The tobacco harvest of 1973 in Henry County, Kentucky, was not all that different from the tobacco harvest decades earlier. The friends and neighbors of Owen and Loyce Flood came over to help the harvest, to swap work under the late summer heat, using tomahawks to cut row after row of the plant, jabbing them onto a spear and piling the spears on wagons to haul to the barn. Wendell Berry, a friend of the Floods who helped at that harvest, wrote that a “generally recognized standard of workmanship, and a general respect for it and pride in it, was built into the work.”
Fifty years later, the model of small farms, using the labor of family and friends, has yielded to one of large, plantation-like farms using immigrant labor. What happened?
According to the sociologist George Ritzer, the modern societies are being ceaselessly pushed towards rationalization or McDonaldization. This is a process that leads to an increasingly sterile and monotonous world, much like a fast food chain. It has four dimensions:
- Efficiency: Things must be done quickly and productively.
- Calculability: More is always better, and we must precisely measure it all.
- Predictability: Products and experiences should be the same, always and everywhere.
- Control: Managers, set processes, and non-human technologies determine what workers and citizens do.
A very brief history of tobacco in the U.S.
Tobacco was the first profitable crop for English colonists in America, being introduced in 1610 in Jamestown. Its cultivation in 17th century Virginia and Maryland initially relied on indentured servants. Slavery came to be more important to the labor-intensive crop in the 18th century, helping to support a planter aristocracy including the likes of Washington and Jefferson, but there were also smallholders.
Following the abolition of slavery, the plantations were broken up. There were many sharecroppers, but tobacco came to be defined by as a stronghold of small, independent farms. In 1900, 54% of farms were owner-operated. In 1920, 40% even of Black tobacco farmers in Orange County and a majority in Forsyth County owned their own farms.
Not all was well, though. Under James Buchanan Duke, American Tobacco became a monopsony that drove the price of tobacco leaves to disastrously low levels, bankrupting many farmers. This caused a violent conflict known as the Black Patch Wars in western Kentucky and Tennessee in which a group called the Night Riders raided towns and terrorized non-compliant farmers to try to get higher prices. Seen here, Kentucky farmers defend their product from Night Riders.
While American Tobacco was eventually broken up under Sherman Anti-Trust, disaster struck again during the Depression. A pound in the 1932 crop was worth 1/4 the 1918-1928 average. 2 in 3 Nash County farms were foreclosed. The Roosevelt Administration had to do something, and in the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act set up a program of production caps and price floors that would define tobacco growing for the rest of the century.
From 1938 through the 70s, tobacco was able to stave off rationalization to a great extent due to government support and rising yields due to mechanization and fertilizer. Farms stayed small: the average farmer planted just 3.2 acres of tobacco in 1969. Labor was still often done by a family or by swapping work with other farmers. Tobacco in this era may have been the closest any American way of life came to the Jeffersonian ideal of agrarianism.
As competition from China and equatorial countries increased in the 80s and 90s, American growers felt the pressure. Farmers started hiring immigrants, legal and illegal, to do most of the work on remaining farms. Companies turned against subsidies, and they were abolished in 2004. Since then, the number of farms has plummeted, the size of farms exploded, and the way of life of the small tobacco farmer has effectively ended.
Control has shifted throughout tobacco's history
The American legal system has been used as a non-human technology to control workers throughout tobacco's history..
- Chattel slavery was obviously the most total control that growers could have over workers, and was very profitable.
- But the U.S. eventually decided that slavery was not acceptable. For sharecroppers and smallholders, each family largely determined how they would work.
- American Tobacco under James Buchanan Duke amassed a great deal of power over prices, enough to leave thousands of families destitute. Again, the political process decided that was unacceptable and busted the trust.
- As global pressures increased, the U.S. created the H-2A visa system to get cheap migrant labor. It is nowhere near as vicious and inhumane a system as slavery, but still: we have created a new legal system in which owners get other people to work the fields, and they have a different legal status, are seen as racially different, and get poorer living conditions.
Throughout tobacco's history, control has swung as political decisions change legal systems. Tobacco's smallholder way of life was protected by government intervention, which was not inevitable. This leads to the conclusion: rationalization is a potent force, but it is not inevitable: we, though political processes, cultural decisions etc. have the power to determine what our society will look like. We must make those decisions wisely.
The drive for efficiency has destroyed tobacco's old way of life
"Everybody simply understood: ‘When I need them again, they’ll come. When they need me, I’ll go.' ... It was a good way to get work done. It was a good way to live." - Wendell Berry, on the 1973 harvest
The small farmers, relying on the labor of family and friends, the government support, and limited foreign competition, could not survive as conditions changed in the 80s and 90s. Consider the following graphs: as international competition became ingrained, the number of farms declined. When government support ended in 2004, the average farm size exploded as the small farmers folded.
“With a sort of wonder, and some regret, [tobacco farmers realize] that while our work was going on, powerful forces were at play that would change the scene and make ‘history’ of those lived days, which were enriched to us by their resemblance to earlier days” - Berry
The small family tobacco farm disappeared in the face of foreign competition and declining government support. This illustrates a crucial fact, though one that is often overlooked: rationalization is a global phenomenon that one must pay attention to the entire global market to understand.
Irrationalities
Ultimately, the entire tobacco industry creates a product that is the country’s largest source of preventable death, killing about 480,000 Americans per year.
There has been animosity between farmers and anti-smoking advocates, with the farmers quick to distance themselves from the negative effects of smoking. But the small farms may have never existed if their product hadn't been addictive. Wrote one historian, “[p]rice supports and parity worked with tobacco because the product was addictive” (Wickenden).
To the extent that rationalization has increased production by ending the small family farm, the end result has been to create more of a product that kills people. Yes, the world got a cheaper product, but do we want that?
In a report entitled “Close to Slavery,” the Southern Poverty Law Center notes that even those legally farming under H-2A visas often have merely “theoretical rights” that “exist mainly on paper”. Migrants often live in trailers with 30 to 40 people for each bathroom and are poisoned by proximity to pesticides in the scorching summer heat
Illegal child labor is widespread in the tobacco industry. Children often work 50 to 60 hours a week, with one report finding that nearly three-quarters of them suffer from serious medical symptoms that are seemingly the result of nicotine poisoning.
Migrant labor, legal and illegal, is cheaper for farmers, and it's better wages than they would get in their countries of origin. Still, is it right that tobacco has gone from family farms to this?
Conclusion
The story of tobacco farming demonstrates that rationalization is a powerful force, but political and social choices are still important. Even as the rest of agriculture rapidly rationalized, tobacco farming remained a small family affair for six decades. Business leaders, politicians, and citizens have power to design society. We should use it well.
References: quotes, paraphrases, statistics
- Bauer, M. (2013, February). Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States. Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved April 19, 2023, from https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/d6_legacy_files/downloads/Close_to_Slavery.pdf
- Bennett, E. (2014). When Tobacco Was King: Families, Farm Labor, and Federal Policy in the Piedmont. University Press of Florida.
- Benson, P. (2012). Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, migrant workers, and the changing face of a global industry. Princeton University Press.
- Capehart, T. (2004, November). Trends in U.S. Tobacco Farming. USDA Economic Research Service. Retrieved April 17, 2023, from https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/outlooks/39463/48597_tbs25702.pdf?v=4152
- Hall, James Baker, and Wendell Berry. Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy. The University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
- Health effects of tobacco use. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2022, March 23). Retrieved April 17, 2023, from https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/public-health-education/health-effects-tobacco-use#References
- Jacobstein, Meyer. The Tobacco Industry in the United States. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1907.
- National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2017 Census of Agriculture — Summary and State Data (2019). United States Department of Agriculture. Retrieved February 22, 2023, from https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2017/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/usv1.pdf
- Robert, Joseph C. The Story of Tobacco in America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.
- Tobacco production, 1961 to 2021. (2023, February 22). Retrieved April 10, 2023, from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tobacco-production?tab=chart&country=USA~BRA~IND~CHN
- Wickenden, D. (2022, February 21). Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age. New Yorker. Retrieved April 17, 2023, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/wendell-berrys-advice-for-a-cataclysmic-age.
- Wurth, Margaret, and Jane Buchanan. “Tobacco's Hidden Children: Hazardous Child Labor in United States Tobacco Farming.” Human Rights Watch, May 2014, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us0514_UploadNewNew.pdf.
Image Credits
- Dorothea Lange. Topping Tobacco, Shoofly, North Carolina. https://picryl.com/media/topping-tobacco-shoofly-north-carolina
- Wikimedia Commons. "Cheeseburgers on Grill." https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr_XP-ert_489502412--Cheeseburgers_on_grill.jpg
- Keith Rocco. "Jamestown, 1630s: Harvey's Industrial Enclave." https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery-item.htm?pg=0&id=CAF2CFC5-155D-451F-67A262E25F088CC7&gid=CAF0E659-155D-451F-67145E627F75F18A
- The Archive Project. "A small group of farmers protect their crop in Southwest Kentucky around 1906." https://archiveproject.com/the-black-patch-wars-kentucky-tennesee-dark-tobacco-1904-1910
- Mary Post Walcott. "Tobacco auction in warehouse in Danville, Virginia, where many Caswell County farmers sell their tobacco at auction." https://picryl.com/media/tobacco-auction-in-warehouse-in-danville-virginia-where-many-caswell-county
- North Carolina State University Archives Photograph Collection. "Tractor pulling experimental tobacco transplanter." https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/ua023_007-007-bx0024-001-010#?c=&m=&cv=&xywh=-1617%2C0%2C8466%2C3683
- Kipp Teague. "Tobacco Field in Pittsylvania County, Virginia." https://www.worldhistory.org/image/13400/tobacco-field/
Credits:
Created with images by Condor 36 - "Aerial view of houses in typical home community" • PiyawatNandeenoparit - "View of young green tobacco plant in field" • Photographee.eu - "Sad depressed woman" • F Armstrong Photo - "Migrant Workers picking strawberries in a Field"