Monday, Jan. 10, 1938
Boycott Business
The enterprising Japanese airmen who dropped a round of bombs on the U. S. gunboat Panay unwittingly did more than the best efforts of the Committee For A Boycott Against Japanese Aggression and the American League for Peace & Democracy to arouse U. S. citizens to a systematic boycott of Japanese goods.
Chief target of anti-Japanese boycotts is raw silk, which makes up over half of Japan's exports to the U. S., and supplies 92% of the silk used here. Recently Manhattan boycotters staged an "anti-silk parade" and last week students from 150 universities danced in the snow around a bonfire on the Vassar College campus feeding silk stockings and ties to the flames (see p. 42).
Last year, during eleven months, the U. S. paid $91.500,000 for 49,200,000 pounds of raw silk, most of which was used in silk hosiery for women. When a college girl buys a pair of lisle or rayon stockings instead of silk she deprives Japan of exactly 10-c-, and probably is not aware that at the same time she is taking 21-c- out of the pockets of U.S. silk hosiery workers. U. S. cotton farmers and non-silk hosiery workers profit to a similar extent. Fearful of such dislocations, both A. F. of L. and C. 1.0. announced that they favor boycotting goods of Japanese manufacture.
The possibility that a boycott can prevent the sale of any great part of the silk hosiery turned out by U. S. manufacturers (42,000,000 dozen pairs in 1936) or throw the 90,000 workers in the industry out of a job seemed slim. About 65% of silk hosiery machines in operation can be converted to lisle or rayon production without much loss. Tide last week reported that during the last two months 55 manufacturers have begun to make lisle hosiery although only five did so before.
Managing Director Earl Constantine of the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers finally issued a warning to his trade: a silk stocking boycott would hurt hosiery mills because lisle stockings wear four times as long as silk and 42,000.000 dozen pairs of silk stockings annually would shrink to ten or twelve million annual output if lisle were substituted.
Such theorizing may be tested if imports of raw silk continue to decline. Militant boycotters point with pride to July when some $4.000.000 was lopped off the $10,940,000 worth of raw silk Japan sold the U. S. in January. October's $8,327,000 slipped to an estimated $6,300.000 in November.
Still too early to estimate are the results of the boycott of Japan's manufactured products. Last week S. H. Kress & Co., the McCrory Stores, the Woolworth chain, S. S. Kresge Co., H. L. Green Co. announced they would place no new orders for Japanese goods. U. S. imports of Japanese foodstuffs, housewares, toys, cotton goods and other manufactured products valued in 1936 at some $76,700,000-- substitutes for which are procurable in domestic and other foreign markets--may be affected if this movement grows.
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