Along Tobacco Road

Big, roundheaded Author Erskine Caldwell (Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre) lived in Georgia until about ten years ago when he moved to Maine. Either State would gladly cede him to the other. He outraged his New England neighbors by announcing that "the [Maine] population is dying out from the top as well as from the bottom." His annual visits to his homeland affect civic-proud Georgians as the coming of the bollweevil. Regularly he infuriates them by writing of terrorized Negroes, of poverty, ignorance, depravity, degeneracy among the poor whites. Latest indignity was his series of articles for the loudly liberal New York Post on the misery of starving sharecroppers near Augusta. In savage detail he described family after family--hungry, diseased, decayed, hopeless (TIME, March 4).

Quivering with rage the Southern Press shouted "Libel!" But the 150-year-old Augusta Chronicle ("The South's Oldest Newspaper") restrained itself. Withholding epithets and stock denials, the Chronicle's Editor Thomas J. Hamilton promised to investigate the Caldwell charges, to report accurately, fearlessly. With the author's father, Rev. Ira Sylvester Caldwell of nearby Wrens, Ga. as guide, two Chronicle newshawks scoured the bleak "sand hill" section between Wrens and Keysville--setting for Tobacco Road. True to promise, the Chronicle front-paged their findings in five straightforward reports which, in any Northern publication, might well have drawn the hot fire of Southern boosters. Dutifully the investigators described the worst cases they found:

P: A family of 16 occupy a ramshackle two-room house, operating a farm as tenants. Rent: 800 lb. of cotton a year. Last year's crop was four bales. After paying two bales for rent and two for fertilizer and funds advanced, the year's profit was 62-c-.

P: Mother, son, imbecile daughter and her two children live in squalor in a one-room house on 40-c- a day when the son can find work. The daughter, again pregnant, freely admitted various parentage of her chifdren, the father of one being the girl's cousin.

P: Father is unable to work because of heart trouble. Mother, 60, so weak from malnutrition that sometimes she can hardly walk, plods ten miles to Wrens to beg a little food. Son, 21, also suffering from undernourishment, has had twelve days relief work since Christmas at $1.20 a day. This family shares its two rag-covered, rickety beds with a young woman who had nowhere else to turn. When the reporters called, not a scrap of food was in the house. All they ever have is cornbread; the meal barrel was empty.

The Chronicle found about a dozen such families, some afflicted with venereal disease. Father Caldwell said there might be 35 such families in Jefferson County-- about 1% of the population. Said the Chronicle: "We have been told, and we believe, that investigation in any area would produce a similar proportion of human derelicts--dregs of civilization."

More shocking was the Chronicle's further belief that "the families visited are descendants of parents who lived in the same manner, are products of a combination of poverty, utter ignorance and interbreeding of families, through generations. . . . It was found that many people in Jefferson County know the families, and have known of their condition for years. . . .

"Relief agencies contribute to these people . . . where blanket rules permit. . . . Ignorance and stubborn reserve frequently cause the most needy families to refuse medical aid or food to satisfy their want. Cases have been reported in which blankets and like articles, sorely needed by the sufferers, have been sold as soon as they were received from relief agencies."

The Chronicle's conclusions: The condition of Jefferson County's lowly 1% is beyond the help of relief agencies. Long-range rehabilitation, geared to individual cases, is the only remedy. "They need education not only in the accepted manner but on moral codes of civilization of which they are not a part." Treatment indicated: Sterilization, provided by a bill passed by the Georgia House and pending before the Senate.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.