Class Note 1973
Long winter ends.
Plains Cotton Cooperative Association president and CEO Wallace Darneille received the prestigious 2010 Award for Corporate Excellence in the small-to-medium enterprise category from the U.S. State Department. Wally was presented with the award to the subsidiary company Denimatrix by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. Denimatrix, located in Guatemala City, is the cooperative’s denim apparel production company. The company, one of three awardees, was nominated by U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala Stephen McFarland. The award recognized Denimatrix for contributing to the development of the local economy, for reaching out to the community to help disadvantaged youth and the homeless in Guatemala City and for environmental stewardship.
Founded in 2009, Denimatrix is a major manufacturer of high-fashion denim jeans with current capacity to produce 150,000 pairs of jeans per week. It is part of the cooperative’s fully vertically integrated business model from field to fashion that includes the American Cotton Growers denim mill in Littlefield, Texas. Headquartered in Lubbock, Plains Cotton also is the largest originator of U.S. cotton to textile mills around the world.
“We are extremely proud that Denimatrix has been chosen for this award,” Wally said at the ceremony. “It is very fitting that they have been honored for their corporate social responsibility and their environmental stewardship. We believe that these values are critical to a company’s success. By providing a stable and desirable workplace, we can attract employees whose productivity will make them competitive in a global economy. This award means a great deal to us about the future as well as the past. It is recognition of the dedication of several generations of PCCA stockholders to doing the right thing for present and future generations. When our apparel customers come to visit Denimatrix, one of the strongest impressions they take away is the sense of teamwork and of family that pervades our facility.”
Princeton University Press recently published James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition, an intellectual biography of President Barack Obama.
Before writing the book Jim interviewed the president’s former professors and classmates, combed through the president’s books, essays and speeches and even read every article published during the three years Obama was involved with the Harvard Law Review (“a superb cure for insomnia” asserts Jim). His conclusion: President Obama is a true intellectual, a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.
“There’s John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson,” he said at a recent lecture.
To Jim, the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century. Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers.”
—Val Armento, 227 Sylvan Ave., San Mateo, CA 94403; val.armento@alum.dartmouth.org
