surance. Meanwhile, the course of pellagra in the South between the two
world wars demonstrates the marginality of public health programs and
laboratory discoveries.
In , as the United States entered the Great War, everyone feared that
teeming southern army camps would compete with already undersupplied
towns for food, and that pellagra, already epidemic, would increase geo-
metrically. Instead, the government managed to organize better food distri-
bution and fed its servicemen well. Wartime labor shortages drove up wages
even for cotton-mill hands, who spent more money on better food. Pella-
gra abated. Goldberger warned, meanwhile, that peace and demobilization
would unleash another epidemic, and he was right. The s were a horror.
Then, amazingly, between and —the very depths of the Great
Depression—pellagra abated once more. Theclaimed much of the
credit. Its county agents (especially in the South) had been campaigning
among ordinary farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers on behalf of ‘‘living
at home’’—that is, keeping vegetable gardens and raising one’s own eggs
and meat. During these years, too, the women agents of the home demon-
stration program taught countless rural women about not only gardening
and poultry raising but preservation of produce by canning. Canned beans
and tomatoes, opened in late winter and spring, could carry a household
past that starving season when pellagra typically broke out.
A complementary explanation is that with commodity prices so low in
these years, farm owners opted for gardens and hogs on land previously
planted entirely in cotton and corn. Also, some landlords, who had in ear-
lier times forced sharecroppers to plant cotton up to the foundations of
their cabins, now permitted gardens.^10 But probably just as important,
many thousands of southerners, black and white, were on the road dur-
ing these years, migrating within the region and beyond it, almost always
to cities. Difficult as life was in urban places during such hard times, par-
ticularly for the down-and-out, food supplies were better there than in the
country, and food was absurdly cheap.
But then pellagra resurged. Explaining this doleful phenomenon, at the
height of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal social welfare programs and after
the laboratory proof of nicotinic acid’s relation to pellagra, is not easy.
One obvious target, however, is southern planter-landlords: Hugely dis-
proportionate beneficiaries of the Agricultural Adjustment Act’s acreage-
reduction and subsidy program, they evicted tens of thousands of tenants
and sharecroppers, many of whom became stranded on rural roadsides.
Simultaneously, the adjustment act succeeded in stabilizing and then