Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/647

 SOUTHERN COTTON-MILL COMMUNITIES 627

The antecedents of this class of labor deserve some attention. A great majority of the operatives come from the agricultural class known as tenant farmers ; that is, men who farm the land of others, paying as rent a considerable portion of each year's crop. The tenant system was adopted in the South during the period of disorder and chaotic ruin following the Civil War, when our old system of labor was dissolved and no better base remained on which to build anew the fabric of agricultural life. Unfit as it is for a country of such institutions as ours, and the source in itself of very sore evils, the tenant system still had a necessary part in the closing third of a century.

Many of the tenant farmers of the last generation had, indeed, "seen better days." Not a few had been freeholders before the war, although usually of the little farms interspersed here and there among the great plantations of the aristocrats. Many others had been overseers, factors, agents of various sorts. A small proportion came from the class of decayed gentlemen. The rest were made up from those strata usually lumped together in motley fashion as "crackers," or, in South Carolina, "poor buckra."

Such are the antecedents of the mass of operatives in the new mills of the South. Bearing in mind this derivation, it is not difficult to account for many qualities, traits, and habitudes that might otherwise appear anomalous. For example, their extrava- gance is a characteristic almost without parallel among the toiling classes. But it is simple of explanation. The transition from a dollarless past to a many-dollared present would render any class of untutored human beings extravagant. Through a long generation of tenant-farming, these people scarcely saw a piece of money from Christmas to Christmas. Each year's sup- plies were either furnished by the owner of the land or bought on credit at a near-by store, to be paid for when cotton was picked. The harvest came, sometimes good, sometimes bad; but, good or bad, it seemed uniformly to take it all to pay the merchant and the landlord. The tenant rarely enjoyed even the sorry pleasure of selling his cotton and paying the hard cash to these creditors ; instead, he usually hauled the raw product of