RISKS OF THE COTTON MARKET 137 



cotton unpicked," wrote a traveler through the South 

 in the late autumn of 1921, "some that would never be 

 picked at all. In some cases it paid the tenant farmer 

 better to desert his own crop and hire out to neighboring 

 farmers to pick their crops." 



The rural South's almost complete dependence on a 

 cotton economy was glaringly shown by the price debacle 

 in 1914. The hardest hit were the plantation areas which 

 were almost wholly dependent on the one crop. In the 

 Alabama Black Belt in 1914, says a Bureau of Labor 

 report, ". . . hundreds of landowners simply released 

 their tenants from such contracts as they held against 

 them. The rents were either relinquished outright or post- 

 poned indefinitely. . . . The customary advances of pro- 

 visions to Negro tenants were cut off. Owners of large 

 plantations were compelled for the first time in their 

 lives to tell their Negroes that they could not feed them 

 and that they were forced to let them move away. In a 

 number of Black Belt counties food was distributed to 

 the starving Negroes by the Federal Department of 

 Agriculture and by the organization of the Red Cross. 

 The tenants . . . were also in debt for provisions which 

 had been furnished them during the past winter. Thus 

 in many instances they lost their mules and other prop- 

 erty which were taken for the payment of rent and store 

 debts. . . . Nearly $50,000 was made up in and around 

 the town of Demopolis, Alabama, and distributed among 

 the most destitute." 48 



Studies on the subject cite the boll weevil and the 

 low prices of 191415 as among the causes of the great 



47 Ray Stannard Baker, New York Evening Post, March 10, 1921. 



48 R. H. Lovall, et al., Negro Migration in 1916-1917, Dept. of 

 Labor Bulletin, 1919, p. 61. 



