Is State Building Too Many Cotton Mills, Asks Charlotte Editor, March 30, 1925

Are We Building Too Many Cotton Mills?

The Charlotte News thinks this question naturally arises form the recent statement of the Guaranty Trust Company of New York, the trust company’s review of business conditions paying much attention to the textile industry. The trust company’s statement explains that the reason the cotton mill industry is not getting up more rapidly out of the slough it has been in for many months is because of the “great expansion which arose in direct response to war-time needs.”

Such an expansion, it continues, involved the outlay of an immense among of capital in the way of plant-investment and equipment which subsequently proved to be far in excess of normal requirements.

The result of such expansions, such a multiplication of cotton mills, and especially in the South, has been a growing inducement to manufacturers to maintain their operating schedule as nearly as possible at a capacity rate in order to avoid the costs of production represented by fixed charges on plants that are partially idle.

The News says “it has been a strange phenomenon that cotton manufacturing, as a composite industry, has not been showing that recovery from the slump of months ago which was reasonably expected in view of general business conditions.

“The fact that business and trade are organically good has been verified in the activities on the stock exchange, but the eagerness of investors to put their money into stock values and the evidence that these stocks were regarded by the public as sound investments,--all of this witnessing to a firm foundation in general business lines,--has not touched the cotton manufacturing field.

“It has been one industry not to feel the new surges of improvement overtaking so many of the other basic industries, and of course, this is hurting the South in no small measure. Cotton manufacturing is our greatest source of activity and of employment, and when it is injured, our social economic body generally suffers an impairment.”

From the editorial page of the Concord Daily Tribune, March 30,1925

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1925-03-30/ed-1/seq-4/#words=March+30%2C+1925