SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



fields of the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and southern 

 Mississippi, cotton is simply out of the picture east of 

 the Alleghenies. Old Black Joe with his mule and his 

 hoe and his chilluns picking snowballs in the two-acre 

 cotton patch can no more compete with the tractor 

 moving back and forth over a hundred level acres in 

 the Mississippi Delta or West Texas than a wheelbarrow 

 can compete with a motor truck. 



But such cold, competitive facts do not jibe with 

 bureaucratic ideas of farm relief; and the taffy of Gov- 

 ernment relief is very sweet and habit-forming. Accord- 

 ingly we have built up in the South a political vested 

 interest in Government interference and coddling which 

 it will be as difficult to eradicate as Nazi ideas from 

 German youth. 



From first to last the Government cotton program 

 displays all the symptoms of the cancerous political dis- 

 ease that today threatens every democratic people. Its 

 causes, its methods, the ends it sought and the results 

 it has achieved, if we understand them, it will help us 

 diagnose the disease before it is too late to save the 

 patient. Every move of the Government cotton program 

 has tended to keep poor land and incompetent fanners 

 in production at the expense of the whole American 

 people. We can well afford to be generously charitable. 

 Unless we choose to commit national suicide we dare 

 not be deliberately inefficient. Human values cannot be 



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