Cultivating Success in the South: Farm Households in the Postbellum Era by Louis A. Ferleger and John D. Metz (review)

After a wide-eyed southern tour in 1924, New York journalist Frank Tannenbaum declared with horror that "[t]he beautiful, sunny South is afflicted with a plague, a white plague—cotton." The tyranny of this "single crop," he observed, caused "not only the poverty of the rural community" and "the low standards of living" but also the "laziness, near-peonage, monotonous diet and its influence upon … lack of proper schooling" in the entire region (Darker Phases of the South [New York, 1924], 116, 117).

Though Tannenbaum's muckraking account was sensationalist, few scholars today would disagree with its basic narrative: that between Reconstruction and the New Deal, cotton's grip on the South vastly expanded, pulling in former yeomen and freedpeople and submerging them in tenancy, dependency, malnutrition, and stagnant poverty. Louis A. Ferleger and John D. Metz's meticulous new study seeks to explode such monolithic portrayals of the postbellum South. Analyzing the Georgia Piedmont counties of Jasper, Franklin, and Crawford between 1880 and 1910, Ferleger and Metz describe a cotton belt sharply distinct from Tannenbaum's : a dynamic place of innovation, investment, consumerism, and indeed success among smallholding farmers.

Providing the evidence for this unorthodox argument are previously overlooked primary sources: probate inventories, the seemingly mundane registries of property owned by deceased individuals. Ferleger and Metz have compiled a database of 228 estates across their three counties and mine it both quantitatively and qualitatively. Though hardly dismissing the existence of poverty or dependence, the authors find a wide diversity of experiences. Cotton indeed expanded its acreage after the Civil War, but it was often complemented by small grains that enabled a surprising degree of self-sufficiency. Small farmers were "shrewd consumers who focused on acquiring those things that would give them a productive edge," most often agricultural implements that promised to maximize their output and independence (p. 4). Yet the yeomanry's material world transcended plows and gins. Parlor organs and sewing machines are rarely imagined among the possessions of fin-de-siècle Georgia farmers, yet Ferleger and Metz show that such goods turned up quite frequently.

The authors claim that the 228 individuals at the core of this study represent a "broad cross section of the farmers who learned to successfully negotiate the economic and social challenges of postbellum Georgia" (p. 174). But how representative were these farmers? Only 7 percent of Ferleger and Metz's decedents were African Americans, despite the fact that two of their three Georgia counties nearly had black majorities throughout the era. Likewise, probate records only included farmers with property valued above $500, eliminating vast swaths of tenants and sharecroppers. Therefore, whether the breadth of the book's data set is wide enough to revise our understanding of "the lives of common people in postbellum Georgia" remains unsettled (p. 6).

Cultivating Success in the South: Farm Households in the Postbellum Era is tightly argued in its attempt to dispel myths of the "New South as culturally stunted and economically stagnant" (p. 5). Yet I often wished that the authors would turn the richness of their cliometric research to address broader questions that have long bedeviled scholars of the region. For a book about yeoman farmers in the late nineteenth century, I was particularly surprised to see no discussion of either the Farmers' Alliance or the Populist Party, as both established deep roots among Georgia smallholders. This is especially frustrating because Ferleger and Metz would be perfectly positioned to respond to Charles Postel's recent reinterpretation of consumerist modernity within that political movement.

Cultivating Success in the South advances a provocative argument that will resonate with a wide range of scholars. Though its dry prose and heavily quantitative style might dissuade some, the book deserves a wide readership and represents...