John Twist Discusses the Agricultural Adjustment Act and Its Consequences (1993)

And the black schools, I'm sure, varied a great deal from the city to the country. But many, most black children in the country did not get an education, did not become literate. In terms of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, can you tell me a little but about the act and also how it was decided that the money was going to be split up? When Roosevelt came in, he passed through Congress the Agricultural Adjustment Act, I think in 1933. And it was designed to bring some relief to this dreadful situation in the rural South. One of its principles was to curtail the production of cotton. In that first year, people were paid to plow up some of the cotton. To get the bill through Congress, Roosevelt had to make

certain concessions. He thought that any funds paid by the Agricultural Adjustment Act should be paid half to the landlord and half to the tenant. The Southern congressmen were not going to stand for that. They refused to pass a bill on that basis. They told Mr. Roosevelt that if he insisted on that, he'd get no bill at all. And if he got no bill at all, chaos was going to reign. Why did the Southern Democrats, why did the Democrats refuse to go along with something that did a 50-50 split? Well, of course, they were responsible to their voters, and that would be the white man.

The white people were going to vote them in or out of office. And they could tell Roosevelt, look, you won't get any bill at all unless you design it our way. And here's why you should do it our way. If you insist on half the money going to the tenant, to the sharecropper, then the landlord will just kick them all off. And work the cotton as a day crop, as a company crop. And he'll just hire them for work when he wants to hire them, but he won't furnish them for a crop. And you've got a worse situation. So I think, as I understand it then, Roosevelt agreed that 90% of the money would be paid as rent to the landlord, and 10% would be paid to the tenant. Then, by the time the bill was passed in Congress and got down to the county level, the county committees, which were all white, made an addendum that any money paid to the tenant would be paid to the landlord in behalf of the tenant. And could be applied to his debt, if there was a debt, rather than to be paid as cash. So it ended up the tenant got no relief in that way.

But the Adjustment Act did have this effect. It immediately pushed cotton out of the four and five cent level to the seven and eight, nine cent a pound level. So that it did have a tremendous, it brought a tremendous relief to the economy, by almost doubling the price of cotton there in a year's time. Last time you said as time went on, there was increasing pressure to give the tenant more of the parity payment. What kind of pressure, where did that come from?