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Comments by: Duard L Pruitt
"From Missouri" is well worth reading. The review by "mizzou lady" is very good, except that she makes a couple of small mistakes. First, the four SwampEast MO floods that Thad Snow observed and/or participated in were in the years 1912, 1913, 1927, and 1937. This re-viewer was personally present at (and had to flee from) the SE MO (Mississippi County) floods of 1927 (as a baby) and 1937 (as an 11 year old boy). A more important mistake is mizzou ladies misunderstanding of the division of crop yields between cotton share croppers and a landowner. The cotton share cropper received half of the gross crop proceeds (not just the profits) if he and his family provided only the human labor required to plant, till, and gather the crop. The landowner, who would provide the seed and tools and mules for planting and tending the crop, received the other half. If the share cropper also provided the seed, mules, and tools, he then also became a "tenant" and received three-quarters of the gross crop proceeds to the landowners one-quarter share. In both cases, if a landowner had provided loans to the sharecropper during the year, the amount of the loan(s) would be subtracted from the sharecropper's share, probably before payment was made. Customarily the cotton crop was sold as rapidly as it was picked and "ginned". Early in the "great depression", Congress passed a law which was intended to compensate landowners and their croppers or tenants for producing fewer acres of cotton so that supply would be reduced and the price could recover somewhat. The law was written with the intent of dividing the payments among the parties in the same ratio as the crop divisions explained above. But the law also had "holes" which permitted a landowner to legally take the entire payment for himself if he wished, and sure enough, most landowners began to do just that. This was a major factor in causing the midwinter "croppers strike" of January 1939. On page 127 Thad Snow notes that cotton had traditionally been a "poverty crop". Before the advent of modern farm machinery (mostly after WWII), the cotton crop was so labor intensive that a single working family could tend no more than about ten acres or so, which typically wouldn't earn enough money for anything but a bare poverty existence. Large landowners might become very rich by having many sharecropper families on their land, if they owned the land outright. If they owed a large mortgage on their land, the landowner might go broke just like the sharecroppers and tenants.

My deduction was that Thad Snow wrote this book partly because he had detected the flaws in our system of Laissez Faire Capitalism, and could understand that these flaws caused the great depression and added to the misery of the working people, particularly the cotton croppers. He noted that the new deal policies helped some, but did not end the great depression. He also saw that the activity and federal economic policies required to fight WWII terminated the great depression quickly and completely. In fact, he claims that he (and others) could see, even before the war started, that the war would have this effect. Unfortunately, he couldn't connect enough dots to figure out what would be necessary to maintain this war prosperity in peacetime. Since Snow's death, we have accumulated an additional 60 years of economic data. We now have over 100 years of continuous good economic data in the USA, and at least a few economists now understand the flaws. Unfortunately, most of our voters are still in the dark on this issue.

Thad Snow's youngest daughter Emily was a classmate of mine in the 1943 graduating class at Charleston, MO High School.

A simple tale, written in the early 1950's, of a Missouri farmer who found himself experiencing a significant historical event in 1939, a peaceful protest by Delta cotton sharecroppers. Thad Snow sits in his room in the 1950's as an elderly gentleman & talks first person about what farming was like in the early 1900's, sharing stories of how to work with mules, the calving season, why he hunted doves, what he enjoyed about his herding dogs, etc. He becomes a major landowner in a section of the U.S. that doesn't completely relate to midwestern or to southern culture. He shares his unique insights of surviving flooding of the Mississippi River in 1911, 1912 & 1937. I found his observations of how people originally worked together but eventually became possessive & self-centered quite telling. So many things are being repeated in present day! He shares his memories of being on committees charged with building the first highways between Cairo, IL & Charleston, MO, and the impact that had on the local economy. He can be a bit blustery, and he is clearly not a professional writer (although he sent articles to the St Louis Post Dispatch throughout his adulthood), but his descriptions are clear and true to life. After the sit-down strike in 1939, he worked in Washington, D.C., trying to gain equal rights & equal pay for cotton sharecroppers (they requested 50% of profits, giving 25% to owners & 25% to tenants). Mr Snow does a fine job of describing his learning process regarding the writing of agricultural legislation and how WWII eventually forces his work to take a step backward. An interesting life story about early 20th century U.S. history.

Great book... A good read. This book would make a good gift for your friends who love to read. It is a good book to read.