Wo Plumbing & for Negroes

WE Americans give a staggering amount of free advice and resources to the world’s poorer nations. That our efforts to rebuild less fortunate societies into facsimiles of our own are often terminated by military coups or Communist revolutions is an ever-increasing source of bewilderment and frustration. In re-examining our foreign-aid program we should consider the experience we have accumulated in trying unsuccessfully to solve the problems of the rural South. It is no accident that the most widespread and degrading rural poverty in the United States is found in the segregationist Deep South. The Ames Plantation in west Tennessee is a case in point.

In 1950 Julia Ames, the widow of a wealthy New England manufacturer, died, leaving a run-down twenty-thousand-acre cotton plantation and a million-dollar endowment in trust to the University of Tennessee to be used for scientific and educational purposes. For years a group of farm specialists from the university worked and schemed to transform the estate’s poverty-stricken Negro and white sharecroppers into a community of prosperous small farmers. Their failure illustrates in an American setting the frustrations confronting the people who administer our foreign-aid program.

Although the University of Tennessee is located in Knoxville, where there are few Negroes and school integration has already begun, the Ames Plantation lies in Hardeman and Fayette counties in a section where 70 percent of the population is Negro. The Democratic primary was still advertised as “all-white” in the local newspaper until the FBI arrived on the scene in 1960. Cotton is the chief crop, and small oneor two-mule tenant farms predominate.

In Fayette County everyone is expected to keep his appointed place. Not long ago a white man from Memphis, who was trying to sell wall board in Somerville, the county seat, had the misfortune of being overheard when he addressed a Negro preacher as “Mr.” on the phone, and of being observed through the church window when he closed the deal with a handshake. He spent several hours in jail before the judge released him with a warning not to be caught in the county again.

It is not often necessary for the small group of landowners and politicians who run the county to resort to the sheriff. Fear, paternalism, and economic controls are usually sufficient to prevent trouble. In fact, the traditional order is firmly cemented by financial obligations that are practically impossible to liquidate, and a few landowners still consider interest from sharecroppers’ loans as their chief source of profit along with sales from the plantation commissary. This is made easier by the fact that explicit written contracts are a rarity between croppers and landlords; a prudent Negro would never even consider questioning his “boss man” about his cotton settlement at the end of the year.

THE AMES PLANTATION

Hobart Ames, an enthusiastic quail hunter, acquired his Fayette and Hardeman county holdings gradually between 1900 and his death in the 1940s. During his lifetime the plantation resembled other now famous Southern estates which have become weekend refuges for tired industrialists. Plantation headquarters was a remodeled antebellum mansion decorated with garish scenes of the chase. There Mr. Ames entertained with the help of a staff of servants who accompanied him on his annual migration south, and with a large force of local retainers. A cotton gin and a herd of pure black Aberdeen Angus cattle supplemented the dogs and horses. Aside from the mansion the best buildings on the place were the brick stables, the kennels (one of the few buildings in the county with central heating), and the cattle barns. As one old hand remarked, “If you’re going to be black around here, you better be a cow.” Deceased dogs and horses shared a well-kept cemetery, and their concrete tombstones are much more durable than the wooden slabs which mark the graves in the Negro burying ground back of Jones Chapel.

In his time Mr. Ames saw the number of small tenant farms on his estate decrease by two thirds, leaving much idle land. The University of Tennessee inherited a plantation whose cropland, interspersed with woods and often cut by huge raw red gullies, continued to be cultivated by some one hundred renters, croppers, and wage hands, most of them Negro. They lived in ancient dilapidated one-room or two-room cabins made of hand-hewn logs, drew water by hand from undependable shallow wells, and boiled the family wash in black iron kettles in the backyard.

Julia Ames’s will was a complicated one. Although she left the plantation for the “exclusive use” of the university, she asked that sixty-year-old Reuben Scott be kept on as manager. She also specified that the National Bird-Dog Field Trials should continue to be held annually on the plantation. She appointed as self-perpetuating trustees of the Ames Foundation the Old Colony Trust Company of Boston and a cousin who had fond memories of hunting trips to the plantation and wished to preserve its atmosphere. For the most part, he was content to leave decisions to the reputable Old Colony Trust Company.

At first, neither the Ames Foundation nor the university had much idea of what to do with the bequest. The foundation trustees, wary of Southern colleges and with little understanding of agricultural research and education, thought chiefly of conserving their capital and avoiding criticism. At the university nearly every official and department head had a different idea of how to use the windfall of $1 million and 20,000 acres. Both parties realized, however, that the federal authorities had to be convinced that a scientific and educational program really did exist or the endowment would soon be eaten away by inheritance and other taxes.

The Ames estate continued to be run in the traditional manner long after the university entered the scene. The plantation bell still tolled six days a week to summon field hands to work at sunup and to tell them when to quit at dusk. Steady workers continued to earn less than $20 for a work week that sometimes stretched beyond seventy hours. In Fayette and Hardeman counties all schools open in August so that they can close in October, when every available person is needed for cotton picking. In other seasons it is sometimes hard to keep people busy, and it was not uncommon to see gangs of Ames Negroes sowing pasture by hand even as late as 1958.

From the beginning, the foundation trustees were liberal in advancing funds to build up the plantation’s traditional cotton and cattle enterprises under the management of Reuben Scott, Mr. Ames’s old manager, who was still actively resisting the changeover from mules to tractors because he thought it was bad for the cotton. The vocational agriculture teacher of a local high school, James Brvan, a loud-spoken segregationist, Sunday school superintendent, and ex-army training officer, was hired to assist him. Mr. Jimmy knew the plantation would eventually have to adopt more modern farming methods — the official audit showed that operating losses had risen to more than $75,000 annually after 1952. But he saw no reason for this to interfere with customary landlord-tenant or Negro-white relationships.

At the university’s insistence a large pedigreedhog unit was eventually installed and operated under university supervision, a college cattle expert arrived to help turn the prize Angus show herd into a paying proposition, and Bryan was urged to clear new land for corn and pasture and to build numerous farm ponds. As the plantation’s operations grew in size and complexity between 1952 and 1958, new machinery broke down with alarming frequency, corn disappeared, and costs increased spectacularly. Scott and Bryan complained that their Negro help soon wrecked new machinery, but one three-dollar-a-day tractor driver remarked, “I know what people doing my kind of work get paid in other places, and I give the boss man all he pays me for.” Conflicts between university planners and the management had to be settled by frantic triangular telephone calls between Boston, Knoxville, and Fayette County.

A visitor who had studied the management of early Russian collective farms found striking parallels with Ames. A less sophisticated local observer remarked that the central plantation operation reminded him of the Shelby County Penal Farm near Memphis.

THE LAND-REFORM PROPOSAL

During this period the foundation trustees were much more reticent when it came to advancing funds for anything that smacked of social experiment, partly because of innate caution and partly because managers Scott and Bryan, along with the foundation’s Memphis attorney and a good many other west Tennesseans, were both tenacious and effective in opposing social change.

In 1953 the university had finally delegated responsibility for preparing a research and educational program for the plantation to its agricultural experiment station deputy director, John Ewing, an east Tennessean who had recently returned from studying economics at Harvard under the direction of the late Professor John D. Black. Ewing and Professor Black advanced a plan which would give the plantation’s Negro and white sharecroppers credit and technical advice and thereby help them enlarge and diversify their small farms and raise their incomes. Black had advised many foreign governments on their development problems, and for him to recommend “land reform” in a quasifeudal context such as this was almost a reflex action.

This plan to turn impoverished sharecroppers into prosperous family farmers like those common in the Northeast and Midwest was gingerly accepted by both university and foundation trustees. It had an idealistic tinge which would help in pressing their case for tax exemption, but all in all their acceptance resembled nothing more than the tepid espousal by Latin-American governments of reforms in order to receive Alliance for Progress aid.

Ewing began cautiously. Four years after Mrs. Ames’s death he asked me to begin a forestry program on the plantation and surreptitiously to help develop the land-reform project. Not long after this, I homas Whatley, a Southern farm economist and veteran of the Farm Security Administration, joined me in Fayette County. Like so many AID and Peace Corps technicians abroad, we found our task immensely complicated by the fact that we had to work through the local power structure. Scott and Bryan and their friends found the racial tensions of Fayette County ideal for their purpose of preserving the Old South.

THE PERILS OF MODERN PLUMBING

In 1955 the Old Colony Trust finally agreed to put up $50,000 for one family-size model farm on which the university could demonstrate modern agricultural practices. This was not the idea Professor Black had proposed, as it placed more emphasis on show and machinery than on the practical steps other sharecroppers could take to change over gradually to more modern diversified farming. Nevertheless, a 310-acre tract was set aside for a new corn, hog, and cotton farm.

Bryan replaced the two previous tenant families with a white farmer brought in from another part of the county and a Negro helper from the plantation. The hired hand’s house “should be set back where he won’t be out on the road with the white man,” advised Bryan, warning that it would be a mistake to paint the Negro’s house or to put running water and a bath in it. (Few of Fayette County’s white tenants had yet acquired such conveniences.) Acting cautiously, the university struck the bathroom out of the house plans, but when they were sent to Boston, the Old Colony’s architect restored it.

In the fall, when the Boston trustees visited the new farm with several university trustees, the new crops, pasture, and livestock barns, and the farmer’s and hired man’s increased incomes went almost unnoticed because of the controversy caused by the modern plumbing. The Old Colony bankers returned to Boston wondering whether the university might not lead them into serious trouble if it succeeded in establishing prosperous Negro-operated farms.

Later results on the demonstration farm were impressive. Production more than doubled in two years. Although the previous tenants had divided a cash income of less than $1200 between them, the demonstration farmer and his hired man together pocketed some $3800, and the foundation’s returns in rent and interest climbed to four times their previous level of $600. But socially, the modern plumbing remained a problem.

WAGES AND WHITE SUPREMACY

Meanwhile the forestry program got off to an auspicious start. Not only could I show a profit from harvesting some of Mr. Ames’s old timber, but I was able to begin several research projects and to bring in forestry students. With an eye to improving the ruinous housing on the plantation, I installed a sawmill to convert low-grade timber into lumber and to give off-season employment. In the woods and sawmill, I introduced such innovations as hourly wages, the fifty-hour week, and piece rates. I continually agitated behind the scenes for the professor’s land reform. As was to be expected, Scott and Bryan complained that the shorter hours and extra pay for extra work would soon ruin the “hands.”

The White Citizens Councils had appeared in nearly every community in the wake of the Supreme Court’s school decision. The councils are pledged to use economic and other pressures to maintain the color line. They are organized on a county basis under the direction of boards whose identity is supposedly a well-kept secret, and each ordinary member knows only the representatives appointed to his board from his district. Members are urged to inform the district chairman of any suspicious activities by either whites or Negroes. The county directors hear charges, pass judgment, and decree punishment.

Although few try, a solid citizen can outbluff the council. When one popular farmer with outspoken views on the movement’s totalitarian methods refused to join, he was warned to pay his dollar or face the loss of credit and the refusal of the local gin to take his cotton. He ignored the council, readily found credit elsewhere, and got his cotton ginned in nearby Mississippi. Rather than press the issue and lose business, the council quietly dropped the matter. A less substantial member of the community, on the other hand, can be quickly ruined, as an unpopular local café owner discovered when he incurred council displeasure and was jailed for cohabitation with his Negro mistress.

The White Citizens Council of Fayette County did not long remain silent about what was happening at the Ames Plantation. Soon after the plumbing incident and the initiation of incentive wage payments in the forestry program, I was summoned to the office of the foundation’s legal adviser, a Memphis attorney who had once worked for Huey Long. There I was informed in a fatherly manner that the foundation trustees were disturbed over reports that the Citizens Council objected to my personal standards in race relations. Three charges had been brought against me: that I had addressed Negroes as Mr. and Mrs., that my wife had allowed her Negro maid to use the shower, and that I had discussed integration problems with a Negro. The same week university trustees received complaints from west Tennessee that I had been working for the NAACP with a Negro agricultural extension agent (whom I had never met). Friends in the Citizens Council later confirmed that the charges had all originated with Scott and Bryan.

My brush with the Citizens Council had its desired effect on the Ames trustees in Boston. The Old Colony vice president in charge of the plantation account wrote: “I heard plenty of criticism about our insistence that a tenant house . . . contain a bath-room. . . . We have got to comport ourselves with the utmost discretion . . . socially we must move with the people.”

According to Manager Scott’s request, the Boston trustees later lowered forestry wages and lengthened the workdays to conform with those prevailing for plantation labor; incentive payments and similar innovations were out. Accepting it philosophically when the efficiency of the forestry crew fell by about a third, the Old Colony officials wrote to Ewing at the university suggesting that if this were detrimental to the research program, the figures could be adjusted to reflect the change in working conditions.

I was learning something that many of our foreign-aid administrators discovered long ago: costly investments in buildings, machinery, and equipment are eagerly sought and granted even when they promise to be white elephants. Changes that imply altered social relationships, on the contrary, are bitterly resisted no matter how attractive their economic prospects.

FAILURE THROUGH SUCCESS

While the race issue had been used successfully to slow down the program to help the plantation’s sharecroppers, it had not stopped it completely. All along, Ewing, Whatley, and I had gone ahead with plans to change the leases on several tenant farms and had even hired a Mississippi-trained agricultural agent to work with us. In early 1956 we asked the foundation to advance some capital for modest improvements on tenant farms — such as buying fertilizer and cattle. The fact that the large, traditionally organized plantation operations continued to lose money in spite of heavy investments from the trust fund seemed to reinforce Ewing’s case for a new approach.

The university had located its swine project in a big pasture next to the traditional starting point for the morning bird-dog field-trial course. The following year Scott routed the first twenty minutes of the course down a narrow lane along which eager trainers, dog owners, would-be gentry, and bootleggers rode their horses and mules following the dogs while hundreds of curious hogs gazed through the fence at them. Shortly afterward an article appeared in the national field-trial magazine protesting the university’s land improvements as violating the spirit of Mrs. Ames’s will by ruining the quail hunting. The trustees, who were as sensitive to criticism from wealthy dog owners as they were to racial incidents, prohibited land improvements on the tenant farms touched by the ten-mile course, a restriction which in effect ruled out the possibility of real progress for all but a handful of tenants. Not until 1956 did the foundation finally agree to reform the leasing agreements for five of the tenant farms well off the field-trial course and to advance $5000 for the tenant experiment.

The choice of suitable tenants for the new program was not helped by the fact that most of the Negroes who showed initiative were considered “uppity” and untrustworthy. An ambitious, hardworking Negro with eight children, who had shown business ability and was endowed with a high diplomatic sense that had kept him in Mr. Scott’s good graces, was given the job of developing a new hog and strawberry farm. The other Negro chosen to grow cotton, corn, and hogs was a part-time preacher who owed his good luck mostly to the fact that his cotton patch was off the field-trial course. The two plantation whites selected were long-term residents, practically the only ones available not already occupied as overseers. A white outsider with no special qualifications was brought in to run the new dairy farm. Having completed about six years of primary schooling, the operators had an educational level only slightly better than that of the typical Ames tenant.

In 1957, with the help of Ewing’s group, these farmers rented modern equipment, bought additional fertilizer and livestock, and began to operate diversified farms. No one wanted another bathroom incident, and new housing for the Negro operators was cautiously deferred.

To almost everyone’s surprise, the five new farms were spectacularly successful. Tenant-family incomes, after costs and rent were deducted, soared to $1700, three times as high as previous earnings, even though 1957 had been a poor crop season. As the new leases called for sharing profits in proportion to each party’s contribution, the foundation also benefited handsomely; its return on the new investment was well over 25 percent.

A local banker and the county’s federally chartered Production Credit Association offered to help finance new tenant operators in future years, and the county newspaper praised the university’s conservative and realistic approach in a front-page editorial. In view of all this, Ewing and his associates optimistically asked the foundation for permission to rewrite the leases of additional tenant farms in 1958, incorporating them into the family-farm program.

Traditional social systems are not so easily changed, however. Both the foundation and the university trustees were far more concerned with criticisms on the race issue and from the field-trial association than with the prospects of profitably improving more tenant farms. They not only refused expansion of the controversial reform program, pleading a shortage of funds —although money was readily found for more conventional expenditures such as the dog kennels; they also turned down Ewing’s proposal that the high interest rate customarily collected on tenant advances (10 percent for the crop season, usually amounting to more than 25 percent annually) be lowered in compliance with state usury laws. This legal dilemma was solved by attributing the difference to costs of supervision, as was done on many other west Tennessee plantations.

The failure to get support for an expanded tenant-farm reform program in 1958 marked the end of the university’s efforts to create Negrooperated family farms. Although three more improved tenant units were created later, whites from outside were brought in to operate them. Citizens Council members boasted that the two Negro families benefiting from the family-farm program in 1958 left the Ames place, while new white tenants were brought in to replace them.

The number of Negroes on the plantation is now only a fraction of what it was at Mrs. Ames’s death. The major portion of the plantation’s cotton allotment has been transferred to the central unit and to the white tenants. While the proportion of Negroes to whites has declined substantially on the plantation, in the rest of Fayette County this ratio has been practically constant since 1950.

The foundation takes pride in pointing out how much land has been improved and in showing the newly fenced pastures, the cornfields, the prize hogs and cattle, the new cotton varieties now mechanically harvested, and the thousands of acres of young pine trees that have been planted. Like numerous costly pilot projects carried out abroad with United States aid, the Ames Plantation makes a good showplace for visiting dignitaries.

The real social problems, as so often happens, have been swept under the rug. The exodus of Negroes from the Ames Plantation is hardly a solution which will engender better racial feelings; nor is it easily duplicated over wide areas, being somewhat reminiscent of antebellum projects to solve the slavery issue by repatriating people to Africa.

Negro leaders in Fayette County, like popular leaders elsewhere, are coming more and more to believe that the best way to advance their cause is through organized pressure and protest. On the other hand, most Ames Plantation Negroes, and many other recipients of well-intentioned aid, might agree with Thoreau, who wrote: “If I knew . . . a man . . . was coming to do me good I should run for my life.”