The system of all cotton and no foodstuffs entails more suffering upon the Negroes than upon anyone else. Theirs, indeed, is a struggle for existence. It goes without saying that if anybody shall go hungry and naked, it will be the Negroes.' The 'Western Cotton Belt has not gone unrepresented in opinions on the living conditions in the cotton in dustry. In an indignant open letter to the Dallas News, T. N. Jones, an attorney of Tyler, Texas, wrote: . . . in the South, there is more abject poverty and illit eracy than in any other country on earth in which a high state of civilization is supposed to exist.
The squalid condition of the cotton raisers of the South is a disgrace to the southern people. They stay in shacks, thousands of which are unfit to house animals, much less human beings. Their children are born under such conditions of medical treatment, food, and clothing as would make an Eskimo rejoice that he did not live in a cotton growing country. Without exception around these shacks there are no decent sanitary accommodations. There are no places for the production and care of live stock or poultry. In hun dreds of instances there are no arrangements for garden or places where vegetables can be raised.
There is not one landowner in forty who raises cotton and cultivates his own farm who now has his own money in the bank with which to finance entirely the production of his crops for 1928.
There is not one tenant farmer in one hundred throughout the whole South who has his own money on hand with which to finance the production of his crop for 1928." One must heed the warning that opinions as to how other people live are as likely to be biased and impres sionistic as opinions as to how they should live. Observ ers of living conditions among any group, unless checked by scientific measurements, are likely to have behind their reports an implied conception of what is right and fitting in the matter of living standards for certain classes and races. We have seen evidences of this in the review of
opinions just passed. But the foregoing opinions on how the cotton farmer lives cannot be dismissed as without value. In spite of conflicting sources and viewpoints, the observations possess a remarkable unanimity. The joint report of the Industrial Conference Board and the United States Chamber of Commerce on The Condition of Agri culture in the United published in 1927, fur nishes a brief summary of the opinions stated: "The section which depends on cotton presents the most un satisfactory aspects. The income of the cotton farmer is on the average very small and the status of these farm ers makes most of the South a dark spot in the agricul tural picture." A sampling of opinions from varying sources, such as has been attempted in the foregoing, reaches the conclu sion that cotton is a cheap crop, produced by cheap labor. And poor folks have poor ways. "No one crop," said Henry Grady, "will make a people prosperous. . . . Whenever the greed for a money crop unbalances the wisdom of husbandry, that money crop is a curse." "Cotton," writes a country editor in picturesque phrases, "is something to exchange for sowbelly and molasses, some flour and a little coffee, for cotton hose, cotton dresses, and cotton shirts. You can't build consolidated schools, cement roads, and painted homes with cotton; it isn't the thing to trade for silken hose, automobiles, radios, washing machines, farm lighting systems, and bath tubs. We've got to replace cotton with something more profitable or get off the earth." 21