SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



a few big operators of large gum rights, but hundreds 

 of little rugged individualists who sorely needed gum 

 money to eke out the scanty cash incomes of their farms 

 were threatened with commercial extermination. 

 Some twenty thousand Negro chippers and dippers 

 would swell the Southern relief rolls, and more seri- 

 ously, would create a new, permanent Southern unem- 

 ployment problem. It was no comfort to anyone that 

 they were all, still owners and gum producers and all 

 their Negro workers, the victims of scientific progress. 

 Technological unemployment buys no more slab-side 

 pork and cornmeal in Georgia and Alabama than it 

 does potatoes and flour in Detroit and Seattle. 



The Government came to the rescue. In 1936 Con- 

 gress declared by law that rosin and turpentine from 

 gum are agricultural crops and that rosin and turpen- 

 tine from stump wood are industrial commodities. This 

 was done to assure the little gum people a share in all 

 the generous farm benefits and to make sure that the 

 half a dozen companies, big and little, in the wood- 

 rosin industry got none. For this purpose of the Agri- 

 cultural Adjustment Agency this charming fiction was 

 quite understandable. When it was adopted by the 

 Commodity Credit Corporation as a basis for ceiling 

 prices, it became illogical and discriminatory. 



The naval stores market was overloaded, so the Agri- 

 cultural Adjustment Agency aimed at crop reduction 

 by paying a bonus of three cents a cut face for not 



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