The crop of 1925 was grown under drought conditions ; the season was ideal in 1926, and without perceptible increase in acreage over the preceding year the Western Belt pushed the cotton market to its lowest level since 1914. Such fluctuations defy cotton conventions and acreage restriction agreements ; they are beyond the power of man to foresee and modify. The western farmers have thus unwillingly added to the hazards of cotton production both for themselves and for the growers who must compete with them.
When one turns from the fluctuations of cotton pro duction and the cotton market to trace the effects of the cotton cycle on the South, he is likely to find that he has made a transition from economics to journalism.
No one denies the influence of the cycle of cotton upon the rural and urban life of the cotton states. The tend encies seem obvious, but rural standards of living are illusive things, and it is only lately that they have re ceived attention from the hands of social scientists. Until data can be accumulated for a realistic study of the fluctuations of the farmer's living with the fluctuation of the price of his commodities, a descriptive presentation from the reports of various observers is likely to be of some value.
Fluctuations in cotton affect the whole economic and social fabric of the South. Journalists do not betray the truth when they write: And what does cotton mean to the cotton states? It means life, health, happiness, and prosperity to them. In fact, noth ing else matters much. If cotton is all right, all's well in the Cotton Belt. And if cotton is sick the whole South is sick. The physician can collect no bills, the merchant can sell noth ing except on credit, railroads go without freight; mill opera tives languish, children grow pale, every person in the street is dejected and gloom reigns throughout the South. . . . Cot ton is the barometer that foretells the industrial fogs, squalls, and fair weather of the South." A good crop and a high price means more than that the farmer's wife can begin to dream of a new parlor carpet and a piano; it means that the preacher's son and the merchant's daughter can go away to college. The clerk scents a raise and cautiously enquires the price of a diamond ring for the girl that for the past two years he has been seeing home from church. The commercial traveler is lavish with more expen sive cigars than he smoked last year, reflecting that the house won't mind a bigger expense account, with orders coming in like this.' It is known that tenants work up into land ownership in good cotton years ; in poor years owners relapse into tenancy. Du Bois in a study of the Negro landholders of Georgia, made for the Department of Labor in 1901, pointed out this trend. After showing that his study indicated that Negro owners in fifty-four Georgia coun ties had increased their landholdings from 338,769 acres in 1874 to 1,075,073 in 1900, Katharine Coman points out: This threefold gain has been won by the most strenuous earning and saving. It means slow, difficult, patient achieve ment. Much depends on the price of cotton. In the years of high prices, 1884, 1890, 1900, there is a long step in ad vances, one hundred thousand acres being added each year. When cotton drops to five cents a pound, there is actual retro gression, as in 1894, 1898 and 1899. The cotton corner of
the year just past "a was the means of putting thousands of Negro farmers in full possession of the land they tilled." Business becomes almost stagnant in certain cotton areas when prices fall. Farmers quit work and come to town not to buy but to stand around on street corners and talk things over. Cotton goes unpicked, partly be cause of a belief that this will cause the price to rise, but mainly because picking would add another expense to a crop already a dead loss. "I found many fields of cotton unpicked," wrote a traveler through the South in the late autumn of 1921, "some that would never be picked at all. In some cases it paid the tenant farmer better to desert his own crop and hire out to neighboring farmers to pick their 47 The rural South's almost complete dependence on a cotton economy was glaringly shown by the price debacle in 1914. The hardest hit were the plantation areas which were almost wholly dependent on the one crop. In the Alabama Black Belt in 1914, says a Bureau of Labor report, ". . . hundreds of landowners simply released their tenants from such contracts as they held against them. The rents were either relinquished outright or post poned indefinitely. . . . The customary advances of pro visions to Negro tenants were cut off. Owners of large plantations were compelled for the first time in their lives to tell their Negroes that they could not feed them and that they were forced to let them move away. In a number of Black Belt counties food was distributed to the starving Negroes by the Federal Department of Agriculture and by the organization of the Red Cross. The tenants . . . were also in debt for provisions which had been furnished them during the past winter. Thus in many instances they lost their mules and other prop erty which were taken for the payment of rent and store debts. . . . Nearly $50,000 was made up in and around the town of Demopolis, Alabama, and distributed among the most destitute." 48 Studies on the subject cite the boll weevil and the low prices of 1914-15 as among the causes of the great Negro migration. Now that the way out has bCen found for many people who never knew it before, migrations may be expected as the result of all periods of low prices. Dr. Andrew M. Soule, President of Georgia State Agri cultural College, estimated that 100,000 of the farm population left Georgia during the first six months of the cotton depression of 1922. A survey carried on by county agents showed that 11,000 farms had been aban doned during that time." The reaction of war prices was in proportion. A greater amount of prosperity was distributed over the Cotton Belt down to the lowest levels of tenancy than ever be fore. A sympathetic observer from Georgia thus describes its interaction on the Black Belt : The Negro tenants are rolling in wealth. It is a curious sight, those in the country districts of Georgia report, to see them come to town with their pockets stuffed with paper money. They pay their bills and buy more goods with money peeled from great rolls of green and yellow backs. Theirs, indeed, is almost an embarrassment of riches. They seem hardly to know how to handle such masses of currency.