The Machine That Killed King Cotton

IN THE DEEP SOUTH, LATE SUMMER WAS THE SEASON FOR PICKING COT ton. The day’s work started at sunrise and continued, with a midday break, until dusk. Children worked with their parents, with everyone making their way down the long rows, kneeling or bending at the waist, taking a firm grip on each fluffy puff, and giving it a pull. Thorny sheaths at the base of every boll, or tuft, of cotton, as rough as splintered wood, turned the workers’ fingers red and sore and sometimes bloody.

Under the blazing sun, each picker dragged a sack that grew heavier as the day wore on. Children as young as 10 picked 150 pounds a day, much of it seeds that would be combed out at the gin. The pay for this: a dollar a day, sometimes less.

“Cotton is king,” boasted South Carolina’s senator James Henry Hammond in 1858. It was indeed, but its rule was tyrannical. Even after the Civil War, its planting, cultivation, and harvesting depended entirely on the hand labor of millions of blacks and poor whites, who lived as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. During the Depression, the writer Robert Montgomery described their lives as a “miserable panorama of unpainted shacks, rain-gullied fields, straggling fences, rattletrap Fords, dirt, poverty, disease, drudgery, and monotony.”

The South depended on their labor, yet few of them would have chosen such lives if they’d had better alternatives. Little education was available for the poor across the hard-bitten region, and these people weren’t just poor; they often had unpayable debts at the company stores where they were forced to buv when they earned their livings in scrip rather than cash. In the mid-1960s Martin Luther King, Jr., met Alabama sharecroppers who had never seen a dollar bill.

An invention had given birth to this grim system: Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, which at the start of the nineteenth century made large-scale cotton growing profitable, pumped new life into the fading institution of slavery, and ensured that something all too like slavery would last long after the Civil War. But an invention would finally rid the world of the hand cotton picker as well.

For the better part of two centuries there was no alternative to the stoop labor of the destitute. Many inventors tried to build a successful cotton-picking machine to do the work mechanically—and one was patented as early as 1850—but cotton was a difficult crop that defeated their efforts. The bolls never ripened at the same time, so fields had to be picked repeatedly. That meant that a cotton-picking machine couldn’t damage the plants; they had to stay healthy to be gleaned later. A machine also had to avoid collecting pieces of leaf or stem, for such “trash” discolored the cotton and reduced its value.

Nineteenth-century inventors didn’t get very far. Peter Haring, of Goliad, Texas, worked through much of the 1890s before building a device that seemed to hold promise. The McCormick Harvesting Machine Company agreed to test it, but in the words of the historian R. Douglas Hurt, “After running the machine down one row four or five times, the technicians could not distinguish whether any cotton had been picked. The picking arms merely brushed the bolls away, broke them off, or failed to reach them, and the picking points dropped the cotton that was picked to the ground.” Having decided that Haring’s contrivance had no “promise of success,” McCormick’s officials returned it to him.

Another inventor, Angus Campbell, of Chicago, had similar bad luck. He built his first cotton picker in 1889 and then spent 20 years making annual journeys to the South to test improvements on it. Even so, trash remained a problem. “Why, that cotton ain’t clean enough for a dog to lie on,” one observer complained. In 1910 the popular magazine The World’s Work summed up the general attitude of plantation owners: “The average cotton-grower believes as firmly in the eternal supremacy of the Negro cotton-picker as he does in the infallibility of the Democratic party.…”

In the 1920s International Harvester entered the field. The company was introducing the world’s first successful line of tractors, and farmers were using them to pull seed drills, plows, and combines. A good mechanical cotton picker would sell not only itself but more tractors. Clarence Hagen, the company’s chief engineer, conducted development work at the company’s headquarters in Chicago and then headed south for field testing.

He started in 1922 with a picker that resembled a vacuum cleaner. Workers would wield tubes to suck bolls from the olants. This sort of machine had been patented since 1859— with tentaclelike hoses that extended from a single vacuum tank, it tended to look like an octopus—and Hagen built both mule- and tractor-drawn versions. In September 1924 he set up a competition between a mule-pulled model and a hand worker near Dallas. The contest resembled the legendary race between John Henry and a steam drill, which John Henry won.

The man pitted against the machine was an experienced field hand who had shown that he could pick up to 400 pounds in a day. The mechanical picker had four hoses, with a separate man tending each. After an hour the field worker was more than 50 yards ahead, and his cotton was considerably cleaner. According to a company historian, the sponsors blamed the men at the hoses: “This test thoroughly convinced the management that to be practical the human element had to be entirely eliminated from cotton harvesting machines.”

International Harvester had covered its bases by buying the rights to the patents of Angus Campbell, who had taken an alternative “spindle” approach in his failed mechanical-picking attempts. A spindle was a rod or prong that could poke into a cotton boll and rotate to spool up the fibers, easily pulling away the boll. Then a “doffer,” amounting to a large comb, would strip the cotton from the spindle. Finally, a flow of air would suck the cotton off the doffer.

The problem lay in devising a spindle that could both grip a boll well enough to pull away its cotton and release it readily when combined with the doffer. The best way to grip the boll was with barbs or points on the spindle, but these would prevent easy removal. A simple smooth spindle could be doffed with ease but had trouble picking up the boll in the first place.

HAGEN TESTED MANY DESIGNS FOR A SPINDLE. HE VARIED its length and diameter; he tapered it toward the tip or put a barbed or serrated edge along its length. None of these possibilities worked well. Hagen wrote that “spindles foul up with a mixture of plant sap, dirt and cotton fibers” that “had to be removed by hand, aided with pocket knives and liberal applications of water.” It looked as though even the industrial muscle of International Harvester couldn’t beat the problem.

Then that proverbial American creature the back-yard tinkerer gave it a try. John Rust was born in Texas in 1892, the seventh of eight children. He learned about cotton the hard way- by helping grow and pick the crop on his family’s farm. As a child he built a steam engine that didn’t run and an airplane with a clockwork motor that didn’t fly. He then put together a vacuum-cleaner-type cotton picker that he hoped would also catch the boll weevils that ate growing cotton plants. It didn’t work either.

Rust’s parents died while he was in high school. After that he lived with relatives for a while, spent some time at a small college in New Mexico, and drifted around the country, doing odd iobs. By 1920 he had completed a correspondence course in automotive engineering and mechanical drafting, and on the basis of that modest accomplishment he managed to land a job as designer and superintendent of construction for a man in Wichita named Ira Marriage, who was trying to develop a better wheat-harvesting combine.

Now that he was a full-time farmmachinery inventor, Rust started thinking about cotton picking again. Taking the spindle approach, he ran up against the problem of doffing the cotton, and not knowing what other people had tried, he fell back on his own ingenuity. Lying in bed one night in 1927, he recalled how when he was a boy the morning dew would make the cotton he picked cling to his fingers. Then he remembered that his grandmother had always moistened the spindle of her spinning wheel to make cotton adhere to it. “I jumped out of bed,” he later wrote, and “found some absorbent cotton and a nail for testing. I licked the nail and twirled it in the cotton and found that it would work.”

He now had the dazzling prospect that a simple unbarbed rotating nail, clearly easy to doff, might when moistened also be effective for collecting cotton. “I knew I had hold of something good,” he later declared. He left his job and returned to Texas. His sister Jennie took him in, in the town of Weatherford, just west of Fort Worth, and allowed him to set up a shop in her garage. He had no money, but a friend of Jennie’s husband lent him $500, and other friends and relatives kicked in another $4,000.

In 1928 he filed for a patent on a cotton picker with moistened spindles. Hagen, at International Harvester, learned of it and decided to try it. He was impressed, and further experimentation showed that spraying more water on the spindles could keep them clean and free of gummy buildup. With success apparently in sight, Hagen started to build 20 experimental machines. Then the stock market crashed.

Hagen shut down the project, but Rust, working with practically nothing, went ahead on his own. His brother Mack, seven years younger but with a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas and experience working for General Electric, joined him. Together they built a picker with moistened spindles, and they took a wooden plank and turned it into a cotton row by mounting 10 stalks to it, each with 10 tufts of cotton. They set up the row in Jennie’s back vard. and their machine nicked 97 of the 100 tufts.

This was encouraging, but the machine did far worse when tried on a genuine cotton row in a field. Short on money, the two got help from Wallace Clemmons, who ran a radio school in New Orleans and who joined with friends to raise another $25,000. The Rusts went to Waco, Texas, where in 1931 their machine became the first ever to pick an entire bale—500 pounds —in a single day.

Clemmons and the Rusts followed up with more tests at the Delta Experiment Station, an agricultural research center in Stoneville, Mississippi. In 1933 an improved version rolled across a field there in the presence of journalists, picking cotton at the rate of 2,500 pounds a day. That was more than a field hand might pick in two weeks. William Ayres, the station’s superintendent, called the apparatus “the missing link in the mechanical production of cotton.”

The demonstration was written up in Harper’s and The American Mercury magazines, and the latter article was reprinted in Reader’s Digest . That brought the Rusts an invitation to Memphis, where the city chamber of commerce helped them line up investment capital. They showed off their machine at the National Cotton Show in 1935 and announced that it would soon be in production.

They demonstrated their picker again in Stoneville in August 1936, with Mack Rust in the driver’s seat. “Pulled by a snorting Deere tractor, the machine moved back and forth …,” Time magazine reported. “Smooth wet spindles combed into the plants, caught the white tufts from open bolls. … Hour after hot hour the spindle-belts droned on like a swarm of bees. Bag after bellying bag poured out its load in a white cascade.” In one hour it picked 400 pounds, “as much as one average hand-picker could gather in four days.” The picked cotton still contained a fair amount of trash, and the machine left waste in the rows, but no one doubted that it worked.

Still, the nation was in no mood to embrace a new technology that promised to put millions of illiterate field hands out of work in the depths of the Depression. The Memphis Commercial Appeal ran a cartoon showing a worker dragging an empty cotton sack while the Rusts’ mechanical picker was being demonstrated. The Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News declared that “it should be driven right out of the cotton fields and sunk into the Mississippi River , together with its plans and specifications. Nothing could be more devastating to labor conditions in the South than a cotton-picking machine.” Congressman Edward Crump, the political boss of Memphis, urged the enactment of a law to keep it out of Tennessee. “I’m scared of the human consequences,” added Carl Bailey, the governor of Arkansas.

The Rusts shared these concerns. They were inclined toward socialism, and they proposed not to sell the machines outright but to lease them, and only to growers who would agree to pay a minimum wage, limit work hours, and forgo the use of child labor. The plan failed. The times were too hard, and planters felt they needed every possible advantage.

In addition, the Rusts’ machine still left much to be desired. Its spindles continued to accumulate the gummy deposits and stains that had vexed International Harvester, and it needed frequent attention from mechanics. The highly regarded Kiplinger Agricultural Letter reported that “its main weakness is that of other mechanical cotton pickers—the cotton it picks contains green leaf and trash.” Scientific American , surveying it and other machines being developed, predicted in 1938 that cotton picking wouldn’t be mechanized for another 25 or 50 years. And Newsweek pointed out that most cotton was grown on farms too small to afford such machines.

The Rusts pressed on. “Depressions can’t last forever,” said John. They and Clemmons built 10 machines as demonstration models; they sold two of them to the Soviet Union and traveled to Tashkent to teach farmers how to use them. They also made sales in Argentina and Australia, and went there as well. Returning home, they built more machines to be used under contract, but rainfall in the Delta was unusually heavy that year, and the machines sank into the mud. In 1940 the Rusts had to sell their shop equipment to stay afloat. Soon thereafter they couldn’t pay a state tax, and their company’s charter was revoked.

Mack then left John and took several machines with him to pick cotton under contract in California and Arizona, while John used two others to pick 140 bales on a friend’s plantation in Mississippi. But these efforts amounted to little more than extended field tests demonstrating how the machines could break down. “The spindle drive tracks wore out and got out of place,” John Rust later told Fortune . “The spindles would bend and hit the spindle guards. The slats weren’t right. I knew my machine wasn’t commercially feasible.” He was now 50 and had almost nothing to show for over 15 years of effort. He decided to “put the whole business in the shed.”

The Rusts had held dramatic demonstrations, but they still had no marketable product and no company to market it; International Harvester, for all its industrial power, continued to limp along with a feeble program of experiments and tests. Mechanization still seemed far in the future.

But then the Depression began to wane, and activity at International Harvester picked up. In 1940 Hagen reinvented his picking machine. His former designs had built it as a separate unit pulled by a tractor or set at the rear of a tractor. Now he had the tractor back down the cotton rows in reverse gear. This enabled the rear tractor wheels, widely enough spaced to avoid damaging the delicate plants, to go first, and the front wheel to stay out of the way until the cotton was picked. “The row of cotton plants pass through the picking throat of the machine first,” Hagen explained. “The cotton is picked before the plants contact any part of the tractor.” And so no cotton bolls were knocked to the ground before they could be gathered.

Field tests began during the 1941 picking season and became an annual occurrence. The company sent a caravan south, with a big truck carrying the machine and a pickup following with tools and spare parts. The picking started in late July, in southern Texas, and swung up into Arkansas and Mississippi. In 1942 it went so well that by December International Harvester’s chairman, Fowler McCormick, announced that he was ready for production: “We are certain that it is a commercial machine right now … our picker has been tested exhaustively, and we know it will pick cotton profitably.…”

With the nation now at war, workers were heading off to both the fighting and the Northern factories, and cotton fields faced manpower shortages. Growers turned to Mexican laborers and even prisoners of war to do the work, and sometimes their crops rotted in the fields. They started feeling more receptive to automation. Meanwhile John Rust’s fortunes began to rise. He and his wife, Thelma, had little left save a heavily mortgaged home in Memphis, but at her urging he took three months to redraw the designs for his machine’s most crucial parts. Cashing in some war bonds, he traveled to Washington to file new patent applications.

When he got there, he learned that representatives from the firm of Allis-Chalmers had been trying to get in touch with him, wanting to purchase rights to his patents and build experimental machines under his supervision. Allis put him on the payroll as a consultant and built six pickers from 1944 to 1945. International Harvester started pilot production too, finally realizing the goal Hagen had been pursuing back in the 1920s.

After the war, International Harvester built its Memphis works as the first factory dedicated to assembling picking machines. It opened in April 1948. Deere followed with a plant near Des Moines and quickly became a strong competitor. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the Ben Pearson Manufacturing Company, a manufacturer of archery equipment that wanted to move into a new field, started buildine cotton-oickine machines, and it too used John Rust as a consultant.

Picking cotton was the hardest part of raising the crop, but unskilled hands had plenty to do before the harvest too. They planted the seeds, removed unwanted seedlings to leave the survivors spaced at proper intervals, and chopped out weeds with hoes. As early as 1944, however, International Harvester was pointing the way to the end of that work, demonstrating the feasibility of the complete mechanization of cotton culture. That year a Mississippi plantation produced the first cotton grown and harvested entirely by machine, with no hand labor at any stage.

THE SEEDS WERE PLANTED BY A DEVICE THAT SPACED THEM evenly. Weed control was done with flamethrowers, applied after the young seedlings developed bark that could withstand the fire. A crop-duster sprayed defoliant to prepare the ripe cotton for picking. Then eight bright red picking machines roamed over the field, harvesting 62 bales in a single day.

The South now faced the prospect of fully mechanized cotton production—and with it massive technological unemployment. Yet the latter didn’t happen; the transition to full mechanization was gradual, giving people time to adjust. Field labor remained in demand, for hand-picked cotton still had the highest quality and commanded premium prices. Some growers used hand labor early in the season and switched to machines as prices fell later in the harvest. Field workers also continued to do weeding, for flame weeders couldn’t be used until the cotton plants were well along in their growth, by which time weeds would have grown too. Mechanized weeding required effective herbicides, which didn’t come along until the mid-1950s.

The mechanization of Southern agriculture ended up taking decades. As it progressed, dramatically increasing productivity, many workers left the land, and die South’s farms were consolidated into fewer but larger holdings. At the same time the demand for cotton fell off, as consumers turned to newer synthetic fabrics. Many growers switched their acreage to rice or soybeans, whose production also had been mechanized. Then, after 1980, demand for cotton rose again.

A single statistic summarizes the overarching change that took place: Within the three cotton states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the number of cotton farms fell by more than 99 percent between 1930 and 1997, from 600,000 to 5,000. In 1930 sharecropping and tenant farming were in their heyday, and the nation produced 14 million bales of cotton. Production dropped below 12 million bales in the 1970s but exceeded 19 million in 1997. By then very few cotton farmers were still in business, but those who remained were truly prosperous.

These decades of change coincided with the Great Migration, in which seven million people moved to the North between 1940 and 1970. Some historians have argued that they were pushed off the land by swelling unemployment and compelled to try anew in die chill winds of die Northern cities. Yet die wages of cotton-picking workers remained steady through the 1950s and into the 1960s, whereas these wages would have fallen sharply had there been a serious labor surplus. In truth, many migrants left the South eagerly, attracted by better jobs elsewhere.

Donald Holley, author of The Second Great Emancipation , concludes that “most of the migrants were not pushed out by mechanical cotton pickers; they were pulled out in a search for better economic opportunities. If they were pushed out at all, they were trying to escape the hard work and low pay associated with southern cotton fields.” In his book The Truly Disadvantaged , the sociologist William Julius Wilson denies that the sharecroppers of the South became the urban underclass of the North. Summarizing a substantial body of research, he declares that the evidence “consistently shows that southernborn blacks who have migrated to the urban North experience greater economic success in terms of employment rates, earnings, and [avoidance of] welfare dependency than do those urban blacks who were born in the North.”

Amid all these gradual trends, there nevertheless was at least one moment when change came swiftly. This was in February 1967, when an act of Congress extended the minimum wage to agricultural workers. At a stroke the wages of cotton pickers more than doubled to $1 an hour, and they rose two years later to $1.30. All at once most of them were priced out of the market. In Holley’s words, “the minimum wage killed the demand for hand labor in the Cotton South.”

By 1967 the imperatives of economics had brought the mechanization of Southern agriculture nearly to completion. Few hand laborers were left to be displaced, for most of them had already found other means of livelihood. The tyranny of King Cotton was now restrained by child-labor laws and by the broad availability of new opportunities. The mechanical cotton picker had played a crucial role in tliis transformation. The 1967 law in turn showed that the South was sufficiently prosperous to stand alongside the rest of the country. A somber legacy of poverty and ignorance belonged increasingly to the past.