Focus 580; Big Cotton: How a Humble Fiber Created Fortunes Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map

In this hour of focus 580 we will be talking about cotton. It might seem at first blush to be a kind of a Monday in thing to be talking about and yet when you start to think about it and you appreciate all the uses to which cotton is put you see that this is something that touches all of our lives in many ways every day. Certainly the first thing that you'll think of is cotton as a textile interior as clothing material and probably we all wear a lot of things that are made out of cotton but also in its different forms as a fiver as an oil or as a seed. Cotton is found in literally thousands of products in foods in cosmetics. It's even in the money the paper money that we use every day in this part of focus 580 will be talking about cotton and it's the many ways that it has helped shape the history perhaps of the world certainly of the United States. And our guest is Steven Yoffe. He is author of a recently published book came out I believe last fall and will still be in bookstores if you're interested in reading the title of his book is Big cocking and the

subtitle How a humble fiber created fortunes wrecked civilizations and put America on the map. It's published by Viking. Our guest Stephen Yoffie is a novelist a playwright a video producer he is an award winning screenwriter. He has written for a number of publications including Playboy Rolling Stone details and also the San Francisco Chronicle. He makes his home in California. This is his first nonfiction book and it is published by Viking. Again it's out there in the bookstore if you want to read it. Questions are also welcome here on the program. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We do also have a toll free line and that is good anywhere that you can hear us 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Well Mr. hello hello how are you. Good thanks and yourself. Good thank you. Thanks for talking with us today we appreciate it. I guess the things I would want to mention here just in terms of explaining your interest in the subject is certainly come by your interest in cotton. Honestly at least in one sense you grew up in Lowell

Massachusetts and this was the place where the first. I hope I have this right as a first textile mill in the United States was located. Yes pretty close to that actually. The first spinning mill was located at the talk of Rhode Island a few years previously but the first real factory in the sense of both spinning and weaving cotton that factory was in Massachusetts in Waltham and then it moved to Lowell fairly quickly after that so the really the first industrial empire created from cotton started in long messages and in fact it was the beginning of the industrial revolution in the United States and certainly the Lowell's were a very important family a big family in terms of early American industry as well as being the Lowell's of Lowell Observatory and where very significant involved with the history of Harvard University and had a couple celebrated poets in the family so the Lowell name is pretty important in American history.

That's right in fact. The Boston aristocrats blow Cabot's and other families were really totally responsible for raising the money and funding of the cotton industry in the United States and it made them extraordinarily wealthy. Along the way as well. Well how else do you account for your starting to dig into this topic and getting more interested in it to the point where you did a significant amount of research and we end up with this book. That's a good question David about the way the book guy came out about two weeks ago not necessarily last. Oh my apologies I guess somehow I thought it might have been a last fall release so it's hot off the press and hot off the press. Well here's basically what happened. I was writing a catalog that my wife was doing for upscale natural products products of the both combined. A lot of a great deal of style with environmental responsibility the catalog is the Viterra.

And when I was helping her by writing the copy for that she was doing some organic cotton products and I said to her well I get a cotton. I mean I understand about a Demick food because we happen to eat a lot of organic food but who knows about organic cotton. Why would they be organic cotton and she said well even call up the color. This woman in Texas is named was Hillary a pepper pepper and. She'll explain it to you so I called up Loretta and Luria grows organic cotton out of Lubbock with about 30 other families and so I started talking to her and she said Well Stephen the problem with conventional cotton is that it's one of the dirtiest products on earth in terms of the amount of pesticides and herbicides it uses. And because I live in an area where cotton is grown I have seen the effects of all of that on the workers in the field in fact there are cottonwood of all around me whose husbands have died in the fields prematurely because of the extraordinary amount of chemicals and pesticides in cotton in fact she said. You know it's environmentally it's dangerous it's not dangerous to wear a pair of jeans because it's been

bleached out. But every pair of jeans basically contains three quarters of a pound of chemicals in the fertilizers pesticides herbicides and so forth. And I started to think about that and I thought to myself whoa that's a story that not many people know so I was in touch with my agent in New York and I mentioned to her that there might be something in this and she said well you know nobody really wants to read a book about how bad cotton is you know why don't you do this. Why did you write the social history of cotton and include all this information in it. And then that really started me on the path and that plus the connection I had to actually growing up in this one city in America where. Which established in many ways the economy of the United States on the basis of cotton led me into doing the book. There are apparently cotton was independently domesticated in into different areas of the world in Asia and in in the New World. There are some differences between those cottons. Does anyone really know has that

pin been pinned down to a particular place where cotton originally came from there. There are two places that it came from and it's an interesting story because two cultures quite independently from one another 10000 miles apart developed the same tools essentially to create fabric from the plant. One of them was in northern Peru and the other was in the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. And by the way there might have been a third at about the same time in what is now Ethiopia. But those are the three areas that cotton was first domesticated and David it was probably about fifty five hundred years ago. There's also some cotton that was found in a cave in Mexico from that time so it's a little spotty but but definitely the Indus Valley and definitely Peru. And one thing about a Cotton Bowl which is really the capsule that contains the lint that I should point out which is that it's a very tough and leathery as a result of which it tends to float across oceans fairly easily and so the migration of cotton as I explained in my book would be sort of like trying to trying to track it would be like

walking at a child who taking a crayon and marking up a globe while it spinning it goes in all directions over millions of years until it lands in these different areas. Well one thing I think is interesting and different a significant difference between these kind of cottons has to do with the length of the fibers and I think that probably that relates to a term that I'm sure a lot of people have heard and probably don't really understand and it is staple length. I'm sure people have to have heard about something being long stable. And that's supposed to be good and yet I'm sure if you asked him Well what does that mean they'd say well I don't know that that is what we're talking about the Asian cons I think tend to be shorter fibers those from the new world tend to be longer. And I guess the one thing that I understand about this is longer is better. You can explain why. Yes size definitely matters when it comes to cotton. There are two sensually two kinds of cotton in the world these days one is a green seeded a plant cotton which is the

cotton that made the south wealthy. That's the sticky seed cotton and it's considered to be medium staple. There's a longer seated black seated a lot I'm sorry lager staple black seated cotton which is basically noticed Pima cotton these days which essentially is Egyptian cotton. The slight difference and variety. Difference basically is this that when you when you wind up making yarn you've got to the whole the Fiver's part and continue to send them down and the cotton fibers are a spiral a futile spiral if you look at them under a microscope so they cling to one another and you take a long length of cotton and continue to pull it and then you twist it well. If you've got two inch staples which is a very long fiber as opposed to an inch which would be sort of like a typical medium staple an inch or an inch and a quarter that difference of a half for three quarters of an inch is crucial because once you pull the fiber as thin as

you can and twist it you are creating strength by twisting these fibers together. And if you can pull it longer and then twist it you can create a really a sturdier fiber that's also thinner at the same time which is why you get high end Egyptian cotton Pima cotton that is very fine and yet has a lot of tensile strength at the same time whereas if you were to do the same thing with a medium length cotton which is what we all wind up wearing and using in sheets the continent actually performs quite well but it doesn't have that extra dimension of fineness about it. Something else I think is interesting that I learned and there people might not know is that now. Cotton Comes in colors naturally it comes in colors and that now again if you got me ask people what color is cotton they'll give you a funny look and say well it's white because we've all seen maybe people actually seen what cotton looks like instantiate state and probably think of cotton balls or something like that and what's on the end of a Q-tip.

It's white but the fact is that there are a number of naturally occurring colored cottons. Yes actually cotton comes in about 36 different varieties and for a long time itself America in particular cotton was blue and it was picked and grown and lived in a variety of colors pretty much the colors of the rainbow with few exceptions the most predominant are various colors various shades of brown from moco through darker brown. And there is in fact in Peru. There is a thriving community that continues to grow brown cotton and use it in various products becoming James real land has spent a fair amount of time. Cultivating that plant in a woman in the United States named Sally Fox was doing the same thing trying to introduce Ronald Cotton into the United States. And it's an interesting part of the fun of doing this book was that as you're discovering these things having read my book I was discovering that when I wrote it because I get out like

everybody else I assumed Well there is cotton and of course there's cotton because there's white cotton and what else is there in fact cotton in its natural state is actually kind of a yellow which has a kind of a yellowish hue to it and it's really only when optical whiteners are applied to cotton that it turns white in the way that we are familiar with it. Our guest in this part of focus 580 Steven Yoffie he's authored a book that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about cotton. It's titled big cotton how a humble fiber created fortunes wrecked civilizations and put America on the map and it's published by Viking and is out now and it just out came out actually at the beginning of January and is in bookstores if you'd like to read it and of course questions are certainly welcome. The telephone number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 and we do also have a toll free line that is good anywhere that you can hear us and that is eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We do

have a caller here someone who has a question to ask so we will get right to them. And there in Indiana on our line. For well below I'm certainly glad to go on in this aspect about cotton clothes a certain style in some respect members or some like Technicolor films I've seen in some of the black and white. But you know the cotton fields are about as wide as you can possibly get and which makes me wonder if they've done some sort of thing to the films this or that slight yellowness come in you know over to a brown background makes it look like it's white when we're looking at. I wonder about that. But one led the industry to do the white thing so to speak. Memories of growing up you know whiteness was purity and I think you know if you did something to your grandmother's white tablecloth you might as well forget it the whole week you know. Thanks a lot.

Lauren was is there some particular reason that accounts for the preference for white of the white when you described it as well it can be described really which is essentially that we can we equate whiteness with purity and whiteness also have the second element to it which which was beneficial to the manufacturer is. And that is one of the dyes were applied to it. And most cotton is dyed in one form or another. Obviously the dyes stay relatively true to the color because the ground of the background is now as pure white as possible. But purity is is is really essential in all of this for the same reason and actually using a lot of the same chemical that teeth whiteners another whiteners they used it's has to do with absorbing the blue rays and so forth. But aside from the technical aspects of it it's just simply of the color described it. It's to make us equate something that we automatically take in as being pure. And I find very attractive for that reason so that the equation of whiteness and cotton is really the cotton industry were very

hard to plant that that concept in our minds. Well it's interesting too though again among the interesting stories in here we're in the section where you're talking about the the Indian cotton industry and how that helped touch off the industrial revolution. Because people in Britain were very interested in Indian cottons that it's actually not an easy thing to get caught and to take die. You have to do a lot of things too it takes to really get it to take up the color. That's right David. One of the reasons is because of the cellulose which essentially is 23 you look at and cotton are related distantly related but they have essentially a lot of chemistry in common. And as a result of being cellulose it does not necessarily absorb dies with the exception of Indigo which is which is a major exception. Otherwise it tends to too late or or create a resistance to the dye that's being applied and so in order to get the cellulose to absorb the dyes

they had to treat the dyes and they called it animal ising them which is to add animal proteins to the cellulose in the end. In India this is figured out oh about seven or eight centuries ago a long long time before the west figured anything out even comparable to that. And there were specialists who died and they were all vegetable dyes at the at the time. And the fact that the trick was essentially not to simply apply the dye but to maintain the dye that remained fixed so that when it was washed the dye color didn't fade and that seems to us natural but it was not a natural occurrence for centuries. All right well let's go and we'll talk with someone else I have a caller in. Calling from a mobile phone car phone line number one hello. Hi who are you. I would like to know if you would speak just a little bit to the natural evolution of cotton. I know that with corn for instance it started out as a grass that was crossed bred and inbred until it became

that and the plant that produces the years that we know today I can only assume that something similar happened with cotton that the fibers of cotton serve some purpose in nature before humans got ahold of it and started modifying it I just want to know if you knew anything about that and I'll just go ahead and thank you thank you a great question and the answer is there's not a lot of historical data on how cotton was first domesticated there are thirty six kinds of cotton out there in the universe but only two or three of them. Really lend themselves to the kind of domestic use. One was in Asia they all have of course Latin names which I won't go into but they all have the same trait and so once they were domesticated there was not a lot of modification going on from that point on they have essentially have to produce flint which is obviously the fiber and by the way every little pod which is about the shape of a walnut called a cotton ball obviously contains about five hundred thousand

fibers all connected to seeds one way or another so that the sensuous the profile and has been the profile for thousands of years. All right. Next we'll go to another caller and this is someone listening in. Champaign it's line number two. Hello. Hello. Yes. You talk about fortunes being made with cotton and one of the ones that I know a little bit about would like to know more about if possible is a potter Palmer who was kind of famous here in Illinois in the development of Chicago and real estate and development and so forth and the Palmer House Hotel and and he financed a lot of the buildings that became like Marshall Fields stores and so forth. And I understand he made his first fortune in kind of cornering cotton in the north right before the Civil War because he kind of predicted that. The northern states would be cut off from cotton

during a conflict and what are the more explicit details about that. While I can honestly tell you I know absolutely nothing about part of Palmer's connection to the cotton forgotten OK well I've I've heard very little had a lot of people been that made fortunes with it. I can definitely tell you about the process that went on but not necessarily his and direct involvement. Basically the concentrating in this country took place in New York and as the conflict between the north and the South escalated. As a lot of people may or may not know a lot of the Southern plantations were financed in fact almost all of the money that that went into financing the southern cotton came from New York financier's some of the came from southern banks but a lot of it developed there and so the North had a vested interest in maintaining the cotton plantations in the south and a lot of that cotton went into New England's mills and the rest of it about two thirds of it went to England's mills. And so

a lot of. The money that was made had to do with trying to make sure that the conflict which escalated between the north and the South did not affect the trade. The trade was essentially conducted between the lords of the Loom who were obviously the manufacturing tycoons in the north and the lords of the lashes they were called who were the plantation owners although I don't know about Palmer's connection to that specifically. I know that in many ways stocks or inventory were built up as much as possible as the as the situation worsened so that when the war came there were men who profited greatly from having a huge inventory to ride them through. Although I have to say and I'm not sure not sure this of course this is true of Parma. Most of the people who had done that expected the civil war to last anywhere from three to six months. That was a very very common assumption at the time and the

fact that it lasted for as long as it did wiped out lots of fortunes because no one really had anticipated the length of the war. OK thank you very much. You're welcome and thank you and again other people who are listening are welcome to call with questions we are. Almost at the midpoint of this hour and again our guest is Steven Yoffie he is a novelist a playwright has been a video producer and award winning screenwriter has written for magazines and has authored this book it's titled big cotton how a humble fiber created fortunes wrecked civilizations and put America on the map as his first nonfiction book. It's published by Viking just out. Questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Maybe take a step back and we talk and we can talk some more about cotton in America but for a moment maybe we talk a little bit about about England about cotton and about the industrial revolution because all those things go together and then very quickly it makes the jump from England across the Atlantic. The United States as we talked about a little

earlier there was a point when some of the most at least as far as Europeans were concerned this desirable cotton was coming from India because they were very highly skilled at producing it at weaving and dyeing it and there was a great in the middle 16 hundreds I guess there was an enormous demand for Indian cotton in Europe in France and also in England and that led some people in England to think well I think we should be able to make this ourselves why buy this from India when we can make our own. And this comes to this story of a man named Richard alk right who is a very important figure perhaps one of the first important figures in the industrial revolution. About him sure. I have to say one of the fascinating parts of the whole process of researching cotton to me David was the extraordinary gallery of rogues and crooks and larcenous and incredibly inventive ingenious people who are often the same person by the way who got involved in the history of our great represents all of those

traits. He was a guy in the late the 18th century about 1770 1780 in the Lancashire which essentially was a bunch of hills and sheep and foggy weather and all the rest of it up there in the middle and of England who was the son of a barber. And he made wigs and making wigs he had to string the strands of hair together. So one of the first inventions were being created hand inventions like the spinning jenny by James hard reason about seven hundred sixty two. He took special interest in that and these are all ways of taking what we had essentially had been a manual operation for centuries which is spinning very laborious spinning and weaving cotton because of its short fibers that takes much longer to do that than many other kinds of fiber like wool or flax. So when our current started to look at the way these things were being done he also came across a couple of early mechanical versions of these hand

Kring to the machines and he thought to himself If I can take this from here and now from there and basically lifted them without any compensation to the people who are the inventors. He put them together with a guy and they invented what is called a water frame and they want to frame it. Is essentially a way of taking the processes of the Spinning Wheel and finding a way to elongate and twist a thread and then wrap it around the spindle using hydraulic power from a nearby stream and there are lots of streams and rivers in comp Crawford where he came from the Lancashire using belt driven machinery to do that and I actually went back into tech at Rhode Island and looked at like a model of the first water frame and you say to yourself because really lint is so extraordinarily fragile and you know you're using a technology that existed 300 years ago it's extraordinary how they were able to take this extraordinarily delicate operation and find a way to mechanize

it. And that really became the genesis of the factory system that really has control lives in England in the United States ever since because once they were able Arkwright was able to mechanized that it was ambitious enough to put together what is really the first factory in this way that we consider the term these days. Creating a building near a river and having all of the machinery built right at that spot and then attracting workers from all around Midlands to actually move it was the first time in history that people actually left home to go work somewhere else far from home and families picked up and moved to this little town in Korea to the town of Crawford which in many ways is the prototype of all of the factory towns that have blossomed really all over the Western Hemisphere ever since. And apparently it's it's a museum now so that if you go there you can actually go and see. You can see it's still standing.

That's right actually a couple of guys in the 70s 1970s and awkward have long been forgotten in Western history and so forth it was like a footnote. They will they found the factory that he had put together in the late 18th century it was filled with toxic paint cans. They flipped it out and now the society in this year and in Crawford is become a museum and of fact in Lowell Massachusetts which really happened about 25 30 years after that the factories that had long been abandoned in Lowell Massachusetts have come back to life as a national park but some of them sure some of your listeners have been too. And it's a really interesting experience to go through the factories by then of course they were they had steam engines and other kinds of. Energy sources but essentially it was the same process of of taking and taking a fiber and transforming it into fabric. And that conversion process that I found

extraordinarily interesting because it was so difficult. It really required the sharpest most advanced kind of intelligence and ingenuity of people to be able to perform it is the is what our right did essentially did he just take the journey and introduce the idea of mechanically making it mechanical powered not by humans on a large scale is essentially not much difference between the water frame and the journey. Now there's not very much difference between the two. There are there are other advances that came about after he made that major advance and one of them had to do with something called the mule and the mule essentially is a way of of not only stretching the fiber before you twist it but also being able to pull it at the same time in a different direction so that what you're wind up with to make it is the

simple and visual as possible. You're able to actually twist and this and lengthen at the same time that's kind of in the slight extension of what he was up to but. And that makes the five by the way stronger. Unless of course and that was the kind of intervention that came around about maybe five six years after he invented the water frame but all of these really as you're describing are modifications of the spinning jenny which was a way of doing what had been done in the single spindle transforming it into a genny that accomplished the same feat in a 10 to 12 spindle simultaneously so it really multiplied the ability of one person to to spin fairly considerable amount of copper. I love the story about Hargreaves how he came up with this idea whether this is apocryphal that people will you know maybe know that for ever just about forever. The spindle on a spinning wheel has been horizontal and the story

is that one day his daughter whose name was Jenny knocked a spinning wheel over suddenly making the spindle go up and down. Vertical and he looked at that thought. Why not. Not only set up a process where the spindle is vertical. Why not put a whole bunch of spindles together and that at least that's the story about how he came up with the idea and why it's called the genny. There are some wonderful stories that are either apocryphal or not they certainly fit in you know with them with the mythology of this another have to do with the lie Whitney who in 1793 of course invented this. The cotton gin and the sea and the cotton gin essentially separate the fiber of a very sticky. See the green seeded cotton. From the seeds something that had been taken a slave an entire day to perform one to loosen one pound of lint. Excruciating work and brutal work his.

Cotton did separated 50 pounds in the same amount of time and the see the apocryphal story if it is apocryphal was that when he was trying to figure out how to do this he went into the back yard and saw a cat trying to corner a chicken. And at the last moment the chicken took off and the cat reached out with its paw and came back with a bunch of feathers. And so he thought to himself. You've got a hole the lint from the seeds not pull the seeds from the lid $10 that's a small difference but a huge one to do with me then he understood. If you could reach into a drum with hooks and grab them grab the lint and pull it and keep the seed from following by blocking the seed. You would essentially accomplish the same thing and that's really the mechanism the fundamental principle of the cause of the cotton gin. Well the protocol is the problem that plagues him and a lot of other of these men was that there was it was very difficult let's say impossible to protect your inventions. People just saw one person would see what somebody else did and they'd say well I can do that would go back to his workshop and do the same

thing. And maybe this gives us an opportunity to come here again to sort of where we started and talk about Francis Cabot Lowell who established the industry here in the United States and apparently what he did was he was in Britain and he spent a lot of time looking at the textile industries there and looking at the way that they did things and then brought what he learned back to the United States to set up his own industry. He did it and he did it really by a wonderful act of thievery and the fever essentially was that he was not allowed by his compatriots actually his friends who were the tycoons of the British textile industry to take any written designs back with him because they were concerned about piracy rightfully so. But they also would license him many of the mechanisms. But he happened to have a photographic memory and he actually sat there day after day and memorized the working of the power loom which is the second piece of component along with a lot of frames extraordinarily complicated piece of machinery.

He actually came back to United States and recreated that from memory with an industrial designer. What would be an industrial designer today. And that's how the power loom and the water frames were combined into the same operation for the first time in history and Massachusetts became the Mecca of the free world really in terms of the ability to create an industrial society that was also advanced because the women of Lowell who were coming off the farm for the first time ever also were very much involved in the self-improvement. So. During the day they worked 14 hours in this fairly stifling environment doing pretty tedious work but at night they actually went out into the world and listened to what Ralph Waldo Emerson and all the people of the time who had something to say and were fairly well known for their for their cultural events meant and they were and the women put together a magazine called The Low offering which

became an extraordinarily famous vehicle for working class expression at the time. Charles Dickens took it to parliament in England. Betaine really an amazing piece of work because it really defied everybody's expectations of what factory workers were like here were women who were factory workers and yet they were cultured. They were interested in learning and they were able to express themselves and so it was in the 1830s it was written there's really been nothing like it since in the United States. We have someone else to talk with here and that would be a caller in a couple of people caller in first in here in Champaign Urbana where we owe one number one. Hello yes interesting Could you say something about the finances like that require very much money to put in a crop each year and what about the futures record syndicate in Japan. Several hundred years

ago there were contracts that basically were futures for rice and so on and hang up and listen and what about the cotton so-called cotton recession in the south about 18 35 or 40. That has always been part of the of the cotton story member economy as a crop and as your caller is suggesting though the panic in 1839 and the economy of cotton has either precipitated the economy of the rest of the country or is mimicked it in many ways because the ability to do to predict what the harvest is going to be and the quantity of cotton is going to be is really. A chancy is whether it's going to rain or snow or tomorrow and all the all the other elements especially that that have to do with the welfare of a crop especially in days when there were not ability. There was no ability to create sophisticated irrigation systems so

futures in New York men and men in the trading of cotton have made a lot fortunes overnight and especially in the years leading up to the Civil War there were wonderful stories harrowing stories at the same time of someone who is trying to corner a market and suddenly there was a surplus of cotton as opposed to a dearth of cotton and supply and demand worked against them so yes. In a way that almost every crop has had futures need in Japan and other countries. Cotton is particularly susceptible to that in fact today were in one thing in 2005. We're looking at a crop from last year which is one of the great bumper crops of the last decade and that has plummeted. Cotton prices around the world as a result of the extraordinary abundance of cotton and it's put a lot of people into a pickle who were expecting

of course to have the demand for cotton greater than the supply. So it continues to this day. How much American cotton is. Exported and how this how does it fit in with with the other things that make up American agriculture. It about to answer your question about 3 million tons of cotton is exported lol. In the last year or 2003 that is about 45 percent of all the cotton exported in the world is exported from the United States. The next in rank would be West Africa which is about a million but Africa consists of Mali and the Nein in terms of how that compares to other crops. I'm not really sure about that. I think probably Saudi would be pretty close to the second. Possibly corn but I know in terms of cotton that the amount of cotton that we export directly affects the

welfare of the growers in West Africa who are using primitive methods that are really very changed very little from before the Civil War in the United States. And I know that because I was recently on a delegation an Oxfam delegation that went to Mali and look at the effect of American cotton subsidies on the cotton farmers of Mali. What do you want. About the little bit more. I very much would like to actually and I'd love to get reaction of any of your listeners who might be interested too. One of the great debates in the United States in terms of agriculture right now is how much money we are giving to cotton growers in the United States or about 25000 of them. And we give them through Farm Act in 2002 about 3.2 billion dollars a year. Eighty percent of that money goes to the top 10 percent of the cotton growers. There are kind of roads like the Boswell's of California who in one year may have something like 20 million dollars.

So there's a tremendous disparity here and the reason that I think it matters and the reason that Oxfam in particular and other other nonprofit organizations are interested is that a lot of the cotton subsidies that people consider to be really too too high not that we are looking for ways necessarily to eliminate them but simply to bring them more into line with reality. These kinds of cities often impoverished countries that are already poor particularly in West Africa and and perhaps to some degree undermine our ability to counter some of the elements that lead to fomenting anger which leads to terrorism in these countries. Well we are in the last 15 minutes or so and I have a couple of cars. And we'll get right to them. And I would like to again introduce our guest We're speaking with Stephen Young. He is a novelist a playwright video producer award winning screenwriter. He is also the author of a new book which is his first nonfiction book that explores all

cotton and the way particularly the role that it has played in the developing of the American economy and in the history of this country but certainly goes beyond that the title of the book is big cotton how a humble fiber created fortunes wrecked civilizations and put America on the map it's published by Viking it's just out now. Been out since the beginning of the month and that is in the bookstore if you want to read it and questions are welcome to 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We have some other callers here. Next we'll talk with someone in Chicago. One for you. Hello. Good morning. I found your story about Robert a little ironic because I think the British were charged with pirating the cotton industry from Calcutta India and effectively causing that terrible poverty that has gone on for centuries there. Did you see any did your research the point that it's a very good question what happened in the 18th

century in India was that England took a look at the incredible amount of cotton that was coming out of India both being grown and manufactured in India and decided that this was a true idea if they could figure out a way to develop their own industry with India and the simplest way to do that essentially was to colonize India. And it wasn't the only reason that England won. One end up essentially attacking in India and subjugating it but it had a lot to do with it because the oil industry in cotton in Calcutta was really very much of a hand industry what they considered to be a factory or maybe three or four people who were operating in the same building. But England had much greater ambition for cotton. And since it could not be grown in England we need as a place for it to be supplied to make a long story short when England are basically timid took over India

to prevent anybody in India from growing and manufacturing. So all the com had to go from India to England be manufactured and then sold back to the people who had grown as a brick. As a follow up question and the last question I might understand was they not just still the cotton bell for the techniques of printing the fabrics that calico was what came from the word Calcutta madrasa. All of these incredible patterns were were taken and so I have a question about that and also since you looked at social history did you look at how the different fabrics develop their own patterns I should say of cotton develop their own history. Calico which was I think probably the primary fabric that was used on the American frontier and how my dress has became a major pattern effect of the lead in in this country not the sort of preppy fabric did you look at any of that. Yes and some of that is in my book I talk more about the dying techniques than I do about the social

significance of some of these patterns in English but there are some wonderful books including woven cargos which I would highly recommend if you wanted to learn more about that the Victoria and Albert Museum in England is a terrific source. It was very cruel in particular what I talk about as have chintz which is essentially colored and often hand painted fabric from the 17th century became such a huge fashion statement in England that it really was the door that opened up cotton from the east to the west because up until around 17:00 as you might know nobody in Europe particularly in the northern countries was interested in cotton at all. Flax was the fabric and it was mixed with wool and something called linsey woolsey and so forth. But the social significance which you're asking me about very specifically and how it connected to the Hindu religion in India is a fascinating subject and one that I touch upon a little bit in my book. OK. Thank you.

You're welcome and thank you for the call and we will continue in the next person up would be Urbana. One woman hello. Yes. The caller from Chicago that took some of the question that I had already so I won't go into that. I would like to add a comment. And that is in the middle middle of the 19th century some who are I don't remember the name year exactly but a law was passed in India that prevented any good agricultural goods especially to be exported on any other ship. Then British ship and thereby not only destroyed the cotton industry but some other industries as well. And this is one of the reasons why probably Mahatma Gandhi took the spinning wheel as a symbolic instrument to agitate against the British Empire. And and the second coming to having that connection is regarding

the stealing of technology. Because today we are talking a lot about intellectual property rights. And most of them are now going against the interest of the developing countries to the extent that medications that were used to thousands of years and now being attempted to be patented in the Western countries. The this situation that came to a discussion several years ago when John Kenneth Galbraith was meeting this campus here and in a discussion he said that his recommendation to countries like India would be to refuse to pay any debt that India owed to Britain because of that kind of theft that Britain had done in India. I would be totally morally OK. I wonder if

any of those aspects are going to question your book and I'll hang up and thank you. Thanks for the caller's question. The relationship of Mahatma Gandhi to cotton is something that I go into in some depth in my book and as the caller suggested you know Britain went to war with India largely because of the commodity in fact one of the interesting parts of reading of doing the research for my book is that I concluded that very few wars have ever been fought without some kind of a commodity way down at the bottom if not more more more obviously as a part of the whole process. Oil in Iraq might be a very good contemporary example of that although some of your listeners might dispute that. I found it to be interesting also in terms of India. The subjugation of the Indian populace to the commercial requirements of Britain were so egregious that when Gandhi came into power and he did it really

by you know trying to speak for the Indian people who had been subjugated now for maybe 200 years. He looked at homespun cotton as a way to establish some sense of identity again. And so the theft really of an entire industry and an entire crop by by England was still very much a motivating factor for him for many many years after it happened. And he went around to the villages and insisted that people start to build their own spinning wheels as he did and there are many shots of him with his home spinning wheel that he got up and used every morning. And so that shukra which is what it was called became the symbol of Indian independence and it's a really interesting story that I hopefully do justice to in my book. And it's on the flag of India to this day and it's on the flag of India a very good point David. Let's go to another caller and that would be someone in. Pain and learn to

follow. Hi you mentioned earlier the subsidies in the US. The three point two billion dollars. What is keeping that alive. Obviously politics but are you is there any justification other than politics for those subsidies. Certainly Congress is not a strategic product of the United States. And you mention it. They have 3.2 billion. And 90 percent goes to 10 percent of the farmers. Time to find out where the where What's the thought process behind them. If you could because it's certainly having a horrible effect on Western Africa right now it certainly is in other places in the world too and that's a discussion that could take a couple of years but to give it to it a few minutes. Essentially it's the power of emotional con con. And the political clout of the Southern states who still have a lot of seniority in crucial committees in Congress. The argument from American cotton growers would be that it also now affects the security of the

United States because in the event that we wind up being at war or being in an adversarial position we need to have our own crops. And we need to be continuing to supply the world with cotton that we grow. But the truth of the matter is without subsidies there would really be no business reason for growing cotton in America. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't. I'm just saying from a business point of view it really doesn't make sense anymore because the cost of producing cotton in America that fully exceeds what we can get for it on the international market and the subsidies are there because the political clout of cotton and its historical connection to the United States has to be really reckoned into the into this. It's intangible but it's very powerful because for many regions of this country the South in particular cotton has a tremendous emotional power. So you put those all together and you get really the situation

that now exists which I think really in many ways is going to jeopardize some of our relationship with countries that we really want to have a firm relationship with in the rest of the world. We're going to have to start with much more that we could discuss if you're interested again look at the book it's titled big cotton published by Viking by our guest Stephen last name spelled Y. Hey thanks very much for talking with us today. You're welcome I do have a website which is Stephenie up a dot com and I mention it because more of the situation in Mali and other things that we got into a bit of the reader can find the listener excuse me can find out more about if they visit the website. Thank you very much for having me David thank you.