Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South

Abstract

Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South. By James C. Giesen. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. xvi, 221. Illustrations, maps, notes, acknowledgments, index. $40.00.) As much cultural history as agricultural history, Boll Weevil Blues explores how individuals, institutions, and classes jockeyed for place amid the thirty-five-year-long boll weevil crisis. In doing so, it reshapes our understanding of that crisis. The cotton-eating insect was, indeed, real; but the hysteria attending its slow eastward advance across the South was abetted by people hoping to benefit from its arrival. The author seeks signs of agency within each level of society and finds planters, politicians, agricultural educators, sharecroppers, and bluesmen all struggling to make the boll weevil pay. The author organizes his study chronologically and spatially to follow the insect's lead. He begins in 1890s and 1900s Texas. Giesen's next stop is the early 1910s Mississippi Delta. From there he follows the bug in the later teens into southeast Alabama and finally into 1920s Georgia. While each section is undergirded with solid economic data, Giesen focuses on different aspects of the crisis in each of the four regions. In Texas, he follows the self-promoting Seaman Knapp (though funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as much "a showman" as an educator). Successfully riding the boll weevil to greater prominence, Knapp laid down a winning template followed throughout the South. The boll weevil, Giesen argues, created the agricultural extension service and enriched the South's agricultural colleges. In the case of the Mississippi Delta, Giesen focuses on the iron-fingered social control sought by planters and the rise of the agribusiness giant, the Delta and Pine Land Company. In Alabama, he chronicles the spectacular rise and fall of diversification accompanying the pest into the wiregrass country. And Georgia had its own Seaman Knapps who leveraged newly fat budgets for their agricultural colleges. Arkansas historians may find the section on the delta of most interest. True, Giesen does not include the Arkansas Delta, but much of the human and political geography of the 1910s Mississippi Delta may bear upon the Arkansas experience. As was the case with almost every other aspect of their system, delta planters thought about fighting the boll weevil in terms of maintaining social control over their black labor force. …