Slow technological progress hinders the textile industry
Cone describes the gradual technological progress of the textile industry and threats to its well-being. He thinks that the textile industry consolidated later than some other industries because of its unique technological demands and because of increasing competition from other products that provide cheaper goods that do the same things, like paper towels, plastic diapers, or even air hand dryers in public restrooms.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Caesar Cone, January 7, 1983. Interview C-0003. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- HARRY WATSON:
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Looking back over business history, it seems to me that the textile
industry has been later to consolidate and has done less of it than
petroleum, automobiles, steel, some of your other industries.
- CEASAR CONE:
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You've got several problems. Number one, the textile industry
started off as kind of a homegrown thing—the hand loom, the
spinning wheel—before technology ever came along with working
with steel or things like that. You had the village blacksmith. The
village blacksmith got out of the blacksmith shop and got into the steel
industry. The textile industry came from the home spinning wheel and the
hand loom. First we went through the water power days, before there was
electric power or steam power. It was an old
industry when all these other new industries came off the drawing board.
That's one reason it didn't flourish in the South
until we had electric power or steam power. Our rivers were small, and
they didn't produce the water power. The old mills used to be
run just like the grist mill. They'd have a dam, and
they'd have a flume, and they'd have water power,
and they'd have a wheel. The whole plant ran from that wheel
through belts and pulleys. Electric power came along, and you could have
individual motors on your machines. You could transmit your power by
wires, and we got rid of all the belts and the pulleys. New England had
big streams, big snows, big runoffs, and they could use water power and
have bigger mills. That's one reason the mills in the South
were just more or less glorified grist mills in the beginning, until Mr.
Duke came along. First it was water power, which he transferred into
electricity and transmitted by wire, and then steam power, which could
be transmitted also by wire after you converted it into electricity. But
the textile industry, frankly, didn't lend itself to the type
of technology that you see in the steel industry, this assembly line
kind of a thing. It still doesn't. It takes an individual
machine to weave. Spinning has been improved to some extent, what they
call open-end spinning. But it's still the same old process
of taking individual fibers and combing them out in the same direction
and then twisting them. That's making thread. Then you take
those threads and you put them on a loom, your warp threads lengthwise
and your cross threads, what we call the filling, in and out.
It's the same old process as the hand loom and the hand
spinning frame. It doesn't lend itself to the type of
automation where you can roll out stuff. One thing
that concerns us, that's killed us to some extent, but we
don't know what to do about it, is the paper industry. There
never used to be paper towels; textiles had all of the towel business.
It had all the diaper business. There are various areas where other
industries can pour stuff out. They can beat us to death. Economically,
though, there's nothing we can do about it. We've
got a more absorbent fabric, but it's a lot more expensive.
Now, with services going up so, it's cheaper to have a
disposable item than it is to have a diaper, we'll say, that
you send off somewhere to have washed. It's not sensible
economically to say that disposable items are cheaper than items that
you can use and re-use, but it's true in this society of ours
in this country. It costs so damn much to have things fixed. You take a
suit of clothes at the cleaner, what it costs you.
- HARRY WATSON:
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Yes, I know. I just picked up some dry cleaning this morning.
- CEASAR CONE:
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I had an interesting example, talking about textiles. I was on the board
for years out here at our airport. When we built a new terminal building
in 1957—of course, they got a new one as of
1983—we put in these hand dryers in the rest rooms. Nobody
can argue that the hand dryer doesn't do a very good job of
drying your hands. Prior to then, years ago, we had the cloth that you
pulled down. Then it came to paper towels. Stark Dillard,
who's dead now, Dillard Paper Company, used to sell us a
bunch of paper towels for the old airport terminal building. When they
went to these blowers, he went out there to see this new building,
beautiful, and went in there. He just raised hell. He said,
"Hot air." And I said, "Stark, I agree with
you. Evaporation is the lousiest way in the world to dry
your hands. But on the other hand, just think. When you got
the paper towel business away from the textile business, a paper
towel's not as nice to dry your hands on as that cloth that
we had out there, but it was more economic. I agree with you, but
we've got a captive audience that goes into that rest room,
and it's a lot cheaper for us to have this dryer, because
those paper towels used to clog up the toilets and mess up, and
we'd have to dispose of them."
[Laughter]
But that's progress, I guess.
- HARRY WATSON:
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Maybe so.
- CEASAR CONE:
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But there was a vast amount of textiles, worldwide, that went down the
drain when the paper industry developed. Kotex. When I first came along,
the whole women's sanitary business was textiles. That was
taken over by the paper business, a hundred percent.