Requiem for a Patriot

"Conservative
Tycoon … Dies at 95," said the New York Times
headline on New Year`s Eve about the death of Roger
Milliken.

Clearly, the headline writer did
not know the man.

For

Roger Milliken exemplified the finest in American
free enterprise. He cared about his workers. He cared
about his industry. He cared about his community. He
cared about his country.

Into his 90s, Roger was holding
strategy sessions in Washington and walking the halls of
Congress to convince free-traders half his age that,

Esau-like, they were swapping the

manufacturing base of their nation for a

mess of Chinese-made

pottage down at the mall.

It was 63 years ago, on his
father`s death, that Roger took over the family business
begun in 1865 and started to build
Milliken & Co.
into the largest privately owned business in America, a
national and world leader in textiles and chemicals that
today holds 2,000 patents.

In the 1950s, he relocated from New
York to Spartanburg, S.C.

Few men did more to build the
two-party system in South Carolina than Roger, who
supported
Barry
Goldwater in 1964 and helped to persuade
Strom
Thurmond to leave the Democratic Party. In the
1960s, Roger had urged
Wofford College  in
Spartanburg to integrate its student body and promised
to

make up for any financial losses if it took the
step.

The great cause of the later years
of his life was his workers, his company and his
country, all of which he saw imperiled by a global
system set up for the benefit of transnational
corporations for whom, as Thomas Jefferson

wrote, the very ground
"they stand upon
does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from
which they draw their gains."

In 1985, Roger had come to the
White House to persuade me to convince the president to
sign a bill to slow the flood of textiles into the
country. No way, I told Mr. Milliken. I`m the biggest
free-trader in the building, except for the
fellow down the hall, who was

Ronald Reagan. Roger went away disappointed. Reagan
vetoed the bill. And I supervised the writing of the
veto message.

Within half a decade, however, some
of us had seen the light and enlisted in Roger`s crusade
to preserve the manufacturing core of the country that
he rightly saw as inextricably tied to the prosperity
and the pre-eminence of the United States.

Among the richest men in America,
Roger did not have to lead this battle, or even to fight
it. Indeed, he did not have to work. He could have
retired and traveled the world as other billionaires
did.

Yet he was there in the thick of
the battle against
NAFTA, GATT and the new World Trade Organization. He
opposed

MFN and PNTR for
China.
He broke with the party he helped to build to back
candidates who would stand with him, as he watched the

U.S. trade deficit rise and rise,

tens of thousands of industrial plants close and
millions of manufacturing jobs leave for Asia. It came
close, I believe, to breaking his heart, for he so loved
his company and his country.

Intellectuals deride
"paternalistic
capitalism," the idea that men who begin and build
companies know better than investors, unions and markets
what is best for them and their workers.

Roger Milliken exemplified the best
of that dying breed.

When his carpet plant in La Grange,
Ga.,

burned down on Jan. 31, 1995, Roger could have
collected the insurance money, taken advantage of NAFTA,
built a new plant in Mexico, employing the same low-wage
labor some of his rivals were using, and pocketed the
difference as profits for his company.

Instead, he arrived in La Grange
the morning after the fire, gathered the stunned
workers, told them he would find temporary jobs for
them, then pledged to have the most modern carpet
factory in the world built on that same site in six
months.

He moved his La Grange workers to
plants across the South, even to England, and called
friendly rivals to ask them to hire his people. He moved
to La Grange, oversaw the design of the new plant,
brought in 3,000 construction workers and craftsmen, and
directed the round-the-clock triple shifts to rebuild
his burned-out factory.

A reporter

called it with amazement
"a company taking
care of its company town." As promised, on Aug. 1,
1995, the

new plant opened.

Roger Milliken belonged to a rare
species of men who used to be more common here in
America than anywhere in the world. With his liberal
arts degree from Yale, he was a man of ideas and a man
of action. He had the ability to enlist creative genius,
managerial talent and loyal workers to build an empire
of production that was the best in the world. He wished
to be remembered with a single word: builder.

That he was, and if America is in a
time of decline, it is because we no longer produce many
men like Roger Milliken.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan
needs

no introduction to
VDARE.COM readers; his book State
of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America, can
be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book
is Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How
Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost
the World,
reviewed

here by

Paul Craig Roberts.