As the roaring twenties turned into the depressed thirties, southern farmers, far removed from the
urban prosperity Americans had enjoyed during the 1920s heyday, found already difficult farming
conditions greatly intensified by the onset of the Great Depression. Agricultural incompetence
plagued the rural South through the misuse of land, depletion of natural resources, and a system
of single-crop farming that failed to adequately provide for growing families on small farms, especially
in the cotton-producing Southeast. Poverty and desperation came to define the...