214 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



ers to keep down the price of their product. . . . The mill 

 owner and the weaver want cheap cotton. Tenant farmers 

 are under an enormous handicap and the landowner knows 

 that high prices mean ability on the part of the tenant to 

 get out from under the yoke and become independent; this 

 the landowner does not wish. The southern farmers must 

 combine; must restrict their crops along the lines of actual 

 supply and demand; must abandon their slipshod methods 

 of farming and resort to scientific processes; must diversify 

 their crops and stand together. 15 



Southern opinion has often pointed to the burden the 

 cotton producers' low standards have placed on the 

 whole section. David R. Coker, outstanding planter of 

 Hartsville, South Carolina, has said in an interview: 



"The South hasn't had enough pay since the Civil War 

 to advance a single step in civilization. Whole families lived 

 on 25 cents a day in the years of five cent cotton. About 

 2,000,000 farm families produced the 1922 crop of 10,000,000 

 bales. That means five bales a family, worth $600. The other 

 farm products are worth perhaps $300, making the total 

 family income $900. The case of the cotton tenant is still 

 worse. His total family income in South Carolina in 1922 

 was $365 or a dollar a day. 



"Perhaps we haven't all realized how wretched an exist- 

 ence the small cotton grower has been forced to lead. Since 

 the Civil War, whether white or colored, he has been the 

 equivalent of slave labor." 



Whenever and wherever I travel [adds the writer], 

 through the Cotton Belt east of the Mississippi the things 

 that haunt me most are the ragged tenants, wrinkled wives, 

 half fed, anaemic children, and the wretched hovels in which 



15 "King Cotton's Impoverished Retinue," Cosmopolitan, Feb. 1909. 

 pp. 253, 258, 261. 



