Arkansas's Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest: The Rise, Decline, & Legacy of Populism & Working-Class Protest - Hardcover

Hild, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826221661 ISBN 13: 9780826221667

Verlag: UNIV OF MISSOURI PR, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

<div>This book is the first devoted entirely to an examination of working-class activism, broadly defined as that of farmers&#8217; organizations, labor unions, and (often biracial) political movements, in Arkansas during the Gilded Age. On one level, Hild argues for the significance of this activism in its own time: had the Arkansas Democratic Party not resorted to undemocratic, unscrupulous, and violent means of repression, the Arkansas Union Labor Party would have taken control of the state government in the election of 1888. He also argues that the significance of these movements lasted beyond their own time, their influence extending into the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers&#8217; Union of the 1930s, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and even today&#8217;s Farmers&#8217; Union and the United Mine Workers of America.<br><br> The story of farmer and labor protest in Arkansas during the late nineteenth century offers lessons relevant to contemporary<br> working-class Americans in what some observers have called the &#8220;new Gilded Age.&#8221;</div>

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

<div><b>Matthew Hild</b> teaches U.S. history and the history of technology and science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He also teaches U.S. and Georgia history at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton and is the author of <i>Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South</i>. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.</div>

Matthew Hild teaches U.S. history and the history of technology and science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He also teaches U.S. and Georgia history at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton and is the author of Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Arkansas's Gilded Age

The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest

By Matthew Hild

University of Missouri Press

Copyright © 2018 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8262-2166-7

Contents

Foreword by Raymond Arsenault, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
I. The Roots of Discontent, 
II. Building the Foundations of Rebellion, 
III. The Great Upheaval, 
IV. The Union Labor Party, 
V. Populism and the Depression of the 1890s, 
VI. Twentieth-Century Legacies, 
Appendixes, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE ROOTS OF DISCONTENT

DURING RECONSTRUCTION, ARKANSAS REPUBLICANS UNDER the leadership of Governor Powell Clayton (whose term was from 1868 to 1871) advocated a reformist agenda that included the establishment of a public school system and a state university, efforts to attract immigrants to the state, and the construction of levees and railroads. Unfortunately, though, as one historian has noted, this "bold and commendable" program was "barely under way ... when it was beset by problems of inadequate finances, mismanagement, corruption, and intense political partisanship." The Arkansas Republican Party then split in spectacular, and violent, fashion in the Brooks-Baxter War. This internecine clash followed a disputed gubernatorial election in 1872 in which the two claimants were rival Republicans; in 1874 the disagreement led to episodes of violence that resulted in more than two hundred deaths. Later that year, the Democratic Party won control of the governor's office and crushed any remaining hopes of the "activist government that ... Clayton and the Republicans had pursued." Arkansas Democrats proved less effective, however, at bringing financial stability or honest government to the state. Under the watch of Thomas J. Churchill, who served as the state treasurer from 1874 until winning the gubernatorial election of 1880, the state accumulated a shortfall of $294,876 in its accounts, which would be the equivalent of several million dollars today. Another shortage of $138,789 accrued during the tenure of Churchill's successor, Major William E. Woodruff, finally leading to condemnation from even the state's Democratic press in an era when most newspapers were clearly partisan.

For working-class Arkansans, then, the "redemption" of the state by the Democratic Party meant a continuation of some of the worst problems of Reconstruction but a loss of the hopes for socioeconomic reform that Governor Clayton had put forth. As noted by the historian Carl H. Moneyhon, "Individual Arkansans may have hoped for changes after 1874, but conditions in the state presented enormous barriers." In one of the most rural and poorest states in the nation — over 97 percent of Arkansans lived in rural communities in 1870, and the state's per capita income in 1880 (seventy-nine dollars) ranked fourth lowest in the nation — this did not bode well for most citizens.

Even before 1874, some farmers began to express concerns about the new postbellum realities of Arkansas agriculture. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, the state's railroad network grew significantly. This development in turn opened new areas of the state to cotton cultivation and, subsequently, many farmers shifted from subsistence to commercial farming. As Arkansas State (and National) Grange leader John Thompson Jones noted in 1877, however, many landowning Arkansas farmers had seen their "active capital ... swept away by the war" to such an extent that many of them had sold "one-half or more of their well-improved farms." For most Arkansas farmers, then, small landowners and tenants alike, commercial farming necessitated purchasing supplies on credit through a system known as the crop-lien, or as many farmers called it, the "anaconda" mortgage (named after the constricting snake), whereby the cotton crop served as the collateral for a loan that would have to be repaid at high interest. W. Scott Morgan, who during the 1880s became a leading figure in the state's agrarian revolt and ran for governor on the People's (or Populist) Party ticket in 1898, later described the anaconda mortgage as "wholesale robbery" characterized by the merchant (or, for tenant farmers, the landowner) "charging two and three prices for the goods furnished, thereby reducing his victims to extreme poverty, yes, to financial skeletons." After 1875, a law passed by the "redeemed" Democratic state legislature ensured that these anaconda mortgages would have "the same force ... as other mortgages."

The Grange

The emergence of the National Grange of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry (better known simply as the Grange) in Arkansas in 1872 represented, in part at least, a response to the economic difficulties confronting the state's farmers after the Civil War. The Grange began in 1867 as the brainchild of Oliver H. Kelley, who, while traveling through the South as an employee of the US Department of Agriculture, decided that "for the resuscitation of the country [meaning the South] and the recuperation of its farmers, whose wealth and resources had been swept away by the cruel hand of war, organization was a necessity." Before putting his plan into practice, Kelley further decided that the organization should not be confined to the South, since "there was vital need of organization among the farmers of the Union, North as well as South." According to historian Gilbert C. Fite, "The objectives of the Grange were to enhance the comforts of farm homes and to improve rural social life, to oppose monopoly, to get better transportation facilities, to obtain improved education, to encourage crop diversification, and to establish business cooperatives as a means of eliminating middlemen and commission merchants." The Grange grew slowly at first, and primarily in the Midwest, but by the early 1870s it began to establish itself in the South. The Grange reached Arkansas in August 1872 after Kelley, who at that time was the organization's secretary, received a letter of inquiry from John Thompson Jones, a fifty-eight-year-old cotton planter living near Helena (Phillips County), Arkansas. Described by one historian as a man "of philosophic mien, with flowing beard and long unkempt locks," Jones was hardly the typical Arkansas farmer, having twice served as a district judge and been chosen as a Democratic US senator-elect in 1866 (although the Senate refused to seat him and Arkansas' other senator-elect, Augustus H. Garland, since the state was still "unreconstructed"). Nevertheless, this Virginia native certainly possessed knowledge of the conditions of agriculture, especially cotton agriculture, in Arkansas, having come to the state during the mid-1830s to become a cotton planter.

The Grange grew rapidly in Arkansas. By May 1873, subordinate Granges (or local chapters) existed not only in Phillips County but also in Arkansas County and in the towns or cities of Trenton, Marvel, Planters, Richland, Clarendon, DeWitt, Mound Grove, Searcy, and Little Rock. In June, delegates from the subordinate Granges met in Helena and organized a State Grange. The first slate of officers elected included Jones as the Worthy Master. Fite noted that the Grange "admitted women on an equal basis with men," and indeed two of the seven officers were women (including Mrs. John Thompson Jones), although they held offices of lesser importance than did the male officers. Grangers in Arkansas did not welcome African Americans (who constituted about one quarter of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF MISSOURI PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0826221661
• ISBN 13: 9780826221667
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 220
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar