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The death and life of Asheboro, N.CThis week before the election there is a lot of arguing about the slowest recovery America has ever seen. We went to North Carolina, a state that went for the president last time but is swinging toward Mitt Romney now. And we found the story of the economy in the death and life of Asheboro.Asheboro grew up on manufacturing, its factories filled with generations of families who built their town near Purgatory Mountain. But in 2008, Asheboro was named one of Americas fastest dying towns. The folks there were never going to quit, but they are still struggling. Why are we stuck somewhere between recession and recovery? No one better to ask than those who live around Purgatory.In Randolph County, theres no escaping the second election since the great recession. Nonstop, the TV promises a better day or warns of a worse one. Folks around here have seen a lot of both. Those days start with the signature sound of Asheboro at the Acme-McCrary textile company. It opened the year that some of its workers helped put a Republican in the White House, William Howard Taft. It was 1909. One hundred and three years later, Bill Redding runs the place.Scott Pelley: At its peak how many employees did you have?Bill Redding: About 2,000.Scott Pelley: And today?Bill Redding: Six hundred. To see why its so hard to stitch together a recovery, look at the ladies hosiery business. Its been torn to shreds by cheap imports. Redding has kept the mill going two ways. One, a great idea. He took a chance on a new product: Spanx shapeware which became a sensation. And two, he moved 600 jobs to Honduras.Scott Pelley: The workers who are less-skilled in Honduras working for you, how much less are they making than the people who work on this floor?Bill Redding: Considerable.Scott Pelley: Fifty percent?Bill Redding: I probably dont wanna answer that.Scott Pelley: Okay. But its a considerable difference?Bill Redding: Oh, yeah.Scott Pelley: And its what keeps your business in business?Bill Redding: Thats true.Scott Pelley: What wouldve happened if youd dug in your heels and said, No, Im keeping 1,200 jobs in this plant in Randolph County?Bill Redding: I think we would probably not exist.You dont have to look far to see what he means. This mill, in the nearby town of Ramseur, was wiped out, with every job gone, a thousand of them. We couldnt help but notice this in the demolition: Please have a safe drive home, we want to see you tomorrow. Remember when driving was the biggest threat to workers? When tomorrow didnt come, there was no future for Ramseurs main drag. Shops shuttered right after the plant and Amelia Hill, one of the last holdouts will close her diner this coming Thursday.Amelia Hill: All the businesses are gone. Theyve just faded out. Moved. I mean you cant survive. Theres no way. Theres no surviving.Scott Pelley: Youve been thinking about your retirement, and youve been saving money, I understand for a long time?Amelia Hill: Right.Scott Pelley: Have you been spending some of that savings to keep the doors open?Amelia Hill: Ive had to, I sure have. Dont want to dig any deeper in it.Scott Pelley: Today the only full-time employees are you and your daughter?Amelia Hill: Right. Right. Scott Pelley: Youre gonna lay off your own daughter?Amelia Hill: Im gonna lay off my own daughter.They turned the bank into a town museum. Its open two days a month which is more than its neighbors.Scott Pelley: These were all the people who came to the cafe and sat at the counter and drank coffee in the afternoon, right-Amelia Hill: Right. Right.Scott Pelley: These were your people? Amelia Hill: Those were my people. Scott Pelley: And now youre one of them.Amelia Hill: And now, Im one of em. Scott Pelley: We couldnt find a better example of whats happening to American manufacturing than this plant on a hilltop in Randolph County. This used to be a textile plant. They started building it in 1949. They built the last addition on it in 1995. But the plant closed and now theyre tearing half of it down. The manager told us that they just cant find a buyer who has enough employees to need this much space. In the year 2000, there were 17 million Americans who were working in manufacturing. Now there are just over 12 million. Thats five million jobs lost in manufacturing in just the last 12 years. But you can also see, rising from the debris of the recession, is a new economy in Asheboro.Klaussner Furniture was forced to lay off half its workers, lost to Chinese imports. Now its holding on to the others by exporting to China. Klaussner Furniture is expensive in China but, turns out, the growing Chinese middle class thinks the Made In America label is a status symbol. Made In America is an advantage for the Technimark company which has created 800 jobs here. It makes plastic products including iPhone covers. Theyre growing because they can deliver a customers new product in two weeks when it can take two months to ship the same thing from China. Up the road in Kernersville, even the abandoned tobacco barns are turning a new leaf - not with one big company moving in, but dozens of new entrepreneurs who are setting up shops. A lot of them were down on their luck and had no choice but to cook up a new idea. Jenny Fulton: I grew up on pickles. My grandmother used to make pickles. Wed-we always had pickles in the house, and I love em. Jenny Fulton and Ashlee Furr were laid off stock brokers. They poured their savings into Miss Jennys Pickles. Theyre in more than 500 stores, some of them in China, and soon to be in Mongolia. Scott Pelley: They like pickles in China?Jenny Fulton: Theyre in 40 stores, and theyre on the shelf-Scott Pelley: Forty stores in China?Jenny Fulton: Yes, sir. Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming, Shenzhen.Scott Pelley: Why did you decide to expand into China?Jenny Fulton: Well Ill tell you what happened, I said, Ashlee, 2011, were gonna export to one country. I dont care what it is. Because 95 percent of the world lives outside of the United States.To reach them she went to a seminar and heard about the U.S. Export-Import Bank - the governments credit agency for foreign trade.Jenny Fulton: And I sat right behind Fred, whos the president of the Export-Import Bank. And so when he got done speaking, I went running outside to the car, because I saw a group of gentlemen standing there. And I said, Whos driving Fred? Guy said, Me, Chris. I said, Youre my new best friend. Get him to eat these pickles before he gets on the plane because I want to export this year.Scott Pelley: You got some pickles to the driver of the head of the Export-Import Bank?Jenny Fulton: Yes, sir. And, and we exported that year. Scott Pelley: Pretty good trick.Jenny Fulton: Ya gotta think out of the jar, you know? If youre selling pickles, you better be creative. Whats made us successful is whats made every American company successful, and thats hard work. And not taking no for an answer. If somebody tells me, No, Scott, I say, Okay that means timings not right. But youll want my pickles.Scott Pelley: No means go?Jenny Fulton: It does, at the right time. But, you know, were not too pushy. You know, I believe it or not. I know you laugh, but-Scott Pelley: Really? Ah, well, Im glad to hear that.Jenny Fulton: What I do is I drip on you, and I dont let you forget me, OK?Here they call that gumption and its forced unemployment from 13 percent, near the highest in the nation, to just about nine and a half. The jobs are coming, just not fast enough. And no family is a better example of that than the Berrys. Bobby Berry lost his factory job three years ago. Hes worked here and there, but mostly theyve lived on his wifes pay and benefits. Sugar Berrys been at the same steady job 27 years at a plant that makes wire for steel-belted tires. This month, Bobby got a job when the malt-o-meal cereal plant expanded with 50 new workers. The Berrys had two paychecks again - until the letter came.Scott Pelley: This is the letter that you received from the company. This layoff is a result of the companys decision to cease operations at the Asheboro wire plant, which will result in the closure of the entire plant and the termination of the employment of substantially all of the plants employees, approximately 310. When you read those words, what did you think?Sugar Berry: It cant be. I, I said it couldnt happen whenever we were sold, but I guess I should have expected it coming.They were sold to a Korean firm. The jobs maybe headed to Vietnam.Scott Pelley: So, one step forward, one step back.Sugar Berry: Uh huh. (affirm)Scott Pelley: It seems like the rest of the country.Bobby and Sugar Berry: Yeah. Scott Pelley: Whats that last day gonna be like? You worked there nearly 30 years.Sugar Berry: I just dont know. Some of those people, Ill probably never see again and weve been together all these years, raised our families together and cut up together and been mad at each other. And, you know, I dont know. I dont want it to come.Not long ago their son Matt mightve followed them into a plant. But instead hes at Randolph Community College learning high-tech manufacturing. Many of his classmates are in their 30s and 40s. Some of them can thank the government for recent increases in tuition assistance, and others in the county have survived on extended unemployment benefits. But with Election Day coming, many have lost patience with predictions of a recovery they dont quite seeScott Pelley: When you see those ads, what do you think?Bobby Berry: I just lost confidence in all of em to tell you the truth. I mean, you know. Theyll make these promises around election time and then it seems like, you know, after its over with, nothing. So, you know, I dont even know if Ill vote.Scott Pelley: Sugar, what do you think?Sugar Berry: It shouldnt be that were trying to one-up either side. It should be that were working together for the American people. And you have not seen that at all. Whoevers got something on the floor, the others gonna do whatever they can do to veto it, or be against it instead of doing whats right for the American people.Around Purgatory Mountain, jobs lost by the thousands are being reinvented by the hundreds. There is considerable doubt that another election will do very much about that. Folks around here believe that if there is to be a brighter tomorrow theyll have to build it themselves.National Archives treasures targeted by thievesAmerican history is housed in the National Archives. Forty-four of them, spread all over the country. They contain documents, photos, maps, artifacts that go back to our founding fathers. Every school kid knows about some of them: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Bill of Rights; but there are millions of others, from the patent for Michael Jacksons moonwalking shoes, to Benedict Arnolds loyalty oath.Many are priceless treasures which means they attract not only scholars but thieves; more and more of them all the time. Getting to the crooks before they get to the archives has become a new priority in law enforcement.No one knows more about this than Barry Landau - a self-described presidential historian and one of the foremost collectors of presidential memorabilia. Thats because Barry Landau carried out the largest theft of these treasures in American history. Prosecutors say he is one of the most accomplished conmen theyve ever encountered. For decades, he was a regular guest at the White House. Here he is with President Ford and Queen Elizabeth. Hes the guy with the beard.He showed up with President Reagan and Nancy at the Inaugural Gala in 1985 and met a whole bunch of presidents: Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton. He wrote an impressive picture-laden book, The Presidents Table. And was invited to the finest anchor desks in town.Matt Lauer: Barry H. Landau is presidential historian.Keith Olbermann clip: The story of the ultimate inauguration collector.But when we met up with him in June, he no longer wanted to tell his story. Hed been convicted of the single largest theft of historic artifacts in the United States. He stole thousands of items; including hundreds of documents signed by some of the most famous names in history: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, Marie Antoinette and Voltaire. Hed pilfered them from museums and libraries all over the country. U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein was in charge of the prosecution.Bob Simon: He was a conman?Rod Rosenstein: Barry Landau was a con artist. And he used his reputation as a presidential historian in order to gain the confidence of museums and other people who had custody of important documents and then he stole them. It was a reputation, it turns out, that was the product of his rich imagination. Landau claimed hed worked for every president since Lyndon Johnson, had served as chief of protocol at the White House.Rod Rosenstein: But in fact, there is no evidence that Barry Landau was ever employed by any White House or had any of the relationships he claimed to have or indeed had any legitimate job at all.The Landau case and a few others let law enforcement know they had a problem they hadnt really been aware of until very recently.Paul Brachfeld: Every institution now that has collections is threatened. We all know that there is a major threat and its getting larger.Former Secret Service employee Paul Brachfeld is the inspector general of the National Archives. He runs the tiny and little-known archival recovery team: armed federal agents and historians who, along with the FBI, go after stolen national treasures. Bob Simon: Now Landau, was he a good thief? Was he a good conman?Paul Brachfeld: From everybody I talked to, he was a master thief. Because he did it over a duration of time. He shopped. He got what he shopped for.A trusted researcher and regular at libraries around the country, Landaus strategy, along with his accomplice, they conquered with kindness; as they did here at the Maryland Historical Society where Pat Anderson is the director. Bob Simon: Some thieves work with knives, others with guns. These guys worked with cupcakes?Pat Anderson: Yes, they did. Yes, they did. They brought us cupcakes and the second time they visited, they brought cookies. Evidently they took treats to every repository they visited.Bob Simon: And it worked.Pat Anderson: It did work.But on July 9th last year, the esteemed Mr. Landau got careless and Pat Andersons archivists got suspicious, caught them stealing and called the police.Bob Simon: How many things did they have when they were caught?Pat Anderson: They had 60 pieces of our library material.Bob Simon: OK, so now this is some of the stuff they stole? Tell me what were looking at.Pat Anderson: These are inauguration souvenirs. Bob Simon: From which inauguration? Pat Anderson: This is Grover Clevelands and, these are fun, tickets to Andrew Johnsons impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. And they grabbed a fistful of those.Bob Simon: I bet.There wasnt much security at the Maryland Historical Society. But still, how do you walk out in front of the librarians desk with 60 documents? The secret was sartorial. Deep pockets. Bob Simon: And those are his costumes?Rod Rosenstein: These are the jackets that Mr. Landau used and he had altered in order to steal items from the historical societies. Now, whats interesting about these coats is that he arranged for a tailor to install interior pockets, hidden pockets inside the jackets that are large enough to fit these documents.Landau had a whole collection of them, including a trench coat.Bob Simon: How did you react when you saw his jackets?Paul Brachfeld: Fascinated. Again, in my world, every criminal is different. Every thief is different. And you just always - you kind of respect them. You kind of learn from them. After the bust in Maryland, Inspector General Brachfeld and the FBI decided it would be a good idea to get a search warrant for Landaus apartment in New York.Bob Simon: It was your agents who broke into Landaus apartment. How did they react when they found what they found?Paul Brachfeld: Well, my focus was getting them a truck because when we got to Mr. Landaus apartment, we came to the quick realization that we needed a truck. This was, by far, in terms of quantity, the largest amount of documents and artifacts that weve ever recovered from one site. Ten thousand items; including 300 of extraordinary historical value. What were they worth on the market?Paul Brachfeld: I think the value was astronomical. And for me, its so difficult to put an empirical number on them. Its basically how much the market would bear. For all I know, to some collector, one document might have been worth millions.Bob Simon: All of these were found in Landaus apartment?Rod Rosenstein: All of these documents were seized from Mr. Landaus apartment in NYC.There were remarkable documents: letters signed by Mark Twain, Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, a document penned by Lorenzo de Medici 533 years ago, an epitaph written by Benjamin Franklin for himself.Bob Simon: And he wrote, Lies here food for the worms yet the work shall not be lost. Pretty good stuff. A letter written by John Hancock with a real John Hancock signature, and for 20th century buffs, there was the original reading copy of FDRs 1937 inaugural address. This one.Video of FDR delivering inaugural address: One third of a nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.Rod Rosenstein: It was a rainy day. In fact, the reading copy of the speech,