In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7 The Redemption of Souls and Soils religion and the rural crisis in the delta Alison Collis Greene On a December evening in 1935, Arkansan Lawrence Brooks Hays stood to address a New York City crowd on the theme “Farm Tenancy and the Christian Conscience.” Most Arkansans knew Hays as a twice-failed gubernatorial candidate with a 350-member Sunday school class at Little Rock’s Second Baptist Church. Members of the ecumenical, New York–based Christian Rural Fellowship invited the Arkansas New Dealer to talk about his weekday work as special assistant to the administrator of the Resettlement Administration. Speaking in both capacities, Hays described the devastation of southern soil even as he touted the benefits of redistributing worn-out land to displaced tenant farmers. “The Christian mind rebels against absentee ownership,” Hays told his New York audience. “Religion is needed in the delicate task of bending the rigid rules of law pertaining to land, making the rules responsive to human needs.”1 In addition to deploring soil exhaustion brought on by poor farming methods, he lamented the loss of the family farm and the rise of corporate agriculture, such as the 38,000 acres of Mississippi earth held by the Britishowned Delta Pine and Land Company, America’s largest cotton plantation.2 Like many Americans, Hays worried that the Great Depression had precipitated a rural crisis. Farmers, miners, and mill workers struggled to make ends meet when prices were high, and by 1930 the raw materials they drew from the earth and processed on the assembly line were nearly worthless. Nowhere was the rural crisis more acute than in the Delta regions of Mississippi and Arkansas. More than 75 percent of the populations of the two states were classified as rural in 1930. They did not fare well. On a single day in 1932, The Redemption of Souls and Soils | 131 nearly 44,000 Mississippi farm families lost their homes either to private loan agencies and mortgage holders or to the state. National media outlets quickly did the math, declaring “One-Fourth of a State Sold for Taxes.” In the same year, Arkansas ran up $160 million in public debt, the highest per capita burden of any state in the nation.3 Most Southerners and New Dealers deemed the rural crisis an economic issue. But Brooks Hays and his New York audience, along with Christian reformers across the United States, argued that the rural crisis was also a moral and religious issue. Thus it demanded as powerful a response from the pulpit and pew as from the halls of Congress. Members of the Christian Rural Fellowship joined a range of progressive reformers who argued that the survival of rural churches depended on their ability to address both the material and spiritual needs of local communities. The church, they contended, had an essential role to play in the redemption of souls and soils.4 Disparate groups of activists determined to transform both the rural South and the rural church converged on the Delta. By the 1930s, the Delta was a region defined as much by the riverbed as by the river itself. The fecund topsoil, deposited over centuries by the river, made the Delta the richest cotton-growing land in the South, and this drew inevitable contrasts between the bountiful earth and the poor who worked it. With encouragement from reformers like Brooks Hays, researchers, denominational advocates, religious activists, and government agents descended on the region. Many hoped to make the Delta a laboratory for social and spiritual transformation. But if the Delta exemplified the nation’s rural crisis, it presented unique challenges to those who sought to record and reshape its story.5 The Mississippi River no longer transported the majority of the Delta’s residents and visitors, but it remained a powerful force in their lives. Despite human efforts to contain it, the river poured over levees in 1927 and again in 1937, displacing much of the region’s population. Even in the years when the river remained within its banks, it served as both a reminder of the instability of farm life and a conduit for the region’s most mobile and most despised population—what one reformer called “the itinerant share cropper.” Both the local middle class and activists visiting the region drew a sharp distinction between this mobile population and “the real share cropper of the South,” who presumably lived a stable, if humble, life on a single plantation. They expressed disdain for the...

Share