An acceptance of both the factors of inherent indi vidual differences and their modification by culture is possible and desirable. One may rightly speak of the bio logical effect of the cotton farmer's environment. Nowhere in the literature is one likely to find a more eloquent pres entation of the inefficient cotton grower of the South as a product of the interaction of heredity and environment than Dr. W. S. Rankin's 17 comment on the tenant, John Smith: Heredity started him out in life; bequeathed him his one talent; equipped him with the sort of brain and brawn that he was to use in endeavoring to . . . exercise dominion over his natural environment.
But circumstance, environment, reaches back to where heredity leaves off and even before birth begins to weave silk or sackcloth for its favored or unfavored child. If unfavored, circumstance stamps the imprint of poverty upon the infant and child. . . .
Poverty draws the plan for John Smith's house; poverty tells him what he may wear; poverty decides whether he shall be warm or cold, dry or wet, clean or dirty; poverty declines to give Smith's young child its quart of milk during the day and so limits God in the sort of dust he may use in making a man; poverty denies Smith a physician to attend his wife in childbirth and sends for the old Negro midwife; poverty refuses permission to have Mrs. Smith's laceration repaired; poverty postpones sending for the physician, delays or denies needed surgery and dentistry, and acute troubles become chronic, curable passes into incurable disease.
Poverty makes Smith and his family sick. Sickness . . . keeps Smith from working or limits his output; sickness or impairment keeps Smith from thinking—thinking is the most important thing Smith should do. Smith's earning capacity is restricted and what he earns is spent on trying to recover health. Smith approves the mortgage and it makes him poorer.
Crude culture, inadequate housing, and poor health reduce energy and create inefficiency. Isolation and ex clusion from educational and cultural contacts have operated to render the cotton farmer's adjustment still more inadequate. T. N. Jones, in referring to the decla rations of Dean D. T. Gray and E. L. Rast, has given a vigorous statement of this view: One fundamental aid which sustains present conditions is the uneducated condition of the masses of the people of the southern states.
The class of farmers about whom these gentlemen were talking are the product of the infamous commercial system which has existed throughout the cotton growing states since 1865. There has never been and is not now in the state of Arkansas a public free school system in which the white children, much less the Negroes, could be given any part of such training as would make them efficient in farming or anything else. . . . All of those inefficient, lazy farmers at
whom the fulmination is aimed were either raised in Arkansas or some other southern state. . . .
The South to its everlasting shame, for more than sixty years has neglected the education and training of her white children except in certain favored localities, and has occupied its time and energies in building and developing urban life. Now, through some of her educators . . . she desires to dis own and kick out her progeny.' We have spoken of the dominating presence of na tional urban culture. It is possible that with respect to the lower strata of cotton producers the statement must be qualified. When an economist says that the most pathetic position in modern American economic life is that held by 40 per cent of the South's cotton farmers, the statement has implications both social and economic. There exists a group which is comparatively excluded from culture. Walter Hines Page's phrasing of the "for gotten man" senses the fact. Booker T. Washington's formula, one as the hand but separate as the fingers, was an attempt to resolve the dilemma for his own racial group.
It is known there has grown up a strongly marked division between classes in the agricultural South. C. E. Gibbons speaks of "two well defined groups of people— the banker-merchant-landlord class and the tenant-small landowner class. The former class has largely made its money from the latter class." 19 "In such areas," writes Carl C. Taylor, ". . . as the tenant-cropper areas of the South the only semblance of a modern civilization that exists is in the country towns." " The presence of what he calls a maximum economic status group and a minimum economic status group, helps to account for what may be termed the rift in culture. Schools, for instance, are good in the towns, but poor in the country regions. There is a circulation of only one newspaper for every 12.7 persons in the nine leading cotton and tobacco states, compared to the rate of one paper for every 3.6 persons in the United States as a whole. The number of native white illiterates for the United States forms 2 per cent of the population. For these nine southern states it forms 5.9 per cent, and if the Negroes and foreign born are included it is 13.2 per cent.' The low status farmers in the South are notable sufferers from exclusion. Economic in part, their exclusion means isolation from participa tion in culture.