Introduction

The tenacious opposition of the white Southern elite to interference in its dealings with Southern farm labor was, as we have seen, consistent with a desire to maintain a system of paternalistic relations with those workers. As long as the cultivation and harvest of cotton required a large supply of cheap, dependable laborers, landed interests had a strong incentive to prevent or limit both the government programs that would have been seen by workers as substitutes for the benefits offered by planters and the migration of workers out of the South. But, by the 1960s, many of the programs originally opposed by the Southern rural elite had come into being without solid Southern opposition, and millions of farm workers had left for the cities of the South and North. We believe that mechanization of cotton was the major catalyst for bringing about the rapid expansion of the federal welfare state and the massive outmigration from the rural South.

Mechanization and the appearance of accompanying science-based technology reduced the economic incentive to provide paternalism. The advances in science that accompanied mechanization increased and stabilized yields, making the farm-specific knowledge of tenants less valuable. Because labor turnover was no longer as costly, the benefits of supplying paternalism were reduced. Mechanization also directly reduced the costs of labor and generating labor effort. With millions of farm workers displaced, the threat of unemployment was sufficient to generate work intensity. Furthermore, mechanization directly reduced the costs of monitoring labor by standardizing the production process and reducing the variation in the marginal productivity of labor. Paternalism became an outdated contractual device.