FARMERS: ‘Bootleg Slavery

Last week the crusading Scripps-Howard newspaper chain started a stark series of articles by Correspondent Hugh Russell Fraser about the “peonage of 8,000,000 share croppers in the South.”

The sensational New York Post published an even starker series on the same subject by earthy Author Erskine Caldwell (God’s Little Acre, Tobacco Road).

From Cincinnati, earnest Socialist Norman Thomas broadcast: “The most wretched conditions on any large scale anywhere to be found in exploited America, exist in [the] cotton country. . . . These share croppers and casual day laborers of the cotton fields are the Forgotten Men of the New Deal. AAA has ‘practically washed its hands of them and their problems.”

Socialist Thomas erred in one respect. Department of Agriculture and AAA officials kept their mouths sternly shut about it, but last week the plight of Southern share croppers weighed heaviest on their minds.

“Poverty Crop.” That Southern agricultural economy was and had for a long time been woefully out of kilter, government agronomists were well aware. The return of 1,250,000 whites and blacks to the land in the past four years has brought the South’s farm population up to 54% of the nation’s total farm population. Yet last year the South received but 33% of the national income from field crops and livestock. Of this, all but a small fraction came from cotton, the “Poverty Crop.”

In the state of Maine, 95 out of every 100 farmers own their own land. But the civil war failed to change basically the Southern plantation system. In Georgia and Mississippi, approximately 70 out of every 100 farmers work somebody else’s land as tenants or share croppers. The share cropper trades his services and those of his family for a shack and half the crop he makes, less 10¢ an acre ditch and road-maintenance fee, 10¢ on every dollar’s worth of supplies bought at the plantation commissary (patronage obligatory) for “management fee,” further deductions depending on the character of the landlord. It was estimated that the average cash income of a Southern share cropper and his family in an average year is $100.

To maintain at least a medium individual farm income level was the purpose of the Cotton Acreage Reduction Program, launched in 1933 and continued last year. The landowner pledged himself “insofar as possible, [to] maintain on this farm the number of tenants and other employes,” which he had maintained in the past. He was also supposed to pass along pro rata the share croppers’ share of the reduction benefit payments.

But a number of Southern landlords, correctly informed by their lawyers that the cotton reduction contract has no legal teeth and does not bind them to maintain the normal number of tenants or to pass their benefit shares along impartially, found means of withholding the reduction fee, ousting tenants from the land. AAA now admits that whereas the pre-New Deal cotton income went 40% to landlords, 60% to tenants, the reverse ratio may now hold true. From a class and country where letter-writing comes hard, some 7,000 share croppers had by last week scrawled out despairing protests to AAAdministrator Chester Davis. And so impartial an observer as the Federal Drought Relief Director of Arkansas has reported wholesale “unloading” of tenants onto relief rolls by their former landlords.

By last week a vast stretch of the South was the scene of humanity hit bottom. No statistics could picture the pallid acres from Georgia to Arkansas, pocked with the burnt stumps of slash pine, gully-gutted, unfertilized; where the whitewash peeled from treeless shacks; where hatchet-faced tenants were not even able to get the three M’s—Meal, Molasses and Meat—a diet that nourishes pellagra but not men.

Two vignettes of life under the New Deal for landless, dole-less, hopeless share croppers 25 miles from Augusta, Ga., as seen by Erskine Caldwell:

“In 1934 a tenant farmer in Jefferson County was unable, because of old age and illness, to work out his crop. A physician prescribed for his ailment, but the man could not buy the medicine, and no relief agency would supply it. A four-year-old girl in the family died at the end of the year of anemia. The tenant moved several miles away to another farm, but after several weeks the landowner decided that he was too old and ill to work a crop on a tenant-farmer basis, or on any other basis, and he was evicted.

“The household goods were carried to the land-limits and deposited by the side of the road. Another tenant took the goods under shelter, and the landowner gave notice that if they were not removed from his land, he would come in to the house and burn them.

“In the meantime the old man had gone off into the swamp, without ax, hammer, or saw, with the intention of felling trees and building a log house for his family. He has not been heard from since he left. . . .”

“Near Keysville a two-room house is occupied by three families, each consisting of man and wife and from one to four children each. . . .

“In one of the two rooms a six-year-old boy licked the paper bag the meat had been brought in. His legs were scarcely any larger than a medium-sized dog’s leg, and his belly was as large as that of a 130-pound woman’s. Suffering from rickets and anemia, his legs were unable to carry him for more than a dozen steps at a time; suffering from malnutrition, his belly was swollen several times its normal size. His face was bony and white. He was starving to death.*

“In the other room of the house, without chairs, beds, or tables, a woman lay rolled up in some quilts trying to sleep. On the floor before an open fire lay two babies, neither a year old, sucking the dry teats of a mongrel bitch. A young girl, somewhere between fifteen and twenty, squatted on the corner of the hearth trying to keep warm.

“The dog got up and crawled to the hearth. She sat on her haunches before the blazing pine-knots, shivering and whining. After a while the girl spoke to the dog and the animal slunk away from the warmth of the fire and lay down again beside the two babies. The infants cuddled against the warmth of the dog’s flanks, searching tearfully for the dry teats.”

Infection Centre. To date Georgians have struck no blow against what shocked Under Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Guy Tugwell has called their state of “bootleg slavery.” Not so the lean tenant farmers of Arkansas, whose memorable bread-riot at England, Ark., four years ago (TIME, Jan. 12, 1931) made the country sit up and take notice.

Encouraged by Socialist Thomas and Professor William R. Amberson of the University of Tennessee, who interrupted his noteworthy researches into artificial blood transfusions (TIME, July 23), the Poinsett County share croppers last summer formed a protective association, The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Program: no evictions; no forced trading at plantation commissaries; direct payment of reduction benefits; representation on all agricultural control boards; co-operation of white and black share croppers. In spite of further evictions for Union participation, in the face of ostentatiously armed “plantation riders,” the Union now numbers 5,000.

All the elements of a rip-snorting class-conflict were present in the little town of Marked Tree in January when a youngster of 24 named Ward H. Rodgers, on the executive committee of the Union, addressed an outdoor gathering of hungry, disgruntled and dispossessed tenant farmers. Ward Rodgers, a Socialistic Texan with theological degrees from Vanderbilt and Boston Universities, was already in bad odor with the landlord class because he had been calling Negroes “mister.” And as an instructor in FERA’s adult education service, he had been mixing Karl Marx with the ABC’s. He was quoted as saying he was willing, if share croppers were not fed, to “lynch every plantation owner in Poinsett County.” Clapped into jail, he was speedily brought to trial, convicted of “anarchy.” He has taken an appeal.

What to Do? Just before the Rodgers trial the AAA dispatched red-headed Mary Connor Myers, a Boston lawyer who helped the Department of Justice jail Al Capone, to Arkansas to see what all the trouble was about. Last week she reported to Washington. It was announced that the written part of her report was confidential, and the oral part was for the ears of Chester Davis alone. The United Press said: “Mrs. Myers, it was understood, uncovered contract violations which caused cruel hardships to part of the farm population. She found share croppers straggling along the highways, homeless and unable to obtain relief.”

The Myers report, soon to be amplified by an AAA share cropping investigation in every Southern county, was withheld, explained Administrator Davis, “because it may lead to legal action.”

Meantime, the Administration’s agriculturalists cast about for means of remedial legislative action. Best bet, according to Dr. Tugwell, was a bill recently introduced in the Senate by Alabama’s Bankhead, to set up a Farm Tenant Homes Corp. financed by the sale of one billion dollars worth of bonds. FTHC would try to establish share croppers on land they could acquire for themselves by easy payments within 50 years. Under Secretary Tugwell, whose mind never lacks for invention, thought the homes might be established in little villages, European-peasant-style, because the share croppers “like to be together.”

Political wiseacres observed that some sort of legislative palliative for the masses in Southern agriculture had better be forthcoming soon from the Administration, because share croppers have been making the best sort of recruits for Huey Long’s rabid band of Share-the-Wealthers.

* For news of children starving elsewhere, see p. 22.