From the VQR Vault: Agrarianism and Industrialism

The Southern factory “hand” has therefore had a rural mind. Industry has remained a new experience. It has been a rescue. The mills have meant release from an agricultural serfdom, and they have brought relatively certain cash wages. These two prime benefits have acted to postpone criticism of the employer on the part of the work.

Broadus Mitchell, “Why Cheap Labor Down South?” October 1929

The nature of cotton production and the plantation system made control of the labor force a chief function of the cotton economy, with all the attendant influences. Mechanization is reducing, and will eventually eliminate, these pressures for a limitless, and correspondingly cheap, labor supply.

Frank E. Smith, “The History of Cotton Spring,” Spring 1957

For unto us God sent To gloze with iron bands The dozing continent—

The fallow graves, ponds Full of limp fish, tall Terrains, fields and fronds Through which we crawl, and call.

Allen Tate, “A Sequence of Stanzas,” Spring 1975

“I would like for my children to have a profession,” Eduardo told me the day we met, although he knows that working in a hotel or selling cell phones is already infinitely easier than his own work. “I am powerless to help them. I am seeing that they want more, but I cannot give it to them. Sometimes when I’m working, when I’m lying down resting, I start to think about that, and I feel sad for them. Because they want to continue. It is the destiny of being poor—if we were to look for a defect, we can start at the beginning of my life. From the beginning of my life, that’s where it started.”

Lygia Navarro, “Inheritance of Dust,” Fall 2009

The Southerner may not have been very happy about many of those old monuments of regional distinctiveness that are now disappearing. He may, in fact, have deplored the existence of some—the one-horse farmer, one-crop agriculture, one-party politics, the sharecropper, the poll tax, the white primary, the Jim Crow car, the lynching bee. It would take a blind sentimentalist to mourn their passing. But until the day before yesterday there they stood, indisputable proof that the South was different.

C. Vann Woodward, “The Search for Southern Identity,” Summer 1958

Find the full text of these works online at vqronline.org.