Time on the Ladder: Career Mobility in Agriculture, 1890 1938

Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferrie

The Journal of Economic History, 2005, vol. 65, issue 04, pages 1058-1081

Abstract: We explore the dynamics of the agricultural ladder for black farmers in the U.S. South using individual-level data from a retrospective survey conducted in 1938 in Jefferson County, Arkansas. We develop and test hypotheses to explain the time spent as a tenant, sharecropper, and wage laborer. The most striking result of our analysis is the importance of individual characteristics in career mobility. In all periods pre World War I; the war years, and subsequent boom; the 1920s; and the Great Depression years some farmers moved up the agricultural ladder quite rapidly while others remained stuck on a rung.Movement from rung to rung has been predominantly in the direction of descent rather than ascent. There is an increasing tendency for the rungs of the ladder to become bars forcing imprisonment in a fixed social status from which it is increasingly difficult to escape.National Resources CommitteeNational Resources Committee, Report.

Date: 2005
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