When the Showers family arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, the railroad had only recently come to town and a modest university was struggling to survive. Having spent the prior 18 years moving from place to place, the family decided to settle down and invest its modest resources to start a furniture company. The business proved to be extremely profitable and a stroke of good fortune for the small community. The company's success strengthened Bloomington's infrastructure, helping to develop new neighborhoods, and the philanthropic acts of the Showers family supported the town's continued development. The family's contributions helped Indiana University through difficult times and paved the way to its becoming the largest university in the state. In this detailed history of Showers Brothers, Carrol Krause tells the story of a remarkably successful collaboration between business, town, and gown.

“A history of Bloomington itself, telling the story of how an industry helped drive the development of one of the Midwest’s most vital university towns.”—Bloom When the Showers family arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, the railroad had only recently come to town and a modest university was struggling to survive. Having spent the prior 18 years moving from place to place, the family decided to settle down and invest its modest resources to start a furniture company. The business proved to be extremely profitable and a stroke of good fortune for the small community. The company’s success strengthened Bloomington’s infrastructure, helping to develop new neighborhoods, and the philanthropic acts of the Showers family supported the towns continued development. The family’s contributions helped Indiana University through difficult times and paved the way to its becoming the largest university in the state. In this detailed history of Showers Brothers, Carrol Krause tells the story of a remarkably successful collaboration between business, town, and gown. “Author Carrol Krause has chosen a very interesting subject and writes with an especially good eye for ‘telling detail’ and for imagining sounds, images, and smells of long ago. The illustrations combined with the engaging style will attract an enthusiastic local audience.”—James H. Madison, author of Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana “This once dominant and still prominent building houses the story of a city’s past manufacturing prowess, a downtown in decline, and an urban renaissance. The roots of that important story are now available in this written history of Showers.”—Mark Kruzan, former mayor of Bloomington, Indiana

Guide to a walking tour of the Showers Brothers Furniture Factory, Bloomington, Indiana, with map, tour sites, and descriptions.

Find a pool of cheap, pliable workers and give them jobs—and soon they cease to be as cheap or as pliable. What is an employer to do then? Why, find another poor community desperate for work. This route—one taken time and again by major American manufacturers—is vividly chronicled in this fascinating account of RCA's half century-long search for desirable sources of labor. Capital Moves introduces us to the people most affected by the migration of industry and, most importantly, recounts how they came to fight against the idea that they were simply "cheap labor." Jefferson Cowie tells the dramatic story of four communities, each irrevocably transformed by the opening of an industrial plant. From the manufacturer's first factory in Camden, New Jersey, where it employed large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants, RCA moved to rural Indiana in 1940, hiring Americans of Scotch-Irish descent for its plant in Bloomington. Then, in the volatile 1960s, the company relocated to Memphis where African Americans made up the core of the labor pool. Finally, the company landed in northern Mexico in the 1970s—a region rapidly becoming one of the most industrialized on the continent.