SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



"When sentiment replaces reason it is rooted deep in 

 human emotion or individual experience. In the South, 

 where for generations cotton has been the economic 

 and social base of whole communities, it is as hard for 

 a man to consider cotton objectively as it is to regard 

 his own wife dispassionately/' 



To many Southerners cotton has long been not only 

 the means of life, but their very way of life. To big 

 planter and little sharecropper, to Mr. Page who runs 

 the bank, to old Dr. Reynolds and young Sam Tolliver, 

 the haberdasher, to the white boy who clerks in the 

 freight office and the black boy who sweeps out the 

 Elite Barber Shop, to the entire neighborhood, cotton 

 was supreme, at once the staple crop and a great his- 

 torical tradition. 



This overemphasis in the Cotton Belt is counter- 

 poised by woeful inappreciation in other parts of the 

 country. Solution of the cotton problem is certainly not 

 helped by the fact that most of our citizens are ignorant 

 of, and so quite indifferent to, the meaning of cotton in 

 the economy of the nation and in the workaday life of 

 each of us. 



How many Americans, for example, realize that we 

 use four times as much cotton as all the wool, silk, and 

 linen, rayon, Celanese, and nylon added together? The 

 palpable differences between a gauze bandage and a 

 canvas awning display the versatility of this most used, 

 most useful textile fiber. But until we stop and think 



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