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"The dog got up and crawled to the hearth. She sat on her haunches before the blazing pine-knots, shivering and whining. After a while the girl spoke to the dog and the animal slunk away from the warmth of the fire and lay down again beside the two babies. The infants cuddled against the warmth of the dog's flanks, searching tearfully for the dry teats."
Infection Centre. To date Georgians have struck no blow against what shocked Under Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Guy Tugwell has called their state of "bootleg slavery." Not so the lean tenant farmers of Arkansas, whose memorable bread-riot at England, Ark., four years ago (TIME, Jan. 12, 1931) made the country sit up and take notice.
Encouraged by Socialist Thomas and Professor William R. Amberson of the University of Tennessee, who interrupted his noteworthy researches into artificial blood transfusions (TIME, July 23), the Poinsett County share croppers last summer formed a protective association, The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union. Program: no evictions; no forced trading at plantation commissaries; direct payment of reduction benefits; representation on all agricultural control boards; co-operation of white and black share croppers. In spite of further evictions for Union participation, in the face of ostentatiously armed "plantation riders," the Union now numbers 5,000.
All the elements of a rip-snorting class-conflict were present in the little town of Marked Tree in January when a youngster of 24 named Ward H. Rodgers, on the executive committee of the Union, addressed an outdoor gathering of hungry, disgruntled and dispossessed tenant farmers. Ward Rodgers, a Socialistic Texan with theological degrees from Vanderbilt and Boston Universities, was already in bad odor with the landlord class because he had been calling Negroes "mister." And as an instructor in FERA's adult education service, he had been mixing Karl Marx with the ABC's. He was quoted as saying he was willing, if share croppers were not fed, to "lynch every plantation owner in Poinsett County." Clapped into jail, he was speedily brought to trial, convicted of "anarchy." He has taken an appeal.
What to Do? Just before the Rodgers trial the AAA dispatched red-headed Mary Connor Myers, a Boston lawyer who helped the Department of Justice jail Al Capone, to Arkansas to see what all the trouble was about. Last week she reported to Washington. It was announced that the written part of her report was confidential, and the oral part was for the ears of Chester Davis alone. The United Press said: "Mrs. Myers, it was understood, uncovered contract violations which caused cruel hardships to part of the farm population. She found share croppers straggling along the highways, homeless and unable to obtain relief."
The Myers report, soon to be amplified by an AAA share cropping investigation in every Southern county, was withheld, explained Administrator Davis, "because it may lead to legal action."