THE COTTON CULTURE COMPLEX 303 



tended his original cross-road cotton buying to merchandising 

 at the ports as exporter, and now his influence was at the 

 crest. The scene shifted. He entered the deflationary inter- 

 act with large stocks of unhedged long staple cotton, for 

 which he had paid a dollar a pound, with large bank loans 

 based on what now looked like fictitious security, with large 

 land holdings on which taxes and interest loomed ahead of 

 harvests, with a Ford car ratio which his auto clientele could 

 not absorb. He was not unhappy. He was only more active, 

 and therefore perhaps happier. He was willing to wait for 

 the come-back. He waited . . . waited . . . waited . . . 

 wearily, at last . . . and then the reckoning. He was bank- 

 rupt, and his bankruptcy carried down with him a whole 

 countryside of honest folk. If his attitude had not been what 

 it was, he could have saved everybody, including himself; 

 being what it was it took him twenty-four months to realize 

 that he had lost his own half a million and much more besides. 

 He has not gone back to his little cotton business, nor to his 

 bank, nor to his farms, nor to his Ford agency, because he 

 has none of these. Today he is managing to live on money 

 that should be paid over to his creditors. 



A speculative riddle confronting those independent 

 growers who are not harassed by creditors is whether to 

 sell on a low market or hold for higher prices. The cot- 

 ton broker, although able to hedge his purchases, is in 

 the midst of speculative attitudes to which he often suc- 

 cumbs. The following interesting comment was made by 

 a Savannah, Georgia, cotton factor before the Federal 

 Trade Commission: 



Now cotton is a torment; the cotton trade is a torment to 

 the legal mind and the scientific mind and the logical mind, 

 because it is neither logical nor scientific, and in many cases 

 it is not legal. 12 



12 The Cotton Trade, Senate Document 100, 1924, pp. 316-17. 



