TEXTILES: Rayon v. Cotton

Cotton-State Senators chortled. Headed by old (79) “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, they had fought a bitter minor battle. The War Department had plumped for the use of rayon cord in synthetic tires in place of cotton. The politicos, ever-sensitive in their cotton fibers, worried about the South’s loss of a good chunk of its domestic cotton market. Then, last week, the Senate’s Truman Committee mightily boosted the cause of cotton cord.

Rough-&-tumble Rubber Czar Jeffers thought he had settled the question last October. At the War Department’s request he has bulled through most of his program to expand U.S. rayon cord capacity 100,000,000 lb. annually (to a total of 200,000,000 lb.). He was all set to use rayon cord in all medium and heavy synthetic tires for the Army. To the outraged protests of cotton Senators (who called Jeffers before the Senate’s Agricultural Committee) Jeffers gave a flat answer: the Army wanted rayon; the Army was going to get it. Army tests, he said, had proved rayon had higher tensile strength than cotton, greater resistance to heat.

The Truman Committee turned its heat on those “Army tests.” Said the Committee: the War Department had decided on rayon “without the benefit of any adequate tests. . . .”

Slipshod tests had been conducted, the Committee reported, under the auspices of military men drafted from the Big Four rubber companies. But even these tests had proved “cotton cord the equal of rayon in most sizes of synthetic rubber tires in the latest tests. Rayon has displayed no superiority over cotton to warrant the great investment in critical materials now being made to produce facilities for rayon cord.”

With a long political look ahead, the Committee gloomed: “The effect of the War Department predilection for rayon . . . will be a disaster to … the South.”

Bull Bill Jeffers snorted: “So what? . . . Experts of the Army, the industry and my office disagree. I’ll trail along with them. . . .”