HOW THE COTTON FARMER LIVES 215 



they live, whether white or Negro ... for the past fifty 

 years cotton has been produced out of the very life blood of 

 the South. 10 



A Georgia farm owner gives the attitude of the cotton 

 producer on living standards and child labor: 



I want to make some money and have tried, but cannot 

 do so growing cotton. I am sore on cotton farming, as it is 

 impossible to be a thrifty citizen and grow cotton. There is 

 no wage in it. You cannot grow cotton to profit by hiring 

 your labor, and where a man does not work his children 

 from six years of age up in the field, he cannot come out 

 of debt and also have the necessities of life. He could not 

 do it if his life depended upon it. 



There is only one way for a planter or farmer to make 

 money with the use of hired labor, and that is to have a 

 grab or commissary and keep books always careful that no 

 laborer exceeds his account, and making sure that at the 

 end of the year he has gotten it all, and his labor has "just 

 lived," as one would say. We have to grow cotton as there 

 is no market at all available for getting cash out of other 

 crops beyond the local demand. I am fifty-three years old and 

 want to sell my farm and go somewhere else out West and 

 try my luck. It is not the southern white man's fault. The 

 fault is the system of marketing cotton under distress. 17 



One southern business man caught in the disastrous 

 cotton fall of 1914 felt his inhibitions removed by the 

 debacle. The living conditions of the Georgia cotton 

 farmer have never been more realistically pictured than 

 by Mr. J. T. Holleman, President of the Southern Mort- 



Quoted by E. V. Wilcox, "The Great White Way of Cotton," 

 Country Gentleman, March 31, 1923, p. 18. 



17 F. J. Bivens, The Farmer's Political Economy, pp. 13-14. 

 Pamphlet. 



