NONREV, Wait a minute here. I SENT YOU NO PRIVATE MESSAGE! You fired off public message #61783 to me and I replied to you IN PUBLIC message #61808. I sent you no other message. Either you or someone else is playing a game here or you don't understand how the board works.
But you certainly do employ the writing style and method of the international left, "code-words" included. Your initial post to me was an attack and a hateful one at that. And then, in this peculiar last message (#61855) you open a new topic, sharecropping, which was an element in my public post to Maurice (#61812).
I see you don't know much about sharecropping so let me shine a little light on the subject. Sharecroppers were by no means at the bottom of the social order in the Old South. At the bottom of the scale were the paid laborors, who recieved cash payment for their efforts. Sharecroppers were respected and were often deacons in the church and members of the local Masons lodge. Sharecroppers were a sort of high skilled independent contractor and good sharecroppers were in strong demand. Many sharecroppers or their parents had at one time been landowners and planters themselves but either gave it up or lost their farm through a foreclosure. There were black as well as white sharecroppers though in most places there was a strong majority of white croppers and a majority of black day labor.
Sharecroppers, in that bygone and totally agrarian world of the Old South were in some ways similar to the salaried, decision making staff or line management level employee of today. As many cotton farms were just one bad crop away from foreclosure a sharecropper who made a few bad calls (weather, timing of planting, chopping, ect.) or didn't work as hard hard or as intelligently as he should could bankrupt his boss and this happened all the time. I think the thing kept most croppers from being owners themselves was aversion to risk; either they had lost their place to the bank or had seen it happen so much that they just felt more comfortable letting someone else bear the risk while they did what they knew best, namely produce good cotton crops.
The main thing that kept the Old South impoverished, for sharecroppers, landowners and all was the declining price of short staple upland cotton. It was a slow grinding steady decline from just after the Civil War to a low of a penny a pound during the 1930's. And I really do understand this stuff for I grew up on a cotton farm myself.
Slagle |
