As one of America's foremost Regionalist painters, Benton celebrated the bounty of the land and heroicized industrial laborers and farm workers in his murals and easel paintings. During the summer of 1928 he made a long road trip south through the cotton fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, in an old Ford station wagon that served as his kitchen, bedroom, and workshop. While the artist decried the racism that he saw in the South, his caricaturized figures, such as the anonymous black field hands and the white pipe-smoking foreman in this painting, often elicited criticism and embroiled the artist in public controversy.