to persuade fruit ranchers to switch to cotton. Camp had been raised on
an up-country South Carolina cotton farm and educated at Clemson, the
state’s agricultural college. Accustomed to southeastern farmers’ curmud-
geonly unreceptiveness to science and innovation, out west Camp discov-
ered communities of entrepreneurial farmers (they preferred ‘‘ranchers’’)
already legendary for their willingness to invest, band together, and exploit
state and federal institutions—not to mention brutalize labor as brazenly
as any Mississippi planter. So Camp succeeded easily in establishing cot-
ton in Kern County, just as the war emergency suddenly ended. Curiously,
the’s program continued. A new, improved strain of long-staple cot-
ton from Mexico flourished in El Norte, and Camp and his sons became
prominent cotton (and potato) ranchers. Over the next two decades, Cali-
fornia cotton culture spread northward in the Central Valley past Sacra-
mento, as well as southward, again, through the Imperial Valley. Ranchers
enjoyed cheap, subsidized irrigation and abundant and mostly manage-
able migrant labor. And their desert environment was hostile to the boll
weevil that had wrecked swaths of the humid Southeast since the s.
Ever progressive, too, the Californians leaped at new chemicals and ma-
chines as soon as any were offered. Already tractorized by the s, they
were also first to buy en masse the first cotton harvesters, just after World
War II. Delta planters in the Southeast, still owners of thousands of mules
and rulers of still-substantial numbers of resident croppers and tenants,
dawdled at full conversion to machines, through the s.
tAbout , H. L. ‘‘Mitch’’ Mitchell (–), just retired from a long
career as a farm labor organizer and human rights champion, returned to
eastern Arkansas, where he had cofounded the Southern Tenant Farmers’
Union in July . Mitchell was well aware that both agriculture and land-
scapes were utterly transformed from the time of his youth. Yet driving
around in Poinsett, Lonoke, and other counties once crowded with impov-
erished black and white cropper and tenant families, Mitch was astounded.
Irreconcilable images still swam in his head a few years later as he com-
posed his autobiography, but one set in particular struck him: On one large,
well-remembered property that once supported (after a fashion) a hundred
families, by the early s onlythreemen conducted all farming opera-
tions from their giant machines.^21 Such a property, almost without people,
cannot be called a plantation. The old labor-intensive complex had finally
been broken, by pre- and postemergent herbicides, petroleum-based pes-