CHAPTER IX 



HUMAN ELEMENTS IN COTTON CULTURE 

 CASE STUDIES 



THE HUMAN factors in cotton, it is to be feared, have 

 been too often disposed of in easy generalizations. These 

 generalizations are likely to fall into one or the other 

 of two extreme attitudes. White croppers in particular 

 and Negro farmers in general, so runs one commonly held 

 view, are inherently inferior, and their status as growers 

 of cotton is merely an evidence of that basic biological 

 fact. Cotton is financed and grown, another view holds, 

 under a system by which small groups of designing men 

 exploit the masses of southern farmers, black and white. 

 It will be realized that the position herein taken is one 

 that refuses to be bound by blanket explanations. Geo- 

 graphic, historical, and economic factors serve to explain 

 many aspects of cotton culture. But the variations both 

 within the practices in the cotton system and also in 

 the traits of the human factors in cotton are so great 

 as to render unsatisfactory many of the explanations 

 offered in terms of race, heredity, tenancy, or the crop 

 lien system. 



The interplay of southern farmers and their cotton 

 under widely varying conditions can best be shown in 

 case studies. Specialization and diversification in cotton 

 culture, management, integrity, industry, thrift, tact, 

 and their opposites are set forth in stories of successes 



