Plant-to-Prosper

Under the yellow and white ballroom lights in Memphis' swank Hotel Peabody, 600 Southern farm folk sat ill at ease one night last week, waiting for the big moment. It came late in the evening--at 9:30 p. m. Most of the farmers' kids were already asleep when Willard C. ("Parson") Teague, chief editorial writer of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, leaned toward the microphone and drawled out the name of the landowner-sweepstakes winner for 1938 in the "C. A.'s" Plant-to-Prosper campaign. Looking completely confused and happy, grey-haired Farmer H. L. Majure of Poplar Grove. Ark. made his way to the platform and was handed a check for $500.

Like seven other State winners in landowner and tenant classes, he had already received a check for $100 and a pedigreed Jersey bull calf. The sweepstakes prize meant that he had outstripped 27,000 other small holders and croppers in meeting the South's biggest agricultural problem: how to make the poorer farm families self-sufficient. Asked what he would do with his $600, Farmer Majure mused: "Guess I'll buy some more land to go with my 40 acres. . . ."

Few newspapers would think it worth-while to run contests among a population group in which only 2% regularly read the papers, but the Commercial Appeal ("Largest Circulation in the South"--now around 126,000) is not out for immediate gains. Its late, revered Publisher Charles Patrick Joseph Mooney, who died in 1926, never tired of preaching that the South would progress only when it taught its farmers to diversify their crops, raise most of their own food. That is the key-note of the Plant-to-Prosper campaign, started in 1933 by the Commercial Appeal now promoted also by the Atlanta Constitution, Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, Chattanooga News. Winner Majure and his family of eight raised $225 worth of their own food this year, have $220 worth on hand, not including some hogs killed this month. They spent only $49.64 for food they did not raise. Thin, round-shouldered Mrs. Majure has on her shelves 273 quarts of vegetables, 40 quarts of meat, six glasses of jelly, 99 quarts of pickles, 18 gallons of syrup.

Typical report from a local Plant-to-Prosper winner: "We tore down an old outhouse and saved the roofing and flooring to build an additional room to our home. . . . We set out seven shade trees and 25 fruit trees . . . have taken better care of the hens, cows, pigs, garden and truck patches. . . ." One Missouri tenant farmer's wife was so enthusiastic she sewed "Plant-to-Prosper" on her son's basketball uniform.

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