Labor for the Picking: the New Deal in the South

Warren Whatley

The Journal of Economic History, 1983, vol. 43, issue 4, 905-929

Abstract: During the Great Depression of the 1930s southern landlords began to replace sharetenants and mules with wage laborers and large-scale preharvest machinery. Informed observers in the 1920s did not expect this to happen until the advent of the mechanical cotton picker, which came after World War I. This paper presents evidence supporting the claim that the AAA policies of the 1930s, and the economic depression they were designed to cure, induced this tenant displacement by increasing the asset value of land rights without securing tenants a share right, and by relaxing the harvest labor constraint that had previously impeded mechanization.

Date: 1983
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jechis:v:43:y:1983:i:04:p:905-929_03

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Journal of Economic History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().