OPINIONS attitudes as to the standard of living he has, or should have, might lead one to believe that the cotton farmer is the victim of a preconception of his role. When he arrived on the scene after the Civil War, cotton had merely changed its status from a slave crop to a cheap crop. Cotton labor was definitely classified as cheap labor. From Phillips' accounts of Negro slavery and from contemporary records of the small upland cotton producers variously called "poor whites," "sand hillers," and "clay eaters" one gathers that their stand ards of living must have been low indeed. Edward At kinson, the New England spinner, by 1861 had anony mously published a pamphlet speculating on the pos sibility of Cheap Cotton by Free Labor after the war. Atkinson arrived at $20 per month as the estimated upkeep of a Negro slave and his family and noted that with cotton at ten cents the owner had continued to buy more land and more slaves. "It is therefore evident," he concluded, "that the owner of land can afford to pay $20 per month wages, and that there is a class of poor white laborers (poor white trash comprising the large ma jority of the cotton states) at hand to whom such pay would be an income never dreamed of." 1 He did not hold to the view accepted by some that it is dangerous to the health of white people to work in the cotton field, and cited Olmsted's A Journey in the Back Country to the effect that : The necessary labor and causes of vital fatigue and vital exhaustion attending any part or all of the processes of cotton culture does not compare with that of our July har vesting; it is not greater than attends the cultivation of In dian corn in the usual New England method. I have seen a weakly white woman the worse for her labor in the cotton field but never a white man; and I have seen hundreds of them at work in cotton fields under the most unfavorable circumstances, miserable, dispirited wretches and of weak muscles, subsisting mainly, as they do, upon corn bread. Mr. De Bow estimates one hundred thousand white men now en gaged in the cultivation of cotton, being one-ninth of the whole cotton force of the country.' The opposing attitudes and opinions as to the stand ard of living of the cotton farmer are plainly motivated by the conflict of interest between the spinner, desiring cheap cotton to manufacture, and the producer, con vinced of inadequate returns. A clash 8 that occurred in a hearing on cotton crop estimates in 1905 between Rep resentative Lovering of Massachusetts, a cotton spin ner, and Representatives Clayton and Burleson, both southern planters, is significant : Lovering:. . . "Here is a crop [cotton] paying the planter 100 to 150 per cent . . ." Clayton (interrupting): "I challenge that statement. I know something about it and I know it is not correct." Burleson: "If it pays so large a per cent to the farmer and so small a per cent to the spinner, how do you account for the fact that the planter of cotton is almost invariably a poor man, while the spinner is almost uniformly a wealthy man." Lovering: "I should dispute that with you. With 625 mil lions going into the South for its cotton crop, who gets it?" Clayton: "The gentleman's statement as to the profits de rived by the southern planters from raising cotton is so absurd that it would make the ordinary plantation mule down in Alabama or Texas laugh, and the mule is a solemn animal and does not generally laugh.
"I was born on a cotton plantation and raised on one. I know something of the hardships and disasters that come to the cotton grower, the risks that he takes, the hardships he endures, and the many disasters that often come to his crop. . . . the cotton plant is the most tender field plant that grows. It is susceptible to more disasters and requires more of human manual labor to produce it than anything else. . . . You cannot make cotton with machinery as you can wheat and corn and other crops."
This clash of interests is more acute between the American growers and the English spinners. Southern merchants and bankers have come to feel that whenever cotton goes high enough to furnish an adequate standard of living for its producers, the English manufacturers begin to talk about cotton famine and to encourage the growing of cotton in the colonies. A writer in the Manu facturers' Record, organ of southern finance, expresses these views : There is probably no other crop in the world against which there has been such a tremendous fight, especially on the part of foreign buyers, for the purpose of breaking down prices and holding cotton growers to starvation wages. For a hundred years the English cotton manufacturers especially, and the English Government as well, have put forth their utmost power to break the price of cotton in America and to produce cotton in other parts of the world in order to lessen their dependence upon the South! England's fear of expensive raw cotton and her hope of escape are both based on the low standards of living of the more backward people. A great part of her textiles have been cheap cotton cloth exported to China and India. When the price of American upland middling reaches certain heights, not only the profits but the exports themselves are in danger of being cut off. Eng land has sought to avoid this difficulty by attempting to stimulate cotton growing by the Empire's supply of cheap labor. The British Cotton Growing Association, founded in 1902, has been granted subsidies by the Im perial Government up until 1916. "The Association be gan operations in West Africa by engaging a number of experts from the United States. . . . Large areas were acquired and put under American cotton on the planta tion principle with native labor, but it was eventually found that this method was not likely to succeed under West African conditions ; and therefore the policy adopted was to encourage cotton growing as an industry . . . conducted by the native on his own land." area was later abandoned ; cotton culture was introduced into other cheap labor areas, and by 1924 the new fields un der the protection of the Association produced 261,900 bales of cotton.' One gathers, also, from the writings of such an Eng lish authority as Mr. John A. Todd that the world's cotton supply must come from agricultural labor with low standards of living: Cotton has always been regarded as a cheap-laborer crop, that is to say, a crop that can only be profitably cultivated where there is an ample supply of cheap laborers. Such a supply of laborers was obtained in the United States by the introduction of slaves, who, though neither very industrious nor efficient, could be trained to the necessary processes of cultivation and picking. Indeed it is admitted that a good Negro is the best cotton cultivator, if he can be persuaded to do his best. But since the liberation of the slaves, good Negroes have become almost the exception; the average "Nigger" has an incurable aversion to steady and especially to prolonged labor. . . . The scarcity of labor has only resulted in raising the general level of wages, and enabling the Negro to adopt a higher standard of living, and copy the luxuries and vices of the white man. . . . The contrast between all this and the position of the Egyptian fellah, with his unlimited capacity for patient plodding work from morn ing till night, for almost seven days a week, and from one year's end to another, on a wage of less than a quarter of that of the American Negro, which yet enables him to main tain a standard of living that makes him the healthiest and strongest agricultural laborer in the world, is painful in the extreme' This view regards the human factors as merely a means to the production of cotton.