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But a number of Southern landlords, correctly informed by their lawyers that the cotton reduction contract has no legal teeth and does not bind them to maintain the normal number of tenants or to pass their benefit shares along impartially, found means of withholding the reduction fee, ousting tenants from the land. AAA now admits that whereas the pre-New Deal cotton income went 40% to landlords, 60% to tenants, the reverse ratio may now hold true. From a class and country where letter-writing comes hard, some 7,000 share croppers had by last week scrawled out despairing protests to AAAdministrator Chester Davis. And so impartial an observer as the Federal Drought Relief Director of Arkansas has reported wholesale "unloading" of tenants onto relief rolls by their former landlords.
By last week a vast stretch of the South was the scene of humanity hit bottom. No statistics could picture the pallid acres from Georgia to Arkansas, pocked with the burnt stumps of slash pine, gully-gutted, unfertilized; where the whitewash peeled from treeless shacks; where hatchet-faced tenants were not even able to get the three M's—Meal, Molasses and Meat—a diet that nourishes pellagra but not men.
Two vignettes of life under the New Deal for landless, dole-less, hopeless share croppers 25 miles from Augusta, Ga., as seen by Erskine Caldwell:
"In 1934 a tenant farmer in Jefferson County was unable, because of old age and illness, to work out his crop. A physician prescribed for his ailment, but the man could not buy the medicine, and no relief agency would supply it. A four-year-old girl in the family died at the end of the year of anemia. The tenant moved several miles away to another farm, but after several weeks the landowner decided that he was too old and ill to work a crop on a tenant-farmer basis, or on any other basis, and he was evicted.
"The household goods were carried to the land-limits and deposited by the side of the road. Another tenant took the goods under shelter, and the landowner gave notice that if they were not removed from his land, he would come in to the house and burn them.
"In the meantime the old man had gone off into the swamp, without ax, hammer, or saw, with the intention of felling trees and building a log house for his family. He has not been heard from since he left. . . ."
"Near Keysville a two-room house is occupied by three families, each consisting of man and wife and from one to four children each. . . .
"In one of the two rooms a six-year-old boy licked the paper bag the meat had been brought in. His legs were scarcely any larger than a medium-sized dog's leg, and his belly was as large as that of a 130-pound woman's. Suffering from rickets and anemia, his legs were unable to carry him for more than a dozen steps at a time; suffering from malnutrition, his belly was swollen several times its normal size. His face was bony and white. He was starving to death.*
"In the other room of the house, without chairs, beds, or tables, a woman lay rolled up in some quilts trying to sleep. On the floor before an open fire lay two babies, neither a year old, sucking the dry teats of a mongrel bitch. A young girl, somewhere between fifteen and twenty, squatted on the corner of the hearth trying to keep warm.