she toured the piedmont plantation belt with Erskine Caldwell, who made
up captions for the photos in their work,You Have Seen Their Faces().
The rest of the enormous pictorial archive of the Great Depression yields
more than faces and bodies, of course. There is also the degradation of
human shelter and clothing and especially of the landscape itself. The cu-
mulativeenvironmentaleffect of the conversion of garden plots to cotton
monoculture seems quite impossible to estimate. The last southeastern
cotton kingdom had such enormous geographic reach, not only into new
plantation-country deltas in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri, but into
hilly, marginal, nonplantation places such as northwestern Georgia and
northwestern Arkansas. Both flat and hilly landscapes suffered lasting mis-
chief. Still photographers placed despondent human subjects before back-
drops of deeply, often irrevocably eroded farmland that should never have
been cultivated. Most memorably, Pare Lorentz’s motion picture documen-
taryThe River() dramatically captured the connectedness of human
poverty and soil erosion in the lower Mississippi country with deforestation
and cultivation in Appalachia and the Midwest. Lorentz’s sonorous narra-
tor intoned, ‘‘Poor land makes poor people.’’
The systemic ecological thinking thatThe Riverrepresented so well was
also propaganda for the Tennessee Valley Authority (). Authorized in
, thenot only constructed dams and hydroelectric operations but
supervised reforestation projects that complemented federal subsidization
of the retirement of farmland. By the s, the ‘‘mid-South,’’ as the huge
-served part of the region was called by then, had become industrialized
and urbanized to a greater degree than ever before. By this time, too, the
southeastern cotton kingdom was reduced to a few earldoms in the deltas.
The rest of the New South’s plantation complex died in protracted stages,
beginning a half-century before mechanization of cotton, corn, and soy-
beans and elimination of sharecropping and most other sorts of labor.^20 In
, southern cotton production approached its zenith. More territorial ex-
pansion was already under way or in the offing—in Texas’s Blackland Prai-
rie, eastern Arkansas, and the Missouri bootheel. By – a staggering
production of more than million bales prompted Louisiana’s Governor
Huey Long to lead a heroic but failed attempt to persuade cotton growers
to take a year off. By that time, however, both the cotton kingdom and the
plantation complex were already doomed by three momentous develop-
ments.
First was a silent, little-noticed ‘‘management failure,’’ as the geogra-
pher Charles Aiken names it. The term assumes (correctly, I think) that