THE COTTON CULTURE COMPLEX a kind of natural harmony about the cot ton system. Its parts fit together so perfectly as to sug gest the fatalism of design. Nature's harmony of the soil, the rainfall, the frostless season, the beaming sun, and a transplanted tropic plant fit well with a trans planted tropic race, landless white farmers, and the slow but all surviving mule to supply the world's steady de mand for a cheap fabric. The spinner, the cotton buyer, the landlord, the supply merchant, and the cotton farmer form an economic harmony that often benefits all except the producer, a complex whole that is so closely intercon nected that no one can suggest any place at which it may be attacked except the grower; and the grower is to change the system himself, cold comfort for advice. The most heroic measures suggested to the man most bound to the system. A resolution of a recent cotton conference, for instance, reads: That the delegates attending this Southwide Cotton Con ference held at New Orleans, Jan. 11-12, 1928, after due and careful deliberation, hereby declare their determination to no longer submit to an unfair yoke of bondage, and voice an emphatic appeal for freedom from oppression of those interests which have so long controlled the marketing and pricing of the South's great staple crop, burdening the grow ers with financial depression and unbearable suffering.' Many of the efforts of cotton growers can, from the na ture of affairs, reach no higher than rhetoric.
In a very true sense the adjustment that exists to cot ton cultivation will be found in the attitudes of the human factors. Accordingly, this chapter deals with traits and attitudes in southern agricultural life growing out of cotton farming. The place of the one-horse cotton farm ers in southern life and the effect of cotton culture on survival are considered as elements of the cotton culture complex. The substance of this chapter is to be regarded as conclusions and inferences drawn from the whole study. Cases are offered as examples of how these attitudes operate in cotton growing. It has been suggested that the Cotton Belt may be regarded as a cultural area,' and the cultivation of the cotton plant regarded as a trait of material culture growing out of what Sumner and Keller call the man-land ratio, society's adjustment to its environment. There are many processes which bear a functional relation to any one element of material culture, and these processes are to be regarded as organized into sets of attitudes and modes of social behavior. In this sense we may say that attitudes surrounding cotton grow ing, rising from geographic and economic factors form a cotton culture complex. Although it will be seen that in the last analysis the attitudes in the cotton culture complex are to be regarded as adjustments to geographic and economic factors, it cannot be successfully main tained that they are all rational adjustments. Received
as social heritages they may persist as habits of thought even after they have ceased to be useful.
Another factor which must be kept in mind is that of individual 'variations within the cotton culture complex. It is not part of the thesis of the cotton culture complex to maintain that cotton growers are equally inclined, for instance, to attitudes of speculation or It will be found, however, that with respect to many of these traits the one-horse cotton farmers, the croppers, and tenants are more nearly standardized. In analyzing the cotton culture complex we are attempting to state in terms of cultural anthropology the problem of the psy chological equipment of the human factors in cotton cul ture.' In so far as the student of contemporary culture has access to economic statistics and to written expres sions of attitudes, he may be regarded as on a footing equally secure with the anthropologist studying a tribe which preserves no written records.
Among the most obvious of the material culture traits associated with cotton are the food habits of its growers. It has been shown that the immense amount of man labor in planting, chopping, and picking cotton comes at times which interfere with the cultivation of other southern crops. Consequently, the family on the one-horse cotton farm has been "driven by compulsion to the most efficient of all the foodstuffs that can be made to suffice." Corn is suited to the southern climate, as it is an efficient pro ducer of cereal carbohydrates. Its dietary properties are similar to those of wheat except that, since its proteid lacks gluten, it does not form a dough. A dietary survey conducted during the war found that the maize kernel constituted 23 per cent of the total food intake of Ten nessee and Georgia mountaineers, 32.5 per cent of that of southern Negroes, but only 1.6 per cent of the diet of 72 northern families in comfortable circumstances.' Hogs thrive on corn and, since they complete their growth in one season, may be regarded as comparatively efficient producers of strong meat. In fact H. P. Armsby has esti mated that about 24 per cent of the energy of grain is recovered for human consumption in pork as compared with about 18 per cent in milk and 3.5 per cent in beef and mutton.' First are eaten the glandular organs, re garded by McCollum as protective foods because of their vitamins and animo acids. The pork of higher protein content, the muscle meats such as hams and shoulders, is eaten next. The cheaper cuts of fat pork, salt cured, be come the year-round staple of diet. Sorghum and sugar cane are eminently suited to the southern climate and produce, without demanding too much labor, a food of high sugar content.