OSHA's Cotton Dust Standard Quotes

This fight is as old civilization: the unending war of a free people with inalienable rights granted by God, against those tyrannical power-hungry politicians intent on the establishment of a totalitarian government.

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William Pitts owner of the 80 year old Hermitage Mills, located in Camden South Carolina.

It is sickening to see the gutless minions of the news media siding with those few crybaby Americans who obviously are looking for a handout from the very hand that fed and clothed their families.

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William Pitts owner of the 80 year old Hermitage Mills, located in Camden South Carolina.

Nobody has proven cotton dust is a source of disease….In forty years, we’ve not had one single employee…disabled because of a respiratory problem.

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William Pitts owner of the 80 year old Hermitage Mills, located in Camden South Carolina.

[Brown lung is] an allergy. If you are exposed to cotton dust and develop any kind of respiratory problem, it can be corrected providing you have not been exposed for a very very long period.

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Robert Small, President of the American Textile Manufacturers Institute, America’s Textile Reporter Bulletin, August, 1978.

On Friday, June 23, the world ended for some U.S. textile firms.

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Textile World, July, 1978.

[Only one percent of cotton workers] have a reaction to cotton dust. The problem is grossly exaggerated. There has not been a known death from byssinosis. There are no autopsy findings that prove the existence of byssinosis in an individual. There are subjective symptoms which the patients express that sometimes result from bronchitis, emphysema or excessive smoking.

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F. Sadler Love, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Textile Manufacturers Institute, The Washington Post.

We are particularly intrigued by the term byssinosis a thing thought up by venal doctors who attended last year’s ILO [International Labor Organization] meetings in Africa, where inferior races are bound to be afflicted by new diseases more superior people defeated years ago...As a matter of fact, we referred to the ‘cotton fever’ earlier, when we pointed out that a good chaw of B.L. dark would take care of it, or some snuff...Well, we want to tell Mr. [James] O’Hara [D-MI] that, and for all our life, we have hated federal interference in our lives businesses…Congressman O’Hara is typical of the lousy representation we get from time-serving Northern Democrats who sell their souls to the venal labor leaders.

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Unsigned editorial in America’s Textile Reporter, a trade publication.