THE POOR WHITE The broad and beautiful Southland is peopled by about thirty million human beings (26,000,000 in 1900), who constitute the “South” as a community conscious of a life separate in many respects from that of the North. What is there in these thirty millions which sets them apart? First of all is the sharp division into two races—two thirds of the people Whites and one third Negroes, which in uncounted open and obscure ways makes the South unlike any other country in the world. In the second place account must be taken of the subdivision of the white people into social and economic classes—a division common in all lands, but peculiar in the South because of the relations of the strata to each other. An analysis of the elements of white population may begin with the less prosperous and progressive portion commonly called the Poor Whites. As used in the South the term means lowlanders; and it is necessary to set off for separate treatment the mountaineers, who are, if not typical Southerners, at least unlike anything in the North. No other inhabitants of the United States are so near the eighteenth century as the people to whom an observer has given the name of “Our contemporary ancestors.” For nowhere else in the United States is there a distinct mountain people. The New England mountaineers live The mountains and their inhabitants are a numerous and significant part of the population in all the upper tier of the Southern States, including Oklahoma; and though they are much less numerous in the lower South, they furnish a large body of voters, and their slow progress is in itself a difficult problem. The Appalachian range, from Canada to Alabama, is made up of belts of parallel ridges; in a few places, such as Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, they rise above 6,000 feet, but they include comparatively few elevations over 3,000 feet, and no lofty plateaus. Between the ridges and in pockets or coves of the mountains are lands that are easily cultivated, and in many places the mountains, when cleared, are fertile to their summits. The scenic culmination of the Appalachians is Blowing Rock in North Carolina, 3,500 feet above the sea, where the rifleman without stirring from one spot may drop his bullets into the Catawba flowing into the Atlantic, the New, which is a head water of the Ohio, and the Watauga, a branch of the Tennessee. Above this spot rises, 3,000 feet higher, the mass of Grandfather’s Mountain; and below is an enchanting series of mountains, range after range, breaking off to the eastern foothills. Within the Appalachians, south of Pennsylvania, dwell The life of the Mountain Whites is not very unlike that of New England in the seventeenth century, New York in the eighteenth, and Minnesota in the nineteenth century. The people are self-sustaining in that they build their own houses, raise their own food, and make their own clothing. There have been instances where in the early morning a sheep was trotting about wearing a pelt which in the evening a mountaineer was wearing, it having been sheared, spun, woven, dyed, cut, made, and unfitted in that one day. Abraham Lincoln, as a boy in Indiana and a young man in Illinois, lived the same kind of life that these people are now going through; for here is the The Mountain Whites, however, are more than primitive or even colonial, they are early English; at least among them are still sung and handed down from grandmother to child Elizabethan ballads. Lord Thomas still hies him to his mother to know Whether I shall marry fair Elender, Local bards also compose for themselves such stirring ditties as “Sourwood Mounting.” Chickens a-crowin’ in the sourwood mountain, The most unfavorable mountain conditions are fairly illustrated by eastern Kentucky, a veritable back country. Along the roads the traveler passes a number of The miserable family described above are a fair type of what a writer on the subject calls the “submerged tenth among the mountaineers”; but they belong to the lowest type, to which those who know them best give no favorable character; they live in the remotest parts of the mountains, in the rudest cabins, with the smallest provision of accumulated food. Most of them are illiterate and more than correspondingly ignorant. Some of them had Indian ancestors and a few bear evidences of negro blood. The so-called “mountain-boomer,” says an observer, “has The same authority has abundant praise for the better type of the mountaineer, who loves the open-air life, cares nothing for luxury, and “has raised the largest average families in America upon the most sterile of ‘upright’ and stony farms, farms the very sight of which would make an Indiana farmer sick with nervous prostration. He has sent his sons out to be leaders of men in all the industries and activities in every part of our country.” If there were no improvement in the mountaineer who remains on his land, the South would rue it; but in some parts of the mountains one may have such experiences as those of the writer in 1907 on a pedestrian journey across the mountains of North Carolina, among what has been supposed to be the most primitive and least hopeful What has been done in Boone County, N. C., is likely to be done in most of the other mountains sooner or later; the coal and the timber draw the railroad, establish the village, make possible the school and start the community upward; but the mountaineers are slow to There is good in these mountain people, there is hope, there is potentiality of business man and college president. Take, for example, the poor mountain boy who, on a trip across the mountains with a fellow Kentuckian, seems to be reading something when he thinks he is not observed, and on closer inquiry reluctantly admits that it is a volume of poetry which some one had left at the house. “Hit’s Robert Burns’s poems; I like them because it seems to me they are written for people like us. Do you know who I like best in those poems? It is that ‘Highland Mary.’” The reason for hope in the future of the Mountain Whites is that they are going through a process which has been shared at one time or another by all the country east of the Rocky Mountains. The Southern mountaineers are the remnant of the many communities of frontiersmen who cleared the forests, fought the Indians, built the first homes, and lived in a primitive fashion. Much of the mountains is still in the colonial condition, but railroads, schools, and cities are powerful civilizing agents, and a people of so much native vigor may be expected in course of no long time to take their place alongside their brethren of the lowlands. The more prosperous South is too The Mountain Whites ought not to be confused with the Poor Whites of the lowlands. Although there are many similarities of origin and life, the main difference is that the mountaineers have almost no Negroes among them and are therefore nearly free from the difficulties of the race problem. In the lowlands as in the mountains, men whose fathers had settled on rich lands, as the country developed were unable to compete with their more alert and successful neighbors, who were always ready to outbid them for land or slaves; therefore they sold out and moved back into the poor lands in the lowlands, or into the belt of thin soil lying between the Piedmont and the low country. Hence the contemptuous names applied to them by the planting class—“Tar Heels” in North Carolina; “Sand Hillers” in South Carolina; “Crackers” in Georgia; “Clay Eaters” in Alabama; “Red Necks” in Arkansas; “Hill Billies” in Mississippi; and “Mean Whites,” “White Trash,” and “No ’Count” everywhere. These so-called Poor Whites are to be found in every state in the South. They are the most numerous element in the Southern population. They are the people who are brought into the closest personal relations with the Negroes. A survey of their conditions and prospects is therefore essential for any clear understanding of the race question. The present dominant position of the Poor Whites is different from that of their predecessors in slavery times. The isolation of these Poor Whites was one if the greatest misfortunes of ante-bellum times: it was not wholly caused by slavery, but was aggravated because the slave owner considered himself in a class apart from the man who had nothing but a poor little farm. “Joyce,” said a Northern officer to a Poor White in Kentucky forty years ago, “what do you think this war is about?” “I reckon that you’uns has come down to take the niggers away from we’uns.” “Joyce, did you ever own a nigger?” “No.” “Any of your family ever own a nigger?” “No, sir.” “Did you ever expect to own a nigger?” “I reckon not.” “Which did the people that did own niggers like best, you or the nigger?” “Well, ’twas this away. If a planter came along and met a nigger, he’d say, ‘Howdy, Pomp! How’s the old massa, and how’s the young massa, and how’s the old missus, and how’s the young missus?’ But if he met me he’d say, ‘Hullo, Joyce, is that you?’” The Poor White, in his lowest days, had a right to feel that he was a political person of consequence, for did he not furnish three presidents of the United States? Jackson was born a Poor White, and had some of the objectionable and most of the attractive qualities of those people; Andrew Johnson came from the upper Valley of the Tennessee; Abraham Lincoln was a Poor White, the son of a shiftless Kentucky farmer. Materially the Poor Whites contributed little to the community, except by clearing the land, and they took care that that process should not go uncomfortably far. Let a Southern writer describe his own ante-bellum neighbors: “These folk of unmixed English stock could What is the present condition of the Poor White? The greater number of white rural families own their farms, though there is a considerable class of renters; and they till them in the wasteful and haphazard fashion of the frontier. Their stock is poor and scanty, except that they love a good horse. Most of their food except sugar they raise on their own places, and up to a few years ago they were clad in homespun. There are still areas such as southern Arkansas and northern Florida in which the life of the Poor Whites has little changed in half a century. Otherwise, if one now seeks to find this primitive and sordid life in the South, he will need to search a long time. After the Civil War the disbanded soldiers went back to their cabins, and for a time resumed their old habits, but at present they are undergoing a great and significant change. Though there are five or six millions of Poor Whites scattered through the South, especially in the remote hill country, for the most part away from the rich cotton lands and the great plantations, you may Wherever the abject Poor White may be, a personal search shows that he is not in the hill country of Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama, nor in the enormous piney woods district of southern Alabama and Georgia. Visit Coosa County, Alabama, supposed to be as near the head waters of Bitter Creek as you can get, lay out a route which will carry you through by-roads, across farms, and into coves where even a drummer is a novelty. You will find many That is the way perhaps a fifth of the hill Whites live, but four fifths of them are in better conditions. The one-room cabins have given way to larger houses, a favorite, though by no means a type, being the double house with the “hall” or open passage from back to front; besides the two rooms there will probably be a lean-to, and perhaps additional rooms built on; and very likely a separate kitchen, used also as a dining room. Instead of the three to twelve little out-buildings scattered about, decent shelters begin to appear for the stock, and tight houses for tools and utensils. Of the morals of these people it is difficult for a stranger to judge, but the intimate family life in the better cabins is in every way decorous. The pride of the family is the splendid patchwork bed quilt, with magnificent patterns, representing anything from the Field of the Cloth of Gold to the solar system. The children, who may be anywhere from two to fifteen in number, are civil, the spirit of the family hospitable; and though there are none of the books and newspapers which help to furnish both the sitting room and the brains of the Northern farmer’s family, they are a hopeful people. Some embarrassing questions arise when there are nine people, old and young, sleeping in the same room, but even in the one-room It is hardly fair to compare these people, who are at best only ten or twenty years away from the frontier, with New Englanders or Middle States or far Western farmers. In the Southern climate people get on with smaller houses, fewer fireplaces and stoves, and more ventilation through the walls. There is little necessity for large farm buildings, and the country is too rough to use much farm machinery. Their outside wants are simple—coffee, sugar, or the excellent cane-syrup, clothing (inasmuch as they no longer make their own), wagons and utensils; these can all be bought with their cotton, and they raise their own corn and “meat” (pork). In comparison with the North a fair standard would be to set a dozen of the Coosa County houses alongside a mining village in Pennsylvania, and the advantage of cleanliness, decency, and thrift would show itself on the Southern side. Those people are rising; though still alarmingly behind, both in education and in a sense of the need of education. Unusually well-to-do farmers may be found who boast that they are illiterate, and who will not send their children steadily to good schools in the neighborhood; but they are learning one of the first lessons of uplift, namely, that the preparation for later comfort is to save money. Saving means work, and perhaps the secret of the undoubted improvement of the Poor Whites is that there is work that they can do, plenty of it at good wages. That is a marvelous difference from slavery times, when there was nothing going on in their region except The son of the Poor White farmer, or the farmer himself, if he finds it hard to make things go, can usually find employment in his own neighborhood, or at no great distance. Large forces of men are employed in clearing new land, a process which is going on in the hills, in the piney woods, and in the richest agricultural belt. Little sawmills are scattered widely, and the turpentine industry gives employment to thousands of people. Day wages have gone up till a dollar a day is easy to earn, and sometimes more; and the wages of farm laborers have risen from the old eight or ten dollars a month to fifteen dollars a month and upward. The great lumber camps give employment to thousands of people, both white and black, and are on the whole demoralizing, for liquor there flows freely; and though families are encouraged to come, the life is irregular, and sawmill towns may suddenly decay. The great resource of the Poor White is work in the cotton mills, for which he furnishes almost the only Even in slavery times the ambitious Poor White could get out of his environment, and furnished many of the business and political leaders of his time; and there was a class of white farmers working their own land. That class still exists, though no longer set off so sharply from the ordinary Poor Whites, inasmuch as the lower element is approaching the higher. As an instance, take a farmstead in Coosa County, Alabama, containing perhaps a hundred acres, and alongside the disused old house is a new and more comfortable one, flanked by a pump house; grouped near it are nine log outhouses, and one frame building intended for cotton seed. The front yard is beaten down flat, for it is very hard to make grass grow in the South near to houses; but it is neat and reasonably tidy; in the foreground stands an old syrup pan with red stone chimney, and near by is the rude horse-mill used for grinding the cane. Such a farm is a fair type of the average place, but still better conditions may be seen in new houses of four and even six rooms, with the front yard fenced in, and a gate, and a big barn for the storage of hay, just such as you might find in southern Iowa. The evident uplift among the Poor Whites in their own strongholds is only a part of the story; for ever since the Revolution there has been a drift of these people into the |