The ordinary grower of cotton cultivates twenty acres, producing one-half a bale to the acre. Unfortunately in too great a majority of cases he is a tenant farmer. Of his ten bales, the result of his year's toil, five must go to the owner of the land. The working farmer for his product gets, we will say, ten cents a pound or fifty dollars a bale; his twelve months of effort and expense bringing him in a gross revenue of $250. This is an insignificant total for the men who among others produce the commodity that controls the world.
Out of that $250 he must provide for his family, himself, and his mule, and make provision for the ensuing times of planting and cultivating. Fully sixty-five per cent of Ameri can cotton crop is produced by this struggling method.
The whole world is combined against the southern farm ers to keep down the price of their product. . . . The mill owner and the weaver want cheap cotton. Tenant farmers are under an enormous handicap and the landowner knows that high prices mean ability on the part of the tenant to get out from under the yoke and become independent; this the landowner does not wish. The southern farmers must combine; must restrict their crops along the lines of actual supply and demand; must abandon their slipshod methods of farming and resort to scientific processes; must diversify their crops and stand together.' Southern opinion has often pointed to the burden the cotton producers' low standards have placed on the whole section. David R. Coker, outstanding planter of Hartsville, South Carolina, has said in an interview: "The South hasn't had enough pay since the Civil War to advance a single step in civilization. Whole families lived on 25 cents a day in the years of five cent cotton. About 2,000,000 farm families produced the 1922 crop of 10,000,000 bales. That means five bales a family, worth $600. The other farm products are worth perhaps $300, making the total family income $900. The case of the cotton tenant is still worse. His total family income in South Carolina in 1922 was $365 or a dollar a day.
"Perhaps we haven't all realized how wretched an exist ence the small cotton grower has been forced to lead. Since the Civil War, whether white or colored, he has been the equivalent of slave labor." "Whenever and wherever I travel [adds the writer], through the Cotton Belt east of the Mississippi the things that haunt me most are the ragged tenants, wrinkled wives, half fed, anaemic children, and the wretched hovels in which they live, whether white or Negro . . . for the past fifty years cotton has been produced out of the very life blood of the South.' A Georgia farm owner gives the attitude of the cotton producer on living standards and child labor: I want to make some money and have tried, but cannot do so growing cotton. I am sore on cotton farming, as it is impossible to be a thrifty citizen and grow cotton. There is no wage in it. You cannot grow cotton to profit by hiring your labor, and where a man does not work his children from six years of age up in the field, he cannot come out of debt and also have the necessities of life. He could not
do it if his life depended upon it.
There is only one way for a planter or farmer to make money with the use of hired labor, and that is to have a grab or commissary and keep books—always careful that no laborer exceeds his account, and making sure that at the end of the year he has gotten it all, and his labor has "just lived," as one would say. We have to grow cotton as there is no market at all available for getting cash out of other crops beyond the local demand. I am fifty-three years old and want to sell my farm and go somewhere else out West and try my luck. It is not the southern white man's fault. The fault is the system of marketing cotton under distress.' One southern business man caught in the disastrous cotton fall of 1914 felt his inhibitions removed by the debacle. The living conditions of the Georgia cotton farmer have never been more realistically pictured than by Mr. J. T. Holleman, President of the Southern Mort gage Company, a Director of the American National Bank of Atlanta, and a "son of the old South." His communication was first published as an open letter to the Atlanta Constitution of September 27, 1914, and later republished as a pamphlet: Pathetic indeed has been the life of the small landowner and tenant farmer in Georgia and the South for fifty years. Courageous, honest, patient, and long-suffering, when shall they see light? When shall their burdens be lifted? In the springtime they go forth with our brothers in black, set their hands to the plow. They bend their backs to the burdens and when the frost falls they have added $1,000,000,000 to the wealth of the world. But small indeed is their share, and meagre is the recompense to them. Every two years, accord ing to the government census, they move from one place to another. They build no homes, they live in rude huts, no flowers about their dwellings, no trees to shade them from the sun, consumed by the summer's heat and chilled by the winter's cold, no lawns about their houses, no garden fences, and with the accursed cotton plant crowding the very thresh old of their rude dwellings. . . . Their sons and daughters come to manhood and womanhood, depart from the farm and are lost to them in some distant community. Finally, when their fight is over they are laid to rest in the rude church yards of the country, others take their place and continue the fight. They have established no permanent home, their kith and kin are scattered far and wide, and the places that knew them once, know them no more, forever. I have no word of criticism for men like these. I know them, I have lived among them. I sprang from them. Who shall undertake to lead these men out of the wilderness of their troubles? Men whom they elevate to high offices in the state and national government are ever ready to teach them politics but they are not prepared to help them solve their problems.