ties in Georgia. Yet his masterful applied interdisciplinarity illuminated
what had gone terribly wrong in Greene and Macon counties. Macon, espe-
cially its soils and black residents, was poor. Greene was poorer still because
it was part of Georgia’s first cotton frontier and its clay dirt and had been
mined and washed longer; thus all of its residents had been impoverished
longer.
In Raper returned to Greene County, stayed for two years, and wrote
Tenants of the Almighty. He hoped to reach a wide audience with this work,
which he addressed to Greene’s own people and wrote in an informal style
that partly disguised his thick description and shrewd analysis. After a hasty
summary of what he had found in , he undertook a frank celebration of
the late New Deal’s Unified Farm Program in the county, which represented
the ideal of the Regionalists, some of the Agrarians, and other small-farmer
advocates. The Unified Farm Program selected promising tenants and a few
sharecroppers and provided them with cheap credit to buy land, mules, and
equipment. Then it offered advisory assistance on marketing (the govern-
ment helped create cooperatives), help in achieving self-sufficiency in food,
and not least, assistance (a requirement, actually) in farm practices that re-
stored soils and fertility. In Greene’s citizens were learning, Raper had
reason to hope, to reverse their historically destructive ways and live har-
moniously with nature, even while earning modest livelihoods. Raper cred-
ited a local black poet, a ‘‘tenant mother’’ named Louisiana Dunn Thomas,
for the title of his book. Thomas had written,
We are tenants of the Almighty
Entrusted with a portion of His earth
To dress and keep
And pass on to the next generation.^49
Sad to say, Arthur Raper’s wartime optimism for Greene County and
comparable southern places was already unwarranted. The Unified Farm
Program and similar tenant-to-owner programs were underfunded from
the start and were soon to be gutted. Federal policy instead was already
dedicated to capital-intensive agriculture, which was moving toward farm-
ing on a large scale, specialization, and a relentless trend away from self-
sufficiency in food. In hardly more than a decade after World War II, almost
all American farmers, including the shrinking number with modest acre-
age, would buy their vegetables, milk, cheese, and meat at supermarkets.
The Soil Conservation Service and thousands of local conservation districts
survive, and water erosion, if not conquered, is essentially controlled. Wind