Many a state in the Union wanted to land the big new plant. It would cost $25 million to $35 million, employ 1,500, be the first in the U.S. to produce a Dacron-like fiber called Teron. This week the site was announced by its joint builders—Britain's Imperial Chemical Industries and the Celanese Corp. of America. Their choice was Shelby, N.C. One major reason for choosing North Carolina, said Celanese, was the "wholehearted cooperation" of Governor Luther Hartwell Hodges.
Energetic, engaging Luther Hodges, 60, ranks as the South's No. i salesman. He is constantly traveling (63,000 miles last year) and speechifying (150 last year) to extol North Carolina's attractions for industry. Among them, as listed by Celanese: "An adequate supply of skilled and semiskilled personnel, attractive residential areas, an excellent public school system, a good network of state and county highways." The state also has a right-to-work law and the lowest rate of unionization in the nation (only 8.3% of North Carolina's nonfarm workers are organized). Since Hodges became Governor in 1954, industrial investments in North Carolina have almost doubled, this year will top $225 million;,
Business in Politics. Ex-Businessman Luther Hodges is a businessman's Governor who likes to say: "I'm one of the few Governors who didn't have any training in politics—except for my general understanding of public relations."
The eighth of nine children of a poor tenant tobacco farmer, Hodges started working as a twelve-year-old hand in Marshall Field & Co.'s Fieldcrest mill at Spray, N.C., worked his way through the University of North Carolina ('19), then went back to the Spray mill. He rose rapidly, became vice president of Marshall Field in 1943, and in 1950 he retired, at 52, to devote the rest of his life to public service. He served a year as industrial chief of the U.S. Economic Cooperation Administration in Germany. In 1952, unwanted and unsupported by the state's Democratic organization, Hodges ran for Lieutenant Governor, traveled 11,000 miles through the state, glad-handed so many voters that he won handily. Two years later Hodges moved up to Governor when Governor William Umstead died, and in 1956 he was easily reelected.
Problems in Manufacturing. Few businessmen would want the kind of headaches that Hodges inherited as Governor. Though rich in scenery and resources, North Carolina is basically a maze of stamp-sized, undermechanized, undercapitalized farms. Its top crop is tobacco (more than half the U.S. output), which exhausts the soil, brings small profits to the farmer. North Carolina's manufacturing is largely in textiles, a low-wage, boom-or-bust industry. Among the states, North Carolina stood No. i in the number of farm residents (1.4 million), No. 48 in the average weekly earnings of manufacturing workers ($47.88). It was clear to Hodges what North Carolina needed. "We had to get our farmers to diversify, to go into other businesses. But where were they to get the capital?"