Men and Things

by Henry A. Atkinson

Press Illustrating Service.

Not many of us stop to consider the man who made possible the white bread that we eat at our daily meals.

The Cane-Sugar Makers. If we travel in a direction a little east of south from the wheat-fields of Canada, we come to the great plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi where sugar-cane is grown. Here we find people of a different type living under different conditions. Sugar-cane is grown in fields that have been won from the swamps by hard toil. In this rich soil, cultivated and ridged by the plow, the sugar-cane is laid in long parallel rows. After it has been buried a few days it begins to sprout, and from each one of the joints on the stalk of cane there grows up a new plant. These are tilled and come to maturity in October. The stalks grow from eight to fifteen feet high and at harvest-time are cut down and then stripped of their leaves by the workers, who take them up in their hands and with a flat knife slash off the long, bladelike leaves, leaving them clean and smooth. The stalks are piled in rows to be picked up later and put into wagons, taken to the siding, loaded into freight-cars, and hauled to the mill, where they are crushed between rollers, and the juice pressed out. The liquid so obtained is then put into large vats and evaporated, leaving brown sugar and molasses. The crude or brown sugar is sent to the refinery and passed through various processes until we get the white sugar that comes to our tables. Practically all of the work on the sugar plantation is done by Negroes. These people live in small cabins and work for a very small wage, ranging from 75 cents to a $1.25 a day. Their tiny houses, which are usually whitewashed and surrounded by a little plot of ground, are the property of the owners of the plantation. The Negro is expected to buy everything from the company’s stores. The prices are high and it is rarely that one finds a family that is not in a perpetual state of debt to the owner of the plantation.

When the migration of Negroes from the South to the North began some few years ago, a great concern was felt in many quarters as to what the result would be. A meeting was held in one of the Southern cities and the Negroes were invited to be present. One of the Negroes said: “If you let me tell you what I think, it is about like this. We-all have been working here for about 75 cents to $1 a day, but we never see the time when we have any money of our own. It takes more than we make for the things we use. Folks in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts offer us $15 to $18 a week, tickets for ourselves and our families, and a free house to live in with two weeks’ rations provided and in the house. Now none of us wants to leave Louisiana, and if you want to keep us here just raise our wages to $2 a day. We would a heap rather stay here than go North.”

Sugar from Beets. Not all the sugar that comes to our tables is made from the cane; in fact only a small proportion is cane-sugar. Most of it is produced from the beet which is grown in large quantities in the West. Montana, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and California are the extensive sugar-beet producing states. The beets grow to an enormous size; they are planted in rows and cared for much as the beets that grow in our vegetable gardens. In California the Japanese are entering very largely into the sugar-beet culture.

The beet-fields call whole families to work. Several towns in the Northwestern states have sections made up entirely of Russians, and people from other lands, who have been attracted by the opportunities for employment offered by the beet industry. One family consisting of a father, mother, thirteen children, and the mother’s sister worked all last summer in one of the beet-fields. The youngest child was only five years old but he put in long hours every day. This family is typical of many. The statistics regarding child labor in the United States show that the vast majority of children employed in gainful labor are the children in the rural districts. Thus sugar comes to your table through two sources: from the workers, including a large number of children, in the beet-fields and the workers on the Southern plantations.

The Corn Belt. In the Middle states we have the great corn-producing areas. A great deal of the philosophy of this region is summed up in the reply of a farmer to the question as to why he was planting more corn than usual. He said: “So that I can feed more hogs.”

“What will you do with the hogs?” he was then asked.

“Sell them and buy more land to plant more corn to raise more hogs to buy more land.”