John and Mack Rust are widely credited with inventing the mechanical cotton picker, a machine that helped transform the South. Whether they deserve the credit, there is no question they were relentless in their efforts.
At one time, everybody in the cotton trade knew their names. The nation’s leading newspapers and magazines — Fortune, Harper’s, The New York Times, The American Mercury, Time, Literary Digest, The Forum — reported on their progress.
The coverage then — and biographies today — omit much of their story.
I learned of the brothers in 1996, when I was digging through the morgue of The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, searching for files on an unrelated story about the cotton industry.
The Rust clips dated from the mid-1930s and covered a period when the brothers lived in Memphis.
Curious, I photocopied the Rust files, determined to learn more, but a series of jobs took me away from the Delta. It wasn’t until 2009, when I came back to Memphis (temporarily), that I began filling in the blanks.
In my spare time, I visited places where the Rusts lived and worked. I made contact with relatives, including John Rust’s only surviving child. I secured photographs and records that have not previously been published and corrected and expanded information about his three marriages and early political activities. I also gained new insight into what motivated John Rust and a deeper appreciation of how critical — and fiercely competitive — the effort to build a working mechanical picker was, as well as why it posed such a dramatic challenge and opportunity for the nation.
Best of all, tracing John and Mack’s story took me to places most Americans don’t learn about in history classes. A coal mining cooperative in Oklahoma. A socialist colony in Louisiana. An interracial cooperative farm in Mississippi. A progressive college in Arkansas. A New Deal project in West Virginia. All places where people sought to rise above the meanness of poverty and hard labor — and build a better world. — Roland Klose, projects2026@yahoo.com