James S. Love

James Spencer Love did not inherit a mill so much as inherit a problem. The grandson of a Gastonia textile pioneer but the son of a Harvard mathematics professor, he came south in 1919 as an outsider, a Cambridge-born, Harvard-trained ex-Army major, to take over a small, struggling cotton operation his family controlled ^[1][2]. What he built from that beginning was not a bigger cotton mill but a new kind of company: by his death in 1962, Burlington Industries was "the largest textile company in the world," the 48th largest corporation in the United States, with sales of $913 million and some 62,000 employees in 18 states and 7 foreign countries ^[1][4].

The pivot that made it possible came in 1923. Convinced he could do better starting fresh than nursing the obsolete Gastonia plant, Love secured a $250,000 loan from the Burlington, North Carolina, Chamber of Commerce, a town hungry to revive mills abandoned by the declining Holt family dynasty, sold off his Gastonia assets, and on November 1, 1923, agreed to incorporate a new company ^[1][3][5]. Burlington Mills opened in 1924 with 200 employees in a single building, and almost immediately Love's first products, flag cloth, bunting, curtain scrim, proved unsellable ^[3][5]. The company was failing again before it had properly begun.

Love's escape was rayon. Originally sold as "artificial silk," rayon was the only synthetic fiber then available, and most American manufacturers treated it with suspicion ^[3][5]. Love, a relentless experimenter, gambled on it. His mill wove an experimental lot of viscose rayon into a crinkled cloth and seamed it into full-width bedspreads, a product crude by later standards but cheap, novel, and a hit in the post-war fashion boom ^[5][6]. By 1935 Love ran the largest rayon-weaving operation in the United States ^[2][6]. He had found the lever Henry Ford found in the Model T: a single product category, ridden relentlessly, that let a small firm outgrow giants.

The Depression, which gutted the cotton-textile South, became Love's opportunity. While competitors closed, he bought their shuttered mills cheap and re-equipped them with looms that could run rayon, stitching dozens of plants into one expanding enterprise ^[1][2]. In 1929 he broke with the industry's habit of selling through New York commission houses and opened his own sales office, determined to build a brand that buyers would demand by name ^[2][7]. In 1937 he reorganized roughly 22 to 30 plants into the Burlington Mills Corporation, with sales near $25 million, and listed the company on the New York Stock Exchange ^[1][2][5].

What truly distinguished Love was structure, not just scale. As the business sprawled across ribbons, hosiery, draperies, carpets, and apparel fabrics, he adopted a decentralized, multidivisional organization, each product run as its own division with its own distribution, long before most textile men thought in those terms ^[2]. The 1955 renaming to Burlington Industries advertised the transformation from "mill" to diversified industrial corporation ^[2]. Love was, in the words of one historian, "a fierce competitor, taking awesome risks," and the risks did not all pay: his attempt to integrate forward into the volatile women's-garment business proved especially dangerous, and he ultimately concluded Burlington should stick to weaving and knitting ^[2].

He was a hard-driving, restless executive, divorced, twice-married, working from Greensboro, New York, and Palm Springs, who supported a federal minimum wage against his own industry's wishes and asked for clemency for men convicted in a textile strike, even as Burlington built a reputation for keeping unions out of its Southern plants ^[1][2]. When he died of a heart attack at 65 in January 1962, the company he had improvised out of a cornfield was approaching a billion dollars a year in sales ^[1][3].

James Spencer Love was born July 6, 1896, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family that straddled New England academe and the New South cotton economy ^[1]. His father, James Lee Love, was a Gastonia, North Carolina, native who became an assistant professor of mathematics and an administrator at Harvard; his mother, Julia Spencer Love, came from a prominent University of North Carolina family, her mother was the writer Cornelia Phillips Spencer ^[1]. Crucially, his paternal grandfather, Robert Calvin Grier Love, had been a textile pioneer who helped found the Gastonia Cotton Manufacturing Company in 1887 ^[2]. Spencer Love thus grew up with the cotton mill in his bloodline but the lecture hall at his door.

He was quick and ambitious. After the Cambridge Latin School he took a B.A. at Harvard in three years and added a year at the Harvard Business School ^[1]. When the United States entered World War I he joined the Army in 1917, served on the headquarters staff of the 78th Division in France, rose to major, and was discharged in 1919, leaving the service, by one account, with about $3,000 in savings ^[1][7].

Rather than stay north, Love went to the family mill in Gastonia in 1919, reportedly starting low and learning the business from the floor up ^[1][2]. Within a few years he and his parents bought control of the Gastonia Cotton Manufacturing Company outright with their savings and credit ^[7]. But Love judged the aging plant a poor foundation. In a decision that defined him, he chose not to prop it up but to liquidate it, carry the best of its machinery to a new town, and begin again, the move to Burlington that would make his name ^[1][3].

Spencer Love's lasting achievement was to prove that a textile maker could be run like a modern industrial corporation. In an industry historians regarded as fragmented, low-margin, and declining, he assembled scale, vertical reach, brand-name marketing, and a decentralized multidivisional structure of the kind associated with steel, autos, and chemicals, and made it the largest textile company on earth ^[2][8]. Burlington's name became a household word for fabrics, and Love himself was later ranked the single most influential business figure in North Carolina history ^[1][2].

The inheritance was not all triumph. Burlington's rise rode the rayon revolution that helped industrialize the Piedmont, but the company also exemplified the Southern textile model of keeping unions out, even as Love personally backed a federal minimum wage and sought clemency for jailed strikers ^[1][2][13]. His philanthropy endured through the Burlington Industries Foundation, the James Lee Love Educational Loan Fund, and the Martha and Spencer Love Foundation, and his name lives on at Elon University's Martha and Spencer Love School of Business ^[1]. His papers sit in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill ^[3].

The company outlived its founder by decades but not the forces he had ridden in reverse. Global competition and trade liberalization hollowed out American textiles, and in 2001 the colossus Love built filed for bankruptcy; financier Wilbur Ross acquired it in 2004 and folded it into the International Textile Group ^[4]. The arc from cornfield to billion-dollar giant to bankruptcy is, in its way, the whole twentieth-century story of American manufacturing, and Spencer Love wrote its boldest chapter.