THE COTTON CULTURE COMPLEX 319 



concerns is quite incorrect cotton production in Texas will 

 jump unbelievably, prices will fall sharply, and the tenant 

 farmers of the old cotton states will have to go out of busi- 



In the meanwhile the poverty of the inefficient one- 

 horse cotton farmer group has not operated against its 

 survival in the succeeding generations. Exclusion from 

 urban culture patterns has left the farmers of lower 

 economic levels with less knowledge of contraceptive prac- 

 tices. For the same reasons his attitudes toward the re- 

 striction of families partake more of the old, the 

 traditional, and the conservative. Moreover, children are 

 less of an economic handicap in that he is not expected 

 to do as much for them. They are more of an advantage 

 because they furnish unskilled farm labor. After having 

 aided in cultivating the family crop, many sons of farm 

 owners as well of renters enter the ranks of cotton crop- 

 pers and tenants. The exhaustion of free land and the 

 differential birth rate in favor of the farmer, accounts in 

 part for increasing tenancy rates. Cotton culture, it may 

 be said, after rendering some of its producers inefficient, 

 makes for their survival both in the economic and biologi- 

 cal sense. They are the marginal farmers, for they exist 

 on the outer margin of culture. "They constitute a more 

 or less disturbing factor a miserable support for them- 

 selves and a disturbing menace to the success of others 

 that must always be counted in the estimate of produc- 

 tion and consumption and in any proposed legislation." 27 



20 Cited by Harry M. Cassidy, "The South and the Tariff," Edi- 

 torial Research Reports, 1928, p. 699. 



27 Condition of Agriculture in the United State, pp. 8-9. 



