I wanted to say thanks again for the recommendation! I finished the book last month.
It was WONDERFUL! I learned so much. Mr."Shaw"/Cobb was truly one of a kind.
If you have any other good reads on sharecropping in the South please let me know
Provided below is an edited excerpt from my
Southern Reconstruction book that describes black sharecropping in the 1930s.
A British company, Delta & Pine Land (D&PL), owned the largest Southern cotton farm during the first half of the twentieth century. It eventually totaled almost forty thousand acres and was located in the delta near Greenville, Mississippi. After confessed bribe taker and former Grand Rapids, Michigan, District Attorney, Lant K. Salsbury, moved to Mississippi, he became a cotton farmer. In 1911, he journeyed to England, where he persuaded a British cotton textiles consortium to acquire the inactive D&PL and use its charter to purchase large tracts of Mississippi cotton land. The British sent over a delegation to investigate. Local planters, who would sell the Brits some of the land, charmed the buyers with hospitality and entertained them with goose hunting.
After completing the purchase, the British quickly discovered how difficult cotton growing could be. Floods in 1912 and 1913 took a toll, as did the persistent boll weevil. The company did not earn a profit until 1917 and did not pay a dividend until 1920. Nonetheless, in the 1920s, the plantation grew from twelve thousand acres to eighteen thousand. Due to overproduction, the cotton market crashed in 1926. The disastrous 1927 flood, however, led to a cotton shortage the following year from which D&PL benefitted primarily by speculative buying early in the futures market. In the ensuing years, the company’s operating efficiency steadily improved. It also pioneered the breeding of superior cotton types that could better withstand insect infestations and provide higher yields.
By the time of the Great Depression, D&PL was not only America’s largest cotton farm, it was also perhaps the most efficient at utilizing its sharecroppers, who were almost entirely blacks. In 1937, the company was the subject of a
Fortune magazine article, “Biggest Cotton Plantation.” In 1936, it produced 15,000 bales at a yield of almost 640 pounds per acre, whereas the typical cotton farmer obtained a yield of only about 190 pounds per acre. Due to its superior qualities, D&PL cotton sold on the market at an average price premium of 10 percent. Its cottonseed was in demand throughout the world, and three thousand five hundred tons were exported. Net income in 1936 was $153,000.
The company provided farms and homes to a dozen managers who were paid a salary of $150 monthly with the potential for a 10–15 percent year-end bonus. Each supervised about 100 sharecropping families with an average of three children. In order to maximize production, managers gave croppers detailed cultivation instructions obtained from the company’s scientific research and experience. For example, croppers were provided D&PL’s high-yield cottonseed, which matured about six weeks earlier than normal. Managers commonly rode through their respective territories daily to look for problems and provide assistance. Crop-dusting airplanes applied insecticides. D&PL also distributed a half ton of yeast annually to worker families in order to prevent pellagra, which was a common ailment among malnourished Southern farmers of the era.
Southeast Missouri Sharecroppers Pictured Above
Beyond these advantages, however, working conditions were little different from those of the earliest post-Civil War sharecroppers. A farmer who used one of the company’s one thousand mules was entitled to a half share at harvest time. If he provided his own mule, the share was typically three-quarters. However, D&PL often did not permit three-quarter shares, because management did not believe that most sharecroppers cared properly for their mules. Each farmer was provided a dwelling unit, free fuel, and a half-acre parcel for growing fruits and vegetables. D&PL also paid for half of the fertilizer costs. The entire cultivating season totaled only 125 days. At other times, croppers might work for cash wages of a dollar a day on other company projects, if available.
D&PL offered croppers a company-owned store to provide food, clothing, and other essentials. The currency of the store was company scrip because of, as
Fortune put it, the sharecropper’s tendency to “blow [cash] rapidly for unnecessaries such as whisky.” Assuming the potential for captive stores to charge high prices and impose steep interest rates,
Fortune concluded that D&PL’s success partly resulted from the “intangible . . . treatment of [its] labor,” which included reasonable terms at the company store. The company also provided a school and hospital for the blacks. The school operated five months annually at no charge. The hospital had a doctor on staff and was available for a fee of $9 a year.
In 1936, the average cropper consumed $200 in store credits and was paid $320 in cash, resulting in total earnings of $520. If one ended the year with a deficit at the store, D&PL normally canceled the debt. The cash was typically paid on “settlement day” at the end of the harvest. Almost immediately thereafter, used car salesmen, prostitutes, and bootleggers arrived in the neighborhood from Greenville. A cropper’s entire year’s earnings might be wasted in a single day. Black-on-black homicides averaged four or five annually.
Between 1930 and 1932, D&PL reported one thousand cases of syphilis. The best treatment available at the time cost $14,000, which was shared by D&PL and the nonprofit Rosenwald Foundation. Thus, over a two-year period, D&PL invested more than twenty-two times its 1936 income to treat venereal disease among its sharecroppers. Assuming only $320 of clear cash income a year as in 1936, the average cropper would have otherwise required forty-four years to pay for the treatment costs alone.
D&PL’s presence was generally regarded as benevolent to African-Americans of the region. Even though labeling sharecropping as a “national disgrace,”
Fortune concluded, “[A]ny practical solution . . . is hard to see and, even if seen, hard to preach. . . . It is possible that at Delta and Pine, you see sharecropping at its best, or say, its least objectionable.” An independent 1939 Harvard University study added scientific evidence to support
Fortune’s opinion. It stated that the good diet and excellent medical care encouraged by D&PL lowered the death rate among the croppers. In response to the study, the
New York Times wrote, “The Harvard experiments not only teach a valuable physiological lesson but [also] point to the sociological moral that working for an enlightened company on a sharecropping basis need not be another form of slavery.”
According to
Fortune, Delta & Pine supplied “better than average cabins with tight-fitting walls [and] grooved and tongued floors.” Tenants were not, however, provided window and door screens, because “the croppers normally punch holes in the screens to let the dogs in or throw trash out.”
When
Fortune asked local whites why D&PL’s black sharecroppers failed to use their earnings to purchase lands and improve their economic status, the whites replied that the croppers earned enough money to do so but most were not thrifty and lacked initiative. They compared such blacks unfavorably to Italian families who had migrated to the area after the Civil War to become cotton workers. Some second generation Italians, they said, “had become Memphis doctors and lawyers . . . or otherwise improved themselves.” At the time, however, black sharecroppers occupied such a low social rank that it may have seemed impossible to many—even among the young and ambitious—to improve their position. There were few examples to serve as role models. Those who tried likely faced obstacles from racial discrimination as the tiny number who succeeded often claimed.
Presently, Delta & Pine Land is a subsidiary of Monsanto Chemical. It is the world’s largest developer of cottonseed and controls about 70 percent of the market. Its breeding, gene-splicing, and selection technologies provide seeds that are setting new records in terms of yield, infestation resistance, and fiber quality. The genetically engineered seed is reducing the need for pesticides. It is also hugely profitable for Monsanto because insecticide costs about $150 per acre, whereas conventional seed is priced at about $8 per acre. D&PL can earn a generous profit margin by pricing its transgenic seed at $32 an acre and still lower a farmer’s overall cultivation costs. The company sold most of its cotton lands in 1978 and no longer operates the plantation.
The 1939 claim by the
New York Times that D&PL’s methods indicated that sharecropping “need not be another form of slavery” warrants analysis. Sharecropping was not a choice freely made by Southerners after the Civil War. It was compelled by a regional capital shortage when the only alternative was starvation. Federal aid, or investment by outside capital, might have enabled more satisfactory arrangements, but neither was forthcoming. The South’s economic recovery was to be by its own bootstraps. Moreover, it would need to be accomplished within an environment of injurious federal policies such as protective tariffs, unfair freight rates, industrial monopolies, and discriminatory banking rules that favored the Northern states. There were consequences.
