Program for Picker

"We got down on our knees," said John D. Rust last week, "and picked cotton when we were boys. We decided then that we would try to invent a machine that would do this back-breaking toil. We have that machine. It will do the work of 50 to 100 men. Thrown on the market in the manner of past inventions, it would mean, in the share-cropped country, that 75% of the labor population would be thrown out of employment. We are not willing that this should happen. How can we prevent it?"

For nearly a century men have tried to work out a practical machine that would displace the millions of human fingers which have picked cotton since the time of Eli Whitney. Inventive John D. Rust hit on the idea of using a moistened, rotating spindle to which the cotton in open bolls would stick. His brother Mack, who had gone to college and worked for General Electric, came to help him. Last year, after successful experiments in Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, the Rust Cotton Harvester began to attract nationwide attention (TIME, April 22).

In Washington lately. New Deal economists have scratched their heads over the Rust picker, pondered the plight of the great mass of black humanity in the South which makes a living picking cotton. They were encouraged to hear that, far from being rapacious moneygetters, the Brothers Rust, professed Socialists, were willing to forego profits rather than deliver a body blow to Southern labor. Holding 51% of the stock in their manufacturing company at Memphis, the Rusts offered marketing control of the picker to the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. The Union had too slim a purse to accept. The Brothers left the offer open.

Last week John & Mack Rust appealed for Federal and state aid in working out a program for painlessly absorbing the picker into the South's economy. An idea of their own is not to sell the harvesters but to lease them to planters who promise to maintain minimum wage and maximum work-hour scales, abolish child labor and accept collective bargaining. If the promises are not kept the Rusts would snatch back the planter's picker.

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