3

Wrapped Up in Cellophane

By the summer of 1931, the worldwide economic depression was well entrenched and getting worse. Improvement, when it finally came, was sputtering at best for much of the decade that followed. But things were far from grim for the viscose industry.¹ In the United States there was only a modest, brief downturn in rayon filament production from 1931 to 1932 and then considerable improvement during the next year. This was followed by steady growth through 1936, a booming 80 percent five-year increase overall. Production in Germany and Italy moved up every year after 1933. Japan simply shot up like a rocket from the start, surpassing the United States as the leading filament producer by 1935. For short-cut rayon staple, as opposed to the longer filament product, the trend from 1931 onward was even more dramatic. There were hundredfold, logarithmic increases in production worldwide. Germany and Italy led the pack, Japan caught up fast, and the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, albeit behind, marched in lockstep in a parallel, no-less-remarkable upward path of expansion.

The big players that hauled in impressive earnings even in the depth of the Depression were more or less the same ones that had sat at the table the decade before. It was Courtaulds in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the United States, it was Courtaulds yet again through its American subsidiary the Viscose Company (not yet the American Viscose Corporation), although DuPont also had a big piece of the action. In Germany, Glanzstoff was a dominant force; in Italy, SNIA; and the Comptoir des Textiles Artificiels (CTA) in France. In the Far East, the Teikoku Rayon Company, Ltd., around since 1918, was another old hand in the viscose rayon business.² In contrast, the Toyo Rayon Company (founded in Japan in 1926) was relatively new on the scene. Under the modest slogan of “No Victory Without Unity,” Toray, the present-day corporate successor to Toyo, explains, “The design of the corporate logo used at the time—three interlocking rings placed inside a double circle, symbolized the opportunities given by heaven, the advantages of the land, and the harmony between human beings. It also represented the formation of the four letters of TOYO. Faced with the Great Depression and downturns in the fiber and textile market soon after its founding . . . Toyo Rayon overcame many hardships.”³

An even more holistic view of the interlocking corporate spheres of rayon manufacturing interests informs Grace Hutchins’s book Labor and Silk from 1929.⁴ The picture that Hutchins paints is not a pastoral vision of heaven, land, and human harmony; she concretely illustrates the state of things with a full-page diagram.⁵ Hutchins had done her homework. All of the large manufacturing countries are accounted for in the figure, along with many of the smaller ones too, each represented by a circle proportionally sized to the amount of national rayon production. Circles within circles illustrate separate corporate entities, also scaled by production volume. In addition, the diagram includes the minority of remaining producers that continued to manufacture rayon by other processes (nitrocellulose and cuprammonium rayon, as well as acetate silk, a related cellulose derivative). Solid or dotted lines connect corporate entities based on outright ownership of subsidiaries (solid) or the holding of an investment stake or some other transnational arrangement (dotted). Glanzstoff, for example, is shown with seven radiating ties, although several of these are dotted lines; Courtaulds manifests six interconnections, but all of its connecting lines are quite solid.

This bewilderingly complex web could easily come across as the product of some anticorporate conspiracy theorist spinning out of control. But if anything, Hutchins underestimated the true extent of the phenomenon. By late 1928, and unknown to her, a hidden layer of cross-ownership was operating through a transnational holding company, the Associated Rayon Corporation, based in Maryland and headed by a Dr. Fritz Blüthgen (conveniently of Glanzstoff), which tied together New York, Amsterdam, and Berlin through the banking concerns of Lehman Brothers, Teixeira de Mattos Brothers, and Lazard Speyer-Ellissen.⁶

Labor and Silk was one volume in the International Publishers’ Labor and Industry series. Closely aligned politically with the Communist Party of the United States, International Publishers had a special connection to worker safety and health through its chief, Alexander Trachtenberg, and its co-owner and angel investor, Abraham A. Heller.⁷ Trachtenberg’s graduate thesis work at Yale, eventually appearing through International Publishers, focused on the occupational hazards of coal miners.⁸ The firm published fictional works, too, touching on the theme of industrial disease, one of the most notable of these being The Way Things Are.⁹ This collection of short stories by Albert Maltz included “Man on the Road,” which, when it first appeared in the magazine New Masses, brought to early public attention a massive outbreak of silicosis caused by a hydroelectric excavation project at Gauley Bridge in West Virginia. The corporate perpetrator at Gauley Bridge was Union Carbide. Ironically, Carbide might be said to have had a dotted-line connection with International Publishers, having purchased Abraham Heller’s lucrative International Oxygen Company in 1930, the same year that Carbide’s subsidiary began its deadly drilling in West Virginia.¹⁰

The Labor and Industry series was meant to educate the masses about the basics of several industrial sectors by taking a scientific approach, a kind of adult-proletarian precursor to the “All About” books (All About Dinosaurs, for instance), which began to appear two decades later. Labor and Silk covers the economics and working conditions of the entire U.S. silk textile industry, giving prominence to the Paterson and Passaic, New Jersey, silk strikes, but going far beyond local or regional questions. Rayon, as “artificial silk,” was a part of that story. Hutchins acknowledges that the potential displacement of workers employed in natural-fiber weaving, silk included, might be counterbalanced by the new production of mixed blends (for example, rayon-silk or rayon-cotton). The more salient point was that the rayon industry was characterized by low wages, long hours, and underunionization relative to the overall textile-manufacturing labor force. Most of all, however, Hutchins emphasizes that the rayon industry operated as the preeminent international industrial cartel.

Unhealthy working conditions arising from the manufacture of artificial silk are given rather short shrift in Labor and Silk, even though elsewhere in the book Hutchins shows that she was quite attuned to industrial disease in the natural silk industry (including the special chemical hazards of textile dyeing).¹¹ She mentions eye and lung problems attributed to acid exposure among British rayon workers, also noting, “The atmosphere of the rayon spinning rooms is described by workers as ‘etherized.’ ”¹² Yet the specific anesthetic vapor in question, carbon disulfide, goes unnamed.

Hutchins did her own research, but she relied on a talented artist collaborator named Esther Shemitz to craft the complex diagrammatic representation of the industry that is the centerpiece of the rayon chapter. Shemitz also provided more figurative line drawings that illustrate other parts of Labor and Silk; her contribution to the work is acknowledged prominently on the title page. Hutchins maintained her commitment to social justice and was highly productive (she subsequently published Youth in Industry, 1932; Children Under Capitalism, 1933; Women Who Work, 1934). She worked alongside her lifetime partner, Anna Rochester, who also wrote for International Publishers’ Labor and Industry series (Labor and Coal, 1931). Esther Shemitz traveled another path, going on to marry Whittaker Chambers in 1930 (Hutchins and Rochester were the only two witnesses at the wedding).¹³ Shemitz stood by her man and was herself a figure in the Alger Hiss Cold War affair, in which Chambers later was to level accusations of spying against the former U.S. State Department official.¹⁴

Labor and Silk threw a wide net meant to capture the international rayon behemoth, but not surprisingly, the nascent Soviet viscose industry slipped through. Hutchins did comment, rather glowingly, on working conditions in Russian silk factories and in the textile industry there generally, based on a personal visit that she had made to the Soviet Union a few years earlier.¹⁵ She may have been unaware of rayon production in the USSR, which went back to the pre–October Revolution establishment of the factory sited in Mytishchi (near Moscow).¹⁶ War and revolution had interrupted production, but the Mytishchi Viskosa factory was back up and running again by 1924, reborn under the aegis of the Moscow Council of the National Economy.

The production methods at Mytishchi Viskosa remained primitive, allowing ample opportunity for carbon disulfide overexposure. The process solution of cellulose liquefied with carbon disulfide was “aged in small boxes moved along on handcarts. . . . The spinning bath contained not only sulfuric acid, sodium sulfate, and zinc sulfate but also glucose. When the plant was short of glucose it used edible sugar instead. The fresh-spun cakes [were] carried on wooden trays.”¹⁷ Such was the boom market for viscose that even in such a technologically limited milieu, beyond the pale of Courtaulds, three other Soviet plants had been online by 1934 (including one for rayon staple), and national production increased by 200 percent over a ten-year interval.¹⁸

Independent of the otherwise dominant international cartel, the atypical Soviet artificial fiber enterprise of the early 1930s could be invoked as the exception proving the rule. But rayon’s sister industry, cellophane, served as self-evident confirmation that concentrated corporate power was axiomatic of the worldwide viscose trade. Making transparent film, as opposed to longer or shorter filaments, was an obvious offshoot of the basic manufacturing process; its possibilities occurred to the earliest viscose tinkerers on both sides of the Channel. The British at first, however, did not exploit this opportunity commercially; uncharacteristically, Courtaulds was not the alpha male of the pack this time. So often forced to back down in rayon confrontations with its British competitors in the first decades of the twentieth century, it was the French Comptoir des Textiles Artificiels that took the lead, no longer the underdog. Before the outbreak of World War I, the CTA had established a new, separate manufacturing concern with its own corporate identity. Based in France and Switzerland, the sole mission of this new enterprise was to make and market transparent viscose film.¹⁹

It took a quarter century from the inception of viscose fiber for its marketers to give birth to the name “rayon.” Further, the designation “rayon” had to be shared with other cellulose-based fibers made through other competing, albeit commercially marginalized, processes (that is, nitrocellulose, cuprammonium, and acetate silk). In short, rayon lacked both trademark protection and a brand identity. So what was the CTA to name its viscose film? Here is where the true genius of the company was manifested. It took “cell” from “cellulose” and combined this with “phane,” a suffix derived from “diaphane” (that is, diaphanous) and voila!—La Cellophane SA was born.²⁰ With that company’s name came one of the most enduring commercial eponyms of the twentieth century, and, unlike “rayon,” it was trademarked. Thus, even though producing transparent viscose film did not necessarily mean having to purchase the patents for the specific industrial process owned by La Cellophane (there were other production options available), successfully marketing such a product virtually required purchasing the right to use the name “cellophane.”

DuPont grasped this quickly, signing an agreement with La Cellophane on 9 June 1923 for the exclusive U.S. rights to make and sell cellophane. DuPont had brought manufacturing online by April 1924, side by side with its Buffalo, New York, flagship viscose filament plant (“Fibersilk” in those heady pre-rayon days) that had been in operation since 1921.²¹ On the Continent, Hoechst had acquired from the CTA the rights to cellophane; with the creation of I. G. Farben in 1925, Hoechst was absorbed, along with its subsidiaries, one of which, Kalle and Company, became the leading German producer.²²

Courtaulds, on the other hand, was not so fast on the uptake. And the pressure was on. La Cellophane had the audacity to start a British subsidiary in 1927 to market its imported product. To add insult to injury, in 1928 a homegrown, Courtaulds-independent operation was launched, Transparent Paper (TP) Limited. The underwriting was huge, thanks to a fairly speculative stock offering that allowed TP to acquire patents, purchase equipment, and bag its biggest trophy, a freehold lease to the Bridge Hall Mills of Bury, Lancashire.²³ Bridge Hall Mills was a paper factory with a long pedigree, going back to the eighteenth century; it expanded into a major industrial operation in the nineteenth century before sputtering to a pre-Depression economic collapse and a 1925 shutdown. The TP stock prospectus, in a boast as empty as the abandoned and stripped mill buildings, put forth that the plant was “in a good state of repair.”²⁴ Viscose film was now on the British map, but the address was not Courtaulds.

Of the other extant production processes for transparent viscose film independent of La Cellophane’s patents, one was in the hands of a German manufacturer that, with some success, marketed it as Transparit. Even more prominent was a Belgian concern called the Société Industrielle de la Cellulose. In 1930, that company established a foothold in Virginia. The new entity, which was clearly in direct competition with DuPont, was named Sylvania (it was forced to market its cellophane product as Sylphrap).²⁵

Courtaulds believed that it, too, could escape cellophane’s brand-name chokehold. A new product called Viscacelle was Courtaulds’ big transparent wrap hope. Indeed, in 1933, Courtaulds’ C. P. Atkinson was very upbeat on Viscacelle,

Containers of metal, glass, cardboard, and paper . . . will be superseded to a large extent, however, by the most modern of all wrapping materials, viz. transparent cellulose paper, which has additional advantages. Courtaulds Ltd. have developed and are producing large quantities of this class of paper under the name of Viscacelle. This paper has excellent pliability which enables it to conform to articles of all shapes, whilst the appearance of an article for sale can often be improved by wrapping it in coloured Viscacelle. . . . A glance in any shop window shows the ubiquity of its applications. Viscacelle does not catch dust. It is impervious to grease, oil, and alcohol.²⁶

Viscacelle, as it turned out, was not around long enough to catch much dust. Even if impervious to grease and alcohol, apparently it was not resistant to the pressure of anemic profits. The product ultimately was abandoned in favor of an alternative strategy, far more in keeping with the way business was done in the rayon trade. Courtaulds simply made a compact with the devil, in 1935 establishing a wholly new entity, British Cellophane. It was a win-win of sorts: Courtaulds put up all the money for the new company, and La Cellophane provided the manufacturing patents and sales rights.²⁷

Even with this large new investment, cellophane was still a side business for Courtaulds. Synthetic textiles remained its core enterprise, but an important lesson from the Viscacelle episode could be applied to rayon. The name could be branded more effectively, even if the appellation “rayon” was not trademark protected. Commencing on 18 May, National Rayon Week was to be the “great merchandising event of 1936,” or as Courtaulds put forth in its advertising prospectus: “Spotlight on rayon. Rayon . . . that has brought colour and beauty into people’s lives. Rayon . . . that has given to women to-day wardrobes that only a few years ago were reserved for the exclusive few.”²⁸

Not national, but rather imperial National Rayon Week was more like it: as far afield as Singapore, the Straits Times ran a piece headlined “ ‘Say Rayon’ Week; Many Uses and Endless Variety.”²⁹ Not that the Courtaulds campaign was eagerly embraced everywhere. From the beginning, rayon filament was a potential threat to the primary producers of natural silk, especially in the Far East. By the 1930s, however, a new phase of competition had come into play. Innovations in short-cut rayon staple allowed the mixing of far greater quantities of the viscose synthetic with wool or cotton, the resulting fiber to be respun as blends in weaving applications; rayon staple also could be used in nonwoven, felt-like applications that previously had been the exclusive bailiwick of natural fibers. So whether branded or not, viscose had grown into an industry so expansive that it had come to be seen as a threat not simply to natural silk feedstock, but to other fibers as well. The Adelaide Advertiser, voicing support for a countercampaign in behalf of the nation’s native wool, noted that “Britain is on the eve of ‘national rayon week’ ”: “There is too much reason to regard artificial silk, or rayon, as Australia’s ‘Public Enemy No. 1’ in the markets of the world.”³⁰

Courtaulds’ sloganeering of the time yielded “The greatest name in rayon” and “As good as it is beautiful,” a bit staid perhaps, but nonetheless better than the cryptic advertising copy of Glanzstoff’s U.S. subsidiary, “Tag always gets ’em”; cellophane was light-years ahead, though, with an apotheosis of pithiness in “Reveals what it seals” and “Shows what it protects.”³¹ Arguably, however, the most successful slogan ever associated with viscose was popularized not by paid advertisement, but rather through a partisan one-liner. In the election year 1936, the American Liberty League, with large underwriting from the du Pont family (personified by Irénée du Pont, former president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and, by that point, vice chairman of its board), was a major conduit for channeling anti–New Deal counterreaction in the period leading up to FDR’s campaign for a second term. James Aloysius Farley, Roosevelt’s postmaster general, Democratic National Committee Chair, and quintessential political operative, was acutely aware that to effectively counter the American Liberty League, offense was the best defense.

The perfect opportunity presented itself on 22 February 1936, when Farley took the podium to address the Washington Day Banquet of the Kansas Democratic Club in Topeka. The first part of his speech emphasized gains made during the first Roosevelt term, with a local, farm-belt emphasis on FDR’s actions to address the plight of agriculture. But then he came to the heart of the matter:

The constant and unsportsmanlike campaign of distortion directed at the Roosevelt administration is so intense, bitter and biased that I frankly confess many honest and upright American citizens are confused and bewildered. . . . Let us reflect not so much on what is said but who says it.

First let us take the miscalled American Liberty League, an organization of multi-millionaires which is run as a subsidiary of the Republican National Committee. They think alike, act alike, and their leaders are in constant heavy conference in Washington figuring out ways to destroy President Roosevelt’s influence with the people. A brilliant editorial writer said it ought to be called the American Cellophane League and he gave two good reasons. He said first, it’s a duPont product and, second, you can see right through it.³²

The speech was widely reported at the time.³³ The Cellophane League aphorism is often misattributed to Farley as its originator, rather than to the unnamed editorial writer that he credited as his source. The original, thirty-word item on the New York Post’s editorial page titled “Wrapped Up in Cellophane” begins, “The Post suggests that the American Liberty League be renamed.”³⁴ Farley had a long political career.³⁵ Even more enduring, the cellophane metaphor has gone on to enter the American political lexicon. The ill-fated Mitt Romney campaign of 2011–12, for example, was deemed particularly well suited for revisiting the allusion, either obliquely, as when Gail Collins wrote in December 2011 that Romney was “generally kept so far from one-on-one interviews that he might as well be wrapped in cellophane,”³⁶ or more directly, as when Kevin Kruse in January 2012 drew parallels between Romney’s recent comments on “one nation under God” and the Liberty League’s employment of a religious minister to speechify on its behalf (parenthetically, Kruse also invoked the Farley line on the American Cellophane League).³⁷

Irénée du Pont may have been sorely vexed by the New Deal and frustrated that his investment in the American Liberty League was all for naught, given FDR’s landslide victory in the 1936 presidential race (the classic Farleyism on that election being, “As goes Maine so goes Vermont”).³⁸ But at least du Pont could take comfort in the continued and even growing strength of the viscose market in those years. There had been challenges early in the Depression: imports threatened the profits of U.S.-based production, and the inventory of unsold, locally produced fibers grew because of declining domestic purchases. These challenges were met through a marriage of convenience with DuPont’s major U.S. rayon competitor, Courtaulds’ Viscose Company. Their two representatives, Samuel Agar Salvage for the Viscose Company and Leonard A. Yerkes for DuPont, served as president and vice president of the Rayon and Synthetic Yarn Association. Founded in 1929, this organization had the superficial trappings of a standard trade association: it included most U.S. rayon manufacturers of the day under one big tent, predominantly viscose producers, but also what remained of those still using other methods, such as cuprammonium.

Salvage and Yerkes called the shots. In the battle over foreign imports, Salvage spearheaded a successful lobbying effort to maintain trade protections (already well established). This was accomplished by the inclusion of fairly hefty duties on imported rayon in the Smoot-Hawley tariff legislation winding its way through Congress in the spring of 1930. Domestically, DuPont and the Viscose Company had already agreed to curtail production in order to stabilize prices through reduced supply, but this effort was being undermined by suppliers that cut prices to increase their share of the reduced market. In July 1931, when the other companies would not fall in line, Salvage and Yerkes agreed to cut their own prices. The Viscose Company and DuPont abruptly left the Rayon and Synthetic Yarn Association, effectively disbanding the group that they had been instrumental in creating.³⁹

Price cutting was coupled with a technical change in how rayon yarn was supplied to the knitting factories that were secondary users of the product. Rather than bundling in skeins, the yarn was wound on cones and oiled to make it ready for immediate knitting. The problem was that when the cones sat unused for more than three months, the oil tended to go rancid, compromising the quality of the yarn. As stocks of unsold product built up in a depressed market, the Viscose Company and DuPont sold off their defective product at a huge discount, although acknowledging that it came without any of the usual product guarantees. But this fix was temporary: the competitors started to sell off better-quality yarn at the same heavy discount or to sell poor-quality yarn but claiming it to be of high quality. Push came to shove. In October 1931, representatives of the rayon companies convened at the Union Club in New York City. A preset price cut for standard-quality yarn would come into force, along with an across-the-board cut in production; to ensure compliance, independent auditors would check the books of each firm.⁴⁰ The Union Club continued to meet over the following months, and although the entente collapsed in mid-1932, by then the worst of the market crisis had passed. And most saliently, DuPont and the Viscose Company were still on top.

Moreover, Irénée du Pont could take personal satisfaction in another DuPont–Viscose Company alliance that was contemporaneous with the Salvage-Yerkes machinations. On 3 January 1931, Mr. and Mrs. Irénée du Pont “made known” (it was not a formal announcement) the engagement of their daughter Eleanor to Philip G. Rust. Eleanor was a graduate of the Baldwin School, active in the Junior League, and, needless to say, a horsewoman; Philip was a graduate of MIT and “connected with the Viscose Company.”⁴¹ The New York Times carried news of the engagement in January, dutifully reported Eleanor’s choice of her bridal attendants in April,⁴² and then covered the May wedding in detail: she held orchids and bridal roses, her veil was of old family lace, and her gown was of egg-shell tone satin—no art-silk for Eleanor, to be sure.⁴³ We are never told more about Philip’s Viscose Company “connection,” which, since it was of a technical nature, may have been considered a bit too hands-on. The patent for his invention of a new means of treating rayon yarn as a way of “freeing the thread from the excess of chemicals used in forming the thread” was granted in late October 1931, a few months after the wedding.⁴⁴ It is not specified where, exactly, through Rust’s invention, the chemicals (prominently including carbon disulfide at this process step) were being freed up to go. No matter: Philip was moving up and out in any event, first into finance and later as a major cattle rancher on a “plantation” in Georgia.⁴⁵

The prominent wedding of the du Pont daughter would surely have caught the attention of any regular reader of the society page. It is even likely that included among the wedding guests were members of the Union Club, and thus, it is theoretically possible that one of them happened to be at the club on a day when the Rayon and Synthetic Yarn Association was having one of its meetings there. Yet even allowing for this coincidence, he (no women were allowed as members) would have found little special in it. This does not mean, however, that neither the Viscose Company–DuPont sweetheart deal on tariffs nor their production volume and price shenanigans went unnoticed.

In August 1931, Frank William Taussig and Harry Dexter White published, “Rayon and the Tariff: The Nature of an Industrial Prodigy.”⁴⁶ This thirty-three-page essay was no mere polemic on the financial advantages the industry had garnered through tariff protections. In it, Taussig and White also systematically review the history of the industry in Europe and the United States, technological aspects of production, and the general economic policy implications of rayon specifically. They also prominently feature the term “duopoly,” meant to capture the essence of the DuPont–Viscose Company relationship within a small group of corporate entities dominating a large industry: “Most interesting to the economist, we have a case where, in some respects at least, there seems to have been successful application of protection to young industries; yet also conditions of production on a huge scale, monopoly or ‘duopoly,’ international combinations and agreements. Here we meet the problems most characteristic of the trends in modern industry, the most baffling and most difficult of accurate analysis, the least easy to interpret in those terms of competitive industry on which modern economic reasoning has chiefly relied.”⁴⁷

Although “Rayon and the Tariff” first appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (Taussig was the journal’s editor), this article was, in substance, a new chapter for a revised edition of Taussig’s classic text, Some Aspects of the Tariff Question.⁴⁸ Frank Taussig was one of the leading U.S. economists in the first half of the twentieth century. Long associated with Harvard University, he had particular expertise in tariff and trade policies, and was no stranger to governmental service.⁴⁹ Harry Dexter White, who did his doctoral work at Harvard under Taussig, was the listed co-author of the revised Tariff Question. White soon left academia to serve in the Department of the Treasury (going on to lead the Bretton Woods Conference, which laid the groundwork for the International Monetary Fund).⁵⁰

Taussig and White were surprisingly sympathetic to the possibility that earlier in the development of the U.S. domestic rayon industry, tariff support may have served a useful purpose. They were clear, however, that by 1931 such a time, if it had ever existed, had long passed. “Rayon and the Tariff” demolishes, one by one, the economic constructs that might be argued to support continued trade protection, including lack of local expertise, shortage of manufacturing equipment, high labor costs, and, above all, a large capital investment: “Allowance should, of course, be made for an adequate return on this capital, with regard not only to depreciation proper but also to risk and obsolescence. These in a chemical industry are important items, especially when the industry is new. Yet with all allowance, the evidence of the profits of the American Viscose indicates that earnings were brilliant—much more than can be thought necessary, by the wildest stretch of business imagination, to attract and keep capital in the industry.”⁵¹

There was another contemporary, and no less keen, observer of the Viscose Company’s legerdemain in manipulating the invisible hand of the marketplace—one with experiential insights. Isidor Reinhard owned and ran the Arcadia Knitting Mills, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with his two brothers, Samuel and David. Arcadia was, in fact, the Viscose Company’s largest yarn buyer in the early 1930s. As a major client, Arcadia received a 5 percent discount on its purchases. This was standard in the industry, but emblematic of the sort of price inconsistency that the Rayon and Synthetic Yarn Association was working to do away with. Salvage told Arcadia that its discount would be falling to 3 percent. Arcadia refused the offer, countering with a proposal that the Viscose Corporation simply buy them out rather than squeeze them to death. On behalf of Viscose, Samuel Salvage declined.⁵²

On 30 March 1932, Salvage cabled Henry Johnson, his direct boss at Courtaulds in England:

HAD TALK WITH YERKES YESTERDAY WHO FEELS RAYON PRODUCERS WILL ULTIMATELY GO IN KNITTING BUSINESS AS KNITTED CLOTH MANUFACTURERS INCLUDING ARCADIA ARE JEOPARDIZING RAYON STOP . . . YERKES WILL INFORM ME BEFORE HE TAKES ANY STEP STOP ARCADIA WILL TAKE VERY LITTLE PROFIT THIS YEAR BUT ASIDE FROM THAT ITHINK [sic] IT IS TOO DANGEROUS TO BE FINANCIALLY ASSOCIATED AS TROUBLE WOULD IMMEDIATELY ARISE AND THEIR SMART JEW LAWYERS WOULD JUMP ON US STOP FURTHERMORE IT WOULD LEAD TO HAVING TO BREAK OUR ARRANGEMENTS WITH RAYON PRODUCERS STOP PLEASE SHOW THIS TO CHAIRMAN IN CASE THEY TRAP HIM AS I FEEL CONFIDENT I AM SPEAKING IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE COMPANY. SALVAGE⁵³

As the situation was worsening, Reinhard was en route to England to make an end-run around Salvage. Reinhard radioed Henry Johnson in London from the SS Europa first on 11 August, then again on the 17th, and finally on the 19th, enumerating Arcadia’s desperate need for viscose yarn (in total, 225,000 pounds a week). By the last message, his request had become a plaintive outpouring, “Please mister Johnson have pity on us and give us the amount of yarn we need otherwise I am afraid our health will break down mentally and physically from the pressure of our customers for their orders.”⁵⁴

But the story did not end there. In February 1934, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) brought a complaint against ten rayon producers, with the Viscose Company and DuPont Rayon heading up the list, and also naming as respondents twenty-two members of Price, Waterhouse and Company.⁵⁵ This was the accounting firm that had been checking the manufacturers’ books to make sure that standardized production levels and charges were adhered to by all.⁵⁶ The FTC believed that a better descriptor for that activity was illegal price-fixing. Hearings on the case began in May 1934 and did not conclude until three years, 6,500 pages of testimony, and 1,700 exhibits later, finally culminating with a 1937 federal cease and desist order against further price-fixing (although the practice, at that point, had already been discontinued among the viscose producers).⁵⁷ The proceedings against Price, Waterhouse were dismissed, thus preserving that firm’s good name (for the meantime). Of special note, the future secretary of state Dean Acheson, of Covington, Burling, Rublee, Acheson & Shorb, served as co-counsel on the DuPont team.⁵⁸

Just days before the judgment in the FTC case was handed down, the July 1937 issue of Fortune hit the stands. Its lead article was on Courtaulds and its American operations: “Mystery: The American Viscose Corp.; A U.S. Investment of $930,000 by Some Shrewd and Close-Mouthed Britishers Yields a Stupendous Net in Twenty-Six Years, Estimated by Fortune at $300,000,000-odd.”⁵⁹ As the expansive title of the piece makes clear, its focus is on the huge profits American Viscose had gathered to date and was continuing to reap. Illustrated profusely in the Fortune style of the day, with striking photographs of plant operations, the article is also richly colored with corporate details. The competitors of American Viscose are reviewed, with a fitting emphasis on DuPont. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, the Arcadia Knitting Mills incident is covered extensively as well. And although the spin is tilted in favor of American Viscose, this part of the story concludes with a zinger. In Fortune’s retelling, Arcadia had at first undercut its competitors by taking advantage of the discounts it received:

Then came the depression, and Arcadia Mills stopped buying yarn. By the time they wanted it again, Viscose had found other outlets. . . . The mills brought suit for $20,000,000, alleging that Viscose had violated an agreement to supply them with all the yarn they needed. The suit was settled out of court—for a nominal sum, so the rumor went in the trade. Meanwhile Viscose had found another struggling young business to take up the yarn it didn’t have for Arcadia. The history of that business, Burlington Mills, [is] as amazing in its own way as Viscose. [emphasis added]⁶⁰

Fortune does not omit biographical details for Samuel Salvage, who is described as “well rewarded for his pains” as president of the American Viscose Company, a position from which he had recently retired, moving up to become chairman of the board:

Now sixty-one, he keeps an apartment at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan and a country estate at Glen Head, Long Island. The house at Glen Head was built in 1928, just in time to entertain for Sir Esme Howard and 1,500 other Englishmen on Empire Day. . . . He has tried his hand at one hobby after another. Once he dabbled in show business. He has raised tulips that won the Holland Bulb Growers Association trophy four years in succession. And he keeps a 150-foot yacht, Colleen II, with a crew of 14 men, for short weekend cruises.⁶¹

Salvage came through the FTC crisis intact, though not unscathed. His affair with the Reinhard brothers had left a lingering taint. In the words of Fortune, “It was no secret that Viscose in 1931 had fallen to a new low level in the estimation of the rayon trade because of the Arcadia Mills episode.”⁶² Moreover, the evidence at the heart of the FTC case comprised Salvage’s cables to Courtaulds on the pricing and production tactics.⁶³ Perhaps not surprisingly, Salvage blamed Arcadia for calling out the FTC dogs upon him.⁶⁴ But as far as is known, he did not invoke the metaphor of Isidor taking a pound of flesh (or if he did, he at least did not memorialize the comment in a cablegram). Arcadia Knitting Mills, whose company motto was “Independence, Liberty, Virtue,” stayed in operation through the 1930s despite being cut off by American Viscose—a photograph of the company’s employee football team from 1932, with the management proudly standing in the back row, hangs today in the California office of Isidor Reinhard’s son, Eli Reinhard, president of the enterprise that he named after his father’s and uncles’ business: Arcadia Development Company.⁶⁵

Meanwhile, in the same years as the FTC episode, DuPont was fighting on a second legal front, going after Waxed Products Company, Inc., for the manner in which it sold viscose-based transparent film made by its chief competitor, the Sylvania Industrial Corporation. Although the cellophane business was dominated by DuPont, Sylvania used manufacturing processes covered by different patents and was thus independent, holding on to roughly a quarter of the market share (and it had the potential to expand in that niche, including by courting tobacco business—the Sylvania product performed well as a wrapper for Lorillard’s chewing plugs).⁶⁶ This was a duopoly in the finest sense of the word. Moreover, Sylvania had been careful (in light of DuPont’s aggressive stance) to avoid making any claims that its product was Cellophane. But that, apparently, was not good enough. It turns out that Waxed Products, when approached by customers wishing to purchase cellophane, did not clarify that what it was distributing did not have a capital C, as it were. DuPont sued for copyright infringement. In May 1934, a lengthy federal district court opinion found in favor of DuPont,⁶⁷ but two years later this was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.⁶⁸ In a much more succinct decision, the Second Circuit determined that the term “cellophane” had come so much into the public use that trademark protection no longer held. DuPont twice asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, and twice the petition was rejected; the second time, Dean Acheson’s senior partner, J. Harry Covington, represented the company.⁶⁹

The waning of cellophane’s trademark protection, determined by mass-market-driven facts on the ground, was only a small part of a much bigger phenomenon. Over the 1930s, the ways in which perceptions of viscose rayon and cellophane played out were telling: both products, despite being chemically identical and produced by the same technology, traveled widely divergent paths in the public imagination. Cellophane became emblematic of something entertainingly novel, the camp chic of its day. Rayon, on the other hand, assumed a tawdry, even sinister aspect. In 1931, looking forward to what the future might hold for rayon, Taussig and White crossed over the border from the land of straight economics into the realm of cultural critique, writing in a Veblenesque tour de force:

Fashion may change. It is more than possible that it will become less favorable to the rayon makers. Their product has been for a long time insistently in demand not only because it was like silk in softness and lustre, but also because, like silk, it had something of the glamor of display and distinction. So long as rayon was still a rare material emulating silk in softness and sheen, fabrics made from it catered to prestige and emulation. But as soon as it comes to be made cheaply in larger and larger quantities, and sold to a wider circle, they must lose some of their charm. “Silk” stockings are no longer insignia of riches and station; they are worn by the maid as well as the mistress.⁷⁰

The maid in ersatz silk stockings that Taussig and White foresaw made her novelistic debut shortly thereafter, personified in Irmgard Keun’s 1932 novel Das kunstseidene Mädchen, which appeared in Britain as The Artificial Silk Girl in the following year.⁷¹ As the Times Literary Supplement noted in its December 1933 review, Doris (the first-person-voiced protagonist of the novel) is “a young lady of easy virtue in the distracted Germany of a year or two ago.”⁷² She goes to Berlin to make it in the big city; not surprisingly, Keun has been invoked as the Candace Bushnell of her day. If so, Doris is more Samantha Jones than Carrie Bradshaw. Although she prefers sheer silk, she will make do with rayon when necessary. But even in this Doris is discerning: she is particularly attracted to the cuprammonium form of nonviscose rayon known commercially as Bemberg silk (Bembergseide). In the 1930s, it had only a tiny share of the market, but even at a higher cost, it held on because it was desirably “super-silky”; and particularly in Germany, Bembergseide undergarments were considered especially hygienic.⁷³ In four places in the book Doris takes note of Bembergseide underwear (indeed, at one point pilfering a pair).⁷⁴ But aside from the novel’s title, the more generic kunstseide (that is, viscose rayon) makes only a single appearance, and that as a caution: “Let me tell you, Herr Brenner, a woman should never wear artificial silk when she’s with a man. It wrinkles too quickly, and what are you going to look like after seven real kisses? Only pure silk, I say.”⁷⁵

Keun was not alone in highlighting rayon accessories as key features in the wardrobe of the moderne social climber. An essay by the leftist German journalist Felix Stössinger, published in the same year that Das kunstseidene Mädchen appeared, critiqued the consumerist pretentions of the revitalized urban shopping landscape of the Berlin of his day. Stössinger noted, inter alia, that Tauenstzien Straße had been transformed into a cheap street carnival where the ribbon vendors had become “a temple to the God of rayon.”⁷⁶ It is no coincidence that near the end of Keun’s book, her material girl, Doris, walks dejectedly on the same Tauenstzien, down on her luck, no place to live, schlepping all her possessions. As she describes it: “I am carrying a suitcase—genuine vulcanized fiber—a suitcase with my Bemberg shirts and stuff, with my hard-earned Berlin things.”⁷⁷

In specifying that the vulcanized fiber of the carrying case was genuine (echt in the original German), the author sounds an ironic note not intended by Doris herself. Vulcanized fiber, like viscose, is a semisynthetic cellulose material made by a process (first patented in the 1870s) in which paper is hardened through a metallic-salt treatment.⁷⁸ Vulcanized cellulose fiber, vaguely leather-like, was particularly popular for use in making synthetic traveling cases that were less expensive than the real thing.

The “artificial silk girl,” as a type, was far from uniquely German. Indeed, it is easy to see why Keun’s novel might have resonated with British readers. Lux soap advertising copy in the 1920s pointed out how the female wage worker could aspire to pass as a member of the leisured class (an office assistant at an open filing cabinet, paneled with illustrations of each piece of garb and text about its laundry care): “HAPPILY THE BUSINESS GIRL OF to-day disproves that the only wear of efficiency is sombre hues of blacks and greys. Every morning she successfully vies with her more leisured sisters in charm and brightness . . . [Upper left panel] THE STOCKINGS—Artificial silk in the popular moonlight shade. Spare them from hot water harsh treatment—wash them in lukewarm Lux.”⁷⁹

But the blurring of social status was only part of the equation. Taussig and White posited that artificial silk might come to be viewed as something not only cheap but also cheapening. In the next issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the publication in which their article had appeared, a physician with expertise in consumer product safety named Carl Alberg took this one step further. In “Economic Aspects of Adulteration and Imitation,” he notes, “The word, imitation, also has an ignoble connotation which, however, does not imply harmfulness. The antagonism to imitations arises rather from the fact that their use confers the opposite of social prestige upon the user.”⁸⁰

Despite the downside to imitation, Alberg argues that at least it is more honest than the misnomer “synthetic”:

If the manufacturer is scrupulous yet anxious to avoid the word, imitation, he may use the word, artificial, or synthetic, instead. These words, however, have meanings not identical with that of the word, imitation. An artificial article in the strict sense of the term is one in which chemical and physical properties is [sic] practically identical with some natural product, but produced by artificial means. Imitation leather is wrongly termed artificial leather, since it is not, chemically speaking, leather at all. This is also true of artificial silk, so-called, which is not silk at all but a cellulose derivative.⁸¹

The imitation in leather-like “vulcanized fiber” was twofold: a cellulose leather knockoff and a name that invoked vulcanization, but was actually based on a chemical manufacturing process nothing like the vulcanizing of rubber. Vulcanization introduced sulfur into the latex feedstock, which was why sulfur dissolved in carbon disulfide caused so much disease in rubber manufacturing. The lexicon of ersatz expanded further through another chemically modified substitute material, vulcanized vegetable oil. In this case, the vulcanization was real: sulfur was introduced into the vegetable oil (rapeseed was one of the preferred starting materials) to create a substitute rubber-like substance that could be mixed with the real stuff to get more product at a cheaper cost. One method of production used carbon disulfide to dissolve the sulfur.⁸² This practice led to workplace poisoning, just as it had in cold vulcanization.⁸³ In the case of vulcanized vegetable oil, a new name for the material came close to admitting its imitation status: factice, initially introduced by the Germans and derived from Latin (as in “factitious”).⁸⁴ Factice is still manufactured and marketed today for use in the rubber industry. Another appearance of the same word with a related etymology, but this time directly from the French factice, for “dummy” (used as in “sham” or “empty object”), is a popular eBay collectable referring to very large perfume bottles meant for display but without any real perfume therein. This is probably a good thing, since very old perfume might well contain traces of carbon disulfide, since the solvent was promoted very early on as a way to effectively extract the essence of roses and other flowers.⁸⁵

The American Dry Goods Association, in 1925, had not been blind to the potential downside of “artificial”—or even worse, “imitation”—silk, and proposed the alternative brand name “rayon,” which caught on right away in the United States. Even though the Brits took longer to warm to “rayon” (perhaps because it was perceived as an Americanism), they came around eventually, and “artsilk” eventually fell by the wayside. Even Samuel Augustine Courtauld could see the downside to “artificial.” Chairing a 1926 meeting of the Royal Society of the Arts at which the chief designer of Courtaulds was reading a paper on synthetic fibers, Courtauld made introductory remarks (paraphrased in a third-person account) that were in sync with Alberg’s argument against the term “artificial”: “The name ‘artificial silk’ was unfortunate, because artificial silk was entirely different from silk both chemically and physically, and its properties were, in some ways, almost the reverse of silk. He supposed that it had originally been called artificial silk on account of its peculiar lustre; so far as the present invention went, it was the most lustrous fibre known. It had added, in reality, a new lustre to life.”⁸⁶

Non-English-language usage varied. The Italians embraced the word “rayon,” using it widely in advertising throughout the 1930s (also applying the word viscosa frequently); the Japanese seemed somewhat open to “rayon” as well. The Germans, in contrast, stuck with “artificial silk” (kunstseide) when referring to filament, as did the French (soie artificielle). Whatever term was applied, the modifier “imitation” was universally avoided, or nearly so. In 1930, a traditional cintu ballad appeared in Tamil: “Imitesan cilkku celai cetamilc cintu.”⁸⁷

Taussig and White, and Alberg, easily might argue that such word preferences were not mere coincidences. But extrapolating beyond a negative market impact to a potentially sinister cultural-spiritual symbolism for imitation was beyond the ken of economic theory. The intersection of ersatz and modernity, however, was a theme well suited for treatment in dystopian fiction. The timing was ripe in early 1932 when, a few months before Kuen’s novel appeared, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World.

If one comes at it from the angle of costume notes, Brave New World might as well be subtitled “The Artificial Silk Boy.” Huxley very nearly perseverates on the topic of synthetic textiles. As with Keun’s Bemberg silk, a nonviscose rayon gets prominent billing, in this case acetate silk (technically, a modified rather than a regenerated cellulose rayon; Huxley would have known cellulose acetate by its British trade name, Celanese). In the first chapter of Brave New World, the decanted embryos are trained to take to a hot climate, “predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers.”⁸⁸ Acetate textiles (including acetate-satin and plain acetate) appear many other times throughout the novel, including an impassioned “I thought I would never see a piece of real acetate silk again.”⁸⁹ But viscose (Huxley’s preferred term for rayon) makes as many appearances in the book as acetate (and maybe more), including as viscose-linen, viscose-wool, viscose fur, and viscose velveteen (the latter twice, in the form of sexy velveteen shorts worn by the novel’s paramour, Lenina).⁹⁰ Juxtaposing viscose with the novel’s title phrase underscores the key role played by the synthetic for Huxley: “He was thinking of Lenina, of an angel in bottle-green viscose, lustrous with youth and skin food, plump, benevolently smiling. His voice faltered. ‘O brave new world,’ he began.”⁹¹

Rayon had traveled a long way, culturally, over a very few years, becoming transformed from the modern everyman’s luxury of 1925 to a tawdry deceit by 1932, if only the short distance from “O, wonder!” to “O brave new world,” separated by only a few lines of text in Shakespeare’s Tempest.

Viscose even became the stuff of medical quackery, with a special flourish of imitation hucksterism. In the late 1920s, the Dr. Clason Viscose Company began to market by mail order a nearly miraculous cure for varicose veins called the “Viscose Treatment.” The term “viscose” likely was co-opted in this scheme for its connotation of modern technology and for simultaneously operating as a near soundalike for “varicose.” The viscose varicose treatment involved spreading a thick paste over the legs and wrapping it over with a bandage.

Within only a few years, the Viscose Treatment had mushroomed into a series of clinics called “Viscose Ambulatoriums” (never referred to in the company’s advertising literature by the presumed Latin plural, ambulatoria).⁹² The flagship operation was based on Alavarado Street in Los Angeles, whence it expanded to Chicago and other sites. Before long, doctors and patients around the country were writing in to the American Medical Association inquiring about the product’s extravagant claims as a cure. This caught the attention of the AMA’s Investigative Bureau, and it had the ear of the Federal Trade Commission. By 1933, the resulting FTC cease and desist order catalogued eight pages worth of false claims made by the Dr. Clason Viscose Company, heading the litany with: “Viscose Method stops pain from Varicose Veins, Milk Leg, Phlebitis, Poor Circulation; stops swelling, positively heals leg sores while you work.”⁹³

The AMA Investigative Bureau had carried out an independent laboratory analysis that showed the product had nothing to do with viscose and, thankfully, at least was not contaminated with carbon disulfide. It was no more than overpriced zinc oxide paste: “The material seems to be a little better than white carpenters’ glue with glycerine. The name itself is misleading as Viscose, as ordinarily known, is a well recognized chemical substance known for years and used in making caps for covering bottles, for making artificial hog casings and in the manufacture of artificial silk.”⁹⁴

Remarkably, the contemporaneous image of cellophane was the polar opposite of that of artificial silk. Cellophane was newfangled but good-natured, contemporary and cute, hygienic yet not sterile, a lark, the cat’s meow—in short, as Cole Porter immortalized it in 1934, the top, right up there with the National Gallery and Greta Garbo’s salary.⁹⁵

Musically, Cole Porter was not alone in composing odes to cellophane, although “You’re the Top” has been perhaps more memorable than Edward Heyman and Richard Myers’s “If Love Came Wrapped in Cellophane” (1935)⁹⁶ or Billie Madsen’s “My Cellophane Baby” (1937).⁹⁷ Nor was the muse of song alone in pushing cellophane. The same year that Anything Goes opened, the defining avant-garde theatrical event of the decade took place, the 1934 stage production of Four Saints in Three Acts. The words were by Gertrude Stein, the music was composed by Virgil Thomson, choreography was by Frederick Ashton, and the production was staged by John Houseman. The costumes and scenery, the work of Florine Stettheimer, prominently featured cellophane (which Stettheimer had earlier incorporated into the curtains in her Manhattan apartment); the exuberance of the stage design led to its being dubbed “Botticellophane.”⁹⁸ The souvenir program for Four Saints in Three Acts (introductory remarks by Carl Van Vechten, portrait photos by Lee Miller) includes special acknowledgment of the DuPont Cellophane Company.⁹⁹

We have no documentation of any Algonquin Round Table conversations that included cellophane witticisms. But we do have Ring Lardner, in a piece in the New Yorker (19 December 1931), imagining the hotel’s manager, Frank Case, interrupting a dancing male couple with the query, “Pardon me, Officer, but can either of you play the cellophane?”¹⁰⁰ The next month, cellophane even made it to the “Talk of the Town” (alongside and above the classic Thurber cartoon of a barking seal in the bedroom looking over the bedstead):

It [cellophane] has all sorts of uses besides the familiar ones. They are making hats out of it, artificial grass and water scenes for the stage, raincoats for emergency use, costumes for burlesque-show choruses, and coverings to protect table tops from glass marks. Kosher cellophane is made to wrap up kosher products. You can make your own flypaper by smearing it with glue and laying it over something flies like to eat. It’s very effective. The flies don’t see it until they are stuck on it. In Oregon a fishing guide discovered that a little piece torn off a cigarette package and stuck on a hook fools trout and salmon. It looks like nothing to flies, but it looks like flies to salmon.¹⁰¹

The New Yorker returned to cellophane again in May 1933, in an essay by E. B. White, whose rapier wit is matched by an incisive critique of how things stood at the worst of the Depression and not long after FDR’s inauguration. In “Alice Through the Cellophane,” White remarks:

The social revolution began with cellophane, which allowed people to see what they were buying instead of simply going ahead and buying it anyway. Consumers are now keenly interested in examining life through the cellophane film of paralyzed industry; they are intrigued with its new transparencies and convinced that some sort of order might be introduced somewhere. Some of the more common paradoxes of this transition period are wrapped in cellophane by economists, and we find people of shall I say average intelligence like myself seeing clearly that there can be a glut of food in a time of famine.¹⁰²

Cellophane may have caught the notice of the elites, but this was because it had become so emblematic of the masses. As an instructional pamphlet produced by the Brooks Paper Company of St. Louis tells its readers, “Nineteen hundred thirty-three has set many new styles. Cellophane has surely taken its place as a leader in these. You will want to be in the swim. The newest thing is Cellophane Clubs, where the fashionable matron and miss join in making gifts, novelties and plainly useful things of Cellophane. . . . You should be the first in your neighborhood to start a Cellophane Club.”¹⁰³ The pamphlet ends by linking cellophane to celebrity: “Hollywood’s famous movie colony has established Cellophane as the anniversary symbol of the first six months of marriage. Already up-to-the-minute folks have grasped the idea and Cellophane-wrapped gifts and remembrances made of Cellophane honor the occasion.”¹⁰⁴

But it is the concluding paragraph of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man in 1934 that sums it up best: “Macaulay started to move. I did not wait to see what he meant to do, but slammed his chin with my left fist. The punch was all right, it landed solidly and dropped him, but I felt a burning sensation on my left side and knew I had torn the bullet-wound open. ‘What do you want me to do?’ I growled at Guild. ‘Put him in cellophane for you?’ ”¹⁰⁵