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and offered farmers information they needed to grow better cotton and achieve higher yields. Even though higher yields in an era of overproduction only led to lower prices, farm agents had little choice but to give planters what they wanted. Through accommodating farmers’ demands, farm agents became an indispensable part of the agricultural community. By the end of the 1920s, however, efforts to pull agriculture out of the postwar recession had all but failed. Although Congress had passed legislation designed to boost the agriculture twice in the 1920s, Republican presidents had vetoed the bills. In fact, the legislation supported by the farm bloc—the National Farmers Union, the National Grange, and the American Farm Bureau Federation—was conservative. The farm bloc could not unite over issues like a protective tariff, something southerners stridently opposed, or production control measures (Whayne 1996).

Even as the depression in agriculture worsened in the late 1920s, a new environmental challenge arose: two natural disasters struck the South within the space of 3 years. The Mississippi River flood of 1927 brought devastation to farmers, and the drought of 1930–1931 led to crop failure across the entire South. Planters, however, learned they could co-opt an outside agency to serve their purposes. Their ability to manipulate the Red Cross during the flood and the drought, prepared them to accept a considerable expansion of the federal government’s role in their operations during the New Deal. The Red Cross served as a nonprofit relief agency independent of the government, but in the 1920s it typically included a high-ranking official of the federal government. Herbert Hoover, who was Commerce Secretary under President Calvin Coolidge, was that man, and he essentially directed relief efforts. Subsequently, as president in 1930–1931, Hoover used the power of the federal government to mount an unprecedented drought relief and recovery effort. During both disasters, the Red Cross worked closely with community leaders and planters to make certain that their needs were met, particularly with regard to labor. During the Flood of 1927, Red Cross officials erected camps for those left homeless by the flood, but that included a sizeable number of tenants and sharecroppers. Fearing their labor force would not return to their plantations, planters secured an agreement with Red Cross officials to only release tenants and sharecroppers when their planters signed them out. During the drought, a controversy arose over the dispersal of Red Cross supplies when it became known that planters were distributing them to tenants and sharecroppers as part of their furnish. In other words, planters exercised control over the relief supplies and used them to keep their labor force in place. Given that the national office of the Red Cross worked with local Red Cross committees selected by the communities they served, the structure itself predestined a local bias. When it became public knowledge, the Red Cross, responding to criticism and fearing a reduction in donations, issued a directive forbidding the practice. Planters expressed anger not at the Red Cross, however, but at the sharecroppers and justified the practice by declaring that tenants and sharecroppers were lazy and shiftless and that they would not work if given the rations without being compelled to return to their plantations to receive them (Daniel 1977; Whayne 1996; Barry 1997).

      By the time Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in the fall of 1932, planters and farmers had been struggling with an economic recession for more than a decade. Many had become accustomed to that relatively new agency—the Cooperative Extension Service—and prominent farmers and planters had become adept at influencing the local farm agents to respond to their needs. The agents cultivated relationships with prominent farmers, business leaders, bankers, and their organizations and were positioned to be an important intermediary for any federal government programs implemented when Roosevelt took office in 1933. The new president appointed Henry A. Wallace, a prominent Iowa farmer and newspaperman, as secretary of agriculture. Wallace played a leading role in fashioning the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), operating on the principle that controlling production of certain overproduced crops would raise the price of those commodities, including the three crops most important in the South: cotton, tobacco, and rice. When Cully A. Cobb, an influential extension official in Mississippi, became director of the cotton division of the AAA, it signaled the importance of both the Extension Service and prominent planters. Closely affiliated with Oscar Johnston who directed the Delta Pine & Land Company in Mississippi, one of the largest cotton producers in the world, Cobb fashioned a program that addressed the needs of the South’s biggest cotton planters. Under the AAA, planters “rented” their cotton acres to the federal government but retained possession of those rented acres and cultivated crops not designated as overproduced. They received a rental payment, typically referred to as a crop subsidy, and an additional “parity” payment if the price they received for their crop failed to provide a sufficient profit compared to the cost of production. County farm agents urged their planters and farmers in the cotton belt to grow soybeans in place of cotton on acres previously devoted to cotton. By 1960, soybean production rivaled that of cotton (Whayne 1996; Daniel 1986).

The AAA’s cotton program might have gone down in history as a resounding success, but for the emergence of a controversy resulting from the actions of some planters. For the first time in the history of US cotton production, planters no longer endured a labor shortage. One of the inherent weaknesses of the post-Civil War labor system was the necessity of maintaining sharecroppers and tenants from spring to fall. In fact, there were only three periods of significant farming activity on cotton plantations: planting in the spring; hoeing weeds and thinning the crop to maximize growth in the summer; and harvesting in the fall. Wage labor utilized only during these busy periods would have made more sense, but planters could not be sure they would have sufficient labor in those crunch times. The sharecropping and tenancy system allowed planters to keep their laborers from the time they prepared the ground to plant the seeds until the crop was harvested, but the transition to soybean production introduced a destabilizing element in the labor system. Although they achieved the long-held dreams of extension agents to restore nitrogen to the soil, soybeans required less maintenance and could be harvested with machinery. Under these circumstances, some planters began evicting tenants they no longer needed, and others often refused to share crop subsidy and parity payments with those who remained (Grubbs 1971; Whayne 1996 ; Fite 1984; Daniel 1986).

      Even before the crisis over evictions and the failure to share crop subsidy payments arose, sharecroppers in Alabama organized to protest Depression-era practices that exacerbated their deteriorating situation. Planters, suffering from declining prices and escalating debts, were squeezing what profits could be had from crop production from their sharecroppers. The Sharecroppers Union, founded in Alabama in 1931, attracted national attention, some of it negative, because of its association with the Communist Party (Kelley 1990). Planters attacked the all-black union using racist rhetoric. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), founded in Arkansas 1934 in response to evictions and a refusal of planters to share crop subsidy payments, took a different path in terms of membership makeup. Although it left the decision of whether to accept black members to local affiliates, the STFU promoted interracial solidarity against the planters (Grubbs 1971; Daniel 1986; Whayne 1996). The integrated STFU had little success in halting evictions or forcing planters to share AAA payments, but it had success with two cotton pickers’ strikes and, in 1936, it garnered publicity after revealing that three entities—all of whom had evicted tenants and thus contributed to unemployment—had received the largest AAA payments: Delta Pine & Land Company in Mississippi and two Arkansas mega-plantations, Lee Wilson & Company and Chapman and Dewey Company. At least one of them faced the cessation of AAA payments for several years. After the United States entered World War II, however, the congressional and AAA appetite for punishing these planters abruptly ceased, and the payments to Lee Wilson not only resumed but the company also received back payments to 1936 (Whayne 2011).

      Despite the efforts of the STFU, a discernable trend toward a labor surplus and wage-labor in areas previously dominated by sharecropping was taking shape by the end of the 1930s. Yet planters had barely become accustomed to the luxury of an abundance of labor when World War II struck. Once the United States joined the Allies in late 1941, farmers were enjoined to produce more than ever with less available labor (Rasmussen 1951). Officials with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) began devising plans to deal with the shortfall, particularly in late 1941. In 1942 they marshaled every available source of labor they could find. On southern plantations, that meant hill and townspeople, but it was clearly insufficient. The federal government negotiated an agreement with Mexico to provide braceros to

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