King Cotton’s essential place in the American fabric

Stephen YAFA, novelist, playwright and screenwriter, grew up in Lowell, Mass., America’s first company town, devoted, as it happened, to cotton manufacture -- the spinning and weaving of fibers into cloth. His book “Big Cotton” revisits his youth by viewing the history of the United States “through the narrow but sharply focused lens of cotton.” A lens of cotton is unusual, to say the least, and can distort the view, as the book’s magniloquent subtitle suggests. But Yafa more than compensates for that defect with a barrage of fascinating information about cotton production and manufacture and the ramified human responses to King Cotton. He explores technological changes with precision and weighs the human gains and losses such changes involved with what may be described as hesitant perspicacity. Altogether, then, a provocative, often persuasive and sometimes uneven book with much to teach readers.

The first three chapters deal with cotton’s prehistoric spread around the world; ancient Peruvian and Aztec weaving; India’s chintzes; and English mechanization of cotton manufacture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The rest of the book focuses on the tumultuous career of cotton in the United States, starting with its cultivation in the South and the transfer of mechanized mills to Massachusetts accompanied by a surge of export from the South, confirming and expanding slavery at the same time that New England’s farm girls swarmed into tidy dormitories in Lowell and elsewhere to work 14 hours a day.

Then Civil War and cotton famine in Europe, resumption of Southern cotton farming on the basis of sharecropping and an influx of Irish and other European immigrants into New England’s cotton mills when native New Englanders started to agitate for shorter hours and better pay. Soon came the boll weevil and its eventual conquest by chemistry; the migration of cotton manufacture to the South, mainly the Carolinas; and the emergence of agribusiness farther west as sharecroppers were displaced by tractors and mechanized cotton pickers.

Finally, high-tech farming on an enormous scale, supported by farm subsidies from the federal government that put cotton “on welfare in this country” and involve the U.S. government in quarrels with the World Trade Organization when we are caught in blatant violation of our treaty obligations.

This core narrative is dramatic and well-told. But what gives the book a special cachet is the way Yafa explores how cotton changed human behavior, while fluctuations in human behavior in turn affected how we treated cotton. Gender relations altered fundamentally, he points out, when young women began to leave home and earn wages in cotton factories, and the hopelessness of sharecroppers’ lives, Yafa says, gave birth to the blues. Conversely, a vogue for Indian chintz provoked English inventors and entrepreneurs to initiate mechanization of cotton manufacture, and a later vogue for blue jeans (at least temporarily) rescued cotton from being overtaken by artificial fibers.

A few samples of the author’s “cotton lens” and gauzy rhetoric, on Eli Whitney’s cotton gin:

“Why then try to separate the seeds of upland cotton from its fibers? Why not instead build a device to separate the fibers from the seeds? Small difference, huge implications. If Whitney’s machine could allow the fibers to be pulled away while creating a barrier that held back the seeds, the claws could exert enough force to yank the fibers free.”

Later:

“Three decades after Whitney’s invention, industrialization arrived in New England with the force of a sudden, turbulent storm. Winds of change blew through the multiplying cotton fields of the South, swept up mountains of lint, and deposited them in the newly minted textile factories of the North. This was all to the good -- a new nation united by one cash crop grown and manufactured within its borders -- but how to hire, train, organize and regulate a large-scale industrial workforce where none yet existed in rural Massachusetts? The North improvised. Factory bells replaced cow bells: they soon sectioned off and parceled out time and labor like generals regimenting troops for combat.”

And one last taste:

“There are a host of ‘what-ifs’ in these biotech scenarios, and few certainties. One is that most of us walking around in a genetically modified cotton shirt have no idea if we are benefiting from human ingenuity or funding future chaos.... When every giant step forward for technology may or may not be an eventual leap backward for humanity or an exquisite pirouette into the abyss, you know you are in cotton country.”

Reading Yafa’s book makes clear that we all live in “cotton country” more than we realize. It is a very American product, offering lots to learn, lots to think about and, here and there, a touch of hype to discount.

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William H. McNeill is professor of history emeritus at the University of Chicago.