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

Matthew Hild (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826221661 ISBN 13: 9780826221667

Publisher: University of Missouri Press, 2018

Synopsis

This book is the first devoted entirely to an examination of working-class activism, broadly defined as that of farmers’ 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’ Union of the 1930s, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and even today’s Farmers’ Union and the United Mine Workers of America.

The story of farmer and labor protest in Arkansas during the late nineteenth century offers lessons relevant to contemporary working-class Americans in what some observers have called the “new Gilded Age.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Hild earned a Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His books deal with the New South, politics, labor, agriculture, race, and economics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 state's population) into their organization though. In 1873, National Grange Master Dudley W. Adams declared that "the [Grange] Constitution is silent in regard to color. ... If a Grange chooses to admit Negroes it may do so. ... The matter is purely a local one." But in Arkansas the Grange was apparently an all-white organization. Nevertheless, by October 1875 the Arkansas State Grange reported a membership of 20,471.

Given that the population of Arkansas in 1875, interpolating from the census figures of 1870 and 1880, was about 650,000, the Grange possessed enough membership to potentially exercise some economic and political clout in the state. Historians have long debated, however, the role that the Grange played as an agent of reform in either of these realms. One of the first historians to examine the Arkansas Grange presented it as a do-nothing organization: "[Grangers] would meet, pledge themselves to prodigious tasks, and promptly forget most of them." A more recent study, however, notes that during the 1870s, the Arkansas Grange "increasingly criticized banks, railroads, and middle men as the real culprits in the farmers' problems" and "sought legislation restricting the power of monopolies such as the railroads." For example, at its annual meeting in January 1877, the Arkansas State Grange passed a resolution urging the Arkansas General Assembly "that some just and equitable law ... be passed regulating the rates of passenger and freight tariffs on lines of railroads in this State, if it be within the power of the General Assembly to enact such a law."

Yet as Edward L. Ayers noted in his study of the post-Reconstruction South, "The Grange sometimes fostered radicalism as well as conservatism," and a close look at the Arkansas Grange provides plenty of evidence of the latter. While railroad freight rates were a problem that farmers of all classes could identify with, the proceedings of the State Grange session of January 1877 mention nary a word about the concerns of tenant farmers or even the crop-lien system. The prominent planter John Thompson Jones served as Worthy Master of the State Grange from its founding until 1877, also serving as the Master of the National Grange during his last two years at the helm of the Arkansas branch. His successor atop the State Grange, Simon P. Hughes, had once been an agricultural wage laborer, but by the early 1870s Hughes had become a successful lawyer, and subsequently he was able "to engage in extensive planting interests on the side." The wealth of Jones and Hughes did not mean that they showed no interest in the problems facing farmers of lesser means, but on the other hand, they showed no inclination to make any radical proposals in their behalf, even while acknowledging that Grange programs were of limited use to small farmers and tenants. In 1877 Jones admitted that the cooperative purchasing efforts of the Arkansas Grange, while benefitting all farmers "in reducing the price, everywhere, of almost every article the farmer has to purchase," nevertheless "benefited ... the small farmers not in just proportion to the larger ones."

In politics, too, the Grange evinced elements of radicalism as well as conservatism. Ostensibly, the Grange was a nonpartisan organization. "No grange, if true to its obligations," stated the National Grange's Declaration of Purposes in 1874, "can discuss political or religious questions, nor call political conventions, nor nominate candidates, nor even discuss their merits in its meetings." An Arkansas Grange newspaper in Van Buren County pointedly made note of this restriction in an editorial later that year. Yet during the previous year, National Grange Master Dudley W. Adams had declared that Grangers felt it "a duty" to "scan very closely the acts of our public servants" and "to see to it that the candidates of all parties be men of integrity, whose interest is the welfare of the people, and not political ring-masters." Adams asserted the right of his rank and file to be actively involved in the political process, stating that "we, as producers, while we furnish food for millions, fight our nation's battles, defend its liberties in times of danger, should, of a right have an equal share as such in the making of these laws by which we are governed." In Arkansas, as one historian noted, the Grange "never made a vigorous effort to participate in politics," yet "in one way or another, was involved in all the political campaigns conducted during its period of strength."

The two men who stood at the helm of the Arkansas Grange during that period of strength — Jones and Hughes — certainly never tried to steer the organization away from the Democratic Party. Jones had nearly become a Democratic US senator in 1866; in 1878 he unsuccessfully tried again to become one of Arkansas's US senators as a Democrat. Hughes unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1876, and while he did not officially involve the Grange in his campaign, he nevertheless drew upon Grange support. Hughes made another failed bid for the Democratic Party's gubernatorial nomination in 1878, by which time he was the Worthy Master of the by-then-declining Arkansas Grange. Hughes eventually captured his prize in 1884, serving as the governor of Arkansas from 1885 to 1889.

The Greenback and Greenback-Labor Parties

But as the Grange began to decline in 1876 — in Arkansas, elsewhere in the South, and across the United States due to a host of problems including failing (and sometimes corrupt) cooperative enterprises, dissent over politics, and the inability of many members to pay dues — some prominent Grangers in Arkansas began to look away from the Democratic Party and toward more radical political alternatives. Charles E. Tobey, an officer in the Arkansas State Grange, one of the state's first Grange organizers, and editor of the Arkansas State Grange newspaper, and Charles E. Cunningham, an active Granger who owned a saw and planing mill in Little Rock, both became active in the Greenback Party at this time. The Greenback movement began in the mid-1870s as a protest against the national system of money and banking that had developed since the Civil War, which coincided with a reduction in the amount of money in circulation in the United States from $30.35 per capita in 1865 to $19.36 by 1880. As historian Charles Postel has noted, the Greenback movement espoused not only doctrines of currency reform but also of labor rights. Tobey organized Greenback clubs in Arkansas in 1876; promoted the movement's "soft money" philosophy, which aimed to put more money into circulation; and tried to convince Grangers to support Greenback Party presidential candidate Peter Cooper. Cunningham presided over what the Arkansas Gazette called a "very slimly attended" Greenback Party state convention in Little Rock on September 12, 1876, at which delegates appointed Tobey, a resident of Pope County, to the party's state central committee. Only 289 Arkansas voters cast ballots for Cooper in November, but at the Arkansas State Grange's annual meeting of 1878, delegates passed a resolution sponsored by Cunningham that placed the organization's stamp of approval upon the doctrines of the Greenback platform.

Yet while the Grange and the Greenback movement shared some ideas about currency reform and antimonopolism, the Arkansas Greenback movement differed sharply from the Arkansas State Grange where matters of race were involved. Many African Americans in Arkansas already had demonstrated a willingness to engage in political activism and, in some instances, even labor activism in the years immediately following emancipation. The most striking instances of black labor activism in Arkansas occurred in John Thompson Jones's Phillips County, described by one historian as having been "the slave capital of the state" in 1860. Even before the Civil War ended, a group of newly freed black farm workers in Phillips County refused to work until their northern lessee agreed to their demands regarding wages and work rules. Then shortly after the war ended, a former slave named Bryant Singfield began organizing other former slaves in Phillips County who had stayed on the plantations of their former masters as contract laborers. Federal military commanders stationed in Helena "encouraged and assisted" Singfield in these efforts, according to the recollection of a former slave. Some of Singfield's followers then took the bold step of leaving their employers' plantations and moving onto an abandoned plot of land that they began farming as their own. A group of white planters, reportedly led by future county sheriff Bart Turner, retaliated by rounding up Singfield and several others who were involved in this budding labor protest and apparently killing them. Local legend later held that Singfield's ghost haunted a swamp where he was killed.

While such labor protests were isolated events, many more African Americans in Arkansas asserted their rights by registering to vote. Assisted by the Union League, which was started by white northerners during the Civil War but drew many southern black followers after the war, some twenty-two thousand black men registered to vote in Arkansas between May and November of 1868. This required a great deal of resolve and courage, as the Ku Klux Klan emerged in Arkansas for the first time in late 1867 and began a campaign of violence and terror against Republicans of both races. As the presidential and congressional elections approached in 1868, the resultant death toll in the state reportedly exceeded two hundred citizens — mostly African Americans, as well as some white Unionists. In the southwestern Arkansas county of Lafayette, where opposition to the Democratic Party would be strong through the late nineteenth century, Klansmen killed about twenty men, most of them African Americans, that summer.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Arkansas's Gilded Age by Matthew Hild. Copyright © 2018 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Missouri Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826221661
• ISBN 13: 9780826221667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 212