User:Brianyoumans/sandbox/Cotton Reduction

Cotton Reduction was a short-lived movement in the American South (1919-1921) to limit cotton production in order to increase prices. Some of the methods used may have been revived or adapted by later governmental price control efforts.

Origin
Cotton prices in early 1919 were higher than they had been in several years, but markets were being disrupted by World War I and the United States was experiencing high inflation. Theodore V. Wensel, a prominent merchant and cotton factor in Natchez, Mississippi, issued a call for a lower cotton production via voluntary reductions in plantings by farmers.

1919
A Cotton Reduction Conference was held in New Orleans, Louisiana on February 4, 1919. The delegates, appointed by the Southern governors, made a number of recommendations including reducing cotton acreage by a third compared to 1918, not selling cotton below 30 cents per pound, and the appointment of Cotton Reduction Committees by each state governor to conduct acreage reduction campaigns in each state. Local meetings in each county were urged, and cotton farmers were encouraged to produce their own foodstuffs. Governors responded by issuing the requested proclamations calling for local meetings to create local committees. The Arkansas state senate called on the state Commissioner of Mines, Manufactures, and Agriculture to organize acreage reduction campaigns in each county through his local agents. Another conference, the Southern States Cotton Acreage Reduction Convention, was held in New Orleans Feb. 17-18 and endorsed much the same efforts as the first conference.

1920
By the beginning of 1920 cotton prices had plunged from 35 cents a pound in mid-1919 to below 20 cents per pound, and remained at those levels until late 1921.

The American Cotton Association had been founded in late 1919. At its first annual meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, April 13-16, 1920, the convention endorsed voluntary reductions in cotton acreage and diversification of crops, along with other measures. A dramatic speech by cooperative activist Aaron Sapiro inspired the inclusion of cooperative creation in the organization's platform.

Another Acreage Reduction Convention was held December 7-8, 1920 in Memphis, Tennessee. This convention, attended by "more than 1,000 representative bankers, merchants, and farmers", called for a fifty percent reduction in cotton production, farmers to plant no more than a third of their cultivated land in cotton, and also called for bankers to enforce these measures by denying credit to violators.

1921
Cotton reduction organizing continued into 1921. Much of the impetus for acreage reduction now came from bankers. Bankers' associations in North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, and elsewhere urged their members to enforce acreage reduction, in the hopes that price increases would help endebted farmers and cotton factors.