HUMAN ELEMENTS IN COTTON 259 



crastination on his part they become stunted and choked 

 with grass, and as a result he gets a low yield which some- 

 times pays his rent and living expense. Often it doesn't pay 

 the rent, especially when price is low. Some years he clears 

 a few dollars on his crop and immediately invests it in a 

 Victrola, organ, family photo enlargements, or an automobile 

 that has been driven at least 30,000 miles. You can guess 

 the result of the story. The landlord usually loses on this 

 class of tenant, and they are in the majority in this section. 

 However, there are a few of this type of tenant who have 

 taken more care and interest in saving, who are in good shape 

 relatively and still rent land rather than buy it. But the 

 majority of the Negro tenants as well as white tenants in 

 this section are now in debt and in fact are seldom out of 

 debt. 7 



Among complicating factors is the question of the in- 

 feriority of the tenants themselves. Isolated, ill-nour- 

 ished, poorly instructed, badly housed, the tenant class, 

 it has been suggested, is rapidly assuming the attitude 

 of a dependent class. The presence or absence of the 

 qualities of industry, good management, and thrift; the 

 vicissitudes of nature and the market are shown in inter- 

 action with the cotton system in one case each from the 

 Eastern and Western Cotton Belts. 



The following case 8 of the struggle of a share renter in 

 the plantation economy of the soil-exhausted Eastern Belt 

 begins with the story of his father: 



7 Letter from a farmer, graduate of University of Tennessee 

 Agricultural College, La Grange, Tenn., April 28, 1928. 



8 Adapted from the Raleigh News and Observer, Sept. 25, 1921. 

 This represents an unusual type of feature story. Ben Dixon Mac- 

 Neill went out a few miles from Raleigh, N. C., and interviewed an 

 "ordinary poor white tenant." As written up it comes dangerously 

 near the real case study method. It makes a vivid presentation of 

 one human factor in cotton. 



