Red Hose In the Sunset

Last week in a hotel at Augusta, Ga., the two top men in the U. S. cotton business spoke their thoughts on cotton's future. They were the tall, urbane Texan Will Clayton, whose Anderson, Clayton & Co. is the world's No. 1 cotton broker; and short, portly Oscar Johnston, No. 1 grower, whose plantation operations in Mississippi--50,000 acres worked by 3,000 farm hands--produce 16,000 bales of cotton a year. Will Clayton is a polished internationalist, a business diplomat who is now a Deputy Loan Administrator for Jesse Jones. Oscar Johnston is rooted in the Delta, a farmer on a vast but local scale. He is the father of the National Cotton Council, a federation of growers, brokers, ginners, warehousemen and crushers which is trying to increase cotton's home market. Last week his Council held its third annual convention at Augusta's stuccoed Bon Air Hotel.

The problem facing the Convention was how, and what portion of, some 10,000,000 Americans can continue to depend on cotton for a living. This living, such as it is (average annual cash income of each U. S. cotton grower: around $400), has always depended in good part on exports. The export market is virtually closed for the duration of the war, if not for good. Last month Secretary of Agriculture Wickard announced that his policy would be based on the assumption that it is closed for good (TIME, Jan. 27). He would not only boost the domestic market, as the Council is trying to do, but reduce cotton acreage and divert the South's land and energies to other crops. Last week the 215 Council delegates listened to hear whether their two biggest members agreed with the New Deal. For different reasons, they did not.

Johnston. Farmer Johnston admitted at once that U. S. cotton exports this year would probably be the lowest since the Civil War blockade was lifted. He blamed this not only on World War II, but on U. S. foreign policy, which has failed to keep foreign (i.e., Axis) markets open during the war, making cotton "essentially a war orphan." That, he said, gave cotton growers a right to compensation. The Government should not only underwrite U. S. cotton production, but also stop trying to curtail it. "It may be argued that such a program will accumulate stocks of cotton in the hands of the Government. . . . What of it?"

Defiant Grower Johnston did not say that the Government should be the goat forever. But, comparing surplus cotton stocks to a strategic-materials stockpile, he intimated that the Government might sell the cotton abroad at a profit after the war. (He recalled that after World War I the foreign cotton market soared.) He also placed faith in the Council's fight for greater domestic consumption. He even preached cotton hosiery. When he reproached American girls for running around with silk stockings "like yellow-legged pullets," the wife* of a retired broker named William Henry Wallace Jr., sitting in the front row, lifted her grey skirt to her knees and displayed naming red cotton hose.

But Mrs. Wallace was the only Council wife so conspicuously clad. One wife had even neglected to bring the cotton dress required for admittance to the Council Ball. Grower Johnston also faced another paradox in the record of the Council's victories. The Council had successfully fought the use of foreign oils in the U. S., on behalf of cottonseed oil. Yet cotton-men have more to fear from anti-import nationalism than any other Americans for, unless the U. S. buys imports from abroad, foreigners have no exchange with which to buy U. S. cotton. In his plans for cotton's future, Grower Johnston seemed to rely not so much on the revival of world trade as on ersatz technology and the maintenance of a potent growers' lobby in Congress, able to unload its surplus on Uncle Sam -- for cash.

Clayton. Farmer Johnston once did an able job for the New Deal. From 1934 to 1937, as the liquidator of the old Hoover Farm Board cotton surplus, he managed to unload some 2,500,000 bales on the market without once breaking the price below 12-c-. In the process, he made the Treasury a fat profit in futures, and infuriated Broker Clayton who, for the first time in years, had to watch someone else make the market. Johnston also got $363,002,57 in AAA checks for the acres he abandoned from 1933 to 1937.

Will Clayton spoke for only 20 minutes (subject: Democracy and Cotton) and he spoke to the point. His quarrel with the New Deal was with its attempt "to peg the world price" of cotton--i.e., to keep the price of U. S. cotton above the Brazilian, Indian and Egyptian level, thus stimulating foreign production and killing for good any remaining foreign market for U. S. cotton. Broker Clayton's speech was a straight plea for old-fashioned world free trade. Like Cordell Hull, Free Trader Clayton saw"the menacing power of Hitler" as the No. 1 obstacle to free trade.

Once Hitler is beaten, Clayton implied, the world markets of yesteryears will return. Delegates liked the simple militancy of Clayton's stand. When he finished, ebullient, French, red-stockinged Mrs. Wallace jumped up and kissed him on the left cheek.

Comer. Far less comforting was a third speech. Donald Comer comes from an old Alabama family whose Barbour County plantation, after growing cotton for a hundred years, is now a profitable stock farm planted to clover, grasses, corn, legumes. No farmer himself, Donald Comer is chairman of Avondale Mills, one of the South's large cotton consumers.

His fact-studded speech (read for him since he had the flu), spoke not of cotton but of the South. Quoting TVA's David Lilienthal, he accused his native land of having exported its soil's fertility, for which no price, however free or however protected, is high enough. Said he: "There is many a gullied hillside in our south eastern States today that is being plowed by a scrub mule, trying to raise cotton in competition with Oscar Johnston's mechanized Pine Delta plantation. It can't be done." His solution: diversification and mechanization of southern farms, restoration of their soil and forests, industrialization. The cotton problem would then take care of itself. But "you can't clear the stream below as long as the old sow wallows in the spring above." Mr. Comer figured that a minimum 32-c- an hour in a factory was better for a Georgia boy than 90-c- a day in the fields.

Almost pure New Dealery, Mr. Comer's visions of a postwar cotton belt were more complicated than idealistic Mr. Clayton's or earthy Mr. Johnston's. But between the three of them, they mapped on cotton's dismal present all its alternatives for years to come.

The margin of wages over living expenses on Northwestern National Life Insurance Co.'s standard of living index has reached a record high. A hypothetical average family which earned and spent $120 a month in 1933 (year the index was started) now earns $157.49 (at the same job) and needs to spend only $130.76 for the same standard of living.

*French-born, her name was Jeanne Leonie Escaravage-Latreille.

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