188 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



mule dealers . . . find their occupations gone when cotton 

 has no value. . . . Their one idea is to see that they [the 

 tenants] produce every bale of cotton possible. If one of 

 these owners lives too far away to look after renting and 

 to attend to the gathering of the crop and the collection of 

 the rent, some local man is made an agent for the purpose. 

 He looks first to making ... a good rent contract for the 

 owner. . . . Then he sees to it that . . . the handling of 

 all the cotton produced on that farm should come through his 

 store or bank. . . . Fertilizers . . . mules . . . farming im- 

 plements ... all the supplies that go to the tenants on this 

 farm are handled by him. . . . The farmer who raises his 

 own supplies at home has no use for these men. [But] cotton 

 farming can be done by any sort of poor white tenant and 

 any sort of ignorant Negro. All these poor tenants need . . . 

 is to have a little direction from town in the springtime, an 

 arrangement by which all they eat and all their stock eats 

 is furnished to them, and they can produce the cotton and 

 carry it into town, where the lord of the manor will be ready 

 to take it and sell it and pocket the lion's share and let the 

 poor white tenants and Negro tenants have just enough to 

 keep them alive until next year's crop. These men give no 

 thought to the building up of the land but milk it from year 

 to year of every ounce of cotton it will produce. 



[As the result] today the southern farms are barren of 

 the very things that should be their glory. You can get on 

 a railroad train or into an automobile and ride a hundred 

 miles without seeing a herd of cattle. When you do see cattle 

 they are little tick infested creatures that no more resemble 

 real cows than a tubercular cotton factory operative resem- 

 bles an athlete. I have young men in my employ twenty-five 

 years of age, born and raised in Georgia, who have never 

 seen a mule colt. There is no grain, no hay, no poultry, no 

 vegetable gardens, no orchards except the peach orchards 

 belonging to non-resident corporations nothing that goes to 

 make up a real farmer's home. 



