Occasionally, we unsuspectingly begin a book and discover that it opens a door onto our own family’s story and explains something very personal. For southerners like me whose family destiny has been linked to cotton, this is a story that will jar you. At one level it is the story of an apparent murder in a small community-Sandersville, Georgia- in the 1920’s and the crushing economic conditions that fueled the desperate act.
This is an example of the kind of local history that is worth writing-a living, breathing example of how the tide of history can wash over and destroy people. My own family experienced these pressures and even today bear the scars of the terrible “Great Recession” of the early 1920’s of which Rawlings writes.
Rawlings comments on the boll weevil infestation which, in popular imagination, was the cause of the disaster that loomed in the post-World War I era. But he also explodes the myth of its catastrophic impact. Instead, he writes, Southerners in the cotton states were faced by far more menacing realities.
Unwilling or unable to diversify after the Civil War, southern political leaders contrived the political means to reestablish slavery by other names. “Jim Crow” laws and voting restrictions kept Blacks confined in pre-war patterns of control and the south descended into the suffocating strangle hold of tenant farming and share cropping . Cotton production with its demand for intensive, cheap labor was congruent with expectations by southerners that the pre-Civil War white political and economic control would prevail. It did.
War in Europe raised everyone’s expectations as well as cotton prices, and restored faith in a system bound to eventually fail. Rawlings describes how cotton became monetized-the equivalent of cash. Loans from local banks, extended on the strength of cotton prices, kept farms afloat from one planting season to the next.
But America was changing. Factories were rising. Midwestern cities were booming under the stimulus of recovering world markets and a new, consumer- driven economy demanded convenience, modernity, radios, telephones, automobiles and ready- made clothing. Stores and gas stations proliferated -and prices rose, rose for everyone it seemed. But the cost of credit also was rising and cotton prices were not keeping pace with inflation. Poorly regulated and under-capitalized banks failed in farm towns across the cotton belt.
My own grandfather had begun a tiny bank in Gough, Georgia, a railroad- inspired town where a main road (from Louisville to Waynesboro) crossed a new spur on the Georgia-Florida Railroad. In the years leading up to and including the Great War, Gough seemed to prosper- like nearby Sandersville, where Rawlings’ story is set. But the end of the war brought disaster. Not only did the banks in the cotton belt fail, so did the towns themselves.
This set off a mass migration. Sharecroppers and even landowners left for jobs in the industrialized north. Land values slumped; local governments could not collect taxes on abandoned lands. Land-rich planters became land-poor as farms brought little on the auction block and were now all but worthless.
Inflation had accomplished what the Civil War had not—it put an end to an outdated farming economy with its endless cycle of credit, tenancy and reliance on a commodity which was now being produced in great quantities in” third world” countries where wages were even lower. Textile- mill towns would face the same collapse in the two decades ahead.
Rawlings’ story is a rich revelation of the causes of the decline of Georgia’s small towns—a decline that continues. Unless they have managed to end up on an interstate highway. Or if they have a branch of the state university. Or they are a county seat. Some have survived as bedroom communities if they are close enough for commuters to work in a nearby city.
The automobile has also played a role in the decline of Georgia’s small towns. Once, cars brought people to town making rural life easier, but like the internet that seemed to promise us the joy of being able to live wherever we might choose, the automobile grew the cities and shrank the small towns. Often even the railroad tracks have been pulled up.
Tourism has brought energy to many small towns in north Georgia, especially along the four-lane roads north of Atlanta, but many small towns in the vastness of the lower two- thirds of the state continue to dry-up. So, Rawlings’ book, while describing a specific time and tragedy, has also sketched the road map showing the relentless pattern of technological and economic transformation that has seen much of the state all but abandoned
For anyone who has limited their reading about Georgia to its plantation era, or dotes on the Civil War, or escapes to the pleasantries of moss-and- live-oak coastal history, Rawlings’ book is an eyeopener. For one thing, it shows us why Erskine Caldwell’s world of Tobacco Road, along with those famous Depression-era photographs of dirt- poor sharecroppers came to define America’s stereotype of rural Georgia. And, thank goodness, Rawlings has pointed us to a deeper understanding and compassion for those who endured -and are enduring- the death of small -town Georgia.