The New Deal for Share-Croppers

 Feb. 13, 1934

http://newdeal.feri.org/nation/na34185.htm

We believe it is fair to say that over the whole cotton belt about one-third of the present rural unemployment can be directly referred to the reduction program.

Once the basic error of production restriction has been made, it is no longer within the power of administrators, however humane, to prevent a train of vicious sequelae. In times of economic stress we see the feeble hold of legal forms.

For half a century now the 40 per cent annual labor turnover has, at each year's end, filled Southern roads with miserable families seeking a new home. With a federal reduction program in operation, new opportunities have almost vanished. The plight of these people thus becomes in a peculiar sense a national responsibility.

In the cotton country its present program is greatly aiding the 30 per cent of owners and higher types of tenants, but it has been of no aid to most of the 70 per cent of croppers and day laborers, many of whom are worse off than ever before.

Ultimately the plantation system must be liquidated. Dr. J. H. Dillard is quite justified when he writes: "Damn the whole tenant system. There can be no decent civilization until it is abolished." We must do away with the whole antiquated scheme of landlord-tenant arrangements, to which there must always cling many of the worst features of chattel slavery without its benefits.

If tenure is absolutely guaranteed, without power to sell or mortgage, possibly on long-term leases from the government under a Federal Loan Authority, it will free a whole people from their present shackles and make possible the education of a more responsible and effective generation than the South has ever known.