Depression Prison Photography and Journalism by John Spivak

A HALTER FOR THE NECK

The iron collar chain is locked to the bars of the cage.

John Spivak photography

The New York Times praised Communist Party reporter John L. Spivak's shocking 1932 novel Georgia Nigger as having "the weight and authority of a sociological investigation." This Southern Classics edition makes Spivak's narrative available to modern readers, augmented with a new introduction by David A. Davis as well as additional documents Spivak gathered during his investigation into the abuses of the Depression-era Southern prison system.

John Spivak's novel "Georgia Nigger"

Georgia Nigger exposes the institutionalized system of sharecropping, debt peonage, and exorbitant chain gang sentences that trapped many southern black men in a cycle of labor exploitation. Spivak (1897-1981) gained unlikely access to chain gangs through the Georgia Prison Commission, and his book combines elements of muckraking reportage and proletarian fiction to offer a sensational and damning case for prison reform.

SICK CONVICTS IN A CAGE

Stripped to the waist because of intense heat.

The plot follows David Jackson, the son of black sharecroppers, who is released from a chain gang then almost immediately re-arrested and bound over to a white planter as a peon. Jackson escapes peonage only to be arrested again as a vagrant and sentenced to another chain gang. He tries to escape again with the help of an older inmate, but they are both captured and suffer torturous punishments. Spivak's novel has merit both as revealing historical account of sharecropping and chain gangs and as a compelling literary allegory of an individual confronted by sweeping social forces.

For Depression-era readers, Georgia Nigger provided outrage beyond its obvious depictions of inhumanity and torture. The book hinges on the crime of vagrancy, a charge often used to force into labor persons without obvious means of income. In this particular arrangement, being unemployed was a crime in itself, which allowed for the exploitation of the economically vulnerable. Like many writers and intellectuals of his era, Spivak sought to expose the abuses committed against the nation's most impoverished. His book combines elements of labor rabble-rousing, radical fiction, and documentary photography to depict the lives of black Southerners and to indict a flawed system of labor and justice. (source: The Reading Room)

Plow Under

Pete Seeger: "I was going right along with the Communist Party line back in the late 30s. I went along with a number of acquaintances I knew and was making up peace songs. In 1940, we even put out a record called “Songs for John Doe” with such lyrics as: “Remember when the AAA killed a million hogs a day, instead of hogs it’s men today, plow the fourth one under, plow under, plow under, plow under every fourth American boy.” I was working with Lee Hays, who was a wonderful songwriter. Lee was the son of a Baptist preacher in Arkansas. He knew gospel songs in white churches and in black churches. Lee came to New York wanting to put out a book of Union songs, and I got together with him. He made up the words of “If I Had a Hammer” and “Kisses Sweeter than Wine.” (Pete Seeger Interview, Rutherford Institute)

“Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.”—Pete Seeger

Remember when the AAA

Killed a million hogs a day

Instead of hogs it's men today

Plow the fourth one under.

CHORUS:

Plow under, plow under

Plow under

Every fourth American boy.

They said our agricultural

System was about to fall

From Washington they sent a call

Plow the fourth one under.

CHORUS

The price of cotton wouldn't rise

They said, "We've got to fertilize"

So now on us they turn their eyes

Plow the fourth one under.

CHORUS

They said our system wouldn't work

Until we killed the surplus off

So now they look at us and say

Plow the fourth one under.

CHORUS

Any ignorant mule does know

Better than to step on a cotton row

But there ain't no mules in Congress, so

Plow the fourth one under.

CHORUS

Homeless farmers

Now the politicians rant

A boy's no better than a cotton plant

But we are here to say you can't

Plow the fourth one under.

The Farmers' Plight: 1930s

The Farmers' Plight: 1930s

Roosevelt moved aggressively to address the crisis facing the nation's farmers. No group was harder hit by the Depression than farmers and farm workers. At the start of the Depression, a fifth of all American families still lived on farms. These families, however, were in deep trouble. Farm income fell by a staggering two-thirds during the Depression's first three years. A bushel of wheat that sold for $2.94 in 1920 dropped to $1 in 1929 and 30 cents in 1932. In one day, a quarter of Mississippi's farm acreage was auctioned off to pay for debts.

Evicted Sharecroppers

The farmers' problem, ironically, was that they grew too much. Worldwide crop production soared--a result of more efficient farm machinery, stronger fertilizers, and improved plant varieties--but demand fell. People ate less bread, Europeans imposed protective tariffs, and consumers replaced cotton with rayon. Too much was being grown, and the glut caused prices to fall. In order to meet farm debts in 1932, farmers needed to grow 2.5 times as much corn as they grew in 1929, 2.7 times as much wheat, and 2.4 times as much cotton.

Tennessee Cotton Pickers

As farm incomes fell, farm tenancy soared; two-fifths of all farmers worked on land that they did not own. The Gudgers, a white southern Alabama sharecropping family of six, illustrated the plight of tenants who were slipping deeper and deeper into debt. Each year, their landlord provided them with 20 acres of land, seed, an unpainted one-room house, a shed, a mule, fertilizer, and $10 a month. In return, they owed him half of their corn and cotton crop and 8 percent interest on their debts. In 1934, they were $80 in debt; by 1935, their debts had risen another $12.

Sharecropper family

Nature itself seemed to have turned against farmers. In the South, the boll weevil devoured the cotton crop; on the Great Plains, the top soil literally blew away, piling up in ditches like "snow drifts in winter." The Dust Bowl produced unparalleled human tragedy, but it had not occurred by accident. The Plains had always been a harsh, arid inhospitable environment. Nevertheless, a covering of tough grass-roots, called sod, permitted the land to retain moisture and support vegetation. During the 1890s, however, overgrazing by cattle severely damaged the sod. Then, during World War I, demand for wheat and the use of gasoline-powered tractors allowed farmers to plow large sections of the prairie for the first time. The fragile skin protecting the prairie was destroyed. When drought struck, beginning in 1930, and temperatures soared (to 108 degrees in Kansas for weeks on end) the wind began to blow the soil away. One Kansas county, which produced 3.4 million bushels of wheat in 1931, harvested just 89,000 bushels in 1933.

South Carolina farm family

Tenant farmers found themselves evicted from their land. By 1939, a million Dust Bowl refugees and other tenant farmers left the Plains to work as itinerant produce pickers in California. As a result, whole counties were depopulated. In one part of Colorado, 2,811 homes were abandoned, while an additional 1,522 people simply disappeared.

13 year old sharecropper.

The New Deal attacked farm problems through a variety of programs. Rural electrification programs meant that for the first time Americans in Appalachia, the Texas Hill Country, and other areas would have the opportunity to share in the benefits of electricity and running water. As late as 1935, more than 6 million of America's 6.8 million farms had no electricity. Unlike their sisters in the city, farm women had no washing machines, refrigerators, or vacuum cleaners. Nor did private utility companies intend to change things. Private companies insisted that it would be cost prohibitive to provide electrical service to rural areas.

Sharecropper and her son

Roosevelt disagreed. Settling on the 40,000 square mile valley of the Tennessee River as his test site, Roosevelt decided to put the government into the electric business. Two months after he took office, Congress passed a bill creating the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The TVA was authorized to build 21 dams to generate electricity for tens of thousands of farm families. In 1935 Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to bring electricity generated by government dams to America's hinterland. Between 1935 and 1942 the lights came on for 35 percent of America's farm families.

Cotton Pickers

Electricity was not the only benefit the New Deal bestowed on farmers. The Soil Conservation Service helped farmers battle erosion; the Farm Credit Administration provided some relief from farm foreclosures; and the Commodity Credit Corporation permitted farmers to use stored products as collateral for loans. Roosevelt's most ambitious farm program, however, was the Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA).

Evicted sharecropper family

The AAA, led by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, sought a partnership between the government and major producers. Together the new allies would raise prices by reducing the supply of farm goods. Under the AAA, the large producers, acting through farm cooperatives, would agree upon a "domestic allotment" plan that would assign acreage quotas to each producer. Participation would be voluntary. Farmers who cut production to comply with the quotas would be paid for land left fallow.

Evicted Arkansas sharecropper family

Unfortunately for its backers, the AAA got off to a horrible start. Because the 1933 crops had already been planted by the time Congress established the AAA, the administration ordered farmers to plow their crops under. The government paid them over $100 million to plow under 10 million acres of cotton. The government also purchased and slaughtered six million pigs, salvaging only one million pounds of meat for the needy. The public neither understood nor forgave the agency for destroying food while jobless people went hungry.

Sharecropper family

Overall, the AAA's record was mixed. It raised farm income, but did little for sharecroppers and tenant farmers--the groups hardest hit by the agricultural crisis. Farm incomes doubled between 1933 and 1936, but large farmers reaped most of the benefits. Many large landowners used government payments to purchase tractors and combines, allowing them to mechanize farm operations, increase crop yields and reduce the need for sharecroppers and tenants. One Mississippi planter bought 22 tractors with his payments and, subsequently, evicted 160 tenant families. The New Deal farm policies unintentionally forced at least 3 million small farmers from the land. For all its inadequacies, however, the AAA established the precedence for a system of farm price supports, subsidies, and surplus purchases that still continues more than half a century later.

Sharecropper Kitchen

(source: Digital History)