Land Laid Waste

by GOVERNOR ELLIS GIBBS ARNALL

1

ONE day, in Southwest Georgia, as I looked into the deep chasm of Providence Canyon, the Biblical passage came to my mind: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” I saw the perverse beauty of the great cut across the face of nature, the mosaic of colors as one layer after another of clay was revealed. Where once there were fields of cotton and corn, there was this great chasm. Within a generation, the unprotected land had been despoiled of its richness, then swept away, until there was a nothingness paneled in red and yellow and cream and a score of variations of these colors.

The National Park Service has called the canyon the most remarkable and most beautiful natural phenomenon east of the Mississippi. It may be. Certainly the colors are striking enough and the gorge is big enough.

To me, however, it was almost the ultimate in horror, unsurpassed except by Copperhill, which resembles nothing so much as that scene Dore imagined to illustrate the Inferno. At Copperhill can be found the same twisted and leafless trees that featured the infernal landscape, trees that seem to be in a torment and a terror that never ends because they have been petrified in the endless winds of Hell. No grass and no flowers. Only the red barrenness of burned clay. The dogs whimper in the pitiless sun or crouch despondently under doorsteps, for there is no shade in this land where every green thing has been destroyed.

The day I saw Ducktown and Copperhill, the phrase ran once more through my mind: “The place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”The wantonness of the sacrilege made me afraid; for here the earth had been desecrated, its holiness mocked, and horror is the result.

Once as I walked over some submarginal Middle Georgia cotton lands, where erosion had eaten away the topsoil to a thin layer that would hardly sustain the weight of the plants, and where the fertility depended upon ever increasing amounts of guano, I heard some talk about the shiftlessness of the tenants on the place. A friend who was with me had lately bought it, in the hope that it could be converted into good grazing land, but our other companion still put his trust in cotton, and little trust at all in the tenant farmers who grew it.

“Most of the good small white farmers in these parts have sold out and gone somewhere else,” he told my friend. “The best nigger tenants have moved away. All we have around here is sorry niggers and po’ white trash that you can’t beat for shiftlessness. They won’t make enough on a place to pay their supply bill. They have to be carried all winter, and they grumble all the time, wanting things they see in the mail-order catalogues. Last winter three families half tore down their houses to get firewood, when they could have cut all they wanted a mile off.”

We went on in silence, inspecting the rusted strands of barbed-wire fence and the sorry soil.

“Just shiftlessness. Worth nothin’. No ‘count folks, but all you can get. Imagine a man tearing down his house and burning it stick by stick,” he went on, as we walked across the final field.

The land we saw that afternoon had suffered long. It lay in one of the earliest-settled counties of the state. Soon after the Revolution, which destroyed more than half the farm homes of Georgia, families from Virginia and South Carolina had moved into this newly opened land. In general, they acquired large acreages. In most instances they were accompanied by slaves. The farm that lay before us had been cleared in 1790, while Washington was President of a newly organized government.

And by 1850 the land had been worn out; within a single lifetime men through folly had destroyed the fortunes of their children. The rich hillsides grew cotton and corn more profusely than the white soil of the fiat country. The hardwood was cut off the hills. The fields were planted to row crops. The rains washed gullies. Soon the soil was exhausted. But the supply of land seemed endless. More slaves banded the trees and felled them on more hillsides, and more land was planted with cotton, while the first fields lay untended.

Finally, the owner removed himself from the worn-out land and took his slaves to the new Texas fields. Many of his neighbors went to South Georgia; others tried Arkansas or Mississippi.

Pine replaced the hardwood that had been cut. A little of the fertility of the soil was regained. About 1885, the pine was cut for sawmills and the hillsides were turned back to cotton again. But the earth rebelled against this cycle of misdeeds. Only in exceptional years did landowner or tenant wring a living from the soil.

My friend had bought the farm from the son of the man who had bought it the year after the pines were cut. The father had never been able to support his family on the land and about 1900 had moved to town and gone to work to support the land. Every year, the son said, there had been a small loss in operations and there had been taxes to pay. When he inherited the property, on his father’s death, he had made the best bargain he could with tenants for nominal rentals and moved to a large city where he could earn his living. A few years before, immediately after a two-year period of good crops in the section, he had found a man willing to rent the entire property for a little more than the taxes. The renter, in turn, placed his own sharecroppers on the land and supplied them. Though the man had a bad name for dealings with his cotton hands, though he was notoriously a sharp trader in dealings with merchants and supplymen, he failed. The land had been turned back to its owner, and he was glad to sell it to my friend.

2

DURING the period when America believed itself most prosperous, when the vision of a boom lasting forever dazzled the eyes of everyone, during the magic decade of the foolish twenties, the county in which my friend now thought to plant kudzu on the slopes to check erosion and to fatten cattle presently in redeemed meadows might have given indication enough that all was not well in America. Thirty-five per cent of the people left the county, unable to obtain even a subsistence from cotton lands that had worn out completely. A fourth of the whites and almost half of the Negroes fled from poverty and its accompanying hunger. They fled from soil that had been the richest in the state a century and a half ago. They fled as the slaves and the slave owners had fled seventy years before them.

I do not know where they went. There have been statistical studies of the journeyings of the dispossessed, but they do not tell the whole story. They are not banded like migratory birds. Some of them went to the cities and were successful and became skilled workers or joined the white-collar class. Some of them went to the cities and landed on relief rolls. Some of them became migrant workers, voyaging about the nation from crop to crop in battered automobiles held together with baling wire, sleeping in miserable shacks and often in the open. Some of them refused to take root in alien soil: like vines torn up and replanted, they faded, yellowed, and died; they could no longer draw to themselves the holiness of the earth, for its goodness had fled and it no longer brought forth crops in its season, but was sterile and bare because the virtue had gone out of it.

You can see some of them, or their kin, on almost any highway of America. Their obsolete cars are piled high — almost buried — with the scant and worn household goods that they carry with them wearily.

I was on my way to a speaking engagement in Brunswick one afternoon with my confidant and helpful friend, Thad Buchanan, when we stopped to help two men who were trying to change a tire with a jack that would not work. We took ours out and they accepted the loan. The travelers were two men, apparently brothers, with their womenfolk and children; the latter stood quietly some distance away from the car in that silence that is traditional for them in the presence of menfolk. The piled belongings included a dismembered stove and a small hickory rocking chair. One of the children presently detached the rocking chair from its retaining ropes and set it on the grass beside the road for the oldest woman.

The soft Southern drawl has an infinity of regional variations. I thought I caught the tongue of Southwest Georgia.

“No, but not far away,” the elder brother said. “We used to live out from Eufaula ‘bout twenty miles across the Alabama line. But my brother worked a place in Macon County for two or three years.”

“Are you making out all right now?” Thad inquired.

“Not too well, with gas so hard to get. We been down in the beans, and there ain’t much money in them.”

“Where are you going now?”

“Well, I guess we’ll try the tomatoes for a while.”

“Things never have been right since the boll weevil came when I was a boy,” the younger brother said as he handed back the jack.

As we drove off, I could hear the oldest woman singing as she rocked: —

America for this family had become a land divided into beans, potatoes, cotton, tomatoes, and oranges. The highways did not link towns or pass through states; they led from a bean farm to a tomato acreage.

They did not know where they had wandered, across a continent perhaps; from Florida to Maryland to California, for all they knew. They had spent their lives in fields or upon asphalt highways, crowded into a car loaded with all their possessions. They may have been among the more fortunate migrants, those who are seldom really hungry for more than a few weeks at a time. But they must keep moving. Perhaps some day there will be a job that is permanent, a place that is home, with a bareswept yard and a few flowers and a garden of greens. They are seeking something.

And the Lord brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs, and with wonders. And he hath brought us into this place, and hath given us this land, even a land that floweth with milk and honey.

3

THEY do not come from the Southeast alone, these wanderers. They come from all over America, from every section where the land has been abused by men, and where in turn the land has rebelled and cast men off. They come from Kansas and Missouri, from Texas and Michigan, from the Carolinas and Kentucky, from Oklahoma, where the billowing dust drove them in a migration that has given their name to all the displaced of America, — the Okies, the people without homes, the sharecroppers and tenants and small farmers of yesterday who have no roof today. During the war years many of them found temporary shelter, found jobs in the shipyards and in the shops, put on a uniform to defend a home that is not their home. At the first sign of a depression, they must take to the roads again, a little more weary, a little more beaten.

“Call out the deputy sheriffs. Don’t give them any credit — they won’t pay you even if they have the money. Give them a little gas and let them get out of town. Here comes another family of those damn ‘Okies.’”

There are at least 150,000,000 acres of eroded land in the United States today. Almost 75,000,000 acres of this land are in the Southeast. But erosion is extending into other areas. There is a growing area of erosion in the Northwest spreading over many acres in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The land destruction is increasing in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio.

In some parts of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Alabama, as much as 50 per cent of the farm lands have been denuded of their topsoil. In some sections half the land once under the plow has been withdrawn from cultivation. Throughout these regions, if any crop is to be grown, commercial fertilizers must be applied lavishly. Sixty per cent of the fertilizer used in America goes to the Southeast to assist the production of cotton and tobacco. But the tonnage required by the Middle States is increasing year after year, an indication that the wastage of the soil is not limited to any single part of America.

Erosion is generally thought of as the result of washing, but another major cause is wind. Much land in the Southwest which was turned to cotton has sustained serious wind erosion. Great acreages in the Middle West which should have been left in grass for cattle ranges were converted unwisely into grain farms, and these have been scenes of dust storms and are rapidly being robbed of all fertility. Aside from erosion, much land is rendered useless in the Southeast by the silting up of streams, with a resultant overflow.

To a considerable extent the areas in which land waste represents the most serious economic and social loss are the basins of the Missouri and the Tennessee. In the second of these, a serious and tentatively successful effort to rebuild an economy while developing the tremendous water-power potential of the area is going on. I say “tentatively successful,” because there is no certainty when the same sinister forces now blocking the Missouri Valley Authority may succeed in altering the objectives or interfering with the program of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The economic loss to the nation through erosion can be pictured statistically. In normal pre-war years, the Southeastern states purchased 5,500,000 tons of fertilizer at a cost of $161,000,000 annually. Yet annually there was taken from the land by erosion 20,000,000 tons of potash, nitrogen, and phosphoric acid, with a value above $600,000,000. In many areas, Southern farmers were not engaged in agriculture; they were mining their soil, not in the metaphorical sense employed by those who think of the waste inherent in the system that dooms the South and West to colonial position in the nation, but in an actual and physical sense. Every year the average Southern farmer puts $2.71 worth of fertilizer back in the soil, and sweats in the sun, chopping cotton to produce the money to pay the supplyman; and during that year the rains wash from his soil $9.00 worth of the same elements.

It is true, however, that the soil of these acreages can be restored. It is necessary only that the farmer of the South forget the one-crop system and turn to the other crops that his soil will produce. These are many. Oranges will grow in the South. Barley, the grain that ranges farthest north, can be produced in the South. Every small grain, legumes, hay, potatoes, peanuts, vegetable truck, many of which aid in restoring the fertility of the soil, can be grown in the South. And by parallel, in the dust bowls of the Southwest and Middle West grass could cover the threatened acres and they could be turned back to the production of cattle. All this can be done.

In the Tennessee Valley it is being done. They have planted trees, 150,000,000 seedlings, that will remake hundreds of thousands of acres. They are cutting the timber wisely, employing 8 per cent of the workers in the Valley in industries built upon the forests; they have made the woods the basis for a $112,000,000 industry. They are using the farm lands kindly, and the production of meat, eggs, milk, and dairy products has increased by half. Millions of acres of land have been terraced. The straight furrow, invitation to erosion, has been supplanted by contour plowing. The number of livestock in the region has more than doubled.

Hunger has been driven out. The yield of the land has increased. In many instances land that, at the time of TVA’s establishment, was regarded as submarginal and suitable only for retirement and public purchase has been restored to such condition that it supports good crops and hearty families.

And because families are hearty, they are no longer fleeing from the Tennessee Valley. The fever of migration has been checked, not by treating the people but by treating the land that they love; by giving the land new hope, the people’s own hope is restored. But there are other areas in America where migration was not checked, and a map of the areas of loss in population would coincide very closely with a map disclosing the waste of the land. Population losses in Georgia, for example, during the decade 1920-1930, corresponded very closely with the areas of the worst soil depletion.

In those years, despite a birth rate higher than the national average, Georgia did not have an increase in population. Though the state sustained neither dust storms nor floods, and therefore little mass migration, here and there a small crossroads community was shuttered up, a farm went to sedge and pine seedlings. The roof of a country church fell in and the graves in the churchyard went untended, because the people had gone — somewhere.

The ruined areas in the South follow two patterns and afflict two different types of inhabitants. One area of erosion follows the hill country, the region of small yeoman farmers. They are the proudest people in the South — a section of the nation never noted for an insufficiency of pride. Their great-grandfathers came out of the hills in 1780 to meet the finest force of British regulars engaged in the attempt to suppress the Revolution. At King’s Mountain the hillsmen and the Redcoats faced each other, squirrel gun against musket, long knife against bayonet; and when night came, the Revolutionists had won the decisive battle of the war, and the retreat of Cornwallis to the Yorktown peninsula was inevitable.

Yes, proud these people were, and fierce, and independent. So that they seceded from North Carolina and established an independent state and invited the new United States to admit them as a member. The State of Franklin possessed the most democratic Constitution of any early American commonwealth, a Constitution that breathed the undying individualism of the people of the hills.

Their descendants are to be found in Tennessee, in North Georgia, in North Carolina, in the hill regions of Kentucky. They are still yeoman farmers. But the soil on their hillsides is washed thin, and the sawmill has stripped much of the land of the trees that held back the waters. Through the area in which they live, through the uplands of these states, there has been increasing poverty.

Some of these people wander from their hills to the cotton mills. But seldom do they part with the land they own. It is left to be tended by some relative or neighbor, and ultimately most of them return to the hills from the mill villages, with enough money saved from their wages to buy a pony and a cow and to resume life again in its familiar pattern. To their group belongs a preponderant part of the families that TVA has helped to earn a new prosperity.

4

THE other section of the South where the land has been laid waste is the Black Belt. It is the section that extends across part of the Carolinas, Middle Georgia, part of Alabama, and even into Texas. It is the section in which the plantation system existed before the end of slavery; a plantation system which bears no resemblance to that of the Delta or of the regions in which mechanized farming has turned the agricultural worker into a mass producer indistinguishable from the man working on an automobile assembly line.

The ills of this area are to be traced back over a hundred years. Much of the land was abandoned temporarily around 1840, and put back into cultivation in 1865, when the temporary high price of cotton made submarginal cotton lands valuable for a three-year boom period.

This is the land of the true sharecropper. The word is one used loosely, applied at times to a class of workers who are no more than wage hands paid in kind, or, more precisely, wage hands who share the risk of farming with their employer but who share to only a limited extent in the profits. Such a system of sharecropping is exceptional in the Southeast, though common in parts of Mississippi and Arkansas.

The genuine sharecropper has no easy life; neither does the tenant farmer just above him in the caste system; nor the renter who has his place at a fixed payment in cash or cotton; nor the small farmer; nor the plantation owner, for that matter. All of them are caught by the tentacles of the one-crop system and squeezed of their labor, their vitality, their independence. Even today, when a considerable part of Georgia has been freed from the one-crop system, when livestock has supplanted cotton, as the greatest dollar producer for the Georgia farmer, sections of the Georgia Black Belt are still tied to a cotton economy. And no matter how high the price of cotton, these farmers arc never prosperous. It is a lucky sharecropper who has money left after paying for his supplies and his share of the cost of guano, and of calcium arsenate to fight the boll weevil; it is a fortunate plantation owner whose place is unmortgaged and who does not lose a little money on each sharecropper on his place.

Cotton and corn are the greatest robbers of the Southern soil; but corn and cotton these sharecroppers must plant apparently until either Gabriel’s trumpet blows or there is a revolution in the agriculture of the South: corn to feed the mules that plow the cotton that sells for cash to buy the fatback and corn meal and syrup that are the standard diet of the region.

A little more than half the people who live in the Black Belt area are Negroes, about a sixth of whom are small independent farmers, in contrast to approximately the third of Negro farmers who own their own land elsewhere in Georgia. Only about a fourth of all farmers, of both races, are landowners; perhaps an additional tenth are cash renters and another fourth are tenants who supply their own livestock and receive from two thirds to three fourths of the products of their lands.

These people are leaving the land, too; but not in the same pattern that is disclosed by the people of the hills. For, if they own the land, they sell it and never return. If they are tenants, they leave and never come back. The land does not seem to have for these people the same attraction that it has for the men of the hill country, whose hearts arc left behind when they essay the adventure of spindle or loom in the lowlands.

You would think that the hill folk, who are among the most intelligent people of the Southeast, would establish small home industries to give employment to their people; that they themselves would carefully replant the hillsides with trees as TVA is doing for them in one area; that they would diversify not only their crops but their employment, so that some members of the family would be industrial workers while others tended the farm. Indeed, that is the precise pattern that TVA is developing for them; it is the pattern that has raised their income, in those sections where TVA operates, from the lowest in the South to a point well above the Southeastern average.

And you would think that the people of the Black Belt, whites and Negroes alike, would limit their plantings of cotton, that they would plant more soil-building crops, that they would put in more livestock on their farms and grow more garden truck.

5

BUT it costs money to do this. And it requires technological skill to convert from relatively simple cotton farming to the complexities of producing cows and pigs. Also you must be able to sell your products, and there are inadequate marketing facilities.

The acquisition of technological skill is difficult, but Georgia’s educators have persisted under great difficulties and have managed to teach many the how of producing things to eat. The marketing problem can eventually be solved, when the South is accepted back as part of the Union, together with the West, and when these two great areas no longer are regarded as colonial appendages to be exploited and drained of all wealth for the support of an Eastern industrial empire. But until that is done, the problem of where the Black Belt farmer will sell his products, other than cotton, cannot be solved.

For the man who buys his cotton — he is often the same man that supplies him with fertilizer and fat-back, with calcium arsenate and corn meal — is used to handling cotton. It is a marketable crop. It can be stored in a warehouse, and the receipt can be taken to the bank as the basis for a loan. But what would such a merchant do with thirty dozen eggs, or six Duroc-Jersey pigs, or a fat calf? There are limits to the appetite of his family, and he has knowledge neither of grades nor of markets for such products, and he has no facilities for temporary storage until he can collect enough to ship a full car of such products.

Moreover, where would he ship them? There are no genuine industrial centers near-by, with a tremendous hunger to be fed. The industrialization of the South has proceeded in such a manner that it has contributed little thus far to the economy of the farmers of the region.

Shall he ship them to the markets of the East? He has knowledge of the cotton market, but where in the East would he dispatch a carload of eggs, and how much would the freight be? And how would his banker and his Eastern wholesaler react to his trading in products that have no easily estimated cash value?

The result of the one-crop system is a veritable mining of the soil. It is not cotton that the Southeast is exporting to feed the hungry spindles of the world; it is the very soil of the South. Year after year the fields are fed their starvation diet of guano; year after year the rains sweep the hillsides and wash away more wealth; year after year the yield of each acre of the tortured land is just a little less. Year after year the owner’s profits grow smaller and the hunger of the sharecroppers mounts.

More and more land is taken from cultivation in this belt each season. Not all of it will be wasted, of course. In some instances the slash pine, which Dr. Charles Herty regarded as the salvation of the South, is replacing cotton as a crop, especially in Southeast Georgia and North Florida and parts of Alabama. To the landowner this is economic salvation. But sharecroppers cannot live amid seedling pines, nor can they wait seven years for them to grow to harvest. They must move on.

This chronicle of erosion may be the tragedy of America. In some parts of the West, where the plow broke soil that should have been left to grass, the desert is encroaching, nibbling off a yard here and an acre there. And in the South, it is nibbling at men’s homes — and at their hearts. Only one thing can save this region from destruction, and that is diversification of its crops, a turning from soil-wasting to soil-building, the making of peace with the earth and with the forces of nature. Economic barriers, some of them a century old, conspire with the customs and habits of the region to make this exceedingly difficult. Yet here is the area where the fight must be fought to save the land and to save the people on it. And the fight must be won.

The fight must be won because the people must not be driven from their homes to join the multitude of wanderers on the face of America. There are people in the Middle Georgia counties, for instance, who have never traveled a day’s journey from where they were born. They have stayed and fought for the land, while the less courageous or more adventurous of their cousins went away to seek some other place, where living was less of a struggle.

The South cannot solve the problem by itself. Regional methods had to be applied in the Tennessee Valley, which cuts across state lines. National remedies will have to be found for some of the economic ills that burden the sharecropper of the Black Belt and threaten to reduce him, whether white or Negro, to the status of an Egyptian fellah toiling in the sweltering Nile valley for some overlord in Cairo or Alexandria. It is not only the red clay of Georgia that is pouring into the sea: it is a part of our common country; and all America has a share in solving the problem.