And because cotton has its equivalent in cash, any time, any place, it is the mortgage crop. The larger the percentage of the farm planted to cotton, the more se curity has the lender of credit. Food furnished by the farm is of interest only to the actual farmer; the land lord and supply merchant receive their payments not in kind but in cash. Where diversified farming is acceptable to the landlord it may encroach upon the vested interests of the merchant and the furnisher. Why should the supply merchant encourage the growing of an abundance of food and feedstuffs at home when he has them for sale at the "General Merchandise" at a profit plus an inter est charge? It is this factor which gives content to the term, "the cotton system." There is an accumulated body of evidence to support the charge that the undiversified growing of cotton is determined by financial interests rather than by agricul tural interests. The tenant farmer's wife of Alabama who wrote the Atlanta Constitution, pathetically inquiring how she and her husband or neighbors were to follow the universal advice to diversify when their landlord wanted only cotton grown, represents a type. A Georgia business man 23 wrote in 1914: If you want to get at the situation you must call a meeting of the owners of these rented farms and . . . the men who buy and sell what goes on and what goes away from the farm. These bankers, merchants, warehousers, fertilizer men, mule dealers . . . find their occupations gone when cotton has no value. . . . Their one idea is to see that they [the tenants] produce every bale of cotton possible. If one of these owners lives too far away to look after renting and to attend to the gathering of the crop and the collection of the rent, some local man is made an agent for the purpose. He looks first to making . . . a good rent contract for the owner. . . . Then he sees to it that . . . the handling of all the cotton produced on that farm should come through his store or bank. . . . Fertilizers . . . mules . . . farming im plements . . . all the supplies that go to the tenants on this farm are handled by him. . . . The farmer who raises his own supplies at home has no use for these men. [But] cotton farming can be done by any sort of poor white tenant and any sort of ignorant Negro. All these poor tenants need . . . is to have a little direction from town in the springtime, an arrangement by which all they eat and all their stock eats is furnished to them, and they can produce the cotton and carry it into town, where the lord of the manor will be ready to take it and sell it and pocket the lion's share and let the poor white tenants and Negro tenants have just enough to keep them alive until next year's crop. These men give no thought to the building up of the land but milk it from year to year of every ounce of cotton it will produce.
[As the result] today the southern farms are barren of the very things that should be their glory. You can get on a railroad train or into an automobile and ride a hundred miles without seeing a herd of cattle. When you do see cattle they are little tick infested creatures that no more resemble real cows than a tubercular cotton factory operative resem bles an athlete. I have young men in my employ twenty-five years of age, born and raised in Georgia, who have never seen a mule colt. There is no grain, no hay, no poultry, no vegetable gardens, no orchards—except the peach orchards belonging to non-resident corporations—nothing that goes to make up a real farmer's home.
It is in years of cotton prosperity that the system flourishes most. When overproduction or crop failures leave notes, rent, and store bills unpaid, a cry for diversifi cation goes up from southern business. But in the pro gram for diversification there exists a fundamental conflict between the public needs of the region and the vested in terests of those engaged in supplying the various forms of cotton credit. This has been caustically pointed out by a Texas lawyer : There are those in every village, town and city in the South who constantly demand that cotton shall be planted in large acreage and have never at any time heretofore urged and are not now urging any decrease in acreage. They con stitute that large and influential class engaged in local com mercial pursuits. Their business is the farm supplying trade of the Southern States. They furnish the rations, either di rectly or indirectly, used by the farmers in producing crops, and they insist that those who eat the bread ,and meat and wear the clothes they sell on credit, produce a crop which can on any day, at some price, be sold for cash.
They may meet, yes, they do meet, in the Chambers of Commerce and proclaim that there must be a reduction of cotton acreage, and from those places they proceed directly to the cuddyholes in their places of business and write chat tel mortgages for the poor devils to sign covering the cotton crops from one to five years and in addition, everything from the pig to products raised by the children. Listen to the
speeches in the Chambers of Commerce, and in the banquet halls where a few most carefully selected farmers are enter tained, and go directly from there to the mortgage records and see the work that is really being done. Always, every where, in the private counting houses, the demand is made that cotton must be produced so that the debts can be paid.
Not one word is said in private conference with the farmers about reduction of cotton It may be that the vested interest in cotton culture is more apparent than real. If the change were made to a well-rounded system of diversified agriculture with cot ton as a cash crop, the supply stores and purveyors of credit would likely find a place in the economic organiza tion equally remunerative because less hazardous. But, like the introduction of machinery, the adoption of a new agricultural economy would cause a shock resulting in the maladjustment of many economic units. Since changes in industrial organization are always engineered by those in possession of the credit facilities, to expect croppers, tenants, or even small owners to carry out an adequate program of diversification is to reproach them for not being able to lift themselves by their own boot straps. The change when it comes will have to be engi neered from above by bankers, landlords, and supply merchants. A general change in the cotton system would involve a social crisis such as a continued depression in the cotton market, or a withdrawal of cheap tenant labor as has occurred in some areas since the Negro migra tions. Such an adjustment would result from continued loss to supply merchants and landlords ; it would be pain ful and of long duration.
Many southern thinkers are coming to feel that the break-up of the plantations into small owned farms offers the only chance for diversification. The plantation with its organized supervision is the more efficient producer of cotton, but it does not provide for the home living from the farm for its workers. The least changes toward di versification may be expected where the plantation or absentee landlords prevail. Many of the landlords who have been successful farmers "now reside in the towns, expecting their tenants to do just as well as they did but at the same time demanding more and more money from the old place." 25 This of course means a concentration on cotton and tobacco. A Mississippi Flood Director for 1927 writes of conditions in the Delta: Portions of this region have been given almost entirely to the raising of cotton. No richer land can be found anywhere than in the Mississippi Delta. Areas that planted 100 per cent cotton are mortgaged to such an extent that it is a question as to whether more than a very few will be able to survive the late overflow. It was necessary for the Red Cross to feed their tenants for almost twelve months, and at this time many of them are experiencing much difficulty in obtaining credit. There are few planters in the Delta who raise their own feedstuff for their hogs and cattle suffi cient to supply their farms. Invariably when you strike such a farmer he has money in the bank and seldom do you find such a farmer with a mortgage on his farm.
I have seen many farmers in the hill district go out and clear land, and establish a new farm, and apparently they seem to be making money for the first two or three or four years. While the land is fresh it would yield three-quarters of a bale to a bale per acre. Their tenants are able to pay out, but after five, six, seven, and eight years the lands begin to fail. It would take three to four acres to make a bale, and after having planted their farms constantly in cotton, most of the landlords lost their farms, had to give them up, and the supply merchants had to take charge of them. Many of the farms have been thrown out, and the landlords are either somewhere in public work or renting themselves." The greatest changes made in the cotton system have occurred in areas inhabited by white and black land own ers, intermingled, who have been aided by bankers. Live stock, dairy cows, poultry have been purchased ; cover crops such as velvet beans, soy beans, cow peas and lespedeza hay have been grown, and the acreage of cotton has been reduced. By rotating so as to plant the cotton each year on soil previously occupied by legumes, it has been possible to increase the yield of cotton while re ducing its acreage. Studies by the Department of Agricul ture have shown that such intensive culture increases the cost per acre of producing cotton but materially reduces the cost per pound. The forcing methods of cultivation are also the ones that have proved most effective against the boll weevil. To such an extent is this true, a president of a fertilizer company with fertilization and the weevil on his mind said that successful cotton growing is tend ing to change from an extensive field type of cultivation to an intensive garden type with a pharmaceutical de partment attached.