“Cotton Guessers”: Crop Forecasters and the Rationalizing of Uncertainty in American Cotton Markets, 1890–1905

Abstract

In fall 1899, the crowd on the floor of the New York Cotton Exchange burst into laughter at the reading of a poem satirizing the crop estimates of Henry M. Neill, the decade’s most renowned and most vilified cotton forecaster. “Strange,” observed poet Mrs. B. W. Hunt, wife of a prominent Georgia farmer, “that this city farmer, regardless rain or shine ... makes crop that’s always ‘fine.’” When the Brazos River flooded, Neill predicted that cotton pickers wearing “diving suits” would harvest “an extra million bales” in Texas. Then when drought hit the rest of the South, Neill foretold, with a wink, a “monster crop” that meant “the price must further drop.” Neill insisted at the end of the poem—just as he had in August 1899—that the year’s yield would surpass eleven million bales and possibly even twelve. The poem concluded with this lament: “Oh, Mr. Neill, this cotton (so queer the south ne’er knew), / These phantom fleecy millions no planter picked but you.”¹ The “phantom fleecy millions” that Neill foresaw were no poetic fancy but rather the center of a decade-long struggle among southern growers, commercial forecasters, and the U.S. government to produce the most accurate and authoritative cotton statistics. Indeed, this poet’s swipe at Neill’s perennially bearish estimates reportedly encouraged, according to the Arkansas Democrat, “those who were fighting the south’s battle against Mr. Neill,” a battle for control of the market in which predictions determined prices.²

I am grateful to the organizers of and participants in the “Understanding Markets: Information, Institutions and History” conference at the Hagley Museum and Library in October 2009. For their helpful comments, I would like to thank Uwe Spiekermann, Jonathan Levy, Ann Fabian, Sarah Igo, Kenneth Lipartito, Jason Petrulis, Josh Lauer, Dan Bouk, Daniel Amsterdam, Dawn Coleman, Deborah Becher, Angus Burgin, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Merritt Roe Smith, Leo Marx, Deborah Fitzgerald, Meg Jacobs, Christopher Capozzola, and Mark Stoneman. I also wish to acknowledge the generous funding provided by the Visiting Scholars Program at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellows program.