One country storekeeper in Georgia states that since the last harvest he has taken in over twenty thousand dollars in cash that he had charged off the books. All this was for goods that had been sold in the past to Negro farm tenants. With prosperity suddenly come upon them, the Negroes made no attempt to avoid their just obligations.' The war migration northward and the good prices for cotton combined to bring about more equitable conditions on the plantations and in landlord-tenant relations. Agri cultural labor, which had always been plentiful and cheap, rose to a higher economic level. In a letter to a news paper a tenant described the new conditions for his class in the following terms : The tenant no longer canvasses a whole country in search of a home, for the landlord goes out into the byways and hedges and compels them to come. The tenant makes his de mands as to additions, repairs to buildings in no uncertain terms. He says how much fertilizer he must have and the landlord gets it. He no longer plows a one-eyed stringhalted mule, for the landlord is on his note for a $700 pair.' Standards of living were raised for farmers from North Carolina to Texas. Debts that had hung over men for years were paid. Storekeepers dug out forgotten ac counts and presented them for payment. Land prices that had been stationary for decades rose almost over night. Writes Ray Standard Baker of the rise and fall of cot ton prices : The tremendous paying of old debts was harvest time for the merchants. In 1918 and 1919 . . . landowners and ten ants had a taste of a better way of life, more of the common decencies and comforts, a better chance to educate their chil dren, a little glimpse beyond the horizon of their dull ordinary lives. It is true there was great wastage . . . for example, a tremendous automobile invasion of the South, but every where I have found new houses, new barns, new roof paint, better roads, schoolhouses, churches, and better farm machin ery. I visited certain neighborhoods where for the first time there have been glimpses of the comforts which are the com mon necessities of farm life in the North: home water supply, plumbing, proper lighting, washing machines, better furni ture, musical instruments, telephones.
. . . and now the curtain seems to be dropping upon that pleasant scene and they feel themselves headed back toward the old morass of crop lien kind of slavery to merchants and bankers." The relation of cotton prices to agrarian unrest in the South is clearly evident and interesting to trace. "The Tillman Movement" in South Carolina, as Francis But ler Simkins has shown in his book of that name, grew out of the inability of the upland cotton farmers in the coastal areas to make a decent living in the 1890's. Till man himself failed at cotton farming and came first into the public eye by his vigorous demands for the relief of agriculture. Benjamin B. Kendrick " has held that the agrarian discontent in the South grew out of the crop lien system and the low social status of the southern farmer in 1880 as compared with 1860. But his low social status was to a large extent a low economic status owing to the falling prices of cotton since 1870. In North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and especially in Georgia, the Agrarian Crusade took the form of a revolt against the Democratic party called Populism. Tom Watson came from a Georgia farm and was a country lawyer and farm owner before he became prominent. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Lease had told her western audiences that what the farmers needed was to raise less corn and more hell ! Down in Dixie, as some wag has accurately put it, they continued to do both.
The black Republicans on the plantations raised the cot ton, and the Populist Democrats, upland cotton farmers, raised the hell. The story of the cotton farmer at the mercy of the market and falling prices, in the toils of the creditor, the supply merchant, the middleman, and the "anaconda" mortgage, going out to do battle against the solid South and the Democratic party, has been en gagingly told for one southern state by A. M. Arnett." In the field of cotton economics the object of the farmers' particular wrath was the New York Cotton Exchange. It was believed that speculators established the prices ruinous to the cotton planters, and a partic ularly popular unwritten plank in the platform of the agrarian revolt was the extermination of the New York Cotton Exchange. A low price for a good crop of cotton was the result of the malign influence of speculators. The farmers were exploited. The attitude is well repre sented in an address delivered by Tom Watson at a cotton convention held during the crisis of 1905: What a singular situation is ours, my brethren. The world has never seen one similar to it. Famine has its millions of victims in India because the crops have failed. We sent the offerings of our charity a year ago to Russia because her crops had failed. Tonight in Ireland starvation Clamors for its victims throughout the length and breadth of that afflicted country, and it is because they didn't make the crops.
It is a curious state of affairs. I starve to death, not be cause I have no crust to eat, but because the table is bounti fully spread. If we make no crop it is ruin, and if we do make one it is ruin too. It's the old predestination cry! You can and you can't, you will and you won't; you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.' The speculators set the price of cotton. They lowered its price by creating cotton which existed in name only, cotton futures. Failing to exterminate the Cotton Ex change, Watson told the growers they had yet one weapon left: Spot cotton is king and always will be king if you will be true to it. The mills can't run on cotton futures. The gambling contracts made on Wall Street itself can't always be settled by other contracts. Sooner or later they have got to have spot cotton.
What is Wall Street doing? It is simply betting that you will sell your cotton in April, May or June at six cents and a fraction. For them to win the game you have got to do it, for if you don't they lose the game and you win it. Put your self with spot cotton just where Sully stood a year ago. Let us keep in our hands that which they are bound to have. Let us hold it like grim death and when they want it let them come to us and pay our price." The South has become used to political gestures in connection with cotton. When a sudden fall in the price of cotton has thrown the section into depression the appeal has been to oratory. Large numbers of legislative pallia tives and nostrums are offered during each recurring depression. They serve as topics of conversation for a while; they bring their sponsors into brief prominence ; but no one expects them to pass. "We've always been hollerin' for help from the Gov'ment," one farmer told Ray Stannard Baker, "but I've yet to find any man who can show me where we ever got it." The agricultural surplus furnishes the most vexing problem in farm economic policy with which the nation has had to deal. The failure of laissez faire to minister to the welfare of the cotton grower has led to suggestions that include valorization of cotton, government subsidies to cotton growers, supervision of acreage planted, and suppression of crop reporting. A lack of clear thinking prevails.