CASE STUDIES factors in cotton, it is to be feared, have been too often disposed of in easy generalizations. These generalizations are likely to fall into one or the other of two extreme attitudes. White croppers in particular and Negro farmers in general, so runs one commonly held view, are inherently inferior, and their status as growers of cotton is merely an evidence of that basic biological fact. Cotton is financed and grown, another view holds, under a system by which small groups of designing men exploit the masses of southern farmers, black and white. It will be realized that the position herein taken is one that refuses to be bound by blanket explanations. Geo graphic, historical, and economic factors serve to explain many aspects of cotton culture. But the variations both within the practices in the cotton system and also in the traits of the human factors in cotton are so great as to render unsatisfactory many of the explanations offered in terms of race, heredity, tenancy, or the crop lien system.
The interplay of southern farmers and their cotton under widely varying conditions can best be shown in case studies. Specialization and diversification in cotton
culture, management, integrity, industry, thrift, tact, and their opposites are set forth in stories of successes and failures of the human factors in cotton. Cotton wage hands, croppers, share tenants, small owners, and large planters are presented in case studies. Such cases as are here offered rarely find their way into the texts on eco nomic history. They represent the average and the type of the agricultural process ; they go behind the statistics and show the cotton system as it works. To those un familiar with southern agricultural processes, they pos sess, it is submitted, interpretative as well as descriptive value. The picture of cotton growers as they remain in the situation in which they were born, climb the ladder of tenure, or fail, offers material valuable for interpre tation of the human factors in cotton.