200 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



devoted to truck growing. The average for the United 

 States is 78 acres of improved land per farm, while all 

 the cotton states except Texas and Oklahoma have less 

 than 45 improved acres. 45 If large farms make possible 

 economies, cut down overhead, and pile up incomes, the 

 cotton grower farms too meanly on too small a scale. 



Another reason often given for cheap labor in cotton 

 is that the cotton grower is inferior in that he is willing 

 to accept a low standard of living. Although efficient, it 

 is contended, they are numerous enough to overproduce 

 cotton. After they have depressed the price of cotton be- 

 low a decent standard of living they continue producing 

 it, since it is impossible to depress their standard of living 

 low enough to cause their withdrawal. The form this argu- 

 ment takes is interracial competition with Negroes on 

 the plantation. The view has been well expressed by a 

 cotton farmer himself writing from Georgia in 1914: 



One great reason, why cotton is so plentiful and cheap, 

 is that on the great plantations of middle Georgia, middle 

 Alabama, Mississippi and others of the richest regions of the 

 South, is it is grown by Negroes who get for their labor, 

 only enough to maintain a bare, brute subsistence. . . . 



They are also intimidated by the sentiment which is kept 

 alive among you against them, and which costs you and your 

 children more than it does them. The few, rich non-resident 

 plantation aristocrats who get the benefit of this cheap, this 

 mule cheap labor, against which you are putting your wives 

 and children in the fields, are not, and never would be, able 

 to intimidate these Negroes by themselves. The Negroes work 

 year after year making cotton to make yours cheaper, and 

 never daring to ask for a settlement in many cases because 

 you make them afraid. Let a voice go up from every cotton 



45 Dept. of Agriculture Yearbook, 1921, p. 491. 



