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Archibald Franklin Toler, Mississippi manager: "I hope it doesn't work."
Co-inventor Mack Rust: "We don't claim that this is the best possible cotton picker. But this machine today is a better cotton picker than the old Model T Ford was an automobile when it was first offered."
Oscar Johnston is the bulky, crinkle-eyed manager of the British-owned Delta & Pine Land Co.. whose 10,000-acre cotton plantation is the largest in the world. This year Mr. Johnston is getting 575 Ib. to the acre of "strict middling" cotton which he sells at a premium over the market price. He gets along well with his 3,000 Negroes, wants to keep them. Newshawks therefore crowded around him last week to hear what he thought of the mechanical menace. Grower Johnston was skeptical but not scornful.
"The machine seems to be basically practical," said he, "but it needs improvements. To be successful, I believe it would require close co-operation among the machine's sponsors, the cotton growers and ginners. IF it is successful, it will be the death knell for family-size farms and for tenants."
One thing of which there was no doubt last week was that the cotton-growing South is excited about the Rust cotton-picker. The Memphis Press-Scimitar and a few other newspaoers were enthusiastic. Most Southern papers, however, declared in effect that even if the picker were good they would not like it. The Memphis Commercial-Appeal printed a cartoon of a pop-eyed old darky trailing an empty cotton-sack and exclaiming: "Ef'n it doose mah wuk—whose wuk I gwine do?" The Jackson, Miss. Daily News, unimpressed by the fact that the Rust brothers are conscientious Socialists and have promised to cushion the impact of the machine on Negro labor, advocated sinking the picker in the Mississippi River, together with its plans and specifications. In Tennessee, which still has antiEvolution laws on its books. Democratic National Committeeman Edward Hull Crump, boss of Memphis (TIME, Aug. 17), predicted that an anti-Picker statute could be passed in his State.