Mr. Todd' reaches the conclusion "that in many cases at least, the profits of cotton growing are by no means so large as we were apt to imagine. The position is practically this, that under such conditions cotton cannot be grown at a profit if all the labor it requires has to be paid Unless the small planter has a large family to do part of the work, cotton at present prices will not pay. Such conditions may be all very well for the Negro, whose standard of living (for his children) has always been low ; education, for example, is only now beginning to be thought necessary ; but they will not do at all for the small white planters, who, in Texas es pecially, are very numerous, and who might have proved the hope of the cotton trade under more favorable con ditions. In other words, it means that cotton is, and must remain a 'black man's crop,' not a white man's." The conflict between the views of spinners and pro ducers of cotton has approached nearest bitterness on this very phase of the field labor of women and children. In an address delivered in Brazil in 1921, Arno S. Pearse of Manchester, England, general secretary of the Inter national Federation of Master Cotton Spinners and Manufacturers' Associations, said in speaking of the cotton outlook : . . . We were told on the authority of the president of the American Cotton Association that the American cotton farmer would no more continue to allow his wife and children to work in the fields. With such fantastic ideas it cannot be expected that there will be an increase in the cotton acre age of the United States of America." The phrase "fantastic ideas" was widely quoted in the South and brought forth a storm of rebuke.
A report of C. P. Ellis and Company,' cotton buyers of New Orleans, Louisiana, issued in the summer of 1919, commented on the high cost of cotton production shown by government surveys as follows : "It is well known that the great bulk of the cotton crop is raised by the small farmer, whose wife and children constitute his only help ; hence, all these ridiculous estimates of cost of pro duction are unworthy of consideration." The lack of economic value implied to the help of the farmer's family, together with the brusqueness of the statement, caused it to meet with strong editorial pro test. One paper spoke of the "enemies within." In this connection President Bradford Knapp of Oklahoma A. and M. College, made the following comment : "I know the world wants cheap cotton to clothe its nakedness, but may God forgive the man who wants it at the price of the labor of women and children in the field." 12 Those closer to the culture are often found prone to indignation over the living conditions of the human fac tors in cotton. A North Carolina pamphleteer in the 1880's views the standard of living in terms of popu lation renewals : Any person starting from Nag's Head—the extreme East and traversing the state to Paint Rock, in the West would be constrained at every step as he viewed the farms around him to exclaim: "My God, how do these people live!" Nature intended every man to be the father of four or five children, at least; but how is he to support them, at the present price of provisions in North Carolina? Cotton puts him in one of two very unfortunate predicaments. He
must either violate one of the fundamental rules of natural law and thereby incur the wrath of God, deprive himself of happiness, and his state of citizens, or he must observe that rule at the risk of imposing misery upon his offspring, and pauperism, and hence crime upon his community; yes, in thousands of instances cotton has put man in this dilemma." T. M. Young, an English traveler who visited the South in the early 1900's, has left his impressions of the housing and clothing of cotton farmers in North Carolina : Dotted about at wide intervals are the wooden cabins of the peasantry. Some of these tiny dwellings are whitewashed, but most of them have never known either paint or whitewash, and never will know them. Very poor and mean-looking they are, but the blaze of roses which you may often see beside the doors and the space and purity around them redeem them from the appearance of squalor. It is in homes and amid surroundings such as these that the population has been bred from which the southern mills are drawing their labor, and the people have that fine physique which one finds in Irish men bred in even the poorest country cabins.
In Piedmont sections [I was told that] farmers brought up large families for almost nothing; the cost of clothing where men work in a cotton shirt and a pair of cotton trousers for nine months in the year, was very much less than in the North; and fuel when it was needed, could be had for nothing in the nearest wood. Many of these people hardly ever saw money before the mill started, and now according to my informant, they hardly know how to spend it. At this mill they were paid in cash every week end. Much of what they earned was "wasted on tawdry finery." 14 Daniel J. Sully of Providence, Rhode Island, was a cotton speculator who cornered the market in 1903-4 and pushed cotton to the high level of 17 cents. He had made several trips through the South before he failed and expressed great, interest in the conditions of the cotton farmer. Writing in a popular magazine in 1909 he assigns the lowest standard of living in America to the cotton grower: American cotton planters, proprietors of the greatest gold producing staple in the world are poor. They are in practical servitude . . . themselves absolutely subservient and the poorest paid toilers in the United States.
Our greatest asset is our greatest humiliation. Cotton is king, but it is a badly served monarch. . . . It does not enrich but rather impoverishes the Southland. An enormous profit is made somewhere in the progress of the cotton to consumer. Every year cotton goods to the value of nearly six billion dollars are turned out from the 125,000,000 spindles in the world. But the poor farmer in the cotton fields sees but a pitiful part of the multiplying fortunes at tending the migration of cotton goods around the earth.