A look at the conditions and attitudes of some of the poorest farmers in the United States, the tenants and sharecroppers of Arkansas during the Great Depression.

‘The Case of the Arkansas Farmer’ by Clay Fulks from Labor Age. Vol. 21 No. 12. December, 1932.

THE case of the Arkansas farmer will be briefly considered in these two aspects: First, his actual economic condition; and second, his reaction to this condition. In dealing with the first, it is necessary to present certain statistics; whereas, in discussing the second, one must define or describe the farmers’ state of mind as revealed by his behavior.

According to the Census definition of a “farm,” there are about 250,000 farms in Arkansas and on these lives a population of about 1,250,000. Arkansas is one of the most predominantly agricultural States of the Union, about three-fourths of the population being on farms. Somewhat more than half the farmers of the State are tenant farmers, the remainder, of course, being owners and “independent” operators. The tenant class is, itself, divisible into two distinct groups, one composed of “renters” and the other of “sharecroppers.”

A Return

A “renter” is a farmer who is “able to furnish himself’; that is to say, he owns a small equipment—teams, tools, machinery, etc.—and he pays rent in kind, a third of some crops and a fourth of others. Few pay cash rent. He must buy his supplies either with his own money or on his own credit. In nearly all cases, he must have credit and this he gets in very small amount and on hard terms from some local merchant or banker. But since the depression came many “renters” have been unable to secure credit from either the local merchant or the banker, and it is something of a mystery how they manage to carry on and “get by.”

Many of these “renters,” in fact, are being “stripped” of their meager equipment and forced into the lower class of “‘sharecroppers.” Their living conditions are very bad, most of them, perhaps, going perpetually undernourished and diseased—certainly they go perpetually ragged and dirty and dejected despite the ministrations of the Red Cross, “Greatest Mother of them all.”

A “sharecropper” is a farmer who owns no equipment whatever beyond his bare hands. The landlord furnishes teams, tools, etc., along with the land and advances supplies or credit. The “sharecropper” gets half of what he produces but, out of this one-half he must pay for whatever supplies or credits have been furnished him, and, needless to say, at exorbitant rates.

The “sharecropper” is more numerous than the “renter,” his economic status is lower, and his living conditions are worse. In fact, the condition of many of these unfortunates is wretched and pitiable in the extreme.

A majority of the “renters” rent from petty landlords who themselves go ragged in order to pay taxes on their lands and thus to remain in the home-owning, or the landlord, class. The renter-tenure prevails more in those parts of the State where the soil is comparatively poor. In the Delta regions, particularly, and along the river flood plains, generally, the land is owned by big landlords who regard their “sharecroppers” much as the feudal lords regarded their villeins, excepting, of course, that the more humiliating personal relationships incident to the ancient feudal tenure,— such, for example, as the “right” of the lord to sleep with his serf’s bride the first night after the wedding—are absent. The exploitation of the “sharecropper” is, however, just as complete and just as callous as that perpetrated upon the feudal serf.

Modern Feudalism

It is upon the cotton plantations that this modern survival of a barbaric system flourishes to a degree approximating its economic prototype; and since Arkansas ranks second among the Southern States in cotton production and since cotton constitutes 60 per cent of the total value of the agricultural products of the State, the magnitude of this survival from feudalism is seen to be vast. The preponderance of this modernized villenage falls upon the Negro “sharecropper” who, by frightful intimidation, has been forced to yield to its devastating exactions and, for the most part, to suffer in silence.

A clearer and at the same time a more comprehensive understanding of the general condition of the Arkansas farmer may be had from studying the following comparative statistics. These figures, I must admit, seem incredible and I shall take care, therefore, to give their source. Shortly before Mr. Hoover’s “temporary” depression settled down upon us, Southwestern Bell Telephone Company conducted a private survey of the economic conditions prevailing in Arkansas at that time, and in its mimeographed report, to which I have had access, these figures occur. The annual Income per farm, as revealed by the Federal Farm Census for 1924-25, was, for Arkansas, $851, whereas, for Oklahoma it was $1,745, for Texas, $1,965; for Kansas, $2,479; and for North Dakota, $3,402. Southwestern Bell quotes the following figures from the National Bureau of Economic Research: The per capita income in Arkansas (not restricted, however, to the farming population) was $379, whereas, that for the United States at large was $627. The per capita income of Arkansas farmers would fall much below the per capita income for the State at large. It is no wonder, then, that the same investigator, studying the Federal Census figures, found that the per capita wealth in Arkansas (again not restricted to the farming population) was $1,394; whereas, for the country at large it was $2,731. When the disastrous condition of the farming industry throughout the country is considered, it becomes more shockingly apparent what the condition in Arkansas must he. It is no wonder, then, — despite the fact that the chartered Babbitts of the State have vociferously succeeded in getting Arkansas pet-named the “Wonder State”—it is no wonder, I say, that the figures giving the number of persons who, during the winter of 1930-31, had to be fed by the “Greatest Mother of us all” correspond almost exactly with the tenant-farming population of the State. And, in this connection, it should be remarked that the fact that it was precisely in those sections of the State where the soil is most fertile that practically the entire tenant-farming population had to be fed by the “G. M. of us all,” is due to something more than a fortuitous ironical coincidence. It has its inexorable economic interpretation.

Role of The Red Cross

That interpretation is simply this: In the immensely rich Delta region it has always been a profitable investment to own large blocks of land. The superior strength and methods of the larger landlords, who only could hold such valuable lands, enabled them to reduce the exploitation of the tenant to a perfect art. Where this had been done, the tenant-farming population was kept stripped almost to its skin, and here, therefore, the “G. M. of us all’? had to come, bringing her soup ladle, to forestall sheer starvation of thousands.

Illustrative examples: In Chicot County, the lowest in the Arkansas Delta region, and one of the most fertile in the United States, out of a total population of approximately 22,000, all but 751, according to figures published at the time, had to be fed by the Red Cross. In Polk County, where the shale-sandstone soil is too poor to attract the large landlord and where, therefore, the petty “grubber” is contemptuously permitted to “dig in’”— here it became the proud boast of the local chamber of commerce that “Polk County could take care of her own.”

(Since then, it may be added, the Mena—Polk County — chamber of commerce has quietly consented to a more thorough-going “nationalization” of the modern American Magna Mater.)

Despite, however, the wretched and weakened condition of the Arkansas farmer, his hereditary Democratic administrators have saddled him with the heaviest per capita State debt borne by any American citizen.

And yet, in the midst of his miserable plight, he is frequently told by the brazen little “economists,” who speak for his despoilers, that his poverty was brought about by his excessive production of wealth. This would seem to make the irony of his situation complete.

Still Bewildered

When we turn to observe his reaction to all this appalling and preposterous mess, a logical view of the case of the Arkansas farmer should seem to indicate a ferocious and fixed resentment against his plunderers, a resentment to be promptly followed by a resolute determination to rise in mass revolt and rid himself of the whole plunderbund.

But such is not in evidence. Instead, the typical Arkansas farmer presents a picture of whimpering bewilderment. Obviously, he is not yet aware that he has been systematically and deliberately tricked and betrayed by the whole clique of business and political leaders he has been trained for generations to trust and to follow blindly and implicitly. He is convinced, of course, that here and there a suave but grasping banker has foreclosed on him unnecessarily; that some trader into whose trap he had blundered has fleeced him to the bare skin; that the government overtaxes him — though, maybe, with benevolent intentions—and that certain public officials whom he had trusted have yielded to a universal temptation and made away with bulging bags of public funds. But the unending series of ruinously low prices he must take for everything he has to sell and the unending series of ruinously high prices he must pay for everything he has to buy—these he sees simply as isolated and unrelated transactions in a world where every man is naturally free to make, and to have enforced, whatever contracts he can.

A Fatalist

The whole huge contract system of modern capitalism the Arkansas farmer accepts as natural, necessary, and immutable. Even while it ruins him, he accepts it with the same dumb and fatalistic passivity with which he accepts the physical universe and the occasional destructive forces—the tornadoes, blizzards, earthquakes, etc.— which that universe unleashes against him. He accepts the contract system of capitalism, and the logical and necessary appurtenances that go with it, because, in his mental situation he must—he can neither envisage nor imagine any other. Not yet.

Even when he attempts to apply logic to the economic situation—which, of course, he rarely does—he is likely to become more hopelessly enmeshed than ever. To him such steps as these seem simple and inevitable: If there were no business men to whom he could sell his surplus products and from whom he could buy the things he must have—if there were no employer to whom workers could go for a job—if there were no traders and traffickers to move commerce—if dealers could not extract profits for their time and risk—if, in short, the exchange of commodities, the extension of credits and the rendering of services were not allowed to continue, why, how in the name of Moses and the prophets could civilized life, or any other kind of life worth living, go on?

And then—if he happens to be engaged in an argument with a radical—he laughs triumphantly and immoderately!

He assumes that civilized life depends on private contract —and his conception of the contract system coincides at all points with the capitalistic system.

He sees other men taking profits; collecting interest; collecting rents— all based upon and growing out of private contracts—and in quick consequence becoming fat, sleek, and arrogant; surrounding themselves with all varieties of luxuries and indulging themselves with wine, women and song. He never sees men acquire these highly desirable things by common productive labor. Contract, then, is seen to be the magic key which unlocks all the gates to earthly paradise.

And thus the typical Arkansas farmer, in common with the overwhelming majority of his fellow-workers of America, still finds it infinitely easier to trust to luck and the most plausible and impressive political messiah than to break with the familiar and immemorial traditions and do original thinking along new and heretical lines. He still remains willing to follow the same old political Pied Pipers he has aways followed, even though a heavy majority of his fellow-farmers find themselves so thoroughly impoverished by the system for which these pipers pipe that they are disfranchised by the poll tax law. (At least 65 per cent of the voting population of Arkansas could not vote in the recent election because they were too poor to pay a poll tax—yet thousands of these loyal and “unterrified” Democrats rushed pell-mell into the Democratic primary, thus taking chances on being sent to the penitentiary in order to vote for the system that has ruined them!)

It would be far pleasanter to report that the farmers of Arkansas are “seeing Red”; that they have developed an ineradicable and intransigent class consciousness; and so on to the ultimate conclusion. But a deep respect for the facts of the case compels me to report that few, very few, of the Arkansas farmers seem prepared to adopt such a course.

And yet there is certainly a considerable volume of “radical” sentiment among these farmers. For, despite the sparse vote cast for the radical party tickets—a sparseness to be attributed largely to the fact that perhaps three fourths of the farmers of the State are disfranchised—it seems easy enough to get multitudes of them to join the Farmers’ Holiday Association. This is true, at any rate, in the vicinity of Commonwealth College. (But this may be partly explained by the fact that the hedge parsons of the country have not yet had time to stigmatize the F.H.A. They will soon get around to the job, however, if that movement continues.) Possibly as soon as the incoming Democratic administration has had time to demonstrate its utter unwillingness, and incapacity, to save the farmers from their economic enemies.

Labor Age was a left-labor monthly magazine with origins in Socialist Review, journal of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Published by the Labor Publication Society from 1921-1933 aligned with the League for Industrial Democracy of left-wing trade unionists across industries. During 1929-33 the magazine was affiliated with the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) led by A. J. Muste. James Maurer, Harry W. Laidler, and Louis Budenz were also writers. The orientation of the magazine was industrial unionism, planning, nationalization, and was illustrated with photos and cartoons. With its stress on worker education, social unionism and rank and file activism, it is one of the essential journals of the radical US labor socialist movement of its time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborage/v21n12-dec-1932-jan-1933-labor-age.pdf