The South was better off without its poor, its blacks, its small cotton farmers argued historian Donald Holley in his study of the impact of the mechanical cotton picker on the twentieth century South. The picker did not push them out; wartime factory jobs in the West and North pulled them away. Bereft of human pickers, planters turned to the machine. Its adoption ended the cotton economy "created" by Eli Whitney's gin in 1793 (p. 1) and inaugurated a second emancipation. Unlike the first that freed the slaves, this freed the planters, enabling them to consolidate their holdings, buy capital-intensive harvesting equipment, and modernize. Modernization, here synonymous with mechanization, was an unalloyed good, according to Holley. It ended the South's dependence on "cheap labor and its corollaries, labor control and Jim Crow repression" (p. 194). Now the poor no longer perform "stoop labor" and tenants are wealthy contract farmers who own mechanical pickers.

Holley joined the cohort of scholars who have tried to reconcile southern outmigration and farm mechanization with economic development and socio-political change. They questioned the nature of the ante- and postbellum cotton culture, its associated labor force and institutions, and the nature and rate of the mechanization of cotton harvesting. To these they added the role of the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act and the work alternatives that wartime production promised. Historians agree that the southerners were overly dependent on cotton monoculture and that unscrupulous landowners through the crop lien system victimized black and white alike.

Laying the foundation for the thesis that adoption of the mechanical picker was the consequence of low quality labor and outmigration, Holley built his case against southerners and southern institutions. Unconsciously invoking John Ford Rhodes, he blamed Eli Whitney's cotton gin for having "created the Old South," "revitalized slavery," and "contributed to the Civil War." Swayed by New South polemicists, Holley insisted that growing cotton "required little or no skill." That was why "slaves, sharecroppers, and poor whites" grew it successfully and why "an economy that rested on ignorance, intimidation and coercion" emerged by 1880 (pp. 2-3, 25). Accordingly, cotton and the gin shared blame for southern economic underdevelopment and institutional failure.

Contradictions plagued the work making it difficult for the reader to follow its arguments. Characterizations of African Americans serve as an example. According to the opinions Holley reprinted and possibly held, they were "superfluous" (pp. 120, 159) and "warped by poverty and ignorance" (p. 121). A 1936 political cartoon depicted the type. It showed an African American man, hat in hand, cotton sack on shoulder, shuffling past a Rust Brothers Cotton Picker Trial crying, "Ef'n It Doose Mah Wuk - Whose Wuk I Gwine Do?" No one's, according to Holley who elsewhere argued that black migrants filled northern welfare not factory rolls. Contradicting his thesis here in suggesting that the harvester pushed out this class, he also contradicted his stereotypes with the story of a college-bound African American man from Mississippi. Like him, Holley wrote, most of the seven million who left the rural South were "typically literate and from southern cities" (p. 163).

Stubbornly clinging to the past, cotton planters and the plant refused to submit to mechanization, according to Holley. Planters would not adapt "existing agricultural machines to their advantage" because "cotton plants could not be combined" like wheat (p. 35). Failing to appreciate the differences between the crops, he also failed to appreciate their similarities. Adoption of mechanical harvesting for both was an incremental process paced by exogenous as much as by endogenous factors. Believing that the reaper "filled an immediate need" (p. 12), Holley missed a perfect opportunity to test Paul David's theory of reaper adoption on his own data.

Holley divided the history of the development of the harvester between three non-contiguous chapters uncritically retelling the familiar yet still fascinating story. He recognized that in cotton producing regions, the tractor pioneered but the mechanical picker completed mechanization. Adoption of the picker was inevitable and legitimated the planter and the plant in this narrative.

Evidence of haste permeated this book but there were other problems. Reaching a conclusion shared by many historians, Holley followed a path determined by his faith in the machine as an ameliorating agent for social change. He ignored those annoying byways that lead to contingency and complexity and ultimately to individuals and the choices they make.

ANGELA LAKWETE

Dr. Lakwete teaches history of technology and United States History at Auburn University, Alabama.