The Columbian. [volume] (Bloomsburg, Pa.) 1866-1910, 1905-04-13
Making THE WORM WORK
Efforts To Establish the Silk
Industry in This Country.
EMPLOYEES POORLY PAID
Before Revolutionary War Many
Americans Found Silk-Producine
Profitable Southerners Coulc
Work Whole Crops in Conjunction
With Cotton Raising.

Work Whole Crops in Conjunction
With Cotton Raising.
II requires 800 silk worms to make
a pound weight OF merchantable CO.
coons. Ii takes eleven pounds of CO.
coons To produce one pound of silk
1880 worms to the pound of silk.
When we take note that the United
States imported in 1904 over 10000
900 pounds of raw silk, we are con-
fronted with the fact that somebody
had to keep more than 52,S00 600. 900
worms at work to supply raw material
for one year for our silk factories.
Now it is not very intellectual labor
to keep a worm munchng mulberry
leaves, nor is it to reel the worms
flmy product into skeins. This labor
is consequently paid in Italy at the
rate Of only 10 to 15 cents a day, and
in Japan at 8 to ~ cents. For that
reason the silk manufacturers believe
that the United States will never go
into the silk worm business.
But off and on the American people
have always felt differently about it.
Ever since the year 1860, when a man
by the name of Aspinwall established
nurseries of the mulberry on Long ISL
and efforts have been periodically
made to render this a silk-producing
country.
Quite a promising silk-producing in
dustry in this country was broken in
upon by the Revolutionary war. This
put the Americans out OF the silk
growing habit. But about 1888 a man
came along and circulated some silk
raising stories and statistics which
were so alluring that there was per
feet craze for setting out the morus
multicaulis. or broad-leaved mulberry.
In New England many fields that
were producing profitable crops were
put into mulberry trees; all over the
country there was a "multicaulis
craze"
Two or three years later an excep-
tionally hard winter performed the
service of killing off most of the null
tfcaulis plantations. But reminders
Of them exist in scattered wayside
trees all over southern New England,
while in the South there are today
wild mulberry thickets descended
from these exotics.
The mulberry tree will grow in the
United States and the silk worm will
flourish here. In fact, there is no
country in the world which is better
adapted to silk culture. The only
reason why we went abroad in 1904
30 1 or .;r
was economic. The delicate threads
spun by the worms have to be reeled
on skeins in reeling establishments
called fllatures. We have no failures
because we have no cocoons to keep
them going. And we have no cocoons
because we have no failures to take
them.
This is not very good reason for
keeping out of the silk-producing busi-
ness, and the government has always
realized it,
J.. o. Howard, a government ento-
mologist, reported at some length on
the matter in 1903 He declared that
there are thousands of people who
are eager to learn of some means of
ihSi llCIl IltOulc ny ever So
slight an amount" and that "at the
present market price in Europe
enough people in this country would
take up silk culture to secure a large
annual crop" He gave it as his
opinion that improved reeling machin-
cry would solve the economic part
of the problem, and showed that no
rhinnrU ha
in the United States.
BY the way, raw silk and silk CO.
coons are on the tariffs free list.
Probably they would not be If there
were silk-producing interest in this
country. This may account for the
very pessimistic way in which the
silk goods manufacturers talk about
the prospects of establishing a silk
producing industry here.
Silk-worm raising in essentially a
houshod industry in Europe and Asia,
and would be here. Its advantages
to the people of the South would be
immense. The country people, white
and colored, of that section, could
produce the whole crop without rails
ing a pound less of cotton than they
do now.
If, on the other hands, the crowding-
out movement that is now being di-
rected against the colored people of
the South should succeed, and an
italian Deasantry should come upon
the soil in their place the cocoon in
dustry would probably be very quick.
ly established there if reeling estab-
Hshments were started.
But it is not upon the 15-cents-a-
day basis that the United States
would want a silkreeling industry. 1t
would want the thing done with i'm
proved automatic machinery and on a
first class American basis. The prob
lem is one that is up to the inventors.
]. e. G.