Paper poses a grave threat to the textile industry
Cone offers some dark predictions for the textile industry. The paper industry is poised to continue taking textiles' business.
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:
-
Were there other problems in the twenties and thirties? Some of the
business histories refer to a situation of over-capacity in the
nineteen-twenties. Your uncle, I believe, Bernard Cone, gave an address
in 1930 to the Business School at Chapel Hill about problems of excess
production.
- CEASAR CONE:
-
The problem was this, what I just talked about. When a plant that was
making diaper cloth had its market going away, it got onto something
that was still going, percales or whatever which were going into dresses
or garments or sheets or pillow cases. It hasn't happened
yet, but I predict that one of these days the textile industry is going
to lose one hell of a lot of product from the institutional sheet and
pillow case business. They've already lost a lot of it from
these gowns. In the operating room now they
have a lot of these paper gowns that are disposable, instead of the
cloth gowns in the hospitals. I don't think lying on a paper
sheet will be as nice as a textile sheet, but in a hotel where
you've got to wash them every day… The
deterioration comes from the washing, not from the use. I can see where
one of these days the paper industry's going to come along
with a poured-out, soft piece of paper that might tear, by gosh, if
you're rough with it, but they'll throw it away.
As the looms and the spinning frames that are devoted to making fabric
that goes into sheets and pillow cases, especially for
institutions… Not for your home, where you maybe sleep on a
sheet for a week before you send it to the laundry. And you only wash it
once a week, so it doesn't deteriorate. It'll last
a lot longer. But these institutional uses, where they have to wash it
after every use, every day… They don't know
whether the fellow's going to stay there overnight or not. So
I can see, when that time comes, little by little, the textile
industry's going to be overproduced. The guy making the
sheets is going to go to maybe the denims, or whatever. Constantly, as I
see it during my experience, we've been shot at because
we've got an expensive way of making a flat surface, taking
those individual little fibers, elongating them, twisting them, then
weaving them. It's much more expensive than a poured product,
plastic or paper, and everybody's going to shoot at us.
There's only one area, in my opinion, that we've
got a bisque, and that is this breathing business for clothing. You
cannot have clothing that doesn't breathe. You'll
suffocate, perspiration, etcetera. So that's the one area
that's going to be the last to be penetrated by other
industries, if ever. But in the processes, the
thing is they kill our other markets. It's tough on us.