Whitney Stevens

Whitney Stevens did not found J. P. Stevens & Company; he was born into it, the great-great-grandnephew of the Massachusetts woolen man whose name the firm carried, and the son of a chairman who had been Secretary of the Army ^[1][6]. By the time he reached the top of the company, president in 1969, then chairman and chief executive in 1980, J. P. Stevens was the second-largest textile manufacturer in the United States, with roughly 43,000 employees, dozens of mills concentrated in the Carolinas and the Deep South, and annual sales near $1.7 billion ^[2][3][4]. It was also, by the late 1970s, the most reviled corporate name in the American labor movement, branded by the AFL-CIO as the "Number One Corporate Outlaw" for its long, methodical, and repeatedly illegal resistance to unions ^[5][6].

The defining drama of Stevens's leadership was not a product or a price but a seventeen-year war over the right of his Southern workers to organize. The campaign had begun in 1963 and centered on the company's seven plants in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, where in 1974 workers voted for the Textile Workers Union, and where Stevens simply refused to sign a contract, dragging the dispute through the courts and the National Labor Relations Board for years ^[1][7]. One NLRB administrative judge wrote that the company had approached bargaining "with all the tractability and open-mindedness of Sherman at the outskirts of Atlanta" ^[5]. The fight gave the country the 1979 film Norma Rae, drawn from the real Roanoke Rapids organizer Crystal Lee Sutton and the journalism that chronicled her ^[1][8][12].

What finally moved the company was not a strike but a new weapon. In 1976 the union organizer Ray Rogers devised the "corporate campaign," attacking Stevens not at the factory gate but in the boardroom, pressuring the banks and insurers whose executives sat on the Stevens board, and on whose boards Stevens men sat in return ^[4][7]. By 1978 the chairman, James Finley, and a director had been driven off the board of Manufacturers Hanover; insurers including Metropolitan Life, holding some $97 million of Stevens debt, leaned on management to settle ^[4]. The pressure reached the directors directly, and it reached Whitney Stevens ^[4][7].

On October 19, 1980, the company capitulated. Stevens signed its first union contract, covering the Roanoke Rapids plants and a mill in Montgomery, Alabama, granting dues check-off, seniority, grievance arbitration, and a roughly $3 million settlement for back wages, while the union ended its boycott and corporate campaign ^[1][7][8]. Whitney Stevens, the man who put his signature to the deal his father and grandfather had spent careers resisting, framed it not as surrender but as a settlement in the "best interests" of both sides, even as he vowed the company would keep opposing the union elsewhere ^[4][7].

The truce did not save the empire. The American textile industry was hemorrhaging to lower-cost imports, and in 1988 J. P. Stevens became a takeover target. After a bruising bidding war among a management group led by Whitney Stevens, the buyout firm Odyssey Partners, and the rival textile maker West Point-Pepperell, the company was carved up: West Point-Pepperell took the sheet-and-towel business for some $1.2 billion, and Odyssey took the rest, eventually renaming it JPS Textile Group ^[2][9]. After 175 years, the family name passed out of family hands, and Whitney Stevens, who by colleagues' account had "lived and breathed" textiles his entire adult life, presided over its end ^[1][3].

Whitney Stevens was born November 26, 1926, in Plainfield, New Jersey, into one of the oldest manufacturing dynasties in America ^[3]. The business traced to 1813, when Captain Nathaniel Stevens began making woolen broadcloth in a converted grist mill in North Andover, Massachusetts; the selling house that bore the J. P. Stevens name was built up at the turn of the twentieth century by John Peters Stevens, a New York commission merchant who distributed the family's New England cloth ^[2][10]. The integrated firm Whitney would one day run was forged in a 1946 merger that joined the manufacturing mills with the J. P. Stevens commission house into a single vertically integrated corporation ^[2][10].

His father was Robert Ten Broeck Stevens, a grandson of the founding line who became president of the company at thirty and chairman after the merger, and who, in 1953, left the executive suite to serve President Eisenhower as Secretary of the Army ^[6][11]. It was Robert Stevens who sat, harried and embattled, at the center of the televised 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings that helped break Senator Joseph McCarthy ^[11]. Whitney thus grew up amid both industrial wealth and public controversy, and absorbed the family creed his father stated plainly, that in the relationship between a company and its workers "a third party can serve no useful purpose" ^[6].

He was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, the town of the company's birth, and at Princeton, class of 1948, serving in the U.S. Naval Reserve during the war years ^[3]. He then went straight into the firm, climbing every rung: vice president by 1958, executive vice president in 1964, president in 1969, and finally chairman and chief executive officer in 1980, succeeding James Finley ^[3][6]. He never worked anywhere else ^[1][3].

Whitney Stevens's name is bound less to a product than to a turning point in American labor history. The seventeen-year campaign against his company produced Norma Rae, popularized the 'corporate campaign' that unions and activists still deploy against corporations today, and ended, on his signature, with the first union contract a Stevens had ever granted ^[1][7][8]. For the labor movement it was a landmark victory; for business historians it is the textbook case of how leverage over a company's financial allies can succeed where conventional organizing fails ^[4][7].

The larger story is one of decline he could manage but not reverse. The integrated Southern textile colossus his family had built was already being undercut by cheaper imports, and within eight years of the union settlement the company was broken apart and the family name sold off ^[2][9]. Whitney Stevens, who had "lived and breathed" the business from Andover to Princeton to the corner office, became the last of his line to run it ^[1][3]. He spent his later decades as a philanthropist and trustee, at Mount Sinai, at the family foundation, on a Montana ranch, far from the mill towns where the fight that defined him had been waged ^[3].