"Machinery Has Completely Taken Over": The Diffusion of the Mechanical Cotton Picker, 1949–1964

The American South experienced abrupt and unexpected changes following World War II. Workers, especially African Americans, left the cotton fields; southern agriculture modernized; and new industries expanded. The Civil Rights Movement altered the social setting permanently. Mechanization of the cotton harvest proceeded rapidly; by 1970, the South's rural labor force had largely departed, leaving the landscape and social system barely recognizable to those who had observed it twenty years earlier.¹

The spread of the mechanical cotton harvester is bound together with the South's social and political transformation and its economic convergence with the rest of the country. Alston and Ferrie argue that the adoption of the cotton picker caused the South's large rural labor force, with its attendant labor monitoring, and the incentives inherent in southern paternalism, to disappear. As a result, southern political leaders, in a move that had national, political implications, abandoned their resistance to welfare-state legislation that substituted for local paternalism. According to Wright, the emergence of the cotton picker was itself a response to the labor scarcity of World War II, further intensified by Federal legislation in the 1930s that had spurred out-migration by undermining the South's "separate" low-wage labor market.²

An examination of how the mechanical cotton picker spread across the South can illuminate such events as the "collapse" of southern equilibrium, the demise of southern paternalism, and the role of social institutions. The consequences of mechanical cotton harvesting have been widely studied, but the causes of the machine's diffusion have received less attention. "Institutions" are often blamed for the region's lagging development, although accounts have not always used a consistent definition of institutions, nor explained how they would have obstructed cotton-harvester diffusion. North uses the term institutions to mean "the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction"—"formal constraints (e.g. rules, laws, constitutions), informal constraints (e.g. norms of behavior . . .), and their enforcement characteristics." This article, however, calls these phenomena "social institutions," in the sense of traditions, customs, or mores as embodied in laws and contracts, for the sake of consistency with the historical and political-science literature. The question is, Did any of the South's social institutions have the potential to retard the wide-spread adoption of the cotton picker?³

As it happened, southern social institutions did little to impede the machine's diffusion once it was mass-produced, although some erosion of long-standing ones may have taken place before cotton-harvester diffusion began. Environmental advantages, along with a superior stock of human capital, fostered earlier diffusion of the mechanical harvester in the West than in the South. Despite the South's deficiency in human capital, southern social institutions had little effect on the cotton picker's acceptance once diffusion began.⁴

Social Institutions and the South

Wright argues that early in the twentieth century, the South exhibited features of a separate economy and that it did not share the same "resource environment" with the rest of the country. Typical of lagging economies, the South lacked an indigenous technological community that could adapt new technology to local conditions. The economic divergence of the South from the rest of the United States was the result of decisions that favored labor-intensive processes, thereby failing to spawn a cluster of engineers and other technical personnel to sustain technological change within the region. At root was a set of deliberate political decisions to withhold education from those who might otherwise have migrated from the region, and to prevent intervention by the federal government that would have undermined the South's separate low-wage economy. Thus was the South's institutional structure founded on historically prior policy that deliberately aimed at retaining a separate society.⁵

Street's contemporary work contains valuable insights about the beginning of the diffusion process: "[F]or at least the period since the advent of the tractor the stultifying effect of Southern social and economic institutions has been a greater factor than the existence of...