Try another experiment with a girl’s sleeveless vest for wearing over the gown under the coat. This garment will cost $1.25 in an East Side shop. It feels like wool and is sold for wool, but it comes out of the pot intact, a strong, durable cotton yarn vest which could have had but a small fraction of wool in it in the first place if, indeed, it had any. Its real worth is not over 25 cents.

This same experiment will show similar adulteration in many of the blankets and much of the dress goods and suitings sold to the unknowing as all wool. Vast quantities of so-called “cotton worsteds” are manufactured annually. The amount of wool in these goods has been steadily decreasing in the last few years, falling from 50 per cent to 25 per cent, and from there to practically all cotton, immense quantities of the last being manufactured for boys’ and men’s wear. It is from cotton worsteds and cheap shoddies that the $8.00 and $10.00 suits for women, the $10.00 and $12.00 suits for men, are generally made. The goods may be sold by the manufacturer for what they are, but at the counter the purchaser receives the express or implied assurance that they are all wool. To such lengths has the adulteration gone that it may be laid down as a fact that people on small incomes to-day rarely if ever wear anything but cotton and shoddy mixtures.

Now, that things have changed is not proof that they are worse. Because a great number of us in the United States cannot get the woollen blankets, shawls, and clothes which we once had and which are still accessible at low prices to the European laborer and peasant is not proof that we have not a better substitute. May it not be that woollen garments, blankets, and suits are a superstition? Are we not just as well off clothed in cotton substitutes?

There is no doubt cotton knit goods are admirably cheap underclothing, most of them are well fitting, and some of them are durable. Where light clothing is sufficient—and with the general heating of houses, factories, and shops and cars, there is no longer the same need, for many people, of heavy clothing as in the old days—they are adequate. There is no doubt the young girl’s cotton worsted gown looks well at the start. The cotton warp “all wool” suit of the laboring man has a correct finish, color, and style, better perhaps than of old, for finish and cut are demanded by the poorest and are achieved remarkably by the cheapest clothiers. But in two particulars the cotton substitute fails. It has not the warmth, and it does not keep its appearance. True, if a man puts on enough cotton garments he can get the same warmth. But he cannot get from cotton the same protection against storm and wet, the same safeguard where his labor subjects him to excessive perspiration. He cannot get the same comfort at night. Moreover, his garment becomes shabby, loses its shape, in much shorter time. Women can no longer make over with satisfaction the gowns they once wore a series of winters. The man’s suit is no longer respectable as “long as it holds together.” Those of us who must buy cheap clothes can find them at the long established popular prices, but we no longer get the warmth or the satisfaction from them.

During the discussion of the Payne-Aldrich tariff bill, evidence enough of this was laid before Congress. Mr. Nicholas Longworth, for instance, read to the Committee on Ways and Means a letter from a clothier in his congressional bailiwick in which the man declared: “I never handled cloth of so inferior a quality as I do now. Laborers, mechanics, and farmers who use ready-made clothing are receiving practically no value for their money.” The National Association of Clothiers were strong in their protest to Congress. “Standard winter worsteds,” their committee said, “which twelve years ago ranged from twenty-one to twenty-four ounces in weight per yard, have gradually been decreased in weight, so that they now range from fourteen to sixteen ounces per yard; standard spring worsteds which ranged from fourteen to sixteen ounces in weight per yard have gradually been decreased, so that they now range from nine to twelve ounces per yard. In consequence, a deterioration of fully thirty-three and one-third per cent in weight has taken place, in addition to the establishment of a much higher range of prices for the same qualities of goods. The clothing manufacturer, therefore, through the inability of the cloth to stand ordinary wear, is largely deprived of the opportunity to produce garments upon which a good reputation can be based.”

But why should the materials which are used in our cheap clothing be unsatisfactory—why can we not get durable cheap goods, as it is certain we once could? The answer is not contained in a word. There is always more than one reason for sweeping changes in standard articles like woollen goods. However, the chief reason, the one which is more powerful than all the rest, is to be found in the complicated wool schedule which has been in operation in this country since 1867, the three years of the Wilson tariff excepted. This schedule rests upon two arbitrary and utterly unjust duties. The first of these is that on wool “in the grease,” as wool is called when it is sheared from the sheep. To prepare this wool for manufacturing it is first scoured until clean, an operation which causes a shrinkage of from twenty to eighty per cent in the weight of the wool. In turning this clean wool into cloth there is a still further shrinkage. Indeed, the total shrinkage from wool to cloth is such that it sometimes requires as much as five or six pounds to make a pound of cloth; and again it requires as little as two pounds. Of course the value of the wool varies according to the shrinkage, i.e. according to the amount of cloth a manufacturer can get from a given lot. It also varies according to the kind of cloth the wool will make, i.e. whether it will make a fine or coarse cloth. Now all imported “grease wool,” suited for clothing regardless of its value, of the amount of dirt and grease there is in it, the amount it shrinks, the amount and quality of cloth you can get from it, has to pay a duty of eleven or twelve cents a pound. If the American wool-growers who secured this duty, to begin with, on the supposition that they would soon be able to produce enough wool to supply the home demand had been able to keep their promises, it would not have been necessary to import wool, and competition might have kept the home prices down. But the wool-growers have not for many years, if ever, produced even half of what we use. It is customary to figure the amount as much larger. “Seventy per cent of the wool we use is produced at home,” the wool boomers cry, but they do their figuring on grease wool and omit altogether the wool which comes in manufactured! There is only one fair way to estimate the amount we grow, and that is to find out what we get from it after it is cleaned of grease and dirt and compare it with the clean wool, raw and manufactured, we import. Do this and we find that we really produce nearer 40 per cent than 70 per cent of what we use. In 1890—in 1895—in 1900—this was the approximate proportion. One of the leading wool authorities of the country makes the relative proportion the same in 1906, i.e. 40 per cent domestic to 60 per cent foreign. For 1909, he figured it 37 per cent domestic to 63 per cent foreign.

Now, as said above, all of the wool imported must pay a duty of eleven or twelve cents a pound when it is “in the grease.” The American wool-grower in normal and prosperous times can charge more for his wool because of this duty. He may not be able to add the full amount to his price—in fact, it is probable that he rarely does, but he certainly gets considerably more than he could if he were not protected.

The way the duty works is clearly illustrated by a personal experience in wool-buying related by Robert Bleakie, of Boston, a manufacturer who has been making woollen goods in this country continuously since 1848. Mr. Bleakie’s account is of a purchase of wool he made in 1897 just before the Dingley Bill went into effect, that is, when we had free wool. He had bought in Africa 223,684 pounds of wool at 99
10 cents a pound. By the time he got it to Boston it cost him 132
10 cents a pound ($29,565.83 for the lot). Now, let us suppose Mr. Bleakie’s wool had not reached Boston until after the Dingley Bill had gone into effect, that is, until after the eleven cents a pound had been placed on grease wool. To get his wool out of the custom-house Mr. Bleakie would have had to pay the tidy sum of $24,605.22; i.e. eleven cents on each pound. This would have made the wool cost him, instead of twenty-nine thousand dollars, over fifty-four thousand dollars. But it was fine wool, shrinking heavily in cleaning. As a matter of fact, he got out of the 223,684 pounds he imported only 85,000 pounds which he could use. But note that he would have had to pay duty on the entire lot, that is, to pay it on 138,684 pounds of grease and dirt as well as on the 85,000 pounds of clean wool! Of course the duty simply shut him off from importing heavy-shrinking wool, and at the same time made domestic wool of this kind too dear to buy.

Now, there are two classes of wool manufacturers, known as carded woollen and worsted. The former, to which class Mr. Bleakie belongs, finds a large proportion of the wool they need to be heavy-shrinking—the latter use mainly the light-shrinking wool. It is the carded woollen manufacturer who makes our heavy woollen clothes—flannels and blankets, the warm and durable “all wool” goods of the poor man. Mr. Bleakie’s experience just quoted shows what the eleven-cent duty on grease wool does to his business. It takes the raw material away from it—“starves” it, as the manufacturers say. At the same time it gives his competitor—the worsted maker—a decisive advantage, for he uses mainly light-shrinking wool. It is obvious that if two manufacturers each import one hundred pounds of wool in the grease, and each pay $11.00 duty on his lot, the one which gets the larger number of pounds of clean wool will have the other at a disadvantage. Yet each will pay the same duty, $11.00 on a hundred-pound lot.

What this discrimination against those who use the heavy-shrinking wool amounts to is making wool too dear to be put into the common grades of flannels, blankets, and clothing materials. The manufacturer is forced to find substitutes. Forty-four years ago, when the duties on the coarse grades of wool were first made prohibitive, and the manufacturers were forced to find substitutes in order to make clothes that the average man could afford to buy, wool rags, wool waste, and carpet wools were resorted to. They were wool, at least, and warm. Between 1867 and 1890 the annual importation of shoddy rose from about 500,000 to 9,000,000 pounds. Then the cry went up that it was displacing wool. Prohibitive duties were placed upon all kinds of wool substitutes. By 1890 duties so high were put on all the wool substitutes that they could not be imported; that is, after taxing wool off our backs—the wool substitutes were taken away. Deprived of the advantages which the inventions for using waste gave, there was nothing left but cotton for the bulk of the substitutes used in inexpensive goods, and cotton it has been ever since. The rapid absorption by cotton of the wool field has indeed been one of the most significant changes in American industry since the McKinley Bill of 1890. The tables of 1905 show that while from 1890 to 1905 cotton increased in the manufacturing of clothing materials about 100 per cent, wool increased only about 25 per cent. One whole department of manufacturing formerly classed under wool, is now placed with cotton hosiery and knit underwear. The decrease in the per capita consumption of wool shows still more strikingly the passing of wool. In 1890 we were consuming 8.75 pounds apiece; in 1904, 6.22 pounds,—less than we used in 1860!