When Cully A. Cobb, an influential extension official in Mississippi, became director of the cotton division of the AAA, it signaled the importance of both the Extension Service and prominent planters. Closely affiliated with Oscar Johnston who directed the Delta Pine & Land Company in Mississippi, one of the largest cotton producers in the world, Cobb fashioned a program that addressed the needs of the South’s biggest cotton planters. Under the AAA, planters “rented” their cotton acres to the federal government but retained possession of those rented acres and cultivated crops not designated as overproduced. They received a rental payment, typically referred to as a crop subsidy, and an additional “parity” payment if the price they received for their crop failed to provide a sufficient profit compared to the cost of production. County farm agents urged their planters and farmers in the cotton belt to grow soybeans in place of cotton on acres previously devoted to cotton. By 1960, soybean production rivaled that of cotton (Whayne 1996; Daniel 1986).
The AAA’s cotton program might have gone down in history as a resounding success, but for the emergence of a controversy resulting from the actions of some planters. For the first time in the history of US cotton production, planters no longer endured a labor shortage. One of the inherent weaknesses of the post-Civil War labor system was the necessity of maintaining sharecroppers and tenants from spring to fall. In fact, there were only three periods of significant farming activity on cotton plantations: planting in the spring; hoeing weeds and thinning the crop to maximize growth in the summer; and harvesting in the fall. Wage labor utilized only during these busy periods would have made more sense, but planters could not be sure they would have sufficient labor in those crunch times. The sharecropping and tenancy system allowed planters to keep their laborers from the time they prepared the ground to plant the seeds until the crop was harvested, but the transition to soybean production introduced a destabilizing element in the labor system. Although they achieved the long-held dreams of extension agents to restore nitrogen to the soil, soybeans required less maintenance and could be harvested with machinery. Under these circumstances, some planters began evicting tenants they no longer needed, and others often refused to share crop subsidy and parity payments with those who remained (Grubbs 1971; Whayne 1996 ; Fite 1984; Daniel 1986).
Even before the crisis over evictions and the failure to share crop subsidy payments arose, sharecroppers in Alabama organized to protest Depression-era practices that exacerbated their deteriorating situation. Planters, suffering from declining prices and escalating debts, were squeezing what profits could be had from crop production from their sharecroppers. The Sharecroppers Union, founded in Alabama in 1931, attracted national attention, some of it negative, because of its association with the Communist Party (Kelley 1990). Planters attacked the all-black union using racist rhetoric. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), founded in Arkansas 1934 in response to evictions and a refusal of planters to share crop subsidy payments, took a different path in terms of membership makeup. Although it left the decision of whether to accept black members to local affiliates, the STFU promoted interracial solidarity against the planters (Grubbs 1971; Daniel 1986; Whayne 1996). The integrated STFU had little success in halting evictions or forcing planters to share AAA payments, but it had success with two cotton pickers’ strikes and, in 1936, it garnered publicity after revealing that three entities—all of whom had evicted tenants and thus contributed to unemployment—had received the largest AAA payments: Delta Pine & Land Company in Mississippi and two Arkansas mega-plantations, Lee Wilson & Company and Chapman and Dewey Company. At least one of them faced the cessation of AAA payments for several years. After the United States entered World War II, however, the congressional and AAA appetite for punishing these planters abruptly ceased, and the payments to Lee Wilson not only resumed but the company also received back payments to 1936 (Whayne 2011).
Despite the efforts of the STFU, a discernable trend toward a labor surplus and wage-labor in areas previously dominated by sharecropping was taking shape by the end of the 1930s. Yet planters had barely become accustomed to the luxury of an abundance of labor when World War II struck. Once the United States joined the Allies in late 1941, farmers were enjoined to produce more than ever with less available labor (Rasmussen 1951). Officials with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) began devising plans to deal with the shortfall, particularly in late 1941. In 1942 they marshaled every available source of labor they could find. On southern plantations, that meant hill and townspeople, but it was clearly insufficient. The federal government negotiated an agreement with Mexico to provide braceros to work on farms and plantations. The first braceros reached southern fields in 1943 and were soon augmented by German prisoners of war, fresh from the Allied victory at the Battle of El Alamein. Italian prisoners of war soon followed. Meanwhile, the Women’s Land Army was revived, modeled on its World War I counterpart, and provided women, girls, and teenage boys, mostly from cities, to augment farm labor needs. Most of this labor—braceros, prisoners of war, and the Women’s Land Army—was distributed through coordination with the county farm agents and in some areas of the South needing an abundance of labor, special labor agents were hired solely for the purpose of working with farmers and planters to address their labor needs. In the end, all of these sources together with an odd assortment of workers from the Caribbean and Canada as well as a small contingent of Japanese internees who were housed in Arkansas, enabled southern farmers and planters to secure requisite labor (Rasmussen 1951).
Just as wartime labor needs increased, the tendency toward mechanization that had begun during the New Deal expanded. As one historian has argued, the adoption of the mechanical cotton picker was revolutionary (Holley 2000). However, production of tractors and combines was not the highest priority of the war industrial complex, and it was only after the war that the turn away from mule-power to engine-power truly accelerated. In 1943, International Harvester developed a mechanical cotton picker, but production levels of the new pickers were low during the war, and the transition to mechanical cotton picking occurred in the postwar period and, even then, certain structural impediments slowed the process. The mule breeding and marketing industry was substantial, and planters and farmers had long-standing relationships with both the beasts and those who sold them. They had capital tied up in barns, harnesses, tillers, and plows, all of which could be adapted to machines, but the desire to do so took time to develop. In some cases, adaptation was not as easy as one might expect. Cotton gins, for example, were an essential component of the cotton production process, but the existing gins were suited to hand-picked cotton. Machine-picked cotton came with a load of debris that the old cotton gins could not easily process. While the immediate adoption of cotton pickers, tractors, and combines in the cotton belt seems slow if examining it on the ground in the 1940s, it was, in fact, remarkably fast in the long view. By 1960, mules were rare on most large plantations. Another important element in the adoption of mechanical cotton pickers and other such machines was the cost involved. Investing in machines required a capital outlay that demanded a certain production level, and larger farmers and planters would be the ones who found it expedient to make this transition (Raper 1946; Street 1957; Aiken 1998; Daniel 2005).
One final factor in the postwar production of cotton had to fall into place before the era of “scientific agriculture” could take shape: the use of new kinds of chemicals. Chopping away weeds and thinning the crop, something that occurred in the hottest months of the summer, was typically done by hand hoe and gang labor. Agriculturalists had experimented with the use of chemicals as weed control since the early twentieth century. In the 1930s, innovations, including the use of synthetic chemicals were pioneered, but the technology exploded in the post-World War II era as products like 2,4-D and other peroxyacetic acid herbicides became available. It was more commonly used in conjunction with the cultivation of corn, oats, and other cereals, as cotton was extremely vulnerable to its misapplication. The transition away from cotton, however, contributed to the growing use of these chemicals in the South and, eventually, chemicals friendlier to cotton were developed (Fite 1984; Daniel 2005).
The use of new chemicals, the adoption of machinery, and return to the trend toward wage labor marked the era of scientific agriculture and the rise of the neo-plantation. Although the transformation favored larger operators as smaller producers could ill afford chemicals and machinery, some small farmers found a way to survive. For most of the twentieth century, farm owners as a category typically owned the vast majority of the acreage
