The average daily cash income of these 329 farmers in 1921 was as follows: If these were not actual figures reported in person by the farmers themselves, they would be absolutely unbelievable. How can farm tenants live and keep their families alive on average actual cash incomes ranging from eight to sixteen cents a day per family member? How can they afford to wait ten or twelve months for the balance of their money? The answer is, They couldn't but for (1) the meagre credit of the supply stores, and (2) advances of their landlords-small sums of money and pantry supplies from time to time. And when their crop money comes in later, their debts consume it almost to the last cent. Such is the economic status of 153 renters and croppers, black and white, or nearly half of all the farmers in this little area of the cottontobacco belt in the South-the status of 51 or more than a fourth of all the white farmers, the status of 102 or nearly three-fourths of all the negro farmers, in Williams and Baldwin townships in Chatham county, North Carolina. As the farm tenants are in this little corner of Chatham, so they are in general throughout the state and every other state in the South. The economic levels of the 329 farm homes covered by this particular field-study are indicated by the following charts exhibiting (1) the average of property owned per family, and (2) the average money handled per day per person in the household. The concentration of farm property in the hands of the landowners, and the amazingly low levels of farm tenants in property ownership appear at a glance. In detail the facts are as follows: (1) a little more than half of all the farmers, both races counted into the total, are landowners, but they own more than nine-tenths of al Ithe property. (2) The black farm owners are a little more than a fourth of all the negro farmers, but they own three-fourths of all the negro property. (3) The white farm owners are nearly three-fourths of all the white farmers, but they own ninety-seven percent of all the white property. Farm areas in general are distinctly characterized by the equable distribution of property, but not so in Southern farm tenancy areas. The disparity in property ownership between farm owners and farm tenants is startling. Such farm wealth as we have in the South is in the hands of the farm owners. It is so in the case of both races. What the tenants own-renters or croppers-is nearly nothing. The drawl of a white cropper exhibits it with photographic accuracy; "Ain't no trouble fer me to move. I ain't got nothing much but er soap gourd and er string er red-peppers. All I got to do is ter call up Tige, spit in the fire place, and start down ther road." But the essential disparity lies in the ownership of land or the lack of such ownership. The tenants as a class own no land. They own a little personal property, but no land. The ownership of land is just as significant today as it was ten centuries ago when the Saxons coined the phrases: "The land is the man; no land, no man; who owns the land owns the man; who owns the land rules the realm." Landownership and liberty go hand in hand in every land under Heaven under any form of government. Freedom-economic, social and political -lies essentially in the ownership of farms in the countryside, and homes in the towns and cities. Landless farm tenants and homeless city dwellers are a rapidly increasing body of people everywhere in America. Already they are a majority in twenty-one states of the Union-in the Great Industrial area north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, they are now an overwhelming majority. And some day these people must be reckoned with en masse. Macaulay's prophecy set 1937 as the fateful year of reckoning between the Haves and the Havenots in America. The beginnings of this time, said Lord Bryce in 1910, lie not more than twenty years ahead. America in her swift onward progress-he goes on to saysees, looming on the horizon and now no longer distant, a line of mists and shadows wherein dangers may lie concealed, whose form and magnitude she can scarcely yet conjecture.-The American Commonwealth, volume II, pp 912-13, 1910 edition. The common condition of landlessness will at last breed a common like-mindedness. Signs of it appear with increasing frequency of late-as for instance in Texas in the last state election-and they are disquieting. Can a civilization forever endure on the basis of political freedom and economic serfdom? At bottom this is the issue that is being fought out in England at this very minute-with ballots, in the English way. Soon or late this is the fundamental issue that America faces, and let us hope that it can be faced in the English and not in the Russian way. Cash Income Levels The landowning farmers and the landless tenants, in the Chatham area surveyed, are far apart in the possession of property. There is less distance between them in the annual average cash handled per household. David R. Coker of Hartsville, S. C., reckoned the average cash incomes on the cotton farms of the South in 1921 at $600.* In our survey, the average cash income of 135 white farm owners was $626 or a little above Mr. Coker's estimate; it was $597 or a trifle below for the 41 black farm owners. As for the tenants, it ranged from $153 for the white croppers to $289 for the black renters. The average gross cash income for the 329 farmers, owners and tenants, black and white, was only $424 in 1921 or nearly a full third less than Mr. Coker's estimate. These annual cash incomes are in striking contrast with $881.90 the average necessary money income for a family of three, and with $1,501.45 the average for a family of six in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania, as reported by the National Industrial Conference Board, in February 1922. * Address before the Cosmos Club, Columbia, S. C., October 22, 1922. The black farm owners and the white farm owners were nearly on a level in annual cash incomes per family; and the negro renters were well above the white renters. The black croppers occupy the next level and the white croppers foot the column. The croppers, white and black, handle less than $200 in cash in the run of the year. The cash incomes of the white farm owners are reduced to a small measure by the idle unproductive land they own. Their main wealth is in land. They are land-poor today, as our landowners were in the days immediately following the war of 1860-65. Nevertheless they hold these profitless lands with grim determination. No other business men on earth would hold on to dead capital in such large measure. The inadequacy of these cash incomes is better realized when they are reduced to the daily cash per household member. The advantage of the landless negro farmer over the landless white farmer is plainer than print. But aside from the question of class levels, the bare facts of daily money income per household member are arresting-or they ought to be. Everybody knows about the picayune daily wage of pauper labor in the far East. We have the same thing in the cotton-belt of the South. We have had vague notions about this thing, but here are the facts or a small cross section of the facts. Half of all our Southern farmers, counting blacks and whites together, are tenants, and a full third of these tenants are croppers. For long years they have been producing cotton on a pauper level at a pauper daily wage in money. Will they continue to do it? For a half century they have stuck to this back-breaking, heart-breaking task because of use and wont and custom. Will they keep it up forever? It does not seem likely. These submerged farmers cannot produce cotton under boll weevil conditions and keep soul and body together or not at any prices that cotton has brought at any time during the last forty years. And if they quit? Well, if they do, the merchants and bankers of the South will face bankruptcy and the cotton spinners of the country will be in sore straits. And about these facts of gross cash incomes in money, per person in farmer households, this may be said they are facts. We do not know and probably never will know the exact cost of producing a pound of cotton on any farm or in any community of any state. The cost varies according to the season, the size of the farm, the industry, |