Key to Higher Cotton Prices, Jobs for Mill Workers, Is People Work, Unless People Buying Cotton Products, Says Editor, July 1921

We observe from Monroe correspondence that the boll weevil is now in Union County, which means that at no distant date it will be here also. Union County has always been in the habit of sharing its possessions liberally with us.

ONE THING NEEDFUL

Various agencies may be invoked to relieve the present distress of the cotton farmer, but nothing that will amount to any substantial assistance to him will be forthcoming until there is, first of all, developed a market for cotton.

The reason that cotton is not worth more than 10 cents a pound now is that nobody is using it. To be sure, there is not enough of it in sight for the average yearly consumption of the spindles of the world if these should be set running at once or within the next year, but the first prerogative to better cotton prices is that these spindles be started.

Various propositions have been considered by cotton farmers, through their organizations and through their friends in Washington, and various relief measures have been suggested, but many of them seem to omit almost entirely this fundamental proposition upon which the future price of cotton will be governed.

The law of supply and demand has the raw cotton situation today by the horns. In this industry at least, that venerable law has not been totally dismissed and relegated. It is working there with a vengeance. The demand has gone to pieces, and this has so materially increased the supply that it is worth nothing. Stimulate the demand, get the markets to absorbing the cotton, get somebody who wants this product for its usual purposes, and there will immediately develop a better price for the staple. Until then, it is only like picking at a cancer with a pin to try to cure the cotton producers’ distress.

-=-

Slackness in business is causing other cotton mill plants in this community to close their spindles and looms. The fact that these properties are face to face with a condition where it will not pay them to operate, adds a strange emphasis upon conditions in other mill communities where there is a self-imposed idleness.

From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, July 16, 1921