Last week the crusading Scripps-Howard newspaper chain started a stark series of articles by Correspondent Hugh Russell Fraser about the "peonage of 8,000,000 share croppers in the South."
The sensational New York Post published an even starker series on the same subject by earthy Author Erskine Caldwell (God's Little Acre, Tobacco Road).
From Cincinnati, earnest Socialist Norman Thomas broadcast: "The most wretched conditions on any large scale anywhere to be found in exploited America, exist in [the] cotton country. . . . These share croppers and casual day laborers of the cotton fields are the Forgotten Men of the New Deal. AAA has 'practically washed its hands of them and their problems."
Socialist Thomas erred in one respect. Department of Agriculture and AAA officials kept their mouths sternly shut about it, but last week the plight of Southern share croppers weighed heaviest on their minds.
"Poverty Crop." That Southern agricultural economy was and had for a long time been woefully out of kilter, government agronomists were well aware. The return of 1,250,000 whites and blacks to the land in the past four years has brought the South's farm population up to 54% of the nation's total farm population. Yet last year the South received but 33% of the national income from field crops and livestock. Of this, all but a small fraction came from cotton, the "Poverty Crop."
In the state of Maine, 95 out of every 100 farmers own their own land. But the civil war failed to change basically the Southern plantation system. In Georgia and Mississippi, approximately 70 out of every 100 farmers work somebody else's land as tenants or share croppers. The share cropper trades his services and those of his family for a shack and half the crop he makes, less 10¢ an acre ditch and road-maintenance fee, 10¢ on every dollar's worth of supplies bought at the plantation commissary (patronage obligatory) for "management fee," further deductions depending on the character of the landlord. It was estimated that the average cash income of a Southern share cropper and his family in an average year is $100.
To maintain at least a medium individual farm income level was the purpose of the Cotton Acreage Reduction Program, launched in 1933 and continued last year. The landowner pledged himself "insofar as possible, [to] maintain on this farm the number of tenants and other employes," which he had maintained in the past. He was also supposed to pass along pro rata the share croppers' share of the reduction benefit payments.