Oe he ee VT, ratah bir ehy ze afer Hire pte pean Ya) takeen tevarchetaast 10s illicseessunaiece palat} tree tbh cay bay ay fe Heritage 0 as Ay? TB AT Rabe, rr of & aPlit Liga ot” yort® 53a ae rx af a peagee® g ? Stip= op Mei he Fs) ¢ y 4 / if 7 nt ye ees % £ geet ore a dy “dD etveye ay ts ae es re sy wad EEG SE stad ate ‘ Pits yao OM 4 Sh ce : x : < Ug ru ’ aK . | { HY UM Ay A TRC AE we CEI E STS ae HOU: RAR ew Ee owl tig” sarara a SPRY WIT Pe iiceuametane ees ab. fi ponnennnnneennnsbntresiniennnre magnetar ERLE | le ee ie is ee igtahe ihe x, Sh Sh tS ah —’ Saal Te “2 crit * * om ee | Ulrich Middeldorf Ni a cia RG ie oe ee Ta SS - ; ON< ‘ a ; er any ade: Sige sy, Pe) i é 3 Ls \ ‘ : ay Nee ae - Ys hae te THE HERITAGE OF COTTON me ny i ae ee .? Path 2 igs Ome apse (see page 4: @ THE HERITAGE of COTTON The Fibre of Two Worlds And Many Ages By M.D.C. CRAWFORD Associate Editor of the “Daily News Record” Former Research Associate in Textiles American Museum of Natural History Research Editor of “Women’s Wear” Profusely Illustrated GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK By arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sona Copyright, 1924 by M.D. C. Crawford All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission. nichts Mew York. Made in the United States of America THE CONSTANT ENCOURAGEMENT OF E. W. FAIRCHILD OVER A PERIOD OF YEARS MADE POSSIBLE THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK. ee FOREWORD Tuis volume is a human record of a great fiber that has played a large part in the civilizations of two hemispheres and across more ages than modern civiliza- tion may safely span, and is still today the most im- portant textile fiber. It is a history in paradoxes. Cotton was ancient in India centuries before Cesar conquered Britain. There was a trade in cotton between the Orient and Europe at least as early as the Crusades. Cotton fabrics were among the earliest objects of trade between the East and the West after Portugese da Gama opened the water route to India in 1497. Yet in the Eighteenth Century a half dozen British mechanics wrested the empire of cotton from the East within a vigorous generation of invention. Columbus believed he had reached India because he found cotton in the Bahama Islands. The weaving and dyeing of cotton were well advanced in the New World many centuries before the Discovery, yet a single Yankee invention shifted the area of cotton cultivated in the New World within the territorial limits of the United States, where it was unknown at the time of the discovery, and cotton has played a great part since the first decade after the Revolu- tion in the economic development of this country. The early growth of New England is largely the record of cotton mill building. The early development Vv vi SF oretword of the South is the history of rapidly expanding cotton plantations and an international commerce in the fiber. Today the cotton mills of the South exceed in pro- ductivity the mills of the East. What will the future of cotton be, what new shifts in plantation areas and mill concentration may we expect? Cotton was once the principal media of artistic expression. Cotton has become the great staple of necessity. Will it again have its golden age of loveli- ness, will some new fiber replace it in economic im- portance? Cotton has brought wealth and power, poverty and degradation in its history. What will its new relationship be to the social, artistic and economic history of America? These problems are treated in a broad way in this volume, no particular phase unduly emphasized and all technical discussion, unless absolutely essential, avoided. At the same time the point of view of the historian, the ethnologist, the technician, the technical expert, the designer and the merchant have all been considered. It is a volume intended to be read not only by those actively concerned with specific problems, but those interested in the history of art and technology as expressed in fabrics. INTRODUCTION as free from technical discussion and statistics as the subject will permit. There is already a large and excellent body of tech- nical literature for the mill engineer, and the tabulation of economic and industrial facts is easily obtainable and reasonably accurate. It is my hope to present the story of the cotton fiber as a human drama—a drama that is by no means in its last act, but merely passing through one of its scenes. Surely in a brief account of how the ingenuity of man met and conquered the many difficulties that surround the textile art, there is a deep and healthy interest. It will strengthen our modesty to compare our actual achievements of the last century and a half of mechani- cal effort with the distinguished accomplishment. of cotton’s golden yesterdays. There are great traditions not alone in the accom- plishment of loveliness in fabrics but in the spirit of workmanship and the underlying significance of effort, that are of incalculable value to us at this particular period. If I may, therefore, through these pages induce men to look again upon cotton as one of the subtlest mediums of art; if in some measure I may direct the thoughts of manufacturers and laborers to a better understanding of the psychological value of interest in work, I shall be amply repaid for my efforts. Vii if is my honest intention to keep this narrative CONTENTS FOREWORD . , é : é : ° ° A INTRODUCTION. : : ; : - THe Marcu or Corton . 2 ; ° 6 ° CHAPTER I.—GENERAL REVIEW . é 2 e ° . II.—PrimitivE Culture : ; - - ° III.—PrimitivE TECHNIQUE . : . ‘ “ IV.—Tue New Wor.tp . : < , ° ‘ V.—PrErRv : ; ; : : VI.—Inpia_l. : ede : ; : ; VII.—EvrRore . ‘ : ; P ‘ 3 ‘ VITI.—ENGuLAND IX.—EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE AGE OF THE MACHINE X.—Corton IN THE COLONIES XI.—Taue Macuine AGE IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE GROWTH OF THE CoTToNn PLANTATION ix 105 132 x Contents CHAPTER XII.—Mitit Buiupine In New ENGiuAND XIII.—Tuer Sours XIV.—RESEARCH ; . : XV.— CONCLUSION. = 2 BIBLIOGRAPHY . INDEX. : . x PAGE 144 163 178 213 233 239 ILLUSTRATIONS INTERMINGLING oF SPANISH AND New Wortup Art IN TEXTILES . : : : : . Frontispiece Puate 2.—Terxtite INFLUENCE oN Otruer TrEecHNIQvues Pratt 3.—Tue EvorvutioN or SPINNING . ; PuatTe 4.—PictortaL SurvEY oF THE Two PRINCIPAL Tyres or Looms . § : ; : Puate 5.—Spaniso INFLUENCE ON THE TEXTILE ARTS oF THE New WorxpD . : é: ‘ ; , Puate 6.—EvIpENCE or Cotron CULTURE IN THE SOUTH- west, Mexico anp CENTRAL AMERICA . ‘ : Puate 7.—IMPLEMENTS AND PROCESSES OF THE TEXTILE Arts In Pre-Inca PERv : 5 : ~ _ Puate 8.—Tyrrs or Decorative FABRICS FROM THE Grave Ciotus oF Pre-Inca PERv. 5 : : Piate 9.—CHARACTERISTIC Design Motives From PRE- Inca Fasprics : : i . . . fe Piatt 10.—DistrisvtioN or THE Wax anv Dye, or Batik Process . ‘ 4 4 : , 7 Puate 11.—Javanese Batixs, Watt PaInTINGS FROM Asanta Caves AND Inp1an PaInteD CoTToNs sHOW Simitar ARTISTIC ORIGIN ‘ : ‘ ; L es xi FACING PAGE 10 27 30 36 53 56 62 79 90 107 xii I lustrations Puate 12.—Tue Earziest Known Corron Watt Hanc- Incs (17rH Cent.) Presrrvep 1n Goop ConpiTIon AND a Famous ILuLusrraTION oN CoTTON OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY . pA ik : 3 ; Pirate 13.—Ancient Cotrron Wari Hancines or InpIA AND FRAGMENTs oF Resist DyEInc From Eeyrt . Pratt 14.—InFuvence or Inpian Cortron on TExtTILE ARTs OF EUROPE . : ‘ : ; : : Puate 15.—INFLUENCE on EncuisH Crarr ARTs OF THE IntTRODUCTION oF InpIAN CaLico . : : A Pirate 16.—TuHe Era or Mecuanicau INVENTION : Puate 17.—Textite Arts oF THE COLONISTS ‘ ; Puate 18:—Era or MEcHANICAL ADAPTATION IN AMERICA e e Bi e ° ry e e PiLatE 19.—CorTTon AND THE SOUTH . é : Fe PLATE 20.—DEVELOPMENT oF CoTTON YARN ; i Puate 21.—Moprern ResearcH In DEsIGn . .. f FACING PAGE 118 185 146 163 174 180 189 192 198 215 THE MARCH OF COTTON 800-700 s.c.—Cotton cultivation and conversion are seen to have been long established in India, from references in the law books of Manu. 400-300 s.c.—Knowledge of cotton is first brought to the Greeks through Herodotus and the chroniclers of the campaigns of Alexander the Great in Central Asia and India. Other writings of the period refer to the exportation of Indian cotton products through the carrying trade of the Arabs. 300-200 s.c.—Cotton cultivation and conversion reach the shores of the Mediterranean via Asia Minor. 70 B.c.—The Romans use cotton tents, awnings and canopies. Compared by Lucretius with the white clouds of heaven. 70 a.pv.—Pliny reports cotton cultivation and manu- facture in Upper Egypt. The priests’ garments are made of cotton. 100-200 a.p.—Cotton is grown in Elis and there also manu- factured into hair-nets. This is the first re- corded instance of cotton grown and manu- factured on European soil, but the industry remained isolated. 200-300 a.p.—Arrian writes that calicoes and muslins are shipped from India to Adule, an Arab port on the Red Sea. 600-700 a.p.—Cotton reported cultivated in China as a decorative plant. 798 a.p.—Cotton first reaches Japan through a ship- wrecked inhabitant of India. The cultivation was later abandoned. KV xvi The March of Cotton 912-961 a.p.—Cotton culture and manufacture are firmly established in Spain under Abdurrhamans III, and also in Sicily under Arab rule. 1050 a.p.—This is the date of the earliest extant specimen of cotton paper, in the manufacture of which the Arabs of Spain are said to have excelled. 1096-1270 a.p.—The Crusades introduce Europeans to the varieties of Levantine and Occidental cottons, disseminate a knowledge of cotton goods, and initiate first an industry in the Crusader states of Asia Minor, and later a lively trade in cotton goods between the Italian city states and Asia. 1200-1300 a.p.—The Tartars introduce cotton cultivation and use into China. This knowledge is afterwards introduced into Korea. 1200-1300 a.p.—The earliest references to cotton appear in contemporary French and English writings. Cotton was first used for candle-wicks in England, and also as trimming for doublets. In France, cotton seems to have been used to make hats. Other references of the same period mention cotton as used in the form of a defensive pad in warfare and also as part of fortifications. 1200-1300 a.p.—Barcelona flourishes as a cotton manufactur- ing center, specializing in cotton sail cloth and fustians. 1320 a.p.—Oppel claims that Ulm in Germany is the first place in Central and Northern Europe where cotton is spun and woven. Venice claims the honor for Europe. 1850-1400 a.p.—Cotton cultivation reaches the Balkan penin- sula through the invasion of the Ottoman Turk. 1375 a.p.—English literary references indicate that cotton goods were being imported as a usual thing. 1492 a.p.—Columbus discovers cotton in the Bahamas. On his return trip, Europe gets its first glimpse of Sea Island Cotton. 1520 a.D.ca.—Magellan reports cotton in Brazil. The March of Cotton XVii 1560 a.p.—Ghent and Bruges are famous for their printed : cotton goods. 1592 a.p.—The Portuguese reintroduce cotton into Japan. 1600 a.p.—This is the date given by some authorities as the beginning of real cotton manufacture in England, coincident with the coming of Flemish refugees from the Netherlands. 1619 a.v.—Cotton is grown by the colonists along the rivers of Virginia. 1619 a.p.—The first negro slaves are imported into the New World. 1621 a.p.—London wool merchants protest against the growth of cotton manufacture, alleging that 40,000 pieces of mixed cotton and linen fabric are being produced yearly in England. 1641 a.p.—This is the date set by George Bigwood as the real beginning of the cotton industry in England. Prior to this date, he says, cotton was only used in England to make candle wicks. 1678 a.p.—Pamphlets indicate that cotton goods are gaining popularity in England. 1700 a.p.—Cotton cultivation in North Carolina furnishes one-fifth of the population with clothing, the cotton being mixed with other fibers to pro- duce cloth. Every farmstead has its cotton patch. 1700 a.v.—First law in England forbidding the use of cotton in the interests of wool growers. 1700-1793 a.p.—The West Indies and Brazil are the great cot- ton producing countries of the New World. 1721 a.p.—Parliament passes a second law protecting the wool interests in England, fining any one who wears a dyed or printed calico. 1733 a.p.—Kaye invents the flying-shuttle. 1736 a.p.—The Manchester Act is passed, allowing cotton and linen mixed calico to be manufactured, while importation of Indian goods is still for- bidden, thus giving Lancashire the monopoly in cotton goods. XViii Che March of Cotton 1750 a.p.—30,000 people in Manchester and Bolton dis- tricts are concerned with cotton manufacture. 1753 a.p.—South Carolina sends a few pounds of cotton to London. 1764 a.p.—Hargreaves invents the Spinning Jenny. 1764 a.p.—Eight bags of cotton are sent from Carolina to Liverpool. 1766 a.p.—Manchester and Bolton manufacture 600,000 pounds sterling worth of cotton and linen goods per year. 1769 a.p.—Arkwright patents the spinning frame. 1770 a.p.—Three bales of cotton go from New York to Liverpool, ten from Charleston, four from Virginia, and three barrels from North Carolina. (Note: A bale or bag at that time was com- puted at 200 lbs.) 1775-1783 a.p.—Cotton manufactures in America are stimulated by the cotton goods famine incident on eight years of war. 1779 a.p.—Crompton invents his Spinning-Mule. 1783 a.p.—The first piece of cotton goods entirely made of cotton is produced in Lancashire. 1785 a.p.—Cartwright invents the power loom. 1786 a.D.—600 pounds of American cotton are shipped to Liverpool. 1787-88 a.p.—The first permament cotton factory built of brick, at Beverly, Massachusetts, is put into operation by a group of men headed by John Cabot and Joshua Fisher. It was not an economic success. 1788 a.p.—A factory is built at Philadelphia Satie with expensive machinery for carding and spinning cotton. 1788 a.p.—Richard Leake of Savannah announces a new staple and decides to experiment with eight acres planted with cotton seed. 1789 4.D.—127,500 pounds of American cotton exported. 1790 a.p.—Samuel Slater migrates from England, and puts up a factory at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, em- bodying the coveted English inventions. Che March of Cotton xix 1790 a.p.—3,138 bales of 500 pounds each are produced in America, and 379 bales are exported. 1793 a.D.—Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin. 1812-1815 a.p.—War with England stimulates American manu- facture. 1815 a.p.—Boston Manufacturing Company founded with power looms. 1820 a.p.—Factory system begins to be applied in England to the weaving industry as well as spinning. At that time there were seventeen times as many hand looms as steam looms in the coun- try. 1832 a.p.—Invention of ring spinning. Che Heritage of Cotton CHAPTER I GENERAL REVIEW HE early history of cotton lies in Asia and in the New World, in ages only partially historic and among peoples wholly alien. Our first literary record of cotton is in the vague phrases of a dead language. The most ancient cotton fabrics are the remains of a civilization that matured and vanished in the New World while Europe was still a barbarous wilderness. As this delicate seed hair first appears in the traditions of Asia, or the marvelous grave cloths of pre-Inca Peru, it is already a finished achievement, complex and varied in technique, highly developed in esthetic values, the fruit of long ages of development and accomplishment, its standards beyond our latest skill. In Europe cotton was known but was of little im- portance in commerce until the hardy mariners of the Sixteenth Century linked the Orient and the Western Hemisphere to Europe. It had no great industrial significance, until the mechanical genius of a few in- ventors in England, and one in the infant republic of the West gave to English speaking people that control of cotton we still enjoy. 3 4 Che Beritage of Cotton It is today one of our chief forms of wealth, quoted on every bourse of the world, a great agricultural staple, a great industrial factor. It had as well its ages of beauty, still preserved for us in priceless webs of living color. Beyond these lie the misty centuries and vague races who first discovered cotton in nature, developed the tools and implements, methods and processes that underlie both the technique and arts of today. All that our own age has done, is to make automatic and mechanical movements and principles that were ancient when life was new along the Ganges, when the ancient civilizations preserved beneath the sands of coastal Peru were at their earliest dawning. With reasonable accuracy we can trace each phase of cotton history as the fiber affects Europe and our own Colonial and early national life. It is true, that this record is neither extensive nor wholly clear, until modern times. But still each phase is sufficiently definite and never lacking in interest. Spain was the first nation of modern Europe to know cotton both as an agricultural product and as a textile fiber. The Moors introduced cotton into Spain in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries and achieved great skill and artistry in its conversion. What part cotton played in the little trickle of Oriental commerce which began after the first Crusade, it is difficult to say. There is uncertainty in the names of fabrics and the lack of scientific knowledge as to the character of fiber that makes this question difficult to determine. Cotton and cotton cloths may easily have passed unnoticed in the commerce of these and even earlier times. In England we first hear of cotton in the late Twelfth Century as candle wicks, embroidery yarns, @eneral Rebietw 5 and as a vegetable wool from the Levant, to be mixed with flax, or sheep’s wool, in the heavier, cheaper fabrics of the poorer classes. No doubt, the traveled scholars of the Monasteries knew its true character, yet the common belief lay in a series of quaint legends of which the delightfully un- veracious Sir John de Mandeville was, if not the father, at least an earnest supporter. Cotton was supposed to be the wool of certain mys- terious Scythian sheep. These lambs grew on shrubs, each cradled in its downy pod. Except for the fact that the stalk was attached to the soil, they were like the little downy creatures who gamboled in the English fields. Fortunately this stem was flexible and per- mitted them to bend down and graze on the adjacent herbage. When, however, all grass within this narrow orbit had been eaten, the lambs naturally and wisely proceeded to expire. Both wool and flesh were then available. Short of a fire breathing dragon, no animal could have been more satisfactory to the Middle Ages. The actual cotton plant was tame beside it. To whom belongs the distinguished honor of this discovery, I can not determine. It is difficult to understand why Italy, more open in many ways to the influence of the Near East than Spain itself, did not acquire some skill in cotton spin- ning and weaving. Her artisans drew a rich inspiration from the eastern arts and had learned how to weave silk and eventually how to raise the delicate, little moths, and supply her own raw material. France, Flanders, and even England acquired in time some degree of Italian skill in this apparently equally difficult medium of expression. But cotton eluded these masters of the loom for centuries. It may have been that in 6 Che Heritage of Cotton cotton weaving, spinning and dyeing there were technical difficulties a little beyond their power. At least, we know that when Europe a few centuries later, with greater skill and knowledge, attempted to pro- duce all cotton fabrics in competition with India, they met with failure, until the Machine Age. There is a rather scanty but none the less interesting classical history of cotton. The Greek historians before the Christian Era knew of the fiber and something of the methods of decoration. Alexander the Great car- ried back from India cotton cultivators and craftsmen and settled these in Asia Minor. There is even some evidence that the arts spread temporarily to the Greek mainland. The Chinese had evidently heard some rumors regarding the fabulous Scythian lambs long before the legend was current in Europe, but the commercial explorers of Old Cathay were either not gifted with the imagination of the Moyen Age, or were not encouraged by their masters to employ their talents. Hence, they merely quote as heresay vague reports regarding “water sheep”’ which sound suggestive. Sir M. Aurel Stein, the explorer of the ruined City of Turfan on the Gobi Desert, mentions the finding of cotton cloth and dates these fabrics from the Second to the Fifth Centuries of the Christian Era. This mysterious ghost of a city, was once a busy market place on the old caravan route between the Near East and China. If the distinguished scholar is correct in his fiber analysis, it is proof that cotton fabrics were articles of trade between India and China in very remote times. There are certain stories that the beautiful blossoms induced Chinese florists to cultivate the plant as a General Rebiew 7 garden flower, but Marco Polo, in the Thirteenth Cen- tury and later Arabic merchants, state positively that cotton was only known in the southern province of Fokien and was then a recent introduction from India. Egypt in very remote times maintained an exten- sive commerce with both India and indirectly with China, but neither silk nor cotton are found in the Egyp- tian tombs until late in the Sassanian Empire which begins in the Eighth Century a.p. This does not prove, of course, that Egyptian merchants and travelers did not know of cotton or silk; it merely proves that other things were regarded as more important in commerce. Cotton culture and the arts of cotton conversion, more particularly the distinctly Indian craft of resist dyeing, spread to the islands of the Indian Ocean at a very early date. Java is supposed to have received cotton between the Third and Fifth Centuries through the efforts of the Buddhist monks and traders. It is even believed to have reached Japan a little later, but if so, it left little if any trace. The fabric arts of later Japan, built so largely upon the cotton arts of India, were the results of the efforts of Dutch traders bringing the craft secrets from India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. It is not difficult, perhaps, to understand why cotton spread from India to the Islands of the Indian Ocean and not into China or Egypt. All people at a certain stage of culture are good weavers and spinners, their crafts well established and adjusted to local supplies of raw material and domestic needs. The introduction of a new fiber or fabric or craft is always attended with difficulty, unless the advantage is very great and ap- parent. The arts of cotton only spread when accom- 8 The Beritage of Cotton panied by a migration of Indian craftsmen, friendly climatic conditions and where the cotton fabric itself was wholly suitable. All of this evidence points conclusively to Southern India as the source of origin for cotton so far as Asia, Europe, and Africa are concerned. The discovery of cotton in the New World, its prevalence and high development all through Spanish America, came, therefore, as a great surprise. Even at this late date we have not solved this great enigma. We have learned, however, that the cultivation of cotton in the Americas, together with a technical development, at least as complex as Asia’s, existed here prior to the earliest certain date we can give to cotton in Asia. In a later chapter I will discuss the influence upon the social habits of Europe, particularly England, due to the introduction of cotton fabrics from India during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. This was followed almost immediately by the discovery in the Western World of an almost inexhaustible supply of raw material as a further incentive to artistic and in- dustrial development. 3 If there is one thing more certain than another in the history of cotton, it is that its beginnings in both technique and art retreat beyond the veil of history into the earlier phases of human development. The modern mill, with its minute divisions of pro- cesses, its intricate and rapidly moving machinery, is incomprehensible to the most intelligent lay observer. The so-called hand implements and processes which preceded the machine, while perhaps a little clearer be- cause of the absence of equipment, to control and dis- tribute power, are only a degree less confusing. It seems wiser, then, to first firmly establish the funda- General Review 9 mental ideas regarding spinning and weaving, to ra- tionally develop these implements and methods as these mature in human consciousness, than to explain such intricate machines as those now in use or their more direct antecedents. We must remember that cotton, as wool, flax and silk, was first discovered by people at a very low stage of culture. It was one of the many fibers tried that met successfully the varying needs of human life over an immense period of years, and has survived across ages untold and largely unknown. How did man first learn to spin, to weave, to dye, to create design in its simplest form? What was the motivation, the guiding impulse? As the records and training of childhood in a large measure explain the adult, so in the infancy of the race, are lessons of value to the present age. Each civilization has the happy and wholly satis- factory habit of regarding itself as the culminating epoch of all culture. It is true that each period con- tains some traces of all the achievements and visions, hopes, defeats and aspirations of the past; but there has been loss as well as gain, nor has the upward climb always been direct. There are many things worthy of retrieving even in our most remote past. No great fundamental history of any art may be truly under- stood if studied merely from the vantage points of a single epoch. CHAPTER II PRIMITIVE CULTURE T is natural that the entire problem of textiles should be confused with the single modern phase of cloth making. The woven web plays so im- portant a part in modern life, we forget that in primi- tive cultures it does not appear until a comparatively late period. Spinning, weaving and dyeing in the Dawn Ages are independent arts which served the needs of society separately for an infinitely longer period than when combined. My purpose in this chapter is to correlate in a brief sketch the basic principles of the textile arts and to show these in their simplest, most elemental forms. To outline the primitive stages of evolution up to the time when loom and spindle, the first crude assays in design, color and the deliberate production of cloth, bring the story within the historic limit of our own hemisphere and Asia. Spinning, the act of combining two or more com- paratively weak filatal elements, through twisting into a comparatively strong yarn, cord or thread, precedes by a full cultural cycle, the crudest idea of weaving. We have still to find any civilization archaic or mod- ern, so elemental as not to be proficient in the arts of spinning. Almost every conceivable material, both TO PLATE 2 PRIMITIVE CULTURE The impulse towards ornament is very ancient in human culture. Many peoples who are not cloth makers, produce de- sign subsequently used in cloth and basketry. Certain types of design originated in body painting and tattooing. Many tech- niques, first developed in basketry, later appear in textiles and are subsequently transferred to pottery. 1—Prehistoric lost color ware or resist dye pottery from Central America. American Museum of Natural History. (Page 59) 2a—Textile pattern on prehistoric pottery from the Southwest. (Page 40) American Museum of Natural History. 2b—Textile pattern on prehistoric pottery from the Southwest. (Page 40) American Museum of Natural History. 8—San Carlos basketry patterns produced by non-cloth making tribe. American Museum of Natural History. iz age 19) 4—Rug of fur applique from Koryak Tribe of Siberia. (Page 20) American Museum of Natural History. 5—Valiente Indian knitted bag from Central America. (Page 20) American Museum of Natural History. 6—Valiente Indian knitted bag from Central America. (Page 20) American Museum of Natural History. 7—Pima baskets showing weaving pattern by non-cloth making people. American Museum of Natural History. (Page 19) 8a—Etched bark belts from New Guinea. (Page 20) American Museum of Natural History. 8b—Etched bark belts from New Guinea. (Page 20) American Museum of Natural History. 9—Detail of decoration, interior of chief’s house in New Guinea. (Page 20) American Museum of Natural History. 10—Tattooed Marquesas Islander. (Page 21) American Museum of Natural History. 11—Samoan fabric of pounded bark known as Tapa, showing textile de- sign produced by non-weaving people. (Page 36) American Museum of Natural History. 12—Samoan implements used to pound paper mulberry bark and print patterns. (Page 36) American Museum of Natural History. 18—Samoan tapa cloth. (Page 36) American Museum of Natural History a i ra , : a a ga Se tis. s 245 eared ri455 19 8 oSteO | ili ~ DS ase! | | oe | en eas FPNAY . 3 i ‘ ae é = : ‘a ¢ <5 a A NX Ay ® | Sx et Seal re CANS: ~~ er - See [NYS/ >it >< > >a de be 22 spe Seo A etl Se Qhoeinssoennin * > Primitive Culture II animal and vegetable, have been used by primitive peoples for cordage. The list is endless. Our earliest ancestors evidently conducted a constant search in nature to find materials to answer their varying filatal needs. There are tribes today in inaccessible jungles, who have no knowledge of weaving in any of its forms, who neither make baskets nor pottery, nor practise the most rudimentary agriculture, but who still know how to spin and have apparently always possessed this knowledge. Even among the few races who can not produce fire by artificial means, the art of spinning is a familiar practice. It is safe, therefore, to reckon cord making as among the first technical achievements of men. Still there must have been a time when man did not know how to spin. There is no doubt that early man developed in con- tinental areas and was a companion of dangerous, carniverous beasts, and faced these dangers with only his native shrewdness and a certain swift strength as his protection. Strong as were his arms, they were no match for the bears; terrible as was the grip of his blunt fingers, it was as nothing to the rending claws of the tiger. If he could not devise some weapon that would equalize these odds, he must have perished in the contest. From immemorial silt, from cave débris, from river drift and marl pit, wherever in our dawning man made his lair home, we find jagged stones, rounded on one side, small enough to cup in the hollow of the hand, yet large and heavy and sharp enough to be a dangerous weapon at close quarters. We call these handstones, the first tool weapon of the human race. To conceive even so elemental a weapon, man had to break up 12 The Heritage of Cotton pieces of flint and use judgment in the selection of the most suitable fragments. No doubt with the aid of this stone he fashioned a club of gnarled wood. This was a reasonable sequence of ideas, since the act of striking, throwing and stabbing are natural movements. At some time there must have come a man, to whom the jagged handstone and the wooden club were insufficient. He did not accept the universe as he found it. In other words he thought. He learned to make this clear distinction between the club and the handstone. With the club he could strike a shrewd blow, beyond the reach of danger and this sufficed for the lesser beasts. With the stone he could strike a downright blow, which even the greater beasts respect- ed. Yet to strike this blow he must come perilously within the reach of claws and fangs. If a way might be devised to combine the com- parative security of the club with the force and im- pact of the stone, it were a great matter. But stone is stone, and wood is wood, and excellent though each be in itself, according to its nature, they will not grow together. Some hint he may have received from the intertwining creeper, the tough lianas coiled like ser- pents about the boughs of trees, or the long sinews in the legs of the deer and the auroch might have given him his first idea. No question he has dragged these out again and again to study mutely their peculiar nature, to experiment with their slender toughness. In the end he loops these sinews about the stone and attempts to fasten it to the end of the club. He learns that if he doubles these sinews, they are better than single, but if he not only doubles them, but twists them, this double and twisted element, is not only still stronger, but the spiral character of the twists forms Primitive Cultur 13 a friction producing surface, which prevents the binding from slipping. This twisting of sinews together is spinning. Spin- ning indeed, in its crudest form, but still true spinning. He has combined with the aid of his strong fingers two comparatively weak filatal elements and fashioned of them one comparatively strong cord. And this suf- fices for his purpose. Stone hammers will be fashioned to wooden handles by this means for more thousands of years than there are centuries in modern history. This twisted cord of sinew marks a great change in human life. New uses for cordage quickly developed. For example, man had noticed that flint broke in razor- edge flakes. It would not be long, therefore, before he would fasten with twisted sinews one of these sharp edged flakes to the end of a slender sapling. He would _ then have a stabbing stick or spear capable of piercing the toughest hide. This would rapidly develop into a Javelin or throwing spear. Fish lines, snares, in some parts of the world the sling, and nets, would be made from twisted sinews or tough grasses and shredded barks at about this era of culture. The idea of cordage of any kind is so universal, that it might well have had multiple origins, the idea occur- ring to many men in many parts of the world, separated by great reaches of time. The next use to which cordage was applied is so unique, so original, that it could have but one single source of origin. tf am well aware that stone axes and points of stone have been se- cured in holes bored in wooden hafts. Whether this method preceded the binding of sinews or not, makes little difference in this narrative, for I am describing the primitive development of textiles, and not the serial culture of man. My hope is to drive home in a few examples the im- portance of textiles before cloth making. 14 The Heritage of Cotton This second man in the great primitive trilogy of inventors must have been gifted with analytical reason- ing powers, been able to carry his deductions through several phases of mental experiment before he actually put his ideas in operation. In other words the final results of his thought was highly composite. This man sees in cord and wood and point of flint new and undreamed of possibilities. To his mind flint is the most perfect material, nor can he conceive of a stronger, tougher cord than that made of twisted sinews. He, therefore, turns his investigation towards the properties of wood. He is familiar with many kinds and each has its separate function in his life. Chiefly, however, his interest centres about the smooth barked, straight saplings which are best suited for haft of stone hammer or shaft for flint tipped spear. In making new weapons he has often marveled how the strength of the sapling grew as he put forth his own strength. The more he bent a sapling the greater grew its power to resist, and if it escaped occasionally from his firm grasp in its upward swing, more often than not it gave him a shrewd blow. This was an indication perhaps of displeasure on the part of the wood, and yet once the wood had been subdued, this spirit of discontent left it and it became his willing servant and stout friend. In time it occurred to him that a sapling might be more easily severed with the jagged stone edge if one end were tied down. Here he discovers that it is not only a convenience but a miracle, for the strength he had marveled at in the bent sapling and the pliant toughness of the cord, when combined, froze into a silent struggle between cord and wood. He runs his calloused hand along the straining curve Primitibe Culture 15 of the bent sapling, it is not unlike his own flexed muscle, when he puts forth his might. Yet it is still the familiar sapling of his many experiences. In wonder he looks at the cord he himself has fashioned from the sinews of the auroch. It is just the same cord he has known for many friendly days and yet how different! Cord and wood have suddenly grown alive in this new relationship. Like a child he touches the straining cord and it answers with a deep, rich note of music. It is the spirit of the wood making protest at being bound! None the less he touches it again with the same result; and yet that note, deep as it was, strong as it was, was not the tone of anger. It is like the call of his mate, like the song that springs to his own hairy lips when the long days come again with the flowers, and the fish leap in the shallows. He strikes it tentatively with his flint hammer and the cord almost snatches it from his hand. He pushes against the cord with the blunt end of his spear, the spear springs away like a living thing, and the cord hums with satisfaction! What are this man’s processes of thought. How does he arrive from one experiment safely to the next, from dream to idea, from idea to action, from action to accomplishment? No man can say. The night of our long climb is lit by the brilliance of a few great intellects, nor is there any rule to measure either their mental processes or the sequence of their appearance. Among the truly great inventors of all the ages, I place the Bow Maker! In all eternity there must have been the twilight instant when this miracle was still but the arched sap- ling and the singing cord; and that instant when the idea flamed like a comet in the midnight firmament and 16 The Heritage of Cotton as clear as his own image in a crystal pool, he sees how all things, strength of cord toughness of wood, power to throw objects aside that touch the cord, all mean, have always meant, must always mean one thing, the Bow! He has bent his last sapling, and attached to either end the twisted cord. In moist, triumphant hand he holds the fruit of his thought and listens to the music of the throbbing cord. It will throw a stone further and surer than his sinewy arm. This is good, but in his mind there is a still greater thought. For if he, himself, the creator of the bow may throw a spear, why may not this creature of his mind also throw its spear? (He has not yet learned to call them arrows). He selects a straight stick, scarce larger than his finger and yet long enough to span the arch of the bow. He tips it with a flake of flint and rubs a notch in the end. Timidly he draws his first arrow, releases it and follows its flight with dazzled eyes. Again and yet again he performs this miracle with increasing satisfaction. Now he fashions a bow Just to the verge of his might to draw and uses great care in selecting arrow shafts, in balancing the tips. And later, either he or some of his descendants fasten to the butt the guiding feathers of the fenney goose. Now comes the never-to-be-forgotten hour, when he makes first assay of his new powers against his ancient enemies. He sees the arrow redden in the heart’s blood of the snarling wolf, he sees the gray feathers encrim- soned against the tawny shoulder of the tiger-devil. His hour has come at last, and he walks upright. No longer shall the lurking shadows of the forest trail drive him chattering in fear to the protecting tree tops. His is the power, safe himself, to send from afar a Primitive Culture 17 lethal message. Men will come and go for countless ages and the castellated ice will cover completely this verdant forest, where now he roams in the sweet security of mastership, nor will men ever devise a more perfect, more certain weapon till the swing of the cycles bring gun powder and the rifled barrel. And all these—axe, snare, sling and bow—are in a sense results of the twisted sinews of the first Cord Maker! The first weaver was he who made the first fish weir. He had observed that it was a little easier to secure his prey in parts of the stream where a wind-blown tree formed an obstruction which permitted the fish to escape only in one direction. Obviously the gods of the forest sent these fortuitously fallen trees in answer to the offerings of the tribe. Still the gods were notably poor fishermen and did not send either enough trees or trees in the right place to suit the growing demand of the ravenous appetites. This man dares to imitate the gods to improve indeed upon their careless methods. He selects a shallow ripple, between two deep pools, drives in up- right sticks in a loop to suit the vagaries of the water. Between these, he intertwines saplings of pliable vines, so that the water may escape but the fish be retained. All that he thought he was doing, all that he hoped to accomplish and all so far as he ever knew he had accom- Nore: ‘‘The missile bow, whatever its form, I regard as a comparatively late development in culture, preceded by the throwing stick and sling, and, in my opinion, a probable development from the throwing stick and nowhere to be regarded a direct invention in any of its existing forms. From studies made with the late Frank Hamilton Cushing I consider all missile bows to be genetically related and as having a common, rather than several, inde- pendent origins. They all, at least in my opinion, have an identical mor- phology.’’—Stewart Culin, Brooklyn Institute Museum, Brooklyn, New York. 18 Che Beritage of Cotton plished, was to build a fish trap in imitation of wind- blown trees. As a matter of fact he is the father of weavers and the latest, most sumptuous fabric of our times, is covered by the same generic definition as this rude texture of upright staffs and intertwining withes. For weaving is the act of interlacing at right angles two filatal elements in such a way that friction holds them in one compact entity. Not long after this great invention of the fish weir, the growing wealth of the tribe in food, gave individuals leisure for further experiment and mats of rushes were intertwined in imitation of the fish weir and wattled huts built originally above a spearing platform as pro- tection from the wind and rain, began to make their appearance. Before long came that period of culture when man left his caves and tree top homes and lived in spiled villages above the shallow waters of lakes. Here he was reasonably secure from danger of attack from marauding animals and devastating forest fires. The task of fishing was relegated to the women. And women not only repaired but built the fish weirs. So all women came to a certain skill and understanding of the arts of interlacing two sets of sticks into a strong open texture. In other words, became weavers. Woman’s life was changed by the weapon-ingenuity of man from one of nervous dread to comparative secur- ity and comfort. No longer does she clutch her latest born and so perilously and preciously handicapped flee when the tiger slips like a gray flame into the clearing. Now he may roar his loudest, tantalized by the delicious scents wafted across the water to his quivering nose. If he shows his evil, wrinkled face at the bridge-tree, the men will fill him full of arrows and there will be a great feast that evening, and the chief will have a fine Primitibe Culture 19 new tiger skin to sit upon before the council fire. No longer does she huddle in mute agony in the corner of the cave, with her little, whimpering bundle of ten- derness, while the gaunt silent men return day by day fishless from the pitiless river. Now plenty warms her life and there is still to eat and eat again. Her man, lean-hipped, burly shouldered, with corded, hairy arms and soft anxious eyes; a bow of seasoned wood, a flint tipped spear, an edged stone cunningly hafted in a stout sapling, the keen delight of the hunt, the riotous joy of the evening feast and the satisfaction of talk with his peers about the council fire; for him these suffice. But not for her. She demands some outlet for the pent up energies, some direction for the creative instincts fostered by the new relationship she has developed towards this particular tiny wattled hut, carpeted with rush mats and the skins of animals. So one evening when her man returns from the hunt, he is shown the first crude basket. For the woman in her new life has always something to carry. First the fish must be transported from the weir, then there are the swift, timid forays into the adjoining forest to gather nuts, and fruits, berries, edible roots and grasses, which have become an important part of the daily menu. The basket is, perhaps, the first device created by human ingenuity that may safely be called a luxury. It is weaving, a direct result of the fish weir and mat- tings. The man looks at it with superior toleration. It is obviously neither weapon nor trap, nor can one make upon it interesting and satisfactory noises. It seems, however, upon reflection to be an overturned hut, a sort of propitiatory offering to the gods of the winds to dissuade them from blowing down the real hut. Such a ritualistic theory is sound, for in spite of 20 The Beritage of Cotton the gods’ power for mischief, they are notably easy to deceive. | That night he showed it at the council fire of the elders. They turned it over, peered into it, smelled it, and wisely shook their heads. Woman’s work of small moment! None the less he carried home in it that night the arrow points he had fashioned while listening to a learned discussion around the fire regarding the habits of the Wolf “‘who eats the sun each night.” The men, through better organization and improved weapons, have driven the more dangerous animals from the little clearing on the shore and the woman finds in the forests more and more things of value. Roots, grasses, fruits and berries, she can gather with more or less impunity and for these she needs more and different types of basketry. She finds as well that certain of these foods, can be dried and stored and this is a further occasion for weaving baskets, and hence increases her quest for fibers, that may be spun and woven. To all of these forces there comes the added incen- tive of color, the desire for chromatic sensation. Here- tofore fear, hunger, desire for security and rude com- fort have entirely governed the quest. Now comes the first, great esthetic impulse, latent always, awaiting this hour to blossom into centuries of beauty. No one studying the arts of primitive people can fail to be impressed by their passionate love for color and design. Almost every implement, every object capable of being designed and stained is decorated. Primitive peoples have a keener if narrower vision of nature than civilized man. They see animals, fishes and reptiles, as well as vegetable matter in all varying forms and can identify the objects of their quest by the Primitive Culture 21 least shade of color visioned. They acquire fine dis- tinctions in color senses, since it is necessary to dis- tinguish the tawny shade of the lion’s mane from the dun color of the deer, to catch the glint of the fishes’ scales in the deepest pool, to distinguish at a glance the edible from the poisonous mollusk. The marked preference of all savage people for different tones of red, which still survives in our own consciousness, is because this color has always pleasant associations, whether it be in fire, the warm blood of the slaughtered animals, the tones of ripened fruit, or the clay which protects from annoying swarms of insects. But there is obviously a vast intellectual difference between seeing color in nature and reacting to color, and in deliberately using color to produce effects. The first coloring was, no doubt, accidental. The juices of fruit, the liquor of certain shell fishes and roots and edible barks, left upon the glistening skin visible traces and between these colors and the satisfaction of eating there was a definite mental reaction. So gradually, the art of body painting and staining developed. I need only cite a few of the more familiar instances to establish this first of all arts in its proper status. The little peoples who lived beyond the walls in northern Britain, were called by the Romans, Picks, the Painted People, because of their habit of tattooing their bodies. The Sioux warrior, the Zuni priest, the African spearman, even the Australian bushman, (lowest in human culture), decorate themselves in marvelous and highly significant patterns. It remained, however, for the Maoris of New Zealand to carry body and facial tattooing to the full dignity of a major art. 22 The Heritage of Cotton The habit in India of painting with henna the nails of famous beauties, the toilet rituals of Egypt and old Cathay, perhaps even the ardent love for cosmetics in this day, are all survivals of these same primordial practices. To transfer this love of color to objects they them- selves created, as well as to their own body, was not a difficult transition. The value of a textile fiber would then be determined by the ease with which it accepted color. As soon, therefore, as any advance guard of the human race migrated to a country where cotton grew, the brilliant blossoms and the opening pods of lint would soon attract attention and when it was found that the cotton fiber had a great receptivity for certain dyes, it would become a favorite for its esthetic rather than its utilitarian qualities. And so this tiny filament begins its history as one of the many, perhaps at the beginning the least im- portant of the textile fibers. When this was in time, even in relationship to culture, it is Impossible to say. It is, of course, possible that these qualities might have been independently discovered by totally distinct races in both Asia and the New World. One thing only is reasonably clear; cotton does not belong in the same class with the first sturdy rough fibers of usage. Its choice was determined because of its qualities as a medium of beauty rather than utility. CHAPTER III PRIMITIVE TECHNIQUE \ S cordage and yarn passed from a strictly utili- tarian usage into the arts, it became desirable to store surplus product for subsequent use. It was natural that they should wrap this yarn, when spun, about either a stick or a stone, and here begins the two great basic methods of spinning. Sooner or later the spinner would discover that a stone, wrapped in a covering of yarn, if allowed to hang down and set in a twirling motion, helped the spinning of fiber. This type of spinning was generally practised among wool and flax using peoples and was in existence in Europe and England within historic times, and is even still practised by the Spanish shepherds. (See whorl and distaff spinning illustration.) It was, however, unsuitable to the short cotton fiber. In this case the yarn was wound on a straight stick. In time the spinner discovered that if one end of the stick rested in a smooth shell or stone, and was twisted with one hand, the other hand might more easily form the thread and smooth out the stick and rough places. (See illustration of Peruvian spinning.) Practically all subsequent spinning has been devel- oped on this principle. The yarns of Dacca muslins (to be mentioned later), the most exquisite of cotton 23 24 Che Heritage of Cotton textures, were spun on this principle, as were those of prehistoric Peru. India later added the spinning wheel to increase the revolutions of the spindle stick and this wheel, some time in the early Middle Ages, was introduced in Europe and became the ancestor of all the spinning devices invented in England during the Eighteenth Century. A little study of the basketry arts will prove that many of our familiar geometric weaving patterns originated in basketry and were later incorporated in cloth. The same is true of many of the techniques of weaving. There are baskets in tapestry, leno, and twill weaves and in embroidery, all of which subse- quently appear in cloth. Consequently, it is little exaggeration to state, that before the first cloth was made, the fundamental methods of ornament, dyeing and fabric construction, had already been developed. Just as the idea of weaving precedes the idea of cloth making, so does the crudest cloth long precede any type of loom. The loom 1s, after all, only a con- venient implement for weaving, not a necessity, until cloth making reaches its finer phases. Today in the jungles of Borneo, rough cotton hammocks are made without a loom, although the loom is used in the weav- ing of finer fabrics. The Indians of Northern Canada make a blanket of twisted strips of rabbit fur without knowledge of any implement similar to a loom. The warps in both cases are stretched on the ground and the weft or filling intertwined by hand. With the expansion of ideas in cloth making, some kind of a frame to hold the warp in position during the act of weaving becomes necessary. The purpose of the loom is to keep the warp threads parallel to each other in one plane, at approximately equal distances apart, and to Primitive Technique 25 permit of their easy manipulation during the insertion of weft. There are two basic types of looms, one which ap- parently developed in the Mediterranean flax area and the type peculiar to the cotton and silk areas. The simplest loom was the former. This consisted of a single, rigid horizontal bar, from which the warps hung down with weights attached to produce tension and to keep the filatal elements parallel to each other. This type of loom quickly reached its fullest pos- sible mechanical development. The addition of two parallel slender rods below the loom bar, running under and over opposite groups of warps, further assisted in keeping the warps in their proper relationship and making it easy for the weaver to separate them in weaving units. Weaving on such a device resembles a kind of em- broidery.. By no means do I wish to infer that many beautiful webs were not woven on this implement. The early Greeks produced beautiful designs on it; perhaps the earliest Assyrian and Babylonia webs were made on this frame. We know of these designs only from the ceramic pictures of the classical Grecian period _and in the degenerate forms of the later Coptic tapes- tries. This loom did not lend itself to the mechanical subtleties of the more highly involved constructions, and it has no descendants in the machines of today. Its history is, however, interesting as proving that a mechanical device may have a very wide terrestrial - distribution, and be of immense antiquity. We find warp weights in the silt of the Swiss Lakes, judged to be between seven and ten thousand years old. This loom is pictured on the famous Grecian vase illustrating 26 The Beritage of Cotton Penelope weaving the tapestry she unravelled each night in answer to the fruitless prayers of her suitors. In a Scandinavian saga, skulls are referred to as warp weights and this type of loom was used up to modern times in Iceland. So in Europe alone we have a clear record of one weaving device covering areas which were known to use flax and wool of not less than ten thou- sand years. To find this loom again we must cross the northern portion of the Asiatic continent over the narrow, island dotted, foggy seas of the Bering Straits, until we come to its last expression among the Haida tribes of Coastal Alaska. Since we know from incontrovertible evidence that the culture of Alaska is of Siberian origin, no one attempts to prove that this particular type of loom was not introduced. It is freely acknowledged as an Asiatic intrusion. There is no inference of a common blood relation- ship between the peoples, who over such a long period of time and wide terrestrial area, used these two interest- ing inventions. I merely cite them to prove how wide a distribution such ideas may have. If such an im- plement can be traced from Asia to the New World, it at least proves that such things are possible. No natural fiber is so pliable as cotton and probably among the great primitive yarns none was so weak. Consequently, the uneven tension of warp weights on the single-barred loom, was not suitable. Silk, of course, is almost as pliable as cotton, even in its natural gummed state. It is not surprising, therefore, to find the two-barred loom in early China, as in the early cotton areas of India. Whether one borrowed from the other or both from a common source, there is no possible way of telling. As a matter of fact, India and NY N N x N y PLATE 8 THE EVOLUTION OF SPINNING The earliest spinning was merely twisting fibers between the fingers or rolling on the naked thigh. Implements were intro- duced when the need for finer yarn developed. Implement spinning is divided into two broad classifications—the whorl and distaff method, where a hanging weight attenuates the par- tially spun thread; and the draught and twist method where the partially spun thread is attenuated through draught created be- tween the spindle and the hand of the spinner. This latter method developed in cotton areas and was finally associated with the wheel to give greater speed to the revolutions of the spindle and hence yield a greater production of yarn. The first man to imitate mechanically this principle of spinning was Samuel Crompton, who invented the mule in 1779. His home is preserved in Bolton, England, as a memorial museum. : 1—Greek woman spinning flax by whorl and distaff or hanging weight method. » (Page 23) 2—-Famous prehistoric Peruvian vase showing spinning by draught and twist method. (Pages 23, 54) American Museum of Natural History. 2a—Aztec mother punishing daughter for poor spinning. (Pages 23, 40) Codex Mendoza Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. 38—Probable method of spinning in prehistoric Peru. (Page 23) 4—Hindu woman spinning cotton on primitive wheel. (Pages 24, 106) 5—Colonial woman spinning cotton with European model of Oriental wheel with cards and basket of roving. (Page 24) 6—Chinaman spinning cotton by adaptation of Indian cotton wheel. (Page 24) %—Hall i’ th’ Wood, house in which Crompton invented the spinning mule in Bolton, England, 1779. (Page 114) Primitibe Technique 27 China are but modern names given to very ancient areas of human culture. The earliest form of the cotton loom consisted of two parallel bars, held apart by being attached to other objects. Around these bars the warp was wrapped. Such a loom still exists in primitive parts of Asia and is found in the more inaccessible jungles of South America. The first improvement was the introduction of two light rods to keep the warps evenly divided and to bring them into a common weaving plane. The next addition was the attaching of the warps to a pliable twisted cord instead of directly to the loom bars, and fastening this cord by a string to the bars. This in- creased the evenness of the weaving plane and pre- vented the warps from cutting during the constant movement of weaving. The last additions to this implement were two sticks with loops of cord attached at equal distances. Through the loops of one, even numbered warps passed; through the loops of the other, the odd numbered. These rods are called healds. The function of these rods is to permit the weaver to divide alternate warps in equal groups, for the convenient insertion of weft in weaving. The weaver lifts one rod with the attached warps and thus forms a triangular space, through which to insert the weft. Releasing this bar, he lifts the second one and forms another triangular space or shed with the second group of warps. By alternating this movement and inserting the weft in each shed, a woven fabric can be made. There are certain minor additions of tools, such as a heavy stick of polished wood called a weaver’s sword or battern for beating each pick of weft closely to its predecessor and lighter daggers of polished wood or 28 Che Heritage of Cotton bone to insert at right angles, between two warps to produce more compact fabrics. In time, a comb-like implement, which operated on a larger number of warps, was invented to take the place of the weaving battern and dagger. In India, this form of loom had a further addition. The heald bars were formed into a frame known as heddles, attached by a cord running over an over- hanging bough of a tree and by loops to the feet of the weaver stretched beneath the warps. (See picture of Indian loom.) The separation of the warps into weav- ing sheds was performed with the movements of the feet. This loom is simply a mechanical improvement over the earlier type I have described. Undoubtedly, this form of loom was introduced into Europe from Asia Minor at a very early date. The Fourteenth Century English silk loom, illustrated in the text, is evidently the same in character as the Indian loom. If silk and cotton were introduced at about this time, or a little earlier, and the spinning wheel, it is not difficult to understand how the loom was borrowed also. The basis of all modern looms is the two-barred principle of warp arrangement and shedding with heddles and harnesses. I hope in this technical discussion of the develop- ment of the primitive loom I have disabused the reader’s mind of the idea that it is simple in the sense of lacking in breadth of intellectual conception. It is in fact one of man’s greatest technical achievements. On this type of loom every cloth we know today, every weave in the history of cloth making has been pro- duced. Peru, perhaps the greatest of textile people, of whom we have an accurate material record, never developed the loom beyond the hand type. Primitive Technique 29 Both of these types of looms, the true hand loom and the foot treadle loom, are used in Europe to this day. The hand loom appears among the rug weavers of Asia Minor and the tapestry weavers of Europe and the foot treadle loom without the addition of power, is used for the production of the finer fashion fabrics in France and Switzerland and is even finding a footing in America. The fact that this type of loom originated in India and spread to Europe, that we find it together with the technical subtleties of fabric construction in the cotton area in the New World, is difficult to explain except on the assumption of direct or indirect social contact. CHAPTER IV THE NEW WORLD begins with the landing of Columbus in the Bahama Islands in the Fall of 1492. To his delight he beheld the natives wearing cotton garments. This could only mean that he had reached the Indies, since to his mind any land producing cotton must be the golden Orient. At the time of the Discovery, only two European peoples were familiar with the East and its products. The Spaniards knew of the Orient through six hundred years of constant warfare with the Moors; the Italians through fruitful centuries of trade and intercourse. Columbus was an Italian, not unfamiliar with the ports of Asia Minor. He sailed on this memorable voyage as a Spanish captain of fortune. Hence the finding of cotton had a double significance for him. It was the twelfth of October when he landed, the harvest season for cotton in this latitude and fairer than any earthly flowers to our great Genoese must have seemed the white streamers of the opening bolls. The first American cotton, therefore, to reach the Old World from America, was brought back by the success- ful dreamer as proof to the skeptical court of Ferdinand and Isabella. sf HE modern story of cotton in the New World $9 | PLATE 4 PRIMITIVE TECHNIQUE THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE WARP WEIGHTED LOOM The warp weighted loom was first developed in the flax area of Europe. The oldest type was discovered in the Neolythic Swiss Lake villages, and is judged to be about ten thousand years old. This loom appears in classical Greece, Scandinavia, Iceland, and was perhaps the loom used in Britain before Ceesar’s time. Its latest form is found among the Haida Indians of the Alaskan Coast and is an intrusion from Asiatic migration. (Pages 26, 35) WARP WEIGHTED LOOM 1—Warp weighted loom from Swiss Lakes. (Page 26) 2—Warp weighted loom from Scandinavia. (Page 26) 3—Greek loom with Penelope and the suitor from Greek vase. (Page 26) 4—Warp weighted loom from Iceland. (Page 26) 5—Haida warp weighted loom from Alaska with ceremonial apron in tapestry weave. (Page 26) THE TWO BARRED LOOM The distribution of the two barred loom is discussed in the chapter on the New World. In both Asia and the New World, it is apparently associated with the history of cotton. This loom is not indigenous in Europe, but was introduced from Asia at a very early period. (Pages 25, 36) 1—Diagram of a Peruvian Tapestry Loom. a, a’, Loom bars: b, Weave dagger forming short shed; b’, Weave dagger beating up pick of weft just delivered by bobbin (d); c, Bobbin of weft being drawn through shed formed by (b); d, d’, d”, d’”, d””, Bobbins containing the different colors of yarn required in fabrics; e’, Warp twisted from small groups to avoid tangles; f, Yarn from bobbin (d’) closing up slit in weaving; e, Shed formed by weave dagger (b). (Page 33) 2—-Drawing of tapestry weaving with design notations. Introduction 4 la Histoire Antigua del Peru. Dr. Julio C. Tello, Lima, Peru. (Page 33) 38—The Common Type of Peruvian Loom. a, a’, Loom bars; b, b’, Loom strings; c, c’, Binding strings; d, Weave sword beating up weft; e, Warps not attached to heald rod (f), hence not lifted; f, Heald rod lifted to form shed; g, Warps attached to heald rod (f) and raised to form shed; h, Weft just delivered by spindle; i, Spindle after inserting pick of weft (k); j, Fell of cloth (already woven portion of web). (Pages 27, 38) 4—Prehistoric Peruvian Loom with partially woven double cloth. (Page 27) Note: Compare this with technical drawing number two. American Museum of Natural History. 5—Hindu weaving on loom with heddle frame to separate the warps. (Pages 26, 28, 66) 6—Two barred loom with heddle used by silk weavers in England in the © Fourteenth Century. (Pages 28, 107) 7—Chinese loom for cotton weaving. (Page 26) f it a ! ha mi ah AWS Hi NAAN SS LM ss Q\ S i ast ts | ron \ i Nh MN a AN il giiy \ The New CHorld 31 It is one of the curious accidents of history, that practically all subsequent Spanish discovery and con- quest in the New World was among peoples well ad- vanced in the arts of cotton spinning and weaving. Cortez, Pizarro, Balboa, Alvarado and Coronado, each came in contact with peoples distinct in culture, if basically similar in race, yet all were skillful weavers of cotton. With the unimportant exceptions of Florida and the moist delta of the Mississippi, all of Spain’s vast Colonial empire of the Sixteenth Century in the New World was carved from the prehistoric cotton area. The prehistoric cotton map of the New World extended southwest from the middle of the State of Utah through the desert parts of our Southwest, Mexico, Central and South America. It did not in- clude any of our Central Mississippi or Atlantic Sea- board cotton states of today, although it may have included the southwestern fringe of Texas. Within this ancient region we have incontrovert- ible evidence that cotton culture existed for many centuries. In most instances it perhaps antedates the Christian Era and in all locations there is reason to believe that our previous notions of antiquity fall far short of the actual truth. Not all of these people, however, achieved an equal skill. The art seemed to have moved northward, our Southwest being its utter- most fringe. It either originated in prehistoric Peru and spread northward, or in some region in Central America and spread in both directions north and south. In these regions we know that great civilizations reached maturity and passed into decay long before the Spanish conquest and in both regions the cultiva- tion and conversion of cotton were among the earliest 32 Che Beritage of Cotton and most advanced of the arts. Among the Mayas of Central America a date of 632 B.c. has recently been firmly established through the calendic researches of Dr. Herbert J. Spinden. But people who had arrived at a sufficient culture to have developed an accurate calendic system based upon the observation of astro- nomical bodies, must have reached a very high degree of culture, suggesting an infinitely remote past. This civilization developed in a climate that did not permit the preservation of fabrics, except in a few special instances. The fact that the perfect desert of coastal Peru has preserved for us each priceless web, each subtlety in design and technique, each implement and tool and process, and the moist climate of Central America has destroyed almost every direct evidence of the fabric arts makes no difference in the rival claims for anti- quity of either region. These are but historic incidents, and there is no direct proof as yet to establish one or the other as the more ancient. Be its point of origin, however, where it may, all over this vast and contiguous area, peopled by tribes of common racial stocks, there is unquestionably a similarity in technique, design and implements, and a universal use of cotton. It is one story retold in many forms and across many centuries. The distinctions in the ancient arts are » themselves an eloquent proof of antiquity, since in all these areas the tools, implements, fibers and in many instances the dyes are identical. No one familiar with the different areas would have the least difficulty in distinguishing the art of one region from that of another. There is, however, a similarity as well as a difference. This can be accounted for by the fact that in realistic designs The New CHorld 33 primitive people represent animal forms, more or less modified to suit their limitations of expression and the advancement of their spiritual conceptions. Since the fauna through all this region is practically identical, with the exception of the high Andes, we must expect occasionally parallels in draftsmanship. There was as well an intermittent trade between certain regions proven by the fact that the arts of one region are sometimes found in the ruins of another. The closest similarity in design is, however, in geometric patterns. All of these people were skilled textile workers, and the geometric limitation of the loom was familiar to each. Wherever in this vast area, covering portions of two great continents, cotton appears, there also is the two-barred loom described in the preceding chapter. The loom of prehistoric Peru, from eighteen hundred to three thousand years old, is exactly the same as the loom discovered within the last fifty years among the Huichol Indians of Southern Mexico, and everywhere else, where we find cotton until the Spanish loom was introduced. No change whatever has taken place in the loom in all these centuries; it has remained absolutely static. The correspondence between the two-barred loom and cot- ton plant is absolute. Wherever this type of loom appears, there is cotton, and wherever cotton appears in ancient times, this type of loom occurs. Certain it is that the two-barred cotton loom and the fundamental fabric constructions, which seem inseparable from this implement, must have spread from one single source in America. So complicated and perfect an instrument, so profound a technical knowledge can not have had in one connected area dual or independent origins. 34 Che Heritage of Cotton No very definite theories have yet been advanced by anthropologists to account for the great archaic cotton cultures in the New World. Their antiquity is conceded by all, of course, and probably exceeds any of the cautious estimates. In a general way, Asia is recognized as the remote cultural home of the Americas. Since there is incon- trovertible evidence of migration from Siberia, even up to comparatively modern times, into Alaska, there is a rather hazy belief that this single point of contact explains all human life on the two continents of North and South America. I have no intention of discussing this problem any further than to call attention to certain facts directly pertinent to this narrative, which seem at variance with this theory. The famous sinew back bow, which originated somewhere in archaic Mediterranean cultures, probably Assyria, has a distribution which corresponds rather closely with that of the warp-weighted loom. Neither the warp-weighted loom nor the sinew back bow occur in any of the cotton areas of the New World. At the northern-most fringe of cotton, the bow was obviously borrowed from the non-cotton, nomadic tribes. Among the Aztecs, the bow and arrow was the hieroglyphical symbol of the wild tribes. Their own weapon was the throwing stick, a prototype of the bow. In the elaborate and beautiful stone carving of the Mayas of Central America there are no representations of the bow. The ancient Peruvians, in whose sandy graves we find so perfect a record of their arts, were unfamiliar with the bow. The sling was their missile weapon. ‘The bow does occur as a plain stick among the tribes to the South and generally through the Che New CHorld 35 jungles east of the Andes. There is, however, a rather strong belief that these peoples were not alone far in- ferior in culture, but actually distinct in race from the higher races of the cotton areas. South of the culture of Alaska, where the warp- weighted loom prevailed, stretched the great American plains where for a long distance no loom of any type is found, but where the bow does exist and has been known for a great period of time. The northern peoples still adhere to the powerful, composite sinew back type which gradually fades out to the single stick type. It is, of course, possible that a slowly drifting migra- tion of peoples, coming in contact with highly varied terrestrial environment, might easily have in the cycles of time lost the warp-weighted loom. The weaving of the cloth suggests a static culture, and cloth itself is a luxury not a social necessity. I am, however, extremely reluctant to believe that any peoples living largely by the chase would have discarded so perfect a weapon as the bow. If, therefore, the peoples of the pre-Columbian cotton areas came at some very remote time from the North, we must determine how they came to change their type of loom, after losing it entirely, and how they abandoned the bow once they reached the area of cotton. Were there then two great roadways from Asia to the New World? Were the ancient peoples of Mexico, Central America and the Pacific Coast of Peru of dis- tinct racial stock from the red men of our plains, forests and frozen tundras? This is by no means proven by the few facts I have outlined. The point is, however, clearly raised, and if it may not be affirmed, neither can it be denied. Nor is there lacking supporting 36 The Heritage of Cotton evidence in the general structure of common myths, in the presence of similar objects in both continents, as well as in the curious relationship of loom types, weave techniques and the cotton plant itself. A glance at the world map will show a most sig- nificant distribution of islands in the Pacific along the Tropic of Capricorn. It is well known that these islands are in most instances really the peaks of submerged mountain chains. In ancient misty ages this chain may have been more closely knit. Among these island peoples there are legends of long journeys to unknown continental coasts, that are suggestive of the legends of the Atlantic Norsemen before Columbus. The sur- vival of certain arts which are strongly reminiscent of textiles, although these peoples are unskilled in loom-work, may be additional proof. Their tapas or pounded bark mats are generally geometric in design and this characteristic in ornament we naturally and rightly associate with some form of weaving. In the next chapter I will present proof that clearly establishes southern India as the home of cotton so far as Asia, Africa, the Islands of the Indian Ocean and Europe are concerned. Unless we are to assume this miracle of ingenuity had two distinct manifesta- tions, we are compelled to acknowledge that the cotton technique of India and the New World must have been derived from some common and as yet unknown source. The most temperate presentation of such evidence is capable of misinterpretation highly prejudicial to the clear reasoning of science. So great a problem as racial and cultural origins can not be settled on a basis of any single group of facts, however broad these may be. Enough has been suggested, however, to make it evi- dent that the broader problem and the complete his- PLATE & NEW WORLD: SPANISH INFLUENCE PART 1 Almost with the Spanish conquest the primitive arts of the New World were affected. The Spanish priests desired to de- stroy all records of the ancient pagan religions and the Spanish governors took advantage of the native skill to make merchan- dise for the Spanish market and to supply the demands of the Spanish residents in the New World. The intrusion resulted in many very beautiful forms and the arts of Latin America to- day are largely the result of these contacts. (Page 43) 1—Loom from Cora Tribe with partly finished double cloth showing Span- ish design with native drawing of horses. (Pages 33, 44) Museum of the American Indian. 2—Huichol double cloth bags with designs of the double eagle of the Holy Roman Empire. (Page 43) American Museum of Natural History. 3—Detail of Mexican embroidery with Saracenic motives. (Page 43) Museum of the American Indian. 4—Detail of Hispano-Inca tapestry shawls with mixture of Spanish and Inca designs about 1570. (Page 43) Museum of the American Indian. 5—Detail of Inca poncho with border of Spanish figures worked in tinsel yarns about 1550. (Page 43) American Museum of Natural History. | 6—Corner of embroidered Mexican scarf with Moorish motives. (Page 43) American Museum of Natural History. %—Detail of Hispano-Inca shawl with Spanish motives worked by Inca | craftsmen about 1580. (Page 43) American Museum of Natural History. th i ee SPR aR Aa chee oun A ROE ROR ORD ono nAiesamaeeetsess ‘¥ o/ ektboon coe sso! 3 /s) A SS SSSI SS SP SASS ISP SESS SD AEE, PMP NS Pe BaP PE AY PE PEA PM PAN IY OS = Che New orld 37 tory of the cotton plant and cotton techniques have much in common. For many years careful investigations have been conducted in our Southwest. The ruins of many ancient people, who lived and prospered centuries before the Spanish conquest, have been scientifically excavated. Among all these people cotton was used and we find remnants of cloth, seed, lint, even spindles and ancient looms. Cotton among these people, how- ever, had a religious rather than a utilitarian usage. The basic fiber of this area was the tough yucca grass. Cotton was an intrusion from a greater civilization to the southward, and is used to this day in most of the religious ceremonies retained by the descendants of these people. Many Hopi ceremonies are associated with the prayers for rain, and symbolic altars are raised to the mystery of fertility. The rain clouds are represented by billowy masses of white cotton and the miracle of the falling rain symbolized by the straight cords of the unwoven upright warps stretched on the loom. The dress of the Hopi bride is cotton, grown, gathered, spun and woven by the relatives of the groom. These are but two instances of the importance of cotton in the religious ceremonies of these peoples. It is doubtful, how- ever, if it had any broad secular use, until modern times. The few fabrics of cotton discovered in the dry caves and burial sites of the Southwest, give us a rather high estimate of their skill. One tapestry apron, a part of which is in the American Museum of Natural History and another in the Museum of the American Indian, is a splendid example of craftsmanship. This apron was found wrapped around a naturally desiccated human body, discovered in a dry cave in Grand Gulch, 38 Che Beritage of Cotton Utah, and is believed to antedate the Christian Era. In the Brooklyn Museum, there is a child’s knitted shirt of unique pattern and a few fragments of sten- cilled cotton duck, which are of equal importance in establishing the technical skill of these people. There are as well woven patterns not unlike our own modern brocades and embroidery among these relics. From the evidence furnished by material culture cotton had a peculiar and important place in the life of the American Indian in the southwestern United States. Its antiquity is assured by its frequent presence among the remains of the ancient Cliff Dwellers. There are hanks of white cotton cord and of dyed cotton cord in the collections from the cliff dwellings of the Cafion de Chelly, Arizona, in the Brooklyn Museum. This cord, from the objects found with it, appears to have formed part of the contents of an aboriginal work basket. In the same collection is a child’s garment made of cotton found on the body of a child in the White House ruin in the Cafion de Chelly. With this garment are frag- ments of a dyed cotton blanket showing a pattern and cotton tassels with which these objects were orna- mented. Yucca fiber, prepared from the fresh green stalks by chewing, was the ordinary textile material of the Cliff Dwellers and this garment and blanket were no doubt exceptional and the work of some devoted mother. Among the existing Zufii and Hopi Indians, in common with the other Pueblo tribes, cotton was used for ceremonial purposes, pointing to a tradition of high antiquity. The ceremonial white garments worn by the manas or unmarried girls were made of cotton as were those of their representatives in the dances. The Hopi girl’s wedding dress was of white cotton. The cotton blankets had cords at their corners The New CHorld 39 with which they were tied. These cords were wrought into the forms of ears of corn on the embroidered cotton blankets worn in ceremonies. The woven cotton belt with long fringe at the ends which was used constantly in Pueblo ceremonial costume was also made of cotton. These cotton blankets and belts were special objects of barter among the Pueblo Indians. They correspond- ed with money, having not only a fixed but a high standard of value. Cotton only was used for a great variety of ceremonial purposes by these Indians, no other fiber being regarded as having any efficiency. It was, indeed, a magical substance. For example, the prayer sticks were tied in pairs with it and it was used to attach to them the ceremonial “breath” feather which was associated with their potency. The tipony or magical wand of feathers was tied with cotton cord as were indeed all the ceremonial sticks used in medicinal ceremonies not only by the Pueblos but by the Navajo as well. Consulting authorities, it is believed from lack of mention by early writers that cotton was not cultivated by the tribes of the southern section of the United States and that the cotton blan- kets seen by De Soto’s troops on the lower Mississippi were brought from the west, possibly from the Pueblos. The Hopi are now the only cultivators of cotton and the robes, kilts and scarfs which they make find their way by trade to other tribes who employ them in their religious performances. In the time of Coronado (1540-42) and Espejo (1583) cotton was raised also by the Acoma and Rio Grande villages in New Mexico. The Pimas in southern Arizona also raised the plant until about 1850 when the industry was brought to an end, by the traders who introduced cheap fabrics, except among the Hopi. In ancient Zufi and Hopi 40 Che Beritage of Cotton mortuary rites raw cotton was placed over the face of the dead and cotton seed deposited with the food vessels on the graves. This is indeed a scanty record, compared with that of more favored regions, still sufficient when taken in connection with their pottery, to prove that their artis- try and craftsmanship were of respectable order. Opinions differ and naturally change with the develop- ment of new evidence, but the general consensus of opinion is that cotton was introduced in this region prior to the Fifth Century B.c. In spite of our great knowledge of the Aztec pul and the dramatic interest aroused by these vigorous people in their contact with the Spaniards, we have, comparatively speaking, few examples of cloth that we may safely date from the pre-Spanish period. The climate in Mexico is generally inimical to the preserva- tion of fabric, nor have we as yet scientifically and systematically investigated all possible grave sites im this turbulent sister republic. But the accounts of the Spanish conquerors and the administrators who fol- lowed them, beginning with Cortez in 1519, the designs on their pottery, wood and stone carving and the picture writing in their marvelous codices give us in- contestable evidence that they were well advanced in the arts of cotton and that cotton was the fiber chiefly used by them for textile purposes. The famous tribute roll of Montezuma gives us an accurate record of the annual assessments levied in bales of cotton and bolts of cloth and decorated blankets by the warlike Aztec Confederacy upon the tribes who acknowledged the ancient city of Mexico as overlord. Qne page shows forty bags of cochineal and two thousand decorated cotton blankets, together with Che New CHorld 4l many other objects of value as the annual assessment of eleven tributary cities. It has been estimated on a basis of modern values, that this entire tribute ran into millions of dollars each year. The Spaniards were quick to recognize the skill of the natives as weavers and organized them into factory groups and annually exported to Spain immense quanti- ties of fabrics as well as cotton fiber. The practice of forcing an out-door people to work indoors, together with the brutal slave-driving methods of the Spanish task masters, was so detrimental to the health of this people, that in the famous humane Laws of the Indies, promulgated by the Spaniards in 1540, the practice was forbidden. One of the most important archeeological discoveries in the New World was recently made in the little crater lake at Chichen Itza. This pool of deep, clear water, surrounded by high cliffs of limestone, was, according to an ancient tradition, once the scene of dramatic human sacrifices. These sacrifices had been discon- tinued long before the Spanish invasion, but none the less lived in the native legends. A recent scientific expedition dredged this little pool with a modern steam shovel and the discoveries were amazing to a degree. In the silt and mud were found beautiful repousser gold breast ornaments, bits of carven jade ornaments, (broken that their spirits might go to the gods), incense bowls filled with copal or rubber gum to produce the white and black smoke so beloved by the Upper Powers. These were studded with jade beads, in some instances only a single jade bead surrounded by green beans, for the priest had discovered that for all the malignant powers of their gods, they could none the less be deceived with impunity. 42 The Beritage of Cotton The least imposing of these discoveries, but by far the most important, as far as this narrative is concerned, are little fragments of charred cotton cloths, once parts of the garments of the deluded and unfortunate victims. These fragments are in far too fragile a condition and far too precious to permit of exhaustive analysis. Fortunately, this is not necessary to determine their technical character, since the weaves are open and easily classified without dissection. All color has naturally disappeared due to the action of the water and the acids in the silt during the centuries of their immersion, but the types of fabric remain clear and unmistakable. They are the same as those found in other of the cotton regions, particularly in Peru and even among the living primitive tribes of the same general region. If a full collection might possibly be gathered, they would no doubt include all the techniques. So far I have examined brocades, crepes, ducks, and embroideries from this source. All of them give an evidence of a high technical skill, although not particularly fine in weave. Among the modern natives, living in isolated regions and comparatively free from Spanish and later Euro- pean influences, there is still a high skill in fabric con- struction and cotton remains the principal fiber. Here and there in these out of the way regions, ancestral crafts are practised in something approaching their pristine splendor, but the mixture of trade yarns and trade cloth and the incorporation of Spanish designs make this record of doubtful validity. The intrusion of Spanish design, and in some measure of Spanish technique, begins very early in the Sixteenth Century, almost at the very dawn of the conquest, and was so penetrating that it has often confused scholars, study- Che New WCHorld 43 ing the native art, who were unfamiliar with Moorish and Spanish motifs. Indeed the natives themselves have no very clear idea of the comparatively recent origin of their present arts. Three centuries of usage among an illiterate people is very likely to obscure sources of origin. It is but fair to state that these intrusions were not always intended to harm the natives, nor were they actually harmful, except from the scientific point of view. Most of the native arts were associated with their religious ceremonies and against these, the Jesuits quite naturally and sincerely waged a constant war- fare. But back of this was the wish to fit the con- quered peoples into the life and arts of Europe and make them an integral part of the Spanish Empire. There can be no question of the sincerity of the Jesuit missions in this purpose, however mistaken it may have been. And it must be admitted with frankness that no people in Europe with the possible exception of the Italians were at this period so rich in decorative arts as the Spanish. They had not alone a reminiscence of their own Gothic period, but a great enrichment from their recent Moorish enemies and it rises as a white column to the memory of these devoted men that there still survives through Central, and South America some of the most efficient craft schools in embroidery and weaving in the world today. One example of how powerful was the Spanish in- trusion may be found in the Huichol fabrics from the highlands of southern Mexico and the closely related Cora tribes. These people were conquered according to Spanish history in 1700. Fifty years later they revolted and drove out all Spanish priests, soldiers and administrators alike, but retained Spanish designs 44 Che Heritage of Cotton in their characteristic double cloth weaving. Here occur the vigorous drawing of Christian saints, Moorish conventions and bird forms originally created by the master weavers of the Byzantine looms, adopted by the Saracens, and so by the Spaniards brought to this remote and alien people. The San Blas Indians, on the coast of Central America, have stoutly maintained their isolation from white contact. They are a war-like, self-contained people living in an inaccessible coastal region, where fortunately for their security neither oil nor gold have yet been found in any quantity. They import certain trade cloths in small quantities, but their chief demand on civilization is for high powered modern rifles. Their applique work, using two colors of fabrics, is very inter- esting. Their patterns, strong and vigorous in com- position, suggest, however, a degeneration from some higher and forgotten technique. One little jacket of gray cotton cloth with a design worked out in aigrette down, twisted into the weft, has a peculiar historic interest. The first landing of Columbus on the main- land was near this region. He describes the natives as wearing cotton garments with designs formed from the inter-weaving of feathers. For a long time scientists assumed that this was a careless description of the feather ponchos, similar to those of Mexico and Peru. As a matter of fact this little garment proves that the great navigator accurately described the costumes as he saw them. We know very little of native dyes. Cochineal was cultivated in both Peru and Mexico from immemorial time and this yielded so beautiful a red, that the Spaniards introduced the cultivation in southern Spain at a very early date, and it spread into the Near East, The New CHorld 45 where it has remained ever since. Of peculiar interest, however, is the dye from the purpura shell fish which produced the beautiful purples still found in certain of the native cotton fabrics and which was unquestion- ably the basis of the fine purple shades in the ancient fabrics of Peru. This little mollusk is found on the coast of Central America and in a small patch off the coast of Peru. The natives wade out in the shallow waters and squeeze the juice into a shallow dish, and then return the mollusk safely to its native ele- ment. The liquor is colorless, although not entirely free from odor. All over the regions that I have briefly covered, the cultivation of cotton and the arts of weaving and dyeing cotton fabrics existed for many centuries before the Spanish invasion and in most instances before the Christian Era. The same type of looms, the same gen- eral techniques pervade all of these regions, and form obviously the same story, told in many different ways. Only recently have our great museums begun to care- fully collect the materials from modern tribes and clarify their existing traditions in comparison with our rapidly growing knowledge of the archaic cultures, but as far back as we can trace, the story of either the arts or agriculture of these people, we find it indissolubly associated with the still more ancient cotton cultures. CHAPTER V PERU IN“ the least interesting phase of the history of the fabric arts of pre-Inca Peru, is the fact that we may study the technical and artistic development of a single people without the confusion of outside influences or intrusions. No matter what may have been the remote origin of this mysterious people, it is beyond question that their civilization is their own, developed through many centuries in a single environment from the spiritual and material reactions of a people of a common or homogeneous race. It is the most perfect fabric record left by any people in the history of the world. Here we do not have to rely on conjecture, traditions or the comparison of related arts, but may study in all their variety the actual fabrics, tools and implements, and through these safely reconstruct the processes and methods. No people in the history of fabrics, in any part of the world, have ever achieved such a high technical skill nor ex- celled them in conception of design, composition or the use of color. Beyond question, the most ancient specimens of cotton fabrics in all the world are those found in the desert graves of pre-Inca Peru. They may even be older than the earliest mention of cotton in the records 46 Peru 47 of India, which occurs in the first millennium before the Christian Era, although not older than the first actual appearance of cotton fabric in the East, which naturally precedes its first literary mention by many centuries. It is impossible, however, to give any reliable dates for this great civilization. We can only gain some comprehension of its antiquity by a comparison with our own historic experiences. Roughly speaking, the people conquered by Pizzaro in 1532, and known as Incas, were at about the same cultural level as our own European ancestors of the Twelfth Century. Our ancestors indeed excelled in the knowledge of iron and steel, but the Incas were infinitely more advanced in road and aqueduct building and in agriculture. Our ancestors had a written lan- guage, but the Incas had a political and social system that had abolished those terrible famines and plagues, which at times wrought such havoc in old Europe. In architecture a reasonable judge will yield the palm to South America, since our great Gothic period comes after the age I have mentioned. And so far as comforts and luxuries of life are concerned, there can be no comparison. In this connection it is but fair to admit, that our forefathers built their culture on the vigorous remains of Roman civilization. After the Crusades, they were open as well to the influences of the later Greek civilizations and powerful suggestions from Oriental sources. Most of our arts, many of our forms of law, the dawn of modern science and language show traces of highly diverse and distinguished sources of origin. It is no accident that Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew are still regarded as the classical languages which lie back of our civilization. In other words, ours is a highly 48 The Peritage of Cotton composite civilization, with all the immense advantages of these inspirational and guiding factors. Conse- quently, he who would seek surely for our beginnings, can not be guided wholly by arbitrary, national dates. Our civilization to a degree is only our own through adoption and intrusion, not through creation. Our textile arts, especially as these are concerned with silk and cotton, were borrowed almost in toto from the East. Design, technique, even philology, indicate how vast is our debt to these alien peoples. Yet in spite of these vast advantages, in spite of the slow accretion of the ripening centuries of our culture, in some ways even today we have still to reach the achieve- ments of this mysterious people of the Pacific Slope of the Andes. Consequently in estimating their age, we must either attribute to them miraculous mental powers in advance of our own, or acknowledge that their civilization must have been the ripened fruit of longer periods of time, than any scientist has yet dared to estimate. It must be remembered as well, that the Incas them- selves, for all of their venerable age, were newcomers in this region. Their traditions, gathered by the Spanish sons of Inca mothers and written within a half century of the Conquest, record their first appearance on the coast from their mountain homes of the interior. There is little doubt, that they were of the same race as this still older people, but had been separated from them for many centuries and had lost all contacts with them before their exodus to the coastal regions which oc- curred, according to these traditions, about two or three centuries before Pizzaro and his armored men landed on their shores. Consequently in dating these cotton fabrics, we have to take into consideration, not Peru 49 only the age of the Inca civilization, but of this still more ancient culture. It is generally acknowledged that all the peoples of the Western Hemisphere, must have come originally from Asia, at a very remote time. The most con- servative estimate of the age of this intrusion, is twenty thousand years or before the last Ice Age. Botanists and biologists do not agree in this opinion, but push it backward into a still more remote anti- quity. These figures are at best but guesses and con- cern themselves with the length of time it must have taken to produce certain food plants and domesticate certain animals. We know at least, that the so-called Dawn Man has never been found in the New World. There are no skeletal remains such as the famous Piltdown skull or the Java-man to push our human record backward into pre-culture ages. Consequently when man migrated from Asia to the New World, he brought with him some rudiments of culture, since such a journey presupposes at least a crude measure of social organization, but this culture must have been of a very low order indeed, some tools and knowledge of processes, perhaps a hazy understanding of agricul- ture, nothing more. To all intents and purposes, the ancient civilizations of the New World are indigenous, the fruit of experiences and achievements in this new home. How long, therefore, must it have taken these people to reach such a degree of culture, to have grown to maturity and to have vanished completely? These considerations are our only guide in establishing comparative dates, which are after all of little signi- ficance in such a history, our penchant for them, resting largely on the predominant part that genealogies play 50 The BHeritage of Cotton in the chronicles of Europe. We must measure history in Peru by cultural achievements, a far surer gauge of value. When the Incas first descended from their mountain home, they came upon the vast, deserted ruins of a vanished people. In the diamond dry air of this region, material decay is apparently inoperative. It is another and more perfect Egypt, an Egypt never in danger of an overflowing Nile. Yet the Inca van guards, drifting to the coast, found ancient buildings, among the world’s most amazing architectural records in ruins, massive blocks of stone eroded even in this preserving climate. These were an agricultural people, supporting ac- cording to estimates, in ancient times, twice the modern population of the countries once included in this em- pire, Peru, parts of Colombia, and Bolivia and the northern sections of Chile. Agriculture was only possible through irrigation and the only water came from the melting snows and ice of the impassable Andes. Consequently every bit of ground where culti- vation could be conducted, with the most Herculean efforts was utilized. There are records of the natives clearing away twenty feet of sand to reach alluvial soil. Their grave sites were located therefore, in particularly dry sections of the desert. Thus delicacy of technique and brilliance of color have been preserved for us since it was their custom to bury with the dead all personal belongings, tools, implements and unfinished work. It is but justice to the Spanish memory to write that the great cultures of America, in the Mayan area and in Peru had already passed into decay centuries before the Spanish invasion. Against their record can not be charged the destruction of the greatest civilizations of the New World. The peoples, whom Aeru 51 they met and conquered’ were themselves recent con- querors and despoilers of the older cultures. There nad evidently occurred, in these regions and in remote times, a series of dramatic national disasters, for which history can ascribe no certain reasons, and nations rich in culture, with immense material resources, high artistic and social attainments, had perished. Wattled huts had turned in the magic of man’s proud genius into cities of carven stone. The rude council before the communal fire had broadened into the dignified senate and the shaman daubed in colored clay, fes- tooned with the teeth and claws of animals, mumbling of the spirits of the dead, had been transformed into the magnificent priest, gorgeous in sacredotal robes, master and servant alike of a complicated ritual, all in the ordered sequence of time. And then at the zenith of power, in the flush of pride, had come the subtle change, and all that genius had devised, all that vanity had sanctioned, all that pride had willed vanished like some iridescent dream. Ancient Peru was of these vanished people. From their graves have been taken some of the loveliest of woven webs. Here is found the complete catalogue of the weaver’s art, traces of each fundamental subtlety of design and construction, and it is idle to assume that such maturity could have been reached, except over vast stretches of fruitful time. Here is in prin- ciple the perfect miniature history of the woven web. We could reconstruct each fabric and method of con- struction and decoration from the evidence of these tombs. We naturally find a different emphasis in technical processes than in Asia. In a general way, the Peruvians excel in the woven design, whereas the craftsmen of India more generally emphasize the 52 Che Beritage of Cotton printed and dyed fabrics. But all the principle tech- niques occur in both areas. There is a certain snobbery even in the science of archeology. OTTON was cultivated on the Greek mainland 82 Che Heritage of Cotton Europe because of the almost constant warfare and the bitter religious differences, and when the Moham- medans were expelled their crafts went with them, leaving only a trace behind, although their influence on design was both powerful and persistent. The Oriental commerce and arts which took root in Italy, in the early centuries of the Middle Ages, came directly from Byzantium, Syria and the Phcenician towns captured by the Crusaders. Before this there was trade in classical times, which was never wholly interrupted. Whether or not cotton appeared in this dim commerce we can not say, but there is no question that the Italian merchant princes were the first to introduce the cotton fiber into Europe generally. Venice is said to have been the first city to have manu- factured cotton fabrics, although the earliest record of cotton fiber was in Genoa, where in the year 1140, cotton from Antioch was weighed on the public scales along with the cottons from Alexandria and Sicily. Cotton was grown in early times in Apulia, Crete, Sicily, Cyprus and Armenia, but the fiber was rated as of lower quality than the Levant or the Indian cottons, which came by way of Alexandria. Cotton fiber was a regular article of commerce be- tween Venice and Ulm as early as 1320, and soon spread to other cities in southern Germany. It was fashioned into cotton and linen and cotton and woolen fabrics, known as “barchents,”’ “fustians,”’ “‘ripplecht,”’ and “gehorte.”? Unquestionably in the late Middle Ages, Germany led all Europe in the production of this — character of merchandise. England, in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, imported large quantities of these fabrics, and there was as well an extensive trade between Antwerp and Venice in printed cottons, Curope 83 both of Indian and European manufacture. England alone bought from the cities of Germany in the Fif- teenth Century, six hundred thousand crowns’ worth annually of barchents and fustians. Block printing and perhaps resist dyeing in a single color were known in Europe before the introduction of Indian calico. A few specimens are preserved in Euro- pean museums of blue and white prints on cotton and linen fabrics of earlier dates. In the Fourteenth Cen- tury, Italy expelled the Anabaptists, first of the great Protestant sects, and these immigrants helped to build up in Central Europe that body of arts we call today by the misleading term of peasant arts. We know these people were skilled printers of cotton and linen fabrics and to have imitated in prints the blue and white em- broideries of Italy. I am inclined to believe that the blue and white prints were a reminiscence of earlier eastern contact through classical Italy. It seems diffi- cult to associate this form of expression with the multi- colored calicoes of the Seventeenth Century. The earliest forms of European carved wooden blocks for printing on fabric we possess are, however, obviously copies in form and design of the Oriental prototypes of the Sixteenth Century. They are irregu- lar in size and shape and each one is a complete unit. Later the wood engravers and etchers of Europe in- fluenced the printers of fabrics and we find rectangular stamps carved in complete and rigid patterns, composed of many units. The last phase, and the one still in use, consists of a number of blocks, each carved in the details of a single color and all so carefully related, as by succes- sive printings to produce many colored designs. The Anabaptists were the ancestors of our Men- nonite Quakers who brought to Pennsylvania a knowl- 84 Che Heritage of Cotton edge of glass making, glazed pottery, weaving of double cloth coverlets and the printing from wooden blocks on fabrics, and we may still discern in these modest Colonial arts a reflective loveliness of the cultured races of antiquity. A list of the cloth printing establishments in Europe and England will give some idea of the importance of the cotton trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Plants were founded in Augsburg in 1688, in Richmond near London in 1690, in Neuchatel in 1716, in Schwechat near Vienna in 1726, in Glasgow in 1732, in Hamburg in 1737, in Zschopau in 1740, also in Schlesia and Rehin-Prussia, in Berlin in 1741, in Mulhausen in 1746, in Plauen in Vogtlande in 1750, in Wesserling in Els in 1760, in Grossenhai in Sachsen in 1763, in Preston near Manchester in 1764, also in Lancashire, in Heidenheim a. d. Brens in 1766, in Chemnitz in 1770, in Jouy in 1776, in Kosmanos in Bohemia in 1778 and in Iwanowo in Russia in 1780. These plants were obviously the result of the trade with India. Such skill in fabric printing as existed in Europe before the introduction of Indian chintzes and calicoes was simple in pattern and in a single color. Our ances- tors used woad, a plant containing a weak dye not unlike indigo in chemical reaction, and in earlier times perhaps the juice of the Mediterranean shell fish that produced the royal purple of Tyre. Indigo was dis- covered by Marco Polo in 1300 and was probably introduced into Europe a little later in small quantities. In the Seventeenth Century there are records of very large shipments which indicate that the cotton and linen industry in dyeing and printing had become very extensive in Europe. Indian madder was used from Ps She 3 Curope 85 classical times to produce red and after the conquest of Mexico, the cochineal insect was imported and later raised in Africa and the Near East. After the voyage of da Gama to Calcutta in 1497, Portugal built up at once a large and profitable trade with the Indies, including cotton and cotton fabrics. The Dutch traded with Lisbon and in this way Ant- werp, Bruges and Haarlem became the most important cotton ports of northern Europe, and the old industries revived, indeed they were vastly stimulated by the rich colored chintzes and calicoes which formed a part of each shipment from the East. We do not know much about the manufacture of cotton in Portugal itself, but it is beyond question that the art of block printing grew up among these people and even affected in some degree the arts of India. Spain, after the conquest . of Mexico and Peru, found in her vast possessions of the West, sufficient scope for her restless energy. So for almost a century, the descendants of Henry the Navi- gator monopolized the cotton trade in the Far East. A few Dutch adventurers and Dutch captains of Spanish vessels, began to voyage among the islands of the eastern seas, carrying on a more or less illicit traffic, bordering often on open piracy. Spain resented this bitterly because of her religious and political differences with Holland, and finally forbade Dutch trade with Lisbon. But the seven seas were then as now a rather wide area over which to enforce authority, and the men, who had met with stubborn courage the armed might of Spain, were difficult to impress with royal edicts. They combined to defend themselves from Spanish vessels of war. Then Spain, mad with ambition, com- mitted national suicide, and the British guns, before which the mighty Armada crumbled into helpless, 86 Che Heritage of Cotton pitiful wrecks, opened the ports of the East to the merchant adventurers of two rising maritime people. The Dutch merchant adventurers eventually amal- gamated in 1602 into one company, under the title of the Dutch East India Company. In 1587, Drake seized the Sé. Phillip, a Portuguese carack from the East Indies, and English privateers in 1592 captured the Madre deDios, and in her cargo discovered calicoes, lawns, quilts and carpets and other rich commodities, and no doubt bills of lading of such value that English adventurers realized the immense wealth to be obtained through direct contact with India. So a memorial was presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1599, and in 1600 a charter granted to the first British East India Company. This does not mean, that the English preceded the Dutch as traders in the East Indies. There is no doubt that the Dutch mariners were the first in these seas after the Portuguese. Cotton is mentioned in France in the Fifteenth Century as padding for armor and for some vague millinery purposes, also for hair nets, and was perhaps used in the rough cloths, mixed with linen, I have mentioned, as being made in southern Germany. The French East India Company was formed in 1664, more than half a century later than the Dutch and English. The introduction of painted calicoes and chintzes of the East met in French markets, in the Seventeenth Century, a vigorous resistance from the manufacturers of silk and wool. Stringent laws were passed and in a measure enforced, and yet it is apparent that in spite of these prohibitions, and maybe because of them, there was a dangerous demand for the forbidden wares. In Moliére’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the tailor, attempting to ape the habits of the gentleman, remarks s Europe 87 that fashionable people wear chintz dressing gowns in the morning. Early in the Eighteenth Century it was estimated that twenty million francs were spent annu- ally on Oriental calicoes and German and perhaps Italian imitations. At this time there were no printers in France able to make fast calicoes, although there was a forbidden traffic in fugitive pigment colors. Prussia had similar prohibitive laws in effect until a calico plant was erected in Berlin in 1741. In 1758, Christoph Phillip Oberkampf, son of a dyer in Weisenband, settled in Paris and entered into partnership with a M. Cottin, who up to that time had never been successful in printing fabrics in fast colors. Oberkampf began at once the printing of calicoes in fast tints and so successful was he and other printers, that in 1759 all restrictions in regard to the domestic trade were removed. In 1776, Oberkampf formed the new partnership of Sarrasin-Demaraise et Oberkampf and established at Jouy, a little town near Versailles, his famous printing works. Very rapidly the beauty and excellence of these fabrics attracted buyers from all over Europe, includ- ing England. Oberkampf was a great favorite of Marie Antoinette, and in 1787 the unhappy Louis XVI con- ferred upon him letters of nobility. By shrewd direc- tion and a very skillful manipulation of the laws of exchange in assignats, he kept his organization intact during the period of the Revolution and survived the period of reconstruction successfully. In 1806, Napo- leon and the Empress Josephine visited his works and Napoleon decorated him with his own Cross of the Legion of Honor. In 1809, Oberkampf received first prize for his contributions to science and art in the fol- lowing citation: 88 Che Heritage of Cotton ““M. Oberkampf began his establishment fifty years ago and naturalized in France the art of painted cotton, which had been built up in Europe from very modest beginnings. M. Oberkampf elevated his manufacture to a great degree of prosperity. He brought perfection in all phases of the industry, be it by the application of chemistry or mechanical processes. Among the new processes should be recognized the engraving of cylin- ders and plates of copper, the impression of a solid green in a single application, and the use of steam in the process of dyeing.” ! Once again in 1810, the great Corsican visited this father of the French textile printing arts and planned with him a joint war against the English. “We will make together,” said the Conqueror of Austerlitz, “‘a rude war against the English, you by your industries and I by my armies.”’ Most of these famous prints are in single colors, stamped from engraved copper plates. Later the cylinder printing of England was introduced but did not fit the genius of the French workmen so perfectly as the more artistic method. These brief comments are little more than a hasty sketch of the history of cotton in continental Europe. I have done scant justice to the arts of the greatest in- dustrial and cultural significance. There is no doubt that in the Eighteenth Century, and perhaps even be- fore, the vigorous realistic expression of Europe, born of the Renaissance, strongly affected the styles of Indian printing. There is no question that France achieved a higher distinction in her own inimitable fabrics than I have suggested. The supremacy of French handcraft looms and in printed cottons of dis- tinction today implies a greater share in the artistic Curope 89 history of the fiber. If we owe much to India (and this debt is beyond question) we owe an almost equal debt to the French craftsmen, who have kept alive the beauty of texture, design and color in cotton. France unquestionably borrowed technology and chemistry from England and Germany, but this debt has been more than repaid by the sustained artistry and tradi- tional good taste of her craft designers. Other factors, however, make it seem wiser to continue the story of calicoes and cottons in the history of that nation most concerned in the later commerce and technology of the fiber. In the great Elizabethan age, the vigorous mariners of England began that series of audacious voyages and expeditions, which, in a short century, placed the com- merce of the world in their control. French, Portuguese and Dutch adventurers still played important parts in their Indian dominions, but to England fell the chief role, so the next century and a half of cotton history becomes merely a detail in the growth of the British Empire. CHAPTER VIII ENGLAND cotton industry, her splendid mechanical con- tributions in the Eighteenth Century, the vast acres of cotton plantations that look to her as a market for their product, make it difficult to imagine a time when cotton was unknown in England, or even of little importance. It is not, however, until the latter part of the Thirteenth and the forepart of the Fourteenth Century that we have any record of cotton in England at all. The oldest record of cotton in the British Islands is contained in the Compotus or inventory of Bolton Abbey. Cotton is here referred to as being used for candle wicks. In a poem, the “Siege of Caer- laverock,”’ dating from 1300, a passage runs: “‘ Maint riche gamboison garni de soie et coton,” (“Many a rich doublet trimmed with silk and cotton”). The “Compotus Earl of Derby,” dating from 1381-82, speaks of cotton thread and of six pounds of cotton wool. These scattered accounts do not determine perhaps the first actual appearance of the fiber in England. Cotton may have been an unconsidered article of trade with Italy and even with Moorish Spain and passed unnoticed in these non-statistical ages. Within the gO qi HE pre-eminence of Great Britain in the modern PLATE 10 INDIA The distribution of resist dyeing is very wide both in point of time and geographically. It is variously known as batik, bandhani, tie and dye, and mastic printing. Molten bees’ wax, applied either with a brush or other implement, is generally used although farinaceous starches and clays are at times ap- plied. In tie-dyeing a cord or thread is used. This page of illustrations is intended to convey some idea of how widespread this technique is. Herodotus mentions it in 450 B.c. among the natives along the borders of the Caspian Sea. So far as other portions of Asia are concerned, including the Asiatic Islands, Africa and Europe, this art evidently spread from southern India. The appearance of this technique in pre-Columbian Peru is difficult to explain and may be an accidental dual discovery. It is, however, apparently a very ancient art. 1—Specimen from A. Von le Coq’s “Chostscho.” This is ascribed to the Fifth Century of the Christian Era. (Page 69) 2—Twelfth Century Armenian Church Hanging. (Page 64) Kevorkian Collection. 8—Prehistoric Peru. (Page 68) American Museum of Natural History. 4—Oldest batik in Japan credited to the Twelfth Century. (Page 76) Museum at Nara in Japan. 5—Egyptian wax painted silk from Eighth or Ninth Century. (Page 75) British Museum. 6—Modern tied and dyed silk from India. (Page 76) Brooklyn Museum. %—Modern mastic block print from Schleswig-Holstein. (Page 76) Brooklyn Museum. 8—First waxing process of Javanese Batik. (Page 75) Collection of the Author. 9—Fabric in process of tie-dyeing rolled on bias, prehistoric Peru. American Museum of Natural History. (Page 58) 10—Examples of tied and dyed fabric from modern Bombay. (Page 79) Collection of the Author. 11—Bogobo headdress from Philippine Islands, showing process of tie- dyeing and finished turbans. (Page 76) American Museum of Natural History. : ae oo : . : PLATE 10 wd ‘ England QI first generation of this century, the cotton and linen fustians and barchents of southern Germany became very important articles of trade with England, and attracted the attention of the poet Chaucer and others; and there seems to have been a strong disposition to have such fabrics manufactured in England. At about this period or a little earlier, Flemish weavers were introduced into England through the patronage of the Crown. England was at this time almost entirely an agricultural nation, her chief exports being wool, which was shipped to the busy looms of the low countries. | It is a great testimonial to the splendid stewardship of the British kings that they sought to build up in their realms the textile arts, and to make little England as independent in manufacturing as she was in political life from her wealthier and more powerful neighbors on the continent. From the time of Edward IV to the end of the Elizabethan period, textile workers were openly and secretly encouraged to settle in England and given certain privileges and a sure protection. Yet of more importance than these worthy efforts were the fierce religious wars in Holland and Flanders, and the crowning horror of St. Bartholomew’s Eve in the tragic streets of old Paris in 1572. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was the last episode responsible for hundreds of thousands of refugees from the con- tinent, mostly skilled artisans, seeking refuge in England in a little over a century. Many, perhaps the majority of these, were textile workers. In consequence, at the dawn of her rise as a great naval power, she was well advanced in the textile arts. In the late Sixteenth Century she was making the cot- ton and linen fustians formerly imported from Germany g2 Che Heritage of Cotton in her own midland countries and even exporting her surplus. England’s modern cotton history begins while the memory of the terrible Armada of Spain was still fresh in the public mind, and is closely connected with the capture of Spanish and Portuguese vessels from the Far East, mentioned in the previous chapter. The founding of the British East India Company, in 1599, was followed by a vigorous generation of Oriental trading, which changed not only the industrial, but the artistic and social life in England. So important did this cotton trade from India and the cotton and linen mixtures of Lancashire become, that the growers of wool and the manufacturers of woolen fabrics made vigorous protest to Parliament for redress. In 1621, twenty years after the founding of the British East India Company, the wool merchants made the follow- ing complaint: | “For about twenty years divers people in this king- dom, but chiefly in the county of Lancaster, have found out the trade of making fustians out of a kind of down, being a fruit of the earth growing on little bushes, or shrubs brought into this kingdom by the Turkey mer- chants from Smyrna, Cyprus, etc., but commonly called cotton wool and also of linen yarn, and not part of the same fustians of any wool at all. There is at least 40,000 pieces of fustian of this kind yearly made in England, and thousands of people set on working of these fustians.”’ Anyone familiar with the history of England at this period, may well believe that such petitions were taken with great seriousness. Wool and all that con- cerned wool was of vital moment to England. The modern political philosophy of Adam Smith, with free England 93 trade and the recognition of labor as a commodity, had yet to be born. We may, therefore, assume that the introduction of cotton merchandise into England was looked upon from the start with scant favor by those not engaged in the trade. There was, however, a growing interest in outland cotton trade, as a note from John Gourney at Patania in 1614 indicates. He describes certain difficulties encountered in securing cotton goods by the British East India Company: “When this man (the native official) is feed by weavers and such as seek to trade with us with about eight or ten per cent., they may freely come and bring us wares, and, besides what the Governor cometh to knowledge of, must yield at least ten per cent. more; and sometimes men have been taken and accused of having gotten much by trade, and after many blows and a long imprisonment pay a forfeit of all the money they have taken. This makes poor men bring their paintings in huggermugger and in the night, as thieves do their stolen cloaks to brokers.”’ In 1649 from Ahmedabad a letter from John Tash, indicates certain further difficulties experienced with the local rulers. “Our chints and tappichindaes, which were the most considerable part of our Bantam investment, were delivered to the workmen so seasonably that they were all returned painted before the rains; so that there was as then nothing wanting unto them but washing, which might have been performed in eight days’ time (they being to that purpose returned to them upon cessation of the raines) but our Governor not suffering them to work in the river hath been an exceeding impediment to the business, whilst the chinters have neglected their 94 Che Beritage of Cotton work to attend upon the Durbbar and sollicite redress, which for consideration of 250 rupees was once granted to them; to the payment whereof they had no sooner consented than our base, unjust and worthless Governor raysed the sum to 1000 rupees with further obstruc- tion.” English and Dutch rivalry was very strong, as might well be expected in this market, and in 1664 the Dutch expelled the British East India Company from Calcutta and in 1682, on the fall of Bantam, the English withdrew from Java. An extract from the Dutch records is as follows: “As to our relations with the English, these are rather poor, for we can not come together without the English shaking their tail. Your Excellency may consider how they burst for spite seeing our success in trade. “The English have beheaded their King and are intent upon breaking with all their neighbors especially with us, in order to secure supremacy of the sea and the monopoly of the trade. This cannot be allowed by the Dutch Nation. “We seem to be at war again with the English.” It was apparently the custom for the European traders in India to buy the cloths from the weavers and to send these out to the dyers, printers and finishers. This practise was attended with great difficulties, due to the natural indolence of white men in a tropical country, lack of knowledge of native customs and the language and the traditional greed and tyranny of the native rulers. From time to time the terrible famines and plagues of India interrupted the trade in frightful earnest. A letter from Fort St. George on the Coromandel Coast England 95 gives us a lurid picture of one of these epidemics in 1687: “Weavers and washers all dead or gone........... 35,000 dead at Madraspatam and 6,000 families re- Men. ee Whole tribes of mechanics extinguished with their arts. There is but one dyer surviving in the Bay.” The first British printing plant was organized in Richmond near London in 1690, and while it was a very modest affair, it was rapidly followed by others. The act of William III, in 1696, prohibiting the importa- tion of woolen goods from Ireland into England, but admitting free of duty the linen wraps used by the weavers of England in their cotton and linen cloths gave great encouragement to this domestic trade, al- though an obvious injustice to Ireland. The effect of printing plants in England was soon felt in the Indian trade. Evidently there were mer- chants even in those days who regarded cheapness as the prime quality in merchandise. A letter to Bombay in 1711 contains the following passage: “We do find the Bales of Chintz are of the worst cloth and prints that ever came................006- MME CAT. oc esis vs ee aS be ee ws the Printing _ stands us in as much as the cloth which is a great abuse upon us for our People here will do it at 14 that price and better colours and patterns.” This may, of course, have been what is known as a shrewd business letter. Or, it may be that even as early as this English merchants were forcing Indian craftsmen to carry out English ideas of design with the natural results. The growth of the trade of Indian printed calicoes 96 Che Beritage of Cotton in England is only roughly suggested in the following statistics. These do not include other forms of cotton goods imported, nor the private trade which was, while of a semi-legal character, still very extensive. In 1671, thirty-four thousand pieces of chintz were imported into England. The pieces were only a few yards in length. In 1681 English merchants secured designs from Holland to be copied in India. It is rather curious to note even at this time the insistence upon originality in pattern. One letter contains the following passage: “Every one desiring something that their neigh- bours have not the like.” By 1683 the demand for calico was beyond all belief. It had become the style and everyone wanted it. The following quotation from a letter to India: “You cannot imagine what a great number of the Chintzes would sell here, they being the ware of gentle- women in Holland. Make great provision of them be- forehand; 200,000 of all sorts in a year will not be too much for this markett, if the directions be punctually observed in the providing of them............... Again in 1686 this letter is of interest: “You may exceed our former orders in Chintz broad of all sorts, whereof some to be of grave and cloth colours, with the greatest variety you can invent, they being become the weare of ladyes of the greatest quality, which they wear on the outside of Gowns Mantuoes which they line with velvet and cloth of gold.” In 1700 the protests of the woolen manufacturers and sheep farmers of England forced Parliament to © forbid the selling of cotton goods in England, andin 1712 a further act prohibiting the use of all printed England ) 97 goods, cotton or otherwise, was passed by Parliament. These laws were, however, not as efficacious as desired, for in 1721 a further act was passed imposing a fine of £5 on the wearer and £20 on the vendor of cotton goods. When the difference in money values between these times and the early Eighteenth Century are con- sidered, it must be admitted that these fines were very serious matters. That they affected the Indian market there can be no doubt. A letter to.the Governor and Council at Fort St. George in 1704, four years after the passage of this first law, indicates this situation very clearly: “We are sorry we can give no great encouragement at present to the fine paintings which we are sensible is brought to great perfection with you. The chief expense (i.e. sale) of that commodity was in England, which now by the Prohibition is taken away, and abroad they turn to no account............... To show how vigorous was the protest of the British wool growers and their paid literary defenders, a quotation from a pamphlet “The Ancient Trades De- cayed and Repaired Again,” in 1678 is pertinent: “This trade (the woollen) is very much hindered by our own people who do wear many foreign commodi- ties instead of our own: as may be instanced by many particulars, viz. instead of green sey that was wont to be used for children’s frocks, is now used and Indian- stained and striped calico; and instead of a perpetuana or shalloon to lyne men’s coats with, is used sometimes a glazened calico, which in the whole is not above 12 d. cheaper and abundantly worse. And sometimes is used a Bangale that is brought from India both for lynings to coats and for petticoats too; yet our English ware is better and cheaper than this, only it 1s thinner 98 Che Beritage of Cotton for the summer. To remedy this, it would be necessary to lay a very high import upon all such commodities as those are, and that no calicoes or other sort of linen be suffered to be glazened.”’ A second pamphlet in 1696 The Naked Truth, in an Essay upon Trade, runs as follows: “The commodities that we chiefly receive from the East Indies are calicoes, muslins, Indian silks, paper, saltpetre, indigo, etc. The advantage of these commod- ities is chiefly in their muslins and Indian silks (a great value in these commodities being comprehended in a small bulk), and these becoming the general wear in England... . “Fashion is truly termed a witch; the dearer and scarcer any commodity, the more the mode. 30 shil- lings a yard for muslins, and only the shadow of a com- modity when procured !”’ Even the great Defoe was induced to lend his genius to the vain attempt to stem the tide. Heis, how- ever, writing evidently at a time after the passage of the laws had in a measure ameliorated the condition of the home manufacturers. “The general fansie of the people runs upon East India goods to that degree that the chints and painted calicoes, which before were only made use of for carpets, quilts, etc., and to clothe children, and ordinary people, become now the dress of our ladies; and such is the power of a note as we saw our persons of quality dressed in Indian carpets, which but a few years before, their chambermaids would have thought too ordinary for them; the chints was advanced from lying upon their floors to their backs, from the foot-cloth to the petti- coat; and even the Queen herself at this time was pleased to appear in China and Japan, I mean, China England 99 silks and Calico. Nor was this all, but it crept into our houses, our closets, and bed-chambers; curtains, cushions, chairs and at last, beds themselves, were nothing but callicoes or Indian stuffs; and in short, almost everything that used to be made of wool or silk, relating either to the dress of women or the furniture of our houses, was supplied by the Indian trade.” “Above half of the (woolen) manufacture was entirely lost, half of the people scattered and ruined, and this by the intercourse of the East Indian trade.” In France equally broad minded legislation had been passed at the instigation of the silk industry. Holland, however, had kept her ports open and did with both France and England a highly profitable business in smuggled goods. The British East India Company as well connived at its own particular brand of smuggling, and the English captains of vessels con- ducted a very profitable if somewhat risky trade. One author in a burst of prophetic eloquence sums up the situation neatly in the following phrases. “Two things,” says this writer, “among us are too ungovernable, our passions and our fashions. “Should I ask the ladies whether they would dress by law, or clothe by act of Parliament—they would ask me whether they were to be statute fools, and to be made pageants and pictures of? They say they expect to do what they please—so they will wear what they please and dress how they please.”’ With such moral support, in spite of all those laudable efforts on the part of British wool manufac- turers and Parliament, the cotton trades could not be discouraged, but continued to increase. Dr. Stukely, in 1724, describes Manchester as “the largest and most th, 100 Che Heritage of Cotton prosperous village in England. 2400 families were | engaged in textiles and there was not only trade with the rest of England, but the beginning of British export trade as well.” Defoe in 1727 mentions cotton manufacturing as the cause of the great prosperity of this town. Bolton was of somewhat less importance in this trade, but still a central market place where salesmen from Ireland on market days offered the linen warps spun in Belfast. Cotton lint was given to the cottage spinners to be returned as yarn, which the merchants distributed to the weavers and the cloth was brought in in bolts on market days, and sent out to be dyed, bleached, finished and printed by the merchants who sought in Lancashire their supplies of these forbidden fabrics. George Crompton, the oldest son of the great inventor, born in 1781, describes as a child how he was employed in this manufacture: “My mother used to bat the cotton on a wire riddle. It was then put into a deep brown mug with a strong ley of soap-suds. My mother then tucked up my petti- coats about my waist and put me in the tub to tread upon the cotton at the bottom. When a second riddle- ful was batted, I was lifted out and it was placed in the mug, and I again trod it down. This process was continued until the mug became so full that I could no longer safely stand in it, when a chair was placed beside it and I held on the back. When the mug was quite full, the soap-suds were poured off and each separate dollop of wool well squeezed to free it from moisture. They were then placed on the broad rack under the beams of the kitchen loft to dry. My mother and my grandmother carded the cotton wool by hand, England 10! taking one of the dollops at a time on the simple hand cards.” So prosperous and powerful did the cotton manufac- turers at Lancashire become that, in 1736, they had the law of 1721 amended, so as to permit the manufacture of mixed calicoes of cotton and linen in England. They agreed, however, with the wool growers and manufacturers that cottons of India should still be excluded. This exclusion of Indian goods seems to have been in a measure effective, for a few years later the great actor, David Garrick, pleaded in a jocular vein with a friend in the Custom House to permit the painted Indian bed curtains, upon which Mrs. Garrick had set her heart, to escape the clutches of the law. This statute known as the Manchester Act, had an immediate effect upon the prosperity of this city. By 1750 there were thirty thousand people in the Manches- ter and Bolton districts exclusively engaged in the manufacture of cotton goods, and by 1766, it was estimated that over six hundred thousand pounds worth of merchandise were manufactured in this region in a single year. From 1750 on the history of cotton in England is largely the history of the calico trade and of mechanical invention and the application of power to machinery. The calico trade, however, preceded the era of invention and was in fact the chief cause, which called it into existence. In 1719, in a pamphlet entitled “The Weavers’ True Case’’ appears the following comparison in the styles of cloths worn in England before and after the great cotton invasion. “Let us cast our eyes backward fifteen years (that is to say to 1704, when the prohibition of calicoes 102 Che Beritage of Cotton decorated in India had been in force four years), and see with what commodities our womenkind were then clothed; we shall see that our women among the Gentry were then clothed with fine English brocades and Venetians, our common Traders’ wives with slight silk Damasks, our country Farmers’ wives and other good country dames with worsted Damasks, flowered Russels and flowered Callimancoes, the meanest of them with plain worsted stuffs. Whereas now those of the first class are clothed with outlaw’d Indian Chints, those of the second with English and Dutch printed Callicoes, those of the third with ordinary Callicoes and printed Linnen, and those of the last with ordinary printed Linnen.”’ Contrast this passage with one which appears in the Gentlemen’s Magazine, on March 14th, 1754, eighteen years after the passage of the Act, which per- mitted the printing of calicoes in Great Britain. “Mr. Sedgwick, a very considerable wholesale trader in printed goods, had the honour to present her royal highness the Princess of Wales with a piece of English chints of excellent workmanship printed on a British cotton, which being of our own manufac- ture, her royal highness was pleased to say she was very glad we had arrived at so great a perfection in the art of printing, and that in her opinion it was prefer- able to any Indian chints whatsoever, and would give orders to have it made up into a garment for her high- ness’ OWN wear ...as an encouragement to the labour and ingenuity of this country.” The great demand for all kinds of printed fabrics aroused the mechanical genius of England to discover more rapid methods of applying patterns. At first carved wooden blocks were employed. This method England 103 has never been excelled in artistic value and is still in use. This was followed by more intricately etched copper plates, used in a press not unlike that used to print books. Both of these methods were intermittent and required too great a degree of hand labor. Finally the idea of engraved copper cylinders was thought of, suggested perhaps by the rollers used in making cotton rovings. This invention had an immense and immediate effect on the entire calico business in England and increased production enormously. It is believed that Charles Taylor and Thomas Walker printed from wooden cylinders before; but in 1770 Thomas Bell, a Scotchman, used the first engraved copper cylinders for this purpose. He is said to have sold his machine to the firm of Livsay, Hargreaves, Hall & Co. about 1785, but this must have been an improved version of his older machine. The description of Bell’s machine is as follows: *“A polished cylinder several feet in length (accord- ing to the width of the piece to be printed) and three or four inches in diameter, 1s engraved with a pattern round the whole of its circumference and from end to end. “Tt is then placed horizontally in a press, and as it revolves the lower part of the circumference passes through the colouring matter, which is then removed from the whole circumference of the cylinder, except the engraved pattern, by an elastic steel blade placed in contact with the cylinder. (This was the forerunner of our modern printing machines.) *“A piece of cloth may then be printed and dried in one or two minutes which, by the old method, would have required the application of the block 448 times.”’ 104. Che Beritage of Cotton In O’Brien’s famous treatise on calico printing, written in 1789, he sagaciously comments upon the fact that the use of roller printing would tend to cheapen the once so desirable product. “What person would willingly give five or six — shillings a yard if their very servants could have an imitation of or what has nearly the effect for two or three?”’ During this period, when the calicoes of India and the imitations in England were attracting the attention of merchants, craftsmen and manufacturers, a small group of men were at work upon machines which in the end changed the entire complexion of the cotton in- dustry. I have reserved the consideration of this period for a separate chapter. CHAPTER IX EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE AGE OF THE MACHINE ments in textile machinery and the application of power to machinery, were made in the Seventeenth Century in continental Europe. It is doubtful, however, if the British inventors of the Eighteenth Century had any direct knowledge of these first hesitating essays; nor do they in any sense diminish the honor of the actual accomplishment. To all mtents and purposes, the great industrial revolution begins in the midland counties of England in the fore part of the Eighteenth Century and ends with the dawn of the Nineteenth. There is no question that the entire movement centers about cotton. With two exceptions every inventor was an Englishman and the great ma- jority were drawn from the ranks of the humblest textile workers. In this period, practically every textile machine we use today was created. All subsequent efforts have been directed towards improving, enlarging and co- ordinating these basic ideas. In this century we see as well the first complete demonstration of the idea of the division of labor and serial production. One continental invention was, however, of such importance as to deserve special mention. The flyer, 105 (he is some evidence that the first experi- 106 Che Beritage of Cotton added to the Indian spinning wheel, which appears on the Saxony wheel, and enters so largely into most types of modern mechanical spinning machinery, was the invention of Leonardo da Vinci, either in the latter portion of the Fifteenth or the first part of the Sixteenth Century. It was probably invented to assist the Italian craftsmen and their followers in southern Germany, to more successfully spin the cotton lint, which was then a regular article of trade between the Levant, the Italian cities and the towns of Flanders. In the Journal des Savants 1678, is an account of a machine to weave by power, invented by a M. de Gennes, a French naval officer, which does not appear to have attracted any attention at that time. There was as well a French device to supply power to two hundred hand spinning wheels at a little later date, but no proof of its application in practical form. The great point about the English inventors was that they were practical artisans, devoting their atten- tion to the actual production of definite and much needed commodities. They were faced with the neces- sity of carrying theory into practice and testing ideas against facts. It is possible that the vigorous commerce of Eng- land in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries may have more ruthlessly destroyed the weaving guilds than on the continent, and thus opened up the way for innovation. This is indicated by the greater specializa- tion in textile production and the inclusion of workers in certain phases outside guild control. But of more importance was the character of the British textile population, as compared to those of continental Europe. There was in the midlands that mingling of closely related peoples of slightly different points of view and PLATES N kOe KS < S ve KAW Ps PLATE 11 INDIA 1—Eighteenth Century printed and painted Indian wall hanging. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Page 70) 2—Eighteenth Century printed and painted Indian wall hanging. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Page 71) z 38—Detail of Javanese batik scarf, Nineteenth Century. (Page 76) . ~ Collection of the Author. ~ 4—Wall painting showing cotton design from the Ajanta cave between the First and Fifth Centuries a.p. (Page 69) The Paintings in the Buddhist Cave Temples of ‘‘ Ajanta”—John Griffiths. 5—Modern tied and dyed Indian scarf. ° (Page 80) Collection of the Author. 6—Detail of Javanese batik scarf, late Eighteenth Century. (Page 76) Collection of the Author. Cighteenth Century: Age of the Machine 107 traditions, which so usually destroys prejudices and stimulates creative thought. The history of textile devices before the machine age is not lacking in interest. Great changes had been made in the simple types borrowed from the Orient, and all of these changes had been of a mechanical nature, as aids to the production in quantity rather than in fineness of quality. Nor can we escape the thought that both the machine and the idea of power application are closely related to the mathematical philosophy and speculation of the age. Great inven- tions in all times are the fulfillment. of processes of thought, not the starting point of thought. There is little direct evidence to prove the point, but a strong assumption exists that both the two barred loom and the spinning wheel were borrowed from the East. There is unquestioned proof that all through northern Europe the warp weighted loom prevailed and existed in some remote regions, even down to our own times. In the fragmentary records of early Europe, no mention of the spinning wheel occurs, but the primitive distaff and whorl method 1s occasionally referred to. Just when the loom was introduced it is difficult to say. The Fourteenth Cen- tury silk loom of England, surely, looks enough lke the Indian loom to have been a recent introduction, but it may have come into Europe at a much earlier period, possibly even during Roman times. As a general rule all European textile implements were heavier than their eastern originals and at a very early date we find them growing more complicated in mechanical detail. This is an interesting indication of that first dawning of technical consciousness, which in no small degree accounts for our material ascendency 108 Che Heritage of Cotton over all Oriental cultures, and while it emphasizes our craft inferiority, perhaps it illustrates at the same time a higher receptivity for mechanical reasoning. The first concrete expression of the machine age was the fly-shuttle of John Kay of Bury, son of a small woolen manufacturer of Colchester. I have included a detailed draft of the device in another portion of the narrative, and will, therefore, only briefly describe its effects upon weaving, rather than enter into a too technical description of its parts. Before Kay’s invention, the shuttle (the wooden container of the bobbin of weft) was passed through © the opening of the warps from one hand to the other, while the pressure of the feet opened the alternating sheds. (See sketch of loom). Consequently the width of cloth was limited to the reasonable spread between the outstretched hands of the weaver. Since the weaver had to- operate the battern or beating up frame of wires as well after each shot of weft, it will be seen that weaving was a rather slow process. Kay wished to make possible the weaving of the broad fabrics of India and to conserve the labor time of his weavers. In perfecting this device, he changed the shape of the shuttle and made certain practical additions to the loom, which prove him to have been not only a man of imagination but of unusual mechanical skill. His perfected invention was greeted with angry protests from both weavers and masters alike, and he was driven from his house and eventually settled in Leeds. Here his fly-shuttle was shamelessly stolen by the manufacturers of woolens and all compensations denied him. Shuttle clubs were formed, each member pledging himself to help defend any member sued by Kay. In the end, though never losing a suit, he was Cighteenth Century: Age of the Machine 109 impoverished and discouraged by his many appear- ances in court, returned to Bury to work as a mill- wright and machinist. Here his inventive genius led him to perfect a spinning machine. It is believed that in many ways his invention anticipated those of Ark- wright and Crompton. Again misfortune pursued him and he fell a victim to that mad fear of all mechanical devices, which pervaded textile England at this time. Kay’s spinning machine was destroyed and his life saved only through a hasty and secret retreat. He sought refuge in France, where he died in poverty in 1764. | It has been estimated, that Kay’s fly-shuttle in- creased the average production of a loom four-fold. Even before this time, there had been a great shortage of cotton weft yarn. Spinning was largely an inter- mittent occupation of women and children in the small agricultural hamlets, while weaving was becoming more and more the steady occupation of a masculine artisan class. It took about three spinners to supply enough yarn for a single weaver and when loom pro- duction was multiplied by four, there arose a dangerous shortage. It must be remembered that at this time there was a great activity in the production of British calicoes and an increasing demand for the rough cotton and linen fabrics, all of which made Kay’s improved loom of the greatest economic importance. It could not, however, reach its fullest value until adequate supplies of weft yarn were obtainable. Attention, therefore, turned to some device to increase the productivity of the spmning wheel. There is even a record of a small reward being offered for such a machine. It will be seen that such a machine, or rather the idea of such a machine, could not have been 110 The Beritage of Cotton any too pleasant to hand spinners, who were receiving comparatively high prices for yarn. Nor can it be said that the English worker of that day, had any aversion to resorting to the cowardly method of mob law to destroy his fancied enemies. An jnventor was regarded in about the same way as an abolitionist was a half century or so later in the South. | The first mechanical spinning device to make more than a single yarn was the roller frame of John Wyatt. This consisted of two sets of rollers, operating at dif- ferent rates of speed, which partially formed the roving, the preliminary process In yarn making. Associated with Wyatt was Louis Paul, a German, who had invented a rude carding device, consisting of a semi- circular receptacle, studded with wire points, in which revolved a wooden cylinder covered with wire nails. This machine separated the fibers and laid them parallel. Neither of these machines had any immediate value, although both contained the sound principles which were later perfected by other inventors and in- corporated in their machines. The first wholly practical spinning machine was the Jenny of James Hargreaves, a modest cottage weaver of Stanhill. He had such great difficulty in obtaining sufficient weft yarn of cotton for his busy loom, in competition with the merchant manufacturers of Lancashire, that he made experiments with spinning wheels to increase his supply. His device gives evidence of a fine practical imagina- tion and sound understanding of the principles of spinning. It consisted of a stout frame of wood sup- porting two racks of spindles, one containing the partially spun roving, still made by hand or on some modification of John Wyatt’s rollers, and the other Cighteenth Century: Age of the Machine 111 to receive the finished yarn. From the roving spindles at the rear of the frame, a carriage drew out the yarn, while the spindles revolved. Both passage of carriage and the drive of the spindles were controlled by a wheel with a belt or cord attached to pulleys and gears. When the yarn had been spun, the carriage traveled forward and the yarn spindles wound it up. This machine is easier to describe than to operate and must have required great skill on the part of the worker. It could only spin a rather coarse, weak weft yarn. None the less, since it contained at first eight and later sixteen spindles, it vastly increased the out- put of yarn and aroused the jealous wrath of the hand spinners. In the year 1767, a mob broke into his home, wrecked his machine and drove him from town in fear of his life. He settled in Nottingham, where a lack of interest in textiles made him safe from molestation. In order to earn enough money to begin life anew, he secretly made a few machines for the more powerful merchant-manufacturers of his vicinity and this fact made it impossible for him to maintain his patent in a law suit, a few years later. It is a satisfaction to write that in spite of this, he was reasonably successful in business and when he died in 1778, left his family in easy circumstances. We now come to the man, who though in one sense not a great inventor, still did most to establish the cotton and in fact all other textile industries on the modern basis. The genius of Richard Arkwright was wholly prac- tical. In organization as in adaptation he was far in advance of his times, and he stands happily in no need of pity, since nature and training had endowed him with a shrewd common sense and energy adequate to 12 Che Heritage of Cotton his needs. He is properly regarded as the father of the cotton mills of today, the prototype of the modern mill treasurer. | He was born December 23, 1732, in the beautiful city of Preston, began life as a barber and later be- came an itinerant buyer of hair for wig makers. Of a clear investigative mind, he absorbed all the wild talk he heard, going from one weaving town to another, in regard to the great and mysterious machines. Unlike his acquaintances, he did not regard these rumors as evil or visionary, but strove to marshal them to the advantage of that excellent young hair merchant, Richard Arkwright. He was familiar with Wyatt’s spinning rollers, he probably saw every day of his life the spinning jenny of Hargreaves, and many other partially successful devices and experiments. In his fertile mind, all of these facts, fancies and conjectures became ideas. Incapable of actually working out his ideas, he guardedly sought the aid of expert clock makers, giving each a separate part to make and assembling these unassisted. It is said that Arkwright received little ~ domestic encouragement. His wife, a practical woman, fearing to spoil a good barber in making a bad mechanic, is reputed to have destroyed his first models, in an attempt to cure his madness. He persisted none the less and at last formed a partnership, in 1769, with Jedediah Strutt, the well- known inventor of the stocking frame. With the support and aid of Strutt, he so far perfected his device as to patent it. He then proceeded to build and organize his first mill in Cromford, which was completed in 1771. Here the real genius of the man shows clearly. Each process of manufacture underwent his careful Cighteenth Century: Age of the Machine 113 scrutiny. He changed details of practice, codrdinated parts to improve the product and increase the yield. He discovered or rather proved how the skill and pro- ductivity of each workman and each group increased with specialization. More than this he carefully cor- related each machine with the functions of the preced- ing and following machines. In other words he grouped in one unit all the most advanced devices for spinning cotton yarn and welded them into a factory. The sum total of his efforts was a spinning mill which could easily and constantly undersell all. competitors. His famous spinning frame, driven by water power, was the first to make cotton warp as well as weft, and thus to his genius we owe the first all-cotton fabrics made entirely from European spun yarn. So successful was he, that a second mill was built, the Masson, on the Derwent in 1775, a year before the Revolution. Arkwright and his partners were too powerful to be intimidated by mobs. Consequently rival manu- facturers simply hired away his trained assistants, and as far as possible imitated his machines, including the use of water as a motive power. He endured this until in 1781, when he at last resorted to legal action. The case was bitterly contested by both parties. It was proved, however, that Arkwright’s machines were but combinations of other devices, the theft of which had been sanctified by time, and he lost his case in 1785, under rather peculiar circumstances. It was not possible, however, to steal his natural ability and energy. He was so much better both as a manufacturer and a business man than any of his rivals, that when he died in 1792, two years after the first successful American mill was built by one of his former workmen, he was a millionaire. 114 Che Heritage of Cotton Of all the famous names in this brief epoch of in- vention, none has a more romantic or indeed pathetic significance than that of Samuel Crompton. Crafts- man and musician, mechanic and dreamer, his inven- tion it was which gave to British manufacturers that final control over the difficult art of fine cotton spinning, which made England the world’s dominant figure in this industry. For it was his mule, so called because of its relationship to Arkwright’s first horse power frame and Hargreaves’ jenny, that made it possible to spin fine yarns, strong enough to weave into the lighter grades of cotton fabrics, suitable for the best calicoes. Before we briefly consider the character of this remarkable invention, a single incident may go to prove how close we are to this entire age of revolution- ary invention. | In Bolton, England, there is today an ancient and gracious manor house, carefully preserved through the generosity of Lord Leverholm as a charming museum. It is known in the quaint Lancastrian dialect as Hall i th’ Wood, or Hall in the Woods. It was once the home of Samuel Crompton and is today a memorial to his genius. Built in three periods, 1480, 1556, and 1668, each wing has been restored and furnished in perfect taste and in accordance with its period. Before these spacious fireplaces, with mechanical clock work to turn the hospitable spits, may well have come some fog bound traveler, with strange tales of the voyage of Portuguese da Gama round the stormy Cape of Good Hope, and his safe return to Lisbon, cargoed with rare essences and cotton of exquisite beauty, or some tale of the bold adventure of our great Genoese, beyond the bleak Atlantic, to that other Indies one day to become so vital in English history. When these events Cighteenth Century: Age of the Machine 115 took place, the oldest wing had hardly reached the middle of its second decade. 3 It must not be supposed that in Crompton’s time it was a home of wealth and elegance. The ancient manor had fallen upon evil days and was the dilapidated tenement of the poor. His room, the fireplace he sat before in suspended dreams, even his chair with the broad arm for writing and drawing, have been care- fully preserved. Here there hangs a portrait of an oval, sensitive face, a cop of yarn he spun and the memory of that great struggle and triumph which no later tragedy might deny him. This is all. His ma- chine 1s guarded in the British Museum and his fame lives in British history. Within a few years of this writing, there were in Bolton, two ancient men, who as children had lived in Hall 7 th’ Wood. They remembered a shabby gentle- man, who enjoyed the unusual privilege of wandering about their garden, for they had been told that he was Mr. Crompton, the inventor. So within the reach of one long life, does this vigorous age touch the man whose genius did so much to build it. Crompton’s invention perfected in 1779, was indeed a combination of the rollers of Wyatt, the jenny of Hargreaves (a small one which he possessed and used, serving as a model) and the practical machine of Ark- wright, known only through repute. But the com- bination thus inspired was a stroke of pure creative genius. Since his time, master mechanics and machine builders have lavished on his invention all of their increasing knowledge of metals and fiber and power application, nor have there been lacking additions of great merit. Yet in principle and indeed in appearance, it is as he first perfected it in his young manhood, nor 116 Che Heritage of Cotton was there ever any machine which combined the virtue of vast production, while still retaining the delicacy of hand directed operation. No better description of the early mule is possible than that contained in Murphy’s excellent work, The Textile Industries. “Having heard of Arkwright’s roller spinning frame, though without knowledge of its structure, Crompton set himself to improving the spinning jenny, introduc- ing the roller spinning principle as an aid in attenuating the rove. On the head of the frame he placed the roving creel, and in front of it two pairs of drawing rollers; he mounted the spindles on a carriage capable of being moved to and fro. As will be evident, this was a com- plete reversal of the motions of the spinning jenny. John Kennedy, a Manchester manufacturer and friend of Crompton, accurately described the chief merit of the ‘mule,’ as it came to be named, in a paper delivered by him to the Manchester Philosophical Society in 1830. ‘The great and important invention of Cromp- ton was his spindle carriage, and the principle of the thread having no strain upon it until it was completed. The carriage with the spindles could, by the movement of the hand and knee, recede just as the rollers delivered out the elongated thread in a soft state, so that it would allow of a considerable stretch before the thread had to encounter the stress of winding on the spindle. This was the corner-stone of the merits of his invention.’” There is no record, I have discovered, that tells how fine in count were the yarns spun on Arkwright’s water frame. They are simply referred to as coarse and heavy. We do know, however, a few years later in America, on an adaptation of his machine, No. 14 and No. 20 were spun. These yarns correspond to our Cighteenth Century: Age of the Machine 117 heavy butcher linen or coarse muslins. Crompton himself made good even No. 80’s, comparable in weight to the yarns used in fine lawns and nainsook. The hand mule up to our own time was used to make the delicate yarn used in the Calais lace trade and I have modern specimens as fine as 405’s or 260,200 yards to the pound or approximately 150 miles. I have also a cop of No. 500 spun for the Jubilee Exposition of Queen Victoria a generation ago. These facts will prove how exquisitely perfect was the original mule for its purpose. Crompton was as much the victim of his own sen- sitive nature, as of the sordid greed of his contem- poraries. His invention was stolen from him through unredeemed promises of reward and threats against his safety. Long after his invention had brought wealth to many manufacturers he lived in want as a spinner craftsman, attempting to support a large family of young children. In 1812, a subscription of about £500 was taken up, and a petition presented to Parliament to give him £20,000 in tardy recognition for his great services. But Spencer Percival, the premier of England, on the very morning of presenting the memorial, was assas- sinated in the House of Parliament, and when the bill was finally placed before the House, it had been reduced to £5,000. This modest sum Crompton lost in a business venture, and lived in his old age on an annuity provided by his later friends. He died in 1827. As soon as the mule became known, successful efforts were made to increase the efficiency. First one detail and then another was improved. As early as 1790, a Mr. Kelly, strangely located on the River Clyde, applied water power, and by an arrangement of taut and slack pulleys made the movement continuous. 118 The Heritage of Cotton For all its marvelous precision of motion, the mule required highly skilled labor and none knew better their value than the mule spinners. They were the haughty aristocrats of the textile trades, demanding high wages and very special privileges. It is narrated that they wore £5 notes in the bands of their hats and would neither drink nor smoke in the common room of the inns. Worse than this in the eyes of their sup- posed masters, they refused to train apprentices unless at their own caprice. Even to this day, the strongest craft union in England is that of the mule spinners. In desperation the baffled manufacturers turned for aid to the great mechanical adapter, Richard Roberts. After five years of experiment, he produced in 1830 the modern self-actor mule, and since this machine could be operated by less skilled mechanics, the arro- gance of the early craftsmen was in a measure curbed. There is but a single name to add to the list of the great inventors, that of Edmund Cartwright, graduate of Oxford, clergyman, writer and inventor of the power loom. I have already mentioned the drawing of a power “loom by de Gennes in France in the Seventeenth Cen- tury. The two Barbers in Scotland in the latter half of the Eighteenth Century also made unsuccessful experiments. It is doubtful, however, if he knew of either of his predecessors. He was a man of independ- ent means, with a gift for mechanics, which in a poorer man had surely reaped a greater reward. He made his first power loom in 1785, and later made a second im- proved model. Neither was wholly successful, the movement that shot the shuttle between sheds, being dangerous, violent, often destroying the warps and occasionally blinding the weaver. PLATE 12 INDIA 1—Painted cotton hanging, early Seventeenth Century, from ruined city of Amber. (Page 70) Brooklyn Museum. 2—Detail of Mogul painting on cotton, Sixteenth Century, showing use of cotton fabric as canopy from Romance of Amir Hamzah in reign of Akbar the Great. 1556-1605. This forms one of a series of illustrations painted on cotton, nine of which are in the Brooklyn Museum. These paintings are believed to have powerfully influenced William Morris in his decorative design. (Page 70) Brooklyn Museum. 38—Painted cotton hanging from ruined city of Amber with portrait of Sir Thomas Roe, British Ambassador of the Court of Jahangir at Agra, 1615-1618. (Page 70) Brooklyn Museum. 4—Seventeenth Century painted and stamped cotton wall hanging from southern India. (Page 70) Brooklyn Museum. i ite tw 0 ae - eS cot ee BEAT Helg aoennnameiin ena ei ase ~ " SSS 7 = Tis Te : 2 y a, YAr_-! ‘ / YS == : ; q Wits Se pers pa: Mir ( \ Fr? PLATE 18 MACHINE AGE IN THE UNITED STATES 1—The Boston Manufacturing Company, Waltham, Mass., the first mill in the United States to use the power loom. (Page 146) From an old photograph. 2—Slater Mill in Pawtucket, R. I., where yarns were first spun by ma- chinery in 1793. Now a museum. (Pages 136, 144) $—The old Whaler, Charles W. Morgan, in New Bedford Harbor with background of cotton warehouses. (Page 161) 4—Spinning machine, patented by Peter Paddleford in 1816. (Page 122) United States National Museum. 5—Mechanical carder built by Samuel Slater for mill in Pawtucket, R. I. United States National Museum. (Page 136) 6—Jenks’ ring frame for spinning cotton. (Page 122) ?—Spinning frame built by Samuel Slater. (Page 136) United States National Museum. % yee 4 7 ag ba ’ ye ow SI ih J , thn L 64 % ee R esearch 189 and have made rather interesting price concessions to this end. | American dye makers are like our weave masters in that they do not pay much attention to any product that cannot be produced in bulk. In some respects there has been a falling off in research since the War, with the general readjustment that has taken place in other industries. But the truth is that no matter how high a price we may have paid for it we need never again be at the mercy of any nation for either dyes or explosives. Among the great variety of dyes which were known indeed before the War, but which have been brought into great prominence since, one group is particularly interesting to the cotton manufacturer and to the public. ‘These are the so-called vat dyes, developed in most instances from an anthracene base and called “vat dyes”’ because the application of color is in vats under immense pressure. These colors on cotton are absolutely fast to sunlight and washing and while in some respects they do not give the rich, beautiful tones of other dye substances, this is not because of any inherent lack of beauty in the chemicals themselves, or in the method through which they have been applied, but because the chemist seldom possesses a nice understanding of color values. No event, since the invention of Whitney’s Cotton Gin, has had greater significance for the textile in- dustries than the developments in the artificial silk industry during the last decade. In a sense, the exorbitant prices of cocoon silk during the War, when this lovely fiber sold for over eighteen dollars a pound, the rapid improvement in knitting machinery, and the high demand for novelty cloths, were responsible for 190 The Beritage of Cotton the last great development in this field. But a broader interpretation may be found in the culmination of chemical and physical research in the industry itself. They had arrived at a place, after patient research and courageous expenditure of capital, that entitled them to the full consideration of all phases of the textile industries. The history of artificial silk curiously begins at about the same period as that of the machines in England. In 1734 the great French chemist, Réaumur, made ex- periments in specially concocted varnishes which were driven through minute holes in sheet iron and pre- cipitated in brittle and unusable threads. In 1858 Andemars, the Swedish chemist, partially perfected artificial filaments through dissolving the inner bark of the mulberry tree in alcohol and ether. The great genius of the industry, however, was Count Hilaire de Chardonnet, who after years of experiment and devotion, including bankruptcy, finally produced late in the eighties a practical commercial fiber. Chardonnet’s process used cotton linters (the hair of seeds) and cotton waste from combing machines, and reduced it in alcohol and ether, finally changing over to the use of sulphuric and nitric acids and denitrating the yarns when wound on the cones and bobbins. This fiber was first shown to the public in the Paris Fair of 1889, and from here begins the real commercial history of the fiber. In 1892 three Englishmen, Cross, Bevan and Beadle, developed a cheaper process through substituting woodpulp for cotton, and this process, generally known by the name of “ Viscose,”’ occupied for many years the principal place in the quantity market. Research IQI These have been the two basic methods upon which all subsequent processes have been developed. But the demands in later years for quality fiber have swung the pendulum of trade sharply in favor of the general principles developed by Chardonnet, and most of the artificial silks now attracting attention are developed from a cotton basis. All over the world today, in Italy, Belgium, Ger- many, France, England and the United States, there are fifty-seven large concerns in this industry, and the more or less accurate statistics of 1922 give a total output of seventy million pounds. When it is con- sidered that only sixty-three million pounds of cocoon silk were produced in the same year, the predom- inance of this industry in a generation will be ap- preciated. In America the Viscose Company for a long time was the largest producer of artificial fiber and was devoted to the woodpulp basis. This company has recently changed to a cotton basis and produces excel- lent yarn by the new process. The American Tubize Company, an offshoot of a Belgian parent, developed finer yarns of greater strength in comparison to diameter, and of greater strength when wet than the viscose. After the War, the Dupont Company developed an organization for making fiber silk and the Industrial Fiber Co. followed suit. Latterly, the chief disadvantages of artificial silks have been their great diameter as compared to the real silk, which gave to cloth a rather coarse texture, and the fact that under moisture they lost about seventy per cent. of their strength. This was a great disadvan- tage until the public became accustomed to the fiber 192 Che Heritage of Cotton and learned how to wash and clean it so as not to impair its value. Lately an English process, known as acetate silk, and called by the trade name of “Celanese,” has at- tracted considerable attention. This silk is absolutely waterproof and does not lose any strength, therefore, when wet. The chief difficulty lies in the fact that it is difficult to dye, since it is impervious to water; but this disability has been largely overcome by inspired chemi- cal research. All of these fibers have peculiar merits and uses, and their great development during the last few years is proof sufficient that the public has accepted them with- out question. One of their great advantages for the weaver lies in the fact that they can be cross-dyed with cottons, silks, or wools, or in combination with any or all of these fibers. That is, if the proper fiber for the purpose is selected, a cotton or silk cloth can be woven, immersed in a dye bath that will dye the cotton or silk, but leave the artificial fiber undyed, and then im- mersed in a second bath which will color the fiber but leave the cotton or silk unstained. Very often it 1s possible to combine the chemicals in the same bath so that two colors are produced in a single dyeing. Many changes can be run on this same theme, and it offers new opportunities for the designer and styler. Obviously, this is another mtricate chemical problem and it must be admitted frankly that the average cotton or silk mill, as the average knitter and dyer, have not been particularly careful in studying out the peculiar qualities of each fiber and selecting the one best fitted for their needs. A greater understanding, however, is growing between the fiber producer and the textile manufacturer PLATE 19 THE SOUTH 4 1—Model of Eli Whitney cotton gin, invented in 1793. (Pages 119, 138) United States National Museum. 2—Primitive method of spinning and weaving, surviving in parts of the south. (Pages 127, 166) United States National Museum. 8—An almost perfect cotton field with the skyline of Dallas, Texas, in the background. (Page 220) ; Courtesy of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce. 4—Mechanical cotton picker experimenting before delegates at the First International Cotton Conference in 1919. (Pages 216, 224) 5—Bales of cotton being moved along the tracks in Memphis, Tenn., fine cotton warehouse. (Page 220) 6—Idealized cotton fiber showing tapering from butt to tip and spinning convolutions. (Page 214) Drawn under the direction of James McDowell. Y—Sea Island cotton under high magnification. (Page 214) James McDowell. 8—Cotton boat “Whisper” on Wolf River at Memphis Levee. (Page 220) 9—Photograph illustrating damage done by boll weevil. The central boll was unaffected by the pest. (Page 223) James McDowell. 10—Egyptian cotton under magnification. (Page 214) James McDowell. 11—Arizona pima cotton grown in Salt River Valley, under magnification. __ James McDowell. | (Page 214) ae 12—Mississippi Valley cotton under magnification. (Page 214) James McDowell. 18—‘“‘The America,” the largest Mississippi River steamboat carrying cotton, at the New Orleans wharf. (Page 220) E 19 LeAh adh lot isccieiastn Fi Research 193 and there is no question that artificial silk of different kinds will play a very large part in the future develop- ment of the style business in cotton fabrics. In a general way, research in mechanical, physical and chemical fields has been accepted at least in theory, and the full practise will follow before long. Already in many ways American mills are the finest technical units in the world. More static labor populations will tend to vastly improve conditions. Such superiority as exists in certain phases of the British industry is due to longer concentration on some definite problem with greater specialization of machinery, and labor trained from generation to generation in specific tasks. The common and perhaps natural habit of looking to a tariff to equalize these advantages, and a little too hasty tendency to blame differences in wages and hours of employment in Europe or other sections of this country for conditions have diverted attention from the essential exhaustive technical analysis and modification of existing systems. William R. Basset, the well known industrial specialist, recently made a survey of the textile indus- tries for the Hoover Committee on the Elimination of Waste in Industry. In time bis keen analysis of condi- tions will receive a wider attention from the textile trade than it has so far perhaps attracted. He dwelt with special emphasis on the wasteful methods of buying raw materials, and on the evils of speculation in cotton. But his observations on the training of labor and a greater human coordination seemed to me to be of peculiar significance. Here indeed lies a great field for intensive study. From time to time our cotton industry has been affected by needlessly bitter and rather aimless in- 194 Che Heritage of Cotton dustrial feuds. These difficulties are in a measure due to the great diversity of textile labor populations and to a large percentage of absentee ownership. They are largely unnecessary and always very costly. It would seem as though some method short of a mere temporary balance of antagonistic forces might be found. There are, of course, large mill units as well as small, where labor difficulties have been reduced to a minimum. Such problems as face us today are of an economic rather than a human character. Few mill men today look upon labor with the cynical eyes of the elder generation. Equally with all minutely divided in- dustries, the cotton mills are open to the attacks of dis- ciplined and organized labor and might easily become the myriad theatres for tragic and sordid dramas of destruction. Saner councils will, however, prevail. The older, ultra-conservative die-hards and the uncom- promising radicals will, I trust, never be permitted to make this industry their battle ground. If the progress of the last ten years is any guide, the cotton industry is oriented towards some rational form of industrial democracy. With extreme reluctance I leave the discussion of these problems, which I have only suggested. ‘They are of vitalmoment. Yet, since they have already been raised and are now under consideration in all sections of the country, I feel it wiser to devote the remainder of this chapter to a field of research only just beginning to attract serious attention. If I have not suggested in this narrative that the history of cotton is the history of a series of great artistic achievements; if I have not proven that the basis of its very existence over long centuries of commerce and invention has been the history of Research 195 beauty; then I have marshalled my facts with poor generalship. The mere coincidence that the cotton fiber lends itself almost perfectly to mechanical production does not alter these facts in any way. The world did not tire of beauty because a few machines happened to be invented and perfected by one single people in the long histories of this great fiber. The next chapter in the story of cotton will be written by the artist-designer. He is almost a new figure in this industry, but the scene is set and the audience waiting for his appearance. Let us admit with candor that the great bulk of so-called textile designs not alone in cotton but in all fabrics, not alone in America but in England, have been mediocre in artistic merit for at least fifty years. There is no need to go over the dreary reasons for this condi- tion. It is enough to write that the problems of conquering the machines, the development of world commerce, and the extremely delicate human adjust- ments to the new philosophy of automatic productive forces were gigantic tasks. A century and a half is in point of fact a very short time to allow for even their partial solution. With a few honorable exceptions in England and America, most of our designs have been obtained in one way or another from France, partic- ularly Paris. In no sense do I mean to belittle the artistic achievements of a gallant and appreciative people when I write that the supremacy of France in the fields of decorative art is in a measure the result of her political exigencies during the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries. When the great industrial revolution began in England with Kay’s fly-shuttle in 1733, France was at 196 The Heritage of Cotton the brink of a series of national blunders and disasters which almost broke her spirit. When English manu- facturers were perfecting machines and systems of mechanical production, France, bankrupt and ringed with foes, willed that kings should die. The year that Eli Whitney’s genius gave to our South her great plantations of cotton, saw France, mad with terror, strike at her nearest foe. And while mills were spring- ing up beside the turbulent rivers of New England, the steel tipped legions of France followed the brilliant Corsican victorious against a world in arms. After the Napoleonic incident, followed the patient, bitter years of reconstruction, and it was not until after the Commune in 1850 that France began to take again her place in the industrial and commercial world. The age of the machine had come, had grown in stature, and France had spent her energy in other chan- nels. She faced a world gone mad over whirling machines and vast forces of productive energy. She had only her craft guilds, a tradition of honest work- manship, and a love of beauty as her salvation. She had never exchanged the artisan for the mill hand, never subordinated the artist to the mechanical director. Her small, personally supervised workshops filled with skilled craftsmen, proud of their dexterity, were more flexible mediums for artistic creation than the great mills of her sister democracies. The traditions of beauty that had grown up under the great Italian masters from the stormy times of Francois, the First, she had never lost even in her darkest hours of struggle. And so the world came to Paris in a stream of gold for the work of her masters. And France was wise, for no specious pleas from the advocates of serial pro- duction ever won her from her firm position. She kept Research : 197 her craftsmen and only experimented in a cautious manner with the machine. She gave security and honor and high rewards to her successful artists in all fields. She built schools and academies, workshops and museums to the end that this creative fertility might live and prosper. England and America and indeed the entire in- dustrial world fed their hungry machines with the ideas that first saw perfection in France. So long as France created, the machines could not become sterile for ideas. France, for almost a century, has been the world’s’ studio. If any valiant and patriotic manufacturer of fabrics in England or America doubts this statement, let him study the list of professional buyers of style merchandise who sail on almost every steamer to the ateliers of Paris, or look at the labels on merchandise in Bond Street shops. If any lay reader believes these state- ments too strong in regard to cotton fabrics, they have but to go into the nearest department store and ask to see the cottons of M. Paul Rodier, artistic heritor of the great craft ages and international merchant. Then came the great War, and France gave every ounce of her energy, every atom of her power to divert disaster. Her craftsmen became Poilus, her masters gave their genius to munition making and the thousand and one grim concerns of war. At once the world’s machines felt the interruption of the life-giving ideas. Manufacturers all over the world soon learned the lesson that merchandise is purchased on its artistic merit rather than its physical qualities. In 1915 we felt this lack very keenly in America. E. W. Fairchild, publisher of Women’s Wear, a daily paper with a national circulation to the retail stores and 198 Che Beritage of Cotton costume manufacturers in America, asked me if some means might not be developed here to fill the gap. There was no time to develop any complicated organi- zation to build solidly from experimental beginnings. What was needed was swift action. Albert Blum, Treasurer of the United Piece Dye Works and a partner in a great Lyons dye house, was called into consultation. He at once agreed to the seriousness of the situation, and placed his time, energy and prestige at the disposal of any plan that remotely promised success. Two great questions at once arose. Did America possess in its museums the collections of decorative arts essential as inspiration to designers? Was there in America adequate talent to reinterpret this. material into acceptable designs? The first question was easily answered. Our mu- seum collections were adequate and accessible. More than this, the directors of our great museums in New York City and Brooklyn were more than anxious to assist us to any degree. In many instances they antici- pated our requests and in all cases they had prepared long in advance of any sign of industrial interest. Our museums offered their collections, and still offer them to the industry with greater freedom than any museums in the world. The next question was not so easily answered. For generations our designers had been discouraged. Tex- tile pattern making was regarded as the lowest and worst paid of the arts. Quite properly our art schools almost totally ignored it since it offered absolutely no field for ambition. England was a little better, per- haps, but only to a degree. Some mills had small staffs of ill-paid copyists or hack designers. There were a few commercial studios that produced painted bits of PLATE 20 DEVELOPMENT OF COTTON YARN The process of spinning is a succession of operations; first paralleling the fiber, next forming them into a soft bolus or sliver and gradually drawing them out and twisting them around each other. 1—Card Sliver:—Soft untwisted rope of parallel fibers. Cotton has pre- viously been ginned to remove seed and passed through the opener in the mill to separate the fibers from the bale pressure, and to dust out the coarser foreign matter. ™ 2—Sliver as it appears after passing through the drawing rollers, to even up = the inequalities of the card slivers and slightly attenuate the mass. 3—Slubber Roving:—First process in which the draft and twist are com- bined. 4—Intermediate Roving:—Second process of draft and twist. 5—Jack Roving:—Process in which twist exceeds draft. 6—Finished yarn. 4 ’ SSE & , Research 199 paper about as inane and original as tomato-can designs. Was there, then, in spite of this colossal and wasteful indifference and neglect, in all this broad land, talent for our needs? First we threw open the museum collections and published in Women’s Wear and elsewhere information to the designers advising them of the great facilities before them. Next a little booklet was prepared showing the technical details of mechanical pattern- making, and finally a few hundred dollars set aside in prizes by Women’s Wear and a nation-wide contest in design organized with the assistance of the art schools of America. he first jury met in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early winter of 1916. I well remember the closing hours, with a blizzard raging outside, when the belated artists brought their bundles of designs to my laboratory in the American Museum of Natural History. I can still recall my anxiety, for until the last three days there was nothing to prove that all of our plans and preparations were not in vain. More than the mere success and failure of a plan was at stake. I had to _ reckon with the enthusiasm of men in a project from which they themselves had neither hope nor expectation of reward. Dr. Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History had said: “It is a source of wonder to me that our textile designers have not made freer use of the collections under my care. Certainly they should serve as a wonderful inspiration.”’ In this connection it may be said that lectures were given in the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art by distinguished scholars on the problems of decorative art and by 200 Che Heritage of Cotton 2 technical experts on the relation of the machine to design. ‘To these lectures designers and design students had been freely invited. There had been as well considerable missionary work in the art schools, both ~ along the line of research in design and the practical application of design through mechanical methods to fabrics. Henry W. Kent, Secretary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said: ‘‘We have always been anxious to reach the great class of textile designers. Individuals have used our collections for a long time, but as a class designers have held aloof. The attitude of Women’s Wear in this matter is admirable, and the effort to give expert advice should meet with success.” Albert Blum said: “It is time that America de- veloped a distinctive textile art. The opportunity to study collections in the two museums through these lectures 1s wonderful.” The first jury consisted of Henry W. Kent, Albert Blum and the author. A few hundred designs were submitted for our inspection and of these about one hundred and seventy-five were hung up in an exhibition to which the textile manufacturers were invited. Even in this first trial the American designer acquitted him- self well; or I should have said herself, since most of the prizes went to women. Both professionals and ama- teurs had an equal standing before this jury, but the amateurs won most of the prizes then as later. Five such contests in all were held, the last four under the auspices of the Art Alliance of America, who generously donated their rooms for the annual showing and took care of the details of the contests. Beginning with the second contest, certain individuals in the industry made generous contributions, and many * | Research 201 expert judges of design either served on the jury or acted in an advisory capacity. The last of these exhibitions was held in 1920, and over one thousand artists, representing thirty-four states and Canada, sent in thirty-five hundred designs, and received prizes of over twenty-three hundred dollars. In all of these contests the designs remained the property of the artists and since all prize designs as well as many others always sold, the successful designers received substantial rewards, and often a sustained recognition in the industry. A list of the jurors and contributors and the consistently successful artists follows: Jurors and Contributors Henry W. Kent, Secretary, Metropolitan Museum of Art ALBERT W. Buu, United Piece Dye Works Epwarp L. Mayer, Costumer ALBERT Herter, Herter Looms J. H. Tuomerson, B. Altman & Co. W. G. Burt, Marshall Field & Co. Mixton VocEt, Bonwit Teller & Co. E. Irvine Hanson, H. R. Mallinson & Co. CuarueEs Gowina, Burton Bros. & Co. J. A. Micet, J. A. Migel, Inc. CHARLES PRENDERGAST, Artist Freperick C. Fousom, F. A. Foster & Co. Max Meyer, A. Beller & Co. Stewart Cun, Brooklyn Museum J. W. MacLaren, Johnson Cowdin & Co. Harry WEaRNE, Interior Decorator Henry P. Davinson, Interior Decorator Grorce B. Cuapwick, Associate Editor of Country Life Harry NryYLAnp, Swain Free School of Design F. W. Purpy, Art Alliance of America 202 Che Beritage of Cotton Cart RorssEx, Louis Roessel & Co. CHARLES CHENEY, Cheney Bros. F. W. Bupp, Cheney Bros. M. D. C. Crawrorp, Associate in Textile Research, Ameri- can Museum of Natural History Artists Muze. DurANT DE SUMENE Martua RytHER ADRIEN FLEARY Maria C. Carr Auice M. Hurp MARGURITE ZORACH Francis FuLtTon Hazet BuRNHAM SLAUGHTER GrRaAcE H. Simonson Brertua Morey LinLian LAWRENCE HELEN S. Daty Laura E. Watton BERTHA SMITH Routu J. Winson W. E. HentscHeu ZoLTON Hecut Mary TANNAHILL Neu WITTERS FLORENCE Lona RACHEL SMITH ANNA PIKULA ALPHONSE BInR Horr GLaDDING Pirter MiJER Auice F. TinpEN Mary Marsan JuLY CONE Mary LovisE CLENDENNING | Research 203 Emma W. Dovucuty KATHERINE W. Batu Brss B. Hueus LovisE Drew Y. Constance Durry Epna B. Lowp CHOLLY FRIETSCH Marion Poor CLARICE PETREMONT CouLton WauGH Itonxka Karasz Rutu REEvEs F. WEINOLD REIss A. J. HEINKE ConRAD KRAMER FaNnNIE BAUMGARTEN Auice L. DALLIMORE Very early in these contests it was discovered that many talented designers had greater facility in working out their ideas on actual fabrics than on paper. A supplementary competition was therefore, arranged, known as “The Albert Blum Exhibition of Hand Decorated Fabrics,” and many of the most beautiful designs were developed in this way. Hand craftsman- ship was found to be of the greatest importance in the problem of design, and this we should have known from the history of ornament as well as from practical experience. I have written before of the great industrial service rendered by the museums. But the Brooklyn Institute Museum played so vital a part in the later and more intimate developments in American textile and costume designing that some special mention seems appropriate. With the generous support of the trustees and working 204 Che Beritage of Cotton in cooperation with the leaders in the industries, Stewart Culin, Curator of the Museum, organized the most complete research collections in the world for the purpose. Certain rooms and special collections of materials and books were set aside for practising designers. Many of the most gifted creators in all fields make con- stant use of this material, and even foreign designers have come to know of the opportunity and gladly and freely take advantage of 1t. Everywhere through the industries, I can trace the direct or indirect effects of this inspiration. No collections in the world are so accessible, no museum has ever made fewer conditions for the uses of its material; nor has the full usefulness of this work been as yet appreciated. Every year it grows in extent and value and no one may write at a future time of the American Renaissance without full recogni- tion of the work of this museum. It 1s beyond praise, as it is above reward. Very soon the use of historic materials began to spread beyond the industries into broader public fields. In the fall of 1921 I was asked to prepare an exhibition of the history of art in cotton for the Cotton Machinery Exposition in Greenville, South Carolina. With the aid of the Brooklyn Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and my own private collection, an exhibition of the history of art in cotton was organized, put in charge of a competent assistant and sent to Greenville. The retail stores learned of this Exhibition and immediately from all over America we received requests for it. This was embarrassing. The material was very precious and to a degree fragile, but arrange- ments were made and the collections visited many cities. There have been four exhibitions of cotton Research 205 alone, counting the first one. The last one was or- ganized at the request of the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers in November, 1923, and was shown at an Exhibition in Mechanics’ Hall in Boston. At this writing this exhibition is still on the road, having been shown in the following cities:* Bonwit Treviter & Co. New York, N. Y. Nerman-Marcvs Co. Dallas, Texas Gus Buas Co. | Little Rock, Ark. L. R. Eaxin Manhattan, Kan. Strix, Barr & Fuuturr Co. St. Louis, Mo. KAUFMANN Strauss Co. Louisville, Ky. THALHEIMER Bros. Richmond, Va. Frank R. Jevuerr, Inc. Washington, D. C. HocuscuriLtp Koun & Co. Baltimore, Md. Kaurman & Barr Co. Pittsburgh, Pa. C. F. Hovey Co. Boston, Mass. THE Howianp Dry Goons Co. Bridgeport, Conn. There were forty requests in all, and this exhibition is still to appear in the following cities: La Saute & Kocu Co. Toledo, Ohio Tue Morenovust-Martens Co. Columbus, Ohio Tue Rixke KuMuer Co. Dayton, Ohio H. & S. Pocur Co. Cincinnati, Ohio L. S. Ayrus & Co. Indianapolis, Ind. t Previous to the exhibition of the National Association of Cotton Manu- facturers, a collection of cotton and cotton dolls known as ‘“ Thirty-Nine Centuries of Cotton Development ” was organized.” This was first shown in the retail store of Carson Pirie Scott & Co. in Chicago, the weeks of January 29th and February 5th, 1923, and was presented with great distinction by this organization. Thousands of people came during the period of two weeks to see this collection and this was the first time that a complete story of the history of a single fiber had been presented to the public in connection with modern merchandise. 206 Che Heritage of Cotton Wuitney-MacGrecor Co. Minneapolis, Minn. Emporium Mmrcantie Co. St. Paul, Minn. FREDERICK & NELSON Seattle, Washington Meter & Frank Co. Portland, Oregon Tue A. T. Lewis & Son Dry Goons Co. Denver, Colorado Miuuer & PAINE Lincoln, Nebraska Davipson Bros. Sioux City, Ia. TuE DENECKE Co. Cedar Rapids, Ta. YETTERS Towa City, Ia. Harnep & Van Maur Davenport, Ia. L. H. Frevp Co. Jackson, Mich. There were one hundred and sixty-seven requests for the exhibitions of cotton materials, but all of these could not be satisfied. The time that such specimens might be away from the museums was, naturally, limited. ‘These exhibitions have been shown, however, in forty-eight cities all over America, and in many of our great educational institutions. In this way materials that formerly were seldom seen outside of great metro- politan areas have had a wide circulation throughout the entire country. These exhibitions have unquestionably awakened the public to the great possibilities of the cotton fabric as a medium of artistic expression. They have given to the mills some indication of the possibilities of design, and have served in a degree as an interpretive medium between the public and the mills. It is impossible in this brief space to enter into all the ramifications of this movement. Many wholly worthy phases of it I have left untouched. In the main, what has been accomplished so far has been to call attention to the museum collections as a source of in- spiration and to establish the American designer on a Research 207 somewhat more secure footing, and to bring to the cotton mills a realization of the part that design might play in their success. With these facts in mind, and with the record of ex- periences successful and otherwise behind me, it is pos- sible to outline, in broad terms, the next development. It is plainly evidenced that there never can be any serious advance in our decorative arts without adequate and accessible historic material as a basis of inspir- ation. In writing this I do not wish to stifle originality in any degree. To merely slavishly copy old designs is not enough. There must be creative interpretation. Each designer, according to his or her imaginative force, training and appreciation, will absorb from the ancient arts ideas and give these expression in new beauty. It has always been so. The history of all art, upon the surface at least, has been the result of exterior impulses resulting in fresh creative power. The ancient arts of Asia Minor and Créte aroused the Greeks; Italy learned from the Near East and Greece; France and Spain drew inspiration from Italy and the Moors; England and America followed France. Forms of expression are nationalistic only so long as they are in the process of creative evolution. Back of all these historic art contacts lie the great periods of expression whose vague antecedents we can trace in ancient wall paintings of Ajanta in the rich treasure tombs of Egypt, in the sandy graves of Gobi. Always some past beauty has been the teacher and inspiration of new loveliness. The ideal designer of the future must then be something more than a student of art history. Trained draftsmanship is essential. And beyond this must be an understanding of the potential capacity of the ma- 208 Che Heritage of Cotton chine as a medium of expression, and a sympathetic accord with the technician. When these desiderata have been accomplished, there is still to be mastered the difficult problem of gauging the public taste which we loosely refer to as style. The whims of peoples for any particular kind or type of ornament, the preference for certain colors, or texture are never wholly accidental, nor to be lightly regarded. This stuff of which dreams are made is in sober truth the very essential of all culture. Through long ages men have desired beauty, have striven to express their ideas of charm. If this desire ever left us for an hour, that hour would mark the wreck of civilization. So the historian of art, the draftsman, technician and style expert must be combined in the designers of tomorrow. Short of this we will never achieve our destiny and the machine will continue to lose prestige and scope. Every texture, every type of design, the complete palette of color, the highest standards in workmanship belong not to the machine but to the craft ages. It is, of course, in one sense unfair to bring the expression of a single age in comparison with the accumulated arts of many ages and many peoples. The great disparity between the esthetic values of machine-made materials and the priceless documents of many yesterdays is due to the fact that in craft ages there was the opportunity for experiment and comparison, and a closer relationship between pro- duction and creation than in our own times. There are for us new constructions of fabrics, new ideas in technical arrangement of yarns and patterns, that are still to be worked out on the machine from research. So far as surface design is concerned, particularly as Research 209 this applies to the printers art, the records of art history offer an endless inspiration. There is no excuse except ignorance and indifference for any unlovely printed fabric, regardless of its price or quality. I believe, however, that the most important subject is that of color. It is so easy to confuse in discussion or writing, the names of colors with the sensation of colors themselves, that the vital importance of the subject is seldom understood. Each season the public focuses its preference on some rather limited range of shades, and the great bulk of buying 1s always on a very narrow section of the palette. The fact that this preference is well understood, and is indeed carefully fostered through the few avenues of publicity used by the textile manufacturers, has never apparently induced any individual or group to make an exhaustive study of the reasons governing this preference. Any careful analysis of the situation will show that the colors that reach and hold public favor are al- most always those that have been by some agency developed from a traditional source. Good color is never an accident. The reaction to color is one of the most vital and one of the most ancient of our emotions. It is quite evident to all students of human culture as to all style experts that a delight or the reverse in chromatic effects is the dominant impulse in our relation to decorative arts past or present. Any museum is in one sense little more than a glorified laboratory of color. It can not be used intelligently except by trained individuals, but the material for research is always present. In spite of these facts, annually the mills of this country and England dye immense quantities of merchandise with- 210 Che Heritage of Cotton out any particular attention to the quality of color except such as are familiar to the chemist. Our public has become highly critical in regard to color values and will no longer accept shades or tones unless these are distinctive in charm. It is, fortu- nately, no longer possible for mills to violate the tradi- tional canons of good taste since these now run counter to the social instincts. I am conscious that I have glorified « an ill paid trade into a profession. This was deliberate. The designer is the artist working through the medium of the ma- chine. Either this or nothing. The problem is not, do we need such a profession; but rather can such individuals ever fully express themselves directly through our intricate machinery? Do we not need some intermediate agency, some kind of design laboratory for first experiments? The mere fact that in England and America we have great mills and precise mechanical rules governing production does not mean that we may not develop craft shops as well. As a matter of fact, the hand craftsman is on the in- crease in both countries and will grow with developing skill and broader understanding of his opportunities. Annually we import millions of dollars worth of hand craft fabrics, and our own craftsmen are by no means denied their markets. Each great unit of mills needs its own special craft laboratory to make materials, to adjust them to markets by tentative trial, and to arrange them for the machine after they have won acceptance. Hand craft is not only a more certain, but is the cheaper method in developing new ideas in textures and patterns. The machine only becomes economical when large quantities of materials are wanted. New ideas a si ae ‘ » 5 ee AN a ee Research 211 seldom win immediate public approval. They must first win the acceptance of a rather small and highly critical group of patrons. Here the craftsman is supreme. It is essential that the craftsman be accorded full legal protection for his creative effort. Our indiffer- ence to the rights of designers amounts almost to a national scandal. Copying successful patterns is the meanest form of commercial dishonesty, and for the entire industry the most expensive, since it discourages the creative force which in the last analysis is the vital life of business as of art. A law giving ample and reasonable protection is one of our great needs. Ina nation addicted as we are to law-regulations, it seems surprising that no such statute has been enacted. Every time some form of protection has been suggested it has met with opposition on the part of certain ele- ments, and been supported in a luke-warm measure by others. This is, of course, a kind of left-handed recognition of the immense importance of design, if a very poor method of encouraging design. A law that will yield protection and at the same time place no unnecessary restrictions on the use of historic materials is needed. It will not be an easy law to draft, nor can it be safely left to our professional legislators. A committee of experts should be organized to study this problem in all its different phases and a broad public spirit aroused in its enforcement. Every time a design is copied and cheapened, both the designer and the public are defrauded. These plans are by no means simple. I never intended to convey any idea that the correction of ancient evils could be accomplished by merely wishing. But they can be corrected. We can have beauty and 212 Che Heritage of Cotton charm in cotton materials produced by machines at less cost of energy and money than is now wasted through errors in artistic judgment, in machinery, or in attempting to seek protection of profits in other directions. I do not feel it to be wholly a matter of choice, nor do I appeal to the spirit of public service in cotton mill owners. It is my sober belief that in the intelligent solution of artistic problems lies their only salvation. This world has not been cured of its love of beauty because some few men own cotton mills. CHAPTER XV CONCLUSION keep the narrative as free as possible from technical details and statistics. There are, how- ever, certain facts which can be presented through no other medium. The United States still far outdistances the rest of the world in the gross weight of cotton raised each year. In 1922 with the world cotton crop around seventeen million bales of five hundred pounds each, we produced over ten million bales. Egypt, India, China and Brazil followed in order. These figures, as all broad generalities on staple products, are open to distinct view-points. As a rule the mill buyers believe government estimates too low and farmers and mer- chants believe them to be too high. The total figures never include the many hundreds of thousands of bales consumed in the domestic markets of China and India. The year 1922 is generally regarded by experts as a very short crop, several million bales below the highest world average such as 1907. | In regard to the quality of the fiber as determined by its length, fineness of diameter, spinning character, color and freedom from foreign matter, James McDow- ell, one of the world’s leading authorities on cotton, has furnished me with the following data: 213 ie the introduction to this volume, I promised to 14 Che Heritage of Cotton The finest grade of cotton is grown on the islands off the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. This crop was at one time of the greatest importance in the spin- ning of extra fine yarns and sewing threads. Due to the ravages of the boll weevil, this crop 1s very small today, seldom exceeding two thousand bales. Next in quality is the Sea Island Cotton, grown on the Islands of St. Kitts and the Barbadoes, most of which is shipped to England and France for the lace trade. The great fine staple of commerce, the fiber most often used where mercerizing of yarn and fabric follows, is that grown in Egypt. After this follows the long staple American cotton grown from specially selected seeds in favored farming regions on the coast of Florida and the rich lands of the Mississippi Valley and certain parts of Arkansas and Texas. The Soudanese, Brazilian and the Peruvian, both rough and smooth, follow. After these come the great mass of the American short staple, upland cotton, the Indian and the Chinese. Cotton cultivation is being encouraged in Samaria in West Africa, in Russian Turkestan (for the Soviet Govern- ment) and in Turkey. Under subsidies from the British Government, cotton is being cultivated on the Gold Coast of Africa, Lagos, South Nigeria, North Nigeria, West Africa, British Uganda, British East Africa, Nyasland, Rhodesia, East Africa and Soudan. The most important experiment now under way is, however, in Western Australia and Queensland, where under careful governmental restrictions, Chinese coolie labor is being employed. The yield from these farms is about eight hundred pounds of lint per acre as compared to an average in America of under two hundred pounds per acre. The high prices prevail- ing for cotton during the last few years, have also en- PLATE 21 2 fth Annual Design Contest Art Alliance of America 10 East $7th Street, New York OPEN TO EVERYONE ~ $2,325 IN PRIZES coomarr in eee er a = Sonar un Searan ae Seer Pe FIRST PRIZES. $050 Aad THERES TONS Deo : pony a > ue a Donan le ‘Coreen SrORe fk Mn Go. Se 9 Baers wm Cfeszeren. Toren 8 Co} Coes Sree. ‘heese Roneost ESD SHARC OS SON FER Eee een % LA AES PD, Kiteserse ene Bares 83586 Neovo beet © Bakiame seowived sx 10 wd tectesting Naw. 8th, F922 duey mnete Satarday, Noe. 2th; FITS Bees de Tree Frade. Mow Firh, JRP Pemes Day TRareday. Neo. sth, 1929 Gavcerend Prcbice Sotwenay, Sow, 2th, TIT CONDITIONS Tesazes mvuei Leocremed capectelly for this contests de design prevk. Dinsigaee many Sse wusentcd lay assy ormadionm Ubeel te potency 5 home pte Nxt owaty siownce Stht Re axcnpted. Resphgest stcesid bec teseckeend cee thr bark: preference wi be green te demas eseenied with ccm eth ibe rape aed address of designate end peiee of domme, AS en uc i peel ttle pent walk 20 Un ie enol es ters na nade. Deniees prog Se Gelb of Ue patie comttoionee! Os the chemmeee gS CUE ITEL PLATE 2i RESEARCH 1—Detail of one of the Design Research Rooms in the Brooklyn Institute Museum. (Page 204) 9—Exhibition of “Cottons Ancient and Modern,” in Mechanics’ Hall, , Boston, National Association of Cotton Manufacturers. November Ist--6th, 1923. (Page 205) 38—Fifth Women’s Wear Design Contest poster, November 8th, 1920. (Page 197) 4—Page from Women’s Wear of July 23rd, 1921, illustrating the possibility of Oriental arts in cotton. (Page 199) 5—Page from Women’s Wear of July 23rd, 1921, illustrating the connection between India, New England and the South in cotton designing. (Page 199) 6—Page from Women’s Wear April 27th, 1922, illustrating the value of the Decorative Arts of the South Sea Islands as a source of inspiration for cotton designing. (Page 199) %—Page from Women’s Wear, July 2nd, 1921, showing ancient documents and modern adaptations. (Page 199) Conclusion 215 couraged cotton growing in Southern Mexico, Yucatan and Ecuador. When it is realized that from a non-producing cotton country in the late Eighteenth Century, by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, cottons of America dominated the world, it will be realized that our supremacy as a cotton raising country may easily be challenged in any generation by any of the continental areas I have mentioned above. Egypt’s supremacy, on the other hand, in fine qualities of cotton is by no means assured. The splendid control of the British Government for many years directed the seed selection and cultivation in Egypt; and if the present unrest in Egypt destroys this control, it will be very difficult if not impossible to restore it, except after long and very expensive experiments. So far no field labor in the world compares to that of the negroes in the South, and this is really the dominant factor in maintaining our control of the fiber. Latterly the shortage of negro labor during the picking season has led to the intro- duction of casual labor from Mexico, and while this labor has been in the main satisfactory, it does not compare to the trained negro cotton picker. There is no menace, however, to our cotton in- dustries suggested in the possible loss of our supremacy as a cotton raising nation. England, the mother of the modern cotton industry, still maintains her vast supe- riority as a producing center and has never raised a single pound of cotton and never could, outside of a green house. The United States is today by far the greatest producer of silk goods, and all her raw fiber comes from Japan, China, India and Italy. The cost of transportation of cotton in the bale is very slight compared to the value of the finished product, and 216 The Heritage of Cotton manufacturing supremacy will be determined by the trained technicians, market conditions, intelligent mer- chandising, skillful and satisfied labor and designers. No one familiar with the average cotton farm and the attitude of mind of the average cotton farmer can be surprised at the discontent with cotton as a staple crop. It is the last of the great staples to resist the use of labor saving agricultural devices. It is the most unintelligently marketed crop of all the great agri- cultural commodities. It requires longer and harder work and there is less security as to rewards than any other. The general condition of the southern farmer so far as life and luxury are concerned is bad. Out of the fertile, inventive genius of America may come in time a practical cotton picker. Experiments with machines of this kind are already as far advanced ~ as was the automobile fifteen years ago. ‘There is then to be considered the control of the boll weevil, the little insect which annually destroys over three hundred million dollars worth of cotton lint. A larger percent- age of graduates of agricultural schools actually on the land and the use of better methods of cultivation and more suitable types of seeds will help the situation. But the average farmer is far from convinced that any measures tending to increase the yield per acre or increase acreage under cultivation are benefits. A bitter experience has proved to him that the large crop, so ardently desired by manufacturers and brokers and so desirable perhaps from a general, economic view- point, means for him low prices and little profits, and often a crushing burden of personal debts. In many parts of the cotton belt, the boll weevil, looked upon by scientists and the public at large as the enemy of the farmer is regarded by the farmer as his friend, and he Conclusion 217 has no real sympathy with any of the many plans now advocated to destroy the pest. It is easy enough to meet his prejudices with theories, but it is hard to arrange arguments to answer the actual facts of his life. There has been a great improvement in warehousing for cotton, more intelligent banking methods are in vogue, there is the beginning of scientific experiments in seeds, and a closer sympathy between the trained mill buyer of cotton and the farmer and all of these things T reckon in the list of benefits. It is now possible for the farmer to borrow money outside the limits of his own community on receipts from bonded warehouses, and this has freed him from a system of money lending that would make a pawn broker ashamed. And all of these things are excellent and fruitful of much of the recent prosperity in the South. The cotton farmer looks, however, with a brooding suspicion on the world’s cotton exchanges and in many instances this suspicion is justified. The buying of the actual cotton fiber is beginning to be done with some pretense of scientific analysis, and of course the natural and healthy conflict between buyer and seller is constructive and helpful. But on the exchanges of the world, future contracts for cotton are annually made totaling unknown hundreds of millions of bales, while the actual cotton crop of the world, as I have mentioned above, averages between sixteen and twenty millions of bales. This anomaly is difficult to explain to the lay mind and, as a matter of fact, toa large extent it has no valid explanation. In the main it is a vicious form of gambling. A certain percentage of this speculative buying is of course a kind of insur- ance policy taken by the seller or manufacturer of cotton goods against future orders, to protect himself 218 Che Heritage af Cotton against the mercurial fluctuations in the raw market, and this activity on the exchanges is obviously legitimate. The principal business, however, of the cotton exchanges is purely speculative and highly dangerous and has no more to do with industry and beneficial economic conditions than gambling at Monte Carlo or the race tracks. Cotton exchanges are fed by a net work of telegraph and cable wires reaching not only to the financial and industrial centers, but to each little farming village. The mania to gamble in cotton futures is just as strong among the Arabs along the Nile as the cropper farmers of the Mississippi Valley or the Texas Plains. Since speculators of this class are usually (for some unknown reason) optimists, the fall of cotton prices of a few points means a heavy toll in human misery. In its worst form gambling in cotton futures is the meanest kind of bucket shop operation. It neither aids the farmer, the mill man nor the public. It is purely parasitic, even when legal. That men should work and drive their wives and children to the verge of desperation and then lose their meager earnings by any such means, can have no serious apologists. Gambling in cotton futures is not confined, how- ever, to the unwary agriculturist. It is a common habit unfortunately with mill treasurers, who should know better, and the experts in the broader ranges of speculative finance, from time to time, are impelled, in spite of previous experience, to test the quickness of their eye against the gyrations of this elusive pea. I am in perfect sympathy with the sincere men who see in better seed selection better warehousing, banking and growing, in the regulation of exchanges, and the elimination of cotton gambling, concrete benefit. But Conclusion 219 back of all of these questions, lies the still broader problem of land ownership. The vast majority of cotton is grown on rented farms, the lessee or the cropper giving from one third to one half of his crop as rent. He is furnished with seeds, at times farm implements, under certain conditions perhaps the use of a mule, some tragic apology for a home, and he is financed at ruinous rates during the planting and cultivating season. He isa victim of the vicissitudes of the market. Seldom can he hold his cotton for a favor- able price, for by the time it is picked, ginned and baled, his debts at most ordinary seasons have eaten up his entire equity. He is prevented, by the owner of the land in most instances, from growing anything else but cotton, and is compelled to buy from the local store the food which he might more profitably and easily raise himself. I know there are exceptions to this rule; I know of men of vision and humanity who handle their estates with constructive judgment, but the general condition of the cotton farmer in the great cotton sections of America is little if any improvement above chattel slavery. The greatest improvement that could come to the prosperity of the South, the greatest insurance this nation could take out to protect its supremacy as a cotton raising country would be a change in the system of land ownership in the South by intelligent banking facilities, which would permit the farmer to own and control the land on which he works. This in my judg- ment is the key to the situation. There is nothing so good for farming as having the farms owned by the men who work the soil and from such a condition all the other benefits now so ardently advocated by the friends of the farmers would easily and naturally result. 220 Che Heritage of Cotton In the year 1919 there was held the First Inter- national Cotton Conference. ‘The world was then cot-— ton hungry. The great demands of the wartime had exhausted the world’s supply and a cotton famine was imminent. So the mill men, technicians, statisticians, bankers and technical experts from all the countries of the world, with the exception of Germany and Austria, planned a trip to the cotton centers of the South. This country, for the first time perhaps since the Civil War, was experiencing the stimulation of a sudden influx of wealth. Sleepy little villages had been converted into thriving prosperous towns, the streets lined with shiny, new automobiles, the stores full of high priced merchandise, hotels and theaters thronged with gay, extravagant crowds. In one little, dusty, Georgia village, a County Fair was in progress and cotton farmers, who until this time had never known any surcease from the burden of debts nor life beyond the limits of stark necessities, waited patiently in line to ride in an aeroplane at the rate of a dollar a minute. Everywhere was the suppressed excitement of an oil boom or a gold rush. Fortunes were made over night by individuals who had never known prosperity before. There was building of roads, of homes, of schools and churches. Field hands, who in ordinary seasons had earned perhaps sixty or seventy cents a day, were now demanding and receiving from seven to ten dollars a day. Patent leather shoes, silk striped shirts, phono- graphs and every other formerly forbidden luxury were being purchased in immense quantities. At the levee in Memphis, I saw a great cotton boat tied up at the wharf, the crew on strike for $7.50 a day and meals. We passed through miles and miles of cotton fields with cotton worth fifty to seventy cents a pound, rotting on < ? Conclusion 221 the plant for lack of pickers. In clubs and hotels, in banks and warehouses, men of affairs expressed the sober conviction that the day had arrived at last when the South had come into her empire and had no further need for New York, London or Chicago to finance her staple crops or industries. In the little mill towns there was the same evidence of prosperity. Most of the three hundred and fifty visitors, who lived in pullman trains during this trip, were mill men, experienced mill men from the cotton factories of the world. They knew of cotton factories in the South, but had considered them as doubtful ventures, running intermittently, badly equipped and poorly managed. What they saw changed their minds radically. Mills were running at full speed at high profits and high wages. We had all heard stories of oppressed and dissatisfied, underpaid and under-nourished labor in southern mills. We saw little villages with pretty cottages, gardens, town halls, athletic fields and nurser- ies and throngs of well conditioned prosperous workmen. There was in many of these towns to be sure, the evi- dence of newness. They were the product of the last few years of high prices and hungry markets. Every- where was a spectacle of a people long denied the simple comforts, for the first time indulging their natural desire for luxury. Cotton had kept them poor, cotton had made them rich! The pent up desires of half a century of enforced self denial was seeking satisfaction! We met finally in convention in the charming old- world city of New Orleans, one of the greatest cotton ports of the world. Here mill men, bankers, statisti- cians, technical experts and merchants met with the growers of cotton. No industrial convention I have » 222 The Beritage of Cotton ever attended had one tithe of the human interest of this one. Here was some lord and master of a million whirling spindles, well dressed, suave, alert, and there a sun-dried farmer, who tilled his acres in some Louisi- ana bottom farm. Here was a man from the well ordered life of middle England, who had spent a half a century in a cotton mill and had seen on this trip, for the first time, a field of cotton, and next to him a lean faced, keen eyed cotton banker from a Texas city, judging the world from his outlook over the dusty spaces of his native state. Experts talked statistics, grading, finance, shipment, packing, warehousing, loom hours, better seeds, the world’s presumptive needs for cotton for a generation. To each problem these men had a definite, academic solution, not untinged perhaps with self-interest. If the farmer would plant more acres, employ better methods of cultivation, exterminate the boll weevil, use better seeds, and raise ten times the crop he raised at present, they proved to him conclusively that his mcome would be greater, his prosperity more sustained, for they could sell his surplus product in the hungry markets of the world. To these theories and platitudes the sun-dried men, who were giving their youth and the youth and hopes and the lives of their children and women folk to raise cotton, made answer. Let the world starve for cotton; let the mills stand idle for cotton; unless the world were willing to pay the price that cotton was worth. For if it lay in manhood, cotton must first yield to them the good things, the simple, good things of life, so ardently desired, so long delayed, so briefly enjoyed. Talk to them about laws of supply and demand! Go hoe a row of cotton under a blistering sun, and see your little Conclusion 223 tender children working beside you in Tophet: Carry the grinding load of a farm mortgage through a few bad years, and see your children leave you and go to the city, or wither in want onthefarm. Stagger under that weary, honorless load on the same road they had groped along and then talk to them about economic theories! Kill the boll weevil? He was their one friend, he gave them schools and clothes and food. Large crops meant wealth to the merchants of cotton, to the mill men, cheaper clothes perhaps to the world, but to them it meant lack of the few creature comforts that life held for them. They met together, coatless, angry, un- impressed by all the waiting world outside, not without force of rough eloquence, and swore to curtail, to drasti- cally curtail their acreage. This was another phase in the cotton story and one deserving of the most earnest consideration. Many of the mill men, to their credit be it writ- ten, especially among the English, were not lacking in sympathy. They too had come up a long, hard road and painfully they knew at first hand long hours of toil and the endless round of the hopeless days. The fine traditions of the open forum, that has kept their little Island secure since Norman William conquered it, made them respect these hard, controversial knocks. They shook their stubborn heads. It was a great question and the answer did not lie, could never lie, they knew, in simply passing the burden of cotton on to these coatless, collarless men, burning with a sense of their accumulated wrongs. I shall not add to the burden of these men the affront of some obvious, academic cure for all these ills. I am not entirely convinced that there is any sure solution within our power to apply. This is, however, 224 The Beritage of Cotton certain, we should allow no undue tenderness for middle men or produce gamblers to stand between justice and their cause. It is easy to sit in some great center of population and sentimentalize on the farm question and perhaps our great wheat farms are in little better condition. If more education is needed, if better seeds will help, if improved machinery will solve some problems, or better warehousing and financing amelio- rate conditions, in the name of decency let these things be given. If there is no answer to cotton but the continued misery of an industrious and sober farm population, then the sooner we cease to be the greatest cotton producing nation in the world, the better off we shall become. In this as in other phases of cotton, I am an optimist. The problems are already in solution. We will find mechanics and research in agriculture and more intelli- gent merchandising and more humane systems of land tenure, more economical in the long run than human misery. Once such conditions are understood in a democracy they must be rectified. The price of a single battleship, or a presidential election wisely spent in constructive investigation, might solve this problem. I have touched very lightly on the question of labor in this narrative. This is from no lack of appreciation of its vital importance, nor because of any belief that all is well in this respect. As a matter of fact, there is no more important problem than that of the human relationship towards the mechanical organizations pro- ducing textiles. I would not have any words of mine distorted into a lack of sympathy with the efforts of the men and women in the labor organizations, who have worked earnestly and under conditions often of great Conclusion 225 personal danger to ameliorate the distressing conditions, which existed in this industry within the last decade. I am equally solicitous to support the sincere and far sighted mill executives, who have tried to bring about some common meeting ground between conflicting forces. There is still much work to be done and many difficulties to overcome, and both types of progressives need all possible encouragement and sympathy. In a general way, however, the economic problem is in a fair way of solution. The attitude towards immigration so strongly held in all parts of America, since the Great War, will make it impossible within this generation at least, to dilute our labor population with aliens with lower scales of living values. This will do away with that competition for employment, which - formerly placed labor and the humane and intelligent employer alike at the mercy of labor mongers. A higher economic value will be placed on the human factor, and the energy and such genius as exists in superintendence will be directed towards better types of machines and processes to make labor more efficient and more productive. The immense sums formerly spent in proselyting alien labor, the contesting of strikes and lockouts, loss due to curtailed production might be spent to greater advantage in training labor to a better understanding of the machines and a higher sense of obligation to the public. The South, from its ingrained social habits and the close relationship between the mills and the mill com- munities, will not, for the present, lift its ban against European colonists. Any attempt to reproduce in mill centers in the South conditions which existed in Law- rence, Massachusetts, and other New England mill towns of recent memory will be met with a fierce 226 Che Heritage of Cotton opposition, in which the entire community will surely join. So both of our great textile sections will tend to static labor conditions and the pitiful traffic in ignorance will diminish, if not cease entirely. If unhappily I am too optimistic in this summary, then we are laying the scenes for a social upheaval in which all industries will be affected. We were tending towards this condition when the War came, and were saved, through the inflation of values, from a predic- ament into which selfishness and stupidity had led us. In the same way I believe that the present differences in wages and hours of employment between the South and East will tend towards a common level and this tend- ency will be upward and not downward. The record of textile labor from the machine age onward has been bad, distressingly bad. In New England, up to the great strike in 1912, which won a wide public sympathy to the workers, no class of American labor was worse treated. I do not know of any actual condition as terrible as the complacent, mechanistic attitude of the steel industry which demanded for manufacturing purposes that large groups of men should work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. But one thing is certain, the light physical character of textile work, the small element of personal danger involved made it, for a time, a fruitful field for the exploitation of women and children in industry. The later development in southern mills, so far as child labor was concerned, was at least as bad, probably worse than in the East. England, first in the field of mechani- cal production, created conditions of life in the midland counties, which Englishmen of conservative attitudes of mind have described in terms more violent than have Conclusion 227 ever been employed by the most desperate radicals in describing modern conditions. So it has not been a matter of a ruling race dominating weaker peoples who chanced to be within their borders. The tyranny of Englishmen over Englishmen, and of the South over its own native labor left nothing to be desired in the way of human misery compared even to New England’s attitude towards Greeks, and Slavs, Italians and other races, who came to supply the human element in her mills. These conditions are still so recent that it does no harm to call attention to them and to encourage each man and woman who reads these words to resolve that in America such conditions never may be brought about again. But even with the most ideal economic justice that may be gotten under our present system, or indeed under the most radical ideas that have been advanced and which are in a measure in practice in Russia today we have still a human problem in textile labor that must be met. The machine age is itself so recent an intrusion in culture that humanity has not yet become adjusted to it. It was never intended in the scheme of things that men and women, descendants of ten thousand years of craftsmanship should perform hour after hour, day after day, year after year, incomprehensible tasks over which they have no control and which offer to them no stimulus. of understanding and sympathy. Anyone of sensitive nature, familiar with textile manu- facture, must have a strong moral sympathy for the great idealistic revolution of John Ruskin and Wil- liam Morris. These philosophers saw clearly that the problem was not entirely one of the division of created wealth; that mere economic justice could not compen- sate for the loss of interest in work, which is the inalien- 228 The Beritage of Cotton able right of everyone, equally with the privilege of working and the right to earn a living. On the other hand it is impossible, impractical and undesirable that we should discard machinery. The machine is simply a tool, another means of expression developed through man’s ingenuity. But we must develop some method of education which will bring workers more in sympathy with the machine, and increase their understanding of its significance. My own belief is that during the next few years in America, there will be a great increase in professional and rational craftsmanship; and that the great mill organizations, built so largely as ventures in finances, will split up into smaller units where personal direction and contact between executives and workers will be closer. So long as the problem remains an economic one, the contest between the selfishness of two groups, there can be but one answer; the strongest group will eventually win and in the long run labor will be the more powertul. We have two forms or organizations of labor now existing in the textile field, one known as the craft union where each process of manufacture has its separate union organization. This type of textile union is a part of the American Federation of Labor and is strongly represented in certain sections of New England and in the South. There is another type of union, which includes in one single organization all workers in textile mills and is known as the Amalgamated Textile Work- ers of America, or the One Big Union Idea. This is largely a fighting organization, which comes into existence more strongly in times of controversy than in times of peace. If the entire industrial North, East and South should become organized on this basis, all that labor Conclusion 229 would have to do to either wreck the industry com- pletely or to have their demands met to the last iota would be to refuse to do anything; to stand still. Capi- tal rules only through division of counsel in labor. It is necessary, therefore, that sympathetic accord and understanding and a common interest and satisfaction in work should be established. There have been in the past a few prophets who have written books, and not a few individuals who wrote books they intended to be prophetic. Among the latter are to be numbered those who predicted a generation ago that staple cotton mills could not prosper in the South. Perhaps there may be others of the same high mentality who will now sign the death warrants for all cotton mills in the East. Without aspiring to the full dignity of a true prophet while earnestly desiring to avoid the other réle, there are a few safe generalities upon which I might venture. The future of cotton mills is not a sectional question in any sense of the word. Cotton mills will survive or perish in either section only as they serve with intelli- gence and genius the public. Our public is fabric pampered, accustomed to the products of the world’s finest looms and no way has yet been devised to force or cajole them into any other attitude. No great class of our citizenship fortunately is compelled by poverty to buy merely merchandise. Fabrics must appeal to them in some way to enjoy their patronage. Fashion spreads from our great cities as fast as the mail can carry the fashion news, as swiftly as merchandise can be shipped to points of distribution, and fashion is the modern, commercial term for beauty and taste. Mills able and willing to meet these shifting require- ments will prosper. The others will continue to squab- 230 Che Heritage of Cotton ble over a rapidly diminishing market. There is no question that the taste of America is already far beyond the average of industrial expression and the end is not yet in sight, nor is the public interested in the general economic conditions of the mills, nor the relationship these mills bear to the general position of America in the markets of the world. The export trade, that once offered a periodical outlet for the accumulated staple merchandise of low grade, may never again be consistently relied upon for the simple reason that the manufacturers of textile machinery are rapidly supplying loomage and spin- dlage to these countries to enable them to make their own cheaper merchandise. These machines are so marvelously perfect and automatic that staple con- structions can now be manufactured by almost any class of labor willing to stand and watch the machines run for ten or twelve hours a day at small wages and under expert direction. Local tariffs will take care of the slight differences in cost. Machinery exports into Japan, China, India, Brazil, the Argentine, and other once great markets for ma- chine-made staple cottons would tell an interesting story, if all the facts might be gathered and analyzed. Russia, for the time at least, imports no fabrics at all and is intent on rehabilitating her old machinery. Here is an illustration, directly in point, of how few staples are actually needed in any regions. Before the War, Russia had over seven million cotton spindles and imported as well many millions of rubles worth of cloth. The Revolution and the loss of Finland cut her spindlage to three million spindles, archaic in type and not in particularly good running order. At the same time, with this inadequate equip- - oe Conclusion 231 ment and with outside supplies cut off, she has been able to satisfy her most pressing requirements and to suc- cessfully exclude all foreign cloth. Russia will continue to buy her cotton from us, mill findings and machinery, and perhaps brains to run her mills for her until she can train non-political foremen; she will buy nothing else, until her economic system breaks down or changes. India may follow suit and China may become easily equally independent, alike of our raw cotton and cotton goods and buy only machinery from us. In Brazil there are over sixty active mills, fully equipped with modern machinery and finishing plants, and the Argentine is only a little behind. Mexico has a large population of sufficient intelligence to work in mills and has as well the possibility under settled conditions of raising large supplies of cotton. In Mexico today there are already several well equipped mill organizations, fully as efficient as any we have in this country making similar grades of merchandise. The only kind of cotton goods, therefore, that we will be able to make or sell successfully either at home or abroad, will be the higher qualities of merchandise, requiring the best and newest machinery, the highest type of superintendence, the best trained help and the guidance of mill treasurers who realize the vital im- portance of design and fashion. This means in many instances a great change in the present organization of our mills, a greater degree of flexibility and the building up of healthy and contented labor communities of skilled workers. It means that each organization will have as a vital element a department of research and experiment in design. Such mills, wherever founded, will succeed and their 232 Che Heritage of Cotton success will be of economic and social value to this devoted and long suffering land. The fact that auto- matic machinery is one of the great conquests of modern civilization, does not change the fact that people desire merchandise for its esthetic rather than its economic value; and the attitude of the world towards beauty has not changed merely at the behest of mentally stagnant mill treasurers who have followed out the ideas developed by a small group of brilliant mechanics in England, in the latter part of the Eighteenth Cen- tury. If this be prophecy, then I stand indicted. For as far as I am personally concerned, the other kind of cotton mills may go to any country sufficiently deluded or benighted to desire them. They have no place in the economic or social scheme of America. And so at the end of the story of cotton, we come again to that ancient and eternal desire for beauty, which launched ten thousand keels in quest of loveli- ness. When we have finally mastered the true significance of the machine and raised it to its highest potential power, we may find its standards of production will bear comparison with the achievements of the golden yesterdays of the craft ages. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aur, AMerR:—“‘History of the Saracens.” APPLETON, NaTHan:—‘Introduction of the Power Loom and Origin of Lowell.”’ Lowell, Mass., 1858. Baines, Epwarp, Jr.:—‘‘The History of Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain.” Baker, G. P.:—‘‘Calico Painting and Printing in the East Indies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Beautifully illustrated with color plates with interesting text. London, 1921. Banp, H. R.:—“‘Indian Dyeing and Block-Printing.”’ BanERJEI, N. N.:—‘‘The Cotton Fabrics of Bengal.” The Journal of Indian Art and Industry. Vol. VII. No. 68. October 1899. Barker, A. F.:—‘‘An Introduction to the Study of Textile Design.”” London, 1903. Biawoop, GEorRGE:—“‘ Cotton.”’ Bowman, F. H.:—“‘Structure of the Cotton Fibre.”” London, 1908. Brooks, Eugene Ciype:—(Professor of Education in Trinity College, Durham, N. C.). “The Story of Cotton and the Development of the Cotton States.” Carry, M.:—“‘A View of the Ruinous Consequences of a De- pendence on Foreign Markets for Sale of the Great Staples of this Nation, Flour, Cotton and Tobacco.”’ (1820). CuattEersiz, A. C.:—‘Notes on the Industries of the United Provinces.” Allahabad, 1908. Curistiz, Mrs. Arcurpatp H.:—‘‘Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving.” London, 1906. Coomaraswamy, A. K.:—‘‘The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon.”’ London, 1913. Crawrorp, M. D. C.:—‘‘ Peruvian Textiles.”” (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History.) 1915. 233 234 Bibliography Crawrorp, M. D. C.:—‘‘ Peruvian Fabrics.” (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History.) 1916. DonnELL, E. J.:—“‘Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton.” Published by the author, New York, 1872. ENTHOVEN, R. E.:—‘‘Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presi- dency.” The Journal of Indian Art and Industry, Vol. X. No. 82. April, 1903. Fatkn, Orto von:—Kunstgeschichte der Seidenweberei.” Berlin, 1921. FrEzIER, Monstrur:—“Frezier’s Voyage to the South Sea.” London, 1717. GARCILASSO DE LA VEGA:—‘Royal Commentaries of Peru.” E. Rycant. London, 1688. GRIFFITHS, JoHN:—“The Paintings in the Buddhist Cave- Temples of Ajanta.” London, 1897. GUARANTY Trust Company oF New York, 1919:—‘‘The Fabric of Civilization: A Short Survey of the Cotton Indus- try in the United States.” Hapaway, W. S.:—‘Cotton Painting and Printing in the Madras Presidency.’ Madras, 1917. The best general work on the cotton printing industry in India with excellent illustrations, by the Superintendent of the School of Arts, Madras. Happon, ALFRED C.:—“‘ Evolution in Art: as illustrated by the Life-Histories of Designs.” New York, 1914. p’ Harcourt, R. anp M.:—‘‘Art Ornemental les Tissus Indiens du Vieux Pérou.” Editions Albert Morancé, 1924. Henp.iey, P. H.:—‘‘Asian Carpets.’ Many rug designs were originally cotton designs. Houmes, Wiuut1am H.:—(a) “Textile Art in its Relation to the Development of Form and Ornament.” (Sixth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, 1889.) (b) “‘Textile Fabrics of Ancient Peru.’ Washington, 1889. Hooper, LutHer:—‘Hand-Loom Weaving, Plain and Orna- mental.’? London, 1910. Karun, A. M.:—Article appearing in “Der Konfectionaer.”” September 16th, 1928. Kipuine, J. L.:—‘‘The Industries of the Punjab.” The Journal of Indian Ari and Industry. Vol. No. 23. July 1888. Lz Coa, A. von:—“‘Chotscho.”’ Berlin, 1913. one ia Bibliography 235 Maccurpy, Grorce Grant, Pa.D.:—“A Study of Chiriquian Antiquities.” A scientific description of the pottery arts of prehistoric Central America. Yale University Press, 1911. MarspEn, Ricnoarp:—‘Cotton Spinnings: Its Development.” Marruews, J. Merritt:—‘‘The Textile Fibres.”” New York, 1924. ’ MircHewyu, Broapus, Pu.D.:—*“ Rise of the Cotton Mills in the South.” Johns Hopkins Press, 1921. A careful and eco- nomic history of the cotton industry in the South. Moxuarggi, T. N.:—‘‘Art Manufacture in India.” Morpuy, Wiuuiam §.:—“The Textile Industries.” Eight volumes. London, 1912. Technical history of textiles fully illustrated. . Nystrom, Paut H., Pu.D.:—‘ Textiles.” New York, 1919. Opret, Pror. Dr. A.:—“Die Baumwolle: Nach Geschichte, Anbau, Verarbeitung, und Handel, sowie nach ihrer Stellung im Volksleben und in der Staatswirtschaft.”” (Compiled by request of the Bremen Cotton Exchange.) PercivaL, Mac Ivar:—‘“ Chintz Book.” Persoz, J.:—‘*Traite Theorique et Pratique de |’Impression des Tissus.”’ Paris, 1846, four volumes of text with Atlas. A practical treatise on the chemistry of dyes and the art of dyeing, valuable for the many specimens of actual dyed fabrics, chiefly cotton, with which the work is illustrated. Reiss, W., AND STUBEL, A.:—“‘ The Necropolis of Ancon in Peru.” A contribution to our knowledge of the culture and indus- tries of the Empire of the Incas, being the results of excava- tions made on the spot. ‘Translated by Prof. A. H. Keane. Three volumes. Berlin, 1880-1887. Samman, H. F.:—‘‘*The Cotton Fabrics of Assam. The Journal of Indian Art and Industry. Vol. X. No. 82. Apri’ 1903. Scumipt, Max:—‘Uber Altperuanische Gewebe.” (Baessler Archiv, Band I. Leipzic and Berlin, 1911.) Sport, Ernest Henry:—‘‘ Man and Cotton.” SILBERRAD, Cuas. A.:—‘‘Cotton Fabrics of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh.” The Journal of Indian Art and Industry. Vol. X. No. 82. April 1903. SpinpDEN, Hersert J., Po.D.:—“A Study of Maya Art.” Pea- body Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology. 236 Bibliography Harvard University, 1918. A carefully illustrated survey of the prehistoric arts of Central America. SprnpEN, HersBert J., Pu.D.:—‘Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central America.” American Museum of Natural History, 1917. A popular discussion of the ancient arts of Mexico. Squirr, E. G.:—‘“‘Incidents of Travel and Explorations in the Land of the Incas.”” New York, 1877. Stem, M. Auret:—*‘ Ruins of Desert Cathay.” Two volumes. - ‘London, 1912. A personal narrative of explorations in Cen- tral Asia and westernmost China, with numerous illustrations, color plates, panoramas and maps from original surveys. Tuurston, Epaar:—“The Cotton Fabric Industry of the Madras Presidency.” The Journal of Indian Art and Industry. Vol. VII. No. 59. July, 1897. TineLEy, Richarp Hoapitey:—“‘The Dramatic Story of Cot- ton.’ From the Mentor of August, 1923. Watton, Perry:—‘‘The Story of Textiles.”” Boston, 1912. WARNER, Sik FrRanK:—‘The Silk Industry of the United King- dom.” Its Origin and Development. London. Watson, J. Forspes:—‘The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India.’’ London, 1866. A catalogue and key to a collection of specimens of all the important textile manufactures, comprising 700 specimens, (in large part cotton) contained in eighteen large volumes of which twenty sets were prepared from the store of the Indian Museum, Calcutta. A set of this most important work can be consulted in the Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. There is a similar collection in eight volumes with printed preface dated 1851, Berlin, collected by the brothers Schlagintwert, chiefly from Nepaul in the Museum of Ethnology in Munich. Watson, Witi1am:—‘Textile Design and Colour.” London, 1912. Wart, Stir Grorce:—‘The Wild and Cultivated. Cotton Plants of the World.” London, 1909. WeeEpeEN, Witi1am B.:—‘‘The Art of Weaving: A Handmaid of Civilization.”’ (Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1902, Vol. I, pages 191-210. Washington, 1903.) eo ae Bibliography 237 WIENER, Cuaries:—‘‘Pérou et Bolivie, Récit de Voyage suivi d’Etudes Archaeologiques et Ethnographiques et de Notes sur |’Ecriture et les Langues des Populations Indiennes.”’ Paris, 1880. WIENER, Lro:—“‘ Africa and the Discovery of America,’ volume 2. Philadelphia, 1922. Apart from theory contains valuable information on cotton in Africa and aboriginal America. Woopsury, Lrvi:—(Secretary of the Treasury) “Tables.” Published in 1836. ZIPsER, JuLIUS:—‘‘ Textile Raw Materials and their Conversion into Yarn.” Edited by Charles Salter. London, 1901. INDEX A Amalgamated Textile Workers of America, 228 American Federation of Labor, 220 American Museum of Natural His- tory, 199 Anabaptists introduce printing in southern Germany, 83 Appleton, Nathan, 145, 146 Armada, Spanish, 85 Arkwright, Richard, 111, 112, 115, 116 Art Alliance of America, 200 Artificial Silk, 189 The American Tubize Co., 191 The American Viscose Co., 191 Andemars, Swedish chemists 1858, 190 Celanese, 192 Cross, Bevan and Beadle, 1892, 190 Cotton cellulose, 178 Count Hillaire de 1889, 190 The Industrial Fiber Co., 1732, 191 Reaumur, French Chemist, 1734, 190 Artists, Lists, 202 Atlanta Exposition, 169 Ayres & Co., L. S., 205 B Chardonnet, Baker, G. P., 75 Ball, Katherine W., 20 Barbosa, Obvarado, 74 Basset, Wm. R., 193 Baumgarten, Fannie, 203 Bell, Thomas, 119, 145 Bennett, Thomas, Jr., 152 Beverly, Mass, 134 Bihr, Alphonse, 202 Blas, Gus, Co., 205 Blum, Albert, 198, 201 Boll Weevil, 223 Bonwit Teller & Co., 208 239 Bow, The Missile, 17 Bowers, Mrs. Isaac, 158 Brava, Island of, 155 Brooklyn Museum, 203 Budd, F. W., 202 Burt, W. G., 201 Cc Cabot, Mr., 134 Calicoes; great demand for, 96 Carlyle, Thomas, 121 Carr, Maria C., 202 Cartwright, Edmund, 118, 119, 145 Chadwick, George B., 201 Charlotte, N. C., 166 Cheney, Charles, 202 Chinese Explorers, 64 Clendenning, Mary Louise, 202 Cochineal, 85 Cceurdoux, Father, 75 Colonial Textile Arts, 127 Color, The beginning of color appli- cation, 21 Columbus finds cotton in Brahma Islands, 30 Compotus, Earl of Derby, 1381, 90 Compotus, Bolton Abbey. First mention of cotton in England, 90 Cone, Julie, 202 Contributors, List of, 201 Converters, 154 Cotton: Arabic names for cotton, 63 Brahmans and cotton, 66 The cotton buyer, 180 Classical names of cotton, 62 Cotton exchanges, 217 Cotton in Europe, 81 Cotton shipped to England, 1764, from Colonies, 129 Cotton Machinery Exposition in Greenville, S. C., 204 Cotton in 1140 in Genoa, 82 240 Cotton—Continued Germany receives cotton from Brazil, 1570, 125 Grades of Cotton, 181, 214 Law in 1721 regarding use of cot- ton, 97 Law forbidding sale of cotton, 1700 and 1712, 96 Cotton seeds for Colonists, 126 Cotton shipments from 1791-1911, 139 Cotton in Spain, 81 Cotton in Ulm in 1320, 82 Upland cotton, 130 Crawford, M. D. C., 202 Crompton, George, son of inventor, 100 Crompton, Samuel, 114, 116, 117, 121 Crompton, Samuel invents spinning mule, 1779, 115 Culin, Stewart, 201, 204 Culin, Stewart, The Missile Bow, 17 D Dacca muslins, 23 Dacca muslins and Indo-Greco statu- ary, 66 Dacca muslin names, 67 Dallimore, Alice L., 203 Daly, Helen S., 202 Davidson, Henry P., 201 Davidson Bros., 206 Decoration, 21 Defoe, 98 Denecke Co., The, 206 Discovery, Era of, 74 Vasco da Gama passage to India, 74 Doughty, Emma W., 203 Drake, Sir Francis, and the Sz. Phillip, 85 Drew, Louise, 203 Duffy, Y. Constance, 203 Dupont Co., 191 Dyes: German Cartel in dyes, 186 Dye Industry, 186 Dye Industry in U. S. result of war, 186 Dyes and explosives, 187 Vat Dyes, 189 Dyeing: Resist dyeing in pre-historic Peru, 58 Pliny describes Mordant dyeing, 65 Distribution of Resist Dyeing, 76 Sndex E Eakin, L. R., 205 Emporium Mercantile Co., 206 England: Cotton used as Candlewicks, 12th Century, 4 English difficulty with the Dutch, 94 F Fairchild, E. W., 197 Field, L. H., Co., 206 First International Cotton Confer- ence, 220 Fleary, Adrien, 202 Franklin, Benjamin, 127, 128 Folsom, Frederick C., 201 mh Frederick & Nelson, 206 Frietsch, Cholly, 203 Fulton, Francis, 202 ; G da Gama, Vasco, 72, 85 Garrick, David, 101 Gin, the Cotton, and Slavery, 139, 163 Gladding, Hope, 202 < Gourney, John describes cotton trade with India, 1614, 93 Gowing, Charles, 20 Gregg, William, 164 Greeks, knew of cotton and cotton technique before Christian Era, 6 Green, Mrs. Nathanial, 138 Greenville, S. C., 166 Grinnell, Joseph, 152 H Hall I’ Th’ Wood, 114 . Hammond, Senator of S. C., 170, 141 ; Hanson, E. Irving, 201 Hargreaves, James, 134, 115 Harned & Van Maur, Inc., 206 : Hecht, Zolton, 202 Heinke, A. J., 203 Hentschel, M. E., 202 Herter, Albert, 201 Hochschild Kohn & Co., 205 Hoover Committee Elimination of a Waste in Industry, 193 ; Hopedale, Massachusetts, 122 © M Hopi Cottons of Ceremony, 37 . Hovey Co., C. F., 205 4 Howland, The, Dry Goods Co., 205 4 Hughs, Bess B., 203 Hurd, Alice M., 202 Sndex I India: Methods of decorating Indian cot- ton, 75 Indian costumes, 71 Seventeenth Century Indian Cot- ton, 70 Indigo, Herodotus mentions, 64 J Jackson, Patrick T., 146 Jacquard, Jean Marie, 119 Java, received cotton from India, 3rd to 5th Century A.p., 7 Jeffersonian embargo, 145 Jefirey, Dr., 19 Jelleff, Frank R., Inc., 205 K Karasz, Ilonka, 203 Kaufman & Baer Co., 205 Kaufmann Strauss Co., 205 Kennedy, John, 116 Kent, Henry W., 200, 201 Kinloch, Andrew, 119 Kipling’s Naulahka, 70 Kramer, Conrad, 203 Ktesias mentions cotton, 400 B.c., 64 L ““Lagoda,’’ 150 La Grange, Ga., 166 La Salle & Koch Co., 205 Lawrence, Amos & Abbott, 149 Lawrence, Lillian, 202 Long, Florence, 202 Leverholm, Lord, 114 Lewis, The A. T., & Son Dry Goods Co., 206 Lowd, Edna B., 203 Lowell, Mass., 148 Lowell, Francis C., 145, 146, 147, 148, 149 Looms: Two basic types of looms, 25 The loom and Cloth Making, 24 Description of Cotton Loom, 25 Distribution of Cotton Looms, 26 Draper Loom, 121 Fourteenth Century Loom in Eng- land, 107 M. de Gennes makes drawing of power loom, 1678, 106 M. de Gennes, 118 241 Looms of Haida Tribes in Alaska, 26 Introduction of Indian Loom in England and Europe, 28 Age of Indian Loom, 66 Indian forms of Cotton Looms, 28 John Kay of Bury and fly shuttle, 108 Francis C. Lowell and the Power Loom, 145 Northrop Loom, 122 Parallel distribution of bow and single barred loom, 34, 35 Penelope’s Loom, 26 Peruvian Loom, 56 Prehistoric and Modern Looms in New World, 33 Warp Weighted loom from Swiss Lake Cultures, 25 M MacLaren, J. W., 201 Manu, Cotton in Statutes of, 65 Marshal, Mary, 202 Mayer, Edward L., Costumer, 201 McDowell, James, 182, 184 Megasthenes, 300 B.c., mentioned flowered muslins, 65 Meier & Frank Co., 206 Memphis, 220 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 199 Meyer, Max, 201 Migel, J. A., 201 Mijer, Pieter, 202 Miller & Paine, 206 Mitchell, Broadus, The Rise of Cot- ton Mills in the South, 163 Mills: Acushnet Mills, 153 Amoskeage, 1831, 150 Bennett Mfg. Co., 153 The Booth Mill, 149 The Boston Mfg. Co., 146, 148 Bristol Mfg. Co., 153 Butler Mills, 154 The Charleston Mfg. Co., 170 City Mfg. Co., 153 Columbia Spinning Co., 153 Cotton Mills in Haverhill, Salem, Nantucket and Exeter, 150 Dartmouth Mfg. Co., 154 Grinnell Mfg. Co., 153 Gosnold Mills Co., 154 The Great Falls Mfg. Co., 1823, 150 The Hamilton Co., 149 Hathaway Mfg. Co., 153 Howland Mfg. Co., 153 242 Hndex Mills—Continued Kilburn Mills, 154 Laconia Mills—1845, 150 The Lawrence Co., 149 Manomet Mills, 154 The Massachusetts Mill, 149 Merrimack Mfg. Co., 148, 149 Naumkeag Steam Cotton Mill, 1847, 150 New Bedford Mfg. Co., 153 Nonquit Spinning Co., 154 Pacific Mfg. Co., 1854, 150 Page Mfg. Co., 154 Pepperhill Mills, 1850, 150 Pierce Mfg. Co., 153 Potoomska Mills, 15 ; Quansett Spinning Co., 154 Rotch Spinning Co., 154 Slater Mills, 144 147, Soule Mills, 154 The Suffolk Mill, 149 Taber Mill, 154 The Tremont Mill, 149 Type of fabric made in Waltham, 147 Wamsutta Mills, 1847, 152-153 Whitman Mills, 154 Mogul Empire, Fall—1368, 73 Mohammedan Conquests and Cot- ton, 68 Mohammedan-Pre Cotton designs, 69 Moliére’s Le Bourgois Gentilhomme, 86 Moody, Paul, 146 148, Moors, The, Abdrahaman ITI, 81 Morehouse Martens Co., The, 205 Morey, Bertha, 202 Morris, Wm., 121 N National Aniline & Chemical Co., 80 National Association of Cotton Man- ufacturers, 205 New Bedford, 151 Neiman- Marcus Co., 205 New World: Antiquity of cotton in New World, 32 Asia, culture home of America, 34 Asiatic intrusion, 49 Cotton blankets in tribute réle of Montezuma, 40 Cotton from Chichen Itza, 41 Discovery of cotton in New World great surprise, 8 Law of the Indies, 41 Maya culture, 32 Native dyes, 44, 45 Parallel distribution of bow and single barred loom, 34 Pre-historic cotton culture, 31 Pre-historic cotton map, 31 Spanish influence on native design, 42 Neyland, Harry, 201 O tiger g Christopher Phillip, Jouy, Bean Robert, 121 P Peel, Sir Robert, 149 Percival, Spencer, 117 Perry, Dwight, 152 Peru: Burial customs, 52 Peruvian colors, 50 Peruvian design, 60 Types of Peruvian fabrics, 56 Incas, 47 Pre-Inca, 3 Cottons of Pre-Inca Peru, 53 Pre-Inca culture, 50 Preparation of fiber, 53 Resist-dyeing in Pre-historic Peru, 58 (9) Petremont, Clarice, 203 Pintado, 74 Pikula, Anna, 202 Plague among dyers on Coromandel Coast, 95 Pliny, 75 Polo, Marco: States cotton was only known in Fokien, 7 Discovered indigo in 1300, 84 Chintzes of Masuliputam, 73 Pogue, H. & S. Co., 205 Poor, Marion, 203 Portuguese, The, 155 Prendergast, Charles, 201 Printing: Thomas Bell invents copper rollers for printing in 1770, 103 Charles Taylor and Thomas Wal- ker, 103 List of printing plants in England and Europe, 84 Manchester Act in 1736 permitting manufacture and sale of British calicoes, 101 First British printing plant estab- lished in Richmond in 1690, 95 Purdy, F. W., 201 a ; * , 5 Index R Reeves, Ruth, 203 Reiss, F. Wienold, 204 Rodier, Paul, 197 Roe, Sir Thomas, 70 Roessel, Carl, 202 Roosevelt dam, Salt River Valley, 180 Ruskin, John, 121 Ryther, Martha, 202 S Salem, Massachusetts, 128 San Blas Indians design, 44 Scythian Sheep—Cotton in the Mid- dle Ages in Europe was supposed to be the wool of a vegetable sheep, 5, 63 Silk in colonies, 126 The rise of the Silk Industry, 160 Simonson, Grace H., 202 Slater, Samuel, goes into partnership with Silas Brown and _ builds first yarn mill in 1793 in Paw- tucket, 135-136 Slaughter, Hazel Burnham, 202 Smith, Bertha, 202 Smith, Rachel, 202 Smiths, early mechanical efforts of the, 135 Southwest, from, 37 Antiquity of Cotton, 38 Spanish Colonists, 125 Spinden, Dr. Herbert J., 32 Spinning: 54 Two methods of spinning, 23 Spinning wheel, 24 James Hargreaves Spinning Jenny, 110 Leonardo da Vinci invents spinning flyer, 106 Old Saxony Wheel, 127 Louis Paul Carder, 110 John Wyatt Spinning Rollers, 110 First spinning mill, in Philadelphia, 134 Ring frame, 122 Cotton statistics: From 1815-1859, 140 1859-1860, 141 1864-1865, 142 Stein, Sir Aurel discovers cotton fabrics in Gobi Desert, 2nd to 5th Century, 6 Stix, Baer & Fuller Dry Goods Co., 205 Stores, List, 205 Oldest Cotton fabrics 243 Strutt, Jededah, 112 Sumene, Mlle. Durant de, 202 T Tannahill, Mary, 202 Tash, John, 93 Textile machinery, 166 Textile workers migrate from Conti- nent to England, 91 Thalheimer Bros., 205 Thompson, J. H., 201 Tilden, Alice F., 202 Trade: Arab Merchants, 69 The British East India Co., 86, 125 The Dutch East India Co., 86 Dutch opens trade in cotton with Japan in 17th Century, 7 The French East India Co., 85 Development of Trade in the Orient, 85 Trade between the Orient and Europe, 72 Egypt, no cotton in commerce with India nor silk with China, 7 Cotton trade in Pre-Spanish Amer- ica, 39 Mr. Sedgwick presents British cali- co to Princess of Wales, 102 Rise of Turks cuts off Europe’s trade, 73 The Weavers’ True Case, 101 Moors introduced cotton into Spain, 9th and 10th Century, 4 V Vogel, Milton, 201 Ww Waltham, Mass., 146 Walton, Laura E., 202 War of 1812, 145, 147 Ward, B. C., & Co., 158 Washington, George, 184 Water Sheep; Chinese explorers early Christian Era mention ‘‘ Water Sheep” perhaps referring to cot- ton, 8 Watt, James, steam-engine, 120 Waugh, Coulton, 203 Wearne, Harry, 201 Whaling industry in New Bedford, 151 Whitman, David, 152 Whitney, Eli, 119, 142 ey saw tooth Gin, 1793, 138, l War yen resin SW uttney: regor Co., 206 Ceerey Wilson, Ruth J., 202 Tae tae oo Wissler, Dr. Clark, 199 ise _ Witters, Nell, 202 ‘ Women’s Wear, 199 * ; Wool merchants protest use of cdttod . ‘ 1621, 92 Wyatt, Jno., 115 - % >. s, oe = . ~ er eA \ ~ - # —s ~ \ ¥ 4 4 - \ ‘ _ .¥ q t a vy . : , er Bea é : _ ’ i t Tan ' SA) We a . aa : iets 7% i . ; ify ‘ * e 4 i, \ . ER Te “ a 7”