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let us also recognize that the industry has not been completely idle in attempting to solve that problem.

We have today in the wool textile industry organizations like Wool Knits, the Wool Bureau, Woolen & Worsteds, Inc., promotional agencies. We also have in this country the American Institute of Mens and Boys Wear, which is a promotional agency dedicated to all textiles, not just wool and worsteds.

That is aimed at promoting better clothing habits for the American public, asking the American male to dress in relation to the requirements of the occasion.

Senator PASTORE. Well, I realize that, but do you think without some partnership arrangement on the part of the Government, that all that is being done in that direction is being done, or that a great deal could be done that is not being done?

Take, for instance, your organization. You are, by comparison, a small-business man.

Mr. BONTE. That is correct.

Senator PASTORE. Now, there is a serious question in this depressed area about how much money you could devote from your profits to research, and you have to rely-I suppose you have arrangements with some national organization, but there again they are doing it for agricultural products, why shouldn't it be done for textile products?

Would you have any objection to that? I don't know what the machinations will have to be, I don't know even what the participation will have to be, but we have studies that are going on in all the universities of this country in one phase or another, whether it is atomic energy, agriculture, or what have you, in order to increase and to explore the further utilization of some of these products, especially here in textiles where it is admitted that it has remained constant for 10 years.

I ask you this question: Let's assume that the United States shut down the barrier completely on the importations of yarn. Do you think that your business would, ipso facto, become lucrative? Mr. BONTE. No.

Senator PASTORE. You have other problems?

Mr. BONTE. The industry has always had problems. As long as they are American problems, each individual can hope to work to solve that particular problem. As to research, we have one of the greatest organizations in the world in Du Pont. They have come out in the last 10 years with nylon, orlon, dacron, and backed them up with millions of dollars of advertising.

Those are some of the problems that our industry has had to face

up to.

Senator PASTORE. But does that help you?

Mr. BONTE. It doesn't hurt me. I can go in and spin orlon and dacron and nylon if I want to. It is a small company; I have to pick out what I think is my best field, but there is nothing preventing me from going into some other field of activity.

Senator PASTORE. I am just curious to get the facts. You see the suggestion was made that possibly we could interest the Federal Government in further research. Just to what extent it has to be, or under what procedures, I don't know.

That all hasn't been defined, but that is part of a presentation that has been made. We, as members of the committee, are merely listening. We haven't called a full meeting or an executive meeting of the subcommittee yet. We haven't had our staff director really analyze it completely and thoroughly yet, but we are merely trying to promote thinking on this subject to see if there isn't some answer, because as you say, our habits have changed as a people, and here we are, even though we have increased phenomenally so as a population within the last 15 or 20 years, we find that this particular industry has remained constant.

Now, we want to get it off dead center, and we are trying to find the answer for it. That will be developed, I hope, during the progress of these hearings, and with the assistance of fine people like yourself who have come before us and given us the advantage of your valuable background and experience, because, after all, you are in the business, you know it better than any man on this committee, and we want your help and we want your suggestions and your recommendations, and we are trying to explore it together with everything else as much as

we can.

For instance, the differential in the cost of cotton. You don't have to be a college graduate to realize how much that hurts. If a foreign country can buy this cotton 25 percent cheaper than an American cotton weaver can, and he can sell it back to us at 25 percent cheaper cost, even that, alone, is a differential that you can't meet on the American market.

Then add the fact that he pays his help 14 cents an hour. That is his business. We are not asking him to pay his help $1.53 an hour, we are not suggesting that to the workers of Japan. That is their responsibility, they run their country as they see fit to run it, and we don't want to interfere with that in the least.

There again, if they pay 14 cents and we pay $1.53, as you know, to make the same thing, to sell on the same market, I repeat again you don't have to have half a dozen college degrees to understand you are at a disadvantage and there must be some answers to those problems and we are hoping possibly we can find them.

Mr. BONTE. Thank you, Senator.

Senator THURMOND. I have no questions. Thank you very much.
Senator PASTORE. Mr. Charles B. Rockwell.

STATEMENT OF CHARLES B. ROCKWELL, THE ALLENDALE CO., CENTREDALE, R. I.

Mr. ROCKWELL. Senator, I will be very short. I will be a little, perhaps brutal, but I will be very short.

Senator PASTORE. That is a "BB" assault, brief and brutal.

Mr. ROCKWELL. I hope we will be friends in spite of it.

You have heard many good presentations of the textile industry and its troubles, so I will confine myself to just one small portion, the fine worsted yarn business.

My name is Charles B. Rockwell. I am president and treasurer of the Allendale Co., of Centredale, R. I.

I have been a manager of spinning and combing plants for 45 years. I was called to Washington in January 1943 to take care of

the cold-weather clothing for the War Production Board, and left June 30, 1944, after serving as Chief of the Wool Branch of the War Production Board.

We are spinners of fine count worsted yarn, and employ about 200 people in Centredale, R. I.

We are particularly well qualified to make this type of yarn. Our machinery is laid out for this, and our employees are skilled and well versed in this branch of the textile business-so much so that, until the Japanese were deliberately given this business, we were steadily employed on this work, and still are able to sell this against any other competitors.

We have lost this business to the Japanese as explained to the Department of Commerce, the State Department. the Office of Defense Mobilization, and our representatives in Congress.

To repeat-we pay $1.60 an hour and the Japanese pay $0.14 an hour-a difference in payroll costs alone of $0.68 per pound.

The tariff on Japanese yarn is----

Plus ad valorem-15 percent, or about....
Plus freight----

Or a total of‒‒‒‒‒‒‒

Our raw material has to pay a tariff of..

Plus ad valorem-6.3 percent, or---.

Or a total of...

Per pound

Then the extra burden of cost of the Japanese yarn is the difference between__.

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Their advantage in New York is_-_. Plus their overhead difference of----

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Which can be stated in round figures as a total of at least___‒‒‒ .50 They are selling in New York by some $0.50 below our costs, and have sold for the last 2 or 3 years at this differential, and have sold such quantities as precludes our doing any volume on these yarns. The Japanese did not have this business before the last war. Therefore, it is not essential to their economy. They killed thousands of our men in the war, and now our Government feels that our people should be forced out of work to support them.

Our State Department and our Department of Commerce are for a continuation of our people being deprived of this work-as per the appended list of correspondence.

Our Representatives in Congress-including yourself-have done nothing to help our company or our employees. You have written a letter to Mr. Brossard on June 6. You even voted for a continuation

of the giveaway program-denying our people their possibilities of continuing in the business which had been their livelihood, and also giving the President of the United States 3 years of still further cutting any protective tariff.

That is the end of my statement.

Senator PASTORE. Let me ask you a question. You haven't been brutal at all. You have stated the facts, and I think it is consistent with a man's patriotism, to stand up and defend his home, his family, and his business.

Of course, we are living in a very complex world, it is a very sensitive world, and I suppose from time to time there is a difference between one man's responsibility as it affects the whole panorama of world activity and another man's responsibility.

It isn't very easy, but the point I mean to make is that we have built into the Reciprocal Trade Act sufficient safeguards, if prudently and wisely exercised, to give protection to the American manufacturer that he is entitled to.

Now, there are some people who feel that the best way of doing this is not to have a Reciprocal Trade Act at all, whereby you would be shutting off the possibility of ever getting into a negotiation with another country.

Well, I suppose if you look at that in the provincial fashion, there may be some substance to that point of view, or to that argument, but then, on the other hand, you are living in a world where, as I have said before, you have these very sensitive things that a President of the United States must deal with, and the Congress of the United States must deal with, also.

Now, I do say this. There is the protection in the law, it is a question of exercising it prudently. Now, I think that the American industry ought to be made to go before a Tariff Commission.

On the other hand, I don't think that a Tariff Commission wants to spell out the fact that American industry ought to be dealt with directly. I don't think it ought to be overruled too easily.

I admit we are living with platitudes and clichés, unless we do this or that Japan will fall, if Japan falls the whole East falls and then peace will be jeopardized. I think that is an easy way sometimes of turning your back on a real problem.

I think it is there, I think it has to be considered, and I think it has to be analyzed.

I am familiar with the correspondence that you sent to me, and I have made arguments and debates on that, and you are familiar with the record of the Senate.

You say, "Yes", but I voted for extension of the trade agreement. I did. I admit it. If I were to do it, I would do it over again. Because I feel it is the function of the Congress to entrust its responsibility to the President of the United States as the President of all the people.

On the other hand, I think the President of the United States must be very, very careful when he overrules the Tariff Commission, to be certain that irreparable harm is not being done to American industry. You and I may disagree, because your responsibility is one and my responsibility is another, but the protection is in the law, and if only we can get the facts before the people who are negotiating these agreements to understand what the repercussions and what the consequences are, I think that we can better understand the problem and better bring about a solution.

That is the reason we are holding these hearings.

Mr. ROCKWELL. May I say that Congress makes the laws. We have a law in which the lowest point is perfectly ridiculous as to tariff, and

if that hurts, then the Executive has the opportunity, if he wishes, to partially correct it, not wholly.

Since he has never done that, 77 cases before the Commission, 5 have been brought up to him, we will be out of business on fine yarn as we are today, long before the peril point has ever reached the President, and it shouldn't have been in the law in the first place, this low tariff. Senator PASTORE. But, Mr. Rockwell, won't you admit that under existing law the President, on an escape clause, has authority to institute a quota?

Mr. ROCKWELL. I think the Reciprocal Trade Agreement is "nuts,"

anyway.

[Laughter.]

Senator PASTORE. Of course, if you had to sit at the Congress of the United States and be responsible to all the people for peace and prosperity, of course, your point of view might be different.

Mr. ROCKWELL. You might use the word "provincial." The United States Government sent me to South America just before we got into the war and I have been to all the European countries and through their textile mills, and they think the thing is "nuts."

Why should we give them all the money? We should let them get out of their own trouble, themselves, and I agree with them. So I am afraid you and I, on that point, are wide apart.

Senator PASTORE. That is what makes America what it is today. Of course, there are many people in the United States and throughout the world who feel that if we hadn't come to the assistance of Europe at the time of reconstruction right after World War II, that communism would have overrun all of Europe, penetrated into Great Britain, and we would have had to stand alone.

Like everything else, it is the preventives that you take that never give you the sickness, and you say maybe I have wasted money. You never know the answer, it is an imponderable to which nobody knows the answer. There we are, we have to listen to someone. I don't agree with President Eisenhower on everything, as you well know. He and I are on opposite sides of the fence as far as that is concerned, but we have agreed on some things.

I don't agree that the law on tariffs, and the law on reciprocal trade has been wisely, prudently, and cautiously administered. I think that they have been bent too easily on political questions to overrule the Tariff Commission.

Mr. ROCKWELL. I agree with you.

Senator PASTORE. Insofar as writing a law is concerned, you have all the safeguards in that law, if only they will be wisely and prudently exercised. I don't think that you should burn down the barn to get rid of one mouse, and I am afraid if you argue you shouldn't have a Reciprocal Trade Act at all, that all this should be thrown back into the Congress, and in my humble opinion, I think ultimately it would lead to chaos.

Now, I say that as honestly and as sincerely as I can, fully recognizing the fact that any other American has a perfect right to stand up and say, "I disagree with you," and maybe I am wrong.

Thank you very much, sir.

Mr. ROCKWELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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