Go South, Young Man!

by LOUIS BROMFIELD

1

IN the course of a year a great, many young men and women drive into Malabar Farm to look around. Most of them are about to start out in life and most of them have very little money and few possessions outside of the clothes on their backs. Usually they are intelligent, energetic, and ambitious. Some have college educations, and a good many have a deep interest in agriculture. They are this generation’s crop of young men and women ready and aching to make their own way, and in doing so to build up the nation as a whole.

Until a couple of generations ago they could have gone out and claimed a section of land or a tract of forest, or gone prospecting for fabulous mineral wealth. Today the Old Frontier has gone forever but a New Frontier has taken its place and that New Frontier is, paradoxically, in one of the oldest parts of the nation — the Deep South.

Usually after we have talked awhile, I finish up by saying, “If you want opportunities, go south! The whole of the South is waking up. There are opportunities there which no longer exist in the overcrowded North and Northeast or even in the great plains or the mountains. There is a whole country in the process of being made over. Why go to Alaska or Brazil when there is a pioneering job to be done right under your nose?”

First of all, it would be well to identify what I mean by the South. Secondly, it would be well to state a few simple home truths. It seems to me that the real South includes Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and East Texas. It cannot be said, I think, that Florida, with its resort attractions and the general Coney Island atmosphere, could be called the South. Central and West Texas and Oklahoma are really the Southwest, from which the First Frontier, on which a man could build a fortune out of a two-bit piece, has not wholly disappeared. Arkansas is border country which has never seemed able to make up its mind; and Kentucky and West Virginia are definitely border states. Missouri, despite the pretensions of some sentimental inhabitants, never was and is not today the real South.

Among the truths the first unpleasant one is that the South would very likely have reached the depths of economic depression even if there had never been a War Between the States. This is so because in the world since 1800 any purely agricultural nation or area has been at a great economic disadvantage. This in turn is so because, with the passing of cottage industries during the Industrial Revolution, virtually the whole income of such areas or nations has been spent in purchasing nails, machinery, clothing, kerosene lanterns, coffins, and what you will, elsewhere. Henry Grady, the South’s first progressive after Appomattox and the forerunner of the new pioneer of today, once wrote an epitaph on the funeral of a Georgia fanner which pointed out that the only thing concerned with the burial and almost the only thing concerned with the whole life of the dead man which came from the South was the earth in which he was being buried. All else was manufactured and shipped in from the North. The dead man had lived a wretched life because all and sometimes more than his agricultural income had been drained away from him and out of the South to the industrial areas of the North.

Not only did the South suffer from the economic hardship of a pure agricultural society but the situation was made worse by the fact that it suffered as well from one of the most destructive agricultures in the history of the world. It was an agriculture supported by so-called “cheap slave labor which grew constantly more expensive as agricultural income declined; it was a careless one-crop" cotton and, in small areas, one-crop “tobacco" agriculture which permitted millions of tons of rich topsoil to be washed away each year and which created constantly declining yields per acre and constantly augmenting costs per bale or per pound of production. The War Between the States in reality contributed only incidentally to the economic decline of the South. It merely hastened by a couple of generations what was already inevitable.

Over vast areas of the Deep South today the blight of a wretched agriculture still remains. In other considerable areas hundreds of thousands of miles of terracing have been created to prevent soil erosion and the depletion of the bare cotton fields by winter rains; and here and there in the midst of the worn-out, blighted areas one finds communities, areas, and individual plantations where the landlords are prosperous, the houses are painted, and new tractors and automobiles stand in the plantation yards. In relation to the New Frontier these prosperous establishments are like the original great plantations built long ago in the savannas and the forests of the First Frontier. One was the symbol of man’s conquest of wild undisciplined nature; the other (the prosperous modern farm or plantation) is the symbol of man’s conquest over his own carelessness, ignorance, and greed.

2

BUT the New Frontier is not merely an agricultural one, although that represents the fundamental solution to the Southern problem. It is a frontier where there are new opportunities in business, small and large, in industry, processing, servicing, and many other fields.

Industry has spread through the South at a phenomenal rate in the last ten years. This has occurred partly through the wise policy of government during the war in dispersing new war plants throughout the country rather than increasing concentration of them in the already overcrowded industrial Northeast. Some of the increase has come about because many great corporations and workingmen themselves realize that crowded cities mean poorer working conditions, augmented labor difficulties, higher living costs, and declining standards of living. Some of it, of course, you can attribute to the incentive of cheaper wages, but this advantage will, as industry spreads through the South, largely disappear, and has indeed already begun to do so. Whatever the reasons, the money of the South is beginning to stick where it belongs.

The balance between industry and agriculture has a bearing on many of the economic problems of the South. One of these problems — that of higher shipping rates for freight into and out of the Deep South — has been a source of cont inual Congressional wrangling and dispute for nearly two generations and is at present t he subject of a suit brought by the State of Georgia still awaiting a hearing before the Supreme Court. The “discriminatory" rates have been a definite handicap to the development of the South and in particular of the more remote areas.

The variance in Southern freight rates from those of the rest of the country has indisputable economic causes. Few, if any, railroads show a profit for passenger traffic alone; their profits come from freight. During the long poverty of the Deep South, freight was light and in a one-crop cotton area very often largely seasonal. The South produced cotton and some timber to be shipped, and in most areas cotton production per acre has been declining steadily since before 1860, so that for a considerable period the railroads carried less and less. In the exact ratio to the declining yields, purchasing power decreased and the amount of goods shipped for sale into many areas declined. The passenger traffic, owing to the poverty of the Southern areas, was at the same time both light and cheap.

These conditions have long been recognized by the government agencies which granted the railroads operating in the Southern areas higher rates on freight shipments than those operating in other parts of the United States and in particular in the Northeast, where both freight and passenger traffic was and is so great as actually to tax at times the capacity of the carriers.

The achievement of a better balance between agriculture and industry, plus a better and more productive agriculture and livestock enterprise and steadily increasing purchasing power, will greatly increase the need for shipping. This in turn should correct the “discriminatory” shipping rates on a basis of economics alone, regardless of any action by government agencies or Supreme Court decisions, for the simple truth is that the railroads are able to operate at reasonably low rates in and throughout any area which is highly productive and which possesses considerable purchasing power.

Of all the Southern states, and for that matter all the forty-eight, no state has shown more progress within the past generation than North Carolina. The progress is not alone economic. Few states have made so rapid an industrial development, and no Southern state has advanced with such speed toward t he achievement of l he vital industrial-agricultural balance so important to the stabilized prosperity of any region, it was not long ago that the same poverty and shabbiness which has largely characterized the Deep South since defeat was almost everywhere in evidence in North Carolina. Today the shabby look has largely gone. The farms appear prosperous and well cared for in most areas, and the shabby cabin slums on the fringes of the towns are on their way out. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has become one of the most vigorous cultural centers of the nation.

It is, I think, indisputably true that culture, social advance, and civilization in general are to a large extent tied to economics, to living standards, and to productivity. So are ignorance, prejudice, and intolerance. Education plays its role, beyond question, but education too is dependent on a stable, fairly prosperous, and balanced economy. North Carolina is a case in proof, for as a state it has made remarkable progress away from the old superstitions and the prejudices which in the past handicapped and at times paralyzed the Deep South.

The bitterest racial feeling in the South has never existed between the Negro and the more prosperous elements of Southern society, but between the handicapped Negro and the unfortunate and poverty-stricken elements of the white race, who found in the different color of their skins their only dubious claim to superiority, and in the Negro the scapegoat for their own failures and miseries.

The so-called “liberal” elements have long railed at the Rankins and the Bilbos, and have even called for their impeachment and conducted political campaigns against them within the State of Mississippi. The fault lies not in the men themselves, and the cure lies not in their impeachment; the fundamental weakness is the low economic level of the State of Mississippi. One could do away with the Bilbos and the Rankins but the chances are that men like them would bob up again, for the simple reason that under the representative form of government, they represent Mississippi. They cannot be replaced until Mississippi itself is cured, and cured by strong doses of economic prosperity, which in turn bring better living standards, better education, and more tolerance, and which abate the need for scapegoats and the hatreds based largely on poverty. A better agriculture, a more dispersed industry, and a balance between the two can bring about this prosperity with its attendant benefits and in many areas has already done so. In the Deep South, North Carolina stands today at one end of the scale and Mississippi at the other. The reasons for both are largely economic.

3

DESPITE the influx of industry, the economic backbone of the South is still largely agricultural and the gains in this field have been progressively important. In five years the agricultural income of North Carolina has increased from about 200 million dollars to about 800 million. Even if we should write off 40 per cent of this gain as arising from inflated prices, the increase would still be remarkable. It has been achieved largely through better and more balanced agriculture, through increases in technology, mechanization, the growth of the dairy and livestock industries, and most of all through soil conservation, good land use, and the gradual abandonment or reform of the old vicious system of single-crop tobacco and cotton agriculture.

Countless contributions have been made to the improvement of Southern agriculture by the Soil Conservation Service, by agricultural engineers, agronomists, the breeders or discoverers of new or improved agricultural products and forage plants, by new methods of processing and new uses for cotton, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other typical Southern crops. See what the livestock industry has contributed to the rising economy of the South. Cattle mean grass and legumes, and grass and legumes mean the end to soil erosion, the end to that constant destruction of organic material by open-row crops which has, more than any other factor, contributed in the past to the destruction of once rich and productive Southern soils. More and more the South is supplying its own milk, beef, and pork and even shipping them to other areas. This is a revolution, for with the exception of the razorback hog and the skinny tough steer the South at one period imported all its meat from the outside. Many Southern cities still import large quantities of milk in tank cars from as far away as Wisconsin, and some cities like Atlanta import their vegetables in winter from Florida and in summer from the North — a process which still represents a drain of dollars, many millions of dollars, out of the area.

The truth is that the South can produce milk and beef on its own ground far more cheaply than these things can be produced in the Middle West, which is largely the center of the dairy and beef-feeding industry. In virtually all of the Deep South the mild climate makes unnecessary a heavy capital investment in great barns. Neither must one spend most of the summer months putting up feed and forage for the six to seven months of indoor winter feeding. In the South a rough shed is the maximum requirement for winter protection, and in some areas even that is unnecessary.

The discovery and development of winter-growing grasses and legumes has made it possible to keep cattle and hogs on pasture throughout the year or in the extreme northern areas of the South for at least ten or eleven months of the year. The Austrian pea, the Caley or Singletary pea, the blue lupine, Ladino clover, the lespedezas, and Kentucky fescue No. 31, a winter-growing grass, have made this year-round-pasture feeding plan not only feasible but exceedingly profitable. The addition of certain trace elements to the soil has made possible the growing of that green-gold crop alfalfa in areas where hitherto it was impossible. Add to these both the Korean and the perennial Sericea lespedeza and crimson clover, and the total cost of milk or of cattle and hog production in the Deep South declines to 50 per cent or less of the cost of production in the rich Midwestern areas. Moreover the benefits and the profits are not simply seasonal. They are both permanent and cumulative, for the grass-livestock program puts an end to soil erosion, saves the run-off water so badly needed on the spot during the summer months, and increases organic material and crop production at an astonishing rate.

Why did the South not discover this gold mine long ago? There are valid reasons— poverty, lack of capital, inertia, psychological depression. But most important of all is the fact that until a short time ago these miraculously profitable salvaging crops — Ladino clover, the lespedezas, the Caley and Austrian peas, Kentucky fescue and all the rest —were unknown. Most of these have been known or have come into more or less common use in America only within the past ten years. Some of them were brought in from remote parts of the earth; some were growing all the time beneath the very noses of the Southern plantation owners.

Kudzu, a coarse, rapidly growing legume of incredible efficiency in checking gullies, restoring drainage, and storing nitrogen, came from Japan, Ladino clover from North Italy. The lespedezas came from Manchuria and Korea. The Caley or Singletary pea is a native of the Deep South. Since before the first settlers came into the Deep South it had been growing there right through the winter and it had been growing there for a century and a half along the roadsides and in fence corners until its great virtues were discovered more or less simultaneously by A. F. Caley, an Ohio farmer settled in Alabama, and by Professor B. Henry Singletary of Louisiana State College. Kentucky fescue No. 31 was noticed by a county agent growing green and lush throughout the winter as far north as Kentucky.

4

IT is probable that we have learned more about the care of soils in the last generation than in all the history of the world before, and it is certainly true that we still know less than a quarter of what there is to be learned. This factor offers tremendous vistas of prosperity for the depleted agriculture of the South and for the general good of a world in which half of the population lives perpetually at a starvation level. In the past most eroded, abandoned, “worn-out” land was considered only fit to return to forests or wilderness. The South, more than any other region, has shown that this is neither necessary nor true. The South, more than any other region of the nation, has suffered from erosion, depletion of the organic material, and a general decline in yields per acre. While cotton has been perhaps the largest single factor, other elements beyond the direct control of man have done their part in the destruction — such elements as heavy seasonal rains, and high temperatures, and mild winters which contribute to the burning up of organic materials. However, until very recently, Southern agriculture took few steps to combat these disadvantages.

There are more miles of terracing in Georgia and Alabama today than in any other states of the Union, but the terracing (to prevent erosion) came about largely through desperation. It was a question of checking the erosion or abandoning the fields altogether to scrub pine and wilderness. We know now that terracing is by no means the final answer to the destruction of agricultural land, but only the first step which, unless followed by a better agriculture and land use, is meaningless and in some cases can be merely destructive. The real answer to soil erosion and better yields lies in rotated crops, livestock, and the restoration of organic materials through green or barnyard manures and the use of grass and legumes.

Millions of acres of so called “worn-out” soils both in the South and in the rest of the country are really not worn out at all; they have merely been farmed so badly and so ignorantly that the native mineral fertility, often very great, has become unavailable to the plants, animals, and people through lack of lime, of organic materials, of moisture, of bacteria, and of many other elements necessary to a living, productive soil and a sound and profitable agriculture. This is particularly true of the South.

We know now that most of the soils of the South are fundamentally good soils and can be restored to a high degree of fertility at an expense which is by no means prohibitive. This holds true of most of the red soils and certainly of the eroded, marl-based soils of the Black Belt of Alabama and Eastern Mississippi. It is certainly true of the almost inexhaustibly rich alluvial soils of the great Delta region. The problem is one of building up those soils and of making available to plants through moisture, organic material, and other means the native fertility of the soils and subsoils and even of the commercial fertilizer used on those lands.

Today thousands of Southern farms established on “worn-out” cotton lands are showing through diversification, livestock, and legumes that this can be done; and as they prove the point the income, economic status, and purchasing power of the farmer and the other residents of the region rise magically. They are proving a point of utmost economic value not only to the South but to the nation — that millions of acres of low production or even of abandoned land can be transformed from a tragic economic and social liability into a great national asset.

It is a simple rule applying alike to industry and to agriculture that the more one produces per unit, per man-hour, per dollar invested in taxes and interest, the lower the cost of production and the wider the margin of potential profit. The South, agriculturally speaking, has been a perfect example of this rule in the past. From the middle of the nineteenth century until very recently the production per acre of cotton steadily declined. Many farms which on virgin soils once produced as much as 2000 to 2500 pounds of cotton per acre sank to a point where they were producing as little as 200 to 300 pounds per acre. The result was of course disastrous since the cost of plowing, fitting, planting, cultivating, and harvesting the cotton remained the same or even increased while the production per acre steadily declined. While land values declined almost to a vanishing point, the same disastrous ratio of decline applied to taxes and interest. But in the very areas where the disaster overtook the agricultural economy, the graph of production per acre has now begun to mount sharply. There are farms which are producing by an improved agriculture as much cotton on ten acres under cultivation as they produced on fifty or sixty acres only a few years ago. The remaining forty or fifty acres have been put to profitable use in raising livestock, sweet potatoes, or other crops.

The gross figures tell their own story. Today the South is producing more cotton than it produced twenty-five years ago on approximately one half the acreage, and this efficient production is still mounting. As against a total agricultural income in fourteen Southern states of $2,437,487,000 in 1940, the total agricultural income of 1947 was $7,818,968,000. Higher prices accounted for perhaps as much as 40 per cent of this increase. The remaining income is legitimate and was brought about by a greater production per acre at cheaper costs and by the rapid diversification and improvement of an agriculture which now includes livestock, dairy products, poultry, peanuts, sweet potatoes — in short many products other than cotton!

5

THE dethroning of King Cotton or at least his reduction to the status of a constitutional monarch is perhaps the most fortunate single economic happening in the history of the South. No tyrant ever did more damage to a people.

Of the income dollars of Southern agriculture in 1925, 53 cents came from cotton. In 1946 only 20 cents came from cotton. Implicit in this comparison is the fact that the number of income dollars was more than three times greater in 1946 and that most of this increase in dollars is the result of the dethronement of King Cotton and the profitable increase in grass, livestock, poultry, and other noncotton production.

At the same time the purchasing power of agriculture has been going up by leaps and bounds. The number of tractors in use on Southern farms shows an increase of 155 per cent, compared with an average increase of about 100 per cent elsewhere. Today the electrified farms in the South represent 40 per cent of the nation’s total. These are tremendous gains which affect not only the economy of the South but that of the whole nation.

In West Texas, cotton is being produced on soils under rainfall conditions which are adverse in comparison with most of the Deep South. It is being produced at a greater profit than on many a rich Delta cotton farm, and the reason lies in mechanization and technology. In the past, cotton was always grown the hard way — indeed the hardest way possible— by slow hand labor, on soils which became each year more difficult to work and less productive, with an endless amount of hauling and handling. The field was plowed and fitted by mule-power, the excess cotton plants “chopped out” by hand, the rows weeded and hoed by hand, the cotton picked by hand. But the process did not end there. The cotton was then hauled miles to an old-fashioned inefficient gin, then back again to the plantation, and finally perhaps miles in another direction to the compress which baled it. It was small wonder that all this, coupled with an ever lowering production per acre, made it impossible to grow cotton profitably. The net result was that all of us were saddled with millions of dollars a year in taxes to support the inefficient cotton agriculture and industry.

Today it is possible to chop cotton by machinery; weed it by flame throwers; pick it by pickers or strippers; and finally to gin, clean, and bale it all in one spot within a few minutes. These mechanical developments plus a good agriculture and a high production per acre at low cost should make any support price or subsidy of cotton wholly unnecessary, and indeed make it possible for the American cotton growers not only to compete with but undersell the cheap labor of Egypt, India, or China.

It might be suggested that such technological and mechanical developments would cause great unemployment, but that is where spreading industry can take up the slack and is doing so. Actually in West Texas and in some other Southern and Southwestern areas, a high degree of mechanization has been brought about largely by the ever increasing cost of hand labor as the hand labor quit the fields for the factories in quest of the higher wages of industry. What is more, mechanization has tended to provide year-round employment instead of merely seasonal employment, and at higher wages than it the past, thus raising living standards, and put chasing power and creating a new economic dignity for the individual worker.

Until comparatively recent times a great curse of Southern agriculture has been the absentee landlord or the great plantation owner operating on the shiftless and planless one-crop system with labor provided on the tenant or sharecropper basis. This created a hopelessly inefficient agriculture of steadily declining production and income as well as one of the worst social and economic systems civilization has evolved. Both the inefficiency and the social system have been preserved by the cotton support prices which amount in reality to subsidization both of a poor agriculture and a wretched social system. In far too many instances the support price or subsidy has permitted landlords and occasionally small independent farmers to continue in their old ways since, so long as the government and the taxpayers of the rest of the nation guaranteed them a profit however small, there was no reason to improve their agriculture.

The so-called Cotton Bloc of Southern Democratic Congressmen, operating under the logrolling system of “I’ll vote for your bill if you’ll vote for mine,” has been able to maintain this paralyzing subsidy long past the period when it served its purpose as an economic cushion to tide the South over a period of wretched and bankrupt agriculture. Actually the subsidy has served to retard rather than advance the economic progress of the cotton areas of the South.

During the past year, the support price measure came within a narrow margin of being voted out. Only a last-minute summoning of Southern Senators and a delayed vote saved the subsidy and perpetuated this needless and indeed corrupting burden on the taxpayers of the whole of the nation. Until subsidies in this form of price supports are abolished, cotton agriculture will never stand wholly or honestly on its own, or show the enterprise and improvement which can greatly benefit the South by eliminating the careless absentee landowner and the stupid, inefficient farmer. It serves to tie up much potentially good agricultural land which might otherwise become an economic asset, and to preserve the medieval Southern system of sharecropping and tenantry.

6

BUT the South is outgrowing these medieval habits. Today the New Frontier in agricultural land offers as great opportunities as the First Frontier of virgin soil ever offered, at less economic cost and infinitely fewer hardships than the earlier frontiersmen knew.

I know of no better example than the southernmost area of the Tennessee Valley Authority near and surrounding Athens, Alabama. Driving from Birmingham to Athens one passes for miles through acres of worn-out land, badly farmed land, with only here and there a passably good farm and decent buildings. As one begins to approach Athens there are signs of an economic improvement and prosperity which rises to a crescendo as one crosses the line into the TVA area immediately surrounding Athens. Here and there are fields of legumes, livestock, good pastures, and big yields. The farmers own shiny new automobiles and the houses look prosperous and well painted. Athens itself has long since lost the look of a run-down shabby Southern town. The difference within a few miles is very nearly unbelievable. It is simply the difference between good land use and bad, the difference between an agriculture of erosion and depletion and that of legumes, livestock, lime, phosphorus, and soil conservation established under the guidance and coöperation of the TVA.

But the gains of the new South are not entirely economic and social. They are cultural as well. In the rising vitality of the literature in the South, one has again the evidence of the close relationship between the economic status of a region or a nation and its own contributions to civilization. The new literature out of the South is based neither upon the overheated romantic tradition employed as a justification for failure nor upon an inferiority complex justifying itself in excuses or in futile talk about the “damn Yankee.” If it pictures poverty, ignorance, and degeneration, it does not drape these things in pathos and romance but treats them satirically or in a fiercely condemnatory fashion. This fact is in itself of immense significance.

One of the tragedies of the whole great region is that the agricultural decline affected the people of considerable areas not only socially and economically but physically as well. As Dr. Hugh Bennett of the Soil Conservation Service has so often said, “poor land makes poor people,” a fact which the medical profession is beginning to realize and understand to an increasing degree. The “poor white,” the “redneck,” the “peckerwood,” are not alone the victims of the War Between the States, of a declining economy and of an evil sharecropping tenant system. They are also the victims of the poor, monotonous, and unbalanced diets induced by poverty and still more profoundly by the deficiencies of food grown upon originally poor soils or soils depleted bv a poor agriculture which fails to make available to plants, animals, and people the residual mineral elements absolutely vital in a sound nutrition. An improved agriculture means not only higher economic status and less ignorance, prejudice, and intolerance, but better physical specimens endowed with energy and active brains.

Despite the great handicaps and t he tragedies of the South, something has begun to stir mightily within the past decade or two. There is a whole new world opening up which manifests itself in a changed point of view, in a new liberalism born of Sout hern soil itself and represented by such men as former Governor Ellis Arnall of Georgia, Senator Lister Hill of Alabama, Representive Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and many others in state and national government.

There are millions of acres of potentially high production agricultural land waiting to be put back into circulation, whole vast and orderly forests to be developed, and great opportunities to be found in the burgeoning industries. In the judgment of at least one observer the South is the greatest area of opportunity open to young Americans, perhaps the last great area that will ever be open to pioneering in this country. A beginning has been made, a solid beginning on sound foundations, but the opportunities are still enormous. To go South and grow up with the New Frontier can be and will be an exciting experience and a profitable one as well.