Authors: David Halberstam
His own early designs featured a serrated or barbed spindle that would pull the cotton off. That, he finally decided after a long series of failures, was not the way to go. For the cotton seemed to obey its own laws and not the laws of man-made machines. It was not so much a machine that picked cotton as a machine that made a mess of cotton. Then one night in 1927, Rust lay in bed pondering his dilemma. There had to be, he was sure, some simple answer. Then he remembered his own experiences back in Texas picking cotton. In the morning when he had picked the bolls, his hands were still wet from the dew and the cotton had tended
to stick to his fingers.
He got out of bed, went downstairs, found a nail, wet it, and stuck it into a clump of cotton. The cotton stuck to the nail. He was stunned that it was all so simple. “I knew I had hold of something good,” he said years later. “I was so sure of it, I thought I’d be able to build a salable machine inside of five years.” Not everyone else was so confident. One hardware-store clerk who sold him parts asked him what he needed them for. When he explained, the clerk answered, “Good heavens, Rust. You can’t do that! Some of the biggest companies in the world have been working on that for years and they haven’t got anywhere yet. If they can’t build a cotton picker, what makes you think you can?” The big companies, Rust answered, were all going in the wrong direction. With that the clerk sold him the material. “But I still think you’re wasting your time,” he noted.
Rust had budgeted five years for the task, but it turned out to take much longer than that. As he worked on the machine, he survived on the kindness of friends and relatives (but always kept a
careful record of his debts). By the time his machine came to market, he had spent perhaps $200,000—but the mighty Harvester Co., his chief rival, had spent an estimated $5 million. He was always underfinanced; he was essentially a tinkerer, working out of his own garage. His one partner during this long, difficult search was his brother, Mack. Like many inventors, he was fiercely independent and wary of big corporations, which he was sure were corrupt. Though he could easily have sold his idea to a large company and seen his machine go to market more readily, he would not even consider the idea. A group of local businessmen once offered him $50,000 for a half interest in his invention, but he preferred to go it alone with his brother.
It was a long, hard journey from drawing board to production. The picker was, in fact, an engineer’s nightmare: a complicated and delicate machine that had to work on rugged terrain. The possibilities of things going wrong were endless. When the Rust machine first went to market in 1927, it contained some 25,000 parts—3,000 in the spindles alone. It worked well in theory, but it was not dependable in the field. Small parts constantly broke down, and if there had been too much rain, the early machines were so incredibly heavy that they sank in the mud. The sixth Rust prototype, completed in 1933, was the first significant success; it was shown at an agricultural station in Stoneville, Mississippi, and it picked more cotton in one hour than an ordinary worker could pick in a week. W. E. Ayres, the director of the station, called it “the missing link in the mechanical production of cotton.” With that the future was assured for someone to mass-produce a mechanical picker; by 1936 he had completed the prototype, and it was now just a matter of time. Ayres later told Rust, “I sincerely hope that you can market your machine shortly. Lincoln emancipated the Southern Negro. It remains for the cotton harvesting machine to emancipate the Southern cotton (tenant) farmer.”
Rust had finally succeeded—at the height of the Depression. Already, millions of men and women were out of work. Did anyone want a machine that would quite possibly create even more unemployment? E. H. Crump, the political boss of Memphis, talked of passing a law to make it illegal to produce the machine. The
Memphis Commercial-Appeal
ran a cartoon of a black field hand with an empty sack saying, “If it does my work—whose work am I going to do?” The
Jackson (Mississippi Daily) News
suggested that the machine be thrown in the Mississippi River.
By 1940, John Rust was desperate. He had the basics of a good
machine, but he still had bugs to work out. He was also broke: His home was mortgaged and he had been forced to sell his shop equipment to pay his debts. He, his wife, his brother, Mack, and his wife had all taken jobs to help pay for their very survival. “There was a long time there,” said G. E. Powell, who worked with Rust, “when he and his wife and his brother and his wife lived in this tiny apartment together, and they essentially lived on starvation wages.” Worst of all, it was rumored that Harvester had its machine down pat and was ready to go into production the minute the war was over. His brother, Mack, finally took off to customize cotton pickers in the Southwest, but at his wife’s urging, John Rust decided to give his machine one more shot: He sat down and for three months all he did was redraw the machine. He cashed his war bonds, went to Washington, and filed his new patents. At the same time Allis-Chalmers, a large company, decided that Rust’s old patents were feasible and was trying to contact him.
He sold Allis-Chalmers permission to use his patents, and the company in turn put him on contract as a consultant; during the war it built six machines for experimental use in the Delta. With the war over, Harvester was ready to go into production and by 1948 it was building a plant to manufacture the picker in Memphis, capital of the cotton belt. But Allis-Chalmers faced strikes and shortages of material after the war and was slower to go into production. When, in 1949, it finally did get going, it manufactured so few machines that it lost exclusive rights to Rust’s designs.
The cotton planters were ready for the arrival of the mechanical picker—rumors of which had been floating around for some twenty years. They saw it as the answer to their growing labor shortage. During the war, many crops had not been fully picked because there were not enough hands. Now the war was over, and to the growers’ shock, the manpower shortage still existed. In addition, the planters realized that they could no longer set the price of labor themselves, because of the growing number of job opportunities for blacks in the North. The cost of labor had tripled in just one decade: In 1940 the price for picking a hundred pounds of seed cotton was 62 cents; by 1945, it was $1.93, and what was worse, after the war it did not go down, as some planters had assumed it would. It kept going up, reaching $2.90 by 1948. At the same time they were suddenly competing with such synthetic fabrics as rayon, for the manufacturing of synthetics had been expedited by the wartime shortages, “
COTTON PICKERS, WHERE ARE YOU
?” read a headline in the
Memphis Press Scimitar
a year after the end of the war. The local director of the federal employment service was appalled because farmers were begging for pickers, even at $2.10 for a hundred pounds of cotton. “A good picker can average 300 or 400 pounds a day,” said Mrs. Clara Kitts. “A whole family can bring home lots of money. The weather has been warm and beautiful. There are lots of people idle. But still nobody comes out to pick. I don’t understand why.” In the days before the war, she added, her office sent out some 16,000 short-term pickers every day. Now that number was down to 3,000.
Worse, and this was something the planters spoke about privately, there were now attitude problems. The war, it was said locally, had ruined many of the black people, particularly the young men. They had become uppity. There were stories about black people sassing their white bosses, or just walking off their jobs one day and never showing up again. The future lay, everyone seemed to agree, with the new machines. Some planters had actually seen demonstrations. In addition, everyone knew Harvester had built a factory in Memphis after the war—a sure sign of confidence. That showed that the company was making a commitment. By 1948 Harvester was in production, turning out 1,000 machines annually, priced at $7,600 (mounted on a tractor)—but it was tax deductible. It was the 1948 crop, more than anything, that convinced the farmers to go mechanical. That had been a particularly good crop, but almost everyone was having trouble getting it picked. By the end of the year some farmers on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi suggested that the Ben Pearson company, which made archery equipment in Pine Bluff, go into the manufacture of cotton pickers. They arranged for Carl Hahn, the head of Pearson, to attend a meeting of planters in January 1949. One of them had seen a demonstration of one of Rust’s machines, and the machine was just waiting for Hahn to take a look. Would Pearson build it, they asked? Hahn thought it a good risk and promised to take it on, if the farmers could guarantee him fifty orders, noncancellable, with $1,000 of the full $3,750 price down. Everyone was enthusiastic, and he quickly raised the necessary money from the men present. By July 1949, they had their first machines out.
It was not exactly a perfect machine, and in that first year, it proved to be better picking cotton in the Southwest and California, because the cotton fields there were irrigated; that meant an easier place to work than the rich, often muddy Delta land. The stress on the machine in the Delta was far greater; in some cases the Pearson
company ended up giving the $1,000 down payment back to the Arkansas farmers and selling the machine out West. Still, of the one hundred machines the Pearson company made that year, ninety-nine were sold. Within eighteen months the Pearson people, working with Rust, improved the spindle on the Rust machine so that it could work the rougher Delta farms.
Billy Pearson grew up in Tallahatchie County and went off to the University of North Carolina, thinking perhaps he would be a lawyer. But his uncle died in 1945 when he was twenty-three, and he came back to take over the family place: 1,500 acres of fertile alluvial soil. The Rainbow Plantation, it was called, because it was shaped like a rainbow. Pearson had never really intended to be a cotton planter, but in later years, he decided that everyone in life has some form of predestination that dictates how his or her life will be spent, and he had been chosen to be a cotton farmer. His mother’s family, the Simpsons, had been in the Delta since the latter part of the nineteenth century: His maternal grandfather, William Marion Simpson, had arrived without money or land but was a shrewd businessman. Some twenty-five years after he arrived in the Delta, he found a partner and bought the Rainbow Plantation, then a handsome spread of 2,300 acres. Those were boom years for agriculture in the Delta; the total price even then was $300,000 with a down payment of $75,000. Within five years, as the price of cotton remained stable, Simpson and his partner had wiped out their indebtedness, at which point they split the land evenly and formed separate plantations. By the mid-twenties, times had become very hard. The price of cotton began an uninterrupted decline, and each spring William Simpson would announce, “Well, the only thing I can do this year is lose some more money.” For almost a decade the Simpsons lived well but accumulated heavy debts, and William Simpson’s considerable shrewdness was required to keep his spread going—essentially, he traded parcels of land against its own indebtedness. By the time cotton farming began to be viable again, at the beginning of World War Two, the plantation had shrunk considerably, from 3,500 acres down to 1,800.
As soon as Pearson returned from the war, he heard about the imminent arrival of the mechanical pickers. In fact, when he took over the family place, he believed machines were the future, and most of the other men his age felt the same way. It was only the older men who looked at the price of the machines—about eight thousand
dollars in all, with the tractor—and thought they themselves were so old and had been around so long that there was no point in changing at this late date. Instead, they would do as they had always done. But the younger men thought of the future, and the future was clearly in the machines. The labor shortages were so acute there had even been some stealing of hands among planters desperate to get their cotton in—a practice so frowned on by most Delta planters that it would have been unthinkable in the past. Pearson bought his first machine, a Harvester, in 1948. He decided on a one-row machine because the spindle seemed stronger, and there was already a good deal of talk about spindle problems with the Rust machines. The problem with the Harvester was that it picked dirty cotton—that is, it pulled in more trash than either the Rust machine or hand labor did: Because the cotton gins were not yet sophisticated enough to separate the trash, Pearson and others like him had to sell their cotton at a discount price, roughly one third off.
Delta planters knew they had only a brief window of time in which to pick their cotton, from the instant it was mature, in late September, to around October 20th, when the rains always came—about four weeks. Pearson’s one-row picker could pick somewhere between 150 and 175 acres in the time allotted, so eventually he went to two-row machines, which could do about 350 acres. A decade later, he had as many as three or four machines on the place. Pearson had only the vaguest sense of the great black migration that was taking place: He was so preoccupied with his cotton that he had not stopped to think about the larger social implications.
From the time that he had come back from the war, he had employed more people than he had needed, and he had watched the migration taking place as people no longer able to make an acceptable living opted to go north, often in the middle of the night without even a farewell. It was a terrible time for these men and their families, he realized; they existed on the edge of solvency and when they got behind and borrowed, as they regularly did, they could rarely climb out of debt. He thought often about one family whose journey had reflected the general hardship of black field hands caught by a dying agricultural way of life. The husband had silently gone off to Detroit one night, leaving behind a wife and seven children. A few months later the rest of the family departed. What shocked Pearson was the manner of their departure: One winter night a pickup truck had shown up and the entire family got in the open back and drove to Detroit in the cold. It was, Pearson thought later, not unlike Eliza going across the ice.