| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South. By Donald Holley. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. xvi, 284 pp. $36.00, ISBN 1-55728-606-X.)

Donald Holley offers a detailed look at the impact of the mechanical cotton picker on the modern South. While he admits that many other forces changed the South, he returns again and again to "the facilitating effect of the mechanization of cotton." Indeed, as his title suggests, Holley argues that "the mechanical cotton picker emancipated workers from backbreaking labor and emancipated the South itself from its dependence on cotton and sharecropping." 1

Much of this book is based on secondary sources or on data drawn from the published census. It begins with a standard view of the postbellum South as beset by poverty caused by small, inefficient farms and a surplus of labor. The heart of the book, however, covers the period from 1930 to 1970 and focuses much more on the introduction of technology than on the related question of labor supply. Holley argues that, instead of the cotton picker pushing labor from the rural South, labor began leaving long before the introduction of a viable cotton picker in the late 1940s. He also suggests that hand picking and machine picking coexisted until the early 1960s when cotton producers quickly switched to machine pickers because they did not need as many hands to weed cotton and because obtaining good quality hand pickers who would work cheap had grown increasingly difficult. . . .

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