gentlemen, that once you start to eliminate it or even do anything to detract from style your unemployment in the industry will inevitably

start to mount.

I do not think the question put by Congressman Martin concerning the comparison of the $10 coat and the $200 coat has been fully answered. I make this statement because of a familiarity with this industry that goes back about 20 years. It is quite conceivable to fabricate a coat that sells for $10 or $12 or $15 which is composed entirely of virgin wool, every bit of it virgin wool, and yet there is no special quality, no special warmth from that garment.

Mr. Del Monte has told you of other things that go into the $200 coat. He gave you an illustration of a garment which is 333-percent cotton and 6623-percent wool, and sells for a large price.

I think from those observations we have presented to you, certainly a case for this industry exists. We are not selling blankets; we are not selling men's coats; we are selling style, and under those circumstances we feel that you should favor no legislation which will tend to detract from that all-important element.

Will you hear Mr. Rothman, and then we will have completed. Mr. CROSSER. Thank you, Mr. Weinberger. We will hear Mr. Rothman.

STATEMENT OF HENRY ROTHMAN, PRESIDENT, INFANT AND CHILDREN'S COAT ASSOCIATION, NEW YORK, N. Y.

Mr. CROSSER. Mr. Rothman, will you give your full name and your connections to the reporter.

Mr. ROTHMAN. Henry Rothman, president, Infant and Children's Coat Association, New York City.

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I will touch on an entirely different phase than that presented by the previous speakers, and I am going to be very brief, because I appreciate the patience you have given to the previous speakers, and in spite of the fact that were only allotted 10 minutes each, in your patience you have given us a little more time, so I am going to be very brief in what I have to present.

I am going to present it from the viewpoint of the difficulty that we would have in the labeling of garments from a point of view of manufacturing them.

I will try and prove the impossibility of compliance with the labeling in compliance with the proposed law, and also the harm of what would be done to the manufacturers through such action.

I will take for example our particular firm. We have been manufacturing children's coats since 1908. Our volume is in excess of $3,000,000. The average cost of our garments is around $4.50, and we approximately manufacture throughout the year about 700,000 garments.

I should say about 60 percent of the fabrics we use in the manufacture of these 700,000 garments are made of fabrics that are not all wool. The reason for using these kinds of fabrics is through our experience we have found that the wearability of such fabrics, the warmth, the satisfaction, the looks, are superior to what we could manufacture to meet the price that a large amount of the consumers are able to pay for the garments.

You realize, as I have said to you, the average price of our garment is $4.50 wholesale, which would mean that the garment retails anywhere from between $5 and $10.

In order to get a styled garment out of the fabric that would answer the purpose, that would give the warmth and the wear, and the durability to the garment, it is necessary that we use a cloth that is known as a cotton warp fabric. The cotton warp fabric may have 25percent wool; that is, 15-percent cotton that is sometimes used in the cloth which helps to give the fabric warmth. It does not necessarily mean when we say that a garment is all wool that it gives more warmth than a garment that is part wool, because in order to get warmth it is necessary to get weight. The weight of the fabric we use particularly for the fall and winter months runs around 20and 24-ounce cloth. It is necessary to have that weight cloth in order to give weight and warmth to the garment, because if we were to use an all-wool cloth for the same price we could not get better than 12 or 14 ounces all-wool cloth as compared with the 20-ounce woolcotton cloth for the same price. So from that point of view it would not be fair to the consumer; it would deprive the consumer of the correct fabric that should be utilized in the manufacture of the garments for that child.

I believe it is the intention of the Congress in putting through this proposed bill to take care of the dishonest manufacturer either of woolens or dishonest manufacturer that uses deception in trying to sell the garments. It would mean that the unscrupulous manufacturer if he had to use an all-wool cloth, because the consuming public would be in the frame of mind that everything is labeled and they would naturally want to buy an all-wool fabric as against a fabric that has part cotton, and an unscrupulous manufacturer would use the all-wool fabric, but he would take out of the garment the workmanship and the skill that the garment should possess, so that from that point of view I feel it would not help, the proposed bill would not help the consuming public.

Now, from the point of view of practicability in labeling these materials as they are cut: They are cut in large quantities. Sometimes two or three different mills' cloth are used in the cutting of a single lot of cloth. It would physically be impossible to tag these different materials in order to label them properly. In other words, under the proposed bill it would be necessary to use the tags of a mill and the mill's cloth, and if perchance we were not able to detect these fabrics and tag them correctly, we would be putting the wrong label on the wrong fabric.

That is all I have to offer.

Mr. MARTIN. Just a question, or rather an observation:

The bulk of the testimony at the prior hearings revolved around a question that has hardly been touched upon this morning, and that is the intermixture of shoddy made out of used clothes. This morning you have gone into the use of cotton to give strength to fabrics, the use of rayon to give finish to the fabric, and so on; but the real question that was gone into heretofore has really not been touched upon this morning, and that, as I say, is the use of these shoddies in the manufacture of garments.

Apparently, so far as the testimony goes this morning, none of you have stated that you use reclaimed wool or shoddy to any considerable extent.

Mr. HAFT. May I answer that question, Congressman?
Mr. MARTIN. Yes.

Mr. HAFT. We frequently, as I said before, use cotton warp and in some of those fabrics in order to make them properly and give them weight there is some shoddy in some of those fabrics, and just as long as the shoddy is a byproduct and can be used satisfactorily and safely, why not use it? Why object to us using shoddy in fabrics if the shoddy is so constructed with the rest of the component parts of the fiber as to give satisfaction? It gives wear to the garment and the consumer is satisfied, because it brings out an article at a price within the reach of her pocketbook.

Mr. MARTIN. The question of price does enter into it and is largely controlling?

Mr. HAFT. That is why shoddy is used.

Mr. MARTIN. If the manufacturer could get the virgin wool as cheaply as he can get the so-called reclaimed wool or shoddy, he would use that wool, would he not, in preference to shoddy?

Mr. HAFT. He certainly would.

Mr. MARTIN. Do you think that the consuming public generally would buy an article if they knew that say 25, 30, or 50 percent of it were made up of second-hand clothing?

Mr. HAFT. Well, I want to answer that in this way, Mr. Congress : That particularly in children's garments, mothers are very careful not to clothe their children with fabrics that have been used before, and under the proposed bill we would have to definitely define that in this particular fabric that it is made from reclaimed wool. Reclaimed wool would mean rags had been used in the remanufacture of the fabrics.

The consumer would definitely not be willing to buy a garment for her child made out of reclaimed wool, because it might reflect upon her mind that this fabric had been used before probably on some sick child.

Mr. MARTIN. How can she now be protected? How can she know what she is getting when she goes to buy a suit of clothes for her child? It might be made out of 100 percent second-hand clothes. How can she know?

Mr. HAFT. But, Mr. Congressman, you and I agree, that while reclaimed wool itself is a deception on the part of the consumer, the child cannot be contaminated with the rags used in the making of reclaimed wool, because of the processes that the rags go through and that the consumer would be in the wrong frame of mind.

Mr. MARTIN. It does not make any difference what chemical process it has been through, if she knew that that suit was made in whole or in part of second-hand clothing she would not buy it, would she, for her child?

Mr. HAFT. And it would be detrimental to her not to buy it, because she probably would not buy a garment at all. She would not buy anything, because of the condition of her pocketbook, whereas we are able to sell her a garment that she is able to buy and at the right price.

Mr. WOLFENDEN. May I interrupt you there?

Neither would she buy soap made from reclaimed garbage, specially if it came from a hospital, would she?

Mr. HAFT. I cannot answer that. I do not know anything about the manufacture of soap.

Mr. REECE. Neither would she eat fried chicken if it were accompanied with a picture of the young chicken walking around the barnyard, all of which I think is aside the question.

Mr. HAFT. I just want to qualify that answer to the question. I would like to put it in my way, if you do not mind. I do not think he has answered the question in the way it can be answered.

All reclaimed wool is not made from old worn clothes. Now, we ship many thousands and thousands of pieces of goods and then they are cut, in the cutting rooms, small pieces or fairly large pieces, off of those clothes, and eventually those are sorted out into different qualities and there have been times when wool has been quite high that we have received as much as 50 and 60 cents a pound for the rags of those wools. Those wools are generally sorted cut at some place and reworked.

Now, that is reworked wool. Of course, there are some old clothes that are probably reworked into shoddy, but they both go into it. Mr. MARTIN. Well, some of the former witnesses here discriminated between the clippings and so forth and the reworked rags.

Mr. HAFT. That is right. The answer is that this cloth is not always the kind of cloth that a woman would object to if she were buying it for a child, because that sometimes is a great deal finer and has a better feeling and gives better wear than does virgin wool of a very low stock.

Mr. MARTIN. Mr. Chairman, I present for insertion in the record a letter from Mr. Arthur Besse, president of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, giving some figures he did not have at the time he testified as to the proportion of the virgin and reclaimed wool annually used in the industry.

Mr. CROSSER. That may be incorporated in the record. (The letter referred to is as follows:)

Hơn. JOHN A. MARTIN,

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF WOOL MANUFACTURERS,

New York City, May 6, 1938.

House of Representatives, Washington, D. C. DEAR CONGRESSMAN MARTIN: On Wednesday when I was testifying in connection with H. R. 9909 you asked me for the comparison between the amount of new and reworked wool used in the wool textile industry. According to the 1935 Census of Manufacturers which is compiled by the Census Bureau there was a total production of 477,000,000 pounds of yarns made on the woolen and worsted systems. This figure omits both carpet yarn and a certain amount of knitting yarn which is spun by the knitting mills themselves. Except for carpet yarn, however, it covers practically the entire industry. During the same year the Census figures indicate that approximately 100,000,000 pounds of recovered wool fiber were used. The ratio, as you will see, is approximately one to five or expressed another way slightly over one-fifth of the total material used in manufacturing woolen and worsted yarns is reworked wool fiber.

Trusting this information will be of service to you in consideration of this bill and thanking you for your courtesy, I am,

Sincerely yours,

ARTHUR BESSE.

Mr. MARTIN. Mr. Chairman, there are some of the proponents of the bill present. I believe that that concludes the list of witnesses in opposition to the bill.

I am wondering whether any of the proponents of the legislation this morning desire to say anything in closing, and if they do, I

think, according to the practice of the committee, we might listen to them briefly.

Mr. REECE. I should think so. Has the cotton or rayon industry either been notified of these hearings? It would seem to me that they have a very material interest in this proposition. When the shoe question was before the committee here, they came in in force. It seems to me that it is of greater concern to them.

Mr. MARTIN. After a while we will be stringing these hearings out until the adjournment of Congress.

Mr. REECE. There are 30,000,000 people in the South who are interested in cotton and rayon.

STATEMENT OF CURT E. FORSTMANN, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, FORSTMANN WOOLEN CO., PASSAIC, N. J.

Mr. FORSTMANN. Mr. Chairman, I have already taken so much of the time of the committee that I do not want at this time to go into detail in rebuttal of some of the remarks that were made this morning. I would like, however, to present for the consideration of the committee an illustrated book of a typical shoddy mill, which may be an interesting thing for you to look at.

During the testimony this morning a few points were brought out that I would like to discuss in a very short way.

In the first place, almost without exception

Mr. REECE. Before you enter on that discussion, you have presented this booklet showing the reclaiming of wool. As I recall, you stated the other day when before the committee that the reclaimed wool was completely sanitary?

Mr. FORSTMANN. That is right.

Mr. REECE. So that there would not be any danger from it?

Mr. FORSTMANN. So that there would not be any danger-in other words, there would not be any danger of disease being transmitted from rags which had been worn by sick people.

Mr. REECE. It is easy to get the wrong impression by looking at the picture of a process. I recall visiting a canning plant one time, and I saw people in a big vat with rubber boots on, of course, tramping kraut and beans and other vegetables that were being canned. That was not an unusual process. Still, it was a little repulsive and conveyed the wrong impression. So these pictures do not seem to me to have any bearing on the question at issue, since it is admitted on all hands that reclaimed wool is completely sanitary.

Mr. FORSTMANN. That is right. The only reason I have submitted this book is for the consideration of your committee, to give the committee a general idea how reclaimed wool is actually made, to show the various processes, and not to imply that due to dirt that may be in the material, in the first place, disease could be transmitted. I do not mean to imply that at all.

Mr. REECE. A photograph of the process of manufacturing rayon from cotton linters and wood fiber would present about the same kind of a picture as these.

Mr. WOLFENDEN. May I interrupt you?

Mr. FORSTMANN. Certainly.

Mr. WOLFENDEN. You do not claim that this is a modern plant?