Picker Paucity

"If the cotton picker ever comes, it will behoove us to do some serious thinking about the human consequences of these machines. I heard a man familiar with the South say recently that the first effects of the development of an efficient cotton picker might be the displacement of over half a million tenant families."

In speaking thus last week at Tuskegee, Ala., Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace echoed the question which has sorely troubled the cotton-growing South ever since the equivocal demonstration of the Rust mechanical cotton picker fortnight ago: If the Rust machine is eventually a success, what will human cotton pickers do for work? Hardly were the words out of the Secretary's mouth when the antipodal question vexed cotton planters in the Mississippi Valley and all over the Southeast: What was this year's cotton crop going to do for human pickers? Though wages were the highest since 1929, field hands were scarce.

Across the Mississippi from Memphis some 200 trucks were pulled up at the Arkansas end of the Harahan Bridge every morning while their drivers vainly sought pickers in the city. "Farmers are begging for pickers and they are offering them from $1 to $1.25 per 100 pounds picked," exclaimed Agricultural Committee Chairman Robert Snowden of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce appealing to the WPA to send men on relief to the fields.

"The necessity of sending Tennessee relief workers to Arkansas is not made clear," retorted Tennessee WPAdministrator Harry S. Berry. "The relief clients at work on projects in the city of Memphis are not rural people and they probably could not pick over 60 to 70 pounds in a day of ten hours and would therefore receive not more than 7-c- per hour for their labor, and in addition they would have to travel 70 miles a day to and from their work. These jobs would not provide a subsistence wage."

At Clarksdale, Miss, and elsewhere in the Mississippi Delta, however, WPA projects were suspended as police lent a hand in the familiar practice of benevolently shanghaiing the jobless to the cotton fields in picking time. Those who refused to go were arrested for vagrancy.

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