by Southern Housewife

Created on: July 02, 2007   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

John Edwards has tremendous credibility when he speaks of two Americas; he has lived in both of them. He was not "born to the manor," he was born to the small clapboard shack in a textile mill village; he was a linthead.

Loose your job, loose your home; living in a mill village meant living in a small rented house owned by the textile mill where you worked. It meant buying groceries from a store owned by the mill, attending school built by the mill, and adhering to the mill's rules for community living, including not-so-subtle pressure to vote the way mill owners suggested. Southern textile mill workers were not unionized; Mill owners owned the mill, and in many respects "owned" or at least controlled nearly every aspect of their workers' lives.

Growing up, both Edwards' parents worked to make ends meet. Edwards watched his Dad struggle to advance in the mill. It didn't matter whether his father worked longer, harder, or more productively, the better jobs and promotions went first to those with more education. Even without money or power, Edwards understood education was an equalizer, and education was the best chance he had to make a future for himself.

Edwards was the first person in his family to go to college. In 1974, just two years after President Nixon's historic visit to China to open trade relations, Edwards graduated with a degree from North Carolina State University in textile technology. Few could predict the textile industry, the South's economic lifeline since Reconstruction, was on its way to collapse. One by one textile mills were "outsourced" to China's cheap labor leaving people who knew nothing but mill work their entire life cut adrift with families to feed and few transferable job skills. With the future of textiles in the South in decline, Edwards decided to go to law school. In 1977, he graduated, with honors, from law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and married Elizabeth.

When John Edwards began his legal career he was anything but the darling of high finance and corporate America, he was a personal injury trial lawyer representing the kind of people he had grown up with on the mill hills. He represented the sick, the poor, and the helpless against insurance companies and large corporations.

Just seven years out of law school, Edwards took the kind of case no seasoned lawyer wanted to touch and turned it into a $3.7 million dollar verdict for his client. John Edwards went on to become one of the most successful

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