INTRODUCTION

1. The schedule of the North Carolina Club at the University of North Carolina in 1921-22 covered the various phases of Home and Farm Ownership-Town and Country, and week by week the University News Letter carried to the press and the people of the state brief summaries of the Club reports, discussions and conclusions. The Club Year-Book will soon

be going into the mails, and in twenty-two chapters will give to the public these studies in full detail.

2. In December 1921 the State Board of Agriculture appointed a State Farm Tenancy Commission consisting of B. F. Brown, Chief of the State Marketing Bureau, Chairman; Clarence Poe, member of the State Board, and editor of the Progressive Farmer; C. C. Taylor of the State College of Agriculture and Engineering; W. C. Jackson of the State College for Women; and E. C. Branson of the State University. The three state institutions named were asked to collaborate with the State and the Federal Department of Agriculture and to conduct field studies of farm tenancy in three typical farm territories. These surveys were made in the summer months of 1922, in compact areas of (1) Edgecombe, a cotton county in the East, (2) Chatham, a diversified farm county in the mid-state, on the edge of the cotton-tobacco belt, and (3) Madison, a mountain county that for fifty years has been developing the evils of tenancy farming in a territory almost exclusively white in population. The surveys were under the general direction of Dr. C. C. Taylor, who is now summarizing the results for the State Tenancy Commission, which in turn will report its findings and conclusions to the State Legislature through the State Board of Agriculture.

3. The particular responsibility of the State University in these surveys was Chatham county which lies within easy distance of the campus. The University surveyor was J. A. Dickey of Alamance county which adjoins Chatham. Mr. Dickey is an A. B. graduate of Elon College, an A.M. graduate of the University, and during his university year an active member of the North Carolina Club. Both the survey purposes and the farm folk surveyed were familiar to Mr. Dickey. He was born and reared on an Alamance county farm. All his life he has lived among the farm people in the hill country on the edge of the fall line of the state. His courses in rural social-economics at the University were directly aimed at his summer survey task, and his field work was done with rare insight, sympathetic understanding, and unfailing tact. Mr. Dickey is now a research fellow of the Cornell College of Agriculture, at Ithaca, N. Y.

4. In keeping with formal resolutions of the Tenancy Commission before the survey began, the North Carolina Club at the University has used the data assembled in Chatham county by Mr. Dickey for a YearBook chapter on The Social Status of Our Farm Tenants. It is the phase of farm tenancy that the Club has been most interested in. We have therefore considered the economic data in brief and only as related in the

largest way to the social estate of John Smith-Tenant. The economic summaries and significances of the surveys in the three counties will be found in detail in the forthcoming report of Dr. Taylor covering all the counties studied and all phases of the study.

5. The conclusions and recommendations of this particular chapter concern Chatham county tenancy in Baldwin and Williams townships, and convey to the public the best thinking of the North Carolina Club. Which means that we are purposing to relieve our collaborators of responsibility for the utterances herein and possibly, of embarrassment.-E. C. BRANSON, Chairman of the Steering Committee, North Carolina Club.

HOW OUR FARM TENANTS LIVE

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The Money They Live On

What about marrying on $20 a month-really on $6.00 a month in money, the balance of your cash income being held back till the end of the year! On a money income of that sort, do you think you'd have the nerve to set about establishing a home, sheltering, feeding, clothing, and safe-guarding a family in sickness and in health, and giving the children a decent chance at life?

I shoved these questions at a young college graduate on the train the other day-a cotton buyer in a flourishing cotton-belt city.

He looked at me in amazement. Kidding me? said he. Looks like it. I'm getting $200 a month, and I can't get married. I'd be a fool to marry on any such income. It couldn't be done in my town.

But, said I, this is exactly what fifty-one farmers have had the nerve to do in one small corner of a mid-state county in North Carolina. Thirtyeight of them are tenants, who handled in 1921 a household average of $250.64 in cash in the run of the year or just a little more than $20 a month. Thirteen are croppers with a household average of $153.27 in cash or a little less than $13 a month. And they are not negro farmers. They are white farmers-tenants to be sure, but native born whites of your race and mine.

How in the name of the Holy-Pink-Toed Prophet do they do it? he said. By which epithet, I gathered that he had been chumming with Cappy Ricks o'nights around the office stove.

Well, said I, they have no house rent to pay-that's everywhere free in this blessed land of cottontots; and no coal bills, for fire-wood is still abundant and free on every farm in North Carolina. Their grocery bills are small, because the farm itself furnishes from three-fourths to fourfifths of the food they eat-vegetables, milk and butter, poultry and eggs, and a little home-raised pork. And then they have various fruits and game in season, by grace of their landowning neighbors or the free gift of the fields. The landlords want their share of the corn and the cash-crop money, but everything else the tenants produce is freely their own. They have plenty to eat and wear, sheer existence considered. It is impossible to starve or freeze in the country regions of North Carolina. God Almighty made the state to be a paradise for poor folks.

He came back at me promptly. But, said he, they need money for shoes and head-wear; they need money for doctors, midwives and dentists, for prescriptions and patent medicines at the drug store, for the contribution box at the church on Sundays, for taxes and insurance, for gas and oil, for chewing tobacco and snuff and a cigar once in a while, for gun shells and fishing tackle, for school books, newspapers and victrolas, for

movies, ice-cream cones and bottled drinks, for fairs, circuses, and street carnivals in the occasional trips to town.

Sure, I said. And after paying the family bill for bread, bonnets and paragoric, how much do you think they have left for social servants like teachers, preachers, and doctors, for social institutions like churches, schools, and colleges, for state and county treasuries, and for petty selfindulgences?

They couldn't have much ready money left over for any such purposes as these, said he. After paying my room rent, cafeteria charges, haberdashery bills, bootblack and barber fees, pressing-club dues, newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and various inescapable incidental expenses, I had only $150 left over last year, and the doctors got every cent of that before I had any chance to spend it on a good time Christmas. I didn't wind up the year in debt, but I was barely on the safe side of the deadline. I think I did pretty well, better in fact than most of the fellows. But as for getting married on $200 a month-nix! I'd be an idiot to do it.

But, I said, on a money average of $20 a month these fifty-one white tenant farmers not only kept themselves and their families alive, but twenty-five of them were out of debt at the end of the year. And more, they have actually accumulated $23,277 in personal property-in workstock, farm implements, household goods and utensils, automobiles, guns, and dogs; and their debts all told were only $4,100. Debts counted out, they are nearly $20,000 ahead of the game.

Well, all I've got to say, he replied, is that they are some financiers! They've got more sense than I've got. If you are giving me straight dope, don't ever again let anybody talk to you about stupid, lazy tenant farmers.

But say, said he, how do these people live? How do they keep soul and body together on an average of thirteen to twenty dollars a month in money? What are their standards of living? What are their notions of comfort and culture? They are not starved nor even half-starved in body, you say, but they must be wholly starved in mind-halt and maimed and blind in spirit! What can they look forward to? Can they ever hope to be anything but underling farmers, disadvantaged and under-privileged, they and their children and their children's children to the remotest generation?

All of which are tremendously important questions. They concern 63,487 white farm tenants in North Carolina. With their families they number 317,500 souls, or nearly one-fifth of the entire white population of the state. Who are these people? Why are they farm tenants instead of farm owners? On what level do they live? What are their hopes and fears? What chance have they to rise out of farm tenancy into farm ownership?

A Close-up Study

John Smith-Tenant, is a piteous figure, as MacNeill's pen gives him to us in the News and Observer. But John Smith, the Wayne county tenant who took the first prize for diversified farming, at the state fair last year, is quite another story. We know much about this or that tenant farmer, but in the South we know almost nothing about our white tenant farmers as a class. And landlords know much about the tenant farmer as an economic factor in the business of farming, but they know very little about him as a social and civic asset or liability in community life and commonwealth development. In cold figures we know nearly all there is to know about farm tenants the country over-the number, the ratios, the types, and the increases or decreases in each state since 1880; and, in recent years in certain closely surveyed areas in the South and Middle West, cold figures have told us much about their farm practices, their labor incomes, and the havoc they work upon soils and farm buildings. But we know much less, in most states nearly nothing, about the tenant as a human being-his home life, his church and school interests, his habits and hopes, and the part he has played in lifting or lowering the level of civilization in his home community. We have reckoned him in dollars and cents; we have not yet appraised him as a home-maker or as a community builder or destroyer in free American democracies. We have known very little about him as a citizen and we have cared less-or so until very recently in this and other states.

What we need is a close-up study of the 317,000 souls in the families of the white tenants of North Carolina. And it must be a keenly sympathetic study or we shall fail to understand and interpret aright the facts we find.

The Tenancy Area Surveyed

In order to supply this need, at least in part, Mr. J. A. Dickey, an A.M. graduate of the State University, spent the three summer months of 1922 in 329 farm homes of Baldwin and Williams townships in the northeast corner of Chatham county. They were the homes of practically all the farmers of this small area-the homes of owners and tenants, white and black.

Chatham is a mid-state county situated along the Fall Line, on the eastern edge of the Piedmont region of the state. The cotton and tobacco counties of the Coastal Plain adjoin it on the east and south, and on the north and west lie the grain, hay, and forage counties of the state. It is a land of rolling hills, abundant water courses, and rich bottom soils-a natural livestock region. The fertility of the soil is attested by the fact that in the olden days it was the seat of a slave-holding aristocracy. Neither slavery nor tenancy ever flourished in poor soils anywhere in the South. There were 729 slave-holding families in Chatham in 1860. Only six counties of the state had more slave-holders and only sixteen contained more slaves. Nevertheless there were in Chatham nearly 1800 white families who owned no slaves. They outnumbered the slave-owning

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