Clarksdale, 1939: The Cotton Industry Told Congress There Was No Machine
The film of this episode premieres January 5, 2027 on YouTube. The documents, the transcript and the sources are below now.
In November 1939 Marion Post Wolcott photographed a cotton field outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, thirteen times in period Kodachrome, and filed nine of the pictures under one identical sentence: "Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss." Nine months later, in a courtroom in Montgomery, Alabama, a congressional committee spent…
Transcript
Four words
R001 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A child sits at the edge of a Mississippi cotton field. The four words filed under it were a category, not a description.
R002 Day laborers picking cotton, near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Day laborers picking cotton. Marion Post Wolcott, November 1939, on a road outside Clarksdale.
R003 Day-laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Wolcott wrote the same four words on the next Clarksdale slide.
R004 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
And on the one after that, still outside Clarksdale.
R005 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Nine of her Clarksdale captions are that one sentence, letter for letter. Four more are the same sentence with a comma moved.
R006 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Thirteen photographs, and one line of description between all of them.
R007 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Not one name.
R008 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss. Delta
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
These are not colorized. Kodachrome reached the shops in 1936 and the Farm Security Administration bought some.
D01 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss. Delta (detail)
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
This is the colour the film recorded in 1939.
R009 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The Library of Congress holds about sixteen hundred of these colour frames, against a hundred and seventy-five thousand black-and-white negatives.
D02 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss. (detail)
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Wolcott shot a hundred and ten of the colour.
R010 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
So the question is not what the pictures look like. It is what those four words meant to the people standing in them.
What they had been
R014 Southern U.S., Mississippi?
Marion Post Wolcott · Mississippi · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A day laborer was paid by the weight picked, at the end of the day, and had no claim on the crop.
R015 Negroes fishing in creek near cotton plantations outside Belzoni, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belzoni, Mississippi · October 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
October 1939, a creek outside Belzoni. Her caption locates it by what is on the far bank: cotton plantations.
R016 Negroes fishing in creek near cotton plantations outside Belzoni, Miss. Delta
Marion Post Wolcott · Belzoni, Mississippi · October 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The Delta. Flat, black-soiled, and the richest cotton land in the country.
R017 Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · September 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Six weeks before Clarksdale she was at Marcella Plantation, at Mileston, eighty miles south.
R018 Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Mileston, Mississippi · September 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Same crop, different word. Here her captions say tenant.
R019 Backyard of Negro tenant's home, Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Miss. Delta
Marion Post Wolcott · Mileston, Mississippi · September 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A tenant had a house on the place, a share of what came off it, and a settlement at the end of the year.
R020 Negro tenant's home beside the Mississippi River levee, near Lake Providence, La.
Marion Post Wolcott · Lake Providence, Louisiana · June 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
June 1940, near Lake Providence, Louisiana. A tenant's house under the Mississippi River levee.
R021 Negro tenant's home beside the Mississippi River levee, near Lake Providence, La.
Marion Post Wolcott · Lake Providence, Louisiana · June 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
The levee is why the land is worth farming, and why the house sits where it sits.
R022 An old tenant house with a mud chimney and cotton growing up to its door, which is occupied by Mulattoes, Melrose, La.
Marion Post Wolcott · Melrose, Louisiana · June 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
At Melrose, an old tenant house with a mud chimney and the cotton grown right up to the door.
The country around it
R023 A cross roads store, bar, "juke joint," and gas station in the cotton plantation area, Melrose, La.
Marion Post Wolcott · Melrose, Louisiana · June 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A crossroads store in the plantation country. Regal whiskey, Jax beer, barbecue, cold beer.
R024 Natchez, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Natchez, Mississippi · August 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Natchez, August 1940. She photographed this one wall four separate times.
R025 Natchez, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Natchez, Mississippi · August 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
In colour the advertising is the loudest thing in the frame, which is what it was painted to be.
R026 An old house almost hidden by sunflowers, Rodney, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Rodney, Mississippi · July 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Rodney, Mississippi. A house almost hidden by sunflowers.
R027 Clothes of swimmers hanging on a telegraph pole, Lake Providence, La. The children from the nearby farms and neighborhoods go swimming, on Saturday afternoon and Sunday, in the lake
Marion Post Wolcott · Lake Providence, Louisiana · June 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Lake Providence, a Saturday. Swimmers' clothes hung on a telegraph pole.
R028 Boys fishing in a bayou, Schriever, La.
Marion Post Wolcott · Schriever, Louisiana · June 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Boys fishing in a bayou beside the school, in south Louisiana.
R029 Boys fishing in a bayou, Schriever, La. Cajun children in a bayou near the school. Terrebonne, a Farm Security Administration project
Marion Post Wolcott · Schriever, Louisiana · June 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
She spent eighteen months on this, across four states, and came back with a hundred and ten slides.
R035 Typical southeastern Georgia farm with newly harvested field of oats
Marion Post Wolcott · Georgia · May 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
May 1939, southeastern Georgia. Oats cut and stood in shocks.
R036 Harvesting oats, southeastern Georgia?
Marion Post Wolcott · Georgia · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
And oats going into a machine, on the same errand a year or so later.
R037 Spreading fertilizer from 4-mule team wagon, Georgia
Marion Post Wolcott · Georgia · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Fertilizer spread from a four-mule team, throwing dust across a Georgia field.
R038 Georgia oat field? Southern U.S.
Marion Post Wolcott · the American South · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Another mule team, another field, and no note of where.
R039 Southeastern Georgia?
Marion Post Wolcott · Georgia · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Two men loading a wagon at a barn. Southeastern Georgia, the Library thinks.
R040 Farm in southern U.S. ... Louisiana?
Marion Post Wolcott · Louisiana · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A farm in rows, somewhere south. The record says Louisiana with a question mark after it.
R041 Southern U.S. ... Louisiana?
Marion Post Wolcott · Louisiana · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Houses along a railroad embankment and a strip of water. Same question mark.
Montgomery, August 1940
In the middle of those eighteen months, in a courtroom in Montgomery, Alabama, Congress sat down to ask who picks the cotton.
R011 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Three days in August 1940. The Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens heard planters, a union, a county doctor and a sugar corporation.
D03 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss. (detail)
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Their accounts of who picks the cotton cannot all be true.
The Delta Council went first, and described the plantation as a factory.
Specialization, mass production, expert technical supervision, employed as in a modern industrial plant.
They told the committee that machinery now did the ploughing and the planting, but that cotton was hand labour exclusively.
R012 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss.
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1939 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
For that purpose, they said, tenants were kept the year round on ninety-five percent of the plantations. Tenants — not the word the government wrote under this field.
They also said the same number of people were living on half the cotton acreage.
Asked who actually picked it, their witness said no survey had been made — and then estimated ten percent Mexican and at least eighty percent Black.
He gave the committee an average income for a family on a plantation he called typical. Four hundred and ninety-five dollars a year, averaged across seven years.
There is no machine
Then the chairman asked about the machine.
There is no mechanical cotton picker on the market, the Delta Council answered, and its influence upon labor will be very little in our section.
R013 Day laborers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Miss. Delta
Marion Post Wolcott · Clarksdale, Mississippi · November 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
November 1940, back outside Clarksdale, a year after the others. The caption is the same four words.
The National Cotton Council put its statement in the record the same week.
Fortunately, it said, the cotton industry has felt very lightly, if at all, the evils of migratory, destitute labor.
And on the exact point Wolcott had photographed thirteen times: a relatively small percentage of the twenty-five million acres now planted to cotton is farmed by day wage labor.
Seventy-five percent
Then the secretary of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union took the stand. Forty thousand members, five states. He was asked what kind of people they were.
They had been tenants and sharecroppers. Today over seventy-five percent are day laborers.
Asked what had caused it, he named a federal programme and a year: the acreage-reduction programme under the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 1934.
The government paid planters to grow less cotton. A tenant had a claim on the crop and therefore on the payment. A day laborer had a claim on neither.
A congressman on the committee put it back to the witness more plainly than the witness had.
Was it to the owner's financial advantage to do all the farming and hire help, rather than rent his land and share the government payments.
The man who built it
Then the union secretary read a statement into the record on behalf of a man who could not attend — John Rust, who had built a working mechanical cotton picker.
His best customers, he said, were the growers who had already tractorized their farms and abandoned the sharecropper system in favour of wages.
And he did not pretend the arithmetic worked out. Not all the sharecroppers and day laborers the machine replaced would be absorbed in building it.
The man who built the machine and the man speaking for the labourers agreed about the mechanism — in the same volume where the industry said no such machine existed.
Rust offered one way out, and it already existed.
The other way
R030 Bayou Bourbeau plantation operated by Bayou Bourbeau Farmstead Association, a cooperative established through the cooperation of FSA, Natchitoches, La.
Marion Post Wolcott · Natchitoches, Louisiana · August 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Bayou Bourbeau, in central Louisiana. A Farm Security Administration cooperative, photographed in August 1940 — the month of the hearing.
R031 Bayou Bourbeau plantation operated by Bayou Bourbeau Farmstead Association, a cooperative established through the cooperation of FSA, Natchitoches, La.
Marion Post Wolcott · Natchitoches, Louisiana · August 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Members worked the land together and held it through a farmstead association rather than a landlord.
R032 Bayou Bourbeau plantation, a FSA cooperative, Natchitoches, La. A Negro family (?) seated on the porch of a house
Marion Post Wolcott · Natchitoches, Louisiana · August 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
It is the only place in a hundred and ten slides where a row of people is working ground that some of them own.
R033 Bayou Bourbeau plantation, a Farm Security Administration cooperative, vicinity of Natchitoches, La. Three Negro children sitting on the porch of a house
Marion Post Wolcott · Natchitoches, Louisiana · August 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Wolcott photographed the families on the steps of their own houses. She still did not write down the names.
R034 A store with live fish for sale, vicinity of Natchitoches, La.
Marion Post Wolcott · Natchitoches, Louisiana · July 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A store nearby, selling live fish.
The slack season
R042 Negro migratory workers and one shack, Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · February 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Belle Glade, Florida, on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee, six hundred miles from Clarksdale.
R043 Negro migratory workers by a shack, Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · February 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Here her captions stop saying tenant and stop saying day laborer. They say migratory.
R044 Negro migratory workers by a shack, Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · February 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Nobody in these frames has a house on a place, or a share of a crop, or a settlement at the end of the year.
R045 Shacks of Negro migratory workers, Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · February 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Boards, tin, and a sheet of plywood nailed over where a window was.
R046 Negro migratory workers by a "juke joint" (?), Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · February 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A juke joint built of corrugated iron. Atlantic ale, Royal Crown, Nehi.
R047 Living quarters and "juke joint" for migratory workers, a slack season; Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · February 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
February 1941. Men at a table outside, under an ice-cold Jax sign.
R048 Migratory laborers outside of a "juke joint" during a slack season, Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · February 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Her caption calls this a slack season.
Five months earlier the United States Sugar Corporation had used that phrase to Congress.
The Everglades peak falls during the slack season in northern Florida, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina.
R049 Houses which have been condemned by the Board of Health, but are still occupied by Negro Migratory workers, Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · January 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
A row of cabins on a dirt lane, and somebody's car parked in front of one of them.
R050 Houses which have been condemned by the Board of Health but are still occupied by Negro migratory workers, Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · January 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Four of her Belle Glade captions say these houses had been condemned by the Board of Health, and were still being lived in.
R051 Houses which have been condemned by the Board of Health but are still occupied by Negro migratory workers, Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · January 1941 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Washing out, cane cut, and a row of buildings the county had already written off.
The county physician for Palm Beach County had described his county to the committee. Prosperous and wealthy on the coast.
Inland, where the vegetables grow, very bad living and housing and sanitary conditions.
R052 Shacks condemned by Board of Health, formerly (?) occupied by migrant workers and pickers, Belle Glade, Fla.
Marion Post Wolcott · Belle Glade, Florida · January 1941? · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
One doctor. Fifty-five thousand people. Five thousand dollars a year.
No place on them
R053 Southern U.S.
Marion Post Wolcott · the American South · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
Thirteen of Wolcott's colour slides carry no place at all. Southern U.S. Cabin in southern U.S. That is the entire record.
R054 Cabin in southern U.S.
Marion Post Wolcott · the American South · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
She knew where she was standing. The note did not survive the trip back to Washington.
R055 Cabin in Southern U.S.
Marion Post Wolcott · the American South · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
So the file cannot tell you which state this is, or whose house it was.
R056 Cabin in Southern U.S.
Marion Post Wolcott · the American South · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
It can tell you the ground is worn out and the roof is going.
R057 House in southern U.S.
Marion Post Wolcott · the American South · about 1940 · Library of Congress · FSA/OWI Kodachrome slide. View the original.
In August 1940 four sets of men told Congress what was happening to the people who picked the cotton. Only one account matches the words the government itself wrote under the pictures.
Sources
- All 57 photographs are period Kodachrome by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration, 1939–41. They are not colorized: the colour is what the film recorded. Federal works, public domain. Library of Congress FSA/OWI Color Photographs: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/
- The Library's own count of the colour set is "approximately 1,600 color photographs" made between 1939 and 1944, against "about 175,000 black-and-white film negatives" in the companion collection: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/
- A harvest of the whole colour file (2026-08-08) returns 1,616 records, of which 110 are Wolcott's. 61 of those had not been used on this channel; 57 are in this episode. Every frame's own record page is linked from its exhibit credit, e.g. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017877497/
- Photograph dates and places on screen come from each record's own `created_published_date` and place subject, never from a harvest timestamp. Where the Library can only say "ca. 1940" the credit says "about 1940", and where it records no place at all — thirteen of these frames — the credit says "the American South" rather than guess a state.
- Masters came from the Wikimedia Commons mirror of the fsac file at 3,840 px; two frames that mirror serves at only 1,024 px (2017877488, 2017877548) were pulled instead from the Library's own master TIFFs at tile.loc.gov, 5,500 px.
- Interstate Migration. Hearings before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, House of Representatives, 76th Congress, 3d session, pursuant to H. Res. 63 and H. Res. 491 — Part 2, Montgomery Hearings, held in the courtroom of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Federal Building, Montgomery, Alabama, August 14, 15 and 16, 1940. GPO. Public domain federal document. Scan: https://archive.org/details/interstatemigrat02unit
- Every quotation on screen was read off the page image, not off the OCR text layer. The OCR of this volume mangles its own printed page numbers (it renders 504 as "^Q4"), so the page map used throughout is printed page = PDF page + 384, verified against five pages by content and confirmed on the rendered image of printed 624.
- p. 397 — the session opening: Wednesday, August 14, 1940, Hon. John H. Tolan presiding.
- p. 605 — Read Dunn, Jr., Delta Council, under the heading THE MECHANICAL COTTON PICKER: "There is no mechanical cotton picker on the market"; its influence on labour "will be very little in our section." The chairman: "Cotton has resisted mechanization longer than any other major crop." Also Dunn's estimate that of the pickers brought in from outside the Delta, "10 percent are Mexican and … at least 80 percent are colored" (the document's period word; the narration says Black), and an average income on a plantation he called typical of "about $495 … an average per year for 7 years."
- p. 607 — the Delta Council's submitted statement: the plantation run on "the principles of specialization, mass production, and expert technical supervision … as in a modern industrial plant"; "hand labor exlusively is used in the cultivation and harvesting of cotton. For this purpose tenants are maintained the year round on 95 percent of the plantations"; and the claim that the plantations sustained "practically the same farm population during the 10-year period on approximately half the cotton acreage."
- p. 612 — the National Cotton Council of America statement (Oscar Johnston), put in the record by James Hand, Jr.: "Fortunately, the cotton industry has felt very lightly, if at all, the evils of 'migratory, destitute labor'"; "A relatively small percentage of the 25,000,000 acres of land now planted to cotton is farmed by day wage labor"; "Virtually 100 percent of the cotton produced must be harvested … by hand. No mechanical device has yet been perfected."
- p. 623–624 — H. L. Mitchell, secretary, Southern Tenant Farmers Union: 40,000 members in five states; they had been tenants "or sharecroppers. Today over 75 percent are day laborers"; the cause was "the starting of the acreage-reduction program under the A. A. A. in 1934"; "The tendency has been to get away from sharecropping and tenant farming and to adopt a wage-labor system, particularly on the larger plantations"; "Increased mechanization has gone hand in hand with this new program. The Government payments, in some measure, have provided capital to buy the machinery." Rep. Carl Curtis's restatement of the mechanism is quoted from the same page.
- p. 629–630 — Statement by John Rust, co-inventor of the cotton picker, read into the record by Mitchell: "we have found that our best prospects for cotton pickers are planters who have already tractorized their farms and abandoned the sharecropper system in favor of the wages system of farming"; and his acknowledgement that not all "the sharecroppers and day laborers who will eventually be replaced by the machine" would be absorbed by making it. Rust also names the FSA cooperative farms as one alternative.
- p. 506 — Clarence R. Bitting for the United States Sugar Corporation: "the seasonal peak for employment in the Everglades is during the slack season for present crops in northern Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina and thus fits ideally with requirements of those areas." Wolcott's own Belle Glade captions, written five months later and with no knowledge of the hearing, twice use the phrase "a slack season".
- p. 590 — Dr. William Weems, county physician, Palm Beach County: the coast "an exceedingly prosperous and wealthy area" and, inland in the vegetable-growing areas, "some very bad living and housing and sanitary conditions". His salary and the county population are his own figures from the same testimony.
- Nothing consulted here says the Board of Health condemnations in Wolcott's Belle Glade captions were discussed at the hearing. The word "condemned" does not appear anywhere in the volume. The captions and the testimony are presented side by side as two separate federal records of the same county, five months apart, and the episode says so.
- The Delta Council's account and the union's account are both reported as testimony. The episode does not assert which witness was right about how many people had been moved from tenancy onto day wages; it points out that the words the government's own photographer wrote under thirteen Delta pictures are the union's word, not the planters'.
- No figure is given for what a day's picking paid at Clarksdale in 1939. Nothing consulted for this episode carries one.