A Hungry South: Poverty, Malnourishment, and Racial Inequity, c. 1930s
The U.S. South in the 1930s was a place defined by a tragic irony: it was a region of great agricultural wealth and productivity that had struggled for decades to feed its own people. This fundamental irony was bound to the seismic shifts in southern farming that altered food availability and access across the South.
Since the end of the Civil War, former plantations throughout the South had been divided into rental shares where poor black and white farmers worked land that belonged to someone else – usually a white man. In the twisted sharecropping and tenant-farm systems that emerged, poor farmers went into debt to pay for overpriced supplies like seeds and groceries and shoes, and very often they never made enough money from the sale of their meager crop shares to climb out of debt. Falling deeper into debt with every year, black and white workers were, in practice, reenslaved to large landowners. For poor sharecroppers and tenant farmers stripped of control of the land they worked, food was at a premium.
Cotton became the crop of choice in the growing cash economy of the New South, with tobacco a close second.[1] Cotton was popular for a reason. It was easy to grow, it did not spoil, it required no special equipment or methods, and it could be quickly turned into credit for the farmer and cash for the merchant. Yet for all its virtues, cotton was not edible.[2] Black and white farm families raised cotton and tobacco instead of growing food that could have fed their families.[3] A garden also required cash to buy seeds, time to tend it, and a patch of soil—and most poor farmers had none of these. Many landlords of the New South forbade their tenants from using rented land for anything other than cotton—even a small garden patch. Instead, tenant farmers bought the cheapest and most filling food they could from their landlords or from a store in town —usually some combination of cornmeal, salt pork, field peas or beans, and molasses.[4] Groceries bought on credit were expensive, but children had to eat. This system of sharecropping, tenancy, and debt was the most significant factor in the degeneration of the early twentieth-century southern diet.
Severe malnutrition throughout the early twentieth-century South made dietary diseases common. Pellagra, caused by lack of niacin and vitamin B3, resulted in painful skin lesions and dementia. Rickets, caused by lack of vitamin D and calcium, resulted in bone deformities and fractures, particularly in children. In the early 1920s, public health crusader and physician Dr. Joseph Goldberger determined that the substandard southern diet of the three “m’s”—meat [cheap pork], meal [substandard cornmeal], and molasses—rather than germ contamination, was the cause of pellagra.[5] A diet enriched with fresh lean meat, field peas, fresh garden vegetables, canned tomatoes, eggs, and buttermilk helped to cure and prevent the disease.[6] The problem was that few poor southerners by the 1920s and 1930s had access to such a diverse and healthful diet. That was true even in places like the southern mountains, where in the past hunting, fishing, raising a few pigs, tending a patch of corn and vegetables, plus trade and barter with one’s neighbors, had once provided a comfortable subsistence for working families.[7] Agrarian self-sufficiency had faded throughout the South not only because of sharecropping but also as new railroads and extractive industries like timber and coal changed the rural landscape.[8]
In the 1930s, the New Deal made many of these changes in southern agriculture permanent. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was a string of economic programs designed to provide “Relief, Recovery, and Reform” from the Depression. In the South, New Deal policies helped cement the transition from plantations and small family-owned farms to large-scale, industrial agriculture.[9]Industrial agriculture further boosted cash crops like cotton and tobacco, which then further reduced food production and food access for the majority of the South’s working poor. Increasingly, poor people turned to government assistance in desperate times. Mildred Cotton Council grew up in rural Chatham County, North Carolina, and remembered when her father reluctantly received “Roosevelt’s WPA food,” including cheese, whole wheat flour, yellow cornmeal (they were used to white), and canned meat.[10] Resolute about his family’s ability to provide for themselves, Mr. Cotton thanked the government agents and asked them to not bring any more.
The New Deal programs included the federally funded documentary work of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers and Federal Writers’ Project writers, whose images and essays (“Life Histories,” Works Project Administration (WPA) State Guides, and “America Eats”) often featured hardworking southern families’ food production and meals, and more often than not, the lack and absence of food. In a 1942 memo, one government administrator reminded his photographers: “People—we must have at once: Pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. Get people with a little spirit. Too many in our file now paint the U.S. as an old person’s home and that just about everyone is too old to work and too malnourished to care much what happens.”[11] In this same era, the social realism of works such as James Agee and Walker Evans’ iconic 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, vividly captured the hunger of working poor white southerners in Hale County, Alabama: “Everything, in fact, fried, boiled, or baked, is heavily seasoned with lard, and flows lard from every pore. So, after even a meal or two, do you.”[12]
The keystone of the New Deal’s agricultural relief programs was overseen by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which paid landowners—again, largely well-to-do white farmers—to take land out of cotton and tobacco production and thereby reduce the surplus and raise the value of these crops.[13] In principle, landowners were expected to share half their payments from the government with their tenant farmers and sharecroppers, who desperately needed the money to feed their hungry families. But in most cases, they did not. Instead, landowners used the government funds to purchase tractors, combines, and mechanized cotton pickers. These tools, in turn, allowed landowners to evict tenant farmers and sharecroppers. At the same time, small farmers who could not compete against mechanization went bankrupt and sold their land to larger landowners. President Franklin Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration to address rural poverty through loans to struggling farmers, commodity adjustments, and resettlement programs that moved farmers from marginal land to more productive regions.[14] Access to food was a critical aspect of these relief efforts.
Under a banner of progress and efficiency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and other government farm programs that supported expansion and mechanization represented the growing role of the federal government in American agriculture.[15] The Department of Agriculture encouraged large farmers to plant new food crops like commercial grade soybeans and rice in the Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana Deltas and corn and peanuts in Georgia and Alabama. But these were food crops intended for distant markets, not for local people. Thanks to the “miracle of science,” thousands of acres of new food crops offered no edible return for the remaining field workers.
As it became harder than ever for poor people to scratch out a living on a farm, thousands of white and black working-class southerners moved to towns and cities. But town and city life was hardly better for most people, and sometimes it was worse. Poor people in southern cities continued to face grinding poverty, hunger, and racism. For those working in textile mills and factories, wages made the promise of three meals a day more probable. But textile mills and other southern industries like timber and coal were declining by the 1920s and 1930s. Even as some people fled struggling farms for life in town, many other workers returned home to the mountains, where they still owned property. Dispirited by the loss of employment, they were grateful for gardens and small farms to feed their families.[16]Thousands more left the South completely, drawn by economic opportunities outside the region—blacks pulled by the Great Migration and the chance to escape Jim Crow racism and poor whites looking for steady employment.
Agricultural legislation of this era was historic: it supported important twentieth-century reforms in southern farming andfoodways. Yet because of racism, this new legislation also ensured growing land loss for black farmers. Despite the “good intentions” of this body of legislation and its many initiatives, white men controlled the Department of Agriculture.[17] Their legacy would long privilege well-to-do white male farmers over the working-poor minorities, women, and small farmers of the rural South.[18]
Not until the late 1990s and early 2000s did this racial injustice finally come before the United States Supreme Court. The successful settlement of the Black Farmers Class Action Lawsuit (Pigford v. Glickman) paid $1.25 billion to black farmers who had been denied federal aid or were underpaid by the government.[19]
From the post-Civil War South through the New South of the 1930s, laws created separate land-grant colleges for southern blacks and whites, home economics programs at southern universities, industrial schools, and settlement schools, as well as the food-related initiatives of agricultural experiment stations, county extension agencies, and “home demonstration” professionals. An army of change-minded interventionists brought public health programs, improved food and diet, scientific agriculture, and education to the South. Food was at the core of many of these new programs. These progressive institutions symbolized a cautiously changing South, but one still unwilling to release the chokehold of race and class that characterized the region from the plantation era to the dawn of the New South and beyond.
The culture of racism and poverty that shaped daily meals in the 1930s was profound. It was so pervasive and deep-rooted, in fact, that it continues in the contemporary South, where inadequate wages and lack of food access continue to limit the working poor to the most substandard food options.[20] The diseases are different today—diabetes and heart disease instead of the New South’s pellagra and rickets —but the causes behind these conditions are the same: the poverty and racial disfranchisement of low income southerners.[21]
Since the end of the Civil War, former plantations throughout the South had been divided into rental shares where poor black and white farmers worked land that belonged to someone else – usually a white man. In the twisted sharecropping and tenant-farm systems that emerged, poor farmers went into debt to pay for overpriced supplies like seeds and groceries and shoes, and very often they never made enough money from the sale of their meager crop shares to climb out of debt. Falling deeper into debt with every year, black and white workers were, in practice, reenslaved to large landowners. For poor sharecroppers and tenant farmers stripped of control of the land they worked, food was at a premium.
Cotton became the crop of choice in the growing cash economy of the New South, with tobacco a close second.[1] Cotton was popular for a reason. It was easy to grow, it did not spoil, it required no special equipment or methods, and it could be quickly turned into credit for the farmer and cash for the merchant. Yet for all its virtues, cotton was not edible.[2] Black and white farm families raised cotton and tobacco instead of growing food that could have fed their families.[3] A garden also required cash to buy seeds, time to tend it, and a patch of soil—and most poor farmers had none of these. Many landlords of the New South forbade their tenants from using rented land for anything other than cotton—even a small garden patch. Instead, tenant farmers bought the cheapest and most filling food they could from their landlords or from a store in town —usually some combination of cornmeal, salt pork, field peas or beans, and molasses.[4] Groceries bought on credit were expensive, but children had to eat. This system of sharecropping, tenancy, and debt was the most significant factor in the degeneration of the early twentieth-century southern diet.
Severe malnutrition throughout the early twentieth-century South made dietary diseases common. Pellagra, caused by lack of niacin and vitamin B3, resulted in painful skin lesions and dementia. Rickets, caused by lack of vitamin D and calcium, resulted in bone deformities and fractures, particularly in children. In the early 1920s, public health crusader and physician Dr. Joseph Goldberger determined that the substandard southern diet of the three “m’s”—meat [cheap pork], meal [substandard cornmeal], and molasses—rather than germ contamination, was the cause of pellagra.[5] A diet enriched with fresh lean meat, field peas, fresh garden vegetables, canned tomatoes, eggs, and buttermilk helped to cure and prevent the disease.[6] The problem was that few poor southerners by the 1920s and 1930s had access to such a diverse and healthful diet. That was true even in places like the southern mountains, where in the past hunting, fishing, raising a few pigs, tending a patch of corn and vegetables, plus trade and barter with one’s neighbors, had once provided a comfortable subsistence for working families.[7] Agrarian self-sufficiency had faded throughout the South not only because of sharecropping but also as new railroads and extractive industries like timber and coal changed the rural landscape.[8]
In the 1930s, the New Deal made many of these changes in southern agriculture permanent. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was a string of economic programs designed to provide “Relief, Recovery, and Reform” from the Depression. In the South, New Deal policies helped cement the transition from plantations and small family-owned farms to large-scale, industrial agriculture.[9]Industrial agriculture further boosted cash crops like cotton and tobacco, which then further reduced food production and food access for the majority of the South’s working poor. Increasingly, poor people turned to government assistance in desperate times. Mildred Cotton Council grew up in rural Chatham County, North Carolina, and remembered when her father reluctantly received “Roosevelt’s WPA food,” including cheese, whole wheat flour, yellow cornmeal (they were used to white), and canned meat.[10] Resolute about his family’s ability to provide for themselves, Mr. Cotton thanked the government agents and asked them to not bring any more.
The New Deal programs included the federally funded documentary work of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers and Federal Writers’ Project writers, whose images and essays (“Life Histories,” Works Project Administration (WPA) State Guides, and “America Eats”) often featured hardworking southern families’ food production and meals, and more often than not, the lack and absence of food. In a 1942 memo, one government administrator reminded his photographers: “People—we must have at once: Pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. Get people with a little spirit. Too many in our file now paint the U.S. as an old person’s home and that just about everyone is too old to work and too malnourished to care much what happens.”[11] In this same era, the social realism of works such as James Agee and Walker Evans’ iconic 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, vividly captured the hunger of working poor white southerners in Hale County, Alabama: “Everything, in fact, fried, boiled, or baked, is heavily seasoned with lard, and flows lard from every pore. So, after even a meal or two, do you.”[12]
The keystone of the New Deal’s agricultural relief programs was overseen by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which paid landowners—again, largely well-to-do white farmers—to take land out of cotton and tobacco production and thereby reduce the surplus and raise the value of these crops.[13] In principle, landowners were expected to share half their payments from the government with their tenant farmers and sharecroppers, who desperately needed the money to feed their hungry families. But in most cases, they did not. Instead, landowners used the government funds to purchase tractors, combines, and mechanized cotton pickers. These tools, in turn, allowed landowners to evict tenant farmers and sharecroppers. At the same time, small farmers who could not compete against mechanization went bankrupt and sold their land to larger landowners. President Franklin Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration to address rural poverty through loans to struggling farmers, commodity adjustments, and resettlement programs that moved farmers from marginal land to more productive regions.[14] Access to food was a critical aspect of these relief efforts.
Under a banner of progress and efficiency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and other government farm programs that supported expansion and mechanization represented the growing role of the federal government in American agriculture.[15] The Department of Agriculture encouraged large farmers to plant new food crops like commercial grade soybeans and rice in the Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana Deltas and corn and peanuts in Georgia and Alabama. But these were food crops intended for distant markets, not for local people. Thanks to the “miracle of science,” thousands of acres of new food crops offered no edible return for the remaining field workers.
As it became harder than ever for poor people to scratch out a living on a farm, thousands of white and black working-class southerners moved to towns and cities. But town and city life was hardly better for most people, and sometimes it was worse. Poor people in southern cities continued to face grinding poverty, hunger, and racism. For those working in textile mills and factories, wages made the promise of three meals a day more probable. But textile mills and other southern industries like timber and coal were declining by the 1920s and 1930s. Even as some people fled struggling farms for life in town, many other workers returned home to the mountains, where they still owned property. Dispirited by the loss of employment, they were grateful for gardens and small farms to feed their families.[16]Thousands more left the South completely, drawn by economic opportunities outside the region—blacks pulled by the Great Migration and the chance to escape Jim Crow racism and poor whites looking for steady employment.
Agricultural legislation of this era was historic: it supported important twentieth-century reforms in southern farming andfoodways. Yet because of racism, this new legislation also ensured growing land loss for black farmers. Despite the “good intentions” of this body of legislation and its many initiatives, white men controlled the Department of Agriculture.[17] Their legacy would long privilege well-to-do white male farmers over the working-poor minorities, women, and small farmers of the rural South.[18]
Not until the late 1990s and early 2000s did this racial injustice finally come before the United States Supreme Court. The successful settlement of the Black Farmers Class Action Lawsuit (Pigford v. Glickman) paid $1.25 billion to black farmers who had been denied federal aid or were underpaid by the government.[19]
From the post-Civil War South through the New South of the 1930s, laws created separate land-grant colleges for southern blacks and whites, home economics programs at southern universities, industrial schools, and settlement schools, as well as the food-related initiatives of agricultural experiment stations, county extension agencies, and “home demonstration” professionals. An army of change-minded interventionists brought public health programs, improved food and diet, scientific agriculture, and education to the South. Food was at the core of many of these new programs. These progressive institutions symbolized a cautiously changing South, but one still unwilling to release the chokehold of race and class that characterized the region from the plantation era to the dawn of the New South and beyond.
The culture of racism and poverty that shaped daily meals in the 1930s was profound. It was so pervasive and deep-rooted, in fact, that it continues in the contemporary South, where inadequate wages and lack of food access continue to limit the working poor to the most substandard food options.[20] The diseases are different today—diabetes and heart disease instead of the New South’s pellagra and rickets —but the causes behind these conditions are the same: the poverty and racial disfranchisement of low income southerners.[21]
Marcie Cohen Ferris is a professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This essay is drawn from her book, The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
[1] John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) 20.
[2] Edward Ayers, Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1870-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 26-27; Rebecca Sharpless and Melissa Walker, eds. Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006) 8.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 21.
[5] Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker, “Pellagra in the Mississippi Flood Area: Report of an Inquiry Relating to the Prevalence of Pellagra in the Area Affected by the Overflow of the Mississippi and Its Tributaries in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana in the Spring of 1927.” Public Health Reports(1896-1970) 42, no. 44 (1927): 2712.
[6] Ibid., 2722.
[7] Jacquelyn Dowd, Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) 9–10.
[8] Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 22–24, 70–73.
[9] Ibid., 82–85; see also Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) 9. Daniel examines the systematic, institutional and government discrimination (from the New Deal through the civil rights movement) against southern minority, women, and black farmers that prevented them from sharing equally in federal agricultural programs. See Clifford Kuhn’s discussion of “high-modernist” efforts of rural New Dealers to transform the southern family farm, in “It Was a Long Way from Perfect, but It Was Working’: The Canning and Home Production Initiatives in Greene County, Georgia, 1940-1942.” Agricultural History 86, no. 2 (2012): 68–69.
[10] Mildred Council, Mama Dip’s Kitchen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) 19.
[11] “R. E. Stryker to Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, in particular,” FSA, February 19, 1942, in Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America, 1935-1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs (New York: Galahad Books, 1973) 187–88.
[12] James Agee and Walker Evans, Cotton Tenants: Three Families. Edited by John Summers (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2013) 100.
[13] Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) 60.
[14] Kuhn, “It Was a Long Way from Perfect,” 71.
[15] Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) 42.
[16] Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 48-49.
[17] Daniel, Dispossession, xii
[18] Ibid.
[19] For more information on the Black Farmers Class Action Lawsuit, see the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, which has fought for the successful resolution of the lawsuit since the 1990s, http://www.federationsoutherncoop.com/. See also Southall, “Senate Approves Payment of Black Farmers’ Claims.”
[20] Ibid., 18–23. See “The State of the South,” for discussion of the social and economic status of southern sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the 1930s.
[21] Ibid., 21.
The image Day laborers picking cotton, near Clarksdale, Miss. by Marion Post Wolcott is part of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540. Please see http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000146/PP/ for more details on this image.