Pages

Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Living on 8 Cents a Day in Chatham County, 1923

How Farm Tenants Live

The Extension Division of the University of North Carolina has just issued a bulletin that contains enough social dynamite to blast the state out of the sedimentary accretion of three centuries, where that dynamite properly placed and detonated. The title of the bulletin is How Farm Tenants Live, and it is a the joint product of J.A. Dickey and E.C. Branson. Mr. Dickey doing the field work and Mr. Branson evidently doing the bulk of the writing. Their idea was to get a cross-section, or rather a microcosm, of farm tenancy in North Carolina, and wit that in view Mr. dickey went into two townships, Baldwin and Williams, in Chatham county and investigated every farm tenant there. His findings and the conclusions of the collaborators are presented in this bulletin in the belief that they are a very fair sample of the farm tenancy problem.

Thus the state has laid before it in brief form some facts on this question. Facts hitherto have been woefully scarce in discussions of the farm tenant. There has been much imagination, a vast deal of emotion, quantities of rhetoric and some downright dishonesty in most of the “argument about it and about” but precious few facts. This bulletin, however, gives the figures, cites chapter and verse, speaks exactly. For instance, it doesn’t say “about one-fourth” of the white tenant farmers in this region are croppers; it says “there are 13 out of 51 tenants.” It doesn’t say, “the farmer’s cash income amounts to only a few hundreds a year.” It says, “the average cash income of 329 farmers is $424 a year.” Briefly, it isn’t arguing with you, it’s telling you. At the end it draws some conclusions, but first it has put you in the possession of the facts on which those conclusions are based, so if you don’t like its conclusions, you are at perfect liberty to draw others of your own.

That sort of talk is worth listening to, worth thinking about, affords something stable and solid on which to base comment.

Outstanding Facts

And here are some of the outstanding facts about our farm tenant population, if these two townships serve as a fair sample. There seem to be three classes of white farm tenants, (1) sons, sons-in-law, or nephews of farm owners, who have a reasonable expectation of coming into possession of the land they work by gift, marriage, or bequest—they are the upper crust of the tenantry; (2) renters, who own their own tools and livestock, but must acquire land by purchase, if at all—they are the middle class, up and coming, whom no discouragement can hold down permanently; and (3) croppers, who own nothing, but work the land with the owner’s tools and livestock for half the value of the money crop.

The cropper is “The man whom God forgot”—to quote the bulletin’s quotation of Service’s line. These people are living, in the district investigated, on an average cash income of eight cents a day. Of course, they have their food and shelter provided; but eight cents a day must clothe them, educate them, amuse them, pay for doctors and medicines when they are sick, and bury them when they die. What wonder that they turn to moonshining and bootlegging? Why, they are cast off even by the church. Whereas the percentage of church membership among the other two classes of tenants is 86 and 84, among croppers it is 40; and the percentage of Sunday school students drops from 66 among the others to 21 among the croppers. “The man whom God forgot”—not a bad phrase, is it?

The cropper, though, is fairly content with his lot. Whatever ambition he may have had has long since been smashed out of him. Better worth consideration is the renter, who, although his income per person in his family is only 14 cents a day, by incredible thrift has saved out of that sum enough to buy a mule and some implements, and is saving to buy a bit of land. What of these heroic strugglers?

“Their lot in life is toil. With only two exceptions, their wives are hoe-hands in the fields, from eight to 10 hours a day during periods ranging from 30 to 200 days of the year, according to family circumstances. One of these women is a mother, 52 years old. The unbroken rule is to send the children, both boys and girls alike, into field work at 7 or 8 years of age—so because there is no hired labor to be had and no money with which to pay such labor.”

Punishing Industry

Then when the renter does save up enough to make a payment on a bit of land, the state of North Carolina declares that he must instantly pay taxes on its full value, although he may have paid in only a tenth of the purchase price, leaving the rest covered by a mortgage. Isn’t that a beautiful method of encouraging thrift? Edwin Markham was much impressed by Millet’s painting of a French peasant; but what Frenchman ever deserved more than the North Carolina renter the line “And on his back the burden of the world.”

The Daily News expects to return to discussion of this bulletin later—indeed, it may be, and we hope will be, discussed for years without exhausting its interest—but in the meantime it earnestly urges every one of its readers who is interested in the progress of the state to apply to the Extension division of the University for a copy. It goes free to North Carolinians—50 cents to others.

--Greensboro Daily News

From the University of North Carolina News Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., February 7, 1923

No comments:

Post a Comment