| Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmer's Union and the New Deal |  | Author: Donald H. Grubbs
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $20.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 880435
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 218
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.7
ISBN: 1557285225
Dewey Decimal Number: 333.335563097609043
EAN: 9781557285225
ASIN: 1557285225
Publication Date: May 1999
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 The most economically marginal Americans fight for their rights during the New Deal April 25, 2008
This book provides great insight into the response of the New Deal to the oppression and severe poverty of southern sharecroppers.. The author utilizes an impressive array of internal government and union reports, private letters, his own personal interviews with the main actors of the book and other primary sources.
When the Roosevelt administration came to power in 1933, it aimed to stabilize the rapidly deflating American economy. In agriculture this meant giving money to farm owners to the extent that they reduced growing crops on their land. The idea was to reduce production in order to raise prices on agricultural goods. Grubbs shows in intricate and somewhat incomprehensible detail the formula instituted whereby the farm growers received almost all of the government payments. Meanwhile the tenant farmers that occupied the retired land were often deprived of even their tiny subsidy through various chicaneries on the part of farm owners. Dobbs quotes an interesting study, partly conducted by economists from the Agricultural Adjustment administration (AAA), the government agency created to oversee New Deal agriculture reforms. The study cited one typical cotton plantation in the south and noted that the annual gross income of the owner increased from $51, 554 in 1932 to $102,202 in 1935. The plantation tenants meanwhile had their average gross income decline over the same time period from $379 to $355. The authors of the study incredibly concluded from this that both tenants and farm owners had "greatly benefited" from AAA policies. Obviously the New Dealers viewed success in terms of landowner profitability and weren't much concerned about seriously raising the incomes of tenants. Tenant farmers were kicked off the land as growers withdrew land from production.
The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) is a big part of this book. It began to take shape in late 1934 and 1935. It was founded in northeastern Arkansas by H.L. Mitchell, a socialist operator of a dry cleaner and a socialist gas station operator, Clay East. The cause of the STFU (protecting sharecroppers) soon attracted attention from liberals and leftists.. The STFU managed in many instances (but not in others) to somewhat reduce the racial prejudices of white southern sharecroppers to the point where the union's locals could be racially integrated. Meanwhile the Roosevelt administration, in spite of some dissent within it, insisted that any problems between tenants and landowners be handled by state and local authorities and local AAA committees. Of course local and state governments in Arkansas and the rest of the south were in the pockets of the farm growers; also the farm growers had had themselves placed in dominant positions on local AAA committees.
At the beginning of 1936, in response to one landowner's plans to negotiate with the STFU, owners in Eastern Arkansas began a campaign of evictions of tenant farmers who were STFU members. Local police and farm owners cooperated in dishing out beatings and arbitrary arrests of union members. Police informed black members that they would be lynched if they didn't stop union activity.. Several black union members were sentenced to charges they confessed to after torture. Other black union members were rounded up and placed in semi-slavery in private work farms, sometimes on the charge of vagrancy but at other times with no charge at all. In one instance several deputy sheriffs invaded an STFU meeting at a church and as the attendees ran away in terror, a man at the podium grabbed a rifle without pointing at the deputies but was then pushed down and beaten. The officers claimed that the man intended to kill them. A black witness who intended to testify in favor of the man ended up murdered by two masked men whose characteristics bore resemblance to two of the deputies who disrupted the meeting. When a white middle class STFU attorney had his home riddled with bullets, he wrote angrily to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. In his response Wallace wanted to blame radical union agitators for provoking the violence but his deputy Rexford Tugwell convinced him not to.
Grubbs shows that the Roosevelt administration was moved into sharper action in mid-1936. The white left wing Protestant minister Claude Williams, doing STFU work, and the daughter of a wealthy Memphis family were forcibly taken by six men from an Arkansas cafe and driven to an isolated area. Williams was compelled to take off his shirt and be flogged with harness straps while the wealthy heiress was forced to lie on the ground and was swatted on her backside a few times. The swats left a welt in the upper part of her leg. Now that a white man and a white lady from a respectable family had gotten a dose of that regularly meted out to blacks in the South, white southern opinion started to think that the situation in Arkansas had gotten out of hand.
Grubbs describes the Roosevelt administration's efforts to push through measures to assist tenant farmers. The Justice Department charged a deputy sheriff operator of a prison farm with holding its convicts in slavery(the deputy was let off with a $3500 fine paid by his farm owner friends). He shows how Southern Democrats blocked any measures apart from a tiny loan program for tenant farmers to purchase homes. Tenant farmers eligible for this program were very small because the program required the loan recipients to make an initial down payment of their own. Very few could afford to make such payments....
Grubbs discusses the later years (late 30's) of the STFU and how the group was pushed into extinction as the doctrinaire communist Don Henderson and the CIO pulled it apart.
This book at times lacks clarity in its prose. This particularly seems to be the case in the last thirty or so page of the book which the author seems to rush through. I would have liked to know more about the structure of the cooperatives set up by Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration.
Balanced portrait of the STFU & its relationship to the New Deal November 19, 2007
Cry from the Cotton is a balanced history that intertwines the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) and the New Deal. This history is neither overly laudatory nor overly critical of the New Deal; instead, Donald Grubbs demonstrates that the STFU was a creation partially in response to the policies of the New Deal and partially in an effort to go further than the New Deal had gone.
Grubbs evaluates the AAA (The Agricultural Adjustment Administration) through the plight of the sharecroppers in Arkansas and the plantation owners; he looks at how the owners of the farmlands took advantage of the sharecroppers by absconding with their portion of the subsidy payments from the AAA and how little the AAA did to improve the lot of the sharecroppers. Grubbs says this is why the socialists were able to form the STFU, since it was more liberal than the conservative policies of FDR's New Deal.
This is a well researched book that explores an area of labor history that is often overlooked by historians of the Great Depression era. I believe that this book should be read by anyone that is studying agricultural history, the dust bowl, or anyone interested in 1930's America.
 Good look at agricultural labor during the Depression January 8, 2002
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Grubbs traces the plight of Southern tenant cotton farmers, both black and white, and the effort to provide tenant farmers with job security and financial stability through unionization. The book begins with the economic and agricultural fallout of the Civil War and on to the movement's initial organization, the New Deal, and efforts to join the AFL-CIO. In 1934 two young Socialists organized the Southern Tenants Farmers Union (STFU) near the town of Tyronza, Arkansas, in order to gain fair wages for tenant farmers who were kept in perpetual destitution. This is a good book about agricultural labor, even if it can be a convoluted read due to its inherent political complexity. "Cry from the Cotton..." is well-researched and copiously noted. Grubbs has used a variety of sources, from government documents, local and union newspapers and magazine articles, to oral interviews, telegrams, and the STFU papers (housed at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill).
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