“THE MUSEUM AS A TOOL TO DEVELOP MAN’S FUTURE”: PUBLIC RELATIONS AND PUBLIC HISTORY IN KANNAPOLIS, NC A Thesis by WILLIAM C. RABY Submitted to the Graduate School at Appalachian State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS May 2020 Department of History i “THE MUSEUM AS A TOOL TO DEVELOP MAN’S FUTURE”: PUBLIC RELATIONS AND PUBLIC HISTORY IN KANNAPOLIS, NC A Thesis by WILLIAM C. RABY May 2020 APPROVED BY: Karl E. Campbell, Ph.D. Chairperson, Thesis Committee Andrea Burns, Ph.D. Member, Thesis Committee Bradley Nash, Jr., Ph.D. Member, Thesis Committee James R. Goff, Ph.D. Chairperson, Department of History Mike McKenzie, Ph.D. Dean, Cratis D. Williams School of Graduate Studies ii Copyright by William C. Raby 2020 All Rights Reserved iii Abstract “THE MUSEUM AS A TOOL TO DEVELOP MAN’S FUTURE”: PUBLIC RELATIONS AND PUBLIC HISTORY IN KANNAPOLIS, NC William C. Raby B.S., Appalachian State University M.A., Appalachian State University Chairperson: Dr. Karl E. Campbell Industrial heritage displays have attracted a large and growing multidisciplinary body of scholarship, much of which explores the relationships between the politics of deindustrialization and the politics of memory. Industrial heritage museums began to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s in concert with widespread deindustrialization, often with the backing of economic development coalitions in the name of economic diversification and postindustrial growth. Scholars have noted that industrial heritage displays represent a marked shift from the industrial museums and exhibitions that proliferated across the Western world in the late-nineteenth century to narrate the social and cultural changes brought by industrialization against the backdrop of shared national pasts. Only a few studies, however, have attempted to examine how museums reflected, navigated, and shaped the changing meaning of industrial environments and industrial workers across the industrial- postindustrial divide. This thesis focuses on a museum project undertaken by the famously paternalistic southern textile manufacturer, Cannon Mills Company of Kannapolis, North iv Carolina, during the 1970s – just a few years before the company entered into a series of crises culminating in its much-publicized shutdown in July 2003. Neither the Cannon Visitor Center nor Cannon Mills Company survived the southern textile industry’s deindustrialization. The site of what was for decades among the largest textile mills in the world has been cleared to make space for the North Carolina Research Campus, a biotechnology research complex championed by billionaire David Murdock as Kannapolis’s postindustrial salvation. The Cannon Visitor Center’s exhibits continue to shape the politics of memory in Kannapolis from their new place in the volunteer-run Kannapolis History Museum in A. L. Brown High School. Rather than serving as a relic of the company’s unquestioned power, however, the story of this bygone museum’s making is one of a New South company struggling to navigate not just the looming threat of textile imports, but the shifting racial and gender dynamics of the post-Civil Rights Era. v Acknowledgments Thank you to Dr. Campbell and Dr. Burns for letting me talk you into serving as my co-chairs at a time when you were both too busy to chair a thesis committee. I wish I could say that I was so easy to work with that your reluctance turned out to be ill-founded, but I will not soon forget your generosity and commitment to my growth as a historian. Thank you also to Dr. Nash. I enjoyed our several conversations about the history and sociology of labor, and I appreciate your insight and encouragement over these past two years. Completing this project took me so long that I can hardly remember a time when my consciousness was not consumed with thoughts of Cannon Mills and industrial heritage. However, as is the case with so much of what our minds come to perceive as natural, there is a story full of contingencies behind how I happened upon the Cannon Visitor Center documents in the reading room of the Rubenstein Library at Duke in August 2018. I have never heard of a research grant that comes with not only a place to stay, but free rides to and from the archive, lunches in the ornate Duke University dining hall, an introduction to the archive staff, and, best of all, great company. I received all of this and more from my aunt and uncle, Susan Ross and Tom Hadzor. I am grateful to the people and institutions who assisted me during my research and made my days of digging one of the most enjoyable parts of this project. Thank you to Josh Rowley at Duke’s Rubenstein Library and Shelley McBride, Ed Robinette, and the other volunteers at the Kannapolis History Museum. Thank you also to Jacqueline L. Anthony, vi President and CEO of the Kannapolis African-American Museum and Cultural Center, for providing several helpful leads. Serving as the Graduate Assistant Coach for the Track & Field and Cross Country teams was a highlight of my second stint in Boone. Thank you to the student-athletes (who won, I think it is worth noting, team Sun Belt Conference titles in Men’s Cross Country in 2017 and Women’s Cross Country in 2018), and, of course, to Coach Mike Curcio, who in addition to coaching me during my undergraduate days at Appalachian State, was my boss and benevolent land baron during my graduate studies. Working as a Resident Advisor with Appalachian State’s Upward Bound program during the summers of 2018-2020 has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. Thank you to the students for, among other things, giving me some faith in America, and to my mentors on the Upward Bound staff, Aaron Gersonde and Kim Grater. Special thanks are due to my UB friends Laura and Marco Fonseca for putting me up on my several trips to Boone this past school year to meet with my committee, drop off library books, and get my computer fixed at the University’s remarkably efficient state-run computer healthcare system. Thank you to my parents for more reasons than I could begin to enumerate here (or anywhere), and to my brother, Harrison, my sister, Elizabeth, and my brother-in-law, the other Will. And finally, thank you to the people of North Carolina for continuing to financially support public higher education, even in such allegedly valueless pursuits as the study of the past. I certainly hope that I didn’t develop any human capital over the course of this project, but for whatever it’s worth, I know I developed as a human being. vii Dedication And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.* ― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five To all the pillars of salt of the earth. * Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, or, the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. (1969; repr., New York: Dial Press, 2005), 21-22. viii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... iv Acknoledgments .................................................................................................................. vi Dedication ......................................................................................................................... viii List of Figures .......................................................................................................................x Chapter One: Introduction .....................................................................................................1 Historicizing Industrial Heritage .............................................................................. 16 Chapter Two: “To answer these questions, we must look into history” ................................ 31 On the Borders of the New South and the Sunbelt .................................................... 33 From New South Modernizer to Sunbelt Traditionalist ............................................ 39 Selling Cannon Mills ............................................................................................... 49 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 53 Chapter Three: Public Relations and Public Work ............................................................... 55 On the Tour ............................................................................................................. 64 Gender, Race, Class, and the Labor of Relating to the Public ................................... 71 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 81 Chapter Four: Public Relations and Public History .............................................................. 84 Professional Services ............................................................................................... 87 Fashion Right Now: Selling Cannon in the 1970s .................................................... 93 A Tale of Two Storylines ......................................................................................... 99 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 115 Chapter 5: Conclusion ......................................................................................................