Two cases, typical of many unwritten southern tragedies, will serve to show how the speculative element in culture goes over into individual attitudes. In the first instance the cycle of cotton prices over a generation left an atti tude of speculation and expectancy that the reverses of a lifetime could not dim: The subject, now dead, was by profession a doctor, but having lost one leg during the Civil War at Fort Sumter—at that time just out of medical college—never again practised. Heir to a large estate, he thereafter devoted himself to farm ing. Being a student, theory came easy and economic specu lation resulted. Year by year he calculated the number of bolls to the stalk, the number of stalks to the row, the num ber of rows to the field; the number of pounds to the acre, dollars to the plow, and notes to the bank. And year by year the bank curtailed his labors. Though his energies never flagged, he was little by little transformed from a man of large holdings to a man of encyclopaedic knowledge in all branches of the cotton industry. He could tell at a glance how many hands high a horse was or the number of pounds of fertilizer that produced a given basket of turnips. An optimist to the end, he died a few years ago an object of charity and derision.
A rising market in cotton, such as prevailed during the World War, enables cotton dealers to extend their opera tions to other fields and thus tends to spread the specula tive risks of cotton over wider areas of business. The following case shows speculative attitudes in the dealings of a combined cotton merchant, farmer, banker, and Ford dealer: The subject for many years was content to operate as a station buyer of cotton in a small town. The ebb and flow of luck was satisfactory and furnished• a living for himself and family. Finally, in middle life, he came upon the scene of inflation caused by the World War and in a bull market, ex panded with astounding favorable results. He established branch offices for his cotton firm, and then took on a small town bank. Money flowed in. He bought farms. Cotton sold for 40 cents. He associated himself with Mr. Ford and shared the prosperity of that King of the Road. Finally, he ex tended his original cross-road cotton buying to merchandising at the ports as exporter, and now his influence was at the crest. The scene shifted. He entered the deflationary inter act with large stoc6 of unhedged long staple cotton, for which he had paid a dollar a pound, with large bank loans based on what now looked like fictitious security, with large land holdings on which taxes and interest loomed ahead of harvests, with a Ford car ratio which his auto clientele could not absorb. He was not unhappy. He was only more active, and therefore perhaps happier. He was willing to wait for the come-back. He waited . . . waited . . . waited . . . wearily, at last . . . and then the reckoning. He was bank rupt, and his bankruptcy carried down with him a whole countryside of honest folk. If his attitude had not been what
it was, he could have saved everybody, including himself; being what it was it took him twenty-four months to realize that he had lost his own half a million and much more besides. He has not gone back to his little cotton business, nor to his bank, nor to his farms, nor to his Ford agency, because he has none of these. Today he is managing to live on money that should be paid over to his creditors.
A speculative riddle confronting those independent growers who are not harassed by creditors is whether to sell on a low market or hold for higher prices. The cot ton broker, although able to hedge his purchases, is in the midst of speculative attitudes to which he often suc cumbs. The following interesting comment was made by a Savannah, Georgia, cotton factor before the Federal Trade Commission: Now cotton is a torment; the cotton trade is a torment to the legal mind and the scientific mind and the logical mind, because it is neither logical nor scientific, and in many cases it is not legal.' The speculative nature of cotton production has car ried over into the psychological equipment of the growers in another attitude, that of non-cooperation. With the American growers possessing a virtual monopoly of the cotton crop, it is held by some that cooperative acreage regulation can be used to prevent disastrous price fail ures. "With proper organization facilities the necessary facts as to supplies and consumptive requirements can be put in the hands of every cotton grower in the South, months before the planting season. The burden of regu lating the cotton acreage would not be heavy on any farmer if cooperative action was uniformly taken each year in every cotton county of the South." 13 But as has been shown, the profits in cotton are cyclical and specu lative. They come as the result of a combination of large yields and high prices. But high prices with high yields are impossible unless acreage reductions or partial crop failures occur in other parts of the Cotton Belt. To re duce one's own acreage, however, is to fail to profit to the fullest extent by the high prices. Disastrous bumper crops are followed by appeals and campaigns to reduce cotton planting. Pledges to cut acreage, called sign-ups, are secured, and optimistic publicity concerning the re sulting reduction is broadcast as encouragement to the farmers. The result is that many growers, convinced of high prices, do not reduce but even increase their acre age. About thirty years ago Sidney Lanier gave us this picture of a Georgia cotton farmer reading a newspaper plea for diversification by one Clisby. It may be regarded as a not inadequate bit of psychology: And presently says he: "Hit's true, That Clisby's head is level; Thar's one thing farmers all must do, To keep themselves from goin' tew Bankruptcy and the devil.