sharecropped plantations, no less than centralized ones, required inter-
ested, resident managers. For a variety of reasons, reported anecdotally and
inferred, planters were beginning a massive withdrawal from the country-
side by about and becoming absentee landlords or simply divesting.
Why? Plantation management is tediously repetitive yet, considering the
increasing mobility of croppers and tenants, consumed with stress. Too,
the planter class was generally an educated one, and remote places offered
members little society among their peers and less-appealing opportunities
for professionals among them than in towns and cities. Idle wives famously
preferred town life. Middle-aged and elderly planters discovered that their
sons and daughters preferred to take their own college credentials to cities,
even faraway northeastern ones. The cumulative effect was a dramatic re-
duction in the numbers of plantations. In the Bureau of the Census
counted , plantations in the eleven former Confederate states. Only
thirty years later—in and before the South felt the full impact of trac-
tors, much less the chemical and harvester revolutions to come—there
were only ,, a reduction of slightly more than half.
Second was the massive exodus of labor, both black and white, which
began in , as American industry responded to Great War market op-
portunities. Between then and , million southerners (about half of
them black, half white) decamped for other parts of the country. These in-
cluded , so-called Okies (actually from Texas, Arkansas, and Louisi-
ana as well as Oklahoma), who streamed west in only five years, –.
Most of them were, first, farm laborers in Arizona and especially California,
but they shortly went to work in war industries. The great bulk of south-
ern émigrés became industrial workers in the Northeast and Midwest. Yet
more millions of southerners moved within the South, almost always from
rural to urban places. Even Texas became statistically an urban state, and
with startling rapidity.
Third was the juggernaut emergence of cotton culture on the West Coast.
Cotton had been tried at least twice before in California—in Los Angeles
County during the s, with ‘‘coolie’’ labor, then at the turn of the twen-
tieth century at the bottom of the state, in what was newly called the Im-
perial Valley. Both these experiments failed, the latter owing mainly to the
unruly geology of the Colorado River delta. Then in the United States
entered World War I, and war planners decided that the army’s flying corps
desperately needed secure supplies of long-staple cotton for covering the
wooden and metal frames of airplanes. Thesent its best cotton man,
Wofford B. ‘‘Bill’’ Camp, out to Kern County, in California’s Central Valley,