Mr. Hocн. Of course, if that were true, that would increase the demand for wool, and presumably increase the price of wool.

Mr. FRENCH. I think it would to some extent.

The CHAIRMAN. That seems to be all, Mr. French. We are greatly obliged to you.

Mr. FRENCH. I want to thank the gentlemen of the committee for their patience, and I think you will bear witness that most of the time I have been before you has not been at my own request.

STATEMENT OF HON. B. CARROLL REECE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TENNESSEE

The CHAIRMAN. We will now hear Mr. Reece. Mr. Reece is the introducer of H. R. 4141. Do you wish to make your statement first of all, without interruption, Mr. Reece?

Mr. REECE. Yes. At the time I introduced my bill I had not made a study of the similar bills which had been introduced. I have looked at this question from the consumer's viewpoint, consequently it was intended to protect the consumer, and that was the sole purpose that I had in mind in introducing the bill. It has not gone into some of the intricate details that are found in Mr. French's bill. It is based, however, on the same general principles. As you have noticed, it relates to three specific things, wool, silk, and leather, differing in that respect from Mr. French's bill, and of course it is a compulsory branding bill, differing in that respect from Senator Lodge's or Mr. Rogers's bill.

I think that if a bill of this general nature is to be passed, it ought to include leather as well as the other materials which have been discussed before your committee, and it is my idea that the branding should relate, of course, only to the principal material contained in shoes, for instance.

Mr. MAPES. Will you repeat that statement, please?

Mr. REECE. I say, the branding should relate only to the principal material which makes up the composition of the shoe. It should not. of course, include the eyes and thread and tacks and those things, My observation as to shoes, as a consumer, is that the average buyer generally buys a pair of shoes with the understanding and the expectation that it is leather, and if the shoe is not-if the content of the shoe is not marked, that idea is most always given, and I think most of the buyers of shoes, especially the country buyers, can make the purchase more on price than on their ability to judge the quality of the shoe, and it appears to me that it is fair and just that the consumer should be protected. If a pair of shoes is purchased and they contain paper or faulty material, usually the purchaser of that type of shoe is a man who subjects his shoes to hard wear, exposes them, and the result is that he gets practically no value out of his purchase. Anyway, I can not see the objection that a manufacturer could put forth in being required to mark the content of the shoe.

It may be that certain material could be used which would be better than poor leather in certain parts of the shoe, but if that is true, and so indicated, the purchaser still gets the value that he would get if they were not so marked.

The same arguments apply, in my judgment, to all the provisions of the bill which I introduced, and my interest is that when the law

is enacted, it be made to apply to these three articles. It is also my judgment that there should be compulsory branding instead of the so-called misbranding, It is not my purpose to take the time of the committee going into details, because the general provisions of this bill have been covered by Mr. French, who introduced the other bill. The CHAIRMAN. Are there any questions to ask Mr. Reece? Mr. Hoch. Just a few questions on details.

I notice Mr. Reece in the bill, in the first section, the second section, and also the third, it seems to have been an oversight there, an omission of the word "State. The first section provides "that every manufacturer of shoes and other articles of footwear purporting to be made of leather within a Territory of the United States or the District of Columbia, shall before offering such articles for sale or for transportation to any State or the District of Columbia" you do not intend to limit that to shoes offered for sale from a Territory or the District of Columbia?

Mr. REECE. No; that is an oversight. That should be corrected. The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Reece, would you interpret the last two lines and a half of paragraph 1 and likewise another paragraph, as indicating that everything in the shoe, other than leather, would have to be set out on a tag? For instance, the duck lining on the inside of an upper, or the steel that might be put into the shank, or the hooks that might be put into the shoe for lacing up purposes, or the nails, or the thread? From this language it would seem to me that every one of those things would have to be indicated if it was not leather.

Mr. REECE. My idea was that only the principal materials should be marked, and of course that change would have to be made in that language.

The CHAIRMAN. You want to have the committee undertake that? Mr. REECE. Well, that was an oversight on my part when the paragraph was drawn.

The CHAIRMAN. That appears to be pretty much what you have indicated in respect of the others.

Mr. REECE. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. In the case of leather, this makes marking compulsory, does it not?

Mr. REECE. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. On every article that is made and sold.

Mr. REECE. Unless it is made of pure material. If it is all wool or all silk, it is not required.

The CHAIRMAN. You do not allow freedom of either marking or not marking, if they choose, but you have everything marked.

Mr. REECE. Everything is to be marked unless it is of pure material.

The CHAIRMAN. According to that, if we happen to have in a cloth a sizing and some cotton and some shoddy and some virgin wool-which may be an impossible combination, but it may be possible on the other hand-your bill provides that everything other than virgin wool should be set forth in some sort of a tag, and hitched on to every suit of clothes and every bolt of cloth that might come on the market.

Mr. REECE. No, sir; my bill does not refer to virgin wool.

The CHAIRMAN. Then you would embody all wool and shoddy in the same class as virgin wool when it comes to the tag?

Mr. REECE. Well, my original idea was that that should be done, and the other thought never occurred to me, probably because I do not have technical knowledge concerning the different types of wool which might go into manufacture.

The CHAIRMAN. With a view to the omission on your part--which I am sure was inadvertent-would you still think that every pair of shoes should be tagged or stamped showing the different substances in them, to hold them together, and so on, and in a piece of cloth, which might contain several other ingredients than wool, that there should be on every article manufactured in this country and its possessions, Territories, and the District of Columbia, a tag or mark showing its composition, and had you any thought of the tremendous expense of doing that for the producers, for the great variety of things that are manufactured?

Mr. REECE. It had not occurred to me that there would be a great variety of material that would be necessary to be marked.

The CHAIRMAN. You can take an article like shoes. We have canvas shoes or shoes made of part canvas and part leather, a very popular sport shoe, and in it there may be a steel shank. They may have a lot of things that go to make up that shoe, and a great variety of them. The manufacturer would have to have the schedule of each shoe and everything that went into it. He would have to have a tag prepared for each grade and variety of shoe, and have them marked and keep them marked all down the line to the consumer. That would be an endless stockroom full of tags to be marked and printed up and entered and tied on. It would require clerks galore. There would probably be tens of thousands of clerks employed in this country to do all that, covering every single article that comes under the heads that you have treated here.

Mr. REECE. Of course, the chairman has much more technical knowledge about manufacturing shoes and a great many other things than I have.

The CHAIRMAN. I am not giving you a lecture on it; I am simply trying to call your attention to what would happen, maybe, under the provisions of the bill.

Mr. REECE. It occurred to me that most of the manufacturers of shoes had their products more or less standardized, and that the box, if the material was to be marked on the box, could be manufactured showing these different kinds of material that enter into the composition of the shoe, and it would require no effort in the case of each individual shoe.

The CHAIRMAN. Now, let me show you. This is in the interest of clarifying the matter. I am not trying to double-cross you here. Mr. REECE. I know.

The CHAIRMAN. You have in here the words "the amount and kind of material.” We have shoes running from 1, children's size up to 13, and then they begin for adults and run up to 13 again, so far as I know, and you say "the amount and kind of material other than leather used in its manufacture." In each shoe there may be a little piece of steel in the shank to keep that arch up where it belongs. According to this language, you would have to know the weight of the steel in every pair of shoes of every size, so many ounces in an 8

shoe, so many ounces in a 10 shoe, and so on up and down, and as to thread you would have to know how many ounces there were in each size of shoe, and if it was canvas on the inside of the upper you would have to know how many ounces or pennyweights there were of canvas in each size of shoe, because every shoe would have a little more or less than the next shoe in size, and your bill provides for the setting forth of those items, and you can see the clerical work that would be involved and the people you would have to have on that work. They would have to have an apothecary's scales in there in order to determine how much weight of each of those things there was in a different article.

Mr. REECE. A great many of those things, I think, could be obviated in determining what constituted the principal material which made up the shoe.

The CHAIRMAN. But you do not say that here. You say in respect to shoes that the manufacturer shall "cause each article to be tagged or stamped, showing the amount and kind of material other than leather used in its manufacture." That is as wide as the world.

Mr. REECE. It was my purpose before the committee got ready to report the bill out, to amplify the bill, defining those things more carefully than it is now done.

The CHAIRMAN. You would not be in favor of such a bill as this? Mr. REECE. That is, I would change that paragraph so as to indicate the material which should be marked. It was not my purpose to include all the material that enters into the composition of the shoe.

The CHAIRMAN. Do I make the complication clear to you, the difficulties that would attend the manufacture?

Mr. REECE. Yes; I understand that.

The CHAIRMAN. It would not only get your canvas in here, you might get half a cent's worth of canvas and 2 cents' worth of labor to handle that canvas from the time it came into the factory until it got onto the market, in the way of entries and weighing and measuring, and a thousand and one things, and where you begin to draw on labor account you begin to get your costs mounting pretty rapidly.

I wanted to call your attention to these possibilities, so that you would realize that we have quite a job on hand before we get this thing worked out.

Mr. BURTNESS. Now, if I understand your theory correctly, Mr. Reece, it is simply this: What you want is legislation that would require stamping or tagging for such portions of a shoe as are substitutes for leather and which appear to be leather, which the ordinary buyer might believe is leather.

Mr. REECE. That is correct.

Mr. BURTNESS. That is the only thing you intended to cover by your legislation, but it apparently covers more than that.

Mr. REECE. Yes; but the descriptions could easily be made so

as to include only the principal article.

Mr. BURTNESS. And it is not your intention at all to cover shoes that do not purport to be made of-leather?

Mr. REECE. Not at all.

Mr. BURTNESS. That is, canvas shoes, for instance, are not included under the terms of the bill.

Mr. REECE. That is right.

Mr. BURTNESS. You did not intend that?

Mr. REECE. And they are not.

The CHAIRMAN. One more thing. Mr. Burtness has brought up a very pertinent inquiry. We have to go now, but between now and to-morrow, when we will ask you to come back, please think of this: Whether or not it is worth your while to get back to the principle, maybe, of the French bill and provide for some consideration as to grades of material, even if you put in nothing but leather. There are various grades of leather of all kinds, and it is very important if you are going to tell the consumer what he is getting, to know whether he is getting number one, number two, number three, number four, number five sole leather, or this, that, or the other upper, or kangaroo one, two, or three, or sheepskin one, two, or five. He has to know all those things in order to get that. Mr. French covers that in his bill because he deals with material that can be classified, but for you to say "all leather" and let it go at that, and that leaves a fellow in the air just as much as he was when he started, because leather is a very elastic term.

We will come together at 10.30 to-morrow morning, if you please, you will come back, Mr. Reece?

and

Mr. REECE. Yes, sir.

(Whereupon at 12 o'clock noon, the committee adjourned until 10.30 o'clock a. m., Friday, April 18, 1924.)

COMMITTEE ON INTERSTATE AND FOREIGN COMMERCE,

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, Friday, April 18, 1924. The committee met at 10.30 o'clock a. m., Hon. Samuel E. Winslow (chairman) presiding.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order, please; and we will continue with the consideration of the truth-in-fabrics subject, and I will ask Colonel Wood if he will make a statement.

STATEMENT OF MR. JOHN P. WOOD, OF PHILADELPHIA, REPRESENTING THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF WOOL MANUFACTURERS

Mr. WOOD. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I represent the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, which has its office at 50 State Street, Boston, Mass., and in conformity with the arrangement made by the chairman on Wednesday, with a view to saving time, my statement will also be made on behalf of the following: American Association of Woolen and Worsted Manufacturers, National Association of Woolen and Worsted Spinners, National Wholesale Dry Goods Association, Worsted Spinners' Association of Philadelphia, Cloth Manufacturers' Association of Philadelphia, and Manufacturers' Club of Philadelphia; reserving to representatives of those organizations who are present the privilege of speaking briefly upon special points which I may not adequately cover, and of filing with the com