Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers' Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880-1890

299 Pages·1988·9.78 MB·English

by  Michael Schwartz

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The Universicy of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© ]976 by Michael Schwartz
All rights reserved. Published 1976
University of Chicago Press edition 1988
Printed in the United States of America
979695 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 5432 1
Ubrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Schwanz, Michael-t 942-
Radical protest and social structure: the southern Farmers'
Alliance and cotton tenancy, 1880-1890 I Michael Schwanz.
p. em.
Reprim. Originally published: New York: Academic Press,
1976. Originally pubUshed in series: Studies in social
discontinuity.
Includes bibliographkal references and index.
1. National Fanners' AUiance and Cndustrial Union. 2. Fanners
Southern States-Political activity-History. 3. Southern States
Soda! conditions. r. Title.
HD1485.N35S37 1988 88-11919
338.1 '06'075-dcl9 ClP
ISBN 0-226-74235-0 (pbk.)
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowkdgments xi
INTRODUCTION
Tenancy, Southern Politics, and the Spiral
of Agrarhn Protest
I THE ONE-CROP COTTON
TENANCY SYSTEM
2 Basic Tenancy Relationships 19
The Basic Tenant-Landlord ReLationship 21
The Merchant and the Crop Lien J4
3 The Tenancy System 41
The System of Supply and Credit 41
The System of Marketing 46
4 The Dynamics of Change in Southern Farm Tenancy 57
The Landlord and the Mercham ,7
Yeoman and Tenant 6}
Prom Tenant to Laborer 61
S Cotton Tenancy, Farmer Immiseratlon, and the
Reemergence of the Planter Aristocracy 73
Cotton Domination of Southern Agriculture 1}
Farmer Insolvency and the True Extent of Tenancy 16
The "New" Landlord Class 80
v
Contents
vi
II AN ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY OF
THE SOUTHERN FARMERS' ALLIANCE
6 Growth and Merger 91
. Early Growth and Merger 92
The Farmers' Associations 9,
The Merger of the Alliance and the Wheel 100
Organizational History, Organizational Structure, Soda! Class,
and Oligarchy 102
7 Structure and Structural Tension within the Alliance 105
Alliance Organization 105
The Social Origins of Leadership and Membership IH
Newsp~pers and the Leadership-MembcIShip Contradiction 118
Financing the Alliance 121
The Farmers' Alliance and the Southern Tenant
Fanning System 125
III THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
8 Defining the Farmers' Alliance 129
9 The Parameters of Organizational Behavior 125
Rationality and Irrationality H5
The Role of the Social Structure in the Behavior
of Social Movements 145
Structured Ignorance 150
10 The Determinants of Organized Protest-Part 1 155
The Class Makeup of the Organization 155
Internal Structure and Punctianing of the Organization 159
The Nature of the Active and Potential Opposition 162
The Nature of the Active and Potential Support 164
11 The Determinants of Organized Protest-Part 2 17l
The Structural Position of the Organization's Membership in the
Structure to Be Challenged 171
The Prevailing: Analysis of the Situation 177
The Previous Actions and Their Outcomes 189
12 The Life of Protest Organizations 193
The Birth and Death of Protest 196
IV THE PROCESS OF ALLIANCE PROTEST
B Local Economic Action and the Process of Escalation 201
14 The Alliance Exchange: The Ultimate Connterinstitution 217
15 The Great Jute Boycott 235
Contents vii
16 The Farmers' Alliance in and around Richmond County,
North Carolina 247
Co-op Buying in Mountain Creek 250
The Alliance Enters North Carolina 251
Local Actions and Merchant Counterattack 255
The Struggle for the Alliance Exchange 257
The Jute Boycott 262
The Bntry into Polities 265
17 The Logic of the Shift into Politics 269
CONCLUSION
18 The Legacy of Populism Defeated 281
subject Index 289
Preface
My interest in protest groups as a subject of research was kindled by the almost
total disjunction between academic literature on collective behavior and the
reality I experienced as a participant in the Civil Rights, student, and antiwar
movements of the 1960s. In my opinion, this failure derives from the refusal of
sociologists to approach social movements as potentially successful and hence
rational means of social reform. Academic researchers seldom ask if a movement
could have succeeded. Instead, they assume the inevitability of failure; and this
makes all protest in some sense pathological; the main issue becomes that of
understanding why people join these failing enterprises. Hence the fascination with
the "mentality" of social protest and the endless search for its "explanation" in
the psychology of the participants. But such explanations are useless in answering
any of the important issues revealed and raised by the 1960s: the effectiveness of
protest as a reform strategy; the conditions of success and failure; the varying use
fulness of centralized and decentralized structure; the question of how power is
exercised and/or maintained by protestors; and the vexing issue of democracy and
oligarchy.
A new departure is needed: a mode of analysis that can really explain and clarify
how protest occurs and when it will grow or die. I have sought this insight in a
study of the Southern Farmers' Alliance, the largest and most radical component
of American Populism. The Populist movement had the broadest support of any
post-Civil War insurgency, and it encompassed the entire range of reform strategy
from counterinstitutions to armed violence. The Southern Alliance, until now
relegated to the beginning chapters of monographs about the People's party,
was particularly resourceful and creative in its attempts to dismantle the Southern
tenant farming system.
This research has reaffirmed my conviction that many sociological questions can
be answered only by approaching them historically. Historical analysis makes
visible the process of social protest and brings into sharp focus the delicate and
often complex interplay between a movement and the structure from which it
ix
x Preface
derives. A movement sUIvives and succeeds insofar as it anticipates and over
comes the resistance of the structure. It dies and fails insofar as it misunderstands
or proves unable to counter this resistance. Likewise, the established structure can
successfully resist change insofar as it is able to act flexibly; to anticipate, thwart,
or redirect protest into less thIeatening channels; or to play upon divisions or weak
nesses within the protest group.
Thus, the dialectics of the relationship between movement and structure are
crucial. By focusing upon the details of this interplay between the Alliance and
the Southern tenant farming system, it is possible to discern the conditions of
successful and unsuccessful protest. By analyzing the changes and developments
in protest strategy-the new ideas and tactics that emerge as the movement de
velops-it is possible to uncover the potential and the limits of protest. And by
studying the rationales that Southern farmers developed to explain their activities,
it is possible to construct a theory of social protest that addresses the fundamental
issues in the field of social movements. This movement-derived theory provides
the foundation for the elaborate paradigm that forms the heart of this study and
is the chief product of this research.
An interactive approach not only leads to a reinterpretation of protest move
ments, but also necessitates a reanalysis of the structures they seek to reform.
Strictly economic analyses have failed to explain the apparent inefficiencies and
irrationalities of the tenant farming system which developed in the postbellum
South. What appears to the naked economic eye as inefficiency is uncovered by this
interactive approach as essential to social control and is therefore-in a broader
sense-both necessary and efficient. For me, this is important evidence of the
fruitfulness of an interdisciplinary orientation. In this case and many others, the
compartmentalization of research into economics, sociology, and history has
limited our ability to understand even those phenomena that are apparently
clearly within the purview of a single discipline.
For the most part, academic social movement literature has objectified its
subjects and has therefore lost the insights gained by participants in protest. This
book is in large part an attempt to retrieve the insights and experiences of Southern
tenants and yeomen who resisted the development of cotton tenancy, a system
that imposed hardship and misery on five generations of Southerners. This move
ment has, until now, been unappreciated either as a source of material about the
process of social protest or as a creative and heroic effort by rank-and-file white and
Black farmers to prevent the disastrous oppression that settled upon the South at
the turn of the century.
I have no illusions about having conclusively proved anything. This monograph
attempts to present a set of fresh historical and sociological facts, together with
enough evidence to demonstrate their plausibility. I hope it is persuasive enou,gh
to encourage further research that will test, modify, and enrich the ideas developed
here.
Acknowledgments
lowe particular thanks to three people. Harrison White helped me through the
entire project. I am especially grateful for his willingness to sift through many
bad ideas in search of the good ones. Laura Anker Schwartz kept a careful his
torian's eye on the line of argument, forcing me to treat my subject with respect
while contributing crucial ideas which brought desparate elements together.
Steven DeCanio madea'substantive contribution to the analysis of tenancy. Though
he has since abandoned this orientation, his work on its development was original
and creative, and I feel I must acknowledge it.
r would also like to gratefully acknowledge the editorial assistance of Charles
Tilly and Robert Marcus. They read and reread the manuscript, suggested sources,
proposed reorganizations of the presentation, word edited, and provided needed
encouragement. The quantitative sections of Part I were supported by NSF Grant
GS 2689. Paul R. Levitt provided valuable assistance in the collection and analysis
of this data.
Finally, r would like to thank a large number of people and organizations from
whom I have borrowed ideas and insights, or received encouragement and help:
Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, Black Panther Party, Gary Blasi, Fredi
Clark, Mark Comfort, Frederick Engels, James Forman, Free Speech Movement,
Sandor Fuchs, Betty Garman, Alan Gilbert, Arthur Goldberg, Jacqueline Goldberg,
Fannie Lou Hamer, The Harvard Movement,. Joseph Helfgot, Carol Hendricks,
Jared Israel, Mary Ellen Jenkins, M. 1. King, Jr., Peter Knapp, Michael Kogen,
Nancy Howell Lee, V. I. Lenin, Joel Levine, James C. Q. Loewen, Malcolm X,
Wanda Mallen, Mao Tse Tung, Karl Marx, Michael Meyerson, Michael Miller,
Huey Newton, Robert Moses Parris, Peace and Freedom Party, Charles Perrow,
James Prickett, Progressive Labor Party, Mario Savio, Joseph Schwartz, Leon
Schwartz, SDS, Bobby Seale, Paula Shatkin, Tracy Sims, SLATE, SNCC, Michael
Useem, Eugene Weinstein, Barry Wellman.
xi

INTRODUCTION
1
Tenancy, Southern Politics, and the
Spiral of Agrarian Protest
For what avail our unexhausted stores,
Our bloomy mountain and our sunny shores,
With all the gifts thaI heaven and earth impart,
The smiles of nature and the charms of art,
While proud oppression in our valleys reigns,
And tyranny usurps our happy plains.
[Anonymous, Raleigh Progressive Parmer, ApIil2, 1889J
In the turbulence of the post-Civi! War South, it was not easy to separate the
truly significant developments from a wide selection of glittering irrelevancies. It
was only when the dust settled in the early I 900s that the salient features of South
em society became visible. The subsequent 75 years have served to underscore the
importance of three central institutions.
First, there emerged the most remarkable non-slave racial caste system developed
up until that time. A system that can be accurately characterized as the parent of
South African apartheid, the Southern segregation system was so complete and so
fanatically enforced that huge budgetary and economic inefficiencies were re
quired to support such minute institutions as separate bathrooms, separate schools,
and even separate passenger cars on trains. 1
Second, the Democratic party became the only viable political force in the
South. The Republican party apparatus atrophied and no other political
grouping arose to replace it. Despite considerable intraparty competition among
Democrats, the South became the only region in which there was no consistent
and important competition for elective and appointive office between two dis
tinct and frequently very dissimilar party organizations. 2
I Descriplions of the system can be found In C. VaM Woodward. Tht Slrange Career of Jim C,ow (New York.
(1974); Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R Gardner, Detp South (Chicago. 1941).
'A good descri)llion of the workings of the one·party system can be found in V. O. Key. Soulhtrn Po/ilics in Slalt
and Nalion (New York. 1950).