““It was getting to be the 1930s. It was a hurting time, and the farm people almost couldn't give the cotton away. The value of what they harvested, the worth of their hard labor and the measure of their days, plummeted after the crash of 1929. A pound of cotton had gone for 30 cents on the open market in the mid-1920s and for nearly 17 cents in the late 1920s. By 1931, the planters couldn't get six cents for that same pound of cotton. The people of New York and Boston were not ordering up new seersucker suits and cotton pillowcases like they did just a few years before. The cotton ripened in the bud, but there was nobody to buy it. So the boss men went without new Model T Fords. The sharecroppers went without shoes.””
