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95 N chapter three The White Plague of Cotton For more than a century, this greatest of economic assets has been also our greatest social humiliation . . . although adding a billion dollars annually to the wealth of the world, the cotton farmers themselves are the most impoverished and backward of any large group of producers in America. —charles s. johnson, edwin r. embree, and w. w. alexander So it is not illogical that the illness of King Cotton should be regarded as distinctive in character and largely unrelated to the health conditions of our economic activity as a whole. To be sure there will be for him no funeral; but is he destined to be the victim of a chronic invalidism? —claudius t. murchison owhere is the paradox of progress and poverty in the New South more apparent than in the region’s reliance on and devotion to cotton . Writing in the Independent, G. L. Fossick proclaimed, “Cotton is the South’s blessing or its curse; at once its hope and its greatest problem.”1 At the turn of the century, the South produced roughly 50 percent of the world’s cotton supply, and optimistic champions of southern progress and material prosperity foresaw a golden future in the continued cultivation of the crop. Some self-proclaimed experts estimated the South could produce as much as 75 percent of the world’s cotton supply. Although other industries such as mining and timber promised to bring great wealth to the region, investors, boosters , and New South proponents paradoxically turned to the commodity most associated with southern rural life and argued that the continued production of cotton would facilitate the economic integration of the region into the modern industrial state. The southern cotton mill industry had made great strides in its competition with New England mills. Optimists celebrated the South’s contribution to worldwide prosperity and the key role the region played in 96 • chapter three bolstering national abundance and progress. Yet cotton was an agricultural product subject to the vagaries of weather, soil exhaustion, disease, and insect devastation, and it did not always bring the same price per pound from year to year. Overproduction of the crop during any given year might satisfy the international market’s demand, furnish raw supplies for burgeoning manufacturers , and guarantee low prices for consumers, but it drove the market price of raw cotton so low that producers often could not recover the cost of production and make a profit. In addition, the cotton exchanges in New York, New Orleans, and Liverpool were wildly speculative and fluctuating prices made it almost impossible to predict future profits. Often these exchanges appeared to act independently of and not in response to actual agricultural conditions. Finally, the region’s devotion to cotton led to dependence on a system of tenancy that contained the fundamental seeds of poverty and debt. The struggle to reconcile King Cotton’s image of grandeur and promise with the reality of material and social decline in the New South reflected a much larger problem. How easily could the South be incorporated into the national fold economically and what, if anything, did it have to offer in the wake of the Civil War? The cotton plant became the symbolic flashpoint for national debates about the economic repercussions of the Civil War, the place of agricultural pursuits in a rapidly industrializing nation, and the South’s long-standing battle with poverty and destitution. Indeed, the region provided a reform template for how to convert a backward locality into a progressive element of the greater productive society. The problem of reconciling regional agricultural backwardness with national industrial progress challenged the fiction of sectional reconciliation, which celebrated harmony between the races, the great industrial strides being made by the South, and the economic unanimity among sections. As early as the 1890s, with the arrival of the boll weevil and the ideological surge in Populist Party principles, federal experts, northern philanthropists, and liberal reformers began to focus on rural problems as the root cause of southern backwardness and stressed the importance of regional rehabilitation to liberal nation-building. By the turn of the century, efforts at reuniting North and South involved the transformative initiatives of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (usda), which pushed for intervention in the South in an attempt to resolve the problem of one-crop agriculture, eradicate the encroaching boll weevil, revitalize country life, facilitate the adjustment of rural people to the [3.16.81.94] Project MUSE...

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