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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview C-0003, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
After getting an education at Harvard Business School and experience in business around the country, Caesar Cone found success in the textile industry in North Carolina in the first half of the twentieth century. In this interview he looks back on his career, describing the textile industry in North Carolina and attacking the increasing entanglement of government and business. Cone is a passionate believer in minimizing government involvement in the marketplace. "Hell, you can't go to the bathroom, hardly, today without running into . . . breaking the law, " he complains. The burden of regulation doesn't just limit individual freedoms, he thinks, but in conjunction with the demands of unions, has hurt the textile industry in the United States and snuffed out employers' impulses to treat their employees well. Cone seems in many ways a typical small-government conservative businessman, but he declares himself a social liberal. That Cone, a Jew, faced a good deal of discrimination throughout his early career may have informed that part of his belief system. This is a spirited interview that will interest, among others, scholars of entrepreneurship and the textile industry in the South.
Mill owner Caesar Cone reflects on the textile industry and what he views as the pernicious influence of government in business and society.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview with Caesar Cone by Harry Watson on January 7, 1983, in Mr. Cone's office in Greensboro, North Carolina. Let's start with a few questions about you personally, and then I'd like to move on to your experience in the company in the thirties, forties, and fifties. When were you born and where?
I was born on January 30, 1908, in the St. Andrew's Hotel in New York City. It was located on the northwest corner of Broadway and Seventy-second Street. The hotel was torn down, I guess, in the twenties or thirties.
How did you happen to be born there?
Well, that's where my mother was.
That's very interesting. Do you know how your parents met
They met in New York. My mother lived to be ninety. She just died twenty years ago, in 1962. She was born in 1872. She and my father did considerable courting, I understand, at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1892 before they got married. I think they had met in New York before that. Both her parents and my father's parents took their families out to this World's Fair. That was the Columbian Exhibition.
Yes, that was in 1893, I believe.
Ninety-two or three.
When did you all move back to Greensboro?
They brought me down here after I was a week or so old. They moved to Greensboro in 1895, some thirteen years before I was born.
Where did you grow up in Greensboro?
I grew up in my parents' home on Summit Avenue. At that time, our place was outside the city limits. You see, my folks bought the defunct Carolina Steel and Iron Company, Several thousand acres northeast of Greensboro. That was organized, I think, around 1880 to make steel in Greensboro. Greensboro was going to be the southern Pittsburgh. But the company went bust, and when my folks decided to go into manufacturing they bought this big piece of property which was outside the city limits. They built the plant there, and they built their home there. We had a farm when I was growing up, and we had our own cows, made our own butter, and had our own chickens. But we didn't have any beef cattle, and we didn't have any hogs, but we had everything else. We had horses, of course; that was before tractors. We had a bunch of horses and had a silo. It was a regular farm.
Where did you go to school?
In Greensboro. I went to grammar school and high school for two years, and then I went out to Oak Ridge Military Academy for my last two years, and then the University of North Carolina, and then the Harvard Business School.
You're smiling about that. Why did you decide to go to Harvard?
I didn't decide.
Oh?
My father died when I was nine years old, but my older brothers and mother more or less decided where I should go to school. After all, I think that used to be the case. I don't know whether it is today or not. I guess children are more independent than they used to be, but you used to do what you were told to do.
Did they go to the Harvard Business School?
No. My oldest brother, who passed away in 1955—he was born in 1895, and he was sixty when he died—only went to the University of North Carolina for two years. He was in the Class of 1916, but he only went for two years. And my other brother, Ben, graduated in 1920. He was interviewed previously. He was in school with this famous Thomas Wolfe. I graduated in 1928 from the University.
What did you major in when you were in college?
I guess it was history.
Really?
I took a lot of courses in history. Maybe economics. I don't know. I think I probably had more courses in history and economics than anything.
Was business school much use to you?
Yes, I think it was very helpful. It taught me to realize that if you had ordinary intelligence it was worth more to you than brains, because some of the Phi Beta Kappa students up there had nervous breakdowns and committed suicide, whereas some of us that were not too smart in undergraduate school did a pretty good job up there at the business school because we weren't scared to make mistakes. In my experience up there at graduate school, where they had the case system, I found that the Phi Beta Kappa student who studied hard and learned right or wrong… Up there at the business school, there wasn't any right or wrong; it was your reasoning that counted. You could answer a question one way, and I could answer it another. The guy who had the best reasoning got the good grade. Those poor fellows were used to reading a book with the right answer and retaining it in their head and making Phi Beta Kappa, but they were scared to reason and come up with an answer because they couldn't find an answer in the library. They'd study in that library all day and all night. I roomed with a boy from the University from Raleigh—he's long been dead, a boy named Shepard—and he and I got through in pretty good shape. Because we decided how we were going to answer a problem, and then we'd go to the library and get some statistics to prove our point. And we'd go through in pretty good shape and not take too much time and worry too much about it. So from that standpoint, I think I got pretty good training up there.
How about the company's policy in years following? Have you preferred to
recruit your executives from business schools or from
Mostly from within the company. You might say I got my job through nepotism; it was shot through with nepotism. Not just Cone family, but by the time I came along it was second generation, pretty much, and third generation all through the employees. In other words, a job with the Cone organization was a job for life and a job for your children if they wanted to go to work for you. We didn't do much recruiting. About my time, just before my oldest brother died—I'd say by the time we got listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1951, and I was Treasurer at that time; he was President—we decided that since we'd become public, although the family owned about fifty percent of the company, that we couldn't afford to run it as we had theretofore for the company, the family, etcetera, and we'd better get out of nepotism. So we didn't have any revolution, but through evolution and attrition… My brother died, and I was made Chief Executive. My children didn't go into the company. My oldest brother's children were already in the company. But we put the sign up, "No More Nepotism," and over the years it's become pretty much professional management. We started recruiting, I'd say, about that time. Prior to that, it was pretty much the buddy system. A fellow who worked for us had a son, and he went to college, maybe, or to textile school, so he went to work for us when he got out. We didn't do any recruiting. It was a question of pretty much finding a job for most any employee's son. It was before the days of the females getting into the business. But the same thing was true as far as secretaries; it was the daughters of employees, etcetera.
Did that system work well?
I'd say no.
Why?
It probably worked well back before my time, but as government got involved, all kinds of legal problems, rights, etcetera, came along, and I'd say that that old system of nepotism was bad. It meant probably you were missing one or two real good people, but on the other hand you were upsetting a heck of a lot of people, and you were stuck with a lot of folks that weren't worth a damn.
Was it a hard decision to change the policy?
Not for me. We also instituted mandatory retirement at age sixty-five. Of course, we had put in a pension plan along the road which we didn't have in the beginning, of course; nobody else did. But mandatory retirement at age sixty-five was something that came along about my time. When I got sixty-five, I got out of there. I didn't want to. I think I could still be there. I'm seventy-five now. But I got out and got this office so that I've been up here ten years. Now some companies let their retired executives still have office space, etcetera, and I think that's bad.
Why do you think that's bad?
I'm afraid they get in the hair of the younger generation. Listen, if the
younger people can't run things—I don't care whether it's a business or
a college or a government—why, it's going down the drain. My only
commercial job in business was with Cone, but I was active with our
Airport Commission for many years in Greensboro; I was President of the
Greensboro Chamber of Commerce; I was President for a
Not as good, huh?
Well, it's not a question of not as good. They spend too much money on things.
Things?
I mean structures, buildings, and they borrow into the future. Spend
more, and it'll be corrected. My feeling is that spending money is the
last thing you ought to do. You want to be sure that your procedures are
correct and that the goal that you're heading for is going to be met
through procedures, and if you need to construct something to do that,
okay. But it seems to me that today, even during this depression, that
ever since Mr. Roosevelt the idea is throw more money at a project,
whether it be a business project, a civic project, whatever, and all the
future problems will be solved. The trouble is, we don't have that much
money. We're loading the future generations to pay for it, plus the
interest. In the old days, anybody that was fortunate enough to borrow
money, whether it was a business or a civic need, a hospital or
whatever, or as a home owner, he was so grateful, the first thing he
wanted to do was tear up the mortgage, pay it back. Today it's a case of
going out and borrowing, borrowing. The government makes it easy with
guarantees in certain areas. Paying this kind of price for money the
last few years is ridiculous. And to slow this thing down, why, we've
got to decide that we're going to take it easy. For instance, look at
the subways in New York. They were built at a time when we didn't have
any inflation, and the people today have the benefit of
Fair enough. It sounds to me that Cone Mills wasn't run that way, either, for years.
That's right, very conservatively. Cone Mills borrowed $600,000 in 1905 to build a plant, and at that time the bank lent them the money and put restrictions in the loan that they couldn't pay dividends till the loan was paid off. And the president of the bank was on the board of the company until the loan was paid off. And that was a $600,000 loan. That's the way business was in the old days, and the company was most grateful to be able to borrow $600,000.
What was the bank?
It was a bank in Baltimore.
From what you said, it doesn't sound to me as if you had a hard time making up your mind to go to work for the family business, that it was pretty much laid out for you. Is that right?
That's right interesting. I did have, kind of, personally, a question. My
second year up at the Business School was right when the Crash had come.
The Crash came in the fall of 1929, and
I wonder if we could get back to that in a minute, and go back to when you were just starting with the company. What were the general problems of the textile industry in the late twenties and early thirties?
I touched on it in this previous recording. The textile industry in this
country—it's true with most industries—started off… And it was that way
in South America. I took a trip down to Brazil and Argentina just after
the War. We had an opportunity to go in business down there, and I went
down there to look around. We found that the structure down there was
about like I guess it was in this country back in the middle nineteenth
century. The mills would sell their product to big wholesalers. The big
wholesalers would sell the product to small wholesalers. The small
wholesalers would sell the product then to the retail stores.
Practically all the fabric was home-sewn. There was very little needle
industry, and there were no chain stores. Sears, Roebuck was just
beginning to think about expanding into South America. This was right
after the War. Back in the old days in this country, the same thing was
true. The manufacturers sold to a handful of big wholesalers. There were
several tiers between the manufacturer and the
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
In fact, I know there were attempts on the part of the independent
merchants to try to get state laws passed against chain stores, food
chains, general merchandise chains, because they were afraid it would
put the individual retailer out of business. And it did, because those
chains got to the point where they could buy in quantities big enough so
they'd go direct to the manufacturer and thereby save the cost of the
middleman. When I first went on the road, we had a good many large dry
goods jobbers still in business, but there are no such anymore; they're
gone. In those days, we wouldn't have thought about selling to retail,
even to Sears, Roebuck. We wouldn't sell to a cutter, the needle trade.
Even though maybe that cutter would buy in sufficient quantities, we'd
sell to jobbers, and the jobber sold to the cutter the cloth he needed.
A good many of the jobbers made their own garments, had their own few
sewing machines to make overalls, work shirts, staple types of garments.
About the time I got on the road in the thirties, those dry goods
jobbers were just beginning to quit. There were several of them in
Pittsburgh, several of them in Buffalo, Utica, Syracuse. Every town had
at least one or two dry goods jobbers. They finally got whittled down to
where about the only business they could still do was in consumer items,
not in piece goods. As a matter of fact, the piece goods business in
this country, pretty much, for staple stuff went to pot, because you
could buy an overall or work shirt,
Looking back over business history, it seems to me that the textile industry has been later to consolidate and has done less of it than petroleum, automobiles, steel, some of your other industries.
You've got several problems. Number one, the textile industry started off
as kind of a homegrown thing—the hand loom, the spinning wheel—before
technology ever came along with working with steel or things like that.
You had the village blacksmith. The village blacksmith got out of the
blacksmith shop and got into the steel industry. The textile industry
came from the home spinning wheel and the hand loom. First we went
through the water power days, before there was electric
Yes, I know. I just picked up some dry cleaning this morning.
I had an interesting example, talking about textiles. I was on the board
for years out here at our airport. When we built a new terminal building
in 1957—of course, they got a new one as of 1983—we put in these hand
dryers in the rest rooms. Nobody can argue that the hand dryer doesn't
do a very good job of drying your hands. Prior to then, years ago, we
had the cloth that you pulled down. Then it came to paper towels. Stark
Dillard, who's dead now, Dillard Paper Company, used to sell us a bunch
of paper towels for the old airport terminal building. When they went to
these blowers, he went out there to see this new building, beautiful,
and went in there. He just raised hell. He said, "Hot air." And I said,
"Stark, I agree with you. Evaporation is the lousiest way in the world
to dry
Maybe so.
But there was a vast amount of textiles, worldwide, that went down the drain when the paper industry developed. Kotex. When I first came along, the whole women's sanitary business was textiles. That was taken over by the paper business, a hundred percent.
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.
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
Looking at that problem historically, how did the Cone Corporation deal with that problem in the Depression in the late twenties? I should think that would have been something you all had to think very seriously about.
This Revolution plant, a lot of that flannel went into diapers and babies' sleepwear. It was soft flannel. We lost the diapers, but we didn't lose the sleepwear until flammability came along and the government said that this nap that makes it nice and fluffy and soft for a kid is too flammable. The first flammability law came along about twenty years ago. So the chemical industry gave us a chemical to put in there that would make this fabric meet the flammability test. Two years later the government came along and said this chemical is cancer-producing, so we've shut the mill down. It's sitting out there now. You want to buy it?
Not today.
Government interference has come along in the last few years and played hell with us. Where it goes from here, I don't know. They're now talking about that formaldehyde is cancer-producing. How you're going to finish cloth without formaldehyde, I don't know. Maybe they've developed something else. But formaldehyde is all over the finishing business in textiles. Always has been. I don't know where we're going to get to with the government interfering. I hope somebody finds the cause and treatment of cancer, because in the meantime they're going to blame it on everything.
You worked in the government during the War.
I was up with the Quartermaster General's Office in the Textile Section.
Frankly, I didn't do a damn thing, but they asked me to go up there. I
was mixed up a little bit with dealing with the chemical warfare. They
were impregnating a lot of the uniforms to make them gas-protective and
ruining the damn things. Wouldn't tell you the formula—that was a
hush-hush secret—so you could determine how you could maybe treat
textile fibers to keep them from the degradation that was caused by this
formula. A lot of problems. I don't think I'd better put it on here. I
could tell you when you shut this thing off. A right cute problem we had
with the Wacs' uniforms.
Beginning after the War, you said that you began to work on consolidating various mills. How did you decide to do it, and how did you go about it?
I can tell you a little detail. Cone Export and Commission Company was
the sales organization, a separate corporation owned pretty much by the
family. It represented not only our own mills but outside mills. It for
some time had represented particularly the Appleton Company, which was
originally a New England operation, and had built a mill down in
Anderson, South Carolina. It later became part of J. P. Stevens. Cone
Company represented Appleton, sold their product. The corporate
headquarters was in Massachusetts. The president or chairman of the
board was a lawyer in New York. Most of the stockholders were up east.
They used to have their annual meeting in the Cone Export and Commission
Company headquarters there in New York. Very close to them. We sold for
them on a commission basis only. They decided they wanted
In setting up the Cone Mills Corporation, was the Cone Export and Commission Company included in the new corporation?
Yes, that was merged in. The sales organization was made part of the
whole. When I first came down here and got into this thing, I found that
Cone Export and Commission Company had been right much run as a family
bank. The officers were not paid salaries. The stockholders were not
paid dividends. They were credited with their salary each month. They
were credited with their dividend each quarter. And they were paid six
percent interest on any credit balance with the company. As they needed
money, they called on the company: send me a thousand dollars, ten
thousand, or whatever, and put it in this bank or that bank in my
personal checking account or whatever. That not only was the family, but
the family had some of its retainers paid that way. Charge my account,
and credit her account. Several of my uncles had white housekeepers. One
was a Scotch lady that lived with the Clarence Cones; one was a German
lady that lived with the Bernard Cones. It was charge my account so much
this month, and credit her account. Gretchen or whatever her name was.
So Gretchen had an account there, and she got six percent on it. They
handled their mills that way. When the mills shipped goods to a
customer, the bill was from the Cone Export and Commission Company. The
mill was credited on the Cone Export and Commission Company books. If
the customer paid or didn't pay, it was up to the Cone Export and
Commission Company to absorb whatever loss it was, bad debt. The minute
the goods were shipped, though, the mill corporation had a credit
balance on the books. In other words, the Cone Export and Commission
Company was a sales agency
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
I don't think much of Mr. [Ralph] Nader. He's criticized the automobile
for killing people and messing up the countryside with all these roads,
etc. I think the automobile has damaged our society more than anything
it could possibly do physically. As an example, my father had the
biggest house in town and was the richest man in town. He lived right
next to his mill, so he could walk to work. And he lived right next to
his mill houses, so his employees could walk to work. They had a store,
and they had their churches, and they had the schools withink walking
distance. As the automobile came along and made people more mobile and
they could live twenty miles away and commute,
How about with your own organization, in terms of the traditional relationship with the mill village and the houses?
We've gotten out of all that.
What made you decide to do that, and when did you do it?
I'd say we started on that about 1950. You see, they took us into the
city limits in 1923. But the tax rate was less out there than in the
city, in that district, because it didn't apply to the bonds, the debt
service, as of the time of the take-in in 1923. Also, the company still
ran the village system, keeping the streets up, the sewage, the water,
etcetera. There were no water meters on the houses, no electric meters.
In the fifties we turned the electric system over to Duke. We turned the
water system over to the city, put water meters in the houses, electric
meters. Originally, when the houses were built, there was maybe a
forty-watt bulb in each of the four rooms, maybe, period. And it didn't
cost a hell of a lot to absorb that juice when you figured the juice
that was being used in the plants and all. But then as electrical
appliances came along and people wanted irons and stoves and bought all
these items, it was
I see.
That's one of your problems down here in Cannon Mills. They still have an unincorporated Kannapolis, and I see this new owner, Murdoch, who bought the place out, is getting ready to have Kannapolis incorporated. I don't know, but I suppose Cannon doesn't have its village houses with water meters and electric meters and all like that, so they're way late in getting into this thing. This equality thing came along, and all we wanted to do was run our plants; we didn't want to get mixed up in having the problems out in the community of putting a black and a white together or next door to each other and creating a big problem. We were smart enough to get out before all this equality hit. We had one plant that we weren't out of. It still had a village after equality. We had to tear the whole damn thing down.
Where was that?
Down in Rutherford County, Cliffside. It was out in the country, on the
Broad River. The mill was a small mill in the beginning, run by water
power. The Haynes family. Not the Winston Hanes. Cone Export had sold
for that mill. They made plaids for years, and we enlarged it. Plaids
went out of business. We turned it into a towel mill like Cannon. Very
much smaller, of course. It now makes denim. But it was way out in the
country, and we had our own village. But we were a little late in
getting the village sold, and we had some blacks over here and whites
over here, the same type of housing but in different areas. We came
along to find that we couldn't offer the house to the man who'd lived in
it with his family for thirty or forty
It sounds like it could be pretty complicated.
We fixed all the village up before we sold it. We gave them easy terms and financed it ourselves instead of selling out wholesale to somebody and then let the moneychangers take over. I think it was at four percent interest. They've got them all paid for now. This was 1950-odd. We made the loans dependent on the size of the house. If a fellow had a four-room house, we figured he ought to pay it off in ten or twelve years. If he was in a two-storey house with eight rooms or six rooms, maybe it was fifteen years. In other words, pattern the thing. But that's all out of the way. We're out of the municipal business.
You mentioned unions a while back. What's been your experience with unions over the years?
The only personal experience I've had with them is, we had a strike some
years ago. It was economic as far as the union was concerned. It was the
check-off. We didn't give them the check-off.
This strike was in the 1960's, I guess?
Oh, it was before that, I guess. I guess it was in the fifties, the last
time we had any real trouble. Of course, where you have a union, you
constantly have to bargain whatever you do, wage raises or any changes
in anything. But the textile union has had its problems, because they
realize that they've got a very weak industry. Management doesn't make
the wages that other managements make; labor doesn't make the kind of
wages; the stockholders don't get the kind of return. I'm talking about
in industry in general. The unions recognize that, and they're smart.
They go where the money is. They go to the steel and the automobile and
the electrical and that kind of industry. After the War, those
industries were able to sell their product for anything and didn't want
to stand a strike and
Where were those?
They had it in the White Oak Mill here in Greensboro, the Proximity Mill
in Greensboro. The Proximity Mill has been closed. The print works here
in Greensboro; that's been closed. White Oak is still going. So two of
the three union mills here in Greensboro are down. They got a contract
down in Haw River. That mill's still operating, although I think they
were thinking about closing it. And the finishing plant in Haw River has
a union. It did, and I guess it still has. We never had a
decertification election. Probably there are fewer union members than
there are non-union members on this dues-paying thing. But we've never
tried it, because we think that once you ask for a decertification
election, you run into a real stir-up. It's not as easy to run a plant
that's got a union as it is to run one that doesn't have, no question
about it. We had a merger with a plant down in Gadsden, Alabama, in
1951, and we finally closed it up about 1960. We couldn't run it. We
thought we knew something about dealing with unions, but the union down
there was an entirely different breed of pup. The same union, TWA, but
Gadsden, Alabama, had three big employers: Cone Mills (this Dwight
Manufacturing), Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and Republic Steel, both of
them highly unionized. Not just the companies, but the steel industry
and the rubber industry did industry-wide bargaining. They'd call a
strike periodically, when they weren't getting together with Akron or
Pittsburgh or wherever. Then they'd all go back to work after a month's
strike, with higher wages, etc. The whole town was unionized, the clerks
in the stores, etcetera. We had the Textile Workers' Union, and they
felt like they were just as strong as these others. Well, they
What would be the effect if there was industry-wide unionization in textiles?
You'd have the same problem you've got with steel and automobiles. You'd
have things pushed to the point where we'd all be if they sue"!;when they sue—"you'll be all
right." Well, how in the heck, if you're starting in business today, are
you going to put your money on the line, and hire anybody, running into
that kind of a possibility? I mean, that's just who you hire or who you
don't hire. You see, that was never on any books up until ten, fifteen,
twenty years ago. You could hire anybody you wanted and fire anybody you
wanted. And unfortunately, the guy that you hire today can leave you any
bright day he wants to and find another job. He's not hooked. See, that
is involuntary servitude, for him to agree that he'll stay with you
irrespective. But you, as the employer, are up against all these daggone
possible suits. Out here at this school I went to, I was on the board.
They let a fellow go that was a teacher out there, and hell, he's suing
the school right now. We've already paid $5,000 to a lawyer at this
point. The government investigated and said nothing to it, but the guy
still has a right to sue you through the courts, you see. I never knew
this guy, but he was of Polish descent, Gabrowski or something like
that, and a Catholic. One year the fellow at the last
Oh, yes.
It inhibits anybody wanting to start a business today. Frankly, I don't
see anybody starting his own business anymore, with all the obligations.
Now you don't know whether you're going to make it or not in the first
place, but you've got all these obligations to anybody you even talk to,
almost. If you don't hire somebody, he'll come along and say, "You
didn't hire me because I was this, that, or the other." And here you
are, before you've even started, up against all these extra costs. The
labor unions can't meet their commitments. They've got no more power to
make a guy work for you, if he doesn't want to, than you have.
Involuntary servitude, that's slavery. And I don't think they should.
But on the other hand,
It makes things a lot more difficult, I can imagine.
They tell me some of these machinery manufacturers can't get liability insurance anymore. There's one of them here in Greensboro, Wysong and Miles Manufacturing Company. They make shears and all kinds of lathes and things for furniture manufacurers. Machinery like that lasts for years, and it goes through the secondhand dealers and so forth. They tell me that there have been some lawsuits in the machinery business. Machines that are forty years old that have gone through a half-dozen hands. Somebody doesn't maintain it or oil it or something, and something happens and somebody gets hurt. And they'll sue the manufacturer who made it forty years ago, although it's been through a half a dozen hands and abused and misused and whatnot.
We never quite got to your experiences as President of Cone Mills Corporation. We've talked about different aspects of that, but what do you think were the most outstanding achievements of your term? You were President, and then you were Chairman of the Board, I believe.
My oldest brother, Herman, was President and Chairman in 1955 when he
passed away; he had a heart attack at sixty. I became President. I had
been Treasurer and was more or less involved in putting the thing
together and just getting listed on the Stock Exchange. They elected me
President and my brother Ben as Chairman of the Board. He had been on
the Board, but he hadn't been active in the business, and he was a big
stockholder. But he was made Chairman to preside at Board meetings,
really, and had no active assignment of duties.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
We didn't have any revolutions, as occur in a great many companies, but we got rid of this nepotism by evolution, and this business of getting rid of old people, the development of a staff that was professional instead of nepotic, and the fact that we should close up plants that were inefficient and not just keep them running for the benefit of publicity or society. The further elimination of paternalism, that is, the village system and all; that started while I was Treasurer. And this idea of not merging, not getting bigger, better to stay small and profitable instead of big and unprofitable.
That was a real choice that you had to face.
Yes, we had plenty of opportunities to merge with this one, that one, and the other one. I guess my accomplishment was to turn things down instead of agreeing to go ahead. Some companies were aspiring to be as big as Burlington Industries, which is number one in the textile industry. We did get mixed up with an operation in Argentina, but we got out of it at no loss, thank God. We turned down an opportunity to go to Ireland, thank God. I think Burlington has had its problems over there. We turned down an opportunity to go to Mexico. I was down there checking on things. Several of our people went down there and worked in a plant for several months. We turned that one down. I guess you'd say I was a great turn-downer.
What was the reason behind that?
Because I didn't think it would be profitable, and I'm sure it turned out that way. Most everybody that went into that kind of stuff had a pretty bad experience with it. I won't mention any names, but I think maybe we turned down one or two that might have been profitable. I don't know. But I was conservative as far as borrowing money was concerned; I didn't want to get mixed up with getting loaded up with debt, and the company's in pretty good shape from that standpoint. We had to borrow for the first time in my experience when we built this finishing plant down in Carlisle, South Carolina, which has been a good investment because we've closed up the finishing plant here in Greensboro. We had waste disposal problems now and water problems and all kinds of problems here in Greensboro, so we built a new plant down in Carlisle, South Carolina, during my time. We had to borrow some money to do it. We had an experience with a takeover artist that we took care of. He lost about five or six million dollars on the deal, sold us the stock back at a big loss. He had bought about ten percent of our company. Like this fellow you read about up at Dan River.
Yes.
Now that guy's probably going to sell his stock to this crowd in Dan River at a nice profit. He's scared them to death.
Yes.
But we just sat and waited for this guy to make his move, and finally,
when things got tough in 1970, he needed money, and he
It adds up.
We bought it from him cheap, what we thought was cheap. But that was right interesting. These financial experts on Wall Street, I tell you, they live by their wits. Hepefully, they'll be able to make money off somebody else's hard work.
Right. You've been active in a lot of things besides the company itself. You mentioned the airport, the hospital, the Chamber of Commerce. Which of those things meant the most to you?
I enjoyed public service. Frankly, I got a bigger kick out of public service, really, than corporate service. I was always a little embarrassed to raise cain about wanting something for my corporation, figuring that I would be accused of being selfish. But when I was trying to push something that was in the public interest, why, I was free to raise all the cain in the world, because I wasn't trying to do it for myself or my associates, especially on this airport thing. But I enjoyed it. I think I accomplished some things.
What, for example?
I think I contributed considerably to the airport situation. But I don't know; I'll let the rest of the people talk about me. Ask somebody else.
You'd better do it in a hurry, though, because they're all about dead.
They were my contemporaries.
If they're as lively as you are, I don't think there'll be any problem with that.
I went over to my brother's office in the Southeastern Building when the other gentleman was up here, and he interviewed both of us, as you know. My brother's got a wall full of plaques, "Man of the Year" and this, that, and the other from all kinds of things. Well, I ain't got any plaques in here. The only things that I've got in here are what I accomplished, not what the other fellow honored me for. It's kind of a generation away from my family, but my children, I accomplished that, and I accomplished a couple of things out there on the wall on my own.
Tell us what they were, so it'll be on the tape.
I learned how to fly an airplane in 1929. I played tennis down at the University of North Carolina in 1927, and that's all I've got out there. Everything else that anybody else gave me just because of honors and all, why, you don't see that. Go ask them.
No, I enjoyed it. I say I enjoyed… Unfortunately, a lot of the things I
ran into disappointed me because of the political impact. Now take the
University of North Carolina. Gordon Gray was head of the Chapel Hill
campus; whether he was President or whether he was Chancellor, I don't
recall. But he asked some of us to come down there one night. He was
setting up a businessman's advisory council or some such, and two of us
from Greensboro were invited. Howard Holderness was President of the
Jefferson Standard Life Insurance
Seven years.
I think Mr. Willard Graham was the first one that set up this Executive
Program in the Commerce School, for weekends, if you're familiar with
that. Executive training. We need to train executives. Well, I got up on
my two feet and said, "Well, now wait. It looks to me like if you could
put courses over here in the School of Education to teach more or less
the free enterprise system and develop textbooks to put courses in the
grammar schools and in the high schools to broaden the understanding of
income taxes, etcetera, etcetera, keep records…" My kids came home and
didn't want to keep any records of anything. When I was a kid, I had to
keep records. Each week I got my allowance, and I had to keep a record
of how I spent it. Save it or spend it, but I had to have my books. At
this time, my kids were coming along. The hell with it. "Oh, no, we need
training." And I said, "I don't think we've got to worry about the crown
princes. After all, we can hire them from New York or some of the
schools that are already doing this kind of thing, but why should North
Carolina have to?" And, "Oh…" Well, it was all obvious that it was set
up, so they put the thing in. Which was all right, it wasn't bad, but
they