But standards of living, as E. L. Kirkpatrick 22 says, are both economic and cultural in that they are deter mined in part by earnings and in part by farmers' ideas of what they should buy with their earnings. This is best shown by the fact, recognized by everyone, that the cost of food may not indicate how well the members of the farm family are nourished, nor the cost of clothing how fashionably and comfortably they are dressed. Crude culture, poor taste in clothing and house furnishing, ill chosen and ill-prepared diet, low ratios of expenditure for education, recreation, and reading are matters of contacts, training, and education. The standard of living is thus a culture complex. It may even serve to determine income as in the case of a cotton mill worker who makes enough to live on in four days at the mill and lays off the other two. In such a case participation in another cul ture by raising his desires should raise his income. The manager of a large Arkansas plantation owned by Frank 0. Lowden, writes of the cotton laborer: He has nothing, wants nothing, expects nothing, does not try to have anything but does waste and destroy any and everything. He is wild for money, but when he gets it, it is not worth five cents on the dollar to buy his needs. That is for waste, his needs are bought on credit.
The cotton farmer is isolated from patterns of social culture by his life in the open country, by his economic status, by his lack of educational advantages, and by the doctrine of native inferiority. Thus because of social cleavage, we have another vicious circle: low economic status and the rift in culture.
If the risks of failure are great and the standards of living are low, the question may be asked, how do almost ten million southern men, women, and children manage to remain in business as cotton growers? Why do not the inefficient producers fail and pass out of the picture? The answer is that the very nature of cotton culture seems to make for the survival of inadequate farmers. The very nature of cotton tenancy in the South attracts men who otherwise could not enter farming. The tenant has no expenses of upkeep of land or buildings. He pays no taxes. He spends little or no time improving the farm stead or making it attractive. He is invited to enter the field of cotton production, is furnished a house, work stock, and a living, and becomes a first charge upon the industry.
No matter how inefficient his cultural practices, some cotton can be grown. No matter how poor the grade and texture, cotton always brings a price. The ease of cotton culture has made for the survival of inefficient men. "Any fool can grow cotton," is a saying heard all over the South. A leading citizen of North Carolina used to de clare: "I wish it was harder to grow cotton. Then there would be some money in it. As it is now, any fool nigger with a bull yearlin' can make cotton." 23 The bull yearling
is a thing of the past, but farmers continue to neglect the cultivation of the crop, to leave it to discolor, un picked in the field, or unstored subject to country dam age. The very methods of bagging, baling, and sampling would not be tolerated in an organized business. The southern cotton bale is the worst packaged commodity in modern commerce. It has been allowed so to remain simply because it is arranged that the damage and the tare are deducted from the sellers, the farmers, or the original shippers, and they, the least organized, can do nothing to change the practice.
In modern industry improvements in technique spread by a kind of cultural diffusion. An advance in the process ing of steel soon spreads to all steel mills. It is not neces sary that steel workers understand or even know of the new technique. Their need is only the "strong back and the weak mind." Technical experts attend to the installa tion of new processes, and executives authorize the pur chase of patent rights. In agriculture every small farmer is his own executive and technical expert. David R. Coker may grow sea island cotton on his upland plantation at Hartsville, South Carolina ; he may grow over a bale to the acre; he may conquer the boll weevil menace. True, but that is no evidence that his practices will be adopted over the Cotton Belt or even in South Carolina. Mr. Coker has said in a personal letter: . . . Although I and my associates have for twenty-five years been engaged in the work of improving the cotton crop, providing marketing facilities for our local territory, and try ing to impress upon the South the principles of a sound and profitable agriculture, we have not been able except in a small territory to do much to check the destructive tendencies in agriculture which have for many years been undermining its foundations in large areas of the cotton The Department of Agriculture realizes that the farmer can have no expert guidance to correspond to the technician in industry. Consequently, thousands of dollars are spent each year in studies and experiments. The re sults are embodied in bulletins which are mailed to all who ask for them. But here the causal relation between ignorance and inefficient farming is clear. The vicious circle is there. Poverty created them ignorant and ignor ance helps to keep them poor. Oftentimes these inefficient methods are matters of tradition, inherited from cotton growing ancestors and embedded in negative and antago nistic attitudes toward diversification, rotation, and scientific agriculture. "My folks have been cotton farm ers since Hector was a pup"; "You can't tell me how to grow cotton out of a book"; "Them University profes sors are good swivel chair farmers," are authentic expressions of folk attitudes.