THE COTTON CULTURE COMPLEX 313 



Carl C. Taylor, ". . . as the tenant-cropper areas of the 

 South the only semblance of a modern civilization that 

 exists is in the country towns." 20 The presence of what he 

 calls a maximum economic status group and a minimum 

 economic status group, helps to account for what may 

 be termed the rift in culture. Schools, for instance, are 

 good in the towns, but poor in the country regions. There 

 is a circulation of only one newspaper for every 12.7 

 persons in the nine leading cotton and tobacco states, 

 compared to the rate of one paper for every 3.6 persons 

 in the United States as a whole. The number of native 

 white illiterates for the United States forms 2 per cent 

 of the population. For these nine southern states it forms 

 5.9 per cent, and if the Negroes and foreign born are 

 included it is 13.2 per cent. 21 The low status farmers in 

 the South are notable sufferers from exclusion. Economic 

 in part, their exclusion means isolation from participa- 

 tion in culture. 



But standards of living, as E. L. Kirkpatrick 22 says, 

 are both economic and cultural in that they are deter- 

 mined in part by earnings and in part by farmers' ideas 

 of what they should buy with their earnings. This is best 

 shown by the fact, recognized by everyone, that the cost 

 of food may not indicate how well the members of the 

 farm family are nourished, nor the cost of clothing how 

 fashionably and comfortably they are dressed. Crude 

 culture, poor taste in clothing and house furnishing, ill- 

 chosen and ill-prepared diet, low ratios of expenditure 

 for education, recreation, and reading are matters of 

 contacts, training, and education. The standard of living 



20 In Sanderson, op. cit., p. 149. 



21 Loc. cit. 22 Ibid., pp. 126-84. 



