver in the U.S.; headquarters moves to Greensboro for rail access.
1937
22 plants consolidated as Burlington Mills Corporation; listed on the NYSE.
1940
Nylon hosiery introduced in May; wartime nylon parachute cloth follows.
1952
First television ad by a textile company; largest synthetic producer in the world.
1955
Renamed Burlington Industries; nine divisions; nearly $1 million in sales per day.
1962
Love dies January 20; Burlington becomes the first textile company to exceed $1 billion in sales.
Principle 1
Abandon the inheritance before it abandons you
The defining decision of Love's early career was not starting Burlington. It was ending Gastonia. The mill was his grandfather's; its existence was the entire reason a Cambridge-raised Harvard graduate had a foothold in Southern textiles at all. He bought it at 23, paid down an $80,000 debt in four years — which proves he could operate it — and then concluded it could not be made competitive with out-of-date equipment in a declining cotton market. He liquidated it and carried "the best of his remaining equipment" to a new site.
The contrast with the Holts is the lesson. E.M. Holt's grandchildren also faced declining mills. They did not reinvent them; they let them "go down," in Reid Maynard's phrase, and then "took their money and got out and quit." Both responses involve leaving. Only one involves leaving with the useful parts and a plan. Love treated the family mill as a set of assets that could be redeployed, not as a monument to be maintained — and he did it before the decline forced the decision on him.
Tactic: Inventory what you inherited — equipment, relationships, reputation — and ask which pieces would survive a move to entirely new ground; then be willing to make the move.
Principle 2
Start the looms before the floor is laid
Burlington Mills began production on July 29, 1924, with only half its weave room floored. This is usually told as color. It is better understood as a policy. Love had a town's money, local shareholders' money, and his family's last capital at stake, and every week the plant sat idle was a week of cost with no revenue and no information. Running looms on dirt meant he learned, within months, that his cotton products were obsolete — and that early knowledge is what pushed him toward rayon while he still had the capital to try it.
The same instinct recurs: a New York sales office opened in 1929 before the company was large enough to obviously justify it; mills bought and refitted during the Depression before the recovery was visible. Love consistently accepted the discomfort of an unfinished structure in exchange for earlier contact with reality.
Tactic: Identify the one capability your venture needs in order to learn whether customers want the product, and put it into operation before everything around it is complete.
Principle 3
Make the town an owner, not a lender
Burlington's founding capital stack was a marvel of community alignment: a $250,000 loan underwritten by the Chamber of Commerce, plus $200,000 in stock sold directly to local residents, alongside the Loves' own $200,000 and $50,000 in machinery. The town was not simply a creditor that could call a note. A meaningful slice of it held equity. The company was named for the place. The mill village of seventy houses, Piedmont Heights, went up with the plant.
This structure did several things at once. It de-risked Love's personal position; it made the community invested in the mill's survival during the near-failure of the cotton period; and it converted the town's anxiety about losing its textile base — the Holt vacuum — into patient capital. The less flattering coda is that Love moved the headquarters to Greensboro twelve years later for better rail access. Alignment at founding did not mean permanent loyalty, and the shareholders presumably did fine anyway.
Tactic: When a community needs what you are building, structure their participation as equity rather than debt, so that their patience becomes your runway.
Principle 4
Bet on the input everyone else calls fake
People called rayon "artificial silk." The early Burlington bedspreads were, in the words of the textile historians, "stiff, slippery, and streaky." Love "hung his hat on the fiber" anyway. Annette C. Wright identifies "shrewd product selection" as the foundational reason Burlington became large and profitable "in what most observers regarded as a declining industry."
The insight was that the market's skepticism about a new input is often the source of the opportunity. Established mills had sunk capital in cotton machinery and cotton expertise; their incumbency made them slow to switch. A newcomer with failing cotton lines and nothing to protect could move first. When the Depression made silk unaffordable, demand for the "fake" swung toward rayon — and Burlington was already the most practiced weaver of it in the country. He made the same move again with nylon in 1940, then with acrylic and polyester.
Tactic: Look for the material, tool, or channel that incumbents dismiss as an inferior imitation, and ask what happens to your position if customers decide "good enough and cheaper" beats "authentic."
Principle 5
Run tiny experiments with existential stakes
The rayon experiment that saved the company was 104 pounds of yarn. Love did not retool a plant. He wove one small lot as filling into an existing 40-inch cotton warp, discovered the result made a crinkled fabric, and realized that seamed down the middle it was wide enough for a bedspread. The cost of the test was trivial. The cost of not running it, given the faltering cotton business, was the company.
This asymmetry — small experiment, enormous downside to inaction — is the shape of good decision-making under pressure. He used existing looms and existing warp. He did not need the product to be beautiful; he needed it to sell. It sold. Only then did he expand into draperies, garment fabric, a second mill with 48 Jacquard looms.
Tactic: When your core business is failing, design the cheapest possible test that uses existing equipment to probe a new market — and run it this month, not after the strategic review.
Principle 6
Own the road to the customer
The centennial account of Burlington credits Love's "commitment to a world-class truck fleet" as the enabler of the rayon bedspread boom, and the company's own history places the trucks at the center of its rise to largest rayon weaver in the country. In 1929 he opened a New York sales office. In 1935 he moved headquarters to Greensboro specifically for its rail connections to New York.
Every one of these decisions was about distribution, not production. Textile mills in the era typically depended on rail schedules and on New York commission houses that sat between the mill and the buyer. By controlling his own trucks and his own sales presence, Love shortened the distance — in time and in relationships — between his looms and the people buying the cloth. Harry Dalton, the American Viscose salesman who slept on Pullmans six nights out of seven, understood the same truth from the supplier side: proximity sells.
Tactic: Map every handoff between your product and your customer, and invest first in owning the one that most controls speed and the relationship.
Principle 7
Buy the dead when everyone else is burying them
The Depression made Burlington. Love bought idle mills from local families across central North Carolina, refitted them with looms that could handle rayon, and reopened them. By 1936 he had 22 plants in nine communities and $25 million in revenues; in 1937 he took the consolidated company public. Fred Rogers's verdict — "a financial man," not a manufacturing man — rests on exactly this sequence.
The key was that Love was not buying mills as they were. He was buying physical shells and labor pools and converting them to a product with rising demand. A closed cotton mill had almost no value to its owner. The same building attached to Burlington's rayon expertise, truck fleet, and New York sales office had a great deal. Counter-cyclical acquisition works only when the acquirer brings the missing ingredient that makes the distressed asset productive again.
Tactic: In a downturn, buy only the distressed assets for which you uniquely supply the missing piece — product, channel, or capability — that the seller could not.
Principle 8
Know who owns your molecule
Wright's sharpest observation concerns the price of Love's best idea. By abandoning cotton for rayon and then nylon, he escaped commodity agriculture — and walked into dependence on a few chemical giants. "After the emergence of artificial and synthetic fibers, textile mills became dependent on large yarn manufacturers in the chemical industry such as Du Pont and Celanese." Burlington could be the biggest textile company on earth and still not control its most important input.
This is the hidden cost of riding a platform shift. The new input that creates your advantage is usually owned by someone else, and that someone has scale, patents, and leverage. Love's aspiration to dominate textiles the way U.S. Steel dominated steel ran into the fact that steel companies owned ore and furnaces, while Burlington bought its fiber from companies far larger than itself.
W
Where Integration Helped — and Where It Hurt
Drawn from Annette C. Wright's analysis of Burlington's strategy, 1923–1962.
| Move | Logic | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Switch from cotton to rayon, then nylon | Product selection in a rising category | Scale Foundation of the empire |
| Horizontal acquisition of idle mills | Buy capacity cheaply, convert to rayon | Scale 22 plants by 1936 |
| Reliance on synthetic yarn suppliers | Unavoidable once off cotton | Risk Dependence on Du Pont, Celanese |
| Forward integration into women's garments | Capture finished-goods margin | Risk "Especially dangerous" |
| Multidivisional reorganization (1955) | Manage sprawl through nine divisions | Try Structure for scope |
| Final retrenchment to weaving and knitting | Stay where the firm had real advantage | Scan Love's late conclusion |
Tactic: For every input your advantage depends on, name the supplier who controls it, estimate their leverage over you in five years, and build your strategy around that constraint rather than pretending it does not exist.
Principle 9
Find the edge of your strategy and step back from it
Love spent three decades expanding — horizontally, backward, forward, into new fibers and new divisions. Then, according to Wright, he looked at the evidence and concluded that "Burlington should remain a weaving and knitting company." Large size and diversification "did not always protect a company's profits." Forward integration into the volatile women's garment industry had proved dangerous.
Founders rarely do this. The temperament that builds an empire usually resists the conclusion that the empire has reached its natural boundary. Love's willingness to retrench is all the more instructive because his successors did the opposite: within a decade of his death the company had bought three furniture makers, wandering further from weaving and knitting than he ever had. The 1987 leveraged buyout and the 2001 bankruptcy had many causes, imports above all, but the post-Love pattern of diversification is a counterpoint worth noting.
Tactic: Once a year, list every line of business and ask which ones exist because they share your core advantage and which exist only because you had the capital to buy them — then be prepared to retreat to the first list.
Principle 10
Brand the commodity
Textiles were a business of anonymous goods sold by the yard to manufacturers who put their own names on the final product. In the late 1930s, on the advice of an associate, Love began advertising Burlington rayon directly as the best quality available — fabric that would not shrink or fade. In 1952 Burlington became the first textile corporation to create a television advertisement. The "dancing man" in Burlington socks later won industry awards; the company hired Petula Clark and Robert Morley as spokespeople.
Branding a commodity accomplishes two things. It gives the end customer a reason to ask for your product by name, which strengthens your position against the cutters and retailers who would otherwise treat your fabric as interchangeable. And it builds a name that outlives the operations: when the International Textile Group absorbed Burlington's assets, it retained "Burlington" as a brand. The factories were sold; the name was kept.
Tactic: If your product is bought by intermediaries and invisible to the end user, find one claim of quality you can credibly guarantee and take it directly to the people who touch the finished good.
Principle 11
Build the pipeline that builds your industry
In 1942, Love joined Herman Cone, W.J. "Nick" Carter, and David Clark in founding what became the North Carolina Textile Foundation, incorporated that December. Their diagnosis was specific: salaries at North Carolina State's textile school were not competitive with industry, so qualified people would not teach there. The foundation set out to raise $500,000 to supplement state salaries and recruit a new dean. By 1945 it had raised more than $700,000; by July 1948, $1 million. In 1955 Burlington helped fund the State reactor program, and the building bears the company's name.
This is self-interest at the scale of an industry. A company that depends on chemical fibers, research laboratories, and engineered processes needs a steady supply of trained engineers and chemists. Love, a Harvard Business School man who had arrived in textiles with no technical background, understood that the region's universities were part of his supply chain. His later trusteeships at UNC and Davidson, and the foundation he and Martha Love established in 1947, extended the same logic.
Tactic: Identify the scarcest category of talent your industry will need in ten years and organize your competitors to fund its training — you will capture a disproportionate share of what you help create.
Principle 12
Treat your own mortality as a strategic variable
Love died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 65, after nearly forty years as president. The company "came under new management," in the words of the corporate record — and within four years began diversifying into furniture, the kind of distant forward integration Love had concluded was hazardous. Whatever judgment he had accumulated about the limits of Burlington's strategy seems not to have been encoded deeply enough in the institution to survive him.
The evidence here is necessarily circumstantial; the sources do not describe his succession planning, and it would be unfair to blame a founder for decisions made by others a decade after his death. But the arc is suggestive. The Holts lost their mills when the founding generation's attention passed to heirs who did not want them. Love's family stepped back from operations and turned toward philanthropy. The company passed to professional managers, then to Morgan Stanley's debt, then to bankruptcy, then to Wilbur Ross. Every handoff carried less of the original judgment.
H
Three Southern Mill Dynasties, Three Endings
How the founding families of the Piedmont textile industry handed off — or didn't.
| Family | Founding asset | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Holt (Alamance County) | 20+ mills, 1837–1900; Alamance Plaids | Risk Grandchildren "took their money and got out" |
| Love (Burlington) | One mill in a cornfield, 1924 | Try Founder dies suddenly; company passes to professional management; merged into ITG in 2004 |
| Cone (Greensboro) | Mills and mill villages; Caesar Cone a 1921 "leader" | Scan Merged with Burlington under Wilbur Ross, 2004 |
Tactic: Write down the three strategic conclusions you have reached at the hardest cost — the boundaries you learned not to cross — and make sure they live in your board's governing documents, not only in your head.
Free playbook
Get The Business Model Playbook
58 business models, one visual page each: how the money flows, the metrics that matter, and who runs it. Free when you join the Faster Than Normal email.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
Love himself left behind few quotable lines in the available record. What survives are the judgments of those who studied him, worked for him, and inherited his name.
— Annette C. Wright, Business History Review (1995)Shrewd product selection allowed Spencer Love to build Burlington Mills into a large profitable firm in what most observers regarded as a declining industry, textiles.
— Bill Finger, Southern Exposure (1975)In 40 years of business, Love gambled and nearly always won; he expanded tremendously, garnering new markets; he became a super personnel manager, systematically weeding out all union supporters. Love's work became a cause, the undivided interest of his life.
— Mary Gowan, dean of the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, Elon University (2011)One of the announcements of Spencer Love's passing noted three qualities that set him apart: vision, courage, and initiative.
— Fred Young, president of Elon College, announcing the Love Foundation's $1 million gift (1985)The Martha and Spencer Love Foundation has made an investment in this community, just as the benefactors did so many times when they invested in new textile operations in this county.
Maxims
- Inheritance is not obligation. Carry the best machinery out of the family mill and leave the building behind.
- Run on half a floor. Production teaches faster than construction; start the looms before the room is finished.
- Let the town buy in. Community equity converts local anxiety into patient capital.
- The "fake" is the opportunity. When incumbents dismiss a new input as an imitation, the newcomer with nothing to protect should move first.
- Test with 104 pounds. The best experiments are cheap, use existing equipment, and are run before desperation becomes collapse.
- Own the truck. Control over distribution is control over speed, and speed is control over the customer.
- Buy the shell, bring the missing piece. Distressed assets are only bargains if you supply what made them fail.
- Know who makes your fiber. Every platform shift creates a new dependency; name it before it names its price.
- Find the boundary and stop. The founder's last strategic act may be deciding what the company should not become.
- Encode the hard lessons. Judgment that lives only in the founder dies with the founder.
