Tar Heel Showcase
Textile mills in \ortli Ctiroliiui pro¬
duce .varn anil fabric, bill their
showcase is maii.v miles away on
i\'cu York's Hortli Street, the cot¬
ton street of the nation.
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North Carolina leads the
nation in three manufactur¬
ing fields textiles, tobacco
and furniture. Of the trumvirate.
however, textiles is the most im¬
portant, any way you measure it.
The textile industry gives employ¬
ment to well over 200,000 opera¬
tives in North Carolina whose pay
totals better than half a billion
dollars a year. But how do the
goods of these hundreds of textile
mills reach the consumer? The
answer is Worth Street. Worth
Street is to textiles what Wall
Street is to banking and finance.
North Carolina has a bigger
stake in what goes on in the Worth
Street community than any other
state. And, rightly enough, the
man who might be called the
"mayor" of Worth Street is a na¬
tive North Carolinian. But just
what is Worth Street, how did it
come into being, and what opera¬
tions go on there?
To some degree, small or great,
directly or indirectly, every per¬
son in the United States is effected
by decisions made on Worth Street.
Especially is this true on the main
streets of towns in North Carolina,
the towns where textiles come
from the mills. What happens in
far-flung corners of the world, in
Japan and India, affects Worth
Street, and what happens on Worth
Street vitally afreets North Caro¬
lina and its economic well-being.
Worth Street consists of about
six city blocks in New York cen¬
tering at Worth and Church
streets. It could better be called
the Worth Community rather than
Worth Street. In this area some
nine-tenths of the total production
of cotton cloth by mills from Maine
to Texas are marketed annually,
both to the home trade and for ex¬
port although American exports
have dwindled so much in the past
two years that trade sources esti¬
mate the loss at the equivalent of
52,000 textile jobs.
The concentrated market place
called Worth Street is flanked by
solid nineteenth century buildings,
ten or fifteen stories high, with
graceful Romanesque arches un¬
der the roof. The firm names let¬
tered in gilt or polished brass sug¬
gest the London of Dickens. Here
on the cotton goods street of the
nation meet thousands of sellers
and tens of thousands of buyers,
scattered from end to end of the
nation and overseas. Here is guided
the manifold operations of the
country's oldest manufacturing in¬
dustry, an industry which directly
furnishes employment to a half
million people.
The Worth Street cotton goods
market is one of the most sensi¬
tive of them all. The dumping of
a large quantity of a certain type
of goods — osnaburgs made in
Japan, as a recent example — can
all but cause the liquidation of an
American mill making the same
type of goods. Since the beginning
of World War II the American in¬
dustry had been free, relatively,
from competition by cheap-labor
foreign countries, but goods from
these countries are again compet¬
ing on the domestic market. Con¬
sequently, Worth Street, in com¬
mon with the whole textile indus¬
try. is jittery over the influx of
goods from Japan and other
countries with which American
mills cannot compete pricewise.
On Worth Street, too. there is
a keen responsiveness to produc¬
tion operations. The concentra¬
tion of pressure at any one point
is rapidly transmitted to other
points. Unprofitable operations in
one item cause a shifting to
another item which merely in¬
tensifies the pressure of competi¬
tion within another group. Thus,
if a ‘‘trickle" of low-price, cheap¬
ly-made imports come in, the
trickle soon becomes a torrent. This
is why Worth Street and the in¬
dustry are so concerned over pro¬
posed tariff negotiations at the up¬
coming Torquay conference in
England in September. The United
THE STATE, JULY 29, 1950