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(More customer reviews)Although Pete Daniel does not mention it, one thing that comes through dramatically in "Breaking the Land" (and any other agricultural history of the area roughly bounded by the Confederacy) is the astonishing fecundity of the South.
This is taken for granted of the Old Northwest, the Midwest, the Northwest or Central California, but somehow the sheer output of southern produce does not get the same attention. It is all the more astonishing considering the defective social, political, legal, commercial and technical condition of the South. Daniel does pay attention to these five aspects, as well as -- for cotton -- the boll weevil.
"Breaking the Land" is an excellent short review of the conditions of southern cash agriculture. Daniel doesn't much like the New Deal, which sets him apart from just about all the Southerners I know. He does emphasize how much we (in my case, my parents and grandparents) embraced it, at which he rather shakes his head in wonder. What he doesn't do is explain how little of the proposed New Deal actually made it through the federal bureaucracy into practice.
Another fine Southern historian, Jonathan Utley, in "Going to War with Japan," explained in detail how a low level functionary given the task of implementing Franklin Roosevelt's carefully calibrated attempt to sway the Japanese by modulated sanctions generated a much tougher policy.
It is not obvious that anything could have moved the Japanese, so it may not have made much difference; but the situation was the same, only different, with the southern New Deal. The New Deal might have worked out much differently if it had ever been put into practice, but the interference of the Supreme Court, racist politicians, big business interests and, again, low level functionaries meant that what the president's Brain Trust (that is, the agricultural economists from Columbia) proposed was not what occurred.
Daniel does an excellent job of explaining the effect of the low level functionaries, and of how different men in the Department of Agriculture helped (in the case of tobacco) put over what the New Deal was meant to be; or (in the case of cotton) stymied it. The real Deal gets exactly one sentence in "Breaking the Land."
While the New Deal as delivered was what counted to southern farmers, a historian should have written more about the slips between political intentions and real practice. Especially as Daniel takes the side of the small farmer, whether tenant or sharecropper, and asks whether the triumph of big agribusiness was inevitable.
The book rather falls apart in the final chapter, in which Daniel laments the loss of the old community and culture of the South and imagines that a different path could have preserved the small farm.
The people who lived in the old community had mixed feelings about it. It's true, as Daniel writes, that the South generated the most vibrant and varied musical culture of the nation, but there is more to life than string band breakdowns. Hank Williams, the voice of the South if it ever had one voice, said he was tired of surveying the same 40 acres again and again over the hindquarters of a mule.
Some black sharecroppers in the Black Belt, on Daniel's evidence, were living in almost Chinese or Indian poverty by the `30s, on two or three cents per capita per day. (Say, 20 or 30 cents now.)
In my mind, there is little to recommend saving an economic situation that produced such outcomes, not to mention the impositions on personal freedom. It is odd that Daniel, who also wrote a history of southern peonage, should present himself this way in "Breaking the Land."
On a practical level, his notion that small, diversified farms near cities could have offered an alternative to extensive cash monocultures is surely mistaken. For one thing, there weren't enough city folk in the South during the transition period to have supported millions of small farmers. For another, we now have the outstanding memoir of a diversified tenant farmer to show how market gardening failed over the same years in Linda Flowers' "Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina." This was not available when Daniel wrote "Breaking the Land" in 1985, and, as he says, very few tenants and croppers left any written record. But anybody who knew southern farming should have been able to figure it out anyway.
As it happens, southern cash cropping (of what other writers have tended to call "colonial produce" because it came from crops that could not be grown in places where well-heeled buyers existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries) presents three very different models of plantation agriculture.
Rice failed in the coastal lowlands, but thrived in the desolate Louisiana prairies, grown not by Southerners but by transplanted Midwestern grain farmers, using more machines and fewer men and mules on larger acreages. Tobacco (Daniel writes only about the flue-cured type) was just the reverse: tiny plots worked by hand, mostly family labor. And, in between, cotton, grown under organizational principles that had not changed since slavery days and, in most important respects, not since Roman times.
There were many quirks of tenancy, but at bottom, the South remained a vast district of irresponsible, often vicious, landlords and a rural proletariat without resources or future. (The decision in Reconstruction not to enact land reform saved the South from a few years of civil war, at the cost of a century and a half of immiseration.) Daniel quotes a North Carolina sharecropper woman who said people said there were good landlords and bad ones, but "I never knowed no good ones."
Daniel at his best describes the collision between aspects of federalism that attempted to manage the array of small farms when the crisis hit in 1922, against the aspects of federalism that had been pushing all along for large scale commercial agriculture.
And at his not so good, he glides over what it was really like to live in a tarpaper shack.
Nothing about the South is easy to categorize. Following the floods of 1927 and the drought of 1930, black sharecroppers fled the Missiissippi Delta. Desperate whites from the hills took their place. These were (though Daniel does not say so) the supposedly independent and comfortable "plain folk of the Old South" eulogized by Frank Owsley.
If the plain folk had ever really existed, they had been ruined by unregulated agricultural competition. By 1930, they were starving and willing to take jobs that black people didn't want. Ironies abound. The Depression shut off even the most menial work that the Delta blacks had fled to take, and they began to drift back in defeat.
The landlords quickly evicted the white sharecroppers and replaced them with dejected blacks, who were easier to control.
It's no wonder both the whites and the blacks responded so warmly to the New Deal, even when it failed to deliver as quickly or as much as promised. Anything was better than what they had.
But, as Linda /Flowers wrote, having lost everything, materially and in great part spiritually, the Southerners felt "throwed away."
It may sound as if I did not admire "Breaking the Land." On the contrary. While I disagree with much of it, both as to choice of facts and analysis, I found it one of the most interesting and independent-minded books on southern agriculture that I have read.
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