Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105/Section068/Miles Thorton

= Miles Thorton =

Early Life
Miles Thorton was born in Memphis Tennessee, on July 24th, 1883. He started school when he was six years old but quit when he was about 16, only finishing the 8th grade. He planned on going to medical college when he was older to become a doctor like his father, however, this never happened. When he quit school, he began shadowing his father and learning the basics of becoming a physician. Thorton’s father owned land which he rented out to tenants, both black and white families. Tenant farming is described as an “agricultural system in which landowners contribute their land and a measure of operating capital and management while tenants contribute their labor with various amounts of capital and management, the returns being shared in a variety of ways” (Tenant Farming | Agriculture 1). The tenants would pay back his father in a combination of cash and a share in the product. Thorton grew up surrounded by this community and watched his father provide the tenants and townspeople with medical care. One time when his father was out of town, Thorton even posed as a doctor and cured a young girl suffering from malaria. He soon realized he did not agree with the practices of modern medicine and the way the medical industry was progressing. He decided this was not a career he wanted to pursue. While shadowing his father’s medical practice he observed a change in doctor-patient relations. He believed doctors were no longer concerned with connecting with their patients but instead jumped straight to prescribing expensive prescriptions to quickly fix problems. He soon became interested in cotton production and began his career in this industry.

Work in The Cotton Industry
Cotton was one of the primary industries in the south, it “emerged as the dominant textile manufacturing region in the United States. As the numbers of mills grew and the production expanded, large numbers of southerners were drawn out of agricultural work to work in factories for the first time” (Carlson 65). His first job in the field was working in his uncle’s cotton warehouse. He worked there for 10 years and was promoted to assistant. This job gave him the basis of his experience and knowledge about cotton production. He then went and worked for Brooks, Nelly, and Finley as the supervisor of weighing and examination in their warehouse for 6 years. He had saved up a lot of money and decided to go into business himself. He started a partnership called “Thorton and McSpadden” with his uncle which lasted four years. During this time, they represented 14 cotton buying firms. In 1922, he got an offer from the Mexico Cotton Association to become the chief examiner of cotton for the factory, so he left Memphis, sold his share of the partnership, and moved to California. His job was to weigh and examine every bale of cotton before it was shipped out and he had to travel to many different cities within his territory. Compared to other crops cotton production depended heavily on human labor, as both “cotton and tobacco-two staples almost synonymous with southern agriculture-remained largely unmechanized” (Musoke 347). This meant that people who worked in the cotton industry had secure jobs. They did not face as high of a risk of losing their job due to the development of machines that were cheaper and more efficient than human labor.

The Great Depression
On October 24th, 1929 the stock market crashed and the biggest economic downturn in history began. The Great Depression lasted 10 years and resulted in a decrease in production, the loss of jobs, and a reduction in wages, seriously affecting the living conditions of many Americans. The conditions during the Great Depression forced Thorton to move to Beaumont to work for his brother W.I Thorton. He worked there for 5 years but during this time the cotton industry was in deep distress. The inflation of prices and “the fact that prices and wages were not perfectly flexible in the 1920s and 1930s meant that movements in aggregate demand had real effects” (Romer 26) that hurt the industry. Additionally, the supply and demand of cotton were unstable, “consumers and producers immediately cut their spending on irreversible durable goods as they waited for additional information about the future” (Romer 31). Due to the major changes to the economy caused by the Great Depression and the impact it had on cotton jobs, Thorton was forced to become an innkeeper at the Textile Inn in 1935.