Croppers' Misery
Sirs:
The stories which the Caldwells, father and son, have told of share croppers in Georgia may, as you point out in your issue of March 25, be true of a biologically degraded 1%. The misery of share croppers in Georgia or in Arkansas is not confined to this degenerate minority. In Arkansas 410 spokesmen for families out of a total attendance at four meetings of 1,719 persons told me that they had neither crops to make nor jobs to work at. Food allowances on which from 10¢ to 20¢ on the dollar extra is charged are held to about $2 a week for a share cropper's family by the plantation owner. Houses are worse than poultry houses on well-kept farms. A family showed me relief which it was told must last for 30 days— there were seven in that family. Its stores consisted of 8 cans of evaporated milk, 5 cans of processed beef, one 24-lb. bag of flour, one 24-lb. bag of meal and a paper package of nondescript meat, weighing perhaps two or three pounds. This family—white, by the way—had just been dumped down by the side of a country highway, because a father had dared unsuccessfully to invoke "the law" against the riding-boss who had seduced and kidnapped his 14-year-old daughter. . . .
The plantation system in the cotton country is the most damnable thing in the U. S., and the operation of the cotton reduction program has added immensely to the woes of a large proportion of tenants who have been cut adrift or reduced to an even lower circle of hell as casual day laborers at 60¢ to 75¢ a day when there is extra work. The whole Administration at Washington turns all complaints over to Mr. Chester Davis, author of the recent purge in the Department of Agriculture, and ardent disbeliever that there is anything wrong in the cotton country, at least anything for which he is responsible.
NORMAN THOMAS New York City Pulitzer Cub
Sirs:
The story about Randolph Apperson Hearst's debut as a cub reporter on his father's San Francisco Examiner (TIME, March 18), reminds me of young Joe Pulitzer's experience under Charlie Chapin on the New York Evening World.
When the elder Pulitzer thought it about time for his namesake to go to work and learn the newspaper business he sent him to Chapin with a note which read: "Treat him just like any of your other boys. I trust you to make a capable man of him."