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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 H-0263, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This interview is a manual on the past, present, and future of the textile industry in the American South. Gordon Berkstresser III moved from management positions in the textiles into academia, where he studies the industry. In this detailed, dense interview, Berkstresser describes some of the changes that have taken place in American textiles over the course of the 20th century and how industry leaders have responded to those changes. He sees the textile industry as dynamic, both technologically and methodologically, but also sees it in a state of crisis, threatened by imports, a weak political position, and calcified ideas. Berkstresser describes complex political and business arrangements with clarity, making this interview a useful, detailed source for information about the textile industry.
Gordon Berkstresser III shares the fruits of his study of the textile industry.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
… They've been looking at the history of the textile industry, as I was telling you on the phone, up to about the Second World War. They've just finished an article that's being published this month in one of the history journals. They've used quite a few oral history interviews with workers who remember the early years of the textile industry and they asked me to go ahead and see what I could find out in terms of trends for later on so they could extend their study a little further.
I was interested if you don't mind starting with this, in—you were talking about your family being involved in the textile industry, from way back…
Actually, the first member of my father's family who came here from
Domshat
Here I am now at State, and I'm teaching sons, daughters, nephews, nieces of former classmates.
I've been involved with what we affectionately call the rag business, since I can remember. It's part of my life.
How did you get involved with the school here, in textiles?
About 8 years ago, I decided to take early retirement. I'd gone back to
City University in New York and written my dissertation. And came here
to teach. And I've enjoyed it.
Had you yourself been working as a marketing executive here in the state?
No, I was in New York. I worked most of my working career in the industry in New York and Chicago. I've had various jobs like product manager, national sales manager, director of new products—those types of things. For firms like J.P. Stevens, Westpoint-Pepperell, Fieldcrest. And I really enjoyed it.
I was fortunate in that I was able to make that mid-life career change. A lot of people just don't ever have the opportunity. I had it, and took it, and have been very happy that I did, because I think it sort of expands you a bit if you can do that.
But one of the things—I must say—that I've got here in front of me a
draft of a report for the Office of Technology Assessment about the
state of the textile and apparel industry and where they're going.
[Note: I asked for a copy, but he said it wasn't ready for public
distribution yet.] In the executive summary we are talking about—we've
given it the tentative title—"U.S. Textile Industry: A Revolution in
We're talking about the textile industry being, outside of agriculture, the nation's oldest industry and yet at the same time the newest.
That process of change is really nothing new. From the time I can remmber as a small kid, going into the mills with my father, my grandfather, there was always some new piece of equipment, being studied, being put in place, a new system of doing something. It didn't necessarily have to be the technology of making yarn or fabric or dying it. Sometimes it was just a new business method.
I remember when everybody was going from the FIFO
So, even though I think the textile industry has this reputation of being a sleepy giant, that moves terribly slowly, and is if not reactionary at least terribly conservative, I think that's a bum rap.
That picture up on the wall is a picture of the old Patterson plant in
Roanoke Rapids and I've seen—in my lifetime, that plant go through huge
metamorphoses, of what it produces, the types of things. The first I can
remember of that plant, it was making a very plain fabric called
soft-filled sheetings that went around the springs in a Beauty Rest
mattress. That business departed, basically because non-wovens came in
and could do the job cheaper. We started
Why do you think those particular changes took place?
They're a response to the market, obviously. Part of the big
metamorphosis that I've seen, too, in the industry, even in my lifetime,
has been the forward integration of the industry. Prior to World War
Two, we still had as much horizonal structure in the industry as there
was vertical. Not only in the manufacturing, but in the marketing vs.
the manufacturing. In my own case, my mother's family came from Leipzig
and Dresden in Germany and my grandfather was in New York and connected
with a selling agent for these mills in Roanoke Rapids, of which my
father's family was involved. So my father married his partner's
daughter. But right about the time of the 30s and on through the 40s,
the selling agent, marketing organization, mostly
There still has existed, even into my generation, and even to the present time a certain amount of distrust—or dealing at arm's length—even within same company, between the marketing end in New York and the Southern mill people. You speak different languages, you went to different schools, you have different experiences. That is changing, but it's been there a long time and it's hard.
I've read that one of the major trends in the last 30 or 40 years in the textile industry has been a much more integration of marketing into the whole factory process and that that has helped the industry to survive and to do better, that there aren't as many overruns as there used to be.
It's continuing to happen. If you pick up any of the
Now, of course, it's moved to the point where basically you have a market-driven industry. One of the big problems for people trying to understand the industry is when you talk about the textile, or the apparel and textile and fiber industry, as one unit, you're talking about something that even the federal government divides into about 68 different SIC codes. Right off the bat, it's not an industry, it's a convenient thing to call this agglomeration. But the differences between the various segments of the industry are really quite large.
For many, many years, even the educational institutions—for many years,
our school here—talked about fiber and textiles. That's where we
stopped. In my lifetime we have added—during the past decade—a real,
ongoing program in apparel. Cut and sew. Take it one step closer to the
consumer. Right now we're trying to add more, through the distribution,
we're adding marketing courses, marketing research courses, getting even
into the retailing. We're going to have to get into the consumer
behavior end of it. There is no question. Because that's part of our
business.
So you do see a real change in the type of composition of the labor force?
No question, no question. Even in my lifetime—most people don't like to talk about it—prior to WWII, you had almost 100% white male management—unfortunately, you still have about 100% white male management—but, in the work force, you had a majority of young white male, with a good cadre of white female—in the mills.
There was a difference, though, in the types of jobs that males and females would have?
Oh, yes, but females would have a good many of the jobs that required certain manual skills and dexterity. Frequently in the things—yarn preparation, where being able to pick up a loose end of a thread and tie it, you know, in a rapid sort of thing.
But, at any rate, during WWII, when we were asked—my family—we were asked, to produce more goods for both war effort and civilian effort out of facilities where it was harder to get good raw material, where it was hard to get replacement parts for machines and so forth, we were asked to produce all of that not only with the difficulty in getting raw materials and replacement parts, but with a different labor force. Because your best—traditionally thought of as best labor force—the young white male—he was off in the Army, getting shot at. And up until that time, blacks were really confined to yard work, sweepers, or dangerous jobs like working in a picker room that exploded occasionally, and that sort of thing. And since WWII, you've had a large part of your white labor force replaced by black, and that's only happened since WWII. All of a sudden all these blacks got "terribly smart"—they had been "very dumb" up to then—and I don't know what it was, but there was this—they all got educated during WWII.
Do you put it back that far? I'm wondering because what I've read so far has suggested that it was only in the 60s that blacks really started moving into—
Well, it started during WWII because that's when the mills were forced to use blacks and forced to accept the fact that the myth that blacks could not handle mechanical things started to be exploded. Because when they started using them they found that—By God!—they could. It took another maybe even twenty years for people to really move through on that but that's really, I feel, where this dispelling of the myth began occur.
Would you say that was also somewhat a result of white workers then moving into the newer industries that started to move into the South in the postwar period?
Yes. Part of that, of course, occurred. But the real reason that blacks
were excluded from the mills were these old myths and at least those
were the rationalizations. Certainly, the white people didn't want them
as part of the labor force within the mill—yard work and so forth was
O.K.—but they didn't want the social implications of their working
together. And the way to keep them out was to say that they weren't
suitable, because that was easier to say than we don't want you. And I'm
a Southerner, and I say that
What has happened now with blacks in the textile force now? Are they getting higher positions, or not?
They had been… the problem is that it's only been a couple of years since
the Affirmative Action stuff has been deemphasized from Washington. I
don't think we're really ready yet to see what the impact of that. I
think that up until a couple of years ago that there was some progress
being made by blacks at least into middle-management—not enough, but
some. And I put it, both blacks and females, because if you study the
industry—the fiber, and textile, and even the apparel industry—the
number of blacks and females that have risen to have really responsible
management positions is abismally slow. It's obviously not based on
those people's abilities. There is no question. But we're certainly
trying to do things about that in a school like ours here. We have about
30% female enrollment. One of my advisees who is graduating this year
has a straight 4.0
What's your percentage of black students?
Blacks is about 5% in this school, and from what I've been able to see
the blacks' placement in the industry is about the same as the whites'.
The white kids who have better than a, say, 2.5 academic average seem to
have no problems. The ones who have lower than that have problems
getting jobs. Eventually we get them placed. About the same with the
black kids. So from that standpoint, the initial job bit seems to be
fine. There isn't the demand and the scurry to hurry up to hire blacks
that there was a few years ago when there was more pressure on
EEO—Affirmative Action, excuse me—but the—what I want to do is—I have to
wait a couple of years—is see what happens to them. Do they hit a
Do you mean combine, like conglomerates?
Yes. What it comes down to, it's sort of like looking at teachers' salaries and the consumption of alcohol—statistically, they co-vary, but I wouldn't say that one is the cause of the other. We've got the situation here in the textile industry and apparel and so forth where there are going to be structural changes and they are a result of this being market-driven. In some research that we did here, when we looked at value-added productivity as a function of the size of the firm we found that the very small firms, who have a lot of flexibility, who have very little access to large groups of capital, but a lot of flexibility and a[re] very fine-tuned to a small segment of the market—a small firm that produces one product and knows its market well—it's flexible and can respond and can lay off people and hire people back—control its costs tremendously—those people have a moderately high productivity.
Way at the other end, the very large firm, with access to huge amounts of
capital, with economies of scale, with not as much flexibility, true,
but ability to plan out in the
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
So what I see, and some of the people who are working with me, is not just an aggregation or conglomeration but both ways, that the important thing is you can't just say that every fiber, textile, apparel firm should get bigger. There's some kinds of commodity fabrics and commodity garment—blue jeans, sure, the way to succeed there is to be a Cone, a Burlington, making miles of denim, or to be a Levi Strauss, cutting hundreds of thousands of dozens of blue jeans because it is a commodity market. No question.
On the other hand, the way to succeed in the high—style thing is to be more flexible and not get caught with the close—outs and the everything else that happens.
And so what I see is an industry that's moving towards the bipolar type of situation. Which, of course, as an educator, I respond to quite favorably because we have some students here who are the type who will go out and compete in a large company in the corporate environment, and they're sophisticated, they'll do very well in that. We have others who will fail miserably in that kind of environment, but who, given the opportunity to be small entrepreneurs, will just take off and go. So I think it's great, from that standpoint. From the standpoint of opportunity, service to the market, that sort of thing. Because you've got all sorts of different elements in this thing, as I say.
Right now, for example, we have a lot of competition,
Now, on the other hand, there are other elements where the import
penetration is not because of just the low labor cost and the subsidies.
You take a look at the phenomenon—if you've seen these Benetton stores—a
few years ago, these cats started off in Europe, right? And what they
did was they had the same equipment that everybody else in the world
has. They had no technological advantage over anybody. What they did is
they took a marketing concept: we're going to target a group. The first
group they targeted was 14- to 24- year-olds. And we're going to do it
through marketing. We're going to give them bright, bold, sassy colors
and patterns. We're going to go the trickle up theory, that is,
What country are they from?
Italy, just outside of Venice is their head office. I'm going to be over there, as a matter of fact. I'm leaving the 12th and that's one of my stops, to see how they do it.
So, I think that really what we have to look at in the
But, at any rate, that itself—this bit of wild growth of this market has
come to a screeching halt—has forced us to a realization now that any of
these increases in imports
And I think that's one of the things that's going to speed up this process of revolution that the industry's going through. Up until a couple years ago, you'd gripe, complain about the imports, but on the other hand, you knew that the figures—if people really wanted to get to you on the figures—they could get access to the same figures and say, Hey, wait a minute. The market is growing at the rate of a half a percent a year. Your production is growing at the rate of a quarter of a percent a year. That means that the imports are going at a fairly fast rate, because they're a lower percent of the market, but you aren't actually decreasing, you're plateauing. So you really haven't lost any jobs to imports, and that's true. You lost the jobs to technology.
The increased technology has meant a lower number of people working, of
course. We intend that. We don't like to talk about it, but we intend
that. The Japanese automated
But the problem now is that the imports are really beginning to cut into what's happening now. So, wow! All of a sudden it's important. So, wow! All of a sudden we need to get in and lobby for some protection—short term…
What has been the trend in federal protection? Has there, there has been some, hasn't there, over the last decade of so?
The trend has been…one of the things that I think about it is that it
hasn't been well thought through. For example, the government supports
an abnormally high price for cotton to the farmer. So that American
cotton is over-priced on a world market basis. That's a straight
subsidy, but it's a subsidy without any control. Now when the Japanese,
for example, subsidize an industry, to rationalize it, for example, like
they have done with their synthetic fiber industry, they also exert a
certain amount of control to make
Now when it comes to apparel, on the other end of the spectrum, we don't subsidize directly, but what we do say is O.K., we're going to control the percentage and number of things that can come in. Well, we say that, we put it on the books, but then we promptly ignore it, and everybody else ignores it, so this flood of goods comes in. Everybody laughs at the U.S., we're the laughing stock of the world, when it comes to this, because they know that if they're out of quota on men's shirts and they're producing more men's shirts they just label them handkerchiefs, and—what the hell—send them in, and we won't do anything to them. Or if one country is out of quota, you put another country's label in it. The number of these violations that have been caught, prosecuted and so forth is so low, it's so ridiculous. The punishment doesn't suit the crime.
So we have a situation then where the people who are manufacturing the fabric and the garment are paying more for the raw material, the cotton, but not getting any help at the other end. And that's assinine. It's just plain ridiculous. But, again, that's life. Nobody said it was going to be fair.
One of the problems that I have, of course, the farm lobby started off
years ago when there were a lot of farmers
You do think that's changing now though?
Oh, yes. They're starting to listen, but it takes time. It doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen in one or two years. It takes decades of intense pressure and work and commitment. I think the people in our industry are maybe now becoming sophisticated enough to see that and are doing it.
Who is setting up lobbying activity?
The American Textile Manufacturers Institute—ATMI, in Washington—and other groups like FFACT—Fiber, Fabric, Apparel, what is it? I've forgotten. It's a group of manufacturers who have gotten together and have pooled resources to get separate lobbying for some protectionist legislation and they did it that way because they wanted to raise money in addition to the money that flows into ATMI. The other groups, the trade groups like the American Apparel Manufacturers Association…just the fact that these operations are located right around D.C. starts to tell you what's happening.
Then you have other things like the National Association of Hosery
Manufacturers. I just spoke to them down in Charlotte. They're
headquartered in Charlotte. They have very little import penetration up
to now. When I spoke to them the other day I warned them that it was
coming and a lot of them just told me I was nuts. They don't want to
hear that. They're not ready yet to commit to going up and having their
offices in Washington and being part of a general influence on their
government because they are still independent little people—the cult of
the individual—around in little towns and they're doing very fine, thank
you very much, and I feel like John the Baptist, the voice of one crying
in the wilderness with these people. When I got through with my talk, I
had a young man with me—I do some consulting work as well—and he says,
you know, they really didn't want to hear what you were telling them. I
said, I
So that is what I think is happening to the industry and it's definitely, for segments, at least, of the fiber, textile, apparel industry, the next ten, fifteen years, at least through the end of this century is going to be very critical times, and…
Do you think then that if something isn't done to stem the tide of the foreign imports that it will really have a bad effect on the industry?
On some segments, certainly, on some segments. For example, after World
War Two, largely because of its own fault, the American textile
machinery industry lost large portions of its world market to Japanese
and European manufacturers. Certain marketing decisions were made,
certain manufacturing decisions were made that contributed to this
problem. Other structural reasons came about. In
I don't think that we should give long-term blanket protection—no way—I
do feel that there are elements of our industry, and I think we've
defined some of them in our report to the Congress, to the OTA, that do
not need any protection. They compete very well in the global market.
Leave them alone. Fine. There are elements of the industry that are
never going to be competitive on a global standpoint, if there is no
strategic necessity, don't try. It's just putting money down a sink
hole. In the middle,
Now, in the question of something like Benetton…is it of national importance for us to be able to produce women's and children's sweaters in the United States? Probably not. Is it important for us, on the other hand, to be able to produce thermal-type clothing from the military standpoint? Yes. Do we have to do it by knitting them in sweaters—traditionally, people in the Navy have always had big bulky sweaters and so forth—or, is it better to do it with some non-wovens and some type of nylon and so forth as a substitute? It doesn't take that much to look at that and say, Hey, well, we really need to protect some segment of the sweater industry or we don't. But, when you come down to things like socks. I've been in the Army, and socks are terribly important. Socks and underwear. Far more important than the rest of the stuff. There's a comfort factor that's really awfully important. Right now, the socks and underwear are not being threatened by imports. Mostly because you've got about 4% labor factor in that so that the cheap labor doesn't give them an advantage. But, at some point, they may be threatened, because of marketing, because of other reasons. I don't know. So I think that we ought to start taking a look at that, right now. Before something happens, before the stuff hits the fan. And say, hey, in this industry, how much of this kind of product should we maintain in the U.S. and how do we do it?
And I think the most important part of the equation, to
Actually, of course, what you could do, too, is you could finance the
whole damn thing with the tariff income. If you decided, hey, we need a
hundred million dollars for research, every penny of it could be taken
out of the tariffs
Have American companies gotten around lower labor costs to some extent by setting up operations of their own in other countries?
To some extent. The eight-o-seven rule on the tariff which allows goods to go out and come back in without being subject to high tariffs has helped in some cases. There are real problems with Americans doing that type of thing. And, again, a lot of it's behavioral. We are just not used to dealing cross-culturally. It's very difficult for us to do that. We don't have the years, the decades of experience other people have. The Japanese in the Pacific basin had several years of experience in dealing cross-culturally.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
It's difficult for, our people, our management people have not been
trained along these lines. There's some truly transnational companies,
like a DuPont, a Shell, where the people you know that work for that
become almost stateless, because their loyalty is to that transnational
country, not to any particular —
Do you think it should basically stay in the United States?
I think that some companies have already proven that by tending to your
own business and doing a good job here. For example, this recent merger,
not merger, the acquisition of Cluett-Peabody by Westpoint-Pepperell.
Several years ago when I visited New York, I used to work with
Westpoint-Pepperell. I met people there who had recently joined
Westpoint-Pepperell from Cluett-Peabody. Westpoint sold a lot of goods
to Cluett Peabody. They were starting to work together. They achieved
this forward-integration. Cluett-Peabody is probably the most automated
shirt manufacturer in the world. They can produce—if you're talking
about forward integration, of the fabric and the shirt itself, and the
control of costs and taking one profit instead of two, throughout the
enterprise. I think that that combination has a very, very high
probablity of surviving and being successful, as a manufacturer of men's
shirts in the U.S. They're close to the market, the whole bit. The
minute you have to start cutting goods here and sending them down to
Costa Rica to sew them and then come back in here, you've got another
step in this chain that takes you a little bit longer to get to the
consumer. If you have to go to Hong Kong, it's
I really feel that there are adequate ways, both from a technological and from a business structural standpoint, to make improvements in our system so that we don't need a great deal of reliance on this. Certainly, there may be some areas where until we get some technological breakthroughs that using some offshore processes would be good. You come back to talking about making a man's shirt. The pockets today are all made automatically on automated machines. Buttonholes are done that way. Even the sewing of buttons in a predetermined sort of line and way can be done. But when you come down to the final bit of assembling a shirt it takes a person on a machine to finalize a shirt. That is the technological bottle-neck. Old Man Singer invented the machine over a hundred years ago and that's still the same technology. Until you can break through that technological bottle-neck, right at that point, labor becomes very important. Maybe the best thing to do is just put the industry on some barges and float it around to whatever country has the cheapest labor.
But in other area where, for example, all of the pattern making—and we
have the equipment right here in our apparel lab—that is where you have
computers that minimize the waste by cutting out the garment, moving
stuff around to see how do you fit these things done by computer, laser
cutting of the fabric itself, assemblage of all of the elements into one
rack that moves from work station to work station throughout
So, to start looking beyond the borders of the U.S., I think, again, some processes, some elements, but for the majority of them, I don't think it's a viable alternative.
The thing to me is that in discussing this and trying to look at it, we
keep trying to look at this industry as if it were just one something
that is fairly well-defined, and it isn't, it's a jelly-fish. It's got
all sorts of things dangling off of it that do things differently. It
changes shape and size and everything—it's a dynamic organism. We can
study and we can define small markets and small segments of it, but
trying to generalize on the whole thing is terribly difficult. Even when
you talk about things like automobiles. I recognize that there are a lot
of little parts that go into making automobiles but when you come right
down to it, you can generalize about automobiles so much easier than you
can about the fiber-textile-apparel. You can generalize about steel
production, aluminium production, automobile tire production, even you
can separate out industrial construction, business construction, you can
generalize about those industries so much easier than you can about—.
Because anything you come up with in textiles and apparel where you can
prove Point A, I will be able to refute it and find an example of B.
There's no question. So if we
Do you think then it's too much to generalize to say that within all these parts of the industry that's there's still very little union organization?
Yes, because in some elements they are heavy. The ILGWU is very active in some localities and some segments of the industry. When we say there's very low union activity, again, there is a lot of shipping by truck between the fiber people to the fabric people, to the dying and finishing, to the apparel, to the warehouse, to the retail store. I've already got six truck shipments, and that's sort of a minimum. Some of the stuff, from the time the fiber is produced to the time something gets to a store or to the consumer can go through fifteen to twenty different transshipments. That's a unionized industry. That's part of this whole complex, that whole distribution circle, is heavily unionized.
That's really the most noteworthy segment that's
Probably, probably, generally, yes. Of course, even some of the retail industry that distributes it is unionized—some isn't. Some of the garment, some of the apparel, a good deal of the fiber industry, chemical industry, is unionized.
Do you think it's fair to say that some of the industry has moved to South because there are fewer unions than …?
Oh, originally, certainly. I was in prep school in Andover in the mid-40s and I used to stand on the highway and watch the trucks going by, taking the looms and spinning frames from Lowell and Lawrence, Mass. textile mills South. They always went in one direction only. The Northern mills were heavily unionized. I remember at that time that a weaver in those Northern mills—say on a Jacquards—would be operating four looms, negotiated contract. In the South, our weavers in Roanoke Rapids were handling twelve looms. today, you don't have that kind of disparity you're here because you've got lower energy costs, lower labor costs, proximity to market, that type of thing. I don't think there's any real movement into this area now because of…It once was; it isn't now.
END OF INTERVIEW